The Village Minstrel (excerpt)

[The meadow behind Swaddywell Pit]

.

Ye meadow blooms ye pasture flowers farwell

Ye banishd trees ye make me deeply sigh

Inclosure came & all your glories fell

Een the old oak that crownd yon rifld dell

Whose age had made it sacred to the view

Not long was left his childerns fate to tell

Where ignorance & wealth their course pursue

Each tree must tumble down—old ‘lea close oak’ adieu

Lubin beheld it all & deeply paind

Along the railed road woud muse & sigh

The only path that freedoms rights maintaind

The naked scenes drew pity from his eye

Tears dropt to mem'ry of delights gone bye

The haunts of freedom cowherds wattld bower

& shepherds huts & trees that tow[e]red high

& spreading thorns that turnd a summer shower

All captives lost & past to sad oppresions power

(lines 1103-1119)

The 'legal robbery' of the enclosures forceably reminded Clare of what has become known in English history as the Norman Yoke.  So here is a piece he wrote under that title to further explain his views of what he was witnessing in his own time.  It might well seem rather familiar to 2016 eyes.

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"

Pfz. MISC MS 198 p44

*noose

April

[Image: The Shepherd’s Calendar (April) – Carry Akroyd]

The infant April joins the spring
And views its watery skye
As youngling linnet trys its wing
And fears at first to flye
With timid step she ventures on
And hardly dares to smile
The blossoms open one by one
And sunny hours beguile
But finer days approacheth yet
With scenes more sweet to charm
And suns arive that rise and set
Bright strangers to a storm
And as the birds with louder song
Each mornings glory cheers
With bolder step she speeds along
And looses all her fears

John Clare – The Shepherd’s Calendar (April - excerpt)

The village band crossed the street and made its way slowly among the hobbling pilgrims, along Church Lane towards Eastwell Spring.

As they drew close they could see that the elms and willows, that last year had made a green and shady grove around the spring, had been dragged to the saw-mill. It is a scarred and barren slope that now leads down to the little pool. The crowds were lining up to fill their leather bottles and jugs. Charlie Turner stood white and shivering, waist deep in water, pulling his ragged half-wit daughter Isabel towards him while she wailed like a lost soul. Mrs Bullimore had set her jug upon a wooden table. Children were jostling around it with farthings in their fists, eager for a cup of sugared water.

Hugh Lupton – The Ballad of John Clare (Chapter 16)

THAT was how it was, but after the enclosures, here is John remembering...

My sundays harmless pleasures were forsook
Nor turnd my rambles to the pasture brook
Were in my youth at ‘Eastwells’ fountain side
Which winters never froze nor summer dryd
Young men & maidens usd to talk & play
In the cool shadows of its willows grey
Drinking loves healths in totts of sugard drink
On the soft swellings of its rushy brink
From the spring head like winter cold & chill
Were boils the white sand that is never still
Now swimming up in silver threads & then
Slow siling down to bubble up agen
There shepherds usd to sit & tell the while
Their tales & jokes to win each maidens smile

(From, “The Memory of Love”, lines 353-366)

Remembrances...

Just a couple of miles from my home along the Otter Valley, in the centre of the cross-roads where four old paths meet, there is an ancient riven oak.  Dead now, but only a few years ago it was still producing its share of wonderfully large acorns.  It has always been known as the ‘Trysting Oak’ after generations of the local lads and lasses from Metcombe, Venn Ottery, Tipton St. John and Fluxton  had met and courted beneath its boughs.  It died because someone – Clare called such an individual ‘the spoiler’ -- set a fire in its hollow trunk.  Clare’s ‘Remembrances’ summarises my feelings about its loss, and the continued thoughtlessness of many towards growing things in the 21st century. 

Remembrances (excerpt)   
By Langley Bush I roam, but the bush hath left its hill, 
On Cowper Green I stray, tis a desert strange and chill, 
And the spreading Lea Close oak, ere decay had penned its will, 
To the axe of the spoiler and self-interest fell a prey, 
And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak's narrow lane 
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again. 
Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain, 
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill 
And hung the moles for traitors -- though the brook is running still 
It runs a sicker brook, cold and chill. 

MP IV 130

All that is left of Langley Bush today is a bump in a field, surmounted by a hawthorn tree planted by the Clare Society 20 years ago.

A notice on the gate says this:

‘The Langley Bush is situated on private land.  Permission to visit the mound should be sought from Fitzwilliam Farm (Milton Estates)’.

So to actually visit the site without ‘permission’, one must trespass on the land legally stolen from the commons during the enclosures.  My heart bleeds...

