Next month, the people of Finstock will re-enact a friendly society Club Day from the 1900s, writes CHRIS KOENIG

To those that have shall be given. The saying came true after the dissolution of the monastaries and again when land was redistributed after the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries. On both occasions it was the propertied classes who benefited and the poor who suffered.

In the 16th century the servants and retainers of great monastaries, such as those at Abingdon or at Osney, were simply turned out to roam the roads as vagrants. In the 19th century poor people were forced off the common lands and into the burgeoning industrial cities.

Next month Finstock Local History Group will re-enact a Club Day held in the village in about 1900. The club in question was the Finstock Benefit Society, a friendly society set up to provide mutual help and support to its members.

Such friendly societies flourished during the 1800s when times were hard. Originally, most were based at pubs where locals gathered and could be persuaded to part with hard-earned cash to pay their subscriptions. To this day some pub names, such as the Gardeners' or Builders' Arms, reflect their origins as the headquarters of friendly societies.

In the case of Finstock, the friendly society's registered office was The Plough. On Saturday, May 17, the local history group will re-form the society for just one day and recreate the scene from the photograph (above).

Members of the History Society and the Hook Norton Brass band will fill the places of the original participants standing or sitting in the same positions.

I am told that the group will include 15 men, eight bandsmen, one woman and two girls, one baby and nine boys. It will recreate a day which, for more than 100 years, was a highlight of village life, culminating at the pub with much roistering and smoking of clay pipes.

Oxfordshire was by no means a rich county in 1900 and emigration from villages was commonplace. Indeed many a sad parting of families bidding adieu to children starting their long journey to Canada or Australia must have occurred on the platform of Finstock Halt.

But before the advent of the welfare state the hardships were often made still worse by the attitudes of the landed classes to such organisations as friendly societies, which were seen by some as subversive organisations to be feared almost as much as trade unions.

Gradually many of these societies began to seek extra respectability by aligning themselves with temperence groups - and dissociating themselves from pubs - though they then too often managed to fall foul of the Church of England authorities by managing to get themselves aligned with "low church" dissenters.

Indeed Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism while at Oxford University, is known to have preached in the open air at Finstock. Following the Chartist riots in the 1840s some land at Minster Lovell was allotted to lucky lottery winners.

Many friendly societies flourished by becoming larger organisations such as the Oddfellows, who maintained a hall in nearby Chipping Norton. The advantage of these larger groups was that as people travelled the land in search of work, they could stay at lodgings in far-off places provided by affiliated societies.

In any case, the Finstock society seems to have maintained its links to The Plough, which already existed back in 1722. A traditional Club Day Dinner of mutton, cabbage, potatoes, bread, cheese and beer will be served up at the pub on Club Day 2008 - but be warned: no admittance to anyone not dressed in period costume.