Change In The Village - free ebook by George Sturt

NEW YORKGEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY1912

Printed in Great Britain by Billing &amp; Sons, Ltd., Guildford, England...

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THE VILLAGE

If one were to be very strict, I suppose it would be wrong to give the name of "village" to the parish dealt with in these chapters, because your true village should have a sort of corporate history of its own, and this one can boast nothing of the kind. It clusters round no central green; no squire ever lived in it; until some thirty years ago it was without a resident parson; its church is not half a century old. Nor are there here, in the shape of patriarchal fields, or shady lanes, or venera

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SELF-RELIANCE

There is a chapter in Dickens's Hard Times which tells how it was discovered that somebody had fallen down a disused mine-shaft, and how the rescue was valiantly effected by a few men who had to be awakened for that end from their drunken Sunday afternoon sleep. Sobered by the dangers they foresaw, these men ran to the pit-mouth, pushed straight to the centre of the crowd there, and fell to work quietly with their ropes and winches. As you read, you seem to see them, spitting on their great hand

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MAN AND WIFE

For general social intercourse the labouring people do not meet at one another's cottages, going out by invitation, or dropping in to tea in the casual way of friendship; they have to be content with "passing the time of day" when they come together by chance. Thus two families may mingle happily as they stroll homewards after the Saturday night's shopping in the town, or on a fine Sunday evening they may make up little parties to go and inspect one another's gardens. Until recently—so recently

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MANIFOLD TROUBLES

Besides the unrelieved hardness of daily life—the need, which never lifts from them, of making shift and doing all things for themselves—there has always been another influence at work upon my neighbours, leaving its indelible mark on them. Almost from infancy onwards, in a most personal and intimate way, they are familiar with harrowing experiences of calamity such as people who employ them are largely able to escape. The little children are not exempt. There being no nursemaids to take care of

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DRINK

It will be understood, from what was said on the subject in the first chapter, that the village population has its rough element, and that drunkenness, or at any rate excessive drinking, is very common. It is true that there are very few habitual drunkards in the parish—there are not even many men, perhaps, who frequently take too much; but, on the other hand, the majority are beer-drinkers, and every now and then one or another of them, normally sober, oversteps the limit. Thus, possibly every

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WAYS AND MEANS

Before going farther I must try to give some account of the ways and means of the villagers, although, obviously, in a population so heterogeneous, nothing short of a scientific survey on the lines pursued by Sir Charles Booth or Mr. Rowntree could be of much value in this direction. The observations to be offered here pretend to no such authority. They have been collected at random, and subjected to no tests, and they refer almost exclusively to the "unskilled" labouring people. During twenty y

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GOOD TEMPER

In view of their unpromising circumstances the people as a rule are surprisingly cheerful. It is true there are never any signs in the valley of that almost festive temper, that glad relish of life, which, if we may believe the poets, used to characterize the English village of old times. Tested by that standard of happiness, it is a low-spirited, mirthless, and all but silent population that we have here now. Of public and exuberant enjoyment there is nothing whatever. And yet, subdued though t

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THE PEASANT SYSTEM

The persistence into the twentieth century—the scarcely realized persistence—not so much of any definite ideas, as of a general temper more proper to the eighteenth century, accounts for all sorts of anomalies in the village, and explains not only why other people do not understand the position of its inhabitants to-day, but why they themselves largely fail to understand it. They are not fully aware of being behind the times, and probably in many respects they no longer are so; only there is tha

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THE NEW THRIFT

One usually thinks of the enclosure of a common as a procedure which takes effect immediately, in striking and memorable change; yet the event in this village seems to have made no lasting impression on people's minds. The older folk talk about things that happened "before the common was enclosed" much as they might say "before the flood," and occasionally they discuss the history of some allotment or other made under the award; but one hears little from them to suggest that the fateful ordinanc

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COMPETITION

When the half-peasant men of the valley began to enter the labour market as avowed wage-earners, a set of conditions confronted them which we are apt to think of as established by a law of Nature, but which, in fact, may be almost unknown in a peasant community. For the first time the importance of a "demand for labour" came home to them. I do not say that it was wholly a new thing; but to the older villagers it had not been, as it is now to their descendants, the dominating factor in their stru

