A West Country Village Ashworthy

W.M. Williams

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415330145
• eBook ISBN: 9781317851028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume examines the effects of rural depopulation as a process on the structure of family and kinship within one small rural area, analysing the spatial relationships of social and economic change. Part One documents these relationships in the context of family farming; the second part is largely devoted to the effects of demographic change on the structure of family and kinship within one small community.

Part One

Chapter One

Ashworthy

ON one of the main roads of the West Country there is a sign-post that marks the way to Kimberford, a small market town which attracts few visitors. Three miles along this side road, a further road—little more than a lane—branches off; there is no signpost to say where it leads. For a mile or so the high banks and hedges on either side shut out much of the light, then the road widens slightly and, after four miles of sharp corners and several cross-roads and forks, arrives at the village of Ashworthy. The newcomer, travelling this way for the first time, sees little of the landscape and can easily lose his route without a good map. Everywhere high banks obscure the view: cows, sheep or a combine-harvester appear suddenly around a corner: the surface of the road is thickly strewn with pot-holes. It is almost as if Man and Nature have joined forces to discourage strangers from visiting the locality.

Ashworthy is a civil parish in Kimberford Rural District. It covers an area of nearly fourteen square miles and is the home of some five hundred and twenty countryfolk. Seen from one of the few good vantage points it appears no different from the surrounding parishes. The surface of the land is sharply dissected by deep, steep-sided valleys: between them, hills and ridges of irregular shape extend as far as the eye can see. The fields, each one enclosed by a substantial hedge, vary in size and shape to no apparent pattern: copses and small plantations add to the complexity of the landscape. The farms and cottages, lying often at the end of a long twisting lane, seem isolated and lonely. The village itself cannot be seen from a distance, even though it occupies the top of one of the larger ridges.

Centuries of careful farming and continuous occupation of the land have ameliorated the harshness of the natural environment. The climate is wet, with strong winds, and the soils are cold and heavy. The district is generally recognized as being poor and difficult to farm. Many of the local place-names reflect the difficult natural conditions—Heath Farm, Bogland, Little Comfort, Starve All and No Great Things. Other place-names recall the distant past. Ashworthy has a long history. Like so many other villages it was founded in the Saxon period, following the invasion during the second half of the seventh century: many of the hamlets and farmsteads are recorded in the Domesday Book. Medieval stone crosses stand at several of the cross-roads.

Evidence of a long social and economic development can be seen everywhere. The small fields with their great hedges originate in the colonization of Saxon times. The font and some small parts of the Church tower are Norman; much of it is fourteenth and fifteenth century in date, built of local stone. Coats of arms of families who are recorded as holding land in the parish between four and five hundred years ago can be found in the Church and in a few farm buildings. Nearly all of the farmsteads are, however, much more recent. Many of them, of the ancient ‘long house’ type, with thick cob walls and a thatched roof, were built in the latter part of the seventeenth century. It was clearly a time of prosperity in Ashworthy, since three of the five large stone-built farmhouses of the lesser gentry or richer yeomen were erected during this period.

As one progresses nearer to the present the evidence becomes more abundant. The nineteenth century was a period of many changes. Years of plenty and enterprise are reflected in the building of new farmsteads, square, solid and somewhat forbidding in appearance. They replaced the traditional long houses, particularly in the years 1840–60. In contrast, the many ruined or half-derelict buildings which are common both in the village and the surrounding countryside point to the decline in population which began in the middle of the century and continued steadily until its end.

These clues to the past are of much more than sentimental or antiquarian interest: they are (or should be) a constant reminder to the field worker of the importance of a historical perspective. Ashworthy’s way of life and social structure were not made overnight. This seems obvious enough and needs to be stated only because far too many social scientists are content to pay lip-service to historical processes or to ignore them altogether.

Ashworthy has few visitors. It is difficult to reach and its landscape is unspectacular: there are no large towns near-by and practically none of the amenities which attract the tourist or holiday-maker. The village is not picturesque. There are a few fine thatched cottages, but the majority of the houses are austere buildings of dark stone with grey slate roofs. The centre of the village is dominated by a large chapel of an uncompromising Nonconformist type. Seen for the first time on a wet day the place appears bleak and unwelcoming. Normally, however, it is friendly and busy, since it provides a number of important services for the locality. There are two ‘general stores’, a butcher’s shop and a bakery which sends four delivery vans far into the surrounding countryside. It has a small inn, a post office, a draper’s shop and two garages, while among the village craftsmen are a shoe repairer, a smith, two tailors, four carpenters and a wheelwright-builder. Transport is provided by a haulage contractor who specializes in the carrying of farm stock and by a man who runs a bus and taxi service. There is a Church with a resident parson and a Methodist Chapel with a resident Minister.¹ The village school, with its staff of two—both of whom live in the village—takes about fifty children up to the age of eleven: older children travel by bus to schools at Longbridge, a small market town nine miles away.

The village is also a centre in many other ways. The people of the parish have to come there to collect their newspapers or periodicals and to change their books at the County Library van which visits once a fortnight. It has the only telephone kiosk in the parish. More important, the large Village Hall is the focus of many social activities. Ashworthy has a flourishing Men’s Social Club, a Youth Club, Women’s Institute, Boy Scout troop, a branch of the British Legion, a Village Band, a Football Team and Supporters’ Club. There is a branch of the W.E.A., a Conservative Association and a Liberal Association. All these, together with the Parish Council and other local bodies, meet in the Village Hall and use its room for dances, whist drives, ‘social evenings’ and the like.

