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.

I’d like you to meet an equally daft lad who works in our local pub and was pontificating about similar points, how much easier life would have been for him as a male in (and I’m quoting here) “medieval or Roman or Lord of the Rings times.”

what. The . Fuck.

Not really. Poor health and malnutrition meant loss of periods and infertility.

Oh I wouldn't dispute any of that! But with all the posts on the negatives, it did seem worth pointing out that there were opportunities for fun (even if it was just an annual fair!) and happiness; and for the humour.

I don't know. Obviously all the things listed are awful and I wouldn't want to live like that. But I imagine there was a certain security living where you had always lived, the women doing household things and the men going to work. My mother lived in a small villiage in Wales when my brother was little (before I was born), and all the women looked out for each other. My family were poor and didn't have a washing machine/dishwasher/indoor toilet but my mother was content. She was surrounded by friends, all the kids knew each other and the women helped each other out. The men tended to work long hours, so it was largely a community of women and children. It was a much physically harder life than I have now, but I don't think I'm any happier. My life is hard in a different way. I spend much of my time ferrying my kids to various things, preparing them for the 11+, GCSEs, A-levels, and many children are in constant stress because of it. The world now is just as full on as it was then and even in modern times, there is no shortage of people in this country without enough food.

The idea of growing your own food, cooking from scratch, making your own clothes, weaving your own baskets sounds really tough, but they had the knowledge and skills. There was enough of a community that people would help each other out and multi-generational living would make things like childcare a lot easier.

300 years ago, they lived with more death and pain, which is obviously really horrible, and I would hate to live like that, but I think we underestimate how important and beneficial community living is, because a lot of us haven't ever really experienced it.

Yet people often conceived 10 to 15 children, likely a good many by marital rape because men had the right to hasex with their wives whenever they liked.

Another reenactor saying no thank you.

I get what you mean to some extent. Where I re-enact I am immersed in a whole village-sized community, some of whom I've known 30+ years, we live, eat, work, play together and it's something I can't experience in real life. I also don't check the news while I'm there. It's wonderful and I wish I could spend my life there sometimes.

But...it's not the reality of life in the past (and I do think we inadvertently give a rather Disney view of things). We might talk of famine and disease, and an aunt who drowned in the pond washing clothes, but we aren't actually starving or had 3 children die of measles, or suffered agony and loss of jawbone because of a tooth abscess, or struggled to survive because our husband's broken leg set badly meaning he can't walk any more, we're not full of worms, our clothes aren't full of fleas and lice, we don't do physical labour for 10 hours a day on bread and dried peas and pottage of onion, carrots and herbs. We don't live in constant fear and worry of so many things we forget these days. Modern day 'pains in the arse' that make our lives feel complex, like paying bills and booking MOTs and worrying about kids eating junk food, are nothing on that.

I think the good parts of life in the past were wonderful, but outweighed by the bad.

There are ways to simplify modern life and make it more like your dream.

However much I love it there, when I get home how I appreciate the sheer joy of making a cuppa in 2 minutes flat, having a hot bath on tap, sitting on a comfy sofa, and sleeping in a soft and clean bed. You don't appreciate the little things until you live without them.

Blimey, such a lot of rose tinted specs. Imagine being a bit different in these lovely closed communities you imagine being so supportive. Imagine being a woman who didnt want loads of kids, or who wanted to be educated, or a boy who was gay or who didnt want to take over tje family business.....imagine everyone gossipping about your business. Sure, every society has its benefits & successes but lets be realistic!

The idea of growing your own food, cooking from scratch, making your own clothes, weaving your own baskets sounds really tough, but they had the knowledge and skills

I can do a lot of these things. I can spin my own yarn, weave my own fabric, sew my own clothes and make my own baskets, spoons, bowls, plates, stools etc. And we grow 95% of our veg and about 30% of our fruit.

And it's easy and enjoyable because I can buy potatoes if the potato harvest fails and not starve instead. If I had to do these things or die, or be cold or not clothed then it would be a whole lot less fun.

Even with the knowledge and skills, even with the fall back of supermarkets etc its still tough sometimes.

Some of my relatives & friends who have passed away in the last 100 years talked about & had photos

No inside toilets
Coal & wood fires & ovens, no electricity, no central heating
Mangle to do washing
Food like hunting rabbit, offal, seasonal food
Farming using heavy horses
Later farming where tractors were open to dust & elements, caused lung disease
No pre made convenience food
Big families & infant mortality
No NHS
Poor education, left school at 14, 15
Minimal women's rights

I think that it would be interesting to see 300 years ago, but I would not wish to live in that era, or 100 years ago

Yes I understand that was just trying to be "Hilarious " 😉

Yes, there are definitely down-sides to tight little communities as well as positives. No escape from bullies. Having to fit in and follow the rules or face dire consequences. Everyone knowing everything about you. Gossip.

Very well put.

I wonder if we’re part of the same village sized community….

But why do you want a life free of UPFs or free of pollution? Because it will make you healthier?
Because your not going to be healthier in a time where there's no modern medicine. Its not like the poor were eating a healthy salad with olive oil dressing and smoked salmon. It was pretty dull food. In the UK spices and things would be for the rich only.

