Archaeological retrospect 5

Extract

It has long been a source of pleasure to us both that the author of the first of these Archaeological Retrospects, Charles Phillips, should share with me independent boyhood contacts with the Vale of White Horse, then in Berkshire but since 1974 in Oxfordshire (Phillips, 1980). Piggotts had been around in Marcham, Hatford and West Challow since the early seventeenth century, and the families died out or slipped quietly downhill to the status of farm labourers or at best small peasant farmers. My great-grandfather was one of these, in Uffington beneath the famous hill-figure, and my grandfather at the age of 10 was taken up to the last of the traditional festive 'scourings' in 1857 by Thomas Hughes of Kingston Lisle, best known as the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, who wrote up the event as The Scouring of the White Horse (1859). Among the festivities were wrestling and back-sword play: these sports 'were kept up there perhaps as long as in any portion of Middle England' wrote the son of a rector of Childrey, a village a few miles from Uffington, who came there in 1882. 'The Childrey schoolmaster', he goes on, 'when he was a boy at Uffington, could throw all his schoolfellows' (Cornish, 1939, 80). The schoolmaster was my grandfather, and my father was born in the village in 1874.