The Changing English Village (Part 2)

As I read more and more of Kathleen Ashby’s wonderfully detailed book – and wish that she had stayed in Tysoe, and carried out her thorough research and narration here… – it becomes obvious that certain themes echo down the centuries: some even remaining – or re-emerging – as contemporary issues. (To paraphrase Douglas Adams: For a few hundred years, nothing changed. Then, after a few centuries or so, nothing continued to change.)

One of the principal themes – Bledington, as Tysoe, being a rural economy – is, of course, land ownership (and the greed that can result); the continuing (if not growing) difference between those who have, and those who have not; and the attitudes of the richer classes to the poorer (never made quite so blunt, perhaps, as in the bearing and behaviour of the current, élitist, Tory-led government – and its continuing mission to boldly rid the poverty-stricken, zero-hour contracted, disabled, and unemployed of all their dignity…).

I know my place. I look up to them…; but while I am poor, I am honest, industrious and trustworthy. Had I the inclination, I could look down on them. But I don’t.

¶

One of the earliest references to this concerns the fourteenth-century, Malvern-born poet, William Langland – most famous for the beautiful and dreamy poem Piers Plowman – and his “passionate concern for the well-being of ordinary folk”:

All around him, Langland sees superstition, greed and riches, together with poverty unrelieved. Pope, priests, bishops, have all failed the people. Greed is the basic cause of evil, affecting not only the great folk, but merchants and tradesmen, and in even greater degree lawyers, those flatterers and sycophants. Langland says clearly what he means by greed. He contrasts “measureless meed” with “measureable hire”. Here is more than a Marxian touch. The longing for unearned increment is in all men; ‘capitalism’ is only one of its results….

“The poor have no power to complain though they smart” but “Ye macemen and mayors that are midmost and mean The King and the Commons have power.”

Langland does not look to rural knights or to the lords of lands for help. In this, and in looking to the towns, he is prophetic. The nineteenth century saw terrible need for help and saw the towns indirectly give it.

¶

Later, when Kathleen Ashby moves on to the sixteenth century, she discusses how…

The great struggles and developments of this period would continue and remain recognisably continuous through more than three hundred years, until the First World War in 1914. Villages would undergo changes apparently revolutionary, but never so thorough that many old patterns ceased to throw up problems, at least one of these, the relief of the poor, growing more acute and tragic for centuries and until 1918, never solved.

I think – as a social historian, very much in touch with the plight of those struggling to find meaning with and through their lives – Kathleen (especially given her heritage) would be heartbroken to see that we have, in the intervening century, regressed so terribly: with anyone who is different – because of unemployment, status, race, infirmity, etc. – being treated so badly, again, by those influencing – and letting themselves be influenced by – the modern press.

For a long time past the problem of poverty had grown more acute and more pervasive…. During the sixteenth century there were added to ‘God’s poor’ (the aged, the blind, the lame, the widow and the orphan) great numbers of destitute persons who were young and even, when not starved of food, able-bodied.

Will historians of the twenty-first century document us in the same way: with benefits sanctions and other measures forcing the ‘hardworking’ featured in political slogan-making to rely on food-banks and other charitable enterprises as leading examples of our belief in unattainable (but capital-led) supposed equality? What about our scurrying to spend increasing portions of our (hard-earned) salaries on property ownership?

In the course of the seventeenth century there came to be a score of freeholders. The husbandmen in their wish to be owners learned to borrow money: here begins the career of that potent and dangerous document… – the mortgage.

At the same time – eerily echoing the news stories and concerns of today – the numbers of labourers and the poor were increasing:

Some became casual workers, and vagrants and then destitute. This was an old problem. Henry VIII’s government had tackled it with some success, providing a parochial machinery and stimulating charity. Elizabeth and her Parliament had passed experimental legislation and checked its results…. But after the coming of James I these practices were discontinued and during the struggle between throne and Parliament the poor were left to parish officers.

The Restoration brought no return of systematic thought or planning…. Those who could have spoken for the poor were silenced and depressed; the idea of allowing or encouraging the poor to speak of their own condition was totally absent. On the contrary, under the dominance of the wealthy landowners who, now, in Boswell’s term “possessed” Parliament, and of industrial entrepreneurs and merchants there grew up an attitude to the poor of unheard of brutality and insolence whose development and spread would continue through the next century…

…and still be present today.

