August 9, I917 
LAND & WATER 
15 
British Art and the Village Church 
By Charles Marriott 
ART is long, and you must begin at the beginning : 
with hfe. We are all talking about reconstruction 
just now, and it is agreed that people must be got 
back to the land, that village industries must be 
revived, and that as a complement or a preliminary to these 
necessary changes village life must be made possible for in- 
telligent people. I am not speaking now of the obvious 
questions of housing and transport, but of the less obvious 
though equally important questions of amusement and 
social intercourse. It is here that differences of o'pinion 
are hkely ; to arise, with all sorts of experiments and 
consequent waste of time and energy*. As to the first of the 
necessary changes there can be no difference of opinion. It 
is proved by the cold logic of the facts, otherwise the activities 
of the submarine. If the war has demonstrated anytliing 
it has demonstrated beyond • any shadow of duubt that in 
the long run, and finally, the man who really matters is the 
man with the hoe. 
How to secure him in large numbers and how to house and 
feed Jiim are not matters for private individuals. These 
tilings will have to be settled by legislation, and necessity 
will show the way. But unless all public houses, concert 
lialls and picture palaces are to be run by the State the question 
of amusement and social intercourse will be left to private 
enlerpvrise ; that is to say, they will become incidental to 
private profit, and suffer accordingly; 
Some sort of communal action is needed and the question 
arises, upon what basis and under what directions ? In any 
question of the sort it is as well to refer to history. Let us 
look back to the time when, unless all th6 books are 
wrong, village life was possible to intelligent people. 
What was the basis and what the direction ? Again, 
unless all the books are wrong, the answer is emphatic and 
simple : the Church. But, indeed, we do not need the books 
to tfll us that ; a walking tour in any English county is 
enough to convince anybody with eyes in his head that the 
full story of possible village life, with all its pleasant associa- 
tions of art, music, the drama and dancing, is written in our 
village churches. Huskin called the cathedral " a Bible in 
stone" ; meaning that it summed up in simple terms for simple 
folk the wiiolc history of man's relations with the visible an»l 
invisible universe ; in respect of the narrower field of village 
life the humbler edifice might well be called a Whitaker. 
In our sentimental regard for the village cliurch we are apt 
to overlook its enormous practical importance. Not only 
the one-time centre of social life, but as the origin and school 
-jjf many of those arts and crafts upon which and not upon 
" business," as our astonished eyes have lately recognised, 
the welfare of the nation finally depends. In so far as civiliza- 
tion is not based ujwn the man with the hoe it is based 
upon the man with the chisel and hammer ; and it was in 
the village workshop in close connection with the village church 
ihat the man with the chisel and hamme;- learnt his craft. 
If the church did not actiially command his labours it gave 
him the subjects and motives without wliich his craft would 
have been a mere whittling of sticks and beating of iron. 
And wherever a village craft, equally with such draggle- 
tailed survivals of organised amusement as " Paste Egging " 
in I^ncashire, and " Guise Dancing " in Cornwall, has 
kej)t alive, you will find at the bottom of it a religious connec 
tion. 
Man}' years ago I was tramping from village to village in 
Bedfordshire with the object of getting orders for photographs 
of churches, of which my employer had the negatives. In 
one village I came upon a complete survival of the village 
craftsman. He was an old man, deaf, blue-eyed and pink- 
cheeked, with a warbling voice and not a hair on his face. 
His workshop stood in a sea of Shirley poppies and other 
annuals, and all about it werp fragments of old grey stone- 
work from the neighbouring church. He was painting a 
blackbird in full song upf)n a spray of hawthorn on a tile for 
what he called a " jardineer." 
" That is the way a blackbird stands when he sings," he 
said with a chuckle. " It took me a long time to see exactly 
how the little rogue set his feet and held his head. When 
I paint a bird you may be sure that every feather is quite 
right." 
My photographs turned him on to colour. With a cunning 
little leer he pulled out a drawer under his desk. 
" Look here," he whispered, " here's colour ! When they 
restored the church yonder they took out the old windows 
and put in new ones by a London firm. Abraham and Isaac, 
and Joseph in the Pit ; all done in washed-out reds and 
greens and browns. This is some of the old stuf!. I took 
it. Ah, yes — colour ! " 
He fingered the glass like a miser ; hfting a handful and 
letting it fall, bit by bit, jingling into the drawer. 
" Have you seen the church yet ? " he asked me. I said 
that I had not been inside. 
" Well, when you do go in, look at the panels in the chancel 
roof. I did them, in stencil ; they are very beautiful." 
He went on to tell me of the many jobs he had done for 
the church ; painting, carving and carpentering. As he 
said, it was only a " public building " that allowed a man to 
use the best materials and put in his best work. 
Again, I know a little church in Gloucestershire where not 
only the ironwork but the brass processional cross was made 
by the village blacksmith ; and everybody must know in- 
stances where something done for the church was the only 
opportunity for the local craftsman to make full use of his 
invention and skill. But, you will say, these are not more 
than interesting survivals. True, but they are survivals 
of a state of things that was once common. They are the 
relics of what it is no extravagance to call the British school 
of arts and crafts ; the community of painters, glaziers, 
carvers, broiderers, and metal-workers who, not less than the 
Italian schools of painting, were primarily dependent upon the 
Church for the development of their skill. 
The more one looks into it the more one is inclined to believe 
that English village life, as distinct from the mere negative 
of town life, with its complement of arts and crafts and or- 
ganised amusements, in a word, " England," ended with the 
Reformation — or at any rate, the seventeenth century. An 
instinctive recognition of this is amusingly confessed in an 
unexpected quarter. In country places it is quite common 
to find good Nonconformists who are proud of the local 
church ; and it is always the Pre-Reformation character of 
the church, in so far as it has been preserved, that appeals to 
them. And, if you come to think of it, Nonconformity itself 
was not a reaction from the Pre-Refoirriation Church but from 
. something made in Germany. There is more than a secular 
meaning in the Royil rejection of Teutonic names and titles. 
But, lest I bethought prejudiced, any living body of religious 
belief might serve as a working basis for the revival of village 
life and the amenities that belong to it. 
What it amounts to is that if we are to have a real revival 
of village life we must get back to some definite basis upon 
wliich it can be organised. Deliberate " revivals" of this 
or that particular village art, industry or amusement, such 
as morris-dancing, will not do ; nor will parish reading or 
recreation rooms or concert halls. No intelligent person is 
going to put up with " parish entertainments." Admirable 
in themselves, these institutions and diversions lack the broad 
and deep foundations of their originals. The men and women 
of the middle ages were united and organised in their arts 
and amusements but not by them ; the arts and amusements 
themselves were definitely related to a common something 
of which the symbol, if not the occasion, was the village church. 
Well, in our village churches we still liave the machinery for 
the revival. One emphasises the churches, the buildings 
themselves rather than the clergy, because they are beyond 
all differences of private opinion, whether religious, pro- 
fessional or esthetic. 
'* Rally round ihe churches," might prove a more effective 
cry than " Rally round the Church." The concrete is more 
pqwerful than the abstract. There is magic in things, material 
things, particularly material things that have been and are 
to be used by generations of men and women. Faithfully 
as the majority of our clergy minister to the spiritual and 
intellectual needs of their parishioners, the character of their 
services, except in places where full ritual is observed, has not 
encouraged them to take full advantage of the material 
resources of their churches, with their extraordinary appeal 
to the imagination and reconciling power. For, just as the 
technical element is the real reconciling factor between the 
creeds of cla.ssical and scientific education, so I believe that 
a common interest in some example of human craftsmanship 
will often settle diflEerences that verbal discussion would 
only accentuate. The Anglican and the Nonconformist 
masons will get hot over doctrine ; they can hardly differ 
about a piece of good stonework. Somehow or other we have 
to get back England. We might do worse than begin by 
concentrating on the institution that best preserves the con- 
tinuity of English life ; in which the fact and sentiment of 
England are combined in concrete form as they are combined 
in nothine else : the village church. 
