book rec! (nonfiction)
Jul. 25th, 2010 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardDorothy Hartley's Lost Country Life is one of those books I found while trawling through the tiny Central library, on a low shelf tucked away in the mostly ignored DA section on the third floor. (DA, for those that don't know Library of Congress call numbers, is British history.) It's a fairly old book, originally published in 1979; it appears that I am the first person to check it out since the library bought it, which is just depressing. I took it out alongside Folklore and Customs of Rural England, which I read first; Folklore and Customs is a brief general survey of...well, various folklore and customs of rural England, brief notes on the sometimes-superstitious traditions kept up in farming country up until about the first and second world wars, sometimes carried on into the U.S. and Canada via immigrants. Imagine my surprise to read the section on wassailing apple orchards and finding a mention of the practice being carried on in Yakima, Washington!
The title of Lost Country Life is something of a misnomer -- I went into it thinking it was going to be similar to Folklore and Customs of Rural England, which uses a lot of interviews and thus falls into a timespan of living memory, primarily the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it also goes back earlier. Hartley's book should probably have been titled Lost Medieval Country Life, because that's the period that's covered; the end stretch of her period is Elizabeth I's reign. The start date is a little murky; at a guess, I'd put it post-Roman Britain, although the period that's covered is largely after the Norman Conquest, but things change slowly in the country.
The book is a survey of everyday life in the medieval countryside, far away from cities. Hartley talks briefly about the nobility, but her concentration is on the peasant folk and the ordinary people of England. She describes the book as "a down-to-earth study of people, their animals, plants, and jobs, in the days when almost all of them lived on and from the land. It is not a history, being agricultural rather than academic." The bulk of the book is divided into chapters based on the months of the year, each one prefaced by Thomas Tusser's farming calendar, and describes briefly the activities that might have been carried out during that month, whether that be the harvest, the care of cattle, or the making of hedges. Hartley also discusses trade, travel, markets and fairs -- a very good general survey of everyday life that's usually ignored in favor of lords and ladies, kings and queens, knights, churchmen, and wars.
If you like that sort of thing, it's a fun read, and very good for writers who like pseudo-medieval fantasy. Lots of things to think about!
Definitely a good read; going on my to-buy list, because it also makes a good reference book.
The title of Lost Country Life is something of a misnomer -- I went into it thinking it was going to be similar to Folklore and Customs of Rural England, which uses a lot of interviews and thus falls into a timespan of living memory, primarily the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it also goes back earlier. Hartley's book should probably have been titled Lost Medieval Country Life, because that's the period that's covered; the end stretch of her period is Elizabeth I's reign. The start date is a little murky; at a guess, I'd put it post-Roman Britain, although the period that's covered is largely after the Norman Conquest, but things change slowly in the country.
The book is a survey of everyday life in the medieval countryside, far away from cities. Hartley talks briefly about the nobility, but her concentration is on the peasant folk and the ordinary people of England. She describes the book as "a down-to-earth study of people, their animals, plants, and jobs, in the days when almost all of them lived on and from the land. It is not a history, being agricultural rather than academic." The bulk of the book is divided into chapters based on the months of the year, each one prefaced by Thomas Tusser's farming calendar, and describes briefly the activities that might have been carried out during that month, whether that be the harvest, the care of cattle, or the making of hedges. Hartley also discusses trade, travel, markets and fairs -- a very good general survey of everyday life that's usually ignored in favor of lords and ladies, kings and queens, knights, churchmen, and wars.
If you like that sort of thing, it's a fun read, and very good for writers who like pseudo-medieval fantasy. Lots of things to think about!
The Cow Herself
Hit nis noht al for the calf that kow loweth
Ac hit is for the grene gras that in the medew groweth.
The continuity of cow covers centuries. The enclosures, which debarred her grazing rights, also develped the mailcoach roads that cleared protective space on either side (to frustrate highway robbers and footpads) and gave some space back to her. These changes went on around the cow, who herself remained static. As Uncle Remus remarked, 'It takes a lot to onsettle sis cow.'
The fine glossy-coated, udder-extended matrons of today do not look like the angular mediaeval cows, but mentally they remain the same. Let a score of strange cows get together anywhere and within twenty-four hours (as any farmer will agree) there will be a Boss Cow. Nothing said; a little shoving perhaps, no violent aggression, but 'the Boss Cow' becomes an established fact, and she will remain, a permanent institution (rather like Queen Victoria). Possibly, when the bellowing wild bulls faced outwards, head down and horns out, defending the herd, she was the experienced old cow who led the safe retreat, as her lineal descendant leads the way to the milking shed and all her sisters immediately rise and follow. (An angry horned cow still suckling her calf is capable of attacking an intruder and goring as fiercely as any bull.)
A cow carries for about nine months, and takes a comparatively short time to come into calf again. (A heifer who 'did not take' on her own farm might be tried out on another estate, with a different bull. If nothing 'came of it' she would be sold for beef.) Veal, condemned as 'froth' meat, was never popular in rural England. Saxons were, on the whole, good cattle men, rearing the bull calf for work and beef, and killing off only those cow calves misborn, deformed, or unlikely to thrive -- a good reason for the English traditional mistrust of veal.
Definitely a good read; going on my to-buy list, because it also makes a good reference book.