[Diggers350] William Cobbett’s Dream Of A ‘Brave Old World’ : Why Britain Needs A Peasants’ Revolt

Tony Gosling tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Sun Jul 24 13:43:40 BST 2022 


William Cobbett’s Dream Of A ‘Brave Old World’: 
Why Britain Needs A Peasants’ Revolt

<https://tlio.org.uk/william-cobbetts-dream-of-a-brave-old-world-why-britain-needs-a-peasants-revolt/>24 
July 2022 <https://tlio.org.uk/author/tony/>Tony 
Gosling - 
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Why Britain needs a peasants’ revolt


<https://unherd.com/2020/08/the-uk-needs-a-peasants-revolt/>To 
become more self-sufficient, we must listen to 
William Cobbett and his dream of a ‘Brave Old World’

Emacs!


John Lewis-Stempel

BY <https://unherd.com/author/john-lewis-stempel/>John Lewis-Stempel

If you leave England via the Severn bridge and 
drive through Wales’ Wye Valley, on a road 
parallel with the river, you will come to a 
settlement central to the history of these isles: 
Monmouth. I should warn you: it is a tad twee. It 
has an M&S Simply Food and a Waitrose. It’s that 
sort of small town. I should, also, declare my 
interest: one of my ancestors, a hardcase Welsh 
Borders esquire called John ap Harri, fought at 
Agincourt alongside Henry V, the warrior king who 
was born in Monmouth castle. So I confess to 
experiencing a small frisson of pride every time 
I go down Monmouth’s charming main (and almost only) street.

If, like the ap Harris and their descendants, you 
appreciate a ruck then ­ despite its genteel, 
beside-the-languid-Wye ambience ­ Monmouth is 
your kind of town. As well as the castle ruins, 
there is the Nelson Museum ­ the victor of the 
Nile and Trafalgar performed quite a lot of 
trysting with Emma Hamilton hereabouts. But my 
own personal place of “have-a-go” pilgrimage is 
the Wetherspoons situated (of course) on Agincourt Square.

I am an expert on that watering hole, The King’s 
Head, a rambling coaching inn dating from the 
17th century, since I spent multitudinous hours 
under its stuccoed ceilings during the interval 
between collecting one child from 
Extra-Curricular Activity A at 5pm and waiting 
for the other to finish Extra-Curricular Activity 
B at 9pm. (We sometimes even spent the night in 
the pub, rather than do the 50-mile round trip 
home and back again to school in the morning. 
Country life, eh?) There are advantages to 
Wetherspoons, I find: their reputation as 
déclassé keeps out sanctimonious snobs. You are 
pretty safe from Emily Thornberry in a Wetherspoons.

I have digressed. The truest reason I love The 
King’s Head is that William Cobbett once gave a 
lecture there: an event commemorated by a nice 
print on the wall of the man ­ in red jacket, 
white britches and black boots, all properly 
Georgian ­ and a bit of accompanying biographical text.

The wall dedicated to William Cobbett in Monmouth’s Wetherspoon’s.

Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale 
as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished 
it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre 
Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British 
Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. 
Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue 
plaque on every place he ever visited. In his 
long life ­ he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 
­ Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, 
MP, agony uncle (his books include 
<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15510/15510-h/15510-h.htm>Advice 
to Young Men), and the founder of 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansard>Hansard.

His obituary in The Times, after categorising him 
as a “self-taught peasant”, 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/27544037>declared 
Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that 
has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: 
when some town council somewhere banned his 
anti-Malthusian play 
<https://www.amazon.co.uk/Surplus-Population-Poor-Law-Bill/dp/0948688076>Surplus 
Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.

Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of 
the rural poor, the village labourer and the 
small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He 
spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country 
folk were suffering a triple wham from 
agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise 
of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his 
name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged 
or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he 
had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.

Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the 
capitalist, manufactory system) and the 
centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London 
(“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no 
bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely 
empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a 
decade travelling around the English sticks to 
discover the true state of affairs. His 
descriptions of his horseback journeys were 
published in 1830 as 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Rides>Rural 
Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.

No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it 
brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board 
descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. 
Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:

The finest sight in England is a stage coach 
ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a 
beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see 
more of what man is capable of performing. The 
vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and 
so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. 
The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The 
inside full and the outside covered, in every 
part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, 
bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand 
and his whip in the other, gives a signal with 
his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.

