amuletsCorn dolly

The explanation usually given for it is a scholars' explanation, and it is worth saying so first. Writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries theorised that before Christianisation the spirit of the corn was held to live among the crop, and that the harvest made it homeless; the last sheaf, plaited into a shape, gave it somewhere to spend the winter until it was ploughed into the first furrow of the new season. James Frazer gave four chapters of The Golden Bough to the Corn-Mother and the Corn-Maiden in northern Europe, drawing on the enormous body of European folklore that Wilhelm Mannhardt had collected.

What Frazer's informants actually described is more concrete. Near Danzig, whoever cut the last ears made them into a doll called the Corn-mother or the Old Woman and it came home on the last waggon. In parts of Holstein the last sheaf was dressed in women's clothes, called the Corn-mother, carried home and then thoroughly drenched with water — a rain-charm, Frazer says. In the district of Bruck in Styria the Corn-mother was made by the oldest married woman in the village, a woman of fifty to fifty-five; the finest ears were plucked out and twisted into a wreath, which the prettiest girl in the village carried on her head to the squire, while the Corn-mother herself was laid down in the barn to keep off the mice. In East Prussia the reapers called out to the woman binding the last sheaf that she was getting the Old Grandmother. In Scotland, when the last corn was cut after Hallowmas, the figure made from it was sometimes the Carlin, the old woman.

The oldest dated mention is a prohibition. In seventh-century Flanders, Saint Eligius told his congregation not to make vetulas — little figures of the Old Woman — nor little deer nor iotticos, nor set tables at night, nor exchange New Year gifts.

Mechanised harvesting effectively ended the craft at the beginning of the twentieth century. It came back in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s as a craft revival: farm workers made new things, including replicas of farm implements, windmills and large figures, new shapes and new techniques appeared, and several books came out in the 1960s and 1970s. The source is blunt about what that revival did: the simple origins of the craft had been lost, and new folklore stories were added to the original ideas. Anyone reading a modern account of what a particular corn dolly means is reading something from that period unless it is sourced to Mannhardt or earlier.

The old long-stemmed, hollow-stemmed wheats the work needs were replaced by short pithy varieties bred for the combine. A number of English and Scottish farmers still grow the old sorts — Maris Wigeon, Squarehead Master, Elite Le Peuple — mainly because thatchers want them.

Cut from the last sheaf standing, at the end of harvest, by a person the local custom names — the one who cuts the last ears, the woman who binds the last sheaf, the oldest married woman in the village. Plaited hollow, or tied with yarn, or dressed as a figure. Carried home on the last waggon, set at the centre of the harvest supper, hung in the house or laid in the barn, and kept over winter. Then it goes back into the ground: ploughed into the first furrow of the new season.

Made as a craft rather than as a harvest rite, and the Heritage Crafts Association lists corn dolly making as endangered. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading and the Ryedale Folk Museum in Yorkshire hold collections of them from around the world.