Everyday Life in a Seventeenth-Century English Village

This four-part series explores a simple question: what would it have been like to live in an English village 400 years ago?

It is a question Dr Mark Hailwood of the University of Bristol is researching as part of a British Academy funded project that aims to assess how well our perceptions of the preindustrial past match up with the historical reality.

The challenge here is that the ordinary women and men who lived in rural villages four centuries ago have left few written accounts of their own experiences. But there is one type of source that can reveal a great deal about their day-to-day lives: witness statements that they provided in court cases. When they were asked to give their version of events relating to a crime or offence they had seen, they often included a wealth of incidental detail about what they were doing at the time that sheds light on their everyday activities.

In these podcasts, Dr Hailwood draws on this material to examine living conditions, people’s working lives, the extent to which villages were isolated and insular, and what the relationship between neighbours was like. In the process, he suggests that many of our long-held ideas about ‘peasant life’ in the past need to be revised.