The Age of Elegance (21 page)

with their beautiful houses—Georgian, Queen Anne, Tudor and Gothic—the romantic eaves and latticed windows of the old, and the classical cornices and pediments of the new, the broad high streets with driven cattle and unbrellaed market tables, the fine trees casting their shade over garden walls, the pillared market-halls, the criers with scarlet coats and bells proclaiming the news. Such towns crowned nearly a thousand years of unbroken civilisation. From their upper windows one looked across gardens to fields, woods and clear rivers whose waters carried trout and crayfish. "One of those pretty, clean, unstenched and unconfined places/' Cobbett called Huntingdon, "that tend to lengthen life and make it happy." At Winchester, when Keats stayed there in 1819, nothing ever seemed to be happening in the still, cobbled streets; nothing but the sound of birds in the gardens, the echoing, unhurrying footsteps of passers-by, the roll of market carts flooding in or out of the city with the tides of the encircling shire. Everywhere, as one travelled this rich, ancient land, one saw the continuity and natural growth of a community that had never known invasion and where the new, not confined as on the Continent by fortifications, had been free to develop without destroying the old. At Norwich, capital like York and Exeter not of a shire but of a province, the city was grouped round an episcopal tower, a Norman castle and a vast market square from whose stalls poured that abundance of foodstuffs which so astonished the German, Meidinger. "The most curious specimen at. present extant of the genuine old English town," Borrow called it, "with its venerable houses, its numerous gardens, its thrice twelve churches, its mighty mound." Farington was impressed by the universally neat appearance of the houses; he could not recollect any other town with such an air of being inhabited by people in good circumstances.

The first thing that struck every visitor to England was her beauty. It derived from her exquisite turf and foliage and soft, aqueous atmosphere: what Leigh Hunt, pining among the Apennines for the buttercup meadows and elms of the vale of Hampstead, called the grassy balm of his native fields. Everywhere was the sense of peace, wealth and security: the avenues of huge elms, the leafy Middlesex landscape, the great trees on Hampstead's airy height, the blue horizons, the farmhouses of beautifully fashioned brick and stone, the pastoral Thames still set, as Horace Walpole had pictured it, amid enamelled meadows and filigree hedges, with brightly-painted barges, solemn as Exchequer ba
rons, moving slowly up to Rich
mond or down to Syon, the sculptured, classical bridges, the wayside alehouses with placid drinkers under their spreading oaks aiid chestnuts, the old grey churches and barns, the ghostly trees in the evening twilight, the drinking cattle and homing rooks, the mystery and the mist.

Though England's forests had long been shorn to feed her fleets and furnaces, the sense of fine trees remained all-pervading. She was still, as Constable painted her, carpeted with her native hard-woods, which gave moisture to her soil, shade to her cattle and depth and rriystery to every horizon. From the terrace at Richmond, or from Harrow hill, one looked across a vast plain from which trees rose in endless waves of blue. Every commentator dwelt on the same phenomenon: the great oaks, the hedgerows of elm and ash, the forest trees scattered about the meadows. Cobbett, stumbling for the first time on the Hampshire hangars, sat motionless on his horse, gazing down on that mighty flood spilling into every valley. In Sherwood Forest avenues stretched for miles in every direction, the solitude broken only by the whirring of partridges and pheasants. Cranborne Chase in Dorset had still nearly ten thousand deer; Windsor Forest, Burnham Beeches and Epping, close to the capital, almost as many. In the Berkshire woodlands south of Reading, Mary Mitford described the forest-like closeness—a labyrinth of woody lanes, crossroads and cartways leading up and down hill to farmhouses buried in leaves and wreathed to their clustered chimneys with vines, and little enclosures so closely set with growing timber as to resemble forest glades. One could scarcely peep, she wrote, through the leaves.
¹

Probably at no period was England so beautiful. Man had everywhere civilised nature without over-exploiting and spoiling it. The great landscape-painters and water colourists of the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth are the testimony to its inspiration. Gainsborough, Morland, de Wint,

¹
Mitford,
Our Village,
74-5, 115;
Cranbourn Chase, passim;
Grote,
passim;
West, II, 51; Cobbett, I, 10, 25, 53, 57-9, 91-2, 121; Bamford, II, 98, 338; Cundall,
Bygone Richmond;
Edlin's
Woodland Crafts in Britain;
Howitt, 366-92; Simond, I, 16, 150-3, 201, 335; II, 98, 103, 150-3, 230, 255, 282;
Old Oak,
2-3; De Selincourt, II, 886; Raumer, III, 136-7; Varley. Raumer thought that, though England might not be the richest land in forests, she seemed the most abounding in trees. Clapham, I, 9-12.

