The Village News

by Tom Fort

  But that was by no means the full story. The other side of it belongs to the names that are not on the gravestones, and that story is not so readily accessible. A similarly lopsided perspective comes from studying the manorial records, in which the same family names crop up again and again. It is understandable to concentrate on those names, because they present a reasonably coherent narrative line. But there are plenty of others whose names are mentioned in passing or not at all, because they did not hang around. Migration and mobility were constant realities, then as now.

  The cosy assumptions about the continuity of country living were demolished by the Cambridge historian Peter Laslett in his 1965 study of pre-industrial society, The World We Have Lost. Laslett and his colleagues took the novel step of examining the parish records of two villages in Northamptonshire, Cogenhoe and Clayworth, to see what light they could shed on the demographics. They revealed a startling turnover of population. Almost half of those living in Cogenhoe in 1618 – eighty-six out of 185 – were no longer there ten years later. Sixteen had died; the rest had moved out. Over the same period ninety-four people moved into the village. In Clayworth between 1676 and 1688, 244 out of 401 named inhabitants disappeared from the roll, and 255 new names were recorded.

  Laslett’s methods were taken up elsewhere and extended, and similar patterns were revealed. The Norfolk church rolls for the period between 1499 and 1530 showed that just over a quarter of the males and just under half of the females in the parishes covered were aged between twenty-one and thirty when their names were recorded for the first time – i.e. they were incomers. Fewer than a quarter had been resident since birth. Records for villages in Worcestershire show that over a 200-year period from 1327, a measly 8 per cent of families remained in the same place.

  In general people did not move far – fifteen or twenty miles at most. They did so for much the same reasons that they do now: to better themselves economically, to take advantage of work opportunities, to escape difficult or intolerable circumstances.

  But although the cast in village life changed much more than was once realised, the structure of that life and its fixed points did not. The spiritual horizons were low and confined, and the opportunities for leisure were severely restricted. There were occasional holidays and feast days. There was attendance at church, nominally compulsory, which gave a rare chance to stand around and do nothing (pews were unknown), listen to stories from a book and socialise outside. Most villages, but not all, had a church. Very few had a dedicated ale-house. If they were lucky there might be a monthly or even weekly market.

  Of the fixed points the most imperative was work. Six days a week the villagers toiled in the fields unless they were too old or sick or injured, or were on an errand appointed from on high. Work filled the hours of daylight for men, women and able-bodied children. The hours of darkness were for rest.

  Village affairs were ordered by a local elite generally composed of the parson, yeomen farmers and skilled craftsmen, aided by the churchwardens and the constable – those with the confidence to speak up at meetings and the competence to take decisions. Although the manorial court limped on into the seventeenth century, the influence of the manor house and its lord over the daily lives of the people – always intermittent and variable – waned into insignificance.

  The services due under the feudal system were never abolished. They merely lapsed as the effort to enforce them became more trouble than it was worth. Lords increasingly resorted to leasing out estates in their entirety, retaining the home farm to supply the needs of the manorial household. Over time the leaseholds mutated into proprietorial rights defendable in the common law courts. Tenants were able to retain a greater portion of the profits from the land, which gave them an incentive to maximise those profits. As they and their descendants became property owners, they also became buyers and sellers of land, the transactions faithfully recorded by those manorial courts which had once directed their lives.

  A new social order was emerging in rural England. The changes were not planned or organised as a matter of policy. They happened in response to localised circumstances, so that often the arrangements in neighbouring manors would be entirely different. The pace of change was uncertain and uncontrolled. But broadly speaking its principal consequence was a growing divide between made-good, property-owning yeomen farmers intent on accumulating land and increasing production, and a wage-earning labouring class available for hire. Although the ancient common rights of every villager persisted, the amount of land on which they might be exercised diminished steadily. The stage was set for capitalism to establish its grip across great tracts of the English countryside.

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  A paradox of enclosure is that it has often been depicted as a wicked land grab orchestrated by the unscrupulous ruling class at the expense of an ignorant and downtrodden peasantry; yet a crucial component of our shared and cherished image of rural England – the irregular chequerboard of fields and hedges and copses – was its direct result. Once the new owners had got their hands on what had once been everyone’s, their first impulse was to advertise their ownership by fencing and then hedging their fields, so that all and sundry might know what belonged to who, and where they might and might not go.

  The charge that enclosure represented the robbing of the poor by the grasping rich has always been beguiling to social historians of leftish inclination. It is certainly true – as observed by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City – that it was ‘part of a wider process in which a capitalist social system was pushed through to a position of dominance by a form of legalised seizure enacted by representatives of the beneficiary class’. It is also true that as a result of enclosure, social divisions in the countryside widened and hardened. The big landowners, the squires and the yeomen farmers pulled ahead. The small-scale tenants got a share of the enclosure spoils according to their status, but these were rarely viable, particularly if they had to bear the cost of hedging or walling. They tended to sell up and either emigrate to town or city, or become farm labourers. The poorest, often little more than squatters dependent on the common land to scrape by, sank into destitution.

