William Cobbett Part 4 – Rural Rides
I first discovered Cobbett in the local history section of my local library. His travels took him across a big chunk of the country, but focused on the south east of England. Initially I thought I was simply getting the recollections of a Victorian traveler, the interest being comparing what he saw with the current setup. We
He is a good travel writer. His Rural Rides is a magnificent chronicle of early nineteenth-century English countryside. It is a love letter to a landscape even if written by a man who spent a lot of his time furiously denouncing the people who lived in it. Reading Cobbett’s descriptions of Hampshire downs, Surrey commons, and Kentish hop gardens is fascinating to compare to the prosaic present day. I particularly remember passing a pub in Battle that Cobbett had visited. He had joined in a meeting of farmers who had passed a resolution renouncing the modern term “agriculturalist” for their profession. Two hundred years later it is a gastropub specialising in fusion.
Here is a man who spent decades railing against English institutions, English politicians, and English social arrangements, yet who could describe an English sunrise with tenderness. Cobbett might despise the government, distrust the aristocracy, and condemn the clergy, but show him a well-managed farm or a thriving market town, and he became as sentimental as a postcard. His England wasn’t the England of kings and ministers but the England of farmers and labourers, of ancient fieldwork and seasonal rhythms that had endured long before the current crop of incompetents had seized power and would endure long after they’d been consigned to richly deserved oblivion.
Rural Rides began as a practical exercise in political journalism. Cobbett needed to understand the real conditions of agricultural England if he was to write convincingly about rural distress and government policy. But somewhere between his first ride out of London and his final return, the project transformed into something much more profound – a systematic exploration of what it meant to belong to a particular place at a particular moment in history.
What makes the Rural Rides so compelling is Cobbett’s eye for the telling detail that reveals the larger pattern. He notices which fields are well-drained and which are waterlogged, which farmhouses are prosperous and which are falling into decay, which villages are thriving and which are emptying of their young people. But he also notices the quality of light on a September morning, the sound of church bells across a river valley, the particular satisfaction of a good dinner eaten after a hard day’s riding. The political analyst and the nature lover were the same person, and their observations reinforced each other in ways that give the book a peculiar power.
His descriptions of the landscape itself are masterful, combining the precision of a surveyor with the sensibility of a poet. “I came down into a most beautiful valley,” he writes of the Wey valley near Farnham, “with a great number of hop gardens, and a great many very pretty houses. The hops here are grown in rows, and look like tall peas in rows in a garden, but with poles about ten feet high.” This wasn’t just scene-setting but careful documentation of how human labour had shaped the natural environment to productive ends – exactly the sort of harmonious relationship between people and place that Cobbett believed was being destroyed by what we would call industrial capitalism.
I dread to think what he would make of the current state of the countryside around Farnham. The modern reader can’t help but be struck by how much of the England Cobbett describes has vanished entirely. The rural economy he chronicled – based on mixed farming, local markets, and seasonal labour – was already under pressure in his time and would be largely swept away by the agricultural revolution of the later nineteenth century. The villages he visited with such pleasure are now commuter dormitories or heritage attractions, their connection to the surrounding landscape severed by motorways and suburban development.
Yet there’s something oddly contemporary about Cobbett’s environmental sensibility. His understanding that landscapes are cultural as well as natural artifacts, shaped by generations of human interaction with particular places, anticipates modern ecological thinking. His recognition that sustainable prosperity depends on maintaining the delicate balance between human needs and natural systems reads like a prophecy of our current environmental crisis. Most prophetically of all, his warnings about the social consequences of prioritising short-term profits over long-term sustainability have proved to be remarkably prescient.
The Rural Rides also reveal the complexity of Cobbett’s relationship with social change. He wasn’t simply a reactionary yearning for an imaginary golden age but a shrewd observer who understood that some changes represented genuine progress whilst others were merely disguised forms of exploitation. He could appreciate improvements in agricultural technique or domestic comfort whilst deploring the social arrangements that prevented ordinary people from benefiting from such advances. His nostalgia was selective and strategic rather than indiscriminate.
Rural Rides evokes a more human-scaled world where individuals could understand their environment and influence their circumstances. His combination of practical analysis with aesthetic appreciation,is not a bad model for today.
In the end, Cobbett’s great achievement was to show that loving your country means taking responsibility for its welfare rather than simply celebrating its achievements or looking down on foreigners. His England was neither perfect nor perfectible, but it was worth fighting for precisely because it was home to real people leading real lives in real places.
