Rural England

“ Much of the loveliness of rural England is due, one must frankly confess, to the big landlords. Though the great houses love us not, we must allow at least that the great houses have cared for the trees in the hedge-rows, and for the timber in the meadows, as well as for the covert that sheltered their pheasants, their foxes, and their gamekeepers. But almost as much of England's charm is due to individual small owners or occupiers. ”

“ I was lecturing to a crowd of East End Londoners at Toynbee Hall on village life in ancient and modern times, and showed them views of the old village street, the cottages, manor-houses, water-mills, and all the charms of rural England, and after the lecture I talked with many of the men who remembered their country homes which they had left in the days of their youth, and they all wished to go back there again, if only they could find work and had not lost the power of doing it. But the rural exodus continues. ”

“ Among all classes there has been a rush from the country to the towns; and there has been a growing tendency to regard rural England rather as a playground than as the source of the nation’s best inhabitants. This tendency has unfortunately, in my judgment at least, been fostered by a legislation which has refused to give agriculture the encouragement it requires, with the result that our villages in England almost all tell the same tale of falling population. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us suppose, as we must in that case, almost all our working population cooped up in large towns in shops and factories, and all the country thrown into large farms to provide them with corn—what an England would it then be! The poetry and the picturesque of rural life would be annihilated; the delicious cottages and gardens, the open common, and the shouting of children would vanish; the scores of sweet old-fashioned hamlets, where an humble sociality and primitive simplicity yet remain, would no more be found ”

“ Rural Scenery in Southern England.
Another marked difference between this country and most parts of ours is the extraordinary finish of the landscape, due to scantiness of forests, absence of undergrowth, thoroughness of tillage, and especially the luxuriance and smoothness of the turf. The quiet beauty of rural England has a perpetual charm. ”

“ Still more peculiar is the rural scenery of England, in the various and beautiful landscape it affords—in the undulating surface—the greenness of the enclosures—the hamlets and country churches—and the farm houses and cottages dispersed over the face of the country, instead of being congregated into villages, as in France and Italy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have no longer those picturesque villages and cottages, half buried in their garden and orchard trees; no longer those home-crofts, with their old, tall hedges; no longer rows of beehives beneath their little thatched southern sheds; those rich fields and farm-houses, [222] surrounded with wealth of corn-ricks, and herds and flocks. You have no longer that quiet and Arcadian-looking population; hedgers and ditchers, ploughmen and substantial farmers, who seem to keep through life the “peaceful tenor of their way,” in old English fulness and content. ”

“ Now the cars sped through the charming country of rural England, with its ever-changing scenes, than which there is nothing more beautiful and peaceful. Cattle browsed upon the hillocks, tiny hamlets were spotlessly neat and orderly, the 72 roads were edged with trimmed hedges, and even in the woods, where wild-plants grew, there was no débris to be found. ”

“ As I pass over her plains, I am filled with admiration of that skill and indefatigable industry which have covered them with such affluence of cattle, such exuberant grass, such depths of waving corn; as I pass by her rural halls and hamlet abodes, I find myself perpetually on classic ground, amid the homes of poets and patriots; when I enter her cities, I am struck with all their busy and swarming children, with their endless manufactures; their institutions for rebutting human evils, and raising the human character ”

“ ON every side a wail is rising over the irreparable damage that is being done to the rural England that we all claim to love. The change that has occurred is most evident to those who have not witnessed its steady progress, rapid as it has been. ”

“ Wordsworth.
We have now taken a comprehensive view of the rural life of England; of the mode in which “gentle and simple,” rich and poor, pass their life in the country; of the sports, the pastimes, the labours and various pursuits which fill up the round of rural existence; of the charms and advantages which there await the lovers of peace, of poetry, of natural beauty, and of pure thoughts: and I think it must be confessed that though other countries may boast a more brilliant climate, none can offer a more varied and attractive beauty ”

“ In rural Essex another observer finds the land [192] 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.” ”

“ The rural exodus is an alarming and very real danger to the welfare of social England. Agricultural machinery has greatly diminished the number of labourers required on a farm. Agricultural depression and the decreased value of land have caused many old country families to close their old manor-houses, as they cannot afford to live on their estates.
Let us hope that those whose happy lot it is to live in the quiet hamlets of our native land, afar from the noise and din of busy towns, will learn to love more deeply their village homes, and interest themselves in their surroundings. ”

“ With what terrible significance do these statistics plead the cause of the poor of our rural districts! Notwithstanding that a town life necessarily presents so many more opportunities for, and temptations to, vice than a rural life; notwithstanding that the associations of the latter are naturally so much purer and so much more moral than those of the former; notwithstanding the wonderfully crowded state of the great manufacturing cities of Lancashire; notwithstanding the constant influx of Irish, sailors, vagrants, beggars, and starving natives of agricultural districts of England and Wales ”

