VIII. COUNTRY EXCITEMENTS
Before closing this department of my work, I must just glance at a few occurrences which serve to give an occasional variety to rural life, and may be classed under the head of Country Excitements. These are races, race-balls, county-balls, concerts, musical festivals, elections, assizes, and confirmations. It will not be requisite to do more than merely mention the greater part of these, for, to describe at length the race-ball and county-balls, the winter concerts of the county town and the musical festivals, would require a separate volume, and they indeed, after all, belong more to the town than to the country. Having, therefore, simply pointed them out as sources of occasional variety to wealthy families during their stay in the country, I shall confine myself in these concluding remarks, to those few particulars which belong more entirely to my subject. Balls and musical exhibitions are sufficiently alike everywhere, to need no distinct details here. It is enough that they serve to break the rural torpor of those who regard existence as only genuine during the London season. The application of the profits both of these balls, and of the musical festivals that have of late years been held in different places, to the support of infirmaries, and to other public objects of benevolence, deserves the highest commendation. Thus dismissing these amusements, neither I nor my readers, I am sure, would wish to have the uproar and exasperation of the county election introduced into this peaceful volume; enough that when it does come to the country Hall, it comes, often as a hurricane, and frequently shakes it to the foundation, leaving in its track debts and mortgages, shyness between neighbours, and rancour amongst old friends.
It would not be giving a faithful view of country life, however, were we to keep out of sight all agitating causes, and all existing drawbacks to the felicity for which such ample materials exist in it. Surveying those splendid materials, as displayed in the preceding chapters,--those abundant means and opportunities, which the wealthy possess for enjoying their lives in the country;--it would be giving a most one-sided view of the rural life of the rich, if we left it to be inferred that “the trail of the serpent” was not to be perceived at times on the fair lawns, and up the marble steps of rural palaces; that the great “Bubbly-Jock,” (Turkey-Cock) which Scott contended that every man found in his path did not shew himself there. The Serpent and the Bubbly-Jock which disturb and poison the rural life of the educated classes in England, are the very same which dash with bitter all English society in the same classes. They are the pride of life, and the pride of the eye. They are that continual struggle for precedence, and those jealousies which are generated by a false social system. Every man lives now-a-day for public observation. He builds his house, and organizes his establishment, so as to strike public opinion as much as possible. Every man is at strife with his neighbour in the matter of worldly greatness. The consequence is, that a false standard of estimation, both of men and things, is established--shew is substituted for real happiness; and no man is valued for his moral or intellectual qualities, so much as for the grandeur of his house, the style of his equipage, the richness of his dinner service, and the heavy extravagance of his dinners. The result of this is, that most are living to the full extent of their means, many beyond it, and few are finding, in the whole round of their life, that alone, which better and higher natures seek--the interchange of heart and mind, which yields present delight, creates permanent attachments, and fills the memory with enduring satisfaction.
This, it must be confessed, is a wretched state of things; but it is one which every person conversant with society knows to exist, and which intelligent foreigners witness with unfeigned surprise. The worst of it is that this unnatural system of life becomes the most sensibly felt in the country. In large towns every man finds a sufficient circle after his own taste: there the petty influences of locality are broken up by the multitude of objects, and the ample choice in association. But in small towns, and country neighbourhoods, where wealthy or educated families are thinly scattered, nothing can be more lamentable, and, were it not lamentable, nothing could be more ludicrous, than the state of rivalry, heart-burning, jealousy, personal mortification, or personal pride, from mere accidents of condition or favour. The titled have a fixed rank, and are comparatively at their ease, but in the great mass of those who have wealth, more or less, without title, what a mighty and eating sore is the struggle for distinction. In the little town, or thinly-scattered neighbourhood, every one is measuring out his imaginary dignity to see if it does not exceed, at least by some inches, that of one or other of his neighbours. The lower you descend in the scale, the more exacting becomes the spirit of exclusiveness. The professions look down upon the trades; the trades on one another. Everywhere the same uneasy spirit shews itself. Nothing can be more ludicrous, or amusing to the philosophic spectator, than to observe how leadership is assumed in every country neighbourhood by certain wealthy families; how carefully that leadership is avoided and opposed by other families. How the majority of families aspire to move in one or the other circle; what wretched and anomalous animals those feel themselves that are not recognised by either. How the man who drives his close carriage looks down upon him who only drives his barouche or phaeton; how both contemn the poor occupier of a gig. I have heard of a gentleman of large fortune who, for some years after his residence in a particular neighbourhood, did not set up his close carriage, but afterwards feeling it more agreeable to do so, was astonished to find himself called upon by a host of carriage-keeping people, who did not seem previously aware of his existence; and rightly deeming the calls to be made upon his carriage, rather than himself, sent round his empty carriage to deliver cards in return. It was a biting satire on a melancholy condition of society, the full force of which can only be perceived by such as have heard the continual exultations of those who have dined with such a great person on such a day, and the equally eager complaints of others, of the pride and exclusiveness they meet with; who have listened to the long catalogue of slights, dead cuts, and offences, and witnessed the perpetual heart-burnings incident to such a state of things. These are the follies that press the charm of existence out of the hearts of thousands, and make the country often a purgatory where it might be a paradise.
