Arlingham, Gloucestershire

Round-up

I belong to a local Facebook group here in our corner of the Cotswolds. People post news, coming events, and other items of interest. If someone spots escaped livestock (sheep usually, occasionally cattle) on a nearby road, they put up a post with details of the location and before long another member who knows which farmer is responsible lets them know. Back in the Middle Ages, before the enclosure of land into small fenced fields, stray livestock was much more of a problem. Animals grazing on open common land wandered off regularly. The answer to this problem was the village pound.

If someone’s animals strayed on to your bit of one of the big open fields and you didn’t know whose they were, you could drive them to the pound, a walled enclosure in the middle of the village. When the owner found out what had happened, the creatures could be retrieved. Most village pounds fell out of use after enclosure of the land into the self-contained fenced or walled fields we know today, when stray livestock became much less of a problem. But a few pounds survive. The one at Arlingham is a rectangular enclosure bounded by walls of a mixture of stones – red sandstone and green pennant stone brought across the River Severn from the Forest of Dean, together with local lias. In c. 1870 when the pound was repaired, a fourth type of stone was used – recycled Cotswold stone from a demolished house, Arlingham Court, which once stood nearby. Amongst the reused stone was part of a window surround, which can still be seen among the masonry on the inside of the front wall (see photograph below).

To pay for the upkeep of the pound and presumably to provide feed for the animals if they spent long there, a charge was levied for each animal impounded. A modern notice lists the charges in force in the 1780s: 1 penny for a horse, 2 pence for a cow, 3 pence for ‘a score [20] of sheep’ and 4 pence for a sow. Quite enough, one would imagine, for an owner to look after their animals (and, after enclosure, their fences), to ensure that they would rarely have to pay up before driving a stubborn cow or pig back home.

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* Arlingham was enclosed in 1802, but the pound was clearly useful enough post-enclosure for these repairs to take place.

Newbury, Berkshire

Hub

"Corn exchange": a phrase that I remember puzzling me as a child. What did they do in there, swap wheat  for barley? Exchange bad jokes and puns? At some point, someone put me right, and much later I came across Adrian Bell's book Corduroy, his account of leaving the literary and artistic world of London and learning to farm in Suffolk in the 1920s, with its description of farmers and merchants bargaining in the local corn exchange. A market for farmers, then (not a farmers' market), and the hub of many an English country town. 

And in many of these towns, the corn exchange is still an imposing building in the centre or on the market place. This one is in the middle of Newbury and is built in Italianate style, with tall arched windows and big classical pilasters. The design was by J S Dodd and the building was put up in 1861–2; it has no doubt been impressing everyone from passers-by to rookie farmers ever since. The details are quite interesting – the name of the building in thin but pleasant lettering (in what lettering experts call, with no disrespect to the form, grotesque capitals) and a roundel with a relief of a castle, its three stylized towers a version of the castle on the Newbury coat of arms.

Now that farmers no longer need to gather together to haggle and sell their crops, corn exchanges need to find new uses to survive. Many have become the venues for other kinds of markets. This one is an arts centre. I'm not sure what Adrian Bell would have thought about this. Perhaps the Londoner, turned farmer, turned writer would have smiled wryly.

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If the name of Adrian Bell sounds familiar, it may be because of his charming books about farming and the English countryside. Corduroy is a good place to start: a gentle, beautifully observed story of the author's induction into farming life and of how he learns his profound respect for the hard work and deep knowledge of the farmer whose eye for a pig, he discovers, is "as subtle as an artist's". Its sequels are Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. The name may also be familiar because at least two of Bell's children have made a useful mark in the world – they are the politician and journalist Martin Bell and the translator Anthea Bell (whose English versions of the Asterix books have amused generations and whose more literary translations, of books such as W G Sebald's transcendent Austerlitz, are superb).