The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 3 Mary’s Materials

This is the third of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on. 

 In the last post I explored some of the environmental and social problems caused by the production of Hugo’s jumper and focused on the manufacture of cotton, nylon and wool from large-scale farms. It was a rather gloomy, but necessary, post. This time though we are going to explore the materials that Mary used and few she could have – its much more positive and forward looking article…

Mary’s jumper is made from local undyed organic wool, it has travelled from a field in the village (via the sheerer who worked at the farm) and has been washed in nothing more than soap and water. 

I am aware that this sounds a little idealistic and pastoral. How convenient that Mary lives next to an organic farm that happens to keep sheep that produce wool suitable for spinning and knitting into a jumper. And yet, is it really so impossible to imagine, at least for those living in rural areas? At the moment in Britain most sheep are breed entirely for meat, with wool being a secondary low value product, but this wasn’t always the case and several traditional breeds were dual purpose, for meat and fleece and even possibly dairy too.

The British wool trade has improved since 2008 when farmers were setting fire to their fleeces, because the low prices meant it wasn’t worth handling and transporting them for sale. Prices for this year are four-fold what they were then, but the quality of the wool is deemed by buyers to be only suitable for carpet making and that’s where 75% of British wool ends up.

And yet what I am suggesting isn’t simply pie in the sky; of course there is a historical precedent, but actually today you can buy organic, British yarns made from the most beautiful British wool and you can even get them dyed with organic dyes into range of colours. Likewise we have access to a number of animal fibres, such alpaca and angora, all produced in natural and humane conditions here in the UK, and this will be true in many countries throughout the world; there are local, sustainable alternatives to mass-produced wool. But these things cannot exist in a vacuum; no one will raise a flock of the finest wool-producing sheep using natural farming methods, if everyone is getting their wool from cheap intensive operations abroad. 

That said, it is important to accept that it is possible to have very poor welfare conditions on a local farm as it is on one far away. However, by buying as local as possible you have a greater chance of being able to assess the welfare conditions of the animals you are buying the wool from, either through direct personal contact, media or animal welfare charity reports or by looking for certifications (e.g. organic). The other important point is that in most countries there are also democratic and political routes to improving and monitoring welfare and so you can have a say in the conditions which form farm practice and law, if you purchase from the country in which you reside and have voting rights.

A slight side track, but if Mary couldn’t afford natural, local wool or was unable to get it, she could have used recycled wool. Almost any jumper or other knitted item can be unpicked fairly easily and the wool rewound to provide a good knitting or weaving yarn. If you get a larger jumper size than you are, even with the inevitable waste, you should have enough for a new one.

Of course it isn’t only wool that we are able to produce in Britain, there are a range of fibre producing plants that grow in our conditions. Flax (linen) is perhaps the most obvious and again this is a traditional material that was grown, spun and woven across Britain, often on a very small scale, requiring none or very little of of the pesticides and excessive water that cotton does. This is entirely possible again and there are small organisations and companies that are providing training and access to the tools to help revitalise the production and use of linen.

Even more than flax, hemp is being rediscovered as a commercial crop. In the C16^th it was considered so vital to the British economy that Henry VIII passed a law stating that farmers had to grow a quarter acre for every 60 acres of arable land they owned. In China they have never stopped growing it and have a 6000-year history of production. Part of the problem has been the confusion between the innocuous hemp plant and the related cannabis plant – a confusion that still exists in Britain today where you need a licence from the Government to grow it. 

Hemp has deep taproots that penetrate down into the subsoil, drawing up nutrients and moisture. That means it requires none of the intensive watering of cotton and, when it is harvested, the roots rot down, increasing the humus and nutrient levels in the topsoil. Because it grows so fast it out performs weeds and therefore requires little or no herbicide. The outer shell, which is removed during the process of fibre extraction, can be used to make logs for wood burners – the ash of which provides a valuable plant food for the garden.

