By Richard Stratton:
But they will maintain the fabric of the world;
And in the handywork of their craft is their prayer.
Ecclesiasticus 38. v. 34Two thousand years ago the settled population of this country was found on the chalk hills of Southern England – the Cotswolds, west Dorset, and eastward to Kent and the Chiltern Hills. Just as Salisbury has long been a market city through being at the confluence of five rivers, so our ancestors sited their capital where the Thames drew them to the sea. At London’s back door they colonised the light lands of Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. It was only on easy working soil that the primitive scratch plough pulled by two oxen could make any penetration. The high chalk has always been a forester’s nightmare but, in Iron Age times, it required minimal clearance. The heavy axe and mouldboard plough which was to tackle the oak, ash and beech forests on the clay of England arrived with the Belgae only shortly before the Christian era.
Chalkland may be thin of soil but it is well drained, the water being held like a sponge by the chalk beneath. Farmers have long known that corn yields excel in a wet season, and nowadays it is accepted that the amalgam of moderate summer temperatures, long days, and ample rainfall, provide almost ideal conditions for top yields of cereals. Down the centuries, from the Saxons struggling to develop the mouldÂboard plough to Jethro Tull’s corn drill and on to the machinery that we see today, chalk farmers have at least been working on a rewarding medium.
When considering the saga of farming in the Deverills over the last two centuries, it is suggested that we survey the scene at 50 year intervals, i.e. 1780, 1830, 1880, 1930 and 1980. Each date has in fact marked a turning point in the story.
First we must learn the changeful moods of heavens,
And all the winds, and of each several field
The natural character, what this consents,
What that declines to bear. Here cereals thrive,
There grapes more gladly ripen, here again
Green saplings flourish and unbidden grass.
Thus on each region Nature long ago
Her stern necessities and changeless laws Imposed . . .
– Virgil.
In the 18th Century the difficult clays of North and West Wiltshire were given, of necessity, to permanent grass and this was cashed in the form of milk and cheese. Farmers and herdsmen were scattered near cattle steadings and thus escaped the full rigours of the manorial system. Fifty year later they were to provide the forceful men who developed dairies and the modern corn techniques on the neighbouring uplands.
By 1780, away in Norfolk, Thomas Coke was just beginning to demonstrate his four-course rotation of turnips barley or oats, clover and grass ley, and finally wheat. The basis of farming in the Deverills, as in much of the country was still the Open Field system, in which tractable land near the village was divided into innumerable small strips of less than one acre each, these then being allocated by the Lord of the Manor (in Kingston, Lord Bath) to leaseholders so that each had a plot in each field. When the system was first introduced from the Mediterranean seaboard the rotation would have been corn and fallow alternately to conserve moisture. In England it was soon extended to two years cereals, followed by one year fallow.
The villages grew up near the river for the sake of a water supply. Even in the author’s childhood the river contained vastly more water than now, for the pumps at Mere had not lowered our water table and there were good hatches everywhere. There would in 1780 have been ample water to power the grist mills at Monkton and Hill Deverills. Especially in spring, flooding the water meadows for early grass presented no problem. Away from the water meadows and the Open Fields were the unenclosed Downs capped with gorse. Wood for fuel was a continuing concern and many of the woods that we see today would have then been hazel coppice, a certain proportion being cut each year. We have recently learnt that no other method of forestry yields more timber per acre. The bound faggots were used for houseÂwarming and bake ovens, and the better wood had innumerable uses for building, thatching spars, hurdle making and garden use.
The prosperity of our villages was linked to the Wiltshire Horn ewes which were organised communally and ranged the Downs every day in charge of shepherds. The vital thing was that by night they were penned in a moveable fold of hurdles on the cultivated strips, thus manuring the soil and allowing wheat to be grown. This process however took a great deal from the Downs and put nothing back, so that after 150 years of it they had been drained of their fertility. The drawÂback to the system was the lack of sheep food in winter, which is notoriously long and severe hereabouts. Everything, except actual breeding ewes and ewe lambs had to be sold or salted down in the autumn. Hay from the meadows was reserved until after Christmas. Salvation was provided by the water meadows which could be made to produce a flush of grass for the ewes and their lambs in March/April; when at last the Downs grew in May the meadows were shut up for hay. Sometimes vetches were grown on the fallow strips for midsummer folding.
