Life In The 17th Century: Turning Wood Into Charcoal | Tales From The Green Valley | Retold

paper was light gold in medieval times i want tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong this is the valley a vanished world from a forgotten time here on the welsh borders a farm is being run by five hand-picked experts as it would have been nearly 400 years ago using only resources available in the year 1620 they are laboring for a full calendar year turning the clock back to rediscover a way of life from an age gone by [Applause] [Music] it's may now it's our ninth month working on the farm and 400 years ago this was a key month for dairy production so we'll be doing lots of milking and butter making the ground's firming up a bit this weather warms so we can start moving timber i'll be getting on with the charcoal burning soon but the one thing that's really got badly behind is getting the clearance on triangle field so that we can get our p crop in eight months ago triangle field was waste ground reclaiming it for cultivation has been the team's biggest task to date they've been working hard to remove the countless bracken and bramble roots [Music] now alex and fonz are finally on the home stretch we had a bit of a crisis meeting yesterday myself from fonz we had decided after we'd put all the muck on there just wasn't really enough organic material on the field we really wanted to to beef up the soil so what we decided to do was to go out into the fields and do some poo picking and this horse manure that we've put on this field this is the sort of stuff that people kill for for their roses this is a replica forte otherwise known as a breast plough and i've been really looking forward to getting to grips with this thing it's fairly heavy fairly robust fonz and i've given it a little bit of a try but this is the first time we've tried it to this extent so not quite sure how it's going to work on the whole field so i'm quite anxious as to whether we can get a nice straight furrows [Music] may is a relatively quiet time in the agricultural calendar so stuart and expert charcoal burner dr malcolm stratford are going to try turning wood into charcoal a valuable item in the 17th century what we've got is an open lattice and we pack this with dry material tinder bits of twigs a bit of dry bark you know little chippings we pack it down the middle we then stack all our proper wood around it charcoal burning's probably been going on thousands of years to be quite honest in the 17th century charcoal burning really powered the beginnings of the industrial revolution to turn wood into charcoal rather than ash means building a special wood stack around a central chimney getting the flu just right is vital charcoal has a lot of advantages it's a lighter weight material and it's virtually smoke free which means you can burn it in a house for example in a brazier without a chimney to take the smoke away the other thing is it's a much purer product it's basically just carbon and therefore it can be used for industrial processes like smelting iron go on there duchess with the carving season over may is the month when dairy production really gets going so ruth and chloe have the job of milking good girl come on it's something that needs to be done morning and evening [Music] duchess is in full milk now she had a calf about a month ago and this is the most productive time of the year really for the dairy we've got really good rich milk coming for the butter and the cheese cream stand still sweetie stand still good this is a 13 year old cow and not very often been milked these udders are like leather it's like milking her is like trying to squeeze a squash ball like you do for physio when you've got a shoulder injury or something this is it's hard work it really is hard work i'm getting hands like nutcrackers the section of field being prepared for peas is relatively small which is just as well since breast ploughing is tricky work this is really just a glorified spade although it's called a breast plough i'm actually finding that i'm not needing to use my breast up here and that in fact the soil here seems to be friable enough to be able to just push it in but i have to say i'm i haven't completed the first furrow yet and it's proving to be quite difficult charcoal burning was a specialist craft the professionals would travel from place to place to ply their trade the charcoal burners in the 17th century were almost a race apart a bit like the romani gypsies were who almost spoke their own language lived quietly in the woods interacted only with themselves and almost nobody else it's curious that you find no surnames that would indicate charcoal burning as profession and you find no wills or inventories for charcoal burners and it indicates in a bit of a way that they may well have been just that much more divorced from the whole normal system of life it may be slow and laborious work but it's also highly skilled requiring diligent attention there's a lovely account in one of the icelandic sagas um saga i think where there was um i believe a man fell asleep while making charcoal it all caught fire and the 80 square miles of forest was burnt down well there's not only three small woods left in iceland most of the saga was about who should pay for the damage the chimney flu finished malcolm and stewart can surround it with the wood they hope to turn into charcoal in the 17th century industry was on the rise and so the need for charcoal was growing ever greater britain's woodlands were devastated to meet demand out at the stables ruth and chloe are slowly getting to grips with milking by hand like the milkmaids of the period somebody who could specialize in the dairy could charge higher rates if you had more than the one cow it might often well be worth employing a dairy maid rather than just a general maid because she could