The “Progress and Prosperity” Rhetoric of Reform

The “Progress and Prosperity” Rhetoric of Reform is Edmund Jordan’s argument that The Village should be remade for commercial sheep raising, with enclosure and wool production replacing much of its shared agricultural life. He presents the scheme as a rational duty attached to inheritance and as a benefit to be administered from above. Walter Thirsk’s account sets that language against the labor, customary claims, and precarious subsistence it would displace: the promise of improvement arrives together with maps, fences, reduced employment, and a new authority over land and people.

Inheritance as a mandate

Edmund Jordan introduces reform as something he is obliged to carry out, not as a personal design or subterfuge. He invokes the final testament governing the estate and describes his impulse to improve as a zeal for progress. The appeal to obligation gives the proposed transformation the appearance of inevitability: inheritance supplies the authority, while improvement supplies its public rationale. Yet the narrator’s account makes clear that the scheme also has a beneficiary. Jordan wants a tidier pattern of life that will secure profit for those with foresight, meaning, in Walter Thirsk’s reading, Jordan himself.

The contrast with Charles Kent’s earlier presentation of change is pointed. Kent had described a future in which neighbors might become richer and more leisurely, remaining at home while earning from yarn. Jordan offers no comparable hope of shared prosperity. He regards the villagers as prosperous enough already and concentrates instead on organizing the estate for profit. His rhetoric therefore changes the meaning of reform: what may have sounded like a communal improvement under Kent becomes, under Jordan, a commercial scheme whose gains are not promised to the community.

The order reform would replace

Jordan dismisses the existing arrangement as a common system that benefits commoners only in prolific years. He regards agriculture without coin as irrational to observers who judge economic life by monetary returns. The qualification about good years matters: The Village’s collective economy is not depicted as secure or abundant. Walter describes poor harvests, declining numbers, and winters when the cattle eat while people do not. But the villagers also understand the land through customary use and labor, not only through title documents. Their hands gather the harvest; their shared dependence on the fields gives them a sense of possession even when they lack deeds.

That competing understanding is already visible in the dispute over newcomers settling on the commons. The villagers cite customary boundaries and fear that outsiders will take a portion of their limited resources; the newcomers’ claim to settlement rests on a different rule, one recognized by written law. Charles Kent’s local authority operates between those orders, while Edmund Jordan’s later program proposes to make formal ownership and planned boundaries decisive. Reform thus does more than alter the crops or livestock. It challenges who may use the land, which claims count, and who has power to enforce them.

Maps, enclosure, and the new production plan

Jordan assigns Philip Earle the task of completing the maps and charts before the week is out, and introduces Baynham as an experienced manager of land for sheep. Baynham is to learn the estate through those charts and, before the first snow, establish fences, dykes, and walls wherever he sees fit. The mapped landscape becomes a plan for physical change: forestry is to be reclaimed, the commons cleared and privately enclosed, and the land turned to pasture. Jordan argues that an oak which provides shade but no food is of little value at his expense; its timber, he says, should be traded rather than preserved for beauty. He concludes that there will be no further need for a plow.

The contrast between a plow and pasture condenses the scale of the proposal. This is not simply an adjustment in farm practice but a shift from cultivated land and common use toward enclosed grassland managed for wool. Jordan’s commercial outlook extends beyond the estate’s fields. He describes the chain of production and sale: rough wool goes to his warehouse, hired women weave cloth, and profits depend on the sale of varied textiles. He also names the intermediaries who take part in the trade, from shearers and staplers to chapmen, fullers, tuckers, and dyers. The details give the plan an appearance of economic expertise, while showing how the village’s land would be connected to a market system whose returns Jordan expects to oversee.

Work, provision, and the cost of improvement

Charles Kent interrupts to remind Jordan that the district has a little fewer than sixty people to feed. Jordan answers that employment will be Baynham’s concern: some villagers, at least, may find work as shearers or sheep-boys, but economies will be necessary. His response treats the inhabitants chiefly as labor to be selected according to the new system’s requirements. The existing livelihood of the community is not to be preserved for everyone; employment is offered conditionally, and the reform explicitly anticipates fewer places.

Jordan’s promise of charity and gratuities does not undo that reduction. He says he will fund a church and employ a priest, presenting the church as a shepherd for the people alongside the sheep he will bring to the fields. The steeple, he says, will stand higher than the house’s turret and any ancient oak left standing, while its bell will summon people to prayer and hurry them to work. The two functions are joined in the plan: religious provision will also mark time and direct labor. Jordan frames this as expenditure he will provide, but the villagers’ continued presence is uncertain; his assurance extends only to those who can remain.

Discipline behind the promise

The reform language gains force from the uneven legal order already at work in the story. Charles Kent is described as just but timid about punishment, and the village has no magistrate or constable. When the stable fire is suspected to have been deliberately set, the likely local penalties include a beating, exclusion beyond the boundaries, and compensation from a household’s animals, rather than execution. The villagers, meanwhile, defend their customary interests against the newcomers and prepare to drive them from the commons. Their conduct shows that order is maintained through local practice as well as written law.

Edmund Jordan takes a harder view. In discussion with Charles Kent, he treats the newcomers’ punishment in the pillory as deserved and regards the law’s severity as an ordinary response to their actions. Later, when Willowjack’s death and Lucy Kent’s bloodstained velvet shawl threaten to expose what happened, Walter understands that a public display of justice would also serve Jordan’s purposes: a hanging would demonstrate control to a population unaccustomed to formal discipline, including discipline over wool and fences. In this light, reform’s maps and economic arguments are not separate from coercive authority. The same project that redraws the land also seeks to establish whose rules will govern it. Walter’s account preserves the tension between Jordan’s language of order and provision and the practical losses that his plan makes visible.