Chatting randomly on a forum recently about history in general, someone said that they would have like to have lived in feudal mediaeval England. Often at the museum, or in Living History events am I asked if would have liked to have really lived in a time period I am demonstrating, or which time period I would like to have lived in. There has always been one era or another that appealed- always of course dependent on just exactly who and what one would have been born- great in any time period to have been born wealthy and been part of the kind of history that the history books, the TV dramas, Hollywood and the historical novel tell us about.
But the real history, made up of the heaving masses flailing in the morass either accepting their lot or striving to clamber out of the pit, is another matter completely. To put myself into the shoes, or rather lack of shoes, that was the reality of all the ag labs all and the miners who somehow managed to survive long enough to beget the ancestors that led ultimately to my random -chance existence, the question I find myself asking is how those people kept going mentally and physically in the absence of the material gain and leisure trade offs for intensive labour we expect today. We also expect advancement in society, personal satisfaction and fulfillment as reward for hard work. Perhaps the hard work was reward in itself for our ancestors but somehow I doubt it. The relentlessness of the toil sun up sun down day in day out without anything to look forward to- in reality, what was there to look forward to for our ag lab or miner ancestors? High days and holidays must have provided some relief, but these were attached to religious ceremonies grafted on to the ancient pagan festivals based upon the agricultural year.
We know that the life of the pre-industrial revolution peasant or artisan was hard and we know that the struggle for survival was probably what kept them going, but surely even the lowliest serf must had had hopes and dreams. Trying to imagine the grim existence leads to an understanding of the need for something beyond the relentless toil and struggle to merely exist. After all, even with the cushy lives we all lead today by comparison, we still need something above and beyond, something to believe in. How easy it is in this context to understand how religion, the church had them all by the short and curlies, the reward in the afterlife, heaven, hell and the Natural Order of Things.
What did our ancestors dream about, aspire to in the abstract? We have records of what the intelligentsia , the moneyed and leisured classes aspired to and achieved in various periods, but the 'common man', mainly illiterate, what was there for him beyond the daily grind? The artisan craftsman often found outlet for his creativity in the great medieaval cathedrals that soared ever upwards, the monk scribe in his illuminated capitals, but the ag lab? Perhaps his joy at the beauty of his world transcended the hardships and registered in ways that were beyond the physical recordings that were written poetry and art manifest.
This world was a world of darkness and silence. No white noise of traffic and machinery, no street lamps, electric lights, no noise or light pollution. The fields and hedgerows would have their own sounds the composition of which could be picked out- each grasshopper, each bird call, each whisper of the grass would be picked up by the ears of our ancestors. They would not be able to go anywhere after sundown, unless it was a clear moonlit night- they just would not have been able to see where they were going, The blackness would have been tangible. There would have been more stars, more constellations, the heavens would have come down to earth in the sense that our ag lab could have observed the movements of the heavens and ordered his life by them. The portents of weather and therefore the behaviour of animals and the production of food and sustenance, even the spread of contagious diseases and plagues could be correlated with observations of the skies and of nature would have been meaningful to him because of precedence of observation of what were once the gods by which men lived their lives and developed rituals to reverse bad auguries and facilitate good ones. Maybe our peasant ancestor absorbed the spiritual to such an extent that the very strength of the earth , the wind, the stars fed not only him but his descendents , and it is that spiritual strength that remains tenaciously somewhere in the dna of his bewildered 21st century sons and daughters.
Another thing that would have been a part of our ancestors’ lives which we find hard to imagine is the smell, or rather stench of everyday life. Often the beasts would share the living space with humans. Humans did not wash bodies or clothes on a regular basis, and if soap was used it would be lye soap, an ingredient of which would be urine and ashes. The rush lights used to put a glimmer of light into a hut of a winters afternoon would give off an acrid odour. There were of course no latrines and faeces would be piled close to the back door of the cottages. People of all classes harboured fleas, lice and worms as a matter of course.
If anything would put me off living in Medieaval England, the thought of having maw worms , creatures that could be six inches long and which can emerge suddenly for any bodily orifice, including the corner of the eye , would certainly be high on the list of the unacceptable. Just imagine, there you are in Orwell's brief bloom of beauty stage of life, on a definite promise one vibrant May morning, wreath of flowers round your head placed there by the vision of beauty about to let you make wild and passionate love to her in the meadow orchids, and a six inch wriggler shoots out of your eye, or worse, her nostril.
Where I was really going when I thought of the lives my ancestors led, other than what to my 20/21st century life has become accustomed to define as my right to enjoy my life and to have every wrinkle in it ironed out by 'the government', was the sheer contrast of expectations. My great grandmother gave birth to fourteen children in the course of seventeen years at the end of the 19th century, and did not lose one of them in infancy. Their father was a survivor of an epidemic of scarlatina on Romney Marsh in the 1830s in which all but he and two of his ten siblings and his mother and father succumbed. My Great-Grandfather worked as an itinerant agricultural labourer from the age of 9 when he was orphaned. His wife could not read and write. It is doubtful if he could read much more than the parts of teh Bible he knew by rote anyway.
The children were born in four different parishes in the Marsh, suggesting that he had to work for different employers to keep them clothed and fed, which he did admirably according to a school photograph taken on 1904 in which several of them , including my Grandfather stand straight and proud and shining like sunbeams in their Sunday best. A few years later the boys were all fighting and dying in the trenches in France and Belgium.
And where I was going? How petty our 20th/21st century whinging and whinings about stress at work, depression, exhaustion, head colds, etc sound in context of how our ancestors lived and how they had no time to worry about such things. So often I am fed up with my job, have changed my job when I have wanted a change. My daughter changes her job every few weeks fo rreasons ranging from she doesn't like it, doesn't like the boss, doesn't like the hours. Thinking 'I am tired in spirit and tired in body' I suddenly realised just how resilient and downright heroic were the folk who lived in past eras.
I doubt anyone would want to regress and wipe out the advances in science and technology that have been made and revolutionised the way people think, the way they Live with a capital L. Also we do recognise that we have lost something alongside the gains, perhaps this is why the past holds a fascination. it is not just to learn by the mistakes that the politicians, kings and generals made, but to regain something of what those ordinary folk who tilled the fields, hacked at the coal face, hammered the cherry red horseshoes on the unforgiving anvil or chipped away at a block of stone to carve representations of the flora , fauna and caricatures of the people that made up their world possessed that we , with all our sophistication seem to have lost.
