How do you gauge gas mark 7 when you’re using a 17th-century bread oven? Why did people 400 years ago save up their urine to help with the laundry? Why did farmers in Britain traditionally plough with oxen and not horses? These are just some of the questions five historians and archaeologists asked themselves as they spent a whole year working a farm restored to how it would have been in the year 1620.
Tales from the Green Valley follows the five as they labour for a full agricultural year, getting to grips with period tools, skills, and technology from the age of the Stuarts, the reign of James I. Everything must be done by hand, from ploughing with a team of oxen using a replica period plough and thatching a cowshed using only authentic materials, to making their own washing liquid for laundry and harvesting the hay and wheat with scythes and sickles.
Stuart Peachey
Stuart Peachey is a British historian specialising in the English Civil War and the history of food and clothing. He has produced many works on these and other subjects. He had a leading role in the promotion of the Norfolk Trained Band, a regiment within the English Civil War Society, and is very active in the living history field.
He also runs Historical Management Associates Ltd based in Bristol, which specializes in the period 1580-1660 (Late Tudor/early Stuart).[1]
He participated in the 2005 historical documentary TV series Tales from the Green Valley and wrote an associated book, The Building of the Green Valley: A Reconstruction of an Early 17th-century Rural Landscape, published in 2006
Books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/99018.Stuart_Peachey
Ruth Goodman
https://www.ruthgoodman.me.uk/
Historian of the Social and Domestic Life of Britain
I am a free lance historian working with museums, theatre, television and educational establishments. I offer advice services, lectures and practical workshops as well as presenting a range of television programmes.
My particular interest is the domestic. How we lived our daily lives, the practical nitty gritty, and why we did it that way. These seemingly little things change the world. Our day to day routines have a huge cumulative effect on the environment, our shopping habits can sway the world’s patterns of trade, how we organise and run our family life sets the political tone of nations. We matter. Us, the little people, women, children and even men. How our ancestors solved the problems of everyday life made the world what it is today.
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17th century agriculture and social change
https://www.bahs.org.uk/SUPPLEMENTS/Finberg/Finberg_7_Thirsk.pdf
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Patterns of Agriculture in 17th century New England
