Rural Rides

by William Cobbett, Ian Dyck (Editor)

Between 1821 and 1836 William Cobbett toured the southern English countryside by foot and on horseback, and Rural Rides is his remarkable account of what he saw. A prolific writer and journalist of genius, Cobbett matured into a radical left-wing politician, and a farmer who ensured his labourers had access to the three Bs: bacon, bread and beer. Recording swiftly changing ways of life, Rural Rides juxtaposes lyrical evocations of the countryside with attacks on the poverty of agricultural workers consigned to hovels with a diet of potatoes and tea. It remains one of the greatest celebrations of agrarian England, admired by thinkers as diverse as Marx, Chesterton and Belloc.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Travel, Politics, Classics, British Literature, 19th Century

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1830

About the author

William Cobbett (1763-1835) was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly. He was also against the Corn Laws, a tax on imported grain. Early in his career, he was a loyalist supporter of King and Country: but later he joined and successfully publicised the radical movement, which led to the Reform Bill of 1832, and to his winning the parliamentary seat of Oldham. Although he was not a Catholic, he became a fiery advocate of Catholic Emancipation in Britain. Through the seeming contradictions in Cobbett's life, two things stayed constant: an opposition to authority and a suspicion of novelty. He wrote many polemics, on subjects from political reform to religion, but is best known for his book from 1830, Rural Rides, which is still in print today.

Reviews

[russell barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bonkers. On the one hand a really really boring series of rides around Surrey, Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire during the 1820s. He describes fields of turnips almost relentlessly on every page, the state of corn and wheat and the fatness of oxen. And when he's not doing that he's railing against the Jews and the Scots. Oh, and he always seems to end up in the same villages, and then tells the same tales and inevitably compares the turnip crops.

However Cobbett *is* quite funny; he's a early version of George Orwell: He takes the piss, gives away his money and has a right old whinge about the Whigs and Tories. In fact in the context of today's financial wobbles and austerity, the world he is describing on the edge of the 'Hungry Forties' is relevant. Although with less turnips.

[Bettie]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34238

Opening: Fog that you might cut with a knife all the way from London to Newbury. This fog does not wet things. It is rather a smoke than a fog. There are no two things in this world; and, were it not for fear of Six-Acts (the “wholesome restraint” of which I continually feel) I might be tempted to carry my comparison further; but, certainly, there are no two things in this world so dissimilar as an English and a Long Island autumn.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another good book from Mr Cobbett. Although sometimes parts are difficult to get into, this book is a must for those interested in social history in the early 19C. It discusses what real history is about, not just the rich or the ruling classes who are just out to get what they can no matter the effect upon the working classes. His concerns for the country are in many respects little different to those of today even after 200 years. Nothing really changes. Human nature remains the same as it always has.

[Andrew]

One of those books I'd heard about for years, largely through E.P. Thompson's magisterial Making of the English Working Class, and basically just finished out of spite. Let me give you the tl;dr version (because it's tl, and because it's totally fine if you dr):

Things William Cobbett likes: turnips, discussing the prices thereof -- includes ordinary turnips and "Swedish" turnips, italicizations

Things William Cobbett doesn't like: Jews, tea, coffee, drinking, "Scotch philosophers" (by which I assume he means Hume and Adam Smith), any activity other than the sober, industrious, Christian kind

Fuck that, I'm off to go drink with some Jews and Scots. Read the E.P. Thompson book instead, it'll give you a better idea of the debates going on in Britain at the time.

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't follow all the of-his-time politics, nor stomach all the of-his-time prejudices and the still universal habit of name-calling. But the Rides are not boring, the descriptions of the landscapes and people are delightful, and I appreciated the tour guide. Not a simple guy, but not a dumb one. Worth spending some time with, though maybe in small doses.

One note on the politics: this politician got his privileged ass out of London and his own context to go look at the rest of the country. He took his agenda along with him, but he at least made an attempt at fact-finding. How many other parliamentarians, then or now, travel to see rather than merely to be seen?

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

cool book. Cobbet has this pretty standard formula where first he describes the soil texture of a place and how good it is for growing turnips, and then he'll do a really cool rant about how the Pitt system of taxation is grinding the rural people down to powder. This happens basically throughout the book but it doesn't get old too much because in some of the rants he'll put in cool anecdotes like the bit where he says that some wealthy landowner was really bad at tree maintenance. pretty insightful guy even though he misidentified the cause of the problems as 'taxes'.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s one of those that are simply off the scale both in terms of how good it is and the impact that it had.

Any serious list, and by serious I mean a list that I agree with, of the greatest Englishman would have to have Cobbett in the top ten. Richard Ingrams puts him at number two, just behind Samuel Johnson. Always good to see the good doctor near the top. Having devoted a good part of my life to the study of literature I’d also throw in the usual Shakespeare and add the more unfashionable Milton, Coleridge, Byron, Dickens and Fielding. Cobbett himself regarded King Alfred as “perhaps the greatest man who ever lived” and who am I to disagree with him? And let us take the opportunity to throw in Tom Paine as someone else both Cobbett and I would agree on. But this isn’t time to plan my hypothetical dinner party (Cobbett would definitely make that!) this is about Rural Rides.

