The Trouble with Tom (5 page)

There's an old rule of thumb for dating hedges, commonly known as Hooper's Rule. It goes like this:

Age of the hedge= [(No. of species per 30yards) x 110] +30

For two species, then, that works out to about 250 years. So take away the cars, take away the glazier's shop and the karaoke, take away the cat's-eyes in the road—take away the road itself. And imagine a gentleman walking along this muddy lane those two centuries ago, back when these old hedges were still young. In his arms, he bears a box of bones.

William Cobbett was born into the life of a farmer's son: a world that in the 1760s was small and circumscribed, with age-old tasks to keep the boy busy. "I do not remember the time when I did not earn my living," he later mused. "My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed, and the rooks from the peas. When I trudged afield, with my wooden bottle and my satchel over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and, at the close of day, to reach home was a task of infinite labour."

His childhood in Surrey was one of relentless work and simple pleasures: for amusement, he and his brothers would shove each other down a steep slope, "rolling down the hill like a barrel or a log of wood" and laughing uncontrollably as they got dirty and torn up. He had little formal schooling, and for the rest of his life considered that hiiside-where he and his brothers bled in and breathed in the dirt, where he covered himself in it and picked it out of his mouth and nose-as
his
schooling. "It is impossible to say how much I owe to that sandhill," he later claimed. Upon hearing that the king kept magnificent gardens in Kew, he eagerly ran away at the age of eleven with nothing but thirteen half-pence in his pocket. From Kew, Cobbett eventually drifted onward into a miserable apprenticeship in a London law office, then back to his native farmland, and finally into a marines enlistment that sent him to the New World just as the Revolution ended.

Cobbett found little left worth defending: "Nova Scotia had no charm for me other than that of novelty. Everything I saw was new: bogs, rocks, mosquitoes, and bullfrogs . . . In short, the most villainous piece of waste land." Even his eventual promotion to sergeant major did not allay his general dismay, for after blowing the whistle on military embezzlement and writing a pamphlet on it, Cobbett was drummed out of the service and nearly charged with sedition. But in writing his pamphlet, Cobbett discovered his two true vocations: righteous fury, and writing furiously.

Wherever he went, Cobbett found trouble-and when he couldn't find it, he made some of his own. Moving to Philadelphia in 1794, he took up the apt counterrevolutionary pen name Peter Porcupine, and enraged locals by plastering his bookseller storefront with pictures of King George. Then, for good measure, in his window display he coupled the likeness of the bloodthirsty Jean-Paul Marat with that of revered city father Ben Franklin-who was also, Cobbett helpfully explained, "a whore-master, a hypocrite, and an infidel." He called Tom Paine a wife-beater—such accusations were nothing new to Paine, as another Tory writer had already accused him of raping a cap-and in the pages of his newspaper The
Porcupine
he gleefully eviscerated the "malignant philosopher" Jefferson. Rather more prosaically, he also accused Declaration signer and local physician Benjamin Rush of killing his patients.

"Honour the King: Fear God,"
read the motto on The Porcupine, but soon Cobbett had quite a few others to fear. "There were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered," he wrote. He was not far wrong, and when Dr. Rush finally slapped the would-be Peter Porcupine with a crushing libel judgment, it sent the nettlesome scribbler fleeing the country.

But back in his beloved Britain, Cobbett fared little better. He loved the crown, not the government that had surrounded it. And so he started an immensely popular newspaper, the
Political Register
, to record the speeches of Parliament and the court. This unprece-dented exposure of their machinations was duly resented by politicians, and eventually Cobbett was thrown-thrown quite enthusiastically, one gathers-into Newgate on a trumped-up charge of treason. Cobbett was left incredulous: "Having lost a fortune in America, solely for the sake of England, I was sent to prison in that same England!" Perhaps, he wondered, the problem was that it wasn't that
same
England. He brooded over how it was no longer the land of his youth.

And then, as always—he wrote.

