Fragments of Two Centuries: Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King

Over the dark night of the 18th and the dull grey morning of the 19th century there was this remarkable feature, that while the local records show how deplorable was the conditi...

The gloom which shrouded the night and morning, the death and birth, of the two centuries, and its terrible consequences to the people of this country, together form an event wh...

With the abolition of the old Poor-law the Parish Constable, as he was understood in the Georgian era, found a large part of his occupation gone. Those important journeys of Dog...

In these days, when so much is heard in favour of coming back to the Parochial area as the unit of local government, it may be of interest just to glance back at the condition o...

When the reforming spirit which brooded over the two centuries touched the subject of education, its advocates became enthusiastic! Here is what an old writer said in 1806 about...

It may be well here to take a nearer view of local life between the years 1760 and 1800. In doing so we shall probably see two extremes of social and political life, with rather...

Many readers, whose lives carry them back before the "forties," taking their stand beneath the broad gateway or pebbled court-yard of our old inns--the Red Lion, the Bull, or th...

It is worthy of notice how locomotion in all ages seems to have classified itself into what we now know as passenger and goods train, saloon and steerage. Away back in the 18th...

Among winter recreations skating was hardly known, and not at all as an amusement for ladies, but then what a glorious pastime was that of sliding! Very few young people can sli...

Prison discipline was evidently very different from our notion of it, for in 1803 we find prisoners in the Cambridge County Gaol stating that they "beg leave to express their gr...

From our present stand-point there is just a touch of pathos in the thought of many aspiring Englishmen of the Georgian era passing away on the eve of momentous changes, privile...

All the old punishments, from the Ducking Stool to the Stocks, proceeded upon the appeal to the moral sense of the community, and up to the middle, or probably nearer to the end...

By the fireside, in health and disease, and in the separations and contingencies of family life, we must look for the drawbacks which our great-grandfathers had to put up with d...

There were two other officials besides the Overseer and Church-warden, the dignity of whose office entitles them to a place of honour in these sketches--viz., the old Parish Con...

The prospect of Royston from its surroundings was, at the beginning of the century, singularly bleak and uninviting in winter time. Of the many plantations which now beautify th...

One of the most interesting, as well as significant things about old-time studies, is the evolution of industry, from the stage, when each domestic hearth was a factory of some...

The Jubilee Monarch, King George III., and his last name-sake, had succeeded so much that was unsettled in the previous hundred years, that the last half of the 18th Century was...