My blog for Tuesday 14th November was devoted to a review of Keith Sutherland’s book The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a very English Revolution published last week in Fourth World Review (FWR141). In my review I took Sutherland to task for his listing of Crown, Lords and Commons as the Three Estates.

In my version of English History our three estates are Monarchy, Church and House of Communities. Our Lords Temporal include the social structures of the monarchy with its aristocratic landed organisation into counties, townships, bailiwicks, lathes and hundreds. Our Lords Spiritual embrace the Church of England which has the freedom to choose the details of its spiritual faith and is not bound by any past Parliament or Treaty to the Book of Common Prayer or King James' New Testament. Nowadays the key religious divide is between Materialists and Atheists...and the rest of us who ask ourselves 'Is that all there is?’...and answer 'No!'

If the English are to get to where Keith Sutherland wants them to go then Parliament needs to be put back in its place. The best way to do this is by an alliance between the other two estates represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and our future King Charles III...on the side of People and Place. Halford Mackinder got it right a century ago when he remarked in Democratic Ideals & Reality that the real political battle is always between Locality and Outside Interests.

Last Saturday Keith Sutherland responded on my blog to the charge that he had got it wrong about the estates. 'You're right,' he wrote, 'about the three medieval estates...Lords Temporal, Lords Spiritual and Commons. But an alternative modern view goes back to a document produced in 1642 when Charles I argued that the Constitution of England was a mixed one in which the three estates of king, lords and commons was balanced together. This is the Aristotelian principle that I try to develop in the book.' Sutherland then references the Cambridge Academic Michael Mendle...author of The Putney Debates and mentions specifically Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions.

Seventeenth Century English History is a boom industry...especially in the US...and Keith Sutherland is right to point to the scholarship behind the fluctuating definitions of the Idea of the Estates. But the practical problem is the need to broaden the English Political Debate. Conventional political options are incapable of solving 21st Century problems. It is as well to remind ourselves that each generation holds all the options and can rewrite the Constitutional Script if they wish to.

The Three Estates is an excellent place to start this debate...and why not bring the subject into Geography and History Curricula in our Secondary Schools? But any modern discussion must include the Fourth Estate with its PR Firms and Spin Controllers...as well as the Print and Electronic Media with its podcasts, blogs and internet channels. Schooling itself is just one channel among many in the Babble of the Fourth Estate.

Readers of the Guardian or the Independent or Anti-Globalisation Demonstrators will find Sutherland's book well worth reading as it does a first class job of stretching the political options within the Established Orthodoxy…an important step when an orthodoxy reaches the end of its appointed course.

Stretching the Consensus Paradigm is crucial if our English Politics are to progress in the 21st Century by Evolution. Revolutions may be unavoidable on occasions…and a Second English Civil War remains a possibility…but revolutions are best avoided because innocent people get hurt. Besides if History teaches us anything it is that no one ever knows where revolutions end up. They always take on a life of their own...with many unanticipated side-effects...most of them nasty.

This is the second extract from Five Acres & A Cow. I had been asked to give a one-hour talk about the Rural Economy at the Stroud Energy Fair in July 2001 and took the Linnaeus line that Farms and Factories don’t mix economically…something which E.F. Schumacher realised. The basis of my talk was John Seymour’s discussion in the Fat of The Land of Cow Economics…and its obscurity. For example what does a cow eat? Grass all summer, and very little else which can be considered as free for the use of our three-acre grass field naturally comes in with our twenty-five pounds a year rent...although actually it is not as simple as all that. John Seymour takes up the tale.

In the winter Brownie must have hay, roots and concentrates. The concentrates we have to buy and that is that. They consist mainly of oats and groundnut cake. And I have to admit shamefacedly enough that I have no idea what this costs me. I get a bill from Jack Hewitt the miller about twice a year depending on how energetic he is feeling in the book-keeping way, it always shakes me to the foundations, but then I know that it includes not only the little bit of food I give to the cow but also pig food and poultry food. I made a rough jumbled stab at working out what the concentrates for brownie cost and after the most devious possible workings came up with about a tanner a day averaged out through the year…winter and summer. Then there is the hay.