  But an equally compelling truth is that the state of the nation demanded the agricultural revolution of which enclosure was a part. The old, open-field communal system evolved to feed those who practised it. Constricted by its web of obligation, it offered few incentives to improve production. While England remained an overwhelmingly rural society, that did not matter. Although many periodically went hungry, very few actually starved to death. But industrialisation and urbanisation created a massive new demand for food. A way had to be found to satisfy the hungry mouths of the factory workers and their families. Farming had to become more efficient. As so often, the market found a way, and there were winners and losers.

  The effect of the changes on the village varied considerably. The major holders of lands, the lords and squires, had generally preferred to live outside the village anyway. In some cases the soaring profits from farming and increased rents enabled them to commission new mansions and lay out parks, which were intended as visible expressions of new-found wealth and power. The game laws they enacted, allowing for the most savage punishments to be imposed on poachers who dared infringe on their properties were a hated extension of that power.

  The made-good yeoman farmer, previously the strongest voice in village counsels, now tended to remove himself by building a new home in the middle of his expanded lands from which to direct his labourers, watch over his tenants and keep his horses for hunting. The workers themselves usually had no choice but to stay in the village, but now found themselves sharing it – not with their fellows, all bound in the same enterprise, but with shopkeepers and traders.

  There had been rural paupers before enclosure, but now they were more conspicuous. Parishes had long since been required to provide relief for the destitute – a duty they often fulfilled by driving them outside the parish boundaries and keeping them there.
The first attempt to organise relief on a wider scale was the so-called Speenhamland system, devised by a group of Berkshire magistrates at a meeting held at the Pelican Inn at Speenhamland near Newbury in 1798. It allowed for a means-tested supplement to the lowest wages, calculated according to the price of bread. The intention was to lessen the impact of widespread impoverishment, but the effect was to encourage employers to keep wages down in the knowledge that the extra – funded by the whole parish – would top them up. The new Poor Law of 1834 did away with Speenhamland, replacing it with the concept of the ‘deserving poor’, which was given bricks-and-mortar expression in that forbidding Victorian institution, the workhouse.

  The main waves of enclosure were accompanied by a significant growth in the rural population, which put downward pressure on earnings. At the same time, the landowners and farmers seized the opportunities offered by mechanisation to push up yields and profits while reducing the labour force. The upshot was the bonfire of rural unrest known as the Captain Swing riots which was lit in Kent in the summer of 1830 and swept across the counties of southern England in a matter of weeks and burned itself out by Christmas.

  Like the Luddites in the towns and cities, the Swing rioters saw themselves being pauperised and victimised by technological advances in which they had no stake. They burned hayricks and smashed the hated new threshing machines and issued illiterate threats to spill blood in the name of the mythical Captain Swing. As with the Luddites – named after the equally mythical General Ludd – the capitalist ruling class called out the military to enforce order by force, and then used the laws they had enacted to crush opposition and punish the troublemakers with the utmost viciousness.

  For the most celebrated rural radical, William Cobbett, the tragedy arising from enclosure was not the actual division of the fields, but the expansion of individual holdings and the social elevation of their owners. ‘I hold a return to small farms to be absolutely necessary to a restoration of anything like an English community,’ Cobbett wrote. ‘When farmers become gentlemen, their labourers become slaves.’

  Poets like Goldsmith and John Clare railed against the changes. Another versifier, the splenetic social agitator Ebenezer Elliott, went further. In his The Splendid Village, published in 1833, Elliott’s Wanderer returns to the place of his birth to find that every good thing he recalls from his childhood has been destroyed. The callous and bullying butcher’s son has been appointed the lord’s steward. The lawyer and the doctor compete in the splendour of their new properties. The old inn is now run by the Constable and the Bailiff, both hated and feared by the villagers in equal measure. The Common is no more and ‘the very children seem afraid to smile’.

  The American writer Washington Irving painted a rosier, not to say sentimentalised picture of the English countryside in his study Rural Life in England, published in 1819. But he still found a growing division between gentry and peasantry. Irving quoted an old squire of his acquaintance lamenting how ‘our simple true-hearted peasantry have broken asunder from the higher classes and seem to think their interests are separate. They have become too knowing and begin to read newspapers and listen to ale-house politicians and talk of reform.’ The squire’s solution – for those like him to spend more time on their estates and for a revival of ‘merrie old English games’ – was as much wishful thinking as Cobbett’s call for the resurrection of the small-scale farmer. The tide was running irresistibly the other way.

  Reviewing East Hendred’s past history from an early twentieth-century perspective, the politician and agricultural historian Lord Ernle found the pre-enclosure village united ‘in a singularly close relationship. Their farming was their common enterprise, even though each individual took the produce of his holding. For good or evil, it allowed no room for the exaggerated individualism and fevered competition of modern life.’ Enclosure and the new methods, Ernle judged, had justified themselves economically by their success. But the impact on the displaced and the dispossessed had been severe – ‘with the break-up of the village farm,’ he wrote, ‘community life shrivelled at the source.’

