Fortunately, we know something of the daily life of the Baldons villagers in these times thanks to the efforts Thomas James Carter. He was born in Marsh Baldon in 1833 and although he left the village to live in Oxford when quite young, he frequently returned to the village to visit his grandmother. He worked as a labourer for much of his life, yet Carter left a remarkable legacy of information about domestic life and traditions in the Baldons in the mid-19th century, based on his own observations and his grandmother’s recollections.
Most of the information below is summarised from Thomas Carter’s recollections.
Agriculture
Farm workers who worked in the fields or the barns were paid about 9 shillings a week, and the carter and the milkman would get 1 shilling extra for working on Sundays in hay time and harvests. About 1s. to 1s.6d. of that went on rent to the Willoughby Estate, similar to the rent paid to the Queen’s College for cottages in Toot Baldon, which in 1887 was generally between £2 - £4 per annum, i.e. 9d. - 1s.6d. per week. Many of the rented cottages had fruit trees in their gardens, and the sale of fruit could produce enough to pay the rent.
Corn was harvested with sickles, which left long straws. These were then cut with scythes, for thatching. Once roofs began to be tiled, long straws were not needed so much.
When hedges were grubbed up, to convert the pasture into
arable land, the men were allowed keep the wood for fuel and during the next
spring could plant potatoes for themselves on the cleared ground.
Clothing
For work, men generally wore thick drab smocks and billycock hats (like a bowler hat), breeches and worsted stockings, and sometimes gaiters. Carter could just remember leather breeches being worn, but they were going out of use in his childhood (i.e. 1830s/40s).
|
This “Sunday best” smock is on display at The Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock. It was made in 1803 and was worn by Mr Lowe, a farm worker from Marsh Baldon. It is more decorative and is made of finer material, linen, than smocks worn for work. |
|
Food and cooking
Cottagers were allowed to glean from the fields after harvest, and could often gather three or four sacks of corn. This was ground by the miller who would keep the bran as payment. In a bad year with a poor harvest, cottagers were reduced to making bread from rye or barley meal. The bread was “never white, but ‘good tackle’” and would last from baking to baking. The oven was usually lit only about once every two weeks. When the oven was not in use, baking was done by covering pots on the hearth in hot ashes from the fire, to make “pot cakes”.
Fresh meat was hardly ever eaten: the staple was ‘pig-sty beef’ (bacon). Often everything was cooked together in a half-bushel (about 18 litres) pot, but smaller pots were also used. The pots had wooden lids of oak or elm. A typical stew might include dumplings, potatoes, greens, bacon, pea soup and carrots. A “skimmer lad” was made from left-over dough placed on top of the bacon as it boiled.
Local “remedies”
Carter’s grandmother was well versed in traditional “medical treatments” used in the Baldons in the mid-1800’s as “cures” for various ailments including:
Getting rid of warts - by taking a black snail, rubbing it on the warts, then impaling it on a thorn – the warts were thought to disappear as it died and rotted. The photo below is of a specimen of a slug on a thorn which Carter sold, in 1898, to the Pitt Rivers Museum.
|
Specimen of slug on thorn, sold to the Pitt Rivers Museum by Carter |
Merry Peg board, made by Carter, now at the Pitt Rivers Museum |
Cure for ‘bad leg’ – “Take a mass o’ clites [also known as goose grass, cleavers or sweethearts, Galium aparine] mash un up wi’ some lard, and put un between two bits of muslin’ and apply to the sore”.
Games and pastimes
‘Merry Peg’ (a local name for Nine Men’s Morris, a two-player board game where pieces are placed with the aim of removing the opponent’s pieces from the board). In 1904 Carter made a wooden Merry Peg board which was passed on to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1911 - see photograph above.
Children would make a ‘snurl’ ball from tree fungus for use in a game similar to rounders, which he said he played at the Baldons ‘65 years ago’ (undated, but by implication the 1840s).