II.BEFORE THE DELUGE
IN order to understand the changes that have taken place in the English countryside during the last century or so, and in order to forecast probable future tendencies, one must first endeavour to analyse the charm of the unspoiled English village and landscape before coal and petrol began to dominate our whole life. That charm is universally admitted but not always rationally appreciated. To begin with, ruin in itself is not a worthy subject for admiration. An American critic is said to have observed to an Englishman:
“What thoughtful people your ancestors were; they not only built churches for you to worship in but ruined abbeys for you to admire.”[1]
“What thoughtful people your ancestors were; they not only built churches for you to worship in but ruined abbeys for you to admire.”[1]
The worship of ruin is a sign of decadence, though it has appeared from time to time in history for hundreds of years. There is a social, even a moral, reproach implied by the sight of a tumbledown cottage; and to the present writer’s mind a ruined church is as much inferior to a perfect church as a dead dog is to a live one. Nobody who really loves architecture can really love ruin; his admiration for the fragments of a great building only makes him wish he could see it in its original splendour. But there is a mellowness and softness that comes to a building with age, and that is a genuine æsthetic attribute. Moreover, the element of historical association is a legitimate cause for our pride in our old villages and towns, a cause by no means to be neglected in this survey. But, apart from these two factors, the charm of the English village, for our purpose, is to be judged strictly on appearances.
Up to about 1810, when the Industrial Revolution began to affect the face of England seriously, the village remained almost unaltered from its medieval state.Though its “lay-out” varied greatly according to its situation, on a hill-top or in a valley, it was generally grouped round a “green” and along the road that ran through it. The “green” was the focus of communal life, at a time when each community was inevitably far more self-contained than it is to-day. Here took place such sports as wrestling and bear-baiting, and revels and dances round the Maypole, of which a rare example survives in Otley, Yorkshire. Here too were the stocks for malefactors, the pound where stray animals were temporarily confined, the well where all water for the smaller houses had to be drawn, and perhaps a stone cross. Usually adjoining the green stood the village church, which gathered the rustic inhabitants within its ancient walls. Gray’sElegygives us the ideal picture of a country church and churchyard, but in only too many villages such an ideal was unrealised. On the village green would also be found the inn, but the heyday of the roadside inn came with the introduction of stage-coaches on the main roads in the nineteenth century. There might be a group of almshouses, butno post-office or bank and probably not a school. Down by the stream stood the mill with its great water-wheel, or if there were no stream there would be a wooden windmill such as we see on the Sussex downs. To an extent that we hardly realise, industry was self-contained in these little communities. Nearly all the simple wants of the cottagers were provided for within their own parish. The blacksmith and the carpenter, the saddler and the basket-maker, practised their crafts in every hamlet. Weaving and spinning, baking and preserving were done by the women at home. Shops were few and small, storing rather than displaying their wares. The comparatively rare goods that were brought into the place from other parts of England had to be carried on pack-horses, so that naturally they became expensive luxuries. There were no newspapers, and hardly anybody in the village—except perhaps the squire and the parson—possessed any books. All these factors, though they may not seem germane to this study, had a bearing on the outward appearance of the village. The squire, as he came to be called,was the great man of the community, for, though he himself might be the “lord of the manor,” that celebrity was more often non-resident. Hence the squire’s house, then “Manor House,” “Hall,” or whatever it was named, was a substantial building standing in a good garden, and because of its size and position it has seldom been affected by the unfortunate tendencies that have so often played havoc with cottages and barns. Barns usually adjoined the squire’s house and sometimes were attached to the rectory as “tithe barns,” for there was collected the tribute of the fields. These barns are invariably simple in design but often of great beauty, and the two qualities are not unconnected. Then there were a few other houses of medium size, and lastly the humble cottages where most of the inhabitants lived, standing close to the road with a small garden behind them. Such were the components of the old English village.
Beyond its doors was the common where the cattle grazed, and beyond that again there were common woods where the pigs picked up their food and where fuel could begathered. Then there were fields for pasturage and for cultivation, divided up into one-acre strips, of which one man might hold any number. These long strips, separated only by a foot or so of rough grass, must have resembled our modern allotments in this country and the great open fields that one sees in France and elsewhere abroad, where hedges and fences are seldom found. The system of enclosing fields within hedges did not become common until about the time of Queen Anne, so that one feature of our landscape that we rightly regard as characteristically English is comparatively modern. In many cases it is also immoral, for enclosure of common land proceeded apace during the eighteenth century.
