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Ian Mortimer suggests that we should look back to the medieval period to seek inspiration for sustainable living
We know we should all be living sustainably if we can. Bestselling historian Ian Mortimer suggests that we should look back to the medieval period – an era in which people took a very local attitude to life – to seek inspiration for sustainable living.
In the third episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series Tudor Life, social historian Ruth Goodman explores what people in the 16th century did for work
From long hours in the fields to the bustling noise of Tudor workshops and marketplaces, we’ll discover exactly how people in the 16th century earned their keep — and what it meant to make a living in a world without modern comforts or job security View Green Video on the source website Enjoyed this video? Ruth is hosting a live Q&A for HistoryExtra members on 19 November 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Find out more here Want more from Ruth? Find more episodes of Tudor life here Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm
Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval
If you want to live a sustainable life today, you need to think local. For that, you can channel the experience of the Middle Ages, as Dr Ian Mortimer suggests
When I have a spare moment, I dabble in making hazel hurdle fence panels. It’s gloriously therapeutic. You get yourself a fat bundle of six-foot-long straight hazel rods, ram a few of them vertically into the ground at regular intervals and then cajole the rest of your rods through them on the horizontal, weaving them in and out of the uprights. The trick is to bend the rods robustly so that you can feel the fibres creaking and twisting through your palms, but you can’t be so hard on the wood that it cracks and snaps. It’s bad if that happens. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/Hurdles-panels-f647815.jpeg" width="1006" height="774" alt="A fence made of light brown hazel rods, weaved together. In the background, there is a wall covered in ivy and a wooden structure with fairy lights on it" title="“My shabby efforts at making hazel hurdle panels,” explains Dr David Musgrove. “Note the amateur broken ends of the rods.”" /> I am a rank amateur at this, and the results of my labours are woefully rustic, but I like the process of getting there. If you’re doing it properly, you’re supposed to split the hazel rods in half, but I’ve yet to conquer that art. To see it done masterfully, there are loads of informative videos of competent, serious chaps in forests teasing the wood into beautiful hurdle panels. People have been making hazel hurdle panels for millennia. In the Somerset Levels, archaeologists have excavated them in situ where they were laid down in the Neolithic period as trackways to help people get across the boggy ground. They survive, amazingly, because peat grew up over them and protected them. The trickiest bit of making a hazel hurdle is procuring the rods. You have to coppice trees (ie cut them down to the base) in order to encourage the hazel to shoot up in straight stems. If you’re managing a woodland, you would crop the coppiced hazel on a regular rotation every five to seven years. It’s a very sustainable building material because the wood grows back fast and parallel, and we know that in the Middle Ages, they were definitely managing their local woodlands to supply this. The medieval mindset It’s just one of many examples of sustainable living that our medieval forebears were engaged in, according to the historian and author Dr Ian Mortimer. “They managed their resources in a way that they knew they could get continuing crops off – if you pollard or coppice a tree, it’ll grow back stronger. They knew about all that sort of thing.” For Mortimer, there’s a lesson there for us – we should look back to the Middle Ages for inspiration for living sustainably today. Now I know what you’re thinking: those medieval folks weren’t living sustainably because they wanted to, but simply because they had to. Read more | What was life like in a medieval town? A historical A-Z It’s certainly true, according to Mortimer, that life in 11th-century England was precarious for many. He notes there was a regular cycle of famine at the time, so much so that some parents were willing to sell their children into slavery, “because that was a child’s best chance of survival”. There wasn’t much surplus around, and for most people, there wasn’t ready access to markets to transfer the surplus anyway, so most communities were pretty much self-sufficient and heavily dependent on their own productivity and ingenuity. By the time we get to the 13th century, however, things are different. England was much more of a market economy and a lot of goods were moving around. Surpluses could be transferred from places with plentiful supplies to areas in need. The precariousness of a subsistence economy was thus overcome. Nevertheless, communities continued to source most of their food and raw materials from their locality. The less distance it had to travel, the less vulnerable the society. WATCH | Dr Ian Mortimer on the medieval mindset of maximising sustainability View Green Video on the source website “Local production combined with a market economy is a very positive way of maximising sustainability. Whether the Middle Ages had a concept of environmental protection or not, people living then certainly knew how to marshal their local resources and wider networks. And that included working together, collectively and collaboratively.” To avoid the spectre of food shortages, medieval farmers had to manage their risks across the community, share good and bad land equitably among one another, and accept communal rules about what was gathered when, where and by whom. “Look through the manorial customs of medieval manors, and they’ll be saying when the peasants can go take their pigs into the woods to get the beech mast from the ground, and when they’re allowed to pick up the fallen sticks for their firewood, how much timber they're allowed to take for their houses,” observes Mortimer. “When you think about an open field system, which is what we had across most of central England, you can see how they divide all the strips of land into areas where no one’s going to have all their land blighted by a frost pocket because it’s all divided up and scattered, so there’s an average sort of production level across all the fields.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2181029275-23ca640.jpg" width="4960" height="2923" alt="Two peasants – one dressed in a red top and blue hat, the other in a blue top with red hat – are bent over in the woods, gathering sticks and twigs. In the background, there are fields, thatched cottages and a man riding a white horse" title="Two peasants gather sticks and twigs, turning them into bundles. This traditional wintertime activity is shown here in a Book of Hours c1550 (Image by Getty)" /> Community values What Mortimer is describing there is a way of living communally where resources were shared in a way that was seen as equitable. It had to be managed and rules observed of course, and that’s where the customs of the manor, and the writ of the lord’s local representative, the reeve, came into play. This wasn’t some utopian land of harmony – some people didn’t conform, sometimes there were disputes and disagreements, and sometimes the lords of the manors pressed hard with their demands on the peasants. But there was a strong element of co-operation among these communities to allow for this way of living. Living sustainably was only sustainable if they worked together. People in the Middle Ages would not have understood the concept of sustainable living – to them, it was just living. So you might take the view that this interpretation is simply historians today mirroring 21st-century concerns and projecting them onto the past. Of course, that’s true to an extent – history is always a reflection of the present. However, academics have been writing about this aspect of medieval life for quite a while. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1156947533-1ba6999.jpg" width="5414" height="4372" alt="A shepherd dressed in light brown and red stands by his flock of sheep. He stands on a yellow path, next to a cream building. In the background, there are more buildings, lots of green trees and a big blue building" title="A shepherd leading his flock, as depicted in a 15th-century miniature. There was a strong ethos of cooperation between medieval peasants (Image by Getty)" /> There is an interesting paper written back in 1990 by Jules Pretty, who is now emeritus professor of environment and society at the University of Essex, and a noted voice in sustainable living. His paper, published in the Agricultural History Review, and called “Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle Ages: The English Manor”, makes the argument that the medieval peasantry valued highly the goals of stability, sustainability and equitability. Like Mortimer, Pretty stresses the importance of neighbourly cooperation: “Villagers traded ale, cereals, hay, livestock and wood, and hired out livestock, ploughs, harrows and carts. Secondly, they provided support and mutual help for each other, particularly through crop and plough-team sharing arrangements. Peasants lent grain, livestock, tools and household utensils to needy neighbours, though these arrangements were more common between small and middle landowners. Thirdly, communal decisions were taken against individuals who had attempted to over-consume or underinvest in the communal resources – in particular those who had encroached onto the common wastes, had over-used the commons, over-gleaned the fields, or had neglected their obligations to maintain roads, ditches, hedges and gate.” Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about... late medieval England Waste not, want not Of course, they were also very mindful of not wasting what they did produce. All parts of the animals they kept were eaten, and they consumed the old animals rather than the young so that they could be sure of getting all the resources (milk, wool, that sort of thing) from them in life. They made sure that they returned what they could to the land they worked as well. The use of animal, and human, excrement for manure was a major concern. And when it came to building materials, they were very happy to reuse stone and timbers from old structures wherever they could – you only have to look at the Roman bricks in the great Norman tower of St Albans Cathedral to see that. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/dreamstimel218021476-2c7d446.jpg" width="2736" height="1826" alt="A photograph of St Albans Cathedral. To the left, a tree partially obscures the building. To the right, a large building with many arched windows and a large tower." title="The Norman tower of St Albans Cathedral includes reused Roman bricks, just one example of a sustainable building practice in the Middle Ages (Image by Dreamstime)" /> In his forthcoming book, Mortimer’s A-Z of English History (Old Street, publication scheduled for 21 October 2025), Mortimer succinctly explains this, and he’s let me quote a few paragraphs here: “Today, few of us keep vats of urine stored around the house. But up until the 19th century it is collected and put to use in fulling wool and scouring cloth, as well as being employed in various dyeing processes. It is in demand because it’s a natural and cheap source of ammonia, which is an alkali. People also use spots of it when removing stains from clothing. It becomes more efficacious when it is old, so people really do store vats of it for long periods of time. Thus, when you imagine the smells in an ordinary medieval home, along with the smoke and the traces of rotting offal in the rushes, add the smell of stale piss. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-56258750-f833761.jpg" width="4018" height="4915" alt="A document showing drawings of 12 bottles of urine. The top 5 are filled with urine from red to green colour, the second row of four have orange and yellow, and the last row of three contain very dark red to black urine" title="A series of flagons containing urine, which, until the 19th century, used to be stored by people at home for various tasks (Image by Getty)" /> “The point here is not to laugh at how gross life was in the past. It is rather that people in the pre-industrial age look at things that we think of as undesirable in different ways. In the 1960s the sociologist Mary Douglas famously observed that there is objectively no such thing as ‘dirt’ but rather what we call ‘dirt’ is simply ‘matter out of place’. A good example is manure: in the garden, it is definitely in the right place; in the middle of your living room carpet, it is dirt. This is why medieval people keep hold of things that neither you nor I would want lingering around the house. In a world created by God, everything has its ‘right place’. “Usefulness is the key. Or sustainability, as we might call it today. Medieval people keep old ashes from the hearth to make potash, which is used for scouring pots and pans with handfuls of straw. They also use potash for making lye (in which you wash your hair, even though it is strongly alkaline). It is also a key ingredient of liquid soap (in which you clean your clothes). Likewise, medieval people will eat all manner of offal that we would throw away. Apples are kept carefully for a full year; if they turn rotten, they are pressed to make cider. Nothing is wasted. Bones are boiled for their marrow. Fat is stored in dripping pans. Skins from all sorts of animals, including goats, dogs and cats, are made into gloves. Fallen boughs and sticks are put aside for firewood. The heat that remains in an oven after the bread has been baked is used to make small cakes. ‘Waste not, want not’ is the motto by which everyone lives unless they are rich enough to be a ‘waster’, and even the wasters let their castoffs and rubbish be used by other people. Almost nothing is thrown away except broken pottery and the cloth used to wipe your ‘nether end’.” The three Rs In our interview, I didn’t chat to Mortimer about the repair culture in the Middle Ages very much, but we did run a fascinating interview on the HistoryExtra podcast a little while ago with the German medievalist Professor Annette Kehnel, author of The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability. Kehnel explained how the repair business was a thriving one in European medieval cities, with people making their livelihoods by repairing clothes, shoes and household goods. You can listen to that here. So, if you think of the three Rs of sustainability – reduce, reuse, recycle – the people of the Middle Ages were absolutely living the second and third values in that list, but not so much the first. Reducing consumption wasn’t really in the gift of most people, with the limited resources available to them, though Mortimer does note that the strictures of the church in terms of not eating meat does play into that: “ You could take the view that the restriction on eating meat across Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays in the Catholic church was not just a spiritual thing, but also about eking out protein because you don’t need to eat meat every single day. Eating fish as opposed to meat then naturally balances things out.” Read more | Why there’s no such thing as a typical medieval peasant To conclude then, Mortimer’s message, drawing on his knowledge of the Middle Ages, is that, if we want to live sustainably today, “Necessities all need to be local and all need to be transported within the locality, in a way that’s reliable and energy-efficient and low cost.” There are problems with that. It’s much more difficult to buy locally if you happen to live in a modern conurbation, and as is regularly reported, it’s often much more expensive to buy locally produced foods than it is to get imported products in a supermarket. But there are urban co-operative movements springing up across the UK that are trying to address those problems. It’s been argued, and counter-argued, that the decline of neighbourliness occurred in the post-medieval period as the ethical code of the old village community unwound in the face of more individualistic behaviour in the 16th and 17th centuries. That debate has been going on among social historians of early modern England for decades, and it carries on still. I’m not going to get into that here, but perhaps the message is that locality, community and sustainability fit together. That certainly was the case in the Middle Ages, and maybe that’s something we should think about today. If we want to live sustainably, we need to think about how we live as local communities and cooperate harmoniously. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
From fatal foliage to the perils of ploughing: the Tudor calendar of death
Delving deep into reports of coroners’ inquests from Tudor England, Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski show how accidental deaths reveal the rhythms of work, travel and leisure throughout the year
January Deadly cold and woodland woes Tudor England languished in the chill grip of a ‘little ice age’, and winters were especially harsh. Decembers were bad enough: in one 1542 blizzard, eight travellers – seven of them women and girls – died on the roads of Herefordshire and Shropshire. January was worse still. Snowstorms in January 1541 wreaked havoc across the Midlands. In Nottinghamshire, William Johnson lost his way heading home from Burton Joyce to his house at Shelford, and perished after falling into an unseen tributary of the Trent. In Derbyshire, three members of the Crabtre family died when their house in Kinder was flattened by a “snowe dryft”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/BAL3294700cmyk-53b87bf.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A man dressed in a green smock and red tights is in the middle of cutting logs with an axe. Around him are other people, including a woman in a blue dress with a baby and another woman bent down on the floor to pick up more logs" title="A man wields an axe in an early 16th-century illustration. Chopping wood in icy conditions was fraught with danger (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> January 1571 claimed victims in East Anglia. Peter Eade, a runaway servant just nine years old, died in snowy Rushford, Norfolk, wandering and hungry. And Robert Kyng, aged 40, fell into a snow-covered “sawyng pytt” in Holton Hall Wood at Stratford St Mary in Suffolk. Many people had to brave such cruel weather to undertake their work, not least felling leafless trees in a season when dormant wood was less likely to crack when cut. William Smale paid the ultimate price when tackling an oak in Bagborough Wood, Somerset in 1513. He cut through it with his axe, but it caught on an ash tree as it fell. To free the oak, Smale hacked three or four times at the ash. It shattered and sent sharp fragments flying at his head, piercing his brain. He died three days later. February Fatal foliage and football February brought more trouble with trees, especially for those gathering greenery to top up dwindling winter stocks of fodder for livestock. In 1565, the keeper of Castle Camps Park in Cambridgeshire sent John Spycer out into the cold to cut leafy branches to feed animals. As Spycer stood on “a smale or slender bowghe”, he fell to his death. In 1505, Thomas Cleygate of Westhumble, Surrey was cutting “mistell bowys” – mistletoe – from a tree to feed sheep when he plunged 9 feet. At the same time, February offered excitement. It was a popular month for playing football, a game that was then much more violent than the modern sport, more akin to American football but without the padding and helmets. Dangers lurked everywhere: in the opposing team, the pitch, even players’ personal accessories. Playing at Allerston, Yorkshire in 1523, John Langbern and Roger Bridkirk crashed into one another as they ran after the ball. Roger – clearly a big lad – landed on top of John, fatally crushing him. In 1564, at St Peter’s in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Walter Brassett was “plaing at the foteball” with neighbours in Edward Bugge’s field when he fell onto a maple tree stump, cut his leg and bled to death in half an hour. It seems, too, that players didn’t remove knives from their belts before getting stuck in. At Bedale, Yorkshire in 1550, George Robynson tackled George Stapper, who was fatally wounded in the belly by Robynson’s blade. Read more | Tudors in turmoil: deciphering Hans Holbein’s masterwork The Ambassadors March The price of poverty, the cost of crows As winter ebbed, so did food stocks – and perhaps charitable instincts – meaning that March was a tough month for the poor. One such unfortunate was octogenarian Elizabeth Purseglove, who fell into a ditch in Chilcote, Derbyshire while begging in 1531. Another, William Dungkyne, fell into a pit as he returned home to Cambridge from begging in Barnwell in 1538. No one even knew the name of the vagrant pauper who fell down “the side of the lower clyffe” at Church Hougham, Kent in March 1596. