An Appreciation of John Seymour’s The Forgotten Crafts

Carleton Palmer

John Seymour, born in Essex, England, in 1914, was sometimes called “The Father of Self-Sufficiency.” He was certainly the author of The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency, first published in 1975, (1-3) and at his passing in 2004 he had authored and co-authored forty books including The Forgotten Crafts, (4,5) and had become a widely-recognized British environmentalist, activist, broadcaster, farmer and futurist. Those achievements, and other elements of his biography, are a strong testament to individualism. (6-7)

The change in title of the considered work from “Crafts” in 1984 to “Arts and Crafts” in the book’s more recent 2001 edition illustrates the flexibility and interpenetration of these terms, whose useful ambiguity broadens the definition of “Art” in the expression “traditional art” beyond non-utilitarian formalist aesthetic doctrine. As Ecker observes, “. . . our Western distinctions between art and craft, fine and applied arts, and related classificatory schemes seem downright arbitrary when the productive activities of humans are approached on their own terms and in their own cultural contexts.” (8) Somehow the “crafts” of the earlier 1984 book became the “arts” of the later 2001 volume when it was combined with the 1987 The National Trust Book of Forgotten Household Crafts. (9) It is no discredit to Seymour that our language is flexible in these matters when it is claimed that some languages have no term for “art” at all.

The Forgotten Crafts is a member of a cross-genre shelf-list of books from the second-half of the twentieth-century (e.g.: 10-13) acknowledging facets of an intricate and difficult problem which is growing increasingly acute at the beginning of the twenty-first, and is clearly defined by Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama: “The challenge we face is therefore to find some means of enjoying the same degree of harmony and tranquility as those more traditional communities while benefiting fully from the material developments of the world as we find it at the dawn of a new millennium.” (14) People understand this conundrum from surprisingly varied perspectives, including but not restricted to nostalgia, survivalism and self-development. It is a virtue of the expression “living traditions in art” that it can catch up all of those viewpoints. John Seymour’s viewpoint advocates a rural, agricultural material culture which requires the practice of hand skills, some of which are summarized in The Forgotten Arts and Crafts, thereby well-qualifying this work for our consideration here.

The section headings of the most recent book clarify the domain:

Part I: Forgotten Arts

Woodland Crafts

Building Crafts

Crafts of the Field

Workshop Crafts

Textiles

Part II: Forgotten Household Crafts

Kitchen Crafts

Dairy Crafts

Laundry Crafts

Around the Home

Textile Crafts

Decorative Crafts

In the ordinary division of labor of a traditionally espoused household Part I might be considered the male domain, and Part II the female province, and although we would not care to be accused of sexism in the politically correct twenty-first century there are historical facts of gender implicit in the construction of the book. The subcategories of the first chapter, Woodland Crafts, takes one into the woods for raw materials with minimal tools:

Hurdle Making

Rake Making

Fork Making

Besom Making

Handle Making

Hoop Making

Ladder Making

Crib Making

Broaches and Pegs

Clog Sole Cutting

Bodging

Charoal Burning

Oak Basket Making

Despite being chromosomally male, since genetics provides no guarantee to this sort of knowledge, Besom Making and Bodging carved (sic) out unfamiliar territory for me until I observed that they were, respectively, twig-broom making and lathing. Each entry sketches a process or set of processes in the fabrication of something necessary to pre-industrial rural life as might have been commonplace in England two hundred or more years ago. In fact, in one form or another, with regional adaptation the processes noted here probably fairly represent their equivalents in any pre-industrial society. Seymour observes, “In spite of the machines, there is not a human skill that was ever developed that is not still practiced somewhere on this planet.”

The “forgotten” in Forgotten Crafts . . . may or may not be literal, for if something is truly forgotten we might not be aware that it was ever known. There is enough evidence in the world that we do not now know how some of the accomplishments of those who came before us were achieved. For example, one of Anna Roosevelt’s achievements in Parmana was to offer and support an hypothesis which explained puzzling prehistoric population density and social organization on the floodplain of the Amazon and Orinoco, “. . . it was hypothesized that the later prehistoric high population density might have developed as a result of the establishment of intensive maize cultivation and that the floodplain chiefdoms might have arisen in response to the managerial requirements of the new system.” (15)

One might suppose that, as a farmer himself, Seymour would have appreciated that the implications of prehistoric agriculture can puzzle us in the age of agribusiness, and he would certainly have been attuned to hearing that craft itself (in this case the agricultural craft of cultivation)had the power to shape a society.

The Forgotten Crafts does not propose to teach us any of the skills it documents, but to inform us that it is the case that “To learn something about crafts and craftsmen is to learn about the history of the race.”

(1) Seymour , John and Will Sutherland , The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it: The Complete Back-to-Basics Guide

(2) Seymour, John, New Complete Self-Sufficiency: the Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers

Publisher: Dorling Kindersley 2003

(3 )Self-Sufficiency Network:

http://www.self-sufficiency.net/index.php

(4) Seymour, John, The Forgotten Crafts: A Practical Guide to Traditional Skills

Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 1984, ISBN: 0394539567

(5) Seymour, John, The Forgotten Arts and Crafts

Dorling Kindersley Publishing NY, 2001 ISBN: 0751327824

(6) obituary

(7) Scott, Tim, compiler, John Seymour: A Collector’s Bibliography, Complete Listing of Books Biographical Notes Scarcity Ratings Hare’s Ear Publications, Cornwall, England 2005, ISBN 0951568671 (www.seaglimpses.com)

(8) Ecker, David W., Toward a Phenomenology of Artistic Process, http://www.cpalmer.biz/ISALTApedia/index.php?title=Ecker:_Toward_a_Phenomenology_of_Artistic_Process

(9) Seymour, John, The National Trust Book of Forgotten Household Crafts Dorling Kindersley, 1987.

(10) Schumacher, E. F., Small is Beautiful New York: Harper and Row, 1973

(11) Fields, Curtis P., The Forgotten Art of Building A Stone Wall, Dublin, New Hampshire: Yankee, Inc., 1971

(12) Lappe, Frances Moore, Diet for a Small Planet, New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1971

(13) Foxfire anthologies, Eliot Wigginton, editor, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday

(14) Gyatso, Tenzin, XIV Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium, Riverhead Trade; Reissue edition (May 8, 2001)

(15) Roosevelt, Anna Curtenius, Parmana: Prehistoric Maize and Manioc subsistence along the Amazon and Orinoco Academic Press, 1980 p. 253