In his readable book, ‘And Did Those Feet – Walking through 2000 years of British and Irish History’, published this year, Charlie Connelly wrote about his fairly recent walks in the British Isles that retraced the steps of famous, seminal journeys from history.  Here is an excerpt from his extraordinary journey through Lincolnshire,  -

After an hour or so of heart-pumpingly terrifying slog, I suddenly became aware that the traffic had disappeared.  There was nothing to be seen in either direction and the sudden silence was as surprising as it was welcome – I could see for a fair distance in both directions and there was no traffic at all.  Then, to my amazement, I saw two people in the road.  The only light was from my own downward-pointing torch and the faint glow of the horizon, so I could  only see them in silhouette, but there were definitely two people walking towards me.  They were actually in the road on the same side as me, so facing any oncoming traffic that might appear; a man and a woman.  I couldn’t see their faces, but they looked quite young.  He was tall, stocky and appeared to be wearing a T-shirt, she was small, wore her hair in a ponytail and had a jacket folded over her arms.  While I was amazed to see anyone out there I was also a little relieved.  Seeing other people reassured me a little, just by the fact that I wasn’t the only pedestrian on the A15 that night.  I’d started to believe that I was the first person ever to walk this stretch, yet here were a couple apparently even worse off than me – at least I was vaguely well equipped.  It was a very cold night and I was well wrapped up; my panting, frightened breath came in big clouds.  They were just in a T-shirt and a blouse.  There must be an explanation for them being out here like this, I thought.  Their car must have broken down or something.  I expected to see it down the road somewhere, hazard lights winking.

‘All right?’ I asked as they drew level.

No reaction.  Not a flicker.  We were a good couple of miles from any kind of house or even turning in either direction; you’d have thought three people in such a similarly tricky predicament would have been pleased to see each other.  But they didn’t even acknowledge me.

‘What are you doing out here?’  Again, not a flicker of reaction.  They just carried on walking in the road as if I wasn’t there, passing within six feet of me.

In the time it took me to walk on a few paces and mutter ‘Well, bollocks to you then’ to myself, I realised that I had the advantage of a map.  I knew that there was nothing in the directin they were going for a good hour’s walk at least.  If they were going for help they wouldn’t find any that way.  I turned around to call after them.

Gone.  There was no sign of them.  It had barely been ten seconds since I’d passed them.  The road was completely flat in both directions and there were fields on either side with low hedgerows separating them from the road.  There was simply nowhere they could have gone, yet they’d totally vanished.  At that point the clouds parted and a big, fat yellow full moon appeared, heaving its way into the sky and illuminating the scene briefly before the clouds joined up again and the traffic resumed with as much ferocity as before.  I walked on as the roar of the traffic battered my eardrums, but the more I thought about it the more confused I became, particularly when I didn’t pass any kind of abandoned vehicle all the rest of the way.  It just didn’t add up.  It was a cold night, yet he was in a T-shirt and she had a jacket folded over her arms.  It was so cold you could see your breath in clouds.  Which is when I realised I hadn’t seen theirs.  Then there was the fact they didn’t acknowledge my presence, even though I’d spoken to them twice.  Out there in the dark, on the road with nothing around for miles, they’d not even nodded at me.

Much later, when I got home at the end of the journey, I looked up the A15 on the internet.  That part of it on the way to Sleaford turned out to be one of the most haunted stretches of road in Britain.  Page after page detailed ghostly experiences precisely where I’d seen those people.  In the late 1990s there had even been an entire episode of This Morning devoted to it.  None of the accounts seemed to tally with what I’d seen (there were frequent tales of motorists seeing a face suddenly looming up in their windscreens out of the darkness and disappearing just before impact, a couple of ghostly horsemen and the usual smattering of Roman soldiers) but it certainly made me wonder.  There could well be a perfectly reasonable explanation.  I may well have inadvertently embellished the tale in my memory – I was, after all, in a fairly agitated state anyway – but to this day I can’t explain what I saw out on the road that night.

It didn’t get me any closer to Sleaford either, and I still had a good couple of hours of frightened trudging ahead of me.  I was out there for so long that the torch batteries began to fail and the light that saved me from the lumps, clumps and bramble trip-wires began to dim.  Eventually, to my immense relief, the lights of a town appeared in the distance, and I can guarantee you right now that nobody, but nobody, has ever been pleased to see the Sleaford Travelodge as I was.

My route had taken me slightly east of Ermine Street, but I was still following a Roman road south when I left Sleaford the next morning.  As far as I could tell it was the most direct route to London so there was still a possibility that Harold passed that way too.  By lunchtime I was making good progress towards Bourne and on a pleasant sunny afternoon passed another big church in the middle of nowhere, this time at the convergence of some tracks rather than roads.  A man was mowing the churchyard and gave me a friendly wave, and a few hundred yards further along the track I found the most extraordinary thing.  There, in the middle of rural Lincolnshire, I found a little piece of Wales.  Just off the track, in front of a line of trees was a flat-fronted standing stone, about four feet high.  A small border in front of it was crammed with flowers and shrubs, some planted, some laid by visitors.  As I approached I could see there was an oval plaque on it and, to my surprise, most of it was in Welsh.  ‘GWENLLIAN’ it said across the centre, with ‘Merch Llywelyn Ein Llew Olaf’ in smaller letters above and the dates 12.6.1282 and 7.6.1337.  Beneath the name was an English translation, ‘Daughter of Llewelyn, Last Prince of Wales’.  In smaller letters around the edge, in English and Welsh, the inscription read, ‘Born at Garthcelyn Aber Gwynedd, at 18 months old she was abducted by Edward I and held captive here at Sempringham Abbey for the rest of her life’.  Another small plaque nearby said ‘In Everlasting Memory – daffodils planted in 1996 by Boston Welsh Society’, with another bearing the legend ‘Merched Y Wawr’, which, I would later learn, is the rough equivalent of a Welsh Women’s Institute.

I was intrigued by this small piece of Wales stuck here, far from main roads, in an apparently unremarkable backwater.  As for Sempringham Abbey, there appeared to be no sign of it as far as I could see; the OS map gave no clue that there was even a ruin here.

There was a crunching of gravel and a sleek black four-wheel-drive vehicle eased to a halt next to me.  A man and a woman got out, stretching and loosening as if they’d reached the end of a long journey.  They came and stood next to me at the stone, and for a while none of us said anything.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said the woman eventually. ‘Such a tragic story.’  Her voice was awed, her accent definitely Welsh.

I had to confess that I had no idea what the stone was for; I’d just been passing.  When she told me that she and her husband had driven all the way from Cardiff just to see it I knew that there had to be something special about this place.

‘How much do you know about Welsh history?’ she asked.  Despite having once had a fiercely patriotic Welsh girlfriend, I had to confess that I didn’t know much.  Patiently she began to explain why there was this little monument to Welshness in the east of England.

‘Llewelyn ap Gruffydd had fought hard to become Prince of Wales,’ she began.  ‘He’d had to defeat his own brothers in battle in 1255 and then set about trying to remove the English.  Henry III had invaded Gwynedd in 1247, built castles and forced the local lords to kowtow to him.  After the battle Llywelyn appointed himself sole ruler of Gwynedd and proclaimed himself Prince in 1258.  Henry was fairly amenable to this at first and praised Llewelyn for his restraint, and eventually – in 1267, I think it was – Henry acknoweldged him as Prince of Wales.  Henry was then succeeded as King of England by Edward I, who wasn’t quite as tolerant of Llywelyn’s status.  But when Llywelyn married Henry’s niece Eleanor at Worcester in 1275, Edward gave the bride away and laid on the wedding feast.

‘However, it still rankled that Llywelyn had refused to attend his coronation and on five occasions between 1274 and 1279 he had refused to pay homage to the English king when asked.  Edward eventually invaded and Llwelyn led a fierce Welsh resistance.  Eventually, though, in the winter of 1282 Llwelyn’s army suffered a defeat in battle at Builth Wells.  Llywelyn was leaving the battle with a handful of followers when they were ambushed and he was killed.  When the English realised just who they’d got they cut off Llywelyn’s head and sent it to Edward, who had it displayed on a spike at the Tower of London, where it stayed for fifteen years.  He’s known today as Llywelyn the Last as he was the last Welsh Prince of an independent Wales.’

‘But what brings you here?’ I asked. ‘Why is this place so significant?’

‘Well, five months before he died Llywelyn had fathered a daughter, Gwenllian.  Eleanor had died in childbirth, so when Llywelyn was killed the baby was orphaned.  When she was eighteen months old she was spirited away and brough here, to Sempringham Abbey, as far from Wales and her heritage as possible.  The English didn’t want her knowing about her background and didn’t want the Welsh to have a figurehead to rally behind, so they sent her here to the nuns, where she lived until she was fifty-six.  Imagine that: living your whole life not knowing who you are.

‘This is such an important place for the Welsh now.  She could have been the continuation of our royal bloodline.  It’s such a terrible thing to do to someone, to take away their birthright, their whole life, yet few people outside Wales know about it.  The history books say that the Gwynedd dynasty, the last official independent Welsh royal family, ended with Llywelyn by actually it ended right here, it’s so unfair.’

Her tone was imploring.  Her voice was filled with injustice that echoed down seven hundred years of history.  When I explained why I was walking through this part of Lincolnshire countryside she clutched my forearm, looked pleadingly into my eyes and said, ‘You have to write about this.  Please write about this.  Promise me you’ll write about this, that you’ll tell her story.’