In modern times Wiltshire is easily accessible, but in 1780 it consisted of a number of remote and largely self-contained communities. A surveyor of the time records:
‘Wiltshire, as being partly a corn and partly a grass county, is capable of producing most of the articles of human sustenance, and, being in general a well cultivated district, its produce is considerably more than its consumption. The principal products are corn, chiefly wheat and barley, cheese and butter; fat calves; fat cattle and sheep and fat pigs. The manufacturing towns within the county and in the eastern parts of Somerset and the cities of Bath and Bristol furnish a constant regular demand for these products and London took no inconsiderable part of them.’ (1) As far as the Deverill Valley was concerned, much of its business would have been through the market at Warminster and the various local sheep fairs, through which huge numbers of store animals were sold for fattening in the Eastern counties.
There is no doubt that the local villages of the 1780’s were busy, self-sufficient communities. Those men not hired to work on the land found employment in service occupations as road-makers, carriers, drowners, thatchers, builders, bakers, smiths or millers, the few unable to work being given some support on parish relief. The women too were all busy with their domestic duties, and probably also organised some basic education for their children under the supervision of the parson. Dwellings were primitive and facilities nonÂexistent, so that life must have been harsh, particularly in the winter.
By the last quarter of the 18th Century the Industrial Revolution was well under way. The manufacturing industries being established in the towns led to an increased demand both for workers and food with which to feed them and it soon became clear that the archaic Open Field system was inadequate. Change was in the air.
As it turned out then, and has so often happened since, war provided the immediate stimulus. The long-drawn-out Napoleonic wars were a true struggle for national survival and at times the threat of starvation was real. This led to rapid price rises, so that whereas in 1780 corn had been 35s.8d per quarter, by 1812 it had soared to 126s.6d, and even in 1830, fifteen years after the war had ended, was still 64s.3d. This had led to furious activity in the valley. Leaseholders had been bought out to make tenanted farms, hedges planted, and buildings erected, and cows brought under cover in the winter so as to improve the milk supply. Although the local farmers had a reputation for building good ricks, much of the harvest was stored in barns. A report says: ‘Their barns are indeed as well calculated as possible for the reception of corn, brick and stone walls being cautiously avoided, except for the foundations and timber and weather-board being used in their stead, and the covering usually being thatch. The general and almost the only material for barn floors in this district is two-inch oak plank laid on oak sleepers, and to prevent rats and mice from burrowing under them they are frequently laid on a bed of flints or broken cinders and sometimes raised on staddle stones.’ (2)
In the parish of Kingston Deverill an oak floor of this type which had been laid down for 34 years was, when taken up, found to be perfectly sound on the under side of the planks while the surface had been completely worn away by the flail. Many new crops adorned the scene. Potatoes had transformed the diet of the poor, and fields of turnips, rape, sanfoin, peas and vetches along with the ‘artificial’ grasses and clovers provided so much winter keep for the sheep that even the ewe lambs could at last be wintered at home. The nearer downlands had been ploughed and on the extra acres barley was the favoured cereal. Yields per acre in the district – previously, wheat 22 bushels (12 cwt), barley 28 bushels (14 cwt), and oats 36 bushels (13 cwt) – had been raised by a quarter. Barley perhaps increased by a third. Artificial manures were still non-existent, and all depended still on fertility brought on by sheep from the Downs. Keysley Down, being on its own, was not so treated, and the stock that grazed there slept there. This resulted in its rental value being enhanced almost to that of arable land in the locality, a clear indication of what might be achieved with manure.
All this development, allied to high corn prices, made for great prosperity in the valley and enclosure brought more benefit than drawback to the people. It is true to say that it was in this period that the mediaeval layout of our villages was changed dramatically into substantially that of the present day.
