My attempts to teach by example the joys of taking fresh, unadulterated food from garden to table have been a miserable failure. Very patiently, four-and-a-half year old Bethany took me into her confidence: “Grandma, if you go into Tesco’s, you will find loads and loads of food there. Shelves and shelves of it. They have potatoes, and bread, fruit, and, and ..” - words failed her – “They even have jars of jam, - I think”. For the modern child the mass production, preserving, processing, packaging and transportation of food is normal and natural, while taking home cultivated food from ground to table is abnormal and un-natural. Now, it is all very well for a rising five to labour under the misapprehension that food appears on the supermarket shelves, and that the money economy in general forms part of the natural order of things. It is quite another to find oneself talking with mature, even elderly, adults who do not seem to have the foggiest idea of how their food has progressed from soil to table. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for people to express surprise at the very idea that they might attempt to understand how the money economy, upon which they are entirely dependent for their everyday needs, actually works.
It was not always so. If we were to re-run history, so to speak, taking a time machine to the early middle ages, we would find loads of people who could explain exactly how the economy, in which they lived and worked and had their being, actually operated. They might or might not be entirely happy about the way the world treated them, but they would be in no doubt about how the basic necessities of life came to be in their possession. In the medieval village community the lord of the manor and small peasant farmers existed in mutually supporting economic units. Traditionally, we have been taught that the poor were exploited by the rich and that traditional farming methods were inefficient and stifling of initiative and innovation. The implication is that modern farming methods are resource-efficient, ecologically sustainable and socially just, which they patently are not. It is, perhaps, time to look again at the medieval village in which the chain of responsibility was clear. Lord and peasant households alike built, thatched and furnished their own dwellings, provided light and heat, made their own clothes, grazed their own livestock, grew and collected their own food. Tallow came from pigs, fuel, fruits, wild foods and medicines came from the forest, cloth from home grown flax and wool, leather from hides, water from own wells. Certain items such as salt, iron, tools, clay, precious stones and dyestuffs might be ‘imported’ from a distance, paid for in money or barter. But these were luxuries, not everyday items. The trade or money economy did not dominate everyday life. Hence the peasant household was as stable and independent as that of the lord or king, which it mirrored. If it was called upon to supply tithes or bonded labour to church, local lord or king, it did so from its own resources, a very different matter from the slave who is utterly dependent on the whim of the master.
H. J. Massingham explored these issues in The Tree of Life, where he drew attention to the pernicious effect of our cancerous money system, which he called chrematistics. He also decried the loss of peasant cultures.