The Village News

by Tom Fort

  There was no source of help or charity for his parishioners, apart from what he and his wife could provide. Kingsley arranged funds for small loans, made it possible for families to get shoes and coal, and organised help for young mothers. He presided over Penny Readings, at which the men and boys contributed a penny a head while the women and girls came free. In winter there were reading classes at the Rectory; in the spring and summer he held writing classes for girls in the coach house. A reading room was opened, equipped with bagatelle and other games; displaying an understanding and tolerance unusual among the clergy, Kingsley arranged for a cask of beer to be included in the facilities.

  ‘The people,’ Fanny Kingsley wrote, ‘were kindly, civil and grateful for notice. Kingsley was daily with them in their cottages . . . until he was personally intimate with every soul in the parish. It was from his house-to-house visiting still more than his church services that he acquired his power. If a man or child were suffering or dying he would go five or six times a day, and night as well as day, for his own heart’s sake as well as their soul’s sake . . . For years he seldom dined out, never during the winter months, and he seldom left the parish except for a few days at a time.’

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  Charles Kingsley was an exceptional specimen of the figure that was at the heart of the life of the village for the best part of a thousand years. The man of God has not always been worthy of his calling, nor has he always been fondly represented. But there can be no doubt about his importance, and that of the church where he officiated.

  ‘The clergy,’ John Wycliffe protested in the fourteenth century, ‘haunt taverns out of all measure and stir men to drunkenness, idleness and cursed swearing and chiding and fighting . . . and sometimes neither have eye nor tongue nor head nor foot to help themselves for drunkenness.’ Chaucer’s version of the medieval ‘poure parson’ is very different; he was ‘of holy thought and work, preached the Gospel gladly, taught his flock devotedly . . .’

  . . . he wayted after no pompe nor reverence

  Nor made himself spiced in conscience

  But Christes love and his apostles twelve

  He taught and first he folwed it himself.

  There were good ones and bad ones and many in between, and it was ever thus. In the day of Wycliffe and Chaucer the priest’s social status was not much higher than that of his working parishioners. Like them he laboured in the fields, returning at the end of the day to a hovel much like theirs. He may have had a smattering of learning, but not enough to compose a sermon or read out the Scriptures. But his very presence enabled him to be a source of comfort when there were precious few others available. He knew the right words at times of crisis, to ease passage into and out of an uncertain world. He might even – if he could be believed – hold the key to another, better world. Furthermore he was the custodian of the one building of permanent stature in the village; the one place where the people could gather for a chat, to hear a story and let their minds wander, free for the moment from the burden of toil.

  Little by little his social status improved. Instead of working the land himself, he found someone else to do it and pay him rent. His tithes, once laboriously collected by cart in the form of grain, were commuted to cash. He discovered that a little learning answered better than none, and his reputation grew with his education. He took more of a part in village affairs, sometimes acting as a spokesman in disputes with the manor. Of course there were plenty of priestly fornicators, drunkards, layabouts, ignoramuses and abusers of their office, and they did huge damage to the Church’s standing. But there were also plenty of ‘poure parsons’ who stayed true to their vows and served their people well.

  The Reformation of the sixteenth century assisted the status of the clergy considerably. Sparked in large part by revulsion and anger at the corrupt and venal state into which the English branch of the Church of Rome had sunk, it made for a cleaner, leaner organisation. The priest could now have a wife if he wanted one, and a family: strong incentives to better himself. The country’s emergence from feudalism into primitive capitalism created a wealth not seen before. Better educated, better housed, better rewarded, the country priest could aspire to raise himself to another level. Enclosure and the accompanying mechanical revolution nourished steep increases in tithes and the rents from glebe lands, propelling him towards that prospect considered most agreeable in English eyes, that of being accepted as a gentleman.

  By the start of the nineteenth century it had become quite normal for the younger sons of squires, knights, even lords to take holy orders. This was the rural England made familiar by Jane Austen and later by Trollope, in which the rector might meet his bishop at the palace, or the squire in his mansion, on level terms. These men, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, generally employed curates to do the donkey-work. They sent their sons to the great public schools, built large and handsome rectories, rode to hounds and – in alliance with the squire – played a significant part in directing the affairs of the village. Even the impoverished clergy – such as Mr Crawley, the perpetual curate of Hogglestock in Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset – had their degrees and their Latin and Greek; indeed Mr Crawley’s intellectual powers intimidated his friend Mr Arabin, Dean of Barchester, and were too much altogether for Bishop Proudie.

  The parson’s influence in the village was pervasive, if not universally appreciated. He was the driving force behind the provision of education – first through charity schools, then Sunday schools and finally village schools. He often funded the school himself, and invariably ensured that he controlled it by appointing the staff and regularly appearing himself. In Lark Rise to Candleford Flora Thompson gave a vivid impression of the vicar, who arrived at school each day at 10 a.m. to teach Scripture:

  He was a parson of the old school; a commanding figure, tall and stout, with white hair, ruddy cheeks and an aristocratically beaked nose, and he was as far as possible removed by birth, education and worldly circumstances from the lambs of his flock. He spoke to them from a great height, physical, mental and spiritual. ‘To order myself lowly and reverently before my betters’ was the clause he underlined in the Church Catechism . . . As a man he was kindly disposed – a giver of blankets and coal at Christmas and of soup and milk puddings to the sick.

