The+Sea+of+Rurality


 * //Every world-economy is a sort of jigsaw puzzle, juxtaposition of zones interconnected, but at different levels. On the ground, at least three different areas or categories can be distinguished: a narrow core, a fairly developed middle zone, and a vast periphery. The qualities and characteristics of the type of society, economy, technology, culture and political order necessarily alter as one moves from one zone to another. This is an explanation of very wide application….//

__//F. Braudel (1979)// __

=CONTENTS=

3.1 The course of urbanisation
 * [|3.1] The course of urbanisation || ||
 * [|3.2] The Chediston story || [|3.2.1] The people ||
 * [|3.3] The romance of rurality || ||
 * [|3.4] Past in the present || ||

A potted history of European economic development would have it that as the peasants cleared the land; as people became more numerous, they harnessed the power of wheel and windmill; communications were established between regions once completely foreign to each other; barriers came down. Countless towns sprang up or revived wherever there was a crossroads of trade, and the creation of these urban islands were undoubtedly the crucial factor that launched the competitive capitalist European economy. Between 1250 and 1350 Europe was suddenly covered with towns, which were the major pieces of an expanding international economic jigsaw. Rural production and exchange was dominant and rurality was the norm for Halesworth’s vast periphery of Hundred and County, within which its new urban economies were developing. The tradesfolk consolidated their urban future within Blything Hundred by virtue of its roads to the river crossing, its market, its workshops and the money that accumulated through buying and selling goods from town and country within half a mile radius from the parish church. Its market place ensured its food supply, as peasants came regularly to town with their produce. Its market stalls offered an outlet for the growing family surpluses of the surrounding lordly domains and for the huge amounts of produce emanating from the ‘lordship-zone’, which came from the payment of manorial dues in kind.

After about 1150, Europe moved beyond direct agricul­tural consumption of peasant rurality and family self-sufficiency, to the stage of indirect agricultural consumption created by the exchange of surplus rural production in urban markets. At the same time, towns attracted all the skilled crafts, creating for themselves a focused monopoly, through guilds and apprenticeships, of the manufacture and marketing of industrial products (Fig 3.1). Only later would this kind of pre-industry move back into the countryside. In short, economic life, especially after the thirteenth century, began to take precedence over the earlier agrarian functions of the towns. Towns became retail islands in a sea of rurality. Their influence spread over a very wide area as the crucial move was made from a domestic to a market economy. In other words, the towns were beginning to tower above their rural surroundings and to look beyond their immediate horizons. This was a great economic leap forward, the first in the series that created European society and launched it on its successful capitalist career. There is only one event even remotely comparable to this: the creation by the first European settlers in America of the many transit-towns, linked to each other by road and by the requirements of commerce, communication, and defence. The guild system was the socioeconomic high point of medieval urban commercialism. The Guild Hall was a central point of business and local politics. Its importance was expressed in silver plate and pomp and circumstance, particularly in a town like Halesworth, where there was no mayoralty. The trade guilds had an enormous amount of power, membership being required for social, economic, or political advancement. Some of the most important guilds had legal enforcement rights, and could forbid traders or artisans to operate within their jurisdiction on penalty of confiscation of their wares and tools. Several, such as the ‘Fishmongers’ and ‘Glovers’, could, on their own authority, search private homes to seize inferior goods. Farmers were not permitted to form a guild for fear of price fixing.

Fig 3.1 The economic course of urbanisation For those who wish to commune with this idea of the Halesworth closed-guild fraternity, the ‘woolshop’ and the ‘paper-shop’ next door occupy part of the main structure of the town’s old Guild Hall in the Thoroughfare. When its main wooden frame was erected, probably in the second half of the 15th century, its very size would have dominated the town’s main street. The building has been much altered since then. There are fragmentary records of the activities of three guilds that used the building: the 'Guild of St John the Baptist', the 'Guild of St Loye and the ‘Guild of St Anthony'. The former was the guild of tailors, and St Loye or St Eloi is the patron saint of blacksmiths. St Anthony represents the grocery fraternary. Each guild, had a location in the parish church, the prominence of its altar being related to the guild’s wealth. The Guild of Blacksmiths seemed to be Halesworth’s richest fraternity, which appears to have occupied the South Chapel, now the Lady Chapel dedicated to St Loye. This raises the question of whether Halesworth’s Blacksmith’s Guild was serving a wider company of smiths with their premises in the surrounding villages. Another aspect of guild history is that by the Tudor period the system was debased by the Crown, and had become largely ceremonial and a source of Crown revenues. It was common for honorary memberships, called the ‘Freedom of the Company’, to be awarded to town notables, and it may be that the chapel in St Mary’s Church represented the hub of local worthies who formed ‘a late medieval church party’ to counterbalance the power of the town’s three manorial lordships.

