STARVATION AND PLENTY
I'm grateful to Dorothy Hartley and her book Food in England (1954) for the clarity she gave me on peasant food and the effects of industrialisation that triggered migration to the towns and away from the land. She made some valuable observations and they triggered me into thinking about Old Barlick and how her thoughts applied to us.
Before industry altered our world, everyone was tied directly to the land in that they grew their own food and foraged in the countryside for game, herbs and seasonal fruits. 3,000 years ago, income levels might have affected access to food but everyone, even the most wealthy, was eating the same things. So let's start by taking poverty out of the equation and consider simple nutrition for my purposes here. The only 'foreign foods' available came with trade with Rome from about 100BC to 500AD when we have good archaeological evidence that the superior families had access to wine, fish sauce and Mediterranean spices because they could afford them. The ordinary peasants wouldn't know about these things. Apart from these luxuries, most of the diet came from local resources, oats, vegetables, mutton and beef and foraged game and fruit. In terms of nutritional value all classes of society were equal because they all had access to the land.
Things started to change at the end of the 16th century. Exploration and the increase in foreign trade brought the introduction of new foods into the Isles. Perhaps the most important from a nutritional point of view was the potato, first cultivated in Western Ireland and by the early 17th century a common crop in England. The exceptional thing about this import was that it soon became a staple of all diets, rich and poor and was a valuable addition to peasant diet. Other imports like tea, coffee, wines, spices and strong spirits were too expensive for the poor at first but were rapidly taken up by more wealthy people. There is much debate about the effect of these foods in a wealthy society. They didn't contribute anything to nutrition and over-indulgence could have actually worsened the diet. In this respect, the basic peasant diet could actually have been more healthy. One thing seems obvious, the peasant's food was more fresh because they got it straight from the source. Consider the difference between milk straight from the cow and the same milk a few hours later on the Lord's table. We forget nowadays how soon milk deteriorates if contaminated by dirt and not refrigerated. Only 80 years ago milk was delivered twice a day to houses in summer for this reason, in thundery weather it could go sour in less than four hours. So, it's possible to make a case that in some respects the poor were better off than the rich.
Move forward now to the late 18th century. The growth of the factory system meant that many of our agrarian peasants were moving off the land into large towns because of the higher income they could command. This applied even in Barlick, the Lancashire Textile Project has plenty of evidence that the origin of many workers in the early textile industry was from the Dales and even further afield. True, their incomes were higher but the crucial point, and this applies even more in the larger towns, is that they were divorced from the land and access to home-grown fresh food. This the point where working class diets start to deteriorate because they were at the mercy of middle-men who brought food into the towns and retailed it. Their primary interest was not nutritional quality but how much profit could be extracted from the trade. Food quality got worse, not simply because it wasn't fresh but also because unscrupulous traders adulterated food to gain profit. Crushed snails were added to watered milk so that it frothed easily when poured, a sign of quality in fresh unadulterated milk. Stone dust was added to flour to bulk it up and Arsenic to make it whiter. Read any account of food quality at this time and you'll find that there were many such practices and they were common. We forget now that the main reason for the inception of the Co-operative movement wasn't cheap food but purity.
Under these conditions, for the first time in 2,000 years the diet of the poor deteriorated and had an increasing influence on public health. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that this problem was realised and we begin to see local and national legislation to control the quality of food. The key point to realise is that the source of these evils was that work in industry provided money but not fresh, free food. It was the dislocation of the food supply that damaged the diet. We should realise at this point that in some respects our old Barlickers were better off than those in the towns because open fields and sources of fresh food from the farms were within walking distance.
I'm often told that there is no point trying to gain lessons from history, it all happened so long ago. I'm afraid I disagree. Substitute the modern food processing giants and supermarkets driven by advertising and profit for the unscrupulous traders of the 18th and 19th centuries. Look at the latest research into what we call The Western Diseases, add in the scourge of obesity and then ask yourself how much of your diet is direct from the source and perfectly fresh. It's a sad fact that in terms of nutritional quality modern diets are nowhere near as good as that which the 'peasants' were eating in the past. They had the added benefit of the physical exercise entailed in producing and gathering their food. My pet point of reference is the difference between modern pickled pork and the dry-cured bacon we got from our pigs at Hey Farm only fifty years ago, believe me, there is no comparison.
Extreme poverty and famine years were of course bad for the poor, in that respect the rich were always going to be the winners. Nowadays, in comparative terms we are all rich but we are in many cases badly-nourished. We aren't going to revert to being land-owning peasants so all we can do is read the history, learn the lessons and do whatever we can to remedy the situation. It won't be done by legislation, the biggest and most influential industry in the UK is the food giants. It may be that it's down to us...
Father with the boar at Hey Farm in 1967.