There is another cause which diminishes in a great degree the enjoyment that might be found in the country, and that is, the almost total cessation of walking amongst the wealthy. Since the universal use of carriages, for anything I can see, thousands of people might just as well be born without legs at all. It would be easy to move them from the bed to the carriage,--thence to the dinner-table, and again to bed. In the country, and especially in the country not far from towns, how rarely do you see the rich except in their luxurious carriages! How rarely do you meet them walking, or even on horseback, as you used to do! Sir Roger de Coverley rode on horseback to the assizes in his day--were he living now, he would roll there in his carriage--lest some one should imagine that he had mortgaged his estate, and laid down his carriage in retrenchment. During the twelve months that I have resided in this neighbourhood--a neighbourhood studded all over with wealthy houses, nothing has surprised me, and the friends who have visited me here, so much as the great rarity of seeing any of the wealthy classes on their legs. With the exception of the Queen and her attendant ladies, who during the then Princess’s abode at Claremont, might be every day met in the winter, walking in frost and snow, and facing the sharpest winds of the sharpest weather, I scarcely remember to have met half-a-dozen of the wealthy classes on foot a mile from their residences. And yet what splendid, airy heaths, what delicious woods, what nooks of bowery foliage, what views into far landscapes, are there all around! It is true, as some of them have observed, that they walk in their own grounds; but what grounds, however beautiful, can compensate for the fresh feeling of the heath and the down; for the dim solemnity of the wild wood; for open, breezy hills, the winding lane, the sight of rustic cottages by the forest side, the tinkle of the herd or the sheep-bell, and all the wild sounds and aspects of earth and heaven, to be met with only in the free regions of nature? They who neglect to walk, or confine their strolls merely to the lawn and the shrubbery, lose nine-tenths of the enjoyment of the country. Those young men, whom it is a pleasure to see with their knapsacks on their backs ranging over moor and mountain, by lake or ocean, in Scotland or Wales, taste more of the life of life in a few summer months than many dwellers in the country ever dream of through their whole existence. I speak advisedly, for I traverse the country in all directions, let me be where I will; and if any ladies think themselves too delicate for walking, I can point them out delicate ladies too that have made excursions on foot through mountain regions of five hundred miles at a time, and recur to those seasons as amongst the most delightful of their lives.
But my desire that all should make their country life as happy as it is capable of being made--which must be by living more to nature and less to fashion--by using both their physical and moral energies; by respecting themselves, and leaving the respect of others to follow as the natural result of a true and pure tone of spirit--is detaining me too long. I must hasten on; and amongst the most prominent of the country excitements, give a passing word to racing. If any one wishes to know how far the turf influences the course of country life, he has only to read the following passage from Nimrod. “Deservedly high as Newmarket stands in the history of the British turf, it is but as a speck on the ocean when compared with the sum total of our provincial meetings, of which there are about one hundred and twenty in England, Scotland, and Wales--several of them twice in the year. Epsom, Ascot, York, Doncaster, and Goodwood, stand first in respect of the value of the prizes, the rank of the company, and the interest attached to them in the sporting world; although several other cities and towns have lately exhibited very tempting bills of fare to owners of good race-horses. In point of antiquity we believe the Roodee of Chester claims pre-eminence of all country race-meetings;--and certainly it has long been in high repute. Falling early in the racing year--always the first Monday in May--it is most numerously attended by the families of the extensive and very aristocratic neighbourhood in which it is placed; and always continues five days.”--The Turf, p. 246.
