The Country and the City III

Yet the eventual structure of feeling is not based only on an idea of the happier past. It is based on that other and associated idea of innocence: the rural innocence of the pastoral, neo-pastoral and reflective poems. The key to its analysis is the contrast of the country with the city and the court: here nature, there worldliness. This contrast depends, often, on just the suppression of work in the countryside, and of the property relations through which this work is organised, which we have already observed. But there are other elements in the contrast. The means of agricultural production - the fields, the woods, the growing crops, the animals - are attractive to the observer and, in many ways and in the good seasons, to the men working in and among them. They can then be effectively contrasted with the exchanges and counting houses of mercantilism, or with the mines, quarries, mills and manufactories of industrial production. That contrast in many ways still holds in experience.

But there is also, throughout, an ideological separation between the processes of rural exploitation, which have been, in effect, dissolved into a landscape, and the register of exploitation, in the law courts, the money markets, the political power and the conspicuous expenditure of the city.

The rhetorical contrast between town and country is indeed traditional: Quintillian (c.35 - c.100 CE)  makes it his first example of a stock thesis, and conventional contrasts between greed and innocence in these characteristic locations are commonplace in later Greek and Latin literature. But it was especially in relation to Rome that the contrast crystallised, at the point where the city could be seen as an independent organism. In the savage satires of Juvenal we find the tone which is more than conventional: a sustained and specific catalogue of corruption:

What I do in Rome? I never learned how 

To lie.  

This teeming life of flattery and bribery, of organised seduction, of noise and traffic, with the streets unsafe because of robbers, with the crowded rickety houses and the constant threat of fire, is the city as itself; going its own way. A retreat to the country or the coast, from this kind of hell, is then a different vision from the mere contrast of rural and urban ways of life. It is of course a rentier's vision: the cool country that is sought is not the country of the working farmer but of the fortunate resident. The rural virtues are there, but as a memory as in Satire XIV:

Old mountains peasants

Used to tell their sons...

Be content with a humble cottage...

Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 46-47] 

It is interesting how separations are created between the city and the country from both sides. The city dwellers often wish the country to conform to an old fashioned ideal that they would not necessarily wish to see operating in the city, acting as a brake on its dynamism. It is easy from a country point of view to see the city as crowded and frantic. However, as I have said there is a continuity of experience between the country and the city with a constant movement of people, goods and ideas between the two. The apparent separation created by these ideas disguises the continuities.

Thus in Jonson's poem to Wroth we can feel the contrast between the country gentleman and the worldly men of the city. But what are the lawyers doing, much of the time, if not proving titles to land? A large part of what is being passed across the exchanges is the surplus value of the unregarded labourers at home, and as trade developed, abroad. And as the moneyed order of the city extends in importance, where does much of the capital go but back to the land, to intensify the exploiting process? The greed and calculation, so easily isolated and condemned in the city, run back, quite clearly to the country houses, with their fields and their labourers around them. And this is a double process. The exploitation of the land and of nature, which takes place in the country, is realised and concentrated on the city. But also, the profits of other kinds of exploitation - the accumulating wealth of the merchant, the lawyer, the court favourite - come to penetrate the country, as if, but only as if, they were a new social phenomenon. As was said in 1577, about the merchants:

They often exchange estates with gentlemen as gentlemen do 
with them; by virtual conversion of one to the other.

That virtual conversion is the whole point. There is a common way of seeing the social process of this period as a kind of infection of the city:

from which (as it were a from a certain rich and wealthy seedplot) courtiers, lawyers and merchants be continuously transplanted.

Well certainly Penhurst is such a case. But a real conflict of interest , between those settled on the land and those settled in the city, which continually defined itself in the shifting economy of the time, could be made the basis of an ideology, in which an innocent and and traditional order was being invaded and destroyed by a new and more ruthless order.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 48-49] 

This is where the idea of a 'traditional' order is most effectively misleading. For there is no innocence in the established proprietors, at any particular time, unless we ourselves choose to put it there. Very few titles to property could bear humane investigation, in the long process of conquest, theft, political intrigue, courtiership, extortion and the power of money. It is a deep and persistent illusion to suppose that time confers on these familiar processes of acquisition an innocence which can be contrasted with the ruthlessness of subsequent stages of the same essential drives.

The 'ancient stocks', to which we are sentimentally referred, are only ordinarily those families who had been pressing and exploiting their neighbours rather longer. And the 'intruders', the new men, were entering and intensifying a system that was already established and which, by its internal pressures, was developing new forms of predation. If we have humanity to spare, it is better directed to the unregarded men who were making and working the land, in any event, under the old owners and the new...

