Ancient church and village and trout streams. Another England
on 08/23/2011 at 10:37 AM
Oh well done old boy, well done!
And the links open up a whole small world full of history:
The Church of All Saints stands on one of the oldest sites of continuous Christian worship in England and is the spiritual hub of the thriving village community.
In the early part of 20th century, much of the area around Barton Stacey was owned by the McCreagh family. The last owner from this family, Michael McCreagh, was opposed to the tithe tax system which took one-tenth of the revenue of his farms, so he stopped them working and allowed them to fall into disrepair. Such was the effect on the area that Barton Stacey became known as a derelict village.
The derelict estates were requisitioned by the government around 1938-1939 for use as a military training area and this began the period of association between Barton Stacey and the army.
Yup, the village was pretty much killed by a landlord who wasn’t going to accept a law that forced him to give 10% of his gross to a church he didn’t belong to. See why we don’t have an official religion in the USA?
So he let the whole village go to rack and ruin, and the tenant farmers had to leave. Don’t feel too sorry for them, because they probably weren’t the ones doing the actual farm work. Those jobs were, um, farmed out, and the workers totally screwed over, though it was welfare from the local church that them alive. Taking care of the poor wasn’t the government’s job in those days. Things were so bad for them 100 years before this (from the Enclosure period onward) that the Luddite-esque Swing Riots set their world aflame. And of the thousand arrested afterwards, while 252 were sentenced to death and deportation, only 19 were actually executed nationwide, but of those 19, 3 locals were deported and 2 others got the noose. So things must have been quite awful in Barton Stacey if the numbers were commensurate with the severity of the crimes.
I love posts that link me to interesting stuff I can learn about! Thanks!
And McCreagh’s behavior happened barely 2 centuries after the whole county chipped in to rebuild the town, which would have all been owned by some earlier lord. Don’t forget - there is no time in the rural world before the 1940s hardly; things hardly change a bit over the centuries. The same families live in the same homes doing the same jobs, forever.
From a news article written in the 1920’s:
This is not the only semi-derelict land in Britain. There is good land being wasted in many other counties. On the one hand, we have our huge bill for imported food and for paying the unemployed to do nothing, together with a widespread but unsatisfied demand for the opportunity of getting land to farm; on the other, acre upon acre of usable land that has been allowed to go to waste or is being grossly misused. The facts have been known to the late Government for years, and details of the Barton Stacey case have several times been brought to their notice. But they have done nothing. They have turned over in their sleep, muttered something about a special Act having to be passed to deal with such cases, and left the land to its desolation, the villagers to their poverty and unemployment.”
A very interesting take on land ownership rights and responsibilities, something we don’t think of often in the more built-up parts of the USA. Tenant farmers were the norm ... since the Normans, maybe even longer. Because the only people who owned any land, the landed gentry, duh, had had an ancestor who had been granted it by some earlier king. Everyone else paid rent in cash or in kind, some families for over 1000 years.
I really like that last photo, which I’ve dubbed ‘the old straight track’.
I hope Alfred Watkins will forgive me.
08/23/2011 at 12:46 PM
