The Village News

by Tom Fort

  Post-1918 a distinct back-to-the-land movement developed, with a strong mystical, quasi-religious tinge to it. One of its most eloquent spokesmen was H. J. Massingham, London born and reared, Oxford educated, a countryman by adoption. Massingham’s central theme was that by sacrificing its peasant agricultural society, England had lost its soul. In book after book and paper after paper he ranted and railed against the modern world, and the destruction of the old order and the established religion. His ideal society was founded on the parish – he scorned towns and cities – which itself was founded on the trinity of church, houses and fields, corresponding to God–Man–Earth. The squire and the parson, in manor and rectory, topped the structure; below were the yeomen, craftsmen and peasants in farmsteads, workshops and cottages.

  Writing in 1952, the last year of his life, H. J. Massingham reviewed the fate of his rural types in an article entitled ‘Village Bedrock’. The peasantry had vanished or had been ‘degraded into a landless proletariat’. The yeoman – the ‘aristocrat of the peasantry’ – had turned into an individualist tenant farmer. The craftsman had become a museum piece, the squire and parson no more than figureheads. All five classes had been uprooted in ‘the process called Progress’ and the real England had been abandoned wilfully and wickedly.

  Another, more popular version of its fate was that it had actually survived the 1914–18 war and subsequent upheavals intact – if only you knew where to find it. This version was peddled by H. V. Morton in his phenomenally popular In Search of England and was inspired, so its author claimed, by his memories while he was serving in Palestine: ‘a village street at dusk with a smell of wood smoke lying in still air . . . I remembered how the church bells ring at home and how the sun leaves a dull red bar down in the west and against it the elms grow blacker minute by minute . . .’

  Morton’s search begins with an encounter in Berkshire with a bowl-turner – the last in England – who tells him in deeply rustic tones that making bowls is better than making money and that money is trouble. At every turn thereafter a living representative of Old England appears in rude homespun apparel to utter earthy philosophical truths and express contentment with an unchanging order in which towns, cities, machines and politics do not belong. It is an exercise in myth-making of the crassest kind, and it comes as no surprise to discover that Morton – a vicious anti-Semite and Little Englander of the worst kind – made most of it up. But it sold in mountains because – like Batsford’s celebrated British Heritage series of guides – it fed a notion of England and Englishness which retained huge sentimental attraction.

  Morton, naturally, travelled by car. The paradox was that the new mobility allied with the marketing of the countryside through the booming genre of travel guide inevitably tarnished the very beauties depicted in sunlit prose and carefully composed photographic images (with never a car or a pylon or a modern building to be seen). The rise of tripperism, the creeping spread of suburbia and the bungalow, the addition of plain, functional council housing to many villages, the disease of ribbon development – all were seen as symptoms of an assault on rural England in which the pleasure-seeker, the holidaymaker, the cyclist and the railway excursionist were the foot soldiers.

  A counter offensive, orchestrated by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, enlisted writers and campaigners to denounce these evils. J. B. Priestley’s judgment in 1939 was typical: ‘It took centuries of workmanship and loving craftsmanship to create the England that was renowned for its charm and delicate beauty. In twenty years we have completely ruined half that beauty.’ Another well-known journalist and commentator, Beverley Nichols, lamented ‘the desertion of the countryside . . . every other village is an advertisement of the fact that we are not only a nation of shopkeepers but a nation of usurious vandals.’

  Occasionally a sceptical voice was raised questioning the paradisial version of rural life promoted by H. V. Morton and the covers of the Batsford guides. One dissenter was J. Robertson Scott, founder and long-serving editor of the Countryman magazine. In his sarcastically titled England’s Green and Pleasant Land, Scott set out to expose the conditions in which agricultural workers actually lived and to demolish cherished myths about the old order. The squirearchy, Scott declared, were the ‘flotsam of feudalism . . . short on brains and public spirit’. As for the other great pillar of the village community, the church, Scott regarded it as dead or dying, partly because many parsons lacked ability and character and partly because people were no longer inclined to believe what was read, sung or said.

