Spending this afternoon imagining the simplicity of life 300 years ago…

[Gwendimarco]

Around 1700ish, pre industrial revolution.
Life would not be easy of course. Childbirth and infant mortality, no rights for women or the poor, work was hard and physical for many.

Life was hard, for sure.

But it was also simpler.

Imagine knowing (or at least expecting) that your grandchildren’s work and way of life would probably be much the same as your grandfather and great grandfather’s.

Imagine never really knowing many people or hearing much news beyond your own village.

Visiting another village could be a day’s travel, if not more. Letters would be delivered by boys on horseback - the Royal Mail isn’t invented yet.

You know where everything in your house was grown or made, and probably the person who grew or made it.

Most people are illiterate, entertainment is stories and theatre with your local community.

Spirituality and religion are how you and everyone around you unquestioningly (for the most part) navigate the trials and tribulations of daily life.

I couldn’t live that life now, accustomed as I am to the 21st century. But I do think wistfully of the slower pace and simplicity.

No way - what if I've spent all day slogging in the field, picking potatoes or somesuch, and I go home and can't be arsed to cook? Stale bread and cheese again for tea? Can't just pop to Tesco for a ready meal. My kids are ill with bubonic plague again - must remember to put a wicker cross on the door to warn the neighbours off.

I rather like modern medicine too much.

I'm listening to a great podcast, Chris Skinners countryside podcast. You can hear a lovely grandfather clock that he said was made in Aylsham in the 17th century. He also explains about the medical tools he's found on his farm. It shouldn't be interesting but it is! Very nostalgic.

Yep work work breed struggle die easy

Christ no. I can imagine yearning for the 1990s (internet being very much a mixed blessing IMO) but not the 1690s or 1790s thank you very much. For starters I’d have at least one dead child by now.

Good grief. Poldark is fiction. It was historical fiction when it was written, & completely romanticised for modern tv. Loads of people didnt live near their family. Rich people's children married away as they couldn't all stay on the estate & poor people travelled to get work. People didnt have time to 'grow their own veggies'. They worked dawn till dusk, usually for someone else.

You might be able to take some inspiration from your romantic view of the past and simplify your life in some ways, if that would appeal? Make jam, batch cook a stew using seasonal meat and vegetables, buy UK produce and cook from scratch. Forage. Learn quilting and knitting!

There's a good chance you wouldn't survive childhood!

One in a hundred births ended in maternal death, so if you had 8 kids or so meant your chances of buying it that way were quite high, especially for a first birth.

If you made it to 30 you had a good chance of getting to 50, 60s would have been very old for an ordinary (not wealthy) person.

You are being v naive though OP. If you weren’t wealthy life was very very tough - stretching money, food and fuel was a constant battle and involves a lot of mental ingenuity as well as hard work. On top of the stress of knowing you might not be able to feed your kids properly or you might end up destitute or not be able to keep your baby warm enough to survive the winter, you had the stress of having to work hard while managing the pain of untreated medical issues plus the stress to having lost children, friends and siblings when they were young.

They had glasses & magnifying glasses.

Quite. Seriously @Poochypaws Poldark is designed by the producers to be cozy Sunday night TV. It has no more to do with real life 300 years ago than Cinderella. Get a grip woman.

I’m scared of lakes and rivers - I am convinced I was drowned as a witch in a previous life. I have virtually black hair (or did when younger) and would have had a few teeth missing in those days which adds to the picture.

It must have been a terrible time to live, illness, death, pain,
poverty, executions. Yuk, no thank you.

Only the few with money.

I think it's likely you'd come across a lot more tragic accidents than "one relative mangled in a threshing machine"

One of my 3 X ( I think, might be 4) great aunts did indeed die in that very way. Aged 45 " From injuries received from a threshing engine" at the local big estate. People were expected to help bring in the harvest for the local landowner and it got her killed. Absolutely horrific. Obviously that was post-industrial revolution.

If you were working class it was an awful life and not hugely better if you were wealthy. Disease was rife. I have ancestors more recently than 1700 who died of smallpox, cholera, lots of TB and bronchitis and my great-grandmother died of typhoid as late as 1890. It was nothing like as rosy as Poldark.

60s would have been very old for an ordinary (not wealthy) person.