 Again this isn’t some fanciful dream, you can buy today hemp yarn, material and products. Even if, at the moment, this isn’t grown in the UK (although often it is EU produced) this is a huge improvement over cotton, the production of which causes so many problems.

Finally there is one plant that grows like a weed (because it is) and yet can also be used to make fibre; nettles. A few years ago there was quite a bit of discussion about the possible use of nettle fibre and De Montfort University had worked on some government funded research, as well as producing some example pieces of clothing. Since then the hype seems to have quietened down a bit and the only real world product as far as I can tell is a 75% wool and 25% nettle fabric produced by Camira in England. Nettle has less fibre content than say hemp or linen, but it is a very fine fibre and could potentially make a good yarn. There is also the added benefit that it is able to provide multiple products from one harvest, such as sugar, animal bedding and leaves for human consumption and, as everyone who has ever had a garden or allotment knows, it grows quite well in this country, with no pesticide, herbicide or fertiliser required. There is a fair bit of historical use to draw on (even as recent as the second world war) and surely this plant deserves more research and experimentation.  

There is no point in pretending that swapping to locally produced, sustainable materials is going to be as easy as it should be, but it is possible – not just in the future – but in the here and now. Mary could indeed knit herself a jumper from organic wool, even if she chose not to spin it and instead bought in the yarn. Likewise, many of the alternatives, such as flax, hemp and nettle provide fantastic opportunities for experimentation and discovery, even in a home or small group environment – the results of which could genuinely be new and should be shared with others. So why not go on a course to learn how to grow and spin flax? You know that patch at the bottom of the allotment that you never get around to weeding, well why not try growing some there? Perhaps get some hemp fibre and have a go at spinning it on a drop spindle or do up a chair with the 25% nettle fabric? Or simply buy in some organic wool and crochet a hat. You may not be able to make enough to clothe the whole family, but the possibilities are enormous and the discovery is half the fun, and every success you do have could make a huge difference to someone you’ll never meet.

The Foolishness of Craft

Craftwork makes no practical or economic sense. Whatever it is that a craftsperson is making could be made quicker by the use of machines, modern materials and (in a western context) cheaper by using labour from abroad. Therefore we should not be surprised that the modern view of craft is that it is a romantic attempt to return to a 19^th century world we have long left behind and which few of us would actually like to return to.

Let’s take an example and imagine it is September here in England; the short nights and slight chill let us know that winter is on its way. Two people decide that they are going to need a new jumper to see them through the winter and keep them warm. The first, let’s call him Hugo, works in mobile telephone sales and earns £15 per hour. He has seen a nice high fashion jumper from a shop called High Street Fashion Co, with the logo staring large on the front breast. The jumper will cost him £80 and so it will take just over 5 hours work to be able to afford it.

Mary on the other hand is an experienced hand spinner and knitter, able to knit herself a jumper. It will take her 12 hours to spin the wool and around 15 hours to knit the jumper. It is a simple woollen jumper, similar to Hugo’s, but with no logo.

On the face of it is it any wonder we reject craft and embrace the modern consumer dream? Both of them get a jumper, but one has to work for 5 hours, whilst the other has to work for 27 hours. Hugo could earn enough to buy 5 jumpers in the time that Mary has made just one. Surely we should get down on our knees every day and thank our lucky stars that modernity has dragged us out of the dark ages and such drudgery?

But if we dig a little deeper for a moment and examine each stage of making Hugo and Mary’s jumpers the picture is much less simplistic.

Mary’s jumper is made from local undyed organic wool, it has travelled from a field in the village (via the sheerer who worked at the farm) and has been washed in nothing more than soap and water.

The materials that Hugo’s jumper is made of are a little more complex and the main material is cotton (60%), which was grown in Kazakhstan, where the water needed for cotton production has caused the Aral Sea to shrink to 15% of its original size. This means that the local farmer no longer has any water to irrigate his food crops. The cotton wasn’t grown organically and so was sprayed with Aldicarb a pesticide so powerful that one drop absorbed into the skin can kill an adult. Nonetheless this it was applied by a man using the most basic of equipment and safety protection, because of the low price being paid for the cotton; sadly he eventually fell ill from the exposure to it and could no longer work, leaving his family in poverty. Despite government efforts some of the cotton was picked by children, paid pitifully low rates of pay.