bring in her own value in wages by the quality of the cheese and the butter she was producing steady steady steady study she does not want to stand still this morning does she no she's really jittery i was like to sweat just following her around not a bad yield it's not as good as i was expecting but you know we can live with it by lunchtime stuart and malcolm's stack of wood is slowly disappearing beneath a layer of bracken and earth the whole purpose of which is to make sure when you burn it the air doesn't get through if you were to let the air in at any time when the charcoal is hot before you know it you were the enormous bonfire and if that happens you get ash and of course no charcoal it's like putting an enormous fire blanket over the pile of burning wood the earth is absolutely vital to the process it controls the flow of oxygen oh that looks fine to me i can't see any green poking through we just pat it down with a shovel in a minute and that should be fine [Music] [Applause] mid-afternoon and the furrows in triangle field are shaping up [Music] [Applause] alex's breast ploughing technique has picked up speed [Music] once the charcoal pile is complete it just needs a bucket of embers to get it lit here we go can you tip a small stack of charcoal like this only takes a day to build typically the biggest tax could involve up to 30 wagon loads of wood once they're stacked all of them start in the same way caught fire already just to top it up a bit with a bit more hot charcoal in we go ow ow the lot with the chimney lit period sources recommend it should be capped as quickly as possible with some wood and a large piece of turf then a close vigil needs to be kept while it slowly smoulders spread it round try and pack it in a little bit but not too tight at this stage better than your average toupee yeah a new may morning time for alex and fonz to get the last of the furrows in and start sowing their pea crop we're really tough that now it resembles a field of sorts even though it's quite a small area and the thing with the ridges as well they've sat up really nicely our dung has mixed really well with our earth which is really important because these peas on sowing they're very special variety of small pea they've been dying out and they're a variety that would have been used 400 years ago and we've got probably over half the stock in the uk so this is quite an important experiment at the back of the farmhouse in the dairy ruth and chloe can get to work on all the milk they've collected it's a wonderful time of year for cream and butter making at the moment takes quite a lot of cream to fill a churn to make a nice big batch so you save up from the evening and the morning milking obviously you can only keep it so long javelis markham for example who wrote at the time recommends that you should never keep your cream in summer more than three days and in winter more than six that the last bit nice fantastic actually quite a lot of cream with enough cream skimmed off ruth and chloe can start the hard work of beating it in a butter churn i mean ideally this amount of cream should take about 20 minutes to turn into butter but it can go on for hours if the temperature's wrong or there's something not quite perfect with the cream how's it going is it going it's beginning to thicken i can feel it beginning to get a bit heavier that's definitely starting to thicken isn't it tears isn't it you can start to hear it i feel it as well it's starting to get a little bit sticky oh gosh that's thickened up okay so look oh you can see it can't you it's coming up the top oh look at that [Laughter] down in the woods it's difficult to know how successful the charcoal burning has been there's only one way to tell for sure crack it open and see how much charcoal is inside all good that's really brilliant stuff there the fire has basically gone out and the heaps cooled down there are a few bits that are still brown not black but this isn't wasted all that would happen is a real charcoal burner would take these half burnt bits and put them straight back into the next burn oh look at this bit it's just beautiful isn't it nice very soft these small domestic heaps are going to be much less efficient on the burn the big commercial boys at the time would have been producing much more efficiently they'd have had maybe 90 percent plus of good charcoal here what you making 30 40 percent maybe even 50 50 you reckon yeah there's quite a bit gone down between the sticks it's not bad at all there's some good charcoal in the middle in the dairy it sounds like the cream has changed texture it's beginning to turn having gone really stiff and heavy it's beginning to lighten up as the first of the separation starts to happen there we go can you hear that it's quite a different noise anyone doing the dairy 400 years ago could not be some fair little slip of a thing you need muscles for something like this and if you haven't gotten when you start you soon have just a sec sorry still partially soaked in buttermilk the butter comes out looking rather like scrambled eggs our next process is squeezing the last of this buttermilk out from the butter if we left it in the butter would go rancid very very quickly but by taking it out it becomes almost pure fat and that way of course it'll keep much better i'll get the jug for the milk so we've got quite a nice amount of butter this time on a farm in the 17th century buttermilk was either drunk given to the pigs or even given to the poor as a form of charity at the bottom end of the farm fonz and alex can turn their attention to the final stage of sowing their pea crop harrowing their work has uncovered some significant discoveries as archaeologists they've got myself and fonz really excited now this may look like a piece of rusty iron but this is in fact the plowshare in the 1940s this 1940s plowshare