Further Titles in the Series by Andrew C. Rouse

LevelA2

Mr Codie of Scotland Yard

The British Pub

The Ride of Johnny Ringo

LevelB1

My Christmases

Tales from Watchet

Small Ads

LevelB2

The English Village

For all levels

with Audrey V. Rouse

Eating Around Britain

Further Titles in the Series

Level A2

István Fekete Thorn Castle

(Tüskevár)

Hungarian Folk Tales

(Magyar népmesék)

Hungarian Legends

(Magyar mondák)

Level B1

Frigyes Karinthy Please, Sir

(Tanár úr kérem)

László L. Lőrincz The Shame of the Great Dome

(A Nagy Kupola szégyene)

Ferenc Molnár The Paul Street Boys

(A Pál utcai fiúk)

Level B1

István Csukás Bowler Hat and Red Nose

(Keménykalap és krumpliorr)

Frigyes Karinthy A Journey Round My Skull

(Utazás a koponyám körül)

Géza Ottlik School at the Frontier

(Iskola a határon)

The English Village

B2 (1200 headwords)

Written by ANDREW C. ROUSE

Illustrated by RONTÓ LILI

ISBN 978 963 05 9313 7

ISSN 2062-6150

Published by Akadémiai Kiadó,

member of the

Association of Hungarian Publishers and Booksellers

founded in 1795.

1117 Budapest, Prielle Kornélia u. 21–35.

www.akademiaikiado.hu

First edition: 2012

©ANDREW C. ROUSE, 2012

© AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ, 2012

Responsible for publication: Director of Akadémiai Kiadó

Responsible for editing: POMÁZI GYÖNGYI

Managing Editor: KÁCSOR LÓRÁNT

Page-Setting: LACZKÓ LÁSZLÓ

Cover Design: SÜTŐ RÓBERT

Technical Editor: KISS ZSUZSA

Print: Akadémiai Nyomda

Managing Director: UJVÁROSI LAJOS

Copyrights are the sole property of the copyright owners

listed above. Any copying, distributing and reproducing in any form

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without prior permission of all copyright owners is prohibited.

Printed in Hungary

This book is dedicated to Cser Teréz,
without whom there would be no series,
and to Lékó Sándor,
without whom I would never have met Cser Teréz.

The English Village

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE

When a person goes to a different country for the first time, it is natural that he will want to see the famous sights that he has already read about: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Taj Mahal in India, the Vatican in Rome, the Acropolis in Athens. The new visitor to England makes his way to London and gets very hot, tired and dirty, walking from Buckingham Palace to Westminster, from Nelson’s Column to the Tower of London. But London is more like London than like England, just as Paris is more like Paris than France. Capital cities are exciting places, and you must go to them if you can, but they are more like each other than the countries they are in, and more like themselves than anything else.

If a person wants to see Old England, then he can perhaps see some of it by looking at famous old buildings. But a lot of the beauty of England is not in big towns at all, but out in the countryside. Some of this beauty is natural; the sea, the hills and valleys, the lakes and rivers. But one of the most beautiful things in England is its villages.

Villages are different from towns. Towns try to say, “People came here to live, and now we are important. We don’t need fields and trees any more.” Villages belong to where they are; the walls of the houses are not brick but the local stone, or mud, and the roofs are made from slate out of the hills or thatch, cut from the wet valleys.

People build their houses where the wind doesn’t blow, where there is water nearby, where they can grow food and keep animals. Of course, not many people in English villages live off the land any more. But luckily, many people can work in a town and still live in a village, and many more people who live in towns want to live in villages. The same sort of people who in Hungary are trying to move to large towns, in England are trying to get out of them, and this means that the villages are in very good condition.

This does produce a new problem. Because many people are trying to buy old village houses, their price goes up, and so the “real” village people, young people whose families have lived in the same village for generations, are finding it very difficult to buy a house in their own village. So on the one hand English villages are becoming very beautiful because the new owners renovate their homes, but on the other hand many villages are losing their special character. The closer a village is to a larger town, the fewer will be the number of people living there who were born there.

Another thing which changes the character of a village is tourism. If a lot of holidaymakers come to a village because it is very beautiful, then it will turn into two villages, a summer one and a winter one. In the summer the private houses turn into small, Bed and Breakfast hotels, the shops sell picture postcards and icecream and cheap presents. In the winter the village becomes quiet again, and the local people try to live off the money they made from the tourists the summer before.

