The Anglo-Saxons understood material things in a way most people no longer do. Yet their relationship to objects is not entirely beyond our grasp. In the 1950s, when I was a boy, rural life in the United States bore some resemblance to conditions in Anglo-Saxon England. Animals, plants, and the tools needed to manage and process them filled our living space. Cows had to be milked and fed every day, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all the other holidays. Family feasts included meat from our own animals – pork sausage in the turkey stuffing, perhaps – and canned or frozen vegetables from the garden. We experienced the relationship between plants and animals and food on the table directly. Although there currently is a trend for restaurants and food businesses to emphasize local produce and stress the connection between what is on the plate and where it was grown, few people butcher their own animals or grow their own food any longer. In my youth this was not the case.

Until the period after World War I, most people in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain lived in the countryside, like my family. The shift from rural to urban was gradual. The US Census Bureau shows that the split was 60 percent to 40 percent in favor of the rural population in 1900. By 1920 the distribution was almost even, 51 percent rural to 49 percent urban. Thereafter the shift was more pronounced: 44 percent to 56 percent in 1940; 30 percent to 70 percent in 1960. By 1990 the United States was 25 percent rural and 75 percent urban. Much of this change, in which over one-third of the country’s population was reclassified as urban, happened in the first two decades of the century (when the rural population shrank by nine percentage points) and between 1940 and 1960 (when the rural population declined a further fourteen points). Losses since have been much smaller, in part because rural life itself has changed. Blue collar workers who live in the countryside drive to factory jobs and shop in supermarkets and discount chains. Their habits are more urban than rural. Cities have changed too. Until recently it was common for people in some urban areas to raise their own animals and to have large gardens.