Working Class Life in 17th Century Somerset with Dr Mark Hailwood

What was life really like for the ordinary people of Somerset in the 17th Century?

Join Dr Mark Hailwood as he looks back 400 years to discover the diverse experiences of every day life in the county.

Mark is working on a project that uses witness statements from court records to reconstruct everyday life in seventeenth-century Somerset villages from the testimony of the ordinary women and men who actually lived in them.

Mark is a first generation academic from a working class background. He holds the position of Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol and is a social historian with a particular interest in the everyday lives of ordinary men and women in England, during the period 1500 – 1700.

His first book ‘Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England‘ was published in 2014. His research interests include the history of drinking, the history of work (especially the gender division of labour and work-based identities), the histories of time-telling and time-use, the history of literacies, the history of the South West as well as approaches to the study of ‘popular culture’ and ‘history from below’.

He is also a contributor to the ‘the many-headed monster’ blog, a collaborative effort focusing on English society and culture in the early modern period.

He was born in Portishead and is currently writing a book titled ‘Everyday Life in the Seventeenth-Century English Village’ which focuses on his hometown of Portishead in Somerset, 400 years ago.

This is an in person talk.

Host or Publisher South West Heritage Trust