The move to enclosure, and private farming, and the concomitant removal of common land, also did nothing to help those at the bottom levels of rural society:

Arthur Young, the first great agricultural reporter was a propagandist for enclosure in his early writings and would later sum up the stimulating quality of outright possession in the well-known phrases “the magic of property turns sand into gold” and “the enjoyment of property… has clothed the very rocks with verdure”.

Beside the satisfaction of gain in produce or money, there were the more imaginative pleasures of ownership and mastery – of being lord of what one surveys and being able to say to one “Go!” and to another “Come!” and perhaps to a third “Vote!” Plainly, profit of this order helped to bring about… enclosure….

Sometimes it is said that the growth of the population of the country led to enclosures, but they were not advocated as a means of feeding the people: the absence of this motive is shown in the general absence of the wish to feed adequately even workers on the land.

There was in fact no adequate debate on the gains and losses from enclosures: exposition was one-sided. Enclosure would change the basis of thousands of communities but this fact was not to the front… landownership and therefore the management of land as property, rather than as soil for crops, was the ruling factor in English life….

The results of the enclosure were not in the economic sphere momentous: there was never emphasis on mere exploitation until the twentieth century. But the system which had come to an end was communal.

This dissolution of community – echoing my plea to the Planning Inspectorate re “the threats the cohesion of this community faces” – may be why we look at Mr White’s field of ridge-and-furrow, between Tysoe Manor and Oxhill Road, and see more than just lumps and bumps of earth. In our veins we understand implicitly what we have already lost; as well as seeing, explicitly, with our brains engaged, the need to preserve this co-operative relic from a long-lost time – the history and nostalgia that can be used in the game of planning poker we play against the likes of Gladman.

¶

As some of us now fight for living wages, so, in the eighteenth century, the obverse: “Maximum wages were controlled by the landlord-magistrates, but not the minimum.” Only as the eighteenth century rolled into the nineteenth would Samuel Whitbread, “the rich brewer and humane man and statesman”, introduce a bill to the House of Commons “to end the fixing of a maximum wage and to institute minimum pay”.

The easiest way to reduce costs of production was by the lowering of wages and increase of hours…. Even the humane Arthur Young wrote that “Everyone knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious… they must (like all mankind) be in poverty or they will not work.”

It would not surprise me if Iain Duncan Smith recites this eagerly, every night, before retiring to bed: where, no doubt, he sleeps easily in his cruel, simplistic beliefs.

Other doctrines, however, did allow the poor to have, at least, souls. With the growth of Methodism in the eighteenth century, and the outpourings of John Wesley, one day his movement “would assist the widespread revolt against evil conditions of living”.

“Want of tenderness,” Dr. Johnson said, “was want of parts and no less a proof of stupidity than depravity,” but England would require most of the nineteenth century to learn the truth of that.

¶

As hinted above, single mothers – as now – came in for particular criticism, as if they had made themselves poor on purpose:

Some have thought that the expectation of an allowance for each child from the parish, influenced unmarried mothers – a reasonable view in some cases but not here a necessary one and false in some parishes, e.g. Tysoe.

Here, Kathleen invokes the deep knowledge her father had of our village, our community; and it is easy to see obvious parallels ploughed between her adopted home of Bledington, and the village where she was raised; as well as between the past and the present.

One passage in particular raised my ire, though, with its modern equivalency in the “deep dark hell” of jobcentres – particularly for those suffering with mental illnesses:

The young and the lame went where their infirmities and capacities were not understood…. In many parishes when work was lacking overseers refused relief unless the men performed some set useless tasks or even actions that did not pretend to be work [including men being] set to lower the height of ridges in the fields by throwing soil into the furrows with spades; they might as well have been set [Sisyphus’] task of rolling a great stone up a hill.

I don’t believe all humans to be evil (although we all contain that seed…); but I do suspect that our tendency to selfishness, and the increasing mania for consumption, along with a parallel wish for ease and speed of delivery – of both goods and information (the received opinion seeming particularly popular – even though we have never had so much data readily within reach…) – have contributed to our continuing disdain for, and ill-treatment of, “anyone who is different” (especially those who we perceive to be beneath us): and particularly those who have less than we do.

These people frighten us, because they are an unknown quantity; but they are also easy to ignore, or, even worse, mistreat, because of their lack of similarity to us, to what we know and understand.