Trespass

The mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932 was a notable act of ‘trespass’ by ordinary working people from Manchester and Sheffield.  It was undertaken at Kinder Scout, in the Peak District of Derbyshire, on 24 April 1932, to highlight that walkers in England and Wales were denied access to areas of open country that had been enclosed by rich landowners, in the early 19^th Century.

Although of course long dead, I have always felt that John Clare should be their patron Saint.

The year is 1820, the place Helpston, an impoverished village in Northamptonshire.  Over the past decade the parish and those around it have been transformed by a parliamentary Enclosure Act.  For centuries the village had been surrounded by huge open fields in which labourers were entitled to farm their strips of land.  To the south, there had been a heath on which a poor man could graze a few sheep or a cow.  But now there are fences, hedgerows, gates.  Trees have been felled and “No Trespassing” signs gone up.  New roads have appeared, streams have been dammed and redirected.  Boundary lines have been imposed like a grid on a landscape that once felt open and free. The common folk?  Legally pauperised.

On paths to freedom and to childhood dear 

A board sticks up to notice “no road here” 

And on the tree with ivy overhung 

The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung 

As though the very birds should learn to know 

When they go there they must no further go

An excerpt from the Act of Enclosure for Helpstone

"AND be it further Enacted, That no Horses, Beasts, Asses, Sheep, Lambs, or other Cattle, shall at any Time within the first Ten Years after the said Allotments shall be directed to be entered upon by the respective Proprietors thereof, be kept in any of the public Carriage Roads or Ways to be set out and fenced off on both Sides, or Laned out in pursuance of this Act."

So at a stroke, no poor man - without an 'allotment' -  could graze his stock on the newly enclosed land.  Pauperised at the stroke of the Parliamentary pen, largely by the very men who would benefit by the Enclosures.  So labourers such as Clare were thrown onto the not so tender mercies of those for whom they worked...

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

Pet MS B6 p166

TRESPASS

I dreaded walking where there was no path
And pressed with cautious tread the meadow swath,
And always turned to look with wary eye,
And always feared the farmer coming by;
Yet everything about where I had gone
Appeared so beautiful, I ventured on;
And when I gained the road where all are free
I fancied every stranger frowned at me,
And every kinder look appeared to say,
“You've been on trespass in your walk to-day.”
I've often thought, the day appeared so fine,
How beautiful if such a place were mine;
But having naught I never feel alone
And cannot use another's as my own.

The Poems of John Clare

ed. J. W. Tibble (2 volumes, Dent, 1935)

The Workhouse Orphan

Familiar to us all from a reading of Dickens : The workhouse orphan Oliver, 'desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery' asks for a bit more gruel, and is institutionally victimised for his temerity: confined for a week in a dark, cold and solitary room, caned by the Beadle, flogged before an audience of paupers, and preached against at prayer-time.  (Chapter 3 – Oliver Twist)

Here is Clare on a subject very dear to his heart, writing 20 years before Dickens’ famous book.

The Workhouse Orphan

With Mary Lee the parish was my lot

& its cold bounty all the friends I got

Dragd from our childhoods pleasures & its plays

We pined in workhouse sorrows many days

Were many wants recievd their scan supply

Were pity never came to check the sigh

Save what laws force from tyrant overseers

Whose bitter gifts was purchased with our tears

There ragd & starvd & workd beyond our powers

We toild those hours you spend in gathering flowers

Nor mothers smiles had we our toils to cheer

But tyrants frowns & threatnings ever near

Who beat enfeebled weakness many times

& scoft misfortunes agonys as crimes

While prides vain childern of a luckier race

Were taught to shun our presence as disgrace

Thus workhouse misery did we both abide

Till our own strength its poverty supplyd

& service freed us –

I hope I’m very wrong, but this is where we certainly seem to be heading as a nation two hundred years later: “Who beat enfeebled weakness many times / & scoft misfortunes agonys as crimes / While prides vain children of a luckier race / Were taught to shun our presence as disgrace”. 

This was published in David Powell’s  ‘Notes’ to Eric Robinson’s “The Parish’ published in 1985, and in EP I 660 (lines 57-75) & Tibbles I 492.

O england boasted land of liberty...

[Image: Unenclosed Moor]

It seems a puzzle to many that ‘The Village Minstrel’ failed so spectacularly after the sensational sales of ‘Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery’ just a year before.

However there is a clue to the failure in the lines quoted below.  This might be further clarified by asking two simple questions, “Who benefitted from the Enclosures that impoverished a whole class of worker, the farm labourer”?  and, “Who actually bought books in the 1820s”?

John Clare himself, by being so honest, alienated probably the majority of his intended readership.  Reading verses such as these made them feel very uncomfortable, trenchant criticism of the legal robbery they and their connections had perpetrated, and that, from a social inferior.

