Life in the villages

Here we assemble all the parts of the letters that help us to draw a picture of how life happened in the villages during the early 1840s.  This is where we here about the endless parties and dances that happen on the lawns or in the fields after harvest, although we learn little about the grinding poverty that confronted the labourers when they greeted a new day each morning.  Above all we appreciate that sudden death means just that, not the resolution of a football match.  Farming, particularly the prices, wins a reasonable level of letter space.  Just occasionally we catch whiffs of the vigilante activity that occurred up and down the land at this period.

The subject that attracts least attention?  The outside world.  Not even county events, let alone national or international happenings manage to penetrate the consciousness of the letter writers.  It is almost as if nothing exists beyond the boundary of the villages.  But, the account of this apparent timeless, hermetic  way of life contains within it the beginning of the end.  Interwoven in the letters appear a stream of references to how the railway gradually extends up from London and Reading, past the villages and beyond to the west.  This was different: Sunday afternoon churches emptied as the villages went down to watch the trains steam into the nearby station. This is truly penetration, because now the men folk set their watches by the train and the villages begin to tick to the national heartbeat.

Within half a century the life in these villages will change immeasurably as both the Slades and the Fullers sold up or went bankrupt, releasing holdings of centuries to smart new money won from the cotton looms up north.