Herrick's 'The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home' is a polished, disturbing and deeply ambivalent poem, which anatomizes relations between wealthy landowners and poor labourers with startling perspicacity. The class of unpropertied rural labourers it depicts were facing unprecedented poverty at the time it was written. While the poem's exact date is uncertain, scholarly estimates span a period of which Peter Bowden writes 'The third, fourth, and fifth decades of the seventeenth century witnessed extreme hardship in England, and were probably among the most terrible years through which the country has ever passed.' 1 The frequent bad harvests of these years impacted heavily on the poorest, coming as they did after a long period of rising food prices, increasing population, growing unemployment, and enclosure of common land, which had traditionally provided a vital safety-net for the poor: from 1500 to 1650, Alan Everitt observes, 'the labouring community, as a whole, was being gradually disinherited and impoverished'. 2 Food riots, and even occasional deaths from starvation, continued through the 1640s. 3 Herrick's poem is often discussed