I cut some rough hay with a scythe the first year in my field. That lasted me until Christmas and then I had to buy hay. The second year I cut half the field with Michael's tractor and that lasted me all that winter and half of next. This year I have had to buy all my hay…and I am feeding hay now even though it is high summer. This is because of the terrible drought last year (1959), the partial drought in the early part of this year (we have had floods of rain since - but too late), and the fact that I have ploughed half of my grass field up. I suppose that this year, for the cow and the pony I shall have spent by the time the winter is over some forty pounds on hay. But it is most unlikely that such a thing will ever happen again. Nothing but a malign miracle can make us ever have to buy hay again. Roots - we have always managed to grow nearly enough…either kale or fodder beet…to feed the cow. But up to this year - not quite. This year I think we will have enough, as we have a fine piece of fodder beet on The Hill.

So all in all, our milk has certainly not been free. I would put the cost of cow food, to date, at about twenty-five to thirty pounds a year. But this must be considered - it will get less year by year until we may get it down to very near nothing. There is no reason at all why one should not feed a cow - ay, and two cows - and a horse, off five acres of land, entirely, and keep up a good milk production. But first the land must be built up to a high state of fertility - and in doing that the cow plays the most important part.

Now what do we get from the cow? When she first calves…and if it is summer and the grass is green…she gives nearly 4 gallons of milk a day. She goes down towards the end of her lactation to perhaps 1½ gallons a day. For most of the time she is giving us from 2 to 3 gallons a day. Now no family of our size can drink 2½ gallons of milk a day. After all - that is 20 pints. So there are various other things that we do with it. We make all our own butter and most of our own cheese. Further - every living thing on the place except the horse benefits from Brownie's milk.

Our pigs thrive in a manner remarkable to our scientific-farmer neighbours. Our young birds thrive and grow into healthy stock by virtue of their share of whatever butter-milk, cheese-whey, milk that has been left about too long and gone bad, cream that has been forgotten and gone mouldy. Our cat and our dog benefit. And the humans benefit by having unlimited, good, untampered with, unpasteurized, unprocessed and unbuggared-about-with milk.

Before we had a cow our milk bill came to two pounds a week, and butter and cheese cost another ten shilling. This comes to £120 a year. So whatever the calculating book-keepers and the costive cost-accountants say and they say a lot (the farming press nowadays runs an unending holy crusade to persuade people against being self-supporting - they want to turn every farmer into a money-grubber pure and simple), we make a profit of at least £90 a year. The fact that we don't actually see the money makes no difference…we are spared having to spend it.

What else does Brownie give us? Well for one thing at least a calf a year. Now we know that non-pedigree Jersey calves are not very valuable. But here is our balance sheet. We have paid out £107 10s. for cattle. We have been paid £149 4s for cattle that we have sold. Thus we have made a profit of £41 14s on the buying and selling of cattle (and rearing of calves). Added to this we still have Brownie and she is at present giving us nearly 4 gallons a day. Her last calf born a fortnight ago just before Sally's latest baby proved alas a bad-doer and I knocked her on the head and her skin is drying for a floor mat and her meat is down in pickle in a large crock for feeding the pigs and fowls. Waste not, want not!

The size of the above sums is due to the fact that we bought another cow. One cow will not give you milk consistently all the year…year after year…so you need two. We sold her again though, being in need at the time both of grass and cash. And once, when we didn't have any pigs, we bought a beef calf, reared him, and sold him at a negligible profit. A poor deal by any standard...and another lesson not to try to swim in the commercial sea.

In the view of some cultural ecologists the Hindu institution of the Sacred Cow is both ecologically and economically functional. Cows provide milk and manure…for bricks and fertiliser…and give birth to bullocks. But the thing to do when you want to get a cow is just go and get a cow. Do not start taking the measure of your ignorance. The cow will dispel your ignorance better than three years at an agricultural college. The cow is a better teacher than any book. Just get the cow. Thus spake John Seymour. Localization with Self-Sufficiency is more threatening to the Anarchy of Corporate Power…with its mindless pursuit of bigger and bigger profits…than any Anti-Capitalist Protests.