The guilds heralded the approach of capitalism in industry as distinct from commerce. The movement of people to the towns and the natural increase of population made the older established craftsman look to his rights and view with jealousy the increasing number of entrants into the crafts. In their hey-day the guilds had been largely classless bodies. A youth served his apprenticeship, perhaps remained for a year or two as a journey­man, and then set up shop for himself as a master craftsman. Even before 1400, this routine had ceased to work smoothly. There were complaints that the guilds were raising entry fees and in various ways restricting admission to the craft. Frequent disputes between masters and journeymen over such matters as hours and wages showed the existence of a clash of interest. The journeymen reacted to the new conditions by forming guilds of their own. These yeomen or journeymen guilds foreshadowed the modern trade union. At first, the older guilds tried to suppress them, and were aided in this by the municipal authorities and the State itself. Indeed an Act passed in 1548 resembles in many ways the famous pre-trade union Combination Law of 1799. It recites that journeyman guilds:


 * //"have made confederacies and promises and have sworn mutual oaths, not only that they should not meddle one with another's work and perform and finish that another hath begun, but also to constitute and appoint how much work they should do in a day and what hours and times they shall work, contrary to the laws and statutes of the realm."//

Sometimes the masters compromised by assigning certain functions to the journeymen guilds, which, made them in effect subordinate parts of the craft guild itself. The significance of the yeomen guilds is that they mark the beginnings of the capitalist system in industry. Under the craft guild system the market was generally a local one, and division of labour between crafts was based on the production of finished commodities. A single craft stood between the raw material and the consumer. The weaver obtained his yarn from the housewife, the traditional spinner or spinster, and made cloth, which he sold, to the consumer. This simple state of affairs could not be permanent.

The guild system, which was closely intertwined with the Church, was dismantled at the Reformation, but the master/learner relationship continued, and is recorded in the lists of Halesworth’s. A list of masters with apprentices dating from the turn of the 18th century is presented in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 List of Halesworth masters with apprenticship indentures 1793-1840 (SRO:124/G5/1) It is not known whether this is a comprehensive list, but it probably represents a random sample of trades that were active in Halesworth at the time. If so, then there was a dominance of shoemakers (a quarter of the total) and tailors taking apprentices (a fifth of the total). This is not surprising when it is remembered that the purchase of shoes and clothes were a major reason why countryfolk came to town.
 * Archer, Harley tailor 1800 || Cullingford, James whitesmith 1826 || Sawing, John shoemaker 1833 ||
 * Archer, Harley tailor 1820 || Easterson, Thomas whitesmith 1822 || Sawing, John shoemaker 1839 ||
 * Berry, Joseph shoemaker 1815 || Estaugh, Wm cordwainer 1798 || Sawing, John shoemaker 1837 ||
 * Botham, Benj. tailor 1837 || Jeffreson, Charles glover 1822 || Smith, George blacksmith 1840 ||
 * Bush, Henry tailor 1793 || Johnson, Sarah dressmaker 1836 || Smith, Nelson wheelwright 1836 ||
 * Calver, John glover 1814 || Kindred, George tailor 1839 || Sones, Zachariah baker 1832 ||
 * Card, William bricklayer 1801 || Mayhew, James farmer 1832 || Spall, David bootmaker 1836 ||
 * Carles, Wm. shoemaker 1833 || Newson, Sam. shoemaker 1818 || Taylor, Wm carpenter 1819 ||
 * Carr, Isaac cordwainer 1826 || Read, Jacob basketmaker 1812 || Took, Robt. baker 1837 ||
 * Carr, Isaac shoemaker 1821 || Robinson, William tailor 1826 || Wilson, George shoemaker 1841 ||
 * Chapman, John shoemaker 1817 || Robinson, William taylor 1813 || Woodyard, Charles bricklayer 1838 ||
 * Collett, Henry tailor 1809 || Rose, Edmund carpenter 1820 || Wright, Benj. tailor 1800 ||
 * Croft, Daniel shoemaker 1818 || Rose, James blacksmith 1840 || Wright, John tailor 1832 ||
 * Cross, Sam shoemaker 1823 || Rounce, Thom. plumber 1840 || ||
 * Cross, William currier 1812 || Sawing, John cordwainer 1832 || ||

There were two forces at work creating a more complicated economic system. First, there was the widening market. So long as trade was confined to the town it was easy for the craftsman to keep in touch with his customers. A wider market made this difficult, if not impossible. The final consumer of his goods might be in another town or another country. The craftsman could not hope to keep in touch with him or to carry through the whole transaction himself. By himself he would be unable to finance the complete transaction from the buying of the raw material to the selling of finished goods, because this would involve laying out money over a lengthy period of time. In other words, the time had come when there was room for someone with capital and knowledge of the market to act as intermediary between producer and consumer.

