Living by the calendar

Big question: How did the calendar shape people's work and daily lives?

A unit from Hearth Learning, built on Keeping Time in Hearth Library. Every source page has the original beside a plain English translation, notes on who made it and how far to trust it, and page images where they exist. Sources marked “Early version” have not yet been checked by a separate review.

Lesson plan

Day 1: A year on the farm (45 minutes)

  1. Open What to do on the farm each month and read the History tab. Tusser starts his year in September, because a new tenant took over a farm at Michaelmas.
  2. Pre-teach thresh, harrow, malting and ted from the key terms. Read the September and October points aloud.
  3. In pairs, students draw the source's farm-year wheel and place each point in its month. They color each point by kind of work: grain, animals, bees, garden or house.
  4. Students label who does each job when Tusser says: the maids (oct.3), the boy (feb.5), the gardener (jan.8), the wife (apr.19).
  5. Pairs say which months look busiest and why, remembering that the page gives only two to four points from each month.

Day 2: Pepys's days (45 minutes)

  1. Open A diary for every day of the year and read the last part of the History tab on Old Style dates: England ran ten days behind most of western Europe.
  2. Read the entries for Christmas 1666, the dinner party of January 1663 and the first mackerel of 1664 aloud.
  3. Groups sort the 24 entries into the four seasons by their modern dates and fill a chart with columns for food, weather, work and pleasures.
  4. Beside each entry, groups write Pepys's own Old Style date and check that the two are always ten days apart.
  5. Each group reports one way the season changes Pepys's life, and one thing about that season the selection does not show.

Day 3: Advice and diary (45 minutes)

  1. Discuss the connection question on A diary for every day of the year. Students choose one season and compare what Tusser and Pepys show about food, work or weather in it.
  2. Point out that both lived under the Old Style calendar, so Tusser's saints' days fell about ten days later in the season than the same dates do now. The encyclopedia article on the Gregorian reform and Old Style dates explains the change.
  3. Discuss the reliability question on What to do on the farm each month: his verses say what a farmer should do, not what happened on any one farm.
  4. 20 minutes: Students answer the big question with evidence: how the calendar shaped people's work and daily lives. They cite at least two points from Tusser and two entries from Pepys, and say what a book of advice shows that a diary cannot.

Sources

What to do on the farm each month

Tusser, 1580 edition; first printed, as a hundred points, in 1557. Moderate.

  1. Comprehension. Which jobs does Tusser give to particular people, such as maids, a boy, the wife or the gardener, and in which months?
  2. Analysis. Several points say why a job or a choice matters, such as the uses of bracken, the timely buyer of firewood, the baker who curses coarse grain, and the farmer who sows in rain. Choose two. What do the reasons show about what a farm household needed and worried about?
  3. Analysis (reliability). Tusser wrote from his own farming in the eastern counties, and his verses say what a farmer should do, not what happened on any one farm. Later writers said he never prospered at farming, though his will shows he owned two small farms. How far can we use his points as evidence of how Tudor farms were actually run, and what else would you want to know?
  4. Connection. Read A year in a sentence: entries from the Chronicle, which records bad years such as 1131, when a cattle plague left a village with no plow teams. Tusser gives each job its proper time. What does each kind of writing show about farm life, and what does each leave out?

Key terms: Michaelmas (the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, September 29, when a new tenant usually took over a farm); flail (a tool for threshing, made of a wooden handle with a shorter stick joined to its end so that it swings freely); thresh (to beat harvested grain so that the seeds come away from the stalks and husks); harrow (to drag a frame with teeth or spikes over plowed ground, breaking up the soil and covering the seed); malting (soaking barley in water, letting it begin to sprout, and then drying it in a kiln to make malt, for brewing ale and beer); hop (a climbing plant whose flowers are used in brewing beer, to give it a bitter flavor and help it keep); ted (to spread new-cut grass out to dry so that it becomes hay)

Activity: Students draw a farm-year wheel of twelve months, starting with September as Tusser does, and place each of the 34 points in its month. They color each point by kind of work (grain, animals, bees, garden, or house) and label who does it when Tusser says. Keeping in mind that the page gives only two to four points from each month, groups then discuss which months look busiest, which kinds of work belong to which seasons, and why.

A diary for every day of the year

Pepys, January 1660 to June 1669, written day by day (modern calendar). Moderate.

  1. Comprehension. In the entry for the dinner party in January 1663, what did Pepys’s wife do before daylight, and what dishes did the guests eat?
  2. Analysis. Pepys notes the first mackerel he has seen this year, the first time this summer that he wore a half shirt, and snow he had not seen for three years. Why might he think things like these worth writing down? What do they show about how the seasons shaped his days?
  3. Analysis (reliability). Pepys kept his diary privately, in shorthand, and sometimes wrote it up from notes several days later. In one entry he reports what the parish clerk Hadley told him about the plague. Which parts of these entries did Pepys see for himself, and which did he hear from others? How should that change the way we use each part?
  4. Connection. Read What to do on the farm each month, in which Tusser tells a farmer what to do each month. Choose one season and compare what each writer shows about food, work or weather. What can a book of advice tell us that a diary cannot, and the reverse?

Key terms: Old Style (the Julian calendar, still used in England in Pepys’s time, which ran ten days behind the Gregorian calendar used in most of western Europe); Exchequer (the royal treasury, which collected the king’s revenues); chine (a piece of an animal’s backbone with the meat next to it, cut for cooking); flageolet (a small flute blown at one end, with finger holes, similar to a recorder); ’Change (short for the Exchange, a building in London where merchants met to do business); periwig (a wig of false hair worn by men); nightgown (in Pepys’s time, a loose gown worn indoors when not fully dressed, not a garment for sleeping in)

Activity: Groups sort the 24 entries into the four seasons, using the modern dates shown on the page, and make a chart for each season with columns for food, weather, work and pleasures. Beside each entry they also write Pepys’s own Old Style date and check that the two are always ten days apart. Each group then reports one thing the diary shows the season changing in Pepys’s life, and one thing about that season the selection does not show.

Standards

Printable worksheet for any source: https://hearthinteractive.com/learning/worksheet.html

Translations drafted by Claude (Anthropic). Free to use in class. Hearth Learning, https://hearthinteractive.com/learning/