Cottage Economy, by William Cobbett

Anyone heard of this one before?

It looks like a decent read.  "...he ought to pay for nothing in money, which he can pay for in any thing but money." 

Speaking of which, the book's copyright has expired. 

http://www.archive.org/stream/cottageeconomyco00cobbrich/cottageeconomyco00cobbrich_djvu.txt

looks like a very interesting read.

I was going to pick a few quotes but I kept finding so many eloquent and profound truths that I couldn't decide on one!

well I guess the statement can be true depending on what the "payment" is..having just seen a woman in our neighborhood prostituing herself for crack cocaine??

sure I'm all for bartering wherever possible..but also one must be careful to limit their obligations to things that they can sensibly accomlish and not overextend themselves.

also some people will attempt to DO things that they are in no way capable of doing properly so they don't have to pay to have them done, jeopardizing their family ..one example might be improperly installed electric systems..causing a house fire

having taken the time to read through the link, i do find it interesting..however in several ways contradictory

somehow this post got messed up when I posted it and part of the quote is missing so i'll try to redo it here..


" if a mistress of a house, the affairs of which are
carried on in this way, is taken up in talking about
what is to be got for dinner, and in negotiations with
the butcher. One single moment spent at table be-
yond what is absolutely necessary, is a moment very
shamefully spent ; but. to suffer a system of domestic
economy, which unnecessarily wastes daily an hour
or two of the mistress's time in hunting for the pro-
vision for the repast, is a shame indeed ; and when
we consider how much time is generally spent in this
and in equally absurd ways, it is no wonder that we
see so little performed by numerous individuals as
they do perform during the course of their lives.

158. Very fat parts ofBeefn\&y be salted and smo-
ked in a like manner. Not the lean ; for that is a great
waste, and is, in short, good for nothing. Poor fel-
lows on board of ships are compelled to eat it, but it
is a very bad thing. "

in my opinion had they not wasted all their time brewing the beer and worrying about the ills of tea drinking and potato eating..maybe they wouldn't have had to spend so much time talking to the butcher or figuring out what to eat..tee hee..and maybe if they weren't so worried about the ills of potatoes..they could have found that they are healthy and nutritious vegetables..

guess the beer clouded their minds some..sure it is interesting but most of the information is not only outdated but very MALE oriented and a bit bigoted..

they tell us how poverty is wrong, yet then want people to continue in poverty..but no..better get out of poverty..don't educate..just educate enough to make it as a laborer...etc..very contradictory..

can see why people of this time frame had such difficult times..esp when they spend so much effort on beer and very little effort on potatoes..tee hee

i did get a kick out of this.

"don't educate..just educate enough to make it as a laborer...etc..very contradictory.."


ha! its our public school system motto! I haven't read the whole thing I have to hold it in my hand to read that much or I will get a headache. I agree it has some rather 'old fashioned' ideas and personal preferences. but it sounds that many of the principles might still be applicable.

alhtough I did make out that he was trying to say people are called poor when they really aren't and the pursuit of being in that top teir is maybe not always so realistic. at least that was my interpretation. and maybe elsewhere it contradicts itself.

"Let it be understood, however, that, by poverty,
I mean real want, a real insufficiency of the iood and
raiment and lodging necessary to health and decency ;
and not that imaginary poverty, of which some per-
sons complain. The man who, by his own and his
family's labour, can provide a sufficiency of food and
raiment, and a comfortable dwelling-place, is not a
poor man."



I like this too.

"He is the cause
of the existence of that family ; and, therefore, he is
not, except in cases of accidental calamity, to throw
upon others the burden of supporting it"

especially after watching some woman on tv complain about having to pay more insurance to have a baby and that the ins. company said they would insure her only if she was sterilized. geee....well.......pay for it, or don't have a baby, or patronize some other company lady!

i too did agree with a lot of what was said, and saved the page as I thought it was worth re reading again and getting any GOOD information out of it..but did find it was way off base on a whole lot of things.

obviously..little was known then

i do agree about the idea of having children that you are capable of taking care of on your own, and also that they will often be a blessing to take care of you when you get older, if they are raised with that kind of respect..however..i have also seen people have a lot of children they did everything for and raised ..so called..well..who walked away and cheated their parents out of their land and home and the parents ended up with nothing in the end.

yeah it is a great concept and my husband and I have been fortunate enough to be able to help our only son to be able to have a wonderful home and property next to us..most of it was a whole lot of GIVING on our part, but knowing his generous heart stems from our giving, we also know that he will be there to help take care of us as long as he is able..and we are able as well..so i can agree with the concept but also don't see it happening in this modern world as much as it appears by his article that it should or would be.

