The English Village Explained: Britain’s Living History (7 page)

The farmer surveying his smart new farmhouse and fields in 1800 would be looking forward to a prosperous future, while some of those working his lands were scraping around for a living. The village was no longer the centre of an agricultural system, but a home for those who provided services for it. In the final period these services would become fused into the trades and their specialised buildings which we associate with the traditional village, only for the social and economic changes of the 20th century to transform them once again
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Industry and the Modern Age

  1800–2000
  

FIG 5.1:
In the modern age the term village has become more flexible with developments like this garden suburb near Liverpool taking on the characteristics of a rural settlement with a green and cottage-style houses. This chapter looks at the new types of village which have appeared in the past 200 years, the social and physical alterations which occurred in existing ones and the changes which are still ongoing today
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R
ural life in the first half of the 19th century was often tumultuous as the effects of war with France and continued industrialisation resulted in changes to farming and to village life. The reforms of the 1830s and beyond, beginning with the reform of Parliament in 1832,
probably saved England from spiralling into the revolutionary fever which had spread across mainland Europe, and during Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) the country became the world’s first industrial nation. Villages, in this new age of the British Empire, were increasingly being affected by international events and industrial developments as the world grew smaller.

Virtually no village community escaped the massacre of the First World War, 1914–1918, and memorial crosses record the names of the young men who lost their lives, affecting a whole generation from labourers up to aristocrats. The loss of these male heirs, the agricultural depression, increased taxation, and the fixing of rents during the war resulted in a great sell off of many country estates from the 1920s.

FIG 5.2:
Estate villages were still being built in the early and mid Victorian period with cottages like these examples at Ilam, Staffs, having a distinctly pointed Gothic appearance and a wealth of vernacular materials and details
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The decline of rural industries and the mechanisation of agriculture, especially after the Second World War, saw the numbers of those who worked on the land fall in the 20th century, although some of this was offset by new businesses which developed where good transport links existed. However, just as some villages began to contract in size, waves of ‘invaders’ from the towns and cities came seeking their rural idyll away from the noise and pollution of the urban environment. At first it was the middle classes at the turn of the 20th century, and then the working classes in the 1930s who found that their shorter working hours gave them time for leisure. Inspired by romantic images of timeless, rustic villages they poured into the countryside which a few generations before had been seen as backward and unappealing. Many of these people made the move a permanent one, saving some villages from physical decline but at the same time bringing different expectations and a different way of life, a change which is still ongoing to this day.

The enclosure movement continued up until the middle of the 19th century, creating a network of new, more efficient farms linked to an increasing worldwide market. This system had been tested during the Napoleonic Wars when agriculture had to feed a nation deprived of imported food by the blockades of foreign ports. The artificially high prices which resulted were maintained after the war by the
Corn Law Act of 1815 which intended to protect the income of the landowners by imposing duties on imported grain, ruling out cheaper competition from abroad. As a result, the poor suffered from the high price of bread, and this, coupled with an excess labour force and the effects of enclosure, increased the exodus to the cities and although farming was still labour-intensive, the total numbers working the land fell.

The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 did not immediately flood the market with the cheap imports that the landowners and farmers feared, instead for a time they entered a period referred to as the Golden Age of High Farming. Around villages all over the country substantial Victorian brick and stone farmsteads record this time of prosperity, with new buildings for livestock, grain storage and machinery. In the 1870s, however, huge quantities of grain from America and Canada flooded onto the market, transported by larger, faster shipping, and from 1879 the price of corn fell. New advances in refrigeration also affected the livestock producers as cheaper meat could now be imported from as far away as New Zealand.

The resulting Agricultural Depression was to last into the early 1900s and had a long-term effect on village life. There was a continuing drop in the numbers of people working the fields, especially among the younger generation, many of whom left agriculture for new careers, while the drop in rents reduced incomes to the owners of the estates. The decline and decay which set in was recorded in paintings and photographs, inadvertently creating an image of charming, rusticated villages which in part triggered the love affair the urban classes were to have with rural life throughout the 20th century.

Not everyone saw decline in this period of general rural economic gloom. The rapidly increasing urban population benefited from higher wages and could afford a more diverse diet. Fresh meat, fruit and vegetables could now be delivered to towns and cities by railway and those farmers who could adapt, turned their land over to market gardening, greenhouses,
orchards and pasture to satisfy this demand for fresh produce. Small fishing communities suddenly grew into villages and towns as trains and refrigeration meant their catches could reach a national rather than just a local market, and tourism created a lucrative second industry. In upland regions, though, sheep and cattle farming continued as it had done for millennia, still structured around the family unit and small hamlets. The only intrusion of technology here was the railway which opened up new markets to them and encouraged the farmers to take over more land up in the hills. In other parts of the country farmers went into specialised production. For instance in Kent, hops were grown, dried in the distinctive oast houses and then sold for beer production.

FIG 5.3:
A graph showing the numbers working in agriculture at the top of the yellow block and the population of rural communities at the top of the orange block, against the booming urban population marked by the thick line rising up from the left
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In the early 1900s Great Britain imported more grain than it produced and starvation was only avoided in wartime by the efforts of the farming industry to increase output. The subsidies offered by central government since then were designed to ensure we could feed ourselves in the future. This encouraged farmers to plough more land, use pesticides, grub up hedges to make larger fields more suitable for the new tractors and machinery and this in turn further reduced the need for labour. Membership of the European Economic Community has also had its effect on the way land is managed. Two hundred years ago the vast majority of villagers worked the land, while today the farm hands who survive are more likely to be outnumbered by commuters, business people and the retired. Agriculture has shaped the countryside since the first Neolithic farmers 6,000 years ago but now the rural economy is more influenced by tourism and leisure, and it is the fortunes of these industries which have the greater effect on many villages.

FIG 5.4 CLEY-NEXT-THE-SEA, NORFOLK:
There was great change in this period along the coastal regions. This former port which had moved in the 17th century (an example of settlement movement still marked by the lonely church further inland) was by the 1840s losing trade to neighbouring Blakeney, who in turn lost out by 1900 to larger towns. Fishing settlements grew as the railways meant catches could reach urban areas still fresh and many villages developed into vibrant coastal towns while cheaper train tickets in the late Victorian period brought more visitors and encouraged others to grow into major seaside resorts
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The development or decline of villages in the 19th and 20th centuries depended upon a number of factors: the success of farms and local industries and their ability to adapt to rapidly changing markets, the presence of a railway and good roads, the close proximity to a town or city, and the benevolent actions of landlords, local government and other groups. Some maintained population levels or grew due to the above factors while others even as late as the mid 20th century, declined and were in exceptional circumstances deserted because they were not in such a fortunate position.