I promised.  She released my arm, wished me luck and they both climbed into the car.  Before they pulled away she wound down the window and called out, ‘When you walk across that little bridge there, look back at the stone and you’ll see,’ and with that the car was gone, heading back to Cardiff.

I walked the few yards to the little stone bridge across the stream that ran behind the memorial.  When I looked back at the stone I saw what she meant.  From that angle it looked exactly like a nun kneeling in prayer.

pp.114-19

Bryan Appleyard, writing on poetry as the essential characteristic of the ‘English Imagination’ – and of Englishness -

HERE are two opening lines:

“Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,”

“Lord, the Roman hycinths are blooming in bowls and”

The first is from Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, the second from T.S. Eliot’s ‘A Song for Simeon’. I quote them here solely because they both send a shiver down my spine. I could try to explain why – that haunting sc-sh-qw sound in the Raleigh, or the odd, unexpected stillness of the Eliot line caused, I think, by ‘in bowls’ and that hanging ‘and’ – but, in truth, my shiver comes from wells deeper than those plumbed by practical criticism. It comes from being and speaking English.

It is unfashionable to speak of national characteristics. Queasy types think it is akin to racism. But the truth is that nations are definably different. Most importantly, they differ in what they do best. No nation has produced better essayists than France, none has produced better composers that the Germans, better painters than the Italians, nor better novelists than the Russians. America invented jazz and still masters the form and, though some may dissent, her record in film is unsurpassed. And the English? The English do poetry.

Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words “We defy augury”. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.

Why this should be is open to infinite speculation. It is often said that Protestantism turned us away from the image to the word, but that was late in the day. Some talk of the landscape or the weather, but other nations have those. More significant may be the legacy of Roman occupation which left the English with a unique sense of home as land, a poetic idea that runs through Clare and Wordsworth to Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’. But the truth, I suspect, is that it is the English language itself which made us poets. This is, of course, unprovable, not least because of the chicken and egg question – did the language make the English poets or did the English make the language poetic? But, if only subjectively, I think some kind of case can be made.

First, I have to acknowledge one unfortunate fact: in the 20th Century, English poetry became American. After Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, England produced only one further uncontestably great poet – W.H. Auden. Ted Hughes seldom works for me and Philip Larkin is superbly second rank. But Eliot, though an aspirant Englishman, never stopped being American. In addition, there was Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery – all giants – as well as a whole host of other figures, like Frank O’Hara, who may yet come to be seen as equally gigantic. This needs to be said partly because this article argues the necessity for a resurrection of our national art, but also because the idea that it is our language that makes our poetry must necessarily encompass the Americans.

If Hamlet can be seen as one big poem, then so, in a sense, can all of English poetry. It is a conversation with itself. Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ – indeed, perhaps the whole of his work – is another way of articulating the spirit of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The World is Too Much With Us’. Robert Browning’s dramatic meditations are refined and internalised by Ezra Pound; the Gothic arches of ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ becoming the broken psychic concrete of the Cantos. John Clare’s open-eyed, innocent, wondering, exact gaze is also that of Ashbery. And – slightly quirky one this – Clare’s line “I am the self consumer of my woes” could, to my ears and mind, prefigure Bob Dylan.

Eliot understood this better than anybody. ‘The Waste Land’ opens with a line – “April is the cruellest month” – that sardonically inverts the mood of the first line of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (“Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote”), as if to remark that all poetry is one, and that in the end is the beginning. Less explicitly, Auden had only to set pen to paper for the whole history of English poetry to come flooding onto the page in his infinity of rhythms and nuances. His great but neglected short poem ‘Like a Vocation’ expresses this eerie feeling of looking around to see where the voices are coming from:

But somewhere always, nowhere particularly unusual,
Almost anywhere in the landscape of water and houses,

The voices are, of course, those which Peter Ackroyd has called English Music.

But this homogeneity, this great conversation, could only happen if there was something in the language that made it possible. This is a much more elusive matter. Of course, one could come up with very broad generalisations; for example, two geniuses – Chaucer and Shakespeare – moulded the language decisively into poetry: they made English poetic. Or one could point to the unique flexibility of English that makes it equally suited to the epic, dramatic or lyric moods. Both observations are demonstrably true.

Yet there are further things that may be said about the themes that run through poetic English which cut deep into our sense of who we are. Here is just one, a famous lyric from the 16th Century.

O WESTERN wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

This is the clearest expression of the disjunction between the world and the soul that is sometimes defined as ‘pathetic fallacy’. The contingency of the weather is heartbreaking – it springs the lines open to expose a whole inner landscape of pain and longing. This heartbreak is an effect of the failed metaphor, for the weather does not reflect our feelings; the sun does not shine because you are happy – it does so because, as Samuel Beckett pointed out, it has “no alternative”.

The failed metaphor arises from poetry itself. It is this link that connects Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens, both poets attempting to unite the poem and the world and, necessarily, failing. But the failed metaphor is also a crucial aspect of the English character. We are – or used to be – ironic, stoical, gloomy but always funny. We revel in defeat and adversity. Jack Dee, Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper are all about failed metaphors. They are made by and of poetry.

There are countless other examples of poetic themes that are also English character traits – our tradition of radical dissent from received narratives is manifest in William Blake; our penchant for fantasy was made by Shakespeare, Edward Lear and Lord Tennyson; our sense of the comedy of the banal runs from Chaucer through Pope to The Royle Family and The Office; and the lively irony of our death was hammered into us by Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Keats and Hardy. And what about these lovely, silvery lines from Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’ as an expression of the Englishman coming to terms with his fate in a deck chair in the late summer sun? Notice how the word ‘still’ seems to make the words pirouette away from banality.

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less.

This correlation between who we are and what we have written is, I believe, unique in the world. “Poetry”, wrote Auden, “makes nothing happen” – but, he added, “It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth”. Poetry is England’s way of happening.

And yet few now know this. Poetry is barely taught and, when it is, the emphasis is always on the ‘accessible’. What on earth does this mean? That the poem should wallow only in the familiar? Children exposed to such supposed difficulty at an early age have no trouble with real poetry. My daughter understood Stevens’ ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ better at ten than I did at 45.

Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England. Perhaps that is the way it must be: “The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days” (Ashbery) must sweep all away. But, though the signs are not good, English poetry is buried too deep in English soil ever to be quite eradicated; and so, like Hamlet, we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night.

Those following the political news from London recently will have been aware of the arrest of Damian Green, the Conservative MP, in relation to a police investigation into the leaks of sensitive information from the Home Office. The following article, ‘Golden Thread, National Myth‘ by Tom Holland, is published in the New Statesman -

The makers of The Devil’s Whore, Channel 4’s recently screened extravaganza set against the backdrop of the English Civil War, must have been especially excited by the arrest of Damian Green. Certainly, it is hard to know what more the Metropolitan Police could have done, short of donning floppy lace collars and pursuing parliamentarians across Marston Moor, to highlight the topicality of the drama’s themes. The centrepiece of the first episode was the notorious attempt by Charles I to seize five troublesome members from the very Parliament House itself.

“All my birds have flown,” intoned the actor Peter Capaldi, looking resplendent in a flowing Cavalier wig – for Charles, who was always a stickler for good manners, no matter what his other faults, had naturally made sure to enter the chamber without a hat. The police who arrested Damian Green seem not to have been quite so sensitive to protocol. No wonder that leading Conservatives, scarcely able to believe their luck, should have hurried to anoint their immigration spokesman a martyr for liberty, a hero in the grand tradition of John Lilburne and John Pym. “This,” warned Michael Howard portentously, “is the sort of thing that led to the start of the Civil War.”

A bit rich, it might have been thought, coming from a man whose tenure as home secretary had suggested that he would rather have relished the reintroduction of the pillory. And yet, instead of laughing at Howard’s analogy, commentators gave it so much airtime that now, several weeks on, it has become a virtual given. MPs in particular have shown themselves to be hugely keen on it – and on the left as well as the right. Perhaps this is not wholly surprising. Principle is invariably the stronger when fused with self-regard. That parliament is the guarantor of British liberties, and that an assault upon its privileges is an assault upon all the British people: here are presumptions fit to energise any member, Labour no less than Tory. A respect for history does not have to be the mark of a Conservative, after all – a truth so self-evident that already, well before the fingering of the Ashford One, it was serving to generate improbable alliances across the party divide.

Prior to Green’s arrest, the single most bizarre political event of the year was surely David Davis’s forcing of a by- election in his own constituency of Haltemprice and Howden, in protest against what he saw as the government’s infringement of civil liberties – a démarche enthusiastically backed by none other than that old leveller, Tony Benn. Both men, attempting to explain what appeared to many a thoroughly quixotic venture, made great play with abstract nouns – “freedoms”, “rights”, and so on – and yet it was evident that their truest inspiration derived not from political theory, but from their understanding of Britain’s past.

Just as the revolutionaries during the Civil Wars, even as they set about turning the world upside down, had claimed to be fighting in defence of their country’s ancient laws, so too did Davis and Benn. “This Sunday,” Davis announced in his resignation speech, “is the anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus.” Parliament, by tamely kowtowing to the 42-day detention plan, had shown itself to be not the defender of British liberty, but rather its jailer. As Benn, shaking his head more in sorrow than in anger, put it: “I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day Magna Carta was repealed.”

