The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Such men were eager to accept office as justices of the peace, to exercise the power that such office bestowed upon them in the granting of licences, in the maintenance of roads and bridges, workhouses and prisons, in the levying of rates and in the administration of justice, though many of them were no more qualified to do so than Henry Fielding’s Mr Thrasher who ‘had some few imperfections in his magisterial capacity’ in that, while it might generally be held that his office required ‘some knowledge of the law’, had ‘never read one syllable of the matter’.26

  If once in his life [the squire] went to London on business he was noticeable in the City crowds for his horse-hair periwig, his jockey belt and his old-fashioned coat without sleeves. His library, traditionally at least, consisted of the Bible, Baker’s Chronicle, Hudibras and Foxe’s Martyrs, and, whether he read these works or not, his view on Puritans and Papists usually coincided with those expressed in the last two.27

  Some squires were quite poor, struggling to survive as gentry on a few hundred pounds a year, but the increase in land values, which almost doubled between 1700 and 1790, helped most to live comfortably, particularly those whose land enabled them to make money from forestry or mining and those who invested in commerce. In 1790, so it has been calculated, beneath the 400 great landowners who had incomes of £10,000 a year and more, there were between 700 and 800 rich gentry who had up to £4000 a year, some 300 to 400 who had between £1000 and £3000, and between 10,000 and 20,000 who had between £300 and £1000.28 Of these there were many far more industrious and astute than the Squire Westerns who slept drunkenly amidst their hounds. There were men like Mr Allworthy of Somerset who possessed, as well as one of the largest estates in the county, ‘an agreeable person, a sound constitution, a solid understanding and a benevolent heart’.29 They served conscientiously on the back-benches of the House of Commons and were respected by the yeomen who came below them in the social scale and by the tenant-farmers who rented their land.

  In the late seventeenth century the yeomen, that class of countrymen between the gentlemen and the petty farmers, numbered perhaps about 120,000. Their yearly incomes were between £40 and £200 a year, their houses comfortable, of timber and plaster in some parts of the country, of brick or stone in others. They were traditionally supposed to be hardworking and prudent, and many of them were so. ‘When this John and Mary were first married,’ said one Devonshire yeoman of another, ‘they had but little, but God did so prosper them that before she died they had 400 bullocks and great store of money and other such stuff and were as well furnished of all things in their house as any one man of their degree was in all their country.’30

  They made or grew nearly all of their food and were generous hosts. They also had a strong sense of social responsibility, willingly acting as churchwardens and conscientiously, if less willingly, as constables, overseers of the poor or surveyors of the highways. They set great store by education and were drawn towards the teachings of the Puritans who saw hard work as an offering to God. Several leading Puritan preachers came from yeomen families.31

  In the eighteenth century the standard of living of yeomen with small holdings began to decline. In some areas, in fact, small owner-occupiers disappeared altogether as more and more land was enclosed; and those who could not find work as agricultural labourers, or in occupations other than farming, became additional burdens on an increasing poor rate. ‘I regard these small occupiers as a set of very miserable men,’ wrote Arthur Young, prolific author of books on agriculture. ‘They fare extremely hard, work without intermission like a horse … and practise every lesson of diligence and frugality without being able to soften their present lot.’32 The Rev. John Howlett agreed with him:

  The small farmer is forced to be laborious to an extreme degree; he works harder and fares harder than the common labourer; and yet with all his labour and with all his fatiguing incessant exertions, seldom can he at all improve his condition or even with any degree of regularity pay his rent and preserve his present situation. He is confined to perpetual drudgery, which is the source of profound ignorance, the parent of obstinacy and blind perseverance in old modes and old practices, however absurd and pernicious.33

  Tenant farmers, who by the end of the century constituted three-quarters of all farmers in England, fared much better, provided their holdings were sufficiently substantial. Indeed, Arthur Young, who had himself failed dismally as a farmer of 300 acres in Essex, thought that the most successful of them made themselves ridiculous by aping the style of gentlemen, by buying pianofortes for their parlours and post-chaises for driving their wives to assembly rooms, by putting their servants into livery, sending their daughters to expensive boarding schools and their sons to university ‘to be made parsons’.

  There was no doubt that good money could be made from farming by those who took advantage of the new methods which were revolutionizing the science of agriculture. There were still backward areas. In the north Young thought it ‘extremely melancholy’ to view such tracts of land as were ‘indisputably capable of yielding many beneficial crops’ lying totally waste. But elsewhere, despite the hardships inflicted by enclosures, the growth of commercial farming was transforming the appearance of a countryside which Smollett described as ‘smiling with cultivation’. ‘I admit I was often amazed,’ wrote a German visitor on a return to England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘to see great uncultivated areas made productive as though through magic and transformed into fine, corn-bearing fields.’34

