by Tom Fort
Once you investigate, you find the village gently humming with activity. The guiding principle is that if you show an interest you are in, because all these worthy bodies are in constant and usually urgent need of new blood. There is a risk – before you know where you are, new commitments are being thrust upon you from all sides, and the phone is ringing to remind you of commitments you would prefer to forget. Your calendar becomes speckled with the times and dates of events and meetings, eating your time like a combine harvester devouring a field of summer wheat.
The village has learned to live without the squire. It could probably survive without the parson and the church, although it does not have to. It helps to have a pub, but this is not as crucial as it used to be. It needs a good village shop which is a post office as well, and if it has more than one shop it is doing well. It needs a successful school and a thriving village hall; and a recreation ground where cricket and football are played, and taught by grown-ups to the boys and girls. It needs infusions of new blood if it is not to atrophy. That means it has to be able to grow, which in turn means it has to make room for new homes.
Some villages tick all these boxes and more, and are in blooming health. Some meet enough of these needs to stay alive and look to the future with hope. Some are fighting to keep the shop open and the school going and the pub from going under, and are in trouble. And there are some that have lost most or all of the essentials, and – like a fading battery – have relapsed into the hushed quiet of the retirement home.
11
ANCIENT RECORDS
Myddle, Shropshire
Around the year 1700 a well-to-do Shropshire farmer with time on his hands sat down and did something that had not been done before and has not really been done since. His name was Richard Gough and he lived in the hamlet of Newton-on-the-Hill, which is a mile or so from the village of Myddle and a few miles north of Shrewsbury. He was then in his sixties (and would reach the ripe old age of eighty-nine), and was the fifth Richard Gough to live and farm there. This made his one of the ‘antient and respectable families’ of the district; and with his active farming days behind him, he decided to set down the stories of those families and of the place where they lived and worked and died.
After a few years Richard Gough came to the end of his account, which he called Antiquities and Memoirs of the Parish of Myddle. The notion of having it published does not seem to have entered his head; it was done for his personal satisfaction only. The manuscript came into the possession of a branch of the family that inherited the farm and remained with them until it was finally published in full in 1875.
The original title page of Gough’s History of Myddle
Gough was evidently an educated man but he was not a historian in a conventional sense. Perhaps because he was writing for his own amusement and no one else’s, he made little attempt to organise his material into a coherent narrative. It has the feel of work taken up and put down according to the whim of the moment, and then put away and returned to at intervals. This probably accounts for it not being as well known as it should be. At its best, Gough’s History is a rival for the diaries compiled by his contemporary in distant London, Samuel Pepys.
It begins very much in the manner of a conventional seventeenth-century antiquarian work, by describing the extent and geography of the parish, its churches and chapels and their rectors and priests, the manor, parks, warrens, meres and pastures, the rents and leases, the castle (in ruins even then), and the lords and earls and assorted bigwigs. This section ends with a series of disjointed jottings about Myddle’s modest contribution to King Charles’s cause in the Civil War (‘Richard Chaloner of Myddle . . . this bastard was partly maintained by the parish and being a big lad went to Shrewsbury and there listed and went to Edgehill and was never heard of afterwards in this country . . . ’).
The unique value of Gough’s History is in its second part which he entitled Observations Concerning the Seates in Myddle Church and the Families to Which They Belong. His inspiration was to draw a plan of the pews in the church, identify the families that had established the right to sit and kneel in them, and write down everything he could remember or find out about them, which was a lot.
Divine service was the only regular occasion at which the whole parish gathered. The practice of securing pews had grown up after the Reformation, with the gentry leading the grab. The order of social precedence was strictly observed: the quality at the front, the yeoman farmers and skilled craftsmen behind, the labourers at the back. Interestingly, the right to a particular pew was not attached to a family but to a property (although in many cases this came to the same thing). Property determined status, and in this way the social structure of the district – who was above, on the same level as, and below whom – achieved a formal and familiar expression.
