Obviously overtaken now by Covid-19 events, but I am still working on it, just in case 2021 makes it possible.
Sometime in the Spring of 2020 I was asked to take part in an evening at the South Bank in London speaking to the title "Poetry and Politics" with particular emphasis on what Clare wrote 200 years ago.
John Clare’s fame as a poet of nature and the English countryside grows every day; without question, the greatest working-class poet ever born in England. He speaks always about the essential bond between human-kind and nature, a vision that is ever green.
Clare’s poetic response to the dramatic transformations in society of the time provides a unique, eye-witness account of the impact these changes had on the people who were the victims, ordinary working people.
What was happening in the countryside during Clare’s lifetime that caught his critical attention, both poetically and politically?
What were the changes that were transforming the face of rural Britian, changes that Clare himself saw had such a decisive effect on both nature and the people living close to it? Thinking about this, I feel that I should concentrate on the Enclosures and its effect on the poor, but how to illustrate this best so the 21st Century mind can grasp its enormity? If for ‘Enclosure’ one substitutes ‘Brexit’, the true shocking nature of the enclosures are magnified to modern eyes, and the real nature of brexit is laid bare. In the first, we see the 'privatisation' of commonly owned land, in the second a 'privatisation' of the very country itself, with the benefactors in both cases being the rich and powerful, the establishment.
I will be saying at the outset of my talk is that nothing has really changed. I am reminded of Tony Benn's famous quote, "I don't think people realise how the establishment became established. They simply stole land and property from the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since."
What Clare called "The Norman Yoke":
The Norman Yoke
Men make a boast of pedigree as well might the descendants of Richard Turpin boast of theirs for both honours spring from robbery & spoilation – what was William the Conqueror but a robber by wholesale & what were his followers but high way men by his authority receiving tithes by their expertness at plunder for which Turpin (a more noble plunderer if absence from fear or dareing achievements make one) received a halter because he dared to rob & could show only his courage for the liscence – the ancestors of a Newton have some thing to boast of but pedigree belongs to a race horse & confers nothing to the mind or the man
I don't know whether Tony knew Clare's work, but he certainly did not know this poem that I uncovered in the Clare Archives a few years ago:
Content thy home be mine
Content thy home be mine
Do not my suit disdain
They who prefer the worlds to thine
Shall find it false & vain
From broken hopes & storms I flye
To hide me in thy peaceful sky
The flatterers meet with smiles
The cunning find their friends
Without I made my pilgrimage
& so met small amends
I looked on fame as merits plea
Twas spring but winter frowned on me
To cringe to menial slaves
To worship titled power
To bend the knee to knaves
The price of earthly dower
Is what I neer was taught to pay
So empty [that] Ive turned away
Where pleasing is to flatter
Where loving is to hate
To praise what we at heart abuse
In love & church & state
This is the worlds but not my game
So poor I am without the shame
Tho flattery findeth friends
In every grade & state
& telling truth offends
The lowly & the great
Truth when the worst is bye shall rise
When follys vapour stinks & flyes
Prides pomps are shadows all
& Titles honours toys
Great births in merits oft are small
& all their praise but noise
Rainbows upon the skyes of May
Fade soon but scarce so soon as they
Then sweet content be thine to call
My sorrows as thy due
For grief is natural to all
As is to night the dew
As disappointed hopes decay
My heart shall struggle & be gay
As hopes from earth shall disappear
With thee Ill not despair
For thou canst look at heaven & see
The vagrant waiting there
& while thou smilest I shall see
Thy lives last gift the best shall be
Here is Clare writing in the late 1820s - prose this time:
The whigs & torys may be better classified
perhaps by the terms of outs & ins for
be they whigs or torys in those situations the
outsare always vociverators of “liberty”
“cruelty of taxation” & “good of the people”
while the insare inflexible tyrants
& determined supporters of all that is
oppressing & annoying to the people &
benefitting to themselves & their connections
(Pet MS A42, p94)
This is how another writer put it:
Several centuries of enclosure were crucial in creating a working class, initially rural but increasingly urban. Families who previously would have been able to eke a living with the use of the Commons were forced off the land they had used for centuries. So the common folk became unable to provide for themselves and so were forced to work for a pitiful wage from their ‘masters’.
