ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

'Engines of divine art': Tools, Work, and Weed-Making in the Early Royal Society

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, I

English Abstract

This paper takes as a point of departure a series of descriptions and rough illustrations of regional weeding tools found in a manuscript essay transcribed by the Herefordshire farmer-clergyman John Beale, and written by his nephew Peter Smyth, now located in the archives of the Royal Society. It reads Beale and Smyth's evocations of six-foot 'foxbills' and 'wide mouth[d]' dock-levers, and interpretations of their supposed usefulness, as a point of contact between emergent, elite husbandry science in Restoration England, and the plural, local, and material worlds of practice science interfaced with, and sought to appropriate.
By locating the letter as one part of a wider project of research into the history of agrestic trades, headed by the Society's 'Georgical Committee', it considers how apparently non-artisanal working practices, such as weeding, contributed to the production of agricultural knowledge in the early Society. It also considers the devices represented in the letter alongside a wider archive of weeding tools recorded in regional probate inventories, from counties including Essex, Yorkshire, and Northumbria, and glimpses of thier use and maintenance in manuscript farming account books. Finally, taking the 'weed' not so much as a pre-determined cultural label, but, instead, as a category produced through the interactions of multiple human and more-than-human actors, it considers the different ways in which these tools, and the labourers who used them, made weeds in both the environments in which they were deployed, and the abstract, learned frameworks which refigured them.

Author

• Francis Taylor