John Clare: "Searching for Blackberries"

Abstract

Blackberrying may appear to be a trivial subject in John Clare's poetry, generally referred to in passing as a characteristic autumnal activity, along with collecting elderberries to wine, or hazel nuts, or mushrooms, or water-cress, or gathering rotten for the cottage-fire. Essentially, is not different from those other rural activities, which formed part of the cottager's economy in every part of Europe. Richard Cobb's brilliant chapter, Forest and Woodland (39-56), paints a picture of lawlessness and disorder in districts not far from Paris, sometimes arising from the theft of wood, but also in part anarchic because of the distance from centres of organized government. Clare's fenlands were like the forests of Montmorency and Chantilly, of Compiegne and Retz. In Helpston, too, it was highly dangerous, to say the least of it, to walk or ride on any of the highroads. . .at dusk, and. . .during the In the English fens, as in France, the inhabitants believed that the produce of the wasteland came to them by right. Also in the fens: At dusk, the passer-by might be confronted by silently-moving lines of shadowy figures, their backs bent under the weight of trunks and piled-up wood, as they headed for home (Cobb 46). Clare referred to this as rotten, omitting the word wood occasionally. Where stickers stroll from day to day And gather loads of rotten And poachers left in safety stray When midnight wears its deepest mood. (Robinson, Powell, Dawson MP3:569) (1) Clare's natural sympathies are with the stickers, as he calls them: the wood-men, on the other hand, the agents of the landowners, are terrifying rascals who make a prison of the forrests and are its joalers. (2) Just as the fallen belonged by right to the local inhabitants in the forests surrounding Paris, so, according to popular belief, did the fallen belong to the locals near the oak woods of Stamford, and, in both regions, led to conflict between landowners and peasants, between the lord's steward and gypsies, (3) or the woodman and villagers. The conflict over extended to other products of the waste--rabbits, hares, birds, withies, reeds, cresses, sloes, dewberries, nuts, mushrooms, elderberries, wild strawberries and blackberries, not to mention eggs, snakes, deer, eels, fish, and other edibles. The custom of nutting, which Clare celebrates, was particularly disliked by the landowners, the celebrates, was particularly disliked by the landowners, the their servants and the tenant-farmers. The pages of the Stamford Mercury and Drakard's Stamford News are filled with advertisements and articles regarding the practice; the Mercury, upholding the rights of the landowners, the News those of the rural population. (4) In times of recession, the downward curves of the economy, the conflict between the improving landlord (fencing his grounds and strengthening his hedges, conserving his hares and pheasants, restricting the holidays of his workforce and constantly trying to limit the traditional holidays of the poor) and the laborer became more fierce, leading, for example, to violence and occasional large-scale affrays between gamekeepers and poachers and to increased punishments in the magistrates' courts for even mild offences of trespass. True, even the most innocent of activities, like nutting or blackberrying, might lead to damage to plantations or to gates being left open, allowing stock to stray. Yet, to working-people, autumn was the time for collecting wild fruits to eke out a limited food-budget. Clare's speaks to this abundance: Autumn comes laden with her ripened load Of fruitage & so scatters them abroad That each fern smothered heath & molehill waste Are black with bramble berrys--(MP2: 140) In the Second World War, when food was scarce in Britain and I was billeted upon an unsuspecting rural family, three of us might collect twenty-five to thirty pounds of blackberries in a day that could be bottled by the housewife at night. …