Few things have changed so radically in Britain over the past couple of centuries as our attitude towards the natural world. What once we would have shunned or shot, now we embrace with a passion, whether it’s a cute new arrival at the zoo or the endangered green belt.
That shift in sensibility is generally accredited to the Romantics of the early 19th century, who were the first to see the natural world as threatened by man, and not simply there for his benefit. Prior to that, examples of writers standing up for our furry and feathered friends are few and far between.
Let’s salute Richard Jago of Warwickshire, then. In 1753 a little poem by Jago appeared in a journal called The Adventurer, edited by (and mostly written by) John Hawkesworth. “An Elegy on a Blackbird Shot on St Valentine’s Day” is its unappealing title. In Jago’s verses, no sooner has the bird in question sung its way into some lady blackbird’s heart than it is taken out by a man with a gun.
When O! with grief my muse relates,
What dire misfortune closed the tale;
Sent by an order from the Fates,
A gunner met them in the vale.
Richard Jago was the rector of Harbury in Warwickshire at that time, and doubtless many of his parishioners were fully armed and perfectly prepared to put paid to wildlife. Indeed, one of Jago’s closest confidants – geographically as well as socially – was William Somerville of Edstone Hall, author of The Chace, the classic account of fox-hunting.
It’s quite possible that the Hanbury rector had never intended to ruffle feathers. Jago seemed to have circulated a manuscript of blackbirds among his friends, who thereupon circulated it to others. Only when the manager of a theatre in Bath passed off the poem as his own, did Jago come out of the woodwork and claim authorship. And with that Mr Jago had his small, but honoured, place in the history of animal rights.
And since no poet had paid much attention to the birds for centuries, he has his place in the history of English literature too.
There’s no doubt about the poem’s subsequent popularity, despite its unconventional theme. It’s said that the organist of Worcester Cathedral set it to music. And having come up with a winning formula, Jago was not about to abandon it, and he addressed further verses to swallows and goldfinches. Doubtless they sung back to him in return.
If Blackbirds was Jago’s greatest hit, it was not his most extended composition. That prize, if prize it be, goes to “Edge-Hill or the rural prospect delineated and moralized”, further proof that Jago lacked a snappy headline writer. Published in 1767, Edge-Hill is an account of the famous Civil War battle in four exhausting books, with plenty of long diversions, as Jago’s magpie mind goes meandering across Warwickshire.
Included along the way (the Fosse Way, in fact), is a nod to Solihull, at whose ancient school Jago was educated.
Hail, Solihull! respectful I salute,
Thy walls; more awful once! when from the sweets
Of festive freedom, and domestic ease,
With throbbing heart, to stern discipline
Of pedagogue morose I had return’d
But tho’ no more his brow severe, nor dread
Of birchen sceptre awes my riper age…
The “morose pedagogue” in question was John Crompton, master of Solihull School, who evidently exercised his arm as much as his voice. I’ll leave you to decide whether the walls of Solihull are still awful.
But a Solihull education did not do Richard Jago any long-term damage, since it won him a place at University College, Oxford in 1732. And here the future bard of the birds found that there was a pecking order amongst humans too. Despite being the son of the rector of Beaudesert (the parish next to Henley-in-Arden), Jago entered the college as a poor scholar, or, in the parlance of the time, a “servitor”.
A servitor received free tuition and accommodation, in return for which he was expected to wait upon the college fellows. On top of that, the company of servitors was shunned by Oxford’s more well-healed undergraduates, who were not expected to have anything to do with them.
To be fair to Jago’s student chums (who included the fellow poet, William Shenstone), they turned a blind eye to university etiquette too.
Emerging triumphantly with an MA, Richard Jago followed his father’s footsteps into the Church, being ordained to the curacy of Snitterfield in Warwickshire. In 1746 he was appointed by Lord Willoughby de Broke to the small living of Harbury and Chesterton in the same county, bringing him about £100 a year. Later, with seven children to feed, Jago welcomed the opportunity to add Snitterfield to his growing portfolio, as well as Kimcote in Leicestershire.
Nevertheless, the poet continued to wile away most of his time at Snitterfield, listening to the birds and ornamenting the vicarage grounds. His wealthier friends – like William Shenstone and Lord Lyttelton – had whole estates to transform; Jago had to make do with his back garden.
It was at Snitterfield that Richard died in May 1781, and was interred in the family vault under the church. There’s an epitaph on the grave, though a better one was penned by Jago’s friend and fellow poet, John Scott Hylton. “He was the affectionate husband”, said Hylton, “the tender parent, the kind master, the hospitable neighbour, and sincere friend.”
And, we should add, a friend of the birds.
