"The scythe was faster... to use than the ancient, short handled,curved, serrated blade sickle."
The Countryside Museum
The scythe is often ranked among the world's most significant advances in agricultural implements of the past thousand years. Its appearance on the farms of Europe in the latter half of the thirteenth century was to profoundly revolutionize agricultural production. Initially used as a grass cutter to gather hay, it was later used to harvest grain. Consisting of a curved blade, sharpened on the inside of the curve, and a long wooden handle (called a snath), the scythe allowed the reaper to stand upright while cutting grass—a vast improvement over the short-bladed sickle, which required the user to stoop uncomfortably as he cut.
A worker using a sickle, which was essentially unaltered in design since its emergence in around 5000 B.C.E., could harvest at best only three-quarters of an acre. (0.3 ha) per day, while the use of a scythe increased the production of grain harvesting to more than an acre (0.4 ha) per day. Its ergonomic design and its way of operating as a kind of lever gave it more power than the backbreaking sickle, and by the sixteenth century the scythe had all but replaced the sickle as the preferred tool for harvesting—as well as the weapon of choice in many a peasant rebellion.
By the late eighteenth century a series of wooden pegs had been added along the snath, which allowed grain to be cut and their stalks gathered in one motion for bundling into sheaves, an innovation that effectively doubled the farmer's productivity. The scythe remained the dominant tool for grain harvesting until the invention of the mechanical horsedrawn reaper in 1831, which could do as much reaping in a day as ten men with scythes.
