The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  1 Mitford, Our Village, 74-5, 115; Cranbourn Chase, passim; Grote, passim; West, II, 51; Cobbett, I, 10, 25, 53, 57-9, 91-2, 121; Bamford, II, 98, 338; Cundall, Bygone Richmond; Edlin's Woodland Crafts in Britain; Howitt, 366-92; Simond, I, 16, 150-3, 201, 335; II, 98, 103, 150-3, 230, 255, 282; Old Oak, 2-3; De Selincourt, II, 886; Raumer, III, 136-7; Varley. Raumer thought that, though England might not be the richest land in forests, she seemed the most abounding in trees. Clapham, I, 9-12.

  Farington, Cozens, Rowlandson, Crome, Cotmah, Girtin, Turner, Bonington and Constable, the Suffolk miller's son who revolutionised European painting, all sprang from that countryside. So did the poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats—who were not isolated phenomena but men inheriting, though in expression they transcended, the common feelings of their countrymen. Even in the unlovely manufacturing towns the English carried the memory of their landscape with them; Cooper, the Chartist leader, thanked God in old age that he was still familiar with the name of every English flower.1 Cobbett, who prided himself on being a plain man with no nonsense about him, travelling from Redbourne to Chesham described how in every field the haymakers had left a closely-mown strip between the hedgerow and the corn; "this," he wrote, "is most beautiful. The hedges are full of shepherd's rose, honeysuckles and all sorts of wild flowers, so that you are upon a grass walk with this most beautiful of all flower-gardens and shrubberies on your one hand and with the corn on the other. And thus you go on from field to field, the sort of corn, the sort of underwood and timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the hedgerows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of pleasure-grounds, indeed! What that man ever invented under the name of pleasure-grounds can equal these fields in Hertfordshire?"

  This landscape was constantly being enriched. It was ditched, hoed and hedged to an extent elsewhere unknown. Stacks over forty feet high, meticulously finished and roofed with straw, barns built to outlast the centuries, outhouses, windmills and watermills which were miracles of fine workmanship, sturdy gates and fences made by men who were masters of their craft, were the commonplaces of the English scene. The thrifty and loving use of nature's resources and the spirit of active and methodical enterprise seemed almost universal. "The white farms . , . the well-stocked rickyards behind," wrote Mary Mitford, "tell of comfort and order."

  Yet every shire, every parish, differed in its farming methods, being cultivated in the way which soil, climate and immemorial experience had proved best. Every district had its particular abundance,

  1 "I was invariably on the hills or in the lanes or woods or by the Trent by sunrise. I often stood to gaze down the vista of a wood or upon some feature of beauty in a landscape with a thrill of joyous feeling that I could not have defined." Cooper, 61. See also Bamford, I, 85.

  the bleak lands as well as the fine. From sandy Norfolk came the enormous turkeys—"the grand Norfolkian holocaust" that at Christmas smoked round Elia's nostrils from a thousand firesides. The stony fields round Bridport were blue with hemp and flax. Salisbury Plain and the Dorset uplands were cropped and fertilised by immense flocks of sheep: "it is the extensive downs in its vicinage," explained the Weymouth guide-book, "which produces the sweetest herbage and gives a peculiarly fine flavour to the mutton." And all over England the folded sheep, fed from the turnip-root, made it possible to grow good crops on marginal lands otherwise too light to bear them: on the Wiltshire downs Cobbett counted four thousand hurdled on a single acre.

  The golden creed of "Hoof and Horn," use and return, was the firm and, as it seemed, unalterable base of the country's wealth. The meadows that fed the suckling ewes and lambs in spring yielded hay by midsummer; and, when the corn was cut, the stubble kept the pigs. A Yorkshire squarson—for the very priests were farmers— recorded as the crown of a holiday tour the spectacle of a hundred and twenty shorthorns tethered and fed where they stood in open sheds on successive crops of vetch, mown grass, clover and tares from fields manured by the straw they had soiled. The yields of such rotational agriculture, judged by the standards of other lands, were amazing. The Isle of Wight, with its fine wheat crops, pastures stocked with Alderneys and downs bearing vast flocks of sheep, grew seven times more than its inhabitants consumed. At Milton in the Vale of Pewsey, where three thousand five hundred acres produced annually three thousand quarters of wheat and six thousand of barley and the wool of seven thousand sheep, as well as eggs, milk and poultry, Cobbett reckoned that every labourer raised enough food to support from fifty to a hundred persons.