Another circumstance operated to the same end. Division of labour tended to disintegrate the processes of production. The making of a single commodity came to be split up into several processes, each being occupied by a single craft. Thus we find distinct crafts of bleachers, weavers, dyers and drapers in Halesworth’s hempen cloth industry. The production of cloth thus became the work of a group of separate crafts, many of which never came into direct contact with the consumer or each other. This involved successive sales of partly finished goods to the next person in the process chain. This stage of industrial development furnished the basis for the capitalistic control of Halesworth’s industry. On the one hand, the subdivision of processes made the craftsmen more expert at their jobs, but it also created the necessity for some sort of co-ordination between the crafts. It was at this point that the capitalist merchant-employers, like James Aldred, came on the scene. He combined the functions of merchant and employer. He purchased the raw material, gave it out to the craftsmen, and then sold the finished article. The craftsmen were in fact his employees.

Situated at the edge of the industrial age, Halesworth was a world of its own, protected by its privileges, an aggressive world and an active force for unequal exchange. A key question is, can the prominent role of a town be accounted for by its having been able to expand and develop in an already-structured rural world, rather than in a vacuum like the towns of the New World (and possibly the Greek city-states)? In other words, did it have resources available to work on, at the expense of which it could grow? Regarding small English market towns like Halesworth, their very sieve-like social structure is evidence that they were ‘filtered out of the countryside’. The Halesworth parish boundary was porous in all directions to the town’s consumers and its producers who served their needs. The topographic boundary was hardly noticeable. This social dynamic is first brought to life in a 16th century description of the town. There were at least two farmsteads close to the church, with access from Pound St and the Market Place directly onto their fields. The backs of the houses on Chediston St and the Thoroughfare looked over closes that had been reclaimed by drainage from riverine fen. Indeed it may be said that the ‘townsfolk’ were ‘countryfolk’ who had a taste for property development and trade.

Through their interactions with land and property they are examples of the embryonic consumer society, which has since driven world development. The universal trait of people to want to better themselves has led to most cultures in the developed world taking the Halesworth route from sustainable self-sufficiency to rampant consumerism. On the way, the consumer movement produces local features in the landscape that, as well as being landmarks of craft and art, may also be considered as symbols of the win-at-all-cost ethic, a form of behaviour that in the long run proves unsustainable. People become rich because they are already fairly rich. However, entrepreneurs grow old, technology reveals its inefficiencies, and wealth is passed to children who spend, rather than invest.

In this respect, local consumerism may be summarised in relation to four stages in the growth of personal economic independence:
 * being able to survive;
 * being comfortable;
 * being able to make an impression;
 * being well-known for 'being well-known'.

Halesworth’s basic rural penumbra has continued well into the 21st century and the ‘walls’ of dense housing estates that now block out the countryside to the north and south of the town only came with the last decades of the 20th century expansion of its population, which was driven by central government, rather than the investment of individuals. Yet, it is still possible to walk east from the church and within less than five minutes be contained within the rural scenery of wet riverside pasture, embedded in a dominant wetland ecology, that has changed little in three centuries. The following section is an exploration of the rural/urban interface as far as it reflects the boundary between producers and consumers, starting with the 1841 Tithe Apportionment of Chediston, a village that is representative of the rural/urban interactions of countryfolk and townsfolk at this time. 3.2 The Chediston story

Unlike Halesworth with its ever-shifting tortuous boundaries, Chediston seems to have retained its pre-Conquest social topography down the centuries. It is a somewhat rectangular parish, with a long axis stretching two miles from Halesworth’s Chediston Street to the west up the valley on either side of the northern Blyth. Its angular shape, which follows the east west orientation of the Blyth tributaries, has prompted speculation about its origins as an Iron Age tribal estate with boundaries marked by streams and watersheds. Its breadth, of about half a mile, is marked by two ancient boundary stones, symbolic ‘gate posts’ to an important valley route, pioneered by Mesolithic peoples, to the lands of the upper Blyth at Metfield. Both stones are rare glacial erratics. ‘Ched’s Stone’ is situated on the northern parish boundary, which runs parallel to the northern watershed of the Blyth. ‘Rhoca’s Stone’ (Rock Stone Manor) stands opposite, by the Cookley parish boundary to the south. The eastern boundary of Chediston runs with that of Halesworth, more or less between the valleys of the northern and southern Blyth.

