• in the critique of immoral elites; of laissez-faire economic policies; and of authoritarianism and bureaucratisation;
• in the valuation of local family or community ties and solidarities; of the moral and intellectual life, culture, “common sense” of the people; and of bottom-up government;
• in the idea that a historical culture is of the utmost importance for both intellectual and political life; and that such history has to centre on the experiences, practices and perspectives of the people;
• … tell me if you think of anything else!

• in the respective definitions of “the people” and of “the elite“;
• in the description and evaluation of social hierarchies and relationships between social groups (are they depicted as reciprocal and consensual? oppressive and antagonistic?);
• in the way of conceiving and evaluating relations within social communities; in the description and evaluation of gender relations and the gender order;
• in the description and respective valuation of town- and country-life;
• in the way of understanding and valuing different religious practices and beliefs, and, in relation to these, different scientific practices and beliefs;
• in the understanding and evaluation of civic and political rights;
• in the (explicit or implicit) depictions of a desirable future;
• in the mode of selection and integration of popular voices within historical discourse;
• … tell me if you think of anything else!

It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent, though upon a sort of challenge, to write even a popular essay in English history, who make no pretence to particular scholarship and am merely a member of the public. The answer is that I know just enough to know one thing: that a history from the standpoint of a member of the public has not been written.
What we call the popular histories should rather be called the anti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without exception, written against the people; and in them the populace is either ignored or elaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true that Green called his book ‘A Short History of the English People’; but he seems to have thought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. For instance, he calls one very large part of his story ‘Puritan England’. But England never was Puritan.
The revolution in human society between the first of the Crusades [11th century] and the last of the Tudors [16th century] was immeasurably more colossal and complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all, that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how our populace gained great things, but today has lost everything.
Strangely enough, the calling of subsequent English history by the sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect (and to discover) that it is not true.

G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England, 1917

The soul of savagery is slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms. The only escape is by doing what the mediævals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family.
If the English really attempt that, the English have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry it through if they will.
If they do not do so, if they continue to move only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt from Germany, there is nothing before us but the Servile State.

G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England, 1917

Chapter 1. English Society Before and After the Coming of Industry

At the beginning of the 17th century, a London bakery was undoubtedly what we should call a commercial or even an industrial undertaking. Yet the business was carried on in the house of the baker himself. It is obvious that all these 13 or 14 people (the baker, his wife, 4 paid employees who were called journeymen, 2 apprentices, 2 maidservants, and the 3 or 4 children of the master baker) ate in the house since the cost of their food helped to determine the production cost of the bread. Except for the journeymen they were all obliged to sleep in the house at night and live together as a family.
The only word used at that time to describe such a group of people was ‘family’. The man at the head of the group, the entrepreneur, the employer, or the manager, was then known as the master or head of the family. He was father to some of its members and in place of father to the rest. There was no sharp distinction between his domestic and his economic function. At that time the family was not one society only but three societies fused together; the society of man and wife, of parents and children and of master and servant. Apprentices were workers who were also children, extra sons or extra daughters. The sons and daughters of the house were workers too.
Few persons in the old world ever found themselves in groups larger than family groups, and there were few families of more than a dozen members. In fact, we can take the bakery to represent the upper limit in size and scale of the group in which ordinary people lived and worked. Among the great mass of society which cultivated the land, the family group was smaller than a London craftsman’s entourage. The ordinary person, especially the female, never went to a gathering larger than could assemble in an ordinary house except when going to church.
Everything physical was on the human scale. No object in England was larger than London Bridge or St Paul’s Cathedral.
And when we turn from London to the immensity of rural England, we encounter something similar. To every farm there was a family, which spread itself over its portion of the village lands as the family of the master-craftsman filled out his manufactory.

It is hard to imagine oneself back into that lost social and economic world where the family group was the almost unique site of economic production as well of human reproduction. We may see at once that the world we have lost, as I have chosen to call it, was no paradise or golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness. But if it is legitimate to use the words exploitation and oppression in thinking of the economic arrangements of the pre-industrial world, there were nevertheless differences in the manner of oppressing and exploiting. The ancient order of society was felt to be eternal and unchangeable by those who supported, enjoyed and endured it. The roles of all the members of the family were, emotionally, all highly symbolic and highly satisfactory. We may feel that in a whole society organised like this, in spite of all the subordination, the exploitation and the obliteration of those who were young, or feminine, or in service, everyone belonged in a group, a family group. Everyone had his circle of affection: every relationship could be seen as a love-relationship. There was nothing to correspond to the thousands of young men on the assembly line, the hundreds of young women in the offices, the lonely lives of housekeeping wives which we now know only too well. There were no hotels, hostels, or blocks of flats for single persons, very few hospitals and none of the kind we are familiar with, almost no young men and women living on their own. The family group where so great a majority lived was what we should undoubtedly call a ‘balanced’ and ‘healthy’ group.
Even in the form given to them by Mr Walt Disney and the other makers of films and picture-books for the youngest members of our puzzled world of successful industrialisation, stories like Cinderella are a sharp reminder of what life was once like for the apprentice, the journeyman, the master and all his family in the craftsman’s household.

