THE FOLKLORE OF PLANTS: Hops

Lisa Karen Miller

          As we saw in the Barley article, life in the Middle Ages was indeed nasty, brutish, and mercifully short.  It’s hard to imagine how hard people worked, starting in childhood, just to be rewarded with an early grave.

         One of the few earthly rewards they got was ale or beer.

          Beer is ale with hops added.  Hops give beer its bitterness and its head, as well as keeping it fresh longer.  Ale would be good only for a number of days, and so had to be made almost continually.  

          An old British adage says, “Plenty of ladybirds, plenty of hops.” Another informs us:

“Till St. James’s day [July 25] be come and gone,

There may be hops or there may be none.”

          In other words, you couldn’t accurately predict the success of the crop until this date had passed.

          In Yorkshire, the nightingale made its first appearance in Doncaster when the hops were first planted. Medicinally, hops, the flowers of Humulus lupulus were used to induce sleep.

          The vines can grow up to 20 feet high, trained up supports.  They were tended by workers on stilts. The flowers were the part used in beer making, and they had to be picked by hand.  

          This is a crop that can “make or break.” William Hazlitt, in his English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, writes that no hop grower “…will have much difficulty in appreciating this proverbial dictum.  An estate has been lost or won in the course of a single season; but the hop is an expensive plant to rear, and a bad year may spoil the entire crop.”

           One reason it was expensive to grow was that, like tobacco, it is a labor-intensive crop requiring many hands in a short space of time.

          First introduced to Britain in the 16^th century by Dutch farmers (another group that knows about beer), it soon became the most important crop in the county of Kent, the Garden of England. Hop picking was an annual seasonal activity. Entire impoverished families in Victorian and Edwardian London used to spend September in Kent, picking hops for the brewers.

          In the 1950s, mechanized harvesters began to replace human hoppers, and the tradition declined.

          The Hop Farm in Tonbridge, Kent, has changed hands only four times in 450 years. Today it is a popular tourist attraction with a museum and family activities.  

          This Oktoberfest, raise a toast to your forebears, who worked so hard just to exist.

© Copyright 2023 Lisa Karen Miller