  The journalist Ivor Brown delivered an equally vigorous counterblast to the sentimental pastoralist in his book The Heart of England, published in 1935. ‘The picturesque façade of the traditional English cottage,’ Brown wrote, ‘is too often the mask of a rural slum.’ He mocked the ‘rhapsodist’ for finding ‘the stout heart of England beating in the rural pub’ which in many cases was ‘a tawdry beer-house dispensing tepid swipes in dirty glasses in a fly-blown bar.’ The squires gave ‘little enough value for lazy privileged lives’, the parson was there ‘pinching and scraping and keeping up a respectable air . . . but the villager fights shy of him.’

  Few, if any, of these competing accounts of rural England were written by men who worked the land or oversaw the pulling of the plough. They were the work of journalists and professional writers, each with an axe to grind, each convinced that his insights were superior to the next man’s, all presuming to know what the working man and his family were experiencing and what was going through their minds. Generally speaking the working man himself and those around him were occupied doing what their forefathers had done, which was endeavouring to make a living and a life against the odds. Few had the time or inclination to share their thoughts with a wider public.

  One shining exception was Fred Kitchen’s Brother to the Ox, accurately subtitled The Autobiography of a Farm Labourer and published in 1939. Kitchen’s notably good-tempered and plain-speaking record of his hard times as boy and man in south Yorkshire was rightly praised for its determinedly unsentimental, anti-pastoral content and tone. Kitchen did not try to distil any great moral from his story, beyond that times change and we change with them.

  When war broke out again in 1939, much of the countryside of England looked very similar to the way it had in 1914. The boundaries of the fields were the same as after enclosure. Sheep grazed the uplands, cattle the lower pastures, and the horse did the work on the arable land. The bond between the village and the land may well have been weakened, but it was unbroken; and the primary purpose of the village was to service the land.

  Village England had, broadly speaking, survived one World War intact. It would not survive another.

  5

  COMMON STREAM

  Foxton, Cambridgeshire

  There is nothing unusual about Foxton except how much is known about it. It is south-west of Cambridge, and just to the south-east of the A10 Cambridge–Royston road. The railway between Cambridge and London intersects the A10 just north of the village, and there is a station there, which makes Foxton a desirable commuter settlement.

  It is shaped like the Greek letter lambda, with the upward stem ending at the station and formed by the strip of housing either side of Station Road. At the bottom is a junction with a minor road leading west towards Shepreth and east and then north-east towards Fowlmere. The old houses of Foxton are positioned along the lower part of Station Road, and both ways along the minor road, with the fine old church set back near the junction. A succession of housing estates built from the 1960s onwards have swelled the lower part of Foxton; since 1950 its population has doubled to around 1200.

  Two views of old Foxton

  In 1949 a schoolmaster bought one of Foxton’s ancient dwellings, a thatched cottage on the western side of The Green, on the road to Shepreth. Rowland Parker was the son of a Lincolnshire farmer. Before the outbreak of war in 1939, he had taught French at a school in Cambridge, and after serving with the Royal Artill
ery during the conflict he returned to his teaching post. Part of his cottage in Foxton dated back to medieval times, and Parker became curious about its history. One Nicholas Pepperton had rebuilt it in 1501, and it had been expanded and extensively altered in 1583 by a later occupant, Thomas Campion. A subsequent Campion added an extra chamber upstairs; although the place was lived in by several different families after that, the cottage remained pretty much unchanged until 1960, when Parker and his wife added a new kitchen.

  By then his curiosity about its past had deepened and intensified considerably. He wondered why the ceilings were so low, and who had embedded a sheep’s jawbone in the chimney breast and why there should have been an 18-inch drop into the main bedroom. He wanted to know who these people were, and how they had lived. So Parker started looking for answers.

  He set about trawling through the thousands of records of the manorial court that had had jurisdiction over Foxton. They ran from the early fourteenth century through to the late seventeenth century, when the manorial system of administration finally gave up the ghost. From manorial rolls he turned to wills and inventories, parish records, the papers of bishops and archdeacons. It took Rowland Parker years, but in the end he had the story of his house. He wrote it and called it Cottage on the Green and had 500 copies printed at his own expense which were snapped up in no time at all.