Farington, Cozens, Rowlandson, Crome, Cotmah, Girtin, Turner, Bonington and Constable, the Suffolk miller's son who revolutionised European painting, all sprang from that countryside. So did the poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats—who were not isolated phenomena but men inheriting, though in expression they transcended, the common feelings of their countrymen. Even in the unlovely manufacturing towns the English carried the memory of their landscape with them; Cooper, the Chartist leader, thanked God in old age that he was still familiar with the name of every English flower.
¹
Cobbett, who prided himself on being a plain man with no nonsense about him, travelling from Redbourne to Chesham described how in every field the haymakers had left a closely-mown strip between the hedgerow and the corn; "this," he wrote, "is most beautiful. The hedges are full of shepherd's rose, honeysuckles and all sorts of wild flowers, so that you are upon a grass walk with this most beautiful of all flower-gardens and shrubberies on your on
e hand and with the corn on the
other. And thus you go on from field to field, the sort of corn, the sort of underwood and timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the hedgerows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of pleasure-grounds, indeed! What that man ever invented under the name of pleasure-grounds can equal these fields in Hertfordshire?"

This landscape was constantly being enriched. It was ditched, hoed and hedged to an extent elsewhere unknown. Stacks over forty feet high, meticulously finished and roofed with straw, barns built to outlast the centuries, outhouses, windmills and watermills which were miracles of fine workmanship, sturdy gates and fences made by men who were masters of their craft, were the commonplaces of the English scene. The thrifty and loving use of nature's resources and the spirit of active and methodical enterprise seemed almost universal. "The white farms . , . the well-stocked rickyards behind," wrote Mary Mitford, "tell of comfort and order."

Yet every shire, every parish, differed in its farming methods, being cultivated in the way which soil, climate and immemorial experience had proved best. Every district had its particular abundance,

¹
"I was invariably on the hills or in the lanes or woods or by the Trent by sunrise. I often stood to gaze down the vista of a wood or upon some feature of beauty in a landscape with a thrill of joyous feeling that I could not have defined." Cooper, 61. See also Bamford,
i,
85.

the bleak lands as well as the fine. From sandy Norfolk came the enormous turkeys—"the grand Norfolkian holocaust" that at Christmas smoked round Elia's nostrils from a thousand firesides. The stony fields round Bridport were blue with hemp and flax. Salisbury Plain and the Dorset uplands were cropped and fertilised by immense flocks of sheep: "it is the extensive downs in its vicinage," explained the Weymouth guide-book, "which produces the sweetest herbage and gives a peculiarly fine flavour to the mutton." And all over England the folded sheep, fed from the turnip-root, made it possible to grow good crops on marginal lands otherwise too light to bear them: on the Wiltshire downs Cobbett counted four thousand hurdled on a single acre.

The golden creed of "Hoof and Horn," use and return, was the firm and, as it seemed, unalterable base of the country's wealth. The meadows that fed the suckling ewes and lambs in spring yielded hay by midsummer; and, when the corn was cut, the stubble kept the pigs. A Yorkshire squarson—for the very priests were farmers— recorded as the crown of a holiday tour the spectacle of a hundred and twenty shorthorns tethered and fed where they stood in open sheds on successive crops of vetch, mown grass, clover and tares from fields manured by the straw they had soiled. The yields of such rotational agriculture, judged by the standards of other lands, were amazing. The Isle of Wight, with its fine wheat crops, pastures stocked with Alderneys and downs bearing vast flocks of sheep, grew seven times more than its inhabitants consumed. At Milton in the Vale of Pewsey, where three thousand five hundred acres produced annually three thousand quarters of wheat and six thousand of barley and the wool of seven thousand sheep, as well as eggs, milk and poultry, Cobbett reckoned that every labourer raised enough food to support from fifty to a hundred persons.

