“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This session did not involve Seth in any way. His presence was not asked for, and he did not appear during the evening. This was an experiment tried, however, more or less at his suggestion that we try different things.

(Sarah lived 3 doors down the street in a dark front room. She had two brothers, one off someplace, he was a sailor. The other was younger. Sarah’s father did something for the cobbler, so he made shoes for the young brother and she was in the shop to get the shoes.

(I don’t know what Sarah’s father did for the cobbler. It was a craft, something he bartered for shoes. Something to do with fishing nets. The village was right by the sea. It was the only cobbler’s shop in quite a few villages around there, and there was a lot of community bartering going on. Sarah’s father made fishnets out of seaweed, dried seaweed, sounds crazy, doesn’t it? They wove it together like rope, then made the nets.

(The cobbler was an old man. He had something to do with being the sexton of a church. It was a small church, not Catholic. It was a Church of England. The cobbler used to ring the bells. His wife was 53, she was named Anna. She wore glasses and had grayish white hair, she was stout and messy.

(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.

(Albert did okay. He got married, and his wife’s name was Sarah too. She was a cousin of Sarah Wellington. There were lots of cousins in the village. Most of the people were related, they had no place else to go.

(They went in a coach. She was 41 and he was 46. They had 2 or 3 children. I don’t know what happened to them. The few people I can tell you about must have died. Albert-Ralph—liked to hunt because he was used to guns and knew about them. But he couldn’t get much because the ground was too rocky. Deer and rabbits, a special kind, no big tails, gray hares of some kind. And there were gray squirrels.

(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?

(A few could write. They could write their own names but they couldn’t read others’. Sometimes a family would have a son go away to learn to write. Then he would teach his parents to write their names, but not often.

(I saw the feet of a man walking along a flat dusty reddish road. He was I think barefoot, though I wondered about some kind of rudimentary sandal. He carried no staff, and had what was apparently a brownish long robe flapping about the calves of his legs. The legs were thin. I could not see the man’s head or shoulders, or even his waist. The land was very flat, reds and browns. There was nothing but horizon in the far distance on the left side, beyond the feet.