Among the thousands of documents in the files of the Kent County Archives in Maidstone, there are two giant vellum pages, stitched together along the bottom edge with vellum strips and carrying the seals and signatures of eleven different individuals. Each page is over two feet wide and eighteen inches high, and both are covered from top to bottom in the tiny, exact but very clear handwriting of the clerk who drew them up.
The document looks as if it might be medieval, or perhaps the translation of something medieval, written on a burnished sheepskin, with the vast Gothic headline ‘This Indenture Tripartite’ painted across the top. It is in fact less than two hundred years old, an agreement made in May 1811 between Sir Horatio Mann, the owner of Sissinghurst, and a set of eight individuals, described as ‘Yeomen of Cranbrook’, who were renting the farm here. It is both an ancient thing, dripping in its medieval inheritance, looking like a treaty drawn up after Agincourt, and a modern one, an arrangement for the welfare officers in Cranbrook, which is what these men were, to take the farm so that the poor of the parish could live and work there: a job-creation scheme of a modern and enlightened kind.
When I first read this document, something else came bowling towards me. This lease, in its attention to the details of the land and the habits by which it was managed, was a voice from the old world. But it was also a summons to do things like it again. It was shaped by the attitudes which I felt Sissinghurst needed, a level of care and understanding which the late twentieth century had almost entirely abandoned. People had always accused me of ‘wanting to turn the clock back’. It was a phrase that seemed wide of the mark to me, dependent on the idea that the passage of time was a singular and univalent process, that the present needed to leave the past behind. I was not interested in turning the clock either backwards or forwards. I simply wanted to make the place as good as it could be.
The indenture, with its wavy upper edge, was a lease for twenty-one years, renewing another which the Cranbrook yeomen had made a few years earlier. The land they were renting at ‘Sissinghurst Farm’ was ‘by estimation 342 acres and a half’, in thirty-seven different parcels of arable, meadow and pastureland. The grass in the meadow was allowed to grow for hay; the pasture was to be grazed all year. There were eight acres of hops and extensive woodland.
All hedges had to be preserved ‘from the bite and spoil of cattle’. If any fruit trees died or were blown down, ‘other good and young fruit trees of the same or better sort’ had to be set in their place. Hedges had to be laid (every nine years) and good ditches made alongside them. They had to keep the buildings in good repair and pay for the window glass, lead-work, straw for any thatching and the carriage of materials. Mann’s steward agreed to provide out of the rent enough rough timber, brick, tiles, lime and iron for the work to be done.
This has a modern ring to it, a negotiated sharing out of tasks and costs. But in relationship to the land there was something much deeper, to do with a vision of cyclicality and self-sufficiency that seemed both extraordinarily and deeply primitive, laying down rules for this place which embodied almost total self-sustenance, and a clarion call for us.
First of all, the tenants were not allowed to carry away from the farm any of the farm’s own produce. Any hay, straw, fodder, unthreshed corn, compost, manure or dung ‘which now is or shall at any time during the said term grow arise or be made upon or from or by means of the said demised premises’ had to stay there. Sissinghurst’s fertility had to be kept at Sissinghurst because its long-term viability as a farm relied on those nutrients remaining to be recycled into the ground. The tenants ‘shall and will there imbarn stack and fodder out all such hay Straw and Fodder’. They were to see that the compost, manure or dung ‘shall and will in a good husbandlike manner [be] laid spread and bestowed in and upon those parts of the land which seem most to need it’. This is something the lease repeats insistently. ‘They shall and will constantly during the said term use plough sow manure mend farm and occupy the said demised lands and premises in a good tenantlike manner and according to the custom of the country in which the same are situate. And so as to ameliorate and to improve and not impoverish the same.’ Those words should be set up on a carved board at the entrance to the barn. They encapsulated, two centuries ago, exactly what I hoped for from my modern farm-and-restaurant scheme. This sense of self-enrichment was exactly what I had been stumbling after.
Here was a template for what we could do, for another way of looking at this place, which ran deep into its roots. It was essentially a cyclical vision. It did not imagine that next year would be very different from this, nor was it an exercise in progress. It felt for the health of the land in a way that understood it as a body, with all the implications of that organic analogy. It was not a fantasy of wholeness, but a working system, tied to earnings, rents, money and returns. It understood about the need for money on both sides, and the careful regulation of costs and responsibilities, but it did not single out money over all other aspects. It understood that money was one outcome, not the only one. And it understood that the land could only give what was put in. It was a picture of constancy and interrelatedness, not in any Wordsworthian ecstasy of revelation or understanding, but in a lease, a formal document made between the baronet and the yeomen of Cranbrook, drawn up by the lawyers. There, preserved in the county archives, was an invitation to the future. It was a world based on cud. A love of cud – that slow, delicious, juicy recycling of the nutritious thing – was what Sissinghurst needed. This was its unfinished history, its folding of the past into the future in the way that a cook stirs sugar into a cake.
