Hungerford – Kintbury and Beyond

Jethro Tull: Not a rock band, but part of a quiet countryside revolution.

Jethro Tull Lane, Hungerford. A new road very close to Prosperous.

On March 24^th 1741, the Kentish Weekly Post printed the following:

“A few Days since died at his Seat at Prosperous near Hungerford in Berkshire, Jethro Tull, Esq; Author of an useful and ingenious Book, entitled, The Horse-Hoing (sic) Husbandry, and has been very well received by the Curious in that Art.”

There is no attempt to elaborate on the subject of Tull’s book and the phrase, “well received by the Curious in that Art” seems to suggest that its appeal might be quite niche. But what the editor of the Kentish Weekly would not have known was that Jethro Tull was one of the gentlemen farmers at the advance guard of a quiet revolution which would eventually change the face of the English countryside.

Jethro Tull was born in 1674, near Upper Basildon, Berkshire and, having studied at Oxford University, originally embarked on a career in law. However, by 1699 his interest turned to agriculture and it was working on his father’s farm at Crowmarsh Gifford in Oxfordshire that he began his work to develop and improve the machinery employed on the land. By 1701 Tull had perfected a horse-drawn seed drill which proved much more economical than the traditional method of sowing by hand.

In 1709 Jethro Tull bought the farm which has come to be most associated with his name: Prosperous on the Salisbury Road between Hungerford & Shalbourne and it was here that he developed the invention which was to make him famous: the horse-drawn hoe which could be used to control the growth of weeds between the planted rows and also improve the soil structure, thereby increasing the yield of crops. It also enabled the work to be done more rapidly than by hand.

It was this horse-drawn hoe which was to be the subjuct of his book, published in 1829:

Horse-hoeing husbandry: or, An essay on the principles of vegetation and tillage. Designed to introduce a new method of culture; whereby the produce of land will be increased, and the usual expence lessened. Together with accurate descriptions and cuts of the instruments employed in it.

Early C19th OS map showing Prosperous to the west of Inkpen.

Increasing the productivity of land was of particular importance at this time. Many recently industrialised towns, particularly in the north and Midlands, had seen a dramatic rise in population as former rural dwellers migrated to them in search of work. But people in all areas were living longer, too: between 1721 and 1821 the population of Britain rose from around 7 million to around 14 million. It was not surprising, therefore, that land owners looked to improved methods in agriculture to feed all these people and, of course, ways in which they could maximise the profits from their land.

In Norfolk, Charles Townsend, 2^nd Viscount Townsend ( 1674 – 1738 ) had already advocated the growing of turnips as part of a crop rotation as he believed they helped improve the soil as well as providing a fodder crop for his animals. This gained him the nickname: Turnip Townsend.

Later, Thomas Coke (1754 – 1842) began further experiments with crop rotations on his estate at Holkham, also in Norfolk.

In Leicestershire, Robert Bakewell ( 1725 – 1795 ) had been experimenting with a more scientific approach to sheep breeding and in 1760 had developed a new variation of the traditional Leicester sheep capable of producing higher quality meat.

Agricultural Societies began to be set up across the country, one of the earliest being the Odiham Agricultural Society, set up in 1783 as a society for “the encouraging of Agricultural and Industry in their town and neighbourhood’.

In July 1794 a meeting was held in the New Inn, Abingdon ( then the county town of Berkshire ) where it was proposed that a Berkshire Agricultural Society should be established mainly for the dissemination of the latest information regarding developments but also:

“From the above funds, to give annual rewards to labourers who have bred up the largest families without or with the least assistance of their parish, such labourers to produce certificates from a subscriber and two overseers of his parish”.

Reading Mercury, August, 1794

Subscribers included Sir Joseph Andrews of Shaw House and Kintbury’s Charles Dundas of Barton Court. It goes without saying that all subscribers were from the wealthier sections of Berkshire society. I very much doubt any of them had ever put a hand to the plough themselves.

As the illustrations of Townsend, Coke and Tull himself – above – show, these “agriculturalists” were not labouring farmers tilling the soil every day themselves. We cannot say for sure that they never worked the land at all, but if they did they would have returning home to a comparatively luxurious lifestyle at the end of the working day. Only Robert Bakewell looks as if he might have done a day’s work on the farm.

By the early years of the C19th, the Hampshire Agricultural Society was well established and in 1820, vicar of Kintbury, Rev Fulwar Craven Fowle was admitted as a member. It is very likely that Rev Fowle would have paid particular attention to the work of Robert Bakewell in Leicestershire as he kept a flock of the new breed of sheep on his land at East Woodhay. When Fowle exhibited his Leicester sheep at the Hampshire Show in June, 1820, they “excited much attention” from farmers and landowners used to seeing mainly South Down or Marino sheep in the local area. The sheep were admired for their, “weight, symmetry, smallness of bone and lightness of offal” all of which had been achieved without feeding corn or cake but “sliced Swedish turnips” alone.

It has to be unlikely that Rev Fowle had very much hands on experience as regards looking after his flock of New Leicesters; it has to be likely that he employed a stock man or shepherd to do most of the work. But this would be true of all the great and the good who were members of the various agricultural societies. Although the idealised notion of “Three acres and a cow” was, later in the century, seen as a way to return to a self sufficient and better life on the land, the reality of everyday life for the smallholder in the early years of the nineteenth century must have been far from idyllic.

The medieval system of three open fields, divided into strips and then shared out amongst the villagers to cultivate, still existed in many areas at this time. The labourer scratching a living on a handkerchief of land or on scattered strips is not going to be able to invest in a horse hoe, even if he had a horse to pull it or enough land to till more than a few furrows. Not surprisingly, hundreds of families moved away from villages and into the ever- growing towns whilst the villages they were leaving behind underwent considerable changes.

A series of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts had begun in the C17th and continued throughout the C18th and C19th, by which much common land was enclosed and incorporated into larger farms or estates. This was bad news for thousands of working people who had previously tilled their small plots of land under the “strip” system or whose cow had grazed on the common. It did, however, allow for more efficient and increased crop production by the farmers or estate owners.

Around Kintbury & Hungerford, there had been common grazing on the water meadows close to the Kennet, although most of this area was enclosed by the C18th. By the early C19th most open fields and common land around Hungerford, Kintbury & Elcot had been enclosed.

Unsurprisingly, many poorer people were distressed and angry at the loss of common land, the access to which they had always considered to be their right. When, in 1816, an Act of Parliament was passed for the enclosure of Woodhay Common, numbers of the “labouring poor” attempted to stop the land being fenced off and allocated to local landowners. Fearing a riot, the response of the authorities was to call in the military.

For some people, enclosures offered an opportunity: The Berkshire Chronicle of 1846 advertised the upcoming sale of a “good Brick & Slated FREEHOLD COTTAGE ” in Shinfield. The many advantages of this property included, “unlimited Common-rights and as the Common-land is about to be enclosed under the new Enclosure Act, considerable advantages must thereby accrue to the owner.”

But not everyone regarded the new laws in this light.

In 1848, the Reading Mercury reported on the Silchester Maying, which “presented a gay scene, from the very numerous company which was attracted to the Common, one of the most picturesque in this neighbourhood, and which, together with Wokefield and Mortimer, have as yet escaped the visitation of the Enclosure Act.”

That final phrase, “as yet escaped the visitation of the Enclosure Act” suggests that the journalist who wrote it was well aware of the devestation felt by poorer people when their common land was enclosed and lost to themselves – almost like an Old Testament Plague of Israel.

A proposed bill of 1844, aimed at making the business of enclosure running more smoothly, met with this response in the Wiltshire Independent of April that year:

A bill for the further robbery of the poor, that is to say, for the inclosure of all those commons which now remain and concequently for their appropriation by those who possess all the previously inclosed lands, is before Parliament. It was introduced by Lord Worsley a few weeks ago but due to the indisposition of the noble lord, the second reading has been postponed until the 24^th instant. It is hoped that it will never be passed, for it is neither nor more less than, as the Times expresses it, “ a proposition which gives four million acres of land to those who already possess thirty two million”.

Dedham Vale by John Constable painted in 1815 (Public domain) Note a landscape without the now familiar patchwork of fields

What the Reading Mercury had described, in 1848, as “the visitation of the Enclosure Act” would eventually completely change the look of the English countryside. It is difficult to imagine now that there was ever a time when the landscape throughout southern England was not a patchwork of fields divided by well established hedges. But it was not ever thus. There is a passage in Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1815, which describes Harriet Smith and her friend Miss Bickerton trying to run away from a group of gypsies. Miss Bickerton, “ran up a steep bank, cleared a slight hedge at the top, and made the best of her way by a short cut back to Highbury.”

It is worth considering that sentence again: Miss Bickerton, ”cleared a slight hedge at the top”.

I grew up in a rural area and whilst I could execute a sort of vault over a five barred field gate, it would have been absolutely impossible to clear – or jump over – any of the field hedges in my area. But in 1815 there would have been hedges, quite newly planted, which were still low enough for someone to clear them, particularly if they feared being chased. In the early years of enclosures, these newly planed field hedges must have been a familiar sight.

Today there is just one village in England where the land is still farmed in the “Open Field” system, in which three fields are divided into strips in the Medieval manner. It is Laxton in Nottinghamshire.

However, according to the Open Spaces Society, there are still 1.3 million acres of common land in England & Wales. We are lucky to have several in West Berkshire; one, Hungerford Common, would have been known well to Jethro Tull, being just a short distance from his land at Prosperous.

Today, the occupants of certain properties in Hungerford still have “commoners’ rights” just as they have had for hundreds of years. In practice, none of them actually graze stock on the common although this right is rented out to local farmers. So cattle graze on the common throughout the summer and into early autumn.

Motorists crossing Hungerford Common frequently have to stop and wait while cattle cross – often very slowly – in front of them.

How much Hungerfoed Common has changed since Jethro Tull’s time, it is difficult to say – perhaps this is one open space that is still broadly similar to the common he must have known. But the view from nearby Walbury Hill would look very different: the patchwork quilt of land divided by hedges and the site of large fields devoted to one crop would be entirely different to the countryside Tull would have known.

Post Script:

Not a rock band, then.

Ian Anderson fronting the band, Jethro Tull

To anyone, like me, who took O level British Social & Economic History, 1700 – 1939 in the late 60s, the name Jethro Tull will probably resound as someone who featured prominently in the syllabus. However, for rock music fans, Jethro Tull was the name of a progressive/folk rock group fronted by Ian Anderson – the musician who played the flute, sometimes standing on one leg. He was not an agriculturalist – and as far as I know hasn’t had any roads named in his honour.

National Library of Scotland OS maps

http://www.laxtonvisitorcentre.org.uk/index.htm

The Open Spaces Societyhttps://www.westberks.gov.uk/media/16127/HECA-KVW-Kennet-Valley-West/pdf/HECA_KVW_Kennet_Valley_West.p

British Newspaper Archive

The Making of the English Landscape: Francis Pryor, Penguin, 2011

In the workhouse

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
– Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander

This, the third verse of the still popular hymn, All things bright and beautiful, is never sung today. When the hymn was first published in 1848, it was a prevalent view that God had ordained your position in life and if you were poor, that was because it was God’s will. This view persisted for much of the nineteenth century.

For the poor of Kintbury and the surrounding villages, the only option for those who had lost all means of self- support – through job loss, through unavoidable incapacity or loss of the main bread winner – was to enter the dreaded workhouse.

Conditions in the workhouse were deliberately unpleasant to deter the poor from turning to this very last resort unnecessarily. If people knew they could turn to the workhouse, so the prevailing mind set ran, they would not bother to save against hard times or support other family members in their times of need. And so conditions were harsh, food minimal and the enforced labour hard.

Following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, villages were grouped into unions around a larger town which is why Kintbury’s destitute were housed in Hungerford Union Workhouse in what is now Park Street.

Hungerford Union Workhouse was opened in 1848; it was three storeys high and of the “Stratton” design after the workhouse in Stratton, Wiltshire.

Inmates were set to work picking oakum – that is to say beating with a mallet then unpicking by hand the tar coated hemp fibres that had been twisted into industrial rope. The finished product – the oakum -was used for such things as waterproofing the joints in wooden piping and between the planks of wooden ships. It was hard and unpleasant work and oakum pickers suffered from bleeding hands and heavy scarring as well as other more serious conditions.

Typically, workhouses were imposing, prison-like buildings

According to the 1881 census, there were ten Kintbury people in the Hungerford workhouse at that time. This number included Henry Randall, a 44 year old farm labourer and his wife, Ann, 44.

In 1871, Henry – an agricultural labourer – and Ann had been living in Kintbury with their children William 8, Eliza, 6, Lucy 2 and Mary 2 months. What happened to the family in the following ten years we do not know but by 1881 Henry and Ann are inmates of the Hungerford Workhouse.

The eldest son, William, by now 18, is a ploughboy working – and most likely living – on a farm at Radley, to the north of the Bath Road. However his sister, Eliza, now 16, is in the workhouse with her parents and described as a “scholar” which seems somewhat unusual as at that time a young working class woman of 16 might be expected to have entered domestic service. Also there, is 12 year old Lucy. Mary, who would have been 10 by 1881, is not listed at all so it has to be likely that she has died. Three more children have been born to the Randalls since 1871: Lizzie, now 8, Louisa now 6, and Martha, now 3 and these are all in the workhouse with their parents.

Perhaps the arrival of more children was too much for the Randalls’ household economy or perhaps Henry had lost his job on the farm.

The Randalls of school age are listed on the census as scholars. Although the workhouse originally employed its own teacher, it seems that by 1881 the boys would have walked to the National School in the High Street, to comply, I expect, with Forster’s Education Act which had made universal education compulsory. The girls, however, received instruction from an “industrial trainer” at the workhouse.

There were 26 other children in the workhouse, all separated from their parents. Similarly, the men were separated from the women.

Twenty nine of the inmates are described as servants and twenty seven as labourers or farm labourers

What I find most surprising, however, is that several of the inmates are listed as having had a trade which might have given them a better chance of supporting themselves but clearly this was not the whole story.

One inmate, Mary Elizabeth Felford, born in Marlborough in 1834, is described as a dressmaker. In 1871 she is living in Wantage with her husband, Edmund, a saddler. However by 1881, Mary is a widow and, one presumes, unable to support herself and her two children so her only option is the workhouse. Why Hungerford, we have no way of knowing but perhaps Mary travelled there in the hope of finding more work but it did not work out. I can find absolutely no positive trace of Mary or her children after the 1881 census

John Waterhouse is an 18 year old tailor from Newhaven. Why, despite having a trade, he was an inmate of the dreaded workhouse, it is impossible to say but after 1881 he disappears completely from the census records.

Kintbury’s Charles Garlick is a widowed tailor in 1881. In 1841 he had been living with his mother Mary and 16 year old sister Rosa in Kintbury, where, interestingly, Mary is described as “Ind” usually an abbreviation for “Independent means”, suggesting that she was well off enough to support herself. What had happened in the following forty years it is impossible to find out, and both Rosa and Mary disappear from later censuses.

Jacob Brooks is a retired blacksmith of 55 who had, ten years earlier, been working on a farm and lodging at a cottage in Hungerford Church Street. However, by 1881 he is an inmate of the workhouse, most likely because he is too infirmed or otherwise unable to support himself. The workhouse would have been his only option.

But even sadder is the case of William Vincent, 39 from Little Bedwyn. He is deaf and dumb and, it seems, only appears on the 1881 census.

So what became of Kintbury’s Randall family? By 1891, William – the son who did not accompany his parents into the workhouse – is an agricultural labourer in Hungerford Newtown where his sisters, Lizzie, now 18 and Martha, now 13, are living with him.

Louisa is a servant in the family of Eli Brown at the Queen’s Arms, East Garston.

By 1901, William , Lizzie and Martha are all living with Lucy and her husband, Samuel Harding, a GWR railway worker. They were lucky, I think, to have an in-law who was able to have them lodge with him – it must have made for cramped living conditions as no artisans’ cottages at this time were spacious, but the extra income must have been welcomed.

It makes me very sad not to have found a really positive outcome for any of the Workhouse inmates I have researched here. Not everyone was a permanent resident; I know from my own family history that a set of 2x great grandparents spent sometime in the Chipping Norton workhouse. However, they survived and were able to move on with their lives – otherwise, I suppose, I would not be writing this.

I hope the Randalls’ family story had a happy ending that I have not, so far, been able to find.

Olive Emma Witt

Should you turn to look to your left as you walk up the path to St Mary’s Church, Kintbury, you will see a rather unusual grave marker.

Should you turn to look to your left as you walk up the path to St Mary’s, Kintbury, you will see a rather unusual grave marker. Rather than being stone, as are the great majority of grave markers, this one, standing little over three feet high, is of metal, probably tin, and enclosed in a five-sided wooden frame. From a distance it looks a little like a larger version of a Victorian schoolchild’s slate; perhaps this was deliberate , because the person commemorated was six year old Olive Emma Witt, who died in 1896.

Olive Emma Witt’s grave marker in Kintbury church yard

The Witts were not originally of Kintbury. Olive’s father, Tom, had been born in 1846 at Braemore, Hampshire, where his father, Charles had been an agricultural labourer. Emma Witt had been born in Salisbury in 1850.

At the time of the 1871 census, Tom was working as a gardener in Salisbury and it has to be likely that it was around this time that he met Emma Skeet, the local girl who would become his wife.

By 1881, the Witts had moved north out of Wiltshire to west Berkshire where Tom now worked as a gardener at Elcot. The family had grown: Walter had been born in 1877 and Herbert in 1880.

It would seem that Tom Witt was an ambitious young man – by the census of 1891 he is a farm bailiff at Inlease Farm on the Hungerford Road out of Kintbury where they have been living for at least six years now. Two more children had been born: Charles in 1885 and Olive in 1890. The household must have been a busy and possibly crowded one as the Witts had four young men lodgers: two carters and two ploughboys, all working on the farm.

Some time within the following six years, Tom progressed from being a bailiff at Inlease to a farmer in his own right at Cullamores Farm on the road out of Kintbury towards Inkpen. Very sadly, however, it was here that, on June 10^th, 1896, little Olive died. The grieving family put an announcement in the Newbury Weekly News.

The census of 1901 shows Tom & Emma still at Cullamores with Tom described as an “Employer”. The distinction between “Employed” and “Employer” was particularly significant in an age of increasing social mobility, particularly for someone like Tom whose father had been an agricultural labourer like so many thousands of men in the middle of the century. Tom & Emma were coming up in the world.

Herbert, now 20, was working on the farm. Charles, however, had turned his back on farming and at 16 was a carpenter’s apprentice. Walter had left Kintbury altogether, and was now a police constable at Rochester Row Police Station in London.

The end of the nineteenth century saw decreasing numbers of workers employed in agriculture and this national trend seems to have been reflected in the family experience of the Witts. By 1911, Walter was married with a daughter and living in Harrow, Middlesex. He was still with the Metropolitan Police. Herbert, who had previously been working on the family farm, had followed his elder brother into the police force, but for him a force not so far from home as he was in Wantage.

By 1911, Tom was 64 and no longer working in agriculture and no longer himself an employer. Furthermore, he and Emma have left Kintbury and were now living in Newland, Cogges, close to Witney in Oxfordshire. He has returned to his first occupation, that of gardener and on the census is identified as a “worker”.

The trajectory of Tom Witt’s life experiences would have mirrored those of many of his contemporaries. Born into an agricultural labourer’s family, Tom had improved his life chances becoming upwardly mobile until he could describe himself as a farmer and employer – a distinction which mattered in this ultra class conscious time. By the time Tom and Emma’s sons had been born, universal education would have given them a far better start in life than that experienced by their grandfather Witt in Hampshire, enabling them to join the police force and ensuring their place in the lower middle classes.

We do not know exactly why Tom & Emma left Cullamores farm but it has to be likely that the slump in agriculture had something to do with it. This was a time when many thousands were still leaving the countryside for the growing towns whilst others were emigrating overseas. For Tom & Emma, perhaps the move northwards to Witney was a fresh start away from the world – and the social status – they had lost.

I wonder if they ever returned to Kintbury and to the little grave in St Mary’s churchyard -the journey back then from Witney would have required three changes of train on the Great Western Railway. The forty mile journey across the downs by road would have been slow and unlikely to be completed easily within a day.

Why Olive’s grave marker was of tin rather than stone I do not know. Iron crosses are not unknown in churchyards but a grave marker of tin is something I have seen nowhere else.

But then, any exploration of family history – any family – raises far more questions than it ever answers.

Tessa Lock