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A Guide to Cheshire Cheese - A Collection of Articles on the History and Production of Cheshire Cheese
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Commencer à lire- Éditeur:
- Read Books Ltd.
- Sortie:
- Sep 6, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781473356924
- Format:
- Livre
Description
Informations sur le livre
A Guide to Cheshire Cheese - A Collection of Articles on the History and Production of Cheshire Cheese
Description
- Éditeur:
- Read Books Ltd.
- Sortie:
- Sep 6, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781473356924
- Format:
- Livre
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A Guide to Cheshire Cheese - A Collection of Articles on the History and Production of Cheshire Cheese
Simon
TWO CENTURIES OF CHESHIRE CHEESE FARMING.
Two types of perspective have to be borne in mind when the amateur turns historian. There is time perspective. Human progress can be traced backwards as a series of steps, but the length of the tread is incomparably longer at the bottom than at the top. Down to quite recent times the critical events of agricultural history are separated by great gaps of time in which each generation painfully relived the life of its fathers. New methods and movements came slowly and haltingly. To this day customs of byegone ages linger side by side with practices so new as to be still experimental. Of a great industry like farming it has never been possible to say thus it was at a given date
; it has always been thus and thus—and thus.
Then there is probability perspective. We live to-day in a world of blaring publicity. Few tasks are more difficult than keeping things quiet. Events of all kinds are compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses, oral, written and pictorial. Even if all the witnesses do not agree, there is no lack of evidence about what we do and think. But two hundred years ago, few people could read; fewer still could write; what few did write wrote for the delectation of their moneyed patrons, and chose ink of a colour likely to please. As one passes beyond the day of printing, real evidence becomes scanty. Mostly the student must proceed by inference, finally by intelligent guessing.
The tale of Cheshire farming may be said to begin in those dim ages that the geologists call the Triassic, when the beds to be known later as Keuper marl were laid down. They were curious rocks; a sort of calcareous clay. Elevated above sea level in the upheaval which ended the period they suffered the fierce elements of a primeval world for ages which stagger the imagination. Towards the end they lay for several millenia under great glaciers which scoured their valleys, ground off their hilltops and intermingled the detritus of native rock with other material from far afield. And as the ice retreated came primitive man, shiveringly, furtively, the hunter and the hunted. He came in waves, always from the South and East, and very little is known about him; though traces of his crude hill-top fortifications still exist. He lived in an age of darkness.
There is a flicker of light about the beginning of the Christian era. It discovers Cheshire thinly populated by Celtic tribes, and the Romans are in possession—the XXth legion is at Chester. Their writers have given some description of the people, mainly by hearsay, and unfortunately not very accurate, but nevertheless illuminating. Cæsar himself wrote The aborigines of the interior (of Britain) for the most part do not sow corn but live on milk and flesh.
But it was a false dawn. As the Romans leave, a semi-darkness falls, and for the next thousand years the turbulent history of the English peoples is fought out in the twilight.
Probably Cheshire escaped the worst of war’s ravages. Attractive as its fertile soils may have been to the invader, Cheshire lay out on the Western fringe of the country, protected by great belts of Midland forest and marsh. At all events it seems to have remained throughout predominantly Celtic; the key to the history of its farming lies in Celtic tribal
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