Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c7.54

c7.54

“Husbandry,” says Knox, “is the great employment of the country. . . . In this the best men labour. Nor is it held any disgrace for Men of the greatest Quality to do any work either at home or in the Field, if it be for themselves; but to work for hire with them is reckoned for a great shame : and very few are here to be found that will work so.” Great chiefs were not ashamed to hold the plough in their own hands, and it was thought becoming for the young men to reap at least a part of the harvest every year; for which damascened and ivory-handled sickles were sometimes used. The great majority of men, and amongst the village folk, of women also, were continually brought into close touch with the soil and with each other by working together in the fields; even the craftsmen did not as a body rely upon their craft as a direct means of livelihood, and used *Social economy* themselves to lay aside their tools to do a share of field work when need was, as at sowing or harvest time. The structure of the regular Indian village community is everywhere apparent, more or less veiled or modified by later developments; the scattered villages of the North Central Province show it best. It is true that the rice lands were held individually and not as common property, but this did not remove the need for communal action in cultivation, each shareholder or tenant or land-owner, as one may prefer to call him, doing an amount of work proportional to the extent of his holding. In such matters as fencing, water-supply and night-watching it would have been absurd to deal with each field separately, and no-one ever thought of doing so. The cultivators decided together in any year whether conditions allowed of the cultivation of the whole or only a part of the fields, the water supply being thus treated as common property due to each in the proportion of his holding. “At reaping they are excellent good,” says Knox, “just after the English manner. The whole Town, as I said before, as they joyn together in Tilling, so in their Harvest also; For all fall in together in reaping one man’s Field, and so to the next, till every man’s Corn be down. And the Custome is, that every man, during the reaping of his Corn, finds all the rest with Victuals.” How strongly we are reminded of mediæval England, and Langland’s “faire field ful of folke . . . of alle maner of men, the mene and the riche.” A great part of the cultivation was looked after by women, the custom varying in different districts. But the presence of women at certain times and places was strictly taboo. The ceremonial purity of the threshing floor was guarded with special care. A special euphemistic vocabulary is made use of while threshing is going on; women are prohibited from entering, as are persons who have attended a funeral, or come from an ‘unclean’ house* (unless after bathing and putting on clean clothes), or have eaten unclean food.