1 8 VILLAGE ENGLAND 



view of this prospect were two good farmhouses, a 

 school, a chapel, and fourteen cottages ; as many as 

 forty-four children attended the school. The land in the 

 immediate neighbourhood was known in those days a 

 generation ago as light arable, and the principal crop 

 was corn. To-day the hamlet is no more seen. It has 

 clean vanished. One rough shepherd and his dog, who 

 live elsewhere, represent the whole extinct hamlet. The 

 village, which may be called Snape, is like Flers or any 

 one of those French villages that felt the full force of war 

 bombardment. You might put up such a notice as was 

 put up on the Somme : &quot; Here was Snape.&quot; cc Troja 

 fuif.&quot; That last phrase &quot; Troy was &quot; has been quoted 

 as one of the most pathetic phrases in the works of Virgil, 

 that great Roman patriotic poet. Is it possible that we 

 find no pathos, that we do not so much as take interest 

 in the disappearance of our own home hamlets ? They 

 matter to us at least as much as Troy mattered to Asia 

 Minor ; indeed, the loss is much more fit for a national 

 lament than either Flers or Troy, The French villages 

 are coming back to life. So in some regards are English 

 villages ; but such disappearances can be paralleled in 

 other countries. 



What of the place during and since its end ? especially 

 the persons, if they are in the plural, who have succeeded 

 the inhabitants of the fourteen cottages and the two farm 

 houses. For the question is not local, but national. 



The penultimate inhabitants were two old ladies and 

 one shepherd. Then only the shepherd was left. At last 

 this lonely person found another house some miles away, 

 and no one remained to mark the place or prevent the 

 collapse of the last house. You can now scarcely trace the 

 hamlet ; the chapel and school and most of the cottages 

 are undiscoverable. Bits of the farmhouses, the highest 



