Threshing grain with a flail

The flail was two sticks joined by a thong of raw hide, a handstaff of about five feet and a beater of thirty inches, swung thirty to forty times a minute on a barn floor through the whole of winter. That winter work was the point, since threshing filled the dead months and paid a labourer when nothing else did, so the machine did not merely speed a task, it removed a season's wages. Labourers broke threshing machines across southern England in the second half of 1830, and the state answered with nineteen executions, 505 transportations to Australia and 644 imprisonments. Flail threshing survives where the straw must not be crushed, for thatching and basketry, and in seed saving and on holdings without power, and around the machine a person still judges moisture and sets drum speed and concave gap from the sample in his hand.