These village services provide for many of the every-day needs of Ashbury folk: they make up to a considerable extent for the remoteness of the parish, which is isolated by its bad roads and the lack of a public transport service rather than by distance from the nearest towns. Kimberford, a small market town, lies only five miles from the village. It is an important market for the farmers of Ashworthy, many of whom own cars. Since there is no bus service, the majority of people go there only to see a doctor, dentist or solicitor, or for some other ‘special’ reason. There are many families in Ashworthy who do not visit Kim-berford from one year to another. Longbridge, farther away, is much more popular because a bus runs there from the village three times a week.² This small town fulfils most of the needs for which there is no provision in Ashworthy. In the words of one villager: ‘It’s not much of a place, but I go there to see the doctor and to the bank. I get my hair cut there and the wife goes to the shops. It’s got dentists and solicitors and auctioneers and people like that.… And, of course, there’s the cinemas— but I haven’t been there since before the war.’

Longbridge and Kimberford are, therefore, important to Ashworthy for certain essential services and this importance is only one aspect of the parish’s relations with the outside world. The parish is part of the larger society and a complex pattern of social and economic ties joins it to other parishes near-by, to the county, and farther afield. Nevertheless, Ashworthy is sufficiently cut off to make personal relations between its people crucial in everyday life. It is a ‘face-to-face’ community, where ‘everyone knows everyone else’. People work with others they have grown up with, they buy their food in shops owned by men and women who have a detailed knowledge of their personal and family history, and they spend their evenings in much the same company. The simple fact of living in a close-knit community dominates social relations.

Its influence can be seen, for example, in the ideas and behaviour of people towards social status. For reasons we shall examine later, class distinction is very poorly developed in Ashworthy. The elaborate class structure and the complex means of establishing and raising individual status which are so striking a feature of the social life of Gosforth in Cumberland³ are almost completely absent from this West Country village. Some people have higher prestige than others but there are no social groups that are or can be identified as belonging to a particular social class. This does not mean that the men and women of Ashworthy are unaware of or deny the existence of class distinction. For many years people have come to live in the parish who have been accustomed all their lives to communities where status considerations are of very real importance. In addition to overcoming the considerable handicap of being ‘a stranger’ they are faced with a way of life where the ‘normal’ criteria of social class have little meaning. As a result, ‘fitting in’—to use the local term—is a difficult and often painful process: many do not succeed and play no part at all in the social life of the parish. Those that do ‘fit in’ are successful because they accept the Ashworthy way of looking at things and of judging people. It is, then, only in respect of ‘strangers’ and ‘outsiders’ that the countryfolk feel class distinction to be important. The idea that someone you have known all your life, been to school with, and who has, perhaps, married a girl who is your first cousin, should be in a superior social position merely because he has a better job, or more money or lives in a bigger house, is foolish and irrelevant to the people of Ashworthy.

In the same way, the religious life of the parish takes place within a framework of close-knit personal relations. The people are either Church of England or Methodist, in roughly equal proportions. The Church is, of course, long established and was for centuries the only religion of the people. The parish as a territorial unit owes its existence to the Church and there are still ways in which it affects the lives of everyone, for example in the payment of tithes. Methodism first came to the parish early in the last century. On October the ninth, 1815 a small group broke away from the established Methodist Church with the formation of a Society of the Bible Christian Connexion at Lake Farm in Shebbear, Devon.⁴ The ‘B.C.’s’—as they came to be known—sent missions into the surrounding country and their chapels grew up over a wide area of the West Country with remarkable speed. A local man was largely responsible for the mission to Ashworthy, when a small number of converts was made. These numbers grew slowly but steadily so that by 1907, when the Bible Christians became joined into the United Methodist Church, they accounted for nearly half the population of the parish.

The early Bible Christians lived austere lives and their outlook and behaviour conflicted at many points with those of their Anglican neighbours. These conflicts must have assumed particular importance in such a close-knit community, where individual families were linked with many others by kinship ties, so that brothers and sisters, and even man and wife, might belong to different churches. Soon, therefore, two opposed forces were at work within the parish: the religious, which demanded of a person that he think and behave differently in certain important ways from those people who belonged to another church; and the social, which brought men and women together through bonds of kinship, neighbourliness and membership of the same group. Out of this opposition there grew up a modus vivendi, still subject to sharp stresses from time to time. ‘We have,’ said one man, ‘got to live with each other and we manage to get along.’

On the one hand, the Methodists still live according to many of the precepts of their nineteenth-century predecessors. Only a tiny minority ever enter the bar of the village inn. A small number of others come on most evenings to the door of the bar, knock and withdraw down the corridor where they wait out of sight for the landlord to bring them cigarettes, matches or packets of biscuits. Most people consider this to be reasonable and proper, although it is the cause of irreverent comment from time to time by the ‘regulars’. Sabbatarianism makes Sunday a very quiet day in the parish, in contrast to the bustle of weekdays, and is strong enough to extend to the ‘regulars’ at the inn. They come six days a week: on Sunday nights the bar is often empty. The Men’s Social Club is closed on Sundays, although several unsuccessful attempts have been made to have it open. Some people do not take Sunday newspapers: a minority listen only to religious programmes on the radio. Some disapprove of a wide range of activities, such as dancing and whist drives.

On the other hand, Methodists attend the fêtes and garden parties held in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index