InfoBritain

 

A History of English Villages

English villages are known throughout the world for their beauty. But what makes them attractive, and how did they develop as they have?

Although generalisation is difficult, it can be said that most English villages were founded at the time of Anglo Saxon settlement, and in the early Middle Ages, between 700 and 1300AD. The Saxons, unlike the Romans who they superceded, were not an urban people. Once the Romans left early in the fifth century, their cities and towns were abandoned, to be replaced by rural settlements. These eventually became villages. Most villages were laid out to a regular plan. The original focus of a village was usually a church, since this had been the main money earning establishment for the lord of the manor. Ten percent of villagers' earnings had to go to the lord for church upkeep, and money was also charged for burials. Quite soon, however, churches were sidelined in favour of a village green, which as a market place, became the new economic focus of the village. The wealth of a local lord still tended to go into the church, but the green was where money was made. Village form then remained fairly settled until the huge shake up that was to occur after 1348 with the Black Death. Bubonic plague decimated populations. Houses and their plots were left vacant. Some villages disappeared completely, but in those where people survived, plots were merged. In general the original regular layouts were loosened. ( See Tracing The History of Villages by Trevor Yorke)

 

Medieval open field system at Rhossili Bay , Gower.

A second great period of change came in the early seventeenth century when enclosures began. A revolution was occurring in agriculture. Tools were improving and techniques were becoming more streamlined. As part of this development the practice of farming scattered strips of land was brought to an end. Scattered holdings were enclosed so that landowners had a block of land in one place. Many smaller landowners were dispossessed. The pace of these changes accelerated towards the nineteenth century, and many people now landless either emigrated, or tried to find work in newly industrialised towns and cities. Back in the village it no longer made sense for farmers' houses to be gathered together. When the village had held a central location amidst many scattered strips of land it had been a convenient place to live. Now farmers moved into new buildings on their enclosed farms. The village houses were left to the landless labourers, and in time became the sought after country homes that we see today. In the nineteenth century the new landless labourers suffered great privation, and early forms of trade union organisation are found amongst agricultural workers in Dorset. See the Tolpuddle Martyrs for more information.

The old open field system of farming survives in only one small location in Britain, at the Vile, Rhossili Bay, on the Gower Peninsula in south Wales. The site is owned by the National Trust, which now acts as landlord, renting out strips to local farmers.

 

A Cottage in Selborne

By the time of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution villages had lost their central position in English life. A few model villages were built around water powered cotton mills - such as Richard Arkwright's Cromford in Derbyshire, Jedediah Strutt's Belper in Derbyshire, Samuel Greg's Bollington in Cheshire, and David Dale's New Lanark in southern Scotland. In the nineteenth century there were also villages built around paper mills dotted along the river Loose in Kent. But for the vast majority of people home was now the industrial towns. Many might regret the passing of village life, and see an urban society as opening the way for social problems. In reality it seems that for most of the nineteenth century unrest virtually never involved the new urban working class. The people who turned to violence during the nineteenth century were small scale industrialists such as handloom weavers who had been left behind by the pace of change; or agricultural workers in the south and east of the country. This latter group faced a precarious life working for farmers. They were more poorly paid than their counterparts in the towns, and their life would not be one that a factory worker would envy. This of course did not stop people looking back fondly at the age of the village. William Cobbett wrote his famous Rural Rides in the 1820s as he rode around the villages of southern England, just at the time when they were falling into decay. Idealistic industrialists such as George Cadbury and William Hesketh Lever tried to recreate the past at Bournville and Port Sunlight. Great Tew in Oxfordshire, which has all the appearance of timeless charm, was largely built by nineteenth century lords, who laid out the green, and surrounded it with new or rebuilt houses with a common rustic architectural theme. Selborne in Hampshire, where Gilbert White wrote his classic Natural History of Selborne, became an icon of lost village life in England. Selborne had been involved in rural riots, so we can be confident that life there was as difficult as it was in most rural areas. Yet only a couple of years after the riots, a journalist from the New Monthly Magazine visited the village and chose not to see such problems. Instead he presented the traditional idealised picture: "Chimneys reeking with evidence of clean hearths in full activity, walls neatly covered with vine and creepers, in full bloom, and trim little gardens prank'd with flowers, seemed here to tell only of cheerful toil and decent competence." (New Monthly Magazine Dec 1830: Quoted in Gilbert White by Richard Mabey)

 

Clovelly

Like Selborne, the ancient village of Clovelly in north Devon became in the nineteenth century a similar icon of a more innocent past. Tourist steamers would bring thousands of visitors in from Ilfracombe and south Wales. The image, inevitably, could not correspond to reality. The popular Victorian writer Charles Kingsley lived in Clovelly as a child and loved Clovelly, which is not surprising for such a beautiful place; but he could also be realistic about life there. In one of his most famous poems, The Three Fishers, Kingsley wrote about a fishing tragedy out in Bideford Bay. Three young fishermen leave for their day's work, waved off by wives and girlfriends, but they are drowned in a storm. The village seems cold in its attitude to the deaths: "Men must work and women must weep." Life grinds on. People came to Clovelly in the nineteenth century to escape the grind of the Industrial Revolution, but in reality fishing, Clovelly's industry, was a tough business like any other. And so was tourism. The idea of Clovelly as a survival from a better, more community minded age was still being played on in an information film I saw at the visitors centre. Personally when I visited, I preferred listening to a recording of The Three Fishers in Charles Kingsley's house. Kingsley gave me the feeling that he loved a real place, and not an idealised place.