indicates the field was cultivated during the second world war at a time when food was rationed even the most marginal of lands was being used for farming in the 17th century you've got very similar demands being made on the english and the welsh landscapes and and areas like the field that we're turning over would have been pressed into service simply because you've got a burgeoning population now the second find is a harrow and this we found just outside the gate in the orchard this particular example was likely to date from the 19th century when this farm was last in use but in style and by design it's very similar to those depicted in contemporary documents ruth and chloe are trying to master some wooden paddles known as butter hands these will squeeze out the last of the buttermilk it's like kneading really like needing bread but you don't want to be doing it with your hands because people's hands are far too warm and you'd be melting the butter and spoiling it once patted the butter is ready for eating but without refrigeration most of it would have been salted to preserve it [Music] the end of a long day and fonz and alex are doing well with their victorian harrow this harrowing is working like a dream it's knocking all the ridges over into the furrows and covering our peas but it's allowing the oxygen to get in so they can breathe and that water and get in it's enormously satisfying isn't it yeah and it's not too heavy so one we can pull it and two it doesn't compact the earth wonderful it's half a field done in yeah how long about 10 minutes yeah 10 minutes if not let's run it down the bottom again of the period actually depict horses pulling these harrows but we had such a nightmare when we brought black foot in here to do the muck spreading that we decided that we'd uh do it ourself and use the both of us and in fact it's really quite light and really easy so i think we've saved ourselves a hell of a lot of time [Music] the charcoal burning has been a reasonable success i'm getting some really nice stuff coming out of here there should be enough to fill at least a couple of sacks the price of charcoal varied but generally you're talking about a shilling a sack for which was about a day's wages at the time some charcoal burn and of course had very unsavory reputations for half filling sacks with stones and earth putting a bit of charcoal on the top and then selling them off to the gullible public another fresh may morning and with their spring crop safely in the ground alex and fonz have decided to take it easy for the day and try a spot of fishing 17th century style now hopefully we should well i'm hoping we'll catch something i'm not i'm not confident to be honest but um it'd be nice to be able to get a couple of bites yeah even if we don't actually land the fish i don't think our horse blackthorne is going to be talking to me at the moment yesterday i pinched a load of hairs from her tail because um to make the fishing lines we need horse hair plaited all woven the horsehair made for a good strong line to go on the end of it they've gathered some bits of wool and feathers to fashion some rustic flies i've been tasked with making the um the rods and i've got one here which i was playing around with it's very thin but what i've done is i've spliced onto the end a piece of i think this is hawthorne on to the end here onto the hazel and the simple reason is by the time the hazel gets this thin it's actually dangerously breakable see i've just broken it but but the idea is is in splicing this onto here you haven't got that flexibility and that's as unlikely to break with much of their dairy work out of the way ruth and chloe can also get on with a more relaxed task making straw rope keith payne's the professional thatcher who worked on the valley's cowshed has come to lend a hand none of them have tried this before life in the past without string and rope would have been virtually impossible every job you need to do involves some sort of string or rope to tie things so being able to produce your own would be a major money-saving thing how's it feeding ruth um well it's sort of coming provided the straw rope's kept dry at all times it can last incredible amount of time this piece here is 400 years old and we found on a thatched cottage interestingly there was no rafters or battens on this roof there was just three horizontal purlings and then the straw rope was woven up and down from top to bottom and the decay and the break in this has only come about where there's been water in grass over the years but the rest of it where there's been no water ingress is as strong as the day it was put there that is quite incredible it is incredible and to hold up probably a ton of thatch all resting on just straw rope is amazing chloe's using a similar technique feeding and twisting straw to make a basket domestically these baskets are enormously useful you've got bee hives log baskets laundry baskets and they're so easy to make they use materials from the farm quick and simple to twist the straw into rope keith and ruth are using a period tool known as a wimble this is a tool i've had for some considerable time as in the woodworm but it's uh but we're hoping it'll actually make the job very easy for us we're hoping we're hoping yeah beginning to learn it aren't we the feel and the idea of it in the farms hall stuart is rustling up some period fare four hundred years ago this was a curious time in culinary terms because certain things particularly the dairy produce was in full flood so we've got masses of butter cream but in other areas like the garden the material that we've planted this year is still only just starting to come through so while we have radishes appearing we're still reliant a little bit on the old leftover winter foods of parsnips the main dish for today's meal is collapen eggs collapse are basically