Self Sufficiency and Sustainability
in Victorian Britain
Self sufficient lifestyles
When Cedd built his monastery of Lastingham, near to the entrance to Farndale, he selected a location vel bestiae commorari vel hommines
bestialiter vivere conserverant,
‘a land fit only for wild beasts, and men who live like wild beasts’. Bede later wrote that he had purposely
selected a location in the habitation where once dragons lay so that
the fruit of good works shall spring up where once beasts dwelt or where men
lived after the manner of beasts. Cedd was on a mission to civilise nature.
Despite Cedd’s efforts, the forested
Farndale continued to be a wilderness for another half a millennium. It was
still the place where Edmund the hermit dwelt in the mid twelfth century, when
parcels of land started to be given to the Rievaulx monks to cultivate.
By the early thirteenth century, it
was cleared on a grand scale for agriculture and by 1301 Farndale was a
thriving agricultural community with two mills and significant population of
farmers.
Our earliest ancestors were on a
mission to civilise nature, although the pace was not fast for hundreds of
years which followed.
Self
sufficiency
Even as the industrial revolution was in full flow through the nineteenth century, a rural economy
persisted, and an innate knowledge of the land allowed families to continue to
survive on small margins.
Every house had a good vegetable
garden and there were allotments for all; but only three of the thirty cottages
had their own water supply. The less fortunate tenants obtained their water
from a well on a vacant plot on the outskirts of the hamlet, from which the
cottage had disappeared. There was no public well or pump. They just had to get
their water where and how they could; the landlords did not undertake to supply
water. Against the wall of every well-kept cottage stood a tarred or
green-painted water butt to catch and store the rain-water from the roof. This
saved many journeys to the well with buckets, as it could be used for cleaning
and washing clothes and for watering small, precious things in the garden. It
was also valued for toilet purposes and the women would hoard the last drops
for themselves and their children to wash in. Rain-water was supposed to be
good for the complexion, and, though they had no money to spend upon
beautifying themselves, they were not too far gone in poverty to neglect such
means as they had to that end. For drinking water, and for cleaning water, too,
when the water butts failed, the women went to the well in all weathers,
drawing up the buckets with a windlass and carting them home suspended from
their shoulders by a yoke. Those were weary journeys 'round the Rise' for
water, and many were the rests and endless was the gossip, as they stood at
corners in their big white aprons and crossover shawls.
(Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter I, Poor People's Houses)
On light evenings, after their
tea-supper, the men worked for an hour or two in their gardens or on the
allotments. They were first-class gardeners and it was their pride to have the
earliest and best of the different kinds of vegetables. They were helped in
this by good soil and plenty of manure from their pigsties; but good tilling
also played its part. They considered keeping the soil constantly stirred about
the roots of growing things the secret of success and used the Dutch hoe a good
deal for this purpose. The process was called 'tickling'. 'Tickle up old Mother
Earth and make her bear!' they would shout to each other across the plots, or
salute a busy neighbour in passing with: 'Just tickling her up a bit, Jack?'
The energy they brought to their
gardening after a hard day's work in the fields was marvellous. They grudged no
effort and seemed never to tire. Often, on moonlight nights in spring, the
solitary fork of some one who had not been able to
tear himself away would be heard and the scent of his twitch fire smoke would
float in at the windows. It was pleasant, too, in summer twilight, perhaps in
hot weather when water was scarce, to hear the swish of water on parched earth
in a garden—water which had been fetched from the brook a quarter of a mile
distant. 'It's no good stintin' th'
land,' they would say. 'If you wants anything out you've got to put summat in, if 'tis only elbow-grease.'
The allotment plots were divided into
two, and one half planted with potatoes and the other half with wheat or
barley. The garden was reserved for green vegetables, currant and gooseberry
bushes, and a few old-fashioned flowers. Proud as they were of their celery,
peas and beans, cauliflowers and marrows, and fine as were the specimens they
could show of these, their potatoes were their special care, for they had to
grow enough to last the year round. They grew all the old-fashioned varieties—ashleaf kidney, early rose, American rose, magnum bonum,
and the huge misshaped white elephant. Everybody knew the elephant was an
unsatisfactory potato, that it was awkward to handle when paring and that it
boiled down to a white pulp in cooking; but it produced tubers of such
astonishing size that none of the men could resist the temptation to plant it.
