What Was It Like To Live In 17th Century Britain? | Tales From The Green Valley | Retold

foreign [Music] this is the valley a vanished World from a forgotten time here on the Welsh borders lies a remarkable Farm one that is trapped in time being restored to how it would have been in the reign of James the first the year 1620. now a unique project is about to take place five hand-picked experts are going to run it as it would have been 400 years ago working without any modern conveniences they'll be toiling to make the farm work for a full calendar year over the next 12 episodes we'll be following our team through the months and Seasons from the warmth of Summer to the dark depths of winter as they turn the clock back to ReDiscover a way of life from an age gone by foreign [Music] this Farm situated in a Welsh Valley was abandoned in the 19th century over 150 years later a project began to restore it over the last 17 years the foundations of a 17th century Farm have been relayed although the site is taking shape there is lots that still needs to be done in order for it to function as a fully working farm our team are going to take on the challenge although modern health and safety laws mean they can't actually live here they're going to work here on a daily basis they'll wear period clothing and cook and eat food from the era they'll be turning Theory into practice doing everything by hand using only tools and materials available in the year 1620. small Hill Farm like this would usually have been run by a farmer his wife and children assisted by some servants and laborers following in their footsteps is Stuart peachy a historian specializing in the food and farming practices of the period he's been closely involved with rebuilding the site since the beginning in theory we know what we're doing for the next 12 months but many of these practices haven't been used in Britain for hundreds of years now it's also the first time on the farm that we've had a full team to run it over a complete calendar year using these original techniques so there's a lot to find out is it really going to work or not four other experts have been recruited to join Stewart story and Ruth Goodman specializes in the clothing and social customs of the era she's an advisor to the Globe Theater and has been a consultant on films like Shakespeare in Love I've done lots of the sort of domestic and social tasks that a farmer's wife would have needed to have done but what I'm really looking forward to is some of the bigger agricultural things like the year-round care of animals sheep shearing a wheat Harvest which I've never really had a chance to try before gorgeous and there are three young archaeologists Chloe Spencer has the most practical experience of working with animals too worried about working with the animals generally I'm a little bit apprehensive about working with period breeds in the 17th century setting I've no idea how they'll react and how to work with them really so I think it's going to be quite a challenge Alex langlands and Peter Ginn nicknamed Fonz are going to be supplying much of the heavy labor their old friends who've excavated many archaeological sites I'm really looking forward to thrive myself into these big agricultural projects we're going to have to be um plowing we're going to have to be sharing the sheep and at the end of the year hopefully we're going to be harvesting but it's one thing to read about it it's another thing to be faced with the task of actually having to do it ever since I was a kid I've always wanted to be a farmer so this represents a fantastic opportunity for me but having to try and get this Farm to work without modern machinery and using tools from the period that's a real daunting task foreign it's September and after a few days settling in now the team really have to get to work this is the month that kicks off the agricultural calendar the most urgent task is plowing they need to get a crop of wheat into the ground if they're going to have anything to harvest next summer this come on nearly there has was common for small farms of the period a team of oxen Arthur and Lancelot have been brought in to help no problem their Handler is John Johnston oxen were the Mainstay of a lot of farms in the good old days and used to have teams varying from a pair up to eight the competition was the horse but at the end of the day the horse in Britain wasn't eaten and in Britain we still eat oxen and of course that was the difference in economics I've never actually plowed before I mean I've read a lot about it and certainly this plow looks the part but you know I'm really looking forward to see how this develops so you need to handle Martin how's the plow looking oh bad just back it up a little bit please that's it all right let's get ready boys okay come on study boys just walk on gently right walk on boys come on walk on off we go that's it good guys come on boys welcome welcome Guys these are English Longhorn oxen and these two are as you can see are about about a ton a piece which is a lot fatter than they should be but they wouldn't let him get too thin because they needed the meat at the end of the day but Arthur and Lancelot here are about uh 12 and a half years old and in theory they would work until they're about 15. walk on a bit Rocky coming up boys walk on it's probable that nobody's used a plow like this since the 17th century in this country but we do at least have period diagrams and instructions from which we've been able to rebuild this one acre used to be the amount of land a man could plow in a day so if we've got half an acre here to put down to grain we should be finished by lunchtime [Music] The Oxen are pulling their weight but team are struggling with the plow ing problem is it gets pinched between the um is it worth taking the culture out I just wonder that yeah Stuart can I have a mallet please yeah for something fun um it's clogging up between the culture and the plowshare so it's just going to raise the culture a bit the cool to the metal pin that's supposed to have to do the cutting and the share well that divides the earth but what we're finding is between the quarter and the share as we're picking up loads of stubble and that's just bluntling the share so it's not going here so what we're going to try first is to remove the culture out of the equation just see if the shear is enough to cut uh whoa whoa indoors in the well house Ruth and Chloe have to master one of the most essential tasks of the 17th century farmer's wife baking bread first step is lighting the bread oven like most bread ovens 400 years ago you actually light a fire inside the oven and then as it burns it heats the stones or bricks around the space and then you can take the fire out and it'll be the hot Stones themselves that do the cooking because these are such fine Twigs they're all this waste material they're really actually springy and difficult to get into the oven I usually find the best way to get this lit really quickly is to put a handful of hay in under the we're aiming for a temperature to cook bread so you know if you're on your oven at home if you've got a dial you want something like gas mark seven welcome well that's the business excellent goodbye goodbye ah okay so we're not Gathering clag anymore so we're good that's been the problem then I think indeed we're starting to get into the ground at last year but it's not perfect yet it should be turning a nice solid on one side only but at the moment it's just scratching a Groove across the ground but it's progress all right okay while the bread oven warms up Ruth and Chloe can get on with making up the dough Farm like this probably would have been making two or three times a week not every family would have had their own bread oven so often in villages you'd have had a a communal bread oven you'd make your bread at home and then take it along to the oven to be baked that's why you prick it and poke it and Mark it with d like in that marvelous nursery rhyme so you know which one's yours I think I'm about there actually if we pop these to rise okay I've done a cloth yep come on boys plowing is going slower than expected at this rate the team certainly won't be finished by lunchtime they may be struggling to finish before nightfall hey up there go on hold up come on Lance you're logging again aren't you come on come around boys round and you want to get this in position yeah goodbyes using a plow is all about technique as well as maintaining a straight line they have to make sure the plow drives deep into the soil come on the plow shirt kept bouncing out but now the two of us putting the weight on it means it's biting and we're getting some pretty good furrows pretty deep look like modern flower steady good boys okay we're coming to turn around right jack out whoa right you're out the way I'm out the way now that the bread oven's up to temperature Ruth and Chloe need to rake out the Embers oh three on there yeah it's quite a big bait we're doing this weekend okay I reckon this will probably last us the best part of half a week or so oh cloud steamer okay all right once the bread's in we put the doors up and then you seal it round with a bit of flour and water taste in comparison to a modern oven it's an awful lot of fat from work however the cooking times are fairly similar to a modern oven and you get a lot of useful cooking heat out of one burn the heat is in the stones and gradually that temperature is coming down so as long as you've got the food lined up in the right sort of order you can bake a series of things from one burn it's been a hard but successful day plowing by late afternoon they've done almost half the field walk on come on it's really going well now we've quite literally got in the groove walk on come on it's fantastic we've got a a plow that's been made to period specifications we've got period species of of oxen and it's and it's really working good boys thrilling absolutely thrilling come on come on come on hurry up okay let's see if he's done lovely knock him on the bottom oh yeah I think that one sounds good of course these loaves got a little bit of Ash and charcoal on the bottom of them because we didn't want to spend too long cleaning the oven out it would be ridiculous to do so so the bottom crust is always just that little bit dirty and that's why some people in the sort of posture houses would slice them that way instead of that way so you get an upper crust and a lower crust and uh obviously the Posh people at the upper crust and that's why we sometimes refer to them as members of the Upper Crust welcome what was that remarkably impressed actually how well they've done in these 1600 conditions and once we got the power of something like right the boys have sort of knuckled in and they really are pulling away quite well here it must have been fairly hard work though I can tell you we haven't done an awful lot but we're all sweating here including the oxen but they do seem to like yokon and once the plow's dug in they will pull away it's sort of instinctive to them somehow um pleasantly surprised you can do it boys come on walk on oh come on Lance eight hours in and the team are well on the way to finishing the field it's been tough but rewarding even if they've been plowing at about half the speed of a 17th century oxen crew [Music] a new morning in the valley time for the team to Don their specially made period clothes for Ruth that means fighting her way into a corset [Music] this one is um stiffened with wood down the center that's this bit here it's just a bit like a wooden ruler and then the rest of it is different with bents which are just sort of reeds sometimes these were like removable and they were carved with sort of because it's next to your heart but sort of love things it might be something that a sweetheart would give you and and there is one really nice little um one that survives that's got written down it uh to my dear sister and don't break this one a lot of hot day in this beach like Libras of the time Alex and Fonz are kitted out in Woolen breeches we're just getting used to the britches now although I'm finding mine are a little hot to be honest they're linen lined and then made of wool so in this warm September I find it does get a little bit a bit sweaty in there it's a little bit strange wearing um half length trousers the whole time but if they're full length you rarely wash woolens and they just get covered in dirt yeah so they do have their fluffy and socks and shoes just easier to wash you can just take them off and bangs done [Music] this shirt it's a linen shirt it's absolutely enormous forehead cloth [Music] it's always the first work out of the day to want to get into one's doublet it's a bit of a palava getting dressed still ready for action now [Music] one of Chloe's daily tasks is mucking out the Farm's period porkers hello piggy piggies are you happy Piggy come on boys the breed of pig we've got here is a world called Tamworth cross which is about the closest you can get to a 17th century Pig they're different from Modern pigs and they're they're a darker color this sort of rich dark brown with a wiry coat modern pigs are almost bald and pink and they can get easily sunburned but these guys they're used to being out all the time just learning about mucking out pigs it's a new one for me I have to say and probably the worst smelling animal I've ever had to do but it's funny what people say pigs don't sleep in their own mess they really don't they've left all the muck a mess at the front of the pen where they're all lying down at the back it's still nice and clean September would have been the time to bring in the first of the apple harvest stewards preparing Refreshments for a long day ahead foreign House Began Life as a medieval long house so originally you'd have had cattle at that end and the residents living cheap by jowl with them down here but like many English farm houses it was upgraded in late Tudor times so that instead of the Cow Shed you now had a grain Barn at the end and you no longer had the waft of excrement around you as you were sitting in your living quarters the very Hub of The Farmhouse was the hall and that in turn centered around the great fireplace here the women would have cooked the men would have come in to join them for the evening meals and all of them would have sat around the fire socializing in the evening drinking their strong beer at the end of the day it was very much the living room within which all social and domestic activities took place to help bring in the apples Chloe is going to press the Valley's Workhorse into service this is Blackthorne she's an ex-pit Pony she's actually a fell horse which is not local it's from up in Yorkshire um short stubby legs which is ideally suited to this kind of work and see already she's got a hell of a temper on her she's been dancing around on the end of this rope so I think we're going to have a bit of a problem no challenge getting her fit again but also getting the boys working with her it's my turn to uh light the fires this morning and unfortunately it's not a simple case of flicking a switch or even striking a match now back in the 17th century they've used a flint and a steel doesn't always work that quickly but for me thankfully this morning this is going to be a relatively easy job this is actually quite similar to a modern lighter modern lighter has a flint and it also has a steel and you roll the Flint across the steel instead of gas we've got a little bit of Tinder which is a basically linen that's been burnt and that lights the straw and hopefully that that fagot's starting to take and now we have a fire excellent Autumn was a crucial time for bringing in Fruit crops such as apples they'd be carefully stored to provide an extra food supply for the winter ahead [Music] trees got quite a few that are already rotten on it uh it's a characteristic of the Cornish aromatic we've got quite a few windfalls on the ground and if we bite in you can see we've got really dark black hips inside there and that's another sign that it's fully right and ready to go that's a lovely taste [Music] even with blackthorn's help it's going to take several trips to the Orchards to bring in all the apples [Music] some things never change 400 years ago the end of a long day marked a chance to relax and enjoy a few beers it is tiring I don't think it is as tiring as I thought it was going to be um it's just a case of once you get used to it you get into that routine I've certainly noticing I've become a lot fitter if you're out doing a job all day and you kind of say to yourself I must get to that point by the end of the day and you're just invigorated right and I don't know whether that's the experience whether that's something that they would have felt back you know only as many years ago but for me I find that very kind of there's a bit of a buzz really I think the biggest surprise for me is how easy it's been to actually just absorb yourself into the life you find yourself just taking to it as like second nature you just forget I mean you really do forget things like TV and rush hour traffic and all that kind of just painstaking part of modern day life hanging on I'm dry me too a fresh day on the farm means Alex and Stuart can start sowing the freshly plowed Fields with wheat it's their main crop they need to make sure it's well established before the winter frosts come [Music] casting the seed throwing it evenly right across the field here and the trick and skill for the farmer on this is to get an even cover otherwise you're going to waste a lot of your seed corn William fits her but he's a chap who wrote a farming manual back in the 17th century and he describes broadcast sowing he says you put the left foot forward and so with the right hand and then the right foot forward and so with the left but the problem I'm having is my left arm doesn't seem to be work I'm just dropping it on the floor so nothing to resort to just using my right hand so I'm sewing with a bit of a kind of backhand technique this way and a forehand technique this way much pretty much like table tennis which I'm notoriously bad at foreign [Music] was a common Farm dish in September with Fields freshly sewn rather than let pigeons eat the seed farmers at the pigeons Unfortunately they don't come oven ready so I've got the job of plucking them and then gutting them this is remarkably easy the feathers just are peeling away from the skin I've only been here for three weeks and already I'm getting a very good idea of what it must have been like to be living back in the 17th century just the fact that you can't come in from the fields and slam something in the oven you've actually got to pluck your birds you've got a knead and bake your bread everything just takes so much time well [Music] Stuart and Alex are going to use a Hawthorne Branch to make a rustic Harrow to rake over their newly sewn wheat seed [Music] that's good that looks good Moment of Truth ready to make sure the Hawthorne spikes knock down the furrows they've tied a log on the back to add some weight it's the first real test for Blackthorne what a good man oh you know what you're doing don't you come on walk on September is a great month for food there's loads of things available we're going to have some apple fritters today with the apples that we picked out in the Orchard and farm Gardens 400 years ago were full of produce at this time of year after hours of plucking fonz's pigeons are now ready for the pot the recipe we follow we're following 400 years old and comes from an English woman's handwritten personal book that funnily enough passed into the ownership of the Washington family and George Washington's wife owned it it seems to have come down her side of the family rather than his to boil pigeons with puddings when your pigeons are clean dressed boil them in water and salt so if you want to pop those in fonts and um give it a couple of pinches of salt then it says then take for the pudding some grated bread a little flour three or four eggs and a little cream take marrow and all beefs to it I think I'm going to use butter actually instead mace nutmeg and cinnamon to your taste and a little sack there you go fond thank you before I came to work on the farm I thought food from the 17th century was going to be tasteless sort of boiled carrots brains stewed turnip but I've been pleasantly surprised the food has been fantastic the recipe requires that the dumplings be wound up in a piece of cloth tied into sections and then boiled over the fire The Rustic Arrow they're using is based on one depicted in a period illustration looking at it I think we might have done better if we put a second log back towards the the tail end to flatten out the back of the Bush but we're getting a reasonable sweep that might just broaden out how much we do the trick now is going to be steering the horse because we should be working systematically from side to side of the field but that's going to come with a bit of practice puppy I can't get to walk in a straight line Chloe we're using another recipe out of this book entitled to Stew a dish of mushrooms they're a marvelous free food at this time of year mushrooms although quite a lot of people in the 17th century were very suspicious of fungi in general on the other hand some people thought that they were an aphrodisiac so good girl a couple of hours in and they're slowly getting to grips with Halloween it needs doing quickly to prevent any birds scoffing their seed use your elbow put your elbow against her shoulder and keep leading she needs to do that to get the momentum up I don't have any experience of this so it's a bit of a learning curve very steep learning curve for me but it seems to be working okay she's not too bothered by it and Alex is doing really well [Music] thank you indoors supper's nearly ready the apple fruit is a sizzling nicely good evening team's first month on the farm has gone well their first major tests plowing sowing and harrowing are done how am I doing with the horse then okay cheers [Music] she's 11 months to Prime make [Music] oh it comes from these birds [Music] look at that one thing that Farmhouse tables still lacked at the time were Forks they were something new to Britain imported from Italy and used only by the Gentry ordinary folk had to make do with knives spoons and their hands can you play over yes [Music] fantastic no the time has just flown by we have sort of slipped into things quite easily here maybe I'm speaking too soon we do have the wintertime maybe you're speaking for yourself it'll be a year before Stuart Ruth Alex Chloe and Fons find out how well their wheat crop has done in the meantime they'll have plenty to get on with each time in the valley it's October [Applause] time to get the pigs out into the woods okay those pigs under control to bring in the pairs and put them into store [Music] and there's a Cow Shed to be built [Music] it's October in our second month on the farm here there's plenty of jobs to be getting on with and 400 years ago perhaps the first priority would be to get in the rest of the Fruit Harvest and we've got a lot of pears to bring in still the pigs too need to be popped down in amongst the trees we've had a really good harvest of nuts so they'll feed off that and fatten up nicely ready for killing later on in the year but our biggest project is the Cow Shed we need to get a roof on and secure before winter strikes it's a huge task the first stage of building the roof is putting the rafters on Stuart Alexander getting to grips with it in a week's Time Professional thatchers will be arriving that leaves seven days to get the roof structure finished roughly perpendicular to the actual you'll need to um a bit shallower yeah that'll come out here you're right I need to be like that yeah okay looking at where you are you want to drop in to about there that's it it's biting now certainly is hard work this sort of stuff I just got to look at that angle right are we starting to drift towards the edge there you want to keep your pressure because you're below it you'll put your down slightness you want to keep the pressure up keep right so it's coming in more this way so I'm just yeah so I'm trying not to actually push it now I'm trying to just let it just yeah ideal William we've got two for each rafter so 64 holes is it yeah at least and how far are we through this one pond about half an inch half an inch going halfway much of its technique a lot of the things we've been doing you know just in the two months we've been here I found that you go in sort of guns blazing and then uh about halfway through the day when you're beginning to flag an ache you realize that it's a lot more about technique and having them kind of just pacing yourself as much as anything one of the regular morning tasks letting out the chickens Falls to Chloe we've got four chickens in a Cockrell the Cockrell looks after the chickens basically he sort of herds them up heard them around and um generally makes a lot of noise when something disturbs him or one of his hands at this time of year we're getting one or two eggs a day maximum I'd say um normally with four chickens you're expecting at least one each a day in Peak laying time but it's coming to the time of year where they're malting and therefore they're not producing as readily after the Glorious Days of September October brings rain to the valley the water is sorely needed for their newly sown crops but it's not good news for the team working to a deadline on the cowshed roof my call it a day shortly because it is really beginning to Buck it down so I think Stewart should we um I think we'll run for cover and maybe come back and do this at another time foreign at the back of the farm in the well house Ruth is busy making breakfast on a farm 400 years ago breakfast was usually served after putting in a few hours hard craft I've made a bit of porridge for breakfast this morning I had to boil water anyway so I had to light the fire for scalding out all the dairy things I've got some blackberries as well I'm going to drop in just to make it a bit more interesting this morning outside the rain has made work difficult partly because of the inadequacies of their 17th century style group these coats are 100 wool so at the moment as we've come in Fairly promptly it's just sitting on the surface but if that gets completely saturated it'll weigh about an extra 10-15 pounds and it'll take the best part of a couple of weeks in this time of year even putting it in front of the fire to actually dry out so it's a case of coming in whenever the weather turns really nasty and getting on with those indoor jobs that we've saved for this sort of purpose as the team adapt to an outdoor life of manual labor they need an appropriate diet of good rich food to keep them going rich people back in the age of Shakespeare Farm Workers at far more than we imagined with such a high volume of hard physical work to do they actually consumed as many calories as a modern athlete up to four thousand a day that's from Golden syrup or butter one place where they'll be burning off some of those calories is the garden October was the time to gather in some of the last fresh salad greens before having to spend the winter months on dried preserved Foods the rocket here that's done quite well we're still getting nice fresh Leaf off it even this late in the season and I think it might carry on for another week or two if I just pinch out all these flower heads so that it puts its energy into the leaf rather than into seed people think of it often as a really sort of modern Posey fancy imported ingredient but it's not it's a traditional British Garden salad it just went out of fashion in the Victorian period for some reason but other than that right through history rocket curing the roof Timbers on the car shed requires dozens of roof pegs metal was too expensive and might even corrode the rafters so Alex is having a go at carving them from wood now this is the kind of 17th century equivalent of the black Decker work mate okay we've got the vice it's operated by my my feet here so I slide it under like so and as I push my feet away from me it grips the peg you see now I need something called a drawer knife quite simply all I'm going to do is just take the corners off jave down the exact width of the uh the pegs we're going to need okay I think that's just about done so we're going to need something in the region of about 70 pegs maybe 75 pegs with Peg's mate Alex Stewart and Farms can crack on with securing the first of the cowshed's 32 Rafters I've wanted you got with these over modern drill bits they don't Jam give it some weight on the top now Alex yep that's gone I can feel it their speed will have to rapidly improve if they are to be ready for the thatchers but Alex's pegs are doing the job and the rafters are beginning to take shape feel well through oh that's that's holding that's great right get the matching one on the other side okay and then we've got this pair locked [Music] it's a bright new morning in the valley time for Ruth and Chloe along with Stewart's son Alistair to get out of the Orchards October is a key month to harvest Nature's Bounty and there's a good crop of pears to bring in take your time don't hurry yourself all right this is a black Worcester which is a warden or cooking pear not really worth eating raw quite hard but as soon as you cook them it brings all the sugars out they soften and they sweeten up they're a good keeping pair and therefore it's worth making sure that you you don't bruise them you don't let them lie on the ground and get wet you choose a nice dry day like today whoops Queen Elizabeth really love pies made out of wardens and they turn up in New Year's gifts to her quite often in quite large quantities it took four days to secure all the rafters on the Cow Shed but before thatching can begin the whole of the roof still needs to be rotted and that's another couple of days walk these rods are going to be woven in amongst the rafters to produce a mat across the roof that we can then lay the Bracken and the thatch over the top of that it takes a real team effort to cut sort and then secure the rods not snapping it has to be green when you use it otherwise you'd never be able to bend it like this but it'll then season in place if we try to do this with old rods they just snap on us even now you have to be careful not to take them past the point of no return at which they break the seasons dictate what has to be done when and the systems have developed as to what you do in which month to cope with that it's not a case that each person comes in and devises his own system you know how the system works over the generation but even then the weather's the Joker in the pack the weather breaks on us then we might find it's very dangerous working up there and we've got to have this roof on otherwise there's no shelter for the cattle this winter I'm actually using a shepherd's crook uh it's not it's not really designed for this it's doing the job okay it's got just an iron hook on the end it looks really easy but the branches are actually quite springy and very hard they're fighting back yet [Music] let's bridge that Gap there I've done a bit of buildings recording as an archaeologist for me really it's just nice to to put that theory to actually building a period Star Building one of the things generally I'm really picking up on is the world different types of wood what they're used for we're finding that the Hazel is absolutely ideal especially the really green Hazel they just seem to slip in so easily [Music] with the rods being woven into place at last the roof is looking strong enough it's going to be covered by well over a ton of thatch working on a Timber roof could present plenty of