We are not “all in this together”. And never really were.

The Changing English Village (Part 1)

History, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents.

– Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thirteen years after writing the biography of her father, Kathleen Ashby authored The Changing English Village: A History of Bledington, Gloucestershire in its Setting 1066-1914 – published by Gordon Norwood, at The Roundwood Press, in Kineton – an immensely detailed and objective work; and yet, at the same time, full of love and respect for the place she had made her home; and filled with the same heartfelt humanity as her earlier book. It is an ideal sequel, therefore; and, in some ways, is a perfect companion (offering a complementary perspective and yet similar sensibility) to Ernst Gombrich’s classic, A Little History of the World.

As the blurb on the dust-jacket says:

Miss Ashby’s book is the story of an English village through nine centuries; but it is more than this: it is the story of the ever-changing pattern of communal existence as reflected in the lives of the inhabitants of a typical parish of the English midlands. The name of the village is unimportant: what is important is the way in which the lives of its inhabitants are shaped by external changes…: Acts of Parliament, national movements, economic, religious and social, have moulded the lives of its inhabitants. Therefore – and this is the importance of the present work – it can be considered as the archetype of all English villages in its development through the centuries. Miss Ashby’s prose is compelling and eminently readable. Here is a book which all who are concerned with the future of rural England would do well to ponder, considering as they do so whether the English village community has come to the end of the road, and whether it will ever exist again as a separate entity.

It would be easy to imagine, from these descriptions, that this is quite a scholarly work – which, in many ways, it is: but any trend towards academe is buried deep beneath the ubiquitous fellow-feeling; and the immense amount of detail it contains therefore lies lightly – each fact being a small, solid, necessary brick that contributes equally to the solidity and beauty of the whole structure – simply serving its order as part of a wonderful travel through the chronicling of what could almost be, as described, any village in ‘middle England’ with deep roots in the past. Such as the three Tysoes, for example!

Kathleen Ashby makes a good wayfaring companion, as she explores Bledington’s relationship with its surroundings, its context, happenings elsewhere that have impact on it and its people, and their contribution to the wider world: putting you in their shoes (when they had any); enabling you to see their growing awareness and environment – cultural, religious, geopolitical – from their perspective, and with their mores. Wherever – and whenever – you open the book, little jewels emerge, small plums of delight; and it soon becomes apparent that, although Bledington is her great love, as a place (equally with Tysoe, where she grew up, I think…), it is England’s history – and that of its inhabitants – that she is narrating.

As Dr Joan Thirsk, then reader in Economic History at the University of Oxford, says in the book’s foreword:

While Miss Ashby writes about the past, she writes unwittingly about herself and her vision of the future…. So [her] history of her village cannot fail to cast brilliant shafts of illuminating understanding through the reflections and memories of every villager who reads her book. The problems of every village community are the same though the solutions vary…. Miss Ashby clearly owes her sharpened vision of this matter to her family and the village of Tysoe in which she was brought up… [and Bledington is a village] that is significantly not unlike Tysoe in its essential lineaments. It was a lordless community, master of itself.

She also sounds a topical warning note…

Our planners would be more wary if they read more history.

…a statement I can only concur with! And then finishes her foreword with typical foresight – which I hope, we, as a village, can continue to bring life to –

There is clearly no reason why the sense of community that pervaded life until the end of the seventeenth century, and the individualism that swept all before it in the eighteenth and nineteenth, should not be blended again into a new harmony in the twentieth or twenty-first century.

A steady spirit, regularly free…

It is not the entwining ivy, the golden jasmine, the clinging honeysuckle, and the trained rosebushes, with their delicate perfume, to which I desire to introduce the readers of the Advertiser, but the real life lived by the labouring poor in the villages of Warwickshire.

– Joseph Ashby: Warwick Advertiser (24 December 1892)

I have in front of me a book that has existed as long as I have; written and signed by an author whose very roots spiral deep into Tysoe’s soil – (Kathleen) MK Ashby, the daughter (and biographer) of Joseph Ashby of Tysoe 1859-1919: A Study of English Village Life.

