Peter Hall on ordinary life in an ordinary village

Foxton is a small village in South Cambridgeshire. I lived near it for years, yet it means no more to me than a level-crossing heralding journey's end: Cambridge. To reach the village, you must turn off the A10. Without Rowland Parker's years of study and understanding, it would not be worth the effort*.

Mr Parker went to live in Foxton in 1946. He is now sixty-two and retired from teaching. He has spent his years on a meticulous examination of the village — its buildings, manorial records, wills, litigations, archaeological remains, the detritus of its history. From the details, he is able to describe Foxton during the last 2,000 years. It is an amazing task, amazingly carried out.

Time is a great fascinator. It is also a great frightener. A child looking at the apparent eternity of his life may hope to experience a great deal, even to change things a little. There is a chill when he contemplates the inevitability of his death; but it passes. He is not yet part of history. The man soon realises his insignificance. He also perhaps understands that he can change very little. Time easily mocks his pretensions.

Mr Parker's book will be very popular. While you read it, time is defeated. Two thousand years of ordinary life in an ordinary village provide the reader with a sense of time that belongs properly not to a man, but to a god. Or at least to a very superior schoolmaster.

The book gives another pleasure: the excitement which comes from watching a craftsman complete an improbable task supremely well. No codicil to a will, no marks upon a floor-board escape Mr Parker's scrutiny. He builds up his speculations with the glee of a master detective. And like all great amateurs — those who love what they do — he is rewarded by amazing luck. For instance, he found the Shepreth gem. It seems that when Queen Boadicea's rebellious tribesmen sacked the local Roman villa, one of their number stole a beautiful seal-stone. He wanted the valuable golden ring, not the Roman image. So he prised the stone from its setting and threw it in the cess pit. Nineteen hundred years later, Rowland Parker found it.

Foxton is situated on a tiny tributary of the River Rhee. Since 1873, the stream has been .dry, for in that year a public-spirited Canon Selwyn supplied the village with pumps. The water was appropriated and the villagers turned away from their stream. The ditch was soon overgrown, and full of rabbits. So ended centuries of effort to develop a community spirit in unthinking individuals:

1492. John Everard, butcher, allowed his dunghill to drain into the common stream of this village . . . fined 4d.

A hundred years later, the concern is the same:

No man shall lett out there sesterns or other synkes untill eight of the clock at night.

But they still did. Manorial law in Foxton was always more honoured in the breach than the observance.

Perhaps Mr Parker's most remarkable discovery is that Foxton's stream was made not by nature but by man. Sixth-century Saxons delved and re-routed water to make a Common Stream four feet deep and some 2,250 yards long. It fixed the position of Foxton for ever. But the book has another common stream: the life of ordinary men. "Human nature does not change very much, if at all," says Parker. Through the years, the squabbles over stealing a few inches of common land, or the tortuous attempts in a man's will to prevent his widow from marrying again demonstrate clearly that

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boorish self-interest endures, whatever fashion in religion or morality. /A village's history is usually told by its lords. Here there is 1 a genuine attempt to allow the labourers a hearing, the men who normally stay out of history.

Their lives throughout the centuries were cold, painful, hungry and over-worked. Mr Parker brings out very well that only in the last few decades has village life been acceptable on a simple animal level. Before then, for most of the time and for most of the people, life was brutish and deprived. Mr Parker is happily no romantic: "I am fairly clear in my mind on two points: firstly that a community spirit cannot exist without real community of interest; secondly that it cannot manifest itself except under compulsion • • One of the risks inherent in this discussion that of confusing 'community' with 'equality. There has never, so far as I can judge, been anything like equality of wealth, status or condition in the community. The nearest approach to it was probably in the, earliest phase of all, and each succeeding phase has seen an ever-widening gap." I like this tone. He is a sceptical radical, believing in no millenium, knowing that the proper study of mankind has to be man, if we are to understand our natural selfishness. The archetypal Foxtonian is obviously much to Mr Parker's liking: "Very little evidence has survived as to the political sympathies of the local populace. . . Such evidence as does exist suggests that the bulk of them were anti' Establishment. If they were pro-anything, they were pro-themselves." Sometimes he becomes too jocular, too much the man outside it all, understanding the quirks and foibles of the other ranks. But it is the price of his enthusiasm; and it is better to be patronising than nostalgic. It is as difficult to write about the English village without beillg sentimental as it is to photograph the green fields of England without being indulgentlY romantic. The beauty of the landscape does"! easily reveal the hearts and the backs that hay' been broken in making it. The village is dead: the motor car has killed Villages are now suburbs or dormitories. We _a, go anywhere, at almost any time. So w„'" romanticise the village now. We yearn for stable society where we know a hundre'b people, rather than the thousand that we Ill, shoulders with each day in a modern city. 13,?„" the village was a prison (unless you were Inc",, enough to be the squire or the parson), 7 treadmill of work with no hope of improventerl or advancement throughout the ages; only Of, exceptional left, the few who derived strenO,P, from their discontent. The rest were apathe?4 living from day to day. But now, says 1'4 Parker, "As a collection of individuals, til., village population never before had such a" easy comfortable life." So he is on the side of progress and in fav°11/s. of today. It may be sad that the old barnhae been demolished, but it is good that people !rer healthier, warmer, better informed. Whetilto they are better in the moral sense, he leaves .% others. But I think he believes them 'hapPie_,1 Those in power are less indifferent to ordina% men; and ordinary men live in less pain and not habitually go hungry.

• e n

This book is very fair in its use of eviu s,

Read it, and see how good the 'good old daY could really be.

Peter Hall, Director of the National Theatre' has recently produced Akenfield