The traditional family-based order was not succeeded since 1710 by another total, structured state. England was the society which first ventured into the industrial era, and English men and women were the first who had to try to find a home for themselves in a world where family and household seemed to have no place.
Every relationship in our world which can be seen to affect our economic life is open to change, is expected to change of itself, or if it does not, to be changed. This makes for a less stable social world. Industrial societies lack the extraordinarily cohesive influence which familial relationships carry with them, that power of reconciling the frustrated and the discontented by emotional means. Who could love the name of a limited company or of a government department as an apprentice could love his superbly satisfactory father-figure master, even if he were a bully and a beater, a usurer and a hypocrite? The ending of the system which ensured that however he was paid, however little he owned, or close he was to the point of starvation, a man usually lived and worked within the family, the circle of affection, released enough dissatisfaction to account for all the restlessness which has marked the progress of the industrial world.

Marx and the historians who have followed him were surely wrong to call this process by the simple name of the triumph of capitalism, the rise and victory of the bourgeoisie. It was not the fact of capitalism alone, not simply the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the few and the reduction of the rest to a position of dependence, which opened wide the social gulf. More important, far more likely a source for the feeling that there is a world which once we all possessed, a world now passed away, is the fact of the transformation of the family life of everyone which industrialism brought with it. The removal of the economic functions from the patriarchal family at the point of industrialisation created a mass society. It turned the people who worked into a mass of undifferentiated equals, working in a factory or scattered between the factories and mines, bereft for ever of the feeling that work, a family affair, carried with it.

The word alienation is part of the cant of the mid-20th century and it began as an attempt to describe the separation of the worker from his world of work. We need not accept all that this expression has come to convey in order to recognise that it does point to something vital to us all in relation to our past. Time was when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone for ever. It makes us very different from our ancestors.

Chapter 2. A one-class society

Perhaps the phrase a ‘one-class society‘ would fit no other European country as well as it seems to fit pre-industrial England.

• In England, the workers of the pre-industrial world cannot be thought of as a community apart from the rest. They did not all share a common work situation by any means, as does the working class in the contemporary industrial world. A considerable part of the labour force were the servants living in the households of their masters. Here we return once again to the minute scale of life, the small size of human groups before the coming of industry. Working persons were held apart from each other by the social system. Many or most of them were subsumed within the personalities of their fathers and masters. If it had not been for the terminology which was invented for a society like our own, it would never have occurred to us even to wonder whether they could be thought of as a community, a class of their own.

• There was a permanent movement into and out of a ruling elite, the dominant minority of families and the descent groups to which they belonged, and not a continuous, unchanging body reproducing itself over time. Elite and mass were kept in constant relation.
  In some countries other than England the nobility does seem to have been more separate from the rest of the privileged community. The rule of status which laid it down that in England the younger son of a baron was plain master, Mr, just like a successful merchant, certainly led to an acceptance of social mobility not so apparent elsewhere.
  And reciprocally, most young people made, inherited, or had the prospect of marrying, enough money to set up as master by himself.

Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 1965

Introduction

The village lies folded away in one of the shallow valleys which dip into the East Anglian coastal plain. It is not a particularly striking place and says little at first meeting. It is a ‘round’ village, with the houses lining the edges of the perimeter lanes, but with shops, church, pub, school, chapel, etc. spread along a central road. Akenfield’s hedges (i.e., a fence or boundary consisting of bushes) – now being slaughtered – were planted in the 18th century and, where they remain, shelter all the wild life of the particular fields they surround.
The centre of the village remains self-contained and quiet in spite of farm machines, motor-bikes and the dull murmur of summer holiday traffic. Jets from the American base nearby occasionally ordain an immense sound and the place seems riven, splintered – yet it resumes its wholeness the second the plane vanishes.
Could this be village indifference or village strength? Insensitivity or a discipline? These East Anglian field workers are the descendants of men who were given battlefield leave to return home and get in the harvest. There is, in the bony quiet of their faces, not insularity or an absence of response, but a rational notion of ‘first things first’, as they say.
The peculiarly English social revolution which began immediately after the Second World War has dramatically changed the countryman’s life, though not nearly so dramatically as that of his cousin’s life in the town. He has his 1960s comforts and luxuries, as well as a fair inkling of popular sixties culture, but these things are apt to be regarded as trimmings [i.e., superficial decoration]. The earth itself has its latest drugs and fertilisers poured into it to make it rich and yielding, but it is still the ‘old clay’. In both its and his reality, the elemental quality remains uppermost. Science is a footnote to what he really believes. And what he knows is often incommunicable.
The villager may be anyone from an old horseman who, a very long time ago in social-change time, belonged to a family used in a serf-fashion, to a rich agricultural technician for whom the word ‘farmer’ is beginning to sound a quaint description, yet both will be one in the great division which separates the growers from the mere consumers of food the world over. Deep in the nature of such men and elemental to their entire being there is the internationalism of the planted earth which makes them, in common with the rice-harvesters of Vietnam or the wine-makers of Burgundy, people who are committed to certain basic ideas and actions which progress and politics can elaborate or confuse, but can never alter. Where the strict village existence is concerned it is Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The villager is often imprisoned by the sheer implacability of the ‘everlasting circle’, as the poet James Reeve described the fertility cycle. His own life and the life of the corn and fruit and creatures clocks along with the same fatalistic movement. Such inevitability cuts down ambition and puts a brake on restlessness.
The villager who has never moved away from his birthplace for anything more than military service retains the unique mark of his particular village. If a man says that he comes from Akenfield he knows that he is telling someone from another part of the neighbourhood a good deal more than this. Anything from his appearance to his politics could be involved. The atavistic thread, whether he likes it or not, remains unbroken for the village man. It is both his advantage and his fetter, allowing him certain instincts, knowledge and emotions which can only be inherited through unbroken contact with the life of the earth itself. It is this thread – and it is classless – which creates such lasting barriers as must exist between the native and the new villager in the modern village setting.
This book is the quest for the voice of Akenfield, Suffolk, as it sounded during the summer and autumn of 1967.
This, on the quiet face of it, is as ordinary a group of country folk as one would meet anywhere in 1967. Or is it? How much is preserved? How much lost?

Work in the Village

[What do you notice about this list?]

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• 

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1 – The Survivors

John Grout – aged 88 – farmer

Mr Grout has been recently widowed after 67 years of marriage. He was married at 18 – ‘I was a pretty lad’ – but had begun work on his father’s farm when he was eleven. Both his father and his grandfather had worked this farm of some 150 acres and had lived to a great age, so Mr. Grout had often talked with men who knew the Suffolk farmers of the 18th century. He is short and sturdy, with a shining brown face and the strange new-looking wide blue eyes of the very old countryman. Day by day he sits in his hilltop house, dressed in thick rough clean clothes and polished buskins, sometimes listening to the clock, sometimes to the radio. – Where is Vietnam, Mr. Grout? – ‘Faraway…’

***

I have farmed in Akenfield since 1926. I had 135 acres and didn’t use a tractor until 1952, and then I never got on with the thing. I have been a man without machinery, as you might say.
Nobody really saw money then, though that didn’t mean that they didn’t want to see it. I wanted to see it so much that I applied for a job on the railway. Whatever could I have been thinking about! A relation of mine spoke for me and soon I was working at Broad Street Station near Liverpool Street. There were lots of Suffolk men working there and hardly any mortal one of them ever got home again. They all wanted to get home, they were that sad in London. And their big wages were little there. Some ran away to Canada and were never heard of again. They couldn’t write, you see; that is how they got lost. There was a place in Broad Street Station where you can stare through the arches and see the stars, and they were the only things I can remember seeing in London. That is the truth. I stayed ten months and then I got home.
The horses were friends and loved like men. Some men would do more for a horse than they would for a wife.
Although the teams ploughed twenty yards apart, the men didn’t talk much to each other, except sometimes they sang. Each man ploughed in his own fashion and with his own mark. It looked all the same if you didn’t know about ploughing, but a farmer could walk on a field ploughed by ten different teams and tell which bit was ploughed by which. Sometimes the Lord would pay a penny an acre extra for perfect ploughing. The men worked perfectly to get this, but they also worked perfectly because it was their work. It belonged to them. It was theirs.
The village stayed the same. If there were changes, I never felt them, so I can’t remark on them.

2 – God

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
– T.S. ELIOT, Little Gidding

Over a third of Akenfield’s population is engaged in a proliferation of Church- or Chapel-based activities.
The interior of the church preserves the evidence of almost a millennium of national religious history. ‘You must see our church’, they say in the village, ‘it is a pretty little place’.

The Brigadier

The church is going to pot [i.e., deteriorating] because of all these young inexperienced parsons. A man shouldn’t be a parson until he’s in his forties; he can’t know about life till then.
The best advice I ever had was given me by a padre, you know. Changed my life, you know. ‘Think of the other fellow‘, he said – something like that. Made me a different person, you know.

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield. Portrait of an English Village, 1969.