Just opening it – and breathing in that musty-but-sweet perfume so redolent of old pages, old literature, old lives – instantly connects me more firmly to the land I live on, the village I live in (as well as whisking me back to the libraries of my childhood; the encumbered shelves of my parents and grandparents). Reading it – and admiring the wonderful, insightful, unique narrative and style – I am immersed in the history of our village: seen through the eyes and experience of a man whose knowledge, wisdom, understanding, ambition and graft – and importance – I can sadly only appreciate from afar: as he was born just over a hundred years before me (and his biography).

He would, though, I am sure, have made a good, lively and true companion, wandering and riding around the highways and byways of his village… – although what he would make of its current manifestation, and the threats it faces from developers, I can only imagine. I believe he would have fought such menaces, though: as he always did so keenly for the causes he so strongly believed in – with “an economy of indignation… saved up for the big things and kept turned in the right directions.”

Time showed in fact that Tysoe men could not be won for vast schemes; they wanted this wrong righted, that foul spot cleared, and reasonable scope for a man’s activity. They had, the best of them, wise inherited attitudes outlasting the occasions of learning…. But though they were sceptics, they saw that there were good men in all ranks and grades, and moreover, that in all but the worst time, everybody, just and unjust alike, contributed something: the foolish amused and the wicked instructed. They saw men as members one of another.

Early in her book, Kathleen Ashby describes the situation of Tysoe in the mid-nineteenth century: the small world her father emerged into (fatherless) – not that so much of our topography has changed… – setting it against its neighbours:

Compared with all these Tysoe had some high distinctions. It was large, and composed in a rare way. Its trinity of hamlets, Upper, Church, and Temple (or, as the old maps had it, Templars’) Tysoe were large groups of houses strung along the foot of the Edge Hills. These, with their minor clusters and lanes, stood on small brooks flowing down parallel courses some quarter or half mile apart. The hills themselves were unique and, moreover, sacred. They looked high and straight, fully their six or seven hundred feet. From their ridge, they are seen to be the edge of a plateau, not straight but a series of curves, forming great amphitheatres, suitable for giant Roman dramas and spectacles, but no one in Tysoe thought of those. For [many of the villagers] they were biblical hills – steadfast, a glimpse vouchsafed of the foundations God has laid, the bastions he has built; yet sometimes skipping like lambs, while clouds that are the skirts and fringes of God’s raiment sweep along them.

Such beautiful, expressive, poetic prose (anything but prosaic): which she also implements in fluently and naturally capturing the villagers’ argot – and without any fuss, pretentiousness, or exaggeration. It rings real and planted; consistent and true… – although she knowingly contrasts this “local mode” with her grandmother’s use of “book language”, when required! She also builds foundations for her writing on those of her parents’ possessions important enough to her sentiment and identity, but essential to the verisimilitude of their lives – such as Joseph’s first personal books: bought in Banbury with three shillings wisely and affectionally gifted by his mother, Elizabeth, from the family’s scant harvest gleanings – delving for documentary evidence; handling them affectionately and with reverence: much as I now do with her creation (and which, with her scrawled dedication, produces similar significance and interconnection).

In a recent post, I asked of our forebears…

How did those people live and work? Why did they stay – or move away? What attracted them? What made it hard for them? What made it hard for them to stay or move away?

…and Kathleen’s A Study of English Village Life goes a very long way to answering that: stretching back centuries in a precursor to – and analogue of – Ronald Blythe’s wonderful, immersive Akenfield: another book that I believe is fundamental to understanding the evolution of rural life; and its frequent foundation in poverty, as well as in tilth.

When her father was alive, the Act of Parliament that was passed in April 1796 “for the enclosure of the open fields of Tysoe” – almost the last parish in the area to succumb: and, therefore, with little apparent resistance – was a recent and living memory; the end of an era (with even the “Red Horse itself… penned up within hedges, without even a footpath past it”). Many of the pre-enclosure rituals were still enacted at harvest, though; and many villagers were still aware of the location of their family’s ‘lands’, or ploughing ridges – a passive, subtle, but behindhand rebellion against “a visible sign and symbol that rampant family and individual power had gained a complete victory over the civic community.”

“Enclosures would have done good if there had been justice in ’em. They give folks allotments now instid o’ ther rights – on a slope so steep a two-legged animal can’t stand, let alone dig!”