potential hazards but it's the period Footwear that's causing Alex and Fonz the most concern yeah these are authentic sort of leather shoes they had a flat sole but as as I'm wearing them that's giving it a bit of grip where's mine are hobnailed um it's actually really useful for um when you're walking across the grass as soon as you get on the cobblestones you tend to start slipping around all over the place and as you have them on the wood it can be quite slippy but you were wearing some the other day and yeah when it's wet on the Hobs on the woods they just slide around like ice skates basically I've broken them in now so they're more comfortable I was getting awful blisters to start with and that and the weird thing is when we got the boots I didn't realize this there were no kind of left and right boots you just had your Shoemaker would make you just a pair of identical boobs so when they arrived I was very much under the impression that I'd been given um to to left feet this one's kind of settled in but this one almost looks like it should be on and they look really stupid when I first started off I don't know which ones I put on which feet and which days so yeah their feet basically I think it changes according to uh my blisters okay anyway let's go on let's get on [Music] another October morning and the next phase of the cowshed roof sees the team out in Triangle field they're cutting down the Bracken they need for the base coat of thatch we need masses of this um this roof itself is about 500 square feet um and to cover that we need approximately enough Bracken to fill the camera shed to put on the roof just just for an undercoat for the thatch we had a bit of rain last night but I don't think it'll do any harm the circulation the air circulation in the shed is going to probably dry it out anyway we're trying to kill two birds with one stone um here and this this is triangle field and we've already taken some Rafters out of here what we're doing here is we're clearing because we'd like to use the field for the pasture or um for arable and we haven't decided yet [Music] to thatch the roof professional Thatcher Keith Paynes has come to help out first task is getting all the edges in order I'm actually setting an eve on the building it's their first stage of rethatching we make up with the wheat small bottles it's just the standing wheat that we use for rethatching the whole building but these actually tied into small armfuls a bind is put around them like so just a handful of straw Twisted round as a straw bombed can get incredibly tight with that so you can actually throw them around and then we're actually lashing these to the timber work we're using hemp twine and this will be individually tied around all the all the sticks and rods that are poked through to create a firm eave with a bit of density that creates the depth of that you won't get wind damage to it and it'll be very difficult for birds to pull out with so much Bracken together it's time to get black film The Valleys resident farmhores pulling her weight blackstone's doing really well today she's a lot quieter than she was last time we worked her um I think I've cracked this one so I take her out and make her do a little bit of work before we start so she's just taking the Fizz off her we've had a couple of problems with the collar but I think they're fairly much ironed out now one of them being that the leather strap is too big for the Buckle it seems to be doing the job quite well she's managing to pull quite heavy weights with it having spent hours cutting the Bracken in Triangle field all they have to do now is persuade Blackthorne to drag it up to the Cow Shed good girl come on sweetie no no no no come on you can do this come on walk on come on no no don't be silly walk on good girl good girl good girl come on then [Music] good man what a good girl steady steady what I'm doing here is um trying to get an even density of depth on the thatch because what I don't want it to do actually is gully out what we mean by gulling out if you have a thinner part of thatch and then a denser part you'll find that the thinner part will actually wear quicker this overhang is quite important to actually shed the water away from the stone work of the building the more even you get this the better water flow you're going to get away on on Blackthorne finally makes it up the hill but the big question now is how many more trips would you need to make of that case how many more loads then we need like that another four to finish this seven eight about another ten do you really know how to cheer somebody up don't you this horse now hates you she doesn't okay no she's done so well and she's a different horse from what she was when we started she's so much fitter um she's lost she's lost a bit of weight she's getting fit she's got shoes on she's she's turning into a proper working horse now she's earning her keep so I'm I'm really pleased with her a fresh Dawn in the valley and with the pressure of completing the cowshed now passed on to the thatchers our team can get on with their next seasonal priority getting the pigs out into the woods this time of year all the acorns are falling the beach Mast hawthorn berries are coming down and it's time to make the most of that by taking the pigs out into the Woodland so they can fatten up because in a few weeks time we're going to slaughter them come on pigs are great on acorns the only problem is if they get too many of them it can actually cause them to explode internally so this is the swine herd's job making sure they get just the right mix okay [Music] we've lost a pig [Music] [Applause] [Music] helping Keith with the cowshed roof is John Let's an archaeologist who's been studying ancient thatching for decades this fracking is going to be the permanent base coat that goes on to the thatched roof thatch is really made of these two layers a permanent base coat that's never replaced so it's always sheltered from the elements and then a weathering coat of another material over the top and Bracken is a very unusual material to use it's certainly not been used for a Century Century and a half at least you can look at it archaeologically you can you can read about it but actually doing it is something slightly different it's full of thorns full of spores I'll be coughing all night and that's certainly not recorded okay cute Keith you want me up there yeah I've just secured this John then you can come on up outside edge cover that side after the first minor breakout the pig Drive appears to be going smoothly pigs are not the easiest of animals to drive because they're a woodland creature and the result is that when you frighten a pig it's Instinct it's a Run for Cover keep those pigs under control you're going to have just the right amount of discipline with a pig too much and it gets frightened and that's it you'll never see it again and too little and it won't move because it's got something interesting it wants to get it snout into burn pigs gently gently through that Gateway otherwise they'll swoop sideways oh he's found some crab apples off that tree in the Hedgerow the pig's designed to hunt for food with its nose it's got very poor eyesight very good sense of smell just now I heard them crunching we've got a Hazel tree there so almost certainly that was hazelnuts the next Tree on the other side of them it's a small Oak there'll be acorns under that and they'll be scoping those as well the undergrowth is full of tasty tidbits for pigs but there's something else that they like the taste of freedom the pigs are just hunting around for anything that looks tasty once they think the little patch they're working on is finished they're off flapping skirts Works remarkably well they don't really like skirts flapping in their faces and the occasional pat on the back with your hand or lightly with a stick sometimes moves them but only if they really want to [Music] foreign [Music] it's uncertain how well the Bracken is going to work as the thatch undercoat it's an experiment even for our two expert thatchers now this is the first time I've actually worked on a Bracken base coat it's it's certainly different with one or two concerns about this being a little bit green and the shrinkage I think the chances are it would have been dried out before it was put on but that's part of the experiment here I mean we you know how long is it going to take for this green bracket to actually dry how much it is going to shrink because if we then put a surface coat of weathering straight over it and the base coat that it's fixed into shrinks it'll let go of these fixings that are holding that surface on the surface should slip off we don't want to get into that situation this one's called Arthur he's the king of the pack and uh and this is his missus clever Pig here he's a bit of a troublemaker the reason why he's only got half a Tails because he tends to wind all the other pigs up one of them's obviously snapped spun around and bit it off they're a wonderful Beast I mean not only are they really useful for for clearing scrub land um they taste fantastic and they pretty much look after themselves very much the good natural life for a pig and they're going to make excellent bacon at the end if they get more of those crab apples you won't even need applesauce on them well I'm looking forward to a nice pork dish sad to see him go though we should maybe think about getting these fillers up into the uh the styes no it's one of them is not problems while John compacts the Bracken Keith has to tie every bundle onto the roof using a Thatcher's two foot long needle and this is the fun bit I've got to stuff my arm through the base layer I've got the rafter now with my left hand and I just find my hand with the end of the needle I've removed the flax now pull the needle back out and then just locate back through this side of the rafter back up again into the needle eye back through and there should be the end of the string there it is and then I will actually do a tie with a horizontal piece of Hazel I force that into the base coat I've already created here goes in a fair way and then I'll actually just do a single knot this end and as I tug this it will pull that tight you can see where that's pulling that in now to even it up you need to get a bit of weight on here and you just literally give it a Bash and you see how it's compacting the Bracken really tightly creating a nice firm base with everyone putting in so much effort Outdoors Stewart is planning a good Hearty dinner I have here a shoulder of lamb from one of the old Hues on the site she's past wool production so she's been fattened up in the autumn and now we've killed her she's going to be spit roasted and at the period the plowman that's the farmer and his senior laborers on the farms would have expected roast meat twice a week usually Thursdays and Sundays guys settling down onto the spikes and these spikes will stop the meat sliding around when you're spit roasting it otherwise you'd finish up with the joint heavy side down the whole time burnt on one side Raw on the other I'll just put a bit of salt on that in the 1600s the British already had a reputation for serving up the best roast dinners a period Source States they are more polite in eating than the French devouring less bread but more meat which they roast in perfection so much fruit ripening on the farm in Autumn it can't all be consumed at once without Refrigeration the best way of preserving it was to store it up in the Loft yeah no problem 400 years ago a place that you'd store your fruit through the winter it's cool up here we're nowhere near any of the fires or chimneys it's dry and there's a really good circulation of air with luck we should still be to have some fresh fruit to eat right through until sort of March time and of course you've got to come up at regular intervals and pick over so if you get any bad ones in amongst it to get rid of them before they can spread that bad to all those that are around them [Music] 400 years ago all the Farms even the laborers Cottages would have had large productive vegetable gardens and one of the items that we'd have in season is beetroot which I'm going to boil up to add salad up in the Apple Loft it's not simply a case of storing and checking your fruit it needs a carefully worked system we keep all the different variety varieties and they all got different keep times so we've got the Cornish aromatics that Chloe's picking through at the moment you say there's quite a lot rotten ones yeah there's quite a few down here those are my favorite for example the leather coats over there for eating just straight I think they're gorgeous they're really really rustity and and my favorite for cooking are the cost starred Apple here which makes lovely pies really nice but we've got lots of different ways we've got Pippins London Pippins we've got the um old pear Mains here you're right love it's Helen Minis the joints should be ready now so it's now a lot hotter than when we put it on slide off the grip on this end actually spent eight years running around this Hillside and she's quite a tough old Beast we're going to be chewing a lot tonight [Music] last few I'll come and give you a hand Chloe [Music] that looks delicious [Music] throwing bits of wood away you know I know it's been a good month in the valley the pear Harvest and pig Drive have gone well but our team have fallen behind with the Cow Shed which it kind of braces the roof needs to be finished before the cows can be brought in when the cold really begins to bite and their strings just sort of has really you start to get colder last few months next time in the valley it's November the team need to get a move on finishing that Cow Shed time to slaughter a pig [Music] and then prepare it for supper [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] it's November now Winter's almost upon us it's our third month working on the farm and we've got most of the fruit in leaves have gone from the orchard but we've still got a couple of big jobs that we've got to get out of the way urgently we've got to get the pig slaughtered so we've got it salted smoked and away and even more urgent than that in some ways we've got to get the Cow Shed finished so I need these rods for Watling the front wall up and we've also got to get that thatch on otherwise it's going to leak like a sieve [Music] the leaves may have fallen but the Autumn sun is still Shining perfect conditions for getting the cowshed finished today's main challenge Falls to Alex and Fonz making a 17th century style wattle and dorbed wall what we're doing is we're creating a lattice work of rods into which we're then going to pack the um the dorb and I'm going to do it from both sides as well so what happens is you'll have the the the main rods coming down here which we're gonna obviously fasten in with these holes that fonzy's making with the auger we've excavated quite a few examples of um Watling dorb walls that have either been burnt or collapsed but obviously never built anything like it so so I'm just gonna strip this down if I just take it off about here but that's quite a thin one and what I'll probably use these thin ones for just putting it at the end here I'm surprised at how easy organ is I mean you have to apply a little bit of pressure to initially get the screw screw it on the end to bite but once it's taken it just pulls itself down should we try and stick one of these in yeah top first just going to find out what the best technique is before we start I'm trying to bend it rather yeah what are you going to drag it along yeah yeah that's excellent yeah that's fairly sturdy I think it's pretty good in it yeah okay what should we get for another one don't be Hasty no you're too hasty while Alex and Fonz are busy outside Ruth and Chloe are preparing for the big day ahead it's a moment they've been building up to all autumn slaughtering one of their specially bred period pigs right Chloe let's move this Barrel oh he's pretty dirty I think we give him a swell out first oh yeah November was the usual seasonal time for killing pigs Farmers avoided having to feed them over Winter the valley porkers have fattened up nicely so local butcher Neil James has come along to act as slaughterman I've got a nice big bowl of blood yes yeah good I think he's uh finished bleeding now and there's a local pig man that used to go to the the small rodents in people's property to to kill their stock obviously you would know what to do not to put the animal in too much stress or whatever so it's done you know humanely as such yes and doing them where they're living anyway they're not they're much much calmer and just nowhere near as frightened are they are they in their own sort of habitat before you know so they don't get frightened and carted around in in vehicles or anything like that exactly fresh blood from a newly killed animal is really useful I'm not going to throw it away I'm going to make blood or black puddings out of it it's the main ingredient I've already got some oats that I've worn cooked through and they're ready to put the blood onto it they'll Steep and then later on when I've cleaned these intestines out we'll use those as the Skins to put the blood sausage in so black puddings take this I'll give the chaps a shout for you hang on back in Stuart times it wasn't simply a case of sending your pig to the abattoir and getting back pork chops wrapped in cling film Pig killing and processing was a major job with everyone on the farm having to lend a hand indoors the pressure is on to get the Brewing Vats ready for the pig's organs I'm going to use a little bit of salt in it as well just to be on the safe side to make sure that we're we're not going to put anything into any bacteria or anything into the the meats but you do need to scrub it well to make sure you've got every little bit in all the cracks in the wood all right we could do to swirl this one out now ready to it's all Heavy aren't they an old saying goes that the only part of a pig not eaten or used was its squeak that's his intestine um it's a case in really you can throw the sausage into him you can fill the back pudding into him and that's cool now do you like sausage uh yeah I love sausage yeah he's actually considering having a bacon sandwich for lunch today but um you'll wait five minutes that's a black pudding for you inside you is when it's called a pig's call I've come across in old recipes it looks like a hair net exactly we still were seeing a trade you pull it out properly um it looks like a bit like um South America stuff like that but uh maybe that wasn't I'm afraid but that's my big fingers it's very popular it's very though on I actually put this on myself just to make it you know nice and moist so I put it on the side and we can use that later maybe thank you I'm just gonna take a little sweet bread out it lies between the legs you can see a ball Pig so he has um two sweet breads hopefully and um let's root bread um I suppose I have his buttocks really there we are but yeah that's where all the action happens I said delicacy people like it um so let me just open them up through my ouch it's uh it's just it's a nice white meat really and all I gotta do is just push it up like that and it should pop out of his skin hopefully very nice fried with uh salt and pepper a bit of flour with the first stage of Butchery over it's time for Alex and Fonz to start threading rods they're beginning to realize just how many are needed hundreds of them all cut on site to construct their wattle and door wall it's something that is used fairly universally especially on on buildings of this this stature really uh a mere Cow Shed we are intending to leave some form of ventilation at the top because one of the big problems was pneumonia with cows so we need to get the moisture out of the Cow Shed otherwise it will get into the lungs and we're very sick cows I can see this being one of those satisfying jobs forms you know when you get the whole thing done by the end of the day it's going tough isn't it yeah on the pig front it's not just a case of Butchery they need to get the bristles off and the period breed a wild boar Tamworth cross is much hairier than modern pigs they have no Modern Machinery instead they're going to try and do it the old-fashioned way with a pig bonfire in order to preserve the meat salt it to get all this hair off leaving the skin intact probably have to scold round the ears and things to get the last bit I think I'll move back a bit in fire excellent it's their first I've never seen this before I must admit it's uh something different we do it uh by hot water the traditional way it's all done by machine I suppose we'd be boil it and scold thereof um I've seen it done with um gas blow torches before my father to do that uh pretty much cleared that back Ridge which is good stiff can we push him on that that's it a second or two yeah I think apart from that bit around the chair I think we turn him over again yeah go on your heavy man it seems to be working quite well at the moment um the hair is coming off the only thing is to try and get that balance between getting the hair off and starting to cook him we don't want to cook him we just want to singe the hair off at this stage but I think it's working with so much left to do to get the Cow Shed finished Alex and fawns crack on with Watling the front wall they're making good progress you're slightly higher at this end um no maybe not actually maybe not I've been trying to alternate well you start fat in one end and yeah yeah at the end of a long day there's still much to be done with a dead pig weighing in at over 100 kilos shifting it takes real effort [Music] everybody over the hair is off just got to get on the table now it's not helping is he okay ready two three I'm running away all right all right all right oh shh that's it yes [Music] yes [Music] another November morning in the valley and the working day begins at dawn there's no such thing as nine to five on a farm so we finished the Watling late last night um we've completed all that that part of the wall but we need to weatherproof it and to do so what we're going to use is a dorb which we're making out of um done here manure clay which we brought up from triangle field and some chaff as well some some wheat so the ratios are one of dung yep three to four of clay that's the idea um the Spade is it's a lot heavier than your average gun Spade of today however I mean the weights it's all in the head so that means you've got a lot of Force to preserve the pork the skin needs to be cleaned for salting so all of the soot from the fire has to be scrubbed off [Music] it's going in quite well all I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to press it in just to try and get it in between the ones and the rods so there's no gaps no air spaces in between your mind kind of switches off to the fact that you're handling well cow dung um because also it's become a substance its own right it's actually starting to hurt the hands just because this is so cold it's almost it's almost freezing and um the straw is is rough and these these rods are rough and uh it's the clay is quite gritty so you're just rubbing your hand across a cold sandpapery surface while a professional slaughterman took care of the kill 400 years ago was the farmer's wife who would have done most of the actual butchering one head over to you I think that's okay well you can see how much meat there is on a on a head lots and lots at the back um also at the cheeks that's often thought to be the nicest piece that that little bit there I might souse them actually in a pickle that's particularly nice once properly salted and smoked a pig like this might well have lasted a family of six for about three months everything from the brain to the Trotters would have been processed and eaten the special recipe dorbed mix has worked well on the Water Wall applied from both sides it is beginning to form into a solid protective layer thankfully we've almost finished daubing so it means I'm going to be able to go and wash my hands and get them warm again I've tried applying it with tools but you just can't you can't feel the wattle underneath you can't compress it into the um into the cracks it's taken us a lot less time than we actually thought hasn't it it's actually been remarkably quick and it's remarkably sturdy as well I mean it's this year when this dries this is not going anywhere it's going to be solid absolutely solid I mean it's certainly windproof and rain proof which was the objective it's not just the pig and Cow Shed that need finishing Stuart and Chloe have got to get in the very last of the Fruit Harvest the meddlers a crop never seen today on Supermarket shelves because they have to appear rotten before they're ready to eat so you pick him at that stage absolutely hard like a golf ball if you were to try and bite into that now it tastes absolutely foul worse than eating crab apples I've got one here it's already ripened up Let it see how squidgy that is look at that squeeze it till it put a small goo will come out from the inside oh perfect that's in Prime condition oh it's got that same sort of broken down text that you get with a sort of Thoroughly cooked Apple slightly slightly grittier that um very smooth that one wasn't ripe they're much better rotten that's why Shakespeare refers to things being as rotten as a meddler you know it's properly matured and um so right they should come off really fast this slot anyways you miss out on many of the finest Foods nowadays everything from sort of fine cheeses through because good food quite often is naturally rotted to get to perfection those meddlers that are already rotten need to be sorted for eating the rest have to be stored indoors for several weeks left in a dark corner to Fester into maturity Alex and fonz's wattle and dorm wall is now down to the very Finishing Touches it has taken three days of work right I've finished this finish is finished yeah yeah all the cracks and pretty much happened with everything in there this is near Perfection as we're gonna get that's excellent a genuine 17th century War all made from materials on the farm so we've got the Hazel the cow and all the clay and of course the Jackie at the store it's done it is you happy I'm happy yeah I'm gonna be happy when I get the off my hands yeah come on let's go and wash my hands [Music] the valley sees another day and preparations indoors are underway for the Epic pork banquet ahead my salt scrubbing at the moment a little bit of salt on the table scrub it fairly dry and then rinse it off and salute it all away and it it sterilizes the surface even if um people don't know about germs right from the Stone Age everybody's known that if you're not clean and sensible about how that you cook food people get ill it was my grandmother who taught me to Salt tables when she was a girl she was really really crossed because the first four of her sort of home economics cooking lessons at school four of them were on how to scrub a table before they allowed her anywhere near food that looks better doesn't it make sure you always go with the grain won't you right the cow sheds front wall finished All That Remains is the roof professional Thatcher Keith Paynes has returned to the farm to oversee its completion the Bracken undercoat that went on last month has held up well and is providing a good base for the weathering coat of straw now going on top foreign this is very dirty and messy because basic is unprocessed it is really the stubble left at the end of harvest because the most important thing was that was the grain the top end of the material it's full of rubbish it's full of all flare leaf and flag there's even a few ears in it and because it's not been thrashed there's all grain and everything in there to clean the surface it's this very crude comb which is made up of a piece of Hazel split in the middle some forged nails and then tied together and it literally just pulls the leaf and the flag and any rubbish out of the coat surface and not only that it's also combing the material all in the same direction so you actually get a better water flow off of the satch [Music] with the surfaces thoroughly scrubbed cooking can begin in earnest and a number of pork dishes are on the menu having killed a pig cut away got the liver here part of which I'm going to use to make a Hog's liver pudding the Trotters as well I want to do today because when we were singing the pig I forgot to put paste around his feet and they did catch a little bit the scraps of the meat I shall make up into sausages and put them inside the intestines I've cleaned some of them out not all yet but um there we are lovely lovely lovely intestines all washed out a team of professional thatchers would normally take two weeks to finish a Cow Shed like the one here in the valley so far it's taken our team of Specialists six weeks under Keith's tuition 400 years ago some Farmer's wives might well have had access to cookery books handwritten texts survive as well as more widely published works the recipe we're following um today for this Hogs liver pudding is in this lovely little book here it's um well it was written anonymously published in 1589 in London there we are to make white puddings of the hog's liver you must parboil the liver and beat it in a mortar and then strain it with cream and put their two five yolks of eggs in the white of two eggs and great half a half penny loaf of light bread and put it there too with small raisins and dates cloves mace sugar saffron and the suet of beef wow I suffering a bit expensive except well all that last little lot is pretty expensive for a farmhouse you know you might have a little bit once or twice a year but not for an everyday thing so I'm not going to use those um expensive important ingredients I'm going to replace them with just herbs out of the garden then take your guts clean washed and stuff them with the forced stuff then boil them that done serve them forth so that's what we should be doing right we're now ready to fix the thatch onto the roof by using our Hazel spas or pegs and basically these are then Twisted they have to be twisted and Not Bent unless The Knack to it you basically twist it into a hairpin incredibly difficult thing to start to learn but once you've got the Knack of it you'll be twisting tree trunks you'll find your knees you want Alex easy one yeah you start off with the smaller sticks because it's just technique really but if you've got a fat one it doesn't have a piano too that's right another another little technique of doing it some people is double thumbs on the back of the bark yeah and then pushing hands away from each other yeah I've tried quite a few of these and I keep breaking them and I'm worried I'm just going to end up breaking them all but how many have I only have I got a duty you've been looking about three thousand by the time to finish this route yeah about three thousand once the liver is chopped and herbs added they need to be wrapped in a cloth to be parboiled the liver is then left to bubble in The Cauldron while the herbs Infuse don't bend no no twisting twisting this is really hard work this is I can't I mean it's just not budging three thousand and relax red wall tears Keith rub it in with the liver cooking over the fire scraps of the pork need to be pounded into sausage meat that says in the recipe to Bray it in a mortar which just means beat The Living Daylights out of it until you've got this sort of consistency I'm gonna take the skins now how does this work well basically you open it up and you stuff it in that's it just keep going and be really quite forceful with it because I mean it's you know it is intestine it's used to having things stuffed down if you see what I mean