Thinking about the Land 2: A Perfect Summer Evening

In my earlier post, I said that I wanted to give the farmers’ perspective on the mid-twentieth century British movement now seen as the origin of organic farming. Now I turn to my very brief encounter with an important member of that movement, Rolf Gardiner, and what the English landscape that we shared looked like to farmers at the time. Then on to the farming practices, Rolf Gardiner’s vision, and the elite dream of Arcadia.

It must have been the early 1960s.

My mother and I, like the fifty or a hundred other guests, waited in the receiving line in front of a charming old mill house to shake the hands of our hosts, Rolf and Marabel Gardiner. To tell the truth, I don’t remember anything about them except that the encounter was all very ceremonial.

A week or so before, an an invitation had arrived in the post. The Gardiners were putting on a semi-private performance of Henry Purcell‘s exquisite opera Dido and Aeneas, composed in the late seventeenth century based on the story on Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid. It was to take place in the garden of their home, Springhead in the village of Fontmell Magna on the borders of Wiltshire and Dorset in southwest England.

Why my family were invited, I’m not sure. We did not know the Gardiners. Perhaps, needing an audience in that remote spot, they had asked around and heard that my parents were early English music enthusiasts with many musician friends.

After being received, we moved on to the discrete table where we paid for our tickets before taking our folding seats on the lawn. We looked across the lake (the former mill pond I believe) to a small Italianate rotunda with woods and the curve of the downs behind it.

The chamber orchestra tuned up. The performers appeared to applause. The soon-to-be-famous bass baritone John Shirley Quirk, tunic-clad as  Aeneas, rolled down a rope slung from the rotunda across the lake to the stage on the lawn with his dignity intact. The soprano (it could have been Janet Baker who made Dido’s lament her own, though I am not sure) sang the long heartbreaking sequence “When I am laid in earth . . . remember me, remember me,” the notes drifting off over the Blackmore Vale.

So although my memory of the Gardiners is blurry at best, my memory of the beauty of the spot and of the music remains vivid.

The patterns of the land: Chalk and cheese

As the evening began to draw in we began the twenty-mile drive home. We climbed up from the Blackmore Vale, dairying country traditionally, making farmhouse Cheddar cheeses for the Bristol and London markets, though this had ended with World War II, to the wide open spaces of the westernmost edge of the Wessex Downs (“downs” comes from the Celtic world for hill, the downs being rolling hills of Chalk laid down in the Cretaceous).

“As different as chalk and cheese” went an old phrase going back to the Middle Ages. We firmly believed, whatever etymologists might say, that this referred to the difference between the Chalk and the Vale: between the open curves of the downs and the small hedged fields of the Vale; between Chalk and clay; between calcium carbonate and silicates; between thin, light soils and wet heavy clay ones; between large farms and small ones; between sheep and cattle; between wheat and cow’s milk cheese.

This relatively simple, small scale, and transparent relation between the underlying geology and the surface features–topography, soils, vegetation, farming, fencing, and housing–was what made it possible for a surveyor, William Smith, to produce one of the world’s first geological maps in 1815.

When I arrived in the United States, it came as something of a shock to realize that whether it were the complex geology of the Appalachians or the blanket of glacial debris over much of the northern part of the country, the landscape could not be read in the straightforward way that I had absorbed as a child and that was pointed out and commented on during every journey by car.

Patterns of the land: the great estates

As always, we paused at Win Green, the highest point in Wiltshire, to look down on the Vale of Wardour, the view fringed by the great estates of the south west of the county of Wiltshire, each with a great country house at its center, most of them handed over to their owners following Henry VIII’s breakup of the preceding huge and wealthy monastic estates such as those owned by Wilton Abbey or Shaftesbury Abbey.

In the 1870s, a hundred years before our outing, 80% of the land in England consisted of such estates which were in the hands of a mere 1% of the population. Nor was this like the dry ranch lands of the American west. It was the best, most fertile, most readily ploughable land in the country.

Like most of the rest of the world, England was still far from escaping the structure shared by all great agrarian empires, whether Chinese, Ottoman, or European, in which tiny elites ruled, while large numbers of others–peasants, slaves, serfs, peons, the name and exact status varied around the world–worked the land the rulers owned. In the American colonies, the estates persisted as plantations.

Much of dynamism of modern history can be attributed to the unlocking of the potential of the workers of the land. And this will be one of the underlying themes of this series of blog posts.

Back to the view. On the eastern horizon lay the edges of the Wilton estate owned by the Earl of Pembroke. In the mid nineteenth century it had stretched over 45,000 acres though it is now reduced to 14,000. To the north we could glimpse the Fonthill estate then owned by Major Morrison, about to be made Lord Margadale. In the same direction but not visible was the Longleat estate of the Marquess of Bath, 9000 acres today. To the north west lay the smaller Stourhead estate owned by the Hoare banking family.