 

 

 

Groombridge, Kent/Sussex border - note the identically coloured front doors, typical of an estate village

The idealisation of villages had been going on for some time. Since the sixteenth century the gentry had stopped spending their money building churches, and now concentrated on building impressive mansions and gardens. Villages were often built, or rebuilt, as attractive accessories to an estate. Nuneham Courtney in Oxfordshire is an example. The rebuilt village became a picturesque introduction to the estate itself. Estate villages are now amongst the most attractive in the country, although many who visit are unaware of their comparatively recent origins. The houses of such villages have a satisfyingly uniform architecture, and if they are still part of an estate, they can even have front doors all painted the same colour. Dumbleton, near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, and Woburn in Bedfordshire are both estate villages. Groombridge village on the border of Kent and Sussex was part of the Groombridge estate, the village rebuilt in the eighteenth century by William Camfield, owner of Groombridge Place. The remains of Upper Eddington can be seen at Ettington Park, a village moved by the Shirley family of Ettington when they enclosed the parkland surrounding their manor house in 1795. (The Shirley Manor house is now a luxury hotel,and accommodation can be booked through InfoBritain.) Lord Ragnor remodelled the Oxfordshire village of Coleshill in the mid nineteenth century, a village still run as an estate, with the National Trust as landlord. The National Trust is also landlord of the estate village of Lacock in Wiltshire. Perhaps the most famous estate village of all is Clovelly - unlike most estate villages Clovelly is genuinely ancient, and has been owned by only three families since the Norman Conquest.

The nineteenth century Irish MP Feargus O'Connor wanted to do more than simply recreate quaint villages. He pledged to recreate the village system in its entirety. After losing his parliamentary seat in 1835, due to a rule requiring a certain level of land ownership, he had joined the Chartists, a radical working class organisation. In 1845 O'Connor launched his Chartist Land Plan, a scheme to buy large estates, and provide tenants with three or four acres of land and a cottage. This plan to resurrect old England failed miserably, and O'Connor ended his days in an asylum. Some of his cottages remain however, and can be seen at Snigs End and Lowbands near Staunton in Gloucestershire. They remain as testimony to an attempt to hold onto the past. But the past had gone. The age of villages had passed.

Life in Britain today is primarily urban, and thousands of villages have been lost. The village remains as a kind of idyll of better days gone by. We might know that this image is misleading, and we might tell ourselves that only the best houses of the wealthy have survived, which skews our modern appreciation of village life. Nevertheless villages continue to represent communities which we feel have been lost in the fast moving, often impersonal world in which we live. Villages in their very make-up seem to lend themselves to playing this role. And this goes beyond the simple fact that villages are small settlements. It has been noted that the layout of villages typically tends to shut out the outside world. A village will usually try to present a "closed vista", where an observer is prevented from seeing right through the village to the countryside beyond. This gives a sense of shelter from what Eric S.Wood in Historical Britain terms the "emptiness outside." Irregular placing of buildings and the use of bends in the road achieve this effect.

 

 

Leigh, Kent - a bend in the road closing in a village

Leigh in Kent is a good example of the use of a bend in the road. Entering Leigh from the east on the B2027, your view of the village is blocked by trees, and by a church built on the bend. You drive through here as though you were passing through a gateway. This is an unofficial gateway to the village. In 2007 there was a debate about how to mark the entrance to London, how to make people feel they were actually in the city. Various markers on roads were discussed. This problem does not present itself with a village like Leigh, where there is a natural gateway to the village.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leigh Green

Going round the curve the green opens up in front of you, and you are very much "in" the village. All lines of sight to the countryside beyond are blocked. This picture was taken beside Leigh green, and looks back towards the bend in the previous picture. Notice how the view is completely obscured by trees. The road curves away out of sight, after coming through the natural entrance described above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Hill Shaftesbury

Some villages use the lie of the land to close the view, so that the only line of sight is inward. Loose in Kent, Groombridge on the Kent/Sussex border, and Finchingfield in Essex are good examples, all built in natural bowls. Clovelly is built on a steep slope, as is Coleshill. Sometimes the view is closed by an impressive building. At this point I have to disagree with Eric Wood who suggests that all the visual effects of villages are designed to hide the world beyond. Ironically when the view is closed by a major building, an equal and opposite effect can also be achieved, in the way the grandeur of the highlighted building is exaggerated. Churches are often used to block lines of sight, and within the small confines of a limited view church spires fly higher into a bigger sky. Axbridge in Somerset, and Tenterden in Kent are two of the many villages which illustrate this. Restrictive visual effects, through a sense of contrast, can emphasise space. This can be seen at the famous location of Gold Hill in Shaftesbury in Dorset where the small world of a street on a hill contrasts with the great view out beyond the rooftops. Perhaps the attractiveness of this combination is only natural. People want security, but they want freedom too. The big desires that carried people beyond the village are there along with a desire for life to continue as it always had.

 

 

 

Tenterden, Kent - St Mildred's church closes the view, while also carrying the eye upward and outward

 

Villages represent a desire to find a place where everyone knows your name. But people have always been restless. The conclusion I have come to, whilst sitting in quiet village tea shops, is that the same features revealing a desire for security, also reveal a desire to escape into a bigger world.