In January 2006, in a speech to the Fabian Society, Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, had spelled out in language no less emotive than Benn’s what he saw as the essence of the country he would soon be leading. There was, he argued, “a golden thread which runs through British history” – and where did the thread begin, if not “that long ago day in Runnymede”? And who better to continue weaving it – by implication – than the Honourable Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath? Two years on, even as civil liberties campaigners continue to cast him as King John redivivus, the Prime Minister surely retains the invincible conviction that if anyone is the true defender of Magna Carta, it is himself.

All of which might seem to suggest, with both supporters and opponents of the government’s anti-terrorism legislation busy laying claim to the legacy of Runnymede, that one side must have it badly wrong. But this is not necessarily so – it is well to remember that Magna Carta has always been hedged by ambiguity. Indeed, that seems to have been precisely what enabled it to be sealed in the first place: the ability of both the king and his enemies to find in it what they pleased. “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined,” declared its most famous chapter, “. . . except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.” A teasingly Delphic statement: does the second clause serve to buttress or to qualify the first? It is not entirely clear. Either it is freedom from the oppression of unjust legislation that is being prescribed, or else it is freedom under the law, a subtly different thing, because laws may always be changed. The tension between these two interpretations has persisted ever since the tents were first packed away at Runnymede – nor, evidently, has it been settled now. The “golden thread” of British liberty remains what it has always been: a thing of glittering and tantalising ambivalence.

All of which, to many, has long been a source of frustration. What value the mystique of Magna Carta and its centuries-old inheritance, when it is capable of being interpreted in such mutually opposed ways? Yet it is possible to argue that what it may lack in clarity it more than makes up for as a myth. If it is true, as the political historian Benedict Anderson argued, that a nation is an “imagined community”, then what gives shape to a nation’s collective imaginings is inevitably what most effectively reflects the widest possible spectrum of its people’s principles and beliefs.

That is why the most potent national myths of all have invariably been those most susceptible to multiple readings – and most capable of evolving in response to change. For that, the surest evidence this year lay not in Britain, but across the Atlantic, in another democracy with an enduring taste for self-mythologisation: the United States of America.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” So spoke President-elect Barack Obama in his victory speech. A politician of the centre left, the son of a Kenyan goat farmer, an African American, he signalled, with his very opening sentence, that he was subscribing to the time-honoured narrative which had always served to burnish his country’s elevated sense of itself. Unsurprisingly, among those hostile to the very notion of the nation state, and to the United States in particular, this served to raise the odd eyebrow. Writing in the New Statesman in November, John Pilger complained that Obama’s oratory was nothing more than the honeyed expression of the “brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the world”. Even blunter was Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command. The president-elect, he sneered, was like a “house slave”. Rather than labouring in the cause of a universal caliphate, as his Muslim heritage might have inspired him to do, Obama had instead bought into the pernicious ideology of those slave-owning hypocrites, the Founding Fathers. Black he might be – but he was no less the white man’s stooge for that.

A bleak and bitter assessment. No doubt, as Obama himself has wryly acknowledged, he is indeed doomed to disappoint. And yet one can acknowledge as much while still recognising in his invocation of the venerable archetypes of American patriotism something nobler than a betrayal of the colour of his skin. After all, far from casting a veil over slavery, he opted, in his very first speech as president-elect, to make it the climax of his address.

The historical narrative Obama delivered that night, rich with allusions to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and the Gettysburg Address, could hardly be reckoned to have redounded un ambiguously to his country’s credit: for the achievements that it chronicled would never have been necessary without America’s original sin. Yet the speech, far from subverting the founding myths of American democracy, served ultimately to buttress them: for a myth is hardly diminished, and may even be enhanced, by being framed as a tragedy. “That’s the true genius of America, that America can change. Our union can be perfected.” Here were convictions as old as the Republic itself, and yet, coming from Obama, they hinted at darkness as well as light: of how America, having originally betrayed her own noblest ideals, must continue with her quest for expiation.

It goes without saying that there are many Americans – white, patriotic, moose-hunting Americans – who viscerally disagree with this reworking of their nation’s founding story. That, however, is precisely the measure of the narrative’s astounding potency: that it can serve to stir the souls of both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, Republican and Democrat, evangelical and liberal. Even beyond the limits of the party system, on the radical fringes of which both Pilger, and possibly even Ayman al-Zawahiri, would presumably approve, the paradigms of American history have maintained something of their implacable grip. When Gil Scott-Heron, that bard of black militancy, eviscerated American mythology in his classic song “Winter in America”, his anger was all the more savage for being blended with such evident disappointment. The constitution, in Scott-Heron’s reading of American history, has never amounted to anything – and yet it remains, for all that, “a noble piece of paper”. Winter in America it might be – and yet always there is the ghost of the summer that should have been.

The role given to Britain in this American master-narrative has usually been an inglorious one. What King John was to Magna Carta, George III was to the constitution of the United States. Yet it is telling that Scott-Heron, in the very opening line of his great song, should have chosen to name-check the Pilgrim Fathers. If it was colonists from Britain who brought both land-hunger and slavery to the New World, then so, too, did they bring what would end up as the ideals of the infant Republic. An interpretation of Magna Carta which saw it as “such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign” served as no less of an inspiration to the Thirteen Colonies than it would to rebels against absolutism during the British Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution. What should lie embedded within the Fifth Amendment to the US constitution, that “noble piece of paper”, is the most celebrated of Magna Carta’s chapters: a guarantee that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law”. Woven into the very fabric of American history, then, is that very same “golden thread” which Gordon Brown, in his speech to the Fabian Society, had identified as British: the “golden thread” of liberty.

No wonder the soon-to-be prime minister showed himself to be not a little jealous of Yankee grandstanding. “Even before America made it its own,” he protested plaintively in the same Fabian Society speech, “I think Britain can lay claim to the idea of liberty.” The speech itself, with its tortured analysis of “Britishness” and its proposal for a national “British Day”, was almost universally derided as a floundering expedient, a desperate ploy to stop Brown’s fellow Scots from leaving the United Kingdom, and radical Islamists from blowing themselves up on Tube trains. Yet, in truth, there was a sadness about it, and a sense of loneliness which marked it out as the very opposite of cynical. Brown’s tone was that of a man labouring to jerry-build a Skoda, who suddenly realises he has had a Rolls-Royce sitting mothballed in his garage all along.

For almost a decade, the government in which he was such a dominant figure had been promoting a vision of Britain as a blissed-out, baggage-free place, one far too hip to bother with anything so terminally un-Cool Britannia as the past. If that attitude presented new Labour with some fairly obvious targets – fox-hunting, Black Rod, and the like – it also obliged them to trash the Labour Party’s own heritage. It was not only Clause Four that had been cheerfully junked. So, too, was the venerable narrative that had enabled an old romantic such as Tony Benn to believe himself the heir of Wat Tyler, the Diggers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Heroes of the common people such figures may have been, but they were dead, they were white, they were European, and they were mostly male. Certainly, to the Young Turks of new Labour, it appeared hard to imagine anything less expressive of cosmopolitanism or diversity than Our Island Story. Only Gordon Brown seems to have paused, to have had second thoughts, to have wondered, in his customarily earnest way, whether there was not possibly the risk of losing something important along the way.

And he was right to wonder – as the campaign against his own anti-terror legislation, ironically enough, has served to suggest. After all, despite the best efforts of Davis and Benn, the person who has most tirelessly invoked Magna Carta over the past few years is decidedly not an Anglo-Saxon male. It is pushing things, perhaps, to cast Shami Chakrabarti as the British Barack Obama; and yet there is no question that, just like Obama, she is invoking themes and narratives that have hitherto tended to be seen as hideously white. It was the failure of our history to reflect today’s multicultural reality that originally persuaded the government to brand Britain as a “young country” – as though the thousand years and more that have passed since its constituent kingdoms were first established could simply be magicked away. Chakrabarti’s term of office at Liberty has served to emphasise just how otiose the whole manoeuvre was. By praising the “golden thread” of the nation’s inheritance in terms that would embarrass many a white liberal, she and her fellow campaigners for civil liberties have disinterred a venerable historical narrative, one that sees the flow of our traditions much as Wordsworth did, as “the Flood of British freedom”. In doing so, they are illustrating once again what has always been the key to understanding radicalism in this country: that it looks for inspiration not in the future, but in the past. As another poet, even greater than Wordsworth, once put it: “I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs/By the known rules of antient libertie.”

Evidently, we live in a sceptical, deconstructive age. The identification of Britain’s evolution with the march of enlightenment – what Herbert Butterfield, back in 1931, termed “the Whig interpretation of history” – has long fallen from academic favour. Meanwhile, in universities and secondary schools, the teaching of history is becoming ever more modular and fragmented, while in primary schools, if the government’s senior education adviser Sir Jim Rose has his way, the subject will soon cease to be a distinctive field of study at all. And yet, against the odds, 2008 should be remembered as the year in which Our Island Story made a spectacular comeback: not as a fantasy of the heritage industry, but rather as a storm-centre of political life; not as a triumphalist narrative, but as one shaded by disappointment no less than achievement; not as a thing uncontested, but as the very stuff of urgent, furious debate. A story, in short, that might well merit a measure of reconstruction.

