The language that would save England

The Reverend William Barnes falls squarely into an English tradition of rural clerics with long white beards, eclectic intellectual passions, a powerful social conscience and a slightly mad look in their eye. Born to a family of agricultural labourers in rural Dorset in 1801, over the course of a long and active life Barnes (shown above) was a schoolmaster, parson, husband and father, inventor, illustrator, solicitor’s clerk, contributor to a Royal Commission, and antiquary.

Barring the trips to study divinity in Cambridge, Barnes lived in Dorset and Wiltshire until his death in 1886. He witnessed enormous changes – none of them, in his eyes, good – in the lives of the working people around him. The agricultural “improvements” that had begun in the 1700s caused particular hardship during the long economic depression of the