The Deverills faced the New Year of 1880 with morale at an all-time low. After the confident years of the Golden Age, 1879 had brought the worst season that anyone could remember. The winter had been one of the coldest of the Century with much snow. On 27th May, after a late spring, a great thunderstorm ushered in the wet spell. June 6.80 ins, July over 4 ins, and August 6.45 ins, tell their own story. Haymaking started on the 11th July and finished in the valley on 15th August. Harvest did not start until 4th September, and what little corn was saved was useless. Farmers were ruined in every direction, but no one else minded because corn had recently started to flood in from the fertile prairies of America at rock-bottom prices, and to cap it all the first shipload of frozen beef had just arrived from Australia. The era of cheap imported food had dawned and British farming had begun its long decline which was to last for some sixty years.
This was all the more galling because so much had been done. The downs above the valley had been fenced in, using massive oak posts dug in every three yards that were to last a century. Mechanical mowers for grass, and binders for corn, had effected a transformation, as had the new threshing machines. Superphosphate made from bones, and guano from seabird manure were joined with chalk and lime to condition the soil, while protein-rich oilcakes fed to stock also enriched the land. Cereal yields had increased and prices had held up because, in spite of all, progress had been barely enough to feed the fantastic increase in the town population. Now however other countries were ready to do it and at less cost.
Unaware that their way of life had reached its zenith the crowded population of the valley went about its daily tasks. In the barns, wheat was bagged up from the heaps using wooden bushel scoops, weighed off at 2¼ cwt in each tidy sack, and loaded onto the wagons for Warminster, there were six sacks on each side and one in the middle at the back, like a priest following choirboys. The pairs of Shire horses were beautifully turned out and were usually in shafts abreast. Warminster was an important market and the sacks of corn were often unloaded in the market street. Similar convoys of wagons came from the Nadder Valley through Stockton Wood and down to Boyton, and the carters had a convivial time before it was time to go to the railway station and load up Radstock coal for the return journey. The beer was strong and the potholes deep and frequent was the damage to life and limb, so that William Stratton was constrained to build a road at his own expense in Monkton Deverill to by-pass The New Inn! The valley road from Brixton to Hill Deverill, by then 25 years old, was a great boon.
Other carters took their teams to the fields, while the shepherds turned the ewes away on the Downs, then dismantled the vacated fold into stands of four hurdles. The under-shepherd would push one post, or shore, through suitable holes in the four hurdles, collect up the other three shores, hold four wire hoops or raves in his hand and carry the lot forward to where the headman was pitching out the new ‘bite’ with a fold bar. This routine took place seven days a week in all weathers. After dinner, taken in the portable shepherd’s hut, the head shepherd would stroll out to collect the ewes from the down and, who knows, secure something for the pot, such time as his underling was collecting exposed flints from the back fold into heaps. Sometimes flints were quarried from the soil, so great was the demand for mixing with chalk quarried locally for road-making. Lambing started soon after Christmas, so that the new breed of Hampshire Down lambs had sufficient time to yield a heavy carcase in October. The lambs were always in a wormÂ-free fold, the ewes’ lot being to clean up at night the residues in the stale fold. The ration was all arable crops, first swedes and kale, then rye and temporary grasses in April/May, vetches over midsummer, then aftermath of hay until massive crops of rape and turnips were ready in August for two months fattening. Lambing had to take place adjacent to a field of swedes and kale, and most substantial pens were built each year.
The central straw yard to house the pregnant ewes at night was walled by a double row of hurdles with straw sandwiched between. From this sprung a lean-to of continuous hurdles resting on their short ends and supported at 45 degrees by timbers in front, under this being coops in which newly-born lambs and mothers could spend forty-eight hours. Beyond the central pens were hardening-off pens before the swedes and kale were rejoined. In no time at all the lambs found their way through a creep into a front pen where cake was available in troughs. No animal ever had a better start in life.
The schools in Longbridge, Kingston and Monkton Deverills were built about now and compulsory education started. They were filled to capacity as the villages were full of children. Also filled to capacity were the churches in the Deverills on Sunday evenings when the four parsons beamed down on flocks packed to the doors. Folly indeed to have jeopardised job and dwelling by non-attendance.
1880 marked a watershed for our country and still more for its countryside. After a century of tremendous progress and development, farming had raised production to the highest level possible with the resources to hand. Further progress waited upon people other than farmers – plant breeders, chemists, engineers and animal geneticists – which the new schools would provide in the fullness of time.