  ‘Move your eyes which side you will,’ Arthur Young confirmed, ‘you will behold nothing but great riches and yet greater resources.’ In the county of Norfolk, half of which in the past had yielded ‘nothing but sheep feed’, ‘those very tracts of land [were now] covered with fine barley and rye as any in the world and great quantities of wheat besides’.35 Following the example of such agricultural innovators as ‘Turnip’ Townshend of Raynham, Norfolk, and the Walpoles of Houghton, Norfolk, of Thomas Coke of Holkham, of Jethro Tull, the Berkshire farmer who invented a drill for planting seeds, and of Richard Bradley, author of several books on husbandry and gardening, farmers now experimented with crop rotation and forage crops, and with new farm layouts. They made better use of the soil, improved fine English breeds, like Herefordshire cattle and Southdown sheep, as well as horses, and introduced to each other new tools and ploughs and even machinery. Steam threshing machinery began to come into general use in several counties in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1800 every two of the three or so million people engaged in agriculture were feeding five others, whereas they were providing food for scarcely more than three other people a century before.

  Yet if farmers were generally prospering, and if tenants on such competently run estates as that of the Earl of Leicester could well afford to pay their higher rents, there were hundreds of thousands of people living in the country – where nearly 80 per cent of England’s 9 million population still lived at the end of the eighteenth century – whose existence remained one of pitiable poverty.

  29 Country Houses and Gardens

  Towards the end of the eighteenth century the formality and orderliness, which had been so apparent in the design and planning of country houses since the days of Inigo Jones, were beginning to be relaxed. Inigo Jones, who had designed Wilton for the Earl of Pembroke, and Roger Pratt who had built Coleshill in Berkshire for his cousin, Sir George Pratt, were both strongly influenced by Continental models; so were the architects of numerous other seventeenth-century country houses built or reconstructed all over England from Raynham Hall in Norfolk, to Ragley Hall in Warwickshire and Petworth in Sussex.

  By the time Chatsworth in Derbyshire was completed in 1707 for the Duke of Devonshire, several revolutionary changes had occurred in the interiors of most large country houses. Servants no longer ate in the hall but had their own servants’ hall, perhaps in the basement, the upper servants in some houses having their meals separately from the lower in the stewa
rd’s parlour. The first-floor great chamber was becoming obsolete, while, on the ground floor, saloons were taking the place of parlours. Backstairs had been introduced; and dressing rooms for both husbands and wives had appeared so that, as Roger North put it, ‘at rising each may retire and have [separate] accommodation complete’.1 Indeed, in many houses, French fashion was followed, and husband and wife had separate bedrooms as well as dressing-rooms.2

  After Vanbrugh – architect of Blenheim and Castle Howard – and the Baroque went out of fashion at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Palladianism came in.

  To begin with [the historian of the country house, Mark Girouard, has written], Palladianism did not mean a change of plan in the country-house world, it only meant a change of uniform. The reign of the saloon between apartments went on – but now the ceremonial centre could be neatly expressed in terms of a temple, with a portico at one or both ends … The apartments could be arranged to produce houses with wings extended … or with … apartments turned back along either side of the hall and saloon to produce a compact, approximately square plan. The type with wings extended was much used for houses at the centre of great estates where show was considered essential. The results were the immensely extended façades of houses like Stowe, Wanstead or Wentworth Woodhouse. The wings-folded arrangement worked very well for houses built for people of moderate fortunes but sophisticated tastes, or for the subsidiary and more private residences of the great.3

  Most of these houses had libraries, something which had not been common in the past when a man who owned more than 1000 books, as Lord Burghley did, was a rarity. The Countess of Shrewsbury had only six books at Hardwick and these she kept in her bedchamber. Libraries were more often to be found in country houses in the later seventeenth-century; but they were generally used for study and, like cabinets of curiosities, were not intended for communal living. In the eighteenth century, however, they became rooms of entertainment and, as well as books, often specially bound and stamped with the family crest, games and folders of prints were kept in them, sometimes also pictures, not just portraits which had filled the galleries of earlier houses but still lifes and landscapes. As they became rooms of entertainment, so they tended to grow in size; and as country gentlemen bought more pictures and sculpture, many of them acquired on the Grand Tour, so more space had to be provided for the display of these too. Architects had to bear these requirements in mind.

  While libraries were becoming rooms of communal entertainment, dining-rooms were beginning to be used for no other purpose than for eating; and the large dining-table became a permanent piece of furniture in them, whereas formerly it was more general to have smaller folding tables which were carried into the room by servants who placed chairs around them as required. The food was brought to the table, course by course, by footmen who took the guests’ plates to the dishes to be served. They also took their glasses to the sideboard where the butler presided over the wine.