30% of the jumper is Nylon, which is a petrochemical substance that creates nitrous oxide in its production, a greenhouse gas around 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It was produced in China.

Finally, like Mary’s, the jumper was also made of wool (10%), but this was produced in Australia from sheep kept in huge herds, with minimum welfare standards. At the same time as the wool was removed the shearer performed ‘mulesing’ on the sheep, which is where the part of the rear of the animal is removed with sheers and without anaesthetic, to prevent flystrike (which could be prevented if better welfare conditions prevailed). The wool was then washed using harsh chemicals which had to be disposed of.

All these materials were then transported from around the world to Bangladesh for spinning together, dying and turning into Hugo’s jumper. The factory does not remove the dye from the vast amounts of water it takes to colour the yarn, so the river they pour their waste into turns the colour of whatever they are dyeing that day. Not so obvious is the heavy metals that are also in the mix, that pollute the watercourse.

So now both Hugo and Mary have got their materials for their jumper and it’s time to start work on making it. Mary, as we know, is an experienced knitter and freed up from the beginners’ desire to ‘see what it looks like when it’s finished’, she relaxes and actually enjoys the process itself. The spinning is done on a treadle powered spinning wheel that is portable and fits in its own rucksack, so that she can take it almost anywhere she wishes. Likewise of course her knitting, which simply folds up and tucks into her bag. She spends some of the time she is spinning and knitting listening to the radio or watching TV, particularly in the evening; two or three times she takes it to her local knitting group and chats to others. But most of all Mary enjoys being in the quiet (perhaps in the garden) and just focusing on what she it doing. The repetitive action of knitting in particular has been shown to have meditative effects similar to meditation and leads to Mary having lower blood pressure and heart rates.

Although Mary has made numerous jumpers before, she is particularly pleased with the way it is turning out. The time and care that she invests in it turn into a form of love for both the process and the finished item.

Of course Hugo isn’t actually going to make his jumper; his is outsourcing that to a girl in Bangladesh that he’ll never meet. But he does need to work for it. It would be true to say that when he was a boy he didn’t dream of working in a mobile phone shop, but as his Dad had told him when he left school, this is the real world and you have to do what you can to make ends meet, getting your head down to some serious work. So that’s what he had done. For the first few months it was actually quite fun, the thrill of the each sale gave him a buzz that lasted (usually) until the next. But slowly this had faded off of a bit, plus two more mobile phone shops had opened in the town, meaning that sales had dropped and heavy pressure was applied to his boss, which in turn came down on him. Every missed sale had to be explained and justified. His main strategy was to ask what phone they had currently and then, no matter how old or new it was, to gently mock it and its age and recommend that they are missing out on the latest features and to gently suggest how impressed others would be if they had x, y or z phone. To be honest each day now had become rather a combination of boredom and stress.

High Street Fashion Co would rather we didn’t know too much about who or how Hugo’s jumper was actually made and will not reveal details of the working conditions in any of the factories they use or the steps they take to ensure that their standards of factory conditions are maintained, stating that these are company secrets. However, from undercover reports and statements from those who have worked previously in these factories we can build up a clear picture.

It will come as no surprise to learn that it was a young woman who made the jumper. But how young? Well, despite companies promising for years to stamp child labour, there are enough regular reports of it happening to assume that the average wardrobe contains a number of garments made by them. Invariably when it gets uncovered producers react shocked and promise to, yet again, stamp it out. The problem is child labour is cheap and people like High Street Fashion Co want cheap clothing.

