FEATURE - Re-writing the rules

For 15 years William Cobbett, the prolific writer and political reformer, made his home five miles from Southampton on a farm at Botley. When he bought Fairthorn, a large red, square house on the river between Botley and Curbridge, in 1805 he had already established himself as a prominent and highly controversial journalist. But it was the harshness of life in surrounding Hampshire parishes that broadened and hard-ened Cobbett's hatred of the land owning political establishment and led him to side firmly with the common man. Several themes to which he referred again and again in his writing - poverty-stricken labourers, ruthless landlords and tax-collecting clergymen - can be traced directly to his years at Botley. Many of the most vivid passages of Rural Rides, his best known journal of horseback travels through the southern counties, are also set in the Hampshire countryside which he loved more than anywhere. Cobbett, the son of a modest farmer, was born in 1763 at Farnham, Surrey where he worked in his father's fields and clipped the hedges and weeded the gardens of the Bishop of Winchester at Farnham Castle. He worked as a clerk in London and he joined the army, spending five years posted in the newly independent United States where he was out-raged by corruption among officers in his regiment. He left and resolved to expose them in a court martial but met with such hostility he fled to France then to America, where he wrote pamphlets under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine. Despite speaking up for the common soldier and briefly embracing the ideals of revolutionary France, he robustly defended Britain from attacks by democrats. On returning he wrote in support of the Tory government of Pitt the Younger, though declined an offer to edit a sympathetic newspaper and became progressively critical of the polit-ical mainstream. He spent five years as a journalist, first launching an unsuccessful newspaper then founding a powerfully written weekly journal The Political Register that remained his mouthpiece through-out his life. With his peasant roots Cobbett hated cities and always called London the Wen. After searching for some time he bought Fairthorn farm to escape the "accursed smoke" of the city, intending to lead a simple country life but was quickly drawn back into more radical politics. He was immediately active in village affairs. He promoted, for instance, a single stick competition whose object was "to break the opponent's head so that the blood may run an inch". Cobbett saw such manly sports as important in encouraging people to be strong and ready to defend their nation, and thought those divorced from the land became "effeminate". He wrote of his happy family life at Botley. He bought more land where he took great delight in planting trees, growing melons and liv ing out his rustic ideal. He and his wife Ann raised seven children and insisted on completing most of their education at home. An entirely self-taught man, Cobbett, mis-trusted formal education - he called universities "dens of dunces". However, rural Hampshire in the early 19th century was desperately poor. Years of war with France had left Britain in debt and forced up agricultural prices as trade was disrupted. Landowners began to raise farmers' rents and offer them insecure tenancies of only a year rather than traditional long tenancies on fixed rent. It accelerated the enclosure of open fields and common land, as politicians approved a flood of private Acts of Parliament to allow landowners to fence off land to grow profitable crops such as corn. Agricultural labourers lost access to strips of land which sustained a feudal system of subsis-tence farming and were forced to rely on wage labour, poor rates or migrate to new industrial towns. Cobbett was incensed by the process. He agitated against local enclosures, such as at Horton Heath, and wrote furiously that labourers lived miserably on potatoes while they grew food for rich city dwellers. He also fell out with the Botley parson, the Rev Richard Baker, who was reportedly an abrasive man and a harsh gatherer of tithes, the taxes levied to support the clergy. Cobbett called him The Magpie. The two kept up their quarrel throughout his 15 years in the village. The Botley parson crops up frequently in his writing and seems to symbolise his dislike of the established church. Cobbett was not a socialist; he did not argue for a new social order but wished to turn back the clock to before the rise of a new class made rich by the war who he blamed for the plight of the rural poor. Thus he was ambiguous about the decline of some aristocratic families, whose roots in Hampshire went back to the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror, as their manors were sold to men made wealthy by trade or industry. Leading radicals would visit Botley and Cobbett kept up his acerbic journalism even when he was jailed for two years, from 1810-12, for sedition after attacking the use of German mercenaries to crush a militia mutiny. On his release from Newgate prison Cobbett, by then a public figure, processed in triumph back to Hampshire with people lining the route and peals of church bells. He was given a public breakfast at Alton and dinner at Winchester. Villagers in Botley unharnessed his horses and pulled his carriage home though the parson locked the church so there was no peal of bells. Soon afterwards he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in Southampton, making a famous pledge never to accept a farthing of public money. Other Radical candidates later followed suit elsewhere. It was government curbs on the free press, banning seditious literature, which hastened the end of his life in Botley. To escape another jail sentence Cobbett fled to America from 1817-19, for which he was later accused of cowardice. After mounting an expensive election cam-paign in Coventry and launching a failed evening newspaper he filed for bankruptcy in 1820, sold the farm at Botley and settled in Kensington near London. With his publishing restricted, Cobbett fell back on making personal speeches to spread his ideas and early in his Rural Rides talks of giving "a rustic harangue" to the farmers at Winchester. In the first election after the Reform Act in 1832 he was finally returned as a Member of Parliament, not for a rural seat in his beloved South but for the northern industrial town of Oldham. He was re-elected in 1835 and died that same year, aged 71, at a farm he had rented near the place of his birth in Surrey. A countryman to the end, the final entry in his diary read: "Ploughing home field."

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