Scouring of the White Horse

[caldrail]

There are times when I stumble across an old gem in my local library. it happened today, as I spotted an old style bound book hidden among the ranks of colourful spines in the 'ancient history' section. Always worth checking out in my experience. Not because older books are any better informed (mostly they aren't, especially the victorian ones) but because they can provide some extraordinary local detail and period atmosphere.

 

This book was called The Scouring of the White Horse and it turns out to have been written by Thomas Hughes, none other than the author of Tom Brown's School Days, both books written in 1857. There's a handwritten note dated 1861 on the first page. You don't get any more atmospheric than that!

 

In my hands was a book about an area of land not far from where I live, that I've visited a few times on my cross country hikes, and what struck me was how similar the land is today. He describes walking along dirt paths that I've trod myself. There's more fences up there now and more intensive farming, though curiously he notes at one point about the keenness of farmers for ploughing. Given the area is rugged chalk upland over looking rural lowlands, the ability of victorian farmers to work the land up there is impressive, but then, the Romano-British did too.

 

Hughes recounts a holiday he spent away from London and his humdrum life as a clerk. I love the bit where his boss pays him off and asks when he wants a well deserved holiday. There's a personal touch about victorian business that we've lost. He discards the Channel Islands, France, the Lakes, and instead heads for the country.

 

I note the various assumptions we have to make when dealing with a holiday journal nearly 150 years old. He refers to a 'Bradshaw' when travelling (a travel guide written in the era for the convenience of railway journeys in an era of a plethora of railway companies and timetables. Back then, an essential aid - just ask Michael Portillo - He did a television series on it). We read how his friend lit a 'lucifer', which turns out to be a pipe. I just love these little details I had no idea of.

 

The White Horse at Uffington is being cleaned. A crowd of willing workers and well-to-do gentlemen cheerily interact. Best of all, the organisers have turned it into a community event and are staging 'games' in the area, with horse races, wrestling, and fights with 'backswords', or sticks, in which head injuries prove the most common defeat. Hughes describes the locals, rough, hardened men, with gypsies and traders, all camped out in the old hill fort (at a small rent, of course - Lord Craven wasn't entirely a landowner for nothing!)

 

There's an exuberance to the manner Hughes writes, and clearly, a vivacious nature to victorian England despite the presence of a brutish underclass. You can't help but love it. And funnily enough, while Hughes tells us that a fifteen year old schoolboy "with sufficient industry" could read two hundred pages of latin text and learn from it, their knowledge of the dark ages and the origins of neolithic monuments is horribly mangled. How things have changed.

 

"But not one man in a thousand who will be on the hill tomorrow will know what the meaning of it all is; and that makes it a melancholy sight to me."

'The Old Gentleman' (Thomas Hughes)

Edited February 7, 2013 by caldrail