Fig 3.2 Chediston Hall The first description of the parish in modern times is given in White's Directory for 1844, which lists the population as 433 ‘souls’ within a parish consisting of 2378 acres of land, of which nearly two-thirds were arable on a rich loamy soil. The manor and a great part of the parish were then owned by George Parkyns, who had purchased the Chediston Hall estate, and the lordship from the Plumer family in 1833.

Walter Plumer seems to have taken an interest in the manorial lands of Chediston in the 1730s. In addition to purchasing the lordship of Chediston manor, in 1739 he also purchased the Manor of Halesworth from Thomas Betts. At this time the Plumer family seems to have had property in Newmarket, but their ancestral home was in Hertfordshire. In any event they were absentee landlords. After Walter’s death the property passed to his brother William. William died in 1767 and his son, also named William, succeeded.For most of the 18th century the Hall seems to have been rented to the Beales and Baas families.

The first Beales of Chediston was recorded in a church memorial dated 1787. The first memorial to a Baas appears in 1806. The last Baas to rent the property was Robert, a member of the Yarmouth branch of the family, who took up the tenancy in 1811. The last of the Plumers, Jane, the wife of William the Younger, died in 1831 and Chediston Hall was bought by George Parkyns two years later. After the sale Robert Baas moved out to Halesworth. This was the property described as ‘a large and elegant mansion in the Tudor style, ornamented with towers, turrets, pinnacles, and an embattled pediment, standing on a bold elevation to the north of the river, facing south’ (Fig 3.2). This raises the question as to when this property was built.The style is a Tudor/Gothic hybrid with elements that place it in the third quarter of the 18th century. This was when William Plummer the Younger was active, and appears to have been the period when the Baas family first appeared in Chediston.

In White’s 1844 directory George Parkyns was listed at Chediston Hall. The entry mentions that all the mature timber in the park had been recently cut down, and new plantations had been made by Parkyns as part of a scheme to enlarge and beautify the Hall’s surroundings. The park actually extended into the northwestern quarter of Halesworth. George Parkyns was also impropriator of Chediston’s St Mary’s rectory, from which he received £230 a year, as a commutation of tithes chargeable on those estates in the parish, which did not belong to him. He also received arbitrary fines from copyholders of the manor; the manorial system was still operating profitably here.

The living of the Church of St. Mary was a vicarage, valued at £6. 7s. 6d., and was united with Halesworth rectory in the patronage of Mrs. E. Badeley, and incumbency of the Rev. J. C. Badeley, with an old parsonage house and 50 acres of glebe. This completes an account of those at the top of Chediston’s wealth pyramid.

The bottom of the village’s social pyramid rested on the Town Estate, consisting of a farm of 30 acres, which was let for £26 a-year. This property had been vested in village feoffees since the reign of Henry VII for the repairs of the church and other charges imposed on the parishioners. There was much giving in the parish. The Almshouses for five poor families were a gift from Henry Claxton, in 1575, and had been rebuilt in 1832. Attached to them was a piece of land let for 20s a year. The poor parishioners had an annuity of 20s. out of land at Cookley, left by the Rev. Thomas Sagar, and about £17 a-year from Henry Smith's Charity for distributions of bread.

The ownership of land is revealed in the Tithe Apportionment of 1840 (Fig 3.3). At this time, there were 22 landowners and about a half of them owned more than 40 acres. George Parkyns was by far the greatest of the landlords with an estate of 1000 acres, which was about two and a half times more than John Birkett who was next in the landowning hierarchy with 379 acres. Not only did Parkyns own almost a half of Chediston’s agricultural land, but he also ran the biggest farm, of about 400 acres. John Birkett did not live in the parish and his land was let to four tenants. The next level of farming by yeomen was represented by five families, Read, Archer, Fiske, Tallent and the Robinson brothers, with enterprises ranging in size from 144 to 182 acres.

Fig 3.3 Distribution of land as recorded in the Chediston tithe apportionment of 1840 Land of less than an acre was usually categorised as house with gardens or yards. This description actually defined a total of 3.6 acres owned by George Parkyns, which probably indicates his importance as the squire.