Come the New Year, the government will announce its decision on whether to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport. If, as expected, expansion is given the green light, a whole village will need to be obliterated: not only houses, but pubs, a school and a church dating back to the Domesday Book. Such is progress, perhaps; and yet not even the most rabid enthusiast for air travel would argue that the whole of Britain be concreted over, that the entire country be transformed into a mere transit hub with shops. Yet that is what we may well end up inhabiting, should we forget the history that has shaped us, the narratives, the themes and, yes, the myths as well.

We live in an age when the issues that have shaped the grand sweep of Britain’s past – issues of security and personal freedom, of identity and dissidence – are coming back into ever more pressing focus, of no less interest to the terrorist suspect banged up in Belmarsh than to the Eurosceptic brandishing a Union Jack.

To let the memories of Our Island Story fade is not to give a vote of confidence to a progressive and multicultural future, but to diminish it. To paraphrase 1066 and All That – it risks seeing more than History come to a.

From Comment is Free -

Brewing storm on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, by Donald Mackinnon

Here is a story told by the Scottish storyteller, David Campbell – courtesy of Christine Stone – that speaks of the childhood places that ground our whole lives:

He was a boy of seven and he lived in his own sweet green glen in the west of Lewis
playing with his companions in the stream
with all his relations about him.

And he thought of the glen as his whole world,
And over and above all was
the sound of the surge of the sea.

And he was only a boy of seven and he didn’t understand when the factor and the sheriff’s officer said that they were to be evicted.

It had no meaning to him, but three weeks later they came back and his parents were taken down and put into a ship, and he himself was taken down and put into the sternsheets of a boat to be rowed to the big ship.

He still didn’t understand.

He thought that surely sometime that evening he would come back to his own green glen
and hear the sound of the surge of the sea.

When they were aboard the ship they were shown their accommodation for the voyage.
It was an area six feet long,
by three feet broad,
by eighteen inches high.

This was for his mother and father, and the same area
Six feet long,
by three feet broad,
by eighteen inches high
for himself and his brother and two sisters.

For six weeks they travelled towards Nova Scotia:
it was a fearful voyage; the sea was rough,
food was scarce.
Many were sick and many died.

But always the boy thought that he would soon be back in his own sweet green glen and hear
the sound of the surge of the sea.

But the ship landed at Nova Scotia and put them ashore.

There was nothing there for them.  They had been told that there would be land there for them to work,
but there was nothing, nothing there for them.

The only offer they had was to work practically as slaves and still the boy thought only of his own sweet green glen
and the sound of the surge of the sea.

His parents decided to travel onwards into the mainland of Canada, and to walk until they could find a spot where they could build a farm.
And this they did.
They found a spot and built their farm.

And the boy grew up and worked there with them but always while he worked about the farm,
always at the back of his head was the thought of his own sweet green glen
and the sound of the surge of the sea.

Time passed, time went on and he left the farm and worked at many things,
in the steel mills of America,
on the railways
at anything wherever he went.

But wherever he went and whatever he did,
the dream was there always in his mind that one day he could see again
his own sweet green glen
and hear the sound of the surge of the sea.

But time passed and time passed, and he realised that age was coming upon him.

And still he had not returned to his own sweet green glen
and the sound of the surge of the sea.

At last he gathered what money he could and he made his way after all these years, back to Lewis.

He walked from Stornoway to his own green glen, but when he got there,
everything was changed.

No longer were there companions,
No longer the little black cattle.

The stream still flowed down the hill where as a child he had played.
The glen was still green, but no longer was there laughter of love in the glen.

And he realised that the only thing that he remembered of the glen was the sound of the surge of the sea.

And he realised that all he could do was to make sure that when he died, for now he was an old man, was to make sure that he would be buried there.

He made all the preparations so that he would be buried there in a knoll above his own sweet green glen where he would hear forever the sound of the surge of the sea.

And he sat on the knoll, the little hill above the glen above the sea, before his death and he thought of his childhood and of the time when the ship had taken him
away from his own green glen,
his own island
his own native land.

Hush.  Hush.  Time to be sleeping.

Here is a book review from the Times Literary Supplement, by John Fanshawe -

Roger Lovegrove
SILENT FIELDS
The long decline of a nation’s wildlife
3520pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $50).
978 0 19 852071 9

In Silent Fields, Roger Lovegrove charts “the history of Man’s deliberate killing of terrestrial wildlife – specifically native birds and mammals – from about 450 years ago to the present”. Henry VIII’s Vermin Acts begin the analysis. Although Lovegrove acknowledges that our interactions with English, Scots and Welsh fauna can be traced back to the post-glacial millennia, it was this Tudor legislation that created a basis for the organized slaughter of competitor species until at least the Second World War. Lovegrove quotes a maximum combined population for England, Wales and Scotland of 3,310,000 people in 1525, less than half that of London in 2001. Sixteen years after Henry VIII was crowned, London was estimated to have 50,000 residents. Most people then were rural, a scene far removed from that of today when – for the first time – more than half the world’s population is urban. In fact, by 2001 only 20 per cent of people in England lived in the “country”. Such statistics are critical to unravelling the evolving social fabric that lies behind Lovegrove’s analysis. Modern concepts of wildlife and “wildlife watching” were way off on the horizon. People lived with and surrounded by nature.

Doctrine also played a crucial role. Before Darwin, no challenge existed to the Creation myth, and people believed absolutely in the biblical concept of human dominion “over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air and over every living thing”. Lovegrove writes that animals “were here to be employed as beasts of toil, as food, for sport . . . or whatever other requirement”. Concern for animal rights or welfare, such as over vivisection, was negligible. Cruelty was rampant, as was poverty: provision for poor relief was yet to arrive, and rural people, especially in famine years, had a high dependency on what Richard Mabey called Food for Free in 1972. Berries, eggs, wild meat, fungi and fruit were lifesavers. Finding such food meant country people had an intimate knowledge of their home ground, of seasons, fauna and flora, and also the wherewithal to resist competitors that threatened crops and livestock. This was largely unwritten knowledge, but it represented a time when an instinct for nature rivalled that now confined to indigenous communities in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific.

Underlining Lovegrove’s book is a patient study of parish records. (Scotland is excluded from the analysis, and has a separate chapter devoted to killing there, including a section on the “wanton slaughter by English ‘sportsmen’ in the nineteenth century”.) Writing in 1768, Robert Smith described stoats as “prone to wanton killing”, and in the Cornish coastal parish of Morwenstow, Thomas Trumble specialized in killing these remarkable little mammals, taking thirty-four in 1694. Amazingly, gamekeepers on the Elveden Estate in Suffolk accounted for 8,883 in the decade beginning 1920. Numbers like these pepper Silent Fields and are a constant source of surprise. From Elspeth Veale’s seminal 1966 study, The English Fur Trade, emerges parallel evidence of excess killing in pursuit of regal finery. Henry VIII passed a final sumptuary Act in 1532 – the same year as his vermin law – regulating a hierarchy of who could wear which fur. Not that he stinted on his own account, using 350 (albeit imported) sable skins to line a single satin gown in 1530. Even this pales by comparison with his forebear Henry IV, whose “splendid robe-of-nine garments was made from 12,000 squirrel and 80 ermines”.

Lovegrove laments that the data he used for Silent Fields, derived from churchwardens’ accounts now held in municipal and county archives across the country, are by no means complete. Many have been destroyed, and even his hard work only scratches the surface of 10,819 potential parishes in England (he trawled through 1,429 of them). His study celebrates localness; the painstaking lists of vermin killed – documented by generations of churchwardens – bring to life an aspect of how people experienced wildlife at a time when parishes lay at the heart of everyone’s lives, when the parochial was reality and a basis for understanding biodiversity.

The core of the book is individual species accounts, dealing first with twenty-one birds; most are either raptors or crows, though some surprises, like kingfisher and dipper, appear. For mammals, there are eleven, and they are a roll call of the stars of children’s popular literature: hedgehog, mole, polecat, pine marten, fox, rat, wild cat, badger, weasel, stoat and otter. Many readers will struggle to avoid flashes of Nick Butterworth’s illustrations for his Percy the Park Keeper series. At first sight, curiously, Butterworth’s miscreant bunnies are missing from the list, but this underscores a constant theme of Lovegrove’s work. Perceptions and attitudes change over time. Rabbits have become pests comparatively recently, swapping places with species like wild cat and pine marten – current red-list causes célèbres. Introduced to Britain by the Normans, knowledge of rabbits’ reproductive capacities meant that their warrens were first confined to offshore islands (another demonstration of changing times, given the massive efforts now dedicated to eradicating “aliens” like cats, hedgehogs and rats from many of those same islands). As land-based warrens were established, often by monastic communities, rabbits dispersed and colonized with predictable success. They were soon an important source of food (and income) to the poor; so naturally a dim view was taken of their native predators, such as foxes and buzzards. Rabbits were an asset worth protecting too. David Dimbleby’s opening BBC flagship episode for How We Built Britain visited the robust and well-fortified Thetford Warrener’s Lodge. They meant significant money for landowners.

All the species accounts are fascinating. Among the mammals, an obvious example is the otter – beloved by wildlife cameramen, celebrated by Henry Williamson as Tarka. Lovegrove notes that otters are totemic of UK conservation success, so much so that the original Otter Trust, established by Philip Wayre in 1971, considers its mission accomplished and has not released captive-bred otters since 1999. Full legal protection for otters was only secured in England and Wales in 1978, and four years later in Scotland. This is again a far cry from the Tudor period, when kings had “Otter Masters”, and otter-hounds were bred for the chase. Otters then competed for freshwater fish on natural lakes and rivers, and plundered man-made ponds with glee. Adding to otter woe was their piscivorous diet which meant that the Catholic community conveniently considered their flesh fishy enough to be valid Friday fare.

