Chapter Two
‘A place of responses or echoes’
Gilbert White made his home in Selborne for the last sixty-odd years of his life. He was also, by a curious stroke of fortune, born there, only a hundred yards from the house in which he died. Ancestors of the Selborne Whites had lived in the area at least as far back as the early sixteenth century. At different times branches of the family had settled in Farnham (Surrey), Basingstoke (Hampshire) and South Warnborough (also in Hampshire and just ten miles north of Selborne). Gilbert’s great-grandfather, Sir Samson White, was born at Cogges, near Witney, Oxfordshire, and later became Lord Mayor of Oxford. So when his son, another Gilbert, accepted the living of Selborne in 1681, he was not venturing into completely foreign territory. He was 31 years old at the time, and a junior Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford (Lords of the Manor of Selborne and patrons of the living of St Mary’s Church). When the younger Gilbert came to reflect on his grandfather’s appointment to a full vicarship at such a comparatively young age and low rank, he concluded it was because of the ‘low estimation’ in which the parish was held by Magdalen. The living, he discovered, had a long history of neglect. Fifty years previously the incumbent had been deprived of his income throughout the period of the Commonwealth, and had ‘retired to a little tenement about a hundred and fifty yards from the church, where he earned a small pittance by the practice of physic’. He was restored in 1660, but was so impoverished that ‘he left the vicarage-house and premises in a very abject and dilapidated state.’ His successor had plans to start repairs but they were cut short by his death.
It was left to Gilbert’s grandfather to make the vicarage a more agreeable place to live:
At his first coming he ceiled the chancel, and also floored and wainscoted the parlour and hall, which before were paved with stone, and had naked walls; he enlarged the kitchen and brewhouse, and dug a cellar and well: he also built a large new barn in the lower yard, removed the hovels in the front court, which he laid out in walks and borders; and entirely planned the back garden, before a rude field with a stone-pit in the midst of it.1
These sound like the actions of a man who had decided to put down roots in the village, and a few years later Gilbert confirmed this by marrying a local farmer’s daughter. Rebekah Luckin was fourteen years his junior, but came from a family that had farmed in the nearby hamlet of Noar (or Nore) Hill for generations. ‘Luckin’s hedge’ is listed as one of the traditional landmarks in the Selborne parish boundary.
Rebekah proved to be a strong and dependable partner and it may well have been her influence that persuaded the Whites to remain in Selborne, despite the village’s comparative remoteness from the mainstream of rural society. It was an isolated, independent community in the eighteenth century, with no dominant local landowner and poor communications with the outside world. The nearest city, Winchester, was only fifteen miles to the west, but since the Romans had built a road between Winchester and Farnham that effectively bypassed the village, it had become a backwater, on the way to nowhere. Even William Cobbett, who had spent the first fourteen years of his life at Farnham, just ten miles to the north, seemed unfamiliar with it when he passed that way in 1822:
I forgot to mention, that, in going from Hawkley to Greatham, the man, who went to show me the way, told me at a certain fork, ‘That road goes to Selborne.’ This put me in mind of a book, which was once recommended to me, but which I never saw, entitled ‘The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne’, (or something of that sort) written, I think, by a parson of the name of White2.
Selborne’s inconspicuousness was largely the result of local geography. It lies on the western edge of the Hampshire Weald, a mass of steep, convoluted chalk hills covered, then as now, with woodland. The local roads kept largely to the low ground, and in many places had been worn deep into the soft chalk and sandstone rocks. In winter these hollow lanes filled with mud, water and sometimes snow and became inpassable to coach traffic. Even the chief way into the village, from Alton in the north, was little more than a sunken, rutted track, 18 feet below ground level in places and little more than 8 feet wide. It was not until 1847 that a properly surfaced road was built overland from Alton. Twelve years previously the writer James Mudie (who was preparing a topographical note for Edward Blyth’s edition of the Natural History) had discovered what formidable obstacles to easy access these hollow lanes presented:
all the way from Harteley, which is at least two miles, the traveller sees little, save a narrow stripe of sky, and steep banks, almost perpendicular, so near to each other that one carriage cannot pass another except at particular points, and presenting a mass of tangled roots interspersed with shivered rocks.3
Mudie had also begun to realize that this sense of being enclosed, wrapped-in, was an essential characteristic of the local landscape. Although he regarded Selborne as a beautiful spot, he saw ‘no possibility of obtaining even a tolerable first or general view of it and at the same time enjoying the luxury of a carriage’.
