It is a question whether such a village is, or ever has been, specially attractive to the eyes of its inhabitants, if indeed they have the ability to consider such things at all. Admiration for the beauty of the countryside seems to be a very modern cult, if we are to take our great writers as typical of their time, though in fact they were usually ahead of their time. Scott, Wordsworth, and other poets of that period certainly saw something in it, but prior to their day there is little evidence that even cultured men noticed anything worthy of comment in the English landscape or the English village. There are exceptions of course, and we find evidence of love of the English countryside even in the work of so classical a writer as Milton, and later in the poems and letters of Cowper. But probably Dr. Johnson is typical of eighteenth-century men of letters. He declined a country living on one occasion, and in several passages of Boswell’s Life we find Johnson making fun of country manners, country conversation, and country life generally, while of landscape and of the beauty of the English village he has little to say. William Cobbett, writing a century ago, is so obsessed with indignation about agricultural poverty and the iniquities of the governing class, that he seldom comments in his Rural Rides on the charm of a village. Sandwich is “as villainous a hole as one could wish to see,” Cirencester “a pretty nice town,” and so is Tonbridge. But he waxes furious about some of the tumbledown cottages that modern well-fed tourists would call “picturesque,” and he regards the barrenness of the New Forest as a blot on our civilisation. Cobbett provides a very good antidote to an over-sentimental view of country life.
III
KING COAL (1810-1910)
THE “Industrial Revolution” that changed the face of a large part of England is generally stated to have commenced about 1770, when machinery began to displace hand-labour and so drove the workers out of their homes into factories. About the same time came the construction of canals connecting the chief waterways and centres of population, and the slow improvement of the roads. But none of these important changes greatly affected the outward appearance of our villages until about forty years later, when, as the title of this chapter indicates, the steam-engine replaced the water-wheel in the factories, and when coal began to make its influence felt all over the country. Simultaneously there grew up a system of macadamised roads and stage-coaches, which gave place in thirty or forty years to railways. For a century coal was the dominant factor in English life, but since 1910 petrol has played the main part in altering the aspect of the countryside.
Meanwhile, of course, minor causes have always been in operation. The progressive enclosure of common land and the gradual grouping of the old one-acre holdings into large hedged fields continued all through the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of violent agitation by Cobbett. Whatever may have been the arguments in favour of enclosure, the inevitable effect on village life was to squeeze the small man out of existence and to perpetuate the big farm employing workers at starvation wages. Poverty stalked through the little cottages, many of which were unfit for human habitation. The cruel game-laws did not prevent the rapid increase of poaching, and the woods were sprinkled with man-traps and spring-guns, which sometimes claimed a gamekeeper for victim instead of a poacher.
And, while economic conditions were rapidly abolishing the old self-supporting village community, changes in the means of transport brought machine-made goods to its doors, thus destroying at one blow the independence of the village craftsman and the rustic character of village architecture. Too scattered, too cowed, and too poor to organise a successful revolt, many of the villagers found their consolation in the little barn-like chapels erected by the Primitive Methodists and other Nonconformist bodies in the early part of the century. Usually severe and uncompromising, often ugly, these buildings represented a revolt against the partnership of squire and parson with its iron grip on village life. The dignified brick meeting-houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of another type, the flamboyant Gothic chapel of Victorian days had not been conceived, but the village Bethel of 1810 or so is a standing witness to the cottager’s grievance against the ruling class of his day. Very little cottage-building was done, for though the population was increasing very fast, it was migrating from country to town in order to be near the new factories.
The network of canals that spread over England between 1760 and 1830 or so did not greatly influence the appearance of the countryside, though their numerous lockhouses and bridges have the merit of severe simplicity. But the system of new roads introduced by Telford and Macadam early in the nineteenth century had an immediate and far-reaching effect. With them we enter on the brief but glorious coaching-period, which holds such a grip on the English imagination that it still dictates the design of our Christmas cards. The “old-fashioned Christmas” that has been such a godsend to artists implies unlimited snow, holly, mistletoe, and plum-pudding, with the steaming horses standing in the inn yard and the red-nosed driver ogling the barmaid. Dickens made the most of it in literature, Hugh Thomson and Cecil Aldin in art. For the stage-coach immediately enlivened every village and town lying on the great highways. The roadside inn came into its own, but after some forty crowded years of glorious life declined again until the motor-car provided it with a new lease of prosperity, or at any rate until the cult of the bicycle gave it a fillip.
The influence of railways on the appearance of the countryside has been mainly indirect, in the sense of having destroyed the isolation of villages and hamlets and with it the local characteristics that they possessed. For example, the use of purple Welsh slates was almost unknown outside Wales up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they came into common use, for though their colour and texture is unpleasing, they are relatively cheap and can be fixed on lightly constructed roofs. So first canals and then railways combined with factories to spread machine-made goods all over the country. Otherwise the railway has not greatly defaced the landscape as a whole, for there are still large tracts of country where one can be out of sight and sound of it, and it is not so ubiquitous as the modern motor-car. Many village railway-stations and cottages are inoffensively designed, and in the “stone” districts of England are usually built of local materials, but their appearance suffers as a rule from the dead hand of central and standardised control. The habit of erecting enormous hoardings in the fields bordering a railway must go far back into the nineteenth century. Presumably these eyesores have some object in view beyond merely annoying the traveller and defacing the landscape, but certainly they must come up for consideration in the last chapter of this essay.
Two hundred years ago, even more recently than that, the populous and prosperous parts of England were East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and some neighbouring counties. Agriculture, sheep-farming, and the wool trade formed the main source of wealth: and the only notable exception was the iron industry of the Weald, where a sufficiency of wood fuel was available for smelting. Between 1750 and 1850 the great northward trek took place, and King Coal became supreme. He ruined an appreciable part of Yorkshire and Lancashire, smeared his ugly fingers over mountain valleys in South Wales and elsewhere, created the “Black Country” in his own image, and last of all produced the terrible blot that we call the “Potteries,” where the whole landscape looks like a bad dream.
The most hideous nightmare-panorama that comes to my mind is a scene of utter desolation not far from Etruria (a singularly inappropriate name), in Staffordshire, where slagheaps, collieries, blast-furnaces, potbanks and smoke dispute the foreground. Yet an old print that I saw in Messrs. Wedgwood’s adjoining works proves that less than two hundred years ago this was unspoiled country. From that time onwards, the northern half of England became the national workshop, and a large part of southern England became a private garden. At the present moment half the total population of England is concentrated in five comparatively small districts: “Greater” London, South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the “Black Country” and Tyneside.
Examples of the early factories built towards the end of the eighteenth century are to be found in the beautiful valley above Stroud, and in many wild and lonely dales among the Pennine hills. They stand beside fast-running streams which at first provided the necessary power, but before long the steam-engine replaced the earlier method, and a tall chimney was one immediate result. Smoke, of course, was another. Yet so many of these old “mills” still survive that we can study their architecture. There are mills in the Stroud Valley admirably designed in the Georgian manner, with well-proportioned windows divided into small panes, stone-slated roofs, and stone walls, innocent of soot and now golden with time. Built of local materials, they harmonise well with their surroundings. The same may be said of a few Yorkshire mills, though for the most part they have been blackened with smoke and are more austere. Standing by some deserted building of this type, its great wheel disused and its windows broken, in a lonely valley with only the noise of the stream audible, one always thinks of the machine-breakers in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, a grim incident of the countryman’s fight against progress.