In actual fact, although young, the woman who made Hugo’s jumper wasn’t a child, and indeed has a young family of her own. She is paid for 8 hours work a day, but must make a certain number of jumpers in that 8 hours before she will get paid. Almost always she has to work an extra hour or two, unpaid, to make the target. Because of the low wages she will then have to start work doing paid overtime, to help pay the families bills. This means that everyday she will start work at 8am and will not leave until between 8pm and 10pm, before walking home for just under an hour and starting her domestic chores. On ten occasions in the last month she had been informed by her boss that she would have to do a night shift that evening, working until anytime between midnight and 3am. No food or drink will be provided and because of the risks of walking home at that time she instead chose to sleep at the factory. Her wage is £32 a month, whilst it costs £74 a month to run a basic household.

No jumper made at 2 in the morning, when you haven’t eaten for hours, your boss is shouting at you because you are going slower and all you can think about are your children at home, is made with love. It’s just another bloody jumper between you and being able to sleep on the factory floor.

When it is made the jumper is packed with up a thousand identical ones and shipped from Bangladesh to England. From there it is taken almost past Hugo’s house on its journey to a central distribution hub in the North of England, sorted into a delivery for Hugo’s local High Street Fashion Co store and then driven back down the country to a smart looking store that could easily be confused for a nightclub entrance.

Hugo had had a pretty rough day at work; you never sell many mobiles on a damp Tuesday afternoon in September and so he’d sat bored at the counter looking out through the window. He wasn’t allowed to read, in case it put off customers and he had played all the games on all the phones. Time passed so slowly. His boss was grumpy and had shut himself away in the office after a phone call from the area manager. There was only one thing Hugo could think of and that was that tonight he was going to get that new jumper from High Street Fashion Co and frankly that would make everything all right. Actually better than alright.

Mary sat in her garden and put down her needle, she had just finished sewing together the panels of the jumper. It needed now to be pressed, but it was complete. She held it up and assessed it. It wasn’t 100% perfect, to her experienced eye she could see one or two stitches that were a touch looser than others, but no-one else would notice. Yes, she was pleased with it; content.

The winter came and both jumpers kept their owners warm over the colder nights. Then one day in early spring a strange thing happened to both jumpers, on the same day. Hugo was running a little late for work and rushed through the store in the hope that his boss would not notice. He caught his jumper on a sharp edge of a display rack and pulled one of the threads of his jumper. He cursed, but actually forgot about it for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until later that evening as he was undressing that he remembered it. He looked at the jumper; it hadn’t washed well as the colour had faded in the first few washes and because it was cotton it had also misshapen quite a bit. Oh, well he thought, I have wanted to get that new one anyway, it only cost £80 and I got a winters use from it. He threw the jumper into the bin and it joined the 900,000 tonnes of clothing waste that gets thrown out every year in Britain. Its final resting place was in a landfill site; the cotton and wool disintegrated into the soil, but the nylon stayed just where it was for at least a 1,000 years.

On that same day Mary was walking through her garden when she too caught her jumper, this time on a rose bush. She too cursed, but wasn’t about to forget damaging a jumper she had spent so long working on. She went inside and repaired it using some of the same yarn she had knitted it from. The repair was invisible and as strong as the original knitting. Despite regular use Mary’s jumper lasted for almost 10 years, before finally one day she decided that it had really seen better days. She placed it on her compost heap where it rotted down into an excellent soil conditioner, which she eventually spread on her rhubarb.

Viewed in this way craft becomes a modest, but achievable and practical response to a whole host of global issues and problems. It allows us to provide for our needs without doing so at the expense of others on the planet. The act of making becomes a gift not only to our own creativity and emotional wellbeing, but also a gift of love towards the rest of humanity. I care for you, even though I have never met you, so I am not going to ask you to work in such conditions so that I can have a jumper to wear. I’ll make it myself.

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

Just discovered an enchanting book  called The Man Who Planted Trees or L'homme qui plantait des arbres by Jean Giono in my local book shop, written in the ashes of the second world war. It is well worth a read or even a watch, as in 1987 Frédéric Back turned it into a wonderful animation. I'll link to both below:.

