Victorian Farm is an observational documentary series following a team who live the life of Victorian farmers for a year. Their first task is the restoration of the cottage to a functional shelter!
Finally, a historical show about the lives of ordinary working people, not a bunch of Dukes and Princesses with titles a yard long…
Victorian Farm is one of a prolific series of historical reenactments/education programs from Absolute History, most of them starring Historian Ruth Goodman, and Archeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, though Tom Pinfold takes Alex’s place for Tudor Monastery and Secrets of the Castle, and I haven’t yet watched Victorian Pharmacy.
Every episode of every series listed here is available from youtube at the time of this writing, for free.
The basic formula is simple: The cast are challenged to live, dress, and work as lower to middle-class tenant farmers or workers for that period in history for a full calendar year.
The weird, delicious recipes! The bootleg sloe gin! The Tamworth hogs evading capture! Haymaking, Beermaking, cheesemaking! Coping with cross-grained cattle and horses, and deeply stupid sheep! The Infamous codpieces! Blacksmithing, fishing, sheep-shearing! Early industrial working-condition horrors! Rural traditions and rituals, usually presented by the slyly humorous and deeply knowledgeable Professor Ronald Hutton.
In order, the series I’ve watched are:
Tales From the Green Valley (Welsh border farm during the reign of King James the 1st)
Think of this series as a worthy prequel. It’s quite interesting, but they had yet to nail down who the permanent crew should be, and the production values are still quite basic.
Victorian Farm (Shropshire farm during the reign of Queen Victoria)
Arguably the best series, this was the first full year pairing Peter, Ruth and Alex as a team, and it’s set on the Acton-Scott estate, still owned by the family who owned it a century ago, the surviving members of which are… let’s say very glad to have tenant farmers acting out their historically-preserved land’s true purpose once more.
Edwardian Farm (Devon farm in the Tamar Valley, during the Reign of king Edward the 7th, just before WWI.)
Inexpressibly raw, and just within the reach of living memory, this documentary experiment explores the ways new technologies like the railway, modern mining and textile industries changed the lives of people living in Devon at the time.
I have a particular interest in this one because some of my own relatives, a young mining engineer and his wife, left the nearby Cornwall area for America just before this series takes place. And having watched it, I can definitely see why…
Wartime Farm
Set during the sustained and deadly sea blockade of WWII, this explores the challenges and changes faced by the farmers of England at the time, as they resisted the Nazi efforts to isolate and starve out the British isles.
I’m not sure if this series would be good or bad to watch with very old people who lived through this time, but they would certainly have an opinion on it…
This one has an echo that’s hard to shake.
Tudor Monastery (set roughly 500 years ago in West Sessex, during the reign of King Henry the 7th)
This series follows the efforts of the team as Tenant farmers of a Catholic monastery just prior to the religious reforms/upheaval enacted by King Henry the 8th. More peas than I’ve ever seen before, the first printed books, the emergence of technology from sorcery, and of course regrettable hosiery.
“Merrie England, for heaven’s sake…”
Secrets of the Castle (unusual among the other series, in that it is set in 13th century France, not England, at the site of a remarkable modern-day historical reconstruction project, the Guédelon Castle)
This thing is unbelievably huge. Hovels. Grain-arcs. What castles really looked like when they were in use. Siege warfare. Well-cooked pork. The geometric secrets of Masonry. …And a number of adorable resident Owls.
Full Steam Ahead (This one follows the establishment of the railway system in mainland Britain, and the effects of a National and soon after Global economy on everyone within reach of it’s stations.) Technical details, early railways, working preserved trains, trade, and loss of limbs by workers, horrific medical cover-ups about industrial disease, and the global boom for scotch whiskey. Old-time fish and chips, and midnight Rhubarb, this series peels the lid off a lot of things even locals may have seen… without really knowing. (Arguably the engineering-minded and perpetually filthy Peter’s contribution to the series, this one was unique in that it didn’t have the ‘for a full calendar year-’ formula.)
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