  Thompson was recalling a poor and isolated rural community in north Oxfordshire in the 1870s, but her parson would have been familiar in thousands of villages across the country through most of the century. A few were committed social reformers – like Charles Kingsley, or the wit and humourist Sydney Smith, who in an earlier age had had the nerve to speak up for the poacher and denounce the savagery of the Game Laws, uttering the extraordinary heresy that ‘the happiness of the common people, whatever gentlemen may say, might every now and then be considered’. But the great majority of the country clergy, having achieved the status of gentry, embraced the brand of complacent autocratic Toryism that went with it. This parson might be a generous benefactor to his parishioners, but he believed unquestioningly that the order of society was divinely appointed and that any change to it should be resisted. Wealth and privilege, he considered, carried obligations, but these did not extend to correcting inequalities.

  The parson’s social ascent gradually removed him from close intimacy with his humbler parishioners. He was someone to be reckoned with, but not often loved, and often not much respected either. When the position of the Anglican Church came under assault from non-conformism, the gentleman rector found himself short of support. His authority was steadily eroded in the period up to 1914, and thereafter he has steadily retreated to the margins of village life. He – and now she – survives, as does his or her church; and often they do great things for the village. But that era when parson, hand in glove with squire, directed the affairs of the village seems remote indeed.

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  Rewind to post-feudal England, and it was the priest and the lord or squire who held power over the village. But the actual day-to-day administratio
n was largely left to others. For a long time the manorial court was the chief engine keeping the wheels rolling. But gradually and haphazardly, without any direction from above, an additional local power base emerged. It began life as the annual parish meeting at Easter-time, to which villagers were summoned by the ringing of the mote-bell, and was generally held in the vestry of the church, hence the name ‘vestry committee’. This evolved into a kind of diminutive parliament which took upon itself all manner of duties that the manorial court was not fit to exercise. These included appointing officers – churchwardens, the constable, the overseer of the poor, the surveyor of the highways. These offices were unpaid, but could be declined only in exceptional circumstances, or by paying an indemnity.

  The crucial period in the transfer of power from manor court to vestry was the second half of the sixteenth century. In 1557 vestries were empowered by the Parliament at Westminster to take charge and levy rates for the upkeep of roads, and to collect and maintain weapons for the local militias. Between 1598 and 1601 a series of acts placed the burden of poor relief on them. A national system of local government was taking shape, with vestries at its heart.

  Dealing with the poor was the most onerous of the responsibilities. The village overseer organised the payment of relief and was also supposed to find work and accommodation for the homeless, and apprenticeships for the young. In practice he came to see his primary role as keeping a lid on the problem, and his methods could be brutal. There was an obvious incentive to keep vagrants and the destitute out of the parish altogether so they would not be a burden on the rate. The customary method was with whip or stick. The resident poor were sometimes required to wear a badge of coloured cloth at their shoulders to distinguish them from itinerant mendicants, thus stigmatising them as parasites in the eyes of the village workforce.

  Inevitably the vestry developed into an oligarchic model of control. The largest group in the village – the cottagers and labourers who had no land apart from their share of the common and the gardens next to their dwellings – worked for wages, paid no rates and were progressively excluded from any share in decision-making. This left the men of property and substance – the squire, if there was one, the parson, freehold farmers, craftsmen – to run things. Over time the open, public aspect of the vestry’s operation withered. A self-appointed and self-perpetuating executive, acting in private if not in secret, took control. In theory they were answerable to the wider community, but as they did not have constitutions and their powers were not strictly defined by statute, the extent of their accountability was up to them.

  In 1835 there were more than 15,000 vestries across England. Their portfolio of responsibilities had expanded; it now included looking after the church and burial grounds, workhouses, charities, market crosses, village pumps and pounds, stocks and prisons, as well as keeping the peace, dealing with vagrancy, mending the roads and poor relief. But in the end the vestries were overwhelmed by the last of these. Between 1795 and 1802 the amount paid out to the poor in England (and Wales) doubled to £4 million and it doubled again by 1817. The vestries were not empowered to raise the sums needed, and as the numbers of the destitute multiplied, parishes resorted to increasingly desperate measures to shift them somewhere else. Eventually the state intervened, and in 1834 the vestries were relieved of the responsibility. Subsequently the establishment of public boards to handle other specific issues – such as health and sanitation – over much wider areas than mere parishes rapidly eroded vestry power. The 1894 Local Government Act sealed the process by setting up elected parish and district councils. The vestries wandered on for a time, restricted to church matters only, eventually metamorphosing into the parochial church councils we still have today.

