CHAPTER 17
THE GOLDEN
AGE SWINDLE
I park in the gravel patch behind The King's Head. It's supposed to be for patrons only and, although I'm not one this particular day, Maggie and I often are, so I figure that's OK. This is one of the reasons I like Bledington. The King's Head does delicious food (which, as you now know, for me is right up there among books and history). Modern guidebooks call it a gastro-pub, a horrible word, though I'm tickled by the idea of the marketing department that first invented it without realising 'gastro' has undertones of a stomach upset with projectile vomiting.
A couple of chickens are loose on the path and scatter at my approach (what's wrong with the foxes round here?) as I make for the second reason I like Bledington: its village green, at the top end of which I decide to sit and take in the scene, after reading the plaque on my chosen bench:
George Beacham
Died 1 March 1978
Clerk to the Parish Council and Church Warden
For 30 years
From here you hardly notice The King's Head. It's a low old building on the edge of the green. There are no garish signs, and anyone driving along the little road that passes through the centre of the village could easily miss it, unless they're locals in the know (or of course happen to have consulted www.tripadvisor.com where six of whose seven reviewers give it ). At the far side of the green, a small stream trickles under a bridge.
Just beyond it, by the bend in the road is an old stone house that Maggie and I looked at in the days when we still thought we could buy the light-and-character combo off the shelf. I would have snapped up the place on the spot because of its name alone. The house is called 'Waterloo.' It summoned up in my head images of an infantryman returning in 1815 from the horrors of Wellington's famous victory to the bosom of his family and the tranquillity of this village. But, when Maggie suggested it had probably been named by a retired ticket collector who'd worked at the Southern Region's mainline station, that killed it for me.
There are no parked cars visible around the green, and apart from a couple of kids' swings by the pub, an ITV film crew working on Marple could set up and start to shoot straight off without touching a thing. Chocolate box or what? Now, of course you may think this looks like it's playing right into Ralph's hands. Marple, Lark Rise to Candleford, they're all one. But you're forgetting, I've got a new shot in my locker, or rather my rucksack, from which I extract Herbert Evans' trusty volume to check again his 1905 judgement on the village: it had, I read, 'the deserted melancholy air of a place which has seen better days.' It's the reverse of that now. But the question is, had it actually ever seen 'better days' before 1905?
My hand digs back into the rucksack and brings out Ms Ashby's history of Bledington, The Changing English Village 1066–1914. Deciding that I need sustenance to help me tackle her 425-page study, I rise from George Beecham's bench and make for The King's Head. It's near enough lunchtime. OK, so it's only ten to twelve. You need to get there early to bag a table. And anyway I can taste the game pie already.
At a small oak table next to the today fireless inglenook, I sip my cranberry juice and head straight for the back of Ms Ashby's volume, hoping for, and relieved to find, a comprehensive index. By the time my jugged hare (even better than the pie) and chips arrive half an hour later, the story's taking shape. I'll paraphrase.
Over the past nine centuries, it seems Bledington's drama has been played out by two groups. They are: The Lord and Lady Veryrichpersons and the poorpeople. I can't say Mr and Mrs poorpeople because that would imply a middle-class title. Oh, and to be fair, I should add that the Veryrichpersons weren't always peers of the realm, some wereAbbots of Winchcombe. During the first few hundred years after the Norman Conquest, Bledington was home to the lower orders. According to Domesday Book, in 1086 there were only twelve families in the village: eight villeins and four bordars. This meant they weren't free to leave the place without the permission of the Abbot, that they had to work on his land without pay and were basically at his mercy, or to be more precise – and to dispel any idea you might have, that a man of the church would personally make sure Bledington's villeins, bordars and their families were fed and cared for – at the mercy of the Abbot's steward who lived it up at the manor house nearby. So no paradise there then.
By the mid 1700s, according to Ms Ashby, 'hardship both grew and took new forms'. The better-off farmers pushed the poor into cottages that had no gardens where vegetables might have been grown and pigs and chickens raised. Nearby woods were cleared so there was less fuel for fires. The word 'starvation' was commonly used at this time to denote both hunger and cold.
With a frisson of guilt, I order The King's Head's home-made apple pie, but feel cleansed when I turn down cream with it, and read that in the nineteenth century there were at least moments of communal jollity. In 1815, the villagers all gathered inside Bledington's Home Farm cart shed and were treated to a dinner of roast beef and plum pudding. Pausing only to pop to the bar and ask for cream to be added to my pie after all, I read on and discover that the motive for the villagers' celebration was the victory at Waterloo! And, as I recall, our almost-home of that name is right next to Home Farm House, and I've noticed an old long building nearby. The cart shed – the very site where the victory was celebrated? We could have been living there now if Maggie hadn't put me off. But she would have rejected it anyway – the windows are too small.