In fact the best Public Policy for the Coming Bad Times will be for the Lord Lieutenants to issue Five Acres and a Cow to every young man in the county. If the Queen can send telegrams when we reach our 100th birthday then her son can make sure that Cows and Land Deeds are handed out to every able-bodied male in his kingdom on their 18th birthday. ‘All power to the parish!’ is the fastest way to ensure that all wealth stays in the county!'

It is difficult buying a cow if you know nothing about it and don't want to be robbed. The Seymours kept blundering about trying to buy a cow but eventually they bought Brownie. Let John take up the tale. We went and looked at a herd of pedigree Jerseys and were offered one…a cull…at just the hundred and twenty guineas. You can buy an awful lot of milk for a hundred and twenty guineas. And you can pay an awful lot out in vet’s bills on a pedigree Jersey or a pedigree any other breed. We did have enough sense - or instinct - to steer us away from over-bred stock.

Eventually we saw an ad in our local rag for a Jersey House-Cow. We went and saw her. She belonged to a small-holder, an oldish man, hard and tough and honest like so many small-holders, who had reared up a heifer calf from this cow and had decided to get rid of the old girl while the going was good. Brownie was darkish brown…too dark for a Jersey…skinny and bony and swag-bellied, a bit shy in the forequarters, not too heavily bagged, a sweet silly frightened old thing, and we bought her for thirty-five quid. She was delivered in a cattle float. And there we were.

It is something suddenly to be landed with a cow. Brownie had just calved, but the vendor was keeping the calf. So there she was with a bagful of milk. We had cleaned and whitewashed out the cowshed…the middle of the two compartments of the weather-boarding shed. We led her in there and I tried to milk her. I had milked cows as a child, but not since. It came back…slowly. But milking a cow…particularly one like Brownie who is hard to milk…Jerseys are apt to be a bit slow on the titty…is a difficult job. I have taught several people to milk since and I have found that there is only one real teacher for difficult things…necessity. I milked Brownie because I had to milk her.

I believe there is no other way to learn to milk a cow. You have to sit there…until it is hard to keep the sweat of your brow from dripping into the pail…and the cow finishes the bit of grub you gave her long before to keep her quiet, and gets restive, and flicks you in the face (hard) with her hard old tail, and jigs about, and kicks the bucket, and you fumble away, and your wrists and forearms get paralytic, and only one thing keeps you at it…the knowledge that the cow has got to be milked to the last drop in each quarter and that she has got to be milked by you. It's no use calling on the Lord God. He won't come down and help you. You are alone…with a cow.

But when you learn to milk comfortably, which you do in about a week, it becomes a pleasant job. I look forward now to the morning and evening milking. There seems to me to be a friendliness between the cow and me, I put my head in her old flank and squirt away, and there is a nice smell, and a nice sound as the jets hiss into the frothing bucket, and I can think, and sum things up, and wonder what I am going to have for supper. In the winter it is dark and cold outside, but warm in Y Beudy…the cow shed…and the hurricane lantern throws fine shadows about the building. The whole job takes perhaps ten minutes - night and morning.

The economics of this are terribly obscure and I would defy all the accountants in the world to work them out. An accountant would say that Labour was the chief item. But how can you assess the cost of labour that you enjoy doing? That is where all accountancy falls down flat on its face. An accountant will say that a man's labour costs are say ten shillings an hour…or five shillings an hour. Or what have you. But supposing a man is enjoying what he is doing? Then he will do it for nothing. If I were to work in an advertising agency I would want my labour to be assessed not at ten shillings or a pound an hour, but at a million pounds an hour. But when I am milking Brownie I am not wasting ten minutes of my life. I am enjoying them. And therefore I do not wish to charge my time up for anything.

In fact I should pay Brownie for she gives me Pleasure for she is one of the family. It is surprising what an affection we feel for the old creature. And Fertility…for her dung is the basis of all husbandry and she is the cornerstone of the arch of our economy. Everything we eat is enriched by either her dung or her milk. Our crops flourish because of the priming-pump effect of her manure. Our animals…and she herself…flourish because of the flourishing of the crops. She is the prime-mover of a beneficial circle of health and fertility. I know this sounds like a lot of crankish clap-trap and fiddle-faddle. It is not though. It is true and very easily verifiable.

