By John Cole
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By John Cole
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To find a unified village - a single ‘local community' - we really need to go back to mediaeval times. Then everyone (including the parson!) farmed his own strips of land. There were, of course, class divisions. but people were held together by the simple fact they had to produce everything they needed right there in the village. Travel - even to the next village - was a rare event: maybe a visit to the Annual Fair, or going to fight with an army. or perhaps going on a pilgrimage. When powerful people began enclosing the land in the 17th and 18th centuries, rich and poor became more sharply divided; but even then what united people was more important than what divided them. This ‘nuclear’ village began to break up as people, especially the young and the poor, were attracted off the land to work in the new factories. At the same time travel was becoming easier and so gradually even the remotest villages came to depend on the goods the factories were producing. The effect was that some villages shrank and others expanded.
The first change probably came when one of the new factories was built, perhaps down near the village corn mill. Alongside would be a neat new row of workers’ cottages. Here was the first new layer to set the compost heap going. In the North of England especially many factories were built where there was no previous community - and the very distinctive ‘mill village' is the result. When the factory came to the village, the workers came too: and now, over 100 years later, often with the factory long gone and the cottages modernised, these mini-'mill villages’ on the edge of a larger village are frequently still quite distinct places on their own.
In the 20th century the pace of change has quickened steadily. Many of the council houses built in the 40s/50s/60s have now been sold to their tenants but an unspoken divide remains between those who live there and the ‘old villagers’. In many ways the village now belongs to this second influx for without the council housing the school would have closed long ago. People from ‘the estate’ probably run the football club and the pub darts team, the Allotment Association and much else. But the feeling lingers that here is a different community, the second layer on the compost heap.
The early 60s seem to have generated a third layer in many places: a more up-market type of housing which has made some of the lanes in the village seem like an offshoot of suburbia—kerbs, lamp-posts, privet hedges and mock burglar alarms. People in these houses will either show no interest in village life or they will take over every activity and run it to suit themselves - often with great enthusiasm and efficiency. Few of these folk would depend on the village for their livelihood or use the village shop to buy their groceries. Fewer still would ever catch a bus.
More recently, across many parts of England at least, a new influx of non-villagers is altering the balance of village life yet again. New infill estates of ‘executive’ housing are crammed in to meet the soaring demand from a new generation of long-distance commuters. For these people the village as such counts for little. ‘Local’ means the nearest town where shops and leisure facilities can be found. They couldn’t manage without two or more cars; in fact, they probably never set foot outside their front gate except to go jogging or to walk the dog. A key feature of this group (as increasingly of those who live in the 1960s mini-suburbia) is that they do not stay in the village for more than three or four years before promotion forces them to move to the other end of England. Only Britain's periodic bouts of economic recession slow this trend!
The newest and most unlikely influx is that seen recently in Bardney - where some of England’s more remote villages are being colonised by retired people cashing in on the relatively high value of their homes in other parts of the country. The question is how they will settle. After a lifetime in suburbia, will they want to tangle with village community life? |
