Hinton Waldrist 2: A Post-Enclosure English Village

Parliamentary Enclosure comes to Hinton Waldrist

One day in 1761, Phipps Weston, a cleric from Fifield, Avery Turrell, a gentleman of Stanford, Robert Hall, a gentleman of Buckland, Robert Jenner, a yeoman from Maysey Hampton and William Stephens, a gentleman from Kemscott, met together at Hinton Waldrist. They were the Commissioners appointed to implement the Parliamentary Act passed that year to enclose Hinton’s open arable fields, common pastures and meadows. Their work changed the lives of the villagers for ever and created the parish as it appears today.

The present ford at Duxford has only been there since the late 19th century - an example of how the parish of Hinton Waldrist has changed, despite it's timeless appearance

Enclosure was about dividing up the commonly-farmed fields and allocating specific portions of land to individuals. It aimed to give each land proprietor an equivalent acreage to their previous allocation  under the open-field system. A survey of the land showed that there was just over 1700 acres to be disposed of. By far the largest amount, 900 acres, went to the Lord of the Manor, the Reverend John Loder. He also received a further 400 acres or so in glebe lands, as he was also rector of the parish. The remaining land, just over 355 acres, was divided between 18 copyhold tenants, whose leases entitled them to hold land for their lifetime and often the lifetime of another generation of their family. The table below gives their names and the amount of land they received. Acreages ranged from 56 for Mary Curtis to just one for Henry Southby.

Commissioners were generally directed to allocate better land, and land nearer their homes, to smaller proprietors, on the reasonable grounds that larger proprietors had more wealth and resources and could bear the costs of poorer and more distant land. The enclosure map that would have been drawn up to show all the allocations has unfortunately been lost, but the diagram below, based on a reconstruction of the map by Jasmine Hawse, shows that the copyholders did indeed have land close to the village itself, or to the hamlet of Duxford, if that was where they lived. However, this meant that in most cases they were allocated one type of land (arable or pasture) and had to make their own decisions regarding whether to use that land for crops or animals, or both. And some villagers who did not lease land but who had enjoyed pasture rights on the commons lost those rights, pushing them further into poverty.

Approximate land allocations following the 1761 enclosure award. The smaller proprietors generally received land nearer to their dwellings in the village, or Duxford hamlet. The glebe lands were spread around the margins of the parish

In some parishes, parliamentary enclosure radically changed the appearance of the landscape, with new straight roads and hedges breaking up the former open vistas. This did not happen to such an extent in Hinton Waldrist. The commissioners ordered only a couple of short and narrow new roads, so the parish’s road layout today is much as it was prior to enclosure. In some parishes enclosure was done with the aim of converting large areas of arable land to pasture, creating a landscape of small, rectangular grass fields, often still retaining undulations of rig and furrow. This did not happen in Hinton, as the land was (and remains) prime arable land. Finally, while new hedges were ordered, particularly in the north of the parish, to demark the copyholders’ plots, much of the south of the parish, which was largely allocated to the Rev Loder, remained unhedged, to facilitate ploughing and reaping the corn.

We do not know how the villagers adapted to the new way of life, or whether enclosure achieved its stated aim of making farming in Hinton more efficient. But fast-forward one hundred years to 1861 and the pattern of land proprietorship in the village was very different. Copyhold tenancy had been phased out as copyholders died and that year’s census showed there were just five large farms in the whole parish, set out in the table below.

Farm	Farmer	Acreage	Labourers
			Men	Women	Boys
Manor Farm	Henry Peacock	618	26	8	9
Glebe Farm	William Gingell	380	18	5	4
Grange Farm	David Lloyd	380	11	4	5
Wales (Duxford) Farm	John Castle	400	18	-	2
Duxford Ferry Farm	William Rose	66	3	1	1

Manor farm was the ‘home farm’ of the lord of the manor, and as the name suggests, Glebe farm was the property of the Rector, at that time, the Rev William Jephson. The owner of Grange farm, David Lloyd, was a doctor and brother-in-law of the then Squire, John Loder-Symonds. The table also shows that a total of 215 men, women and boys were employed as labourers on Hinton’s farms, a high proportion of the parish’s total population of 329 souls. (Two other farms are named in the 1861 census and appear in the south of the parish on the 1876 1:2500 Ordnance Survey map: Welmore farm and the unpromisingly named Starveall farm. Both were subsumed within one or other of the five big farms and the farmhouses were occupied by labourers).

Manor farm, rebuilt in the 19th century, is an imposing building, as befits the 'home farm' of the lord of the manor

The 1861 census also shows that just one of the surnames of the copyhold farmers allocated land in 1761 appears in the parish one hundred years later (Absalom – twelve people of that name are living in the parish, in two families of farm labourers). Hinton had metamorphosed from a parish of small yeoman and tenant farmers to one where farming was taking place on an industrial scale. The nature of arable farming had changed too: there is now no hint of rig and furrow in the arable fields.

