The Common Stream: Two Thousand Years of the English Village Book

This is a book for anyone with an interest in English social history.
Choosing an actual location , the author has researched the history of this site, checking up on the archeology and the official records of who lived here since records were kept.

The artefacts and official records bring people who may be long forgotten to light. Through them, we can piece together what life was like for these ordinary folk who may have lived in Victorian England, or lived through the turbulent Middle Ages or even those who saw the Romans come to Britain.

But rather than the mere details, the author looks beyond the figures and the entries to the people behind them.

He reflects, for instance, on the fact that one elderly woman was paid a few pence for picking stones from a farmers field one January and asks us to consider what this meant in real terms- the fact that this elderly woman was willing to work for hours in the freezing cold, rather than face the humiliation of having to beg for money off of the Parish workhouse. he considers the implications of so many children who died before the age of five in the village and compares it with the death rates in rural England today.

This is history as you are unlikely to read it anywhere else. A real eye opener as to what life was really like in bygone England for most of the population.