The Order's main practical aim was to create an outdoor movement that would allow boys, girls, men and women to work and learn together.
In the early 1930s, the Order launched Grith Fyrd to combat the "three evils of the day: monstrous labour, with its occasional relief by quick, aimless excitement; the state of passivity and absorption; the loss of the incentive of self-expression and creativeness".
The Grith Fyrd campers - or Pioneers - were a mixture of young unemployed men, who were able to continue to draw benefit, and idealists who mostly came from middle-class backgrounds.
Aldous Huxley wrote in the Sunday Chronicle that the Godshill camp was "almost a replica of an American backwoods settlement of a century ago".
[1] The present-day Grith pioneers provide an environment, through woodland camping and similar means, which gives those people taking part scope for self-realisation and the development of personal and social responsibility, wider educational opportunities, and a sense of responsibility towards the protection of the natural environment.