One of these coaches coming in, after a long 
journey is a sight not less interesting. The 
horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from 
their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole 
equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. 
But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.

Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in 
Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.

When you go to that Wetherspoons yourself, take a 
copy of Rural Rides with you, sit under Cobbett’s 
portrait, and ask yourself the following 
question. Given all the Westminster-overlooked 
problems of British country people in 2020 ­ from 
the absence of public transport to abundance of 
second-homers ­ who speaks for us now? Where is 
our champion, our Cobbett? The one of us who can speak for us? Where?

Cobbett’s solution to the woes of the Regency 
rural poor was a return to a barter-based 
Medieval economy under gent paternalists with a 
sense of noblesse oblige, plus Parliamentary 
voting reform, creating a Britain where there 
would be “room for us all, and  plenty for us to 
eat and to drink”. In the bon mot of 
<https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Adventures-William-Cobbett/dp/0006388256>his 
biographer Richard Ingrams, Cobbett sought a “Brave Old World”.

Even in the 19thcentury, the call to go “back to 
the land” ­ vacating the towns and dismantling 
the factory system ­ was unrealisable nostalgia. 
But that is not to say that Cobbett’s proposals 
were meritless. One in particular needs dusting 
down today: self-sufficiency, as promoted in his 
manual and manifesto, 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottage_Economy>Cottage Economy.

Of course ­ and I hear your sniggers ­ 
self-sufficiency has become a Tom-and-Barbara 
Good Life laugh, if a slightly strangled one now 
that, due to Covid “collapsology”, your 
neighbours are fleeing the Wen for a house with a 
large garden in Norfolk. If you truly believe 
self-sufficiency too quaint, ponder this: in 
France some 20% of the fresh produce consumed is 
still raised in the kitchen garden, the potager. 
Then ponder this also: during Covid, France’s 
newspapers declared 
<https://www.sudouest.fr/2020/05/08/potagers-et-jardins-les-stars-du-confinement-7468201-4051.php>“Potagers 
et jardins, les stars du confinement”. Well, 
obviously. Soul, stomach, sense of self-reliance, 
re-connection to healing nature all satisfied by 
a quarter of an acre. Every one of psychologist 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs>Abraham 
Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” ticked. Voila!

Actually, self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard 
farming ­ call it what you like ­ is a venerable 
British tradition. Once upon a time governments 
even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings 
Acts authorising acquisition of land for those 
wanting to grow their own. Between 1908 and 1914 
alone, 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/3741490>205,103 
acres were purchased in England and Wales for 
smallholders and allotmenteers. In return for 
service in the Great War, 24,000 soldiers were 
settled on plots in our green and pleasant land. 
The allotment movement was boosted by Round 2 
with militaristic Germany, 1939-45, and the “Dig 
for Victory” campaign. By 1943 there were 
<https://www.allotment-garden.org/allotment-information/allotment-history/>1,400,000 
allotments in the UK, producing a gob-smacking 1.3 million tonnes of food.

Then came the outbreak of peace, the population 
doubling to 60 million, and an expansion of 
housing which caused hard-pressed local 
authorities to sell land to developers. 
Currently, there are a niggardly 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/4699817/Allotments-a-very-British-passion.html>250,000 
allotments in the UK, and the waiting lists are 
as long as rake handles. But now that BoJo has 
decided that money does, after all, grow on 
trees, why not spend a casual couple of billion 
purchasing land around Britain to be divided up 
into plots for village people and townspeople 
alike? (I propose this be called “The Cobbett Scheme”.)

So, when you are in Monmouth, do visit The King’s 
Head. Cobbett, the man who dined alike with Pitt 
and farmworker, who hated cruelty to animals, and 
appreciated a good pint, would have been entirely 
at home in a Wetherspoons ­with their CAMRA ale, 
RSPCA Freedom Food eggs, Marine Stewardship 
Council fish (I have eaten in Michelin starred 
restaurants with less ethical food and drinks 
policies) and its merciful absence of stuffed 
shirts.And, alongside Rural Rides, have Cottage 
Economy with you, and ask yourself this ultimate 
question: do we not need more self-sufficiency in this country?

I say we do. As the Sex Pistols should have sung: “Autarchy for the UK!”






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