  Necessity acted as a spur. A fast-rising population, which, through medical advances, had doubled in a century, and which for a generation had been cut off by war from foreign supplies, needed ever more grain, meat and ale and was prepared to pay for it. Landlords and farmers, sowing root crops and clovers, liming, marling and draining, carrying the plough and hurdled sheep to the hills, reclaiming moor and marsh, breeding ever fatter livestock, and pursuing husbandry as a high science, had obtained from the soil the utmost output of which it was capable. The productivity of Norfolk doubled in two decades, largely through the genius of one of its squires, Coke of Holkham, who, working in a smock-frock like a labourer, first taught himself to farm and then taught his tenants. The heaths to the west of London, the haunt from time immemorial of highwaymen, were turned into the finest market gardens. New methods were constantly being tried; horses superseded oxen in the plough, thrashing machines the flail, and drills' broadcast sowing, turnips and swedes eliminated the bare fallow of the past and fed the livestock in winter. "Everyone," wrote a foreigner, "has planted or is planting his thousands or millions of timber trees, has his flocks, talks of turnips, cloves and lucerne, drains and enclosures.'' Scott took greater pride in his compositions for manure than in his literary ones and boasted that his oaks would outlast his laurels.1

  This wonderful performance was achieved by organic farming without injury to the capital of the soil. Its object was not to seize the maximum profit from sales against costs in the minimum time, but to secure over the years the highest possible increase from soil, plant and beast. The goal was the productive fertility of the land rather than the immediate saleability of particular crops in relation to wage-costs: output per acre instead of output per wage-earner. The farming was multi-, never mono-, cultural, and much of the all-pervading plenty arose from by-products like the snow-white ducks of the Vale of Aylesbury. "Whenever cows are kept, so must pigs," wrote a country gentleman, "or the profit of buttermilk and whey will be lost." The beautiful thatched roofs of the cottages and barns were made from the combed straw left over by the threshers. When timber was cut, a temporary shed was erected round it so that every piece could be worked for the exact purpose for which it was suited, without leaving a splinter on the ground.2

  All this abundance, though directed by landlords and farmers applying the knowledge gleaned from the great agricultural experimerits of the past three generations,

  1 Bewick, 8, 155; Clapham, I, 15-19; Lord Coleridge, 223-4; Cobbett, Rural Rides, I, 19-21, 24; Grote, I, 19-21, 24; Eland, 50, 64; Ernie, 190-223, 225; Hamilton of Dalzell, MS, 151-6; Howitt, 125; Lockhart, IV, 263-4; V, 133; Mitford, Our Village, 104-5; Newton, 185-8; Paget Brothers, 271-2; Simond, I, 181-2, 330-1; II, 75-6, 223, 291; Smart, 138-50; Wansey, 22.

  2 See Bamford, II, 21, 260; Cobbett, Rural Rides, I, 49. 87-9, 108; II, 363-6; Cranbourn Chase, 47, 65-7; Daniel, VII, 36; Edlin; Eland, 97-IOI; Fowler, 241; Grote, 21; Howitt, 109-11: Boy’s Country Book, 89-90; Lamb, VI, 480; Mitford, Our Village, 32; Newton, 184-5, 195; Paget Brothers, 180-1; Lady Shelley, I, 38; Simond, I, 13,170-1, 195. 206, 209, 216, 239, 330-2; II, 54, 72, 75-6, 242, 245, 291; Sea Bathing Places, 504.

  was founded on the plentiful labour of an hereditary race of husbandmen bred in the cumulative lore of centuries. In a single field in East Lothian a traveller counted forty-eight reapers; near Bury St. Edmunds he saw ten ploughs turning at the same hedge. In haymaking time squads of labourers moved from tract t
o tract, leaving the fields cleared behind them, the mowers going before with their scythes, the haymakers following. There were gangs of boys to pull the charlock and keep the land clean, and women to pick stones, weed, reap and glean. Few complained of their hours of labour or the aches they suffered for the enrichment of others and the support of their country: their heart was in the land they served, and their pride in their strength and skill.