  By now Parker had become incurably infected with the history bug. In gathering the material about his own dwelling, he had sifted his way through a mountain relating to the other houses of Foxton and the families who had built and lived in them. His obvious next move was to write the history of the whole village. In this he was assisted by the fortuitous discovery near Shepreth of the site of an extensive Roman villa. Although nothing of it remained above ground, excavation revealed the ground plan and produced enough mundane evidence of daily life – chiefly from the midden – to enable a speculative account of its occupation. ‘The Roman villa came into the picture, adding a thousand years to the story,’ Parker recalled in his characteristically laconic way.

  Several more years of research, writing and rewriting followed. The final result was a remarkable book to which Parker gave the memorable title The Common Stream. The inspiration for the name came from the humble brook – itself unnamed – that the people of the village had dug sometime after the Roman occupation to make viable the place they had chosen to settle.

  In writing The Common Stream, Rowland Parker did a great deal more than just write the history of Foxton, one more worthy parish record to add to the thousands. He conjured something unique – as he put it, ‘not just the history of my village; the history of any village.’ It was published in 1975 and was an immediate bestseller. Although its author is not even noticed by Wikipedia, the book is a classic and will remain so – its status recognised by Eland Publishing, which has recently produced a handsome new edition. Scholarly, wise and elegantly written, it is a key chronicle of English rural life. In my view it stands up there with Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield and Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.

  The claim Rowland Parker made for it – as the story of the village, not just this one – was a bold one, and strictly speaking false, since every village is different. But in a deeper sense it is splendidly justified. ‘This is no chronicle of kings and prelates and nobles,’ he wrote in the introduction. ‘It is the story of the Common Man, of the ordinary men and women who in their countless thousands have trudged through life and then departed from it, leaving little trace.’

  Little trace, but some; and it was in uncovering and teasing out and making sense of those traces that Rowland Parker displayed his mastery as a historian of unusual distinction. His range was extraordinarily limited, but he penetrated to an extraordinary depth. These humble Cambridgeshire peasants and yeomen farmers, limited in their spheres of activity to the struggle for survival and advancement, achieve a kind of dramatic reincarnation as a result of his tireless hunting through the ancient records – in their industry and resourcefulness, their quarrelsomeness, their rivalries and litigations, their acts of meanness and generosity, their striving to make something of themselves.

  Inevitably much of the pre-medieval narrative is guesswork of an informed and intelligent kind. ‘Where I have not written what actually did happen,’ Parker explained, ‘I have written what I firmly believe, and have good reason to believe, could have happened.’ His reconstruction begins with the arrival of those he calls The People by the Brook, the first settlement, the rearing of livestock and growing of crops and catching of fish in the reedy meres. The Romans arrived, the area was colonised, and work began on building a residence for an important officer of the Roman army. Parker had little to go on, and some of his conjectures may seem fanciful enough; from the absence of broken toys among the excavated fragments of pottery, for instance, he deduced that the commander and his presumed wife had no children; from the presence of large quantities of the shells of oysters – prized by Romans as promotors of virility and fertility – he guessed that they wanted them badly.

  At some point the villa was ransacked, burned and destroyed. Parker’s version of events – for which there is no direct evidence whatever – is that it was attacked in the course of the revolt led by the Iceni queen Boudicca, and that the Roman army officer and his wife were killed. He speculates that their bodies were burned by the villagers who then dismantled the villa down to its foundations and levelled the site in the hope of convincing the legionaries when they arrived intent on retribution that it had never existed.

  If so, the ruse does not appear to have worked. At least some of the village huts were burned, and the site was abandoned for a time before being partially reoccupied. Roman rule was certainly reimposed after the revolt, and the Roman system of administration restored – for a time. Then it crumbled entirely. New settlers spread across southern England including Fenland, and new settlements arose. ‘It was, I believe,’ Parker wrote, ‘the most momentous thing that ever happened to England – the Common Man’s England, and nothing that has happened since has succeeded in undoing what was then done.’