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/2A2D892cmyk-WL-6f63f5c.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white sketch shows a man laying on the ground with a rifle, lying in wait to shoot a bird" title="A 16th-century engraving of duck-hunting in winter. Shooting at birds with relatively rudimentary guns, which might misfire alarmingly, could be a hazardous activity in the Tudor era (Image by Alamy)" /> Work was relatively scarce, too, though there were always tasks to tackle – scaring birds away from growing crops, for example. At Revelstoke, Devon in 1564, Andrew Wylloughby was trying to disperse crows by firing lead pellets from his “handgonne” when it misfired and burned his face; he dropped it, accidentally shooting John Kinkham in the leg. Older technologies weren’t necessarily safer: in April 1556, Thomas Branches was using his “lether slynge” to drive crows off barley in Patching, Sussex when one stone “sudenlye slypte owte of the slynge backewarde” and felled Richard Sowton with a point-blank blow to the head. April Risking it all for birds and blooms A tempting new source of food appeared in April: recently hatched rook chicks, ready for plucking from their nest and baking in a pie – if you could climb safely up and down a tree, that is. In Warwickshire in 1548, George Gybbes fell 40 feet from an elm at Hunscote. In 1564, Thomas Harmon plummeted 60 feet from an ash at Moxhull. In Suffolk, Robert Beamont came down 50 feet from an elm in the “Rookewood” at Brightwell in 1588. At Clyst Honiton in Devon in 1518, Benedict Page managed to cling on in his oak tree when a too-slender branch snapped beneath his feet. But he dropped the pointed pole he was carrying onto Richard Kellegh, who died six days later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/TA8AB8cmyk-ade569b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Rook hatchlings might make a tasty Tudor pie filling for springtime – if you could collect them safely from their nests in tall trees (Image by Alamy)" title="Rook hatchlings might make a tasty Tudor pie filling for springtime – if you could collect them safely from their nests in tall trees (Image by Alamy)" /> Picking flowers should have been less perilous – but children were prone to collecting blooms in risky spots. Four-year-old Margaret Bockyn fell into her father’s garden pond at Rollesby in Norfolk while gathering “pryme roses” on the bank in 1579. Similarly, five-year-old Barbara Fell plunged into a pond just outside Walmgate Bar at York during a flower-picking session the following year. Eight-year-old Robert Hudsone avoided water while collecting blooms at Stutton near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire in 1562, but wandered too close to a grey horse, which kicked him fatally in the head. Read more | The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life May When leisure turned lethal In this prime month for recreation, revellers needed to be wary of the maypoles set up for dancing. Alice Wasse was hit in the head by one that fell in the wind at Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire in 1578. Elsewhere, John Richardson was killed while a pole was being erected on Abbey Green, Bath in 1594, and Thomas Wylkes died while one was being taken down at Marsh Baldon in Oxfordshire in 1543, having failed to heed the workmen’s cries of “aware, aware, avoide”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-598816499cmyk-f68e73e.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A very colourful image of many people milling about at a village fair. People are dancing together around a pole and in the background, people barter over a table" title="Villagers dance around a pole in an illustration from c1530. Even such an enjoyable activity wasn’t without risks (Image by Getty Images)" /> Clement weather also encouraged more permanent construction. Robert Catley died while working on a barn at Thornton-in-Craven, North Yorkshire in 1539, as did John Hodges toiling on a “wayn house” at Hope under Dinmore, Herefordshire, and James Breythweth and John Wood building a house at Worksop, Nottinghamshire in 1566. Authorities encouraged men to practise shooting arrows rather than dancing – and May saw more archery accidents than any other month. At Horsley, Gloucestershire in 1504, John Snowe rushed to the target after taking his shot, and was hit by those firing after him. And at Dagenham, Essex in 1591, John Skoggyn was so focused on checking where his arrow had gone that he “dyd not go aside” when John Cartnayle “dyd crye” to warn him that he was about to shoot at the same mark. Skoggyn suffered an arrow in the head. June Drowning by numbers Many people perished in the water in June, when early summer heat drove working men to bathe at the end of the day. They flocked to rivers and ponds in large numbers – irrespective of whether they could swim. In June 1583 alone, 11 men died by drowning in places ranging from Dorset to Northamptonshire, Somerset to Suffolk. In Maidstone, Thomas Carpenter was within sight of other young men in the millstream when he fell into a whirlpool, but they could not save him without endangering themselves. In the Thames, Martin Robinson buckled on two bladders to help him stay afloat at Paris Garden in Southwark, but the buckle broke and he perished. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/BAL234051cmyk-8ee7af6.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A woodcut from a 1587 treatise on the art of swimming. Not all who enjoyed a dip could handle strong currents in rivers and millstreams (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="A woodcut from a 1587 treatise on the art of swimming. Not all who enjoyed a dip could handle strong currents in rivers and millstreams (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Many workers died while washing sheep in preparation for shearing. This practice claimed two dozen victims – two-thirds of them in June and a quarter of them women – as panicking sheep knocked over the labourers or slipped out of their grasp and were chased into deeper water. Such deaths occurred in major rivers including the Avon, Calder, Great Ouse, Severn, Thames and Trent, but also in creeks, brooks and millstreams. Read more | Trade, religion and diversity: how Tudor London became a global city July The hidden horrors of harvests and haystacks Harvesting the hay from meadows and marshes in high summer, workers wielded extremely sharp scythes that they swung with force. Mowers walked in staggered lines to try to avoid slicing one another, but fatal accidents were not uncommon. At Welford in Northamptonshire in 1559, Richard Goodall safely worked his way across Widow Symes’ field for four hours. He was then caught in the leg by Ralph Billinge’s scythe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1199902989cmyk-3ccbdc7.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Three men cut crops with scythes. In the background, other harvesters are at work and there are many farming fields" title="Harvesters cut crops with scythes in a 16th-century painting. Systems were put in place to reduce the risks of slicing fellow workers – but didn’t always prevent fatal accidents (Image by Getty Images)" /> Troubles were not at an end when the hay was carted away, because haystacks were unstable, leading to misfortunes for those working on them. William Awdeley of Botolph Claydon, Buckinghamshire, aged over 60, fell off the “heye mowe” in his barn that he had climbed to “trede his heye” in 1555. This work was more typically undertaken by young women; one such was Jane Turney, who fell off a stack at Tidburst in Aldenham, Hertfordshire, and died in 1574. Harvest-time also saw people playing various sports – forerunners of field athletics – many of which involved throwing things. Spectators were warned, but couldn’t always take evasive action. July brought mishaps with quoits in Berkshire in 1538, a pikestaff in Yorkshire in 1526, a plough coulter (blade) in Cumberland in 1564, and a sledgehammer in Dorset in 1591. August Carts, crops and pitchforks August brought the grain harvest – and more dangers in the forms of reaping and carting, especially when workers made haste in the uncertain English weather. Jumping on and off carts to pile crops and rope them down often resulted in falls, cracked heads and broken necks or backs. Snapping ropes took the lives of John Helder at Tuddenham, Suffolk in 1553; John Edmunds at Shoddesden, Hampshire in 1551; and John Stacye at Newbury, Berkshire in 1539. William Gybbys of Woodnesborough in Kent fell in 1551 while standing on slippery sheaves of wheat. John Cowper of Rodmersham, also in Kent, was dislodged by a sudden gust of wind and fell to his death. At Plash in Elworthy, Somerset in 1580, John Selacke faced a different kind of problem when the lower of his two cartwheels “did sodainlye sincke so depe into the grownde” that the whole cart fell over and he was fatally injured. Vehicles often crashed en route to the barn, where more perils lurked. Carts manoeuvring in tight spaces, crops piled in towering stacks and sharp-pronged pitchforks interacted alarmingly. In August 1579, for example, Richard Taylor climbed up to the “pytch hole” in Henry Boughtone’s barn at Pattishall in Northamptonshire, where the sheaves were pitched through from the carts to the stacks inside. The unfortunate labourer slipped and