I guess one of the things that i found hilarious was his dependency on BEER, seeing as my husband is a recovering alcohlic and beer is the last thing i would think of speniding time on here..and his blaming potatoes on the ills of the nation.

Nightshades used to be considered a dire poison.

I also think that he does consider a wife and children almost as slaves..and considers some idle time as a real sin..

myself at my age i have learned that sometimes idle time is better for your health than work, or all work..and that we can overextend ourselves to the place where we destroy our minds and bodies and don't find any enjoyment in the life we have been given here on this earth..if you took the time that you put into making the beer, and sat down and enjoyed your children for an hour...maybe you wouldn't need the beer to make it through the day.

Brenda Groth wrote:
obviously..little was known then...

i found hilarious...his dependency on BEER...

I also think that he does consider a wife and children almost as slaves..and considers some idle time as a real sin...if you took the time that you put into making the beer, and sat down and enjoyed your children for an hour...maybe you wouldn't need the beer to make it through the day.

Slaves and beer go together like a horse and blinders.  Beer is what built the pyramids of Egypt: most of the calories available to those slaves were in a form that kept them manageable.

One of the facts our culture is still struggling to absorb is just how much of a worker's value is wasted when the information they gather and the understanding that their perspective fosters are discarded.  Idleness is a huge requirement for harnessing that sort of value.

I've read that the world wars took so much from the economy that we couldn't afford to keep women out of the workplace.  I imagine the economy of the next few decades will be so difficult and complicated that we can't afford to keep labor away from management duties...and (maybe I'm in the minority here) so de-monetized that we won't be able to afford to keep men out of the home.

Joel Hollingsworth wrote:

One of the facts our culture is still struggling to absorb is just how much of a worker's value is wasted when the information they gather and the understanding that their perspective fosters are discarded.  Idleness is a huge requirement for harnessing that sort of value.

so de-monetized that we won't be able to afford to keep men out of the home.

maybe its because I haven't had my coffee yet  ........could you elaborate........my brain isn't quite getting around idleness as a requirement for utilizing worker perspective.....maybe something just went totally over my head.

or de-monetizing putting men in the home. is that, as in "in the home" to generate family goods to support them that cannot be purchased?

  I am not at all de valueing idleness. I think that is one of the huge benefits of modern technology is that it allows us to sit around and think, generate ideas, cultivate relationships etc.......but it can also leave too much time for beer thinking of the soviet union and the reported huge drinking problem that became almost endemic to the male population.

appears that the ancestors that despised idleness have created a bit of idle conversation here..tee hee..which i am enjoying.

funny thing is..when i "sleep" on a problem, often i have the answer during the night or in the morning.

it is true that modern times have allowed us more idle time..but it also appears to me that a lot of time spent producing something that isn't really needed in our daily life..is kinda wasted time, effort, expense and land use.

not having to plant hops and barley, or whatever is used in beer making, frees up my land for other things, and they probably wouldn't grow that well here anyway..also i don't have to use the time and resources to make the beer, store it, process it..nor drink it..i have great water here.

observing people in my life who have spent a lot of time playing around with alcoholic beverages..i've never found that it created any productive abilities in them..usually  they would lie down, in front of the t v  and pass out..

of course this isn't really a post on the evils of beer drinking..and i wouldn't even mind having a nice cold beer occasionally with a pizza..however..i don't as it could lead my husband back into alcohol dependency..which would kill him..he nearly died last time..mixing drugs and alcohol..the drugs are required for his survival at this point..with his medical conditions..but they don't mix with alcohol.

I'm sure that we can find better ways to get those carbohydrates as energy..and at much less effort and land and time use..sure in the end of the article he does give some validity to using vegetables..but not much..

it is also fairly obvious that this is a western european type of thinking..which in many ways i find very "thoughtless"..in their use of their land anyway....honestly..maybe if they had given more time to "thinking" and less to "drinking" they would have planted their land to vegetables and maybe developed their minds a little more..hey I've watch a little BBC too..very little..can't quite handle their thought processes

I like my wine but I  wouldn't devote a whole lot of my land to it that is for sure! I certainly wouldn't put hops or barley in. probably wouldn't grow here either and although an occasional beer is ok it wouldn't be worth much effort to me.

I rather like idle time.......

i do still have 100 year old plus vineyard here..but if i have a good grape year, i can them for juice or make jelly..i also have planted a lot of table grapes and eat them fresh or freeze them for eating later.

i did make wine when we were first married, as we had such a good crop then..but we had some explosions that were really dangerous..and that ended that..good thing or Ron would have just gotten drunk more.

i actually don't mind the vines..they are easy to care for and do produce well when we don't have too cold or too wet a year..and they provide shade and wildlife cover.

i too would love to be able to plant some grains here..maybe next spring..i need to do some study on what will grow here and how..but it won't be to make beer..i'd rather make breads or cereals.

