1 - The Thame Household in Context

Summary

What is meant by context? All inquiry is by its nature defined by an area of focus which does not exist in isolation but is conditional on other elements. In textual analysis it is the narrative in which the passage under consideration is embedded, but in other areas of inquiry it should include any factor which impacts on the matter under primary consideration. This study focusses on households in Thame, but they existed not in isolation but in contact with a wider world in which each household was embedded and which affected its material condition, its social structures and its values. In this chapter, then, we consider a wide range of factors which provided opportunities and constraints to Thame households: environmental conditions, economic activities, social structures and cultural ideologies. In attempting to evaluate such factors we are confronted by the distance of time which has obscured much of past lived experience, and by the problem of fully comprehending the significance of such factors for the various households in the study. Not only is much of what was known and experienced by a resident of Thame – man, woman and child – in the seventeenth century at best indistinctly and uncertainly perceived from the present, but also, paradoxically, the process of historical research and inquiry may well focus on aspects of the past which were unknown or imperfectly comprehended by those ‘living the past’. For example, present understanding of Thame may be enhanced by knowledge of early settlement on the site, which would be obscured and seem largely irrelevant to the seventeenth-century inhabitant. Again, historical research may reveal processes of demographic shift or meteorological conditions in the seventeenth century which placed pressure on resources and helped to reconfigure social structures, but which the individuals living through those processes may well have experienced only as aberrations to assumed norms, as anxiety or optimism rather than tending to permanent change in their world. Contextual factors for this study are most significant in the way in which they affected the actions and mentalities of the past, not as abstracted historical facts and processes. As Muir writes, ‘the sense of place is a subjective phenomenon … the exclusion of emotion from intellect and symbol from reason in western science does not equip us to recognize and relate to sense of place factors which may have motivated our distant forebears’.