stubbleweed is compacting down well onto the roof combined with the Bracken undercoat there will be some 18 inches of thatch protecting the Cow Shed once the liver's par boiled it's just a case of finely chopping it and then adding the remaining ingredients some eggs and a good dollop of cream when it was parboiling all those little herbs in amongst the liver of course the flavor has gone right into the liver so it should have a really good flavor I think that's about ready more sausage skin stuffing just a minute it's it feels sort of it's in hard pieces and it's kind of squidgy and slimy and it's pretty disgusting which is actually it's really starting to look like uh one long piece of paper now picked intestines lovely do you think anybody's actually gonna eat this all right finish with it so we're just putting the finishing touches on now this is literally the last one that's got to go on these are the external fixing for the stubble facts there's several of them running across now about every eight inches so we've got two Spas to put in now these have got to go in uphill so the water doesn't course down them so can we have the last Spar Alex there we go marvelous perfectly Twisted I hope I never have to twist another Spa as long as I live here we go last one going in nicely uphill find the Holdings quite a nice bit of bite when you drive them in in with your hands nicely firm excellent and we're done it's the Moment of Truth by the moment of truth will be when it rains but I just want to see what it looks like crowning sense of achievement I think we just need to stand back a bit make sure the rods are where we want them and uh yeah good one it really is not going to need any major work I hope for probably six seven years it's certainly many centuries since people actually process cereal crops with a stubble left in the field so they cut for thatching but to actually work with it it's been quite amazing I've surprised myself with you how much of my modern skill really is still associated with three four five hundred years ago this is this is the first time I've um I've done any thatching at all and um obviously starting off with the Bracken the Bracken coat I did them half of the bomb with the gads and tying it down and making sure it was all compact enough and the roof has turned out ten times better than I thought it would I thought it'd look a bit Shaggy a bit untidy but it's really firm and compact I think we've got as close to a Tudor style Cow Shed as we possibly could I mean I know it's our interpretation of it but this is well I think this is damn close I've feel like I've really achieved something and and really really enjoyed it has to be said I hope all jobs on the farm are going to be like that because I certainly now you know if I get a building I'm going to be thatching it I'll rip the tollery and throw some Thatcher because it's just it's such a great thing to do though it's actually you know a great job to have as well so it's kind of a bear good idea excellent we can go out tomorrow sizzling over a hot fire dinner and the Hogs liver puddings are almost ready it's been a long and complex task killing and butchering Arthur the pig but it's been one that has brought the whole team together right who's having Trotters oh my certainly though sad to see Arthur go they can take pleasure in knowing the food on their plates is all homegrown even if Alex has to wait a few months for his bacon sandwiches Bradley [Music] all right let's give it a go okay that's not your thing no what what's that the liver green much better the valley team and our quarter of the way through their year on the farm so far most of their projects have worked well how will they fare when the mid-winter cold really starts to bite foreign [Applause] it's December which means Christmas 17th century Style bringing in a proper old-fashioned yule log lots of hearty drinking and it's all hands to the deck cooking up a festive feast [Music] foreign it's December and it's our fourth month working on the farm the big item this month of course is Christmas and at a period 400 years ago they'd have feasted for 12 days solid so that means a lot of preparation work it doesn't mean we can neglect the normal farm work as well though so we've got to keep a close eye on the livestock into these weather conditions and particularly we've got to bring the horses in now at the moment The Stables is full with our spare firewood for the winter and that means erecting a hovel to act as a wood store so time we got started with it [Music] the challenge of building the wood store hovel Falls to Alex and Fonz [Music] e unfortunately there's no kind of sort of flat packed hovel you can't go out and buy one so it's really very much a case of us experimenting with um with with Tim different Timbers in different places and and hopefully um not making a mistake and having to go out and get another Timber I think that is too high because we've got the pad Stone haven't we yeah I mean the reason why we are sitting these on the pad Stones it's purely because it's so wet around here these Timbers will rot if we don't do this I like other buildings of the period hovels a semi-permanent structures so and they don't tend to survive any archaeological records we don't know exactly how they were built we do have examples in the States they're still semi-permanent structures that are built each year but um probably came across around this time with the pilgrims we're gonna have to get out of sort of working High aren't we some sort yeah well six foot I'm resigned six I'm six foot with heels on so um so if we take a sort of rough yeah if we just measure roughly on the string then we'll bring it down indoors by the fire Chloe and Ruth are making some extra woolies gloves and a pair of hoes sewing I can hardly see a thing [Music] well it's never that brilliant in December anyway so it's the sort of six or one and a half a dozen of the other do we come inside where there's a bit of warmth so you can keep moving physically but the lights pour or do you sit outside where the lights better and freeze your fingers into little sausages we've had a few days of real biting days a couple of frosts and things like that and the one main problem I find up here is the um is the wind actually because you're standing on top of that hill and that wind it cuts right through you even wearing your woolly layers and your Linens underneath and it's getting wet feet as well for the home so I find you know having a spare a couple of pairs so that you can put them on once you've got wet face it just makes all the difference doesn't it we don't have any boots we've only got shoes on so oh yeah I've always got it easy on that don't they yeah there's no real records of women having boots but it's a bit difficult to know for certain whether women in the country did or didn't I would have felt that a farmer's wife on a place like this that was so muddy would you know have a pair of boots somewhere even if she just borrowed her husbands when it was really bad um I'm not far off I've got the footing let's see and I just got to drop the back of the leg really cut from a thick Woolen cloth Ruth's holes are beginning to shape up it's a time-consuming task and so is getting the skeleton of the hovel to hold together what we've done is we've um we've prefab some frames as references in the materials um historical materials that say that you take your hovel Timbers down after the end of the season and you might store them in the stable so what we've done is we've built a frame two pegs in diagonally opposed so they're taking the force both up and down so that shouldn't go anywhere and we've done that in eight places when we lift this up the movement in this plane is going to be negligible but the movement in this plane is going to be quite intense so that's that's where we're going to have problems stabilizing it [Music] all the hovel Timbers have been carefully chosen so that they lock together you want excellent okay how's it standing standing free isn't it it's brilliant we should get some braces that was a lot easier than I expected Christmas may be just around the corner but there are plenty of routine tasks that need attending to First prop that we've harvested still on the vine releasing the peas onto the cloth that I've put underneath this is one of the main field crops of the year not as important as the grain crops and it's the last one that we Harvest but it serves a number of purposes we can grow this on land that's had grain crops for a number of years it'll put some nitrogen back into the soil re-fertilize the soil and even in the 17th century they understood that it was good for the soil even if they didn't know the chemistry of it I think the thing I miss most now is the waterproof clothing you start a job outside in December you can't finish it as soon as it starts raining it's it's very annoying and you were missing your bra to begin with weren't you because you just weren't comfy so that was because I'd lost so much weight so um Ruth now altered it four minutes it's a marvelous marvelous change she's got lots of lovely uplift with the dried peas thrashed it's time to sieve them nothing goes to waste the stalks and pods Left Behind will make a tasty snack for the animals it's easy for the smig ones don't take a bit more persuading so but most the peas have come through with now very little rubbish contaminating them these peas we can use for peas pudding which can be eaten hot or cold and they'll be very useful for thickening up pottages stews things of that nature as well so a very valuable source of nutrition on the farm they're really interesting the clothes that survive and I find it really rather exciting when if you're allowed to get close to a piece of clothing that was on somebody 400 years ago I mean just how much more personal can you get than to than to pick up a garment that somebody else wore and you can see like you know you can see like the sweat marks on the collar anything you know that's real contact with the past isn't it you know that's not dry book learning that's up close and personal you can see exactly just by just by the way that we're wearing them exactly how it would have worked they do actually worked they're not costumes they're clothes yeah and you know it's not about looking pretty or looking silly or anything it's about being warm being covered being protected from brambles being you know kept out of the rain it's about living outdoors with no heating apart from the occasional fire and doing this sort of physical work isn't it absolutely look at that with the front Central strut added the hovel appears to be Rockstar the showpiece timber has worked really well and the idea is with the braces here is just to stop that movement so we'll put some on at the back and I you know I'm fairly sure this is not well you can I mean look at that question the pads don't maybe they're wiggling a bit [Music] it's a new and very special day in the valley 400 years ago the 12 Days of Christmas marked a major event in people's lives has everyone prepared for feasting is Christmas Eve and we're really busy 400 years ago that have been just as busy but an awful lot of food to prepare this is sort of the main feasting season of the year and we're using up many of the fresh things that won't keep much longer enjoying it in one sort of big huge blowout um so I'm making mince pies at the moment and as the word says mince pies used to have meat in them the recipes call for either lamb or veal or beef and as we're having roast beef for Christmas dinner which Chloe is boning out at the moment I'm using all the trimmings and then I've got all the sweet ingredients ready these are exotic imported ingredients really quite expensive in this 400 years ago so they really only reserved for special Times Like Christmas so I've got raisins of the sun here these ones are currants and dried figs which I'm going to mince up and add in with the minced meat oh well done finally oh that looks really good you've got most of that off nice and clean do you want to have a hack at that yeah I'll just pop it on there and I'll take all the extra bits of meat Outdoors the boys are rushing to finish the hovel most of the firewood has been moved out of the Stables but the roof still needs some work we've Bracken thatched and the reason we've done that is because obviously we've taken all of our seasoned wood out of the stable and we need to make sure that we keep the majority of the rain off here and I think that's working fairly well but we've been generating quite a lot of new Greenwood recently so I've really just got to crack on and make sure I finish this end of the hovel the wood we're putting on here has got no other use it's so grotty than firewood the Birch has all been stacked elsewhere because we're going to only use that in the water coppers where it doesn't get smoke in our eyes in the main room that would cause absolute sort of tears all over the place because it's very accurate here there's Oak which gives you a really lovely uh warm flame there's a certain amount of Ash coming up now that's beautiful because you can actually burn that green you don't have to wait for it to season but that would then go on the ready-to-use pile but keep off the elm they say at the period it grows like graveyard mold so you won't get much heat out of that oh you're stuck thank you that should be great yeah back in Stuart times roast turkey wasn't the prime ingredient of Christmas dinner Goose was a common favorite and in a well-off farmhouse beef was often the centerpiece didn't she spices like cinnamon and pepper and Nutmeg and so forth all had to come from the Far East in the most amazing trading voyages and as a result they cost an absolute Fortune got some mace here which is the covering that you get around nutmeg I'm gonna pop a little bit of that in foreign how you getting on over there we're done we're just tying these off that's fantastic um where'd you actually want this well if you pop it in the dairy and put a cloth over it ready and then we'll be ready for tomorrow yeah so I just got to do the rice for the rice pudding it's got to go on to boil we've got the peas to boil I'm ready for the peas pudding and then we're just about done on this and we can get on with the big job of decorating the house ready for Christmas one of my favorite things to do on Christmas Eve for the hovel roof the boys have been busy over the past month harvesting Bracken with the skills he picked up thatching The Cow Shed Alex is using Bracken as the top coat of thatch over bundles of Twigs called important obviously to get a steeper pitch as possible because we want the water to run down the Bracken it's good fun this is some it's working big it's like big sculpture you know you've really got to just hit it hard obviously paying special attention not to to fall off the roof as I did the other day problem is is because we've had a few frosts it has in fact it's got a lot more brittle and so it's really scratching the hands and the major concern is that it's thinning out as well so I'm getting my excuses in early totally honest I'd give my right arm to pop down the DIY store and get a roll of felt lovely fonts oh this is looking much better now a lot happier with this [Music] people living on a 17th century Farm religion was the truly dominant factor of Christmas much of the seasonal paraphernalia we take for granted today came in much later [Applause] [Music] one man who can help the team ReDiscover a Shakespearean Style Christmas is Ronald Hutton a leading expert on Tudor and Steward Society 400 years ago people went to church on Sundays and at the great feast days like Christmas for the simple reason they got fined if they didn't now this wasn't particularly to keep them Pious it was to make sure that they weren't Roman Catholics or forms a radical Protestant who represented actual enemies the Church of England it's a political business but that at least meant everybody turned up behind the Christian Feast of Christ's birthday lies a massive range of prehistoric Pagan festivals celebrating the rebirth of the year and the Sun the winter solstice the Anglo-Saxons called it the mother night mode the Scandinavians that's the Vikings to us called it Yule which is of course a term we imported it's the same primitive Instinct of getting worried as the daylight and the warmth goes and the trees shed their leaves around you and the same emerged to celebrate once you realize the Turning Point's been reached no matter how many of you are going to die before the spring comes it's on its way done there's a bit of a shallower pitch up there isn't it yeah so what do you think I think it's very good I think because you're done I think a poorly built house [Music] back in the age of Shakespeare there was no such thing as a Christmas tree mistletoe or fairy lights but decorating the house was still a big affair Christmas Eve in a farmhouse about 400 years ago was one of the most exciting times of the year it's the beginning of the biggest holiday of the year 12 days of eating drinking and making marriage and the last four weeks which as a season of Advent would be the time the last hard work of the entire year upon the farm and also of drawing your belt a bit tighter cutting down your food in order to save up the real grub for the holiday so people be living on porridge living on bread and cheese hard work lack of excitement of malnutrition so on Christmas Eve the good times finally coming let's face it midwinter left to its own natural devices is a pretty depressing time of year it's when there's least Greenery fewest flowers and Blossoms what do you do you turn your home into a garden you bring in the symbols of life and you put them up Holly and Ivy are the obvious favorites they're most common but also they've got rosemary wonderfully scented wow and bay leaves also with their own more subtle scent we know about these because they're celebrating the Poetry of the time Robert Herrick the greatest lyrical poet of the early 17th century saying bring up the Rosemary and The Bays so this is a kitchen that's going in for Christmas big time on Christmas Eve let that one drop because it just pushes it yep and then if we suspend it because we've got the nail there haven't we all the firewood has been stored in the hovel but there is one very special item that needs to be moved nowadays known primarily as a chocolate dessert 400 years ago it was brought into The Farmhouse as a central part of the Christmas festivities wow the Yule Log is the exact 17th century equivalent the modern Christmas tree it's equivalent because like the Christmas tree it's just come in from Germany the Christmas tree arrived the 19th century the Yule lock probably in the 16th just as everybody naturally gathers around the tree these days everyone gathers around this gigantic Log In The Burning Heart in the early modern period and getting it here is a considerable physical feat in its own right requiring all the Lusty men of the households and having made the struggle to get it here traditionally they're welcomed with hot spiced ale as a poem which goes bring with a cry Jolly Jolly Lads the Christmas logs the firing while my good wife she bitsy all be free and drink to your heart's Desiring yes please here we go you deserve this after that that's enough that's a stop okay Gentlemen let's give this some hope Nails indeed that's delicious fantastic [Music] Christmas day in the valley but there's no time for a lie in before preparations can begin for the big Feast The Animals still need to be tended to and the fire lit early so it's hot enough to spit roast the beef so much easier with a piece that's boned out beautifully beautifully burned out is that on yeah I think that's it starts wrinkle a bit yeah there we go for that Spike sorry in order to make sure that it Cooks nicely and stays moist we shall keep basting and dredging right through the roasting process alternately so you put on a baste give it 10 minutes or so and then dredge it with bread crumbs um and it'll build up a crust around it which seals all the juices in makes it really tasty I have to say oven roasted meat and got a thing on spit roast meat as long as you do it properly with the beef slowly cooking Chloe and Fonz can check up on the livestock some of the cows in the valley are pregnant and the team are keeping a close eye on them one is looking especially close to term the leader of the herd Duchess she's looking huge but we're not too worried about her because she's had plenty of calves before and she shouldn't have a problem with this one she should hopefully just drop it in the middle of the night and we'll come down one morning and find it sitting there on the floor next to her but we are going to supplement her diet with basically a high protein feed that we're going to make up from things like turnip heads rolled barley and then we'll start the Battle of pinching the milk yeah yeah The Duchess is a big cow I mean she's had so many carbs over the years that she's got sprung ribs so uh it makes her appear pregnant all the time actually with the beef roasting well the team can get on with the other dishes Stewart is making a period style chicken pie how's that water doing is it 400 years ago chicken wasn't a very common meat so it would have been a special treat we know that on this Farm part of their rent was to pay a fat hen at the Feast of the circumcision which is the first of January so they definitely had chicken around at the time and it's Christmas so hey if they had a spare one they probably went for it and had one themselves now I need to mix the first layer of the pie which is the dried fruit and we've got raisins now we know they were importing these from places like Malaga I've seen account books from the 1630s for a farmer on angle seat where he trots off usually about mid-December and raisins are one of the Staples he buys year after year are we ready on the pie case uh just about yeah this is the base layer fills in there now to keep the flavor really rich and Sumptuous although it's not actually an expensive ingredient plenty of butter this will just melt and soak into the dried fruits and we then add in let's hope it's going to fit we're going to pop some more butter on top otherwise it'll all dry we've got spices to go on top as well dried fruit it's a conspicuous consumption really this isn't it most of the Year all the food is really very local but to this time of year at Christmas you know you're sort of bringing in foods from all over the known world like many pies of the time the casing on this one is disposable it's the goodies inside that are all important I think these cows are doing remarkably well overall I think they're they seem very happy they're an incredibly friendly little herd actually they've really bonded as a herd I mean Duchess is the leader oh yeah what she says goes really and this is sweetheart this is duchess's calf that's born in April now you can just see the horns coming through here I mean I was always under the impression that male Bulls had horns watch it but apparently it could be either sex and the calf will have horns if the mother did or if the father did I have come to light cows I mean they're docile animals and so am I and um we get on very well it took a little while I mean I was a bit apprehensive at first I mean they are big animals but they're very very gentle I had one major problem with this cow I was feeding her and she thought I was definitely not feeding her enough and she turned around and I got the end of one of those right between the two big muscles on the side of my thigh I had a bruise for about a month off that the crust of the beef is building up well but it's not just hot dishes that the team are cooking up for dinner one of the other special dishes we're going to do for this meal is a grand salad aping what the Gentry would eat on a regular basis for their feasts now the core of the grand salad and it's going to be a bit like a bullseye with concentric circles we have a mixture of dried fruits into the pot go some olives almonds some chopped figs and lots of currants currents was such an important part of Cuisine for people who could afford them but just over 20 years later when the Civil War broke out the import occurrence was banned by Parliament because so much money was leaving the country to buy them that they needed to keep in there to pay the troops with jobs this pie looks about dark yeah it looks really good Chloe couldn't take that out and pop it in the next to the Bake Oven would you yeah thank you [Music] and then slight variation on the modern mince pie mainly being about 20 times the size and uh she looks quite good I'm surprised but it does look quite nice I hope I hope it tastes as good as it looks back in the hall the last thing needed is the salad dressing we're going to use two Exotics here the first one is sugar now this would have cost around about six months a pound now it's at a time when a labor is earning about eight months a day sugar loaves like this were generally imported from Morocco next ingredient is what they called salad oil in the period olive oil from the Mediterranean come past me that Sugar could you stew thank you very much and last but not least we've got a large apple pie here we go I'm going to take this straight out because it's actually quite hot if you look at Gentry menus you find that many of their dishes are purely for display and the appearance and the layout and the color in a dish like this is in some ways almost as important as the flavor um I suppose if you had it on a daily basis he'd be showing you had all this spare labor wouldn't you all this time that you could just let your servants go and do useless prettiness as opposed to doing useful work and for people like this it's just nice to have pretty food once or twice a year to drink with our Christmas dinner we're gonna have lambswool which is beer and you pull in it and then let the jug sit by the fire and just warm through so the flavors mix a little bit is it just apples in there yeah it's just apples and I think we just need something to top this up it's probably a rosemary [Music] [Applause] all of the finery would have come out for the Christmas dinner best Linens plates and glasses they'd have even brought out their best candles expensive scented beeswax instead of the usual tallow pies we got on the table one two three four five yeah five pies yeah let's hope that's nearly one each just like today Christmas in the 1600s was all about Hospitality so the team have invited over Keith Paynes the Thatcher who helped them build the Valley's Cow Shed Nana you're supposed to eat it the team have cracked open their finest period tipples like whiskey Beth start off with any raw spirit and then you put in about 10 ingredients and there's Licorice and aniseed and sugar and spices and dried fruits and all you do is you stir it once a day for 10 days and then you decant off the liquor and don't dry for three days Cheers Cheers Cheers happy Christmas wow a Merry Christmas [Music] and a successful first four months I think I'm bad is it yeah yeah cheers I think you can pay me for the patching with this so this is the mince meat pie this is the mince meat pie with real meat in it [Laughter] this tastes just like modern mince meat yeah it does doesn't it I know it's not quite sweet is it really I mean not quite sickly but I think I prefer that's nice I like that chicken pox there's a luxury for this time of year Orange in there yeah the bones aren't as hard as the pie crust thank you oh yeah muscles muscles the Fonzy Crush in his hand yeah [Music] [Music] March paint you know almonds and sugar takes hours so what do we do just eat him everyone's got the pig's ears [Laughter] [Music] another year next time in the valley it's January the team resort to some period medicines to beat the aches and pains [Music] they stock up on winter wood supplies [Music] and they get some surprisingly acrobatic help with hedgeling [Applause] [Music] 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 [Music] it's January now and it's our fifth month working on the farm and the weather outside is pretty cold wet and miserable we've had to bring the cattle in so that means we're mucking out once a day this is a pretty strenuous job but the biggest thing we're doing this month is harvesting our Timber supplies we need all this lightweight stuff for things like the copper to keep us well supplied with hot water and it also will supply us with timber for the main fires in the hall and for doing a lot of repair works we need it for repairing tools for doing little bits of building work which is a good time of year to catch up on now great thing about the wells it's one of the few bits of water that doesn't freeze up on us at this time of year and a good supply of hot water from that copper is essential but our biggest task of the month is the Hedge laying we've got to get those boundaries stock proof before the spring and this is the time to do it when the leaves are off and the animals are away indoors [Music] crucial for fixing boundaries on a farm keeps the animals out of areas where they'd cause damage January was the usual time to catch up on Farm maintenance so professional hedge layer Nicholas mcelvanna has come to show Alex how it's done so what we're doing here is actually just like filling the gaps here and we've got to make a stockproof barrier now so we're going to be knocking in some Stakes weaving this in and then the whole thing is going to knock together in a year or two's time all the shoots will come through and you'll have a living a living fence basically that's the idea you're thinking kind of a whole generation ahead you're not really just thinking about you know putting a fence up and hoping it lasts 15 years here it's all about foresight and planning for the benefit of the farm this is the first time our team has had to face really bitter weather it may be pretty to look at but it makes working outside particularly arduous and it's not just themselves they have to worry about they also have to look after their livestock we've just had the first hard Frost and Snow of the winter so we've got to break the ice up on the pond or this will build up into a really thick layer in London at the period they could actually have Frost fares on the Thames because it was so solid we're dependent on this for the water supply for the animals otherwise I've got to start hauling it out of the well and every one of those cows is drinking 10 gallons a day so I can do without the extra work now that the shed for the cows is up and running Ruth and Chloe are becoming dab hands of mucking out just there oh they look for the back excellent thanks I got my little pile there the Mug's actually quite useful we're going to be spreading this on the fields later on in the year and it's not as easy as it looks either is it no oh no Chloe does it about three times faster than me it's it's a highly sophisticated art form at least we can see today with the sunblock yes it's really nice and light in here actually normally it's Pitch Black in here and you honestly can't see a thing no you really can't so trying to distinguish the fresh straw from the from the muck is virtually impossible it's a very Relentless job you can't decide one morning oh I don't think I'll bother I think I have a lion this morning somebody's got to do it so you have to get up rain will shine so I put a bit of tension on him right get some nice low cut there he is hedgling is all about manipulating what grows naturally provided they're cut only part way through branches will continue to grow because the very fabric of the hedges remains alive these boundaries literally grow stronger over time what will happen when this