Change in the Village

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CHANGE IN THE VILLAGE

BY

GEORGE BOURNE

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1912


_Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons, Ltd., Guildford, England_


TO

MY SISTERS




CONTENTS


I
                                   PAGE
    I. THE VILLAGE                    3


II

THE PRESENT TIME

   II. SELF-RELIANCE                 21
  III. MAN AND WIFE                  38
   IV. MANIFOLD TROUBLES             50
    V. DRINK                         65
   VI. WAYS AND MEANS                79
  VII. GOOD TEMPER                   97


III

THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES

 VIII. THE PEASANT SYSTEM           115
   IX. THE NEW THRIFT               127
    X. COMPETITION                  143
   XI. HUMILIATION                  151
  XII. THE HUMILIATED               167
 XIII. NOTICE TO QUIT               180


IV

THE RESULTING NEEDS

  XIV. THE INITIAL DEFECT           193
   XV. THE OPPORTUNITY              200
  XVI. THE OBSTACLES                217
 XVII. THE WOMEN'S NEED             229
XVIII. THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING    244
  XIX. EMOTIONAL STARVATION         260
   XX. THE CHILDREN'S NEED          272


V

  XXI. THE FORWARD MOVEMENT         289




I

THE VILLAGE




I

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
venerable homesteads, any of those features that testify to the
immemorial antiquity of real villages as the homes of men; and this for
a very simple reason. In the days when real villages were growing, our
valley could not have supported a quite self-contained community: it
was, in fact, nothing but a part of the wide rolling heath-country--the
"common," or "waste," belonging to the town which lies northwards, in a
more fertile valley of its own. Here, there was no fertility. Deep down
in the hollow a stream, which runs dry every summer, had prepared a
strip of soil just worth reclaiming as coarse meadow or tillage; but the
strip was narrow--a man might throw a stone across it at some
points--and on either side the heath and gorse and fern held their own
on the dry sand. Such a place afforded no room for an English village of
the true manorial kind; and I surmise that it lay all but uninhabited
until perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time a few
"squatters" from neighbouring parishes had probably settled here, to
make what living they might beside the stream-bed. At no time,
therefore, did the people form a group of genuinely agricultural
rustics. Up to a period within living memory, they were an almost
independent folk, leading a sort of "crofter," or (as I have preferred
to call it) a "peasant" life; while to-day the majority of the men, no
longer independent, go out to work as railway navvies, builders'
labourers, drivers of vans and carts in the town; or are more casually
employed at digging gravel, or road-mending, or harvesting and
hay-making, or attending people's gardens, or laying sewers, or in fact
at any job they can find. At a low estimate nine out of every ten of
them get their living outside the parish boundaries; and this fact by
itself would rob the place of its title to be thought a village, in the
strict sense.

In appearance, too, it is abnormal. As you look down upon the valley
from its high sides, hardly anywhere are there to be seen three
cottages in a row, but all about the steep slopes the little mean
dwelling-places are scattered in disorder. So it extends east and west
for perhaps a mile and a half--a surprisingly populous hollow now,
wanting in restfulness to the eyes and much disfigured by shabby detail,
as it winds away into homelier and softer country at either end. The
high-road out of the town, stretching away for Hindhead and the South
Coast, comes slanting down athwart the valley, cutting it into "Upper"
and "Lower" halves or ends; and just in the bottom, where there is a
bridge over the stream, the appearances might deceive a stranger into
thinking that he had come to the nucleus of an old village, since a
dilapidated farmstead and a number of cottages line the sides of the
road at that point. The appearances, however, are deceptive. I doubt if
the cottages are more than a century old; and even if any of them have a
greater antiquity, still it is not as the last relics of an earlier
village that they are to be regarded.