Parkyns bought out the Plumer interest, but it is not known how the Plumers came to own so much of Chediston’s land, but they were probably occupying fields and cottages that from time out of mind had been attached to its main manor. The demesne was probably located where Chediston Hall and its park were sited. Although the Plumer/Parkyns property made up a large proportion of the parish, the question should be put in terms of when, to what extent, and how, did the rest of the manorial lands change from copyhold to freehold. From the unified timber styles of the farmhouses set out up the valley in a regular sequence on either side of Chediston Beck, it can be assumed that its farms were planned around the late Tudor period. Hedgerow dating indicates that many of their field systems are between 500 and 700 years old. Unfortunately, the manorial rolls for Chediston have not survived to answer questions about the history of land distribution. All we can say is that by the 1840s the lives of the four hundred or so inhabitants of the village were, as tenants, in the hands of twenty-two people. The histogram of landownership points up the social dominance of the Parkyns and the Birketts (Fig 3.3). 3.2.1 The people In 1851 the population of Chediston was represented by 89 households. A summary of the major categories of people in the village derived from the census is set out in Table 3.1 Most of the households were headed by farm labourers, who worked for the eighteen farmers of the parish, at an average ratio of 4 labourers per farmer. There was a strong element of self-sufficiency in the village, with the needs of the inhabitants for house maintenance, beer, clothes, shoes and groceries being met by village retailers. The agricultural production was mostly wheat and barley. The only industrial enterprise was a substantial milling business towards the head of the valley, employing three men.

Table 3.1 Categories of people listed in the 1851 census There were just over a hundred young children in the community, of whom around 20% were scholars. Their need for education was met by a parochial school staffed by two teachers.
 * __Designation__ || __No.__ || __Comments__ ||
 * Gentlemen || 1 || ||
 * Farmers || 20 || 1 retired; 1 also a miller; 1 also a wheelwright; 1 also a grocer ||
 * Farm labourers || 80 || 4 were paupers ||
 * Farm bailifs || 2 || ||
 * Thatchers || 2 || 1 retired ||
 * Millers || 3 || working for a farmer who was also a miller ||
 * Publicans || 1 || ||
 * Carpenters || 2 || ||
 * Tailors || 1 || ||
 * Shoemakers || 3 || ||
 * Milliners and hat makers || 1 || ||
 * School teachers || 2 || ||
 * Nurses || 1 || ||
 * Curates || 1 || ||
 * House servants || 31 || ||
 * Grooms || 3 || ||
 * Coachman || 1 || ||
 * Dressmakers || 3 || ||
 * Tea dealer || 1 || ||
 * Annuitants || 1 || ||
 * Boys || 57 || 10 years and under ||
 * Girls || 60 || 10 years and under ||
 * Scholars || 23 || 5 of these were over 10 years ||
 * Persons not born in Suffolk || 16 || ||
 * Paupers || 15 || 7 living in the Almshouse ||

Table 3.2 Farmers listed in the 1851 census Leaving aside two widows, who were each running their deceased husband’s farm, 40% of the farmers in the 1851 census were born in Chediston. During the passing of 15 years that had elapsed between the Tithe Apportionment and the 1851 census, many farming families had disappeared and only six turned up in the census with same surnames as those of farmers in the Apportionment. This high rate of turnover of farms was borne out by the lists of farmers in Whites directories for both Chediston and Halesworth (Table 3.3). These phenomena are indicators of the tenuous connection of families to the land.
 * Farm || Name || Status || Age (m) || Age (f) || Description || Birthplace ||
 * Red House || Read Thomas || Married || 32 || || farmer 197acres 6men 5boys || Suffolk Wilby ||
 * || Matthews John || Unmarried || 62 || || farmer 120 acres 2men 2boys ||  ||
 * || Fisher John || Married || 33 || || farmer 295 acres 9 men ||  ||
 * || Gibson William || Married || 57 || || farmer 59 acres 2men 2boys ||  ||
 * Cottage Farm || Balls James || Married || 58 || || farmer 82 acres 3 men ||  ||
 * || Balls Robert || Married || 31 || || farmer 12 acres & wheelwright ||  ||
 * || Burrows James || Married || 53 || || farmer 16 acres & grocer ||  ||
 * || Ingate Charles || Married || 47 || || farmer 140 acres 4 men 1 boy ||  ||
 * || Sones John || Married || 76 || || farmer 55 acres 1 man ||  ||
 * || Bishop Thomas || Widower || 67 || || Estate agent farmer 90acres ||  ||
 * || Turner Thomas || Married || 37 || || farmer 56 acres 2 men ||  ||
 * || Sones Mary || Widow || || 36 || farmer 68 acres 1 man ||  ||
 * || Robinson George || Widower || 60 || || farmer 250 acres 7men 2boys ||  ||
 * || Woolnough George || Married || 36 || || farmer 60 acres 1 man ||  ||
 * || Archer Harley || Widower || 72 || || farmer 190 acres 3men 1 boy ||  ||
 * || Seaman Mary || Widow || || 52 || farmer 135 acres 4 men 1boy ||  ||
 * || Read Samuel || Married || 83 || || farmer 27 acres 1 man ||  ||
 * || Burrows Charles || Married || 62 || || farmer 26 acres 1 man ||  ||

