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by Bill Bryson

  In their enthusiasm to unearth treasures, many of the new breed of investigators perpetrated some fairly appalling damage. Artifacts were dug from the soil “like potatoes,” in the words of one alarmed observer. In Norfolk, members of the new Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society—founded shortly before Mr. Marsham took up his position in our parish—stripped well over a hundred burial mounds, a good portion of the county total, without leaving any record of what they had found or how it was arrayed, to the despair of later generations of scholars.

  There is a certain obvious and painful irony in the thought that just as Britons were discovering their past, they were simultaneously destroying a good part of it. Perhaps no one better exemplified this new breed of rapacious collector than William Greenwell (1820–1918), canon of Durham Cathedral, whom we met much earlier as the inventor of Greenwell’s glory, the celebrated (among those who celebrate such things) trout fly. In the course of a long career, Greenwell built up an extraordinary assemblage of artifacts “by gift, by purchase and by felony,” in the words of one historian. He single-handedly excavated—though devoured might be the better word—443 burial mounds all across England. His methods could be described as keen but slapdash. He left virtually no notes or records, so it is often all but impossible to know what came from where.

  Greenwell’s one compensating virtue was that he introduced the resplendently named Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers to the magic of archaeology. Pitt Rivers is memorable for two things: being one of the most important early archaeologists, and the nastiest of men. We have met him in passing already in this volume. He was the formidable figure who insisted that his wife should be cremated. (“Damn it, woman, you shall burn” was his cheery catchphrase.) He came from an interesting family, some of whose members we have also encountered before, notably two great-aunts of his who could fairly be described as firecrackers. The first, Penelope, married Viscount Ligonier of Clonmell. It was she, you may recall, who had an affair with an Italian count, then ran off with her footman. The second was the young woman who married Peter Beckford but fell disastrously in love with his cousin William, builder of Fonthill Abbey. Both were the daughters of George Pitt, first Baron Rivers, from whom our Pitt Rivers took both halves of his name.

  Augustus Pitt Rivers was a large and intimidating figure with a fiery temper at the end of a very short fuse who presided imperiously over an estate of twenty-seven thousand acres called Rushmore, near Salisbury. He was notoriously mean-spirited. His wife once invited local villagers to Rushmore for a Christmas party, and was heartbroken when no one turned up. What she didn’t know was that her husband, learning of her plans, had sent a servant to padlock the estate gates.

  Pitt Rivers’s particular speciality—a kind of hobby, it would seem—was evicting aged tenants. On one occasion he served notice on a man and his crippled wife, both in their eighties. When they begged him to reconsider, as they had no living relatives and nowhere to go, he responded briskly: “I was extremely sorry to get your letter & to see how much you disliked leaving Hinton. To be brief I feel my duties to the property necessitate my occupying the house as soon as possible.” The couple were forthwith ejected, though in fact Pitt Rivers never moved in and, according to his biographer, Mark Bowden, almost certainly never intended to.

  He was capable of the most sudden and disproportionate violence. After banishing one of his sons from the estate for some untold infraction, he forbade his other children to have any contact with him. But one daughter, Alice, took pity on her brother and met him at the estate edge to pass him some money. Learning of this, Pitt Rivers intercepted Alice as she returned to the house and beat her to the ground with her own riding crop.*

  For all his personal shortcomings, Pitt Rivers was an outstanding archaeologist—indeed, was one of the fathers of modern archaeology. He brought method and rigor to the field. He carefully labeled shards of pottery and other fragments at a time when that was not routinely done. The idea of organizing archaeological finds into a systematic sequence—a process known as typology—was his invention. Unusually, he was less interested in glittering treasure than in the objects of everyday life—beakers, combs, decorative beads, and the like—which had mostly gone undervalued theretofore. He also brought to archaeology a devotion to precision. He invented a device called a craniometer, which could make very exact measurements of human skulls. After his death, his collection of artifacts formed the foundation of the great Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