  These skilful, simple and generous-hearted men, with the gaunt bony frames, slow gait and stolid, patient eyes, followed husbandry in all its branches, including wood-cutting, hurdling, thatching and sheep-shearing. They were more efficient than any machine, for their exactitude was based on a sensitive knowledge of nature learnt from childhood. Their industry was prodigious. They worked from first light till dusk. In a day a good dibbler would sow a bushel and a peck, and a mower- cover two acres. They wasted little or nothing; a reaper with his sickle would cut the ears of corn with so short a straw that scarcely a weed found its way into the sheaf. In their spare time—often only achieved after a walk of several miles home—they kept pigs and bees and cultivated their gardens, those long irregular slips with gooseberry bushes, neatly tended vegetables and flowers, which Cobbett thought distinguished England from the rest of the world; "we have only to look at these gardens to know what sort of people English, labourers are."1

  While their husbands and fathers toiled in the fields, the wives and children at home added their own contribution to England's wealth. They worked at the loom, made lace—particularly in Buckinghamshire and Nottinghamshire—buttons, string, netting, packthread and gloves, and plaited straw into a thousand useful and beautiful shapes.2 In season they tramped into the woods or orchards to gather fuel, nuts and fruit, or worked in gangs in the hay and

  1 Cobbett, Rural Rides, I, 81, idem, I, 61; Clapham, I, 109-201; Eland, 21, 70-1, 127-8; Grote, 22-3; Howitt, 107-18; Boy's Country Book, 83; Mitford, Our Village, 7-8, 14, 43, 65; Newton, 188: Simond, I, 181, 184; II, 86, 293.

  4 Bamford stumping the country in the summer of 1808 encountered in the fields north of Loughborough a company of young women with forks and rakes on their shoulders; the kind, merry creatures made a ring around him and danced, afterwards regaling him with brown bread and cheese and a draught of home-brewed ale.

  harvest fields. In the pasture lands the unmarried women watched and milked cows, going out in traditional fashion with cans balanced on their heads and wooden milking-stools in their hands.1 Their younger brothers, in patched round smocks, took service on the farms at eight or nine years of age, learning their fathers' lore of life and working as long as their elders. For all their hard usage they seemed healthy and happy—"wild, nimble, gleesome beings," as Bamford, looking back, remembered: the "open, spirited, good-humoured race" of Mary Mitford's village, with brown and ruddy cheeks and merry eyes, always ready for a bird's nesting or a game of cricket, "batting, bowling and fielding as if for life" at the end of twelve or fourteen hours' field labour.2 They grew up to be farmers' boys or "chawbacons"—bucolic, round-faced, hardy—the "clods" of whom the county regiments were made and who held the ridge at Waterloo. With their grey slouch hats, bright neck cloths and ribbons and proverbial pitchforks, they could be seen in the aggregate at the hiring fairs in the county towns or at the traditional farm feasts of harvest and sheep-shearing.

  The farm labourer's work was supplemented by a host of rustic craftsmen. The drover with his lacquer-back curry-comb, the swearing carter, the shepherd with his dog and crook and eye watchful for tick, foot-rot or blow-fly, the wood-cutters, sawyers, hurdlers, spoke-choppers, faggoters, rake and ladder-makers of the forest lands, the village blacksmiths, saddlers, tailors, wheelwrights, masons, carpenters, glaziers, clock-makers, millwrights, carriers, reddlemen, shoemakers and pedlars who kept the rustic economy self-sufficient, were part of an army many times larger than Wellington's and without which his could neither have been recruited nor maintained. Many were craftsmen of exquisite quality, like Miss Mitford's humble neighbour, "famed ten miles round and worthy all his fame," whom few cabinet-makers, even in London, surpassed. They were the hard core of England, and her wealth rested on the fact that they were able and willing in their lifetime of unresting work to do so much in return for the food, clothing, shelter and modest comfort which in all ages, whatever the nominal money-level of wages and prices, remains the reward of manual labour. The nation which

  1 In the north at Keswick the girl who served the town with milk rode a pony with two large barrels slung on either side. Newton, 184.

  . 2 Witnesses as temperamentally diverse as Mary Mitford, William Howitt, Samuel Bamford, the handloom weaver, and Mrs. Grote of East Burnham, the Radical's wife, paint the same picture from close personal observations in four different counties.

  employed them received for their keep a per capita return in skill and industry probably greater than that enjoyed by any other in history.

  Outside their homely circle, yet auxiliary to it, were the independent tirailleurs of the industry—the vermin-catchers with their skin caps, gaiters and leather bags, the samphire and herb-gatherers of the cliffs and moors, the twine-makers of the Derbyshire caves, the hurdle-makers of Cranborne Chase and the bodgers of the Chilterns, the dog-breakers and gamekeepers, understrappers and wild rovers who were all to be found labouring in their place and season. These, too, were masters of their crafts, like the rat-catcher in The Romany Rye who described his trade as the best in the world and the most diverting and one that was likely to last for ever.1 So were the raggle-taggle gipsies—makers of saucepans and basket-weavers—encamped with their ponies and beautifully painted caravans in the dingles and grassy rides: "Can you," ran their song,

  "speak the Romany tongue?

