4: A Village of Three Parts

In his Shetland-based fieldwork, Goffman identified communities within communities and this mirrored the situation in Broadlands. A later chapter will discuss individual villager ‘types’ and modern rural dispositions. The task here, however, is to unravel how these spatially ‘zoned’ communities came about. The previous chapter described the catalyst of an economic boom. This foregrounded how and when the village expanded and effectively became partitioned. Future planning needs vis-à-vis desired development are touched upon, providing a sense of the rural lifestyle Broadlands' different villagers imagined and valued.

The popular BBC television series Downton Abbey traced the changing fortunes of one family and its primary estate. Broadlands' Lord of the Manor had a considerably larger estate than that of the fictional Crawleys. It included seats in northern England and Norfolk, representation in both Houses of Parliament. Perhaps due to the diversity of their holdings, they did not have the same totalising presence within the village and estate as the Crawleys. This intense cultural grip is still to be found in Norfolk villages within the centrifugal pull of Sandringham (owned by Her Majesty The Queen) or Holkham (the Earl of Leicester, the Coke family as mentioned earlier) for instance. In that sense, when Broadlands' absentee Lord of the Manor moved on in the early twentieth century, it was neither a cultural nor an economic wrench, as the fortunes of the village were not closely bound to the estate. Rather, their absence had already led to a local elite coming to prominence. These residential, professional and/or landowning classes were then able to consolidate their position through the resulting land acquisitions and opportunities that arose.