At Home - Bill Bryson [238]
Whether Lubbock was unaware of Pitt Rivers’s brutality to Alice or was simply prepared to overlook it—and little says more of the age than that either was possible—he and Pitt Rivers had a happy working relationship, no doubt because they had so many interests in common. As inspector of ancient monuments, Pitt Rivers’s powers were not spectacular. His brief was to identify important monuments that might be endangered, and to offer to take them into state care if the owner wished. Although this would relieve owners of the cost of maintaining sites, most balked because it was such an unprecedented step to cede control of any part of one’s estate. Even Lubbock hesitated before relinquishing Silbury Hill. The act carefully excluded houses, castles, and ecclesiastical structures. All that left were prehistoric monuments. The Office of Works provided Pitt Rivers with almost no money—half of his budget one year was spent on putting a low fence around a single burial mound—and in 1890 it removed his salary altogether, thereafter merely covering his expenses. Even then it asked him to stop “touting” for more monuments.
Pitt Rivers died in 1900. In eighteen years, he managed to list (or “schedule,” as the parlance has it) just forty-three monuments, barely over two a year. (The number of scheduled ancient monuments today is over nineteen thousand.) But he had helped set two immeasurably important precedents—that ancient things are precious enough to protect and that owners of ancient monuments have a duty to look after them. These policies weren’t always enforced with much rigor in his day, but the principles embedded in them were crucial, and they inspired others to take additional protective actions. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, led by the designer William Morris, was founded in 1877, and the National Trust followed in 1895. At last British monuments began to enjoy some measure of formal protection.
Risks continued, however. Stonehenge remained in private hands, and the owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, refused to listen to government advice or even have inspectors on his land. Around the turn of the century it was reported that an anonymous buyer was interested in shipping the stones to America to reerect as a tourist attraction somewhere out west. Had Antrobus accepted such an offer, there was nothing in law anyone could do to stop him. Nor indeed for many years was there anyone willing to try. For ten years after Pitt Rivers’s death, the position of inspector of ancient monuments was left vacant to save funds.
II
Even as all this was unfolding, life in the British countryside was being severely reshaped by an event that is little remembered now but was one of the most economically catastrophic in modern British history: the agricultural depression of the 1870s, when harvests were abysmal in seven years out of ten. This time, however, farmers and landowners couldn’t compensate by raising prices, as they always had in the past, because now they faced vigorous competition from overseas. America in particular had become a vast agricultural machine. Thanks to the McCormick reaper and other large, clattery implements, America’s prairies had become devastatingly productive. Between 1872 and 1902, American wheat production increased by 700 percent. In the same period, British wheat production fell by more than 40 percent.
Prices collapsed, too. Wheat, barley, oats, bacon, pork, mutton, and lamb all roughly halved in value during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Wool dropped from 28 shillings per fourteen-pound bundle to just 12 shillings. Thousands of tenant farmers were ruined. More than a hundred thousand farmers and farmworkers left