Sons of the soil
J. W. M. THOMPSON
The Farm and the Village George Ewart Evans (Faber 21s) A sense of urgency is not usually thought of as part of a historian's necessary equipment. The past, after all, will not go away; its records are more systematically preserved than ever before and even tend to proliferate as a result of modern investigations. The student can work at leisure, illuminating some corner of history -and leaving what he cannot tackle to others who come later. Mr George Ewart Evans is a social historian of a rather different pattern. His admirable books all derive from his ob- servation, when living in a secluded Suffolk village after the last war, that the older country people around him were the last surviving wit- nesses of a completed era. They belonged to a rural culture which had extended in unbroken line at least since the early Middle Ages, and which possessed innumerable direct links with much earlier times, but which had been wholly extinguished in their lifetimes.
This led him into what has become a thriving growth area in historical studies, the investiga- tion of this lately vanished culture and the extinct organic community of the English country. village. And although in the process he has naturally made use of the documentary Material, the particular merit of his work is the extent to which he has drawn upon the oral evidence of the dwindling number of survivors —the last members of the last generation to know from personal experience what life was like on the farms and in the villages of England through the centuries. Hence his need for some sense of urgency; for an unexcavatecl archaeolo- gical site after waiting in the soil for perhaps a couple of thousand years will not suffer from the neglect of a few more, whereas the sort of knowledge waiting to be taken down from the old is always on the brink of extinction.
Mr Evans writes lucidly, he never senti- mentalises, and he has a scholarly regard for accurate detail. Over the years, therefore, his writings have presented an elegant and exact picture of the departed society which he has -studied, and his latest book, The Farm and the Village, maintains his standards although on a smaller scale. His territory is East Anglia, but he can awaken a sense of the past in other parts of England. He is encyclopaedic, for ex- ample, about the precise nature of the wOrk imposed by the old farming upon its huge labour force, with their hand-tools which had often been evolved two or three thousand years ago and had scarcely changed thereafter. Broad- cast sowing of the seed as in the biblical
parable; cutting the corn with a sickle which descended directly from the prehistoric imple- ments fashioned out of flint and bone; thresh- ing with a wooden flail as introduced by the Romans; cutting thistles with a hook unaltered from those to be seen in a fourteenth century, psalter—all these tasks were performed by English farm labourers within living memory. Mr Evans has pieced together the fading details of their work.
• In his -account of it he constantly reports some pleasant minor discovery. He notes a link, for instance, between hand-threshing and the change-ringing of -village church bells: A group of ringers would go to work as a team on the gruelling task of threshing in the barn, and would ease the monotony by beating out the-grain with the intricate rhythms which they practised on the bell-ropes. Again, when making the crucial decision as to whether the soil had gained- enough warmth from the spring sun to germinate seed, extreme delicacy of appraisal was required; many pre-scientific farmers, he learns, went into their fields, took down their trousers and sat bare on the seed-bed to make absolutely sure the land was warm enough for barley. How sad if this fundamental bit of farming know-how had escaped history's net! And he is frequently able to authenticate a point from literature. Old men have told him how the harvest was packed down tightly as it was being brought into the barn. A boy on a quiet old horse would ride round and round upon the heaped corn, trampling it down and rising higher and higher until the horse and rider reached the roof; then they would be lowered to the floor by a rope thrown over a tie-beam. When Mr Evans first described this circus-like procedure he met some scepticism. In his new book he quotes as supporting evi- dence a description of the technique from Robert Bloomfield's eighteenth century auto- biographical poem, The Farmer's Boy.
But the old farming meant much more than a collection of almost-forgotten working methods. As his findings testify, it created a kind of unified, very nearly self-sufficient com- munity which has no parallel today. Practically every human need, from working tools to clothes or food or furniture, was supplied from within the village. Recently I came across a sixty-year-old county directory and looked up an East Anglian village which I know well; the miniature army of craftsmen and tradesmen listed there could, and did, supply the villagers' wants from the cradle to the grave. The same village today, still in a thriving farming district, supports only a handful of suppliers of goods imported from outside, plus a couple of shops selling antiques. The internal combustion engine, in addition to closing the door on mil- lennia of farming history, has atomised the life of the farming villages.
It is a great merit of such' studies as these that they help to clarify the, changes still in helter-skelter progress in rural life, and also to place them in perspective. Thus, Mr Evans notes that the prospect of extinction which the present-day small farmer faces as a result of the still-evolving pressures of mechanised agriculture faithfully repeats the predicament of the small farmer wben the Saxons introduced the 'carruca,' the heavy plough with which the clay lands were first brought under corn. This sophisticated piece of farm gear was expensive (because it contained a lot of iron and needed at least six oxen to draw it) and was beyond the reach of the small man. Common owner- ship was essential, and strip-farming in the open field became a stark necessity. In much the same way, he argues, the small farmer of today will have to resort increasingly to co-operative methods or disappear. But above all; Mr Evans's merit is that he makes clear and interesting the human background against which the whole of English history, until the day before yesterday at least, must be imagined if it is to be seen with truth.
Previous page