Lovegrove’s introduction also considers the contemporary and changing value of money. All the species accounts chart sums paid, and the price per otter head ranged from 2d, specified in the 1566 Act, to the fairly high price of 7s 6d offered by the Prestbury vestry in 1731. Daniel Defoe’s 1704 definition of a “poor man” in Kent as earning “between seven and ten shillings a week” is cited – for Lovegrove “a figure that still applied in most areas, certainly in the southern counties, for the remainder of that century”. Hunting vermin was potentially very profitable. At Prestbury, wily cross-border sneaks were discouraged by having to “declare before a lawful magistrate that the said otter was taken and killed within the parish precincts”. Such strictures notwithstanding, there was considerable room for creative accounting.

Among the birds, two charismatic raptors, sea eagle and red kite – both the focus of successful reintroductions – have chapters dedicated to them. Lovegrove opens his kite account with some lines from John Clare – the poet deploys an early name, “paddock”, “riding in the sky, above the oaks, in easy sail, on still wings and forked tail”. Kite flight is always spectacular, and Mark Cocker’s account in Birds Britannica (reviewed in the TLS, December 9, 2005) captures its mastery perfectly with the word “languid”. Cocker also lists other former names, “glede” or “glead” (from the Saxon for “glide”), and notes that kites were once so common as to enter local place names, such as Gleadthorpe in Northamptonshire. Clare’s “paddock”, a variant of other colloquial names, “puttock” and “puddock”, was also used for buzzard, the origins of which Cocker says are obscure.

These days it is commonplace to see red kites on the wing close to the reintroduction sites over, for instance, the M4. Such new-generation kites wheel lazily over “John Clare country”. Clare “bemoaned its loss at the hand of Man in 1830”, and by the time he was buried in his beloved Helpston parish in 1864, kite numbers were in free fall. Only in 1903, when members of the British Ornithologists’ Club formed a Kite Committee, did the climb from a low of five pairs towards today’s population of more than a1,000 begin. If this success continues, some believe the red kite could again be our most common raptor and reach in excess of 50,000 birds.

Lovegrove quotes Clare a number of times. In recent years, the resuscitation of the poet has gathered momentum with new selections of his work – including The Wood Is Sweet (2005), produced by David Powell, with fine linocuts by Carry Akroyd – Iain Sinclair’s wonderful Edge of the Orison (reviewed in the TLS, October 7, 2005) and Jonathan Bate’s biography (reviewed in the TLS, November 7, 2003). As well as the red kite (twice – both in celebration, and acknowledging their skills at taking chicks, ducklings and goslings), Silent Fields has Clare lines on the hedgehog and the mole. But far more importantly, he is also quoted railing against the changing landscape: “Inclosure thou’rt a curse upon the land, / And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence planned”. Helpston was enclosed in 1820, and Clare’s Gloucestershire contemporary James Knapp wrote at the time, of disappearing wildlife: “Some of our birds are annually diminishing – population, plough, enclosure, clearance, drainage”. Although Clare was actually briefly employed to plant the hawthorn hedges we so often celebrate, it seems that he and others were recognizing that a semi-natural mosaic of wildlands and agriculture was to be transformed irretrievably. And all this before the modern conservation movement had begun; more than a century before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Change flows through Lovegrove’s work like a tide; and his own career, as a prime mover in Welsh conservation – notably as Welsh regional director for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – spans a period of remarkable change for many of these species. To quibble over his thoroughness seems ridiculous, but there is an irony in his subtitle “The long decline of a nation’s wildlife” given that many of his vermin species are now starting to thrive in what are otherwise days of extreme biodiversity loss. Some, like badgers, may once again become the target of centrally sanctioned control. Lovegrove tackles some of this in his final chapters, noting that the raven, for example, is recovering apace. But other species, birds that were never vermin, and that were so abundant over the early period of this analysis – like the lapwing, skylark and common partridge – are in decline which not even Clare could have foreseen. Lovegrove has a final section in which he reviews a whole series of current issues, including the rolling red-grouse-moor-versus-hen-harrier conservation debate, and the Hunting with Dogs Act.

The most moving point, however, lies at the beginning of Silent Fields, before the story really unfolds. Lovegrove’s dedication is longer than many, and he remembers a friend, Fred Farrell, “with whom I spent the joyous years of youth roaming the hills, marshes, fields and woods of Cumberland”. If Roger Lovegrove’s lessons are to be learned, then we need to see the story spun as emblematic of a far wider crisis. We need to return nature to the heart of our culture, to the centre of communities. This can only really happen if the rich mosaic of nature that Cumbria represented a working life ago is secured for all of us – in all our backyards, our parishes.
_________________________________________________________

John Fanshawe lives in north Cornwall, and works for the conservation charity BirdLife International.

On the day that a home property deal in the UK (in London – read the article in the Evening Standard) was done for just under £1billion (which equals just under $2trillion US), one visitor who lives elsewhere in England got the train to work… just like many others who prefer, need, or can only afford, to live outside the capital -

Up at 5.45am. I have a breakfast meeting in London: good for those who live there, not so good for the rest of us. House dark and a bit chilly: central heating hasn’t kicked in yet. Children sleeping. Greeted by yawning cats, surprised that any human is sentient at this time of day. Pack laptop and 3G modem and start car. Journey to station takes ten minutes — later in the morning it will take 50. Astonishing spectacle at station car park — vacant spaces. Park car and wait for idiotic meter to dispense ticket while making loud buzzing noises after swallowing coins to the value of the Gross National Product of Ecuador. Join throng of furtive, hurrying figures, coat-collars turned up against the biting East Anglian wind. I have entered, albeit temporarily, the world of The Commuter.

Day return to London costs £29. We’re flying to Derry at half term and tickets for all the family have cost less. Buy papers and board train, which is populated mainly by ashen-faced folks clutching cardboard cups of Costa coffee and newspapers. One or two have paperback books. One person opens a laptop (a Dell) and starts work on a document. After a time I notice that he is stabbing angrily at his keyboard and recognise the characteristic symptoms of system crash. That’s right — he’s a Windows user. Nothing I can do for him. Blue screen of death. Leave him to his fate. I’m sure he saved the document. Or not.

We speed through darkened countryside, stopping at small stations to pick up commuters. Affluent ones get on at Audley End, in leafy Essex countryside. Mostly work in the City, I’d say. Better suits anyway.

Dawn breaks, revealing a lowering, grey sky. We pass through towns and settlements, seeing only untidy back gardens and the rear ends of industrial estates. Interesting that we turn our backs on the railway and present our best face to the road. So a rail trip always reveals the dark underbelly of urbanisation.

With each stop, the train fills. There’s a seat for everyone — just. Past the urban waste that is Tottenham Hale and slipping into the City, heading for Liverpool Street station where, the driver announces over the public-address system, “this train will terminate”. “No, you silly bugger”, I reply under my breath, “the service terminates, not the train”. Pedantic, you see. Comes from being an academic.

Onto the platform and join the lemmings heading into the City, where they will sit at multi-screen desks and buy and sell sub-prime mortgages wrapped up in pink tape and made to look like assets. Outside the station there’s a line of Mercedes and Lexuses and Audi A8s with smoked glass, waiting to whisk corporate bosses to their places of work. I walk through the throng to my meeting remembering the advice of a former colleague (a lawyer who turned down a lucrative City career to become an academic). “Making money is easy”, he used to say, “provided you are prepared to work with the stuff”. These people have made that choice. For years they’ve lived high off the hog, earning the colossal bonuses which have had such a distorting impact on our economy (as John Lanchester dryly observed recently). 2007/08 will be a lean year for some of them; there are forecasts of 20,000 redundancies looming in the Square Mile. Last in, first out. Easy come, easy go. Not my problem. Now where is that bloody venue?

Robert McCrum’s review of the Earls of Paradise from the Observer -

A perfect Wilton weave

Adam Nicolson’s Earls of Paradise is a moving account of the Elizabethan golden age, retold through the varying fortunes of the Pembroke family, and a tour de force

Robert McCrum
Sunday January 6, 2008
The Observer

Buy Earls of Paradise at the Guardian bookshop

The dream of perfection, like the dream of escape, is an archetypal longing that expresses itself in the persistent myth of the golden age. Who knows what fifth- century Athens or Augustan Rome were really like? But we continue to invest those societies with cultural glamour and significance, retelling their stories in an implied critique of our inferior and barbarous times. It’s not just a classical phenomenon. A similar homage is paid to Josephine Vienna (Haydn, Mozart and the young Beethoven) and revolutionary Philadelphia (Franklin, Madison, Adams, Jefferson et al). Closer to home, Heritage Britain could hardly survive without these golden dreams.

In the beaten ways of English history, there are many competing versions of a pastoral idyll: Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon renaissance, Merrie England and Sherwood Forest and, almost within living memory, that Edwardian swansong, ‘the long, hot summer of 1911′. These, and other lost paradises, fuse into a fierce nostalgia for a past greatness as the producers of films about Elizabeth I know to their profit.