Table 3.3 Farmers of Chediston and Halesworth in White's Directories for 1844 and 1855
 * Chediston 1844 || Halesworth 1844 || Chediston 1855 || Halesworth 1855 ||
 * Archer, Harley || Butcher, Isaac || Balls, James || Cole, John ||
 * Bishop, Corbyn Jonathan || George, William || Balls, John* || George, Martin ||
 * Bishop, Thomas || Haward, Robert || Balls, Robert || George, William ||
 * Blaxhill, Samuel || Johnson, J Exors || Beckett, J.* || Hart, C ||
 * Booth, William || Ling, William || Bishop, Thomas || Johnson, James ||
 * Denny, John || Punchard, Thomas || Bryant, Thomas || Punchard, James ||
 * Fisher, John || Smith, John || Burrows, Charles || Punchard, Thomas ||
 * Fryett, Lydia || Webb, John Julius || Burrows, James || Woodgate, William jnr ||
 * Gibson, William || Woodyard, William || Crabtree, John* || ||
 * Gibson, William || || Gibson, William ||  ||
 * Ingate, Charles || || Ingate, Charles ||  ||
 * Ingate, Charles jnr || || Ingate, William ||  ||
 * Read, Samuel || || Ingate, John ||  ||
 * Read, Thomas || || Mathews, John ||  ||
 * Robinson, George || || Read, Samuel ||  ||
 * Sones, John || || Read, T. Cracknell* ||  ||
 * Winter, Robert || || Read, Thomas ||  ||
 * Woolnough, James || || Robinson, George ||  ||
 * || || Sones, John ||  ||
 * || || Seamans, Mary ||  ||
 * || || Turner, Nesling* ||  ||
 * || || Woolnough, George ||  ||
 * Not in the 1851 census

The distribution of land between farms in 1851 followed the same pattern at the time of the Tithe Apportionment (Fig 3.4). At the top of the new 1851 social hierarchy was Thomas Rant, gentlemen, who had replaced George Parkyns at Chediston Hall. His family consisted of his wife, his sister and three young children. Thomas was born five miles away in Mendham and his father seems to have brought money into the area that originated in a family business in Norwich. This enabled his son to live as a gentleman, particularly as Parkyns seems to have retained most of his land in trust. If the Rants farmed at all, they did not operate on the Parkyns scale. Their domestic needs were serviced by seven house servants (equivalent to about 25% of all the servants of the parish). It may well be that the Rants actually rented the Hall because George Parkyns’ Trustees retained his former role as impropriator of the rectory and lord of the manor, and thereby continued to collect the appropriate annual dues in Parkyns name. The Trustees were still described as lords of the manor and chief landowners in Kelly's 1896 Directory. Thus, Parkyns ghost continued to dominate Chediston’s rurality through many generations of tenant farmers and cottagers.

From the 1850s, Chediston’s population began to decline and at the end of the century it had fallen by about 16%. There was little or no development in the village except for the erection of a Primitive Methodist chapel 1863. Indeed, the Directory descriptions of the village remained the same until the 1920s, by which time the population was only 60% of its peak in the 1850s. The only noteworthy events seemed to have been the restoration of the church in 1895, and a new bell added to the church peal in 1911. Chediston Hall survived the war as a military HQ only to be completely demolished in the 1950's and its park ploughed up.

Fig 3.4 Farmers listed in the 1851 census for Chediston and the size of their farms The visual character of a village is expressed in the lie of the land, and its compartmentation into fields and building plots. This in turn is a topographical pattern generated by the wealth of individuals and their determination to make an impact. At the start of the 19th century, just 22 people owned Chediston’s 2378 acres. From this point, the fine detail of who and how the land was held sets a scenario for all the local players in the early Victorian parish power game. It summarises three social inputs to the average village economy, directed respectively by 'capitalist developers', 'owner-occupier workers', and the freehold clergy (Fig 3.5). From the Tithe Apportionment of 1840 we can define the next economic layer of owner-occupier farmers, the larger tenant farmers and salaried professional farm managers, who were dependent on an estate-owning capitalist. Then there were tradesmen such as millers, blacksmiths and innkeepers, and finally the great pool of labourers for hire.