  Can you make the fiddle ring?

  Can you poison a jolly hog

  And split the stick for the linen string?"

  A grade higher in the national economy were the yeomen—the men who worked and owned, whether by freehold or copyhold, their own land. They ranged from the great Norfolk yeoman, ninety years old and worth £90,000, whom Borrow remembered riding into Norwich in a white corduroy suit and snuff-coloured greatcoat, to the "smock-frock farmer" who entertained the Romany Rye on a holding of two acres cultivated with four kinds of grain—wheat, barley, peas and beans—and whose garden, pollinated by bees, was as full of scents as an orange grove. Such men knew how to keep themselves and their families self-sufficient, quartering their lands in husbandly rotation and manuring them from the cow, mare, foal, sow and poultry that filled their little yards, fortressed round by hayrick, beanstack, wheatrick and

  1 "When you see the rats pouring out of their holes and running up my hands and arms, it's not after me they comes, but after the oils I carries about me they comes." Romany Rye, 226-7. See also Cooper, 18-19; Daniel, I, 23; Harris, 1-2; Eland, 42, 65, 74-5, 127-8fBamford, I, 33, 37, 71; Bewick, 10-11; Clapham, I, 66, 73, 169-70; Cranbourn Chase, 59-60, 65-7; Grote, 21-2; Howitt, 112; Lavengro, XIII, 29, 240, 319-20; Old Oak, 3; Simond, I, 199; II, 103; Mitford, Literary Life, 177; Our Village, 10, 13, 89, 155; Sea-Bathing Places, 272.

  orchard. They followed the plough and carted muck like labourers, while their wives handled the churn, pressed curd in cheese-pan, boiled whey, salted and turned cheese, fed calves, geese, turkeys and fowls, and, seated on a stuffed sack, jogged weekly to market, bringing up their children in the process and starching flounces and shirt-frills for their richer neighbours. On such holdings the whole family worked without cessation but enjoyed liberty and a share of the good things they created.1 They were most numerous in the unenclosed north, where the "statesmen" of Westmorland and Wensleydale lived in grey mossy stone houses on the hillsides; "to this day," wrote Bewick, recalling them in old age, "I can see their broad shoulders and their hardy sunburnt looks." Historically speaking, the yeomen were fast declining, but in 1815 between a quarter and a fifth of England's farmlands was still owned and cultivated by them. Their greatest contribution wa
s the immense quantity of poultry, ducks and geese they kept on the commons and marginal lands; Cobbett saw ten thousand on a single common between Chobham and Farnham. What they did not eat themselves they sold to feed the nearest town, setting up their standings of butter, eggs, poultry and vegetables in the market place. Like their neighbours, the cottage labourers, they also kept pigs fed on household waste and surplus milk products. Theirs, measured by England's needs, was the truest economy.

  With the agricultural changes which were uprooting them, the yeomen were yielding to the large tenant-farmers who paid the rents that supported the aristocratic splendour and display of the English capital and country-houses. Some of these farmed a thousand or r lore acres, employed sixty or seventy labourers and kept hunters ar d banking accounts—a thing almost unknown on the Continent, ^ihey laid out lawns and shrubbed gardens before their substantial farmhouses and had their daughters taught the piano. They would sometimes pay more for a prize-bull or blood-stallion than their

  1 . . The father, mother and children returning from the wheatfield, the little ones laden with bristling, close-tied bunches of wheat-ears, their own gleanings, or a bottle and a basket which had contained their frugal dinner, whilst the mother would carry her babe hushing and lulling it, and the father and her elder child trudged after with the cradle, all seeming weary and all happy." Our Village, 73. Mary Mitford, though an educated woman, knew rustic life at first hand, for after her father's ruin she spent her life in a tiny cottage in a country parish. See also idem, 32, 70-1, 73, 86, 125-6; Ackermann, Microcosm, III, 73; Bamford, I, 22, 71, 206; II, 21; Bewick, 30-1, 40-1; Cobbctt, I, 12, 50-1; Clapham, I, 33-4, in, 113-14, 183-4; Fowler, I, 260; Grote, 9, 21-3; Howitt, 108-9, 124; Jekyll and Jones, 114; Larpent, III, 68; Lavengro, 120; Mitford, Literary Life, 199-201; Newton, 184; Picturesque Representation, Plate II; St. John Priest, General View of Agriculture of Buckingham (1810); Simond, I, 338; Smith, I, 331; Woodward, 8.