“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It was in 1748, in England. They were leather shoes. They had huge cowhides hanging up in a back room of the cobbler’s shop, and there were a lot of dried cowhides hanging up in another room, too. It was very cold in there, where the first cowhides were. It wasn’t ventilated, they didn’t have any windows there.

(Her father and mother weren’t there. Sarah didn’t live there, she was just in there. She lived 3 doors away. How long did she live? She died at 17, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. The cobbler came out of a back room into the front room and there she was, all in flames and screaming. The cobbler shoved her out in the street and rolled her over on the stones and in the dirt, but she died.

(The fishermen had plain wooden boats, not canoes. I don’t know what kind of fish it was, but they had piles of it on a good day. Blackish fish, some of it only a few inches long, some much longer, averaging maybe a foot in length. Yes, they had fish all year long, it wasn’t seasonal. The water was warm in the winter. That’s why it was so foggy. They didn’t farm too much because the ground was poor and rocky and very hilly, so they depended on the fish.

(The name of the village was Levonshire. It had less than 300 people. It was very rocky there. It was on the northeast coast of England. The people there used to get food also from another village farther north. For some reason the land was better there. What did they grow? Yes, I see tomatoes. But as I say it I remember reading that they didn’t eat tomatoes in those days. But yes, the people in the smaller villages ate them. And there was wheat and barley. They had nice cows.

(There was a boy in the shop too. He wasn’t their son, just an apprentice to the cobbler. He slept in the kitchen. His name was Albert, Albert Lang. He was 11, I think. The cobbler and his wife didn’t have any children. She had trouble with her glasses. This was strange, because most people didn’t have them. I don’t know where she got them, in another town, but they weren’t very good. Handmade, they had to grind the glass and stuff. They were like magnifying glasses, in a frame on her nose.

(The cobbler was comparatively well off, though not wealthy. He was 53 years old when he died. The boy Albert was too young to take his place when he died, so the village didn’t have a cobbler for a couple of years. The boy was a fisherman for a while. Then another cobbler came and Albert helped him in the shop.

(How far were they from London? Well, it was two days overland, by stage, two days on horseback. They made about 20 miles a day. They didn’t like to travel after dark. It was too dangerous, there were too many robbers. So they always stayed at this inn that was about halfway there. It was called Sedgewick. They’d get there by evening of the first day.

(In the inn there was a huge fireplace. Their dishes were made of earthenware. They had ale, they served lots of ale at meals. Their meat was ribs, they had mutton ribs, I think. And something called braunschweiger. They had bread, barley bread and soup. Fish soup and mussels. They didn’t have salt. They had beans, I don’t know what kind.

(They always saved the bullets if they could find them after using them. The metal was hard to get. The guns were awfully heavy, they didn’t shoot them much. These bullets were something new. They didn’t last, they stopped making them. For some reason I don’t understand the bullets might explode. The men didn’t want to keep the powder and the bullets together. Sometimes the powder was rusty and sometimes whitish. They were big bullets—one of the reasons the guns were so big.

(The people didn’t go to London often. Some never went at all. The first Sarah who died at 17 never went. Albert’s Sarah went. King Edward was in London then. Albert and Sarah did well and could afford to go. When Edward was being crowned they went to London. They didn’t see the coronation, they were just common people but they wanted to be there. Everybody was excited.

(The descendants of the invaders lived in the village too. There was the Laverne family, and De Nauge, and the Breims. They slept on hay. It was so damp it wasn’t healthy, it was too foggy. The hay was never dry. There were many children around. Families that could had a cow. Were the people happy? That’s a silly question. They were as happy as anybody else. They didn’t like their babies dying, though, but they just thought it was life. They drank a lot—ale. No school, they couldn’t read. Well, the sexton, he read some but not much, nobody else could. They didn’t think it was necessary. They didn’t have books, so what good did it do to be able to read?

(They didn’t have water to drink. There was salt in the ocean, that’s why they washed in the ocean. But they didn’t think it was healthy to drink water. It was hilly and rocky behind the village but there was a stream up there, and they went up there with horses and buckets. But they didn’t drink the water. They drank ale. They made soups out of the water but never thought of drinking it. They were lucky, too. They had a stream that came down from a high place. They’d have had to dig down too far for water otherwise.