*
Gilbert and Rebekah settled in at Selborne and produced six children. It was their eldest son John, born in 1688, who was to become the father of the Selborne naturalist. He qualified as a barrister, and eventually became a JP, but he never seems to have practised, and admitted later to a deep mistrust of the whole legal profession. When he was 31 he married Anne Holt, a rector’s daughter from Streatham and an heiress in a small way, and retired to the country. Very little more is heard of him. He never worked and apparently did little at home except play the harpsichord and potter in the garden. Except for respectful and formal references, his family rarely mention him in their letters, and, by default, a picture of a rather inadequate and withdrawn personality emerges. In the little hard evidence available, he was hypochondriacal and found it hard to cope with his affairs. He may well have been a depressive.
John and Anne probably spent the first year after their marriage in September 1719 living with John’s parents in Selborne, and it was there, ten months later, that Gilbert the younger was born, on 18 July 1720. Later that year John and Anne moved to a house of their own in the village of Compton near Guildford, and over the next seven years Anne gave birth regularly every September or October. Three children died in infancy. The next oldest to survive, Thomas (born in October 1724) went on to become a successful London merchant and amateur scholar. Benjamin (born in September 1725) was destined to become a distinguished bookseller and to publish Gilbert’s Natural History. Rebecca (born in October 1726) married Mr Henry Woods and settled in Chilgrove, Sussex. John (born in September 1727) followed Gilbert to Oxford, and into the Church, but found himself in trouble in circumstances that were to cast a shadow over the rest of his life. Another son, Francis, was born in March 1728 or 1729 (the year is not recorded) while John and Anne were living briefly at East Harting, in Sussex. He died when he was little more than 21.
On 13 February 1728 or 1729, the Reverend Gilbert White died, and his widow, together with her two unmarried daughters, moved across the street to a house known as the Wakes,* which Gilbert had purchased and bequeathed to them for just this purpose. It was a smallish place then, with none of the rambling extensions it now sprouts. But when both daughters were married, on the same day in January 1729 or 1730 – Dorothea to her father’s successor, the Reverend Basil Cane, and Elizabeth to a cousin, Charles White – it must have seemed little more than a lonely and echoing shell to Rebekah, 66 years old and used to having people around her all her life.
The obvious solution, now that John’s swelling family had no permanent roots, was that they should come back to Selborne and move in with her at the Wakes. This they did, and the younger Gilbert thus returned to his birthplace at the age of about 9. Within three years he had acquired another brother and sister. Anne (born in April 1731) married Thomas Barker, of Lyndon Hall in Rutland, and some forty years later became one of Gilbert’s favourite correspondents. Henry (born in June 1733) later went to Oxford and became rector of Fyfield, twenty-five miles north-west of Selborne.
By 1733 there were eleven people packed into a house which probably had no more than five bedrooms, two of them attics. It may have been a cheerful dormitory atmosphere for the six youngest Whites, who were then all under 8 years old; but Gilbert was a crucial five years older than his oldest brother, Thomas, and from the age of 10 must have become accustomed to being by himself. His father, with no work to do, acted as an occasional tutor, but, prone as he was to melancholy and withdrawal, can’t have been much company for his son.