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HUMILIATION

Still more than the relations of the villagers with their own kind their relations with other sorts of people have suffered change under the new thrift. To just that extent to which the early inhabitants of the valley were peasants, they formed, as it were, a separate group, careless of the outer world and its concerns. They could afford to ignore it, and to be ignored by it. To them, so well suited with their own outlook and customs, it was a matter of small importance, though all England shoul

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THE HUMILIATED

The effects of this "inferiority" which has been thrust upon the villagers are not exactly conspicuous in any particular direction. As it has been shown already, the people themselves seem almost unaware of any grievance in the matter, the change having come upon them too gradually for it to be sharply felt. They bear no malice against their employers. You would hardly learn, from anything that they consciously say or do, that in becoming so humiliated they have been hurt in their feelings, or h

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NOTICE TO QUIT

It might be thought that at least when they are at home the people would be untroubled; yet that is not the case. Influences from the new civilization reach them in their cottages, and the intrusion is but the more searching for being impersonal. It is borne in upon the senses in the shape of sights and sounds proclaiming across the valley that the village is an altered place, that the modern world is submerging it, that the old comfortable seclusion is gone. Even the obscurity of winter nights

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THE INITIAL DEFECT

Keeping pace with the alterations in their circumstances, a great mental and spiritual destitution has made its appearance amongst the labouring people. I say "has made its appearance" because it cannot be wholly attributed to the changes we have been discussing. Those changes have done their part, certainly. Obliterating the country crafts and cults, breaking down the old neighbourly feelings, turning what was an interesting economy into an anxious calculation of shillings and pence, and reduci

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THE OPPORTUNITY

Amongst so many drawbacks to the new thrift, one good thing that it has brought to the villagers, in the shape of a little leisure, gives us the means of seeing in more detail how destitute of interests their life has become. It must be owned that the leisure is very scanty. It is so obscured, too, by the people's habit of putting themselves to productive work in it that I have sometimes doubted if any benefit of the kind actually filtered down into their overburdened lives. Others, however, wit

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THE OBSTACLES

Keeping this old-fashioned kind of life in mind as we turn again to the modern labourer's existence, we see at once where the change has come in, and why leisure, from being of small account, has become of so great importance. It is the amends due for a deprivation that has been suffered. Unlike the industry of a peasantry, commercial wage-earning cannot satisfy the cravings of a man's soul at the same time that it occupies his body, cannot exercise many of his faculties or appeal to many of his

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THE WOMEN'S NEED

If, while the common was still open, very few even of the men of the village troubled about regular employment, we may well believe that there were still fewer regular wage-earners amongst the women. I do not mean that wage-earning was a thing they never did. There was not a woman in the valley, perhaps, but had experience of it at hay-making and harvesting, while all would have been disappointed to miss the hop-picking. But these occasional employments had more resemblance to holidays and outin

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THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING

Some light was thrown on the more specific needs of the village by an experiment in which I had a share from ten to thirteen years ago. The absence of any reasonable pastime for the younger people suggested it. At night one saw boys and young men loafing and shivering under the lamp outside the public-house doors, or in the glimmer that shone across the road from the windows of the one or two village shops. They had nothing to do there but to stand where they could just see one another and try t

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EMOTIONAL STARVATION

Remembering the tales which get into the papers now and then of riot amongst the "high-spirited young gentlemen" at the Universities, I am a little unwilling to say more about the unruliness of our village youths, as though it were something peculiar to their rank of life. Yet it must not be quite passed over. To be sure, not all the village lads, any more than all undergraduates, are turbulent and mischievous; yet here, as at Oxford, there is a minority who apparently think it manly to be insub

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THE CHILDREN'S NEED

As one of the managing committee of the village schools for a good many years, I have had considerable opportunity of watching the children collectively. The circumstances, perhaps, are not altogether favourable to the formation of trustworthy opinions. Seen in large numbers, and under discipline too, the children look too much alike; one misses the infinite variety of their personalities such as would appear in them at home. On the other hand, characteristics common to them all, which might pas

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THE FORWARD MOVEMENT

The last twenty years having witnessed so much change in the village, it is interesting to speculate as to the farther changes that may be looked for in the years to come; indeed, it is more than merely interesting. Educational enthusiasts are busy; legislators have their eye on villages; throughout the leisured classes it is habitual to look upon "the poor" as a sort of raw material, to be remodelled according to leisured ideas of what is virtuous, or refined, or useful, or nice; and nobody see

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