My mother was not a great lover of animals although she was a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ( RSPB ) and a supporter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ( RSPCA ). It was not until I was in Nairobi in the 1970s that I had an animal in my life…a Rhodesian Ridgeback whose purpose was to keep Black Kenyans away from the house…more guard dog than pet.

However my Swedish wife grew up with cats in the 1950s so when we moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1980 with our two young children cats returned to her life…and entered mine. Female cats take a shine to me…singling me out from the group for their feline affections. But unlike the English Country Set…I have never devoted significant waking hours to the care of dogs and horses…and the destruction of foxes.

I do not dislike animals and have never been instinctively cruel to them like many small boys…preferring to step over small crawly things rather than squish them underfoot. But I have never been one to form deep attachments to my fellow creatures…my vegetarian tendencies being driven by factory farming and health concerns. But I am an astute observer of human nature and notice that others have rather different Animal Lover Credentials to myself.

Over the course of the year Miss Kendall has spent many happy hours tapping away at a keyboard a couple of feet away from me in Rye Library. As her heap of scribblings got bigger and bigger my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her what she was up to. ‘Family History…everything I find out I write up and send to others in the family.’

One thing led to another…as these things do…and I enquired about other things…like the wicker basket attached to her shopping trolley. ‘That,’ I was told in no uncertain terms, ‘is Upsie!’ I peeked inside the wicker basket and…lo and behold…inside was a real live pigeon cocking its head and peering back at me. ‘That,’ I was told disdainfully, ‘is not a pigeon but a collared dove. And It is a He and has a name. Address him as Upsie if you please’.

My mother had a bird table in the back garden and dutifully fed the Robins, House Sparrows and Blue Tits each winter…and shooed away the Pigeons. My reading of Andy Capp had prepared me for the fact that ‘oop-north’ they race pigeons. But the idea of taking dickie birds out for walkies struck me as medieval. King John took hawks out hunting 800 years ago but encountering someone on Lion Street walking the dove was something else.

Mind you Connie would come home from time to time with a Swan or a Heron under her arm…broken wings usually from the power lines on Romney Marsh. Then there was Harry the Pigeon who made a mess of the Cockpit Bunk for a couple of weeks before Connie released him back into the wild…at the second attempt. The first time she let him go downstream and he never made it across to the other bank so she ended up rowing frantically to fetch a very damp pigeon in the dinghy. Pigeons don’t swim. Two days later she walked him to a copse and put him on a branch.

Upsie died four days ago. Miss Kendall came into Rye Library looking rather upset. I offered my condolences and mumbled something about an Ode to Upsie-Daisie. Two days later I got two pages of hand-written details on the Life and Times of Upsie…and a dossier of coloured pictures. Miss Kendall tells me she finds it easy to bond with other species and she is quite certain Upsie was happy being fussed over for their two years together. He loved going out with her to the fields…instead of being indoors…to see other birds and enjoy the fresh air, sunshine, trees and sky.

Upsie was ill and unable to move when Miss Kendall found him in her garden on Udimore Road. He was suffering from a virus that caused him to lose his balance. He struggled to stand up but would eventually topple over onto his back. But he was a brave little fellow and it was not long before he was walking up and down the hall…even flying short distances although his right wing was droopy. Indeed after his first moult it never regained its flight feathers.

Upsie had two years of good health but the virus he had when Miss Kendall found him is one of those that lay dormant…like Malaria in humans…and can flare up at any time. A few weeks ago Upsie started to have neck spasms…a sign that the virus was active once more. The local vet…a young South African woman…was called out and ended Upsie’s suffering with a lethal injection. To Miss Kendall Upsie was Family so she saw nothing in the slightest bit surprising about grieving for a Collared Dove as she might for a son or a sister.

Today was the high spot of my Chorister Christmas with Ryesingers Carol Concert at East Guldeford Church at 2.30 pm followed by a rush across the county to Icklesham Parish Church for their Carol Service at 4 pm. Elspeth and I arrived at Icklesham church door just as the choir were processing past so we sidled into the assembled ranks. For my first two years with Ryesingers Betty Paine sat next to me in the Tenor Row…though she has abandoned us for the altos. After the East Guldeford Concert she told me that she had never heard the men sing better. High praise indeed.