Richard Gough’s scheme was very simple. He began with the pews on the north side of the church, working back from the one nearest the pulpit, then dealt with the larger block down the middle, then with those down the south side. But although the scheme was methodical in concept, the treatment of each pew-holder is anything but. It begins with the family at their prayers in church. Gough then follows them outside wherever the trail leads him: where they live, where they lived before, the marriages, the deaths, the births, the waxings and wanings of fortunes, the mishaps, accidents, rumours, scandals, triumphs and disasters. Forbears and siblings appear, cousins and the cousins of cousins, discarded suitors, drinking companions, ne’er-do-wells, neighbours, business partners. Only when the material relating to the family with this pew is exhausted does he return to the church and address the next pew. And even then, having moved on, should he recall a detail about the previous lot, he puts it down there and then, rather than go back to insert it where it belongs.
The effect can be confusing, to put it mildly. Here is the authentic flavour of Gough’s method:
There was one Richard Acherley, a younger brother of that ancient and substantial family of the Acherleys of Stanwardine in the fields. He was a tanner and had his tan-house in Stanwardine in the fields but lived (as a tenant) at Wycherley Hall. He purchased lands in Marton of David Owen and one Twilord. I suppose that these two had married co-heiresses for I find no mention of but one house of the lands and that stood on a sandy bank on this side of Mr Acherley’s new barns. Richard Acherley had issue, Thomas Acherley, to whom he gave these lands in Marton. This Thomas was a tanner and dwelt in Marton and held Mr Lloyd Pierce his house there and dwelt in it and suffered the other two to go to decay. He built a tan-house which is now standing by the old mill brook. He had two sons – Thomas, the second of that name, and Richard – he also had two daughters. After the death of his first wife he married the widow of Nicholas Gough of Wolverley, a very wealthy widow. He went to live with her at Wolverley and gave his lands in Marton to his eldest son, Thomas, who married Elinor, the sister of Roger Griffiths, an eminent alderman in Shrewsbury; and this Roger Griffiths likewise married Mary, the oldest sister of Thomas Acherley. The youngest daughter was married to one Simcoks, a mercer in Whitchurch. Richard, the younger son, was married at Wolverley and died about middle age . . .
I hope everyone has been able to follow that? No? Well, I’m afraid we are still only halfway through the single paragraph devoted to the affairs of the Acherleys. It then returns to Thomas, the second tanner, and details his various land purchases and leases, his branching out into dealing in timber, the inheritances of his offspring and their marriages, and the convoluted manner in which the lands at Marton eventually reverted to another branch of the family altogether.
Nothing is left out. In his preamble to the narrative of the pews, Gough defended himself against a charge he could probably see coming: ‘If any man blame me for that I have declared the vicious lives or actions of their ancestors, let him take care to avoid such evil course that he leave not a blemish on his name when he is dead and let him know that I have written nothing out of malice.’
Perhaps
not, but of course it is the ‘vicious lives and actions’ that spice the story of Myddle. We meet George Reve, a Cheshire dairyman, ‘a bragging, boasting vainglorious person’; Richard Clecton, ‘an untowardly person’ who married Annie, the daughter of William Tyler, ‘a woman as infamous as himself’ and ‘soon out ran his wife and left his wife big with child’; Thomas Jukes, ‘a bauling (sic), bold confident person’ who ‘often kept company with his betters but showed them no more respect than if they had been his equals or inferiors’; John Gossage, ‘a drunken, debauched person . . . he married a widow . . . bedded with her one night, in the morning he cursed her for a whore and turned her off and came near her no more’; William Tyler himself, ‘a tailor but altogether unseemly for such a calling for he was a big, tall, corpulent person, but not so big in body as bad in conditions . . . he was a great comrade of John Gossage, of whom I have spoken before . . .’