landed on a pitchfork propped by the wall. Wounded between the ribs on his left side, he died just over two days later. September Mellow fruitfulness – and falls Most fruit and nuts ripen in September, when pickers – who ranged in status from labourers to gentlemen and included women, boys and girls – climbed trees, frequently falling to their deaths in the process. An apple tree branch broke as Hugh Pritfoote sat on it at Dewchurch, Herefordshire in 1578. Thomas Chapman came off his ladder as he picked apples at Borden in Kent in 1520. And Jane Acton fell out of a pear tree at Stanford-on-Teme, Worcestershire in 1586. Maturing acorns attracted pig-farmers, who climbed oaks to knock down the nuts to fatten their swine. In September 1559, Thomas Way fell in the New Forest, and in September 1540 Ralph Colley’s quest for “okehornez” at Bakewell ended with his neck broken on a stone below the tree. October Perils of ploughing The agricultural cycle began each October with ploughing. Draught animals – oxen on heavy clay soils, horses for easier ground – could be hard to handle: restive during harnessing, distracted by dogs, kicking out when whipped. And if anything went wrong, being run over by the ploughshare resulted in horrible (and often fatal) injuries. At Ledbury, Herefordshire in 1539, John Bradford’s thigh was cut down to the bone by the plough’s blade. And in East Sutton, Kent in 1578, Thomas Seman was wounded in the right side with a gash three inches (about 7.5cm) long, three inches wide and four inches (10cm) deep. This month also saw one instance of a fate all too common year round. At Bramerton, Norfolk on 16 October 1579, a 19-year-old maidservant took “a payle” from her master’s house and headed for a pit on the common to collect water. The ground there was slippery, and she fell in and drowned. One in eight accidental deaths of women and girls over five years old was the result of such work – traipsing backwards and forwards to wells, ponds, rivers and streams day after day to keep households supplied with water. The thing that made the sad case of this ill-fated young woman notable was her famous namesake: she was Anne Bulleyn. November High drama on rooftops and bell-ropes An ideal time for re-roofing buildings was November, when straw was abundant after harvest. Professional thatchers and handy householders alike clambered up with thatching needles and yelms – straightened bundles of straw. The dangers were many: ladders broke, thatchers slipped off roof beams, and springles – thin, flexible sticks used for pinning down thatch – could be treacherous. In 1564, one sprang back and hit Richard Hotchkis just below the right eye as he thatched Richard Askall’s house at Atcham in Shropshire. And when John Houson fell off his ladder at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire in 1563, he landed on a springle that pierced his left side, penetrating 5 inches deep. During the reign of Elizabeth I, bells were rung on 17 November to celebrate the anniversary of her accession to the throne in 1558. Curiously, bells comprised the main cause of accidental death at church – and three mishaps on that pivotal day reveal the various ways death could occur. At York Minster in 1599, Robert Grymstone got the bell-rope caught between his legs, and was lifted high before being dropped on his head. At Cobham, Kent in 1592, a bell-rope snagged the bench on which John Robinson stood, hauling it 6 feet into the air; John slid off and down onto the paved church floor. At Beaumont, Essex in 1581, William Taylor found that neither the great bell nor the middle bell had ropes, so he climbed into the steeple to ring them on the headstock. He misjudged the swing of the middle bell, though, and his head, neck and shoulders were crushed between bell and frame. Read more | The poet, the gardener and the witch: forgotten voices of Tudor England December Frosty falls and fatal festivities Cold set in once more in December. Ice often caused accidents at watermills, where workers slipped into the millrace off frosty footbridges or fell while clearing encrusted waterwheels. It might also break under those who ventured out to hunt otters or to take short-cuts across frozen watercourses. It formed floes on rivers, too; in 1532, ice tipped over a ferry on the Wye at Bredwardine, resulting in the loss of all 10 passengers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/HIP2677878cmyk-d060c95.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A large crowd of people and a carriage with two horsees take part in various activities on the frozen river Thames" title="A coloured 17th-century engraving shows revellers on the frozen Thames. Venturing out onto the ice, whether for fun or for work, could be risky (Image by TopFoto)" /> Christmas was, of course, a time for going to church, for celebrating, for feasting – and for accidents. Hurrying from church to the rectory in Croxton, Cambridgeshire on Christmas Day 1521, Robert Bakar fell into the parson’s pond and drowned. Jane Jenden tumbled off a table while hanging greenery in her home in 1562. And Jane Typtott stabbed herself in the leg while slaughtering her pig on Christmas Eve 1567. Seasonal pastimes posed threats, too. Wrestling in the hall at Kneesall Rectory, Nottinghamshire in 1549, Thomas Bunting fell on Lawrence Mylner’s knife. And in Houghton, Hampshire in 1563, John Hypper crushed his testicles while “playinge Christenmas games” with his neighbours. Tudor life was rich in variety – and so was Tudor death. Steven Gunn is professor of early modern history at Merton College, University of Oxford. Tomasz Gromelski is a researcher at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Their new book is An Accidental History of Tudor England (John Murray) This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Flower power: how plants transformed the lives of 17th-century women
Few 17th-century women could travel the world. But the world could visit them in their gardens. Susannah Lyon-Whaley reveals how exotic plants – from Chinese rhubarb to South American passionfruit – opened new horizons in fashion, food and science
Anna Buckett had never seen a pineapple. Undeterred, on 12 July 1656, she took the bold move of stitching one. While the fine stitches on her sampler show dexterity, the result is more artistic than realistic. The red pineapple looks a little like a monstrous jelly with beetle legs. Amid Anna’s stitched pinks, pansies and honeysuckles, the pineapple – a native of countries like Brazil and Suriname that would not grow successfully in English gardens until the 1700s – was out of place. She had never seen a pineapple, but Anna may have seen pictures. The first printed depiction of a pineapple in Europe was in black and white in Gonzalo de Oviedo’s Historia General de las Indias (1535). Another herbal text (1641) claimed that the fruit tasted “as if wine, rosewater and sugar were mixed together”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2HHR700cmyk-ce191d2.jpg" width="1545" height="1030" alt="A detailed and colourful piece of needlework shows a scene with two people, a lion and a horse at the top, with several plants, leaves and red pineapples across the bottom" title="A needlework sampler stitched by Anna Buckett in 1656, including her depiction of a red pineapple, resembling a “monstrous jelly with beetle legs” (Image by Alamy)" /> Anna may have been the Anne Buckett baptised in May 1643 in Middlesex, or the Ann Becket baptised in December 1644 in Surrey, though neither is certain. Like other daughters of merchants or gentlemen learning the gentler arts, she stitched both gardens she saw and those she imagined. Needlework creations of the time swarmed with peacocks, parrots, lions, leopards and sunflowers from foreign lands. In the 17th century, voyages to new colonies in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and India turned plants like tobacco and sugarcane into profits. They also sent waves of plants rippling back across the sea. For women at home, gardens made the wider world a material reality. Dainties for a queen In 1629, John Parkinson, royal herbalist to Charles I, dedicated his new book of flowers, Paradisi in Sole, to the king’s wife, 20-year-old French-born Henrietta Maria. “Knowing your maiestie so much delighted with all the faire flowers of a garden,” the work “seemed as it were destined, to bee first offered into your highnesse hands.” The more exotic and ‘outlandish’ a flower, the more fashionable. The potatoes of Canada with their small yellow blooms, wrote Parkinson, were once stewed with butter and wine as “dainties for a queene”. But by 1629 these were “growne to be so common here with us at London, that even the most vulgar begin to despise them”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1130662874cmyk-fb05112.jpg" width="3226" height="2149" alt="A black and white sketch of several intertwining plants" title="A page from Paradisi in Sole, John Parkinson’s 1629 book of flowers dedicated to Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. Parkinson urged elite women to smell and taste the blooms in their gardens" /> Paradisi in Sole was a gateway to further knowledge for ‘gentlewomen’, and Parkinson urged such women to look, smell and taste in their own domestic gardens. The crown imperial from Constantinople “doe smell somewhat strong as it were the savour of a Foxe”. Tulip bulbs tasted like “sweete onions”. The West Indian “daffodil with a red flower” was “by the Indians in their tongue named Azcal Xochitl”. Flowers introduced new smellscapes as well as sights. The scent of orange flowers – originally grown in China – in perfumed waters was favoured by ladies and queens, even if the orange fruit could be sold in playhouses by girls of dubious reputation. In a Dutch still life painting by Pieter Claesz dated 1627, a dead turkey baked into a pie clutches a sprig of orange blossom in its beak. On a table set with Chinese porcelain, a Pacific nautilus shell and Indian spices, the blossom is just one of many exotica. Sweet-smelling nasturtiums from the West Indies decked small bunches that a woman might present to a friend or receive from a lover. Blooms like jasmine, orange blossom and the delicate white flowers of the Mexican tuberose perfumed women from princesses to sex workers. A satire on a lady’s dressing room by Mary Evelyn in 1690 described gloves scented with such fragrances. In the poem Pendragon, or, The Carpet Knight his Kalendar (1698), the knight follows Selena to church, only to be overwhelmed by “a whiff of tuberose” emanating from “her skin or clothes”. A scent bottle from the Cheapside hoard of Elizabethan and Stuart jewels, found in London in 1912, is encrusted with enamel, gold and gems. Other bottles engraved with oriental-style birds and plants attested to the value of the smells they contained. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/HR2E2Tcmyk-8d05622.jpg" width="1754" height="1168" alt="A painting shows to women in dresses, with curly hair. The woman on the left wears a pearl necklace. The one on the right is holding a painting of a tulip" title="A portrait of Mary Capel (left) with her sister Elizabeth (holding a painting of a tulip). Mary was reportedly responsible for the introduction of 87 new plants into England" /> Like Anna’s pineapple, flowers were sources of artistic inspiration and invited readers to picture foreign places. Elizabeth, Countess of Carnarvon, holds her own painting of a tulip, also known as a ‘Turk’s cap’, in a portrait with her sister Mary Capel, later Duchess of Beaufort. For Mary, flowers were a scientific passion. Plants put her in touch with botanists like Hans Sloane and opened her mind to places she could only read of: the West Indies, China, Japan and Ceylon. Mary kept books of the plants she grew and collected, along with notes including their indigenous names. Among her pressed flowers at the Natural History Museum is a desiccated South American passionfruit “ripen’d at Fairford in Gloucestershire”. As a woman, Mary could not join the Royal Society, the premier organisation for the study of natural history, nor publish work in her name. Yet, in the century of her death it was reported that she was responsible for the introduction of 87 new plants, among them Virginian blush flowered speedwell and Persian bell flowered gigantic swallow wort. One hundred years after she died, botanist Robert Brown named the Western Australian gravel bottlebrush after her: Beaufortia Decussata. Prickly fig trees But not only duchesses took an interest in botany. “Mistresse Thomasin Tunstall” lived in rural Bull Bank in Lancashire, 5 miles north of Hornby Castle, far from noble courts. Tunstall collected rare native plants like the cuckoo flower and lady slipper orchid. Parkinson noted that she “hath often sent mee up the rootes to London, which have borne faire flowers in my garden”. The marginal notes in Tunstall’s copy of botanist John Gerard’s famous ‘herbal’ show her awareness of plants from the wider world. Tunstall noted that Gerard’s “Prickly Indian Fig tree” grew at “Mr Parkinson’s gardin at the siyne of the goulden morter on Ludyat Hill”. Women worked with these plants – as well as studied and collected them. A bill from the 1680s for Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II, offers rare evidence of women’s garden labour. Weeders worked among the queen’s sweet-scented tuberoses, Ethiopian bladder senna, purple Virginian honeysuckle, and apios americana sourced from the keeper of the Chelsea Physic Garden. At least one found love amid the blooms. On 19 August 1688, Katherine Griffin married Thomas Williams – one of the queen’s garden labourers – at the Holy Trinity in Knightsbridge and is subsequently listed with the weeding women as Katherine Williams. Despite being paid 10p a day or £1 a month (roughly £120 today), half as much as the male gardeners whose names are recorded in the same bills, women like Katherine were adept at their tasks. The “garden of pleasure stored with these out-landish flowers… needeth not so much or so often manuring with soyle, as another garden planted with… English flowers,” John Parkinson had written in Paradisi in Sole. But it did “neede to bee well cleansed from all annoyances… stones, weedes, rootes of trees, bushes”. A weeding woman had to know which seedlings to pull. What might she have thought of the unusual plants she was required to treat like “so many jewels”? Such work did not go unnoticed. The young noblewoman Celia Fiennes described a statue of an “old weeder woman” in the Duke of Bedford’s cherry garden that was “done so like and her clothes so well that at first I tooke it to be a real living body”. A Mortlake tapestry pictures a woman weeding. Her clothes, which are not as rich as those worn by a nearby noble couple, suggest she might be the gardener’s wife. The daffodils growing beside her were new additions to the decorative garden under names such as ‘Narcissus Africanus’, the French daffodil, and the ‘Daffodill of Constantinople’. Shining like diamonds In the garden of pleasure and the adjoining kitchen garden, North American tobacco with its pretty pink flowers became a salve for ulcers and wounds, or a syrup to treat asthma. Manuscript books of recipes compiled by women include “pellitory of Spayne” (likely the North African Anacyclus pyrethrum) in a gargle for phlegm and rhubarb from China in laxatives. Widely read printed recipes called for sugar, the crystallised product of the juice from the sugar cane plant. With its fine white powder, a lady or her maidservant could transform English roses, borage, marigolds or gillyflowers into “candie hard and glistering like diamonds”. A humbler conserve of native betony flowers and foreign sugar purporting to aid conception instructed its maker to boil “betony new and tender one pound, the best sugar three pound” until they became a syrup. At the start of the 17th century, sugar was a luxury product. But by the end of the century, plantations established in British colonies like Barbados meant sugar was affordable for the likes of yeoman farmers and their wives. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/15-Ladies-Directory-Af-d.45-titlepagecmyk-c46872d.jpg" width="1104" height="735" alt="An old double page from a book shows an illustration of a woman making syrup on the left, and on the right, a page titled THE LADIES DIRECTORY IN CHOICE EXPERIMENTS AND CURIOSITES OF PRESERVING IN JELLIES AND CANDYING BOTH FRUITS & FLOWERS" title="The Ladies Directory of “experiments and curiosities” from 1662 offers women advice on producing drinks, jellies, candied flowers and cakes" /> But ‘exotic’ flowers had a darker side. To source specimens, English women relied on imperial trade routes. The Duchess of Beaufort had trees, cuttings and saplings transported from Barbados. One of the ships that transported “poyson trees” for her in 1696 returned to the island in 1702 carrying enslaved people as cargo. Some gentlewomen may have read Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), written to attract sugar planters to the colony. He wrote of a new vegetable root “of which the negres brought the seeds” that was “very good meat” for sea voyages, “boyl’d with powdred pork, and eaten with butter, vinegar, and pepper”. Other pages detailed tortures to keep the enslaved African population in check. How much did women of the time know about their impact on ecologies and people far away? It is difficult to guess. Today, flowers imported to the UK from markets such as Kenya are plagued by instances of modern-day slavery. Are those of us who admire and purchase these travelling beauties, these innocent-looking roses, plastic-wrapped and transported thousands of miles on planes, so different from early modern women? Few 17th-century English women may have travelled the high seas to foreign climes but many, particularly the educated and wealthy, experienced the wider world through nature’s bounty. As plants shaped their view of foreign shores, they in turn made these plants into something new. In their gardens, foreign flowers were moulded into emblems of fashion and art, and exotic plants became perfumes, medicine and food. When the young Anna Buckett stitched a pineapple, the curious mind of this ordinary girl was encountering a world miles away from her English pinks and pansies. Or was it? Through books or word of mouth, pineapples had entered her own experience. Susannah Lyon-Whaley is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of York This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Historian Patrick Joyce explores the history of peasants, from their role in society to why their way of life offers critical lessons for our modern world
What is a peasant? This is not an easy question to answer. Certain men have even died for trying to answer it, not least the influential Soviet economist Alexander Vasilyevich Chayanov, a theorist on peasants who was murdered on the orders of Joseph Stalin for his views. I will attempt some clarifications of the term ‘peasant’ in this article – albeit in less overtly murderous times. The peasant is usually seen as an individual primarily focused on securing the subsistence needs of the family unit. Peasants seek not to maximise income or profit. They do not produce a surplus, at least in the sense of the accumulation of capital to make more capital. They minimise risks rather than maximise gains. They are thus, and of necessity, conservative. Their aim is to ensure that all family members are adequately fed and employed. What they have to tell us concerns how the Earth and the heavens can be lived in a different way from our own. It would be better to say quasi-subsistence than subsistence however, for few peasants led solely subsistence lives, needing access to markets of various sorts for their incomings and outgoings. Peasants are not necessarily anti-capitalist; they are more indifferent to capitalism as it is simply not part of their mental universe. The essential point is that land – whether it is self-owned, rented, and so on – is understood to be a social rather than economic entity to a peasant. Read more | Why there’s no such thing as a typical medieval peasant While the stereotypical view might be that peasants are generally low income, throughout history there is usually some differentiation, with some being richer, and others poorer. Overall, the communal – the village itself – is what mattered the most to peasants, and