next year or in the spring even is that little buds are going to appear here all the way along and if I leave this hook here they'll appear there as well on the end the tree will always grow at its ends so that's why I'm going to chop the end off here as well yeah see if you can get them up here oh up there get that out of the way yep over the top here yep oh I'm with you coming back guys because they're all flexible aren't they yeah they are and that's not going to kill it no that'll keep it oh just encourage it to shoot there it'll be all right he's snagging up there you can see where he's been rubbing on that bridge this may seem like a gentle rustic Pursuit but it helps if hedgeley is a natural acrobat if I can all right of course today hedging is uh considered the skill but back in the uh the 17th century it's just simply one of those jobs that you'd have to get done and you'd have to know how to do it and of course the skills it involves are very similar to many of the other jobs that I've been doing in particular thatching as well working with the Hazels and the gads so I'm beginning to consider myself more a jack of all trades rather than a master of one Farmers had to be especially versatile to turn a profit and at this time of year a rather unusual Harvest made for a lucrative sideline oh castles are created by a wasp that drills into the park where it's thin on young oak trees and Leia grub inside the lump that the tree produces to protect itself the oak Apple is very rich in tannin and when mixed with a substance they call Green Copperas it would produce a black dye that was used either for dyeing cloth or for use as ink in the reign of James the first about one in four people were literate so the ink was becoming increasingly useful for writing we have to grind the out goals to a powder and the fine of the Dust a smoother our ink will be at the end of the day now take an old vessel to mix in this ink is poisonous so we can't risk anything we're ever going to cook in again and then add the green Copperas so this they would have obtained from the merchants and now a little water not too much of the ink will be too weak to work properly and just and so simply and easily we have ink right it's really coming together now when I first looked at the stretch we were going to hedge very much like it is down here you've got all sorts of different sizes and it really just doesn't look very even at all and yet when I look back up the Hedge it really looks really formal and really professionally laid the more Thorn and scrub and things that are sticking out towards the stock it the more they're going to be put off it's not going to look like really great and it keeps them away from the green Chute so the Aesthetics of it aren't that important and really the natural form of the trees will Define what it looks like and just trim it back roughly right just quickly without modern utilities 17th century farmers were not only governed by the yearly agricultural cycle they also had to keep to a strict daily pattern here in the valley the last job before the light goes is putting the cows to bed [Music] but the end of daylight doesn't mean the end of the Working Day there are still jobs for Stewart and his son Alistair to be getting on with there were many tasks that needed doing when you were fairly exhausted at the end of a long day and just sitting by the fire repairing the family's shoes was one of them every time I put one in the next one bounces out one of the best sources for the farmer's typical working day is a fellow called conveys Markham who was writing in 1613 and he described um slightly idealized plow Monday this is the first plowing day after 12th night so early January and he goes through from getting up well Before Dawn and going out with your Lantern to tend to the stock right through to the evening supper time at six and then sitting by the fire crushing crab apples mending the shoes before you have a final trip out check the stock embedded down well for the night and you turn in about nine o'clock ish get a good night's sleep because you're going to be up again at about five or six in the morning I think if you actually tried to follow his regime to the letter you'd probably collapse from exhaustion within a few months even somebody who's used to it but if you take it with a pinch of salt and add in a bit more social drinking and all the other activities that we know there's a lot of evidence was going on you're getting a fair idea of the pattern of the Working Day foreign [Music] January morning in the valley and Ruth is following in the footsteps of farmers wives 400 years ago preparing medicines to combat the winter aches and pains just about every woman had at least some medical knowledge professional medicine was very expensive both the ingredients and the advice so for most people domestic production was really the only sort of access to Medicine in fact there's a quote from a chap called Robert Greene in 1595 saying I make my wife my doctor and my garden my Apothecary shop and that about sums it up really I'm making here a sage oil which was thought to be good for Rheumatic joints pains in the joints so particularly this time of year when it's you know you're working Outdoors a lot in the damp and the cold it's the sort of thing that you want to have big stores of I've got a load of oil in here and which I've been boiling some Sage leaves until they've gone crispy all the juices from the sage has now come out of the sage leaves and gone into the oil I'm going to discard this first slot and then I'm going to put a whole fresh lot in and then this other batch of stuff I'm working on here I've made an infusion in water with rosemary which frankly looks a bit gunky we're going to distill it distilling was done using an alembic Pottery cone with a spout by cooling it on the outside the liquid condenses inside and slowly drips out just wring that out and pop them around and it's easy enough then to sort of just change your clothes if they dry out by distilling it was possible even at home in the 17th century to extract the essence of herbs and plants not far removed from the essential oils that can be bought in chemists today down at the bottom end of the farm in L field Alex and Fonz have been busy putting into practice their hedging skills we want to stop putting sheep in this field we're having to work on the boundaries to stop them escaping and we've used a sort of a variety of hedging techniques this is a holly tree that we've failed we went a few mistakes we should have had a few um steaks in here one of the big problems we found live hedging was the fact that if you leave The Hollies for too long and they get too thick they become immensely brittle and they're really hard to work with and it makes it really difficult to to wind in all these branches but we've created a fairly robust boundary I mean this is as fun says it's only for sheep but this this runs quite nicely into our dead hedge which goes down here the problem here was that we didn't have any species at all to work with so we chopped down some Oak we've chopped down some birch as well what we've done is we've broken it all up and just I suppose just experimented really yeah Hedges were fast workers according to give's markham's file manual he specifies a good dead hedger would accomplish around 32 feet a day of Hedgerow five feet high now I'm going to be fairly generous to the chat and that in reality if I'm standing up here level with the Hedge it's only about three feet and he says anything shorter than five feet and not as thick as it should be for cattle maybe we're looking at about 65 feet a day for one hedger now we took how long do we take on this we took a day and a half to do this a day and a half between two of us yeah we were going to get um but we are getting better aren't we we are getting better but um you know we've got lots of practice there's many fields that need um need the hedges sorting so um yeah we better quack on funds yeah by straining off the sage oil it can be stored for later use I'm just going to put it to one side to cool down and then I'll pop a lid on it as well as the oils and distilled Waters a farmer's wife of the period would have been able to make a whole range of other preparations with the herbs pills trashes which are a bit like sort of lozenges syrups electories which are things preserved in boiled in honey I'm going to do a salve next for putting on open wounds and sores the main ingredient is Elder buds considered especially good for cooling wounds and preventing infection to them are added some candle wax and a good dollop of pig fat just wanted all to sort of melt together so I'm going to take that straight off the heat give it a bit of a stir and then I shall put it straight away into a little pot to set solid [Music] January was a key time for managing Woodlands wood was one of the most essential elements in people's lives and an important cash crop vital for everything from building to keeping them warm so our team are out harvesting in the copies we have to caucus the Woodland when the leaves are off the trees so Jenna is a good month for it and copying is a very ancient way of managing Woods in this country goes back to at least Roman times and before so it gives you a sustainable crop of Timber the idea is that you knock the tree over cut it off and it will then reshoot from the base if you planted a hazelnut then that tree would grow to maturity and die in about 150 years but you can find in corners of this country the stools the bases from which Hazels that are cop is still regrowing that are 2 000 years old the wood has a multitude of uses everything from bundles of used to fire up the bread oven the timber needed for construction if you were to pop down your local DIY store there's normally a couple of shelves dedicated to different types of doweling different thicknesses of wood this is essentially what the cops is doing in the 17th century for example the Hazel here now you can take off your one or two year shoots which are very thin and very flexible or you can take off your seven eight year shoots which a little bit thicker and then finally you'll go up to something that's maybe 10 15 years and they all have different uses the use of wood was so great at this time the timber supplies in Britain were dwindling so much so that the government began to impose restrictions you're also leaving by law at this period 12 large trees for each acre because you need your Big Timber for things like ships to protect the shores of this country [Applause] at the end of a long hard day Ruth has a chance to try out her 17th century remedies on her first willing patient [Music] the self that I made a before the buds and the pig fat and wax John give me a finger yeah I clouted the um top of my finger the other day with the Mallet and it keeps opening up and what's happening in fact is that um it's making the The Joint sort of swell up as well so restricting movement all right injury number one out of the way right you've got more of you indeed yes I have to go there a lot of the force I'm using the bill hook with going right through my elbow and I do suffer from what today is called tennis elbow I suppose it's something called hedger's elbow at the time um but yeah that I mean that's been that's been chronic especially with the cold and so I'm really really suffering there so I don't know what you've got in your box of tricks well I think probably some Sage oil you want to roll your sleeve up right sorry about cold hands it's all right I'm just gonna rub it oh you might want to rub that on yourself actually do you wanna just rub it in just give it a really good sort of massage into the physical labor it is it's beginning to take its toll I mean you wake up in the morning and the arm's a bit creaky and my back as well when I get up I find it really difficult just to bend down to get my socks on but hopefully these ointments will work fingers dealt with elbows down with me the chesty cough is another one that I'm suffering from at the moment so the medical thinking of the time held that people were made up of four elements or humors coughs and colds were thought to be caused by an excess of the cold wet humor phlegm all I'm going to do is give you a mustard plaster you know like in that nursery rhyme when Jack and Jill fall down the hill and they bandaged his head with vinegar and brown paper well that's a plaster I've got some mustard and honey here and this is going to be bound onto his chest it's going to be pretty sticky I'm gonna I'm gonna smell like a Gammon ham once this has been on me I think we are if we were a wealthier family because we'd probably sort of you know make you up some pills with things like ginger and pepper you know which were also hot ingredients but really really pricey whereas this is pretty cheap really here we go oh you're gonna love this ready yeah okay go go arms up please I've always supposed to be hot and dry well it will be in a minute there we go you're right there put this shirt on I've used these so housewifefully medicines for quite a lot of years really in in some way or other and some of them some of them work um most of them they're really placebos to be honest um mind you one shouldn't underestimate the power of a placebo especially when it's dripping all down my belly as well and it's not bath night for another five nights [Music] it's a new day time for Alex and Fonz to take on the biggest project of the New Year triangle field they've already cleared the mass of bracken and bramble that was here in September now they're trying to turn it into a working field where they can sow their spring crops without Modern Machinery they're relying instead on the livestock the cows will be the first animals that will take into the into the field and they'll take off all the all the big stuff then after that we'll be looking to get the sheep in there just to nibble down the last bits and pieces and then finally of course the pigs will go in to root out all the all the roots and the tubers and all the grubs as well I mean this whole process of turning triangle field into arable land it's something that would have taken place over probably many years but we're going to accelerate the process so it's a kind of unquantifiable workload for us get them yes while Alex and Fonz get busy Stewart is rustling up a good winter dinner for a household 400 years ago January marked the start of Lena times we've now looking at long life Foods salted like the Gammon pickled with the gherkins dried with peas and the grains that we're using here back in 1620 if you didn't salt the pig it would have rotted within a few days of actually being killed this one's got a yellowish tinge because this Gammon has been up the chimney smoking it has a number of preserving effects partially it desiccates it so it'll dry it out but also it puts a toxic layer on the outside as well which is going to deter a lot of bacterial action the total of all those preserving effects on this chunk of Arthur's back leg means that since we killed him in November it's almost in the same condition as it was then so to the pot the quiet time in the Valley's vegetable garden with only the hardiest of crops left to harvest kale for supper it's a really Hardy vegetable one of the Culvert families are most of the things in this bed cabbages of All Sorts are called coal warts and they last us right through the winter they'll cope with the frosts and things very very common in fact so much associated with being the vegetable of the poor that people often call their sort of like Gardens kale yards I know when I lived in Chester there's an area there called the kale yards just outside the city walls behind the cathedral big flat area I'm going to leave the stalks in the ground I'm going to cut this one last week and you can see there's little bits of regrowth coming so if the weather stays mild I might get another crop off the same stock at least a small one anyway so I'm just going to take the tops off one of the dishes on the menu is a classic traditional one peas pudding I'm not going to put quite the whole amount in and that will be far more by the time it's full of peas pudding that we need but as the rhyme says peas pudding hot peas pudding cold peas pudding in the pot nine days old there's references to people at the period cutting a slice of peas pudding like you might cut a slice of cake I'm just putting it in their pocket and going out for the day foreign dish found right to the lowest social levels is just a dish using whole grains all we do is put this in the pot boil it until the grains burst it's got various names some areas it's called from entry in other areas particularly down the West country they call it wash Brew if you can afford it you can improve the flavor with a little milk or honey or whatever you can stretch to you can whine if you're really well to do so into the pot pretty lean time in the garden at the moment not much left in here I've got a few root vegetables still some carrots and parsnips got some leeks coming they're still too small for harvesting but come spring they'll be ready don't really want to be out here that much because if you walk on the soil too much you can pack it down and lose all the air spaces and then things don't grow quite so well so we've got some winter pruning to do in mind um the gooseberries they're getting rather overcrowded so I shall be taking quite a lot of the wood out of this one make a nice open framework so lots of air can get through and that way we'll get a really good crop hopefully with no mildew on the fruit foreign butter but it's far too hot to actually uh start stripping the Rind off yet so let's put that aside for a minute the Gammon is going to be seasoned with fresh herbs from the garden Rosemary and Sage then the outer rind and excess fat has to be stripped off the bone removed and the meat smothered in a pastry case with lashings of butter foreign crimp it on now this is going to take about half an hour in the bread oven the meat's pre-cooked so all we're doing now is baking off the pastry [Music] five months into the project and the team have settled into the pace of 17th century life wow look at that that's fantastic Stewart oh beautiful looks delicious dinner by the fire offers a chance to reflect on another busy day why don't you wear the hat I I don't mind I don't mind that it just to have it just feels a little bit tight sometimes on the head try my statute cap that's just a different shape it might work better no so much yeah it's much looser fit actually put it down see what happens [Laughter] but I quite like the joint view angle though yeah that's fine they're called statute captures there was at one point an actual law saying you know a statute saying that people should wear knitted caps so that I stature a law yeah a hat law yeah everybody it was supposed to be everything everybody except ladies gentlemen and ladies Maids were supposed to wear knitted caps and that way poor people could knit caps and make a living January's gone well for the valley team they've yet to shirk from their Relentless physical labors but how will they fare as winter drags on with snow on the horizon [Applause] next time on the valley it's February a heavy fall of snow transforms the farm building a lavatory 17th century style of course [Music] and it's time to bring the sheep in for a thorough checkup [Music] it's February now it's our sixth month on the farm and we're halfway through the agricultural year it's a very austere time 400 years ago it was the start of Lent when you were only allowed to eat fish and dairy produce and not flesh we've got a lot of work to get through this month as usual we've got to get the Sheep overhauled so they're in good condition before lambing next month but there is one job that's a lot more urgent than all the rest the privy has developed a severe list in the last scale and if we're not careful one dark night it's going to be down around our ears rebuilding the privy is this month's challenge for Alex and Fonz first and foremost it's a bit of a structural Hazard you can see it's leaning here it hasn't been braced properly when it was first built so the wind's just blown it over slightly we've got to pop it up on this side another concern is this seat it's um I think Fonzie you've had a few problems and it's a given that this plank is going to break and I don't want to be the one on it when it breaks the final concern is that uh it's becoming a bit of a biological Hazard the original pit that was dug um I think it was dug deep enough and we find that we're filling it up really quickly so another task to dig a deeper hole okay ship well yeah we get that around the other side and shove with it do you want to take it out we think it's going to fall be careful I think it should be all right it may be but it's going a bit no okay back off right okay let's get around the other side and push it down so what we're going to do we're just going to give it a big well if you go on the back corner on the upright on the back one yeah I'll see if I can get this up the inside if you take that corner funds and we'll see how much strength it's got left in it okay when we're gonna go on on four can't count that five let's go for three one one two three well that's really in it right now if you start taking it apart yep strip it down with the cold of February upon the valley Chloe is paying special attention to the Farm's two young ponies she's hoping to train them up as working farm horses we're losing all the grass out in The Big Field and there's a lot of stock out there so um to feed them on their own out there would be a bit silly because they wouldn't really get a look into any hay we put out because all the other stuff would just get straight to it so bring them into the yard throw a bit on the floor and see what they eat they're doing really well actually considering about two months ago these two were pretty much Wild um obviously we've made a bit of a difference here if I can actually get my skirt back this one certainly I got she kicked me two months ago really hard and I think now we're we're a bit of a change Pony I'm not quite sure why she's so keen on my skirt one of the key agricultural landmarks is looming spring sewing so Stewart and his son Alistair need to get the Pea seed ready for planting we harvested the peas on the vine that we were going to use for seed earlier this year and now we've got the time set a bit of sunshine good light and gently put our way through [Music] the waste stalks and pods called the P horn quickly become a snack for the horses this is the sort of job that any member of the household might have done although quite often one can get the children to get the bulk of it sorted gives you a bit of a rest though and uh but this time of year that means you can start to get a bit chilled so in a few minutes I think we're gonna have to go off and do something a bit more active yep I just lose this stuff into the yard I think um harmful about the same as what's on the floor would be good up above the Stables the levels of hay in The Loft are slowly being depleted by winter feeding out on the privy it's time for Alex and Fonz to remove the old rotten floorboards and really start getting their hands dirty it's unfortunate for Fonzie he um he lost it Hazard the other night which is a dice game we play as a consequence um he's got the onerous task of digging out the cesspit it was fixed the dice were loaded in my favor 400 years ago human feces was a vital fertilizer in cities specialist contractors called night soilmen emptied privies and took the waste out of town for processing have you got your tool I made this yesterday you have a special present to Fonzie his scoop so there you go mate 's job can only be described as grim but it's a job that had to be done and was actually very valuable it was used for uh compost mixed with wood ash you can't put it straight on the top of the field you've got to dig it down and you can't plant root vegetables in it in the first year only vegetables that grow above ground such as kale or cabbage but the second year is brilliant for root vegetables and they're scoot working it's heavy yeah but not as heavy as the Spade but it's working well it's working very well it wasn't just human feces that had value like any 17th century farmer's wife Ruth has to take extra care of another waste product in a farm like this even our urine has a value and a use of course at night getting into the privy out here is almost impossible it's pitch black you'd be stumbling all over the place so we use piss pots up in the bedroom just like they would have done and then in the morning I have to come out here and empty it being useful I keep it separate and store it in a jar by the privy how's it going phones we're getting close we're almost there looks a bit better didn't it you're in on a farm it's really mostly used for making ammonia bleach for laundry really you only just have to leave it for about three weeks and still urine becomes ammonia it's a really useful chemical and of course in towns it was actively collected on a sort of industrial scale so there were people whose job it was to go around and collect piss pots that were stood outside of pubs which hopefully everybody contributed to and they would take them away and then start using them in a whole range of industrial processes including the making of saltpeter which of course is one of the most important ingredients for gunpowder really burgeoning industry at the time waste management 400 years ago was a sort of Fairly large business really extending all over the place there was money in muck [Music] temperatures have been dropping in the valley and for the very first time in the team's year on the farm snow is falling despite the turn in the weather Stuart Ruth and Chloe need to bring the sheep in for essential maintenance sheep really evolved to live up on high mountains in dry areas so firstly because there's no rocks to wear away their toenails they tend to get ingrowing toenails we've got to trim those every now and again the other thing that we've got a big problem with at the moment is that we've just had a few warm days there's a lot of fresh grass coming through and as a result of that they've developed severe diarrhea and they've got really claggy backsides so what we've got to do is cut all this dangling crud off the back end of them and then look for saws and treat that appropriately if there's a problem there getting a bit better at this sheep herding because in the period although they had sheep dogs period sheep dogs were only used for driving the sheep and they hadn't yet developed a system of of sort of training the dogs to do that going round thing so many Shepherds carried a sort of a scoop on the end of the stick so they could like pick up a little bit of something and then fling it over the far side of the herd and that would turn them foreign like the Sheep actually they're um they're quite easy to heard compared to the pigs and the cows so I'm quite fond of them in that respect and they've all got their individual characters we've got uh we've got Monty who's he's the only RAM and um he's he likes to think he's boss but really like as you in every household he's not it's the women that are in charge and we've got these sort of eight-year-old use that they really know their stuff and their boss there we go well done [Music] a new day and the snow has settled turning the valley into a winter wonderland [Music] but the serious business of looking after the livestock has to go on particularly duchess who is eight months pregnant [Music] with the sheep in from the fields Stewart Ruth and Chloe can give them a proper going over gently does it just stop bolting that way right that was easier than I expected oh she's a bit soggy with this snow nothing much wrong with this one right these are Cotswold to go right back to Roman times and they kept because this really long fur that they've got but they're not particularly good mountain sheep so you've got to give them a lot of attention right now mind you the pictures you see are these sheep come here all right on your back oh there we go right let's get you cleaned up there's a Cotswold it's got this very distinctive four lock and a very long staple very long thread to the wall and you can find statues up on the Cotswolds from Roman times which show exactly that shape of fur on the head they do but they usually look a bit smaller when you see pictures isn't it when you see periods over the years in the period the the sheep the same breed but nonetheless was actually physically smaller which would have made this sort of handling a lot easier than these great huge lumps they're now known as Cotswold Lions because of the size and look of them you'll get about a 10 pound fleece off a Cotswold a modern sort of Welsh mountain sheep you might be looking at about three pounds so a lot of wool for your money on these the the shoes are actually as long as they start sharp they're really easy to do um the ones Ruth's using are actually very a razor sharp actually and we cut myself shopping them earlier bit there that's your tail isn't it I'm gonna check her feet as well while I'm here just to make sure she hasn't got any Cuts or problems there that one's all right Chloe have you got that Stockholm tar it's the thing most frequently recommended in um period sources so this will act just as like an antiseptic and sort of seal up any cuts there we go come on then you do anything else wobbly already there we are just give her a minute with these large breeds if you have them on their backs for too long all the internal organs have flopped over the wrong way and they Crush down and it starts to cause some severe problems inside so the last thing that I need to do with her now that we've done our feet and dagged her tail I'm gonna do standing up right [Laughter] now how much is this worth what I'm going to do is have a look at your gums because one of the Diagnostics that you get in the period books is if the gums are white we've got a problem but those are beautifully pink see that are those teeth doing they're in Fairly good shape for you of your age right okay there you go okay who's next the cesspit has been dug out and enlarged now fawns and Alex can get on with the privy superstructure the problem obviously with the snow it's rained all my Timbers and what I've done is I've pre-fabed the structure for the privy and in fact I think this one should be on that side it should to help keep the wall plates in position they'll also need to be morted in foreign yeah what I've done is just cut really simple motions and Tenon joints so just you've got like a sort of Peg which just Keys into a hole and then because they're quite Broad and it's quite deep that's managing actually just to stand up on its own for now you know of course there's mortise and Tenon joints up there as well you in there yeah give it a tug Stonehenge wood hinge okay purebred Cotswold sheep there's only about a thousand of them left in existence it's very close to the sort of sheep Medieval Times being the core of our Woolen industry there are even more primitive sheep like the soy you're not going anywhere girl okay have a look at her feet when I hold her [Laughter] things like the soy have only survived out on primitive Islands because nobody bothered with them so this is the cultivated sheet that we would have bothered farming not these scrawny little deer like don't you look at me like that girl is somebody going to deal with her backside I'm not sitting here all day in the snow come on girl laughs oh that's no problem it's just a great fluffy ball we've known each other a long time haven't we go all the ones we've cleared up so far