It is important to know what a British person means when he says the word, village. I spent the summer of 1988 in a place called Watchet. Watchet has a population of three thousand. The tourists called it a village, but the local people call it a town. When I was a child I lived in a town called Bridport. Bridport then had a population of six thousand. Once, my parents lived in a place called Thaxted, in the county of Essex, thirty miles from London and twenty from Cambridge. Thaxted was called a big village. It has a population of two thousand people. Most villages have populations of a few hundred people.

Villages may have small populations, but there are a great many of them. The bigger ones have five or ten shops, a church or two, and at least one pub. One of the shops will also be a post office, but the other part of the shop could be a green-grocer’s, a sweet shop or a gift shop. In the village of Williton the post office is in a saddlery (a place where you can buy saddles, the thing you sit on a horse), and in the very small village of Bicknoller, where there are no shops at all, the post office is in the pub.

Many villages do not have shops, but nearly all of them have a pub and a church, often very close to each other. At Broadhembury in Devon The Drewe Arms is right next to the entrance to the churchyard. The story goes that all the buildings in the village except the pub and the church belonged to the Lord of the Manor, so the pub was built next to the church because it was safer that way. It is a fact that the Drewe family still owns much of the village.

The disappearance of shops from villages is quite a recent thing; in fact, it is still happening. The villages are not getting smaller; if anything, they are getting bigger. But nearly everyone has a car these days, and most people have a deep freezer. Everything is cheaper in the towns, and most people live in the villages but work in the towns. Once a week they do “a big shop”, and put all their food, even bread and milk, in the deep freezer. What they do not buy they grow in their garden, and half of that goes in the deep freezer, too. So the village shopkeeper finds it more and more difficult to earn enough money to keep his shop open.

Pubs are different. Quite a lot of the money you give the landlord for your drinks and cigarettes is tax. You pay tax for drinking, he pays tax for selling, and the brewers of beer and distillers of spirits pay tax for making alcoholic drinks. But a great number of English people still prefer to drink in a pub than in their homes. Until not very long ago, it was perfectly normal for the average Englishman to keep no alcohol at all in his home. So the village pub is not in such danger as the village shop. If the pub is a good one. If it is old, pretty, friendly and has good beer, then not only will it not be in danger of closing, but it will be very successful, for an Englishman will happily sit in his car and drive to a pub quite a few miles away. (British “drink and drive” laws allow you to drink about one pint of beer.)

Every village has a church, and the church building is nearly always the oldest building in the village. This is partly because the churches are better quality buildings, and partly because if a church for some reason did fall or burn down, the new one was built in the same place. Not all of a twelfth century church is twelfth century. You can guess how big a village was when the church was built by looking at the size of the church. Each church had to be big enough to hold all the people of the village, because everyone had to go to church. If a village was so small that it did not have a church, then the people living there (perhaps forty or fifty people) had to walk or ride to the nearest church. These small villages without churches are called hamlets, or “little homes”.

It is very expensive to keep Britain’s thousands of beautiful village churches in good condition. Nowadays, less people go to church regularly. I remember when I was a boy and sang in the village church choir at Bothenhampton, West Dorset. There were Sundays when there were more people in the choir than there were in the congregation. When the church was built, everyone in the village went to it. But now that nearly everyone has a car, they can choose to go to one of the churches in the nearest town, only a couple of miles away. They might choose to do this because the choir is better, or because they are Baptists, or Catholics, or Methodists, or Quakers, or even because they don’t like the vicar of the church. A few years ago many of the people living in the Essex village of Thaxted went to the next village down the road every Sunday morning, because the new vicar was quite young and introduced new ideas which they did not like. As a result, the little church of Great Sampford was quite full, while the much bigger one in Thaxted was half empty.

The church at Oare, a little village in the heart of Exmoor, may have to close its doors to the villagers if they cannot find enough money to repair it. Only a few families live in the village, but thousands of tourists visit it every summer. In 1869, R.D. Blackmore, a local romantic novelist, published his novel, Lorna Doone, and Oare Church is the scene of the wedding of the hero and heroine of the novel, where Lorna is shot during the wedding ceremony by the villain of the novel, Carver Doone. So the tourists come in their thousands, but they do not have to pay a penny to go into the church. (Until a few years ago every church was always open and always free to enter. Recently, some cathedrals have started having an entrance fee (Salisbury, Westminster Abbey), and all churches have an “honesty box”, where visitors can put as much money as they wish.)

If some village churches are just big enough to hold the number of people living in the village, others are so big that you might think you were inside a small cathedral. Some of the biggest village churches are in East Anglia, the part of England above the eastern part of Greater London, including north Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. These very big churches are called the Wool Churches, because they were built with the money of very rich sheep farmers. They are not only big, but very tall, with pointed spires high above the rest of the village that you can see from miles away.

