A Farmer’s Courtship
Chapter 13: "Your Story Matters" series
Samuel Allery from Blackawton Devon.
“I brought her a basket of turnips. Not romantic, but practical.”
AI-assisted image by Ideogram 3.0 at Abacus.au, July 2025
I have posed some interview-like questions to draw out the lives of my ancestors in a first-person narrative with Claude Sonnet as my AI assistant. The vignette below is the imagined response from Samuel Allery, my ancestor from Blackawton, Devon.
“What was courtship like for you as a farmer from Devon in the early 1800s?”
Courtship, for the likes of us, wasn’t candlelight and poetry. It was more about steadiness than spark—proof that you could keep a roof over your head and bread on the table. I wasn’t much for words then, and truth be told, I’m not now. But when I first saw Alice Pillage standing outside the mill with her sleeves rolled up and her hair tied back with a string, I knew I wanted to be the man who fetched the kindling for her fire.
She wasn’t the sort to swoon over trinkets, and I wasn’t the sort to buy them. What I had was a good plot of turnips, harvested clean and sweet after a rain. I bundled up the best of them in a basket lined with cabbage leaves and walked the lane to Moreleigh with a knot in my stomach and mud on my boots.
Alice met me at the gate, arms crossed, an eyebrow raised. “Is this a proposal or a produce delivery?”
“Bit of both,” I said, and she laughed.
That was the beginning of it. I visited most Sundays after chapel, my hands scrubbed and hair combed like a nervous boy, though I was well past twenty-five. We walked the hedgerows, speaking more with silences than sentences. She’d point out herbs, I’d name the birds, and between us grew a quiet kind of knowing.
Her mother eyed me like a rooster sizing up the fox. Her father asked how many acres I had and whether I planned on staying put. I answered straight: “I’ve no desire for cities or ships. I was born to this land, and I’ll be buried in it.”
That seemed to satisfy them more than any fancy words would have.
One crisp April morning, I asked Alice to marry me. No kneeling, no ring—just us under the ash tree, with the smell of loam and wild garlic thick in the air. She looked at me a long time, then said, “Alright—but I’m not taking your name just to be fed turnips forever.”
We were married in East Allington. Her dress was blue wool, stitched by her sister, and the whole church smelled faintly of rosemary and sheep. I brought a wheel of cheese for the feast and a jug of cider strong enough to buckle the knees. She brought herself—and that was plenty.
We didn’t speak of love much. Didn’t have to. She knew it when I mended the roof before she asked or brought her the first strawberries of summer. I saw it in the way she warmed my boots and left the candle burning when I worked late.
Ours was a courtship of soil and service, of laughter tucked into the folds of work. No lace or letters, but a lifetime’s worth of loyalty planted deep and tended daily.
Ms. Perplexity assists!
I was curious to know how far Samuel walked to deliver his basket to Alice. I asked this question on Perplexity and got this answer.
