Gleaning

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 in an extra-judicial dictum of Lord Hale it is said that those (who enter a field for this purpose are not guilty of trespass, and Blackstone seems disposed to adopt his opinion; but the Court of Common Pleas has since decided that the public cannot claim the privilege as a right. The custom still exists in England, though it is often restricted to the wives and children of the harvesters. In Scotland the law has decided that the poor possess no right to glean, and that the farmer may exclude them from his fields.