LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

medium-sized farms of the nineteenth century have had a disproportionately large influence on the shape of the modern landscape. Recently archaeologists have quite rightly focused attention on these places, which for some reason were largely ignored in the 1970s and 1980s. However, there is also a much older tradition of recording so-called ‘vernacular architecture’ which I will define for present purposes as buildings built by people rather than trained architects often using traditional designs and materials. I say ‘often’, because sometimes buildings that are vernacular in spirit can be fashioned from mass-produced components, such as some converted barracks in Shropshire or the ‘Tin Tabernacle’ in Northamptonshire, which I discuss in Chapter 7.⁴⁷ There used to be hot debate about what buildings were truly vernacular and which were not. But it was a fruitless debate and today we are less concerned about what is or isn’t ‘truly’ vernacular and now include many threatened nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings, such as prefabricated temporary school buildings and cinemas.⁴⁸

      Much of the earlier surviving post-medieval rural architecture of Scotland and Wales is vernacular and a surprising amount survives in England, despite, or in some instances because of, the era of high farming.⁴⁹ Many farming families are quite conservative and were reluctant to demolish earlier buildings, which they often ‘improved’ by adding huge and usually unsympathetic new wings and ranges. My own great-grandfather more than doubled the size of his modest Queen Anne house in Hertfordshire, a few windows of which now appear to squint out from behind a massive red-brick late Victorian pile. Indoors, and with sufficient time to spare, you can just work out the shape of the earlier building.

      The post-medieval centuries witnessed the creation of the diverse rural landscapes that we all inhabit. True, there is evidence within those landscapes of much earlier times, but this is often hidden away, as humps and bumps, or sinuous field boundaries. Most of the ‘furniture’ of the countryside, the fences, gates and the drystone walls that surround our fields, were erected in the past two centuries – and if not, you can be certain that they have been extensively repaired in that time. Similarly, although there are indeed a few surviving ancient hedges (although sadly we no longer believe that these can be aged simply by counting their component species⁵⁰) these will have been laid, interplanted and today trimmed back by mechanised flail-cutters countless times in the last hundred years.

      Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the British countryside will be aware that the eastern side of the country has a drier climate, which is why the landscape here is given over to arable and mixed livestock and arable farming. To the west the more moist, Atlantic climate tends to favour pasture. This broad distinction was first mapped by the farm economist James Caird in 1852 and it applies with even greater force today, when grazing livestock are almost completely absent across huge areas of east Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and East Anglia.⁵¹ If livestock are absent I also fear for the knowledge and traditions that were once a part of animal husbandry. The much-parodied grasping ‘barley baron’ whose eyes are only focused on the ‘bottom line’ and whose vision requires him to grub up all trees and hedgerows to create vast prairie-like fields, was, until very recently, not a complete figure of fun. Although most farmers used the availability of EEC grants responsibly, such men indeed existed and their depredations can still be seen, especially in parts of eastern England.

      Indeed, anyone blessed with good eyesight could appreciate the devastation that was caused to the landscape of lowland Britain from about 1950 to 1990 when some 400,000 kilometres of hedgerow were destroyed.⁵² As I noted, much of this was perpetrated in the name of agricultural progress (I almost mistakenly said ‘improvement’) and often with huge injections of taxpayers’ money. The trouble is that any taxpayers with interests other than increased agricultural efficiency were simply ignored. With the single exception of Scheduled Ancient Monuments (i.e. sites protected by law), no regard was taken of any archaeological remains that might be damaged by the new methods of power-farming. After some thirty years of unrestrained destruction, during which the vast majority of lowland sites and monuments were either destroyed or severely damaged, the powers that be reluctantly acknowledged that the plough was a threat to what little remains of our past.⁵³

      Let’s finish this chapter by taking the long view. There can be little doubt that there were far larger changes to Britain’s rural landscapes than those that began in and then followed the Second World War. The arrival of farming itself in the Neolithic, around 4500 bc, is an obvious example. The development of the first fields in the earlier Bronze Age, from about 2000 bc, is another. In historic times further eras of change included the later Saxon period (in, say, the three centuries after ad 800), when we saw the rise of the Open Field system and the nucleation of dispersed settlements into more compact villages.⁵⁴ Finally, and as we have just seen in this chapter, the disruption to rural life caused by successive waves of plague in the two centuries following the Black Death of 1348 was to prove of great importance, as it led directly to the regionalisation of the countryside that was such a prominent feature of the early modern period.

      The rural transformations of prehistory and history, however, happened slowly, usually as part of more widespread changes in northern Europe (although the development of fields in Bronze Age Britain does still seem to have been a largely insular development).⁵⁵ And when I say ‘slowly’, I mean over at least two, and more usually three or four centuries. In the case of the Neolithic adoption of farming, the process took a full millennium. But the changes that the British government decided to push through, in order to meet the threat to food supplies posed by the Nazis across the Channel, happened very rapidly indeed. Something broadly similar took place in the Roman period when southern Britain became, in effect, the western Empire’s ‘bread basket’, providing huge quantities of wheat for the Roman army. But unlike the rural reforms of the Second World War, the Roman changes were reversed in the late fourth and fifth centuries, when the troops were withdrawn – and large areas of the countryside reverted to grassland.⁵⁶

      The rapid movement out of pasture and into cereals and other crops that happened between 1939 and 1945 seems to have had a permanent effect. Recent research has drawn attention to the wartime changes to British farming which were intended to feed the populace, despite Hitler’s U-boat Atlantic blockade.⁵⁷ Those reforms were urgently needed but they helped turn farmers and landowners from countrymen to businessmen, and everything that followed – especially the grant-driven over-production inspired by Brussels – was made possible by what happened then.

      The wartime changes to the farming economy and landscape of Britain do help explain why subsequent developments, largely funded by EEC grant-aid in the form of the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP, had such different effects on either side of the Channel. The small – tiny by British standards – landholdings of the French countryside were largely sustained by the injection of CAP cash – as, indeed, the legislation had intended from the very outset. But in Britain the far larger landowners and farmers, who had developed their businesses during the war, duly accepted the CAP handouts and used the money to further increase the size, and therefore the profitability, of their operations. They now had the capital to buy up smaller, generally less efficient operations, with the result that commercial farms in Britain grew rapidly in size throughout the seventies and eighties. Meanwhile in France, CAP money continued to support what was in effect a peasant-farming economy.

      So ultimately, when I’m out field-walking and I angrily ponder the dark line left in the soil by a recently destroyed hedgerow, I first blame Nazis and then Eurocrats. I suppose it’s much easier than blaming myself, and millions like me, who allowed such terrible things to happen to the countryside of lowland Britain in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

      If

Скачать книгу