The condition of England

by Charles F. G. Masterman

CHAPTER VI
THE COUNTRYSIDE

OUTSIDE this exuberant life of the cities, standing aloof from it, and with but little share in its prosperity, stands the countryside. Rural England, beyond the radius of certain favoured neighbourhoods, and apart from the specialised population which serves the necessities of the country house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life of the fields for the life of the town. A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages. In scattered feudal districts a liberal distribution of alms and of charity masquerading as employment may serve to retain a subservient population in a “model village.” When these hierarchies and generosities are absent the cottages crumble to pieces and are never repaired; no new cottages are constructed: the labourer loses not only intimacy with the land, but even all desire for the land; that longing for a particular position of his own which is the strongest animating force in the peasantry of every other country in the world. The villages are left to old men and to children, to the inert, unenterprising, and intellectually feeble. Whole ancient skilled occupations—hedging and ditching, the traditional treatment of beasts and growing things—are becoming lost arts in rural England. Behind the appearance of a feverish prosperity and adventure—motors along all the main roads, golf-courses, gamekeepers, gardeners, armies of industrious servants, excursionists, hospitable entertainment of country house-parties—we can discern the passing of a race of men.

From every region of southern England comes the same testimony. “There is no social life at all,” writes a Somerset clergyman. “A village which once fed, clothed, policed, and regulated itself cannot now dig its own wells or build its own barns. Still less can it act its own dramas, build its own church, or organise its own work and play. It is pathetically helpless in everything.” He sees no forces in being adequate to arrest this prolonged secular decline. “As things go on now,” is his forecast, “we shall have empty fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen, in all the green of England. Nomadic herds will sweep over the country, sowing, shearing, grass-cutting, reaping and binding with machines: a system which does not make for health, peace, discipline, nobleness of life.” “England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.”[13]

In rural Essex another observer finds the land becoming “one vast wilderness,” “a retreat for foxes and a shelter for conies”: with the houses tumbling into decay, no new houses built, apathy settling down like a grey cloud over all. “The sturdy sons of the village have fled; they have left behind the old men, the lame, the mentally deficient, the vicious, the born tired.” Farm buildings and cottages are rapidly going to pieces. He notes the steady increase in the agricultural returns of “Land laid down to grass.” “It would be better described,” he declares, “as land which has laid itself down to twitch and thistle.” He heaps scorn upon “those glowing patriots who, in their anxiety to build up an Empire, have been grabbing at continents and lost their own land.”[14]

And in Wiltshire, again, another observer can show the two great wants of the labourer still unsatisfied—Hope and a Home. He laments the passing of the old village gentry, who still had some sympathy and channels of communication with the labourer; and the substitution for them of the large farmer, who utterly hates and despises the class beneath him. “‘As long as a man stays on the land, he can’t call his soul his own,’ is an expression often heard among the poor.” He exhibits the striking contrast between the brother and sister: the sister who has “gone into service,” and found a demand for her work, and acquired under such conditions hope, independence, and a vigour of mind; the brother left on the fields, with the prospect before him of unchanging manual labour, at unchanging, scanty wages, until the workhouse absorbs him at the end. He shows the tragedy of the mere material collapse in the material conditions; village after village, in which no new cottages have been built for a hundred years; crumbling walls, falling into decay; crowded families, with all the starved life and degradation inevitably associated with such overcrowding; the whole presenting an aspect of fatigue and of decline. “To outsiders, who live in country villages, the wonder is not why many leave, but why any stay.” He will not agree that this is merely the normal condition of the rural population, as seen through jaundiced eyes. Once there was life in rural England. That life is vanishing like a dream. “‘Still as a slave before his lord,’ represents the attitude of the farm hand in the presence of his employer. No sheep before her shearers was ever more dumb than the milkers and carters and ploughmen at the village meetings to which their masters choose to summon them. They are cowed. It is to this that the race has come whom Froissart has described as ‘le plus périlleux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux et orgueilleux.’ Pride is dead in their souls.”[15]

This writer does not despair of revival as a result of large and drastic changes. “The monopoly of great farmers must be broken up,” he boldly declares, “before the dawn of hope can rise upon the English peasant.” He has discovered deep in the heart of the country labourer that “Love of the Land” which has survived through all the generations of hopeless drudgery. He recognises it as “a survival from the days when an able-bodied Englishman, bred on and to the land, might cherish the hope of one day calling a corner of it his own, at least as the tenant of a landlord without personal interest in the degradation of his dependants.” Here is the sole asset we possess in the work of rural revival. Parliament has been attempting by legislation to give to some select persons in the villages direct access to the land. The labourer to-day is slowly and doubtfully realising that a law has been passed which is designed to work for his benefit. The whole conception is new to him. “Law” he has hitherto regarded as something remote or inimical, symbolised by the village policeman, or the magistrates who penalise poaching and petty larceny. Those who made themselves missionaries of the new Act in the villages found everywhere this first incredulity. They announced the decree of Government that henceforth the first charge on the land should be the allotment or small holding; that nothing was to stand in the way of the provision of such holding when it was desired; that, if necessary by compulsion, the claims of sport, the claims of pleasure, the ambitions of the large farmer adding field to field, the prejudice or caprice of those who dislike the creation of these small plots and gardens, were to be made to yield to the primary necessity of finding land for the landless. The labourer was silent, astonished, doubtful, wondering if this was a new trick designed for his disadvantage. There were meetings at night, to which men came furtively; suggestions that one is a “spy,” and dogged silence until he has departed; doubt as to what Mr. A. (the landlord) would think of it, or whether Mr. B. (the farmer) would dispossess all those who apply for land, or if Mr. C. (the vicar) would be inclined to look favourably on the affair. The stirring and the movement for a time seemed real; far more real than many had ventured to hope for when the Act was passing through Parliament. But the rather cumbrous machinery is difficult to put into operation, and the future is still uncertain. If the Parish Councils and County Councils and Central Commissioners prove adequate to the situation, they may yet reveal life where there now is little but death, and a transformation of England’s deserted countryside. If the difficulties are insuperable or action too long delayed, with Councils embarking upon one experiment chosen from ten applications, postponing for months or years any energetic action; there will be no vocal protest, and few who cannot look beneath the surface will realise what has happened. The serene life of rural England, viewed from the country house or city observatory, will continue undisturbed. There will be no revolution, red flags, open riots, rick-burning. But the people will quietly melt away, into the cities, beyond the sea. The last of the Sibylline Books will have been flung into the flames.

