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MIDDLE AGES 1250-1500 Life in the countryside Part

Daily bread:

  • Peasants worked hard on the land. Their lives depended on it.
  • A good harvest meant some chance of health and comfort. 
  • A bad harvest could mean death
  • Great Famine 1315-16: followed by outbreaks of disease affected cattle and sheep. Bad weather and poor harvests lasted until 1322. The peasants were helpless against these disasters. About 10% of the population died.

Dangerous bread:

  • Even a good harvest might bring hidden problems.
  • In damp conditions a certain fungus grew on rye. This was the grain used to make bread eaten by the poor
  • We now know this fugus caused a disease called 'Ergotism'
  • Victims suffered from an outbust of painful pustles and a burning sensation. They frequently had hallucinations and many went mad.
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MIDDLE AGES 1250-1500 Life in the countryside Part

The importance of water:

  • Every village was near a stream of spring 
  • This provided water for humans and for their animals 
  • From records of deaths by accidental drowning, we know that peasants sometimes bathed in streams, usually in the summer months 

The power of water:

  • Some streams turned water wheels. These helped to grind grain 
  • In the later Middle Ages, some powered fulling mills where mighty hammers cleaned and softened newly made cloth. The cloth was soaked in a mixture largely made of urine. Fulling in the countryside polluted many streams. 
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MIDDLE AGES 1250-1500- Life in the towns

Roads and streets:

  • Peasants would take the same cart that took rubbish from the midden to the fields to take grain, fruit, fish, cheese, timber and cloth to the towns 
  • Drovers walked livestock such as cattle to the towns 
  • Town centres were often paved or cobbled but these often broke up and turned back to dirt and mud 

Water and waste:

  • The market square in some towns had a conduit. This was a fountain that all could use.
  • Water carriers filled leather sacks at these conduits and went selling door to door.
  • No one had pipes to bring clean water into their house
  • Tavern ale was stron brewed ale and drunkeness was a common problem 
  • From 1293, London paid rakers to clear the streets and dispose of rubbish outside the town walls. From there it could be taken by the peasants and spread on the fields. 
  • Householders were allowed to put rubbish on the street outside their houses for 3-4 days but they could be fined if it had not been taken away. 
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EARLY MODERN 1500-1750

Clean water:

  • Cleanliness depended on your wealth 
  • Rich and middlesing sort had servants to do their washing, a poorer person might only have one set of woollen clothes riddled with lice and fleas, which were carriers of thypus and plague.
  • Access to water became difficult, there was 3 main ways to get water:

1) Pay for water to be piped to your house (In 1609, Hugh Middleton created a 'New river' which piped spring water 38 miles from countryside to a reservoir in Islington from which 30,000 houses were supplied. People paid a quaterly bill.)

2) Collecting water from a conduit: these were public water fountains provided by town councils, individuals or acts of charity.

3) Buying water from a water seller who collected water from conduits or the river and carried it through the streets in a large container. You could pay a water seller to bring water to your house. 

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EARLY MODERN 1500-1750 Food and famine

Food and famine: 

  • Richer people ate lots of meat such as beef, lamb and chicken and enjoyed white bread. 
  • The diet of the rich included small quantities of salad leaves, vegtables and fruit. People drank wine, ale, beer as they knew water would make them ill. Overall, wealthy people had plenty to eat but their diet was unbalanced and unhealthy
  • Fish was still important and the religous custom of eating fish on Fridays continued 
  • Merchants brought new products from America so people who could afford began to eat a wider range of food e.g. peppers, pumpkins and potatoes. New drinks like hot chocolate, tea and coffee were sweetened with sugar.
  • By 1750 there were over 500 coffee houses in London. The national addiction to coffee and sugar had begun. So too had the problem of rotting teeth and obesity.
  • Poorer people mainly ate bread, vegtabes, eggs, cheese. Meat was an occasional treat.
  • If there was a run of bad harvests people could starve to dearg, like the one which occurred in 1623-24 in Cumbria. Widespread famine was rare in early modern period but hunger which weakened people's resistance to disease was common. 
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INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN 1750-1900 Housing

Industrial Britain 1750-1900:

  • All large towns in early industrial Britain had lodging housing where single people lived and where newly arrived families stayed while they looked for houses to rent. These were often large, old houses divided up into smaller rooms. They varied a lot, buy many where filthy and over-crowded
  • People were often packed into small rooms, sometimes sleeping on the floor or sharing a bed. In these conditions, diseases spread quickly. Typhus was very common. 
  • The best home a family could hope for was a house with a back yard
  • Many people had to make do with back-to-back housing. Builders brought these in order to pack as many houses as possible onto a small plot of land. Back-to-back terraces were built in double rows. Each house had its own front wall, but some joined to others on the back and sides
  • Some of the very poorest people could not afford back to back housing to even rent out, Instead, they crowded below ground in the cellars of other peoples houses. 
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INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN 1750-1900 Food and health

Idustrial Britain 1750-1900:

  • Poeples diet played a major part in the public health crisis of the early 19th century
  • Industrial workers were cut off from the land and it was impossible to grow food in the slum districts of towns and cities
  • Working class families were forced to buy their food from small shops and street sellers. The income of many families was simple too low to buy sufficent food, particularly when there was several children to feed.
  • Poor families mainly lived on bread, butter, potatoes and tea. Occasionally cheap bacon, rabbit or offal provided a treat 
  • As a result of poor diet, many people in this time period were malnourished
  • The quality was also an issue, not until the 1860's was food preserved in cans and refigerators were not invented until the 1880's. In addition, the lassiez-faire attitude meant that the national and local government made little attempt to control the production and sale of food until the later 19th century. As a result, much of the food eaten by the poor, urban workers were alduterated. Butchers sold meat from diseased animals and cows milk was adulterated with water and chalk. 
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BRITAIN IN 1900

New technology accelerated the way in which we live:

  • We watch television or use tablets as we sit on our sofas.
  • We use remote controls to switch TV channels without moving from our seats.
  • Far more people watch sport on TV tahn taking part in it.
  • Power tools and houshold appliances mean that jobs in our homes that once involved effort are far less physically demanding
  • Robots do the heavy work in factories whilst workers watch monitors

A research project in 2013 showed that the poorer parts of society are the least active:

  • Almost 75% of people who have no qualifications take little or no exercise.
  • Overall 44% of men and 33% of women are classed as overweight 
  • In the 1890s, 40% of men from industrial towns were found to be too weak to join the army; in 2006 over a tird of the nations teenagers would have been too fat to be allowed to join up so the army changed its standards and accepted volunteers who, until then, would have been classes as overweight.
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