The Language That Would Save England

Dispossession And Grinding Poverty Blighted 19th-Century Rural England. The Solution, According To One Eccentric Clergyman, Lay In A Form Of English Taken Back To Its Anglo-Saxon Roots. Siân Rees Investigates.

- Siân Rees

The Reverend William Barnes falls squarely into an English tradition of rural clerics with long white beards, eclectic intellectual passions, a powerful social conscience and a slightly mad look in their eye. Born to a family of agricultural labourers in rural Dorset in 1801, over the course of a long and active life Barnes (shown above) were a schoolmaster, parson, husband and father, inventor, illustrator, solicitor’s clerk, contributor to a Royal Commission, and antiquary.

Barring the trips to study divinity in Cambridge, Barnes lived in Dorset and Wiltshire until his death in 1886. He witnessed enormous changes – none of them, in his eyes, good – in the lives of the working people around him. The agricultural “improvements” that had begun in the 1700s caused particular hardship during the long economic depression of the early 19th century. Experiments with crops, animals and equipment and the development of large-scale mono-crop and dairy farming all led to rising yields and profits for farm owners, but not for the labourers who worked their land. Over a few generations, a self-sufficient yeomanry became a landless peasantry, reduced to selling its labor by the day or hour or season, turning to welfare or emigration to replace their lost security.