During these last and rather solitary childhood years Gilbert must have spent much of his time exploring the countryside round Selborne, and it would be surprising if he hadn’t the same physical curiosity about natural history as most country boys of that age. But it does not seem to have been a formal interest, to the extent that he kept notes or a regular journal. (By contrast, his future brother-in-law, Thomas Barker of Lyndon, two years his junior, had begun a nature diary at the age of 10. A couple of austere notes penned in this diary in the spring of 1736 are the only surviving record of Gilbert’s early interest in natural history. ‘A flock of geese flew N’ the first reads, adding – in acknowledgement to the observer – the initials G.W. Gilbert was 15 at the time and probably spending the Easter holidays with his aunt, Mary Isaac, at Whitwell rectory, a couple of miles away.) Whatever his childhood experiences of Selborne’s countryside and wildlife, they did not seem to be the kind which may be recalled as precise memories, and Gilbert’s writings are unusual for the lack of specific references to, or anecdotes from, his early years. But one aspect certainly made a lasting – though possibly unconscious – impression on him, and that was the character of the Selborne landscape. The parish, as we shall see, contains a great variety of scenery within a comparatively small compass, and the mere fact of being able to pass from water meadow to rocky lane to wooded hill-top in a five-minute walk would have been an education for young Gilbert. Long before he became detached enough to realize he was living in a geographically privileged parish, or self-consciously to contemplate ‘the view’, he would have been imprinted by the essential qualities of the local landscape.
What were these? For once, it’s possible to hint at an answer from modern evidence, because the countryside in the vicinity of the village has changed very little. It’s the kind of dense, luxuriant, muddled landscape which is still quite common in the hillier regions of southern England, but which in Selborne has been emphasized by a combination of local geology and social history. It is highly distinctive, a matter not just of particular features but of the relations between them. These are some notes which I took in November 1983, trying to capture these characteristics in the jumble of damp closes and copses that lies between the church and the Lythes, one of Gilbert’s favourite walks:
No real views or prospects – except momentarily glimpsed through the trees, and framed in a gap at the end of the valley. What you do see is much more a matter of close-up detail and texture: layered freestone; tree-roots contoured round the layers; fungus on the dying trees, saplings in the gaps left by fallen trunks, yet these textured too – bent, opportunist, twiggy, eaten, snapped, re-shooting. Beyond the trees, broken, tufty grass, surrounded by more woods; dips in the ground; tiny coppices in further dips just visible by the tops of their winter twigs; glimpses of water – in ruts, pools, winding drainage ditches, but mostly invisible until you are close by, hidden by trees and tussocks; the water broken up, too – shelves of gravel in the streamlets, bays, cattle wallows, loops and islets, fallen trees bridging the water and entangled with the hedges.
The pattern is repeated, though without so much water, up on the common, and in the deep lanes that cut through the parish. It is a quirky, unexpected, intimate mixture, full of vitality and a sense of interdependence, that draws you down into its details, not into generalities beyond. It is also a landscape which could hardly fail to mould the outlook of any sensitive young person who spent a good deal of time inside it, and it is echoed not just in the contents of White’s book, but in the rhythms and structure of much of the writing itself. White, I am sure, was conscious of this. The second of his letters to Thomas Pennant (Letter X in the Natural History) is typical of his rambling style. He chats enthusiastically about the eating habits of young owls, the ducks that visit the woodland ponds, and a house-martin glimpsed in Oxford in early winter. Then he breaks off, almost apologetically, and attempts to explain this torrent of discursive ornithology. ‘The parish I live in,’ he writes ‘is a very abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds.’4 It is not hard to imagine him being struck by this thought, out, perhaps, on one of the network of paths that lead out of the Wakes’ meadows and switchback and criss-cross along the foot of the Hanger.
The landscape of the entire parish repeated this unpredictable, muddled mix, whether in deep woodland or out on the open heaths of Woolmer Forest. Only in the northwestern quarter, in the flat ‘champain’ country of hop and arable fields was it conspicuously more ordered.