Click here for a .pdf version of the book

Click here to go to youtube and watch the animated version.

There is even a world touring puppet show; more details by clicking here.

Not another abandoned blog...!

Click here to read Simon Fairlie's article

Please don’t think this yet another abandoned blog... it’s not. But life has been so busy of recent, that I don’t seem to have found the time to post up or indeed do anything of much note that is post worthy. However, life is getting back to normal a little and in the next few weeks I hope to post up some pages on making bookbinding equipment (a lying press and bone folders) as well as some more weaving and actual book binding.

For now I am working on an article that looks in more depth at one aspect of Simon Fairlie’s much quoted piece Can Britain Feed Itself? If you haven’t read it and sustainability and resilience in food production are of interest please do follow the link, it is an excellent read.

Download Thinking Allowed with
Grayson Perry & Richard Sennett
broadcast 6th Feb 2008

One other thing that comes with much recommendation is an edition of the Radio 4 programme, Thinking allowed with Richard Sennett & Greyson Perry, discussing craft and what it means to be a crafts person. The conversation is fascinating, liberating and sobering almost equal measure. There are too many points to bring out here, and anyway you might as well listen to the show and get it first hand, but the crucial point for me was the need to accept flux and incompleteness as essential elements within the creative process. Grayson (who is a most surprisingly erudite and thoughtful person) says that a tightness to be right can constipate and kill the creative process, but that in accepting that we will not always be right we have embrace difficulty and struggle.

Later he almost sums up the whole programme when says:

‘People are put off struggle, with a low boredom threshold; we’re addicted to adrenalin and drama. Everything is black and white with no middle ground and we have the attention span of a gnat. The idea of working at something for 10,000 hours for 8 or 10 years scares people, but it’s brilliant if you do.’

For me they get a little muddled when they talk about machines, berating Ruskin for being blind to their effectiveness and then going on to criticise computer designed buildings for their lack of material awareness and Victorian pottery for its lack of life. But this doesn’t not distract from the excellent show and has inspired me to read Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman. The radio show can be listened to by clicking play below or downloaded by using the link under the Thinking Allowed image.

So please bear with me dear reader, much more is to come for we have only just begun!

The Age of Healing by John Seymour

 "The Age of Plunder is nearly at an end.
The Age of Healing is ready to be born.

And whether it arrives or not depends upon two people: you and me.

The Age of Plunder was the natural successor to the so-called Age of Reason: the Age in which humankind decided that it knew better than God. For 200 years now the greedy and ruthless have been plundering the planet but their time will soon be up. The whole thing is going to come crashing down.

It could not have gone on much longer anyway - because soon there will be nothing left to plunder. The forests have almost gone from the Earth, the fish of the sea are all but exhausted, the air surrounding us and the waters of the Earth will soon be able to take no more poisonous wastes and, most serious of all, the soil is going. For we soil organisms this could be terminal. As long as the oil reserves last agribusiness will be able to produce the agrichemicals needed to keep some sort of production of vitiated food going from the eroded soil, but the oil deposits - that Pandora's Box of evil things - will soon be exhausted and then the final account, long deferred, will come up for payment. The bailiffs who present it will have strange names, like Famine, Pestilence and War.

But, thank God, maybe the old Earth will not have to wait for this to happen. The whole great edifice of international trade and finance - the whole mighty plunder-machine - is quite likely to burst like a balloon that has grown too big. The whole thing is becoming unsustainable: it has grown too huge to manage.

Owing to the incorrigible tendency towards cannibalism by the huge industrial corporations - the tendency of the bigger ones to swallow up the smaller ones - these molochs are becoming too large for humans to control or the planet to support. Ten years ago no economist would have predicted the complete collapse of the mighty Soviet machine that had engulfed half the Earth. International capitalism will follow.

