Rusticus

Part 1

RUSTICUS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

For the Contents of this Series see the end of the Book.

RUSTICUS

THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRYSIDE

BY MARTIN S. BRIGGS

Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis.

Horace, Epist. I, i, 42

LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

In the Heel of Italy. 1910.

Baroque Architecture. 1913.

Through Egypt in War-time. 1918.

Muhammadan Architecture in Egypt and Palestine. 1924.

A Short History of the Building Crafts. 1925.

The Architect in History. (in the Press)

Made and Printed in Great Britain by

THE BOWERING PRESS, PLYMOUTH.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. “SO THIS IS ENGLAND!” 7

II. BEFORE THE DELUGE 12

III. KING COAL (c. 1810-1910) 26

IV. THE AGE OF PETROL (c. 1910 onwards) 46

V. THE FUTURE 61

SOME ADDRESSES 95

“SO THIS IS ENGLAND!”

On every side a wail is rising over the irreparable damage that is being done to the rural England that we all claim to love. The change that has occurred is most evident to those who have not witnessed its steady progress, rapid as it has been. To realise what has happened, let us put ourselves in the place of an Englishman who is now returning home after a sojourn of twenty years in some remote Eastern outpost of our Empire. Imagine him as a sensitive observer like Doughty or Kinglake, a man who has learned to appreciate the savage beauty of the Arabian desert, the very antithesis of his own land. But now at last the sand has eaten into his soul, and he is longing to see the English countryside that he remembers so well. He thinks of small green fields, of little grey churches with rooks cawing among the elms, of running water, even of grey skies, in fact of everything that is most characteristically English. There is nothing in our poetry that better describes this England than Kipling’s “Sussex,” and Kipling knew all about the East.

Part 2

Our traveller lands at Folkestone eagerly anticipating his journey through Kent, and, in order to see as much as possible of hedgerows and villages and fields on the way up to London, he charters a motor-car. There is something rather daring, to his mind, in this business of the car; on his last visit to England in 1907 cars were not entirely unknown, but there was then a touch of novelty about them. His driver gingerly threads his way up from the harbour through a maze of hooting charabancs and yelping Fords, with several hairbreadth escapes which make the traveller wish himself back on his lurching camel. But soon Folkestone is left behind, and he settles down to a contemplation of the number-plate of the car in front, while the fumes of its exhaust mingle with those of his own Corona. He expects to find some changes in the aspect of England, but then of course there was the Town-Planning Act in 1909, so that nothing very unpleasant need be feared, and at any rate one misses the East Kent Coalfield by coming this way. The road is very wide and very straight; there is no dust. A small lighthouse with black and white sides, crowned by a red lamp busily blinking in broad daylight, indicates a cross-roads. Yes, this new route avoids the streets of Sandgate and Hythe, which must be very crowded in these days, but the wire fences are a poor substitute for green hedges. And these terrible petrol-stations every few yards with their glaring red and yellow pumps are very trying to the eyes. Still there are some old landmarks left: the hoardings are bigger than ever, and some of them bear the familiar legends of Edwardian days.

He looks forward to passing through Lenham, Charing, and Harrietsham--three beautiful villages on the main road--but as each is approached his car swerves along the new racing-track and thus avoids the village High Street, rejoining the old main road, widened beyond recognition, a little farther on. He passes through a great cutting gashed through the chalk. Felled trees lie by the road, old walls are pulled down, all bends are straightened out, everything is cleared away to allow the cars and charabancs to roar through the countryside. But is it countryside any longer? More than anything else in this nightmare drive he is impressed by the New Architecture, which appears to consist mainly of bungalows.

The bungalow as he knew it in the East was a large, low, cool, white building surrounded by verandahs, as un-English in appearance as anything could be. But these bungalows are quite different, and seem to be thrown haphazard all over the place, along the main roads for miles beyond every town. Shoddy, ugly, vulgar shacks they are, recalling to his mind some of the worst aspects of life in the Middle West as depicted on the films. The materials of which they are constructed are cheap and nasty. Round each bungalow is a collection of smaller shacks, where the Baby Austin and the chickens live; and in place of embowering trees he sees a jungle of wireless poles and clothes-props. Untidiness, vulgarity, Americanism, discord of colouring and form, seem to have invaded every village through which he passes.

