Ranging from farming, cloth making and many other occupations to the houses people lived in, the furnishing of those housings and how people dressed and ate, this book provides an evocative picture of daily life in Calderdale between 1688 and 1700. Anyone wanting to understand how their ancestors or predecessors in this upland area of Yorkshire used to live will find this book hugely informative.
For ten years two groups of local historians meticulously transcribed and published hundreds of wills and lists of contents of people's houses in the Calder valley. This book draws on this huge mass of information to provide a vivid recreation of life and work in Britain's wealthiest and most productive upland region. Its economy was based on wool textiles that financed the exceptional buildings in the hills of the Calder valley as well as the flourishing town of Halifax. In this volume all the food, artefacts, equipment and products are studied and illustrated in great detail, drawing on solely local examples of this period. The result is a unique account of life and work in this part of seventeenth-century England just before it was transformed by the Industrial Revolution.
Peter Brears is a museum and historic house consultant and has worked on many projects with the National Trust and Historic England after a career managing major museums in Yorkshire. His extensive knowledge of historic physical artefacts, combined with a lifelong interest in the history of the Calder valley, has enabled him to both explain and illustrate the way in which people in the valley lived at the end of the seventeenth century.