Where did Cumbria's posh people go?
Victorian visitors noticed the Lake District had few gentry and many wealthy peasants. Wordsworth claimed these Statesmen farmers lived in "perfect equality." But is this a Revolutionary myth?
The first tourists who visited the Lake District in the late eighteenth century wrote home about a place that was very different from the rest of class-conscious England. Of course, they remarked on the high fells, peaks, crags and passes.
They were enchanted by the many slender lakes glimmering at the bases of the deep valleys and the distinctive buildings made of volcanic stone, glacial boulders and cobbles dragged from the rushing rivers.
But being British, what struck many of them as unique was the large number of well-off independent farmers taking prominent roles in social life instead of the gentry - of whom there seemed to be very few around. The statesmen farmers occupied a station in Cumbrian society far above the lowly tenant husbandmen typically found in the south.
They were surprisingly well-educated, individualistic proprietors of land that appeared to have been handed down through families for generations. The existence of this breed of legally free, middle-class peasants unfettered by obligations to any lord or master is one of the things that made Cumbria stand out in Britain.
Many Romantically-inclined writers and thinkers have portrayed these distinctive Lake District individuals as if they were survivors from a Golden Age. They are seen as relics from a time when free-born Englishman enjoyed precious rights that have been lost.
The vanished freedoms are supposed to include not being told what to do quite so much and being let off certain taxes. These liberties were supposed to have existed in Anglo-Saxon times before the Norman yoke descended on the necks of the population and snuffed out Merrie Old England. The supposed existence of this previous class of freeborn men and women fuelled the aspirations of Romantic radicals such as Arts and Crafts pioneer William Morris. They dreamed of restoring the country to a sort of unchanging Medieval society without classes - and this led them to support the revolutionary aspirations of oppressed classes abroad.
A rival version of the same myth also excited the minds of Romantic conservatives such as John Ruskin. He longed to reverse the wheels of advancing democracy and return to what he saw as the ideal Medieval-style society society of rigid hierarchy - only with a new breed of kindly aristocrats, not the current grasping lot, at the top who would properly look after an obedient peasantry
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Like all Golden Ages, neither version ever existed. However, the great Cumbrian poet William Wordsworth went to school in Hawkshead with the sons of these yeomen. Their families cultivated plots averaging twenty-four acres (about a tenth the size of the typical Cumbrian farm today).
Wordsworth admired the Statesmen so much he built his worldview and poetic philosophy around their manly feelings, strong attachments to the land, domestic economy, and self-sufficient characters.
He seemed to identify more strongly with them than his own class as represented by his lawyer father. John Wordsworth was legal agent for the stingy and unstable James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and Collector of Customs at Whitehaven. It was a job which included the use of the largest and most elegant Georgian mansion in the handsome town of Cockermouth.
The statesmen farmers were said to live in an unusual state of equality with each other. Gentry and aristocratic families tended from the 16th century onward to live outside Cumbria, often settling in the south to enjoy the delights of London, pursue professional advancement or to seek a seat in Parliament.
Academics have speculated that the relative flatness of the class hierarchy in Cumbria inclined Wordsworth to support the French Revolution and its objectives of liberty and equality.
But the truth is that Wordsworth changed his mind about what the statesmen represented as he got older. He appeared to switch sides from the William Morris team to the Ruskinians. As a youthful left-winger in 1790 he visited Switzerland on a walking tour and encountered Swiss shepherds. They were idealised by the revolutionaries as the “noble savages” that the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau portrayed as ideal men, innately good humans uncorrupted by the evils of civilisation.
Wordsworth immediately identified them as versions of the statesmen he knew in the Lake Country. He wrote in one poem that one might find on the brow of a mountain “man in all his dignity, gifted with exquisite reason.” Wordsworth imagined that their shepherding work would leave them plenty of time for leisure, study, and political activity.
He wrote that the shepherd: “marches carrying a sword, a crook, and some books” in other words, they embody in one body the political fighter, the caring herdsman and the natural intellectual. This might seem more than a little preposterous, but at this time, Wordsworth shared Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s enthusiasm for “Pantisocracy.”
This was a plan to set up an ideal community in America where, as a friend wrote, “each man would labour two or three hours in a day, the produce of which labour would… be more than sufficient to support the colony… and their leisure hours are to be spent in study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children.”
But a mere three years later, in 1793, Wordsworth suffered a shattering emotional and ideological blow when the reign of Terror broke out in Paris and quickly consumed the lives of moderate revolutionaries with whom he had mixed. He fled France, abandoning his girlfriend Annette Vallon and the tiny daughter she bore him, Caroline, and took refuge in England where he seems to have suffered a serious nervous breakdown.
Unsurprisingly, after seeing his friends consumed by the bloody nightmare of the Terror, Wordsworth’s thinking took a turn away from its earlier optimism. Yet it is typical of left-wing political activists who begin a journey to the right to insist their principles remain intact. Thus, the symbol of the statesmen remained important to him. He continued to admire their stalwart qualities and the importance of constructive leisure time.
But in Wordsworth’s modified version, their time off is no longer devoted to politics (as symbolised by the book and sword he mentioned in the poem). Instead, the statesman is seen as a moral icon, dedicated not to changing the world but strictly to the cultivation of what he called “domestic affections.” He went from seeing them as representatives of a democratic future to symbols of a conservative stability.
Wordsworth famously eulogised the Cumbrian yeoman farmers in his Guide to the Lakes published in 1810. In that book he described the area as a “perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists” among whom there was “perfect equality.” It was a society free from gentry domination (“neither high-born nobleman, knight nor esquire was here.”). The community, he wrote, was remarkable for its stability (the land farmed by “these humble sons of the hills . . . had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of their name and blood”). Wordsworth described the superior moral strength the men derived from their way of life.
In a letter to Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons, the poet wrote: “the power which these affections will acquire amongst such men is inconceivable by those who have only had an opportunity of observing hired labourers, farmers, and the manufacturing Poor.” Wordsworth added: “Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings.” Having emphasised how important the influence of the statesmen was on society, Wordsworth added, gloomily: “This class of men is rapidly disappearing.”
Wordsworth’s most famous portrayal of a statesman farmer is Michael, published in the hugely influential collection that he wrote with Coleridge called Lyrical Ballads in 1800. The poem's central symbol, the stones of Michael's unfinished sheepfold, represents the broken bond between father and son, the death of the family's lineage, the symbolic decay of old-fashioned values in the face of “modern” industrialism, and the general decline of a rural community.
Wordsworth did not discover the yeoman and his symbolic significance himself. He was picking up on an idea that was already quite deep-rooted in English folklore. The word yeoman is a medieval term that originally referred to someone from the middle ranks of society. It came into currency in the wake of England’s victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. That battle was said to have been won by the longbows wielded by stout citizens recruited from the provincial towns and villages of England.
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