Joel Hollingsworth wrote:
I've read that the world wars took so much from the economy that we couldn't afford to keep women out of the workplace.  I imagine the economy of the next few decades will be so difficult and complicated that we can't afford to keep labor away from management duties...and (maybe I'm in the minority here) so de-monetized that we won't be able to afford to keep men out of the home.

My story is too long to fully describe in this context, but I totally agree with this, as we have become more used to my husband's unemployed staus, right as we are undergoing the biggest transition of our lives, both externally and internally.
Within the next year or two, at the longest, we plan on making our complete exodus from city life. We have the advantage, at 55, of having done the "back to the land" thing before.
We literally homesteaded raw acreage and spent the first 2 winters without indoor plumbing. We built a timber framed home, bermed into a north hill, from recycled beams and did many things right, learning invaluable lessons. But we fell short of being able to hold that dream, precisly because my husband continued to work, although I had a marginally sucessful "cottage business" which definitely could have been more than enough income, if we both had equal interest. But, he bought into the hype, as a seemingly empowered and sucessful breadwinner, about leveraging our equity to complete a more grandiose and extravagant home than we actually needed, or I had envisioned. We wound up having to sell our "dream home" on acreage and I wound up enslaved to a miserable low wage job, employed to do for someone elses business what I had formerly enjoyed doing for my own.
After a few more ups and downs, which our relationship miraculously survived, my husband found sobriety almost one year ago, as the economy crashed and many other challenges came our way, in a sort of perfect storm.
If we don't learn our lessons the first time round, they keep getting more dramatic!

Didnot women get jobs in th efirst world war because the men were out getting killed? i did my school thesis on the war artists there were regiments of artist them as the time before photography was close enough for some old fashioned institutions that meant drawing instead of photographing, to survive. That was how women won the vote in england their war effort won them the vote. Maybe htyat was just the mens waqy of pretending that women couldnot get things because they pressurised men byu¡ut because htey ahd been good girls giving them the vote after the war effort as the men were already covinced of the nuisance women could make off them selves without it was just winning a battrle though they lost the war. 
There were portraits from the first world war time of of happy fulfilled looking women just in to having a job and a better wage than being maids and cooks  gave i suppose and portraits of confused looking young men, being in the trenches is not so cool. agri rose macaskie.

  As to alcohol i read that it was usefull because it was in the old days befoer good plumbing a safe drink, compared to drinking water, it didvnot give you colera.
  if people drink and fall uncounsciose on the sofa, then maybe its not just the drink that's wrong with them, maybe they have chronic depression. Maybe if you drink it should be accompanied by some other activity like pyramid building. Take him to the doctor or psychiatrist or read up on deppresion.
  Though it is probably possible to do more without drinking, drinking gives me a tired back muscle, which i always iterpret as m ebeign tired, fatigue i suppose because it reduce how well your muscles are oxygenated as it affects your cardiovascular sytem. It mean I have and considerably less energy the next day if i drink too much and also its meant ot be a deppresant. All those ty'0pes in Moes bar in the SImpsons look really unenergetic.
    Churchill tippled like crazy and lots of other functioning people drink, i think considering what are the other factors that lead to becoming usless when drunkis drink is probably a more interesting passtime than thinking of how bad drinking is. I dont think drink is a good thing but as comptent people drink i think the other factors that lead to your drunk becoming incompetent should receive more attention than they do with all the enphasis put on drink itself. Does alcoholics anonymous work well enough for us to really believe in it? There are still a lot of alcoholics around.
      My youngest sister was taken off to be cured and i think that it made a nice person that I loved for her sense of humor generosity except with helping you to wash up and love of animals and fairley forgiving nature in to a right bitch as far as i can make out.
      Sometimes i wonder if it is not that my brother causes a lot of mischeive, everytime he makes special freinds of someone i lose that person. Indeed he seems to be freinds with each person but they stop relating to each other, he is certainely not a cementer of group relations and he says if i give anything to others that giving things is a way of having people treat you right, well he uses money to get peopole to treat others wrong, my evidences is buckets of clues nothing i can prove but a lot of clues is nearly as good as one bit of solid evidence i suppose. He has plenty, i believe, to use. I really like giving things may be a comment like that serves to stop others giving and that really leaves them further out of the running than they may have been already as evryone else gives . My mother bought him up to be always out playing with other boys instead of sitting at home with a lot of girls 4 sisters and that seems to have messed him up as part of the family. His privledge made him feel out of things, being always out playing instead of washing up was priveledge. 
      Many people i loved have died to me in one form or other long before they died phisicall.
      back on alcohol, I have seen women who have suffered cures who i would diagnose as alcoholic and broken, as opposed to alcoholic and in one peice and i have known plenty of alcoholics, when i was trying to see what i could do for tramps i saw lots of alcoholics. and they were like other groups of people one finds, one set of problems seem to beset one of them and another another.  There are people who would treat them all in the same way it seems silly to me. Mostly the fashion seems to be trying to treat them as if they were thoroughly egotistical, complete narcisists, it is people like Hitler and hannibal lector who don't seem to be capable of putting themselves in other peoples shoes which is to say who are complete narcisists not drunks who have their faults but i have not noticed they are worse complete narcisists than those that don't drink, it is  just some drunks stop being usefull to those around them and even are a nuiscance not that their evaluation of others leaves a lot to be desired. THey usually get trodden on and pushed around by undrunk narcisistsas they are weak which is a problem .
        I have two hops plants in my garden they are not doing very well, I like them, they make a sunny looking and sort of humble looking, rather than palacial climber. agri rose macaskie.

