What Life Was REALLY Like on an English Farm in 1900 Before Electricity | British History

Half past four in the morning. The only light in the yard is a single oil lamp. Eleven cows are waiting to be milked, by hand, the way they always have been. This is real everyday life on an English farm in 1900: the agricultural depression that nearly ended it, the Norfolk four-course rotation that saved it, a labourer's wage and what it actually bought, and the night the whole village lit bonfires for a war one family was living through very differently from everyone else. "The Hartley family" is a composite: a dramatization built from the historical record of English farming in this period, representing the real, ordinary experience of tenant farmers and farm labourers. CHAPTERS 00:00 4:30am, before electricity 00:57 The depression that nearly ended English farming 04:00 What a farm labourer actually earned 05:04 A day on the farm begins 08:10 Children in the fields 09:22 Harvest: the month that decides the year 12:31 Mafeking night 15:27 What's left of this world today Sources and further reading in the pinned comment. #BritishHistory #EnglishFarm #VictorianEra #ForgottenHistory #RuralLife