Necessity acted as a spur. A fast-rising population, which, through medical advances, had doubled in a century, and which for a generation had been cut off by war from foreign supplies, needed ever more grain, meat and ale and was prepared to pay for it. Landlords and farmers, sowing root crops and clovers, liming, marling and draining, carrying the plough and hurdled sheep to the hills, reclaiming moor and marsh, breeding ever fatter livestock, and pursuing husbandry as a high science, had obtained from the soil the utmost output of which it was capab
le. The productivity of Norfolk
doubled in two decades, largely through the genius of one of its squires, Coke of Holkham, who, working in a smock-frock like a labourer, first taught himself to farm and then taught his tenants. The heaths to the west of London, the haunt from time immemorial of highwaymen, were turned into the finest market gardens. New methods were constantly being tried; horses superseded oxen in the plough, thrashing machines the flail, and drills' broadca
st sowing, turnips and swedes eli
minated the bare fallow of the past and fed the livestock in winter. "Everyone," wrote a foreigner, "has planted or is planting his thousands or millions of timber trees, has his flocks, talks of turnips, cloves and lucerne, drains and enclosures.'' Scott took greater pride in his compositions for manure than in his literary ones and boasted that his oaks would outlast his laurels.
¹

This wonderful performance was achieved by organic farming without injury to the capital of the soil. Its object was not to seize the maximum profit from sales against costs in the minimum time, but to secure over the years the highest possible increase from soil, plant and beast. The goal was the productive fertility of the land rather than the immediate saleability of particular crops in relation to wage-costs: output per acre instead of output per wage-earner. The farming was multi-, never mono-, cultural, and much of the all-pervading plenty arose from by-products like the snow-white ducks of the Vale of Aylesbury. "Whenever cows are kept, so must pigs," wrote a country gentleman, "or the profit of buttermilk and whey will be lost." The beautiful thatched roofs of the cottages and barns were made from the combed straw left over by the threshers. When timber was cut, a temporary shed was erected round it so that every piece could be worked for the exact purpose for which it was suited, without leaving a splinter on the ground.
²

All this abundance, though directed by landlords and farmers applying the knowledge gleaned fro
m the great agricultural experi
merits of the past three generations,

¹
Bewick, 8, 155; Clapham, I, 15-19; Lord Coleridge, 223-4; Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
I, 19-21, 24; Grote, I, 19-21, 24; Eland, 50, 64; Ernie, 190-223, 225;
Hamilton of Dalzell,
MS, 151-6; Howitt, 125; Lockhart, IV, 263-4; V, 133; Mitford,
Our Village,
104-5; Newton, 185-8;
Paget Brothers,
271-2; Simond, I, 181-2, 330-1; II, 75-6, 223, 291; Smart, 138-50; Wansey, 22.

²
See Bamford, II, 21, 260; Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
I, 49. 87-9, 108; II, 363-6;
Cranbourn Chase,
47, 65-7; Daniel, VII, 36; Edlin; Eland, 97
-IOI;
Fowler, 241; Grote, 21; Howitt, 109-11:
Boy’
s Country Book,
89-90; Lamb, VI, 480; Mitford,
Our Village,
32; Newton, 184-5, 195;
Paget Brothers,
180-1; Lady Shelley, I, 38; Simond, I, 13,170-1, 195. 206, 209, 216, 239, 330-2; II, 54, 72, 75-6, 242, 245, 291;
Sea Bathing Places,
504.

was founded on the plentiful labour of an hereditary race of husbandmen bred in the cumulative lore of centuries. In a single field in East Lothian a traveller counted forty-eight reapers; near Bury St. Edmunds he saw ten ploughs turning at the same hedge. In haymaking time squads of labourers moved from tract to tract, leaving the fields cleared behind them, the mowers going before with their scythes, the haymakers following. There were gangs of boys to pull the charlock and keep the land clean, and women to pick stones, weed, reap and glean. Few complained of their hours of labour or the aches they suffered for the enrichment of others and the support of their country: their heart was in the land they served, and their pride in their strength and skill.