unity against ‘outsiders’ – who were always seen as a threat – in difficult times. And then there are broader, less analytic, definitions of ‘peasant’, which concern how the word has been used over time. Under this view, peasants have been ascribed to a whole host of conditions: labourers, with or without land; sharecroppers; farm servants; rural people of low rank; even rentiers of a small sort. These people would – for the most part – call themselves peasants, and be called this in return. So, it does not seem a bad idea to refer to them as peasants today. Life in Victorian Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | This six-week course covers everything you need to know about Victorian Britain, guided by historian Ruth Goodman and filmed on location at Black Country Living Museum. Explore the course now Of course, peasants have varied greatly across and outside Europe, the former being the focus of my recent book: Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (2024). The large “agrivillages” of the Italian south, full of (almost) landless, waged labourers, were not the same as the scattered holdings of south Poland or west Ireland, themselves in fact pretty “micro” in size. The different patterns of European state formation created different peasantries, although until the 20th century many “national” peasantries in practice lived their lives immune – if not unaffected – by the state. There are north-south and east-west distinctions across Europe that are of profound, long-term historical importance. The feudal system distinguished Europe north of the Mediterranean basin and the lands of the Mediterranean itself, which were governed by the latifundia system [large landed estates often overseen by servitude]. The latter, inherited from the Roman world, shaped both southern Europe and South America. These enormously large estates held in the hands of the few were accompanied by minifundismo – the tiny holdings of the many. Read more | 6 moments when diseases drastically altered human history The decline of feudalism and of serfdom was more marked in the west than the east, and the reimposition of serfdom in eastern Europe set up distinctions every bit as enduring as that of the latifundia system. North-west Europe was in the vanguard of capitalist change, particularly the North Sea basin, especially England and the Netherlands. The decline of the peasantry in the 20th century was phenomenal, worldwide and not just in Europe. Numbers tell the story in stark fashion. The urban dwelling proportion of the world’s population has increased from just over 20 per cent of the total in 1950 to approaching 60 per cent today. The pace then quickened in the latter half of the 20th century: between 1991 and 2019 the proportion of the world’s population engaged in agriculture fell from 44 per cent to 27 per cent. And yet not so long ago the world looked very different, Europe included. For instance, in France, which was once the greatest peasant country in Europe, the percentage of people in agriculture out of total employment in 1950 was still 23 per cent and only three per cent in 2019. In 1913 that figure was 41 per cent. By 2019, only six per cent of employment in once deep-peasant Russia was in agriculture. What was life like as a peasant? On the podcast | Patrick Joyce considers what peasant society was like – and how this way of life has disappeared Listen now There has additionally been a physical falling silent of the countryside, noted everywhere in Europe, from Ireland to the Breton villages of the 1960s and 70s to Romania. In 1950s Ireland, perhaps as much as a fifth of the population left for British cities. Rural migration was apparent everywhere in Europe, even in the rapidly and brutally industrialising communist east. Italy, too, was transformed very early after the Second World War by the vast movement of people from the rural south, the Mezziogiorno, to the rapidly industrialising north. These social changes have been accompanied by huge shifts in big agricultural business. The intensive production model has spread from the USA, and great swathes of the rural landscape have been transformed by it, particularly in the form of monoculture, one-crop production in a single expanse. In Europe, as increasingly everywhere else, the industrialisation of agriculture has transformed everything: vastly increased production is accomplished by vastly fewer workers on the basis of new technologies, mechanisation, and bioscience. Read more | Your guide to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 So in the increasing absence of peasants, why should we remember them? This is why: peasants matter because of what the pattern of their lives reveals about being human. They are among the closest mankind has been to nature; they understand nature intimately and with depth, even though their idea of nature is not the same as ours today. Peasant cultures are also almost always cultures of scarcity. They understood that the fruits of the Earth are finite and should be equally shared. The idea of “the limited good” appears again and again in peasant societies, the idea that there was only a limited supply of the goods of the earth, so that if one man prospered another went without. Theirs is the outlook of those who cannot bend the world to their will, of those who do not, unlike so many of us today, conceive of a world of unlimited resource. Although many people – particularly the young – are being more conscious about such things today, it is still the case that large numbers of people who are concerned about the destruction of the natural world have hardly any idea of what peasants are or were. Peasants lived within a horizon of necessity that we no longer inhabit, although the environmental crisis might mean that we reinhabit it in the future. They were survivors, as we may have to learn to be. Their vision included the recognition that the dead, and so with them the past itself, have a foundational role in human existence. The dead and the past are part of “nature”. The vision of the cosmos that peasants had comprehended contained order and chaos, beauty and terror. Though invariably at the bottom of society it was, and in many respects still is, the peasant who is society’s essential foundation. It has been said that what the skeleton is to the body the peasant is to society, that which holds the whole thing up. For most of history people have lived their lives as peasants; empires have survived for centuries, sat upon the backs of peasants. And so “culture” is made possible. This is the “culture” that gets put in the great museums, not the age-old culture of peasants. Their lot is usually the little-visited ‘ethnographic’ museum. While we may all in the end pay a common price for the desecration of the planet, peasants have already paid theirs. Not just with environmental destruction and agribusiness in recent decades but over centuries, for the great victims of modernity and progress have been peasants. Peasants were after all right to distrust progress. In the 1970s the incomparable John Berger wrote this as the epigraph to his great trilogy on 20th-century peasants, Into Their Labours. It is taken from St John 4:38: “Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labour”. We are so entered. Patrick Joyce is a social historian and the author of Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (2024). You can listen to him talk about his book on the HistoryExtra podcast here
My history hero: Adam Henson chooses Robert Bakewell (1725–95)
Countryfile presenter, farmer and author Adam Henson chooses Robert Bakewell as a history hero
Robert Bakewell: in profile Robert Bakewell was an English agriculturalist who pioneered the systematic selective breeding of sheep, cattle and horses. Born in Leicestershire, he is best known for his breeding of sheep with superior wool, such as the Lincoln Longwool, which led to the creation of many modern breeds. When did you first hear about Robert Bakewell? My father was a farmer, like me. He was interested in the history of animal breeding. To showcase rare breeds he opened the Cotswold Farm Park in 1971 and would tell me about this man who did so much to shape British agriculture. Dad set out the Farm Park livestock displays so they suited periods of history, from the Iron Age to the modern day. To help represent the agricultural revolution paddock, we had a 20ft Foamex board cut-out of Bakewell sat on a horse, so I’ve been aware of him for years. What kind of person was he? He was a real trailblazer when it came to improving livestock. He was also one of the first people to start selective breeding, coupling the best rams with the best ewes, and the best bulls with the best cows. He was quite a large man, so he didn’t just understand the importance of the quality of food, he obviously ate well too! Read more | Dig for Victory: Britain's WW2 war on hunger What made Bakewell a hero? The vital role he played in the development of British farm breeds and, in particular, regional breeds. Bakewell played a key part in the development of early breed selection, which has helped give so many areas of the country an identity – be it Hereford or Angus, which are famous for their cattle, or the Cotswolds, which is famous for its sheep. These regional breeds are part of what makes Britain what it is today – and they have been taken all over the world by those who settled in places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. What was Bakewell’s finest hour? In my view, it was the creation of the Leicester Longwool Sheep, with its long, lustrous fleece, which was created by mating ewes and rams with high-quality wool. We sometimes forget that the wool trade – which was built, to a large extent, on longwool breeds with fabulous fleeces – had a huge impact on the nation’s wealth. Can you see any parallels between his life and your own? Yes, we both worked with livestock. One of my favourite aspects of farming is selecting the correct bull or ram to go with a herd or flock and looking forward to how the offspring turn out! What do you think Bakewell would make of modern farm-animal breeding? I think he would regard some modern selective breeding as a step too far. Due to breeding-in traits like double muscling, Belgian Blue cows often can’t give birth and have to have a caesarean. After around three caesareans, a cow will not be able to breed any more. Pushing so hard for production in livestock can cause welfare issues, and I’m not sure that would have sat easily with Bakewell. Adam Henson is a presenter on BBC Countryfile. He also runs the Cotswold Farm Park and wrote a children’s book, A Year on Adam’s Farm (Penguin, 2021) This content first appeared in the November 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine Discover more history heroes, our monthy series in which popular figures from the present tell us about who inspired them from the past Explore our history heroes