Magnificent in every way. One of the best travel books I have read, one of the best snapshot/state of the nation studies, a brilliant audit of the agriculture of southern England during the Corn Laws, a masterful account of the effects of government policy on the producers of food (and to some extent industry- especially textiles - there were many producers of cloth in the south west and quite a few mills), a brilliant and brilliantly biassed history of the period and a must for any student of UK politics in the post Napoleonic era. On top of that an entertaining read.

Not always factually accurate but I’ll happily sacrifice that in return for some of the best rants against some of the most deserving targets...including the often sainted Wilberforce.

And for us nostalgists a panorama of pre-industrial England, an England before the railways and photography. It captures in prose what Wordsworth and Coleridge et al caught in verse and Constable and Thomas Bewick with pencil and brush.

[Gary Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing book! I love the style of writing, the use of the old English language (book was written in 1830!). It provides a fascinating insight to rural life in England during the early 19th Century. The struggles the farmers were having, heavy taxation etc. William Cobbett is not shy about letting his feeling be known about certain politicians who are bringing the country to its knees. In contrast his beautiful descriptions of the counties, villages and towns he visits are so detailed, even down to the types of trees, soil and livestock. I lived in Hampshire before moving to the US and know the counties and towns well both in Hampshire and surrounding Berkshire, Wiltshire & Dorset. But to be taken back in history to what they were then is priceless!

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Cobbett is a disagreeable character in some ways. He is a scold who rides his high horse, literally and figuratively, across early 19th century England. Unless you are really well up on the political controversies of the era, many of his shots will just whizz past your head. He suffered from an unpleasant anti-Semitism that he gives frequent vent to. He has an annoying habit of going into “I told you so” mode. And yet…Cobbett is one of the outstanding writers and appreciators of the English landscape, both wild and human-mediated, and I think he is an infinitely more interesting figure as a grumpy-lyrical artist than he would be as a purely lyrical one. It’s not everyone who can mix political vitriol with a sincere pleasure in a turnip harvest (and describe the latter so beautifully). Cobbett’s Rural Rides, which takes up two volumes and 642 closely printed pages in the old Everyman edition, deserves to be read and savored in full.

[Justin Tyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book for the glimpses (more than glimpses, really) into life in England in the 1820's. Whether it's chatting to farm labourers or squires; descriptions of the hospitality available in Inns; descriptions of the country-side before housing estates blotted it out; or just silently witnessing the concerns of ordinary people 200 years ago - it makes me wish I could walk beside him along the muddy lanes.

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very disappointing book. I was looking forward to reading another travel book especially as it covered places I knew, but an inflated ego, waffling and ridiculous generalisations got in the way. Conclusion - mostly very boring with occasional short interesting passages. Read H.V. Morton instead!

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a fascinating insight into the state of the nation in about 1825, with a particular emphasis on the decline of many rural areas in southern England. Cobbett was brought up at Farnham just below the Hog’s Back on the Surrey-Hampshire border. If the family had had more money, he would perhaps have been a Tory squire. He loved country pursuits and farming. But they didn’t and he spent time in the army in Canada, got to know America and also went to France after his radical views made England too hot to remain. He became a journalist and pamphleteer of great influence.

He had many bugbears: paper money, pensions for soldiers and others, Jews, Quakers and all speculators because, in his view, they didn’t do honest work, depriving the honest working man of fair wages and subjecting him to income tax and duties that went to “tax eaters” (bureaucrats). Similarly Methodist killjoys and the C of E were loathsome in his view, not least because of the tithe, which absentee parsons took as their revenue, rather than helping the poor of the parish, allowing rectories and parsonages to fall into ruins. He had a particular feud with Adam Smith and Scottish writers on economics and was outraged by Malthus’s view that the poor would always breed more prolifically than food production coins keep up with.

The book is well read and unabridged, usually a fundamental requirement for me. But in this case, because the pieces were serialised in his Political Register, they are hugely repetitive. Careful editing could perhaps have reduced this very long listen by at least a third without loss.

[T.]

From Jack Bell's piece “Saving the Commons” (https://www.plough.com/en/topics/just...

Rural Rides documents the social consequences of enclosure and the centralization of agriculture. It tells us of workers’ habits of dress, the state of their farms, the condition of the cottages they lived in. It also describes how enormous damage to the natural world impoverished the people who depended upon it. Long before more recent calls to return to indigenous methods of agriculture and land stewardship, Cobbett perceived the significance of farming with nature rather than against it: hedge-laying, tree-planting, coppicing, and other aspects of mixed, small-scale agriculture. This longstanding cottage economy not only encouraged enclaves of wildness in a landscape dominated by increasingly centralized agricultural systems, it had long helped the rural poor avoid dependence on parish relief or the chance of having a benevolent landlord. Cobbett called for his country’s ruling classes to give back the common land they had stolen from their own people.