Our stability is but balance, and conduct lies
In masterful administration of the unforeseen.
Robert Bridges.
When the writer’s grandfather William contemplated the unforeseen in 1880,his reasoning must have been thus: ‘I doubt if I can ever grow corn to compete with this imported stuff. [In fact the price of wheat dropped from a price of 45s. per qr. (about £10 per ton) to a low of 23s.per qr. (about £5 per ton) in 1894.]However Cousin Arthur, at Alton Priors has several sets of steam tackle which he is anxious to hire out and we will try the effect of this on the heavy land in the Bradley Valley which ought to grow good crops if tackled this way. I was brought up to understand milking cows. The cheese dairy at Bradley Road is a success and I will start an ordinary dairy in the village. I shall push this cheap imported corn into the cows and also use it to augment the whey for the pigs at Bradley Road. At least dairy and pig products still seem to be wanted. Thank goodness Lord Bath and I have got the downs fully fenced. I will soft-pedal on the hurdle flock and buy a lot of cheap lambs from Scotland to run round for a year. If my landlord will ease back on the rent, and if I economise generally, I may get through!’
In the event he was one of the few that did. So impressed was he by the steam tackle that eventually he bought two engines for himself and a third, a lighter one, to drive the threshing machine. The policy of buying imported feeding stuffs was carried to such lengths that in the 1920’s every barn in the valley would be chock-full in the autumn with flaked maize (cornflakes), rice meal and protein cakes all bought at about £5 per ton delivered in. The lamb venture was soon under way; the Warminster Journal of 7th October 1882 noted:
Much interest was created at Trowbridge railway station on Saturday by the arrival of two long special trains containing no less than 1,800Scotch sheep – whiteÂfaced, black-faced and horned – consigned to Mr. Wm. Stratton of Kingston Deverill. They are, we understand, to be turned on to a large quantity of downland which that gentleman occupies. They appeared to be a wiry breed and on leaving the train jumped like deer. The cost of carriage alone amounted to upwards of £200. The untrucking and despatching to Warminster of flock after flock was superintended by Mr. Stratton himself.
The Great War brought a sudden call for food at any price, but motive power was still restricted to human muscle and the draught of heavy horses, and this set a limit to what could be done. There was still a full population in the valley and it took all their strength to work the farms. The war was to prove only an interruption in the remorseless decline of agriculture. The body blow came in 1922 with the sudden repeal of the Corn Production Act. The price of wheat dropped from 80s. per quarter to 40s. in a year and farm wages were cut back. This time the whole country entered into a depression which reached its nadir in 1930. Labour left the villages steadily and nothing was spent. I can remember my father buying only one new implement – an elevator made by John Wallis Titt of Warminster. Many farms could not find a tenant, and land in the valley bought for £16 an acre in 1920 was valued at £10 in 1930. At this date mains electricity, which had come to the town of Godalming in Surrey in 1881, was still 17 years away from the Deverills and its absence caused no comment. Rural life was truly broken. Each day in my childhood I expected my father to announce that we were bankrupt. The repeal of the Corn Production Act put paid to corn growing, even with the help of the steam tackle which was then sold for scrap, and thousands of acres in the district tumbled down to permanent pasture which was ranched. Grassland sheep, such as the Exmoors, replaced the hurdle flocks and were lambed in April. Rabbits abounded. In one year 3,000 carcases were sent out of Kingston Deverill by rail to Smithfield Market where they sold on commission. A return of 9d. each brought great joy to the breakfast table.
In the l 920’s the postal address of the Deverills was Bath, and the mail was delivered by horse-drawn vehicle to Maiden Bradley. A hero called Charlie Newbury then walked with it down the valley. His first drop was Kingston Deverill Post Office, so that the postmaster, Mr. John Carpenter, could deliver round the village at a salary of 5s. per week. Charlie then called at Manor Farm sharp at 8 o’clock and then delivered the post on down as far as Longbridge Deverill, where a hut was provided for him in which to spend the afternoon. At tea time he set off to walk back home up the valley, clearing boxes as he went, his last clearance at Kingston Deverill Post Office being timed for 6.45 p.m. When the writer first remembers him he had graduated to a bicycle for the trip. He never missed a day. One of the excitements of the week was the Wincanton to Warminster bus which came through the valley from Maiden Bradley. It soon gave up.
