Anne: This stuff about how farmers functioned is very interesting. I guess I'm not going to get far with how much that land was worth, am I? ;) So if there are two figures on the tax list and not three, the value is the assessed value? What you say about how farmers lived and worked is very consistent with what I read in the Oley Valley book I have. It is pretty amazing. I don't know how come they didn't simply use each other's horses! After all, surely while he was stabling the horse that wandered goodness knows how far and its owner never missed it, his own horse was off somewhere... (grin) So that's why John Smith needed 39 acres for what one gets the idea was subsistence farming - so his cows and horse could find enough grass among the trees, huh? It's hard to believe they were using wooden plows, though that appears to be exactly what it says in the Oley Valley book. I thought they were using iron plows in Europe in medieval times! In Austin, where I live, there is a botanical gardens, and they've got these little cabins based on a Swedish farming operation of some sort, but modelled after how the Swedish settlers along the Delaware lived. And the plows are sure of iron! What did the blacksmith do, anyhow? One thing, though, the Oley Valley book solves the one horse mystery by saying that if the family owned one farm horse, which is most often what they owned, it was usually a Clysdale, or something like it. More prosperous farmers tried to own a bay mare with nice saddle and bridle - and I have a Thompson ancestor, named Ezra, the family lived simply enough, he owned a hundred acres, they seem to have been fairly prosperous, he had several horses, a pig or two, enough cattle - and he had, in his estate inventory, his roan mare, which was worth a few times what the other horses were, adn also, one year, he is appraised an extra $20 for owning a carriage. Now that makes sense - single clysdales pull big carriages all around downtown Austin, and one would be well capable of both the plowing, and pulling the Smiths and their seven children in the wagon the twelve miles every Sunday to teh New London Presbyterian Church. As to the plowing, the Oley book says they hitched that wooden plough to a horse to pull it while the farmer guided it, and also that they did plow, sometimes twice. Big horses certainly existed; they served as battle horses during the Middle Ages. The family diet clearly consisted of lard, rye and wheat, molasses, salt pork, sausage, which they stuffed themselves, and beans, and vegetables from the garden, and one assumes dairy products from the cows though I didn't see a churn for making butter; the carpets were braided by his wife, most of the furniture was plain and there was teh exact amount of it there for function - but he had his roan mare and his carriage. Sounds like my father, with his motorcycle. (grin) He was the minister on the motorcycle for awhile. People knew he found it alot cheaper than travelling about the parish by car. But the notion that only 2% if that of the land was under cultivation adds up. It explains why people with huge acreage seemed to have teh same quantity of crops in the ground as people with small acreage. It is very possible they bought alot of land for other reasons; people with large parcels of land usually prospered well off of it by exploiting it in a number of ways, to judge from what I've seen in both my ancestors, and English history and historical novels. They might have a mill or two on the land, sell lumber, etc. Maybe they were also thinking about dividing it among their children, which they often did. Yours, Dora --- Anne Wiegle <awiegle@fast.net> wrote: > Hi Dora- > The figures you see on the tax records are the > assessed value, and then the > tax, which is usually a few shillings. > Now the assessed value is NOT the real value. > You can find that out by looking > in land records to see what people paid for it. > If someone has owned land for a while, and it > has increased in value, then the > assessed value will be way under the fair > market value. > > As far a how much land you needed to live on: > If you read in Futhy & Cope about the > percentage of land under cultivation, it > is miniscule. Like in 1750 it was .02%. > In those days you put a fence around your __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/