THE DESTRUCTION OF DOWNLAND SOCIETY 1650–1830
The crown was restored in 1660, but not everything was restored with it. England could scarcely go back to the system or the mentality on which the prewar country had once relied. The war itself had been too deep and disturbing a rupture. There was no going back. The earls of Pembroke each in turn became the man of his moment: restoration rakes (one a multiple murderer), eighteenth-century connoisseurs, army officers, and conservative politicians. But around them, in the chalkland valleys they owned, as elsewhere, a disaster unfolded.
The Anglican divine Richard Baxter wrote a homily in 1691 on The condition of poor farm tenants. “The old custom was,” Baxter wrote nostalgically, “to let lands by lease for lives or for a long term of years, and to take a fine at first and a small yearly rent afterward, and so when a man, with his marriage portion, had taken a lease he lived comfortably afterward and got somewhat for his children.” That is the air of retrospective regret for a land of lost content. The pattern of human relationships had been folded into the habits of the land. The wife’s dowry had paid the fine with which the couple entered into the copyhold, and the man’s life’s labor prepared for his children to do the same.
“But now in most countries,” Baxter continued, meaning in most parts of England, “the custom is changed into yearly rack-rents,” meaning not only that custom itself was over and done with, but also that the new annual rents were equal or nearly equal to the value of what the land could produce in the year. His subtext went far deeper into moral outrage. The new rents had been racked, bent, stretched, and strained to the point where they were no longer morally legitimate.
“The poor tenants are glad of a piece of hanged bacon once a week,” Baxter told his gentlemanly audience, the grandsons of those who had read John Norden’s treatise on mutuality as the essence of state management at the beginning of the century,
and some few that can kill a bull eat now and then a bit of hanged beef, enough to try the stomach of an ostrich. He is a rich man that can afford to eat a joint of fresh meat (beef, mutton or veal) once in a month or fortnight. If their sow pig or their hens breed chickens, they cannot afford to eat them, but must sell them to make their rent. They cannot afford to eat the eggs that their hens lay, nor the apples or pears that grow on their trees (save some that are not vendible) but must make money of all. All the best of their butter and cheese they must sell and feed themselves, and children, and servants with skimmed cheese and skimmed milk and whey curds.
The change from copyhold to leasehold and rack rent, which began in earnest in the seventeenth century and would continue until deep into the nineteenth century, was the deepest possible transformation of the social fabric of England. Where people before had, as Baxter implies, eaten their own produce, now their produce amounted to a single thing: money. The yeomen copyholders became what Baxter was already calling in the 1690s “the poor enslaved husbandmen” of England.
Few landlords, he said, “scruple raising rents to as much as they can get, when poor men, rather than beg and have no dwelling, will promise more than they can pay; and then, with care and toil, make shift as long as they can.” The idea of a balanced community, of mutuality in rights and obligations, of control of the government of the manor through the custom of the manor: all that had been collapsed into a simple cash deal. If you could pay the rent, you could stay on the land. If you couldn’t, you couldn’t. The natural drift of such a system was the replacement of an integrated copyhold community with a monopolistic landlord and a gang of rightless, dependent, impoverished tenants. Huge noncommunal farms would have on their margins scatterings of paupers’ cottages, precisely the pattern that developed in these valleys in the nineteenth century.
In the period covered by most of this book Arcadianism was essentially a political idea, an idealism intended to embrace the whole of society. In the eighteenth century, that wholeness disappeared and Arcadianism lost its social dimension. In the making of the great eighteenth-century parks, and in the taste for the refined Meissen figures or Fragonard prettinesses, there was no political or social freight. The pink-cheeked shepherdess and her satin-suited swain, set in the smoothed contours of the English landscape school, was a slick of suavity, the most expensive wallpaper ever devised. Arcadia in the eighteenth century became décor, not a hope for society. Its money-cushioned languor became a commodity to be bought, an accessory to market success, not a criticism of individualism, market, or state. This eviscerated Arcadianism became effete, the symbol of everything against which the hunger of the Romantics for a vivid reality would react. Eighteenth-century Arcadia had lost its soul and become the country in a Savile Row suit, decorated with hermitages and tree clumps that were no more than pale, polite ghosts of their great Renaissance forebears.
Accompanying a smoothing out of the parks was a devastation of rural society. Jump to the end of August 1826, and William Cobbett is riding through the green and gold chalkstream valleys of the Wiltshire Downs. He cannot believe that he is seeing a place of such unparalleled and dreamlike beauty.
