Dr Rosemary Hoppitt reviews 'A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk 1784: François de Rochefoucauld'
Tips: To carry on listening to this programme (11 mins) whilst browsing other pages hold 'shift' as you click on the next link.
To jump to other places in the programme - click on the right hand bar - you may have to wait for it to finish downloading.
Listen on iphone/ipad or download MP3
During the 1780s while in his teens François de Rochefoucauld spent time travelling in Europe. However his was no Grand Tour taking in art and architecture, but one focussed on ‘the useful in preference to the picturesque’, for this young man, his younger brother Alexandre and their travelling companion and mentor Maximilien de Lazowski were interested in things agricultural. So it was that in December 1783 they came to England and made their way to Suffolk, and Bury St Edmunds in particular, having been recommended the county in preference to going west to Bristol (‘an ugly town’) due to the fact that in Suffolk ‘English was spoken best and.. it rained the least’.
Norman Scarfe translated and edited the account of the year spent in Suffolk over twenty years ago, and now it is printed for a fourth time in a paperback edition, which itself says much about the success of the book. In the introduction he effectively sets the scene, providing the historical context (less than a decade before the French Revolution) and Francois’ family background. He was a member of the nobility, the elder son of the duc de Liancourt, who was Grand Master of the Wardrobe and very close to King Louis XVI, but also unusually for the period, liberal – devoted to ‘political economy and good works’. Scarfe explains how in a moment of serendipity the party are directed towards East Anglia where they eventually come ‘under the wing, and spell, of Arthur Young already a famous advocate of every kind of improved husbandry’.
The book is well-provided with illustrations – family portraits of the main characters and contemporary images of places, sadly though all in black and white, which renders a rather dour character to the people, houses and landscapes of the county. It is liberally supplied with copious and detailed footnotes which show the depth and breadth of Scarfe’s scholarship, and help to explain and expand upon the text, thus adding to the enjoyment of the reader.
François, in a letter dedicating the account to his father, indicates that he struggled with the format and in the end ‘unable to find a form that seemed clear and sensible – decided to impose no order at all, but wrote down everything just as it came into my head.’ As a result it is not unlike a modern ‘blog’ and the reader is able to make a measured progress through the book, dipping into a short aspect here or a longer one there, reading in the order written, or not, as the subject proves more or less of interest.
Aged just eighteen, François is writing the account to send home to his father, the duc de Liancourt. He includes aspects and events of English provincial life, such as those of ‘polite society’ – dances, clubs, taking tea, dining and horse-racing as well as more serious subjects – religion, politics and justice. His level of detail is intriguing, for example he writes of English country houses ‘I very much like the doors which are simple and shut properly....... The fireplaces are not designed like ours...and are always square’ A frequent reference is to the cleanliness and tidiness he sees – ‘...the houses are washed very often, inside and out.... people go to lengths to preserve all this spruceness....nowhere a speck of dust’. However he discovers all this is for show, for the kitchens: ‘you can’t imagine the squalor....’.
For the local reader however the most interest is to be found in the accounts of the sojourn at Bury St Edmunds which opens a window on real life and real people. The detail of their living arrangements, their daily round of visiting new friends and acquaintances and François tells us ‘there were a great many of them...’.
Apart from the historical context à propos the political situation, this time was also a turning point in social and economic history, for here we are in the thick of the ‘agricultural revolution’ and at the beginning of the height of parliamentary enclosure. The five-day tour which the party made with Arthur Young provides a wonderful first-hand account of this revolution in action. All along the journey François details the nature and quality of the agricultural landscape and he declares himself ‘astonished’ at the intelligent and knowledgeable discourse that they had with local farmers. Having stayed at Ipswich (‘badly built’ with ‘not a single inn that is even barely passable’), they set off for Woodbridge and then headed out into the Sandlings visiting farms on the Bawdsey peninsula; here they found large newly enclosed farms, of 1000s of acres, growing wheat and in particular carrots and broad beans. Arthur Young was interested in the growing of carrots and he ‘assured us that their cultivation was peculiar to this corner of Suffolk’ being sent to London and also used for feed for horses and pigs. The detail of this section is enhanced with additional information from Arthur Young’s own account of this journey. The return journey was taken via Heveningham Hall – then recently built - and ‘the only house in Suffolk really worth seeing’; and then to Framlingham, and into dairying country where ‘the finest cows are’, returning to Bury via Stowmarket. The account of the tour is then followed by a section entitled ‘Of Agriculture in General’ which Scarfe notes ‘demonstrates beautifully that Young’s teaching and example had entirely succeeded’.
Other journeys took the trio to Cambridge where François was impressed by the beauty of the colleges: ‘prodigiously grand and remarkable for architectural nobility...’. Their journey into Norfolk, to King’s Lynn, Holkham, Blickling, Norwich and Yarmouth is from the notes of Lazowski, and this edition is enhanced by the inclusion of Lazowski’s detailed description of the Norwich Textile industry, but sadly Scarfe chose to omit ‘the long descriptions’ of Coke’s famous farming methods as they are, he assures us, described in detail elsewhere.
This paperback edition has a new cover illustration – one of Thomas Churchyard’s paintings of the River Deben at Woodbridge, but no printed endpapers – a pity then that these two changes were not highlighted in the text – so the reader is still directed to the missing endpapers showing Angel Hill in Bury St Edmunds in 1774, and the jacket is no longer an image of Mistley and the Stour. However these are minor irritations – the contents are fascinating at a variety of levels, whether your interest as a reader is polite society, houses and parks and gardens, politics or agriculture and stockbreeding, and all the more remarkable in that these are the words of eighteen-year old.
Translated and edited by Norman Scarfe
Paperback edition 2011 £12.99
(ISBN: 978 1 84383 675 9)
Boydell Press, Woodbridge
Suffolk Records Society Vol.XXX
First published 1988
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