It is in the nature of a limited company that it can have no responsibility either to the environment around it or to the people who work for it. It is no use blaming the directors - if they do anything that might reduce profits for the shareholders they will quickly be replaced. And the shareholders not only have no liability for debts incurred by the company - but they take no responsibility for the world of nature around them. If the directors can secure bigger profits by dumping poisons into the nearest river - they have to do this. If they do not, they will very quickly be replaced. If they can make more profit by halving the work force - they will have to do so or again they will be replaced. If both shareholders and directors suffer from that most uncapitalist thing - a conscience - to the extent that it interferes with profits - that company will be swallowed up by another giant that has no such inconvenient scruples.

One of the most dramatic effects of the Age of Plunder has been to drive most of the world's population into vast conurbations. These huge assemblies of uprooted people, called cities, are not only ugly but also dangerous. The billions who live in them can only be kept alive by an enormous system of transport which brings water, food, power, fuel and all the necessities of life, often great distances. Any breakdown in the supply of all this would be disastrous. And the great plundering molochs of companies which run it all get fewer and fewer, and bigger and bigger, and more and more people find themselves out of work, not needed, redundant and disempowered.

And meanwhile the tiny scattering of people left on the land, which is the only source of true wealth, have been forced by their paucity of numbers to resort to more and more destructive methods of producing the huge amount of food needed to sustain these billions. They have been forced to ignore the laws of husbandry, which could have retained the fertility of the soil as long as the world lasted, and farm instead with chemicals and huge machines. The soil is becoming poisoned and eroded. The only beneficiaries of this have been the huge chemical companies but they will destroy themselves in the end because they are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

If we open our eyes, we will realize that all this is bound to come crashing down in the end. Then, in the ashes of the Age of Plunder, a new age could arise. The real New Age: the Age of Healing!

We will set about it, just you and me, to heal the ravaged Earth. If we do not - if we fail - then there will not be an Age of Healing: there will be an Age of Chaos and it will not be nice.

And we do not have to wait for the end of the Age of Plunder to start the work. We must start now.

And how can we - just the two of us, you and me, who are so few and disempowered - start this great work by ourselves?

Firstly, say to yourself, and I promise I will do the same, the following resolution:
"I am only one. I can only do what one can do. But what one can do I will do!"
Then consider what you can do.
Refuse to work for the plunderers. Refuse to buy their shoddy goods. Give up the ambition of living like a Texan millionaire. Boycott the Lottery, not because you think you won't win it, but because you don't want to win it!

Refuse to shop in the plunderer's "supermarkets".

Work, always, for a decentralist economy. Support local traders and producers - try to get what you need from as near your home as you can.

Take part in your local politics - boycott the politics of the huge scale, the remote and far-away. The current non-violent defiance of the law by people protesting against the export of live animals from Britain is a fine example of citizen-power.

Work for an economy in which land and property are fairly shared out among the people so that "everybody has enough and nobody has too much".

We must withhold our work, our custom, and our investment from plundering industry. This may cause us "financial hardship" : then we must endure "financial hardship" .

Road transport is the most destructive thing of all. If you live in a city, you do not need a car. (When you go to the country you can hire one - it's much cheaper than owning.) If you live in the country, you may need one - use it as little as possible.

Boycott most goods brought from far away. Take some trouble to find locally produced goods and buy them. Heavy road transport is enormously polluting.

Oppose new road building. Building new roads never relieves traffic congestion - it simply generates more traffic. The only way of solving the traffic problem is to have less traffic.

If you possibly can, do not work for huge organizations. If we withhold our labour from them, they will wither away. (Do not be afraid that this will lose "jobs". It will create more jobs - a multitude of small firms create more "jobs" than a few big ones).

Support local cultural activities. Boycott mass "culture" coming from countries far away.

Encourage, support, and initiate, local credit and finance organizations.

Buy, if you cannot grow, organically produced food. Thus you will help destroy the polluting chemical industry - and you will be healthier. Boycott, absolutely consistently, all products that have involved cruelty to animals.

Support the local and the small-scale.

I will do the same as I ask you to do.