Fig 3.5 The 'players' in the rural parish 'power game' Chediston's owner-occupier farmers, represented by the likes of the Bishops (80 acres), Suggates (116 acres) and Robinsons (200 acres), ran enterprises that depended to a considerable degree upon family labour, with a low capital input. 'Yeoman' is how they would have described themselves in earlier decades, a designation which usually referred to owner-occupier farmers who got their whole living from the land. There is no evidence of any capitalist developers i.e. absentee landowners who improved their farms then let them out to enterprising tenants. Although no records exist to throw light on the financial base of the Chediston yeoman, it is known that from early times, peasant and small farmers gradually came under the control of the financier. Borrowing and lending were not new phenomena in the 19th century. The very structure of agriculture was based on waiting between sowing and reaping, and, therefore, credit trans­actions were common even in medieval times. All sorts of devices were used to circumvent the legal prohibition of usury. There were the great financial dealings of kings and nobles, monasteries, bishops and the papacy, which strike the eye at once. Even a cursory glance at the life of a medieval manor or borough shows credit transactions springing spontaneously from the ordinary necessities of humble people, who may curse the lender but who cannot dispense with loans. In the towns there were always individuals who specialized in finance, but throughout the country districts money lending was simply a by-employment of the larger yeoman farmers, the parson or the innkeeper. Down the road in Halesworth, in contrast to Chediston, the urban power game was played out between merchants and shopkeepers and their craftsmen. Though in general craftsmen generally worked at home or in their own workshops and with their own tools, they were dependent for employment on the merchant who paid them on a piece work basis. There were of course many intermediate steps and many variations in the development of this system. For example, a small dealer or merchant might get his raw materials on credit from a larger dealer, or the larger dealer such as a maltster, might work on a credit system with London merchants. But the general principle was the same. The merchant controlled the direction of the commercial side of this industry, and he was ultimately in control of production as well. 3.3 The romance of rurality

It is all too easy, when contemplating historical personages, to stick to the notional attachments to place, which give them a romantic air. The reality was that they were often powerful, and ruthless players in the social game.

Nothing will bridge the gulf which stretches between the Victorian farmer and his labourers except the discovery of a personal account written about what it was really like to spend from January to the middle of March, dawn to dusk, bush draining a huge expanse of clay land. So far, Chediston has not, nor has any other village as far as we know, yielded a literate labourer witness. The gleanings of George Ewart Evans in Norfolk, and Alan Jobson in Suffolk, both taken from oral reminiscences collected in the 1960s and 70s, of those born at the end of the last century, provide us with filtered fragments which just about reach a generation long gone.

Luckily, in Rider Haggard we have an East Anglian farmer who documented the social gap, although he was not able to fill the void. He lived on the clayey drift edge, just across the Waveney border in Norfolk, a landscape not so different from Chediston. The journal he wrote for the year 1898 chronicles his daily observations of what it was like to be a tenant farmer on 350 acres. He admired the skills and strength of his hired workers, their stoicism and their character, but with all his imagination as a novelist he could not get into their situation. Perhaps there is nothing to say except the bald facts of their labouring, which Haggard really admits when he says 'such toilers betray not the least delight at the termination of their long ill-paid labour'. Indeed, why should they be keen to articulate the 'poverty, pain, and the infinite unrecorded tragedies of humble lives'.

Haggard employed fifteen men on his farm and gives meticulous descriptions of their many skills, such as dyke-drawing, the toughest of all the winter jobs. This is an account which reminds one that, the ploughing apart, most of Britain's landscape was fashioned by men with spades. Haggard's labourers worked a twelve-hour day in summer and every daylight hour in winter, and without holidays. Minimal though their education was, it taught them that there are places in the world besides their own parish, and made them aspiring and restless. More and more of them disappear, making for the army, the colonies, the Lowestoft fishing smacks, anywhere preferable to a farm. It grieved him. Published as 'A Farmer's Year', Haggard's journal praises agriculture as man's natural activity, the noblest of tasks, and he cites its improved conditions. Now and then, he joined in the labouring, although this he found separated him further from the workers than if he had merely sat on his horse and made notes. Whatever he saw, felt, or did, is written down with total candour, and the outcome is that he revealed what many farmers today would recognise as the lost soul of British agriculture. How else could we possibly interpret the following-
 * //"It is curious how extraordinarily susceptible some of us are to the influences of weather, and even to those of the different seasons. I do not think that these affect the dwellers in towns so much, for, their existence being more artificial, the ties which bind them to Nature are loosened; but with folk who live in the country and study it, it is otherwise. Every impulse of the seasons throbs through them, and month-by-month, even when they are unconscious of it, their minds reflect something of the tone and colour of the pageant of the passing day. After all, why should it not be so, seeing that our bodies are built up of the products of the earth, and that in them are to be found many, if not all, of the elements that go to make the worlds, or at any rate our world, and every fruit and thing it bears? The wonder is not that we are so much in tune with Nature's laws and phases, but that we can ever escape or quell their mastery. This is where the brain and the will of man come in."//