Hinton Manor in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries: the Loder Squires

The Loder dynasty held the manor of Hinton for over two hundred years, from the late 17^th to the early 20^th centuries. As we saw in my previous article, the squire who ordered the enclosure of the parish was the Rev John Loder (1725-1805), who was also rector of the parish and Master of the Berkshire Hunt. His heir was his daughter Maria (1775-1820). In 1796 she married Robert Symonds, fourth son of a Herefordshire landowner, a Church of England deacon and a hunting partner of her father. It is reported that at first her father disapproved of the match, but Symonds won him over with a gift of a fine hunting dog. In 1801, the 76-year-old Rev Loder gave Symonds, who by now had taken holy orders, the rectorship of Hinton, in succession to himself.

Rev Symonds was said to take his clerical duties lightly, being more concerned with hunting. The same year as he was offered the rectorship of Hinton, he was also given by a benefactor a substantial living in Herefordshire, a hundred miles away. When the bishop objected to his appointment, on the reasonable grounds that Symonds could not live in Berkshire and maintain a parish in Herefordshire, Symonds breezily replied that he could hunt on Saturday and ride to his parish on Sunday morning in time to take the service. In the event, he only kept that parish for a year, before being formally instituted to the parish of Hinton Waldrist in 1802. Nicholas Davenport, in his entertaining history of Hinton Manor, remarked that, “Together, the two sporting parsons [Rev John Loder and Rev Robert Symonds] managed the Old Berkshire hounds, swearing hard on weekdays, and preaching hard on Sundays”.

Rev Loder died in 1805, aged 80 and Robert Symonds became Squire of Hinton Manor as well as Rector. During the 19^th Century the manor house was altered and expanded, encouraged by the boom in manorial incomes triggered by the passing of the Corn Laws in 1815. The repeal of those laws in 1848 was an early cause of the decline of the English country houses, as over time, cheaper foreign imports undermined their incomes from agricultural land.

Robert Symonds died in 1836 and the Manor passed to his son, John Loder Symonds, who, as a teetotaller, was responsible for Hinton having no public house. He and his wife had no children, and following his death in 1875, the manor passed to a cousin, Captain Frederick Cleave Symonds, an army officer who took the name Loder-Symonds and came to live at Hinton Manor (and wrote about his forebears in a history of the Old Berkshire Hunt). He and his wife had two daughters and five sons, all of whom became military officers, with, as we will see, tragic consequences.

Daily Life in Hinton Waldrist in the 19^th Century

We can call on two literary sources, one indirect and the other direct, for insights into daily life in Hinton during the latter half of the 19^th century. The indirect source is Flora Thompson’s classic trilogy, “Lark Rise to Candelford”, an account of her childhood in the agricultural parish of Cottisford, about thirty miles north-east of Hinton, and very similar in its population size and make-up. Thompson’s biographer, Richard Mabey, describes Lark Rise to Candleford as a mixture of memoir, social history and fiction, and some of her tales of village characters are doubtless embellished, but her overall account of a farming community of poor agricultural labourers and their masters in the depressed 1880s rings true and provides a model for Hinton Waldrist at that time.

All the “components” of a rural parish are present in Flora Thompson’s books. The parish has its manor house, dominated by the rather indolent Squire and his snobbish mother, who is desperate to maintain her social position despite the manor’s shrinking income, while her son strolls around the estate with a shotgun and a pair of spaniels, or sings “negro songs”, accompanying himself on his banjo. The elderly Rector preaches high Toryism from the pulpit, exhorting his labouring parishioners to accept their impoverished lot as God’s will, while his busybody daughter offers friendship and charity to the labourers’ wives (without much by way of thanks). The parish’s only farmer largely directs operations from his substantial farmhouse, leaving supervision of the men to his bailiff, and is confident that he is a good employer despite paying a labourer just ten shillings a week, as he gives them a feast at harvest time and a joint of meat at Chistmas, and does not tell them how to vote. Another important figure is the landlord of the only inn, liked by his customers for his fine ale and for tolerating his customers buying just one half pint each evening. The village schoolmistress does her best with youngsters whose ambitions stretch little further than working in the fields or joining the army (the boys), or going into service for a few years before marriage (the girls) while hoping to be invited to tea at the manor house. In the third book, Candleford Green, Laura, now fourteen, goes to work in the post office in a nearby village and we meet the formidable postmistress, Dorcas Lane, who also owns the village blacksmith’s shop, and the hard but respectful smiths.