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  The notion that the village as a social organism was in trouble as it entered the twentieth century was articulated by George Sturt and others before the outbreak of war in 1914, and was taken up again when the hostilities were over. The challenge was to engineer a new purpose and direction for it, in keeping with the changing times. In a book called The English Village: The Origin and Decay of Its Community, Harold Peake, a distinguished archaeologist and expert on pastoralism, argued that a settlement needed a population of at least a thousand to support its essential services, such as shops, doctor, school, club and so on. Peake, writing in the early 1920s, envisaged colonies of craftsmen and women – weavers, potters, cabinet-makers and the like – supporting the agricultural way of life. His image of village life is touchingly naïve: ‘All the members of our village should realise that they are members of one and the same community. The agriculturist and the craftsman, and the artisan and the professional man, would meet on common ground at the village club . . .’

  Post-1945 a new generation of trained planners went forth armed with the provisions of the 1946 Town and Country Planning Act to direct the building of a new England after the devastation of war. One was Thomas Sharp, author of a highly influential book about town planning and another – probably less influential – called The Anatomy of the Village. Sharp’s guiding principle was ‘conscious simplicity . . . informed, orderly, utilitarian, charming’. He deplored shapeless, ad hoc additions – ‘our new villages and rebuilt villages cannot in the future have the artless and unsophisticated simplicity of the natural growing villages in the past.’ They must be shaped and planned as units, by experts (presumably such as himself). New homes must be ‘in harmony’ with traditional cottages but not ape them. Sharp favoured small terraces of brick cottages with flat roofs and without gardens, arranged to shut off views of the surrounding countryside so that they provided ‘a kind of psychological refuge’.

  Thomas Sharp’s approach was modernistic and autocratic. It assumed that the superior intelligence and awareness of the trained planner would hold sway over the views of bureaucrats, builders, preservationists and other interested parties. But to the great English geographer W. G. Hoskins, the professional planner was a malign and sinister figure responsible for untold damage to the countryside – ‘black-hatted officers of THIS and THAT’, he characterised them scornfully. In The Making of the English Landscape, Hoskins deployed his pioneering techniques of fieldwork – unpeeling the past through minute investigation of the land – to support his ferocious hostility to the England of his own time. ‘Since the year 1914,’ Hoskins wrote, ‘every single change in the English landscape has either uglified or destroyed its meaning or both.’ He railed against the ‘barbaric England of the scientists, the military men and the politicians: let us turn away and contemplate the past before all is lost to the vandals.’

  Hoskins subscribed fully to the myth of England’s fall so acutely analysed by Raymond Williams. The argument was that by switching from a rural to an industrial society we had lost our way and created the conditions for all our misery and disorder. To illustrate its central fallacy Williams used the metaphor of an escalator. By analysing the testimony of writers on rural themes, he was able to show that wherever the commentator was on it – from the sixteenth century to the present – the Arcadia or Utopia or Golden Age was always located imprecisely in the past.

  At the centre of the mythic vision was the village: timeless, stable, useful, at one with the landscape, sprung from the soil, organic, secure, interdependent, the true community. Raymond Williams had grown up in a village near Abergavenny in rural Wales. ‘I see the idealisation of settlement in its literary-historical version,’ he wrote in The Country and the City, ‘as an insolent indifference to most people’s needs . . . I know why people have to move, why so many in my own family moved.’

  But when it came to shaping public perception the Hoskins version proved more persuasive. The revolution that was visibly sweeping the countryside – the industrialisation of agriculture and the annexation of the village by middle-class out-commuters – seemed to give potent support to the thesis of loss and destruction over gain and development. It became an orthodoxy that the countryside was in crisis and the village had
been dealt a mortal blow. That strand has generally held the upper hand since Hoskins’ book first appeared in 1955. Leftish-inclined academics and researchers have periodically emerged from university sociology faculties to investigate individual ‘rural communities’ and discovered what everyone knew all along: that farming no longer mattered, that soaring property prices had put housing beyond the reach of locals, that long-established families resented the incomers and felt excluded from their place, that the cherished ‘sense of community’ had been eroded. And so forth.

  In the mid-1970s a young Cambridgeshire farmer, Robin Page, produced a book called The Decline of an English Village which was an extended bellow of rage against the agrarian revolution. ‘It is,’ Page wrote, ‘a story of rural customs disappearing, of people being dispossessed, of communities losing their land, their beliefs, their traditions – losing themselves.’ Page looked back at his Golden Age – presumably in the 1950s – when ‘the sights and sounds of everyday life led to feelings of well-being and security.’ There were pike, roach, dace and sticklebacks in the brook, Bert the postman delivered the mail with a nod and a smile, everyone knew everyone, everyone had a friendly word for everyone. Then progress arrived. The smithy was replaced by more council houses and the grass verges by concrete. The bakery gave way to a self-service store. Houses were built on Kings Grove – ‘the bulldozers and diggers moved in as the young rooks cried greedily for food.’