Meaning & Analysis
In fertile barley land, do not leave balks—unploughed strips—unused; when soil is good, plough it all.
Insights
Seizing opportunity
When conditions are favorable, do not leave potential idle. Good ‘ground’—talent, time, capital—deserves full cultivation rather than hesitant omission.
Thorough workmanship
Finish the job without gaps. Balks stand for neglected corners of a task; the maxim urges completeness over piecemeal effort.
Order and precedence
Applied socially, it warns against ‘skipping over’ those who should come first—e.g., marrying the younger before the elder—so no ‘balk’ is left in the family’s fertile field.
Avoiding waste
Leaving productive assets untouched is a form of waste. The saying promotes prudent stewardship: extract yield where yield is possible.
Inclusive selection
Do not arbitrarily pass over worthy persons or options. Exclusions in a rich field (of candidates or ideas) are metaphorical balks that diminish the common good.
Open-field agriculture
A ‘balk’ was an unploughed strip used as a boundary or path in the open-field system. The proverb’s force is pragmatic: in ‘good ground’ you minimize such strips to maximize yield.
Bere-land and dialect
‘Bear/bere’ is Scots for barley; variants even misread it as ‘beer-land.’ The dialectal coloring roots the counsel in a northern agrarian economy where barley was a staple crop.
Marriage custom
A traditional note applies it to household order: when proposing to marry the younger daughter first, the proverb rebukes the plan—leaving the elder ‘unploughed’ in good ground offends custom and harmony.
Civic application
Fuller’s figurative use—‘making baulks of as good ground as any he ploweth up’—criticizes policies that sideline ‘good ground’ (worthy families or talents). Administrative omissions become agricultural waste.
Psychology of omission
Humans neglect hard or awkward patches (procrastination, avoidance). Naming those patches ‘balks’ reframes avoidance as visible loss, motivating completion where payoff is high.
Rhetorical Devices
Imperative maxim
‘Make no …’ delivers a crisp, actionable rule, giving the line prescriptive bite.
Extended metaphor
Fieldwork stands for all productive enterprise; ‘balks’ become a vivid emblem of neglect or unfair omission.
Synecdoche
A narrow strip (‘balk’) represents broader failures—unfinished tasks, skipped persons, unrealized opportunities.
Alliteration
The /b/ cluster in ‘BALKS’ and ‘bear-land’ adds mnemonic snap suited to oral transmission.
Ellipsis of rationale
The proverb omits the why—listeners supply reasons (yield, fairness, order)—which deepens internalization.
Transcription
Quotations
(Make not a balke of).
(of good bear land).
Some say that in silencing many gentile families, he makes baulks of as good ground as any he ploweth up.
[As in 1636 Cam.].
(of good beer-land).
(Make not balks of).
(Bearland).
Spoken when it is proposed to marry the youngest Daughter, before the eldest.
Annotations
- strips of unploughed land dividing holdings
- land set aside for barley
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.