Why Put Pine Tar Boots on 300 Geese?

If you came across a man walking down the road with 300 geese, all of whomever wearing boots made of tar, would you find it strange? You wouldn't if you lived in the 1700's. At that time, how else could you get a few hundred animals to market? Without refrigeration, they had to be alive at the market or they'd be more than rotten by the time the buyer wanted to cook them. That meant walking them about 100 miles over ten days. This is that story....

Transcript

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On a September morning in Norfolk in the year seventeen eighty three, three hundred geese are walking down a road. They are not being carried. They are not in cages, they are walking in the way geese walk, which is with considerable confidence and moderate cooperation, and a noise that carries for half a mile in still air. The man behind them is not panicking. This is not his first time. But it is a long road, and the geese have not yet had their breakfast, and if you have ever spent time near geese that are both mobile and hungry, you understand why he is paying close attention. Look at the geese more carefully, though, and something is unusual. Their feet, from the ankle down, are not the pale orange pink of a goose's foot. They are dark, almost black, slightly thickened. Each foot has been coated in something that is dried hard and is holding its shape against the ground. The geese walk on these coated feet with no apparent difficulty. They will be walking on them for ten days and roughly a hundred miles before they arrive at the goose fair in Nottingham, where they will be sold, and where, within a few days of that, most of them will be dead. This is the story of the goose drover, the man who walked the stubble geese of East Anglia to the Micklemus Markets every autumn for three centuries, and of the tar that went on their feet before they left, and of the road that got them there, and of the world that made the whole arrangement seem perfectly ordinary. Your name is Edmund Thrower. You are thirty four years old, a drover working on contract for three Norfolk farmers, whose birds you have combined into this flock of three hundred, and you have been making this run, or one very like it, every autumn since you were nineteen. The year is seventeen eighty three. You are not a wealthy man, you are not a poor one. You exist in the specific economic position of someone whose skill is not farming and not trade, but the movement of things between the two, which in the England of seventeen eighty three places you in a world that most people neither fully understand nor particularly think about. The farmers need their geese to reach the market fat and upright, and worth what the market will pay for them. The buyers at Nottingham need the geese to arrive at all. You are the solution to both problems, and the fee you charge reflects the fact that nobody else in this county does it better. The fee is four shillings per score of birds delivered alive and fit for sale. A score is twenty. Three hundred birds is fifteen score, which works out to three pounds if all three hundred arrive in good condition, which they will not, because this is a ten day walk across Autumn England, and things happen on a ten day walk across Autumn England, and both you and the farmers who hired you understand this and have priced it accordingly. Two hundred and seventy birds alive at the other end would be a reasonable outcome. Two hundred and sixty would be acceptable. Anything below two hundred and fifty is a conversation you would prefer to avoid. With you today is a boy of about thirteen named Will, who is the son of one of the farmers and has been sent along partly to learn the work and partly because three hundred geese cannot be managed by one man without assistance. Will is currently at the back of the flock, which is the position that requires the least skill and produces the most noise. He is doing reasonably well. The tar happened four days ago, on the morning before you left. The geese were driven, a dozen at a time, through a shallow wooden trough filled with a mixture of pine tar and sand, thin enough that it spread easily, but thick enough to adhere. The geese walked through it under mild protest and emerged with their feet coated to roughly the depth of a finger above the ankle joint. On the first pass the coating was still soft, and the birds tracked it across the yard for an hour until it set. On the second pass the next morning, with a lighter coat of pure tar over the first, it hardened into something closer to a sole, dark and slightly flexible, conforming to the shape of each foot. Pine tar is not a complicated substance. It is what you get when you heat pine wood, specifically the denser heartwood, in a closed chamber and collect what runs out. The result is a thick, dark, strongly aromatic liquid, somewhere between brown and black, with a smell that is sharp and resinous and sits in your nose long after you have moved away from it. Its useful properties are that it is waterproof, moderately flexible once dried, and will adhere to almost any surface it is applied warm. Shipwrights use it on hull seams. Rope makers use it to preserve hemp against rot. Farmers use it on fence posts and on the hooves of cattle with hoof problems. Goose drovers use it on feet. The sand in the first