The Wansdyke & District Forums

Brenda's Tuckers and Margaret's chapels have set me thinking about the deliberate clearances, which deserve a thread of their own, because they trouble me more than plague or enclosure ever could. Plague is a calamity; enclosure is at least an economic argument. But the emparking clearances of the eighteenth century were a matter of taste. A landowner wanted a prospect from his new windows, an unbroken sweep of grass and artful clumps of trees, and a working village with its cottages and middens and noise spoiled the view. So the village was removed and the people with it, sometimes to a tidy new row out of sight, often simply dispersed.

Goldsmith wrote his Deserted Village about exactly this. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... ed-village

What unsettles me is the silence of it in the record. A man does not minute the destruction of a community he undertook for the sake of a better view. It simply stops appearing.

my familys been on this land a long time and the stories that come down arent about plague, theyre about the gentry. being moved, being told. my great great whatever was put out of a cottage so the squire could plant trees, and the trees are still there and we still touch our caps for the money. that sticks longer than any sickness. sickness is nobodys fault. that was somebodys choice.

Bill is right and it is exactly what I was saying on Brendas thread. The ones that were moved by sickness, the family grieved and got on. The ones that were moved by a man with a plan, the family never forgot, and never said why out loud either, just a tightness when the big house was mentioned. You can still feel it in some villages, who looks at the ground when the estate comes up in talk.

Just so, both of you, and that is the thing the documents cannot hold and you two carry: not the fact of the clearance, which the maps show, but the temperature of it. The grievance outlasts the record by three hundred years. I find that, in its way, a kind of justice. The estate kept the land. The families kept the memory of how. I know which I would rather be remembered for holding.