By 1851, the village was overwhelmingly a place for farm labourers. There were sixty of them. 'It may be doubted,' says our author, 'whether any family gained a living without anxiety.' There were periods of famine, and the stealing of food and fuel became more common. After the workhouse opened at Stow in 1836, there were more and more cases of Bledington people who were unable to support themselves and so were sent there. The workhouse regime was apparently as oppressive as that of a prison. One benighted inmate, Jane Waring of Bledington, and her blind common-law husband escaped through a window, leaving 'her two bastard children behind her.' She was eventually tracked down in Woodstock 16 miles away, begging for food, and was dragged back to the workhouse.
By the end of the century, 'voluntary associations for prosecution' were set up in the district, i.e. vigilantes. They kept dogs, including a pack of bloodhounds, to pursue sheep-stealers.
I'm in need of fresh air, so pack my books into the rucksack and go to the bar to pay my bill.
'Oh, you didn't finish all your apple pie,' says the landlady. 'Was it all right?'
'I'm sure it's lovely,' I reply. 'Just lost my appetite.'
I wander out into the sunshine on Bledington's green. So much then for our Edwardian cyclist's 'better days'. Maybe he too expected a village to be an idyll of prosperity and peace. So where did this myth of a pastoral golden age come from? It's been around for a helluva long time. We should probably blame the ancient Greeks for starting it off with all their bucolic stanzas describing youths with pan pipes frolicking in the fields with fanciable demi-goddesses. Later came Spenser and his 'Faerie Queene', Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess, followed by Wordsworth and the Romantic poets. Today there are the TV companies with Lark Rise, The Darling Buds of May, All Creatures Great and Small, etc, etc. Then there's me with my childhood memories of rabbits and mushrooms and tractor rides in the eternal sunshine of Hogsthorpe. I'm responsible too. In fact lots of us are. In the globalised economy of the twenty-first century, city-dwellers yearn for clean air, open views, less stress and fewer drive-by shootings. So they retire to a village.
We've come to see the escape into village life as 'Recapturing an Ancestral Peace'. TV programmes, sociologists, me, we talk about RE-generating the English village, as though some past dynamism has been lost. Maybe it has in some places. But not everywhere.
I look around at Bledington with its village green, its little stream running through, its pub and its well kept, pretty – yes, I'm not going to make an excuse for the word – its pretty houses, set off b
y neat and imaginative gardens. It's not a question of having lost 'The Good Old Days' at all. It's more: 'You've Never Had It So Good As Right Now In The Twenty-first Century'. This most peaceful and affluent little spot was for hundreds of years a sink of misery and despair for most of its population. How common is that story to the villages of England, I wonder?
So what's happened to bring about such a staggering improvement to life in Bledington since 1905?
I can think of five things straight off:
1. Mains sewerage,
2. Internet shopping,
3. Final salary pension schemes,
4. Monty Don and Gardeners' World, and
5. A 4,000 per cent improvement in the purchasing power of the national average wage. (Actually, I'm not sure about this figure, but whatever it is, it's going to be impressive.)
Villages have got swept along with all those benefits which, no doubt, city dwellers would claim they devised and produced. My conclusion, therefore, is that some villages at least have not been thrown struggling onto the scrapheap by the rise of the globalised metropolis, but are in fact in mid-season form (though the demise of benefit number three, above, might mean it'll be back to the knacker's yard again in a few years' time).
My deep sigh of satisfaction as I survey the horizon round Bledington Green grows deeper when I spy the tower of the village church, poking up above the cottage roofs. That'll be my next stop.
As I've already said, I'm not religious. But churches, especially village churches, are for me the most exciting buildings imaginable. If someone in the future invents a device which enables us to travel 700 years back in time, you just tell them: 'Sorry, it's been done already!' You or I can do it right now, any day of the week (though there's a degree of overcrowding on a Sunday). Go into a village parish church. Many of them are pieces of England straight out of the Middle Ages which have never stopped functioning as they did then. Of course, to be fair, some don't live up to my hype. The Victorians did their obsessive best to tidy them up and so wrecked a lot of them. But there are plenty they didn't. The best ones for me started life around a thousand years ago, got bits added and altered for the next half-millennium, till the Reformation, and then were largely left alone. I say 'largely' because most of them do lack their medieval stained glass, wall paintings and statues, which Cromwell and the Puritans later smashed, white-washed over and tugged down. Boo.
Bledington Church is one of the best time machines around. But don't worry; you're not going to have to sit through a geekish account of box-pew ends, collar-beam roofs and finial-topped fonts. Let me just say that there's a ramshackle elegance about a good parish church. You can't help taking to the one in Bledington as soon as you catch sight of it, with its huge, square Perpendicular windows that look like they've been stolen from a cathedral and foisted on the reluctant little Norman nave. Someone has slapped a big white label on its tower, or – as we see on slightly closer inspection – a big white clock face, strangely diamond-shaped, announcing 'VR 1897'. Then there's the door, made of cracked, shrunken oak that must pre-date Noah, full of nail holes, some with the dark stain of the nail rust still in them, and two giant black hinges that obviously once supported the Great Gate of Kiev before the village carpenter got his hands on them. Open this door and what hits you is the smell. Musty and rich. Like fourteenth-century armpits. Now go in yourself, hug its fat columns, fear its leaning-over chancel arch, and feel what it was like to be here on 14 September 1371, or whatever date you choose between 1100 and 1525.