Of course a city eats what its country neighbours have grown. It is able to do so by the services it provides, its political authority, law and trade, to those who are in charge of the rural exploitation, with whom, characteristically, it is linked in a mutual necessity of profit and power. But then, at marginal points, as the processes of the city become in some respects self-generating, and especially in the course of foreign conquests and trade, there is a new basis for the contrast between one 'order' and another. The agents of power and profit become, as it were, alienated, and in certain political situations can be become dominant. Over and above the interlocking exploitation, there is what can be be seen as a factual exploitation of the country as a whole by the city as a whole.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 50-51]   

The true history of the English countryside has been centred thoughout in the problems of property in land, and in the consequent social and working relationships. By the eighteenth century, nearly half of the cultivated land was owned by some five thousand families. As a central form of this predominance, four hundred families, in a population of some seven or eight million people, owned nearly a quarter of cultivated land. Beneath this domination, there was no longer, in any classical sense, a peasantry, but an increasingly regular structure of tenant farmers and wage-labourers: the social relationships that we can properly call those of agrarian capitalism. The regulation of production was increasingly in the terms of an organised market.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p. 60]  

The Country and The City II

On of the things that interests me in relation to landscape, the landscape genre, the sublime and the uses of the countryside is hunting. Living off the land, whether collecting berries or hunting animals for food and protection, surely meets our most primal needs. I have from childhood been an opponent of fox hunting. As I child I felt empathy with the fox not the people on the horses. However, hunting is much more than this and even fox hunting has a context within farming; in the creation of ceremony and organisation of communal support to protect farmed animals in open country from wild predators. Many people who oppose fox hunting would support hunting by indigenous people even though they might have concern in supporting only those hunting methods that are the most humane. It is a complex and difficult topic. This passage from The Country and the City highlights one of the arguments, in a historical context, in relation to this topic:

To make many men poor and dependent, and then to offer them charitable relief, can perhaps, be seen as humane. But the landowning class required dependence, in social and political quite as much as in directly economic terms. Slowly, through this period, there began, in many villages, a direct political struggle. The provision and control of pauper relief went alongside the intensified importance and prosecution of the Game Laws. The figure of what is called the 'poacher' becomes characteristic. A last property in nature, in its old way of life but now its 'preservation' of wild life as 'game', was directly and repeatedly challenged by men living and finding their living in their own places, their own country, but now, by the arbitrariness of the law, made over into criminals, into rogues, into marginal men.

The history of the game laws and of the men who defied them , is a central feature of the class struggle in nineteenth century rural society. In orthodox accounts the morality and the aesthetic of the so called owners, who developed in just this period their leisurely rituals of shooting and hunting, have been widely publicised, and very much later - when it didn't so much matter - there was the minor cult of the 'poacher' as a 'character'; the attractive and vagrant rogue. But there was always a different morality, which I remember hearing in the talk of small farmers and labourers. The immense presumption of this lordly ownership of the rabbits and the fish and birds -

And every beast did thither bring

Himself to be an offering

- was at once savagely asserted and skilfully challenged. I have heard my grandfather talk of the 'labourer's supper' with what seemed to me then as now an understandable pride: a rabbit knocked off behind the hedge, a swede knocked off at the edge of the path: a meal for eight children. If there are any ready to mourn the loss of a country way of life, let them mourn the 'poachers' who were caught and savagely punished, until a different and urban conscience exerted some controls. Or if there are any who wish to attack those who destroyed country customs, let them attack those who made the finding of food into theft.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. 1973. (this edition) Spokesman, Nottinham 2011 [p.p. 183 - 184]

Raymond Williams The Country and the City

Appendix

'Country', as a word, is derived from contra (against, opposite) and has the original sense of the land spread out over and against the observer. In the thirteenth century it acquired the modern meanings of a tract or region, and of a land or nation. in Tindale in 1526 it is contrasted with the city: 'tolde it in the citye, and in the countre' (Mark v.14). 'City' by this time had become normal usage for a large town, though derived from civitas, which in its turn was derived from civis (a citizen in the sense of a national). Civitas had meant community, and was applied to the tribes of Gaul; later it was the name of an ecclesiastical district. In Old English it was interchangeable with burh and was more commonly used in this sense than urbs, which had been nearer the modern sense. In Middle English it had become common and in the reign of Henry VIII was made the equivalent to the seat of a cathedral, a usage since surpassed.

From the late sixteenth century, as the general history would lead one to expect, there are more frequent and pointed contrasts of the 'city' and the 'country'. 'Countryman' and 'country people' in the rural sense date from this period, as do 'country-house' and 'country-seat'. 'Countrified' follows in the mid-seventeenth century; 'bumpkin' and 'country-bumpkin' from the same period. 'Countryside' is an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century development, in its modern sense. 'Rural' and 'rustic' are present as physical descriptions from the fifteenth century but acquire social implications, mainly specialising in 'rustic' and 'rusticity' from the late sixteenth century. 'Urbane' similarly extended from its sixteenth century physical sense to its modern social implications, first recorded in the early seventeenth century.

