Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 136

I suspect many professional historians will find this book slightly uncomfortable – not because of its subject – but because of how that subject is tackled. Its avowed intention is to ‘give a voice’ to the rural poor, mainly of Norfolk, in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It does this through a series of brief vignettes covering topics like machine breaking, poaching, instances of ‘rough music’, witchcraft and rural bastardy. The topics chosen are interesting enough but it is the way they are treated which causes some problems. Each essay is prefaced by what the author calls a ‘dramatized section’. In these he uses what he calls ‘imaginative licence’ to put a gloss on the accounts which follow, for example using a vernacular voice to present a version from the view of ‘the poor’, or writing an account of the event described in the third person in an almost novelistic way.

This has advantages, especially for the non-specialist reader. Many historical sources are dry and not easy to follow and present barriers to understanding necessitating long and often complex exegesis by the historian. This in turn often blunts the impact of what are frequently powerful and moving historical stories. However, to many ‘professionals’ such changes smack of tampering with evidence. It is not that Lee makes anything up in the way of facts, rather that the ‘imaginative licence’ employed appears to give sets of meanings to events over and above what is in the source. For example, in the account of ‘rough music’ at Clippersby in Norfolk in 1868 in the Norfolk News (quoted it has to be said by Lee), the victim, John Mumford, ‘was standing at a gate ... with his master [when he saw a number of men coming towards him]. They were carrying an image, which was dressed in [a] similar dress which he wore.’ Lee renders this at much greater length, having Mumford hear music and drumbeats across the marsh and his employer recognize the effigy: ‘“That look just like you John!” cried his employer, his voice incredulous but betraying the first chokings of suppressed laughter. With a muttered curse Mumford turned his back on the scene and set off for home, trying hard not to break into a run ...’.

There is nothing implausible in this. Mumford’s employer raised laughter in the court when he described the effigy; Mumford did go to his house (as did the procession); but it is the assumptions about ‘the muttered curses’ and later when Mumford in his house stands ‘flattened against the wall’ while outside his neighbours join in ‘dancing impromptu reels’ that leave me uneasy. Simply we don’t know if he was ‘flattened against the wall’, and secondly, in the case of the reels, it is stretching the evidence a bit.

In fairness, we only know it is stretching the evidence because Lee, unlike say Ronald Blythe in Akenfield, provides us with the original material, but it remains important. Lee wants to give the rural poor a voice – a project to which I have given part of my working life and which I strongly applaud – but the question must be does this method do that? The answer is not simple. The imaginative reconstruction of the lives of the poor, both contemporary and historical, has huge virtues and at its best presents texts of enormous power. Few rural historians could have read Adam Thorpe’s novel Ulverton without a recognition of the deep ‘truth’ of his account of the aftermath of Swing. Nearly a hundred years earlier Hudson’s accounts of the same events in A shepherd’s life with its intensely moving plea for the ‘good, brave men’ transported in 1830–1 has a similar resonance. Yet it is an area which those who lack the training, patience and skill of the novelist should always approach with caution. Against this there is real value for the non-specialist or general reader in using materials in this way. In that respect, the book will certainly have a potential appeal outside the normal academic audience.

I am left however with a sense of unease. In the final chapter Lee talks about ‘finding patterns’, including widespread alienation among the rural poor of the 1820s to 1840s, who after the suppression of Swing, the advent of the New Poor Law, the ‘new’ game acts and enclosure appear as a class apart, sullenly and bitterly confront-ing the rural elite. In some ways that was certainly the case, as the essays and vignettes in the book show. Yet it was a short moment and one which was made more complex, as Lee’s other work shows, by the reaction of the rural poor of East Anglia in the 1850s and 1860s. In those years the rick burner and cattle maimer becomes less significant than the Methodist preacher, the friendly society member and ultimately the trade unionist and Liberal Party activist. By the early 1870s there were more labourers involved in these essentially respectable movements than had ever been actively involved in the desperate resistance of the 1830s and 1840s. This is not to discount the earlier period, and Lee’s work certainly gives it a real and anguished human face, but to suggest that the patterns found might be different.

There were survivals of older ‘class struggles without class’, as E.P.Thompson called them, but they seem increasingly odd and even out of step. In 1911, in a bitter strike at St Faiths in Norfolk, the women and children of the village ‘ran-tanned’ blacklegs and ended up in court. They claimed what they were doing was a ‘tradition’ and clearly understood the public contempt and disapproval contained within the ritual. Yet circumstances had changed, and with that change so the ritual shifted its site, its meaning and its importance. What they were doing was part of a strike, led by a well-organized and increasingly powerful union in one of its strongholds. They were supported by unionized urban workers, the Independent Labour Party and were defended in court by a solicitor hired and paid for by the union. There are patterns but they are patterns which show the rural poor modernizing their protest into nineteenth-century forms recognized, albeit reluctantly, by the state. They were also forms which, at least in terms of hours, wages and conditions, were more effective than the doomed and bitter movements of a hundred years earlier. It is that pattern, that change, which needs to be understood, for it was that change which the trades unionists and the early rural socialists of Norfolk believed to be the great advance. They also believed that it was an advance of their own making. The unions, the friendly societies even the Methodist Chapel were, they believed, the product of a new rural ‘working class’ and their own activity.