Lost Country Life: How English country folk lived, worked, threshed, thatched, rolled fleece, milled corn, brewed mead...

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-dweller's year, and opens up the customs and traditions of a vanished rural life.

"An entrancing world where the farmer's 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)