This is certainly the most delightful farming in the world. No ditches, no water-furrows, no drains, hardly any hedges, no dirt and mire, even in the wettest seasons of the year: and though the downs are naked and cold, the valleys are snugness itself. They are, as to the downs, what ah-ahs are in parks or lawns. When you are going over the downs, you look over the valleys, as in the case of the ah-ah; and if you be not acquainted with the country, your surprise, when you come to the edge of the hill, is very great. The shelter in these valleys, and particularly where the downs are steep and lofty on the sides, is very complete. Then the trees are everywhere lofty. They are generally elms, with some ashes, which delight in the soil that they find here. There are, almost always, two or three large clumps of trees in every parish, and a rookery or two (not rag-rookery) to every parish. By the water’s edge there are willows; and to almost every farm there is a fine orchard, the trees being, in general, very fine, and this year they are, in general, well loaded with fruit. So that, all taken together, it seems impossible to find a more beautiful and pleasant country than this, or to imagine any life more easy and happy than men might here lead.
It is difficult to think of two people in English history more different than Philip Sidney and William Cobbett, but here they are as one. “During the day I crossed the river about fifteen or sixteen times, and in such hot weather it was very pleasant to be so much amongst meadows and water.” Cobbett’s wonderfully expert eye ranged over the stack yards, the barley ricks, the wheat ricks, and hayricks, the enormous barns, some over 250 feet in length, the vast 400-acre fields, the flocks with 4,000 sheep and lambs in them, and the overwhelming abundance of straw:
Cattle and horses are bedded up to their eyes. The yards are put close under the shelter of a hill, or are protected by lofty and thick-set trees. Every animal seems comfortably situated; and in the dreariest days of winter these are, perhaps, the happiest scenes in the world;
They might have been, but they weren’t, because amid this astonishing fecundity and richness—it was a painting by Constable made flesh—were scenes of such devastating poverty that Cobbett came away sickened and ashamed. The predictions of Richard Baxter had come true. The men and women who lived and worked in these Arcadian valleys were “tormented by an accursed system that takes the food from those that raise it, and gives it to those that do nothing that is useful to man.” These valleys would be the most delicious places on earth
if those, whose labour makes it all, trees, corn, sheep and everything, had but their fair share of the produce of that labour. What share they really have of it one cannot exactly say; but I should suppose that every labouring man in this valley raises as much food as would suffice for fifty or a hundred persons, fed like himself!
In taking my leave of this beautiful vale, I have to express my deep shame, as an Englishman, at beholding the general extreme poverty of those who cause this vale to produce such quantities of food and raiment. This is, I verily believe it, the worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth. Dogs and hogs and horses are treated with more civility; and as to food and lodging, how gladly would the labourers change with them! This state of things never can continue many years! By some means or other there must be an end to it; and my firm belief is that that end will be dreadful. In the meanwhile I see, and I see it with pleasure, that the common people know that they are ill used; and that they cordially, most cordially, hate those who ill-treat them.
Cobbett turned to the Bible, using the voice of Amos the prophet to excoriate the landlords who had destroyed the communities that had once occupied these valleys:
Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail, that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes. Shall not the land tremble for this; and every one mourn that dwelleth therein? I will turn your feasting into mourning, saith the Lord God, and your songs into lamentations.
Norden’s idea that community should be based on love had simply disappeared. The parliamentary enclosure movement of the previous century had eroded and, in some places, removed the last rights of the copyholders to keep their animals on what had been the common grazings. The whole idea of communality evaporated. The great landowners, the Pembrokes included, reacquired the commons and gradually removed the customary rights on them. The families that had been copyholders became landless farmworkers, dependent on the cash wages paid for their labor. What looked like an equality and even liberty in the market was in fact a form of rightlessness.
The wars with France that persisted throughout the long eighteenth century, until 1815, created a falsely inflated market, delaying the recognition of what had happened. After Waterloo, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the catastrophe struck. Prices fell, rents shrank, poverty became usual, the old families of the chalkland valleys failed, and new men entered in their place. Banks called in their loans and landlords their rents. Bankruptcies, seizures, arrests, and imprisonment for debt colored the lives of these villages. Men came to be hired for as little as a week at a time. Many farmers lost everything and even applied for the handouts from a social welfare system that had been devised in the sixteenth century and could not cope with anything resembling this. Any suggestion of continuity, of the custom of the manor, of practices observed “time out of mind” would have been laughed into oblivion. This was the world for which Arcadia was nothing but a prettiness seen from a drawing room window, which made Cobbett feel ashamed.
