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Their history in a village stream

Tr>« Common Stream. By Rowland Parker. Collins. 278 pp. Index. N.Z. price $6.60. “Let not ambition mock their useful toil. Then homely joys, ano destiny obscure. f.’or grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile. The short and simple annals of the poor .’’ Gray’s "Elegy’’ is no longer a ’ashionable source of quotation; its homely wisdom is ignored, or scorned for its sentimentality But Gray < aptures exactly the flavour of one of the most remarkable histories to appear for many years The people who inspired Gray with a love amounting to reverence are the people who moved Rowland Parker to write This book. They are the Common People normally quite beneath the grander gaze of historians: they are the ordinary men and women of England’s hundreds of villages and, incidentally, the ancestors of. perhaps. 80 per cent of today’s New Zealanders. To attempt their history’ must have been a daunting task. Mr Parker chose to describe it through the history of one village — Foxton. near Cambridge, which for more than 2000 years seems to have had a population of about 400. The author chose Foxton for the best reasons of all: he lives there and loves it Foxton had the unexpected advantage that many of its records were intact, especially from about 1500, and desultory archaeological -esearch from the nineteenth century onwards has helped to provide evidence that goes back to pre-Roman times. The Common Stream of the title is the village stream, the very life of the village from the dawn of history although it is overgrown or piped today: the stream is also the

continuity of ordinary human beings in the village. And through the example of Foxton the stream of life in most of England can be guessed at, pondered. and enjoyed with an awsome sense of the doggedness of “little people.” Mr Parker, by profession, is neither a writer nor a scholarly historian. As a result, his work has an engaging frankness and directness; he is unabashed at confessing his own shortcomings and quite happy to admit to the gaps in his knowledge where he has had to guess or interpolate. The result is a book which conveys a sense of great learning, lightly imparted. He is balanced and wise, imaginative and truthful at the same time. In England “The Common Stream” has been received with something akin to awe; its reception here deserves to be as warm Professional historians will nibble and gnaw at its findings, but few books have ever conveyed such a sense of the span of human endeavour. The Roman officer who built a villa at Foxton. ate oysters by the dozen, dreamed of fathering a son, and had his modest estate ravaged by Boadiceas rebellion is one of our ancestors. So is the one John Rayner, of a vast clan of Rayners who thrived in Foxton. and who between 1541 and 1586 fought a continuous war with his neighbours and the petty officials of the day.

John Rayner came before the manor lourt no less than 37 times; his offences ranged from failing to mend his fences to cutting down other people s willow trees; his fines varied from fourpence to 10 shillings. There is no evidence that he paid any of them, but he seems to have been the real centre of interest in Foxton at a time when the reformation of the Church, Bloody Queen Mary, and

Queen Elizabeth with all her admirals and poets made not a ripple there' Our lineage, too, must include people like the elderly widows, Cowper and Gregory, who in 1772 collected, carted and spread stones by the waggon-load to mend Foxton's main street at one-and-sixpence a load. “Old Widow Cowper, with her hands, picked 27 cart loads of stones that winter. If she had been on parish relief she would have received £2-10-0. By doing this work she earned £2-0-6d, and her name did not appear on the paupers’ list. If you know of an instance of courage, stoical pride, and endurance which can surpass that, I would like to hear of it”, writes Mr Parker.

Let that passage stand as an example of the kind of painstaking detail assembled by Mr Parker, and of his engaging way of presenting it. Mr Parker spent 13 years tapping the waters of his stream. He round oak beams in village houses still in use after 500 years; some laid, flat as foundations, had turned quietly to dust in the 20th century, like the life in the village that had existed time out of mind until this century. But Foxton is still there, thriving now with about 1300 people, many of them treating it as a haven of retreat from J:he cities where they work. Probably no event has touched the village deeply since Roman times, although Parliamentary troops once paused there to fire their cannons at Royalists across the river in Barrington. Mr Parker remarks that the watching Foxtonians probably got great pleasure, not because of" their political allegiance, which seems hardly to have existed, but because their larger rival village, the people whose heads they cracked on annual fair days, and who had been their rivals at least since Saxon times, were on the receiving end. That kind of local exclusiveness dies hard, but it would be difficult to find today. Nevertheless it helped to give Foxton the unique charm of a particular village which no general history could ever have achieved. Who can resist the appeal of a communitv where, in 1770. the local constable noted in the poor rate accounts “Paid for thing for cockade — one shilling." Only to find that the badge of office he had provided for himself was jumped on by the Vestry Committee a year later when they resolved: “No cockade to be paid for by the poor rates" Such was the stuff of life in Foxton. In Mr Parker’s hands the result is a unarming book.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19750621.2.83.4

Bibliographic details

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33875, 21 June 1975, Page 10

Word Count
993

Their history in a village stream Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33875, 21 June 1975, Page 10

Their history in a village stream Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33875, 21 June 1975, Page 10

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