I often muse on British food is still generally so bad, and French so fine. This seems like a pretty coherent account….

All the evidence points to the triad of the Industrial Revolution, empire and free trade. The first drove people from the fields to the factories; the colonies of the second grew what Sidney Mintz has called the tropical “drug foods” (including sugar and tea); the cheap imports encouraged by the third drove out the homegrown. None of these phenomena were peculiar to Britain, but no other European country had them in combination so early or to the same extent. Britain’s industrial working classes, unmoored from the domestic habits of their rural ancestors and crazed by their factory hours, simply forgot how to cook. As early as 1800, according to Colquhoun, “the poor in Britain were now subsisting not on the diet that had remained broadly unchanged for centuries, of ale, grain, vegetables and a modicum of fatty meat, but on a vastly less nutritious mix of often adulterated white bread, cheese, tea and sugar.
….In the course of the next century, the British population grew fourfold. Canning factories were part of the solution to feeding it. … By 1914, Britain was the world’s largest consumer of tinned goods — a fact that echoes today in the figures for its consumption of “ready meals,” which are three times more than the European average.

Now online are all 50 volumes of Medieval Archaeology.

Among the items I enjoyed reading was one on (pdf)growing hemp in eastern England.

It started c. 800AD (not the sort of time that you think of as one for agricultural innovation!), and throws new light on names such as Hemel Hempstead,

Traditional processing of the hemp crop to extract the long bast fibres without damaging them involves the process of ‘retting’. Hemp stalk bundles are submerged in water for about 7 to 10 days. During this time, the plant materials begin to decompose and the pectin that binds the fibrous and non-fibrous portion of the stalk is broken down, after which the fibre can be easily separated from the other tissues. …The retting process generates foul decay products, which can easily contaminate local water supplies and must therefore be carried out away from areas of settlement. To rehearse the lines from Tusser’s instructions for proper husbandry in September:
Now pluck up thy hemp, and go beat out the seed,
And afterward water it, as ye see need;
But not in the river, where cattle should drink,
For poisoning them, and the people with stink.

Wonder what they do today, since hemp is generally regarded as a “green” fibre. Anyone know? (Since my wardrobe seems to be including increasing quantities as time goes by – it does seem to add a nice, “linenish” texture.)

Where does the paper come from? I’ve just spent the best part of an evening trying finally to get on top of seven months or so of filing – and that despite the fact that I’m trying very hard to go entirely over to virtual records. (No more photocopying of articles!)

But one little gem that emerged was from a newsletter of the IHR friends – a website detailing Richard II’s treasure roll – lost for centuries at the bottom of a miscellaneous pile of files…. unfortunately I didn’t find anything quite such fun – mostly receipts that probably should go on my tax return but I can no longer remember to what they relate.

Of limited interest to most, but since my grandmother has been digging all of this up, I thought that I might post it in case it should help someone else’s Googesearch.

My great grandfather, William J.G. Boor, married Louisa A Hinton (one of 11 children) in 1893. They had two children: William R.G., born 1893, Doris Margaret. J. born 1897.

William married I don’t know when and my grandmother Edna Louise was born 1921 and married in 1941.

Louisa died in 1935.

Doris married George Michael Bushnell in 1938. (Interesting, at the age of 41.)

I believe that Louisa grew up on a farm near Stroud, NSW, and that William Boor may have been a soldier.