Every one who has seen the crowds of wealthy people who flock to a celebrated race-meeting, and throng the stand and the carriage stations, with brilliant dresses and gay equipages, may imagine, then, how much excitement is spread through that class of society during their stay in the country; by one hundred and twenty race-meetings in one quarter or other of the island; especially as the greater part of these occur during the months that they are absent from town. So having read the passage quoted from Nimrod, he has only to turn to the volume itself--a volume written with great ability; and, making allowance for the author’s sporting predilections, in an excellent spirit, and he will thus find that course described as such a horrible resort of blacklegs and desperadoes, of traitorous jockeys and poisoning trainers, as makes one at once recoil from the recital, and wonder that our young nobles and gentlemen should commit themselves and their fortunes to such hands; or that the fair and the refined should consent to gaze on such a scene of infamy. Hear Nimrod’s own words--“How many fine domains have been shared amongst these hosts of rapacious sharks, during the last two hundred years! and unless the system be altered--how many more are doomed to fall into the same gulf! For, we lament to say, the evil has increased; all heretofore, indeed, has been ‘tarts and cheesecakes’ to the villanous proceedings of the last twenty years on the English turf.” Let us move on to less repulsive scenes.
Amongst these may be reckoned the periodical arrivals of the bishops and the judges. The arrival of the bishop to perform the ceremony of confirmation, is but a triennial occurrence, but it is one of the most imposing of the rites of the church. The flocking of the clergy and their families to town; the processions of country children on foot, and led by the parish clerk or schoolmaster, or in carts and other rustic vehicles; the gathering of the children of the rich towards the church in their white dresses, and in gay carriages; the assembling of all classes in the common temple of their religion; the solemnity of the address and the imposition of hands by the prelate; the stately music of the organ, and the silent looking on of the congregated people--all combine to produce a very striking spectacle--a spectacle which to those who believe in its essentiality and efficacy, has something in it touching and beautiful.
But perhaps the parade of the assize time, is the most picturesque of this class of occurrences. There is more of the old English ceremony, custom, and costume about it. The judges who go through the land as the representatives of majesty, certainly go through it en prince. Nothing can be more unlike than their progress to, and their state in, the courts in town, and the same things in their provincial tour of justice. In town you may see the Lord Chief Justice mount his horse at his own door, and ride quietly away towards Westminster Hall. You may see Lord Abinger in the Court of Exchequer, sitting very much at his ease in his black gown and wig of modest dimensions, dispatching business in a work-a-day manner; but in the country you find these very men arrayed in their scarlet and ermine, seated in much greater state, and dispensing justice in a much fuller court than, except on extraordinary occasions, attends them in town.
The high-sheriff of every county, selected from its best families, in preparation for the arrival of the county judge, has put his equipage and train in order. His carriage, his horses, his harness, all have undergone a rigid examination, and are all put into the highest condition that paint, gilding, varnish, lining, and plate, can bestow; or if he be a young man of some spirit and ambition, he has purchased a new carriage for the occasion. His tenants and household servants, to the number of forty or fifty, have been put into a new livery in the cut of the old yeomen, and generally of some bright or peculiar colour, green, blue, white, or delicate drab, as indeed the livery of the gentlemen may be. Mounted on their horses, and with their javelins or halberds, and preceded by two trumpeters, who, old Aubrey can tell you, are a very ancient essential on such occasions, they escort the sheriff on his way to meet the judges. The sheriff who has thus showily appointed what are provincially termed his javelin-men, has not in the meantime neglected himself. He has put on at least a court dress, and in cases where he has happened to be a man of taste, and a man of figure to boot, he has put on a rich suit of the fashion of Sir Charles Grandison, or of some one of his ancestors, as he stands in full-length portraiture in his family gallery. He issues from his hall, arrayed perhaps in a rich mulberry coloured coat with huge embroidered cuffs and button-holes, huge gold buttons, and lining of primrose serge; a splendid waistcoat of gold brocaded satin, with ample pockets and flaps reaching half-way to his knees; satin breeches, and silk stockings with immense clocks; large gold buckles at his knees and upon his shoes. Add to this his sword, his cocked hat, and his cravat and ruffles of fine point lace, and you have the high-sheriff in all his glory, just as we saw him in one of our county assize courts not many years ago, sitting on the right hand of the judge; and it must be confessed in admirable keeping with his old-world robes of scarlet and ermine. Well, he enters the county town with his troop of javelin-men, his trumpeters blowing stoutly before him. He takes up his lodgings there, and on the morning of the judge’s approach, he marches out in the same style, followed by a long train of the gentlemen and tradesmen of the place, who are anxious to testify their respect to the ancient forms of justice, and the representative of the monarch. He advances some mile or two on the way by which the judge is to arrive. There the procession halts, generally in a position which commands a view of the road by which the judge is expected. Anon, there is a stir, a looking out amongst them, your eye follows theirs, and you see a carriage, dusty and travel-soiled, come driving rapidly on. It is that of the judge. As they drive up, the javelin-men and gentlemen uncover; the sheriff descends from his carriage; his gowned and bewigged lordship descends from his; the sheriff makes his bow and his compliments; the judge enters the carriage of the sheriff with him, his own carriage falls into the rear, and the procession now moves on towards the town, with bannered trumpets blowing, and amid a continually increasing crowd of spectators. There is something very quaint and old English in the whole affair; and as I have seen the sheriff and his train thus, waiting the approach of the judge on some rising ground in the public road, the scene has brought back to my imagination a feeling of the past times--simpler in heart than the present, but more formal in manner, and perhaps fonder of solemn parade. But the bells are ringing merrily to welcome the learned judge, and thousands are thronging to see the sight of the sheriff and his men, and to catch a glimpse of the judge’s wig as the coach passes, and many of them to wonder how the sheriff can seem so much at his ease with such an awful man: while within the strong walls of the prison, the sounds of bells and the trampling feet of the crowds without, are causing stout hearts and miserable hearts to tremble and feel chill.
