UNTIL the 19th century, most of today’s Cumbria was virtually cut off from the rest of England for reasons that geography makes clear. Its central mountain range of Scafell throws up a huge volcanic mass, which has to be circumnavigated, forcing transport to its edges. This is the core of the Lake District, some 30 miles wide, and it excites passion in all those who love it.

Like the millions who live here or visit, I lift my eyes unto the hills and encounter constancy and majesty, a grandeur that lifts me away from the mundane. Yet it took me much of a lifetime fully to realise that this awe-inspiring, contained world is also the scene of an exceptional social history. Essentially shaped by an unusual form of tenancy and by the landscape, this is usually elided into a broader history of Cumbria, where it can get lost.

So, ten years ago, I embarked on a project to unravel the history of an iconic area within it and then, as it were, to restitch its tapestry. I had come to believe that the detail would bring alive the story of the indigenous people of the whole district: the people who became, for William Wordsworth, the paradigm of a life well lived.

And to set their story in its rightful place for the first time since the poet introduced them: in the heart of the Lake District, the poet’s “visionary mountain republic”.

The locus of the story is the 90 square miles of Great Crosthwaite’s Old Parish, its place in the district well captured by Wordsworth himself when he wrote one of the first comprehensive descriptions of the whole area.

Imagining a bird’s-eye view from a point between the tops of Great Gable and Scafell in the central mountain range, and starting from the south-east and the Langdale Valley, he described an incomplete circle of valleys running from it “like spokes from the nave of a wheel”.

Crosthwaite Parish encompassed the eighth and northernmost valley, Borrowdale. By far the largest parish in the heart of the Lake District, Crosthwaite’s old boundary travelled the tops of a magic circle of Lake District mountains: Skiddaw, Helvellyn, and Great Gable.

And it includes the area where every fell-walker feels that they have come home: at the high crossroads of the central mountains, where the wall shelter near Esk Hause provides a natural meeting place for all who are en route east, west, north, or south.

Home also to two lakes, Derwentwater and Thirlmere, and their accompanying valleys, as well as part of Bassenthwaite Lake, Great Crosthwaite and Keswick are found at the northern end of Derwentwater, for Wordsworth “distinguished from all other Lakes by being surrounded with sublimity”.

ATTRACTIVELY asymmetrical, Derwentwater is bordered on its eastern and western sides by mountains and high fells, which can be reflected, along with the sky, in the lake’s often glass-like water: vivid light green or burnished copper-brown, depending on the seasons and the bracken. At the southern end of the lake, Castle Crag, a small, steep, pine-covered Italianate hill, believed to have been the site of an Iron Age fort, hides Borrowdale from the rest of the valley.

Behind Crosthwaite and Keswick is Skiddaw, Coleridge’s “God made manifest”, formed of the most ancient rock in the Lake District: a massive guard against the north wind and an emphatic scenic full stop. When the bright golden light of evening spotlights its top from late summer, the heather adds another colour to the range, a brooding saturated purple combusting with the gold. And, in painting after painting, the brightly whitewashed Crosthwaite church is seen, standing alone at its foot, an essential part of the artist’s composition.

According to tradition, the church’s dramatic placement on a slightly raised site was ordained during a missionary visit from Glasgow’s and Strathclyde’s St Kentigern, in about 553. Crosthwaite (and much of old Cumberland) had been part of the British kingdom of Strathclyde for most of the period between the departure of the Romans in the early fifth century and 1092, by which time Strathclyde had become part of Scotland.

Thus, our parish was not covered by the Domesday Book commissioned by William the Conqueror, and, when his successor, William II, claimed “the land around Carlisle” in 1092, it was, surprisingly, allowed to stay under its Scottish lord. In the 12th century, Alice de Rumelli, Baroness of all Allerdale — a vast territory stretching from the south of Cumbria to the north, and east from the sea to the Helvellyn range — built her only Cumbrian church here.