I shall be for ever grateful to Bledington's worshippers for keeping this building still doing what it's been doing, without interruption, for the past millennium. The parish church has obviously been part of the glue that's stuck this village together during all those grim times when there wasn't a glorious battle to celebrate. And, though Sunday attendances are down everywhere, the old church must still help stick the village together today. Let's not forget George Beacham, of memorial bench fame, churchwarden for thirty years.
There's a big difference between a city parish church and a village one. In cities, they huddle, half ashamed at the feet of tall, loutish office blocks or are squashed unnoticed between a mini-mart and a KFC, knowing they don't really belong there any more. In villages, their towers and spires are still the tallest things around and their graveyards let them breathe. Even to those villagers that go to them only on Christmas Eve, or when Great-uncle Donald dies or Gillie gets married, they mark out this village as something separate. Something you can belong to.
I make my way back to the car by a different route and am reminded that Bledington is bigger than you first think, and it has a new section. There's even a close of bungalows, which – unlike in Hogsthorpe – have spread only a hundred yards or so. And there's a short row of more affordable houses, looking a bit ashen-faced, it has to be said, alongside the healthy tans of the rest of the village. So that's the other good thing to say about Bledington: it caters for all tastes and incomes.
As I take a wistful glance at 'Waterloo', I notice something about Bledington that's not changed for the better. I'm looking at a house name a couple of doors down, 'The Old Post Office'. Bledington no longer has any kind of shop. Nor of course, does it have any jobs for locals, apart from a dozen cooks, waiters and bar staff at The King's Head. But then little villages are not for working or shopping any more. It's a fact of life. There's a clear line between Bledington and the slightly bigger villages like Stow where people can do both. And I suppose it doesn't mean that Bledington and the thousands like it across the country are necessarily in need of regeneration, whatever we think that means.
Back at the green, a mum is showing her wellied toddler the ducks, two blokes in tweed hats are laughing while their dogs wrestle each other and a handful of kids are seeing how high they can go on the swings. A village green does make a difference to a village. Aston Magna, where you're never sure whether you've reached the middle till you're back out in open fields at the far end, didn't have one. No heart. No bit in the middle where you can stand and look around, and feel you're taking in the whole village. Like the church, an open acre of grass in the centre tells you, 'This is it. This is what you belong to.' The Market Square does the same for Stow.
Half an hour later, I pop into Maggie's shop.
'You look pleased with yourself,' she says. 'So has it been a good day with Nik at The Old Stables?'
'Oh. Oh, no,' I say, dropping the corners of my mouth. 'It hasn't. It hasn't at all. Work's had to stop. The lorries can't get through to take all the rubble and stuff away. The council have got no idea when the road's going to reopen.'
'Oh. Why didn't you call me?'
'I didn't want to worry you while you're working,' I say, crossing my fingers inside the pockets of my jeans.
Monday 8.30 a.m. a week and a half later, Nik calls.
'Great news, Derek,' he announces. 'The road's open again. I've just spoken to the lorry firm. We're top of their list. They'll start shifting all the rubble and stuff later this morning.'
'Hurray!' I shout down the phone and share with Maggie the glad update.
O ye of short memory! As if converting The Old Stables were all beer and skittles.
CHAPTER 18
TALES OF THE DEAD
One of the disadvantages of building within the boundaries of medieval Stow, is you have to employ an archaeologist to watch you dig out the foundations and then report back to the council's planning office.
The ground under Stow is apparently chock-full of artefacts. The village's history goes back more than 3,000 years. Bronze Age pottery's been found here. If you were a Midlands-based travelling salesman in the first millennium BC, hawking bags of salt, copper helmets, or antediluvian knick-knacks, you'd be bound to pass through Stow. Three ancient trade routes met and crossed each other on the top of the hill that's now Stow-on-the-Wold: the Jurassic Way, the Salt Way, and the one the Romans adopted and straightened out to make the A429, alias the Fosse Way.
It's not hard to see that what must have been lively crossroads would soon turn into a place where people stopped to buy and sell from each other. And this same place is where Stow's long, wide-open Market Square sits today.
What's more puzzling is this. Around 700 BC, Iron Age settlers turned the Stow hilltop into a fortified camp. You can still see its outline in the twenty-first century road pattern and in the occasional, otherwise unexplained 6-foot-high earth banks, like the one you may remember inspired me to market Maggie's old house as 'Fort's Edge.' But this camp had no water supply. The two wells which the Iron-Agers used are several hundred yards down the valley. And again, you can still see them today, just follow the sign that says it's forbidden to use the well water to wash your car.
Now, security was as hot a topic for village folk 2,700 years ago as it is nowadays for inner-city dwellers. Clearly the average Iron Age family was safer on a hilltop where they could see trouble coming, whether in the form of a cutpurse or a cut-throat. But it wouldn't take a Health and Safety Officer, you'd think, to point out that all a mugger or tribal enemy had to do was stake out the water holes outside the safety of the fort's walls, and sooner or later the victims would be lining up for their water and as good as offering you their money or their jugulars.
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 14