  The same has been asserted many times, with varying degrees of vehemence. But is it true? The village may no longer have been a community of farmers united in a common enterprise. But it did not cease to exist. It remained a village, therefore a community, therefore with a community life. Then as now. Common sense says so.

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  In East Hendred the ancient Church of St Augustine stands across the road from the equally ancient Hendred House, home of the lords of the manor, the Eystons, for the past 550 years and more. On the face of it the situation of the two most important and imposing buildings in the village would appear to symbolise that relationship of squire and parson so critical to the welfare of the community for so long. As it happens, the Eystons have always been Roman Catholic, and have always worshipped in their own – also very ancient – chapel at the side of the house. Even so, there is an Eyston chapel in the Anglican church and Eystons are buried in its graveyard, suggesting a cordial working relationship despite doctrinal differences.

  Hendred House is unusual for a manor house in being at the heart of the village, and very unusual indeed for still being occupied by the same family that was there when Henry VI was on the throne. The Eystons have played little part on the wider national stage; only one of them, Charles – an early eighteenth-century antiquary and expert on ecclesiastical buildings – warrants an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. Their low profile was undoubtedly connected with their unswerving Catholicism. The benefit for East Hendred was their availability for involvement in village life.

  Speaking generally, however, the squire has largely disappeared from the rural scene. Even a hundred years ago he had become a threatened species. His imminent passing was mourned by an incurably sentimental Tory cleric, the Reverend P. H. Ditchfield, who was the Rector of Barkham in Berkshire for almost half a century, a stalwart of the Berkshire Archaeological Society and the author of a host of books with titles like Bygone Berkshire, The Parson’s Pleasance and Old English Sports and Customs. In his Old Village Life, published in 1920, Ditchfield paid a nostalgic tribute: ‘The old squire was an upright magistrate, a kind landlord, a liberal contributor according to his means, a friend of the poor, the unflinching protector of the oppressed, a firm opponent of the wicked, ever willing to advise, ever ready to help . . . but the race is dying out.’

  A less charitable view was presented by Lord Macaulay – admittedly of the seventeenth-century incarnation: ‘His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and pronunciation were such as we would expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accent. His opinions . . . were the opinions of a child . . . his animosities were numerous and bitter . . . his ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was essentially a patrician . . .’

  The familiar figure was moulded of materials from various sources. His ancestor may have been a knight, or an esquire who waited upon a knight, or an upwardly mobile lawyer, administrator or tax collector. The squire had land enough to live more or less comfortably off the rents. He was a Justice of the Peace and sometimes undertook other unpaid duties, such as inspecting prisons, schools, the workhouse or the local lunatic asylum. He hunted as if it were a religion and often served as Master of the Hunt, regarding his duty to preserve the game on his estate as sacred. He regarded himself as belonging to a particular stratum in the English social hierarchy, forming with his fellow squires a powerful force for stability – one naturally requiring the maintenance of superiority and strong control over the lower orders.

  The essayist Joseph Addison, co-founder of the Spectator, created an enduring exemplar of the breed in the figure of Sir Roger de Coverley. He is a Worcestershire squire, a To
ry and dedicated hunter of foxes, a magistrate and village benefactor. He and his family have their pew in church, at the front, and when he leaves at the end of divine service his tenants bow to him as he makes his slow and majestic progress along the aisle. Every now and then he stops to inquire as to how one or other is doing, or to ask why one is absent, ‘which is understood as a kind of reprimand’. He is a good man, liberal by his lights, but very jealous of his prestige. Sir Roger is particularly wary of the man on the rung of the ladder immediately below his, the yeoman farmer – ‘with about a hundred a year . . . and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant’.

  The squire’s obsession with riding to hounds and preserving game, and the belief of so many that chasing and killing birds and animals were the greatest accomplishments of civilised life, served to distance him further from his tenants and the labouring classes. When that obsession was aided and abetted by the Game Laws, prescribing savage penalties on any poacher caught taking a precious bird or beast, that distance easily transmuted into resentment and hatred.

  W. H. Hudson, a great observer and celebrant of natural history and the English countryside, deplored the influence of the squire: ‘What I heartily dislike is the effect of his position (that of a giant among pygmies) on the lowly minds about him, and the servility, hypocrisy and parasitism which spring up and flourish in his wide shadow whether he likes these weeds or not. As a rule he likes them, since the poor devil has this in common with the rest of us, that he likes to stand high in the general regard.’

  By the time Hudson wrote these words (in A Shepherd’s Life, published in 1910) the sun was setting fast on the squire’s heyday. For several centuries he had formed a partnership with the parson which had done much to shape village life. On the whole it can be said that he generally acted from the best intentions, as determined by his restricted horizons. He was often ignorant, dim, prejudiced, intolerant and extremely slow in seeing what was in front of his face. But he gave freely of his time and energy, and without him the village would have been poorer materially, and probably spiritually as well.