It took me two decades to call myself a Writer and a Journalist. But after two years with Ryesingers I felt ready to call myself a Journeyman Tenor. Now I tell people I am a Writer and a Singer…and don’t get paid for either of them. But I have an extensive musical pedigree that began as a Carol Singer in Eltham Park in the early 1950s. I never got paid then either so nothing changes. We would go round door-to-door in the two weeks before Christmas singing our carols and collecting for Dr Barnardos Children’s Homes. Not a penny went to ourselves. I had a beautiful treble voice back then…as did my young brother Clifford who now sings with a Male Voice Choir in Oldham.

In the 1950s my parents’ next door neighbours at 122 Crookston Road were the Taylors…Catholics who emigrated to London from Liverpool. Noel Taylor played the organ at the Catholic Church in Dunvegan Road at the top of Westmount Road. My mother had a piano at home and played herself. When I was seven my mother arranged for Mr. Taylor to give me piano lessons. I still remember Mr Taylor’s front room and the scales and arpeggios I had to learn. One of my strengths as a Singer is my ability to sight read. Others have expressed envy at my talent but unlike my sense of pitch which I would class as a talent my ability to read music has been learnt…and Mr Taylor started me off.

By the time I was nine I was singing in St Luke’s Church Choir, singing the Treble Solo for Once In Royal David’s City…although Clifford’s rendition for the same choir a few years later was better than mine…and getting paid 2/6 for weddings on Saturdays…the only time in my life I have been paid to sing. Ryesingers get contributions but We Singers are not deemed to be Charitable Objects so the money is given away in its turn to other charities.

Musical Life at my Secondary School was…and is…nothing short of awesome. The Christ’s Hospital School Band is world-famous and once a year the Chapel Choir sings for the school’s benefactors in the City of London. I was a member of the Chapel Choir and the smaller Madrigal Choir throughout my time at CH…first as a Treble, then as an Alto and finally as a Tenor. My finest hour came one Christmas when I was the school’s Top Alto and had the honour of singing with Stuart Holland…the best Tenor Voice I have ever heard. In Who’s Who one year the former Treasury Secretary in the Labour Government…and top aide to Tony Benn…lists Singing in the Bath as his hobby.

CH School Fees were means tested but despite this my schooling costs were still a big burden…on my brothers. Bringing up four boys doesn’t come cheap either now or then. I am conscious of the extent to which I have been privileged…and God willing intend to repay my debts. But money would not stretch to Music Lessons. I was given a scholarship for the piano…and then studied the organ as well. The violin was free as a School Orchestra was getting under way. But by my third year I was starting to make the grade in Rugby and Cricket where I won my School Colours…and was to become Captain and Vice-Captain respectively…and also played Soccer, Hockey, Basketball and Boxing for the school. By the third year something had to give so I dropped the Violin…and never did take up the Clarinet which I could have learnt free as no one had to pay for music lessons for the CH Band.

At university I sang with the Cambridge Gilbert & Sullivan Society which with good republican sensitivities I had joined because they were the only Cambridge Society to welcome Town & Gown as members. I had a one-line solo part in The Gondoliers in 1966 at the Cambridge Arts Theatre and sang in the chorus of Ruddigore in 1967. Since then 35 years have passed without Organised Music in my life until I joined Ryesingers the year after Connie died to give myself a Social Life…and because I was conscious of my long musical heritage and my wasting musical talents.

This is the second extract from The Wealth of Counties. Last Wednesday’s blog dealt with the Male Preserves of Work and Money. Women are more practical and worry about things like Food and Shelter. If anywhere can be self-sufficient in food then its the Garden of England...at least in essential foods. Coffee & tea will always need to be imported. But there are also local substitutes...Silver Birch Wine for Grape Wine; Chamomile Tea for China Tea and so on. Good Food must be a labour of love. So we'll start by appointing a Master Gardener in each of our Parish Regions. There'll be 500 of them. What else will they need? Six Journeymen Gardeners under the direction of each Master Gardener…each with five apprentices a-piece? Good! What is their job exactly?

