Why make a TV series about life on a 400 year old farm? That was my first question, when I was asked to direct and produce a 12-part BBC series about five specialists working on a farm in the Welsh hills as it would have been in the 17th century. I have to admit that I was quite skeptical of the idea. Not only did it mean uprooting my family and moving to Wales for a year, but more than that, I worried that it could become another low-level reality show, where the historical concept would be relegated to the background.

There have been a plethora of shows where an average family or group of people is plunged into an alien setting, the past, cloaked in period clothing and stripped of modern luxuries and facilities. They are insightful at times, but much of their time is spent on the personal, the arguments between ‘contestants’ and all things sensational. I wanted to try and do something very different: a show that was beautiful to watch and most important of all, informative.

Instead of just using street people, we wanted our team of vintage farmers to be experts, specialists in different fields. The aim was to take their learned knowledge and apply it, to try to turn theory into practice. So we brought together our experts: Stuart Peachey, a food and agricultural historian, Ruth Goodman, a social historian and specialist in clothing, Alex Langlands and Peter Fonz Ginn, two young, strong and, above all, practical archaeologists, and Chloe Spencer, an archaeologist. experienced. in working with animals. We started filming in September, the beginning of the agricultural calendar, with twelve months of cultivation on the horizon.

But what to film? For much of the year, this question was answered, because the farm’s schedule of activities is almost predetermined. The yearly, monthly, and almost daily tasks of the farmer are virtually set in stone, dictated by weather, soil, and the basic cycle of life. From the beginning, this was one of the most significant lessons impacting our specialists. Of course, they had some space to choose what to do and when. Some months, like January in the dead of winter, are relatively quiet times, with no pressing tasks to deal with. A time like this is a welcome respite for the farmer, allowing him to catch up on repairs, maintenance and catch a breather before the onslaught of spring. The rest of the time, the big events are organized as a series of milestones: from the plowing and planting in September, and the fruit picking in October, to the sheep shearing in June and the production of hay while the sun shines in July.

As I was planning our filming schedule, the main farming tasks were pretty obvious, but one area I hadn’t particularly considered in terms of farming activities was construction. In fact, a number of construction projects came up during the year, from installing a shack (a lumberyard), to replacing the outhouse damaged by the February storms. One of the first great tasks that experts had to face was to build a stable using only tools, technology and materials available in the year 1620. To put things in context, this was a time when pilgrims they were sailing for the United States, and James I was sitting on the throne, only a few decades before civil war tore England apart.

It was a real delight to see the barn slowly but surely lift off the ground. First, Alex and Fonz faced a wall of adobe and adobe, made of wooden rods covered in a mixture of cow dung, clay, and straw. The entire team then went to work on the roof, from cutting the rafters to putting up the thatching. It was probably the first time that I fully appreciated the deep and multiple qualities of a farmer of the time. Yes, you could occasionally call in outside craftsmen and specialists, but these would have been expensive and certainly not just a phone call away. It was vital to be able to do things for yourself. He had to be resourceful, inventive and, above all, a jack of all trades who could turn his hand into almost any practical job.

Not only that, but the farmer needed to immerse himself in his local environment. While most of us today travel through the countryside simply admiring the rural beauty and charms of it, the vintage farmer viewed it through very different lenses. To him, the surrounding landscape was like a giant pantry and toolbox filled with valuable resources, all with their own qualities and uses, from different woods to plants with medicinal properties. From father to son, he passed down and learned that inherent knowledge of the “art of the jungle”: what could be useful, how it should be managed, and when it should be collected.

I remember the time when Alex was working on the roof of the barn. He had excavated similar buildings from the period, but it was only as he manipulated the materials, inserting flexible rods of hazelnut through roof beams to create a thatched mesh, that he gradually appreciated the various properties and potential of its play. of tools. .

In the 17th century, wood was a very important resource. It was used to such an extent, from charcoal making to shipbuilding, that it is estimated that there were half as many trees in Britain as there are today. In the face of such appetite, the timber itself was cultivated, and most farms of any size had their own coppice, a meticulously managed area of ​​woodland with a perspective stretching decades, if not centuries, into the future. When we harvested wood from the farm’s grove, it was like walking into a giant DIY store, ready to go and easily labeled if you knew what you were looking at. Different species of trees, of varying sizes, from saplings to giant oaks, were grown to provide rods and beams in a variety of thicknesses and lengths. Any type of wood that was required, from making dowels, building a table or replacing the wood on the ceiling, everything was ready at hand. It was an area of ​​agriculture that I hadn’t even thought about before I got to work directing the series.