Every year specimens were taken to the inn to be weighed on the only pair of
scales in the hamlet, then handed round for guesses to be made of the weight.
As the men said, when a patch of elephants was dug up and spread out, 'You'd
got summat to put in your eye and look at.'
Very little money was spent on seed;
there was little to spend, and they depended mainly upon the seed saved from
the previous year. Sometimes, to secure the advantage of fresh soil, they would
exchange a bag of seed potatoes with friends living at a distance, and
sometimes a gardener at one of the big houses around would give one of them a
few tubers of a new variety. These would be carefully planted and tended, and,
when the crop was dug up, specimens would be presented to neighbours.
Most of the men sang or whistled as
they dug or hoed. There was a good deal of outdoor singing in those days.
Workmen sang at their jobs; men with horses and carts sang on the road; the
baker, the miller's man, and the fish-hawker sang as they went from door to
door; even the doctor and parson on their rounds hummed a tune between their
teeth. People were poorer and had not the comforts, amusements, or knowledge we
have to-day; but they were happier. Which seems to suggest that happiness
depends more upon the state of mind—and body, perhaps—than upon circumstances
and events.
(Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter III, Men Afield)
As well as their flower garden, the
women cultivated a herb corner, stocked with thyme and parsley and sage for
cooking, rosemary to flavour the home-made lard, lavender to scent the best
clothes, and peppermint, pennyroyal, horehound, camomile, tansy, balm, and rue
for physic. They made a good deal of camomile tea, which they drank freely to
ward off colds, to soothe the nerves, and as a general tonic. A large jug of
this was always prepared and stood ready for heating up after confinements. The
horehound was used with honey in a preparation to be taken for sore throats and
colds on the chest. Peppermint tea was made rather as a luxury than a medicine;
it was brought out on special occasions and drunk from wine-glasses; and the
women had a private use for the pennyroyal, though, judging from appearances,
it was not very effective. As well as the garden herbs, still in general use,
some of the older women used wild ones, which they gathered in their seasons
and dried.
All kinds of home-made wines were
brewed by all but the poorest. Sloes and blackberries and elderberries could be
picked from the hedgerows, dandelions and coltsfoot and cowslips from the
fields, and the garden provided rhubarb, currants and gooseberries and
parsnips. Jam was made from garden and hedgerow fruit. This had to be made over
an open fire and needed great care in the making; but the result was generally
good—too good, the women said, for the jam disappeared too soon. Some notable
housewives made jelly. Crab-apple jelly was a speciality at the end house.
Crab-apple trees abounded in the hedgerows and the children knew just where to
go for red crabs, red-and-yellow streaked crabs, or crabs which hung like ropes
of green onions on the branches.
A quickly made delicacy was cowslip
tea. This was made by picking the golden pips from a handful of cowslips,
pouring boiling water over them, and letting the tea stand a few minutes to
infuse. It could then be drunk either with or without sugar as preferred.
(Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter VI, the Besieged Generation)
Carbon footprints barely registered
for generations.
Nature’s
mastery
After the widespread taming of
agricultural land in the thirteenth century, by 1315, the number of tenancies
had multiplied and an average holding was only about 10 acres. Households were
increasingly struggling to feed themselves, let alone feed the towns, and had
probably reached their sustainable levels. Real wages fell by about 20% between
1290 and 1350.
In the second half of the thirteenth
century there was a disastrous fall in global temperatures, which led to a
succession of storms, frosts and droughts. The Great Storm of 1289 ruined
harvests across the country. The Thames froze in 1309 to 1310. In 1315 to 1316,
two years of continual rain ruined harvests. A great famine across Europe
lasted for 7 years. These were years of perhaps the worst economic disaster
that the nation has faced. Half a million people died of hunger and disease.
In 1349 came the Black Death. Indeed the plague attacked the
population four times in thirty years and became endemic for three centuries.
