H. J. Massingham, ‘Our Inheritance from the Past’, in Britain and the Beast, ed. by Clough Williams-Ellis (London: Readers’ Union, 1938), pp.8-31 (pp.29-31)

The astounding longevity of the village community seems to me one of the most, if not the most, memorable thing in the history and pre-history of England. An antiquity so vast covers all argument and does in a way silence all criticism. But that it virtually had no history is yet more extraordinary . It existed as a self-governing organism that functioned by internal custom and tradition, and was largely independent not only of external law but of foreign invasion, political change, and national progress. We do not normally associate vitality with an extreme conservatism, but here the one was the condition of the other. It is obvious that there must have been a considerable elasticity within the mechanism and a constant readiness to modify and adapt it to changing conditions. A structure too rigid would have cracked under so heavy a pressure of time. Practical experience was constantly at hand to overhaul the mechanism, and it is noteworthy that the communal village did produce many reformers, the spiritual force of the Lollard movement, and a bounty of rich idiom and folk-poetry quite apart from its handicrafts, [end p.29] its local architecture, and the highly individual quality of its produce. Such elements do not spell stagnation. Still less do we associate conservatism with social equality and the co-operative spirit, but here they were one. To reach such a conclusion I have been forced to make a very dull and prosaic retrospect. But surely the end has justified the means when a fact so wonderful emerges. It is so wonderful that there appears to be only one explanation for it. The village community articulated the natural state and the instinctive disposition of man as a social unit passing through a civilized and alien environment which failed, except quite incidentally, to influence it. The true environment of this community was nature herself, its own little patch of nature.

How fruitful was that union in all things except material progress is expressed in the telling figures—2000 B.C. to A.D. 1800. Empires and dynasties, wars and revolutions, social convulsions, redemptions and prostrations were scribbled without number and then erased from the Book of Political Man. The glory of the village community is its blank page. It exchanged one lord for another and the foot-plough for the mattock. It put two oxen to the plough and then added six more. But of all the social experiments of man it was nearest to eternity. It lasted. It only steps into history when commerce and progress destroyed it.

That event was the greatest crime in England’s past. England’s present shows that it was also her greatest blunder. The ruin of the peasantry in the eighteenth century has been followed by the ruin of the land in the twentieth. Defenceless, its weedy fields with their skinny hedges and choked ditches, its desecrated woods and dales, polluted rivers and deserted hills, lie open to a horde of speculators whose rape far exceeds in violence the worst excesses of the old barbarian invaders. Our only remedy for this plague of Progress is to buy up and set aside a few acres as museum pieces for sightseers. But if we want a countryside which is a living whole and not a mummified fragment, we shall have to borrow some of our .capital from the past. Even granted an urban population so [end p.30] preposterously swollen as it is to-day, it is still possible to do a great deal towards the restoration of the English countryside. As Cicero said: ‘Nothing is more excellent than agriculture, nothing more productive, nothing more pleasant, nothing more worthy of free men.’ If we lack the will to do this act of reparation, that is our own look-out. If the dairy farmers of a district, instead of living on mortgaged farms, letting their land fall into deeper decay and neglect every year, and all at cut-throat competition with one another, would combine to set up a co-operative milking plant with graded and sterilized milk and collective distribution, they could afford to give their labourers a shareholder’s interest in it. That is what the labourer needs more than he needs his minimum wage. He is not only a highly skilled worker who inherits by unconscious memory the profound local knowledge of the old villagers; he is also a man of such variety of occupation as removes him a world away from the mechanized and specialized workman of the towns. Yet there is neither promotion nor increase of wage nor possession of land for him. At seventy he is where he was at twenty. Once give him a stake in this combine-farm and a new local life will arise from the ashes of the one that is dead.

The restoration of village prosperity merely by the mechanization of farming is an idle dream. What has to be rediscovered and restored by methods and appliances in harmony with our present environment is the living spirit of the old village community. The modem equivalents of the open field system, commonable pasture, and co-aration are the co-operative purchase of machinery , seeds, and manures, the borrowing of capital, stock-breeding, and the sale of produce in common together with the provision of allotment fields. Preservation of the land by chance bequest or desperate purchase can only be a temporary bandage for a broken anatomy. The evil is within. It can be expelled only by the resurrection of the genius of place which was nurtured by the ancient village.

The problem of the countryside is identical with the problem of the countryman. [end p.31]

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