The Oxe hath therefore stretch’d his yoake in vaine

I have just returned from the 6th (I think) International Robin Hood Conference at Gregynog, Powys, where I gave a paper on the Roman bandit Bulla Felix. I drove back home through the drowned fields of Shropshire. Imprinted in my mind this stark image, glimpsed briefly through a hedge: a field of barley, nearly ripe, standing in water almost up to the ears.

Titania complains to Oberon:

And never since the middle Summers spring
Met we on hil, in dale, forrest, or mead,
By paved fountaine, or by rushie brooke,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling Winde,
But with thy braules thou hast disturb’d our sport.
Therefore the Windes, piping to us in vaine,
As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogges: Which falling in the Land,
Hath everie petty River made so proud,
That they have over-borne their Continents.
The Oxe hath therefore stretch’d his yoake in vaine,
The Ploughman lost his sweat, and the greene Corne
Hath rotted, ere his youth attain’d a beard:
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And Crowes are fatted with the murrion flocke,
The nine mens Morris is fild up with mud,
And the queint Mazes in the wanton greene,
For lacke of tread are undistinguishable.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

from A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595)


When I first read this, aged eleven, I was stirred and delighted by the poetry. Well-fed western child of the sixties that I was, I had no experience that would have allowed me to conceive of the horrors lurking just beyond the surface of these lines: the stunted, sickly children, the starved vagrants dying in ditches. We shall survive our ruined harvest, but only because we long ago learned the art of making lifeless currency multiply and grow as if it were corn – an art that every orthodox Elizabethan would have professed to consider unnatural and evil.


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