Lost Country Life

Lost Country Life by Hartley, Dorothy. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780394748382.

This beautiful and heartfelt encyclopedia of rural life in the middle ages gets its special charm because the author, as a little girl, knew shepherds and laborers who lived in a way hardly changed through the centuries. She shares that land, now lost forever, where man was the measure of all things. Using as a framework a 16th-century calendar of advice for farmers, she takes us month by month through the country-dwellers year, and opens up the customs and traditions of a vanished rural life. "An entrancing world where the farmers mind and arms and the land beneath his feet gave him all he needed to fashion a full and happy life." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)