This post introduces a new podcast series by many-headed monster blogger Dr Mark Hailwood. You can access the podcasts via the Historical Association website here, and/or read on for some background on how they came about. If you have any comments on the episodes please add them at the bottom of this post.

Mark Hailwood

This simple question sits at the heart of pretty much all of the research I have undertaken as a historian. I have always been interested in the world of ‘ordinary’ women and men before modernity, and in how their world became this one. But it isn’t necessarily an easy question to answer. Working class rural dwellers in the past have left few written accounts of their everyday experiences, which has been enough to put off most historians from trying to recover their history.

There are though sources we can use, with a bit (well, a lot) of patience and some careful analysis. The most valuable of these, to my mind, are witness statements – or ‘depositions’ – from court cases, which relatively humble men and women were asked to give surprisingly often: early modern England was, as historians now know, a remarkably litigious society. And by combing through vast numbers of these surviving testimonies it is possible to discover a great deal about the day-to-day doings of seventeenth-century villagers – something I’ve blogged about before here, and here.

Typically my research on these sources has been concerned with specific topics – about the role of alcohol in preindustrial society, or about the differences between women’s and men’s working lives – but I am currently trying to draw these strands together to develop a more rounded picture of everyday life 400 years ago. Thanks to funding from the British Academy, I have spent the past year reflecting on, and re-reading some of, the tens of thousands of depositions I have consulted over the years, to draw out some of the most important themes that they reveal.

But that has not been an easy task either. Everyday life is a vast topic, and it is not possible to focus on everything these depositions might tell us. So, for this project, I thought I would concentrate on those aspects of seventeenth-century daily life that might surprise us the most, and challenge what we tend to assume about the period.