Brad McCormick: > My understanding of pre-Industrial (pre-Enclosure, etc.) life > is a bit different: more like Brueghel paintings of peasants > working-and-playing. Not what I would aspire to, but a lot > better than being an early industrial worker. > > I read the stuff a long time ago, so the references are > lost, but a large part of the "moral" rationalization of the > industrial system was that the peasants worked little and > drank/screwed a lot. My understanding is that > peasants worked far fewer hours than early industrial > workers.
I don't disagree that peasants had their good times, like those Breughel depicts in his paintings, but there were also very bad times. Being at the bottom of the European class system prior to the industrial revolution meant that you could suffer famines, wars, dispossession and general kicking around. My own ancestors left Wuerttemburg or the southern Rhineland probably in about 1815 or 1820 because the area had overrun by Napoleon, had been pillaged blind by contending armies, had suffered crop failures and starvation and was not a good place to live. Next, they appear to have found themselves in central Germany, near Halle. I have no idea of what they did there, or how they lived, but when Allexander II of Russia freed the serfs in the early 1860s the family migrated to the Ukraine to take up agricultural work. The conditions under which they lived and worked while there proved absolutely miserable and by the 1890s, they'd had enough and started back to Germany. By then central and eastern Europe had industrialized and they wound up living and working in a textile center near Lodz, Poland. My grandfather migrated to Canada in 1913, but my grandmother and their seven kids remained stuck in one of the war zones of WWI. Most of them didn't make it to Canada until the later 1920s. I'm not saying that my family was chronically unhappy. It's probable that, as it moved around, it's various members had good times and bad, perhaps played music and danced, and probably went to church and commented unfavourably on those who didn't. But everything I heard my grandparents say when I was a child suggested hard, hard times. Working in the textile industry near Lodz was one of their better times because they could save a little money, enough for my grandfather to buy passage to Canada, and because several family members could get work. My father, who was small, agile and clever, began work in the textile mill at age seven because kids were needed to crawl into machinery and fix it so that it would not have to be shut down. Breughel, who lived in the 16th Century when times may have been better, painted happy peasants dancing. However, he also knew about the other side of life. To see what I mean, go to: http://artchive.com/ftp_site.htm . Ed Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax (613) 728 9382 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
