To The Manor Born

What does the future hold for the English country squire? Adrian Leak finds out and gets to know some of history and literature’s most affable examples.

- Adrian Leak

SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY, a genial Worcestershire squire at large during the reign of Queen Anne, is one of the great creations of English literature. His story first appeared in 1711, scattered across the pages of 30 issues of the Spectator, so we have only glimpses of the man, but the picture we have, to borrow Horace Walpole’s phrase, excels in ‘truthfulness and finish’.

At our first introduction, we see Sir Roger calling on a neighbour in the country. ‘When he comes into a house,’ we are told, ‘he calls the servants by their names, and talks all the way up the stairs to a visit.’ We can see him, chatting to the footman at the door, calling out a greeting to a servant girl he passes in the hall and then stopping on the stairs to ask after her ailing mother. We know the detail. It’s all there, unwritten, but implicit in Joseph Addison’s brief sentence.

This familiarity between master and servant, landlord and tenant, gives his conduct as chairman of the quarter sessions a particular flavour. It is generally agreed that Sir Roger is a fair and wise magistrate. On his bench, common sense sits side by side with legal precedent. He is, however, more knowledgeable about the minutiae of the law than he pretends. His elucidation of a particularly obscure passage in the Game Act gained him universal applause in the county and the widespread respect of his fellow justices.

Sir Roger is, of course, a work of fiction, but what is a fact is the prominent role played by the squire in rural society. William Cobbett, famous for his Rural Rides (1822–30), looked back with nostalgia to ‘the resident gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from their childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost’.