The only bright spot in the farming scene was the arrival of the natural fertiliser, nitrate of soda, mined in Chile. The nitrogen it contained did marvellous things to grass and root crops but, if applied at more than 1 cwt per acre, it caused the then varieties of corn to fall over flat with shock. It enabled a yield of one ton per acre of wheat to be grown in Kingston in 1919,which warranted a cable with the news being despatched to Hong Kong to my Uncle who was travelling round the world.
What, then, of the much vaunted internal combustion engine? Messrs. Petter and Lister put their wonderful small-Âhorsepower stationary paraffin engines on the market and these found a myriad of uses – water pumping, driving barn machinery and elevators in the field. Tractors were still too unreliable and feeble for this hilly country, but the famous 10/20 International Junior from America was famous ‘on the belt’. The local hills proved too much for the early cars. My parents allowed an hour for the five mile journey to Charnage near Mere on Sunday afternoons. Mother had to jump out and put a block of wood behind a wheel when the engine stalled. Usually three attempts were necessary this side; to conquer Warminster Hollow on the return trip necessitated the four children being put out to walk while my father reversed the empty car up the hill under mother’s direction.
Certain it is that no one who lived through these times will ever forget them.
When we left the Deverill Valley farmers in 1930they were at their wits’ end to produce anything that their country needed. Seemingly all food for industrial nations could be more cheaply produced abroad and, indeed, had to be imported because it was the only way open to the new countries to service the capital which had been invested by the old countries for their development. Incidentally, South American beef was to be halted temporarily by the German U-Boats, but then more permanently because the foreign governments there eventually expropriated their BritishÂ-financed railways for a pittance, interest payments ceased, and the natives could enjoy eating their own steaks at long last. The Colonies, however, were made to behave more respectfully.
What saved Wiltshire at the eleventh hour was liquid milk. When town dairies became impractical after the war, and mechanical transport made collection of milk from farms dependable, large dairying businesses had built depots in the towns of North and West Wiltshire, Wootton Bassett, Chippenham, Melksham, Frome and Semley in order to process milk and rail it to London. At this time more milk left Semley each day than from any other depot in the country. In 1930 Arthur Hosier at Collingbourne Ducis and Wexcombe had ready his open-air milking bail. The sheds of six stalls, each served by a cake hopper, were on wheels and surmounted by a flat, light roof. The cows left a collecting pen of chestnut paling, entered the stalls for milking and feed, and regained the pasture when a vertical sliding door was raised in front of them. Coupled up was a vacuum pump and engine in a portable shepherd’s hut, and the milk was delivered, roughly cooled, into churns. The whole outfit could be moved around the field, to the benefit of both, and into any other field after uncoupling. A man and boy could milk 70 cows easily. Unlimited and cheap Irish heifers came over to Fishguard and were railed cheaply to Warminster Station. Most other cows were currently hand milked at an allocation of 11 per man. The dry hills around the Deverills were ideal for these outdoor bails; in the wetter valley they were often on a concrete pad near existing buildings, but it was unusual for even these herds to come indoors in winter.
While the monthly milk cheque was saving Wiltshire, a corn growing county like Hampshire lost nearly all its farmers and was virtually derelict. Arable farmers had to wait until 1933 when Parliament grudgingly passed the Wheat Act. Under this a guaranteed price for a certain amount of English wheat was set at a small premium over imported, but if the pitifully small standard quantity was exceeded the deficiency payment was reduced pro rata. The Wheat Act and the advent of the sugar beet crop allowed arable England to tick over until 1939.
Great developments in fertiliser production followed the fixation of nitrogen from the air earlier in the Century, the new nitrogen fertilisers being used with increasing confidence and success. Soil analysis pointed the way to mixtures with superphosphate and potash, and around the Deverills small plots of virgin, impoverished downland were ploughed for trial plots and sown to improved grasses. They stood out for miles, but the excited sheep and rabbits saw to it that no grass raised an ugly head! On the machinery front the eve of war in 1939 found the Deverills still well-horsed with a few tractors pulling horse-designed implements. Nothing had been done to produce improved breeds of stock or of cereals.
