Darkness and Discomfort in Great Rollright
Living conditions of a 19th-century shepherd
If you’ve ever moved from the city to the countryside, you’ll have been struck by the enclosing, blackness of night. Suddenly, you can’t find your car outside your house without the aid of a torch! In the short days of winter, the darkness is all-abiding. This January when below zero temperatures have alternated with strong winds and storms, shepherd Richard Widdows’ living conditions have been on my mind. What must it have been like to live in an agricultural labourer’s stone cottage in midwinter in the 1800s with no consistent source of light, heating, sanitation or running water?
Darkness and light
In the 19th century, daylight governed the patterns of life. Work routines responded to seasonal variations in light, as described by GE Mingay in Rural Life in Victorian England (1976): ‘Labourers’ usual hours were from six to six in summer, with an hour for meals, and from seven to dusk in winter.’ Working hours were extended during harvest time until late into the evening. Shepherds, though, also had to work long days and often at night during lambing, which would have started in the cold dinginess of February, extending into the spring. In early summer, sheep shearing would begin.
After dusk, candlelight and the flames from the hearth would have provided the only sources of interior light. In Farmhouses and Cottages of Great Rollright (2022), Carol Dingle describes the now demolished Potter’s Coomb, a terrace of two small cottages, where Widdows’ lived in the latter three decades of his life. Adjoining the lychgate of St Andrew’s church, each dwelling had ‘a single ground-floor room with an open fireplace for cooking’ and ‘two bedrooms open to the rafters lacking fireplaces’. With no heating in the upstairs rooms and no insulation, the sleeping quarters would have provided little more warmth or shelter than a barn. Any activity in the evening would have taken place downstairs at the fireside.
Candles were a weekly expense along with food, rent and fuel. ‘Tallow candles made from animal fat in moulds were the cheapest but they burnt with a smoky flame which produced progressively less and less light - and they stank.’ By Widdows’ old age at the end of the century, tallow, spermaceti and beeswax candles were replaced by paraffin wax candles that were cheaper, odourless and more reliable.
As Mingay explains: ‘The farmers frequently supplied some form of fuel [to their workers], though it might be peat, furze or gorse.’ The amount of wood on a property formed a part of the valuation reports undertaken by Brasenose College of their lesees’ estates. In a report undertaken in March 1869 by Frank Field on behalf of the college of the holding of William Fletcher – Widdows’ employer – it was commented: ‘There is not much timber on the estate, but a portion of what there is, is come to its best long since, is now deteriorating and should be cut down.’ The spinney that had previously been listed on the lease as part of ‘the demise’ had been claimed and cut down by Richard Berry, a prosperous farmer with adjoining land. This suggests that there was a shortage of wood in the village and it had become a point of contention between farmers. A dispute that William Fletcher, Widdows’ employer, was not winning! In such a context, Fletcher must have struggled to provide Widdows and the other labourers on his farm with free firewood as fuel.
Discomfort
Lack of fuel not only affected the ability to heat and light a dwelling, but also to cook hot food. As described by Mingay, agricultural workers’ diets were monotonous and heavily reliant on bread in the first half of the 19th century: ‘bread and cheese, bread and milk, bread and bacon, bread and dripping.’ Many agricultural labourers and farmers kept a pig in a pigsty at the rear of their homes, a luxurious supplement to their diet. Home-grown vegetables were also an important source of sustenance. In The Manors and Advowson of Great Rollright (1927), historian Reginald W Jeffery comments that ‘By 1813, both potatoes and cabbages began to appear [in Great Rollright] but not at any great scale.’ In local newspaper coverage, featuring Widdows as a centenarian after the turn of the century, his ability to grow his own vegetables in old age, particularly potatoes, is often referred to. Potatoes must have represented an important source of nourishment in his dotage, having subsisted for many years on a bread heavy diet.
The cottages at Potter’s Coomb would have probably shared an outside privy. This was an unlined cesspool in the ground with a wooden hut built over it. Water, as described by Carol Dingle, had to be collected by the cottages’ inhabitants into the 1930s. There was water in a well in an adjacent field, but it was only suitable for washing. Drinking water had to be collected from Tyte Tap, a natural spring in the village, further away on Tyte End.
Before moving into the centre of Great Rollright in the last few decades of his life, Widdows and his family lived for about forty years a mile north of the village in a valley or coombe on a ‘small field homestead’, Coombe Cottage. (The cottage was demolished in 2015 to make way for a substantial new stone house in a historic style.) The cottage is referred to in Brasenose College’s valuation report of 1869 when Widdows was still living there: ‘The house is in a very poor state and seems to be going to decay from old age.’ Again, in July 1872 in a letter written from Field & Castle in Oxford to the college, reporting on Fletcher’s leased property and land, the condition of the dwelling is commented upon: ‘the roof of the cottage is got bad and requires to have got some new rafters and the slating.’ Repairs to the barn roof on the homestead seemed to have been a greater priority than the shepherd’s dwelling. The condition of Widdows’ accommodation did not seem to be pressing for the freeholder or the tenant farmer William Fletcher.
It is apparent from these accounts of Cottage Coombe that with its dilapidated roof, it could not have been watertight. Located at the bottom of a valley, the cottage would not only have been extremely cold in winter, but also very damp after prolonged periods of rain. The walls and earth floors would have been awash with water.
Between the mid-1830s and 1870s, Richard Widdows must have shared this cramped and ramshackle cottage with at least a wife and three or four children at anyone time. He was the father of eleven children by two wives: his first wife Eliza Penn died in 1849 and he married his second wife Jane Wiggins in 1854. Children of agricultural workers tended to move on much earlier than today, leaving home in their teens to take up farm work, go into service or get married. The deaths of Eliza in her mid 30s and their son Joseph at 14 or 15 in 1861 begs the question as to whether the harsh and insanitary conditions in this isolated, tumbledown cottage could have contributed to their ill health.
The draw of gaslight
In his history of the village, Jeffery attributes the decline in Great Rollright’s population to the attractions of urban life. The number of inhabitants decreased by over 30% in the second half of the 19th century: from 459 in 1841 to 318 in 1901. Jeffery ascribes: ‘the general rural exodus to the “fascination of the gas lamp,” and it is most probable that when the railway came, this “fascination” came with it.’ The instalment of the railway station at Rollright Halt in 1887, half a mile from the village, certainly made emigration much easier. For agricultural workers, the appeal of the bright lights of the city must have been both metaphorical and literal. Metropolitan life held the promise of not only escaping poorly paid, arduous labour in the fields, but also gloomy living conditions in dark dwellings.
With thanks to the archivists at Brasenose College for providing access to the college’s rent books and to Carol Dingle for her support.