Indeed, it is 'the brain and will of man' that have produced the technician in an air-conditioned capsule, pulling a multi-furrow plough across an empty landscape as fast as the wind. The paradox is that the soul of agriculture has gone the way of Rider Haggard's hired ploughman, who behind striving horses, "wrapped in his thick cape against the sleet, wrestled the complaining plough beneath his hands'. The soul of agriculture is the spiritual enthusiasm of articulate landowners and urban critics of the rural scene. It is difficult to discern in the general picture of the countryside. This is created by brain and will, with the broader brush strokes of jobs and incomes. In this respect, Haggard's ‘isolated existence of town folk’ has now spread to villages, where even a child's journey to school involves being encapsulated from the elements. The speed of this change is remarkable. People farming today, who started out milking individual cows into a pail from a wooden stool, have ended up being told what to do by their internet agronomist and a computerised combine harvester. Everything about farms is seen to be dangerous- children are worried about poisonous flowers, won't get their feet dirty, and daren't stroke the sheep or pat the cows. Farmers have changed from being 'dear Farmer Giles' to a wicked sub-set of society that poisons the land, and whose animals you've got to let out from behind bars.

The turning point for Chediston, as in most other parts of rural Suffolk came in the 1960s. The typical ‘80 acre farmsteads’ came on the market with the retirement of the pre-War generation who had just about been converted from horse to tractor. At that time most of Chediston’s farms were mixing dairying with arable, and kept pigs and chickens. Farms were amalgamated and the 800 acre farm became the norm. Redundant homesteads were sold off to dentists, doctors and computer programmers. In the urge for higher productivity, land was drained and hedges removed. Livestock that could not be intensified was removed from the balance sheet. Animals no longer diversified the farming scene. The last of Chediston’s dairy herds was sold off in 1997. Although pigs remain, they are produced unseen in intensive enclosed prefabs. Barns are being converted into houses and the land of the retired 1960s generation is being farmed by contractors, who can descend on the fields to complete harvesting, ploughing or sowing in less than a day. There has also been a decided shift towards farmers functioning as landscape and wildlife managers, for which environmental goods the government pays out money that was formerly attached as a subsidy to increase the output of agricultural products. 3.4 Past in the present

Historically, Chediston is part of a long-enduring basic unit of rural settlement. No human group can live, and above all survive, to reproduce itself, unless it contains at least four or five hundred individuals. Until a hundred years ago that meant a village, or several neighbouring villages, in touch with each other, formed both a social community based on kinship, and an area distinguished by cultivation, land-clearance, roads, paths and dwellings. This has been described as a 'cultural clearing' - which for the first migrants encountering Suffolk's coastal topography, meant an open space literally hacked out of the forest.

Within the charmed circle of these thousands of small units, history passed in slow motion, lives repeated themselves from one generation to the next; the landscape obstinately remained the same, or very nearly so. Pre-industrial Chediston is reflected in its tithe map as a patchwork of ploughed fields, meadows, gardens, orchards and hemp-plots; herds grazed in the wet valley bottoms; and everywhere there were the same implements: pick, shovel, plough, and mill, all manufactured and maintained by the blacksmith's forge and wheelwright's shop.

At the level above these little communities, linking them together whenever they were less than completely self-sufficient, came the smallest possible economic unit: a complex consisting of a small market town, perhaps the site of a fair, with a cluster of dependent villages around it. Each village had to be close enough to the town for it to be possible to walk to and from market in a day. But the actual dimensions of the unit would equally depend on the available means of transport, the density of settlement, and the fertility of the area in question. The more scattered the population, and the more barren the soil, the greater the distances travelled.

With respect to Victorian Chediston, this represents the extreme rurality of the natural resources from which Halesworth’s colonists were escaping.