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.