Spring more resembles winter now then spring
The shades are banishd all—the birds betook to wing
There once was lanes in natures freedom dropt
There once was paths that every valley wound
Inclosure came & every path was stopt
Each tyrant fixt his sign were pads was found
To hint a trespass now who crossd the ground
Justice is made to speak as they command
The high road now must be each stinted bound

—Inclosure thourt a curse upon the land
& tastless was the wretch who thy existance pland
O england boasted land of liberty
Wi strangers still thou mayst thy title own
But thy poor slaves the alteration see
Wi many a loss to them the truth is known
Like emigrating bird thy freedoms flown
While mongrel clowns low as their rooting plough
Disdain thy laws to put in force their own
& every village owns its tyrants now
& parish slaves must live as parish kings alow

The Village Minstrel (1821)

(lines 1081 – 1101)

Another writer put it this way, “The law itself now became the instrument by which the theft of the people’s land was achieved (...) 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.”  The writer?  Karl Marx in “Das Kapital”, wonder if he had read Clare?

Round Oak and Eastwell

All that is left of Eastwell Spring in 2016

In my own native field two fountains run
All desolate and naked to the sun;
The fell destroyer's hand hath reft their side
Of every tree that hid and beautified
Their shallow waters in delightful clumps,
That sunburnt now o'er pebbles skips and jumps.

One where stone quarries in its hills are broke
Still keeps its ancient pastoral name, Round Oak,
Although one little solitary tree
Is all that's left of its old pedigree.

The other, more deformed, creeps down the dell,
Scarcely the shade of what was once Eastwell,
While the elm-groves that groaned beneath no tax
Have paid their tribute to the lawless axe,
And the old rooks that waited other springs
Have fled to stranger scenes on startled wings.

The place all lonely and all naked lies,
And Eastwell spring in change's symphonies
Boils up its sand unnoticed and alone,
To all its former happiness unknown.

Its glory gone, its Sunday pastimes o'er,
The haunts of shepherds and of maids no more.
The passer-by unheeding tramples on
Nor heeds the spring, nor trees nor bushes gone,
While the stray poet's memory haunts the spot
Like a friend's features time hath nigh forgot.

The Poems of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble
(2 volumes, Dent, 1935)

Round Oak Spring

Sweet brook Ive met thee many a summers day

& ventured fearless in thy shallow flood
& rambled oft thy sweet unwearied way
Neath willows cool that on thy margin stood
With crowds of partners in my artless play
Grasshopper beetle bee & butterflye
That frisked about as though in merry mood
To see their old companion sporting bye
Sweet brook lifes glories once were thine & mine
Shades cloathed thy spring that now doth naked lie
On thy white boiling sand the sweet woodbine
Darkened & dipt its flowers — I mark & sigh
& muse oer troubles since we met the last
Like two fond friends whose happiness is past

Pet MS A23 R42
MP IV 280

Round Oak Spring is now nothing more than a drainage ditch, running east from a point a hundred metres or so SW of Royce Wood.

First Love's Recollections (part)

First love will with the heart remain
When all its hopes are bye,
As frail rose-blossoms still retain
Their fragrance when they die;
And joy's first dreams will haunt the mind
With shades from whence they sprung,
As summer leaves the stems behind
On which spring's blossoms hung.

Mary! I dare not call thee dear,
I've lost that right so long;
Yet once again I vex thine ear
With memory's idle song.
Had time and change not blotted out
The love of former days,
Thou wert the last that I should doubt
Of pleasing with my praise.

MP V 11

Clare on the Skylark

Yesterday jogging around the East Devon lanes turned out to be the day to which I always look forward every year -- the skylarks are 'up' and singing their little hearts out. When they say it is Spring... it is Spring. 

Bird of the morn,

When roseate clouds begin

To show the opening dawn

Thou gladly sing'st it in,

And o'er the sweet green fields and happy vales

Thy pleasant song is heard, mixed with the morning gales.

LP I 309

A Thrall in Northampton

[Clare in the porch of All Saint's Church, Northampton - Unknown artist]

Although rather changed from the text of the Authorised Version of the Bible that Clare knew, had memorised and loved, the words (below) are dredged up from the depth of his subconscious and desolate state of mind; arguably a true reflection of his inner life at the end of this (1841), the most difficult year of his life.

Obsessed as he is with the veracity of his memory of Mary, Clare finds himself dwelling on a biblical passage of doom and loss. Composing a long paraphrase of the prophecy, with that final denouement — ‘though bondsmen enslave thee’ — laying in wait. He finds himself writing a prophecy of his own judgment and removal.

Roger R.