The tiny amount you and I can do is hardly likely to bring the huge worldwide moloch of plundering industry down? Well, if you and I don't do it, it will not be done, and the Age of Plunder will terminate in the Age of Chaos. We have to do it - just the two of us - just you and me. There is no "them" - there is nobody else. Just you and me. On our infirm shoulders we must take up this heavy burden now - the task of restoring the health, the wholeness, the beauty and the integrity of our planet. We must start the Age of Healing now! Tomorrow will be too late."

Extract from www.carninglipress.co.uk

Under an Elm Tree by William Morris

"Midsummer in the country — here you may walk between the fields and hedges that are as it were one huge nosegay for you, redolent of bean-flowers and clover and sweet hay and elder-blossom. The cottage gardens are bright with flowers, the cottages themselves mostly models of architecture in their way. Above them towers here and there the architecture proper of days bygone, when every craftsman was an artist and brought definite intelligence to bear upon his work. Man in the past, nature in the present, seem to be bent on pleasing you and making all things delightful to your senses; even the burning dusty road has a look of luxury as you lie on the strip of roadside green, and listen to the blackbirds singing, surely for your benefit, and, I was going to say as if they were paid to do it, but I was wrong, for as it is they seem to be doing their best.

And all, or let us say most things, are brilliantly alive. The shadowy bleak in the river down yonder, which is — ignorant of the fate that Barking Reach is preparing for its waters — sapphire blue under this ruffling wind and cloudless sky, and barred across here and there with the pearly white-flowered water-weeds, every yard of its banks a treasure of delicate design, meadowsweet and dewberry and comfrey and bed-straw — from the bleak in the river, amongst the labyrinth of grasses, to the starlings busy in the new shorn fields, or about the grey ridges of the hay, all is eager, and I think all is happy that is not anxious.

What is that thought that has come into one’s head as one turns round in the shadow of the roadside elm? A country-side worth fighting for if that were necessary, worth taking trouble to defend its peace. I raise my head, and betwixt the elm-boughs I see far off a grey buttressed down rising over the sea of green and blue-green meadows and fields, and dim on the flank of it over its buttresses can see a quaint figure made by cutting the short turf away from the chalk of the hill-side; a figure which represents a White Horse according to the heraldry of the period, eleven hundred years ago. Hard by that hill-side the country people of the day did verily fight for the peace and loveliness of this very country where I lie, and coming back from their victory scored the image of the White Horse as a token of their valour, and, who knows? perhaps as an example for their descendants to follow.

For a little time it makes the blood stir in me as I think of that, but as I watch the swallows flitting past me betwixt hedge and hedge, or mounting over the hedge in an easy sweep and hawking over the bean-field beyond, another thought comes over me. These live things I have been speaking of, bleak and swallows and starlings and blackbirds, are all after their kind beautiful and graceful, not one of them is lacking in its due grace and beauty; but yesterday as I was passing by a hay-field there was an old red-roan cart-horse looking seriously but good-humouredly at me from a gap in the hedge, and I stopped to make his acquaintance; and I am sorry to say that in spite of his obvious merits he was ugly, Roman-nosed, shambling, ungainly: yet how useful he had been — for others. Also the same day (but not in the same field) I saw some other animals, male and female, with whom also I made acquaintance, for the male ones at least were thirsty. And these animals, both male and female, were ungraceful, unbeautiful, as ungainly as the roan cart-horse; yet they were obviously useful, for they were making hay before my eyes. Then I bethought me that as I had seen starlings in Hertfordshire that were of the same race as the Thames side starlings, so I had seen or heard of featherless two-legged animals of the same race as the thirsty creatures in the hay-field; they had been sculptured in the frieze of the Parthenon, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, imagined in literature as the heroes and heroines of romance; nay, when people had created in their minds a god of the universe, creator of all that was, is, or shall be, they were driven to represent him as one of that same race to which the thirsty haymakers belonged; as though supreme intelligence and the greatest measure of gracefulness and beauty and majesty were at their highest in the race of those ungainly animals.

