English Rural Life
In October 1908, Aubrey gave Doreen a book entitled Highways & Byways in Berkshire. Was this a romantic gesture or had they been married for forty years? Were they siblings, cousins or just good friends? We shall probably never know as Terroir purchased the book, from a British Heart Foundation charity shop, well over a hundred years later. The fly leaf dedication reveals only that Aubrey considered himself a man of Southsea at the time.
We do know that the book was written by James Edmund Vincent, with illustrations by Frederick L Griggs and was published by the London house of Macmillan & Co Ltd in 1906.
J E Vincent was a Welsh barrister, called to the Bar in 1884, went the North Wales circuit, but began to ‘devote more attention to journalism than law’ (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1912_supplement/Vincent,_James_Edmund) and was soon authoring books on a variety of subjects. In the early 1900s, he moved to the Vale of the White Horse, near Abingdon (at that time in Berkshire, now Oxfordshire) where he penned this volume and contributed to other publications devoted to the same area.
Frederick Gibbs RA was ‘one of the finest and most respected etchers of his time’ as well as an architectural draughtsman, illustrator, and early conservationist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._L._Griggs). He illustrated a number of Macmillan’s Highways & Byways series but one suspects that this was just an early step on his path to becoming, in 1931, one of the first etchers to be elected to full membership to the Royal Academy.
In June this year, Terroir walked a section of the Ridgeway National Trail through the ‘Berkshire Downs’ (Blog 136 ‘Ridgeways’). One of us was curious to see what James E Vincent made of the area, particularly as our party included another North Walian who had, like James Vincent, emigrated to the Home Counties.
James Vincent discusses the Berkshire Downs in his second chapter of ‘Highways & Byways in Berkshire’. The account is discursive, often self-indulgent and sometimes confusing, but does consider a number of topics of interest to Terroir.
The chapter starts with a discussion on what we would now call landscape character: ‘The fascination of Downs’, remarks Vincent, is ‘more comparable, perhaps, to that of the Canadian prairie than to any other scenery in the world’.
Above: American Mid West prairie lands in the 1880s, from the Puffin edition of Little House on the Prairie, drawn Garth Williams
He suggests that the new-comer to Canada is ‘appalled by the savage solitude’ and ‘wearied by gentle and monotonous undulations of poor grass which seem to go on for ever’. [I’m so not picking up Berkshire here]. Laura Ingalls Wilder hinted at this experience in her ‘Little House’ books (Blog 129), but Vincent’s point, when we finally get to it, appears to be that ‘The Berkshire Downs … attract the newcomer at once’ while the call of the Canadian Prairies only becomes irresistible after a considerable absence!
Above: Canadian prairies, Alberta 2023
Vincent follows his transatlantic distraction with a more traditional eulogy on English downland: the springy turf, the soft, elastic grass, the gentian or orchid, the faint fragrance of hundreds of tiny flowers, the hum of bees. Agricultural changes mean that much of that springy turf is now gone although some of the track margins do still support a diversity of wild flowers (including orchids) within the, now longer, grassy habitat.
As with ourselves, so Vincent was enthralled by evidence of the Downs’ antiquity (‘a tumulus, or a group of great grey stones’) (right - a view of Wayland’s Smithy) but unfortunately our author cannot get those Canadian prairies out of his head.
He dismisses the prairies’ early history (defined by JEV as anything prior to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway) by suggesting it could be ‘condensed into a few sentences’. Please don’t pass that on to the Canadian First Nationers.
As a Welshman abroad, Vincent indulges himself with a diversion into linguistics and the origin of place names: ‘having been born in Wales and being well aware that the Britons were before Roman and Saxon, I have a tendency to suspect a British origin for old-place names when the derivation is not obvious’. The debate centres on the villages of East and West Hendred. JEV argues that ‘Hendred’ is surely a corruption of the Welsh Hêndre or Hêndref meaning ‘old town’ or ‘old house’. Terroir will spare you Vincent’s defence of his theory but the author is firm in his conclusion that a Celtic influence still abounds in the culture and DNA of these Berkshire villages.
Whatever your views, it is an excellent excuse to feature one of Griggs’ illustrations (left).
Vincent has other surprises for us. After 14 closely typeset pages, he introduces the concept of ‘Berkshire sheep’. We think he means sheep that graze in Berkshire as we can find no reference to such a sheep breed. Hampshire sheep appear to be downland grazers so perhaps the bureaucratic nightmare of moving county boundaries applied to the naming of sheep as well. Our man then goes on to state that the Berkshire Downs were not, in fact, grazed by sheep at all, despite much of what he has written and/or implied in earlier sections. Indeed, by page 30, he has all these sheep penned on the lowlands, eating turnips and clover.
But one cannot deny that agricultural changes must have wrought many, many alterations to the landscape known to James Vincent at the start of the 20th century. Sheep of any sort are now a rarity and, although some verges might still be spangled with wild flowers familiar to our author, one suspects that the wider landscape now sports crops of different shades of green, planted on a different scale and creating very different landscape patterns. The weed-free, densely packed plantings of short stemmed wheat, barley and even peas would have been, we suspect, entirely alien to Vincent’s Berkshire landscape.
After around 6,500 words, Vincent ends his Berkshire Downs chapter with specific reference to horses and hares: ‘the only animals one sees’. Although we spotted a number of bird species and some butterflies on our 2024 walk, we would agree with Vincent that wild mammals were not much in evidence. The sight of race horses training on the Berkshire Downs, however, is probably the only landscape detail which Terroir and James Vincent would have in common. Vincent cites the 18th century Prince William, Duke of Cumberland as starting the trend with the construction of substantial stables near the village of East Ilsley and suggests that these Berkshire gallops rivaled Newmarket with their ‘better galloping ground and purer air’. The Downs remain an important locale for race horse training today (see images below).
And the hares? The final pages of Chapter 2 are not for the faint hearted nor for the Hunt Saboteur. Vincent revels in the delights of hare coursing - and of class consciousness! Bemoaning that coursing has fallen into disrepute ‘because it has come to be practised by persons of low repute’, (by which he means ‘publicans’ and ‘betting men’), he continues, ‘For the sport itself, privately pursued by small groups of gentlemen with two or three couples of greyhounds … I know nothing prettier’. He speaks with equal enthusiasm of fox hunting, and of shooting pheasant and partridge. He is clearly an avid enthusiast and his love of hunting shines through: his prose becomes lyrical, imaginative and fast moving in a way that not even the Welsh language, wild flowers or prehistoric antiquities had inspired him in earlier pages. Perhaps hunting is why James Edmund Vincent moved to Berkshire?
Postscript:
While researching this blog I was reminded of the excellent Museum of English Rural Life (The MERL), at Reading University. The Museum houses a magical, and nostalgic, collection of all things agricultural, including the finest line up of farm carts I’ve ever seen. Yes, I know - I never imagined that I would hear myself say that, but looking at the design quirks of hay wagons can be just as absorbing for Terroir as discussing car marques and specs can be for petrol heads.
But the Museum is not just about the English or Rural Life. Studying the Museum’s archive catalogue is like walking through your favourite sweet shop. Enjoyed Ladybird Books? A fan of Samuel Beckett? Want to study the history of Woolworths? Got a thing about clay land drainage pipes? Then this is the place for you.
I was reminded of all this when I started looking at the publisher of the Highways & Byways series. So good to know that the archive of Macmillan and Co Ltd (all 762 boxes) is safely tucked up in the Museum of English Rural Life.
University of Reading, Redlands Road, Reading, RG1 5EX