The English Village Explained: Britain’s Living History by Trevor Yorke Read Free Book Online Page B

left the village were to find it harder to make ends meet in the next period as industrialisation killed off even the cottage industries they now relied upon.

    FIG 4.11 EXEMPLAR VILLAGE c1800: Our imaginary village has entered the industrial age. On the hill in the distance a local lord has built his new mansion and has converted the old fields into a sweeping landscape park. To the right a fulling mill with its chimney has been built alongside the river and a wharf created next to the new canal which now passes along the valley. The village has drifted down towards these sources of employment leaving the older part in the foreground on the outskirts of the settlement. In front of us the exterior of the church has changed little while the manor house to the left has been re-built a number of times. The high wall on the right encloses the garden of the new vicarage, but still retains the shape of the two medieval crofts which had been taken over by their neighbour in the previous view. On the site of his house now stands a new stone cottage which the man across the road can only look at enviously. His own timber-framed house, covered in a protective plaster layer, was built some years before on the old green. The only part of the green still remaining is around the pond by the T-junction .
    The farmer surveying his smart new farmhouse and fields in 1800 would be looking forward to a prosperous future, while some of those working his lands were scraping around for a living. The village was no longer the centre of an agricultural system, but a home for those who provided services for it. In the final period these services would become fused into the trades and their specialised buildings which we associate with the traditional village, only for the social and economic changes of the 20th century to transform them once again .

C HAPTER 5
Industry and
the Modern Age
     
      1800–2000   

    FIG 5.1: In the modern age the term village has become more flexible with developments like this garden suburb near Liverpool taking on the characteristics of a rural settlement with a green and cottage-style houses. This chapter looks at the new types of village which have appeared in the past 200 years, the social and physical alterations which occurred in existing ones and the changes which are still ongoing today .
    R ural life in the first half of the 19th century was often tumultuous as the effects of war with France and continued industrialisation resulted in changes to farming and to village life. The reforms of the 1830s and beyond, beginning with the reform of Parliament in 1832,probably saved England from spiralling into the revolutionary fever which had spread across mainland Europe, and during Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) the country became the world’s first industrial nation. Villages, in this new age of the British Empire, were increasingly being affected by international events and industrial developments as the world grew smaller.
    Virtually no village community escaped the massacre of the First World War, 1914–1918, and memorial crosses record the names of the young men who lost their lives, affecting a whole generation from labourers up to aristocrats. The loss of these male heirs, the agricultural depression, increased taxation, and the fixing of rents during the war resulted in a great sell off of many country estates from the 1920s.

    FIG 5.2: Estate villages were still being built in the early and mid Victorian period with cottages like these examples at Ilam, Staffs, having a distinctly pointed Gothic appearance and a wealth of vernacular materials and details .
    The decline of rural industries and the mechanisation of agriculture, especially after the Second World War, saw the numbers of those who worked on the land fall in the 20th century, although some of this was offset by new businesses which developed where good transport links existed. However, just as some villages began to contract in size,