there's plenty of Flesh on there they're getting plenty to eat at the moment it's all the hay we've been feeding them out of the Lofts so they're in a fairly good sheep shape for sheep shape shape shape now this the temperature in the valley has dropped to about -4 working without modern waterproofs the team have to keep busy outside just to keep warm here we go it's good hi only the walls in the uh the roof today now I'll pop some toilet seat of course certainly very ground for a toilet excellent I think it's time to uh pack up beer and head for the head for the fire in the hall to help thaw out our team period music specialist Trevor James has come along with an assortment of 17th century instruments for them to try out like this Satan because you're supposed to use a feather really a feather I've used a platform before one of the platforms that's clearly a feathered let's give it a try foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the English bagpipe was very popular in this period it was in popular right the way through the medieval period I mean Henry VII for example had an actual bagpipe band at court I think there was about 40 of them but he was sort of the last Monarch to have bagpipes at court and then gradually they sort of drop down the social scales I mean on a farm like this in this particular period the bagpipes would certainly have been played and little things like the pipe and Tabor even the one-man band of the period and it's played with the table pipe surprisingly or to give it its other name the three hole pipe so if I cover all the holes and blow at four different breath pressures we'll actually end up with four different notes so [Music] foreign the thing about the music of the period is people tend to think of it as a very courtly sort of Music very dainty very Steppy if they like but in fact in an environment like this it would be quite raucous and and very Lively and lots of drinking and having a damn good time and talking of rustic I've got one more little gem for you Chloe me yes no that's a walking stick that's not an instrument this is a snorkel all right okay yes yes the curvature doesn't have any effect upon the sound that the instrument produces at all but it's really like the saxophone IT projects the sound forward but it has a beautifully raw sound it's [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] if you can't do that I've got these for you [Music] on the job [Music] all right after several days the February snow is finally melting in the valley time for phones and Alex to install the toilet seat rather than period authenticity here they've made something with comfort in mind okay phones on with the Box the splash guard it's time for the business end of things now putting our toilet structure in that sits quite nicely just see how smoothly it sits on some of these these floorboards on the lid there we go that's Central um a little bit to you at the right at the back um yeah that's that's good having a lift there we are a nice clean drop some five six feet in fact look ponds we've got some uh we've got some water building up there we've got our our own self-flushing toilet well I suppose we should um should check it out to see if it's sturdy enough in the uh certainly comfy enough it's got a bit of a good bit of a backrest thing going here as well that's quite nice you look very Regal I have Regal looking out over the garden I'm still not convinced about the size of this whole load funds tends to uh pinch somewhat if you were to give it going [Music] in all it's taken 10 days to rebuild the Valley's privy now they just need to finish the roof [Music] in the 1600s February would have been a very lean time little grows in the garden and most farm animals are pregnant so fresh meat is off the menu all of which makes it highly appropriate that this marks the beginning of Lent forty days of culinary restraint the church's very own Lenten period of abstinence is exactly that point in the year when an ordinary farming family hasn't got any choice anyway but fish in all its preserved ways are available right through the year these ones are smoked you can have insulted or pickled obviously as well and it's sea fish it's not freshwater fish for ordinary common people because in order to have freshwater fish you've got to have the rights to the fishing in the streams and rivers and lakes and frankly that was wealthy people only Queen Elizabeth was determined to increase the number of fishermen because she needed Sailors she needed train Sailors to defend the country initially well obviously against the Armada and other such threats and she had no money to pay anybody so she came up with this marvelous wheeze of having extra fish days in the week so that instead of just being Friday it was also supposed to be Wednesday and Saturday so it'd be a huge market for fish which would mean we'd have more fishermen and therefore automatically all these trained sailors on the menu for tonight is a fish salad skin off do we not eat the skin look look how tough it is well you can eat it did you use that for anything there's some talk um or at least they say they found some archaeologically of condoms made out of fish skin why not function trying it no way nice the privy is now ready for its Finishing Touches tidying up the thatch and smearing the last of the door bonded the 17th century style wattle walls you think with all the uh with all the thatching that I've done on the Cow Shed and the brackets thatching are done on the hobble that I already got a bit better at this but I've actually found with this building because it's so small it's been really really fiddly I'm just going along with the the Mallet here it's just a stubble thatch again so it doesn't have to look pretty it's got to be functional really indoors the winter warmer dish is apple pudding 400 years ago boiling the bag puds using a pudding cloth were a new culinary creation things like spotted dick and Christmas pudding are all delivery at modern derivations of this technique that was first sort of made popular and discovered really at the very very beginning of the 17th century there's a marvelous account by a French traveler visiting Britain one of the things he said was to come in Pudding time was to come in the best of times pull it in there are you I'm gonna dress this salad with some fire which is a salt marsh plant and in land of course you'd have to have it pickled in order to keep it because rather nice with the with the sort of smokedness of the fish and I'm going to put the salad right in the center in a sort of big mountain or Hill just pop these last few little bits on just to make it look nice and there we go one red herring salad I'm gonna are you getting on all right with those puddings I'm nearly finished fantastic puddings need about two hours of cooking in a cauldron of boiling water that's pretty much finished it's as good as I'll get it when I first started on the farm but about six months ago uh I didn't think I'd be digging out old privies and doing so much construction work but it's been fun and I think we've done really well it's taking a lot of time this has but it's it's been a really rewarding job and a showpiece of all our all our skills and yeah it's been it's been really enjoyable Deadshot for this project Deadshot a few fish are left over after the salad so Ruth is frying them in a preheated pan before dinner is served Stuart makes a dash outside into a cold dark February night weaving his way across the vegetable garden to Christen the Valley's new toilet facilities foreign ERS yet this seat seems to have been smoothed down well but I hope he's done a good job on the floorboards there was a case 400 years ago where a nine-year-old went off to the privy and the floorboards are rotted and he was straight in there drowned before they got him out 400 years ago they didn't have purpose made Soft toilet paper to use but neither were they having to resort to Cabbage leaves the Publishers were churning out Pulp Fiction there was joke books and Romantics hails real Mills and boom stuff and there's one wag put it it was but bum fodder picked to wipe the nation's ass there with meanwhile the fish supper is ready to eat don't you want to try a bit dear yeah can I just do a little bit of yours unless you're just a little meaty yeah the valley team I know exactly halfway through their year on the farm they've weathered the worst of the winter but spring will bring new challenges and new workloads next time in the valley it's March [Music] [Applause] the better of the boys round one for the pigs [Music] wheat gets a good threshing [Music] foreign and it's time for some period fun and games [Applause] [Music] 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 [Music] [Applause] March and our seventh month here in the farm it's coming up to that next great landmark in the agricultural calendar the spring sowing and 400 years ago just like us they'd have been spending a great deal of time and effort preparing the soil here in the garden there's an enormous amount to be done and also out in Triangle field where we're trying to take a piece of land back from waste into agricultural use indoors as well it's the time of year for making March beer and I know that we need another batch of grain prepared ready to take to the Miller otherwise we're going to run out of bread [Music] 400 years ago bread truly was the staple of life but making it was a slow hard task [Music] the first stage of turning wheat into bread flour is threshing this means Alex and Fonz have to literally beat the grains out okay let's give it a hiding from okay well 400 years ago these things were used for the beating the wheat and giving it a damn good hiding instead of just beating it with a stick the idea is here that the hinge in the middle means that you can thresh in a much smaller area the other benefit of the hinge is so that the top part of the flail strikes the wheat flat and therefore knock out more seeds of grain now it's something you do intermittently you wouldn't all in one go because grain keeps better in this form than it does as flour with the weather warming up in March Stewart needs to get out in the garden and start a major overhaul now 400 years ago this was the really heavy time for work in the garden you haven't got rotavators or any of the modern equipment for a garden this size so it's the one time that the men are brought into the garden to break the back of the heavy work of digging rest of the year sewing and weeding and harvesting that can all be handled by the women it's nice lightweight work last year this was the cabbage and kale and other brassica's bed this year we're going to be planting root vegetables so beetroot carrots onions parsnips turnips and by changing the type of crop each year you prevent the buildup of diseases in the soil those things that like cabbage are going to be a bit confused when they try and bite an onion it's also time to prepare another of the key dietary Staples of the 17th century beer Ruth and Chloe are making up one of the particularly strong period varieties March beer to check that water Brewing is one of those processes that just has to happen again and again and again through the year it's our main drink it's not just for getting drunk in the evenings although it wasn't the Industrial Revolution yet that didn't mean we wasn't any industry there was loads of Industry paper mills Tanners Dyers all cited along streams and rivers using that water and dumping their effluent into it so unless you actually had a spring then your water could be pretty dodgy and beer is safe to drink the water's ready up to temperature now oh lovely do you want to put some of the malt in yeah would you want a third of it yeah I think so the main ingredient malt is germinated barley usually supplied by a professional molster last one it's lovely after several hours of beating Alex and Fonz can pause to examine the precious fruit of their labor and oh look at that must be about must be near on an inch thick actually on top of this this blanket in the well house the mixture of malt and hot water is mashing down well claw smells wonderful I love this it's like oval tea it's really nice people in the 17th century drank huge amounts of beer really by modern standards up to eight pints a day but that was the weak beer the low alcohol beer it was a really important part of people's diet contains lots of minerals and vitamins and quite a lot of carbohydrates so it's quite an important element in the diet itself and in fact a temperance movement in the 19th century actually caused major malnutrition amongst the rural poor when people were encouraged to switch from drinking beer to drinking tea foreign this is the first stage of the Brewing it's called mashing the hot water which we're pouring onto the malted grain releases enzymes which help to break down the coat of the grain basically and release the starch and starts the fermenting process give me a hand putting that lid here ready one two three yeah lovely Outdoors Stewart and his son Alistair are sowing martok field beans a very rare variety like a small broad Bean which used to be grown centuries ago important to get these in early so March is an ideal time because then there's less chance that we'll get black fly building up on them and at the period of course there were no insecticides that you could spray on as we can now to rectify a problem so get them in early while the Frost's still working for you they're pretty Hardy if you relied on the natural Predators things like ladybirds they would actually keep the worst of the pest burden down but at the upper classes when they were growing flower gardens and it was important to them then they did have some chemicals they used we found one referred to called oppermanent and after some considerable research we discovered this was arsenic trisulfide so you certainly want to wash your cabbages if it's coming out of an upper cross Garden but around here all you've got to do is watch out for the ladybirds between your teeth [Music] at the end of a hard day the team decided to have a bit of fun playing some of the indoor games that were popular back in the age of the stewards if you get your chance to get the pot okay and my chance if he blows it to you three all split the pot yes right okay so I've got to get seven it's silly this but it's actually a seven babe there's lots of dice games not just this one though this is a fairly dangerous one you can lose everything on this game hazarded by name and Hazard by Nature done by a chat called sturt back in um well beginning the 19th century actually but he collected together all these old games and the references and proof of what was played when um there's a really great quote actually from like grab it this art is the mother of lies of perjuries and theft of debate of injuries of manslaughter the very invention of the Devils of hell and actually I think it must be it's fairly accurate because if you read some of the coroner's record records of um you know all suspicious deaths fights in ale houses over alcohol that involve gambling are quite common as it is I'm already mucking out tomorrow the consequence of my losing streak so I'll go in three yeah I'm going six oh here we go you can't get an eight that's for sure no I've got an eight that's a three winner really you're not mucking out anyway yeah I can live with mucking out [Music] a new March morning Daleks and Fonz are going to try and process the threshed grain they need to separate the grains of wheat from their shells the chaff [Music] technique we're going to use here is something called a winnowing basket and you can see What's Happening Here is I'm spilling a lot of grain yeah but that's fine because we're spilling it back onto our blankets it's not to worry the idea here really is yeah to kind of throw it up in the air and rely on the Wind to then blow the chest how's it coming on chaps all on top of the grain yeah I need the wind to blow it off could it be your Technique ones we've also got separation here haven't we so I could take that off now see that all the chaff just sitting on the top there in the well house roof and Chloe need to press on with the March beer it takes at least a month to brew they've strained Out The Malt so the next step is to add the Hops which give beer its bitter taste in contrast to the period sweet ale the Hops act as a preservative so if you make beer it'll keep for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks months even but if you make ale it really only keeps for sort of a fortnight at most hmm that smells a bit different it does doesn't it changes it quite quite quickly at this point it's still sort of they're still sort of divide really between ale which is being largely made by women at home domestically in small batches using small tubs small barrels and beer which is being largely but not exclusively brewed by men on a commercial basis the Hops now need to boil for an hour then yeast is added before it's decanted into barrels to ferment out in the spring Sunshine the winnowing is going well hours of practice is starting to make fonz's technique look almost perfect it's a replica of baskets of the period and it's obviously got one side to it that flattens off at the far end allowing you to catch it up here and swirl it round but also allowing the chapter float out of the end we've seen depictions of these in in paintings from the period it was really just a case of honing our technique and and we tried the basket the other way around and and also trying to just trying to Swirl It round and flick it up Swirl It round and flick it up it's the difficulty without flowing it all over the farm yard yep you're happy with that the Apple grain yeah okay wonderful this month see some new additions to the valley as was common in Spring they've brought in some piglets specially bred wild boar Tamworth crosses the closest type to the pigs of the era these brought us wieners when they're just old enough to leave their mother at a few months old and not every farm would have kept a sow over winter it was an extra expense for the next few months they're going to be fattening themselves up through the summer converting all our waste into usable meat for the Autumn but in the short term we're going to make even more use of them by sending them down to Triangle field where they'll root up all the Bramble Roots rip out the Bracken trample the young brackens it tries to appear and not only are they going to help clear the ground but all the dung that's coming out of the back end is going to add to the soil fertility there which has been taking a lot of effort from us over the last few weeks for Ruth and Chloe it's time for a journey with Blackthorne they're off to the mill with Alex and fonz's freshly winnowed green without a card they're using a traditional pack saddle some people use little hand Mills or cone stones for grinding small amounts of flour hence the expression The Daily Grind but most would have saved their grain for a trip to the Miller a bit more that way a bit more pick it up there you go can you start to jump on madam over at the pigsty it's time for the piglets to earn their keep by foraging in Triangle fields the boys have made some pig yolks which were used 400 years ago unfortunately no one knows exactly what these yolks look like round one to the pigs round two golden Fonzie Kevin [Applause] from the period takes some farming we know that they used Yokes the Pigs Would often be running free around the yard and if they found a hedge because it's a woodland animal it's shaped like a torpedo it just squeezes through any Gap but they just really really freeze you can still try and ignore it pigs always scream a lot when you handle them it's uh just the way they are but they actually get far less stressed than animals like young Lambs where you've got to be fairly short on the time you're actually handling them before they start to palpitate a lot these things are built like tanks no that's a very healthy Pig making a fairly standard Pig noise foreign is to prevent the pig from burrowing underneath the hedges the dead Hedges that we've made they're getting out of pens it's got the two forks there so when he gets his head down he can't properly get under and ideally this one on top as well stops it getting through bars but we don't know yet we're just experimenting and hopefully they'll work it really is uh it's quite a battle to get these things on number two I suppose so number two [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] there we go [Applause] [Music] to Mill their grain booth and Chloe have come to the Museum of Welsh life where a working water mill similar to those of the period is still in operation when you go in okay resident Milling expert Garand Thomas is going to turn our team's threshed grain into flower first process you tie the sack off to this chain and this is pull up the very top of the mill then to start the Milling process they weigh about 112 pounds each or 50 kilos and although the water wheel is Lifting and you've got to really pull down this road to get that stacked to the top floor you know in Triangle field an area of waste ground is being made ready for the spring pea crop but there are still masses of brackenroots clogging the soil hungry piglets should provide the solution unfortunately there's been a problem with the yolks 400 years ago we know they had yolks for pigs unfortunately we don't know exactly what those yolks look like so the yolks we put on were purely an experiment unfortunately it didn't work they fell off so we're just going to trust the pigs we'll be happy with the food and that'll keep them contained we'll go back to the old traditional swine herd angle we can have somebody up there just keeping an eye on them make sure they don't wander off into one of the pastures and start destroying the grassland all right but they're happy the workings of a Watermill are based on gravity so with the Valley's wheat now up on the top floor it can begin its Journey Down to the water-powered millstones where it will be ground into bread flour of the 1600s remarkably different to now generally speaking they eat a lot more bread as a bulk since Norman times flower mills were a key source of government revenue tax was levied on every sack of grain that was milled in the year 1400 there was a Welsh leader called Owen bindur some people known as Oregon dower the first thing he did was he destroyed the English Mills knowing that this would sever the income of the English landowners once ground out by the millstones the flower trickles down into Hoppers below I love the way it's going in so quickly and it came out so slowly he's got a really nice fine grinder it's quite nice to know we're really using our own flower this time it's it's it's a very it's a rewarding feeling it's the most enormous amount of Labor and thought and efforts gone into it just to produce something that is you know so basic really a sort of staple of life so then you can just about make out the the wheat coming through just bouncing off my fingers now going inside the stones it goes into the eye of the top Stone that's turning the lower Stone isn't turning at all but the gap between the stone tapers as it goes out towards the edges so the flower then is sent out centrifugally right to the edges which then drops downstairs as wholemeal flour Milling may seem slow by modern standards but compared to doing it by hand Mills were a vital labor-saving device I could produce I don't know some some 200 kilos in a day whereas using a hand corner it would take me about an hour to get enough flour for one loaf this is roughly 33 times faster people often imagine that you know the sort of heavy lifting of sacks and things are going off to the mill must have been man's work but um women did quite a lot of heavy labor too and most marketing that you know sort of buying and selling on a sort of daily domestic basis was in England and Wales usually done by women um foreigners thought it was really really unusual you know on the continent women just didn't have that amount of freedom [Music] foreign [Music] next morning and Stewart is making an early start on the cooking the team was still in the middle of Lent so like their ancestors 400 years ago they are avoiding meat so today's meal is based around fish and we've got some salt Cod here an egg and pear pie with the last of the nice soft pears for the end of the winter and the few vegetables we can find out in the garden so we've got some leeks some onions we've had in store and there's still a few herbs out there that are hanging on I'm also going to be using a chafing dish essentially a charcoal Brazier with holes in the bottom the ash can fall down and the air can pass up and to light this I need some red hot coals out of the fire just to get it started there we go chafing dishes were a common 17th century cooking device perfect for gently simmering fish salt card was a durable lightweight food that could be moved easily up to the Hill Farms and was very readily and cheaply available at the West Coast ports particularly on the East Coast it was more Herring but this would have come across from places like Bristol tough as old boots though I need to cook this in ver juice which is a crab apple vinegar so it doesn't just taste acid like normal vinegar but it's got that dryness if you've ever bitten into a crab apple and it gives it a real bit of zing there we go and she goes to simmer and that'll take an hour or two just cooking very very gently I'll just sprinkle these over the top leave that to warm up the next dish I've got to prepare is the egg and pear pie so these are the last of the black worsters they won't keep much longer and these have got to be soaked in beer which as you can imagine is going to improve the flavor nicely we're following a recipe that dates back to around 1600 and it's somewhat unusual to Modern ears because it involves putting in a mixture of sweet things pears with Savory things in this case eggs but it was quite common at the period to mix fruit and meat elements or savory elements together I put some Ale in being ale you don't have the hot content you get in beer so it's far less bitter there you go and we'll just let those marinate bringing animals into triangle field over the past few months has helped with rooting it up but with April almost upon them it's going to require some real muscle to accelerate the process the next job is to quite literally dig deep and dig out the Bracken Roots which are going down almost as far as the topsoil we've got some coming up here you see you can see the density of these things in some places it's coming up almost like a carpet every morning when I wake up my shoulders are just so stiff and it's a real effort to try and convince yourself to come back to Triangle field it is a Relentless process really is this is the first job that's kind of come close to actually breaking breaking us it really is is it's just non-stop digging every day indoors the salt cord is simmering nicely on the chafing dish the next thing I need to do is that get these hard-boiled egg yolks out of the eggs and in mid-winter we wouldn't have been able to do this recipe because the chickens shut down for about three months and stopped laying but they started up again a couple of weeks back to make the egg and pear pie mix the egg yolks need a quick grind in the mortar then a splash of cream is added along with a few crunchy hazelnuts this is mixed with the pears along with a spoonful of honey and then put over the fire to Stew in the dairy the girls March beer has been fermenting all month just about ready to drink now the big stodge dish for today is what was known as drewson's potage the main ingredient is oatmeal now this is coarsely ground oatmeal so you can still see the grains in there it's not like a modern porridge oat which is crushed between massive steel rollers these days now the second ingredient is absolutely free it's the sludge from the bottom of the beer barrels that we're clearing out and This is highly nutritious as well as being cheap it's all those wonderful bee vitamins that they advertise on the back of a Marmite pack is exactly what you've got here all this is going to need it's half an hour or so stewing on the Fire it's all been pretty physical this morning it's fairly physical pressuring winnowing I didn't think before showing them fishing and flesh how much of this beer have you had right get them one it's hot egg and pear pie it's been a good month in the valley with the vegetable garden zone triangle field ready for planting and a batch of flour in store the team can sit back and enjoy a well-earned sip of homemade extra strong beer look on your face it's fishy and very salty but just as fish and beef it's a bit like it was a bit like sort of fishy chewing gums it doesn't matter how much it just won't go away did I not tell you that that extra family weren't coming for dinner I'll just keep chewing I'm slowly rinsing the vinegar out of it it's not it's no it's rough it's meals like this you can see why they look forward to Spring for the valley experts winter is finally behind them spring flowers longer days and a brighter season Beckham next time in the valley the month of April time to give The Farmhouse a thorough spring clean rebuilding a dry stone wall [Music] Farm sees a new arrival a brand new baby calf [Music] it's April our eighth month here on the farm and spring has truly sprung 400 years ago on a day like today a farmer's wife would be doing as many jobs as possible out here in the sun and the fresh air we've got a lot to be getting on with out in the fields there's a lot of spring sewing to be done all the peas and beans need to go in my first job this month though is to totally turn over this house drag everything out give it a scouring from top to bottom a real spring clean foreign begins The Farmhouse needs to be cleared [Music] there's not much in the way of furniture some Trestle tables cupboards and a few chairs the first thing to be cleaned is the chimney and Stuart is the one going up the ladder the cheapest way of doing this is to tie a bit of holly bush on the good stout rope take it out the ladder drop the Rope down the chimney and then we just pull it through from underneath and Holly is great because it bends it'll deform around the chimney should slide past all the bars that we've got in there and give it a good scratch and scrape out bring that slip down before we get a chimney fire which potentially could be absolutely fatal as ever Alex and Fonz are ready to get their hands dirty okay you ready yep like most jobs on a farm 400 years ago chimney sweeping wouldn't be left to an expensive outside specialist instead it was just another of the basic tasks that the farmer's family did themselves oh this is the painful bit while the chimney is being swept Ruth and Chloe are beginning work on the Fabrics you're right there the first jobs of spring cleaning really is to get all the Woolen textiles out of the house and give them the darn good airing choose a nice bright sunny day so we can blow all the Dust Away beat all the bits and Bobs out these are things that it's quite hard and not necessarily a good idea to to water wash too much so um yeah do you want to pull me yeah pole down for me in the 17th century the main textiles on a farm were Homespun wool linen or hemp you can get the sticks sticks that's all the way into it bad for him come in until absolutely no idea how much stuff is going to come out but by the feel of it hopefully in this first go we should get all of it and we won't need to do it again part of the way up the chimney are some bars for hanging meat to smoke it looks like the Holly has got snagged I'll just have a