Читать книгу Oliver Cromwell - John Buchan - Страница 8

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The curtain rises upon a shaggy England. The gardenland with which we are familiar was not yet, for there was little enclosure, except in the deer-parks of the gentry, though in the richer tracts around the more thriving villages hedges had begun to define the meadows and ploughlands. There were great spaces of heath and down which were common pasture, and the farms were like those of Picardy to-day, with fields unmarked except by the outline of the crops. The roads, even the main highways, were rudimentary, and over large areas impassable in snow or flood. Around the habitable places flowed the wilds of an older England, the remnant of those forests which had once lain like a fur over the country, and in their recesses still lurked an ancient vagabondage. A man could walk in primeval woodland from the Channel to the Tees, and on heather from the Peak to the Forth.

But, since the land had had a century of peace, the England of the Tudors had slowly changed. The villages, with their greens, churches and manor-houses, had now more stone and brick than oak and plaster. The new security had made houses which were once forts expand into pleasaunces and gardens. The towns were stretching beyond their mediæval limits into modest suburbs, and London was spreading fast into her northern and western fields. The nation was still a rural people; THE FACE OF ENGLAND a town-dweller had open country within view, and was as familiar as the villager with rustic sounds and sights, and even in London the Fleet Street linen-draper could cross Tottenham hill on a May morning for a day’s fishing. There was as yet no harsh barrier between city and country.

This uniformity was varied by two strong forces in the national life, the distinctions of locality and of class. The cities had still the mediæval particularism; they were tenacious of their liberties, jealous of their burgher rights, not to be dictated to by king or parliament, and they had their own militia for defence. Only London, Bristol and Norwich had more than 10,000 inhabitants, but every township under its ancient charter was to itself a little kingdom. In landward parts each district had its special customs and its vigorous local patriotism, so that a man from Yorkshire was almost a foreigner to a man from Somerset, and in any dispute the first loyalty would be owed to the tradition of a man’s own countryside. These traditions were curiously varied, so that it is not easy to define a temper as common to the whole nation. Party attachments in their ordinary sense had not begun, but provincial ties were never so binding. The plain man, gentle or simple, who was used to following the fashion, was certain in the eastern counties, in Buckinghamshire, and in Northamptonshire to be something of a radical and a puritan, while in Kent and in Cornwall and in the north he could be counted upon to be staunch for church and king. This localism, bequeathed from the Middle Ages, led to a snug and idiomatic life, grounded deep in the soil and tenacious of its heritage. Herrick’s lore

of may-poles, hock carts, wassails, wakes,

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes

would be cherished the more because the dwellers fifty miles off told the same tale with a difference. The vigour of this local life meant that it would be long before a public matter became an intimate concern of the whole land, and that in any such dispute half the nation would take sides at the start because of fantastic and irrational loyalties.

The other force which broke the uniformity of English life, that of class distinction, was still in the making. The scale ascended from the vagabond and broken man to the labourer and the small craftsman; to the tenant-farmer and the yeoman in the country and the merchants and artificers in the towns; then in the cities to the merchant-adventurer, and in the country through the lesser gentry to the great landowners. Of these grades two had come to special prominence. The city merchant on the grand scale, with a holding in companies that traded in the ends of the earth, had now so many points of contact with public affairs that he had perforce to become something of a politician. The yeoman, owning his own land, was a pioneer in new methods of agriculture, an independent figure with a vote for parliament, one who was inclined to think his own thoughts and ask no man’s leave. He was the link between the peasantry and the gentry, the most solid thing in England, wearing russet clothes, in Fuller’s words, but making golden payment. As for the gentry, there was as yet no sharp cleavage by vocation. A younger son did not lose rank through adopting a trade. A Poyntz of Midgham did not feel his Norman blood degraded by the fact that his father was a London upholsterer and that he had been born over the shop in Cornhill. Something of this liberality was due to the fact that the nobility had been comprehensively leavened by the new Tudor creations. The Bohuns and Mortimers and Mowbrays had gone, and the new grandees were nearer to the commonalty. They had been largely made by the Crown, but they were for the Crown only so long as the Crown did not tamper with their privileges and fortunes. The Whig oligarchy of a later age was already in the making. They were a ruling class, not a caste, and therefore they were realist and not romantic; they might oppose the king, but it would not be for the sake of the people, for they had little concern with whimsies about popular rights. When the clash came the great houses were THE NEW ECONOMY largely neutral or against the Throne; for loyalty on the old pattern we must look to the smaller gentry who had more ancient strains in their blood and less to lose.

Such was the face of England to a superficial observer in the opening seventeenth century. A foreign traveller with an eye in his head would have reported that the long peace had made the country prosperous and the people content. The new poor law preserved a semblance of order, and there was far less ostensible misery than in other lands. He would have noted a great middle class, running from the yeoman up to a point short of the higher nobility, which had the same kind of education and which mixed freely. Above all he would have recorded a vigorous provincial feeling, which it would be hard, short of a great foreign menace, to unify for any national purpose. Much of the government of England was done locally by the justices in the country and the corporations in the towns, and to the ordinary citizen the Throne was a faraway thing. He would have added that the great nobles, secure in their vast estates, had less need to be courtiers than elsewhere.

But the face of England was not the heart of it. A shrewd observer might have detected some perilous yeast at work in men’s souls.