I think the 1700s to me seem dark, depressing, smelly, cold and damp.

Was it simpler? Now if I'm hungry I can buy food pretty much anywhere. If I'm cold I can turn on my heating or put on a jumper, of which I have many because I can buy them easily. If I'm sick I go to the doctor. If I need the toilet I flush it away. If my shoes get a hole in I get new ones. Everything is quite easy. Obviously there are stresses that come with modern life, but I think the stresses of the past are probably much greater.

I knew people that did it so did it as a teenager then came back to it a few years ago.
I will pm you a link.
Alternatively have a google for groups in your area, they usually have a website and most though not all are happy to have new members.

No time’s a good time to be poor!

God no. Coming from a family of mostly poor, land workers in a rural area I don't even have to look 100 years back to be extremely grateful for what I have. It wasn't about cooking lovely fresh food and then hanging out with other women - it was sending one of the kids out to trap a rabbit for dinner while you hoped there was something not rotten in the vegetable store to have with it, and then serving everyone else - and it was cooked on the coal stove which would be tempermental and likely to spit sparks and burn things. Or go out, so someone had to keep an eye on it all the time. Earlier it would have been wood and then gathering wood would have been another job to do with the children on your skirts.
Many women had to work - piece work or labour as well as their home tasks. Then washing, mending, making clothes. No entertainment except for going to church

“No pollution” is a complete fantasy. Even 2000 years ago the Roman Empire created such far-reaching pollution from industrial activity (particularly mining) that deposits of polluting lead and antimony from that era persist deep in Greenland’s ice.

By the 17th century pollution in British cities was such a pervasive issue that it was wrongly blamed for outbreaks of plague:

https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/air-pollution-london-fumifugium/

I live near to Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire. Owned by the NT and has been preserved as a working 18th/19th century mill. Well worth a visit. One thing that has always struck me is that the women loom operators (working 6 days a week, 14 hour days in winter, 11-12 in summer when the river that turned the water-wheel that powered the mill was lower) would have their babies, have a fortnight off work and then be back toiling away in the mill. Their older children would bring the babies to be breastfed at lunchtime. The infant mortality rate must have been massive. Then presumably the women went home and cooked and cleaned on top of their full-time work. And Quarry Bank was considered a good place to work, because the mill-owners built houses and a church for their workers. Conditions in the mills in Manchester city centre were considerably worse. And their children would join them from the age of 8 or so. Milk-workers went deaf and generally died of “cotton lung”, the result of breathing in millions of cotton fibres every day (no ventilation in the mills; the windows were always shut as humidity was better for the cotton). That was normal life for millions of people in cotton mills in the North, from the 1750s until the 1900s.

And re pollution, the air outside in the countryside was cleaner but the air in your home wouldn’t have been great with the open fire! The air in towns would have been awful!

Thomas Hobbes IIRC, in the 18th century. So he was debating much the same ideas re the medieval/Tudor era that we are about the 18th century. Very symmetrical.😁

I'll tell you how my grandma lived, and by extension me when i visited. Wake up at 4 am to make/bake bread and other stuff needed,feed animals ,get breakfast ready . Then at 6 go and work the fields/crops. In 40 degrees heat gathering /weeding/watering/whatever else tomatoes ,potatoes, grains etc. No running water at home so having to go several times a day to get water in buckets from the well. Using an outhouse and a bucket at night. For quite a lot of years they used cut up newspapers instead of toilet paper. Having to collect cow/horse dung to patch up the house . After a long day working the fields, come home and feed the animals, clean ,cook etc. Then crash into bed to do it all over again. Summers were the worst , as the day started at 4 am and ended at 11 pm. Hand washing everything, making everything, walking everywhere.That's without the medical issues, health issues, poverty on bad crop years etc. It wasn't fucking idyllic.

Maybe the OP needs to brush up on her 18th/19th century authors and read a few of their books. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (referred to via the film by a PP) is a bit on the long side. But I can recommend anything by Emile Zola, especially L’Assommoir (the title is untranslatable but references the bars where they used to get hammered on absinthe, the French version of gin palaces).

On this side of the Channel, Dickens is well worth a revisit, and for a clear-eyed look at the restrictions faced by women and the insularity of provincial towns, try George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, as well as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. (The descriptions of the stodgy food in the last one was almost enough to give me indigestion). Even Jane Austen, whose fiction is elegantly escapist in style, gives a few glimpses of a much harsher world in parts of Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.

These were works of fiction, of course. But they were written by people who lived the reality of life two to three centuries ago.

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel KW?

I agree that life at the start and after the Industrial Revolution was awful for anyone poor and uneducated but before that, if you survived childhood the likelihood was that you would be relatively healthy.

Less dental problems because there was very little sugar in diets. Although childbirth was risky, most women were a lot fitter, thinner and younger. Midwifery was also all about preserving the perineum so that infection was prevented. Babies were breastfed will those health benefits.

Communal living also gave women protection - there would be a lot of social pressure not to beat your wife or children. Old people knew their families would look after them.

Religion was a discipline but also provided fun and community with church ales etc

It always surprises me how international medievals were too. There was lots of travel and Latin as a pan-European/African language meant lots of communication.

Yes.