  Thanks in large part to Pitt Rivers’s exacting methodology, by the second half of the nineteenth century archaeology was becoming more like a science and less like a treasure hunt, and the more careless excesses of the early antiquaries were becoming a thing of the past. In the wider world, however, destruction was getting worse. Practically all the ancient monuments in Britain were in private hands, and no law compelled owners to look after them. Stories abounded of people destroying artifacts, either because they found them a nuisance or failed to appreciate their rarity. In Orkney, a farmer at Stenness, not far from Skara Brae, demolished a prehistoric megalith known as the Stone of Odin because it was in his way when he plowed. He was about to start in on the now-famous Stones of Stenness when horrified islanders persuaded him to desist.

  Even something as peerless as Stonehenge was astoundingly insecure. Visitors commonly carved their names in the stones or chipped off pieces to take away as souvenirs. One man was found banging away on a sarsen with a sledgehammer. In 1883, the London and South-Western Railway announced plans to run a line through the heart of the Stonehenge site. When people complained, a railway official countered that Stonehenge was “entirely out of repair, and not the slightest use to anyone now.”

  Clearly, Britain’s ancient heritage needed a savior. Enter one of the most extraordinary fellows of that extraordinary age. His name was John Lubbock, and it is remarkable that he is not better known. It would be hard to name any figure who did more useful things in more fields and won less lasting fame for it.

  The son of a wealthy banker, Lubbock grew up as a neighbor of Charles Darwin in Kent. He played with Darwin’s children and was constantly in and out of the Darwin house. He had a gift for natural history, which endeared him to the great man. The two spent many hours together in Darwin’s study looking at specimens in matching microscopes. At one point when Darwin was depressed, young Lubbock was the only visitor he would receive.

  Upon reaching adulthood, Lubbock followed his father into banking, but his heart was in science. He was a tireless, if slightly eccentric, experimenter. Once he spent three months trying to teach his dog to read. Developing an interest in archaeology, he learned Danish because Denmark was then the world leader in the field. His particular interest in insects led him to keep a colony of bees in his sitting room, the better to study their habits. In 1886, he discovered the pauropods—one of the family of tiny, and previously unsuspected, mites mentioned in our earlier discussion of household creatures. Since, as we have seen, many mites weren’t noticed by science at all until the middle of the twentieth century, to identify a family of them in 1886 was a signal achievement, particularly for a banker whose scientific pursuits were limited to evenings and weekends. No less significant was his study of the variability of nervous systems in insects, which lent important support to Darwin and his idea of descent with modification just at a time when Darwin really needed it.

  Punch cartoon of John Lubbock, architect of the Bank Holidays Act and the Ancient Monuments Protection Act (photo credit 19.1)

  As well as being a banker and keen entomologist, Lubbock was also a distinguished archaeologist, a trustee of the British Museum, a member of Parliament, the vice chancellor (or head) of London University, and an author of popular books, among rather a lot else. As an archaeologist, he coined the terms palaeolithic, mesolithic, and neolithic, and was one of the first to use the handy new word prehistoric. As a politician and member of Parliament for the Liberal Party, he became a champion of the worki
ng man. He introduced legislation to limit the hours worked in shops to ten hours a day, and in 1871 he pushed through—virtually single-handedly—the Bank Holidays Act, which introduced the breathtakingly radical idea of a paid secular holiday for workers.* It is almost impossible now to imagine what excitement this caused. Before Lubbock’s new law, most employees were excused from work on Good Friday, Christmas Day or Boxing Day (but not generally both), and Sundays, and that was it. The idea of having a bonus day off—and in summer at that—was almost too thrilling to bear. Lubbock was widely agreed to be the most popular man in England, and bank holidays for a long time were affectionately known as “St. Lubbock’s days.” No one in his age would ever have supposed that his name would one day be forgotten.