The gold standard for our island myth surely remains the extraordinary transition from Tudor to Jacobean England that just happens to coincide with the life of William Shakespeare, now one of our biggest exports. In literature, Dr Johnson was one of the first to compose a mission statement for this project when he wrote: ‘From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all purposes of use and elegance … few ideas would be lost to mankind for want of English words in which they might be expressed.’

To get behind this myth, how can we verify the mundane reality of the Elizabethan golden age? Adam Nicolson thinks he has the answer. In a brilliantly imaginative and beautifully written coup of scholarship, he examines the lost world of the Elizabethan Renaissance, from its enchanted beginnings in the 1520s to its brutal death in the 1640s, through the fortunes of one great English family, the Pembrokes of Wilton, in the heartland of Wessex.

Nicolson has written well about the English landscape before, but here he surpasses himself. The reader feels as if he has tramped every acre of his subject from Cranborne Chase to the river Wylye. Here, Wilton is not just a great house with its famous ‘double cube’ room. It also represents an immemorial landscape and a way of life whose roots lie in the Anglo-Saxon past and Alfred’s great battles with the Danes. This continuity lingers: D-Day was planned here; the British army’s HQ is still scarcely a mile from the great house.

The Pembroke family, which includes the Herberts and the Sidneys, embodied aristocratic, provincial privilege. Opposed to modernity, they stood resolutely for a feudal order, a version of community that one of their greatest scions, the soldier-poet Philip Sidney, called Arcadia. We associate the Arcadian dream with shepherds and bucolic idleness, with meadows, pan pipes and the idiocies of romantic love, but Nicolson, who is deeply attached to his subject, wants a more complex understanding. Arcadia, he writes, ‘is the dream of power’.

In Arcadia, order and tranquillity are achieved through a kind of tyranny, even of violence. ‘Its belief in the beauties of ancient community also relies on that community accepting the imposition of authority. Democracy and Arcadia cannot co-exist.’

But genius and Arcadia can. Wilton was the inspiration for a galaxy of writers and artists from Walter Raleigh and John Donne to Inigo Jones and Anthony van Dyck. In 1603, it was also the scene of a semi-documented production of As You Like It by ‘the man Shakespeare’, the richest and wittiest statement of the pastoral versus the modern in the playwright’s canon.

Nicolson’s fascinating account of this performance which, he argues, was part of a complex power struggle at the court of the new king James I, will not satisfy every Shakespeare scholar. But it’s a vital hinge in his narrative, marking the transition to go-getting, market-oriented Protestant man who turns his back on the forest of Arden aka Catholic England for something more individual and, ultimately, more inhuman.

The tragedy of the Pembrokes, for this is the darker key into which this absorbing book now moves, is the parable of a society coming apart at the seams under the strain of modernisation. William, 4th Earl of Pembroke, fell out with the King and sided with Parliament, splitting his family. In microcosm, Nicolson suggests, this was the experience of English families of all classes: make an impossible choice and plunge into a vortex of chaotic violence.

The Civil War ravaged Arcadian Wilton. Detachments of troops from both sides camped in its great rooms. Roads became unsafe to travel. Householders were butchered for the slightest reason or none. Soldiers who stayed in Salisbury in 1643 set fire to the beds they had slept in. There was an epidemic of sheep stealing. Everyday life became a Hobbesian nightmare. Royalist and parliamentary forces were equally villainous. Somehow, the Pembrokes came through the crisis, flirting with Cromwell and keeping a link with the crown. When the King was executed in January 1649, one of his final acts was to give his gold watch to a member of the Pembroke family.

On the scaffold, Charles quoted from Arcadia. This, for Milton, was the last straw, a symptom of everything that was wrong with royalism. Those who longed for Arcadia, he wrote, were ‘by nature slaves and arrant beasts’ fit only for their ‘old servitude’. Puritan modernisers like Milton saw Arcadia as a retrogressive despotism.

But here’s the irony. The English Arcadia that flourished and died during the golden century described in this book became a vision of social perfection that would be co-opted by the Romantics, by the young Karl Marx, William Morris, the modern Greens and even revolutionary Americans such as Thomas Jefferson.

‘Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God,’ wrote Jefferson. Through politicians such as Lincoln, together with the pioneers of the American West, the hard-working rural farmer in his log cabin became an essential constituency in the American republic, where the dream of perfection is still alive. Some of them, the people of Iowa, voted last Thursday. In the strangest way, a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for an Arcadian future.

Et in Arcadia: literary utopias

Plato’s Republic (approx 360BC) argues that an ideal society requires farmers, warriors and rulers, with successful relations between the three.

The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon (1626) depicts Bensalem, a mythical land where marriage, family and learning unite society.

Peter Pan (1904) by JM Barrie. In Peter’s Neverland, ageing ceases and eternal childhood is therefore possible.

The Island (1962) by Aldous Huxley depicts the fictional island of Pala whose hybrid culture represents an ideal merging of Eastern and Western ideas. Man is not enslaved to technology but, rather, manages it wisely.

Shikasta (1979) by Doris Lessing. The Planet of Shikasta, known as ‘Earth’ to its inhabitants, is kept at peace due to emanations of positive astral energy.

The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 is one of the best-known works of Friedrich Engels.

Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820 – August 5, 1895) was a German social scientist and philosopher, who developed communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator, Karl Marx, co-authoring The Communist Manifesto (1848). Engels also edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after Marx’s death.

Originally written in German as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, it is a study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels’ first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution, and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports.

It is considered by many to be a classic account of the condition of the industrial working class. It was originally addressed to a German audience. The eldest son of a successful German textile industrialist, Engels became involved in radical journalism as a teenager. Sent to England, what he saw made him even more radical. About this time he formed his life-long intellectual partnership with Karl Marx.

The German original

In the original German edition he said:

The condition of the working-class is the real basis and point of departure of all social movements of the present because it is the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of the social misery existing in our day. French and German working-class Communism are its direct, Fourierism and English Socialism, as well as the Communism of the German educated bourgeoisie, are its indirect products. A knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories, on the one hand, and for judgments about their right to exist, on the other; and to put an end to all sentimental dreams and fancies pro and con. But proletarian conditions exist in their classical form, in their perfection, only in the British Empire, particularly in England proper. Besides, only in England has the necessary material been so completely collected and put on record by official enquiries as is essential for any in the least exhaustive presentation of the subject.

We Germans more than anybody else stand in need of a knowledge of the facts concerning this question. And while the conditions of existence of Germany’s proletariat have not assumed the classical form that they have in England, we nevertheless have, at bottom, the same social order, which sooner or later must necessarily reach the same degree of acuteness as it has already attained across the North Sea, unless the intelligence of the nation brings about in time the adoption of measures that will provide a new basis for the whole social system. The root-causes whose effect in England has been the misery and oppression of the proletariat exist also in Germany and in the long run must engender the same results. ^[1]

English editions

The book was translated into English in 1885 by an American lady called Florence Kelley (also known as Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky). Authorised by Engels and with a newly written preface by him, it was published in 1887 in New York, and in London in 1891. These English editions had the qualification in 1844 added to the English title.

Engels in his 1892 preface said:

The author, at that time, was young, twenty-four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed… The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages…

Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous…

But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it. France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors who, at this moment — as foreseen by me in 1844 — are more and more breaking up England’s industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True, the external surroundings in which the working-class is placed in America are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and children in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the ‘bosses’ as a means of domination over the workers…

It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book — philosophical, economical, political — does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My, book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of Modern Socialism from one of its ancestors, German philosophy.^[2]

The book has recently been reissued by Oxford University Press (ISBN 0-19-283688-9).

Sources

• Amazon Book Reviews
• [1] Oxford University Press
• [2] conservatives.com listing the book
• [3] The 19th-century Novel in France and England and the Discourses of Urbanism

References

1. ^ Translation of the 1845 German preface
2. ^ Preface to the English Edition (1892)

External links

• Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (Full text at the Marx/Engels Internet Archive.)
• A letter from Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky

The historian, Tristram Hunt, writing on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website -

Did Engels like doughnuts?

That’s the conundrum I’ll be addressing in the inaugural Friedrich Engels Lecture at the Urbis Museum, Manchester. I hope it is not quite as fatuous a question as it seems, given the recent report (pdf)
by Iain Duncan Smith‘s Centre for Social Justice on the nature of modern Manchester. Said Duncan Smith:

“Manchester is one of the greatest cities in the UK and its economic rebirth over the last 15 years is enriching the lives of many of its two million citizens.

“But many others are being left behind … We almost have two Manchesters – one that is forging ahead, creating jobs, wealth and regeneration of run-down areas – and another mired in a deepening spiral of social breakdown.”

What Duncan Smith hinted at was the work of leading Manchester University geographer Brian Robson, who has contrasted the penthouses, restaurants, and “count the cranes” skyline of downtown Manchester with “the land of the forgotten … the endless rows of impoverished terrace housing and half empty council housing where unemployment is horrendous, where houses sell – if at all – for under £10,000, where crime … traps people in their homes, where drugs are common currency …” Northern cities, he suggested, are increasingly characterised by the reverse of the north American “doughnut” phenomenon, in which the original city centres become hollowed out and deserted. Or rather, they have become like British doughnuts: jam in the middle, encircled by stodge. This is not a new theme. Indeed, over 160 years ago, Friedrich Engels was making some very similar points in terms of the spatial inequality of the industrial city. Dividing his time between his Eccles mill, the warehouses of Princess Street, and the underworld of 1840s Lancashire, Engels was mesmerised by Manchester’s social chasm. “The modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester … the effects of modern manufacture upon the working class must necessarily develop here most freely and perfectly,” he wrote in expectation of looming revolution. The result was that, “the enemies are dividing gradually into two great camps – the bourgeois on the one hand, the workers on the other.” Industrial capitalism had divided one city into two warring nations of rich and poor. And this class conflict was embedded in the very fabric of the streets.

