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.

Several people seem surprisingly angry with me. I didn’t say that I wish I lived back then. I was just being conversational, wondering about a very different way of life.
Thanks to those sharing interesting information and stories from generations ago!

I too am surprised by how angry some people seem to be getting, as if you're personally insulting them and their 18th century struggles.

Not sure about some of this.

Women were certainly younger and thinner when having babies, but poor women were chronically malnutritioned and by the 1700s, women working in factories, mines, mills etc were vitamin D deficient so often had osteoporosis and were also often anaemic.

There was no widespread understanding of the causes of puerperal fever until the mid-late 1800s. Focus on preservation of the perineum was to reduce risk of heavy blood loss rather than infection, as it was understood that maternal haemorrhage was a cause of death. The need for hand washing and clean aprons, clothes etc came much later.

Babies were breastfed where the mother was alive or a wet-nurse was available. I’m the workhouse or if the mother was dead and there was no wet-nurse, they were fed flour-and-water pap, with the results about what you would expect.

Rape was not an offence in marriage and even if women weren’t always beaten, many lived very difficult lives - often at the hands of their own mothers or mother-in-laws.

The thing is, if you want a slower pace of life you can make that happen. We're not completely helpless to circumstances.

I read an article about this a little while ago it was absolutely fascinating

@WithIcePlease

I found it

www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

I think about it a lot, when you hear about young children having split nights it makes a lot more sense

If you like social history, I recommend reading about the people that lived on St Kilda & the Outer Hebrides

Simpler is wrong word, at least it gets misinterpreted.

It was "simpler" because you had far fewer choices (than nowadays). Far Less control over what happened to you & people around you. You didn't have much choice about your MP or if your govt went to war or where (whether) to send your kids to school or whether to have kids or what to eat or what entertainment to do. You got what you got and rarely had choices.

Also, Nowadays we're specialists. I'm very good at a few things, competent at quite a few things, and most things I can't do at all, I only know how to find someone competent. In 1700, most people were generalists and were competent at a huge range of skills. Your whole life was filled with labour intensive chores (unless you were a rare rich person). You were too tired to worry about little things, I suppose.

Lolsies, this

We look,back misty eyed to a rural idyll that never actually existed.

Life in the 18 and 19 centuries was nasty, brutish and short for many people and in some areas for most people.

Typhus anyone? That ravaged my own rural family as late as the 1850s.

I'd have died in childbirth, based on my two births. No thanks.

@TheABC

The last witchcraft trial in England was in 1944.

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.

This is the most sensible thing I've read on this post. There are a lot of things today which stop people from having a happy life, but most of the posts on this thread totally disregard those. Anyone would think everyone is now living in some sort of utopia. People, whenever they lived, just made the best of what they had and got on with it.

My house was built in the 1700s and the living room, that me and two kids are stretched out in now, once housed a whole family. The mum and dad must have worked their fingers to the bone every day, and then were cooped up in this room with their many children once they clocked off. Another five families occupied the rest of the house and they would have shared an outside toilet.

Re not knowing about the troubles of the world, as much as I think we’re now way too overloaded with info, back then people were terrified of the unknown. People worried about things that they had no way of confirming or understanding. They were in so many ways crippled by lack of education and opportunities. Maybe if you lived somewhere with abundant food and good weather, maybe? But even if you read books like Cider With Rosie (I know not 18c) where they have as much of an abundance of local produce as there really can be in the UK, and a kind community, it was also clearly really bloody hard.

Feudalism was horrendous, the Roman period may have worked slightly better for the poor as it wasn’t so divided but I don’t know enough about it really. Wars between nobles left trails of destruction, the poor being collateral damage that nobody gave a shit about. Not sure what period of time was ever all that great? Humans need each other to survive and thrive, but we are seemingly predisposed to wanting more power and can’t seem to keep it in check in order to benefit from a sharing, caring society. There’s enough of everything in the world for everyone and yet it’s never ever been fair.

