Tag Archives: agricultural history

Social History Book Advent Calendar Day 20 – more on rural life and a bit about Suffragettes

by thehistoryinterpreter

If anyone is still reading these, congratulations and I refuse to be responsible if you have succumbed to my suggestions and blown your book buying budget. Today I would like to introduce you to Pamela Horn’s Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside. I have had the pleasure of hearing Pamela Horn speak. In fact, on one memorable and somewhat embarrassing occasion, her 35mm slides slowly melted in the projector we had provided (you can tell this was some time ago!). Her social history books are all valuable reading for anyone trying to understand life in the Victorian era. The clue to the content of this particular volume is in the title and this is an excellent general introduction. The book covers many aspects of rural life in the nineteenth century. Here we can learn about home life, education, religion, leisure and cottage industries. There is a chapter covering the impact of trade unionism and another about crime and punishment. Other chapters look at poverty and at medical care. I particularly like the author’s habit of using named individuals as examples. The fruits of her extensive research in contemporary sources are shared with her readers.

My paperback edition has a few, rather dark, black and white photographs by way of illustrations, which don’t really add anything to the text. The appendices include details of labouring budgets and wages and a contemporary accounts of labouring life. There is also a useful bibliography, as well as end notes. It is another very useful book for those looking for context for the lives of their ancestors.

There was not much progress on Barefoot on the Cobbles yesterday. I am still bogged down with the tricky inquest scene. I took time out to write the next in my series of articles for the In-depth Genealogist Magazine (IDG). My column is about the lives of our female ancestors and this contribution was to be about suffragettes. I rashly included this when I was working on the suffragette chapter of Barefoot but suddenly this seemed like a less than good idea. IDG has an international readership and I needed to take that in to account and actually, once I got started, I really enjoyed researching it and I am now wishing I had time to take this further. I don’t have time. I really don’t. Please keep reminding me of this. I will pass on one gem that I gleaned. There is an online list of suffragists who signed a petition to parliament in 1866. I don’t want to give too much of the article away but there are similar lists of signatories to later petitions in Australia and New Zealand that a whiz of your preferred search engine should lead you to. Was great great granny a suffragette? I am wondering how much of my newly found knowledge I can impart to students of my forthcoming online Discovering Your British Family and Local Community in the early 20th Century course. You know the course, I believe I have mentioned it before and I expect, if there are still spaces, I will mention it again. It would be a great boost to your research as 2018 dawns.

Social History Book Advent Calendar Day 19 – life on the farm

by thehistoryinterpreter

I could not compile a list of social history books and omit the ‘Farm’ series. They have already warranted a couple of passing references in other posts but today’s belongs solely to them. Many people, especially in Britain, are family with BBC TV’s living history series Victorian Farm/Edwardian Farm/Tudor Monastery Farm/Wartime Farm. All of these are now available on DVD and are a wonderful insight into rural life in the period specified. What is less well known is that each series also has an accompanying book; I have them all. These are ‘coffee table’ books: beautifully produced hardbacks with lavish coloured illustrations. There are contemporary illustrations as well as scenes from the programme. I have no idea how well this translates to the e-reader editions. The books are nonetheless well researched and the insight into the experimental archaeology carried out by the authors, Peter Ginn, Ruth Goodman and Alex Langlands, is invaluable. For those who are unfamiliar with the series, three historians/archaeologists spent a year recreating life in a farm of a particular period. The books describe the highs and lows of their experiences.

I have decided to focus on Wartime Farm. The war referred to in the title is the Second World War, so this volume features the struggle to increase production during the conflict and the on-going tussles with officialdom, in the shape of the ‘War-Ag’. The book goes beyond the difficulties of the small-scale mixed farmer to describe the role of the farmer’s wife, giving and added female perspective. There are sections devoted to rationing, machinery, evacuees, home defence, labour, digging for victory and making do and mending, along with many others. The book does talk about the making of the series and this aspect may be less relevant to some. There are however ‘how to’ sections; so between the pages you will find a recipe for plum duff, instructions for making a mop, details of how to dance the foxtrot and how to make shampoo. In summary then, a good, general introduction to life on the wartime farm, well written and beautifully produced. Insider tip – there was a low-key, forerunner to these programmes, Tales from the Green Valley, focusing on the seventeenth century. I think this is the best of the lot. There is no book for this one but you can still get it on DVD, either as a stand alone or, at very little extra cost, as a companion with Victorian Farm and yes, I have that too.