If his two years in jail were meant to shut Cobbett up, it didn't work. "During my imprisonment," he boasted, "I published 364 Essays and Letters upon political subjects." He still managed to keep his
Political Register
going every week, even during a spell as a farmer back to America from 1817 to 1819. In the midst of this, he also became the great agricultural author of his era, writing on
Cottage
Economy
and the popular guide
The American Gardener,
which remains in print today. The man sold
seeds
in his spare time. It seems hard to reconcile the notion of a seed merchant and garden writer with a political firebrand today you don't exactly go to the Burpee rack at the hardware store to get riled up about anything. But soil was political in Cobbett's time. And these hedges before us? They were harbingers of perhaps the greatest upheaval England had ever known.

A farm truck rumbles past me, heading toward Guildford, sweeping by a weedy graveyard of rusting tractors and plows. I bend down and examine the leaning sign jammed into the ground nearby:

People still work their land here. But what, exactly, do we mean by
their
land? Many years ago, a rector named Augustus Jessopp pondered just this question. "If I take my handkerchief out of my pocket I show you something which certainly belongs to me; I bought and paid for it," he explained. "If I please I may—
as I can
—toss it into the fire and reduce it to ashes in a few moments; in fact, destroy it, practically get rid of it, annihilate it." It was his property, after all; why not? But, ah—there was a catch—for all property is
not
the same. Look down at the plot of land that you are standing on: "I
cannot
destroy it," he reasoned. "I
may
not quite serve it as if it were wholly and exclusively mine." So we may call our friends with the hay, eggs, and manure
owners
of the land, but only for now: it was once someone else's, and it will be someone else's again. Their tenancy on the land, even if for three, five, or ten generations, is temporary. This is why any owner who rails against land-use rules has forgotten a basic tenet of common law: they are the stewards of their plot, and not its sovereign.

A thousand years ago, these lands that we see before us here on the A323—
all
land, in fact-belonged to the king. It was granted to nobility at his pleasure, and revoked at his displeasure. These lords, in turn, let their manors to local gentry, who then sublet plots to the farmers. If anyone died intestate—as a great many of them were prone to do during plague years—land would escheat back up the chain of ownership. And nobody was unreservedly
entitled
to this land: it was always the king's, and subject to his taxes and demands for military service. That's why to this day in Britain the Treasure Act requires any poor sap unfortunate enough to find a buried sack of doubloons in their backyard to turn it over to the crown. But this was part of a rural covenant, for in return every village had a commons land where citizens could graze their sheep and cows. It was far from perfect. There was a tangle of laws over how often you were allowed to graze, how much turf you could dig up to burn as fuel, or how many branches you were allowed to lop off a nobleman's trees as kindling. These land arrangements stifled mobility: they ensured that the rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor. But everyone was indeed guaranteed something.

Visit the Normandy Commons now, and you'll find a pleasant sprawl of wodn fields and trees; there's slide, monkey bars, a public loo, and a decent soccer pitch. What you will not find are sheep munching the grass, or anyone hoeing beans. We're expected to earn our livings in private dwellings now, a transition from public to private wealth that occurred before Cobbett's eyes. Parliamentary orders for the fencing off and sale of commons land-known as Acts of Enclosure—remade his countryside at a frantic pace. In the decade before Cobbett's birth in 1763, there had been 163 such acts: the first decade of the new century had seen 906. Once landowners possessed this land, they guarded it jealously. They'd bore holes into hedge stakes and funnel in gunpowder; any shivering impoverished soul unfortunate enough to steal a hedge stake for kindling would, upon tossing one onto a fire, be rewarded with a hearth-shattering thunderclap. In another town, Cobbett even found a self-styled Paradise Place encircled with signs warning of leg-snapping mantraps. He shook his head at the sight of it: fancy that as Paradise!

Commons lands—
wastes
, landowners now sniffed—disappeared, and private property arose in their place. This hedge in front of me—and there are now some five hundred thousand miles of them in England—arose during these years, not as quaint sidings to rural roads, but as a sentinel of newly created private property. Cobbett was outraged: "[What] could lead English gentlemen to disregard matters like these! That could induce them to tear up 'wastes' and sweep away occupiers like those I have described! Wastes indeed!"