@RedRobyn2021
Thank you for finding that
I was so surprised when I heard about it and also surprising how it seems to have dropped off the radar of social history too

Unlike Poldark at least Les Miserables was only written just over 30 years after the events it portrays.

I'm not sure I'd even choose to go back to the 1950s, let alone the 1700s!! The 1990s were good though <wistful teenage reminiscing>...

They didn't even have penicillin t hough so any infection could be life threatening
There was a very real.risk both you and your baby might not even survive birth
My 16 year old was diagnosed with Diabetes in February he's insulin dependent fingers crossed he will.live a more or less normal life with a manageable condition
He would have died within weeks or even straight away as he was in DKA ,when he was diagnosed.

I've got one word: dentistry

I practise the second sleep, only over Winter though. It suits me very well. Sleep from 8-12pm, get up and do three hours in my office, reading, googling, working. Then back to sleep from 3-6.

In Summer I sleep 11-4, then kip for an hour in the afternoon.

Gosh I think you've had a really hard time on this thread.

You said in your opening post all the horrible things about 300 years ago but mentioned as a benefit a simpler way of life. I think with todays increasing pressure it is normal to imagine an escape to a simpler way of life. I mean look at the number of people who want to move to the country to get peace and have chickens and grow vegetables. It's natural to day dream about this when life's pressures get too much. I mean 300 years ago nobody got the hump when you didn't reply within 5 minutes to their text.

Some posters do seems quite determined to start an arguement and deliberately misinterpret your post. I bet you imagined a lovely day dreamy type thread with people talking about fresh vegetables, family round the corner and no emails from your boss at the weekend instead posters have taken out their modern day stress on you

As for me well that's my bubble burst. You mean Poldark is not real. Jeez next they'll be telling me there's no tooth fairy! Spoilsports!

Oh well, I'm going back to watching Poldark to get away from all the angry, outraged posters.

And just think the fact that there are so many angry, outraged posters kinda makes your point for you. People today are very stressed. Thus the day dream of a simpler life.

Life expectancy was only that low because of high infant mortality - if you made it through infant and childhood, people would generally survive into your late adulthood. Not everyone died in their 30s!

Also it was interesting that lots of the items mentioned by posters as being unbearable are coming back to haunt us.

Antibiotics - aren't we predicted to have a problem in the coming years. No new antibiotics have been invented for a long time and the current ones are less effective due to overuse

Dentists - lots of posters saying how awful no dentistry. My current dentist was only taking on private patients this year after being a NHS dentist for his whole career. Now he has closed his books to even private patients. There is a huge shortage of dentists.

Lack of medical care/knowledge - of course we have it better but look at the way things are headed. Can't get a GP appointment and if you have a heart attack you might get an ambulance or you might wait for 4 hours with no help and die.
We have the know-how but it is becoming less accessible for the majority of the population

Rape in marriage - of course not good but we have our own problems. Marriages are breaking down due to men being addicted to online porn. Our young men are having their minds warped by violent porn before they have even had a real relationship. How do we think they are going to treat their wives when their sex education came from watching humiliating porn of trafficked girls.

People suffering from malnutrition - yes of course this was awful. We have our own 'crisis' - they died from lack of food, we are dying from overeating and eating of processed foods. I mean there were no diet pills or surgery for obese people back then.

They had lots of horrible diseases but we have things they didn't - diabetes due to our sugar filled, over processed diets. Mental health problems caused by isolation and lack of family support. Suicide in youngsters caused by cyberbullying.

Someone mentioned poor people were at the mercy of landowners for the roof over their head - Isn't this so similar to what is going on in the current rental market - people being evicted, shortage of properties, handing over a huge percentage of your wages to your landlord for the roof over your head

Yes of course we have it much much easier than 300 years ago but we are not without problems and some of them are pretty serious.

I wouldn't want to live in those times though because of poor dentistry and medical care - in fact, had I lived then I'd have died a long, slow death (assuming I developed that same health conditions that I have now).

Imagine if you needed dental work...that always pulls me out of it