The families headed by agricultural labourers who make up the bulk of the population of the parish are treated fondly in Thompson’s account, if sometimes a little archly. The husbands rise early to walk to the farm and their day’s work in the arable fields. When they return, they tend to the family pig or work in their garden or allotment, growing vegetables to supplement the family diet. Then in the evening they convene at the inn for their nightly half pint, an argument about politics and a round of songs. Their wives clean the house, prepare the meals, do the laundry and raise large families of children, and attempt to make ends meet and keep a civilised household on their husbands’ meagre wages. In their scant leisure time they gossip or read 'penny dreadful' novels. Some older women, who are either single or whose families have left home, also work in the fields, but not at the same time as the men.

All these characters can be found in Hinton Waldrist at this time. In 1891 (the year after Flora Thompson left Cottisford) the squire was Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds, then aged 44. At that time he and his wife Elizabeth had six children. The Rector was Rev Frederick Harper, 39 and unmarried, who lived in the rectory with his sister and elderly mother. The schoolmaster was 26 year old Walter Ansell, who lived with his wife and four children in the school cottage. There was a postmistress and shopkeeper, 66 year old Elizabeth Smith. The blacksmith, whose shop was a few doors from the post office, was Frederick Ayris, who took on the business when his father Thomas retired. The parish’s farmers at that time were Henry Chandler (Manor farm), Henry Temple (Duxford farm), Elizabeth Hobbs (Duxford Ferry farm), Joseph Potts (Grange farm) and Daniel Tarrant (Glebe farm). There was even a businessman, George Batts, a butter factor who employed a number of villagers and lived in Glebe Cottage, which, despite its name, was an imposing residence. None of the above-named were born in the parish, and many of the labourers, servants, carters and tradesmen who made up the rest of the population of 301 (including large numbers of children) were also “incomers”, often from nearby parishes: the pattern in the 19^th century was for people to move around relatively frequently, though usually within a relatively small area.

Many of Hinton's formerly important buildings are still standing, though none now have their original function - all are private residences. Here we see the rectory...

...the post office and general store...

...the blacksmith's shop...

...and the school

Thompson also describes the occasional set-piece village festivals, such as the harvest feast and the May Queen parade. Doubtless, these also happened in Hinton. A piece in Jackson’s Oxford Journal of 7^th June 1856 describes a celebration to mark the end of the Crimean War:

‘On Thursday the 29^th ult, the public holiday was celebrated in the old English style, in the parish of Hinton Waldrist. The proceedings commenced with divine service in the parish church, after which the whole parish, young and old, to the number of about 400, sat down to a hot dinner of beef and plum pudding, prepared for them in a barn, which had been most tastefully decorated with flags, flowers and evergreens for the occasion. In the evening there was a band of music and a dance on the village green. With other rustic sports, such as running in sacks, and at dark some excellent fireworks; after which God Save the Queen was sung in the open air by the assembled people, and the proceedings of the day terminated with the Evening Hymn’.

The more direct literary source for life in 19^th century Hinton is a fine coffee-table book titled A Village Lost and Found and authored by Brian May and Elena Vidal. It includes reproductions and commentaries on a set of stereoscopic photographs, produced in the 1850s by the photographer T.R. Williams. The set in question depicts scenes from an unnamed rural village, which detective work revealed to be Hinton Waldrist. It appears that Williams spent some of his childhood in Hinton, explaining his choice of location. Although posed and stylised, the sixty images offer a (literal) snapshot of life in Hinton at that time. Brian May, when not occupied by his day job as lead guitarist of Queen, collects such sets, which were hugely popular during the early years of photography.

The set begins, conventionally enough, at the Manor house, with several views of the house and grounds. We meet the Squire, John Loder-Symonds, inevitably carrying his shotgun. The second largest house in the village was the rectory and it is shown with the church in the background, and just a glimpse of the then rector, Rev William Jephson. We also see the village blacksmith outside his shop and a former schoolmistress, now retired. Then follow a number of pictures of farm labourers at work, taken at harvest time, with reaping, loading the corn onto wagons and making hay ricks, and even loading the dung cart. There is a picture of village women ‘gleaning’ – gathering for their own use stray ears of corn left behind after the crop had been harvested.

Several pictures depict scenes around the village and some of the actual villagers make cameo appearances, chatting, drawing water from their wells, looking after their pigs, tending their gardens, and so on. Some of the names correspond to those in the 1851 census, including John Sims, Dick Carter, Joe Bennett and Jane Edmunds. Unsurprisingly, the photographer has chosen to depict the more picturesque cottages, those situated along the high street and the road that heads north from it towards the church. These are all two-storey, thatched and are set in relatively extensive gardens. They were probably once the dwellings of the 18^th century copyhold farmers; the 1761 enclosure schedule tells us that Thomas Dew, Henry Richards and Edward Church lived on the high street and Edward Richards, Richard Humphris and John Absalom lived on the road leading to the church. Many of the cottages shown in the pictures still stand, much altered and gentrified. A terrace of smaller cottages stretched down the lane that ran south from the blacksmith’s shop (now Lamb Road), but these were probably too mean for a photograph set that would have been mainly sold to middle class town dwellers. At the same time, the one picture taken within a cottage shows it scantly furnished and with rough bare walls – just a hint of how poor the circumstances of many of the villagers would have been.

