A Modern Rural Ride: Sussex

IN THE mid-1820s William Cobbett, variously farmer, soldier, bankrupt and Radical MP, rode through the English countryside noting the condition of agriculture and of the people. The southern counties that he visited had neither suffered nor profited from the Industrial Revolution; the Agricultural Revolution, on the other hand, had changed the face of the landscape Cobbett loved forever. Subsistence farming, when there had been 'a pig in every sty', was a thing of the past. The land was now enclosed, paving the way for farming as a modem business; the agricultural labourers were penniless and struggling as never before -- at least never before within living memory.

Bigoted, big-hearted, intensely conservative yet radical, stubborn, self-congratulatory, polemical, irrational, inconsistent and compassionate, Cobbett set out to describe, in his own forthright way, what he saw on his tours, unstinting in his praise of what pleased him (a good field of hay; a well-dressed labourer; a sirloin of beef; an old-style yeoman farmer sitting down at table with his men; a flock of goldfinches) and unhesitating in his vituperation of what did not (Methodist ministers, economic theorists, bankers and brokers, turnpike roads, suburban squires and 'the Wen' of London).

Cobbett was born in Farnham in Surrey in 1762, the son of an agricultural labourer. Self-educated, he says that his 'birth of intellect' came through reading Swift's Tale of a Tub as a boy. Though he regularly attempted to settle down to a life of rural tranquillity, his perceptions of injustice kept dragging him back into the fighting line. His idea of a just society was one which would allow a man to live well by his own efforts. By 'living well', however, Cobbett meant sufficiency and no more. Anything that smacked of luxury or superfluity was anathema to him. And by a many s 'own efforts' he meant hard work: getting up early, eating frugally, and not frittering away one's time. He was neither a prude nor a Puritan, but he was scornful of self-indulgence, and though he earned a reputation as the champion of the poor, it was only of the deserving and never of the idle. His romanticised image of his own childhood convinced him that the late 18th century had been England's golden age; that it was a time when men were honest in their work, simple in their habits, undemanding in their tastes, content with the station in life that God had allotted them. His failure to understand human aspirations made Utopias hard to find. As a young soldier in America he developed a revulsion against the 'democracy' which he witnessed there, and returned to England first a Tory and then a Reformer, embarking on a career as a journalist. Too much close contact with the politics of Pitt and Fox, however, turned him into a fierce Radical.

In the weekly Political Register which he founded, he published an article deploring military flogging, for which he was fined [pound]1,000. In later life he found himself imprisoned for debt and prosecuted for sedition, as well as winning a seat in Parliament as Radical MP for Oldham. But Cobbett's output was more than just a collection of indignant tirades. His descriptions of the countryside of the South of England, his understanding of its life cycles and his appreciation of its beauty, and the robust, unsentimental but very feeling language in which it is expressed in his Rural Rides, is perhaps unsurpassed in English prose literature. His conversational style, emphasised by his use of italics and capitalisation, has attracted generations of readers.

The urbanisation and suburbanisation of Britain today, the alienation from rural life that is the lot of most of us, and the hardships tat farmers and farm workers are currently enduring, mean that the time is probably right for Cobbett to ride again. Beleaguered by a Common Agricultural Policy whereby one size is supposed to fit all, and finding their way of life increasingly under threat, misrepresented, or simply sneered at, farmers are once again looking for robust voices to stand up for them, and make their point of view heard in a large, noisy, consumerist, leisure-filled, street-wise, sophisticated world, where the 'stock-jobbers' and the 'funding system' seem to have come out on top.

Horsham (West Sussex)

Friday, 9 June, 2000

Came from the Wen through Croydon, and am got here to sleep, intending to set off for ARDINGLY in the morning, with a view of visiting the South of England Show. From Croydon my road was through Reigate, Horley and Crawley, and from there westwards to this place, though had it not been for the signposts I should scarcely have been aware of crossing from one parish boundary into another, for the country is so built-upon that there are no green spaces in between, though between Crawley and HORSHAM there is a thing which terms itself a forest, a shabby, villainous affair indeed, a mere rascally tract of fir-trees. This is all a very stock-jobbery kind of country, with brick boxes of a very loan-mongering sort of complexion strung out beside the road, and some that are mere cottages too, though I saw very few termed as such, for while thirty years or so ago it was all the vogue to get a new-built brick and timber barracks of a place christened a cottage, it is now become rather the mode to have a low, cramped, el derly dwelling labelled a house. My road was straight, with tall garden trees and rhododendrons grown very high on either side, giving a sense that they were hiding something, and though their aim is to create privacy for the houses to which they are appended, their effect is to give a very vivid idea of superabundant population. I should have had views to the Surrey hills on my right and the South Downs on my left, having got up onto some pretty high ground, but the roadside trees were so tall as at times to form a tunnel above my head, so I had views of neither beyond the merest glimpse, and every so often the beggarly contours of the fir-trees would rise up between and mar the scene entirely.