THE ROOT-BOOK

Being a Full and Discerning Grading of Every Potato and Turnip in the Realm, by One Who Knows a Handsome Root From a Homely One at Forty Paces.

Set down with great care by Prosper Clod, Grader of Roots and Setter of the Standard, whose eye has never once been fooled by a pretty potato — a boast few graders, and no turnips at all, can make.

A Word on the Eye

You keep your money in potatoes. Do not look at me like that; you do. The whole realm does. A day's labour is a peck of King Edwards, a bride is opened at nine sacks, a debt is a debt in roots — and so the man who grades the roots is not weighing dinner, squire. He is minting the coin. My grade sets the price, and the price sets the table, and the tithe, and the wedding, and the whole slow turning wealth of the valley, and it all comes down, in the end, to my eye.

And my eye is not fooled. Forty years, and never once taken in. I grade by look — a good root is a handsome root, smooth of skin, fair of shape, honest and round in the hand — and the ugly ones I cast down where they belong. Beauty is worth. It always has been. A thing that looks like wealth is wealth, and I will hear no reeve nor cellar-woman tell me otherwise.

Each entry: The Root · The Grade · The Reason — the Reason being my eye, which does not explain itself, and is never wrong.

1 · The Table Root (First Grade)

The Root. Smooth, fair, round, a skin like a clean cheek; the sort you could set before the Bastables and not blush. The Grade. First. My gold. My standard. The coin the fine houses pay in. The Reason. It is beautiful, and beauty commands. A First-Grade root is worth three of any other, and I have made whole families rich by finding a clamp full of them, and been thanked in the good parlour for it.

2 · The Market Root (Second)

The Root. Decent. Honest. A little rough, a little plain, but no shame in it. The Grade. Second. The everyday coin of the everyday man. The Reason. It will do. Not a root to be proud of, but a root to be paid in, and most of the valley is paid in Seconds and gets along, which is what Seconds are for.

3 · The Clod (Reject)

The Root. Knobbled, warted, lumpen, ugly as a bag of knees. An offence to a discerning table. The Grade. None. Below the coin. Cast to the pig-heap, or, if there's a deal of them, tipped into the poor's sack at the gate for whatever they'll give. The Reason. It is unlovely, and unlovely is worthless. I do not know how a grader could be plainer. Look at the thing.

4 · The Eye Itself

The Root. All of them, at a glance, by the cartload. The Grade. Set in a breath. The Reason. It is a gift, and gifts are not taught and cannot be learned and will not be argued with. Bring me a hundredweight and I will have it graded before you've tied the horse, and I will not be a root wrong in the hundred, and I will take a small ale for my trouble and consider it robbery of myself.

5 · The Setting of the Standard

The Root. The realm's whole crop, and thereby the realm's whole purse. The Grade. Mine to give. The Reason. When you keep your money in a thing that grows, someone must say what a good one is worth, and that someone is me. I set the rate the valley reckons by. There is more of Sogmarsh passes through my eye of a harvest than through the whole Exchequer in a year, and the Exchequer, I notice, has a roof, and I have a shed. There is no justice in it, and I say so, and grade on.

6 · Mrs Doon

The Root. The point at which the cellar-woman and I fall out, every autumn, without fail. The Grade. She grades by what lasts. I grade by what looks. She keeps the ledger of what keeps and what turns; I keep the standard of what sells; and we have never once agreed, and she called me, to my face, in front of the weighing-shed, a man who would starve in a good year sooner than eat an ugly potato. The Reason. I graded her opinion a Second, and went home. A man does not take instruction on roots from a woman who stores them. Storing is not grading. Any fool can keep a thing. It takes an eye to judge it.

7 · On Beauty, Which Is a Moral Condition

The Root. — The Grade. — The Reason. A handsome table is not a vanity, squire; it is a sign. A fair root on a clean cloth says here is a house in good order, a family that has done things properly, a valley that is coming along. I do not merely grade potatoes. I grade the realm's good opinion of itself, and I keep it high, and I will not apologise for a standard.

8 · What Comes Through the Winter

The Root. The Clod. The warted, knobbled, worthless one I have flung to the pigs and the poor for forty years. The Grade. None, from me. And there is the whole of my ruin, said plain at last. The Reason. The ugly root keeps. That is the one thing my eye, the finest in the valley, has never once seen: the knobbled Clod comes through the hungriest winter sound and sweet and sustaining, while my flawless First Grade — my gold, my standard, my beautiful coin — rots to grey water in the clamp by Candlemas, handsome to the last and no good to a soul. The poor, eating my rejects at the gate, have wintered every year of their lives on the true wealth of the realm, and I have graded that wealth into the pig-heap with my own hand, proud of my eye, and called it a standard. Mrs Doon told me. Mrs Doon, who keeps what lasts, told me forty years ago, and I graded her a Second, being unable — with the finest eye in the whole of Sogmarsh — to see the one plain thing sat ugly and sound and priceless right in front of it.