coat is the key to the whole construction. The tar alone would be too smooth, and a goose on a smooth soled tar coating on a wet road would be sliding rather than walking. The sand gives grip and also gives texture for the second coat to bond to, so that what you end up with is not merely a coating, but something with actual structural integrity, a boot in the truest functional sense, made from materials that cost almost nothing, and applied in twenty minutes per dozen birds. If you did not do this, the geese would walk the road surface bare, and by day three the pads of their feet would be worn through, and by day five you would have a flock of birds in genuine pain, moving at half pace and losing weight, which is the opposite of what the Nottingham buyer is paying for. A goose that arrives at the fair thin is worth less. A goose that arrives lame is worth considerably less. A goose that does not arrive is worth nothing, and you have paid the cost of its feed along the road, which comes out of your margin. The tar boots are not sentiment. They are arithmetic. This is something easy to forget about England in seventeen eighty three. Everything you ate that was not grown in your own garden traveled to you on foot, not figuratively, literally on foot. The cattle from Wales and Scotland walked to London. The sheep from Lincolnshire walked south. The turkeys from Norfolk walked west, and the geese, hundreds of thousands of them every autumn, walked wherever the markets were, because there was no other practical way to move a living animal any distance. There were no railways, there were no livestock trucks, there were canals, but canals are for cargo that does not panic and does not require pasture. There were road coaches, but road coaches carry people, not flocks of three hundred. The only vehicle available to a goose was its own feet, and the only way to get a goose from Norfolk to Nottingham was to walk behind it for ten days and make sure it ate enough on the way. By eighteen hundred, somewhere in the range of a hundred thousand cattle, seven hundred and fifty thousand sheep, and numbers of geese and turkeys that no one counted carefully were passing through Smithfield Market in London annually, most of them having walked the last substantial portion of their journey. The drove roads they walked were wider than ordinary roads, forty to ninety feet across, with broad verges of rough grass that served as continuous grazing on the move. These roads looked to a modern eye like country lanes with unusually wide, unkempt edges. That is not what they were. They were engineered in their way for the specific purpose of keeping large numbers of moving animals fed and separated from the crops in the fields alongside them. You avoid the turnpike roads when you can. The turnpike trusts charge a toll for every drove animal that passes through their gates, and on a run of a hundred miles, the tolls add up to money that comes directly out of your margin. The drove roads that parallel the turnpikes were made specifically to allow drovers to avoid this, and the routes are known to anyone in your line of work the way a riverman knows the channels, which way to go around which town, which inn has a proper paddock for the night, which farmer along the route will let you use his stubble field for a penny a hundred birds, which stretches of common land are still open, and which have been enclosed and are no longer available. The enclosures are a problem that has been growing your whole working life. Common land, the wide unfenced ground that drovers have grazed their animals on for centuries, is being taken into private ownership under acts of parliament that have been moving steadily through the English countryside since before you were born. Each enclosure removes a piece of the grazing network that these drives depend on. The Nottingham Run that your father did in the 1750s, used common land at four points along the route that are now enclosed, and require you to negotiate access with private landowners who are under no obligation to say yes and know it. You have so far been able to manage this. You think about what will happen if the remaining commons go the same way, and then you stop thinking about it because there is nothing useful in the thought, and you have three hundred geese to get to Nottingham. The geese themselves require some understanding. A domestic goose in seventeen eighty three is a greylag goose, the species domesticated in England and across northern Europe, a large bird with gray and white plumage and an orange bill, considerably heavier through the body than its wild relatives. The birds in your flock weigh somewhere between ten and fourteen pounds each. By the time the harvest stubble is gone and Michaelmas approaches, they are at their fattest, having spent the weeks after harvest in the cut grain fields eating whatever the reapers left behind, which is where the term stubble goose comes from. A well-fed stubble goose in the late September is an animal that has spent six weeks doing nothing but converting grain stubble to body weight, and it shows geese are not easy animals. They have structured social arrangements within the flock, a hierarchy that was established on the farm and that reasserts itself constantly on the road with dominant birds at the front, setting pace and direction, and subordinate