  people argue instead of discussng things because full importance as work is not given to discussing things in many situations and adults are always trying to improbe there status by pretending they are working all the time and will not engage in activities that don't come under this ehadign . . Things take a while to discuss what you are going to do on saturday for instance and if you try to rush the conversation you end up shouting. big businesses pay a lot to people who ahve meetings when money is at stake turning things over properly is considered an important part of work.
  THough my family was well off i was brought up to be a drudge as a woman and one who was to good at their home work, though usually said to be good in class when things were discussed. This means i feel bad if i am not doing a big bit of the fisical work the washing up. I have noticed that others are bought up differently, to be bosses and they don't feel bad if they aren't dong the phisical work, they see clearly that the job of boss is time consuming and includes them bettering their mind as a peice of work and getting others to do the less well renumerated work.
  of course if you are a bos it reduces your importance if you discuss things and let others have their say instead of just deciding yourself. >Talking is a more vital activity than a lot of others it serves to educate adults as long as talking about sensible things is a requirement of that part of society. Considering this type of interaction as frivolouse is maybe a way of maintaining class and sexual advantages, calling theiir conversatrions frivolouse and yours seriose an dpersuade them they like talking of stupid things .  Freauds student friends where reffered to as his freinds in studies rather than as his social life this gave him an extra big right to be with them men usually can dignify their social life to some extent in this way while there wives socail life is considered frivolouse . Just having a group of freinds empowers and protects you even if the conversation is silly an ddoes not eduacte you. WHen the social group you belong to demands seriouse conversation people try to pick up usefull bits of information. i am going to crrect this later and send it now. 

I got to have a nice chat with Brandon Sheard of Homestead Meatsmith a couple weeks ago for School of Traditional Skills, and he said that this book is one of his top reccomendations regarding homesteading and related subjects.  I went ahead and picked up a physical copy, but this free version is great for anyone who likes using their e-reader:

https://archive.org/details/cottageeconomyco00cobbrich/page/n5/mode/2up

It's a bit off subject, perhaps, but hops is a great medicine.  It's a painkiller, for example, a muscle relaxer, including menstrual cramps, it has antimicrobial properties, is an aid for insomnia, it's useful in treating arthritis.  Recent (2018) studies indicates it may be helpful in treating cancer, but more research is required.  It's good for much more than beer!

I thought this will be an interesting read, from what I have read so far.  

I agree with his definition of poor.  I know my oldest son felt we were poor, although we always had enough for necessities and a few luxuries.  He was probably frustrated by my lack of sympathy over his having to co-ar-dinate to get to drive the family car when his friend was given a new, tricked out truck upon graduating from high school, but he knew me well enough to know not to even bring it up.  The lack of the latest Apple phone does not make you poor.

I see some of his ideas are obviously wrong, given 200 years of rapid increasing knowledge and a different culture.  His assumption of the importance of beer is the obvious one.  Still I believe he was simply voicing the common belief.  As evidence I refer you to read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography about working in a printers shop in England when old ben was a young man, where they felt that you couldn't be strong without drinking beer).  

If you are upset about the patriarchal focus, go find another book, but look for a more recent publication.  Most of the writing of this time will be similar.  Alternatively, you could simply right it off for what it is, a man's perspective given at a certain culture, time and place and thank God you were born here and now.

As far as idleness is concerned, at this time in England the commons were pretty much gone, which had provided a cushion for the working rural poor, this drove down wages, and people worked much harder just to get enough to eat and keep themselves clothed (When well made pants were expected to last a couple of decades).  In that situation, a couple of hours each day might be viewed as a waste.

I agree the guy writing this took a lot of time to write it, which indicates to me he was NOT one of the poor.