Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 175

This handsome and lavishly-illustrated volume is essentially an updated version of Stanes’ The old farm which appeared in 1990. While it could so easily have been yet another of those wistfully nostalgic, maundering and rather dreary accounts of ‘the old days’, it is in fact a thoughtful, detailed and unsentimental review of rural life in the south-west between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. There are the usual descriptions of crops and animals, food and drink, haytime and harvest and the evolution of local vernacular architecture, along with a close examination of the hearthside culture of south-west Britain with its periodic feasts and festivals. Particularly impressive is the lengthy section on those vast and occasionally enigmatic Devon banks and the names of the fields they enclose. As Stanes is careful to point out, from a farming perspective Devon and Cornwall were rather different from many other parts of the country. A combination of early enclosure and the availability of ample upland common grazing gave free rein (within the limitations of their leases) to farmers to develop husbandry systems which eliminated the need for wasteful fallow courses. Hence the alternate husbandry, rotational farming and water meadows which so impressed Oliver Cromwell that he declared the farming of Devon and Cornwall to be the best in the land. If some elements of Devonian agriculture, including ‘paring and burning’ and various aspects of local mixed farming found critics among nineteenth-century advocates of the Norfolk four-course arrangement, the system was sufficiently robust and flexible to allow most farmers from the south-west to ride out the depression of the 1880s and 1890s while many of their detractors went bankrupt.

As a scholar and sometime farmer himself, Stanes writes very knowledgeably on the social side of the rural world: of kinship, family and inheritance; of marriage, society and religion, and of the darker side of village life: the feuds, the ‘rough music’, the abuse of witches and the ‘disappearance’ of unpopular folk. Although the absence of a clear chronological framework sometimes makes it difficult to tell whether we are reading of the 1650s or the 1950s, this is, to my way of thinking, the most stimulating section of Stanes’ book. I could not help reflecting, as I read of the ‘fun’ at haymaking and the communal nature of much of the work of the fields that for some people rural life was, in virtually all respects, beastly and brutish. Apart from the dreary and back-breaking labour involved in the growing season (endless hoeing and singling row crops, ‘roguing’ cereals, carting muck), at harvest (thistles and yet more thistles) and threshing in the winter (the horrors of rats in those corn stacks, the muscle-wrenching business of handling 18 stone sacks of wheat and the wheeziness engendered by fungal spores), there was the regular inhumanity of man to man. To be sure, life in the fields as a boy could be great fun if you didn’t have to be there, as in my own case where the majority of the day was spent wandering around with a gun potting the odd rabbit. But if you had to labour in those fields and were slightly out of the ordinary; a shade eccentric perhaps, or even female, life could be hellish. As a boy in the late 1950s I well remember the pleasure taken by my father’s men in taunting an epileptic casual labourer until he had a fit. Meanwhile, the mentally feeble residents of my Northamptonshire village (and they were in plentiful supply) were considered quite fair game by those who would probably have been at the front of the crowd at a jolly seventeenth-century witch burning! Bullying, incest and physical and sexual abuse, to say nothing of bestiality and deplorable cruelty to animals were common place in the ‘innocent’ rural England of my child hood. Robin Stanes quite rightly emphasizes the many positive virtues of rural life which, after all were the norm. Or were they? Perhaps the time has come for the oral historians to capture the realities of the rural world in the first two post-war decades before it is too late. In the meantime, as the environmentalists moan in their urban drawing rooms, I shall continue to rejoice in the products of Fisons, ICI and Monsanto, those illustrious eliminators of plant and animal disease, facilitators of an easier life, and indefatigable destroyers of thistles and poppies, whose efforts fuelled the remarkable agricultural revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.