GLEANING. In conformity with the positive command contained in the Mosaic law, to leave the gleanings of the harvest to the poor and to the stranger (Lev. xix. 9, and xxiii. 22) there has been almost everywhere a popular feeling to the effect that the farmer was not entitled to prevent the poor from gathering what the reaper had left behind. In England, the custom of gleaning had very nearly passed into a legal right, for there is an extra-judicial dictum of lord Hale, in which he says that those who enter a field for this purpose are not guilty of trespass, and Blackstone (iii. 12) seems disposed to adopt his opinion; but the question has since been,twice tried, and decided in the negative in the court of common pleas, the court finding it to be, a practice incom patible with the exclusive enjoyment of property, and productive of vagrancy and many mischievous consequences (1 H. Bl. Rep. 51). It is still, however, the custom all over England to allow the poor to glean, at least after the harvest is carried. The privilege is one which, both from motive of humanity and of economy, ought certainly to be continued within proper limits, because it not only adds to the comfort and well-being of the poor, but by preserving from waste a portion of the fruits of the earth, and by employing. children and infirm persons whose labor would not be available for any other purpose, it diminishes the expenditure for the support of the indigent, which already presses so heavily on the industrious portion of the community. 'It is a privilege, how
ever, which is apt to 'be abused by able-bodied who, by rising 'early in the morning, and going into fields from which the crop has only been partially carried, con trive to carry off grain to a greater value than the wages which they could have earned by honest harvest-work. With a view to checking this abuse, farmers in various dis tricts have established rules for regulating the practice• of gleaning. Sonie curious statistics on the subject of gleaning were published in the Journal of the Statistical Society of London. In Bohn's Political Dictionary, under the head `! Gleaning," a state ment is made showing that the total gleanings of 388 families was £423 12s., and the average for each family £1 ls. 10d. which was one-fifth Of the average harvest-wages of each of the same number of families.
In Scotland, it has been more than once decided that the poor possess no right to glean, at common law, and that the farmer may exclude them from his fields (Hutch. Justice of the Peace, ii. 4'7; Dunlop's Paroch. Law, 223).