The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [68]
Clare loved his paths, and knew them intimately. In his childhood, Helpston was encircled by three great fields, each divided into strips for cultivation by all landowners and tenants of the village. To the south of the village lay Royce Wood (Rice Wood, as the OS has it), and beyond that, Emmonsales Heath, a massive wide-skied common used by all for rough grazing. Clare and his boyhood mates had the run of it all, ‘roaming about on rapture’s easy wing’. They knew every furlong, strip, copse, heath, pond and wood, and exactly which path would take them where. But a path was more, far more, than a means to an end: it was a world of its own, with its own lore and mood, somewhere to be relished not just for what it did, in taking you from A to B, but for what it was. Nearly two centuries on, we are by his side, smelling the earth and air, as in The Flitting he extols the
Green lanes that shut out burning skies
And old crooked stiles to rest upon.
Above them hangs a maple tree,
Below grass swells a velvet hill,
And little footpaths sweet to see
Goes seeking sweeter places still.
It was losing the paths that focused them so sharply into Clare’s mind and poetry. His childhood and adolescence coincided exactly with the time that the enclosures reached his part of the world. When he was six, the nearby village of Bainton became the first in the area to be enclosed. A decade later, an Enclosure Act was passed in Parliament for Helpston and all its surrounding parishes, and over the next few years the young John watched with mounting horror as favourite trees and copses were ripped out, streams blocked and diverted, and fences and gates thrown up across the fields and heaths in which he had wandered freely, developing an intimacy with every leaf, flower, insect and bird. As a graphic reminder, ‘On paths to freedom and to childhood dear / A board sticks up to notice “no road here”’: a punishment almost impossible to bear for one so sensitive.
He railed with increasing bellicosity about the injustices of enclosure, which brought him into direct conflict with some of his wealthy patrons, who had, on his initial success, been delighted to be seen publicly supporting the nation’s new favourite peasant. After the dizzying sales of his first collection, which needed reprinting four times within the first year, the pressure was on for a swift and successful sequel. The title poem of the collection, The Village Minstrel, did not beat about the bush:
There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt,
There once were paths that every valley wound,
– Inclosure came, and every path was stopt;
Each tyrant fix’d his sign where paths were found,
To hint a trespass now who cross’d the ground:
Justice is made to speak as they command
The high road now must be each stinted bound:
– Inclosure, thou’rt curse upon the land,
And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann’d.
Such bald sentiment brought immediate use of his red pen by one of Clare’s most effusive supporters, Lord Radstock. ‘This is Radical Slang’ he scrawled across the lines when given a proof copy of the collection to see. Radstock’s unbending attitudes – he had already objected to a line about a baby ‘all beshit’ – can perhaps best be seen in the titles of his own most successful books, The British Flag Triumphant!, a collection of naval tales about us whupping the French, and The Cottager’s Friend; Or, a Word in Season to Him who is so Fortunate as to possess a Bible or New Testament, And a Book of Common Prayer.
Looking at poems such as this one, it’s easy to be lulled into a belief that Clare was some early The Land Is Ours propagandist, who would have been at the forefront of any protest smashing down the iniquitous gates and fences. In truth, the new order terrified him, and