'Metropolis' had been the chief town or seat of a bishop from the sixteenth century; 'metropolitan' is still mainly physical until the eighteenth century when it begins to take on its modern social implications. 'Suburban', similarly, has a physical sense from the early seventeenth century, and a physical sense from the nineteenth.

'Farm' was originally a fixed payment, then from the sixteenth century, by extension a holding of land on lease, and so to the modern meaning. 'Commuter' is a late nineteenth century railway term, from the ticket bought at a commuted rate. 'Conurbation' first appears in the mid-twentieth century. 'Pastoral' with the sense of feeding, as in 'pasture', is in common use for shepherds from the fourteenth century, and has an almost contemporary analogical meaning for priests. 'Pastoral' in its social and literal senses comes from the late sixteenth century, which can be seen as the decisive period in the formation of the structure of the meanings in the words which describe my main theme.  

It's interesting to start at the end. This list tracks the changes in meaning and development of words that refer to the country and the city as feelings towards these locations mutate through social, cultural and political developments. This is the theme of William's book set in the context of our own desire for a nostalgic countryside.

The initial problem is one of persective. A few years ago I was sent a book for review: a country book, in a familiar idiom, that I would normally have enjoyed reading. But there in front of the experience was a formula:

A way of life that has come down to us since the times of Virgil has suddenly ended.

In detail, this was certainly interesting. From Virgil? Here? A way of country life?
       But in outline, of course, the position was familiar. As it is put in a memorable sentence, in the same book:

A whole culture that had preserved its continuity from the earliest times and now received its quietus.

It had happened, it seemed, in the last fifty years: say since the First World War. But this raised a problem. I remembered a sentence in a critically influential book: Leavis and Thompson's Culture and Environment, published in 1932. The 'organic community' of 'Old England' had disappeared; 'the change is very recent indeed'. This view was primarily based on the books of George Sturt, which appeared between 1907 and 1923. In Change in the Village, published in 1911, Sturt wrote of the rural England 'that is dying out now'. Just back, we can see, over the last hill...
...Is it any more than an age old habit of using the past, the 'good old days, as a stick to beat the present? It is clearly something of that, but there are still difficulties. The apparent resting places, the successive Old Englands to which we are confidently referred but which then seem to move and recede, have some actual significance, when they are looked at in their own terms. Of course we notice their locations in the childhoods of their authors, and this must be relevant. Nostalgia, it can be said, is universal and persistent; only other men's nostalgias offend ... But again, what seemed a simple escalator, a perpetual recession into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old England, settlement, the rural virtues - all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different things are brought to question. We shall need precise analysis of each kind of retrospect, as it comes. We shall see successive stages of the criticism which the retrospect supports: religious, humanist, political, cultural. (p.p. 9 - 12)  

In his introduction to the edition I have (Spokesman, 2011, Nottingham) Sam Smith writes

Like John Berger, in his exactly contemporaneous reading of the visual arts, Ways of Seeing (1972), Williams insists on the actively political nature of the way of perception. Of the 'mystification of the land and estate' in Carew's celebrations of Saxham or Jonson's of Penhurst, he observes that 'It is essential to remember the recent character of these "traditional" settlements when we are asked to take up a position towards the more evidently new and speculating 'landowners', for 'The social change conceals again, a quite precise set of social relationships.' ...
...It is clear from all this that Williams's study is not another moralistic account of the emergence of a capitalist economy and polity, but an attempt, through its literature, to explore the complex and conflicted actualities of the process, in which industrial and agrarian capital were mutually interpenetrative and sustaining, as it was lived, endured or enjoyed, by men and women 'on the ground'. That doesn't mean that he doesn't take a stand. On the contrary, the whole book is infused with an impassioned socialist humanism that puts mealy mouthed twenty-first century versions to shame. When he addresses present-day developments of 'a mode of production which has indeed transformed the world', he doesn't hesitate to give globalisation its proper name, speaking of capitalism's culmination in imperialism'.

One of things that I take from reading The Country and the City is that the relationship is not always one of conflict. That there is a continuity in experience between the country and the city as people move between the two. The rapid urbanisation that took place during the Industrial Revolution was driven by the movement of people from the country to the town and city and in many cases country people took their experience of rural resistance to the cities and helped create the trade union movement. The rural and urban resistance was nurtured by books published in towns and cities. This can be seen to some extent in my blog Cardiff Castle of Crossed Destinies There is a calendar of insurrection under swords_fire_unrest.

This by Luke White is a very good resource if you are interested in the sublime.