By far the largest church of its time in the Lake District, it was soon to become the first parish church within “the heart of the fells”. Alice’s church is still called St Kentigern’s today, while Keswick, half a mile away from the church and first mentioned in the context of an 1190s Rumelli seigneurial gift, became the Lake District’s first market town at the end of the 13th century.

BUT the remarkable social history of the parish really emerged only at the end of the 14th century, when the last de Rumelli bequeathed her ancient land to the Percys from Northumberland; for, from then on, all the parish business was to be administered, right up to the second half of the 19th century, by tenants who became known as “customary”.

These tenants had an exceptional advantage and, from the early 17th century onwards, a virtually unique one. Despite their many burdens of feudal obligation, for most of their time their land passed on to their heirs, only reverting to “the lord” if they did not have a direct heir, had not paid their dues, or had carried out a criminal act.

This gave them a sense of future possibility, and a quite different level of connection to their land than people elsewhere in Britain. In time, they had been able also to sell or lease their holdings. Eighteen customary tenants were chosen annually at St Kentigern’s for the particular form of governance in the parish: the “rule of select vestry”.

In place before 1400, from the beginning the vestry oversaw a school and was entirely responsible for the appointment and regulation of the schoolmasters, and administering the money and land that had been given to endow it.

By Elizabethan times, vestry governance was publicly recognised for the first time in legal statutes, and the Eighteen Men began to officially oversee taxation, maintenance of the poor, education, and infrastructure. From then on, the whole of rural England was governed by “the parish” until Victorian times, when parishes progressively lost their powers as the state began to intervene. This process has seldom been traced right through in a single parish.

The Eighteen Men were strongly connected to the juries of the manor courts, always came from the same class, and often included members of the same families. Their history covers the period when Wordsworth would describe the Lake District as a “pure commonwealth”. And the unique freedom enjoyed by the upland customary tenants was underlined in the 17th century, when local political life in the rest of the country was being transformed by the much debated rise of the gentry.

Largely owing to the arcane effects of old forest laws, Crosthwaite Parish did not follow suit. From 1571 (when the Elizabethan religious settlement was finalised) to 1834 (when the state started to move responsibility for provision for the parish poor to Cockermouth), the hill farmers “were practically their own masters. They were forced to be careful, but they had no one to cringe to.”

THESE were the glory days of the hill-farming community and the customary tenant. They gave both the parish and the Lake District their particular character. Wordsworth was to become their poet and used the inclusive word “estatesman” to cover everyone, wealthy yeoman and poor subsistence farmer alike, who worked his own land and could pass both it and its stock on to his children.

He believed that the statesmen’s lives — lived entirely in response to the natural world and the needs of family, community, and flock — best represented human nature, and wrought parables for mankind from their stories.

The publication of Thomas Gray’s journal of his visit to the Lake District in 1769 had introduced, probably for the first time, the two words that are used to identify the region today, and by Wordsworth’s time picturesque tourism had already become established. By the 1790s, the Lakes had become the principal English destination, with Crosthwaite Parish — Derwentwater, Borrowdale, Keswick — its focal centre, until the railways brought tourists to the south Lakes in 1847.

Once Wordsworth had immortalised the recently conceived “English Lakes”, intertwining its landscape with the romantic imagination for ever — and indeed largely creating that imagination — the area became clearly recognised as a peopled landscape, and the course was set more widely for the transformation of what had been the largest isolated area of England into one of its most visited.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey both lived in Great Crosthwaite Parish; Wordsworth first gained his right to vote by owning a patch of land within it; and all three poets tramped to see each other “ower t’raise” to Grasmere, often meeting in Thirlmere Valley.

At the heart of the Lake Poets’ landscape, along with Grasmere and Rydal — key locations in the great change of Lake District — Crosthwaite Parish can also be read as a paradigm for Wordsworth’s “perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists”.

This is an edited extract from Mountain Republic: A Lake District parish — Eighteen men, the Lake Poets and the National Trust by Philippa Harrison, published by Apollo at £35 (Church Times Bookshop £31.50); 978-1-83893-182-7. 

Read a review of the book here.