Crying The Neck is a harvest festival tradition once common in counties of Devon and Cornwall in the United Kingdom, in which a farm worker holds aloft the final handful of cut corn and a series of calls are chanted.
The tradition declined following the invention of machines such as the combine harvester,[citation needed] and is no longer known to be practised in Devon. In Cornwall, however, the tradition was revived in the early twentieth century by the Old Cornwall Society.[1]
In The Story of Cornwall, by Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin, the following explanation is given on the practice:
The rest would then shout,
and the reply would be:
Everyone then joined in shouting:
(calling the farmer by name.)"
Sometimes the ceremony is given in the Cornish Language, here between An Tregher (the reaper) and An Re erel (the others):
Yma genef! Yma genef! Yma genef!
Pandr’us genes? Pandr’us genes? Pandr’us genes?
Pen Yar! Pen Yar! Pen Yar!
An Re erel – “Houra! Houra! Houra!
Robert Hunt wrote in his Popular Romances of the West of England that the neck would be hung in the farmhouse after the ceremony.[2]
In a harvest scene in the third episode of the second series of the 2015 of Poldark, Francis Poldark performs the tradition at Trenwith, his estate.[3]
In a harvest scene in the third episode of supernatural drama The Living and the Dead (S01 E03), Charlotte Appleby performs the tradition at her husband's family farm, which she manages.[4]