Although the great estates shaped my life in many ways, as they did the lives of everyone in rural England, they were a world apart. I turn, therefore, to an article in Vanity Fair in 2010 by an insider Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer and younger brother of Princess Diana.

It used to be pretty simple, being a British aristocrat. A way of living developed in the years of plenty. These began in the primitive, dog-eat-dog frenzy of Henry VIII’s Tudor court (his superfluous Queens were just 2 of as many as 72,000 who lost their heads during his reign) and progressed to the languid, be-plumed pomp of Queen Victoria’s heyday.

There were blips along the way, of course: wars—even a civil war, followed by an unhappy, yet-to-be-repeated experiment with republicanism—as well as occasional economic turmoil and choking plagues on a national level. On an individual basis, there was financial incompetence, premature death from illness or on the battlefield, and just plain bad luck.

However, many aristocratic families weathered the turbulence. Those that did not disappeared but were quickly replaced.

As the holder of one of the grand, hereditary titles of Britain, you merely had to do what was expected of you and then die. Succeed and grateful servants and tenants would mourn you, while even more grateful descendants would celebrate your brief flowering at the head of the family tree. You could expect, as a mark of eternal gratitude, a carved tomb in the ancestral mausoleum. . . .

So, what was the nobleman expected to do to have his life deemed a success? Ideally, he would marry “well,” which meant blending his bloodline with that of another great family, or one of less impressive pedigree but vast wealth. He would play an enormous role in the life of his country, and would be in the select pool of several dozen families that dominated the royal court and politics, for generation after generation. (Leadership in the church or the armed services was reserved for his younger brothers.)

He would preside over the agricultural estate that stood as the cornerstone of all. The great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope gave one of his characters the line “Land gives so much more than the rent. It gives position and influence and political power, to say nothing about the game.” (my italics)

This had been a truism for centuries: the ownership of land provided the great magnates with massive incomes, which funded their lifestyles and underpinned their ability to demand high office. . . .

He would entertain generously. This was a serious business, a duty, which would result in disgrace and derision if inadequately performed. There were two main settings for this: the country mansion (where winter was dominated by hunting with hounds and the shooting of game birds) and the London palace (where unmarried daughters were matched with eligible bachelors).

Central to this existence was a belief in, and an unquestioning adherence to, primogeniture. . . . Nearly all . . . English [titles] devolved to the eldest son, or to the senior male heir if there was no son.

With the titles went the estate—estates were “entailed,” which meant they and the family’s primary hereditary title could not be separated, even if the heir had less shining qualities than another son.

The head of the family would arrange dowries for his daughters when they married, and he might give some capital to the younger sons. However, in order to keep the family’s wealth centralized and alive, preferably in perpetuity, he relied on a system that was as logically practical as it was ruthlessly clinical.

The large estates in England and southern Scotland, in contrast to many parts of the world, were no longer worked by peasants or slaves. In the movement known as the enclosures, peasant or small yeoman farmer holdings had been consolidated into farms. Most peasants or small farmers had moved to the towns, England being one of the first countries to urbanize. Others had migrated to the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand in hope of land of their own.

The farms themselves, shaped by the great estates and even by the church lands from which the estates had been created, were managed by a small number of farmers and worked by a larger but still small number of farm workers. This was the third pattern superimposed on the topography.

Patterns of the land: the farms

We drove down from the downs along a lane worn deep into the earth. Then we turned east through the lush wooded Wardour Vale. To our right, neighbor farmers’ fields of grain were ripening on the Greensand slopes that led up to the foot of the Wessex downs. We knew who owned or rented each farm. “So and so looks like he has a good crop this year,” we might comment, or “So and so else’s crop got knocked about by the storm the other night.”

Most farms were at least 200 acres, it being very difficult to make a living with anything less, so that you drove through them for about half a mile. Many were a thousand acres of more so that it might take you a couple of miles to cross them.

Most farms were necessarily rented from the big estates. Others were owned by farmers who over the past hundred years had taken advantage of the difficulties encountered by the big estates–first the import of cheap wheat from overseas that reduced the rents that the aristocracy could charge their tenants, then the imposition of death duties (inheritance taxes) by (particularly) Labor governments to break up the estates. They were, however, far from gone. Prince Charles still owns 135,000 acres on which he collects rent.

Above the fields, the 300 foot undulating scarp of the downs was marked with chalk pits every few miles. When the chalk pits below the regimental badges carved by soldiers waiting transport to the front in World War I and above them the ramparts of the Iron Age hill fort, Chiselbury became visible, we were almost home to our farmhouse.

This landscape–minutely patterned spatially by geology, estates, and farms, but with the temporal patterns foreshortened so that Iron Age hill forts, medieval churches, Elizabethan country houses, mock Roman ruins, Georgian farm houses and the people who for brief moments of those thousands of years lived and died in them blurred–was the world which Rolf Gardiner, London born and bred, entered in the 1920s.

Before returning to Rolf Gardiner, though, I need to say more about the farms and how they worked. That will take a week because I have an unexpected deadline that has popped up.

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