What induced them? Why, money. Private owners tended their plots with greater efficiency and ingenuity, and sought out the latest agricultural improvements: over the span of the eighteenth century, the average weight of sheep shipped to London's Smithfield Market more than doubled, and average calf weight tripled. Even as its poor starved, England was stuffed with food; even as land became rich and thick with green hedges, the country's poor became landless. These quaint hedgerows are not the stuff of Old England: they are what killed it. Walled off from sustenance, the rural poor flooded into industrial cities, ripe for exploitation. By the time Cobbett arrived at that Liverpool dock in 1819, he found a country tipping into revolution.

Not of men-but of machines.

A road branches off from the A323, and it is so unremarkable that one can drive right past it, which is indeed what every car does:

I should think the parish name alone is worth stopping for. Just beyond its opening verge, hidden behind a thicket, there hides a pleasant little clearing. A placid brown hare gazes at me from it, twitches in the laziest manner possible for his species, and lopes off with a perfunctory, not-trying-terribly-hard-at-hoppinggait. He meanders up and across the deserted back road and toward a driveway bearing a sign reading COBBETT'S CLOSE.

Cobbett's close!

Oh, but is he? Is he close? I fear not. It's on some of Cobbett's old farmland, true, but it's hard to imagine a place that could now be further from Cobbett's heart. For Cobbett's Close is a trailer park—a gathering of prefabricated buildings, if you prefer—all plunked down like so many discarded cracker cartons in these woods. There they sit: modern structures not really built to last, erected on privately owned property, and not a garden plot or a grazing sheep in sight.

If you wanted a repudiation of everything Cobbett lived for, this might be it. When he wrote a book titled
Cottage Economy
, he was not speaking of being economical in the modern sense of cheapness: he was talking about creating a national economy of cottages. He longed to instruct the populace in moving back to the land, back to self-sufficiency, to grow and make for themselves. But the only thing you can
grow
in boxy prefabs like these is hydroponic weed; the only thing you can
make
is microwave popcorn. Cobbett saw all this coming even in his own day. 'To buy the thing,
ready made
, was the taste of the day," he mocked. 'Thousands, who were house-keepers, bought their dinners ready cooked: nothing was so common as to rent breasts for children to suck: a man actually advertised, in the London papers, to supply childless husbands with heirs! In this case, the articles were, of course, to be
ready made
."

The argument he began lives on even today. Paine and Cobbett were their era's perfect expressions of progressivism and conservatism. While Cobbett hoed turnips and railed against the mill towns and the destruction of the rhythms of rural life, Paine spent his post-Revolution years suggesting improvements in steam engines, inventing smokeless candles so that people could stay up late, and hawking the newfangled cast-iron bridge he designed. Cobbett looked to the past for Britain's salvation, Paine to the future; what they shared was a profound dissatisfaction with the present . . . oh, and with each other. Paine referred to the self-styled Peter Porcupine as "Peter Skunk," while Cobbett's pet name for Paine was generally "hypocritical monster" or the snappier "Infidel."

Indeed, Cobbett went so far in 1796 as to reprint and annotate a hostile biography
The Life of Thomas Paine
— a hit job secretly funded by the British government, it had been published under a pseudonym in 1791, and slyly subtitled
A Defense of His Writings
, the better to lure in and sucker punch Paine's own readers. But its accuracy and origins did not concern Cobbett much. Unusually for a biographer, Cobbett frankly professed ignorance of what Paine was even up to anymore, nor did he care:

How Tom gets a living now, or what Brothel he inhabits, I know not, nor does it much signify. He has done all the mischief he can do in this world; and whether his carcass is at last suffered to rot on the earth, or to be dried in the air, is of very little consequence. Whenever and wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion; no friendly hand will close his eyes, not a groan will be uttered, not a tear will be shed. Like Judas, he will be remembered by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by the single monosyllable of
Paine
.