Such circles are often completed in Gough’s world, where everyone knew everyone and he knew them all. Deals are made, debts contracted, land exchanged, marriages entered into and exited, houses built and lived in and left to decay, friendships forged, enmities sustained. Much of it is the small beer of daily life. But some men and women put themselves beyond the pale. The Wenlocke brothers were ‘night-walkers and robbed orchards and gardens and stole hay’. A lusty son of Clarke attacked a bailiff seeking payment for a debt with a spade and ‘cloave out his brains’. Hugh Elks and some companions, with Elks’s dog, broke into a neighbour’s house when the neighbour was at church and were surprised at their work by a servant girl who was making cheese. Elks cut her throat and the gang fled, leaving the dog which was later found ‘almost bursted’ with eating the cheese.
The women could be as bad. A choice example was Elizabeth, daughter of Griffith ap Reece of Newton, ‘a young wanton widow’ who married Onslow but ‘she soon grew into dislike of him and was willing to be shot of him.’ She formed a conspiracy with two other dissatisfied Myddle wives to poison their husbands one night, ‘but only Onslow died, the other two escaped very hardly. This wicked act was soon blazed abroad and Elizabeth escaped to Wales.’ She somehow escaped the gallows and returned to marry John Owen, ‘the worst thief in the parish’, who was hanged in Shrewsbury for his many crimes.
A recurring theme is habitual heavy drinking. Professor David Hey – who edited Gough’s History for publication by Penguin in 1982 as well as writing an illuminating book entitled An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts – made the point that this weakness for drink appears rather at odds with the Protestant work ethic observed by most Myddle people. On the other hand it was the one sure solace in lives otherwise ruled by toil, and it was readily available. So Thomas Downton’s wife ‘went daily to the alehouse . . . her husband paid £10 a time for alehouse scores.’ What David Higley of Balderton ‘got by hard labour he spent idly in the alehouse’. The effect could be ruinous, as with Thomas Hayward, who ‘had little quietness at home which caused him to frequent public houses . . . he sold and consumed all his estate and was afterwards maintained in charity by his eldest son . . .’
Occasionally the wider world impinges on Gough’s corner of north Shropshire, mainly in connection with the Civil War. He dutifully records these occurrences but his real interest is in his own circle, that backbone of England formed by yeomen farmers such as himself, the husbandmen, and the craftsmen and skilled workers. The gentry intrude little, and the agricultural labouring class hardly at all (they did not qualify for pew rights). He gives an extraordinarily vital picture of a society in a constant state of flux – some going up, some down, some struggling to maintain their position, some giving up the struggle, some soaring aloft. And within it are his people, real people, with their virtues and failings, vividly displaying themselves, the way they walked and talked, their habits, peculiarities and aspirations.
Gough’s greatest attention is given, naturally enough, to his own family, of the ninth pew on the south side of the north aisle. His account of the several generations, their marriages, births, deaths, acquisitions, occasional scandals (one Gough daughter, Katherine, ‘proved a wanton, light woman to her ruin and disgrace’) occupies a substantial portion of the text. Gough does not boast about himself or the family. But his quiet, strong pride in the position they have secured is apparent.
Overall it is the sense of community that comes out so powerfully from the History. It belonged, not to the village of Myddle, but to the parish centred on Myddle. There were six other settlements, of which Gough’s own, Newton-on-the-Hill, was a mile away and others up to two miles away. There was evidently constant contact between them all; witness the degree of inter-marriage. They moved around to work and visit, and considered it no great upheaval to relocate altogether. They all knew each other and knew a great deal about each other, although it’s doubtful if any knew as much as Richard Gough.
*
So who will speak for Myddle now?
It is a striking paradox that we should know more about how this society functioned 350 years ago than anyone would be able to reveal today. Were Richard Gough still with us, living up at Newton-on-the-Hill, still coming to worship at Myddle Church, with his farm perhaps being run by a son, what could he write down that would tell them in 2365 how everything was?
