This has been a remarkable week for English rugby fans. It has been almost impossible to miss the reports of the English victory over Australia.

Some have said the style of the play could have been better. I and many others were brought up on a diet of English rugby teams who played open attractive rugby in an amateur code, and lost.

It is nicer to win.

This must be a really good time to be an Englishman in Australia. There was some Yorkshire connection to the winning team, with at least two of the players having been at school in the county.

The replaying of the final few minutes of the game on the radio in the evening, while I was driving round the York ring road, provoked a reaction far more likely to cause an accident than talking on the mobile telephone ever has.

The police are too busy to enforce the laws they have, never mind introducing a new one.

Last week was Martinmas Week. Traditionally this was the week when farm workers were hired for the following year.

The agreement was that what we would now call contracts of employment lasted for a year, starting at the hiring fairs which took place during this week. It was agreed what the rate of pay would be for the whole year and payment was at the year end.

In fact, what happened was that workers took advances on the wage through the year until there might well be little left to be paid at the end of the year, when staff and employers made the decision about whether they were leaving or not.

Unmarried staff "lived in" which meant they lived with the family normally in a separate part of the farmhouse, often up a set of different stairs.

Rates of pay seem, to our modern ears, to have been pitifully low. A neighbour was remarking that his father was hired out not long after the turn of the last century, for five pounds a year. His food was paid for so that was his spending money, but it still does not seem much even if he was very young.

Hiring fairs took place in the nearby towns. Staff would be looking for better employers or for promotion on a different farm and employers would be looking to fill the vacancies for the huge amount of manual work which took place in those days.

Eventually, permanent positions were found and the annual ritual ceased as each individual progressed up the hierarchy of farm staff. The food on offer to living in staff was, as you would expect, a major factor. If the food was good and the staff were properly looked after the turnover of men was not large. It was a time before mechanisation and horses had to be looked after.

On some farms near Whitby and the River Esk so much fresh salmon was served up the men got fed up of eating it!

These were the days before refrigeration, indeed before electricity on many farms. It must have been very difficult to have provided food for so large a household of manual workers.

With the exception of making pork into bacon and ham there was no real way of preserving meat for year-round consumption. Everything had to be fresh. We have come a long way from that situation. Practically everything is available all the year round. This may be progress.

Now the fairs, like that this week, are dedicated to St Nicholas, but the food is still good.

Updated: 11:14 Tuesday, November 25, 2003