812 words 
Sally Coulthard
A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects
Manchester: HarperNorth, 2024
This was the November 2024 pick for Time Team’s Book of the Month. Time Team had been a beloved archaeology series, running for twenty seasons from 1994 to 2012/2013, and it has been resurrected a few years ago as a crowdfunding project with many new features such as monthly archaeology news, podcasts, and a Patreon website.
For me, those Book of the Month picks are usually a bit hit and miss, but A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects is actually delightful. It is exactly what it says on the cover: The history of rural life from pre-farming communities’ attempts to engineer the landscape around them to the invention of agriculture and on to modern country life, exemplified in 100 objects, with its main focus on the British countryside.
Be it the famous deer headdresses of Star Carr or the drinking straw (which originated in about 3000 BC, if you can believe it), the axe-hammer of the Sutton Hoo ship burial (not a weapon as first assumed but used to cull cattle), all sorts of weird wards against evil, the potato rake signaling the cultivation of the spud in the late 18th century, or the story of the water filter (as late as 1944, a third of Britain’s countryside didn’t have access to clean, piped water!), the book is full of fascinating facts about rural life.
One object I immediately marked was No. 66, Lumbric Alum UST, 18th century. Coulthard explains that this substance is “shorthand for lumbricor (powdered earthworm), alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) and ustum, the Latin for ‘burnt’”. So yes, we are dealing with earthworm ashes, a medical ingredient. Coulthard goes on,
Earthworms had a long and illustrious career as an ingredient in folk healing and ‘medical’ remedies. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, noted that they were employed for a number of ailments. The creature’s remarkable ability to survive being chopped in half was deeply unusual and its self-healing abilities were thought to be transferable to the human body. The ashes of burnt earthworms, blended with oil, tar or honey, were believed to fix a whole range of ulcers and open cuts, and even knit broken bones.
But the reason why I had to chuckle as I read on was the following:
A frankly bewildering treatment for deep wounds, offered by German physician Michael Ettmüller, applied a ‘Mixture of the Oil of Earthworms, Oil of foxes, Man’s Fat and juice of earthworms.’
The second to last of these ingredients was as hideous as it sounds. Between the sixteenth and the end of the nineteenth century, human fat was believed to have remarkable healing qualities. Traded under the respectable-sounding Latin title Axungia hominis, (axungia being the word for soft fat), human fat was boiled and rendered from the bodies gathered from executions and dissecting theatres, earning it the folk name ‘poor sinner’s fat.’
Well – I guess we finally found the origins of the human soap myth! And, contrary to the former, Axungia hominis appears to have actually existed.
The book concludes with object No. 100, the Robo-Bee, a tiny drone developed to solve the problem of pollinating crops with fewer and fewer bees around. Which brings us to the modern countryside and its dwindling biodiversity.
Now, environmental protection is a bit of a controversial topic at least on the mainstream right, since it is seen as a leftist talking point and therefore has to be fought tooth and nail. I happen to strongly disagree. Environmentalism has always been a rightist issue, until it was hijacked by the left – somebody could perhaps enlighten me in the comments as to how that came about. What could be more of a concern for those on the right than protecting our land, our soil, our countryside? I was absolutely disgusted with all of the notable German right-wing “influencers” who celebrated Greta Thunberg getting carried off by the police at a demonstration in 2023, when protesters were trying to prevent the village of Lützerath being turned into a giant hole in the ground for coal mining. Think what you will about Greta Thunberg and the Green movement in general. (Monika Schaefer called the German Green Party the “watermelon party” – green on the outside, red on the inside) But a whole chunk of the landscape, including a village that had been around since at least 1168, was about to be destroyed. If you take a look at this list, you’ll see how many other places have fallen victim to opencast coal mining. Is that what we should be supporting? I don’t think so.
At any rate, A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects is a relaxing read. The chapters are only two to four pages long and so can easily be read in between other tasks or as the mood strikes you. It also makes for great bedtime reading.
5 comments
This looks great. If you wanted to write a bestseller. Write a book of 100 items from the German countryside. That’s a book worth publishing.
I’ll think about it. 🙂
I haven’t heard of Robo-Bee since Michael McShane used it stingingly to bail Richie Rich and his pals out of the subatomic molecular reorganizer. ‘Watermelon party’ is a very good witticism from Frau Schaefer I’m sure republican goofs would luv to steal for libtard ownership grandstanding. Then apologize cuz racist.
‘Environmentalism’ became ‘left’ because the Right worships money and ‘environmentalism’ inconvenienced business.
Yes, there is a lot of truth to that.
My Dad is a retired aerospace and nuclear engineer who put in a series of giant wind turbines in Eastern Idaho, where the wind blows without mercy. I think they look pretty graceful slowly cranking out the megawatts on the ridgeline. The farmers are not inconvenienced by them and they are like cash cows in their pocket. But a lot of people just plain don’t like them.
Anyway, he is as ultra-Conservative as anyone ─ albeit not explicitly White Nationalist ─ and he constantly had to fight political opposition from Republicans, including Idaho’s lone billionaire, Frank Vandersloot, the multi-level marketing king who dabbles in local politics.
Wind turbines work in places where the wind blows ─ but that is not usually where the power is consumed, so there has to be a robust electrical power grid to go along with it. And the towers don’t go up without extensive meteorological studies beforehand.
Rooftop solar panels have promise too, at least in the Southwest where the sun shines. These provide a lot of power during the daytime, but they will not heat or cool your typical house, and they have to be connected to the utility company too, so they are going to take a very long time to pay themselves off.
Also, the presence of solar panels can have both positive and negative outcomes for property values, so unless the panels are subsidized somehow, they are a questionable prospect for the home or business owner. The power companies want to charge you retail rates for the electricity that you consume, and then pay you wholesale rates for the power that you generate.
That being said, the people who think that Tesla cars, windmills, and solar panels are going to replace carbon-generating fossil fuels are kidding themselves.
The key is building sufficient cheap nuclear power, a robust and smart power grid ─ and lots of wind turbines and solar just for icing on the cake. The nuclear plants can generate massive amounts of hydrogen for fuel cells with off-peak power.
That and replacing most liquid motor fuels for internal combustion engines with compressed methane would take care of 99 percent of the smog problem.
I support drilling and using oil, and using rather than burning off methane as waste at the well head (allow the pipelines, Chief ─ it will add cash to your tribal coffers and help clean our environment).
I do support banning the burning of coal, however. That will also mean less mercury in the seafood.
Germany really got shot in the foot when Frau Kameradin Merkel decided to scrap the aging nuclear plants instead of refitting and rebuilding them with modern hardware. This means that Germans are dependent upon Russian natural gas and whether the Poles will let them pipe it over. They are also now mining and burning more coal, and that is far dirtier than those nasty nukes that Leftists are always in a tizzy over.
🙂
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