quick Wrecking okay font yeah you see where it's stuck yeah it's just stuck on one of these yes hooks actually yeah the smoking bar but there we go that should be it should be free now yeah come down oh right there's certainly a lot of stuff up there so here we go but it should come quite easily now so here we go get that it's quite a bit there [Music] it's off the bed and they're coming out along with all the other Woolen textiles [Music] with April upon them the team need to prepare for sowing seeds out in the fields inside Ruth and Chloe have to clear up the chimney debris before Ash and dust blow all over the house [Music] they're everywhere aren't they triangle field was Wasteland six months ago preparing it for crops has been excruciating labor a seemingly losing battle against a mass of gnarled roots these are the Primal roots and these are the Bracken routes if we don't get rid of them they'll regrow and they'll kill our pea crop so what we're doing is we're building pies we're going to burn them and use them as fertilizer back on the field they won't burn like a raging fire they should smolder with big plumes of white smoke sweeping Out The Farmhouse can now begin in earnest smoking Ash dust off all these little Ledges on the wall you can see because it's an uneven surface obviously just like nowadays some people are more house proud than others and um references to people often mention how clean a woman was about her house so you know it obviously mattered to people and they'd obviously discussed it and gossiped about you know Mrs so-and-so doesn't keep a very clean house this is so and so oh she's pristine and lovely just like today really so it's sort of different sort of dirt there's certainly a lot more sort of dust mud and smoke sort of firm particles the most modern people have but then again there's probably less house mites because we have more fresh air coming through and there's less textiles it's quite a lot of stuff up here and it's actually coming down from between the the cracks in the floorboards of the room above so especially with this broom it's got quite quite pointy bits on the ends and it gets right into the cracks and sort of deposits it on your head which is delightful for cleaning about the house Farmer's wives made ingenious use of Natural Resources going here so the the goose we had earlier on in the year tweet and it makes a really good sort of duster comes small brush it gets in all the corners good for getting that cobwebs and bits that accumulate there's not a lot of point we sweeping Florence if that's finished no no whatsoever do you want to do the wall let me start with the one in the middle the massive Roots Turf and twigs dug out of triangle field now need disposing of I've just got out a strip of canvas which we've um just pasted a bit of pitch on and wrapped around in this stick so it just smokes away if you need a flame just give it a bit of a blow what I'm going to do is I built a sort of flu under these pies and hopefully the that we've set underneath the pile should get it kick-started it's not something I've ever done before so I'm I'm hoping it will um it'll take and it'll smell it it'll probably I should imagine take over a day if not longer this one I think is on its way thank you Piers provide a very effective way of destroying waste while keeping fire under control yeah might as well get more it's not just the Bramble and Bracken that's killed by this process but all the weed seed that's lurking there in the soil as well just waiting to sprout in the spring and compete with our crops so it sterilizes the whole soil but in the process we destroy all the organic matter that's in there we keep the chemicals the nitrogens and phosphoruses and so forth that are in there but we lose the organic matter that holds the soil together so once we uh have finished the burn then we're going to have to put that organic material back by putting loads and loads of dung onto this soil to give it body so it actually holds together again and retains water [Music] [Music] it's the end of a long day the root pies in Triangle Fields seem to have been a great success but no one really knows how many weeds are still lurking to threaten their pea crop [Music] but the farm work isn't over Fonz and Chloe have to mount an all-night vigil over one of their cows who is due to give birth any time now in the cowshed must be about one in the morning and we've we've crept out of bed because we've got Duchess in the Cow Shed at the moment because we think tonight is going to be the night that she gives birth um we're just here just to check up on her we've got our food and some water but um we've heard a few noises from myself and Chloe we've um we've both crept out to just to see how she's doing feels fine I can't feel anything kicking in there she's she's really very very Placid very docile I think the very fact that she's letting us get this close to her could mean she's she's imminent but she seems quite calm and every now and then her breathing picks up gets quite rapid she lies down so we're assuming that it's it's coming it's on its way it's a very Hardy breed Welsh black they're very very sturdy beef cattle these really they can survive all weathers um it's just the newborn calf that we're a bit worried about that's the reason why Duchess is in here the following morning and there's no new calf Duchess remains resolutely pregnant Sleepless vigil with Duchess tonight and nothing's happened I'm going to let her out into the Big Field now and she'll rejoin the other cow as well we'll see we'll keep our eye on her and then probably bring her in again tonight and hopefully before then I can get some sleep Duchess has already had 12 carves in the past so the team aren't really expecting any problems with the birth but they'd rather be safe than sorry he's rejoined the herd very quickly they're calling each other this morning which makes a complete racket and she seems really eager to get onto that morning Jew grass so yeah they all seem very happy and it's been quite experienced actually it's quite fun staying up watching the cows I mean I feel quite I feel quite alive actually quite awake [Music] foreign s have demolished an old field boundary so dry Stone Waller Nicholas mcalvenor if we've come to give Stewart a much needed Helping Hand dry Stone walling's the sort of skill that every farmer would have because he'd patched the small bits himself but for the bigger jobs you'd have laborers who've worked up particular Specialties some were Hedges and ditches some would have been dry Stone walnuts so it was one of the ways in which they earned a bit of money to pay the rent my principles are Stone warning are basically you've got random shapes and you're trying to fit them together into a kind of solid form you know interlocking much the same as a jigsaw puzzle in fact I used to do loads of jigsaw puzzles as a child and I attribute that to being able to do stone walls now yeah other way up you're holding a three-dimensional shape in your head you see a gap and you're looking around for that stone and one way or another you recognize it as soon as you as you spot it and it slots in there quite easily big ones for the air you can't do that one there this one no beyond that one with the layers in strata yeah in the Valley's farmyard Ruth and Chloe continue with their spring clean their first task today is changing the beds 400 years ago and the very very rich had sort of marvelous Ida down and then lower down it was other sorts of feather beds or feather mattresses flock or wool for sort of most sort of farming farmers and then right at the bottom for servants laborers that sort of person cheapest of all was hay and straw of course at the end of the winter it smells frankly sort of thirsty isn't it a bit musty and parasites have you know have a chance of building up things like lice if you're not careful actually only been here a couple of weeks before I got I got quite badly bitten around my knees anywhere my skin was in contact with the um with the mattress it was really nasty actually but 400 years ago there were things you could do to try and stop bugs invading your bed it helps to keep the insects at Bay to use insecticides in your hay otherwise known as herbs there's quite a number of herbs that have quite strong anti-insect properties because this is unimproved pastures no chemicals gone on it lots of different species grow in amongst the grass including ladies bed straw and it's something that helps with insects and also helps with the smell it's got a really nice fresh smell that lasts well pretty much all year dry stone walls weren't the only way of securing the field boundary hedge laying was a quicker option but where Hedges require regular maintenance stone walls at a much more permanent solution and the materials needed are quite literally lying around on the fields waiting to be cleared once you've brought your stones in off the field you've put them up into a stable shape you've got yourself a wall which a barrier which is going to keep your stock out for probably about 150 to 200 years maybe with a little bit of Maintenance where cows try to get over or trees come down or something but really it should be a stable block right swinging straight in there sir there's two sorts of dry stone wall that you find around in the country these days some of the really ancient ones which go Way Way Back certainly back to the 1620s and these tend to be small Fields curved walls but you shouldn't confuse those with sort of massive lengths that you get across the middle of the Yorkshire Dales which are all Victorian or 18th century enclosure walls from The Acts of parliament when they carved up the Fells makes you realize the mattresses are shaping up well back in the reign of James the first there were no easy care duvets but they weren't exactly sleeping rough they're quite comfortable as long as you put enough hay in them you don't put enough hay in they tend to go very flat very quickly they do this and you end up with with um holes sort of under your balm and under your shoulders and or wherever what point you lie on and right ready go yeah mine's going all the way up ready ah fantastic wriggle up well that's not bad wake me up when it's dinner time oh this is so comfy down in Triangle field the root bonfires have worked a treat smoldering down to a fine Ash now it just needs spreading around putting some goodness back into the soil as recommended by the farming manuals of the time 's Markham affects reference to doing this if you want to turn a field over from kind of heathland of course they would have known back then that the ash is ideal for turning these kind of acidic soils into the kind of soils that we'll need to grow our peas in it's not a project I'll enter into lightly again I think [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] marks a special day in the valley with a brand new addition to the farm team after weeks of anxious waiting Duchess has finally given birth yeah last night Duchess escaped birth to a calf a book off it was a horrible night last night lots of hail lots of wind we call this this beautiful new calf you forget how small they are very black so uh quite hard to see in a Black Cow Shed at night that just seems to be um good she's been resting she's been eating I think she's probably eager to get out it's a beautiful day out there beautiful spring day and um it was a beautiful day to be born actually as of yet we haven't decided our name for him uh my guess would be big ears [Music] we'll think of something foreign [Music] with the first section of wall finished Nick and Stewart begin the next laying the foundations is the most important task all the big base stones have to be precisely maneuvered into position the tools of the trade be basic I probably haven't changed for hundreds of years you lump hammer for just compounding the the soil around but also just breaking off your blocks and making sure everything's seated down so your basic lump of metal and then the iron bar which is probably the most valuable tool because with that you can move anything up to five six times your own weight and maneuver Stones where you just break your back otherwise so for me if I had to choose one tool it would be the iron bar for the wolf here we have a modern day brickies Hammer it's very good for just doing the final little dressings and adjustments the stones if there's a fiddly bits or breaking a bit off there now this is a hammer head which I found underneath some flagstones in The Tudor house not far from here at all and it hasn't really changed in design over the period as you can see the weight and the profiles are exactly the same and they would have done exactly the same job now the Tradesman that lost this would have cursed important as these tools all are the most important ones are your hands down in Triangle field the next job is muck spreading Alex and Fonz have brought in Blackthorne to shift the compost on their convertible hay Sledge well that's it how many points at the back okay you just want to hold a steady I've just got some off cuts of wood that I'm going to lay down as planks on our hay Sledge to turn it into a makeshift dunkart Farms of the period much bigger ones a lot more wearable they would have had a probably a dung box out on the back of a sledge that should be a good enough platform for us to put our dung on after mucking out the Cow Shed over winter the team have built up a decent sized dung Heap to fertilize their fields good girl come on okay it's going up there slowly now we don't want it going all the way just nice and easy so we're dealing here with about a quarter to half a ton of stone and we're just two bars we've been able to lift the thing up put it more or less exactly where we want we'll just see right it's moving to me do you want to study it on the other side and slow it down get a bit more leverage on this now lent's over and people 400 years ago kept to it much more rigorously than people tend to do these days a whole new diet arrives partly because we've stopped fasting but um perhaps more importantly just because the Turning of the year there's different food stuffs available so it's a completely different diet to what we've been eating thank goodness we've got lots of fresh spring stuff from the garden we've got young veal um we've got lots and lots of milk products and indeed loads of eggs the chickens are laying nicely now Chloe's going to make us a salad she's got some chives sorrel salad Burnette and smallage out of the garden which has come nice and I'm going to start off with a custard so I'm using up all these lovely eggs I think that'll probably be enough and I've got loads of cream and some of the morning's milk custard was a really popular dish 400 years ago just as it is now really I'm just going to flavor it with a little dash of rose water which is um distilled water with the essence of Damascus roses I suppose in a modern one you'd use vanilla but rose water was a much more popular condiment I'll whisk it all up and I'm going to pop it in some little tart I baked the cases blind already in the oven so once I've popped this in it'll just take 20 minutes half an hour a nice cool oven to set the custard that's it and whoa whoa whoa whoa that's cool Alex and fonz's hay Sledge come done card seems to be doing the job but it's going to take plenty of trips with Blackthorn to cover the whole field with a rich layer of fertilizer just go in there in fact it's in a bit of a problem in the course of a day you reckon on doing about six yards of stone wool which isn't that much to look at but it all adds up over the course of a week or two you can get a lot of satisfaction from working with the stones especially when you have a productive period maybe for a few hours everything's just slotting in nicely you've got some good Stone and it's all fitting in together in two days Stuart and Nick have replaced about eight meters of stone wall making the boundary between the top Orchard and the main field once again secure the rest of the eggs I'm going to use to make a tansy which is a bit like an omelette really and it gets its name from the herb which I've gathered out the garden here I want to get just the juice out of it and I'm not going to use a huge amount people 400 years ago knew that it was slightly toxic and indeed used it medicinally because of that because in a high quantity it can drive the worms out of your gut you know if you've got worms in your own body that should be bruised now I'm just going to squeeze the juice out and let it drop into the eggs I'm just going to whisk this up and then put it to one side we'll fry it in butter just before dinner team I'm just seeing a big change of diet the coming of spring is having another profound effect yeah with with the longer evenings and the earlier mornings where you've got so much more time in daylight that the whole your whole mood changes you become so much more optimistic I can imagine how 400 years ago it must have just been such a difference to the to the feeling and the way you work you feel you have more energy and just more Drive generally it's been hard work for Fonz and Alex spreading the muck on their soon to be sowed pea bed the black phone has done the trick for them they're on their Sixth and last muck run it's quite hard to get the Dome up and down especially if we were doing it manually that takes a long time I mean each each done done cartwheel is probably about about eight wheelbarrow loads so that's uh eight trips we don't have to make London platform forward and whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa that's it good girl good girl April was a common time for a farmer to set aside one of his calves for Slaughter providing rennet and veal today's main meal I'm going to slice this up into lots of thin little um steaks or you know escalops I suppose if you're being Posh and then we're going to sear them called carbonadoing and it's very similar to sort of barbecuing frankly oh you can hear that can't you smell it and see if I can loosen it and turn it with the fire up to heat and the coals flattened to make a good cooking bed the carbonado Deville and tansy omelet are looking good oh Lord it is green look at it yeah it is isn't it there we go fantastic [Music] yeah go on sit down I'm nearly there [Music] after a good spring clean the team are dining in a nicely spruced up farmhouse triangle field is well on the way the stone walls are intact and as summer draws on they now have a new calf to look after yeah so it's very much like Barbie yeah I think they're much better without sugar yeah it's funny isn't it you know you sort of modern things I put sugar on absolutely everything well after that I have to say this is a absolute feast [Music] next time in the valley it's May and flowers and Blossom fill the Farm's Meadows [Music] to be ready for spring sowing this harrowing is working like a dream the team tried their hand at charcoal burning time to get busy making butter [Music] foreign [Music] 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 as weather warms so we can start moving Timber and 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 pea 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 funds we had decided after we'd put all the 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 field and do some poo-picking and this horse knew that we put on this field this is the sort of stuff that people kill for for their roses this is a replica forter otherwise known as a breastplow and I've been really looking forward to getting into grips with this thing it's fairly heavy fairly robust funds 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 um 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 you 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 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] 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 plowing is tricky work this is really just a glorified Spade I love it's called a breastplow I'm actually finding but 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 Barrow yet and it's proving to be quite difficult oh [Music] charcoal burning was a specialist craft the professionals would travel from place to place to play 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 infantries 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 the whole normal system of life it may be slow and laborious work but it's also highly skilled requiring diligent attention a little lovely accounting one of the Icelandic sagas um The grafenkel Saga I think where there was I believe a man fell asleep while making charcoal it all caught fire and the 80 square miles of forest was burnt down there's not only three small Woods left in Iceland spoke to the Saga was about who should pay for the damage the chimney flew 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 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 study study study I does not want to stand still this morning does she no she's really jittery I was trying to sweat just following her around not a bad yield yeah 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's hot before you know it you've got 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 Alex's breast plowing technique has picked up speed [Music] once the charcoal pile is complete it just needs a bucket of Embers to get it lit if to build the biggest tax could involve up to 30 were 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 a bit more hot chocolate in we go ow is that the knot with the chimney lid period sources recommended 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 smolders spread it round try and pack it in a little bit but not too tight at this stage better than your average toupee yeah that is [Music] a new May morning time for Alex and Fonz to get the last of the furrows in and start sewing their pea crop we're really tough that now it resembles a field of sorts even though it's 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 are on sewing they're a 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 tave up from the evening and the morning milking obviously you can only keep it so long juve's 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 about the last bit nice fantastic actually quite a lot of cream off that one with enough cream skimmed off Ruth and Chloe can start the hard work of beating it in a butter churn foreign 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 it's beginning to thicken I can feel it beginning to get a bit heavier oh that's definitely starting to thicken there's no 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 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 awkward 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 that's just beautiful isn't it really 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 plus of good charcoal here what do you reckon 30 40 maybe even 50 50 you reckon yeah because there's quite a bit gone down between the sticks it's not bad at all there's some good charcoal in the middle 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 little separation starts to happen there we go can you hear that it's quite a different 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 in funds really excited now this may look like a piece of rusty iron but this is in fact a plow chef from 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 feeding 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 padded the butter is ready for eating but without Refrigeration most of it would have been salted to preserve it 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 recovering our pays but it's allowing the oxygen to get in so they can breathe awesome 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 that let's run it down the bottom again [Music] illustrations of the period asked me to pick horses pulling these arrows but yeah there's a nightmare when we brought Black Thorn in here to do the mark spreading that we decided that we'd do it ourselves and use the both of us and in fact it's really quite light and really easy so I think we've saved ourselves ahead of a lot of time foreign [Applause] [Music] has been a reasonable success I get him some really nice stuff coming out of here there should be enough to fill at least a couple of sacks the pints of charcoal vary but generally you're talking about a Shillings sack for which was about a day's wages at the time some charcoal burning of course had very unsafe adaptations particularly 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 crops 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 blackthorn's 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 platted or woven the horse hair 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 that 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 onto the end here onto the Hazel and the simple reason is by the time the Hazel gets this thin it's actually dangerously breakable um 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 Paynes 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 ropes kept dry at all times it can last incredible amount of time um 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 watering 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 isn't amazing Chloe is using a similar technique feeding and twisting straw to make a basket domestically these baskets are enormously useful beehives log baskets laundry baskets and they're so easy to make they use materials from the farm it's 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 beginning to learn it aren't we the feel and the idea of it in the Farms Hall Stewart is rustling up some period fare 400 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 collopen eggs collops 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 [Music] 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 the actual rope to be made when I've Twisted sort of threads to me tassels and cords and things I've sort of just Twisted Twisted it in my fingers um but this is much easier up [Laughter] down on a nearby River full of seasonally jumping salmon Alex and fans can try out their period fishing tackle a local fisherman Robin Coleman is offering a few handy tips certain 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 horse head 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 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 is 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 props what was up with it then 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 didn't think of them 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 never thought of you've got rose water as the flavoring agent so here we go the main ingredients are a good job of fresh cheese splash of cream some eggs handful of currants some butter and a luxury item of the period Brown powdered sugar 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 um 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 the luck still no catches down on the river but for Fonz and Alex it's a well-deserved rest do you think there 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 um probably not so good as they are today of Landing one of actually Landing it right yeah 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 funds 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 but [Music] [Applause] [Music] we've gone over everything the boys may have failed to bring home a giant salmon but old-fashioned bacon and eggs makes for a hearty supper yeah [Applause] like you've never seen it before the valley team have triumphed over the mainspring 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 did you have a good day yeah 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 the main reason for fishing was to avoid his wife that you didn't get on with foreign next time in the valley it's June time to wash the sheep for shearing [Music] there's cheese making in the dairy [Music] first of all the mid-summer rebels [Applause] [Music] it's June already in our 10th month here on the farm 400 years ago a farmer's wife and the maids would have been switching their main Dairy production from butter towards cheese it was also a time of year when many parishes up and down the country sort of had a party or sort of mid-summer festivals of one sort or another and we should be doing the same we're gonna have a great big bonfires outside the most important project however 400 years ago at this time of year was shearing sheep because that was people's main cash crop [Music] the warmer weather makes June an ideal time to share the Sheep but the first task for Stuart Alex and Fons is to give their flock of Cotswolds a good old wash at the local stream which means getting as wet as the animals [Music] each Cotswold sheep weighs in at about 50 kilos and waterlogged they become even heavier I overdo it here we're not using any soap products or anything just using the stream water and it's just bringing the dust out of the wool you know just giving it so well in my hands to it try not to get bitten by the Flies as well this is well documented in a period I mean this is the ideal way to wash your sheep really you've got running water it's lovely and clean I think this size nearly done you never said maybe this one what we're aiming to do here is get the worst of the mess off while they've still got the fleece on them so that when they come to Shear it's going to be a lot cleaner and it dries a lot better when it's still on the sheet let's imagine you've got this enormous 10 pound woolly jumper rolled in a ball it's never going to dry out okay get my ah yeah that was quick June was a key time on farms for cheese production the perfect excuse for Ruth and Chloe to cool off in the dairy milk changes through the year it's all to do with the grass that the cows are eating so back in May they were producing really really rich creamy milk which made fantastic butter but now the grass has changed um and we're finding that we're getting higher casein levels which makes great cheese but it's not quite so good for butter so there's a sort of seasonality in Dairy things the milk mixed with cream needs to be warmed to body temperature rather than putting it over a fire it's simpler just to add some warm water and then to turn this milk into cheese we have to use a sort of magic ingredient really called rennet which 400 years ago was made from the stomach of a young calf one that hadn't eaten grass yet so very young so the first couple of weeks of life and they would have slaughtered a one calf in the spring chosen one to to sacrifice really to make cheese for the rest of the year the carved stomach would be cleaned and salted gradually the enzymes inside would turn the fluids into rennet which curdles milk there were alternatives to rennet but they were not commonly used there are vegetarian options like Nettles lemon juice vinegar you can use as well all of which will will turn the milk you get a lower yield it's not as actually as cost effective in the end so it's a bit of a false economy but obviously it means you don't have to kill your calf in a Dairy of the period you'd have cheeses at all different stages the rennet's been working on this one overnight and we've got some nice separation into the solid and the liquid the curds in the way and we've got some already dripping some that are pretty much ready to go into a press [Music] halfway through the day and Alex funds and Stewart are doing well four sheep washed two to go [Music] these guys are very tricky customers they know what's coming well they seem to enjoy it once they're in this is Monty I'd love a hand he knows what's in store for him now yeah he knows the score okay let's go don't put your Hooves there do you want a hand strain that last bit I think so I've