The law itself now became the instrument by which the theft of the people’s land was achieved, although the great farmers continued to use their petty private methods in addition. The parliamentary form of this robbery was to pass Acts for the enclosure of commons; in other words, decrees whereby the great landowners made a present to themselves of the people’s land, which thus became their own private property. A systematic seizure of communal landed property helped to swell the size of those great farms which, in the eighteenth century, were called “capital farms” or “merchant farms”
(Karl Marx – Das Kapital)
Here is a 20thCentury English Historian on the subject...
Enclosure was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers. But what might be “perfectly legal” involved a rupture of the traditional village rights and customs. The social violence of enclosure consisted precisely in the drastic, total imposition upon the village of capitalist property-definitions. A monumental piece of rural theft.
Those petty rights of the villagers, such as gleaning, access to fuel, and the tethering of stock in the lanes or on the stubble, which are irrelevant to the historian of economic growth, were of critical importance to the subsistence of the poor.
(E. P. Thompson- The Making of the English Working Class,)
On the 16th July 2017, Jeremy Corbyn quoted John Clare at Tolpuddle festival:
"Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave …
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came."
Even 200 years later, without any doubt Clare is as relevant as ever. Here are the lines from his 1820 collection "Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery" that his publisher had expunged from the book in the Second and subsequent editions, much to Clare's annoyance:
"Accursed wealth oer bounding human laws
Of every evil thou remains the cause
Victims of want those wretches such as me
Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee
Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed
& thine our loss of labour & of bread
Thou art the cause that levels every tree
& woods bow down to clear a way for thee "
‘Accursed Wealth’ – those two words echo down the generations for any student of Clare, whether scholar or simply a reader of the great poet’s work. Right from the early poems that have come down to us, we find in Clare an honesty that is often painful to observe. We all know that here was a man born in grinding poverty, like other labourers of his time subjected to the Speenhamland system:
The authorities at Speenhamland in Berkshire approved a means-tested sliding-scale of wage supplements in order to mitigate the worst effects of rural poverty. Families were paid extra to top up wages to a set level. The immediate impact of paying the poor rate fell on the landowners of the parish concerned. They then sought other (cheaper) means of dealing with the poor, the workhouse.
For us, who have observed the vast expansion of the so-called 'gig' economy of the past 10 years, all this is very familiar. We don't yet have the Workhouse, but it has been suggested. Here is Clare on the subject, again a poem I uncovered in the Archives:
Poverty
They give me eight pence by the day
& make it up at night
With six pence worth of parish pay
& can ye call it right
Im going to justice just to see
What she will have to say
& faith I doubt I shall not see
Yer honour there today
No friend I am a faithful mate
To justice but ye mean
What may be named a magistrate
& there Im never seen
Nay they have stopt me when Ive gone
To take that weight away
& backed deceptions wrong
To take your gains away
Apology for the Poor
Every restraint now adays is laid on poverty & every liberty is given to luxury burthens are constantly laid upon the weak & the strong are left without them – with the weak they are called useful & nessesary laws & with the rich they are considered as mean & incommod{i}ous matters never intended for them
Thus every nessesary article with the poor is taxed & every luxury with the rich goes riot free as far as possible with the descency of parsiality to participate
>>>>>>>>>
but perhaps because of naivety, roundly cheated by those he regarded as 'his betters' -- his publishers -- out of most of his earnings:
"& tho I know I am cheated such is the cunning of avarice [that] like the tricks of a conjuror it defies detection"
(...) The piece will 'grow' as I continue to compose it. Hope readers will find it interesting and enlightening.
Roger R.
Posts