Two of my ancestors died in their 80s . They got married in 1703 and were married for 63 years and it was so remarkable it was noted in the parish register.

@Gwendimarco
OP do you mean life was simpler in that people were more accepting of the difficulties in life. So if you were poor, like the majority, you would have to do a tough physical job to survive respectfully? That disease and death could come at any time? So in that sense things were out of your control. Even knowing children were likely to follow in whatever your trade was, I guess there is a reassurance in that, that their future is not unknown.

There wasn’t an aspiration to change your circumstances, just to keep going. So a blacksmith would be happy for his son to also be a blacksmith. A footman would be happy to work for a respectable family in a respectable job etc.

I’ve read two books recently that you might enjoy.
Longbourn by Jo Baker - about the lives of the servants in Pride and Prejudice. (I love a good regency novel but this is certainly not light hearted and witty!)
The Strange adventures of H by Sarah Burton - set in London around the time of the plague, shows how unpredictable life could be for women in particular.

We forget that people in the past were just like us. They didn’t have the scientific knowledge or technology, but they weren’t any less intelligent. They felt the same frustration and fear and love as we feel now. Just because virtually every family in the village had buried at least one child didn’t make the pain any less for parents, I’m sure.

For me, the worst agony I have personally been in - even worse than childbirth - is cystitis. The awful, pissing blood kind. I cannot imagine what that must have been like with no antibiotics. I can quite easily imagine dying of it.

We imagine dying of diseases we don’t have any more, like the plague or sweating sickness, but they also had our diseases too to contend with. TB and strokes and heart attacks. And think of dying of untreated cancer and the pain that must have caused.

my great-grandmother died of typhoid as late as 1890.

Oh and another great grandmother had 5 of her children die before the age of 5 , two of them just weeks apart. All would have been saved by antibiotics and that was far from uncommon.

No, I'll take modern life, thanks very much! Back then, I'd probably have been dead by now (I'm late 40s). DC2 would've died around 18 months when he had a serious illness that he wouldn't have survived in 1700. Not that my DH and I would ever have met, since his ancestors lived in other countries and he'd have probably died at birth (he was a blue baby). Life was simple - yes - you were unlikely to travel much more than 30 miles from where you were born and you'd have married a local lad/lass. If you were gay you'd have been married off regardless. If you were female you'd have been pregnant/breast feeding almost constantly from marriage up to the point that your fertility ended or you died (whichever came first). Repeated pregnancies, births and feeding infants would've exhausted and depleted your health. Shall I go on?

Ah trust you lot to well and truly skewer my daydreamings. 😂
At least @Poochypaws could see where I was coming from. I maintain that a life free from international news, ultra processed foods and pollution remains appealing.

Not so much the prevalence of intestinal worms, perhaps!

Of course we’ll never know, but I do wonder whether despite the hardships they were any less happy than we are, as obviously they wouldn’t know differently a d from their point of view they’d never had it better, as many of you feel about today. I wonder what those born in 2323 will make of our way of life.

is unlikely yesteryou woulda had the luxury of wistful daydreaming-far less delusioned by your romantic interpretation of a slowpaced life.Apart from hard-graft,repeat loss of children(which i cant imagine being any more bearable 300yrs ago)general freezing cold,hardship,unsanitary,child labour,no actual "rewards"living to survive.couldnt bloody read and write you said so royal mail notion made me laugh. Even the gentry lifestyle-was pretty grim. (i hate being cold) . is 1700 smallpox,cholera,probli typhoid.definate slow painful death seems to have been all the rage.I dunno that lack of ambition -imagining your children (survived)enuf to wear grandas boots would been anything along the lines of simplistic.

Sounds like hell and it was hell for many people. Hardship, lack of choice and limitations are not simplicity. They're hardship, lack of choice and limitations. They're not something to aspire or wistfully dream of .

Your home sounds amazing, I would love to live in a house with a history like that.

It wasn't free from pollution tbough! The streets were full of human & animal shit! They designed over shoes called pattens to lift you out of the muck. Rich people lived upstream/wind to get away from pollution. The rivers were full of pollution from various industries & trade. Everythink stank! People died or went mad from mercury poisoning etc etc etc It also wasn't free from international news. How do you think the Reformation happened? An upheaval so huge that its barely imaginable now.

Really? I didn't know, I would have been ok then!