But Joseph, as he ripened each summer, with the crops, was also interested in the wider world:

Three things came to him in this period; some idea of how events elsewhere affected his own home and village; some knowledge that other communities produced other manners and other men; and then the sense, to describe it as best I can, that under the wide acreage of grass and corn and woods which he saw daily there was a ghostly, ancient tessellated pavement made of the events and thoughts and associations of other times. The historical sense he shared with many of the men he met about his work. Their strong memory for the past was unimpaired by much reading or novelty of experience, and yet their interest had been sharpened by the sense of rapid change.

In many ways, Joseph – with his political understanding, cultural immersion and regular contributions to the (then very) local press – was the original Bard of Tysoe: more social and forthcoming than I, though; and with a more monumental and commanding presence – an organizer of men and causes, as well as of words and ideas.

Although “talk was his medium… he was a lifelong writer of one kind of thing and another.” Sadly, though, “there remain only printed fragments or faded manuscript sentences” – a fact that makes me hesitate, and then meditate on the future of my words, in a period when we no longer relish and rely on the almost-permanency of “old pages” and “encumbered shelves”; but commit our thoughts to flimsy, fleeting pixels, viewed transitorily, rather than stacked and cherished, to one day be visited again with delight at the conclusion of a successful forage for a familiar, half-remembered phrase or sentence.

“He liked to write as an onlooker, wide-minded and kindly, indulging, I think, in the fantasy of being at ease as to time and income…” – a sentiment, and an ambition, I empathize with (but have not yet attained). He also, like me, “must have found time to read books on history and rural affairs, or his writings could not have achieved their quality.” He wears his learning lightly, though; and always parallels it with action: using the conclusions he arrives at, with great thought, to understand, strengthen and animate the lives of his peers; to “arrive at the facts [that] would make ill-informed talk an anachronism.”

This devotion to knowledge, passed down from his mother, flowed naturally to his offspring, as well. He believed that “it was always important to notice how things appeared to children” – and his, inheriting his love of Tysoe, as well as his talents, “firmly believed themselves to live in an area of remarkable natural beauty. To them the Edge Hills were high, though not too high for one to stand often on their top and look out over the world.”

Kathleen – as his natural, bardic successor – reproduces, towards the end of the book, her first (although not childish) attempt at capturing the Tysoe she saw, felt, lived in, and loved:

We no longer see our country as did the old painters, the distance dark and threatening, the great elms near at hand admired for strength, their leaves individually drawn as each a sign of life and power…. Looking from the top of Sunrising our landscape is friendly to its bounds; we interpret its light and shade with the great Constable’s help to mean corn and plough and meadow.

From below our hills are high: “Man lifts up his eyes to the hills.” In the vale is a man’s home; the market and the milkpail. The poetry of these may be more profound than that of the heights but it is not easy to feel it so. On the hills is exhilarating wind. There in June the harebells and thyme “waft prayers and adoration to the azure”, the firs on Old Lodge toss their boughs in a rarer, quicker, air. Here a few romantic young folk load the wind with shouted poetry. Many through the nineteenth century have thrilled to feel their minds expand with the wide view. “Yonder see the Coventry spire”, they say, or “as far as the Severn”, but what they mean is that here the soul is large and free. These long-sighted folk are mostly men taking a Sabbath walk. On Sundays village women are busy dressing each member of the family, in Sunday best, and then afterwards cooking the finest, largest meal of the week, but here they come on summer weekdays gathering mushrooms or blackberries. It is difficult for them to shed the numerous and pressing cares of the household, but gradually in the keen air sight and smell become heightened, hands fall idle and the gatherers note the tiny flowers and the cloudlets in the sky. It is animal life that attracts the little children; they like to frighten the clumsy sheep – so often it is they themselves who have been afraid. They fly with the birds that are freer even than their holiday selves. The bigger children remember that they came here in February, when the wind was at its keenest, to chop boughs and pick up chips from the trees that had been felled. The pale sunlight and the pale primroses asserting themselves against the cold had promised summer and now the promise was fulfilled. Very soon the visitors to the hills return to their life of custom and work in their homes below, but they will come again when time and labour permit, to look outwards and heavenwards.

However, her “study”, written half a century later, concludes with these words – bringing us back to her father… – words which I cannot better:

It has been the special destiny of Englishmen to be at once good citizens and highly individualised – to be very serious pilgrims, like Bunyan’s, but telling fine tales on the way, like Chaucer’s. The scale of our lives is different now; for us all the world is our parish; all the more need to practise our wits and skills in Joseph Ashby’s way, on the home acres.