What is it, then, that makes for beauty in a farmed place, which makes it stand out and apart from the beauty of the wild? It is at least in part a recognition of its fruitfulness, of the earth there being prepared to give some sustenance to the people who work it and work with it. But in each field, here or anywhere fields have lasted some time, there is something more than that. Each field is a small world, a particular vision, a definite history, cut off from the others and from the waste beyond them. Each is a history of care, as much as a person, or a tended animal. A field holds its own stories inside its boundaries and its essence is that the natural and the cultural have been allowed and even encouraged to come to an accommodation there. The field in that way is an act of symbiosis, the product of a human contract with the natural. In a field we are neither alien nor omnipotent. Fields belong to us but there are things beyond us in them. We shape them, make them, control them, name them, hedge them, gate them, plough them, mow them, reap them and plough them again but they are not what we are. They are our partners. Or at least that is their ideal condition. Industrialised farming is often painful and disturbing because it involves the breaking of that contract and the chemical reduction of partner to slave. It doesn’t need to be like that. It has usually, in human history, not been like that. The good farm is witness to a concordance between the human and the natural, a mutuality which as Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and poet, has written, is the essence of music, goodness and hope:
Now every move
Answers what is still.
This work of love rhymes
Living and dead. A dance
Is what this plodding is.
A song, whatever is said.
I think that the farmed landscape is the most beautiful thing the human race has ever made. There is no need to be parochial about this: the great temperate belt, below the great forest and above the great desert, the humano-bio-sphere, girdling the earth, humanising it, is the great human habitat, the monument to symbiosis, to human and natural interpenetration. Is that human-devised skin wrapped around the earth no more than a product of an economic desire to survive, to get the food in? Surely not. More than the wilderness, it is our world, essentially co-operative and the great testament to what we are.
My particular problem at Sissinghurst – that I am both in it and excluded from it, that it is mine and not mine, that it has me by the hear
t but there is no possession there, that in some ways it is a source of life and meaning and in others a trap – all of this is only a heightened version of what our general relationship to place always has to be. We are all dispossessed. We are mortal, the earth is not ours and we are transient passengers, even parasites on it. And so almost by definition we must do things on it and with it which stand to be good in the long term. In my own mind, I have arrived at a particular phrase: the honourable landscape. Honour is the only thing that survives death. Honour is the denial of self and time. Honour understands about the virtue of the broad compass, of taking account as much as possible of what matters. Honour is not singular. It stands outside the claims of the ego, the desire to exploit, dominate or spoil. It understands about mutuality and the folding in of contradictory desires into a single variegated but integrated whole. It is a social and moral quality, founded on a self-renewing respect for the reality of others. It may be a hopelessly antiquated formulation, but that in the end is what I am interested in here.
I am leaving this story when it is quite unfinished. There are a thousand and one steps still to take. I sit beside the barn at Sissinghurst and look at the clouds streaming away in front of me to the north-east. That is what the future looks like too: avenues of bubbled possibility. The future here seems just as long as the past that extends behind it. Everything that Vita and Harold responded to when they came here nearly eighty years ago is still alive, but I also remember what John Berger wrote in Pig Earth: ‘The past is never behind. It is always to the side.’ That is true. The past is everywhere around me, coexistent with present and future, soaked into this soil but not sterilising it. There is no hierarchy. Past, present and future are all equally co-existent and Sissinghurst is becoming a place that responds to all three. And through that re-connection Sissinghurst will once again reacquire, I hope, a sense of its own middle, a confidence that it can turn to its own resources and find untold riches there. It will become, in the best possible sense of the word, its own place. That is the word to which this book has been devoted: place as the roomiest of containers for human meaning; place as the medium in which natural and cultural, inherited and invented, individual and communal can all fuse and fertilise. I don’t remember anything in my own life which has made me look at the world with such a surge of optimism and hope.
Image Gallery
THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS: Lawn, pink brick, deep borders, tiled roofs, oast houses, fields and wood.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SISSINGHURST (above) The ruined house which Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson came to in 1930 was surrounded by a fully active, mixed Wealden farm. Dairy cattle, sheep, pigs, orchards, hop gardens, hay meadows and cornfields clustered around the buildings. The garden they made was a response to that landscape. The Nuttery (below) consisted of old Kentish cobnuts underplanted with a Persian carpet of polyanthus, designed to resemble a heightened version of a Kentish wood floor.
THE ESTATE: As it stood in 1903 was almost twice its present size.
In the early 1950s, the farmer James Stearns was still collecting faggots from the woods on which the London hop-pickers made their bedding.
The memorial stone to Vita Sackville-West sits above an old Spanish bench on which the weather has done its work. ‘Her possessions must grow old with her,’ Nigel Nicolson wrote after her death. ‘She must be surrounded by evidence of time.’
TIME AND CYCLICALITY: Sissinghurst is shaped both by the passing of time and its cycles. In the woods the cycles of the coppice-wood have been maintained for at least a thousand years, the underwood cut every twelve or fifteen years, the oak standards kept until they are about a century old.