Nor is this change confined to roads and buildings. The whole character of the villages is altered. Smocks and sunbonnets have gone for ever, and with them most of the old village crafts. The blacksmith’s day is done. Artificial-silk leg-wear and gramophone-records fill the windows of the village store, a blatant cinema has appeared next door, and most people do their shopping in London.

So this is England!

II.

BEFORE THE DELUGE

In order to understand the changes that have taken place in the English countryside during the last century or so, and in order to forecast probable future tendencies, one must first endeavour to analyse the charm of the unspoiled English village and landscape before coal and petrol began to dominate our whole life. That charm is universally admitted but not always rationally appreciated. To begin with, ruin in itself is not a worthy subject for admiration. An American critic is said to have observed to an Englishman:

“What thoughtful people your ancestors were; they not only built churches for you to worship in but ruined abbeys for you to admire.”

The worship of ruin is a sign of decadence, though it has appeared from time to time in history for hundreds of years. There is a social, even a moral, reproach implied by the sight of a tumbledown cottage; and to the present writer’s mind a ruined church is as much inferior to a perfect church as a dead dog is to a live one. Nobody who really loves architecture can really love ruin; his admiration for the fragments of a great building only makes him wish he could see it in its original splendour. But there is a mellowness and softness that comes to a building with age, and that is a genuine æsthetic attribute. Moreover, the element of historical association is a legitimate cause for our pride in our old villages and towns, a cause by no means to be neglected in this survey. But, apart from these two factors, the charm of the English village, for our purpose, is to be judged strictly on appearances.

Up to about 1810, when the Industrial Revolution began to affect the face of England seriously, the village remained almost unaltered from its medieval state. Though its “lay-out” varied greatly according to its situation, on a hill-top or in a valley, it was generally grouped round a “green” and along the road that ran through it. The “green” was the focus of communal life, at a time when each community was inevitably far more self-contained than it is to-day. Here took place such sports as wrestling and bear-baiting, and revels and dances round the Maypole, of which a rare example survives in Otley, Yorkshire. Here too were the stocks for malefactors, the pound where stray animals were temporarily confined, the well where all water for the smaller houses had to be drawn, and perhaps a stone cross. Usually adjoining the green stood the village church, which gathered the rustic inhabitants within its ancient walls. Gray’s Elegy gives us the ideal picture of a country church and churchyard, but in only too many villages such an ideal was unrealised. On the village green would also be found the inn, but the heyday of the roadside inn came with the introduction of stage-coaches on the main roads in the nineteenth century. There might be a group of almshouses, but no post-office or bank and probably not a school. Down by the stream stood the mill with its great water-wheel, or if there were no stream there would be a wooden windmill such as we see on the Sussex downs. To an extent that we hardly realise, industry was self-contained in these little communities. Nearly all the simple wants of the cottagers were provided for within their own parish. The blacksmith and the carpenter, the saddler and the basket-maker, practised their crafts in every hamlet. Weaving and spinning, baking and preserving were done by the women at home. Shops were few and small, storing rather than displaying their wares. The comparatively rare goods that were brought into the place from other parts of England had to be carried on pack-horses, so that naturally they became expensive luxuries. There were no newspapers, and hardly anybody in the village--except perhaps the squire and the parson--possessed any books. All these factors, though they may not seem germane to this study, had a bearing on the outward appearance of the village. The squire, as he came to be called, was the great man of the community, for, though he himself might be the “lord of the manor,” that celebrity was more often non-resident. Hence the squire’s house, then “Manor House,” “Hall,” or whatever it was named, was a substantial building standing in a good garden, and because of its size and position it has seldom been affected by the unfortunate tendencies that have so often played havoc with cottages and barns. Barns usually adjoined the squire’s house and sometimes were attached to the rectory as “tithe barns,” for there was collected the tribute of the fields. These barns are invariably simple in design but often of great beauty, and the two qualities are not unconnected. Then there were a few other houses of medium size, and lastly the humble cottages where most of the inhabitants lived, standing close to the road with a small garden behind them. Such were the components of the old English village.

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