Mardler August 2018

Local History
A long rambling nonsense poem of 1620 by John Taylor “In
Praise of Hempseed” (cover plate shown below) described the
various uses of hemp but also waxed lyrical about the
medicinal properties of the seed, against “All Dropsies, Colics,
Jaundices, or Scabs, Gangreens, Ulcers, wounds, and mortal
stabs” but also pointed out that the hangman’s rope was made
of hemp and hemp fibres were made into paper, sacks and the
seeds produced oil too.
Sweet sacred Muses, my invention raise
Unto the life, to write great Hempseeds praise.
This grain growes to a stalk, whose coat or skin
Good industry doth hatchell, twist, and spin,
And for mans best advantage and availes
It makes clothes, cordage, halters, ropes and sailes .
The ultra-smelly process of ‘retting’, separating the embedded
fibre from the flax stem through partial rotting was done by
immersing the harvested crop in water The rotting was brought
about by a complex enzyme action of microbes naturally
present in retting water. Retting ponds can still be seen on old
maps but no-one wanted to live near one. Fields and
properties nearby might be called 'Hemplands' or 'Hempfield',
such as Little Hemplands, the Syleham parish clerk’s house,
still with that name and Great Hemplands, clearly visible on
the tithe map of Syleham drawn in 1839. Syleham Green had
a ‘retting pit pightle’. There were other retting pits at Eye and
Scole and it is thought the River Waveney could also be used
for retting, so that was possibly where the Brockdish hemp
harvest was retted. Arthur Young, the great agricultural
observer, recorded 8 acres of hemp being grown in Brockdish
when he visited in 1802. There were also many public houses
called The Hemp Sheaf; the one in Stradbroke that closed in
the 1980s is now a private house.
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