ELIZABETHAN GLORY: From its medieval obscurity, Sissinghurst roared into extravagance and prominence. If you had stood on the Tower steps in 1573 you would have seen an elegant Renaissance courtyard, full of classical detail, designed to accommodate the Queen and her court. A 700-acre park was laid out around the house, enclosed with a fence or pale, set on a bank, whose remains can still be traced in the surrounding woods.
TUDOR SISSINGHURST Sir John Baker (c.1488–1558), known as Bloody Baker, a ferociously anti-protestant servant of the Tudor crown, made the fortune with which Sissinghurst was built.
IN DECLINE Sissinghurst fell apart in the eighteenth century, as the descendants of the Bakers neglected it. In the Seven Years War (1756-63) it became a prison camp for captured French sailors, the scene of atrocities and chronic violence (for a full description see pp.339-41).
In 1796, the parish leased what remained of Sissinghurst as a poor house and by the mid-1820s the place had turned entirely agricultural.
Officers of the militia drew the great medieval, Tudor and Elizabethan house in the last years before the French prisoners effectively destroyed it.
VITA AND HAROLD Vita was born in 1892 as the only child of Lord and Lady Sackville. She stands beside her parents in 1917 aged twenty-five, with her two sons Ben, three, and Nigel, less than a year-old.
In 1913 Vita married Harold Nicolson, the son of a family of ‘impecunious high civil servants’, a diplomat, writer, diarist and politician.
SISSINGHURST EVOLVES The early twentieth-century farm was the last in Kent to be entirely worked with Sussex oxen–until about 1920–and was the scene of cattle shows until the Second World War. When Harold and Vita first came to look at it in 1930 they found the Tudor buildings battered but within two years they had begun to lay out the garden within the walls. Through the last decades of the twentieth century, the farm became increasingly unlike the mixed farm of the past, until by 2000, there was no farmer at Sissinghurst, no farm animals and no buildings put to any farm use. Efficiently grown crops of sprayed and fertilised wheat were grown by farmers now based elsewhere.
A NEW BEGINNING The author makes a rare practical contribution early in 2009, planting an apple tree in the new mixed orchard, while Amy Covey (below), the National Trust’s new vegetable gardener at Sissinghurst, harvests some of the first roots, beans and salads for the restaurant.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SISSINGHURST
A remarkable eighteenth-century picture of Sissinghurst surfaced in Ontario in the spring of 2008 (see Plates II pp.2–3). For years nobody has known which house it portrayed and its owner, Derrick Bradbury, recently started to circulate copies to see if it could be identified. It was finally recognised as Sissinghurst by Nicholas Cooper, the architectural historian, in May 2008.
This watercolour was intended as a picture of a double murder, but it is also by far the best portrayal ever discovered of Sissinghurst as the Elizabethans intended it to be.
An onion-domed prospect tower-cum-gateway was centred on a distinguished courtyard, at the far end of which an elaborate doorway opened into a passage which in turn led through to the medieval court beyond. Small banqueting houses to the north and perhaps to the south had large windows overlooking the park. Dignified barns stored the hay necessary for the park deer in the winter. A great garden was laid out between the middle courtyard and the moat to the north and east, of which the paths and beds can faintly be seen in this picture. It was on the site of the lower left-hand bed of this Elizabethan garden that Vita Sackville-West discovered the unknown gallica rose, now called ‘Sissinghurst Castle’, when she arrived here in 1930. It now seems at least possible that bushes of the particularly persistent rose had been growing in this garden continuously since the sixteenth-century.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Sissinghurst was burdened by debt, the park was in ruins and the place was let out to the government because no one in the Baker family cared for it. It became a camp for French naval prisoners during the Seven Years’ War. About three thousand of them were held there, guarded by detachments of various English Militia regiments.
The prisoners trashed the buildings, destroying the Elizabethan panelling and marble fireplaces, burning the pews and altar rails in the chapel, leaving the garden without a stump above ground. After the war was over, most of the buildings
shown here were demolished. Only fragments, including the tower, the long front range and one barn, now remain. These were the damp and poignant ruins in which Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson made their famous garden.
On 9 July 1761, the terrible incident shown in the painting occurred. Its details are known from the evidence given to an inquiry later that year. Early in the morning, three re-captured escapees were being led back to Sissinghurst through the fields, outside the frame of this picture to the top. ‘A Number of P[risoner]s … having the curiosity to see which of their comrades they were that were retaken, did all make towards the Fence but with no other intent.’ The sentry on the far side of the moat, a soldier of the Kent Militia called John Bramston, told them not to come near the fence, or he would fire at them.
Bramston was already known to be off his head. He seems to have loaded his musket with three balls. One of them lodged itself in the wall surrounding the garden (shown pale pink on the left of the garden), but one hit a Frenchman, Baslier Baillie, and wounded him. (He is shown here being attended by two of his friends.) The third hit and killed Sebastien Billet, shown here lying dead, with his blood spattered on the ground beside him. Baillie would die later from his wounds in the hospital – a toxic sink of disease and filth – which was in the barn at the bottom left of the picture.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 30
