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June from Walters W.425
Typical labors for June include sheep-shearing and hay-mowing, (or scything) and raking the dried hay into small piles. Despite what The Walters Museum says about this June calendar image from Walters W.425, “Three figures farming,” they are in fact two figures scything hay. The two men in the front are mowing or cutting the grass, which once it dries, magically becomes hay. They men are both using scythes mounted on a long shaft called a snath. The snath has an extra handle which makes the two-handed swinging motion of mowing the hay more efficient. As they mow they create small piles of drying hay. Once the hay is dried, it is…
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June from the Da Costa Hours
The occupation for June in this Simon Bening calendar image from the Da Costa Hours (Morgan Library MS. M.399, fol. 7v) is sheep-shearing. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d see today, though electric clippers are more common these days. Bening also depicted sheep shearing for the June calendar page in the Golf Book in a strikingly similar scene. The positions of sheep and shearer are the same even now. A fellow in a coat and hat is leaning on a walking stick; this might be the owner or the shepherd, or even a nosey neighbor, but his clothing marks him as someone who’s more than a peasant laborer. He has his…
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June from The Golf Book
The calendar pages for June typically feature the zodiac symbols associated with Cancer the crab. The labors for the month are often the wheat harvest (reaping), or cutting hay and raking it to dry first in windrows and then stacks, or sometimes, sheep-shearing. Sometimes calendar images for June show a fallow field being plowed and re-seeded, or, as the seasonal rhyme for the labors of the months notes “Junij And I wede my corne well I-now,” June was often a time for weeding. In this pair of leaves from the British Library’s Golf Book, on the left is an atypical but nonetheless appropriate scene showing a tournament, a formal series…
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June from Très Riches Heures
The favored labor of June often varies in books of hours. In colder regions, like England and Germany, the hay harvest is often associated with July, with weeding the labor for June. In sunny France, the labor of June in books of hours was often haying. This is the case in the June calendar illumination of the Très Riches Heures. In the background the towers of the Duke’s Paris residence, the hôtel de Nesle, rise across the Seine. Once it was the royal residence of King Charles VI (before he moved to the Louvre), now it is the Palais de Justice. The two orange conical towers belong to the Conciergerie,…