The danger here, of course, is of interpreting the lie of the land with tutored hindsight, of putting modern sensibilities into eightenth-century heads. Yet in the earliest indigenous description of the local scenery, the highly functional ‘Directory of the Bounds’, the scenery sounds every bit as ‘abrupt and uneven’ as it does in White’s descriptions. Beating the Bounds, or Perambulation, was kept up in Selborne at sporadic intervals throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming more frequent at times of uncertainty and dispute about land-rights. Traditionally the ceremony was carried out to check that the boundary landmarks were still in place, and to impress on each new generation of village children precisely where the ancient demarcation lines between parish and parish lay. The route was normally passed down through collective memory, but after the 1703 walk (in which Gilbert’s grandfather took part) the details – ‘Taken from the oldest records as they were constantly perambulated in ancient Times’ – were inscribed in the Parish Register. This is an extract from the route taken during the afternoon of the first day:
From thence inclining to the right hand towards Park Pond, the Bounds are through the middle of the said Pond: and then keeping straight on across the Park up the Hill, leave forked Pond a little on the left hand, thence over the next Hill into the Bottom, keeping near to the Edge of Grigg’s Green, and over the moor that lyes on the left hand under Weaver’s Down, from thence by a Slade up the Hill towards the east side of the Hill, and then passing over and leaving the top of the Hill a little to your right hand, keep down the side of the Hill to a green way, (where you see Foley Ponds on the left) and keeping all along that way on the east side of Iron Barrow or Iron Hill, down to dead man’s Thorn, where is also a large stone, near to a road, and here a Gospel is to be read, a Psalm to be sung, and a Cross made X.5
The Perambulation took three whole days and covered close on eighteen miles (or nearer thirty, if you counted ‘all its curves and indentings’). Selborne was a sizeable parish in the eighteenth century, embracing a great variety of soils, vegetation and farming styles. This variation has always been one of the sources of the district’s pervading sense of unevenness and intimacy. But underlying everything are two more fundamental influences: geology and social history.
There is still no better description of local geology and geography than Gilbert’s own account in the opening sections of the Natural History. Essentially the parish can be divided into two broad regions, along the line of the village street. To the south-west is a range of steep chalk-hills culminating in the wooded slope known as Selborne Hanger or, more usually, simply the Hanger. To the north-east is a flatter area on sandstone, where the soils become progressively more acid until they merge with the Surrey heathlands. Where the two rocks meet, the water which has percolated down through the chalk emerges in a series of springs, and it was close to this source of water, and the fertile, loamy soils it encouraged, that the settlement of Selborne grew up.
The dominant feature of the village is the Hanger. It rises steeply about 300 feet above the level of the street, a louring whaleback that is rarely out of view. It was less wooded in White’s day, but even without trees it would have reduced the amount of daylight for those living in its shadow by as much as three hours. In the eighteenth century the southeast end of the Hanger was chiefly open, scrubby sheep-down. On the top was Selborne Common, a tract of rough grazing, open enough for the village to hold its cricket matches, but studded with oak and beech pollards, and also known as the High Wood. Straighter, younger beeches grew on the slopes. Beeches were Gilbert’s favourite trees, and he was deeply upset when Magdalen College felled large quantities during the middle decades of the century.
On the other side of the spring line was a belt of wet meadows, pastures, copses of ash, hazel and maple, and another wooded common known as Dorton. Then, out on the extreme eastern edge of the parish, the dark expanse of Woolmer Forest began. This was not a forest of trees, but a ‘legal’ forest, a large area of land, nearly 9000 acres, subject to forest laws designed to preserve game for royal hunting parties. What little woodland it did contain was largely decrepit and not regenerating. (White went so far as to say that it was ‘without one standing tree in the whole extent’, though he may well have been applying rather severe standards of uprightness.6) Woolmer was chiefly a sweep of undulating sandy heathland covered with heather and bracken, and broken here and there by patches of peat and bog in the hollows. It was a haunt of nightjars and snipe, and until the early years of the eighteenth century – to the delight and frequent downfall of the local poachers – of red deer and black grouse. On the western edge of the Forest were three large pools, Oakhanger, Bin’s and Woolmer Ponds, the last having a circumference of nearly a mile and a half at the time White was writing, and attracting huge flocks of wild duck in the winter.
Other oddities were scattered throughout the parish: more ponds in the northern corner of the village, formed by the damming of one of the brooks, where Gilbert used to watch swallows feeding; a romantic, secret ravine, no more than a couple of hundred yards from the street, draped with moss and ferns and carrying one of the other local streams; miniature hangers, perched on the sides of the dry valleys that radiate at right angles from the streams; a chalk outcrop topped with downland and ancient quarry pits at Noar Hill. And passing between and through them, circulating around the village and occasionally tunnelling their way into the outside world, were the hollow lanes. There was scarcely a single lane in eighteenth-century Selborne that wasn’t more or less underground. Centuries of wear from traffic and weather had worn them deep down into the soft sandstone and chalk rocks. As a consequence the lanes were more than just a system of by-ways. They were landmarks, physical records of the past history and everyday experience of the parish. Every extreme of weather – gale, snow, downpour – left lingering traces here long after its effects had vanished on the surface. Drifts and landslides were trapped like climatic fossils. And every horse or coach that succeeded in passing along them helped pummel the floor of the lane down again.