Cobbett was politically radical and theologically prescient. Rural Rides expresses the view of a world where the land is a common inheritance for all, not the property of a few. In an era where the systems of centralization and control Cobbett critiqued have led to an ecological crisis of existential proportions, we would do well to reconsider Rural Rides’s vehement critique of a system incapable of recognizing moral or environmental limits.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Between 1821 and 1826 William Cobbett toured the southern English countryside by foot and on horseback, and Rural Rides is his remarkable account of what he saw. A prolific writer and journalist of genius, Cobbett matured into a radical left-wing politician, and a farmer who ensured his labourers had access to the three Bs: bacon, bread and beer. Recording swiftly changing ways of life, Rural Rides juxtaposes lyrical evocations of the countryside with attacks on the poverty of agricultural workers consigned to hovels with a diet of potatoes and tea. It remains one of the greatest celebrations of agrarian England, admired by thinkers as diverse as Marx, Chesterton and Belloc."
~~back cover

I'm sure it's all that the reviewer says, but I just couldn't get past the political rants.

[Mike Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed his mix of country matters, and his riding escapades, with his diatribes against parliament in the 1820s, regarding the ruination of rural workers and farmers. He has no time for universities: "those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities".
He bemoans the bankrupting of the country in fighting the French, eg. building the Martello towers on the coast. Seems similar to what happened to Britain’s finances from WW1 and WW2, and more recently the fortune spent on beating Covid-19. In each case it was done with borrowed money.
Another bit of similarity to our times, when he points out the large number of churches that now have few attendees for services.
As others have said, a bit repetitive, but there were still gems in the later pages.

[Jack Theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A suitable book for someone who has an intense love for the english countryside; however the book is only interspersed with short, mellifluous passages which otherwise him surveying the soil quality, nature of turnips, and folly of every farmer but himself.

[Rufus Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

William Cobbett gets into a village, it's either beautiful or an absolute shithole with terrible people, he'll comment about the agriculture, whine about the politics, then leave.

Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. I enjoyed the odd zinger but it's WAY too long and gets boring very quickly.

[Sophie Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good insights on the state of the English countryside in the 1820s but unfortunately it's interspersed with 32 flavors of racism and religious bigotry, which makes it hard to read.

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a long haul to finish this book, reading 1% each day on my phone. The best parts are William Cobbett's observations of rural life in the 1820's in England and his wonder at the natural beauty of the landscapes through which he passes on horseback. It is also striking to hear what an ascetic fellow he was, riding all day long eating only meat and bread twice a day, in bed by 8:00 at night so he could be up at 4:00 to write (I was wondering how he managed to write so much while traveling). His diatribes against Jews, Quakers, and Scots can be rather hard to take, and his railing against "tax-eaters" (the rich, pensioners, the Army) is repetitive and tiresome. Overall, though, this book is worth the read simply for the way it records in great detail a way of life that no longer exists.

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Long-forgotten - or, long-won - quarrels, turnips and bacon are the chief features of this work. Cobbett comes across as a chronically bad-tempered know-all. To be fair, the writing was probably less tedious when taken in its original serial form, and is probably of more interest if you are familiar with southern England. As it stands, though, in the Penguin English Library edition, far and away the most readable section is the excellent introduction by George Woodcock. It's only to be recommended to those who want to know what was being written and read in the nineteenth century.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was on sale so I went for it. I am going to like parts of the book and it is going to take me a very long time to finish it - if I do.
Here is a sample:
"The fog prevented me from seeing much of the fields as I came along yesterday; but the fields of Swedish Turnips that I did see were good; pretty good; though not clean and neat like those in Norfolk."
Oh my. As I read further I feel I have found a book to put me to sleep.
Read a sample before purchase!

[Clare Flynn]

Hugely repetitive in the routes he takes, the places he stops at, the things he rants about and the scenery he describes (turnip fields feature strongly!)
I skim read it, looking for the gems of useful information on agricultural wages, the cruelty of the Game Laws and the plight of farm labourers and tenant farmers

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Cobbett was a social campaigner on behalf of the rural poor. On his rides he saw many examples of injustice and poverty which angered him. He also observed the English countryside and agricultural practices. This is a detailed portrait of rural England at the time.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful mind. I am starting his 'Cottage Economy' today. Of interest related to both agricultural and political history. Wish there had been explanatory footnotes, some of the political disputes and personalities are obscure to me as an American two centuries later.

[Fazackerly Toast · Rating 3 out of 5]

finished at last! Dispatches from the front line of the early nineteenth century British war against the poor - lively, funny, immediate - I really enjoyed it.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard going at times but so interesting, English countryside as it used to be through the eyes of a unique individual

[Sally O'wheel]

I think the edition I read was abridged because I wasn't irritated by endless descriptions of turnip fields. I read this book because I was studying the Captain Swing Riots and was interested in conditions of farm labourers in southern England generally. So I found it really rewarding to read a contemporary account. I found his railing against paper money interesting, and was not offended by his anti Quaker, anti Jew sentiments which I took with a grain of salt. He meant well. He put his money where his mouth was and made a contribution to the betterment of others. He was a man of his time and better than most.