got all I can out like with these puddles if I hold the cloth do you want to yeah I'll lift it okay once the curds and whey have separated and been turned the solids need to be gathered in muslin tied up and then left to drain here we go now if you grab those two sides so it doesn't spill sideways right where where's this one going to go straight up straight up there sorry oh my Lord got it thank you it's been hard going down at the Sheep washing pond but Alex Fonz and Stewart have managed to get the job done and limit their injuries to just a few bruises now they can relax with a period potion sheep washers posset there's a farmer up in Yorkshire chap called Henry best who is writing a book of instruction for his sons in the early 1600s on how to run the farm and he says that when you're doing the Sheep washing around about the middle of the day the guy's been standing out there he's done 60 sheep already and he's freezing himself to death out there so you fill him up with this concoction hot milk poured into a hail and then add in breadcrumbs nutmeg and enough pepper that it tastes hot now I've got a nasty feeling with this one I've over spiced it a little bit you could be anesthetized well enough to do another 60 sheep after one of those this is bad I'm not a fan of sheep shearing was it posit ship washing sheep washing yes there isn't a sheep shearing poster I thought this is an ordeal another bright June day in the valley [Music] are you trying are you just about ready with that one um pretty much yeah um the sheep have dried out overnight which means Alex Stewart and Fonz can press ahead with the shearing it's something they've never done before using old-fashioned hand shears means their main challenge will be to avoid cutting off more than just wool these days it will take a specialist hand Shearer about an hour to Shear a sheep we've got six sheep so I very much doubt it's going to take us six hours because we're gonna have to try and get into the groove okay phones which is the first proverbial land to the slaughter then Roper shoes quite close got it yep yep so we got our first victim here we're going to start the ass end because that's where the wool sort of naturally peels away from the the body of the sheep well these sheep are big very big and they're strong so I think it's going to be a day of pain are we ready to go I think we are it's actually not that easy to know kind of know where to start not bits coming off I very very much doubt this is all going to come off in one piece like a flea so I very much suspect it's going to be bits and Bobs you should be able to feel the difference uh yeah I can I know what you mean I know what you mean of course the sources give us the great advice of the good sheep Shearer will share a sheep well and a bad sheep Shearer will share a sheep badly however we do know and the new world's got this sort of yellow Hue and slightly more springy so you should be able to see a break and also feel a break with the shears in the dairy Ruth and Chloe start the day by getting on to the next stage of cheese production why or rather like that you know the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet sat on a tougher eating her curdsom way actually that rhyme comes from about this time Dr Muffet was a her father was a famous um doctor in the early 17th century anyway once it's separated this one's been dripping overnight and it's mostly dry that is cottage cheese um you don't have to do anything else to it you can eat it straight away this one we always intended to use that way so I actually put some herbs in it to give it a bit of flavor if you wanted to keep cheese however then you need to make hard cheeses that won't go off and you'll be able to eat them all through the year then and for that you need a cheese press like this one here which is just sort of a barrel with holes in the bottom the press needs to be lined with muslin the solid curds plopped in and then Ruth can squeeze out the last of the watery way so to make something that's a bit like cheddar or Cheshire that will keep all the air it's literally just a matter of pressing long enough and hard enough and I'll just pop a weight on that now and the last bit away will quietly be squeezed out June was the big month for sheep shearing if you went any earlier in the year then you had the danger that the weather would turn cold and if you could imagine running around in midwinter with no clothes on at all it's very much like that for a sheep you only got to look at the thickness of wool that's coming off there in that Pelt to see what a difference it's going to make to their insulation if you go any later in the air then the Sheep are naturally going to shed that winter coat so they're down to their fresh summer growth nowadays when the fleece is worth less than the cost of actually shearing the Sheep you're still seeing Farmers doing the shearing because of the animal welfare side of things but in the 17th century the wool is the big money earner while shearing went on there would usually be a pot of Stockholm tar bubbling away ready to dab onto any Nicks yeah I've got a couple of Nicks there's one there's one there just in there yeah as well he's very tiny little tiny one Stuart yup you got that is that tar ready yeah we're nice and warm it's got a couple of Nicks there's a tall seals have a look we've got a couple in here the tar was like a period antiseptic and plaster it's sealed up Cuts preventing flies from getting in and laying maggots to me starting to look like a Dalmatian Now isn't she I'm gonna turn out the uh cheese that we've had in the Press overnight and see what kind of state it's in 400 years ago it would have been the decision of the dairy Maids or the farmer or the farmer's wife what kind of cheese they wanted whether they wanted a hard cheese or a softer Brie Camembert type cheese which would obviously take less time in the Press um so this one has come up very nicely actually obviously the shape of the press is making an imprint because it really is starting to look like the ones you buy in a big round from the supermarket it's still quite crumbly like a cottage cheese but it's lost a lot of the liquid still tastes horrible but I think with the maturing if we leave it for a bit it will gain quite a nice flavor at the time it was reckoned that a Clipper could she a 60 sheep in a day so far Alex and Fons have managed four the first sheet we did took a while to get into it but easy sped up something chronic now which is good for me because I'm having to straddle these sheep which gets quite sweaty especially in these Bridges but now I've got a technique going where I'm kind of going with the Contour I'm not coming in at different angles so I'm much more confident Alex will whiz through here and when you get to the face and the ears and the eyes yeah and especially underneath it just takes so much longer because it's so intricate and when you start snooping around the near the regions they go nuts yeah not happy oh their Monty wasn't too bothered sheep shearing was one of those events when all the communities sort of came together particularly on the big Estates to work at one particular job for just one day Henry best who left us a good account of sheep shearing practices up in Yorkshire described how one of his neighbors used to hire a bagpiper who'd play for all the shearers and then at the end of the day he'd organize a feast where he'd Slaughter one of the old Hues and have this along with various cakes and other dishes so the people felt they'd really been part of the community not just sort of isolated laborers hired him for the day once the Press has removed all the way hard cheeses like this one can be left to mature you do however have to look after it quite carefully and tender every day really so each day you have to turn it and that's because gravity means that any moisture that's in the cheese will gradually sink to the bottom and if you didn't turn them and just left them one way up they'd get sort of hard and dry and crumbly on the top and sort of a bit soggy in the bottom won't be very nice I've got a bit of a mold or Bloom coming on the surface of this well there's no problem with that because that's going to stay on the surface on on a rind and I'm creating the Rind as I'm turning it by wiping it all over every day with a nice clean cloth that's been just dipped in salt water the Rind is really useful because it protects the inner cheese keeps the moisture in keeps the bacteria out you don't need plastic over it she's a rind of a cheese does that thing for you by the end of a two to three month period we'll have a cheese that is finished and will then keep and store for a year at a time wool was such a valuable commodity back in the 17th century that not even the scraps would have gone to waste they were collected up washed to get rid of that crud and could be used for stuffing pillows and mattresses it was such a poor quality item that quite often the poor would come around at the end of a day shearing begging for a handout and would be given a handful each to go away and add to their next pillows worth the day is getting late but the boys are pressing on determined to get their flock finished the idea that 400 years ago they were doing 60 in a day is pretty daunting Prospect however the Sheep was smaller I'm having to break barely frequently now this is my back just bending over and getting round it's really starting to starting to Creak and the other thing is the hand as well doing that relentlessly Not only was the money from fleeces one of the key incomes for the farmers at the time but it was also probably the greatest of the national exports and quality fleeces such as the ones we're getting from these Cotswolds would have made things like broadcloths which would have then been almost entirely sold to Rich Foreigners for their Posey clothing [Music] cheese oh I do hope it tastes as good as it looks I'm so proud of it so far aren't those presses wonderful things [Music] the end of a long day and with all their sheep sheared Fonz and Alex can recover with the jug of homemade beer geez successful day sharing well yeah apart from the aches and the pains I have to admit my hands really hurt now we started getting pretty quick didn't we yeah that was good definitely the person you know is the first one that's a spotted spotted like four or five Nicks on that one leg didn't think we'd get them all done today to be honest it's been there it's been fairly exhausting but it means you don't have to get up early to do them tomorrow no so we have a bit of a line tomorrow hopefully we've had a fantastic day haven't we yeah loads of wool loads of War went in doing something as well which um maybe never get the chance to do again um which is which is fantastic really to yeah and I do feel after dealing with after sharing the six of them I do not an expert but I feel like well you know that's something something I could do and and if I was you know stuck on this Farm 400 years ago I stand a fair chance of getting a fairly decent fleece off them so yeah I mean we're just getting so used to all the animals on the farm and the Sheep are really quite low maintenance as well they seem to hang out just in the top of the field wander down once in a day for a drink water yeah foreign [Music] oh yeah fantastic [Music] today's an exceptional day in the valley the team are going to celebrate mid-summer after Christmas it was one of the biggest festivals in the calendar which means getting an early start with the cooking I'm making a much bigger meal today we've got a lot of people coming over for a party so we should be making socks and wine with the bread and some wine we should be making elderflower fritters with the elderflowers from the hedgerows we've also got mutton um it's a sensible time of year for people to kill an older sheep who's no longer really much useful after you've shared or got the last crop of wool offer and we should be eating two of her back legs we're making um one boiled and one into meatballs shaped like pears and then we've got some white pots which are cream and rice using a lot of our Dairy produce at the moment including a cottage cheese um what else oh lots and lots and lots of salad sort of things out of the garden which is absolutely overflowing at the moment could you pop that in the big leg needs to boil for a couple of hours with the bone yeah yes the other bone would be nice give a bit more flavor foreign with the sheep shearing done Alex steweden fawns need to tackle another urgent seasonal task weeding the wheat crop that they sowed last September [Music] strikes me as how the height has changed in Grain over the last 400 years this is already pushing about four foot against me and when it finishes it'll be about five or six feet high at the period you get occasional references to losing small cows just disappear in the middle of a green field you can't actually see them the modern wheat quite often it's down to about two foot these days because they just look on all that stem as waste and they rather put the nutrients into the heads in the modern varieties 400 years ago the long stems had a number of uses from making straw rope to thatching for this task I've uh consulted period documents to build my my weeding sticks which comprise of a hook here and a fork the idea is I just rest the hook behind the weed and then Spirit down with the fork and just give it a yank and that should pull the roots out as this site is kept as it was 400 years ago no pesticides have been used so that also means you get all the wild flowers growing and all the weeds because one man's weed is another man's wild flower we're getting around 16 hours of sunlight a day and we're always outside doing stuff it's been amazing for the mood I mean everyone's just really upbeat it's such a contrast to Winter foreign [Music] for the main dish of today's celebrations Ruth is following a rather special period recipe we're following is from a book by a chat called Thomas Dawson the good housewife's Jewel and he published the first part in 1596. it's quite an unusual one to make pears to be boiled in meat we take a piece of leg of mutton which we've got here all veal being mixed with a little of sheep's suet which is what Chloe's doing taking four raw egg yolks then take a little Thyme and parsley chop small a few gooseberries which I've been working on here put all these together being seasoned with salt and saffron cloves beaten and brought together it's starting to smell really nice the mixture here I can really smell the gooseberries coming out it's lovely then make rolls or balls like to a pear and when you have done so take the stalk of the sage and put it into the ends of your pears or balls and that's going to then be sort of like simmered in broth so they're going to look like well it's supposed to look like a fruit but they're actually made out of meat quite often in these period recipes making one thing look like another is a sort of common theme what do you want these shirt these are the two Steward Alex and Fonz are preparing a bonfire the centerpiece for the rebels Ronald Hutton is a leading expert on the customs of the time [Music] he has returned to the valley to help them ReDiscover the joys of mid-summer revelry one of the vital traditional rules of mid-summer is that it faces one of the most dangerous times of the year now this sounds absurd these days what it actually faces as the school holidays but July and August were an absolutely Dreadful time traditionally for insects which means you get plague you get typhus you get malaria it's also a time when human Raiders are most able to get in the seas and the high roads which means that so you have to face people coming to Studio chickens ride their horses for your crops lift your sheep your cattle your horses and with all these dangers and Prospects Midsummer is an opportunity to try and protect yourself magically against all these threats and fire is the great resource to do it ever since the Old Stone Age fire is what you use cheers and so symbolically like whacking great fire a sacred fire you carry fire around your dwellings you leap over the fire to protect yourself from that way you stash in the good luck to try and ward off all the horrors to come in the next two months until the first Frost of Autumn Drive those fears back where they should be thank you interestingly mid-summer is one of those festivals that has virtually no Christian connotations they hijacked all the other good ones like Easter and Christmas but some reason they seem to have left out mid-summer and you get a lot of activities as well as the fires and jumping through them ritually you've got all the garlanding of the young ladies and the houses which has very little to do with the sort of Christian tradition it's nice to be doing something else in this field other than running around and chasing sheep I think which seemed to be very disobedient I think we ought to cook one tonight be nice the lamp pears just need cooking over the fire but there's still a great deal left to prepare for tonight boiled up some cream and a little bit of sugar and some other spices to sweeten it mace as soon as it came off the fire we poured in a load of um rice one not a load a little bit of rice and that has caused us part cooked part sort of soaked as it's cooled down this just needs now some four egg yolks and two whole eggs and then a little sprinkle of brown sugar on top and we'll send it off to be baked so that it Browns up nicely it's sort of like the 17th century equivalent of well I suppose halfway between a baked custard and a rice pudding [Music] the sun is down time to let the midsummer Revels begin the tradition was for a great crowd from the surrounding villages to come and enjoy the hospitality okay why don't you can do the honors thank you very much upon this vigil of Saint Peter I liked this good fire for the happiness health and well-being of our community that it may Purge the air of all unwholesome Vapors [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and one two three start the sheer power of the fire brings home to you this wonderful thrilling emotive effect it has I believe you actually can burn away all this Fortune all evil all threats from the air just the Sparks are flying all around you you're literally are lighting up the night that's your creation you've done it warmed by the fire the revelers can gorge themselves on a 17th century style feast fancy one of those what is with you having one oh should I share one with you oh yeah we'll stick one in my plate down here and we'll share one what do you think Rock Cakes I tried my best give it a go they taste pretty good all right good very good smell nice they're all lovely yeah are you enjoying Henrietta tonight as you did in life laughs [Music] [Applause] it's the height of Summer on the farm but for our team the hardest work still lies ahead I'm in the Valley it's July the weather's hotting up time to bring in the New Harvest from the garden [Music] the team quite literally make hay while the sun shines to be done [Music] it's July and it's our 11th month working on the farm 400 years ago they would have been entering the busiest period of the year Harvest Time two months of solid labor we've got the first of the soft fruit ready to bring in red currants white currants and of course gooseberries now that Summer's here and the weather's warmed up a lot it's good weather conditions to get out and get some of that laundry done the grass is ripening nicely out in the fields and at the period this would have been a time when it was crucial to get the grass cut made into hay and back into the barns baby July's biggest challenge will be cutting down all the hay in the meadow Tim Kohler of English nature who's been hey harvesting by hand for over a decade has come to help Stuart Alex and Fons I thought it's just like synchronized swimming Plum or something trying to grow in the middle the blue bells of spring are now long gone and the grass has flourished on this Upland pasture there are a number of ways you can tell whether the crops ready to cut or not it's not so much a matter of how high it is but you've got to look at the rightness of the crop this is hay rattle you see it's got these very papery capsules and when those are drying the seeds are starting to fall out that's one way of selling that the haze about ready to cut and you can look at some of this other seed heads as well this is a sweet Vernal grass and you can see that again it's got all papery and dry and when the seeds start to drop out of that that's when this stem starts to die off and then you lose a lot of the goodness out of the hay at that point Harvest time is a job when everybody gets stuck in it's not just the farmer and his servants but this is the time when you start to employ the laborers because you've got to make use of the good weather to get it down while you can without a successful hay Harvest there would be no fodder to feed the Farm's livestock there's no artificial Foods at all for the animals in this period so if they can't keep them going in the winter when there's no grazing for the animals they'll lose the animals over the winter [Music] thank you [Music] July brings the farm Garden into full bloom everything is blossoming the period Gooseberry bushes are doing specially well so Ruth and Chloe are busy picking people are a bit ambiguous really about fruit in the period fresh fruit of course you know can give you the runs really if you eat too much of it all at once particularly if you've gone without for a while and people sort of confused the sort of diarrhea that that gives you with the sort of diarrhea that kills people all the flux or the bloody flux they used to call it um so many of the um manuals have appeared the sort of Health manuals give advice that you should only eat cooked fruit and particularly children should be kept off all raw fresh fruit that you know they should sort of wait till they're about 10 and then a bit of well-boiled Apple you know to be safe we've got several different period varieties of gooseberries out here red and green and the green were riper earlier in the year we use those for the pears in meat for the June Revels I actually prefer the red ones now but um the big fat juicy green ones that we had earlier were lovely there's lots of period recipes for gooseberries Gooseberry fall turns up in loads of books and so do various Tarts and pies and sources for things like fish as well particularly sort of a smoked and pickled fishes which I suppose they'd make quite a nice so yeah well they're sort of nice and tart aren't they a bit like um cranberries oh dear look I burst that one it's probably about it now isn't it yeah fully enough I'm gonna do those beans okay Fonz and Alex have never done a hay Harvest using period tools before and it's taking time to perfect their technique I started off with a rather clumsy quick eating Style full of defensive but it's slowly changing into a kind of sand wedge just really trying to keep the blade as close to the ground as possible and parallel to the ground and get a nice clean sweep it's quite an effective little tool the idea is I've got to spread the hay out as Loosely as possible so the sort of The Wider the prongs before greater the spread and when it's spread out like that it should dry quicker come close to losing a couple of Limbs standing behind this man when he first started I had to do a Scottish dance around his sword right side back in March the team sewed some beans in the garden four months later and they're just beginning to sprout these are our Martock field beans goes right back to Medieval Times this variety and most of them of course you grow out in the field and then leave them in the pots until they dry out actually on the plant and harvest them as a dried Bean but I'm just having a few here first few young beans that are developing in order to have some fresh they're fresh they're more like a sort of a broad Bean really quite nice and dry they're really nice for all the year in sort of soups and stews pottages it's the old term or you can soak them and boil them and then re-fry them in butter and onions that's my favorite way unless it gives you wind but other than that no they're still yet a bit small aren't they they are a bit Yeah quite sweet when they're actually online it's amazing the difference in the garden now it was uh it was so bare and Bleak in January it was just miserable there was nothing growing except a few measly cabbages and now this looks like a jungle in here almost you're right are they finding any well I've got about four or five where it's a bit early for them isn't it after five hours of siding the boys are about a third of the way through their two acre hay Meadow farming manuals of the period reckon that an experienced mower would be able to clear this Meadow in a single day oh now in the lower back hmm that's the thing you're using as a pivot don't you guys in the reign of James the first hay mowers were paid about 10 pennies a day happens more than a farm laborer normally received but it was a long day from about five in the morning to sundown with just an hour for lunch it's not like cheers awesome it's just an ordinary you start drinking that strongly you have your legs off cutting around out there [Music] these Apothecary roses it's just smell fantastic they're um a very ancient variety Rosa Gallagher really um beautiful beautiful scent they don't last long you only get them for a couple of weeks and there's no repeat flowering which is why you know people have read modern roses the main use for roses was in rose water which you can use for cooking um as a flavoring ingredient but also in cosmetics both for its smell and sometimes also with crushed petals for the color medicinally be made into little cakes with sugar for headaches rose cakes and then you might also eat petals just straight in a salad again they sort of were thought at the time to help to sort of lighten the spirits lighten the mood a sort of period antidepressant [Music] as evening draws in the boys still have hours of work ahead but the long summer days mean they can pack in plenty more siding [Music] foreign July day in the valley time for Ruth and Chloe to get to grips with one of the major tasks for a 17th century farmer's wife doing the laundry there was no washing powder as such so the process has to start with making your own your own detergent we're making lye that's it we've got stones in the bottom of this bucket which has got like little holes in Chloe's putting some straw in on top and that's going to act as a filter and then the main ingredient the active ingredient really is wood ash that we've collected from our fire we've sifted it so we've got a plain white clean Ash the ash produces a strong Alkali which helps dissolve any grease in the laundry and clean the chimney and it's now it's been sat there waiting for us to use it um it's fantastic we can just reuse everything on the farm to transform this concoction into a 17th century style washing liquid they need plenty of water from the well and just strain it through very slowly just dribble it through don't want it all in one big bush okay I'm gonna go just slowly we're getting some kind of coming through now beautiful yeah so you don't want it to go too fast because you know it actually picks up more sort of chemical content if it goes through slow after several days of sun Stuart Alex and Fonz returned to the haymeadow to begin the next process turning the cut grass I never know where I've spread it you know you sort of move it around and then some of it's actually quite Green in the news yeah haymaking is basically desiccation of the hay drying it out so all the chemical and biological action in its ceases spread the hair out right across the field so it dries out as well as possible all the period illustrations the woodcuts of people haymaking show a blazing sun often very stylized in the background to make that point so you literally make hay while the sun shines foreign Ruth and Chloe's period washing liquid is shaping up sort of a green yellow color you believe Ruth when she told me it was going to go that color because I thought it would just come out the sort of gray mush color that the ashes it's amazing the smell it's incredibly strong it smells like boiled laundry when you leave your laundry in the dryer for too long out in the meadow the Summer sun is still beating down I think this has got to be my favorite field when we got here in September they'd uh they finished the hay Harvest so it completely moaned down didn't look like much but now we've seen it you know growing it's been covered in snow we've had a snowball fight here and now we we get to spend all day here doing the hay Harvest it's not particularly physically stressful but it's weird getting the technique time for Ruth and Chloe to start the washing some clothes and linen sheets we're going to do a great big wash 400 years ago most people probably did you know sort of little bit day by day just to keep ticking over and then a big wash say about once a month but if however they found something was really stained they couldn't just go out and buy a bar of vanish what they used was their own urine that had been fermented so it turns into ammonia and we've got a bucket down here that's been sitting around for about three weeks honks to high heaven that apron actually's got quite a nasty grass stain so anywhere that's got stains on it you just dip that little bit of stain into the fermented urine and then that should bleach it out saying just hook it in and leave it leave it there yeah you don't have to put your hands in it too much we're just going to pull the light over all this really greasy stuff right just slowly it was possible to make bars of washing soap by boiling up the lye with animal fat and salt and we'd also there's a possibility in 1620s that you might actually be breaking the law Charles the first actually gave the Monopoly on soap to one of his cronies there's a sort of money-making measure so anybody who wanted to make soap technically had to have a license from this person who owned the Monopoly the end of another long day in the meadow the hay Harvest has been a success and so far the team have been lucky with the weather [Music] a new dawn on the farm and with their laundry soaked in lie Ruth and Chloe can head out to a nearby stream for the main wash and rinse [Music] one had running water in their houses so if you've got the sort of a job to do that needs an awful lot of water rather than using you well it makes sense to bring the job to the water so we're taking all this laundry down to the stream where we've got as much water as it possibly need they're quite Hefty we've carried them a fair way now and I think I think we're suffering more than I am how you doing oh I'd be glad to get in that stream yeah warm [Music] on a hot July day it's an opportunity for Ruth and Chloe to have a refreshing paddle still early in the morning and Fonz and Alex are checking on the Pea crop they sowed back in the spring it's been two months now since we sold our pea crop in Triangle field and two months ago we were working pretty much all of the day to clear out the Bracken routes and the Bramble routes from an area within triangle field to plant a peacock in as The Summer's kicked in so the roots and we've got pretty much Bracken everywhere all over the field and brambles pretty much everywhere except thankfully within our pea crop this has been today our most challenging project and it seems the challenge doesn't really stop here we're still having to weed the Pea crop a small amount of bragan has sprouted among the peas but it's nowhere near as big or dense as the growth surrounding the P