Yet there was a paradox about the lanes. Although their origins were entirely artificial, they had developed one of the wildest, most apparently natural countenances of any parish feature, and Gilbert was fascinated by them:
In many places they are reduced sixteen or eighteen feet beneath the level of the fields; and after floods, and in frosts, exhibit very grotesque and wild appearances, from the tangled roots that are twisted among the strata, and from the torrents rushing down their broken sides; and especially when those cascades are frozen into icicles, hanging in all the fanciful shapes of frostwork. These rugged gloomy scenes affright the ladies when they peep down into them from the paths above, and make timid horsemen shudder while they ride along them; but delight the naturalist with their various botany.7
They could also, needless to say, become impossible to negotiate, and it was the precarious balance that they maintained between isolating the village and providing an escape route that was to become as important to Gilbert as any of their wild flowers or ‘curious filices’.
*
The hollow lanes date back at least to the Saxon period, which is when most of the features of the Selborne landscape acquired their current names, as Gilbert worked out during his researches for the Antiquities. For instance, hanger is from OE hangra, a steep, and later a wooded, slope; lythe from OE hlithe, a steep pasture; Plestor, the open space near the church, from OE plegstow, a playground. Even Selborne itself is derived from OE sealh or sele, sallows, and burne, a stream.8
In late medieval times Selborne began to acquire a social independence that matched its physical quirkiness. It came about in the most roundabout way, in the wake of an extraordinary history of local ecclesiastical debauchery. There had once been an Augustinian Priory in Selborne, just beyond Dorton. It had been founded by the Bishop of Winchester in 1233, had marked time inconspicuously for a century or two, and then collapsed in scandal in 1484 from a surfeit of almost every indulgence forbidden to the monastic calling. When Gilbert wrote up the Priory saga in the Antiquities he spoke with grave disapproval of the monks’ ‘sensuality and … general delinquency’.9 He also quoted from that fiercely radical and populist attack upon church corruption, The Vision of Piers Plowman:
Now is religion a rider, a romer by streate;
A leader of love-days, and a loud begger;
A pricker on a palfrey from maner to maner,
A heape of hounds at his arse, as he a lord were.
Gilbert thought this poem ‘a striking picture of monastic insolence and dissipation; and a specimen of one of the keenest pieces of satire now subsisting in any language, ancient or modern’; and this sympathetic reference is one of the few clues to his own feelings about the proper role and deportment of the clergy. But he did see the funny side of this tumble from grace, and while he was still fresh from disentangling the Latin text of William of Wykeham’s commission of inquiry into the affair, he wrote an altogether more boisterous account to his nephew Sam Barker:
They were become mighty hunters, and used to attend junketings, and feastings; had altered their mode of dress; and used to let suspectae come into their cloisters after it was dark; had suffered their buildings to dilapidate; had pawned their plate; administered the sacrament with such nasty cups, and musty, sour wine, that men abhorred the sight (ut sit hominibus horrori)… they also were got into a method of laying naked in bed without their breeches, for which they are much reprimanded.10
What set off the decline isn’t known for certain, but it’s tempting to think that Selborne’s wayward genius loci had some part in it. The Priory was actually situated within the boundaries of the Royal Forest of Woolmer, and under siege by the pleasures of the flesh. King Edward I frequently stayed at the Priory when he was on hunting trips, and expected his large retinue to be fed and entertained. If that was a drain on the monks’ finances it was nothing compared to the testing their sacred vows received from the spectacle of the aristocracy at play, and from the ever-present temptation of other kinds of royal beast in the Selborne woods. The Brothers were regularly hauled up for poaching offences before itinerant magistrates, and on one occasion the Prior himself paid the then huge sum of £4 not to have his dog’s feet mutilated (a frequent procedure in royal forests to discourage illegal hunting).11
Following William of Wykeham’s inquiry in 1373 various attempts were made to reform the Priory, but without success, and in 1484 the formal process of dissolution was begun. William Waynflete, who was then Bishop of Winchester, decided to appropriate it, together with all its Selborne lands, to supplement the income of Magdalen College, Oxford, which he had personally founded in 1459. Magdalen, in effect, became the Lord of the Manor, and thus the patron of the local church of St Mary.