just rashes of bacon except when you haven't got a slicer they're doing it with a knife they tend to come out a bit more chunky more like gammon ham now the bacon 400 years ago had to last without refrigeration so the only way to do that was to make it a lot saltier than nowadays to make it palatable the bacon needs soaking to remove some of the salt before cooking this well we're going a change of shift the other way around because my hands are hurting there doesn't seem to be any uh evidence in this period of a specialist industry making straw rope or a cottage industry i think it was just such a simple technique that people could just pick it up from the farm anybody from laborers farmer's wife anybody really could make it as and when they needed the actual rope to be made when i've twisted sort of threads to make tassels and cords and things i've sort of just twisted twisted it in my fingers but this is much easier [Laughter] down on a nearby river full of seasonally jumping salmon alex and fonz can try out their period fishing tackle a local fisherman robin coleman is offering a few handy tips so in the sources there's two types of line horse hair and silk and we can't afford silk so we would have used horse hair yes i mean the object of the the horsehair was because it was the only material that became almost invisible in the water right i'm steadily getting the hang of casting and not catching alex and taking his coat off him but um i don't think i'm gonna catch anything well you don't know you never know it works i mean we've proved that we are able to get the fly in the water we're relying entirely on the structure of this rod to cushion the impact of the fish although fishing reels had started to be used in the period alex and fonz have gone for simplicity if they do get a bite they could try a technique recommended in period texts throwing in the rod and letting the fish tire itself out i don't think i'll be catching much today back to the drawing board has it snapped yeah it's just just snapped it um probably a notch in the splice it's too deep or the willow that's too too soft perhaps what was that with it then uh technique don't be frightened to blame my tool spawns 400 years ago as it still is may was the time when you had a lot of bank holidays or the equivalent thereof big festivals the big festival dish that we're going to do which was very common at this time of year is florence or as we think of nowadays cheesecakes they even use the term sometimes then it's very different from a modern cheesecake it's done in a puff pastry case not on a biscuit base and instead of all those fruit toppings which they'd never thought of you've got rose water as the flavouring agent so here we go main ingredients are a good dollop of fresh cheese a splash of cream some eggs a handful of currants some butter and a luxury item of the period brown powder sugar now for the flavoring this is the rose water not too much of this because it actually tastes quite salty and a little nutmeg just to spice it up once beaten the cheesecake mix needs to be poured into a pre-baked pastry case ready for cooking in the farm's bread oven the mayday festivities started with just after midnight all the youths of the village would head out into the woods collecting flowers and greenery to decorate the house with now john stowe who is writing in the late elizabethan period and is a miserable puritan killjoy claimed that of every hundred virgins that went out into the woods scarce a third came back in the same condition don't have to luck still no catch is down on the river but for fonz and alex it's a well-deserved rest do you think they would have been more skillful fishermen back then successful fisherman years ago worked very hard for what they caught however there were a lot more fish then sure to catch so the chances were greater of connecting with the fish and probably not so good as they are today of landing one of actually landing it right yeah i've i've had one bite have you well i've had something nibble do that ah what do you think of the new improved rod then fonz i think it's brilliant i can cast the fly quite far out to fashion her basket chloe has been experimenting with various materials halfway through i switched to using nettle which um is very effective but it takes a hell of a long time to strip the nettle down and you get stung to pieces this is our new egg basket because we've had several breakages using ceramic bowls every time people go and collect the eggs and i thought this would be a bit more sensible [Music] [Applause] shane we'd like to record something but we can't have everything [Music] the boys may have failed to bring home a giant salmon but old-fashioned bacon and eggs makes for a hearty supper [Music] delicious there's the saltiness of the bacon you don't need salt the valley team have triumphed over the main spring tasks on the farm no one knows for sure how the peas are going to do in triangle field but after four months hard labor they can at least look forward to finding out so did you have a good day yeah nonetheless we had a great day yeah good fun there's a farmer up in yorkshire used to go fishing at this period and kept a diary about it now it becomes obvious when you read his diary that the main reason for fishing was to avoid his wife that you didn't get along

Channel: Retold - Documentaries & Reconstructions

Views: 99,257

Keywords: 17th century England, Retold - Documentaries & Reconstructions, ancient farming methods, ancient technology, authentic materials, farm restoration, farming reconstruction, hay harvesting, historical experience, horse ploughing, laundry techniques, lifestyle reenactment, period tools, rustic living, thatching techniques, traditional living, washing liquid recipe, wheat harvesting

Id: ULjF35kCMcE

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021