Some of the cottages depicted in Williams's photos still exist, altered and updated. The rear of this cottage is shown in a view entitled "Maria Carson's Washing Day". It is now known as St Giles's Cottage. It is likely to have once been the dwelling of a copyhold tenant farmer

'The Row' on Lamb road was added to in the early twentieth century

Another aspect of Hinton that was depicted in the photographs, but that has now been lost, is the small port at Duxford Ferry Farm. In the 19^th century the river Thames was widened and a weir was constructed to ensure that the water was deep enough for cargo barges to pass through, and the farm, situated on the south bank of the river, had a quay, from where farm produce could be shipped to Oxford and beyond, and coal and other village essentials brought in. The farm also kept a ferry boat and travellers could be rowed across the river. Later in the 19^th century, the natural loop of the Thames that has Duxford at its southern extent was “bypassed” by the construction of a canal known as the Cut. This took water from the Duxford loop and meant that the port could no longer function. Duxford Ferry farm fell into disrepair and was later demolished – the site is now overgrown and just a few stones remain. The ford that gave the hamlet and farm their name was restored and can still be crossed when the river is low.

The ford at Duxford is now a picturesque spot. It was rebuilt in the late 19th century

Hinton Waldrist moves into the Twentieth Century

“All the time, boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives, or at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the church…is engraved with their names” (Flora Thompson, Lark Rise).

The plaque commemorating Hinton’s World War One dead lists fourteen names. Four of them are from the same family. They are all of them sons of the Squire, Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds. To compound the tragedy, one of his daughters also died in the war, killed when the ship taking her and her husband to a war posting in Africa was torpedoed. See here for a web page that tells the war stories of the Loder-Symonds family.

Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds’ wife also died in 1918 and the Squire himself died in 1923, aged 77. His heir was his one surviving son, naval captain (later Vice Admiral) Frederick Parland Loder-Symonds One of his sons was to be killed in action in World War Two, as was one of Flora Thompson’s sons. But the long squirearchy of the Loder-Symonds in Hinton Waldrist was drawing to a close. In the mid-1930s Frederick Parland Loder-Symonds sold Hinton Manor and its estates to Nicholas Davenport (1893-1979), an economist, journalist and financier and author of the aforementioned history of Hinton Manor. He lived in the manor house until his death and his widow Olga, a former film actress and painter, continued to live there until her death in 2008.

Nicholas and Olga Davenport at Hinton Manor

This is the nearest a casual visitor can get to Hinton Manor today

The agricultural way of life continued up to and beyond the Second World War. In the 1930s, a farm labourer’s wages were thirty shillings a week, a modest improvement on the ten shillings a week paid in the 1880s. Hinton village only gained piped water from mains in 1947, finally releasing villagers from having to draw water from their wells and using earth closets in huts in their gardens. This, and the coming of electricity (gas has still to reach the village), marked the beginning of its gentrification.

Today, the fields surrounding Hinton village are still intensively farmed, with arable and dairy farming alongside market gardening, but the mechanisation of agriculture means that only a tiny handful of villagers work on the land. The village is more affluent than it has ever been, as it is largely a dormitory for professionals working in neighbouring towns. At the same time, there is less community infrastructure. The village school closed down in 1966 and the shop and post office closed in the 1990s. The parish church is now part of a group of seven churches under a single parson and services are held monthly. The only reason that Hinton has not lost its inn is that it did not have one in the first place. Many of the extensive allotments, a feature of the village since Victorian times, are disused and one wonders how long it will be before more executive houses are built on them. Hinton Waldrist is still a peaceful and enchanting place, and many of its old buildings survive, but its pictorial chronicler T.R. Williams would find little that he would recognise in the parish today.

The rather neglected allotments in the centre of the village give witness to the passing of the rural way of life for the majority of today's residents

Sources used:
Genealogical information avalable at The Genealogist.co.uk 
Historic Ordnance Survey maps available at Old Maps
New Landscapes: Enclosure in Berkshire Berkshire Record Office

Davenport N (1978) The Honour of St Valery: The Story of an English Manor House. London: Scolar Press
Hawse, J.S. (1968) Hinton Waldrist through the Centuries. Unpublished typescript.
Loder-Symonds F.C. & Crowdy P (1905) A History of the old Berks Hunt from 1760 to 1904: with a chapter on early foxhunting.

Mabey R (2014) Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford. London: Allen Lane

May B & Vidal E (2009) A Village Lost and Found. London: Francis Lincoln Limited

Thompson F (1944) Lark Rise to Candelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press