During the period between c800 BC and the Roman invasion of AD 43, Europeans brought knowledge of iron-working technology to the British Isles. BBC History Revealed brings you a quick guide to the British Iron Age
When was the British Iron Age? The Iron Age of the British Isles is usually dated to the period between c800 BC and the Roman invasion of AD 43, during which time knowledge of iron-working technology was brought to Britain by Europeans, later referred to as Celts. By 500–400 BC, use of iron artefacts had been adopted across the British Isles, gradually replacing the use of bronze. How did people live? Perhaps surprisingly, Iron Age people were closer to the men and women of today than we might think. Settlements consisting of individual stone houses with garden plots sited along a street have been found in Cornwall, while in Wessex, remains of large thatched roundhouses have been unearthed, which would have been a hub for domestic life. Explore 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain An open-hearth fire in the centre of the house would have provided warmth, light, and a means of cooking food. The Iron Age diet itself was not unlike ours, consisting of bread, grains, a type of porridge, and meat, as well as honey and dairy products – and even beer! Iron Age Britain was primarily agricultural, with crops and livestock providing the means of survival, as well as commodities that could be exchanged with neighbouring farms. There was even time for leisure. Glass gaming pieces discovered in Iron Age burials indicate the presence of rudimentary board games, while the use of large, upright weaving looms meant that fashion, too, played a part in daily life. Textiles were dyed bright colours, and decorative accessories, such as brooches and pins, have also been discovered. Read more about what life was like during the Iron Age What do we know of their beliefs? With farming at the heart of Iron Age society, religious festivals probably followed the agricultural year. Two celebrations we know of are Beltane, on 1 May, which welcomed the warm season and the moving of cattle to open fields, and Lughnasadh, on 1 August, which marked the ripening of crops. One festival still marked today is that of Samhain, on 1 November, a time when spirits were thought to pass between the two worlds, and the end of the Iron Age year. There may have been as many as 400 gods and goddesses worshipped in Iron Age Britain, and weapons, animal sacrifices and other precious objects believed to have been sacrificed to the gods have been found in rivers, lakes and bogs across the British Isles. Who were the Druids? Little is known about the Druids, other than that they were Celtic priests who led religious ceremonies. Most of our information about them comes from later Roman descriptions, some of which refer to the druidic practice of human sacrifice. What is some of the evidence of Iron Age Britain? The most common and visible remains of the Iron Age are the 3,000 or so hill forts that can be found across Britain – one of the largest is Maiden Castle in Dorset, which is the size of 50 football pitches. These sites were probably only used for seasonal gatherings and trade, rather than as permanent settlements. In 1984, the incredible discovery of a 2,000-year-old, perfectly preserved male body was made in a peat bog on Lindow Moss in Cheshire. The Iron Age find revealed much about the environment in which the ancient man had lived and died. Thought to be about 25 years old, Lindow Man's beard and moustache had been cut with shears, while his last meal had been burnt, unleavened bread. He had also died a very violent death – struck on the head twice with a heavy object and possibly strangled in what may have been an elaborate religious sacrifice. What ended the Iron Age? The Iron Age did not end overnight with the invasion of the Romans in AD 43, and many Iron Age beliefs and practices continued, particularly in parts of the British Isles where Roman rule was weak or non-existent. Contact with the Roman world had been established well before the invasion, with luxury goods such as wine traded for grains, slaves and minerals. Rome also seems to have established diplomatic relations with Iron Age tribes, which helped spread its influence in the aftermath of the invasion of AD 43. The Roman invasion: whose side were the Britons on? This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed
Five centuries ago they were grown only in a slither of South America. Now they’re on the menu in virtually every country on Earth. Rebecca Earle reveals how a combination of colonialism, industrialisation and food insecurity propelled the once lowly spud to global domination
We don’t think of potatoes as exotic. Quite the opposite; they are utterly familiar. When the artist Subodh Gupta was growing up in 1970s India, he wondered whether everyone ate potatoes, or if it was only people in Bihar. A French traveller visiting Colombia in the early 19th century was surprised to see ‘European’ potatoes sold alongside South American vegetables such as cassava. For an Indian boy, potatoes are Indian. For a Frenchman, they are European. This is pretty remarkable for a food unknown to most of humanity before the 16th century. Until then the only people who ate potatoes lived along the spine of mountains that runs from the Andes in Bolivia and Chile north through the Rockies. This ‘American cordillera’, as it’s called, is the origin of potatoes. In fact, no one else had laid eyes on a potato before Spanish conquistadors invaded South America in the 1530s and overthrew the Inca empire. That set in motion a whirlwind that blew potatoes to India, France and beyond. This makes it all the more extraordinary just how ordinary potatoes are these days. Their very names proclaim their rootedness in the right-here, in exactly wherever we are: Ayrshire new potatoes, Idaho russet, Irish cobbler, Darjeeling red round. Even the Incas viewed the potato as pretty ordinary. An Andean legend from long before the Spanish arrived tells of the ‘Baked Potato Gleaner’, a mythical beggar who encapsulated the tuber’s underdog status. In Peru the potato had long been a staple, eaten alongside maize, quinoa and a multitude of other vegetables. The growing of maize was important to the Inca state, in part because corn was the key ingredient for the aqha (maize beer) that lubricated many official events. The Inca himself participated every year in a symbolic maize-planting ceremony, to the accompaniment of music and song, and similar state-level festivities marked the maize harvest. In the sacred fields around the Inca capital, Cuzco, small gold and silver replica cornstalks were interspersed among the growing maize, to ‘encourage’ it. No such imperial oversight was bestowed on potatoes, which were considered a lowly food, necessary but banal. Cultivated at village level, they were traded and consumed within more local orbits, their growth fostered by smaller rituals outside the orbit of the Inca state. One account from 16th-century Peru describes the local festivities that marked the inauguration of the planting season in the mountain village of Lampa. Local dignitaries seated themselves on carpets to watch the proceedings. A procession of richly attired attendants accompanied the seed potatoes, which were carried by six men making music on drums. Events culminated with the sacrifice of a particularly beautiful llama, whose blood was immediately sprinkled on the potatoes. Potatoes remained an important resource for Andean villagers in subsequent centuries. The 80-year-old Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, descendant of Quechua noblemen, drew a picture of a village potato harvest in the early 17th century. His line drawing showed villagers hard at work unearthing and transporting the crop. The spud goes global The same forces that brought the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his soldiers to Peru subsequently propelled the potato around the world. From the 16th century, colonialism, warfare and expanding networks of trade set people and objects in motion in unprecedented ways. The potato was caught up in this global flux. Today, according to the United Nations, it is grown in virtually every country, and is the world’s fourth most important food crop. The skilled task of adapting the potato to the varied growing conditions it encountered in northern Italy, Bengal or upstate New York was undertaken largely by the anonymous small farmers who grew the new plant in garden plots, and doubtless appreciated the potato’s prolific yield and nutritious content. While a hectare of land sown with wheat may yield enough protein to feed seven people over the course of a year, a hectare of potatoes will nourish 17. Only soybeans produce more protein per hectare, among the major crops. Potatoes also require less water than other crops, and grow in a great variety of climatic conditions, including on poor soil. The potato is thus an excellent tool in efforts to reduce hunger and food insecurity. This is why the United Nations named 2008 ‘The International Year of the Potato’. Ordinary people doubtless also appreciated the fact that tax collectors were slow to notice the new arrival, and so for many years potatoes did not attract the same tithes and other agricultural taxes levied on more familiar crops. The potato’s integration into everyday eating practices around the world did not however result solely from the colonial, military and mercantile forces that provided the