  Breakfast was served at about half past nine or ten, and usually consisted of tea or chocolate and hot buttered bread, perhaps with cheese, or toast. The German pastor, Carl Philip Moritz, was delighted by toast, an English invention. ‘There is a way of roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire which is incomparable,’ he wrote. ‘One slice after another is taken and held to the fire with a fork till the butter soaks through the whole pile of slices. This is called toast.’4 Peter Kalm, a young Swedish scientist, added that the English invented toast because their houses were so cold that to harden the bread was the only means of spreading butter.5

  Dinner was served at about four or five and supper at ten, though by the early nineteenth century the hour of dinner had moved on to nearer seven o’clock, and luncheon was served as an additional meal in the middle of the day. After the dessert had been served at dinner the ladies retired to the drawing-room for tea or coffee, while the men remained drinking in the dining-room, sometimes for hours.6

  In simpler homes dinner was still served in the middle of the day, although the provincial family with pretensions might sit down at two or three o’clock, like the mercer of Boswell’s acquaintance who had settled in Durham and wished to impress the people there with what he supposed to be the fashionable ways of the capital. The Rector of Aston near Birmingham also had dinner at three. When Catherine Hutton went to dinner with him in 1779 the meal ended at five when the ladies went to the drawing-room for an hour, and at about six they ordered tea and asked the gentlemen to come to join them.7

  In London this summons would probably have resulted in the gentlemen going upstairs, for town houses tended to be built to a common design, often being constructed by builders without the help of architects and with panelling and staircases following stock patterns. The kitchen was in the basement, the dining-room and parlour on the ground floor, the drawing-room on the floor above, and the bedrooms on the floor above that.

  The relaxation of formality which began towards the end of the eighteenth century was commented upon by several foreign observers. ‘Formality counts for nothing,’ wrote the duc de La Rochefoucauld after his visit to England in 1784,

  and for the greatest part of the time one pays no attention to it. Thus, judged by French standards, the English, and especially the women, seem lacking in polite behaviour. All the young people whom I have met in society in Bury [St Edmunds] give the impression of being what we should call badly brought up: they hum under their breath, they whistle, they sit down in a large armchair and put their feet on another, they sit on any table in the room and do a thousand other things which would be ridiculous in France, but are done quite naturally in England.8

  Two years before, Carl Moritz had commented upon the casual way in which Members of Parliament entered the Commons: ‘They even come into the House in their great coats and with boots and spurs. It is not at all uncommon to see a member lying stretched out on one of the benches, while others are debating. Some crack nuts, others eat oranges. There is no end to their going in and out.’9

  This growing informality was reflected in the abandonment of the practice of ladies and gentlemen sitting in constraining circles of chairs to talk to each other for the freedom of individual groups entertaining themselves in different ways. It was also reflected in the design of new houses. It was no longer considered essential to maintain the symmetry of a house by balancing a servants’ wing with another wing on the opposite side of the main block. It was felt to be a much happier arrangement if the principal rooms of the house, not least the new breakfast-room which was also used as a morning sitting-room, could not only overlook vistas, parks and gardens but, by means of low-silled or French windows, actually open out into the garden as in the irregular houses designed by John Nash in association with Humphry Repton of which the cottage orné built for the Prince of Wales in Windsor Park, and later to be known as The Royal Lodge, was a charming example.10

  The ideal garden was now considered to ‘bee irregular’ in the words of Henry Wotton, a former British ambassador in Venice, rather than formal and geometrically planned as in the Tudor fashion. The new style had been introduced slowly. In the seventeenth century the model landscape gardens had been French in style, with the axial and radial avenues, the parterres, canals and statuary, to be seen at Versailles. In the reign of William and Mary this French style had been slightly modified by Dutch influences, particularly by the more extensive use of clipped evergreens and of leaden statues. But it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that a strong reaction set in against French formality in landscape gardening which was now seen as a reflection of authoritarianism in politics and the arts.11 Joseph Addison, who argued that the garden should be freed from the constraints and restrictions that the French had imposed upon it, wrote in The Spectator in 1712:

  I look upon the Pleasure which we take in a Garden, as one of the most innocent Delights in humane Life. A Garden was the Habitation of our first Parents before the Fall. It is naturally apt to fill the Mind with Calmne
ss and Tranquility, and to lay all its turbulent Passions at Rest. It gives us a great Insight into the Contrivance and Wisdom of Providence, and suggests innumerable Subjects for Meditation. I cannot but think the very Complacency and Satisfaction which a Man takes in these Works of Nature, to be a laudable, if not virtuous Habit of Mind.12

  The English garden, it was felt, should, as Alexander Pope said, ‘call in the country’. It should, according to Stephen Switzer, the influential author of The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation (1715), allow ‘Beauties of Nature’ to remain ‘uncorrupted by Art’: ‘All the adjacent Country [should] be laid open to View, and the Eye should not be bounded with High Walls, Woods misplac’d and several Obstructions.’ It should celebrate the rural life as Virgil and Horace had done; it should assume the forms suggested by the ‘best of landskip painters’, examples of whose work William Kent, painter and architect as well as landscape gardener, went to Italy to collect. By making use of the ha-ha it was possible to suggest that ‘the adjacent Country was all a Garden’, the garden itself comprising undulating expanses of grass, sinuous walks and streams, classical and Gothic temples and follies, or, where possible, genuine ruins. Calling upon such professional architects and designers as Vanbrugh, Bridgeman, Gibbs and Kent, landowners set about remodelling their grounds; and, though the English garden was less expensive to lay out and to maintain than the French, several of them were ruined by their expenditure, while the results of their labours were often derided: