The Squirearchy
BY CHRISTOPHER HILL THE English squirearchy, Dr. Wingfield-Stratford tells us,* brings out the worst prejudices of .historians. Senti- mentalists treat "the old English squire" as if he were one recognisable person, and as if his alleged virtues were a national asset that it is a patriotic duty to inflate.' Old- * THE SQUIRE AND HIS RELATIONS. By Esme Wingfield-Stratford. (Cassell, 42s.) fashioned Radicals and new-fangled Marxists' depict him 'not as an amiable zany, but as a hard-faced tyrant, of the kind denounced by the Hebrew prophets.' Dr. Wingfield-Stratford has, he assures us, tried 'to avoid both these extremes, and . . . to tell the story of the squire without bias or sentiment.'
It is indeed as impossible to draw up a comprehensive indict- ment of a social group as of a nation. Dr. Wingfield-Stratford convincingly shows that there were good and bad squires, benevolent sportsmen and ruthless exploiters. His agreeably gossipy narrative is based largely on literary sources—Addison, Steele, Fielding, Surtees; and it is excellently illustrated. He manages—especially when dealing with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—to mingle a number of shrewd observa- tions with his entertaining anecdotes. His reflections on fox- hunting, for instance, are worthy of consideration. After the final elimination of wolves in the seventeenth century, the fox remained the major destructive nuisance to English farmers, and foxhunting served a socially useful purpose. But from the end of the eighteenth century foxhunting was transformed into a form of conspicuous waste : foxes were preserved for the sole purpose of being hunted, regardless of the cost to the farming community. Foxhunting lost its social function, and became an expensive ritual, into which only the best families or the very rich were initiated, .a ritual with `barbarising and brutalising tendencies.'
Dr. Wingfield-Stratford associates this perversion of fox- hunting With a general 'reversion of the squirearchy towards barbarism' towards the end of the eighteenth century. He possibly exaggerates the cultural level of Squire Western and his contemporaries : but he may be right in arguing that anti- intellectualism became more pronounced as the squirearchy became more exclusively rentier, as the lead and inspiration in economic progress passed to other social groups. Fear of the French Revolution, combined with radicalism among the English rural poor, encouraged 'reactionary tendencies' and a growing social snobbery among the gentry, as well as a new readiness to go to church. Concentration on sport seems to have coincided with a decline in the exclusive political effectiveness of the gentry and aristocracy. Victorian Dukes, Dr. Wingfield-Stratford points out, served no useful purpose except that of public entertainers. In many of its forms—e.g., cricket—sport was largely an excuse for betting.
It was in these same early decades of the nineteenth century that the squirearchy became standardised. The Romantic movement popularised sentimental medimval conceptions of the 'old English squire.' As urban parvenus ousted the tradi- tional families from the land at an accelerating rate, it became more and more important to establish norms of conduct, and attitude. 'The prime agent' in this process of 'turning out a standardised human product' Dr. Wingfield-Stratford sees in the public schools. 'However rapidly the old breed of squires might be squeezed out of their estates by newly acquired wealth, there would always, after the interlude of a generation, be old public schoolboys to function in that capacity with specious verisimilitude. . . . The exultation of sport above culture, and of barbaric virility above the refinements and graces of civilisation, was a tendency that had been at work ever since the British upper class had been deprived of its cultural leaven and driven back on its own insular resources as the sequel of, the French Revolution. Those admired heroes of the Turf and the Chase, ... what were they psychologically but clear cases of arrested development, schoolboy minds in grown-up—even middle-aged and senile—bodies?' In the public schools 'an oligarchy, or inquisition, of senior boys' was given a free hand to impose its Own code of values and discipline. The system 'was specifically designed to eliminate variation.' This mass-production of standardised gentlemen was a 'uniquely British phenomenon,' and was 'probably the means of averting an agrarian revolution and preserving the framework of the squirearchy substantially intact,' even after the social composition of the class had radically changed. Nor was the public school type of merely insular importance. It was trained in the habits of command, over 'native abroad and dependents at home, no less than dogs and horses. But it was devoid on principle of the imaginative sympathy needed for co-operation with those members of alien civilisations who claimed to be dealt with on a footing of equality; it was dis- trustful of intellect, contemptuous of culture, hidebound in its prejudices, and utterly lacking in initiative. In short, the new model of upper-class training was a most effective instrument for the standardisation of barbarism.'
One or two of Dr. Wingfield-Stratford's historical assump- tions will not win universal acceptance. He takes a little seriously Disraeli's romantic fiction that an 'alliance of monarchy, Church and people' had existed under the early Stuarts. He appears to • put the squires on the royal side in the civil war, against a 'capitalised plutocracy.' This must seem odd to anyone who has studied the composition of the Long Parliament. Although Dr. Wingfield-Stratford rightly claims for himself a certain 'detachment' in his attitude towards the squires, he clearly strongly dislikes modern industrial capital- ism because of its depersonalisation of human relations : the industrialist does not captain his factory's cricket team. The obverse of this, despite disclaimers, is a certain sentimentalisa- tion of medimval patriarchal attitudes. The members of the manorial cricket team, after all, did not elect their captain.
So in the last analysis Dr. Wingfield-Stratford's entertaining book still begs a question or two. Of course there were good and bad squires. Of course the personal relationship between squire and villagers could be a human one, pleasant to both sides. But the same has been said, not untruly, of serfdom in Russia before 1861, of slavery in America before the Civil War. Dictatorship is not justified as a system by the discovery of one benevolent dictator, nor bureaucracy by twenty good bureaucrats. The real problem concerns the nature of the relationship between any squire and his village—what Dr. Wingfield-Stratford perceptively calls 'parochial divine right.' At a certain stage of history, the feudal patriarchal relation- ship of lord to tenants may have been inevitable. But of its very nature the relationship is an unequal one. The squire is likely to be better educated, at least in the formal sense; he is trained to command, the village to obey; he holds the economic whip- hand. It was by free use of their powers as employers, landlords and JPs, as Dr. Wingfield-Stratford reminds us, that the squires were able to prevent agricultural trade unionism spreading after its first successes in the 1870s. The relationship between squire and villagers may be one of goodwill; his wife may be a Lady Bountiful: but the relationship can never be one, of equality. The principle on which the greatest of the squires, Oliver Cromwell, ruled England—'What's for their good, not what pleases them'—is necessarily the best that can be hoped for in the relationship. Has this sort of relationship any place in a democratic society? It was a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary who said of the period in which he farmed the family estates : 'My relations with the peasantry became abnormal.' If democracy means anything at all as a philosophy of government, the relation of squire to villagers surely is abnormal.
So whatever we think of the earlier period, the relationship of squire to villagers was inevitably called in question from the end of the eighteenth century, when democracy became a national political programme, and increasingly in the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries, as that programme was realised. This was also the period, Dr. Wingfield-Stratford shows us, in which the urban industrial sector had replaced agriculture as the dominant sector of the economy. It was a period in which agriculture had become an industry in which advance was possible only to those with large capital sums to invest, in which the small freeholders, who had previously bridged the gap between squire and agricultural labourer in the villages, were finally squeezed out. The squires were ceasing to be in any real sense the leaders of the economic or political life of the country, were becoming renders, conspicuous consumers, relapsing into barbarism, held in cohesion only by the discipline imposed by the public schools. Dr. Wingfield-Stratford quotes only the first line of the couplet from which his title is drawn: 'God bless the squire and his relations.' But the inevitable conclusion of the prayer is 'And keep us in our proper stations.'
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