 

Social History Book Advent Calendar Day 14 – Farming Surveys

by thehistoryinterpreter

Another one for those interested in agricultural history today and it is a whole series of books, rather than just one. Most family historians I speak to have agricultural labourers hidden somewhere in the boughs of their family tree. What we need to realise is that these are not some amorphous group whose experiences were all very similar. Farming practices differ according to soil, terrain and climate. The Book of the Farm, that I mentioned earlier in the month, is a general account; you also need something more specific. To find out what life would have been like for a farm labourer in a particular part of the country you cannot do better than consult the appropriate volume of the General View of Agriculture. These county volumes were commissioned by the Board of Agriculture and were produced on the cusp of the agricultural revolution, in the 1790s, although some ran to more than one edition. I have a facsimile edition of Charles Vancouver’s General View of the Agriculture of Devon with observations on means of its improvement. Vancouver wrote the second edition for Devon and was also responsible for some other counties. I can only write about the Devon volume but I suspect that the others are similar, as they were part of a national survey.

The coverage is comprehensive and in the case of Devon, is broken down in to six regions, so the characteristics of a fairly small area can be discovered. The topics cover: soil, climate, crops, livestock, tools, terms of service for labourers, buildings, roads, markets and ways in which productivity could be improved. My edition had line drawings, a map and tables covering such things as parish by parish lists of population, amounts paid in poor relief, occupational structure, number of houses in the parish and other valuable goodies such as the menu for Exeter House of Industry (the forerunner of the workhouse) and the characteristics of different breeds of sheep. There are line drawings illustrating farm implements and livestock.

In short, if you only read one book to help you understanding the farming practices of your ancestors, or your locality in the past, then it should be the appropriate county volume of this series. The full list can be found here. If all this sounds a bit too good to be true, it is because there is a downside. Although some of volumes are available as internet downloads, others have to be purchased in hard copy and are not always cheap. My advice is to shop around because you and your agricultural labouring ancestors, need these books.

On the subject of agricultural labourers, for some strange reason, one of the most popular posts on my blog is one that I wrote about agricultural labourers. Every year there is a sudden spike in hits on this page via the site of an Australian University. I can’t see the actual page containing the link as it is in a ‘students only’ area but apparently they have been directed to me. I would have thought that there were far more in-depth accounts that they could go to but there it is.

Social History Book Advent Calendar Day 10 – for those with an interest in agriculture

by thehistoryinterpreter

Henry Stephens's Book of the Farm: concise and revised edition by [Langlands, Alex]This one is for all those family historians with agricultural labouring ancestors and for writers of historical fiction who are using a nineteenth century rural setting. The lavish production and copious illustrations also make it ideal for history lovers in general to browse. Henry Stephens’ Book of the Farm, was first published as a guide to mixed farming in the 1840s. It became the handbook used by the historical interpreters working on BBC TV’s Victorian Farm (DVDs of this excellent series are available). One of the presenters, Alex Langlands, had an abridged version of Stephens’ work reprinted to accompany the TV series. He included an introduction and many coloured illustrations that I assume were not in the original. There are also copious line drawings, which may have been part of Stephens’ work. If you require regional farming specifics, you will need to look beyond this book but here is a wonderful general introduction, written at the dawning of the age of agricultural mechanisation. You will find a season by season account of the many and varied duties on a farm. You can learn how swine were fattened, driven and slaughtered and there are clear instructions for forming a dunghill (always useful). There are sections on training sheep dogs, sowing flax and hemp and making butter. Amazon have a ‘look inside’ feature, so you can see the full extent of the contents. A few short chapters in to this lovely book and you will be treading in the footsteps of your farming ancestors – but beware of the dunghills.

Social History Book Advent Calendar Day 8

by thehistoryinterpreter

With some technical wizardry, this post should appear at a time when I am languishing in a local shopping centre hoping to sell my books to unsuspecting passers-by. I have a small share in a stall, along with other local authors. No idea how successful it will be but I will try anything once.

On the social history book front, I have chosen The Village Labourer 1760-1832: a study of government in England before the reform bill by J L and Barbara Hammond as today’s offering. This is another book that has been on our shelves for some time; the first edition came out in 1911. It looks at the fate of the disenfranchised rural labourer at a time when the government were bringing in enclosures. It considers how enclosures were forced on the agricultural poor and the impact that they had. It also covers the reaction and riots of the 1830s. It does come from a particular political stance but this is a refreshing outlook for a book written over a century ago. A slight criticism is the emphasis on the Home Counties. Seventy pages of appendices include transcripts of particular enclosure acts; there are also examples of family budgets. There is a companion volume ‘The Town Labourer 1760-1832: the new civilisation’, which also highlights the plight of the working classes, this time from an urban perspective. As long as you keep the authors’ biases in mind these volumes provide a valuable and interesting background for our working class ancestors.