Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 311

I must start by declaring an interest – or, more accurately, a non-interest. English pastoral was commissioned by my daughter Helen when she worked for Allen Lane; she also commissioned and saw to publication James Rebanks’s best-seller, The shepherd’s life (2015). I have had, until now, nothing at all to do with the commissioning, editing, or promoting of either book. Had I been involved in the preparation of English pastoral, however, I would have queried the use of endorsements from Philip Pullman and Caitlin Moran: media celebs not noted as authorities on the hardships or history of farming. English pastoral looks set to repeat the success of The shepherd’s life, having featured in January 2021 as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. But what can it offer to the student of agricultural and rural history?

Although much of the book does concern sheep and fields, its title is mischievously misleading. This is no tale of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, or escape from the stresses of urban life to bucolic tranquillity. The book is divided into three roughly equal sections, the first of which brings to life the author’s memories of childhood on his family’s Cumbrian farm and makes clear just how much of an endurance test such an existence could often be. Rebanks quotes Virgil’s Georgics, in which the poet describes farming as a war against nature, where defeat means starvation. It would seem that Rebanks is remembering the early to mid-1980s (the book provides very few dates), describing a farm where money was short and there was a constant struggle to keep on top of things. ‘And such a hard way of living made for hard people’, Rebanks tells us (p. 31).

The young Rebanks was much influenced by his grandfather, a farmer of the old school, who used the fields as classrooms in which he could pass on traditional knowledge to his grandson. He was slow, patient, and observant, and cared for his animals; he would not have been out of place in a book by H. J. Massingham. But Rebanks’s farming relatives were dismissive of such an outmoded approach, and his father found himself increasingly under pressure to modernize. Rebanks is grateful to his grandfather for having shown him a traditional way of farming before it died out. Far from the supposed timelessness of rural England, English Pastoral conveys a sense of constant change: during the late twentieth century in particular, but stretching back through generations of the Rebanks family.

The coming of agri-business to Cumbria affected not just farming methods and farm numbers, but the wider culture and social life of the inhabitants. The world in which the young Rebanks was brought up was not entirely bleak, though: he recalls that there was a sense of community, an awareness of natural cycles, a wide range of skilled crafts still being practised, and an independence of spirit that resisted the blandishments of consumerism. But, in the end, Rebanks’s father could not hold out against the changed approach that other farmers had adopted.

In the second section, ironically titled ‘Progress’, Rebanks describes how, through seeing the problems his father faced, he came in effect to discover those ideas about farming, economics and the environment which the organic movement has been promulgating since the 1930s. During the mid-1990s he spent time working on an Australian farm, an experience which showed him the reality of agri-business techniques. There was no sense of history ‘to slow everything down’, there were no people, no farmsteads: ‘Just flat fields, perfect for huge machines’ (p. 95). Tens of thousands of sheep were ranched in fields bigger than the Rebanks family’s entire farm, a scale of production with which smaller farms could not possibly compete. Rebanks returned to Cumbria appreciating the full beauty of its landscape but bewildered by the seemingly impossible task lying ahead for him if he wanted to continue his family’s farming history.

The account of how he and his father tried to keep afloat as economic pressure squeezed them ever harder, is powerful and informative – a valuable contribution to the agricultural history of the late twentieth century. Rebanks shows the reality behind the economists’ abstractions: the harm done to animals and the soil, and the poverty, isolation and social fracturing that adoption of agri-business techniques brought in its train. But his grandfather had offered him a different perspective, and it seemed to him, given the problems which overwhelmed his father, that there was wisdom to be gleaned from this supposedly outdated approach.

So, James Rebanks has come to appreciate the importance of a sense of limits; of replenishing the ‘living soil’ (though he does not mention Eve Balfour); of working with biological cycles; of encouraging earthworms; of mixed farming; of the philosophy of stewardship; of seeking quality rather than quantity; of local food production; of planting trees, and, in short, of agriculture as husbandry. This term takes us back to the 1945 collection of essays edited by Massingham: The Natural Order: Essays in the return to husbandry. Sadly, Rebanks refers to none of the chief pioneers of the organic movement, in whose writings all the above ideas and practices can be found, as well as a hostility to capitalist economics that Rebanks evidently shares.

Just as the early organicists contrasted economics with ecology, so Rebanks does, and not merely in theory but in practice. The book’s third section is an account of how during the past few years he has sought to demonstrate to environmental activists that farming can be ecologically beneficial. He is fighting on two fronts: against those who see farming as inherently anti-environmental, and against those who ignore environmental and social issues in favour of large-scale food-production, where pursuit of ‘efficiency’ overrides other considerations. If Rebanks’s project proves successful, his future books should, like English pastoral, make interesting reading.