“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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 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.

(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.

(I can more or less see the main street. I see houses and a couple of shops, then a narrow cobbled walk raised up high—it was a partly dirt road built up of rocks and stones that ran around an inlet from the sea. But it was never flooded, the road kept the village dry. There wasn’t any sandy beach. No, I wouldn’t know it if I saw it, it’s not there now. I don’t think I’d know the spot. It was just this little inlet, with the rocky hills and not much grass. It wasn’t a seaport, big ships couldn’t get in close. There was just room enough for their little boats to go out after fish.

(The village had been there for 350 years. I told you its name before, Levonshire. I think before that it had a different name. All those invasions, a lot of them came along that coast. There were the Norsemen, and I guess the Gauls. They had sails, big sailboats. The Gauls looked French, swarthy, a lot of them were little men. Everybody knows what the Norsemen were like. That was long before these people I’m telling you about lived there.

(In London, I don’t know why, Albert’s wife liked to go to the bakery shops. They had fancier breads there than they did in the village. I’ll figure out why I want to call Albert Ralph. The bakery always smelled good. Sarah liked to eat a lot.

(And Sarah, the first one, if she hadn’t burned to death she would have died anyhow at 17. It’s so funny, but she had tuberculosis. One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. The village wasn’t sunny, and they kept the windows closed. There weren’t many windows anyhow. The land was very rocky, and they just would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. They had dogs and cats.

(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.