Yet of all features of the English countryside the one that has changed most is the road. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century roads were simply open tracks through fields or over commons. They were not fenced in, their boundaries being vaguely assumed; and they were not metalled. Their condition was so bad in North Herefordshire in 1788 that they had to be levelled “bymeans of ploughs, drawn by eight or ten horses; and in this state they remained until the following autumn,” Each parish was held responsible for the “repairs” of its roads, but this process seldom involved more than a cartload of faggots or stones in the worst holes. Hence wheeled traffic was impossible. Everything and everybody had to travel through the mire, on horseback or on foot; and at a time when the population of London amounted to 700,000, its fish was coming on horseback from the Solway, and its mutton was walking up in thousands on its own legs from Scotland and Wales, disputing the road with vast droves of geese and turkeys. Such was the state of affairs up to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when turnpikes and tollbars began to take effect, but the good coaching-roads of Telford and Macadam were not constructed till the nineteenth century. Nor were bridges very common at a time when there was no wheeled traffic, for any shallow stream could be forded by a pack-horse. But such bridges as then existed were almost always a pleasure to behold.
This picture of rural England at the end of the eighteenth century is no more than a descriptive inventory of the contents of the average English village at that time. Yet everyone who knows such a village, unaltered by the march of civilisation since 1810 or so, can be relied on to say that it has an undoubted charm of its own. There is certainly no charm in an inventory, so we must now seek for the ingredients that are lacking in our list.
The first is, without doubt, the perfect harmony of Nature and art. The colours and texture of the old buildings harmonise admirably with the colours of the surrounding landscape. In some places that is due to an actual identity of material. Thus the old stone farm-houses that one sees in the Yorkshire dales are built of the same sandstone rocks that jut out from the hillside all round them. But, on the whole, that is unusual. There is no similarity between the rich red brickwork of East Anglia and anything in the surrounding earth or vegetation, nor between the Cotswold stone cottages and the green slopes on which they stand. Aftermaking all allowances for the mellowing that time produces, all we can say about this matter of colour is that old building materials seem to harmonise with their natural surroundings, whatever colours are involved and whatever may be the surroundings. That is not quite accurate. In Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales, where the prevailing colour of the landscape is in dull tones, buildings of local stone with roofs of sturdy thick local slates do undoubtedly merge into the general colour-scheme more successfully than buildings with red-tiled roofs; whereas the warmer colouring and more generous sunshine of the southern half of England allows of a greater range of tone in buildings, even assimilating the “magpie” half-timber houses of the West Midlands.
But texture, too, has a part to play. The materials used in old buildings were all “home-made”; therefore they lacked the smooth mechanical surface that is so antagonistic to Nature, and thus the very defects of their manufacture prevented any clash between nature and art. But, above all, most of these old farms and cottageswere simple, spontaneous, unsophisticated, and English. Their design and their construction were traditional, born of the soil on which they stood. The snobbery of the Victorian suburban villa was unknown to the village yokels who produced masterpieces of cottage design. The very simplicity of their “programme” was their salvation. They had to provide a dwelling-house of given size from local materials. There was no question of deciding between Welsh slates and red tiles: only one form of roofing was available locally. The rooms were shockingly low, according to our ideas, but as an external result there was a long low roof, and low eaves, all assisting to produce an unobtrusive effect attuned to the landscape. On the other hand, the fireplace and the chimney above it were large, for wood was the only fuel available, and thus bold chimneys are found externally. The windows were glazed with small panes because nobody then could make large ones.
The old-fashioned cottage, a truly beautiful thing, was the work of competent men who, generally speaking, were content to satisfya utilitarian demand without trying to create a sensation.
On the other hand there is a question that I have not yet heard asked: was there never an ambitious tradesman or tradesman’s wife in the past who wished to create an architectural sensation in the village? Surely a flamboyant half-timbered inn must have looked rather startling when first erected? And the village “highbrow” of 1750 or so who procured from an architect in the nearest town a design for a Palladian façade in the latest mode, did he not create a discord in the harmony of the village street? The answer to this compound question must be in the affirmative, but the results are less obtrusive than they would be to-day. The black and white inn would have the same proportions, the same fenestration, the same doors and chimneys, as a brick building in the same street; and the “genuine antique” façade from Palladio would become a little less exotic by the time that the village bricklayer had finished with it. The harmony and repose that characterises the old English village is mainly due to its isolation: therewas no disturbing influence from outside, no filtration of alien ideas, and no introduction of discordant materials. But the “silk” stockings and the gramophone-records that now decorate the shop-window of the village store have their counterpart in the modern architecture of the village street.
An endeavour has been made in the preceding paragraphs to picture the unspoiled English village as it appears to the ordinary intelligent observer of to-day. No attempt has been made to glorify village life, past or present. There are some people who see nothing but cause for regret in the invasion of the villages by what we call “progress,” but for the most part those people are not sons of the soil: they are either “week-enders” or people of comfortable incomes who have retired to a cottageornéamid congenial surroundings. They see and know little of the monotony that drives the young people into the towns, or of the hardships of lambing and winter work on the farms. There are other critics who say that architecture is so much a reflection of social conditions that a beautiful village could onlyhave been produced by a happy and contented people.
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’sLifewe find Johnson making fun of country manners, country conversation, and country lifegenerally, 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 hisRural Rideson 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.