Two More County Books
Hertfordshire. By Sir William Beach Thomas. (Robert Hale. ISO Dorset. By Eric Benfield. (Robert Hale. Iss.) HAD Sir William Beach Thomas been unable for one reason or another to undertakthe formidable task of memorising and musing about the county he-has already endeared to us over a long period of years, the publishers of this admirable series might well have been in despair. By residence, intimacy, maturity of knowledge and style and catholicity of.interest he is unique in the kind of ecological relation with which-he stands to Hertfordsire. His very grace of manner as a writer, seasoned, classical, allusive, urbane and humanistic, is perfectly adapted for a county which is deep in history, rich in manorial dignity and of a quietistic and domestic culture in its small towns, embowered villages, secretive lanes and winding waterways. Sir William is so familiar with his theme, having it by heart in the dual sense, that he can afford to be discursive about it, to wander at will from places to persons, from agriculture to natural history, from hornbeams to homesteads, from inns to mansions and from literature to topography with the sinuosity of his own river Lea.
It is the very serenity of his informal perambulations about the county which offers the sharpest criticism to the planners' plotting in " development " with which he is forced to deal. What has made his task so much more exacting than it would have been a score of years ago is this new wholly external mentality which carves owl new or satellite towns upon a county which has taken on so mellow a patina from time, as Alexander carved out provinces for his generals. Hertfordshire finds itself turned from an association of homes, great and small, to a beleaguered citadel, and much of this chronicle is perforce elegiac. The occupational forces have even routed the very fish in his beloved Lea. Sir William does not shrink from the lists, for he has been a tban'of affairs as well as a scholar and ruralist. But there is pain in this book as well as the happy mood handed down to him from Isaak Walton, Lamb, Fuller and even Cobbett, who put aside his Ihiinders to brandish his joy in the fertility of Hertfordshire for mill and malthouse. For all its meanderings the book is as comprehensive as though it had been worked out on a series of six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, and the map at the end of it, the one blot on its otherwise impeccable equipment, does ill-justice to the text. I was particularly interested in Sir William's disclosures about the obsolete straw- plaiting industry of the county, for 1 possess sixteen patterns of Essex plaits with the plaiting-mill and splitting-engine used by a dame of ninety-one, and yet have never been able to gather any information from villagers about this craft. In his rewarding dis- courses about the noble trees of his county, Sir William speaks of " the still unexplained habit of planting yews by churches." It seems that the antiquity of the sacred yew goes behind that of the Druidical and Dardanian oak, and Dr. Vaughan Cornish has elicited (and the twelfth-century Book of Llandaff confirms him) that the space between the churchyard yew and the church-porch was a sanctuary for refugees as inviolable as within the church. I must confess myself rather nonplussed by Mt. Benfield's record of Dorset. Dorset is a county of such extraordinary variety and opulence in landscape, geology, architecture and historical tradition that to devote a third of a book of 230 pages to .the Monmouth rebellion and its aftermath (as much Somerset's as Dorset's) and some a priori arguments about Maiden Castle hardly appeared a judicious economy of space. But I need not have wondered how the author was to cover his ground since he makes no attempt at all to do so. " It is not for me to speak more for one part than another with regard to the touchy subject of beauty " is an odd confession for a county writer Of the Dorset churches all we hear is: " Is there so very much difference in placing flowers on a stone altar in a St. Mary's to putting them on a Standing Stone ? " Of neither the vernacular architecture nor the diverse range of country manors do we hear a word, and, except for Dorchester, the towns and villages are virtually given a miss. Topography shares their fate.
Mr. Benfield drifts along talking about anything that comes into his head, with Dorset too often only an incidental background and sometimes not even that. Nor is he by any means always accurate when he does talk about his native county. Dorset, for instance, has two famous breeds of sheep, not one, and Poundbury is Danish, not pre-Roman. Blandford he dismisses as entirely lacking in the " charm of real old streets and houses," and it is hardly illuminating of the Dynasts to say that it " does not come off at all." Nor is the count against Hardy one of " pessimism " but of an inartistic Darwinian accidentalism that makes hay of his plots. Mr. Benfield is interesting about the Purbeck marblers and stone-workers, but as he has " nothing to say " about Hardy as a poet, so he has very little to say about Dorset as a county. H. J. MASSINGHAM.
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