A Farmworker’s Cottage

Catharine was born in a farmworker’s cottage, much the same as the one in the picture. In the mid nineteenth century, such cottages often looked very pretty, from the outside. Quite often thatched, and with roses or wisteria trailing round the doors and windows.

However, the inside of the cottage was very spartan. Most cottages had only two or three rooms: a large kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. Often one of those bedrooms was a landing bedroom with no seperate door. Some cottages were single storey and others sometimes had an extra lean-to scullery at the back. The properties were often quite dark, with small windows, often ill-fitting, so providing little light, but many draughts. The downstairs floors were usually brick, laid straight into the earth, so frequently wet. The upstairs floors would be floorboards. A rag or sacking rug, may have provided some small comfort

Most of the cottages had a garden, which would be used for growing vegetables to supplement the food the villagers could purchase. Some villagers would have room to keep a pig, which in return for eating all the peelings and left overs, would supply the owners, and often other friends and relatives, with a much needed amount of protein.

Usually at the bottom of the garden, would be an outside privy, or earth closet. In some cases this was available to only one family, but in many cases had to be shared. The emptying of this would also be shared, with the men clearing the closet at night. This night soil, would either be used on gardens, or sometimes taken away by the parish on night soil carts.

In 1850, there was unlikely to be any running water to individual cottages. The village would have had a pump, from which water could be collected as needed. Some cottages may have had a well in the garden, and all of the residents would have collected rain water, by means of water butts, or other containers for use in cleaning, washing, and laundry.

Cooking would take place over an ever burning fire in the kitchen. Water would also be boiled here for washing clothes and linen. The fuel for the fire would most likely be gathered by the women, though the men might supply and cut logs. In some cases coal could be purchased and delivered.

Life was one of continuous toil for both men and women. Men would spend their days working on the farm or in the garden. Women kept the home as comfortable as possible, washing, cleaning, cooking collecting water and of course looking after the children. They may also have taken in extra work.

In later years Catharine’s mother is described as a seamstress, but most of the women also worked on the land at some time in their life.

It was a hard life for the agricultural worker and his family.