Saffron Cultivation

‘Lockers on board a ship are nothing to the cupboards of an old house,’ wrote the Reverend Henry John Wale (1827–1892). The Reverend Wale’s ancestral home had been full of them. When the house in Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire, was eventually pulled down, one of these cupboards was found to contain a number of household account books that had been kept by Thomas Wale (1701–1796), the reverend’s grandfather. Reverend Wale published extracts from these books in 1883 which provide a fascinating insight into the life of an eighteenth-century gentleman farmer.¹