birds at the back, receiving the consequences of everyone else's decisions. They graze as they walk, pulling at the verge grass without breaking pace, which is one advantage they have over turkeys, who are slower, prone to roosting in inconvenient trees at night, and require considerably more management. A goose will walk and eat at the same time. A turkey treats these as separate activities. Geese also communicate at volume. The sound of three hundred geese in motion is not background noise. It is the dominant fact of the acoustic environment for a radius of several hundred yards in all directions. It precedes the flock by some distance and follows it by about the same. Farmers along the route have been known to appear at their gates as you pass simply to watch, the way you might watch a river in flood, with a mixture of interest and relief that it is moving away from you. The other thing about geese is that they are not inclined to be driven. Cattle can be pushed from behind. Sheep cluster and move as a mass that responds to pressure. Geese have a different psychology. They move forward well when they want to move forward, which is most of the time, particularly in the morning when they are fresh and the grass is wet, they become considerably less cooperative in the afternoon when they are full and the road is warm and a nap in the verge seems like a reasonable proposition. The drover's art with geese is less about pushing and more about preventing the alternatives. You keep them from dispersing into the field margins. You keep the back of the flock moving so the front has somewhere it needs to be. You know which individuals are the natural leaders and you manage your position relative to them, because three hundred geese that have collectively decided to go left will go left, and arguing with that decision is an exercise in noise and lost time. Will has learned this in the first morning. He tried early on to redirect a group of about twenty birds that had found a gap in the hedge, and were investigating it with the specific, purposeful attention geese bring to anything they want to do. He went at them directly, waving his arms, which communicated to the geese that a large flailing animal was attacking them from the very direction they were trying to avoid, and they responded accordingly. You did not say anything. You walked around to the field side of the gap, stood still and waited. The geese, finding their escape route now occupied, thought about this for a moment and rejoined the flock. Will watched this and understood it. He has not made the same mistake twice. You stop for the night at a roadside inn called the Three Cups, outside Wymanham, where you have stopped on this run every year for eleven years. The innkeeper, whose name is Bates, has a paddock behind the stabling yard that will hold three hundred geese without too much difficulty, with a drainage ditch on one side that serves as a water source and enough rough grass that the birds will spend the last hour of daylight eating and then settle. Geese do not roost, they sleep on the ground in a group. In the specific arrangement they have worked out among themselves over a lifetime, of sleeping near each other, with the dominant birds in the center and the subordinate birds at the edges, where the fox is more likely to come from. This is not something you arranged, it is something they arranged. You eat at the inn's common table with Bates and two other travelers, a pack man working a regular route between Norwich and the Midlands, and a younger man who has been walking to find work and is not sure yet whether he has found it. The meal is a muttons and stew and bread and a jug of small beer, which is the standard offering at any inn of this type, and which is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, and which is exactly what you want after nine miles on a road with three hundred geese. Bates has made the stew himself, which you know because his wife died three years ago, and he has been making it himself since then. Bates is not gifted. You eat it without comment. The small beer is weak enough. The children drink it as a matter of course, which is the point of it. Water from roadside sources is untrustworthy in ways that have nothing to do with how it looks or smells, and a man who is working a drove for ten days cannot afford to spend three of them recovering from something he drank at a drainage ditch. The beer is weak enough not to impair you, and strong enough to have gone through a fermentation process that has killed whatever was growing in the water before the malt went in. This is not a theory you have. It is simply what you drink and what everyone drinks, and what has always been drunk, and the alternative is worse. Before you sleep you count the birds, two hundred and ninety eight. One bird was taken by a fox in the first mile before the flock had properly consolidated, which happened before you could prevent it, and which you noted in the tally you keep in your head. One bird turned up lame by midday, the tar coating on the right foot having separated at the heel, and you stripped the loose material and recoated it from the small pot you carry for exactly this purpose. The lame bird is moving adequately, you will check it again in the morning. Two hundred and ninety eight from three hundred on day one is not a number that worries you. The faith of the English countryside in seventeen eighty three is Anglican in name and older than that in practice, a layering of Christian observance over agricultural rhythms that predate the church by several centuries. Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, falls on the twenty ninth of September, and it is one of the four quarter days on which English economic life has organized itself since the medieval period. Rents are due on quarter days, servants are hired on quarter days, debts are settled, leases begun, accounts squared, Michaelmas is the last of the working year's four poles, the moment when summer's accounting is done and the winter's reckoning begins. The goose is at the center of it, because the goose is what the stubble fields produce at exactly this time of year. The geese have been eating the harvest leavings. The harvest is finished. Micklmus is due. The birds are at their peak. The timing is not coincidence. It is the same rhythm that has organized the English countryside since long before anyone called it Micklmus or knew who Saint Michael was. The saying has been in circulation for so long that nobody knows who said it first. Eat a goose on Michaelmas Day, or want not for money all the year. What it means practically is this if you have a goose to eat on Micklmus, you are solvent. The goose is the measure of solvency, which is why the goose fares are what they are. Markets that exist at the hinge of the agricultural year, where the solvents sell to the prosperous and the rents are met with feathers. You are not a sentimental man about this. You have been walking geese to Micklemus markets since you were nineteen, and the birds are goods in your charge, not a companion's. But you understand the calendar they belong to in the way that anyone understands the structure of the world they were born into, which is to say, completely and without thinking about it very much. The geese go to Nottingham. Nottingham is where the money is, the money is what Michaelmas is for. By day four you are into Lincolnshire, and the character of the land has changed. Norfolk is low and flat and wide, with big skies and a wind off the North Sea that in September carries the first real suggestion of what is coming. Lincolnshire is similar in its flatness but different in its soil, heavier and darker, with drained fenland on the eastern side that smells of wet earth and decomposing reed even in dry weather. The drove road runs along a raised bank above the fens with water on one side and arable land on the other, and the geese move along it in a column that is thinned and lengthened from the broad mass of the first day into something more organized, more settled. The daily routine of walking having established itself in the flock the same way it establishes itself in the men. Your feet are in a state you have stopped thinking about. You wear good boots, waxed leather, resold twice in the past year, and by the end of any ten day drove they feel like an argument about priorities. You have a blister on the inside of your right heel that appeared on day two, and has now become part of the texture of the day in the way that the smell of the geese has become part of the texture of the day, present and unremarkable. Will, whose boots are less good, is managing with the Specific determined silence of a young person who understands that complaining will not change anything and might invite comment. The geese are in better condition than you are. This is something you have thought about before and find mildly amusing. The tar boots have held well on all but three birds, two of which you recoated on the road, and one of which you decided to sell to a farm we passed in Spalding, since a bird with a genuine foot problem that gets worse will lose weight faster than you can compensate for, and will arrive in Nottingham worth less than the cost of the feed that got it there. The farmer gave you fourpence for it, which is not what it would bring at the fair, but is fourpence more than nothing. And the arithmetic of this drove is made of exactly these small decisions repeated ten times a day for ten days. On the eighth day, it rains, not a drizzle. A proper October rain that begins before dawn and is still present at midday, a gray persistent downpour that turns the drove road surface to a slick of wet clay, and puddles the verge grass into something between lawn and marsh. This is when the tar boots earn their keep absolutely. A barefooted goose on this road surface would be sliding and struggling and using energy it needs for body weight. Your geese are walking it more or less normally, their coated feet gripping the clay where a bear pad would skate. They are wet and unhappy in the way that geese in rain are always wet and unhappy, which is not as unhappy as you might expect, since geese have waterproof plumage, and a relationship with water that is fundamentally different from most other farm animals. They are wet, they are not distressed, they keep moving. You are wetter than the geese and less philosophically equipped to deal with it. Your coat is a heavy wool drover's coat. The kind that absorbs water up to a point, and then maintains a kind of equilibrium in which you are not getting wetter, but you are not getting drier either, and you are warmer than you would be in nothing, which is the most that