means for the plant to reach new destinations. Local contexts also shaped its reception. In New Zealand, where European sailors had planted potatoes in the 1770s, the tubers were quickly adopted into Maori agriculture both as a foodstuff and as a commodity. As a foodstuff they supplemented the local staple of sweet potatoes. Unlike sweet potatoes, which were embedded in a pre-existing web of ritual restrictions on cultivation, potatoes were free of such prohibitions and so could be grown in a wider range of circumstances. The historian Hazel Petrie has suggested that, for this reason, potatoes were a popular addition to village agriculture and quickly became an important food, consumed in huge quantities at the hui, or festive gatherings, that punctuated Maori life. They also acquired an economic importance. Together with pigs, potatoes were used as a currency when trading with Europeans for muskets and other iron goods. By the early 19th century, Maori farmers were growing the plant on a large commercial scale specifically for this trade. “Potatoes and pork, pork and potatoes wherever we went. I began to get tired of pork and potatoes,” complained one English writer during an 1830s visit to the islands. European voyages of exploration and colonisation brought the potato to New Zealand but its entry into Maori life resulted from Maoris’ active management of the trading and diplomatic opportunities it enabled, as well as their technical skill in adapting it to the local agricultural context. The sneering state Although ordinary people in many parts of the world came to appreciate potatoes, this enthusiasm was not always shared by representatives of the state. In 17th-century Ireland, colonial officials complained that the prolific potato allowed locals to laze around and enjoy life, rather than working hard for the benefit of the occupying English state. “What need they to work, who can content themselves with potatoes?” one English officer, William Petty, remarked testily. Potatoes were derided for being too prolific. Yet, during the 18th century, such criticism was replaced by approbation. As industry and agriculture expanded and warfare increased, high-yielding, easy-to-grow foods began to look more attractive to statesmen. The potato regained its allure. Patriotic individuals across Europe encouraged potato consumption, and sponsored all manner of competitions and other promotions in the hope of shifting consumers from wheat bread and other grains onto potatoes. In 1790, Peter Sirkal, a peasant from Lifland (part of the Russian empire), received 10 roubles, enough to buy a horse or perhaps two bulls, when he won a competition sponsored by the St Petersburg Free Economic Society for the largest potato harvest. Four years later, the Tuileries Gardens in Paris were dug up, replaced with potato fields planted on the orders of the national government, which likewise hoped to encourage wider cultivation of the root. Increasing potato consumption became a goal for many European states during the Enlightenment. But with the coming of a new century, the potato’s fortunes swung yet again. Pessimism about the potato’s capacity to contribute to economic growth and national security returned during the Victorian era. With growing industrialisation came an obsession with nutritional science as the key to unlocking economic growth. ‘Human motors’ – the working bodies who powered factories – needed sufficient protein and other nutrients in order to ensure commercial success. Nineteenth-century nutritionists were not enthusiastic about potatoes. Sadly, they were believed to encourage ‘lazy potato blood’ and a sluggish personality. A mere 14 days of subsisting on the tuber would render a man unable to work at all, in the view of the Dutch physician Jacob Moleschott. Worse, potatoes were now associated with backwardness. In demonstrations of the potato’s negative effect on the advance toward modernity, the Irish peasant was – as he had been two centuries earlier – Exhibit A. Because they subsisted on potatoes that they grew themselves, Irish cottiers could resist becoming a rural proletariat wholly dependent on wages for their survival. From this perspective, potatoes were a roadblock on the route to capitalism. This viewpoint would have terrible consequences. Many of the 19th-century liberals in Whitehall who ran colonial Ireland viewed the terrible potato famine that decimated the country between 1845 and 1849 as a blessing, because it promised to wipe out a way of life they viewed as archaic. How, asked Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury, were Irish labourers to support themselves in the post-famine future? He saw only one possibility: “The position occupied by these classes is no longer tenable and it is necessary for them to live by the wages of their labour.” The Irish would no longer eat potatoes that they grew themselves, but rather grain, “which they will purchase out of their wages”. In other words, they would become a rural proletariat. While, in the 17th century, writers such as Petty disliked the potato because it enabled Irish peasants to evade the reach of the state, by the 19th century its crime was to defy the inevitable advance of capitalism. Expert opinion about the potato’s contributions to building powerful economies and strong states has continued to oscillate between enthusiasm and disdain. During both world wars, potatoes were enlisted in the war effort, often in the hope of protecting scarce grain supplies. In the First World War, the US government hoped increased domestic potato consumption would compensate for the export of 20 million bushels of wheat destined for allies in Europe. Potatoes featured regularly in the flourless wartime ‘victory recipes’ distributed by the new Food Administration. The owners of the Staack & Luckiesh pharmacy in the Iowa town of Maquoketa used their shop window (shown above) to present an imaginative staging of such advice. Below a placard exhorting Americans to “Join the ranks and spud the kaiser”, a small battalion of potatoes brandished sabres and waved the stars and stripes under the leadership of a larger potato representing General Pershing, head of the US Expeditionary Forces in Europe. An explanatory label hailed the formation of “the newest fighting corps: the Potatriots”. “Eat potatoes and save wheat” was the overall message, proclaimed clearly on a placard. Suitable recipes could be obtained inside the shop. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/09/Potatriots-1251a4d.jpg" width="2619" height="2196" alt="A shop in Iowa urges “potatriots” to “Join the ranks and spud the kaiser”. With huge amounts of wheat being shipped to Europe, America’s wartime government actively promoted potato consumption. (Photo by NARA)" title="A shop in Iowa urges “potatriots” to “Join the ranks and spud the kaiser”. With huge amounts of wheat being shipped to Europe, America’s wartime government actively promoted potato consumption. (Photo by NARA)" /> In contrast, the agricultural development programmes created from 1945 accorded almost no importance to potatoes and other tubers, and focused instead on grains such as maize and rice. From their perspective, the potato was “not relevant” to global food security. Against the ebb-and-flow of varying governmental attitudes towards the potato, small farmers around the world continue to appreciate the tuber’s many virtues. The United Nations was right to hail the potato as an important source of food security, especially for poor farmers in the global south. In the UN’s view, the potato contributes to food security because it is widely eaten, and hence is “a truly global food”, because it is nutritious and easy to cultivate, and – crucially – because it is not an internationally traded commodity Since potato markets are generally local, shoppers are protected from global price fluctuations. Cereal prices, in contrast, have increased markedly since 1990, causing serious hunger in the developing world. Many people grow potatoes for their own consumption, and so can avoid markets altogether. The very qualities that outraged William Petty in the 1670s, and Charles Trevelyan in the 1840s, are now identified as virtues. Local knowledge In declaring 2008 the International Year of the Potato, the UN praised the expertise of small-scale potato farmers around the world for protecting the genetic diversity that is now identified as a major component in a sustainable food system. Like trained scientists, small farmers are often experimentalists, engaging in observation, interpretation, field-trials, evaluation and manipulation in order to identify and develop new cultivars and new methods of cultivation. They discuss their experiences with others in their locality, exchange seeds and techniques, and adapt their own practices in light of these conversations. In the Andes, many potato farmers maintain between 12 and 15 different plots in continuous cultivation; yet more are cultivated non-continuously. They may also swap both seeds and fields with neighbours. Through such exchanges it is possible for a single farmer to gain access to up to a hundred different potato cultivars. Matching particular seed potatoes to the soil and environmental requirements of specific pieces of land requires a vast body of practical agronomic knowledge, and leads to ongoing experimentation. This sort of constant evaluation and innovation is responsible for the remarkable diversity of potato varieties in the Andes. In the 1960s agronomists thought that Peru possessed some 1,400 native potato varieties; current estimates now put the figure somewhere between 2,700 and 3,800. Today, the global potato provides nourishment to farmers and eaters around the world, including in its Andean homeland. Rebecca Earle is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato, which was published by Cambridge University Press in June This article was first published in the September 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
Professor Tom Devine explores one of the most traumatic moments in Scottish history
Professor Tom Devine explores one of the most traumatic moments in Scottish history and explains how a number of misconceptions still exist around the Clearances.