field all their hard work rushing this waste ground into use seems to have paid off 400 years ago they had taken about three years to turn a bit of waste ground like this into an arable field and what they would have done is a technique called Bracken bruising which is effectively folding Bracken stems over and crushing them and this over a period of time will weed the Bracken out slowly by causing a buildup in toxins in the plant and then that's your problem solved oh God it's cold down at the stream the laundry needs to be dunked and soaked repeatedly and then given a good Bash [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] it looks pretty odd in this beat a little bit lights out of clothing but if you think about it it's just what you do in a modern washing machine and the agitation drives the dirt out of the linen it's violent but it works really well it'd be no good if there were buttons on anything because you'd crush them to bits so all the underwear and all the Linens that are washed in this way are all tied with tapes and fastenings like that rather than hard fastenings don't care [Applause] we often find groups of women at places like this and streams doing their washing together there's a wonderful wood cut of the six places where women were known to gather and gossip and down the stream doing the laundry is one of the ones pictured it's a bit like your modern day going down the laundrette you sort of all meet up down there get your laundry done and then go off home and it's um I say this is a bit nicer really made for a hard task much easier yes it goes much quicker with nobody likes doing their laundry right yeah thank you indoors a Hearty dinner is underway to reward the team's hard work we're into July now and it's the times of Plenty rather than the times of death and we've got a lot of fresh material coming in from the garden now not just the normal green leafy things like lettuce and spinach but also Blues from borage flowers pinks from the rose petals here and fennel with that sort of very filmy sort of appearance it has all of this is going to go into a salad later but the key thing for tonight's meal is beef by July they'd had a couple of prime months in May and June when the grass was growing as fast as it ever does and they were in perfect condition one of the things they were looking for was for the cows to be as fat as possible the fat was actually worth twice as much as the meat as well as being a valuable source of calories animal fats also provided the oils and greases needed in a number of industrial processes oh we've got 15 pounds of beef in these five beef chops and even at a pound of beef a day which was what they were averaging a pound of meat on these Farms that would have been well above the standard ration I'm not at all sure that our crew are going to manage to get through this so we'll probably be eating this cold for the next couple of days as well the recipe I'm cooking today was written down on Monday the 14th of October 1644 and it was in the Diary of a cavalryman during the English Civil War called Richard Simmons and he calls it La poignant source so it should be really tasty one there now that the hay has had a chance to dry out in the meadow Alex and Fonz can rake it up into ready for loading it's good that we laid it out in the Rosen turned it a few times it was just so much easier if it's all out in rows then you know one half's gonna of it's going to get nice and cooked in the sun your piles all seem to be bigger than mine yes the original recipe called for oranges and lemons pricey items at the time but easily affordable to the Gentry and a Gentleman officer like Richard Simmons what I'm going to use is a few of our slightly unripe gooseberries out of the garden which should give it that same sort of citrusy Zing that he was so impressed by in the whole of the Civil War this was the only recipe he ever wrote down with the chops cut they go into a cauldron with plenty of stale beer a dash of rose water some gooseberries and a selection of garden herbs then it just needs to Stew over the fire s they would come in all different shapes and sizes um I'm using it pretty much just like a cricket bat but you use the waste of it to uh to drive the swing onto the laundry seems to be working but it's hard work [Applause] it's amazingly therapeutic [Laughter] I think we lost our Rhythm a bit yeah this was really cool [Applause] go go go go on all right you get first splash the next dish I'm going to do is an icing pudding and this comes from The Good Housewives handmade for the kitchen it's a early 17th century cookery book and we start off with a good dollop there of oatmeal and I've soaked that in hot cream for about three hours pinch of salt and a good pinch of saffron that'll give it a nice yellow color as well as giving it a bit of a flavor it's the most expensive ingredient here everything else very simple stuff that we can bring from around the farm we need a couple of eggs a little bit of chopped suet I'll put some fat in there we're going to boil these in with our beef chops in beer so it's going to soak up all those berry beefy sort of flavors into it now the last thing I need to do is to stuff this mixture into the pudding casings these are just animal intestines they come in various sizes depending on the animal this first one looks like Pig and in she goes making puddings in animals intestines is very traditional a number of modern dishes that have the word pudding in their title like rice puddings and bread puddings started off being cooked in the 17th century in animals intestines just as this is twist in the middle it's finally time to get the hay in so Alex and Fonz have called on their ex-pit Pony Blackthorn to pull the Hazel Edge that's great funds the degree of importance these kind of animals would have had on farms 400 years ago well I just it just can't be underestimated because Blackthorn has proved so useful I mean she she really is she's our tractor she's our trailer she's our Our Land Rover she's pretty much everything on this Farm okay forward forward walk on okay nice smooth run whoa whoa after hours of pummeling Ruth and Chloe can relax a bit and start hanging out the laundry mangles hadn't been invented in the 17th century and obviously not tumble dryers either so to get it dry we first of all need to wring it out and they often use something like this a ringing post um which you can just twist the washing round it means you don't have to have two of you to do it in towns they were often really quite sturdy ones permanently in place sort of as a town convenience there's um really famous engraving of a map of London in the mid Tudor period that shows more fields which were Fields back then and they were put aside for public laundry and the map actually shows the ringing sticks great big fat posts because obviously they've got quite a lot of use [Music] a new one should go and lay these out [Music] 400 years ago it was common for people to spread their laundry on the fields or over bushes to dry and bleach in the Sun but there had to be ever mindful of Thieves who tried to pill for valuable clothing foreign [Music] I'll climb up there the team's first major Harvest has been a long hard earned success now the hay can be stored away above the Cow Shed making sure that it's dried thoroughly is absolutely vital this may look like hay but it's in fact a very dangerous substance if it was wet it would um start decomposing and it generates a lot of heat and obviously the heat mixed with a bit of oxygen a bit of fuel can combust into a fire and then we've lost our Cow Shed which took us so long to build and it's the best part of a couple of months work plus the hay Harvest this is the part I've really been looking forward to because what we're going to do is we're we're actually going to leave this Farm having Built This Barn put a roof on it thatched it filled up the inside and we're going to leave it with a good Loft full of hay for this next winter so I'm really chuffed with this how's that going in we're unpacking because the floor's not so it's not stable it's just actually stay on the floor so I'm just packing just packing in a layer for the floor well let's do it build the floor didn't we why my hands with the hay safely stored the valley team can at last sit back and enjoy an evening of relaxation there's one shop each I'm hungry on that one on top [Music] go and just stop it any good all right pretty good what have we got in these oatmeal cream saffron salt and sued think of it as a bread substitute not haggis it's much like haggis but without the meat but by boiling it with the meat juices down in the meat juices yeah they're cooked in the same pot thirsty with I am actually it is just really hard working it's hot isn't it and you you just don't realize you're not drinking enough you keep working and working and you think you're drinking lots but you're not beautiful the team's penultimate month on the farm has been a fruitful one but the biggest and most important month is still to come it's time in the valley it's August their final month [Music] to fatten up some geese Harvest is ready time to reap the crop they sowed a year ago this is the make or break point of the Agricultural year the success of the entire project will depend on getting this right [Music] foreign this is the valley a vanished World from a forgotten time here on the Welsh borders lies a remarkable Farm one that is trapped in time restored to how it would have been in the reign of James the first the year 1620. [Music] here a unique project has been taking place five hand-picked experts have been running it as it would have been 400 years ago [Music] working without any modern conveniences they've been toiling to make the farm work for a full calendar year through the months and Seasons they've turned the clock back to ReDiscover a way of life from an age gone by [Music] the time's up August marks the end of the Agricultural year and their very last month in the valley foreign it's August our 12th and final month here on the farm and 400 years ago this really would have been crunch time for a farmer we've got the most enormous amount to do provided the weather holes we've got to get out in the fields and cut the grain stook it dry it bring it all in the wheat Harvest has always been a real Race Against Time [Music] the team plowed sewed and harrowed this field back in their very first month September no one was quite sure how the grain would do a year later and it's standing almost fully ripe a glorious golden yellow now all they have to do is cut it down [Music] as was traditional in the Harvest they've brought in some extra Manpower Stewart's Sons Graham and Ian yes again we've got no idea exactly how this would have been done I mean Alex and I are both been Consulting the sources and we've given a lot of thought and a lot of debate and um I mean there's a number of theories aren't there well yeah there are I mean some of the illustrations for example you've got these guys depicted as kneeling down it looks like they're cutting right at the bottom there's also some useful material in Gabe's markham's books on how to run your estate Markham is recommending leaving 18 inches of stubble and part of the reason for this is that if you took the whole of the crop off you've only got the same amount of green which is what you're really after but you've got twice as much bulk and that means you need twice as much Barn space which is often a limiting factor for the farmers of the period the team are using replicas of period hooks or sickles at first I thought that it was going to be the case of slashing it with like we did with the grass hooks but it's not the case these sickles in fact they've uh they've got serrated edges so I'm doing is just getting hold of a handful and just tearing the sickle around the edge of it and of course in doing that I'm not agitating the head of the wheat and therefore shaking out the grain could you make sure all the hair it's facing the same direction is that all right so that all the Heads Lay the same way and not someone wearing some the other thank you as was normal for women at the time Ruth and Chloe are heavily involved in the wheat Harvest bundling up the cut green although it's Relentless work it marks a final High Point in their work on the farm it's lovely for us to be involved in this last big agricultural push of the year it's wonderful it gives you a real sense of achievement and a finality in a way it's really enhance the pump too it is yeah everybody got involved in Harvest Time Yeah men women and children does get it done quicker as well it's the reason they have um academic terms like they do you know even to this day we all still have the sort of harvest period off from schools and things and that was originally so that all the students and pupils could be out in the fields with so much time pressure involved in cutting the wheat women also helped tickle it down but while malema was earned about eight pennies a day women were paid about six pennies in a hand hook and find the heat on it's it's humidity is a bit but we're making good progress yeah this field is about just over half an acre so they normally reckon that a man could clear this field on his own in half a day but they were a lot fitter and more experienced at it than we are but it started at seven and they'd often reckon not to finish the day's cutting until the uh the light went six hours in and the team are slowly getting there they're about halfway through the field the May point of the Agricultural year really grain is the the basic food stuff it's the thing that lasts you right through the winter and if you have a rubbish grain Harvest and you're in quite serious bother so it would have been quite an anxious time for a farmer 400 years ago this period variety of wheat stands up to five feet high much taller than modern varieties but there are some spots where it's very thin and stunted as much as I'd like to blame it on the fertility of the soil and the fact that isn't really the right kind of area to grow wheat I feel it's probably got more to do with my uh somewhat clumsy sewing technique I'm starving with everyone hard at work in the field there's no one left over to cook up a hearty meal so they're making do with a simple picnic [Music] oh look we'd have a visitor right all my Smart's the end of the year doesn't it a week drop in Harvest Homes what we're waiting for get there soon big critical task has brought everyone together back-breaking work but they're well on their way to completing their last big project on the farm [Music] it's nearing the end of the day but there's still plenty to do all the bundled wheat has to be stood up in stooks so it can dry in the Sun and Air [Music] a fresh August morning in the valley time for Ruth and Chloe to take out the geese around behind them actually [Music] have you seen we put walnuts we've also got geese in the pan [Applause] well we shouldn't need to water them no no they were getting a bit warm we've had a bit of a disaster really well it's not that much of a disaster but the geese saw an opportunity to slip through and get into the pond and it's been a hot day and they're all in there I'm not quite sure I have a theory yeah I have this stick here that I think minky wants Pinky [Music] I see it makes good mink Well Done That Dog koi fantastic you're a star Mickey come on puppy that's it yes once again Alex Fonz and Stewart have called on Blackthorne to help pull the hay Sledge once the wheat stooks have had a good chance to wear and dry they need to be brought in as quickly as possible not only is the grain it's safe to put in at this point but also a lot of the weeds have dried off you can see the greens all going very very pale we've got a lot of odd bits and pieces in here because we're not sort of spraying to kill off all the weed so that will be veg sometimes it was grown as a crop because it's very good animal fod it's like a little looping or pea but that will sort out later it's not the work that's a problem for Blackpool she's used to pulling heavy loads and she was a pit Pony standing around doing nothing I mean while I was standing here we're just getting bit into pieces by the horseflies she's flayed up a little bit but she's got a Sit Karma now compared to Stoops of the period ours actually quite small but they've been extremely successful when we cut the wheat the other day they were tiny little green tips on the ends of the ears here but they've now turned under this lovely August Sun a gorgeous golden yellowy brown but they're not too dry so that when we're moving them shaking them around we're not dropping the grain out so I think we've got it just right this time there would usually have been a range of poultry on a 17th century Farm chickens pick up bits of grain and insects Ducks Hoover up slugs and caterpillars in the garden and geese are useful for trimming down grass August was a traditional month to take East up to the wheat field to eat any spilled grain two reasons for that one is we don't actually want any grain to self-seed in the field we want to clear it off and that way we won't run the risk of diseases carrying from one year to the next and the other reason of course is to fatten up the geese for a good time of year to be fattening them up ready for micklemus which was the traditional time to eat goose there's cookies I'm doing the field get nice and fat first load of wheat sticks tied on the Sledge the boys can start bringing it in even with blackthorn's help it's going to take them a number of runs to clear the field [Music] [Applause] store it in their grain Barn the wheat had to last the farm almost a whole year so the Barn's conditions were critical we've laid out a carpet of really spiky gauze on our on our barn floor it's lovely and bouncy it's about six inches thick and it lets the air flow underneath and of course it keeps the wheat off the floor so it doesn't get damp but the main reason for the course is to act as a deterrent for mice and rats that want to eat our grain because obviously it'll be uh very spiky against their little noses as they try and burrow in up in the stubble field the geese are settling in gobbling up any leftovers on the ground the girls are having a very arduous time of it there's been one more interesting things we've done really because I've not done anything like this before it is you're right it's nice to get into the holidays it must have been absolutely terrifying keeping your eye on the weather I mean that's what these Stoops are for isn't it it's a sort of like you know hanging on for the last bit of Summer Sun you can possibly get on it but you've got it in a form that should the heavens open you can whisk it inside I think it's getting even muggier isn't it but we look like we've beaten the rain okay seem to be enjoying yourself I do quite happy I've been all quiet okay yeah nine hours in and Stewart and Alex are loading up the very last stooks of wheat ready for the final run down to the grain Barn we've only grown one small field of wheat here back in the early 17th century even a small Upland Farm like this would have grown more wheat and then they'd have had barley oats probably rye as well on top of that but it's also a case that the Upland Farms would have been more emphasizing the livestock side of their operations so the grains would have been a smaller proportion of what they did compared to the lowland Farms tight on there okay all this standing around loading and unloading has been a real test of blackthorn's patients but she's done well I'll walk on just got used to standing still yes [Music] [Applause] gonna have to overhaul the Sledge before uh next year that's for sure yeah it's gonna need a few repairs yeah I think that run is split on the other side that's going to have to come off and be completely it's last of the Year doesn't it [Music] foreign [Music] fortunately the weather has held and all the grain is now down from the field the barn is slowly filling up foreign years ago that would be the next 12 months bread corn for them so I'm glad I'm not having to live off this for another 12 months I don't think we've got enough here but if we've done a few more fields we could have done yes it's about just over half an acre of wheat was actually planted in there when you take off the edges it's amazing how much it's filled up the bar no September we started with that wasn't it that wasn't indeed yeah throwing it all down plowing it it's done well a good long time 12 months the end of August and the team's final day on the farm which means time's up for one of the stubble fed geese [Music] a goose has got a lot of uses not just eggs during life and meat when it's dead the feathers on this swing will make writing quills I'm right-handed this stretches back away from my face over my wrist if I was using the other Wing then it would stick the other way and it would be getting up my nose which would be a real nuisance while One Wing could be used for writing quills the other was frequently used in a farmhouse as a duster brush but it was the small breastfeathers that were most precious the light fluffy down it's far more valuable although you get less of it and those would have been sold at the period to the Gentry from many farms before they've got enough for their pillows or if they're really rich even for mattresses [Music] one final task remains for Alex and Fons in the wheat field all the stubble left after cutting the grain has to be sighthed down and brought in [Music] I fancy saw them today the straw stems had a number of valuable benefits be used for thatching as as fuel for burning or as bedding for animals [Music] be our last job on the farm I'm really going to miss this place I've been here for 12 months and um I've always studied history by reading about it in books but uh there's such an amazing difference between reading and actually getting out there and doing it and it really has been an eye opener brilliant education but it is hard work while the boys sweat in the field Ruth and Chloe are getting on with an important seasonal task making Rush lights assisted by expert candlemaker David constable back in the 17th century summer was the time really to be gathering these rushes in they're nice and Lush full of growth as big as they get and you need to gather them when they're still green so it's no good trying to do it in the winter so at some point in the summer somebody in the family has to find time to prepare them not only were the rushes a free local resource so too was the material they had to be dipped in to make them into Rush lights animal fat or tallow the qualities of Tallow would vary immensely from different animals and even a u and a sheep a telechand or a Tallow Candle Maker would have known his facts very well and known where to go on the animal and just looked at the carcass and known what he could use and what he couldn't dipped into a cauldron of molten Tallow the summer cut rushes soak up the fat storing it to be burned for light mid-morning and Fonz and Alex are doing well but it's hot unrelenting work back at the beginning of winter I was quite concerned that the clothes wouldn't be warm enough you know just this linen top and that doublet and the breeches not only going down to the knees but yeah it was a pleasant surprise to find that I actually really quite warm to work in and yet now you're being punished I'm punished yeah oh God while Rush lights were the cheapest Light Source on a farm they did also have candles without electricity both were absolutely vital if you could afford candles you used candles candles last longer they're easier to use you don't have to fiddle with them all the time um and they just they smell better too but they do cost quite a lot of money in com you know in comparison to free the candlemaker would charge something like six months a day if you fed him and gave him wine and beer and stuff or nipens if you didn't and uh you'd stay there for like as many candles as you as you wanted and then move on to the next house with wax these would build up quite quickly but with Tallow which is such a soft fat it would most probably take something like 100 dips to get this to a detail about an inch or so the most expensive candles were made of beeswax a farm like this would probably have only used them on special occasions we got glass we make a lot of mini you know we pour them in molds a lot now oh right so rather than yeah indoors in the hall Stewart is planning a slap up Harvest dinner with goose Pie as the centerpiece the oldest copy of this recipe occurs in a book called The Good Housewives Jewel written in 1596 by Thomas Dawson with the goose boned the meat needs to be parboiled in a boiling cauldron over the fire carrots at this period came in a whole variety of colors these are white there are Dutch paintings even of purple carrots as well as the normal orange ones that we expect nowadays foreign the dish we're going to do is a carrot puree you make them into a mush with vinegar and in the more upper class recipes you'd add currants and sugar as well I'm using a bell metal Skillet Bell metal is a type of bronze and it does tell us that they must have kept their kitchenware pretty clean because if you allow it to sit there and fester you develop a little green Bluey green spots on it which are Verdigris which is highly toxic so cleanliness was definitely a feature of their kitchens at the end of the day Ruth Chloe and David can finally try out their Rush lights well don't get your hopes up too high I do have a habit of blowing out they're useful but you know you don't have to rely on them too much if you know what I mean this is a rush light holder sort of a specialist bit of equipment really they'll find loads of these archaeologically and because it's just a sort of pair of Jaws really that clamps the rush at any angle you choose to put it I'm gonna have to watch the uh angle of this I think so it's gonna maybe Peter out in it's not bad is it it's quite a reasonable light brilliant I was not expecting it to actually burn I was just yeah a recent discovery in the 1600s enabled Candlelight to be magnified for close detailed work so in 1613 they developed the Canon condenser which was a ball of glass full of water and it magnified the light of the of the candle so if you're working on lace there I don't know if you can see that amazing it's I love the way it's like pointed so you can actually direct like a really neat little stab of light at it they would have like a stand of these condensers with say four on and four lacemakers would sit round and um be working under these lights these little spotlights with the goose cooked it's time to stuff it into a rustic pie case except on special occasions this would have been seasoned at the period with Alexander seeds in a farm situation rather than black pepper it was cheap well free they could grow it in the gardens whereas pepper from the Indies was very expensive the pie needs to be packed out with butter and the lid put on ready for baking in the bread oven here we have a pie as it would have been 400 years ago some things are as certain now as they were 400 years ago and in a British summer that means rain I'm absolutely exhausted yeah this Harvest is pretty much wiped me out has to be said get your Fitness levels back after this morning it was so hot that the straw well it was like really crispy and goldeny so it was ideal for taking into the cart shed if we could have just got it in just before this rain perfect down and dusted sadly not no in came the rain spoiled off our little fantasy if it gets too wet we may actually have to rake it out again and wait for it to dry and go through the whole procedure again if we're to use this straw for bedding or fuel on the farm yeah now you're willing to boots well my feet are still roasting hot mine with the stubble getting more and more sodden Alex and fawns have to abandon it to the elements only we had a tumble dryer and retire inside where dinner awaits [Music] so it's smaller the wheat Harvest is now safely in store the make or break project in the agricultural calendar has been a success [Music] of life oh we've left you a bit off yes this will be the team's very last meal in the valley what began a year ago was a unique project to ReDiscover how a farm was worked in the 17th century is now complete so what are we what have we got here then that is carrot puree done with white carrots which is what we had in one of the rows in the garden wonderful and then it's got butter in it and vinegar as well 12 months of effort and labor have transformed this site into a farm that looks and functions as it would have done during the reign of James the first from building projects to cookery ancient technology to period breeds of animals our experts have gained a unique insight into a lost world and a forgotten time by putting into practice what others only write about the team have taken us to the very heart of people's lives 400 years ago one of the great things about period jobs is that although at first glance they may seem to be very boring and repetitive and you're doing them hour after hour through the day things like dry Stone Walling where you're banging their rocks together fiddling with them all the time to find that mix at the end of it you stand back and there's another couple of yards across the landscape it's very very satisfying I think the thing I've enjoyed most about this year is the chance to really practice at things and get reasonably good at the cheese making for example I started off having done a few little goes but not being that great at it and I've done so much that my cheese making has improved and improved Improvement we make quite tasty stuff now [Music] I think I'm really gonna miss working with the animals I've built up quite a close working relationship with them especially Blackthorne and I think because they're period rare breeds they have this much more natural character because they haven't been as intensively reared I'm gonna miss them these characters that provided company for us for a year it's it's going to be a wrench leaving I think [Music] I've been on this farm for 12 months and one of the last things I thought I'd be doing is building projects they've been a necessity we've had three to do a cow shared a privy and a hovel we've built them we've risen to a challenge and they're still standing there are mark on the farm and I think they were the things that gave me my biggest sense of achievement I think if one thing stands out it's not necessarily working here in the 17th century but working here in the countryside amongst nature and I'm really going to struggle to drag myself out of this beautiful rural setting back into the 21st century [Music] so has anyone got their mugs full yeah yeah okay well I think they should raise a toast to a fantastic year on the valley yeah okay what's hail [Applause] [Music] round one to the pigs there are even more primitive sheep like the soy [Music] you're not going anywhere girl [Music] what are you up to Monty oh Jews there [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Retold - Documentaries & Reconstructions

Views: 407,469

Keywords: Retold, Reenactment, Docuseries, Docudrama, Reenacted documentary, Docudrama full episodes, Full episodes, Retold channel, Retold full episodes, tales from the green valley episode 1, tales from the green valley, down on the farm, bbc, bbc2, historical documentary, victorian era documentary, victorian lifestyle, how to live like a victorian, medieval, medieval times, medieval lifestyle, age of the stuarts, history of the stuarts, self sufficiency, who were the stuarts

Id: iHTfH-qEHx4

Length: 343min 44sec (20624 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 24 2022