© MASTERPICS / ALAMY
There is a wonderful picture by the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka entitled Pilgrimage. It shows three men kneeling among clouds and rocks, leaning on rough walking sticks, on the bleak summit of Ireland’s holy mountain Croagh Patrick. The men are unsmiling, eyes fixed beyond the frame, but the picture is full of intensity, urgency; its composition has clear echoes of the three crosses that stood on Golgotha. Pilgrims to Croagh Patrick ascended (and sometimes still do ascend) the mountain on their knees, an act of penance but also of hope. Koudelka took the photograph in 1972, but it depicts a world that would have been instantly recognisable to someone a century earlier. And now that world seems to have vanished quite suddenly. Who are these men in their threadbare suits, on their knees on the stony earth, in a gesture of supplication both vigorous and gentle?
Koudelka’s image begins the social historian Patrick Joyce’s fascinating, elegiac study of what used to be called “peasantry”, the class of people who, for millennia, underpinned and defined working rural life in Europe. It is a reflective history, concentrating on Ireland, Poland and Italy, threaded through with personal recollection: for the man on the left of the photograph is the author’s cousin Sean Joyce (Seán Seoighe), a bachelor farmer from the borderlands of Mayo and Galway. Patrick Joyce, who has spent his own working life as a distinguished academic, comes from Irish peasant stock on both sides of his family. At 78, he is among the last generation to have experienced first-hand the nature of European peasant life before what he calls “the vanishing”. He refers to this book as a “homage to my own.”