What this vanishing life signifies, in its strength and in its weaknesses, can only be revealed to those who through months and years have made it the subject of sympathetic study. The landlord, the farmer, the clergyman, the newspaper correspondent primed with casual conversation in the village inn, think that they know the labourer. They probably know nothing whatever about him. With his limited vocabulary, with his racial distrust of the stranger, and all of another class, with a mind which maintains such reticence except in moments of overpowering emotion, that labourer stands, a perplexing enigmatic figure alone in a voluble, self-analysing world. In certain sympathetic studies he is revealed in his strength and his weakness, by those who are able to get behind much that is superficially unattractive to the solid endurance and courage and helpfulness beneath it all.

In his Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, Mr. “George Bourne” has presented an illuminating picture of an old man who himself stands for the last relic of a vanishing race. He has collected and treasured the sayings of “Bettesworth” as he passes slowly downward in the day’s decline; remarks trivial or commonplace, worldly wisdom, strange superstitions, acceptance of the sunshine, bewilderment before the hostile forces of the world. There are years passed in almost daily intercourse before his master discovers that Bettesworth had once fought through the Crimean war. That experience had made no permanent impression of horror or of pride. The events of the day, which influence men’s passions in some mobile, distant universe, filter down into this quiet country like the noise of something far away. And the South African War, and the death of the Queen, and a General Election scarcely do more than ripple the surface of these deep waters. Of more importance is the untimely summer rain which ruins the harvest, dispossession from a cottage, the illness of a wife, the calamity of advancing age. The heroic patience and endurance of the labourer is here revealed, in face of accepted and inevitable change. He resists the embraces of the workhouse with that dogged despair with which the English rural poor have resisted the “Bastilles” since their foundation. He clings to life and its possible activities, continuing his work, suffering and half blind, meeting death when it comes as the poor have usually met it, without hope and without fear; his mind at the end with the past rather than with the future. The Pagan remains, and refuses to be silenced by the long centuries of Christian tradition. There is scepticism concerning “these here places nobody ever bin to an’ come back again to tell we.” “Nobody don’t know nothin’ about it. ’Tain’t as if they come back to tell ye. There’s my father what bin dead this forty year, what a crool man he must be not to’ve come back in all that time, if he was able, an’ tell me about it. That’s what I said to Colonel Sadler. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you had better talk to the Vicar.’ ‘Vicar?’ I says; ‘he won’t talk to me. Besides, what do he know about it more’n anybody else?’”

He is seen moving into his squalid cottage, and refusing to be dislodged from his lair: resisting, to the death, the services of the efficient poor law infirmary or the suggestion of Hospital kindliness. He had a theory that “bread never ought to be no less than a shillin’ a gallon” if farmers were to prosper: but on hearing of the new “fiscal reform,” “Oh dear!” is his comment, “we don’t want no taxes on food.” In war-time he is on the side of “our country,” and has a subtle explanation of the report of “missing” in the newspapers. “Prisoners—or else burnt.” “They burns ’em, some says.” He enjoys his life to the end; despising, so long as is possible, the forces of ill-health, advancing old age, weariness; exhibiting in circumstances of bereavement and squalid misery the astonishing endurance and clinging to life which is found amongst the rural poor of England. “During the last year or two of his life he was seldom without pain. He could joke about his passing indispositions as he could defy his landlord. A neighbour looking in upon him, and seeing his serious condition, said genially, ‘You ben’t goin’ to die, be ye, Freddy?’ And he answered, ‘I dunno. Shouldn’t care if I do. ’Tis a poor feller as can’t make up his mind to die once. If we had to die two or three times, then there might be something to fret about.’” Later, he adds more seriously, “But nobody dunno when, that’s the best of it.”

The author recounts, with a poignant simplicity, the incidents of the old man’s death: in hot July weather, with the year at the summit of riotous life, and every element in nature taunting the impotence of humanity before the triumphant forces of destruction. “He is dying,” was the thought at the end, “without any suspicion that any one could think of him with admiration and reverence.” His race is perishing in similar ignorance, unhonoured and unsung: without a suspicion that “any one could think of it with admiration and reverence.” The agricultural labourer survived the intolerable conditions of the early century when his life was one impossible struggle against penury and starvation. He stands to-day for a moment, an old man in a crumbling home, the last of a long line of high tradition and heritage. He stands to-day without successors: occupying the region of his ancestors, which they had peopled since England first was: which they had maintained, with no ignoble life, through the transitory centuries.