1939/40 saw not only an avalanche of bombs but an avalanche of machinery from the New World; combine drills, crawler tractors and combine harvesters were leased, lent or even bought by this country. Luckily farmers had little time to recriminate over the past. They quietly resolved to peep over the horizon more often in future. Over the war years local farmers accepted orders from a committee of their colleagues which organised food production for South-west Wiltshire from an office in Warminster. They struggled to grow potatoes, sugar beet and flax on top of their previous activities. They learnt to indent for gangs of Women’s Land Army from their hostel in Mere and for soldiers and army lorries to help cart sheaves at harvest time. Food at any price was overnight the order of the day, but an Excess Profits Tax at 100 per cent saw to it that the fortunes of the previous war were not repeated. All worked with a will – there was nothing else to do anyway. The new P.A.Y.E. tax took some getting used to.
For some years after it was all over, food was still desperately short. During the war the downland between Lord’s Hill and Mere had been stripped of internal fences and used as three huge tank training areas, cattle and sheep being allowed to roam the grass on a communal basis. By 1945 the movement of tanks had partially cleared the gorse and thorn bushes, and power was now at hand to complete the clearance and convert to arable; in this way the ‘farmed’ acreage of the Deverill parishes more than doubled in five years. Ample supplies of compound granulated fertilisers held the key and Stapledon’s grass mixtures were on hand to complete the transformation. Combine harvesters designed to cope with two tons of corn per acre rather than the 10 cwt every other year of the prairies were at last available, and short-strawed varieties of cereals with a potential to convert modern fertilisers into high yields made their appearance. The situation was also further improved by myxomatosis, which unpleasant though it was, effectively destroyed the rabbits which had previously swarmed everywhere, and allowed maximum use to be made of every acre.
All this absorbed the Deverill farmers happily until the early Seventies. The drudgery of manual work steadily eased and technical progress drew back towards farming and its ancillary industries many of the descendants of those who had moved away into the towns. The 1947 Agriculture Act gave stable prices for two decades and farming held its head high in a world short of food. True the closing of the village primary schools at Longbridge and Kingston Deverill together with that of the New Inn at Monkton Deverill sapped village life, but the universal motor car softened the blows. The arrival of more and more professional and retired people added much-needed variety to the social scene.
In the 1970’s the climate for farming changed to the extent that farmers’ net incomes halved over the decade, this being caused chiefly by the end of cheap oil and raging inflation. The value of money halved every five years, and costs increased dramatically. Farmers responded on the liveÂstock side by doubling the size of their milking herds and putting their Friesians into modern buildings, where they ate silage, not hay, in winter and were in the charge of one man.
A century earlier to grow wheat after wheat was to put one’s tenancy at risk. In the Seventies, with the aid of fertilisers and with power available to till the arable thoroughly, rotations steadily lengthened, so that by 1980 monoculture of cereals was both respectable and profitable. In no other way could the land here produce a higher return per acre. New varieties of wheat had a potential yield of three tons per acre and more; this needed healthy plants and the agrochemical industry was ready with herbicides, fungicides and growth regulators in profusion. The soil seemed to be merely an anchorage for potentially healthy crops and the out-turn at harvest depended only on the right blend of sunshine, temperature and rain from April until August. In order to streamline the work, fences were removed to make even larger fields.
To end our story, we can perhaps realise that, after a whole century, farming in this district has emulated the prairie farming that so nearly destroyed it in 1880. Here we grow three tons of grain per acre at high cost; in the New Countries one ton per acre at low cost. Where do we go from here? Can we flout our instincts indefinitely and farm our thin, hungry and leached soils without a proper blend of hoof and corn? Only time will tell.
NOTES
1. Davis, T., General View of the Agriculture of the County of Wilts., London, 1794. Thomas Davis was steward to the Marquis of Bath.
2. Davis, T., General View of the Agriculture of Wiltshire, London, 1813. This is mainly a reprint (with some additions) of the work referred to in (1) above. It was produced by the son (also a Thomas) of the original author.