30 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Th us, in Th ompson’s world, only when this kind of work is more genteel and
undertaken voluntarily to provide a small supplementary income, rather than
out of dire economic necessity, is it deemed morally and socially acceptable.
Williams singles out a particular woman, Betsy Horton, to represent the
old-fashioned fi eld worker who had toiled throughout the seasons all her life.
Diminutive in stature, her ‘face very wrinkled and sunburnt, like leather almost’,
Betsy is immediately reminiscent of Richard Jeff eries’s account of ‘fi eld-faring
women’ who ‘in their latter days ... resemble the pollard oaks, which linger on
year aft er year, and fi nally fall from sheer decay’.^20 Th ompson tells of Mrs Spicer,
‘a pioneer in the wearing of trousers’, and of Lily, ‘big and strong and clumsy as a
carthorse and dark as a gipsy, her skin ingrained with fi eld mould and the smell
of the earth about her’.^21 To these writers, such women possess something of the
heroic in their capacity for a lifetime’s sustained, unremitting hard work and
endurance, but at the same time this is seen not merely to have defeminized them,
but in a sense to have dehumanized them too, so that they became, as it were,
assimilated into the natural environment. For Sturt, Lucy Bettesworth is a similar
exemplary fi gure, but his representation of her is more expansive and complex.
Initially he sees her only in external, ungendered and non-human terms: she is ‘a
kind of substantial shadow’ who might be mistaken for ‘a fi eld scarecrow’, a ‘piece
of antiquity resuming forgotten life’, and an ‘odd slate-coloured and dishevelled,
not quite human, apparition’.^22 Even as he brings a closer perspective to bear, Lucy
remains a grotesque whose ‘face is a face of the fi elds’, ‘unhomely’ and ‘undomesti-
cated’; she ‘seems out of place, out of touch with our times’, ‘obedient and quiet and
dumb, like an overdriven animal’, ‘too unlovely to be loved’; one of the ‘unvalued
products’ of the fi elds which ‘have overlaid her humanity with an enigmatic and
half-dreadful composure like their own’.^23 Yet from this unpromising introduc-
tion, Sturt claims that the labours which have so disfi gured Lucy ‘rank among the
great things for which our race has lived’, and deserve to be remembered alongside
the victory over the Armada, the occupation of India, and Britain’s command of
the seas: ‘nor could there have been any Agincourt or Waterloo had there been
no forgotten folk left at home to enforce the harvests from our English valleys’.^24
In this way she is unexpectedly idealized, not as a woman, since all traces of femi-
ninity have been eroded by her work, but as a type whose unnoticed labour has
contributed to the greatness of Britain. Sturt’s fascination with ‘forgotten folk’
like Lucy and her husband lies in their history which is so diff erent from his own.
Although (or, perhaps, because) he can only construct it from limited evidence
and conversational fragments, he claims the Bettesworths as late embodiments of
a mode of life which has already almost vanished, but which he regards as having
formed the essence of Englishness.