Peter Quince
I read the other day that Parson Woodforde's parish in Norfolk is to be ' rationalised,' if that is the appropriate term. In other words the living, which has been vacant for several months since the last Rector died, is not to be filled; instead the village of Weston Longueville is to be joined with a number of other places and entrusted to a 'team ministry.' It is not for me to criticise the ways in which the Established Church goes about its business. All the same, the news struck me as being sad. I am not, at the moment, concerned about the spiritual welfare of the inhabitants of that tranquil corner of Norfolk. What I find melancholy is the severance, in this small act of modernisation, of yet another link with England's rural past, and a link in this case with a delightful person who belonged to that past.
Anyone who wishes to understand the evolution of English country life needs to make the acquaintenance of Parson Woodforde. He kept his diary, in copious detail, for forty-nine years, the last twenty-six of which (from 1776 to 1802) he spent as the resident incumbent of Weston. His great-great-great-nephew, a Somerset doctor, made the manuscript available for publication early in the present century. It fills five volumes (even after abridgement) and it is quite simply one of the great diaries in the language.
I suppose there is less self-revelation in it than is to be found in Pepys. Instead there is a marvellously close and detailed picture of the village scene of the time. Woodforde led a placid enough bachelor life. He did once propose marriage to a young lady, but she jilted him in favour of a man of wealth; thereafter he settled down comfortably to celibacy, sharing his parsonage with a niece who seems to have ben a rather jolly and vivacious girl. Apart from a few adventurous expeditions to London and the West Country, his parish was his world.
I have often thought that the eighteenth century country parson, if he had the right inclinations, occupied one of the most agreeable of niches in our social history. Woodforde's diary certainly supports this view (as, in a different way, do the writings of that other country clergyman, the Rev Gilbert White). Woodforde was not a naturalist in the sense that White was one; he simply took great pleasure in the daily round among the fields and woods of Norfolk and the modest social life of his village. Evidently it was a contented community. The poor were, to our minds, appallingly poor; the fortunate few were, conversely, remarkably comfortable; yet they all seemed to rub along together harmoniously.
Thus, the Parson was even tacitly included in the smuggling network which, illicitly, warded off the worst pains of the excisemen. He also brewed his own Strong Beer, farmed his land, coursed his hounds, and regularly feasted with his neighbours, a group of whom dined together every Monday. And how well they did themselves, the lucky ones in Old England! For instance: "We had for Dinner some Pyke and fred Soals, a nice Piece of boiled Beef, Ham and a couple of Fowls, Peas and Beans, a green Goose roasted, Gooseberry Pies, Currant Tarts &c!'
Along with such plenty went domestic austerities which most people today would find acute. (" The Frost severer than ever in the night, as it even froze the Chamber Pots under the Beds.") Nevertheless one's impression is of a cheeerful and goodtempered rural life. The village was a genuinely organic community, and although it was obviously firmly hierarchical, it is also portrayed as essentially friendly. The old Parson seems to have been as happy giving a Christmas feast for poor old men in the parish as when dining with his smarter friends.
This, of course, is a lingering strand in village life even today, when so much has been changed. The labourer in his council house and the landowner in his Georgian manor are far more likely to be on easy social terms than their urban equivalents. I visited Weston not long ago and was sorry to find that Woodforde's parsonage no longer existed (although the fine Perpendicular church still stands, in a landscape he would have recognised). It may be irrational, but I am even sorrier that henceforth there is to be no Parson either, and that the continuity with that scrupulously-recorded fragment of rural history has been broken.
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