Dorset farm labourers 1840s

 

 

Good smock picture

 RuralHistoria posted this. They said 'One of the earliest pictures taken in the county of Bedfordshire. Taken in 1854, it shows the Toddington Manor gamekeeper, Norman Snoxell (on the left), with a poacher he had apprehended'

Bizarre battle of Bossenden wood 1838

 The last battle on English soil. Article here

Coates cider men

 Marketing from the 60s I guess. Coates was a sparkling cider made in Nailsea 1925-1974, See also here

A Dorset Shepherd 1890s

 From Draper 1997. 

Smocks

 Article here on smocks. There is a tv show Out of Town we watch. It's a programme from the old days and it deals with Country matters. Jack Hargreaves presents. Usually something about fishing but tonight's they did a little about smocks. A Hiring smock was deliberately well embroidered to show off the skills of the shepherd's wife through her skill with the needle. A diligent wife was an asset to a shepherd bringing up orphan lambs. Susan grew up in the Cotswolds and feared orphan lambs that were usually sold as pets. She did all manner of chores collecting eggs, cooking etc. 

William Cobbett Rural Rides Frome in the 1820s

 From Project Gutenberg. Wikipedia entry here

I took a post-chaise in the afternoon of yesterday and went to Frome, where I saw, upon my entrance into the town, between two and three hundred weavers, men and boys, cracking stones, moving earth, and doing other sorts of work, towards making a fine road into the town. I drove into the town, and through the principal streets, and then I put my chaise up a little at one of the inns.

This appears to be a sort of little Manchester. A very small Manchester, indeed; for it does not contain above ten or twelve thousand people, but it has all the flash of a Manchester, and the innkeepers and their people look and behave like the Manchester fellows. I was, I must confess, glad to find proofs of the irretrievable decay of the place. I remembered how ready the bluff manufacturers had been to call in the troops of various descriptions. “Let them,” said I to myself, “call the troops in now, to make their trade revive. Let them now resort to their friends of the yeomanry and of the army; let them now threaten their poor workmen with the gaol, when they dare to ask for the means of preventing starvation in their families. Let them, who have, in fact, lived and thriven by the sword, now call upon the parson-magistrate to bring out the soldiers to compel me, for instance, to give thirty shillings a yard for the superfine black broad cloth (made at Frome), which Mr. Roe, at Kensington, offered me at seven shillings and sixpence a yard just before I left home! Yes, these men have ground down into powder those who were earning them their fortunes: let the grinders themselves now be ground, and, according to the usual wise and just course of Providence, let them be crushed by the system which they have delighted in, because it made others crouch beneath them.” Their poor work-people cannot be worse off than they long have been. The parish pay, which they now get upon the roads, is 2s. 6d. a week for a man, 2s. for his wife, 1s. 3d. for each child under eight years of age, 3d. a week, in addition, to each child above eight, who can go to work: and, if the children above eight years old, whether girls or boys, do not go to work upon the road, they have nothing! Thus, a family of five people have just as much, and eight pence over, as goes down the throat of one single foot soldier; but, observe, the standing soldier; that “truly English institution” has clothing, fuel,[Pg 362] candle, soap, and house-rent, over and above what is allowed to this miserable family! And yet the base reptiles, who are called “country gentlemen,” and whom Sir James Graham calls upon us to commit all sorts of acts of injustice in order to preserve, never utter a whisper about the expenses of keeping the soldiers, while they are everlastingly railing against the working people, of every description, and representing them, and them only, as the cause of the loss of their estates!

These poor creatures at Frome have pawned all their things, or nearly all. All their best clothes, their blankets and sheets; their looms; any little piece of furniture that they had, and that was good for anything. Mothers have been compelled to pawn all the tolerably good clothes that their children had. In case of a man having two or three shirts, he is left with only one, and sometimes without any shirt; and, though this is a sort of manufacture that cannot very well come to a complete end, still it has received a blow from which it cannot possibly recover. The population of this Frome has been augmented to the degree of one-third within the last six or seven years. There are here all the usual signs of accommodation bills and all false paper stuff, called money: new houses, in abundance, half finished; new gingerbread “places of worship,” as they are called; great swaggering inns; parcels of swaggering fellows going about, with vulgarity imprinted upon their countenances, but with good clothes upon their backs.

I found the working people at Frome very intelligent; very well informed as to the cause of their misery; not at all humbugged by the canters, whether about religion or loyalty.

Clothing and Landscape by Rachel Worth

 Recommended by Anthony L. Dawson.

At the beginning of the Victorian period, most of England's population lived in the countryside; by its end, the balance had tipped towards living in urban and suburban spaces. In the context of this rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. Rachel Worth explores ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. Her compelling study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian peri

A fine smock

 Before mining started in Radstock in 1763 it was a typical Mendip village with sheep being farmed. We have a bridge called sheep wash bridge from those times. 

"Haymakers" by George Stubbs, c. 1785.

No smocks. A bit early for Haymaking. I did it once as a lad. Sweaty work. Moving haybales about into a trailer then into a barn.

Somerset smock

 

19th century West Country (probably Somerset) shepherd's cream linen smock

19th century West Country (probably Somerset) shepherd's cream linen smock, full length, with full sleeves and front pockets, smocking to the bodice front and back, flanked by panels of embroidery, and above the cuffs, 

Also see this article

A 19th-century shepherd in a smock-frock. Detail from Found by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1854

 

Somerset Smocks Martyn C. Brown

 

Article on this subject. Worth a read. 

Another smock picture

 From 1808. 

English Smocks With directions for making them Alice Armes

Celia found this book but it was prohibitively expensive but I have found a pdf of it. Here
 

See here for an illustration of said garment

1830s smock

 Celia picked this old guide book at Cheddar car boot sale. Love this place we had some great times there - we were allowed to sleep on the carts in the barn. Thought this smock photo was interesting. Very Far From the Madding Crowd. Read an article about smocks here

 From here

Illustration of a farmer's boy from Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the English(1814) by William Alexander (1767-1816). Original from The New York Public Library. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

This figure may be said rather to represent the usual dress of the farmers' servants in the southern parts of the kingdom. The frock, which he wears over his other clothes, is made of coarse linen, much in the same form as a shirt, except that the front is close, and usually stitched or plaited in a fanciful manner, as are also the shoulders aud back part of the neck. The small keg, seen on the ground, contains his beverage, when employed in the fields, and his provisions he carries in a wallet. These labourers are, in general, a hardy, robust class of men, and furnish the best soldiers in our armies. It may be observed here, that the peasantry and farmers' servants in the southern counties of England are far behind their brethren in the more northern parts both in the cleanness and neatness of their dress.

A milk maid