okmatewanker

I wonder if there ever was a “golden age of farming” when farming was a comfortable lifestyle. It seems to me that it has always been a very difficult career.

If I look at my own family - my English quarter were all farmers and they did OK. They lived to a ripe old age (my gggg-grandmother died of "senility of age", she just got old and something stopped working) and had many children, all living in pretty flexible multi-generational units that allowed a flexibility to take in waifs and strays (an illegitimate child could work the land just as well as anyone else, so a grandparent or uncle would always find room for them). A ggggg-grandfather found himself at 63 with his wife and 7 or 8 kids dead, so he married a much younger woman and got a similar number of kids. He died at the age of 79. His grandfather died in 1767 at the age of 84. His father died in 1746 at the age of 90 (although he was a priest).

Meanwhile on my Dad's side, all his great-grandparents were born in Ireland and all his grandparents were born in Liverpool. The majority of his male ancestors from those generations died nasty deaths in their thirties, largely because the Industrial Revolution ground such people up and oiled the machinery of progress with their blood (literally so for his maternal grandfather).

So farming would have been a tough job but it was preferable to a lot of the urban options.