These Master Gardeners of ours have sworn an oath. Let’s call the Soil Doctors oath the Hebenshausen Oath by analogy with the Hippocratic Oath of the Body Doctors. The charter of their guild requires that they prepare a beautiful garden in their parish. It sets quality and not quantity as the standard. The Journeymen's Guild requires them to be responsible for distributing produce and determining the disposal of surpluses. The Apprentices owe allegiance and obedience to their Master Gardener which means specifically to do his bidding. In practice this will entail providing for the food needs of a particular group of families. So that's sorted out the permanent staff.

But it's not enough hands for our task. What about those 300 000 privileged young people over the age of eleven...the Idle Young? There's no such thing as a free lunch. We'll invent School Enterprises and give them the job of milking cows, bringing in the harvest and making cider. Let's draft in half of them each year. That should do it. And that's a job for the apprentices. Recruit from the Hundred…for there are 100 families in their care…ten persons to help look after the garden of these thirty to fifty families. There, that wasn't hard. We've got ourselves a Food Workforce. Here they are rearing to go. All they want to know is how much they're going to get paid. Well let's work it out.

A Good Day's Pay can be related to the cost of a home by assuming that it is reasonable for one day of a good week's pay to go to pay for shelter. £ 2 500 a year for seven years gets a family of three a house. That's £ 48 per week which puts our work in the fields at a basic rate of £ 16 per person per day. For much of the year these Food Workers may only need to work an hour or so a day. So converting this to an hourly wage makes little sense. We take a long view.

If you are doing your job we'll hear about it...just as soon as if you are not doing your job...from those most affected. It's in nobody's interest that people should make work or look busy. This is a most interesting thing. Right at the very heart of our system of Just Wages the fixed hourly wage with its clocking on is condemned as contra natura and the parable of the vineyard in the Christian New Testament is seen to be the sensible way to relate work to pay.

Will you work for that? The Ayes have it so apprentices are on £ 80 a week. We'll give them four weeks unpaid leave and a Christmas Bonus to bring their salary to £ 4 000. No reason not to put the youngsters on the same pay scale. Jesus of Nazareth was a first rate political economist as Bernard Shaw pointed out and this is what he would have done. We only need them for a few months of the year so we'll budget £1 000 a year each. Some related graduated salary scales for our Journeymen and Master Gardeners and there you have it…and here is the annual wage bill.

500 Master Gardeners at £20 000, 3000 Journeymen at £10 000, 15000 Apprentices at £4 000 and 150 000 Self-Helpers at £1000. An annual Food Wage Bill of a quarter of a million pounds to feed a million and a half people. That's £500 per household per year...plus some help bringing in the harvest. There will be overheads...but fertilisers and pesticides will not be among them. Equipment, barns, sheds, so perhaps the final price will be 50% more. Does the number of people make sense? We are putting 300 youngsters between 11 and 25 under the wing of 30 apprentice gardeners in each parish producing food for 3000 people. That's 337 people out of 3000 or 11% involved in food production. Or if you make allowance for the fact that the youngsters are only involved for a quarter of the year then the percentage drops to below 4% of the parish or 12% of the current working population.

Half of England's food needs are currently produced with 6% of the working population so without regard for land, we are at least putting in sufficient people to feed Kent even with efficiencies of one half of conventional agriculture. But in fact Horticulture is reckoned to be about five times as efficient as Agriculture in terms of Production per Acre so in practice this workforce probably has the potential to produce substantial surpluses of staples as well as an abundance of more exotic vegetables...particularly as we get clever with the use of greenhouses.

And so to Animal Husbandry. Fifty years ago John Seymour bought a Jersey House Cow. This one act forced the Seymours a long way along the road to Self-Sufficiency and a Peasant Economy because having bought a cow you soon find there are a lot of other things to do. The Seymour Family could not consume four gallons of milk a day and had not learnt to turn surplus milk into cheese. So they had to get some other animals to feed it to. They could scarcely feed it back to the cow…for that would somehow be unseemly…so they had to buy pigs. And what was to be done with all that dung? The Seymours extended their gardening and farming activities to make good use of it.