Not the mute children of the soil....
Dec. 12th, 2024 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinLess than half the male population in England and Wales was working in agriculture by the C18th, well before the Industrial Revolution: How important was agriculture before and during the Industrial Revolution? (Cue my usual rant about dodgy nostalgic visions of The People of England as Rural Peasantry, quite possibly tugging their forelocks.) Okay, it varied by region, and some could be high, while others, e.g. mining areas and some cities, were low. But in comparison to most other parts of Europe, 'the shift out of agriculture in England began 200-300 years earlier'.
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This 1630 English Bible has an array of evidence of women’s book ownership:
“Joan Woottem” has signed her name below the message: “November ye 21st 1733 / my sister [?] gaue / mee this book.” Unfortunately, her sister’s name is difficult to make out due to the ink stains and scribbled. Joan used the rest of the page to jot down a recipe “for a pain or a strain” that requires several ingredients such as sack, oil of Exeter, St. Johns Wort, and other oils.
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This is fascinating, but I'm not sure it counts as mysterious, exactly - possibly the Agatha Christie connection is responsible for that: The Mysterious Affair of Adultery in the Divorce Court. This duo of cases worked out so neatly I am inclined to suspect that there was a certain amount of behind-the-scenes collusion - the legalistic 'desertion' set-up suggests this to me.
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This is also fascinating, and rather more unexpected: No “Sane” Person Would Have Any Idea’: Patients’ Involvement in Late Nineteenth-century British Asylum Psychiatry:
Harding was a voluntary patient throughout his asylum stay; Haigh was legally certified as insane, but his relationship with his physicians led to later voluntary admissions and eventually a re-evaluation of his legal status. I argue that it is this unique (ambiguous) status that provided them both with a unique place within the asylum’s social order. By presenting an original angle that contradicts classic views on doctor–patient relationships, this facet of late-Victorian asylumdom also sheds new light on classic historiographical narratives. Both Haigh and Harding seemingly accepted certain elements of the patient role while rejecting others; both also took on additional identities and even contributed to medical debates over the ways in which madness could be defined and represented. In these particular cases, the patient’s view thus sits between the professionalised medical view and lay conceptualisations of madness.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 05:53 pm (UTC)Isn't the current date for the beginning of mass secular land enclosure in England circa 1450CE? (Monasteries etc having turfed peasants off land earlier, presumably.) Can't work in agriculture without access to land one way or another.
ETA. Also, rhetorical question: does coppicing and charcoal burning etc count as "agriculture" or is forestry separate? How much time would a tradesman have to spend coppicing and charcoal burning for it to be his primary profession even if he made more money from craftwork and trade? (Wot about pig in back garden etc.?) /entirely rhetorical questions
no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 06:15 pm (UTC)I'd guess this also effected craft-workers, many of whom needed "forest" resources more than they needed commons for grazing. The removal of their rights to also grow and forage for food, and keep back-garden livestock, and go wooding for fuel (and "forest" resources), would've meant the advantages to trade and retail of living in a town or city were no longer outweighed by benefits from having access to land in the countryside. Hence presumably the rise of urban middle classes long before the industrial revolution. But that's merely my assumption following on from earlier mass secular enclosures (again, iirc enclosures of land belonging to religious foundations set the pattern of large scale English clearances for sheep pasturage etc).
Religious foundations hypothetically offered evicted unmarried men a place as lay brothers (basically unpaid labour who got basic bed, board, and points to be redeemed in heaven) but I've often wondered what happened to the women who were similarly displaced - they can't all have been happily married to breadwinning men.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 06:43 pm (UTC)