But the college’s chief interest in the Selborne estates was a financial one, and by the middle of the sixteenth century its only direct representative in the parish was a priest (who doubled as woodman and bailiff) living in a house next to the already crumbling Priory buildings. Soon he was gone and by the eighteenth century Magdalen’s influence extended not much further than appointing the vicar, and attending, usually in the persons of the College President and Bursar, the Manorial Court in the Grange tithe barn. This was normally held annually, except when there were special cases to be considered; and the college representatives must have been relieved that their trips to this inaccessible, upstart community were no more frequent. Between visits they relied for help and contact on the vicar and any other friends they could muster in the area. Now and then, there are revealing glimpses of just how distant and occasionally casual the relationship between Magdalen and the village was. In 1719, for example, the College wrote to the Vicar of East Worldham (three miles north of Selborne) giving him full authority to manage and cut the coppice-wood in Selborne.12 It was, on the surface, a baffling exercise in delegation, since Gilbert’s energetic and able grandfather was still vicar, and had performed this service thirty years before. But he may have fallen out with Magdalen that very year, by taking the villagers’ side in a conflict over common rights. Magdalen had made an attempt to claim rights over the local woods and common, the Selborne copyholders had resisted, and the case had gone to court. The result was a clear defeat for the College, and a Decree in Chancery affirming the villagers’ common rights.13
A few years later Magdalen’s agent and rent-collector was an elderly man called Jethro Longworth. In 1730 (when Gilbert was 10 years old and about in the local lanes and woods) Longworth wrote to the Bursar in a small and shaky hand, asking if the monies could be exchanged ‘in this county for there is much Robing on the Road’. A letter the following year, shakier still, has the postscript ‘pray excuse my scribble for I can scarce see what I write.’14
Absentee landlordism was the downfall of many rural communities in the eighteenth century, but Selborne flourished without the yoke of a squire. No single landowner determined the pattern of farming locally, or was able to institute widespread changes in the landscape. Instead there were a large number of owner-occupiers, copyholders and customary tenants, mostly with holdings of between ten and twenty acres. The largest owner had seventy-five acres. Gilbert, by the time of his death, had some forty acres scattered around the parish in a number of closes and strips in the common fields.15 Selborne, consequently, was an independent even if not particularly prosperous community, and – a fact important for the work Gilbert would one day be undertaking – a place where people could move about where they wished and exercise rights over a considerable area of common-land. Common rights are notoriously difficult to describe with accuracy or certainty, but the Decree in Chancery of 1719 had given a sound legal footing to at least some of the traditional practices. The ancient tenements in the village (there were forty-seven listed in 1793)16 had three fundamental rights attached to them. The occupiers could graze all kinds of cattle on the Hanger, the High Wood and Dorton. They could cut and gather underwood, free, for repairing the fences between their land and the common. And on the payment of a small charge (one shilling and fourpence for most of the eighteenth century)17 they could buy the firewood that was cut from the tops of the beech pollards scattered throughout the common. Beyond these three basic rights we are in the realm of ‘customary practice’ and handed-down tradition. Magdalen College almost certainly retained the right to cut the larger trees for timber, though there seems to have been an understanding that they would retain a beech ‘presence’ on the Hanger to guarantee a source of mast for grazing animals. Most of the citizens of Selborne, whether copyholders or not, had also ‘since time immemorial’ cut peat for fuel in Woolmer Forest, and gathered dead or fallen branches ‘in proper season’ for firewood.18
While all these rights were exercised and jealously guarded they helped protect the commons against ‘reclamation’ as farmland, and encouraged a diverse pattern of land use. But not everyone approved of such emancipated behaviour among the rural working class, especially the surveyors who, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, were engaged on a county by county assessment of the state of the nation’s agriculture. The Board of Agriculture representatives have become notorious for their censorious attitude towards the standards and values of rural inhabitants, and they had stern, disapproving words for East Hampshire. They thought the workers over-paid and ill-disciplined, and were appalled at the state of the roads. Many failed to find Selborne at all. Arthur Young (1768) approached no closer than Alton, four miles to the north, and even there found most of the farms were less than a hundred acres in extent.19 Abraham and William Driver (1794) mention the increase in hop-planting in the district but regarded much of the countryside as little better than a jungle:
We are sorry to observe such immense tracts of open heath, and uncultivated land, which strongly indicate the want of means, or inclination, to improve it, and often reminds the traveller of uncivilised nations, where nature pursues her own course, without the assistance of human art.20
For Charles Vancouver (1810) it was not just the heaths but the extensive woodlands (15 per cent, he estimated in the district) that were behind the deplorable lack of agricultural discipline. The local workers spent too much time in day-work, cutting wood and peat, when they should have been in the fields. They also spent too much time doing nothing at all, he complained in shocked tones, often going home at 4 pm in the summertime, when the ‘correct’ hour was 6.21
The only contemporary survey of Selborne village is a census carried out by Gilbert himself, in an official return to the Bishop of Winchester in 1788.22 He found that the long village street, together with a few side-lanes and a scatter of outlying farms, supported a population of 676, divided among 136 tenements or families. Baptisms had risen from a yearly average of nearly thirteen in the 1720s to more than twenty in the 1770s. The number of deaths were more stable, at around ten a year. Men and women had the same life expectancy, and in general ‘the inhabitants enjoy a good share of health and longevity: and the parish swarms with children.’ It also, according to White, ‘abounded’ with poor, though it’s clear from his description that these lived way above the standards usual for the eighteenth-century rural poor. Many were ‘sober and industrious, and live comfortably in good stone or brick cottages, which are glazed, and have chambers above stairs: mud buildings we have none.’23 The village was not prosperous enough to maintain a schoolmaster and the education of the village children was in the hands of ‘two or three dames’. But there was a total of £10 a year in charitable endowments for the children of the poor. One of these had been made in 1719, by Gilbert’s grandfather. It was provided by the income from a piece of land in Hawkley, usually about £3 a year, and was intended ‘For teaching the poor children of Selborne to read, write, sew & knit, say their prayers & catechisms’. The Vestry Accounts show that comparatively few people were receiving Parish Relief. In 1789, for example, twenty villagers were receiving an average of about six shillings a month. In 1791 the number had risen to twenty-five, but only about half a dozen were receiving relief on a regular basis.24
In general the diversity of land-work available – picking hops, barking timber, as well as more orthodox farming tasks – and the marginal income from the commons kept most people above the real poverty line and maintained a spirit of enterprising self-sufficiency in the community.
Perhaps the last word on the pervading character and influence of the landscape should be left to Cobbett, one local witness who is unlikely ever to be accused of glamourization. The day he had his tantalizing glimpse of the road to Selborne he had been exploring the country just to the south-east of the parish. He’d been given anxious warnings against venturing into this interior. The terrain, he was told, was treacherous. He would either find himself careering down slippery chalk slopes, or wallowing through two-foot-deep mud in the tracks. Cobbett plunged in, and during the next few hours encountered some of the most dramatic scenery that even he, a seasoned tourist, had ever seen. He was astonished by the suddenness of the edge of Hawkley Hanger and the view over the plunging, wooded hills. It was ‘like looking from the top of a castle into the sea’ with the cross-hangers running into it ‘like piers’. He slithered down muddy hanger sides (‘like grey soap’) by gripping onto the underwood, took to one of the deepest hollow lanes, whose towering sandstone walls terrified the horses, and rode off into the mud. ‘Talk of shows, indeed! Take a piece of this road; just a cut across, and a rod long, and carry it up to London. That would be something like a show!’ He ended the day in the company of a doltish local guide, getting hopelessly lost in the dark in Woolmer Forest. It was, he reckoned, ‘the most interesting day, as far as I know, that I ever passed in my life’.25
* The house is more properly known as Wakes’, having once belonged to a family of the same name. But ‘the Wakes’ is the form now in common usage.