He could describe his house and land and record what the farm produced, but as no one apart from his son and perhaps one other would be working on it, there would not be much material there. He could name his neighbours, but would he know them intimately? Perhaps; but it is certain that he and they would not be bound into a shared life and interdependence as they were in 1660. At church he would know the other worshippers and something about them. But the pews that announced who was who and where they were in the pecking order are mostly empty now, and you can sit where you like, and anyway the building he knew was demolished twenty years after his death and replaced.
The society he knew so intimately did not last much longer than the church. According to Professor David Hey, many of the smaller holdings were amalgamated during the eighteenth century, and there was a large-scale conversion of pasture to arable. The sector of middle-ranking farmers and husbandmen was eroded, and many of the family names recorded by Gough simply vanished. By the time of the Tithe Award of 1838 – the next detailed account of who owned what – the community had become polarised between the few prosperous farmers and the mass of the agricultural labourers.
However, the nature of the business – farming supported by crafts and trades – did not change radically until well into the twentieth century. The Ordnance Survey map of 1929 shows Myddle as a slender, irregular settlement strung out along an east–west axis created by its one through road. The two big farms of the village – Alford Farm and Castle Farm – are positioned either side. By 1954 the village had hardly expanded at all. But the 1982 map shows new housing as having sprouted down and around Myddle Hill, to the east, and along the road past the church leading out to the west. Since then Alford farmhouse has gone and the land around it has been annexed by housing estates, although Castle Farm survives intact.
The most recent substantial addition to Myddle is Wellcroft, a typically meaningless developer name for a fist-shaped cluster of large red-brick detached houses just west of the Rectory. By the mediocre standards of contemporary house design, Wellcroft is inoffensive. It is certainly a cut above the new rectory, a dismal 1960s brick box which stands in a large garden across from the church and next to the rather splendid Old Rectory, presumably discarded by the ecclesiastical authorities because it was too grand and expensive to maintain. At the other end of the village, behind the village hall, is Eagle Farm, a representative specimen of 1980s housebuilding: detached red-brick with touches of bogus beaming, dung-coloured woodwork, double garages with dung-coloured doors, patches of pallid lawn, little gardens squeezed by high fences. In comparison the thirty-odd dwellings comprising Alford Grange and Alford Gardens are innocuous, even pleasant.
&n
bsp; The Myddle of Gough’s day has been comprehensively erased. To find a relic of it, I pedalled a little way out of the village to the west and down a quiet lane until I reached a thatched cottage on the left. The original building dates from 1581, and although now called The Oaks, was previously known as Hanmer’s Cottage. Of Abraham Hanmer disappointingly little is told in Gough’s History beyond that he was ‘a litigious person among his neighbours’; that he married Katherine Emry, whose father had been a tenant in the cottage; and that ‘hee had noe children and therefore he took this Daniell, a bastard of his brother Thomas and brought him up as his child.’
I was welcomed there by a very sweet and chatty elderly couple. He had been a master thatcher, and she – a native of Myddle and a direct descendant of the Hanmers – had run a driving school in Shrewsbury. As a girl, she said, the great presence in her life had been her grandfather. In addition to squeezing what he could from his smallholding, he had been the village barber, cycle repair man and cobbler. ‘Everyone knew everyone then, and everyone helped everyone else,’ she said sadly. It was a familiar refrain. But the two of them were contented enough in their little old house, and they kept up old contacts in the village by going down once a month for the Friendship Club lunch. The one cloud in their sky was the uncertainty over the future of their little bit of countryside. A developer had tried to get permission for houses on the field opposite, and although they had been turned down by the council, these people didn’t give up, did they?
I told them they were right to be anxious. In the eyes of developers, no village is ever big enough – there is always one more field, one more paddock, one more outsize garden that could and should be built on. But to me it seemed obvious that Myddle had grown sufficiently, and that more large-scale building would threaten to overwhelm whatever character and identity it has managed to retain.