Small
Horizons and communities
There was a strong sense of place in rural communities. In
Roman religion, genius loci invoked the protective spirit of a place.
Amidst the extended families of Kilton, there was no doubt a sense of security that was felt from close
interactions between large numbers of individuals who knew each other well and
shared cultural ideas. Multi generational families
had both a sense of place and ancestry.
John Farndale
could recall some one hundred and twenty parents and children, besides
men-servants and women-servants; I remember ten farmers occupant of some seven hundred
acres of land. I see in the book recorded and registered in olden time, the
names of farmers who once occupied this great farm – R and W Jolly, M Young, R
Mitchell; W Wood, J Harland, T Toas, J Readman, J Farndale, S Farndale, J and W Farndale, all
these tenants once occupied this great farm; now blended into one.
I
remember what a muster at the Kilton rent days, twice a year, when dinner was
provided for a quarter of a hundred tenants, Brotton,
Moorsholm, Stanghoe,
those paid their rents at Kilton; and were indeed belonging to the Kilton
Court, kept here also, and the old matron proudly provided a rich plum
pudding and roast beef; and the steward also a jolly punch bowl, for it was
a pleasure to him to take the rents at Kilton, the day before Skelton rent day.
The steward always called old J Farndale to the
vice-chair, he being old, and the oldest tenant. Farndale’s was the most
numerous family, and had lived on the estate for many ages. Kilton had many
mechanics, and here we had a public house, a meeting house, two lodging houses,
and a school house, to learn our ABCs, from which sprang two eminent school
masters, who became extremely popular; we had a butcher’s shop, we had a London
tailor and is apprentice, and eight other apprentices more; we had a rag
merchant and a shop which sold song books, pins, needles, tape and thread; we
had five sailors, two soldiers, two missionaries, besides a number of old
people, aged 80, 90 and 100 years. But last, not least, Wm Tulley Esq., who took so much interest in the old castle – planted
its orchard, bowling green, and made fish ponds, which were fed by a reservoir
near the Park House, Kiltonthorpe, Kilton Lodge,
together with all these improvements around the castle, which are now no more.
This genealogical journey tells the
story of one extended family, all related to each other, albeit increasingly
distantly. From that limited perspective, we have encountered a multiplicity of
stories, of struggle, initiative, tragedy, achievement, ambition, of following
calls to battle, taming our own lands, and travelling to new ones.
The astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 to 1996), left a cosmic perspective, to the multiplicity of human stories, when he thought about a
photograph of the earth taken by Voyager 1 when it paused briefly to look
backwards on its mission to the edge of the solar system.
Earthrise, William Anders, Apollo 8,
24 December 1968, from the far side of the moon The Pale Blue Dot,
Voyager 1, 14 February 1990, from beyond Neptune
From this distant vantage point, the
Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different.
Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone
you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who
ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every
hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother
and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme
leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there
– on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a
vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals
and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary
masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the
inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how
eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings,
our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged
position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our
planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity,
in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to
save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so
far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to
which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not,
for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a
humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better
demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our
tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with
one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've
ever known.
(Pale Blue Dot, 1994, Carl Sagan)
Good
Ancestors
In A Guide to
Saltburn by the Sea and the Surrounding District, in 1864, John Farndale, who was
somewhat self-righteous and annoyingly competitive at everything he did, wrote
It was ordained that even to me was given an errand to fulfil, which I am at
this time feebly endeavouring to discharge:- namely, to do good in my day and
generation.
Roman Krznaric has recently picked up on the idea of The Good Ancestor. He worries that we live in an age dominated by the tyranny of short
termism, perhaps epitomised by the iPhone culture of the twenty first century,
in which we find it difficult to gain a perspective of more than a couple of
generations. He advocates long term thinking as the tool of the ‘good ancestor’
to take decisions which reflect the longer term future of our human journey.
Balancing
the threats of climate change with the realities and challenges of day to day
living are not new. It might be however that a long term perspective, which
reflects lessons which have already been learnt, might help. A perspective of some sixty
generations through a journey two millennia …