can be said for it. Will has a coat of similar weight and inferior condition, which achieved equilibrium earlier, and has been expressing its opinion about the situation since roughly eight in the morning. You stop for an hour at midday at a farmhouse whose owner you know by name, a man called Evison, who lets you bring the geese into his yard and gives you and Will soup at his kitchen table in exchange for news of the road from the east, which is the currency that drovers have always traded in. You tell him about prices at the Norfolk markets, about the road conditions in Lincolnshire, about a cattle drover you passed two days back heading the other way who had word of a sickness in the stock markets at Leicester. He tells you about conditions ahead, about a bridge repair that has narrowed the crossing at a creek four miles on, about a farmer named Holt, who has enclosed a section of common that this drove has used for twelve years and has put up a fence that forces you two miles off your direct route. You note this. You will have to add the detour to your mental map of the route, the same way you have added every other change over fifteen years of making this run. The road shifts, the enclosures come. The common land shrinks. The route you are walking now is not quite the route your father walked when he did this drive twenty years before you, and the route someone will walk in twenty years will not quite be this one. But the geese will still need to get to market, and somebody will still be walking behind them. This is your working assumption. It has been true for three centuries. You see no reason it will stop being true. You arrive at the Nottingham Goose Fair on the morning of the ninth day with two hundred and seventy one geese, twenty seven birds lost over nine days, ten below your starting count, of three hundred and one above your worst acceptable outcome, three to foxes, two to foot problems sold along the road, twelve dead of various causes on the road, ten missing, which is the category you use for birds that wandered into a hedge or a field, and were not recovered before the flock moved on, which means they were eaten by someone or something and are beyond accounting. The fair is substantial. This is not a village market. The Nottingham Goose Fair in the seventeen eighties draws birds from across the midlands in the east, with drovers arriving from multiple directions over the preceding days, and the smell and noise of several thousand geese in pens and paddocks around the market ground is an experience that has its own particular texture, which is mostly sound and partly smell, and partly the specific visual fact of that many birds in one place. A gray and white and orange mass that shifts and settles and reasserts itself continuously in the way that large groups of geese always do. You sell your birds to a buyer named Crisp, who you have dealt with before and who knows your birds will be well conditioned, and does not insult you by offering low on the first go. The price is a shilling and ninepence a bird for the bulk of the flock, with a slightly lower rate for the dozen birds that are thinner than optimal. You do the arithmetic in your head, subtract your costs, and find that the result is consistent with what you expected, and slightly better than last year, which was a poor year for reasons that had nothing to do with your driving, and everything to do with the summer being dry and the birds coming off the stubble lighter than usual. You pay Will his shilling for the nine days, which is what you agreed, and which he accepts without comment. Though you can see him calculating what a shilling means against nine days of wet roads and cold soup and geese, and finding the number both correct and insufficient. This is the calculation every young drover makes and has to make his own peace with. The peace comes when it comes from the fact that the alternative is the farm, which is also wet roads and cold soup, but smaller and with no movement in it. The railway arrived in this part of England in the eighteen forties. Within ten years of the first livestock wagon, the long drives had largely ended. The Nottingham Goose Fair continued, but the geese arrived by rail in crates in a matter of hours rather than ten days, and the drove roads that had been maintained by continuous use for centuries began to close over and disappear. The enclosures that Edmund Thrower navigated around had been a slow pressure. The railway was a different kind of ending, fast and complete and final. The gossamer that drifts across English fields in October, the fine spider web filaments that catch the autumn light and float in the cool air of harvest, takes its name from those birds. Goose summer was the old term for late September and early October, because that was when the geese were plucked, and the feathers and down drifted across the countryside in quantities that hung in the air like mist. The feathers went into pillows and mattresses and quilts. The quills went into pen cases, the fat went into cooking. The carcass went onto the Micklemas table. Nothing about the goose was wasted, including the two weeks it spent walking a hundred miles to get where it was going, wearing a pair of boots made of pine tar and sand that nobody thought to write about, because nobody thought it was remarkable. It was just how geese arrived.