John Clare Society newsletter

No. 111 - March 2011

All powerless thou to shun the doom
Or to avert the blow
To sudden desolation shalt thou go
& to the ruin which thou shalt not know

(Isaiah 47 paraphrase, lines 57-60)

Thy merchants from thy youth
They shall wander one & all
To his quarters & the truth
Shall leave thee more in thrall
Though slave dealers take thee
though bondsmen enslave thee
There's none shall be able to shield thee or save thee

(Isaiah paraphrase, lines 85-90)

In due course the ‘slave dealers’, in the form of Parson Glossop, Fenwick Skrimshire and William Page, arrive at the cottage and there are none able to shield him or save him, estranged as he was… ‘a stranger to his own family’.

One day keepers came, and a vain struggle, and the Northborough cottage saw John Clare no more. He was now in the asylum at Northampton, and the minds of Northamptonshire noblemen need no longer be troubled that a poet was wandering in miserable happiness under their park walls.

So far, the madness of Clare had been rather an exaltation of mind than a collapse. Forsaken mainly by his friends… unrecognized by the new generation of writers and of readers, hated by his neighbours, wasted with hopeless love, he had encouraged a life of imagination and ideals. Imagination overpowered him, until his perception of realities failed him. He could see Mary Joyce or talk with her, he had a family of dream-children by her: but if this was madness, there was method in it. But now the blow fell, imprisonment for life: down went John Clare into idiocy, "the ludicrous with the terrible." And even from this desperate abyss he rose.

Earl Fitzwilliam paid for Clare's maintenance in the Northampton Asylum, but at the ordinary rate for poor people. The asylum authorities at least seemed to have recognized Clare as a man out of the common, treating him as a "gentleman patient," and allowing him -- for the first twelve years -- to go when he wished into Northampton, where he would sit under the portico of All Saints' Church in meditation.

(from ‘Poems Chiefly From Manuscript’
Edited by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921

Valentine

The morning is up betimes my dear

Each postman is loaded by Cupid

The letters are nothing but lovers and rhymes

Some loving or joking or stupid

'Tis an old fashioned thing to go church to be wed

And then nothing can alter the fashion

But today like the birds many lovers are led

More warmly revealing their passion.

Thy love at the first gave such witching delight

No maiden on earth could be neater

And absence has kept thee so long from my sight

That thy beauty shines sweeter and sweeter.

The flowers of summer are showy and fine

But the blossoms of spring are the dearest

And just so it is with my fair Valentine

The best are the sweet and the sincerest.

There's the cyclamen flower of a delicate hue

There's the snowdrop so drooping of delicate white

There's the violet and crocus all over dark blue

That makes in a nosegay a Valentine quite.

I'll wed thee and love thee, and this is the day

We must call those we love Valentine

And I hope when we see the sweet blossoms of May
Thou'lt be a sweet blossom of mine.

LP I 405

(A final Knight transcript)

Pxxxx in 1818

[Image by Clementina Lady Hawarden (1860s) V&A]

Her hair was swarthy brown and soft of hue

As the sweet gloom that falls with evens dew

That on her fine white forehead did divide

In the triumphant negligence of pride

Her eyes were dark but they wore lights to shine

That love adores & poets call divine

Her cheeks summer blooms more hues than shade

Of loves soft innosence without its guide

& on the poutings of her amorous lip

Where youth loves fancied nectar loves to sip

Beauty had formulated that bewitching spell

That love adores & language cannot tell

Where charms triumphant made each gaze a prey
Heartaches for looking ere he turned away

"The Poet in Love" - Arbour Editions (2014)

“I met Patty by accident fell in love by accident married her by accident and esteemed her by choice       sure enough if I had not met her I should have at this day been a lonely solitary – feeling nothing but the worlds sorrows and troubles and sharing none of its happiness – as it is in the midst of trouble I am happy having a companion whom I feel deserves my best esteem”

'My Autobiographical Writings' (Robinson)

Song : "Say what is love?"

This is the first of Clare's poems that grasped me as a young(er) man in the early 1970s.  I learned it then -- probably as I was then newly engaged -- and find it is still on my mind and lips from time to time.  And to illustrate it?  A lover's view of Swaddywell in the Summer.

.

Say what is love? To live in vain
To live and die and live again?

Say what is love? Is it to be
In prison still and still be free --

Or seem as free? Alone and prove
The hopeless hopes of real love?

Does real love on earth exist?
Tis like a sun beam on the mist,

That fades and nowhere will remain,
And nowhere is o’ertook again.

Say what is love? -– A blooming name,
A rose-leaf on the page of fame,

That blooms, then fades, to cheat no more,
And is what nothing was before?

Say what is love? Whate’er it be,
It centres, Mary, still with thee.

LP I 78

(part of 'Child Harold')