  But it is for one other innovation that Lubbock is of importance to us here: the preservation of ancient monuments. In 1872, Lubbock learned from a rector in rural Wiltshire that a big chunk of Avebury, an ancient circle of stones considerably larger than Stonehenge (though not so picturesquely composed), was about to be cleared away for new housing. Lubbock bought the threatened land, along with two other ancient monuments nearby, West Kennett Long Barrow and Silbury Hill (an enormous manmade mound—the largest in Europe), but clearly he couldn’t protect every worthy thing that grew threatened, so he began to press for legislation to safeguard historic treasures. Realizing this ambition was not nearly as straightforward as common sense would suggest it ought to be, because the ruling Tories under Benjamin Disraeli saw it as an egregious assault on property rights. The idea of giving a government functionary the right to come onto the land of a person of superior caste and start telling him how to manage his estate was preposterous—outrageous. Lubbock persevered, however, and in 1882, under the new Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone, he managed to push through Parliament the Ancient Monuments Protection Act—a landmark piece of legislation if ever there was one.

  Because the protection of monuments was such a sensitive issue, it was agreed that the first inspector of ancient monuments should be someone landowners could respect, ideally a large landowner himself. It so happened that Lubbock knew just the person—the man who was about to become his new father-in-law, none other than Augustus Pitt Rivers.

  Their relationship through marriage must have been as surprising to them as it is to us. For one thing, the two men were nearly the same age. It just happened that the recently widowed Lubbock met Pitt Rivers’s daughter Alice on a weekend stay at Castle Howard in the early 1880s. Lubbock was nearly fifty, Alice just eighteen. What caused a spark between them is beyond plausible guessing, but they were married soon afterward. It wasn’t an outstandingly happy marriage. She was younger than some of his children, which made for awkward relationships, and appears to have had little interest in his work, but the one certainty is that life with Lubbock was better than being beaten to the ground with a riding crop.

  Whether Lubbock was unaware of Pitt Rivers’s brutality to Alice or was simply prepared to overlook it—and little says more of the age than that either was possible—he and Pitt Rivers had a happy working relationship, no doubt because they had so many interests in common. As inspector of ancient monuments, Pitt Rivers’s powers were not spectacular. His brief was to identify important monuments that might be endangered, and to offer to take them into state care if the owner wished. Although this would relieve owners of the cost of maintaining sites, most balked because it was such an unprecedented step to cede control of any part of one’s estate. Even Lubbock hesitated before relinquishing Silbury Hill. The act carefully excluded houses, castles, and ecclesiastical structures. All that left were prehistoric monuments. The Office of Works provided Pitt Rivers with almost no money—half of his budget one year was spent on putting a low fence around a single burial mound—and in 1890 it removed his salary altogether, thereafter merely covering his expenses. Even then it asked him to stop “touting” for more monuments.

  Pitt Rivers died in 1900. In eighteen years, he managed to list (or “schedule,” as the parlance has it) just forty-three monuments, barely over two a year. (The number of scheduled ancient monuments today is over nineteen thousand.) But he had helped set two immeasurably important precedents—that ancient things are precious enough to protect and that owners of ancient monuments have a duty to look after them. These policies weren’t always enforced with much rigor in his day, but the principles embedded in them were crucial, and they inspired others to take additional protective actions. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, led by the designer William Morris, was founded in 1877, and the National Trust followed in 1895. At last British monuments began to enjoy some measure of formal protection.

  Risks continued, however. Stonehenge remained in private hands, and the owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, refused to listen to government advice or even have inspectors on his land. Around the turn of the century it was reported that an anonymous buyer was interested in shipping the stones to America to reerect as a tourist attraction somewhere out west. Had Antrobus accepted such an offer, there was nothing in law anyone could do to stop him. Nor indeed for many years was there anyone willing to try. For ten years after Pitt Rivers’s death, the position of inspector of ancient monuments was left vacant to save funds.

