Google Books and The Book of the Farm by Henry Stephens

One of my great delights is downloading books from google. 

 This I hasten to add is not just because they are free but because they are no longer available. Most have sat on a dusty university shelf for decades and they date from the 18th and 19th centuries.
So google book downloads have allowed me to trawl the reports of the Poor Law Commisioners from the late 1830s into the ‘40s, obscure guides on employing servants and the wonderful book The Book of the Farm by Henry Stephens.

It was written in 1844, and ran to countless editions. It was the manual for anyone wanting to be a farmer. Everything is here from what crops to plant and when to how to make a well, as well as sound advice on hiring labourers, the construction of a water meadow, and the best location for the milk house and cheese room. I learned which materials were best for building a farm house and how much I could expect to pay for materials, as well as the most up to date scientific information on planting wurzels.

It was a practical book and so “the cost of digging a well in clay, eight feet in diameter and sixteen deep and building a ring three feet in diameter with dry rubble masonry is only L5 [£5] exclusive of carriage and the cost of pumps.”

He calculated that that two brood sows could produce 40 pigs between them and that retaining six for home use the remaining 34 could easily be sold at market. So many of the smaller farmers and market gardeners in the township might well keep at least one sow and use it to supplement their income. Nor should we forget that these animals were destined for the table and so the slaughter of pigs was best done around Martinmas in early November because “the flesh in the warm months is not sufficiently firm and is then liable to be fly born before it is cured” and doing so in early November had the added advantage that cured hams would be ready for Christmas.

To read Stephens is to step back into the world that was Chorlton in the 1850s and for that alone it is worth making the effort to get a copy.
This review was first posted in full on Friends of Chorlton Meadows http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.com/
Picture; cows on Chorlton meadows from the collection of David Dishop

A People’s History of England ………… one to read

Now I am always interested in the books which people say had a profound effect on them.

Book cover, 1974

For those in the Labour movement that book is usually "The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressell which described the working conditions on a building site in the early years of the last century.

I will have read it sometime in the summer of 1967, by which time I had already been a member of the Labour Party for over a year.

And while the novel is a powerful critique of capitalism, my choice would be A L Morton’s “A People’s History of England”, published in 1938.

I pretty much read it from cover to cover around the same time as Tressell’s book, and in the midst of doing A level History, English and the British Constitution, I found it a revealing and challenging anecdote to traditional accounts of our past.

Moreover, it complimented the teachings of two of my three teachers at Crown Woods and shaped my own thinking and my own approach to teaching and writing history.

It is one of those “general histories” which sweeps through our story, starting during the Neolithic period, and rolling on to the Roman occupation, the Feudal System, the development and dominance of capitalism, into the age of Imperialism, culminating on the eve of the Second World War.

Peterloo Commemorations, 2019

It moves with a pace, is easy to read, but has a sense of authority, and of course advances a different approach which seeks not to explain the past as the actions of Kings and Queens, or “great men and women” but from the bottom up.

It opens with a paragraph which seems all the more relevant at present, starting in prehistory with “Early maps show a world in which Britain is a remote outpost, a shapeless cluster of islands out into the encircling ocean.  

But in some of these maps a significant tilt brings their South-western coast close to the North of Spain, reminding us that earlier still, centuries before the making of maps that have survived , Britain lay not outside the world but on a regular trade route which linked Mediterranean civilisation with the amber bearing North”.*

In the course of the book Mr. Morton does not fall into the trap of romanticizing the past, recognizing that while “the Levellers’ movement looks forward to the demands of the Chartists in the Nineteenth Century it had in the Seventeenth no solid backing.  

It was movement of a doomed class, the independent farmers, who with the exception of the fortunate few, were in the next two centuries to be slowly crushed by the growth of large-scale capitalist agriculture ……….” **

Demonstrations in support of Farm Labourers, 1874

The first edition published in 1938, ended with an epilogue, written a year earlier, which concluded with “The world stands in the shadow of a war more terrible than that of 1914.  

If war comes the British Government must bear a heavy share of the responsibility.  

It is not even now too late for the danger to be averted , if the British people, and above all the working people who form the overwhelming majority of the population and who are always the worst suffers in any war, are able to unite in sufficient strength to force the Government to stop aggression and take their stand with France and the Soviet Union for world peace”.***

Twenty-seven years later, writing a forward to a new edition Mr. Morton explained, that he had dropped the epilogue, because it had become “quite inadequate as an account of those momentous years from  1914 to 1938, but didn’t feel himself “competent to deal with the very difficult problems of a period quite outside my own field of study”.****

N.U.M , 1986

Now that may be, but I rather think that the closing paragraphs of that epilogue have a resonance today, and even more so if we substitute Brexit for war, and adapt the reference to the named countries.

Location; Britain

Pictures; cover to  the 1974 edition, published by Lawrence & Wishart, Peterloo Commemorations, 2019, courtesy of David Harrop, Farm Labourers Lock-Out Demonstration, Manchester, 1874,  from the Graphic Newspaper 1874, and NUM badge, 1986 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Morton, A. L., A People’s History of England, 1938 Tribes and Legions, page 13, Left Book Club Edition

**ibid page 247

*** ibid page 526

****Moreton, A.L., Forward to first paperback edition, published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1965