Under the elm-tree these things puzzle me, and again my thoughts return to the bold men of that very country-side, who, coming back from Ashdown field, scored that White Horse to look down for ever on the valley of the Thames; and I thought it likely that they had this much in common with the starlings and the bleak, that there was more equality amongst them than we are used to now, and that there would have been more models available amongst them for Woden than one would be like to find in the Thames-side meadows.

Under the elm-tree I don’t ask myself whether that is owing to the greater average intelligence of men at the present day, and to the progress of humanity made since the time of the only decent official that England ever had, Alfred the Great, to wit; for indeed the place and time are not favourable to such questions, which seem sheer nonsense amidst of all that waste of superabundant beauty and pleasure held out to men who cannot take it or use it, unless some chance rich idler may happen to stray that way. My thoughts turn back to the haymakers and their hopes, and I remember that yesterday morning I said to a bystander, ‘Mr So-and-so (the farmer) is late in sending his men into the hay-field’.

Quoth he, ‘You see, sir, Mr So-and-so is short-handed’.

‘How’s that?’ said I, pricking up my Socialist ears.

‘Well, sir,’ said he, ‘these men are the old men and women bred in the village, and pretty much past work; and the young men with more work in them, they do think that they ought to have more wages than them, and Mr So-and-so, he won’t pay it. So you see, he be short-handed.’

As I turned away, thinking over all the untold, untellable details of misery that lay within this shabby, sordid story, another one met my ears. A labourer of the village comes to a farmer and says to him that he really can’t work for 9s. a week any more, but must have 10s. Says the farmer, ‘Get your 10s. somewhere else then’. The man turns away to two month’s lack of employment, and then comes back begging for his 9s. slavery.

Commonplace stories of unsupported strikes, you will say. Indeed they are, if not they would be easily remedied; the casual tragedy cut short; the casual wrongdoer branded as a person out of humanity. But since they are so commonplace -

What will happen, say my gloomy thoughts to me under the elm tree, with all this country beauty so tragically incongruous in its richness with the country misery which cannot feel its existence? Well, if we must still be slaves and slaveholders, it will not last long; the Battle of Ashdown will be forgotten for the last commercial crisis; Alfred’s heraldry will yield to the lions of the half crown. The architecture of the crafts-gildsmen will tumble down, or be ‘restored’ for the benefit of the hunters of picturesque, who, hopeless themselves, are incapable of understanding the hopes of past days, or the expression of them. The beauty of the landscape will be exploited and artificialized for the sake of the villa-dweller’s purses where it is striking enough to touch their jaded appetites; but in quiet places like this it will vanish year by year (as indeed it is now doing) under the attacks of the most grovelling commercialism.

Yet think I to myself under the elm-tree, whatever England, once so beautiful, may become, it will be good enough for us if we set no hope before us but the continuance of a population of slaves and slave-holders for the country which we pretend to love, while we use it and our sham love for it as a stalking-horse for robbery of the poor at home and abroad. The worst outward ugliness and vulgarity will be good enough for such sneaks and cowards.

Let me turn the leaf and find a new picture, or my holiday is spoilt; and don’t let some of my Socialist friends with whom I have wrangled about the horrors of London, say, ‘This is all that can come of your country life’. For as the round of the seasons under our system of landlord farmer and labourer produces in the country pinching parsimony and dullness, so does the ‘excitement of intellectual life’ in the cities produce the slum under the capitalist system of turning out and selling market wares not for use but for waste. Turn the page I say. The hayfield is a pretty sight this month seen under the elm, as the work goes forward on the other side of the way opposite to the bean-field, till you look at the haymakers closely. Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety, need their useful labour for themselves and their neighbours cripple and disfigure them and knock them out of the shape of men fit to represent the Gods and Heroes? And if under such conditions a new Ashdown had to be fought (against capitalist robbers this time), the new White Horse would look down on the home of men as wise as the starlings in their equality, and so perhaps as happy."

First published by William Morris in Commonweal on the 6th July 1889 .

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