Practically all the churches of Great Britain that are standing today are made of some kind of stone, because the people that built them wanted them to last for a long time. But the rest of the houses in a village show what basic materials the villagers could find in the area to build their homes with. In many parts of England you can see houses with a framework of wood, with plaster in between, painted white or sometimes pink. Behind this plaster is the original “wattle and daub”. Wattle and daub is a very old building material. After the wooden framework was put up, the spaces in between were filled with branches. Then, a mixture of thick, muddy earth was thrown at the branches until the framework was completely filled in. This was left to dry, and the result was a house with very strong, thick walls. Some wattle and daub cottages in England are more than four hundred years old. You can see a great many of them in Essex and Sussex. In the middle of these villages there is often a large duck pond. This is not because the villagers loved ducks, but because the earth for the daub left a big hole, which filled up with water when it rained. Houses which were too far away from the middle of the village have their own duck ponds in front of them.

The roofs of the houses in the villages of Dorset and Devon are thatched; in North Wales, where there is slate in the mountains, they have slate roofs. The Cotswold villages, west of Oxford, have houses built of Cotswold Stone, which has a warm atmosphere you can find nowhere else in the world, while in Portland, an island or peninsula off or on the county of Dorset, (it depends on whether the tide is out or in!) the village houses are built of the same Portland Stone as some of the greatest buildings in London. In the Scottish Highlands, the crofter’s cottage was built of bricks of peat, a very thick, rich earth that you can find in that part of the country. Crofters were poor Scottish farmers who rented their land and homes from the Laird, the Scottish name for “lord” – although often the Laird was not much richer than they were and sometimes even a member of their “family”. (The word “family” in Scotland is “clan”, and a clan includes all sorts of distant cousins!)

You can see that if you know a little about British geology and architecture, you can guess where a village is, just by looking at a photograph of it. But there are other ways, too. In the next chapters we shall be looking at some of the customs of village people from different parts of the British Isles that are still alive and celebrated, and at some folk tales from the different parts of the country.

VILLAGE FOLK CUSTOMS

BREAD AND CHEESE GIVING

St. Briavels, Glucestershire

On Whit Sunday, the seventh Sunday after Easter, the people of St. Briavels go out of the church after the evening service, and walk along the lane outside the church. There, they get bread and cheese, but they have to be quick, for the food is thrown down from the high stone wall that runs along the side of the lane. There is a lot of pushing and laughing as everyone tries to get hold of a loaf of bread or a piece of cheese.

It is not certain why, but this custom is supposed to be a necessary part of keeping the privilege of cutting down wood in the Wood of Hodenhales for the villagers’ fires, and of letting the villagers keep their animals on the common land. Common land is the land near a village which all the villagers can use without paying any money. Many English villages still have a common, though today it is more often used as a children’s playground and for playing cricket on.

BURNING THE OLD YEAR OUT

Biggar, Lanarkshire

Three or four weeks before New Year’s Eve, the people of Biggar start building a bonfire in a field near the village. They take wood and anything else that will burn, and they fill the fire with fireworks. By December 31st, the bonfire is very big indeed. At about halfpast nine that evening, a man whom the villagers have chosen goes to the bonfire and lights it. The night fills with the sounds of the crackle of burning wood, of fireworks, and of a village of people all enjoying themselves. Then, at midnight, silence falls. The villagers all hold hands and sing the traditional New Year’s Eve midnight song, Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne, and the village church bells start ringing. After this, all the young people of the village go about playing tricks. The favourite one is to remove gates from their gate-posts and to hide them where no-one can find them. Last of all, the men and boys of the village go first-footing until the early hours of the morning.

FIRST-FOOTING

First-footing is a very old tradition, and it is still a very important part of the New Year celebrations in the north of England and in Scotland. The first-footers are the men who first step into a house in the New Year. In most places it is very bad luck if the first person to enter your home in the new year is a woman. The first-footers bring bread and a piece of coal, sometimes money, and in Scotland whisky. The first-footers give these gifts to wish you a successful new year. Then the people of the house offer the first-footers food and alcoholic drinks.

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE

slate pala

thatch zsúp

saddlery szíj- és nyergesárubolt

saddle nyereg

brewer sörfőző

distiller pálinkafőző

hamlet falucska

congregation gyülekezet

vicar anglikán lelkész

villain gonosztevő

pointed spire csúcsos templomtorony

wattle and daub sövényfal

crofter kisbirtokos

peat tőzeg

VILLAGE FOLK CUSTOMS

Whit Sunday Pünkösd vasárnap