Early yesterday morning Otis Ferry, ringleader of the House of Commons invaders, saddled up and prepared to do his job, which meant some killing. The huntsman who led a raid last week into the heart of parliamentary democracy remained utterly defiant.

MPs had voted to ban hunting but Ferry, son of the rock star Bryan Ferry, still had a point to make: he would continue to hunt come what may.

As is customary at the start of a new hunting season, Ferry and the South Shropshire hunt, where he is joint master, were in pursuit of fox cubs. The aim was to track down young foxes whose numbers shoot up after the breeding season and send in the hounds. It can be a bloody business and it is a pursuit that is alien to most urban dwellers. But to rural campaigners it is a necessary task and a traditional freedom — and one that they will not give up without a fight.

“I signed a declaration that I was prepared to go to prison for hunting,” Ferry said. “I am going to stand by my word. This isn’t just about foxhunting, it’s about the government’s attitude to the countryside, the country people and minorities.”

His mother Lucy agrees. “I would not harm or hurt anyone, but I would go to jail. So would hundreds of other people prepared to cause disturbances. It’s bad luck on the public, but it’s the only way of making Tony Blair realise how badly he has miscalculated,” she said.

That the countryside is angry there can be no doubt. As last week’s violent disorder in London illustrated, the prime minister appears — just eight months ahead of an election — to have plunged England into a new form of class war.

It is a conflict which has echoes of the Thatcher government’s brutal battle with the miners and the poll tax protesters. But today it is not unionists, students or anarchists who are thumping policemen and hurling sticks. The protesters come from what remains of Old England and are out in force. Their anger is fuelled not just by the proposed hunting ban but also by a raft of festering rural resentments ranging from petrol prices to farm regulations, school closures and council tax.

The Countryside Alliance, the tent under which most of the protesters have gathered, says rural life is being irrevocably changed and it has pledged to fight. And in this it is promising more — much more — direct action to come.

Yesterday its supporters forced Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, to cancel a visit to the Peak District in which he was to lead a group of ramblers in a hike to celebrate the introduction today of the right to roam.

Others are promising more radical action. There is talk of landowners denying the armed forces access to their firing ranges and a blockade of London is mooted. Already there have been attempts at bringing down power lines in Cumbria and more extreme campaigners talk of poisoning reservoirs and disrupting food supplies.

On Friday Edward Duke, leader of the Real Countryside Alliance, said attacks on water supplies, railways and power lines could be “legitimate”, although he admitted that they might prove “counter- productive”. He said he would prefer to target Labour ministers and MPs directly.

How did such a normally polite and conservative slice of England come to behave like this? When MPs casually voted for a ban on hunting with dogs last week, did it mark a defining moment in the power struggle between the rural classes who once ruled parliament and the urban masses whose representatives now dominate? Are the townies now in control or will the shire folk fight back successfully?

TO understand better what is happening in Britain’s countryside, take a look at the village of Nunney in Somerset. Dominated by the turrets of Nunney Castle, the village lies on the edge of the Mendip Hills and retains the image of a rural idyll.

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