Re:My students never knew’: the lecturer who lived in a tent
by inglor_cz on Saturday October 30, 2021 @12:28PM
(#29050022)
My grandparents ran away from agricultural villages to a heavily industrial city, because living there was comparatively easier, even though grandpa had a lot of work running a steam engine. (Steam engines require a lot of heavy manual work to run.)
Agriculture without mechanisation is absolutely brutal on human body, plus you are dependent on random fluctuations in weather. A bad year or, God forbid, two bad years in a row meant a credible threat of starvation in the 1910s or 1920s for "ordinary" peasants.
And if the men were called to military service, as in the Great War (some were exempt, but not nearly enough), then women and the elderly had to do all the heavy work such as tiling, which they often could not.
People have all kinds of romantic concepts of rural life. It was rather harsh.
Agriculture without mechanisation is absolutely brutal on human body, plus you are dependent on random fluctuations in weather. A bad year or, God forbid, two bad years in a row meant a credible threat of starvation in the 1910s or 1920s for "ordinary" peasants.
And if the men were called to military service, as in the Great War (some were exempt, but not nearly enough), then women and the elderly had to do all the heavy work such as tiling, which they often could not.
People have all kinds of romantic concepts of rural life. It was rather harsh.