It goes without saying that the main raison d’être of a farm is the food. Four hundred years ago, without electricity, people had to find other ways to keep food as long as possible without refrigeration. Of course, it’s still made in the traditional way today, in many places out of necessity and in other cases because the curing process adds flavor, like Parma hams hung for years, smoked herring, or pickled vegetables in vinegar. But it is one thing to taste your favorite salami and quite another to see how it is made.

From the moment we killed one of the pigs on the farm, the meal clock was ticking. First the blood had to be drained and used, then the official had to be consumed, only then could attention turn to the rest of the pig. It was commonly said that the only part of a pig that was not eaten was its squeal. Certainly nothing was wasted. Back then, apprehension about food was an unheard of luxury. But it’s not a simple, straightforward job to process an entire animal from start to finish, especially for people used to buying their bacon sliced ​​and wrapped in cling film. It’s a time-consuming task but in many ways it’s fun and festive, as it still is in many countries, where entire families come together to kill and prosecute one of their beasts. It really is all hands on pump. Simply removing the bristles from Arthur the pig, a cross of boar and tamworth, as close as we can get to the breed of the time, was a major undertaking. These pigs are incredibly docile and friendly, but they’re also incredibly fluffy, just like they had to be, living in the woods for a significant amount of time.

Today, the fine bristles of our nearly bald pigs are boiled in large vats, but back then farmers brought another technique into play: a pig campfire. They couldn’t burn it for long or it would start to cook the carcass, but it had to be long enough to singe the hairs. Waxed, the soot then had to be rubbed off, only then was the skin clean enough that salt could be applied in generous amounts to cure it. In our modern world, where processed foods are everywhere, it’s refreshing to take a step back, remember where food actually comes from, and appreciate the sheer amount of time it takes to prepare the things by hand to eat, from pluck a chicken and earn wheat, even peas.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I have to say that Arthur’s pork chops were perhaps the most succulent and flavorful I’ve ever had. Another highlight on the food front was the apples. These days, when we browse the fruit section of a supermarket, we may come across half a dozen varieties, bred to look pretty and last well. The orchards of our 400-year-old reconstructed farmhouse were bursting with apples I’d heard of but never seen, from Cornish Aromatics to Costards for cooking. The fall surplus could not be consumed all at once, so they were stored upstairs on the farm, in an ‘apple loft’, where it was cool and airy. They had to be turned over regularly and checked to see if any had gone bad, but the vast majority survived in excellent condition for six months, a good source of vitamins through the winter until spring came. While store-bought apples often seem to go bad in just a few weeks these days, it was quite the shock to eat apples in March that we’d picked the previous September, with no fridge in sight.

Standing behind the camera, it was fascinating to see the experts adapt so easily to a very different pace of life and immerse themselves in tasks that had not been seen in Britain for centuries. Throughout the year a whole host of traditional artisans joined them, contributing additional skills, many of them on the verge of disappearing in this country. Until a professional candlemaker came to help the team, he had no idea that most candles on a farm at that time would have been made from sheep fat. Before a bird master arrived on set with a 400-year-old straw rope and a ‘wimble’ used to spin it, he would never have believed that a strong rope could be made from something as light as straw. Until a charcoal burner arrived to help the team, he would never have imagined how slow and complicated the process of turning wood into something as vital as coal is.

It’s easy to look back on such a rural idyll through rose-colored glasses. In our busy, always-on lives, it’s easy to dream of a way of life that seems simpler, slower, and more realistic. It is all too easy to forget the terrible disease and low life expectancy, the physical exhaustion of manual labor, or the despair and starvation when a farm was in trouble.

Making this documentary series was a long learning curve for me. I’m under no illusions anymore about how much better it was in ‘the good old days’. I quite like the idea of ​​drinking only beer, apparently up to eight pints a day, as most people don’t have access to clean water, and fermented beer is safe to drink. I like the almost spiritual satisfaction that comes from spending a whole day working in the fields and arriving exhausted to find a good dinner on the table. But having watched Ruth and Chloe do laundry 17th century style, make their own ‘lye’ washing up liquid from the ashes in the fire, use stored urine to remove tough stains and then dump it all on the rocks in a stream, I certainly wouldn’t want to turn back the clock and give up my washing machine.