“ This, then, is a hopeful sign, and both pledge and proof of progress—that the very cottages of laboring men in England that once figured so poetically in the histories and pictures of rural life, are now being turned inside out to the scrutiny of a more enlightened and benevolent age, revealing conditions that stir up the whole community to painful sensibility and to vigorous efforts to improve them. ”

“ Instead of the solitary chateau, or baronial castle, amid dark forests, or wide unfenced plains; instead of the great landed proprietors crowding into large towns, and the very labourers huddling themselves into villages, and going, as they do, in some parts of France, seven or eight miles on asses to their daily work in the fields, the hills and valleys of England are studded all over with the dwellings of the landed gentry, and the cottages of their husbandmen. ”

“ In the rural districts a thrifty peasantry are more widely distributed over the soil, to which they are peculiarly attached, than in almost any part of Britain, and occupied for the most part in the more hopeful and less toilsome of the two branches of agriculture, namely, that of stock-breeding. Surrounded on three sides by the sea, there are ready facilities for the trader, the sailor, or the fisherman. The romantic scenery of the country is another valuable asset to its people and brings an annual and certain income that only one small corner of England can show any parallel to. ”

“ We may rather be entitled to infer that there has been a considerable change in rural economy. For the cultivation of his demesne land the lord begins to rely less and less on the labour of serfs whom he feeds, more and more upon the labour of tenants who have plots of their own and who feed themselves. ”

“ The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country, has diffused a degree of taste and elegance in rural economy that descends to the lowest class. The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment. ”

“ The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling. They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures and employments of the country. This passion seems inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural habits, and evince a tact for rural occupation. ”

“ On some parts of my journey, as we receded from the coast, the drill husbandry, the garden-like culture, and the open country entirely under tillage, resembled portions of England, especially in those districts where the rural population is confined to villages very distant from each other, and concealed from the road. The French peasants are very early risers ”

“ Farms of a score to a few hundred acres, only part of which are cultivated, form rural communities among the hills or along a river valley. Here and there a few houses cluster in village or hamlet, where each house yard has its garden patch, but the inhabitants of the village depend on other means than agriculture for a living. On the farms dairy and poultry products share with agriculture in rural importance, and no one crop constitutes an agricultural staple. In New England the villages are comparatively near together, and social life needs only prodding to produce a healthy development. ”

“ In 1893, not one-fourth, but half, the agricultural surface of England and Wales was held by 2250 persons. That is, 2250 persons owned between them 6000 of the 12,000 rural parishes of England and Wales. In our time those who say that these 2250 persons hold too much land are called robbers and revolutionaries. But the monks held in trust for the poor; and no one has ever yet had the courage to say that the great landowners hold their estates in trust for the poor. ”

“ By the enforcement of prohibitory laws, and the general reprobation of intemperance in the rural districts of New England, the moral condition of the hill farmers has been, on the whole, much improved, and their manner of life—their civilization—much advanced. ”

“ We hear little to-day about the abandoned farms of New England. In the decade past they have steadily found a market and hundreds of them have been reclaimed for summer occupancy or for suburban homes for city men. Even in rural counties where decay has been notable in many townships, there are always prosperous towns and villages, along the rivers and the railroads, where substantial prosperity will doubtless continue for many years to come. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In my earlier chapters I traced to the Industrial Revolution in England the origin of that subordination, in the English-speaking countries, of rural to urban interests which finds its expression to-day in the problem of rural life. I have shown that the continuance of the tendency in America was natural if not inevitable, and have urged that, for economic, social and political reasons, its further progress should now be stayed. ”

“ I think the extraordinary blessings and privileges of English rural life have never been sufficiently considered. It is only when we begin to count them up that we become aware of their amount, and surpassing character. ”

“ Now the porcupine and the skunk, the chimney swift and the adder are the undisputed owners of the deserted farms. The people have gone as though the plague had smitten the land, and houses, barns, fences, bridges, and well-sweeps are mouldering 214 away together. Why is it? Ask the West and the great cities, which between them have drawn the young blood from New England’s rural families, leaving the old and feeble to struggle alone with life on the hills. ”

“ It is a matter of surprise to an American first visiting England, to see the quantities of game which abound at certain seasons of the year in the London and other markets of that country, in contrast with the scanty supply, or rather no supply at all, existing in the markets of American cities. The reason for such difference is, that in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, every acre of the soil is appropriated to some profitable use, while we, from the abundance of land in America, select only the best for agricultural purposes, and let the remainder go barren and uncared for. ”