  At some point in this murky post-Roman period – Parker asserts that it was in the sixth century – a settlement took shape where old Foxton now stands. To enable it to function – which meant providing its own water supply – the settlers dug a channel between two existing streams flowing to the south-west and the north-east. It was over a mile long, and although it was no more than four feet deep and in many places could easily be jumped over, it provided Foxton with its water for over a thousand years. The shape of the settlement was determined by the course of the Brook; every dwelling had access to it. Its well-being was crucial, and maintaining it in good order was the prime communal responsibility until well into the nineteenth century.

  From the digging of the Brook and the establishment of the proto-Foxton, Parker took what he referred to as ‘a leap across the remaining dark centuries’ to AD 1000. By then Foxton and its boundaries had been accorded official recognition in charter. It was registered as the property of the nunnery of Chatteris which had been founded towards the end of the tenth century in the Fens about thirty miles to the north. After 1066 half of the estate was given away to one of William the Conqueror’s intimate circle of Norman backers, Geoffrey de Mandeville. The remainder, including Foxton, was retained by the Abbess of Chatteris. By 1200 she had acquired the so-called ‘view of frankpledge’ over Foxton which – in theory anyway – gave her word the force of law.

  But in practice her word counted for very little and she hardly impinged on the lives of the folk of Foxton. They tilled their holdings along the village brook. They lived in single-room habitations of timber, wattle and daub, roofed with straw or reeds. Their inanimate possessions were few: stools, benches, tables, platters, bowls, cups, earthenware cooking pots. They ate coarse bread, gruel, pease, eggs, cheese, a few vegetables, an occasional piece of mutton or bacon, a very occasional chicken or rabbit. They dressed in homespun wool garm
ents and tanned animal skins. They drank water or a fermented brew of water and barley which they called ale. They had to use the village mill to grind their corn. They had to go to church on Sundays. If they became involved in a dispute – which most did, sooner or later – or if they were accused of a crime, they had to attend the manorial court for judgment.

  By 1250 every family in Foxton had a surname. Everyone paid rents and fines. Everyone made payments: to get married, to be buried, to conclude an agreement with a neighbour, to bring a case to court, to attend the court hearing, to be exempt from attending the court hearing, to bequeath property. The one inescapable event in life that was not subject to a charge was being born.

  The special quality of Rowland Parker’s The Common Stream lies in its wealth of mundane detail, in the very ordinariness of the life revealed. I do not want to steal Parker’s thunder, so I will give just one example, illustrating the matter of peasant mobility in the medieval period. In Foxton we have one Thomas Pate attending on the manorial court in 1317 to argue that his elder brother John should be denied a holding of land because fifteen years before he had come to the court ‘and paid the Lady (the Abbess of Chatteris) five shillings to go where he pleased’. The custom – which according to Thomas ‘has been in use since time out of memory’ – was that such an arrangement meant permanent exclusion from any land holding in the manor. Parker points out that the principal tenants could have bent the system to allow John Pate back in – but they chose not to, possibly because of personal antagonism, but more likely because land was scarce and they wanted more for themselves.

  The absence of fraternal affection manifested by Thomas Pate was entirely typical of the village. It existed in a state of continuous low-level strife: brother against brother, husband against wife and vice versa, father against son and vice versa, neighbour against neighbour. Boundary disputes arising from encroachments of one kind or another were the main source of trouble, filling the pages of the manorial court records. An extraordinary map reproduced in Rowland Parker’s Cottage on the Green helps explain why quarrels were so common and why working lives were so arduous. It shows the distribution of the land holdings of Nicholas Campion, who at one time lived in Parker’s cottage. His forty-five slender strips were scattered literally all over the parish, scarcely any of them next to another and some up to two-and-a-half miles apart. Not until enclosure in 1826 did this incredibly burdensome and inefficient kaleidoscope of holdings begin to evolve into something more rational and productive.