The presence of the free market in labor and land was nothing new. Many deeds from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries have survived describing the deals conducted by small landowners in and around Wilton. But the growing sense that the market was king—whether in land or labor—became the crucial transformation in early modern England. In the first earl’s survey made in 1567 there were twenty-one copyholders in Wilton itself and three free tenants, who could sell their land if they wished. By the time of the survey done for Philip Pembroke in 1631–1632, there were only five copyholders and twenty-two tenants “by indenture,” holding what were effectively modern leases. By 1831 there were two hugely rich farmers in Wilton, both tenants of the earl. Neither did any farmwork himself—too grand—and both relied for their riches on employed laborers. Not a single man worked his own land. That tradition and that connection had gone. Instead, Wilton had a population of 113 adult male agricultural laborers, the men whom Richard Baxter had called “the poor enslaved husbandmen of England,” and whom Cobbett saw as the “worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth.” Almost 500 of such men, rioting in the 1830s against the tithes paid to the church and the introduction of mechanical threshing machines, against the pauperization of their lives, were transported to Tasmania, with men from Wylye, Bishopstone, Bower Chalke, and Ramsbury among them. Fifteen others were hanged. In those figures, and in that conclusion, one can see the death of a communal idea.
Arcadia had been the dream of power. Only the powerful could indulge in its fantasy of wholeness, because it relied in the end on an imposition of authority. It was everything that the world of Adam Smith, and of the triumphant and beneficent market, would not approve. It was, in that sense, also the dream of illiberal beauty, of a calm and richness that emerged not because individuals had been allowed to pursue their individual ends but because they had submitted to a protective authority.
Our modern nostrils quiver and bristle at this idea. Can happiness and contentment really come from such radical limitations on individual freedoms? Can the system really be justified when so few seem to benefit in their silks and gilded rooms and so many are condemned to a life of poverty and drudgery in their small poor houses at the edges of their damp river meadows?
But look at what happened to these villages in the course of the eighteenth century, and the condition to which their inhabitants had sunk by the time Cobbett came to see them. Could one not see their fate as a justification for the earlier social system. It had of course denied rights to the individual. It had favored the coherence of the community over those rights. It had understood, in an extraordinarily modern way, the need for the ecological balance that Philip Sidney had seen in the grasses growing equally together in an Arcadian lawn.
Another question emerges from that: Was the vitality of the chalkland valley communities dependent on a powerful overlord? Or could anything resembling the vivid communal life embodied in “the custom of the manor” have survived in a system that did not depend on hierarchy and dominance? Maybe not. Communities need to obey agreed laws, and those laws need to be imposed.
This, in the end, is surely the moral of the Pembrokes and their Wiltshire valleys. They were defending their own against an encroaching state. As individuals, they were clearly fallible, corrupt, self-seeking, vacillating, irresolute, irascible, and at times less than articulate. But their story is not about individualism; it is about their joint belief in a version of the communal, in which principles both of hierarchy and of mutuality were deeply embedded. That is a strange pairing to modern minds. We think that hierarchy is bound to be domineering, and that mutuality cannot have hierarchy as one of its elements. The virtue of the Arcadianism this book has described was that, in an evolved and balanced way, it understood how to accommodate these contradictory principles.
It is important, of course, to recognize that those who were most energetic in promoting this system were those who benefited most from it. Did the poor really like the stasis and exclusion of the copyhold manor? Probably not. The eruption of popular anger and violence in the Civil War might well be seen as the expression of a rage whose origins were in generations of oppression and denial that the old system had imposed.
Nor is it likely that the elite rural idyll was something the Pembrokes’ tenants wholly subscribed to. George Herbert’s description of his parishioners as a dumb and sullen lot, scarcely dancing their way to the fields or church, must have some truth in it. Arcadianism didn’t always feel Arcadian if you were a member of the caste. Nor, importantly, were the people of these valleys unreconstructed rustics, as Herbert and others were tempted to describe them. The streets of Salisbury, until controlled and cleared by the city authorities, were as chaotic and frightening and as full of importuning and sometimes aggressive beggars as the streets of Calcutta. Much of the valley of the Nadder, to the west of the city, was busy with traffic and distinctly suburban in character by the early part of the seventeenth century.
So, for all the communal ideology, there is a divergence between the wish-fulfillment ideals of the Pembrokes and the reality of ordinary lives. The examples toward the end of this book of all the stresses and strains in the run-up to the Civil War—the seeking for market solutions to chronic poverty, the disobedience of communal laws, and the ever-present sense of violence and abuse—all that may well have occurred earlier, but the evidence has not survived. Documents from the Tudor decades are much thinner on the ground than those from the early seventeenth century, particularly the quarter sessions records, which survive in quantity only from the beginning of the reign of James I. The dream of perfection undoubtedly sheltered in its heart both a systematic limit placed on the individual and his liberties and a natural human effort to escape and resist that limitation.
It was an exploitative world: How, except by exploitation, could the earls have paid for their luxuries from the rents and fines of their copyhold tenants? But it was also a world that in its ideals and practice was alive with a sense of jointness, of a joint enterprise between the different connected parts of the social organism. It lived above all in its gatherings: at the village courts, at the masques and tournaments, at the hay harvest and the wheat harvest, at the plays in the candlelit halls, at the great funerals, and eventually at the desperate hilltop meetings during the Civil War. It is a world that has entirely disappeared, but one whose virtues disappeared with its faults.