In his 1845 masterpiece, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels chronicled how the seemingly chaotic Manchester was, in fact, a carefully planned expression of middle-class power. Behind the crumbling back-to-back terraces, the vast mills and criss-crossing railways, the city was carefully laid out as a result of implicit class zoning. Like few before him, he appreciated the city’s spatial dynamics – its streets, houses, factories and warehouses – as expressions of social and political power. He began in Deansgate – the jam in the doughnut – which, as today, was home to the city’s high-end shops and showy warehouses. Surrounding it was the stodge – a girdle of “unmixed working people’s quarters” – beyond which began the suburbs of the rich, “the breezy heights of Cheetham Hill”.

What excited Engels’ interest was how “the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left.” The city was designed “to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy” the human cost of their riches, “the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth”. And they certainly weren’t innocent “in the matters of this sensitive method of construction”.

Just as Duncan Smith describes it, two nations existed in industrial Manchester, safe in the certainty they would never have to confront one another. But there the similarities between Iain Duncan Smith – never an obvious Marxist – and Engels end. While Duncan Smith’s solution to the problems of urban Britain recall a different Victorian tradition – of family values and Christian morals (and the government pursues its own policies of massive inward investment through the Pathfinder Scheme and Single Regeneration Budget) – Engels’ answer was altogether grander.

Even though cities were the fulcrum of the working-class movement and the backdrops for class consciousness and revolution, Engels saw no future for them in a communist society. “Abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself,” he wrote in his later, more scientistic phase. Steam power and electricity had made industry mobile thereby invalidating the economic rationale for the city.

“It is true that in the huge towns civilisation has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of. But it must and will be got rid of, however protracted a process it may be.”

A rather dramatic answer to Manchester’s doughnut dilemma – and, like so many urban regeneration strategies, equally guilty of valuing rhetoric above reality.

From the website, CountryLovers -

Long ago…
Nearly every part of Britain’s countryside has been touched by man at some stage in history – from the barren deforested Peak District cleared by slash-and-burn in neolithic times, to the New Forest created as a hunting ground by William the Conqueror in 1079, to the Fens, watermeadows of Hampshire, and the Broads of Norfolk which are the result of peat extraction during the Middle Ages. Our landscape is also littered with old communication routes like the ancient Icknield Way, Roman roads such as Watling Street, and pack-horse routes which straddled the hill ranges between Pennine towns. And then there are tell-tale signs of woodland industries – like the coppiced oaks in the Quantock Hills, and pollarded beeches of Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire. Neolithic people cleared many areas of Britain of their forest. For example, prior to the arrival of folk on the scene in East Anglia there was a large amount of oak, elm, lime and alder forestation in that area, as analysis of pollen taken from Hockham Mere has shown. The Yorkshire Wolds, South Downs and Salisbury Plain were also cleared of their forestation by man.

From the Iron Age until the arrival of the Romans farming was pretty subsistence-like. A farmer would raise cattle or, to a lesser extent sheep and pigs, grow ancient varieties of wheat [such as spelt, emmer and einkorn] and other grains, and complement these with berries and fruit when in season. Perhaps a not unfamiliar story to countless generations of farmers and countryfolk who have done likewise ever since.

Italian influences…
Much of pre-Roman Britain was composed of an ‘open field’ system of agriculture; each field being unenclosed and subdivided among farmers, rather than being cultivated in ‘common’. Fields were often square in shape, and in upland areas the boundaries sometimes became, or were, banked up with earth [a lynchet enclosure].

When the Romans appeared so, too, did new forms of farmstead: – the almost self-sufficient villa type [villa being the latin word for a country-house or farm], and holdings awarded to loyal army veterans who stuck it out in Britain’s rainy landscape. The invaders brought with them unknown animals and plants, while importing exotic goods such as olives (as archaeological evidence shows in places like Roman York). Among the plants believed to have been brought to Britain by the Romans are parsley, alexanders, cabbages, walnuts, vines and roses.

The Roman’s brought ‘a new degree of planning’ to their agricultural endeavours (well usually), and we began to see field systems that included more rectangular shapes. And being rather disciplined people they frequently laid out fields on a grid system with lanes for access.

Invasion…
After several hundred years Rome’s influence waned, to be replaced by new incomers – the Anglo-Saxons and Danes. To an Anglo-Saxon mind the word ‘field‘ meant a piece of ‘open country‘, which they had cleared of its trees by axe or fire. Indeed, the name of the Essex town of Brentwood means burnt wood. Like place names [see our on-line Place Names article], much of what we can learn about Britain’s landscape is to be found in field names; the name given to a field frequently identifying an ancient or early land usage or condition of the land. ‘Iron acre’ might indicate a place of iron ore extraction or manufacture, for example, and ‘breck’ cultivated soil.

Anglo-Saxon settlements were sometimes centered round a village green [although there are examples 'greens' even before the Romans arrived], or strung along an old road. However, the one common feature of all Anglo-Saxon communities was that they arranged their land usage communally. The arable fields were large open spaces and were divided into strips (ridge and furrow), with common grazing land and common woodland for other uses. The Anglo-Saxons also developed the ‘three field system‘ – wheat, barley, fallow – of crop rotation. They also drained Suffolk’s fenland area for arable farming – a legacy which enabled farmers in the middle-ages to graze the sheep that gave rise to the prosperous, wealth creating wool trade in the Suffolk area. Although it should be noted that the Romans had carried out some drainage during their stay.

As mentioned, lowland open fields in Anglo-Saxon times were divided into half to one acre strips and separated by gullies or trenches which gave the landscape a ‘ridge and furrow’ appearance. These strips (called selions), were usually bundled together in ‘furlongs‘ and each strip was cultivated by a single farmer.

Determining the exact size of a farmers ‘strip’ was an inexact science since a furlong (a furrow’s length) was measured as the distance a plough team could pull before they ran out of puff and came to a standstill – before being turned by the farmer to plough the return furrow – while an acre was the amount of land which could be ploughed in a single day by a plough team of oxen. However, the amount of work able to be done by the plough team was obviously dependent upon the nature of the soil – whether it was stony, loam, or clay based.

Communes…
Being a communally based society the Anglo-Saxons ensured that each farmer and his family got a fair deal; farmers having several strips spread across both good and bad land so that the burdens of poor soil were shared. Sometimes the empty spaces between the furlongs became lanes, and in later times would become the boundary line on which ‘enclosure’ hedges would be planted, thereby fixing the shape of the original furlongs and field systems.

Land then, as it still remains today, was a way of determining a person’s wealth and status. In more northerly territory occupied by the Danes a ‘thane’ would have owned five or more hides of land (a hide being about 100 acres of land), a freeman churl had a least one, while geburs and cotsetlans were tied to their lord even though they may have had land to farm.

In some areas such as Scotland and northern England an ‘infield-outfield‘ system of land use occurred. Fields nearest to a village [the 'infields'] were permanently used for cropping while those beyond [the 'outfields'] were grazed. Beyond the ‘outfields’ there would be waste land for common pasture, or moorland in the case of upland areas. These waste lands (in both highland and lowland situations), were the only source of new land and were frequently reclaimed [a process called 'assarting'] to form new enclosed farm holdings. Many of these holdings eventually became split up over time – through communal sharing out of land strips (where clearing of the waste had been a group effort), or through the inevitable breaking up among heirs and successors.

As with all land – the way a village farmed the surrounding land was based on how the land was best suited, but also on local inheritance customs. At it simplest level there were two field systems, but there were also three and four-field systems, and some even larger ones. The result of this was a huge amount of variation in land use and rights around Britain.

Although we think of hedges as being a natural part of Britain’s landscape in the middle ages it is likely that there were few hedges in our landscape; the terrain being composed of large open fields which were also known as ‘champion’ fields – derived from the french word ‘campagne’ [meaning countryside]

One of the inevitable consequences of breaking land into ever smaller holdings, as the population grew, was the impracticability of farming small plots, and so ‘Common field‘ systems developed, becoming a well established feature of land management by 13th century.

Closing act…
The Black Death provided the catalyst for a major change in land usage and appearance. Individuals had frequently settled parts of the communally held waste lands, pasture and grazing, as well as the land beyond, but after the depopulation of rural communities following the Black Death, many landowners took the opportunity to ‘enclose’ pastureland and consolidate land holdings. However, the level of ‘enclosure’ of this period was nothing in comparison to devastating acts of the 18th and 19th century.

At the same time there was a switch from grain to sheep and, more importantly, higher value wool production. Enclosure provided another benefit over ‘champion’ (open) fields – control of sheep. The growth of the cloth industry in medieval times also meant that farmers could grow dye crops such as madder and dyer’s rocket on a commercial basis.

The 16th century saw the dissolution of the monasteries [1538] which released huge tracts of land previously held by the Church, and gave fresh impetus to enclosure and consolidation. This consequently lead to an increase in arable farming; landowners able to fulfil the grain requirements of a population which was only just returning to levels prior to the Black Death [1348].