  II

  Even as all this was unfolding, life in the British countryside was being severely reshaped by an event that is little remembered now but was one of the most economically catastrophic in modern British history: the agricultural depression of the 1870s, when harvests were abysmal in seven years out of ten. This time, however, farmers and landowners couldn’t compensate by raising prices, as they always had in the past, because now they faced vigorous competition from overseas. America in particular had become a vast agricultural machine. Thanks to the McCormick reaper and other large, clattery implements, America’s prairies had become devastatingly productive. Between 1872 and 1902, American wheat production increased by 700 percent. In the same period, British wheat production fell by more than 40 percent.

  Prices collapsed, too. Wheat, barley, oats, bacon, pork, mutton, and lamb all roughly halved in value during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Wool dropped from 28 shillings per fourteen-pound bundle to just 12 shillings. Thousands of tenant farmers were ruined. More than a hundred thousand farmers and farmworkers left the land. Fields stood idle. Rents went unpaid. Nowhere was there any prospect of relief. Country churches became conspicuously empty as parish rolls shrank. Those worshippers that remained were poorer than ever. It wasn’t a great time to be a country clergyman. It never would be again.

  At the height of the agricultural crisis, the British government under the Liberals did an odd thing. It invented a tax designed to punish a class of people who were already suffering severely and had done nothing in particular to cause the current troubles. The class was large landowners. The tax was death duties. Life was about to change utterly for thousands of people, including our own Mr. Marsham.

  The designer of the new tax was Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, the chancellor of the exchequer, a man who seems not to have been liked much by anyone at any point in his life, including his own family. Known familiarly, if not altogether affectionately, as “Jumbo” because of his magnificent rotundity, Harcourt was an unlikely persecutor of the landed classes, since he was one of them himself. The Harcourt family home was Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire, which we have visited in this book already. Nuneham, you may remember, was where an earlier Harcourt reconfigured the estate but failed to recollect where the old village well had been, fell into it, and drowned. For as long as there had been Tories, the Harcourts had numbered themselves among them, so William’s joining of the Liberals was seen within his family as the darkest treachery. Even Liberals were startled by his tax. Lord Rosebery, the prime minister (who was himself a big landowner), wondered if some relief should at least be granted in those cases where two inheritors died in quick succession. It would be harsh, Rosebery thought, to tax an
estate a second time before the legatee had had a chance to rebuild the family finances. Harcourt, however, refused all appeals for concessions.

  That Harcourt stood almost no chance of inheriting his own family property no doubt colored his principles. In fact, to his presumed surprise, he did inherit it when his elder brother’s son died suddenly, but heirlessly, in the spring of 1904. Harcourt didn’t get to enjoy his good fortune long, however. He expired six months later himself, which meant that his heirs were among the first to be taxed twice over in exactly the way that Rosebery had feared and Harcourt had dismissed. Life doesn’t often get much neater than that.

  Death duties in Harcourt’s time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions who didn’t have to pay them, that they were raised again and again until by the eve of the Second World War they stood at 60 percent—a level that would make even the richest eyes water. At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly and other new taxes invented—the Undeveloped Land Duty, the Incremental Value Duty, the Super Tax—all of which fell disproportionately on those with a lot of land and plummy accents. For the upper classes the twentieth century became, in the words of David Cannadine, a time “of encircling gloom.”

  Most lived within a semipermanent state of crisis. When things got really bad—when a roof needed replacing or a tax demand hit the mat—disaster could generally be staved off by selling heirlooms. Paintings, tapestries, jewels, books, porcelain, silver plate, rare stamps—whatever would attract a reasonable price poured out of English stately homes and into museums or the hands of foreigners. This was the age in which Henry Clay Folger bought every Shakespeare First Folio he could lay hands on and George Washington Vanderbilt bought treasures enough to fill his 250-room Biltmore mansion; when men like Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and J. P. Morgan acquired old masters by the wagonload; and when William Randolph Hearst acquired almost anything else that was going.