‘Specialisation’ began to take place as cities like London grew in size – Norfolk produced malt, Sussex grew wheat, Suffolk specialised in dairy produce, Hampshire raised sheep, and Kent provided fruit, vegetables and hops. In the Weald, the iron industry boomed, huge quantities of timber being felled to provide charcoal for smelting, while many villages constructed ‘ponds’ to store the water which powered machinery used in the iron-making process.

Economics…
However, in typical ‘supply-demand’ fashion that every student of economics knows, grain prices fell in the latter part of the 17th century, and farmers turned to other produce such as meat, fowl, fruit, vegetables, and dairy produce (‘diversifying’ as we would call it these days). Today, some farmers are turning to exotic salad crops, llama farming, and even tourism.

But this was also an age of improvements in agricultural techniques, ploughing equipment, livestock breeding and plant selection. Essentially one can say that by 1700 agriculture had generally been reorganised from a subsistence-based occupation into something more akin to an industry; a rising population also making it economically viable for landowners to drain and reclaim water-laden areas such as the Lincolnshire fens for grazing (although it was not until the 20th century that this area was used for arable farming). In the 17th and 18th centuries ‘watermeadows‘, which provided grass when winter feed ran out, were developed; many of them using carefully controlled flooding of grassland through systems of sluices. Many watermeadows are now subject to environmental legislation because of their unique place in our rural landscape.

Technology and Ferment…
The 18th century saw the further march of progress in agriculture – but not all of it welcomed. Jethro Tull designed his seed drill [1701], Meikle a winnowing machine [c1720], Menzies a water-driven threshing machine [1732], and ‘Turnip’ Townshend developed a four-course crop rotation [roots such as turnips in year one, followed by barley in year two, then seed crops like clover and rye grass, followed by wheat in the final year], among many inventions which pushed agriculture’s technological envelope. There also developed agricultural Societies and Shows which ‘communicated’ these technological advancements throughout agricultural and rural communities. Indeed, by the mid-18th century Britain was producing surpluses of farm produce. Still, more than three quarters of the population were involved in agriculture, or worked in the countryside employed in work in the wool industry [Britain's main export at the time].

Remember too, that the 18th century was also a time of canal building across Britain – and made the transportation of bulk goods like coal, pottery and grain over long distances, and to urban populations more practicable. For instance the Llangollen canal was specifically built for transporting produce from the hinterland.

By this time also, more sophisticated equipment and land management techniques seemed to indicate that ‘enclosure’ was a better way of farming the land, and subsequently thousands of ‘Enclosure Acts‘ passed by Parliament from 1750 to 1850 changed the face of Britain’s rural landscape. In the rapacious quest for land consolidation by large and often unscrupulous landowners these Acts frequently forced smaller farmers and allotment owners to sell to the big landowners – creating large numbers of landless and dispossesed people who eventually migrated to the cities in search of a living. There were frequently riots and civil disobedience against the Enclosures in the countryside.

In fact this period of rural history was one of the grimmest and most brutal. Many of the poorest labourers in the countryside were only able to ‘make ends meet’ because they could keep a cow, pig or geese on the ‘common’ land by right of renting a cottage within a village. They might also raise a few vegetables in the common fields, and gather fuel too. When the ‘common’ land became enclosed it destroyed the economic independence of these cottagers who now had to depend on their wages alone, being forced, as they were, to sell their livestock – the very means which had kept them from sinking into absolute poverty.

The value of real wages had fallen though. In ‘Notes on the Agriculture of Norfolk‘ [1796] Nathaniel Kent noted that the price of provisions had gone up by 60% in the previous forty to fifty years, but wages by only 25%. Another authority suggested that between 1760 and 1813 wages rose by 60%, but the price of wheat by 130%. These figures need to be seen in context with the importance of common land usage… One writer in 1798 stating that out of 23,000 arable acres in Middlesex 20,000 were cultivated on the common-field system, the same writer also informing us: ‘I have known thirty landlords in a field of 200 acres, and the property of each so divided as to lie in ten or twenty places.’ The damaging impact of Enclosure was therefore potentially huge on the rural way of life.

One of the best documented cases of defiance to Enclosure was at Otmoor in Oxfordshire. There Lord Abingdon claimed rights of soil and sport on the public common. In his ‘History of Oxfordshire‘ Dunkin gives an insight into Otmoor’s usage: ‘Whilst this extensive piece of land remained unenclosed, the farmers… estimated the profits of a summer’s pasturage at 20s per head…. But the greatest benefit was reaped by the cottagers, many of whom turned out large numbers of geese, to which the coarse aquatic sward was well suited, and thereby brought up their families in comparative plenty’. Then came the Petition for enclosure.

Before 1774 a landowner did not even have to notify his neighbours that he was petitioning Parliament to redistribute their property. The landowner would simply petition – setting out the disadvantages of the current system and advantages of the alternative in the petition. You would simply wake up one morning to find your land was being taken from you. Such was the backlash to this iniquitous state of affairs that the House of Commons [HoC] eventually insisted that notice of any such petition should be pinned to the doors of churches of parishes concerned – but only for limited periods.

Such was the mood at Otmoor that on August 14th 1814 [reported in HoC Journal, Feb 17th 1815], those sent to affix the Notices on the Church doors of two Parishes involved were unable to do so because they were confronted by mobs armed with every description of offensive weapon, and prevented by violence and threats of immediate death. Local resentment about Otmoor simmered for years and, 15 years later, local inhabitants took to destroying all the fences. The Oxfordshire Militia were called and a troop of Yeomanry Cavalry, but the protestors failed to be moved, even when the Riot Act was read aloud. In the struggle which followed over 60 protestors were seized and 44 sent off to Oxford goal. As they were driven through Oxford’s streets – where St. Giles’ Fair happened to be taking place – the Oxford’s inhabitants turned on the yoemanry: ‘hurling brickbats, stones and sticks at them from every side‘. As they turned into Beaumont Street the yoemen were overwhelmed by the mob and the 44 prisoners slipped away – unfortunately to be re-caught.

Anyone who vented their anger by damaging partitioning fences could expect harsh teatment. In the ‘main features’ of the Haute Huntre, Lincs. – Enclosure Act, 1767 the penalties for wilfull and malicious cutting, breaking down, burning or demolishing of any division fence were a fine of £5 to £20 for the first offence [or 1 to 2 months imprisonment], a £10 to £40 fine [or a 6 to 12 month sentence], and ‘transportation for 7 years as a felon‘ for the third offence.

In the upland areas of Yorkshire and Derbyshire (but also in lowland areas), the great movement towards ‘enclosure’ is best exemplified by the miles of drystone walls which straddle the landscape; built by armies of wall builders who moved from job to job, landowner to landowner. At the same time an industry grew up in supplying the hedging shrubs such as blackthorn and hawthorn used for enclosure boundaries in other areas. Which lasts longest? Well, some hedges have been dated as 400 or 500 years old (many are much older), while the life of a drystone wall is reckoned to be about 200 years.

Appliance of Science…
The Victorians were to leave other lasting impressions on our countryside. Their quest for new machinery and mechanisation, the ‘appliance of science’ to agriculture, and increasing influence or organisations such as the Royal Agricultural Society [founded in 1839], had great impact upon rural environments and farming.

By the mid-1830′s steam ploughing was in use, and threshing took place in the fields rather than the farmyard by roughly the middle of the 19th century, which meant that the large barns required by earlier generations for storing unthreshed sheafs were no longer needed; modern intensive cereal farming has seen huge grain silos blossoming on the landscape.

Writing in the Kent Herald, in September 1830, a local landowner commented that there were 23 barns in his local parish. He calculated that 15 men would be employed until May in the task of threshing the corn from these barns, earning them from fifteen to twenty shillings a week. Unsurprisingly many of the rural population regarded threshing machines as a threat to their livelihoods and there were frequent outbreaks of civil disorder in which the machines were broken in protest.

From the 1870s until the commencement of the First World War British farming went through unprecedented turmoil. During the early part of this period there were many bad harvests, and the import of wheat, wool and meat from the overseas impacted on farm prices. Tenant farmers – the majority – unable to pay their rents abandoned the land, very much as today. By the time of WWI only a third of Britain’s food was produced on these shores, which prompted the government to encourage the nation to ‘Dig for Victory‘; and several million acres of under-utilised land were brought into production.

Modern times…
The inter-war years brought more misery as farm prices slumped in the 1920s, and many country estates were broken up. War, again, revived land usage, and since WWII farming has largely remained on a secure footing to become a true business – ‘agribusiness’. The latter has brought visible changes to the British countryside; the most noticeable being the removal of hedges to enlargen fields so that large-scale mechanised planting and harvesting can take place, aided by pesticides and fertilisers. A field that would once have taken a days to prepare, or sow, or harvest by hand, can now be achieved in hours. Such is the sophistication at the top end of the agricultural industry that computer aided technologies (sometimes GPS guided) can ‘map’ fields; allowing farmers to deliver extra fertiliser, nutrients or seed depending on the soil quality in different parts of the terrain, and thereby optimise output.

Now, when you next pass through our wonderful countryside on a drive, or explore its leafy lanes on foot, you can be sure that some areas of the landscape around you have played a part in the rich tapestry of social and industrial heritage of Britain. Almost every stone, tree and plant has a tale to tell. Enjoy it.