Well, the procession and the throng “go sounding through the town,” and the court being opened in due form, they arrive at the judge’s lodgings, whence, after a suitable time allowed for the judge’s refreshment, they proceed to church. Whatever may be the effect of this custom of the judge’s going to church before proceeding to discharge his awful duties of deciding upon the destinies of his fellow men, it is a beautiful one, and bespeaks in those who instituted it, a just sense of the value of human life, and of the true source whence all right judgment must proceed. It was well, and more than well, that the judge should be sent to hear from the Christian minister, that the temper in which a judge should sit to decide the fate of his fellow mortals, should be that of the Christian--the divine union of justice and mercy. It was well that he should be reminded that every act of his judgment in the court about to open, must one day be rejudged, in a court and before a judge, from which there can be no appeal.
As they move on towards the great mother-church, thousands on thousands throng to gaze. Every window presents its quota of protruded heads; every flight of steps before the doors of houses, and every other elevated spot, is occupied. Boys are hanging by lamp-posts, and on iron palisades, like bats. The procession used to be much enlivened by the presence of the mayor and corporation in their robes, and with the mace borne before them; but the New Corporation Act has led to a woful stripping of this pageant. The sheriff selects the clergyman to preach on the occasion, who is generally some young friend or relative whom he wishes to bring into notice. This ceremony being over, the judge returns to the court; the grand jury, selected from the gentlemen of the county, present their bills, and the trials proceed. In the sheriff’s gallery may be seen some of his friends, perhaps the ladies of his family and other acquaintances, with others, all introduced by ticket; on the bench by the judge, may often be seen seated with the sheriff, some great man or lady of the neighbourhood, especially if some trial in which one of their own body, some disputed will which involves a large property, or similar cause of interest, draws them from their homes, and fills the court to suffocation. While the court continues, day by day you see the train of javelin-men come marching on foot with the state carriage of the sheriff, to conduct him from his lodgings to those of the judge, and back again at the close of the court in the evening, till the trials are ended; and judge, sheriff, gay carriage, with its splendid hammer-cloth, jolly coachman, and slim footmen, in their cocked hats and flaxen wigs, javelin-men, and crowd, all meet and vanish away, and the excitement of the assize is over for another half-year.
Such are the principal country excitements; and to these may be added those of another class, which have sprung up of late years, and have done much good--the floral and horticultural shews. These have been warmly patronized by the aristocracy; and it forms a striking feature in modern country life, to see carriages and pedestrians hastening, on certain days to certain places, where different flowers and fruits, in their respective seasons, are displayed with great taste, and with brilliant effect. The place of meeting is sometimes at a country inn, where, on the bowling-green, tents are pitched, in which the flowers or fruits are exhibited, and the whole scene is extremely gay. Such a one I saw at Kingston Hill, near Richmond Park--a Dahlia shew: on the end of the house an invitation to all England being gorgeously emblazoned in dahlia-flowers, surmounted by the crown royal, and the good English initials Q. V.; looking as though the worthy horticulturists meant to set the rational example of using the English language to the English people.
I. THE ENGLISH FARMER
There are few things which give one such a feeling of the prosperity of the country, as seeing the country people pour into a large town on market-day. There they come, streaming along all the roads that lead to it from the wide country round. The footpaths are filled with a hardy and homely succession of pedestrians, men and women, with their baskets on their arms, containing their butter, eggs, apples, mushrooms, walnuts, nuts, elderberries, blackberries, bundles of herbs, young pigeons, fowls, or whatever happens to be in season. There are boys and girls too, similarly loaded, and also with baskets of birds’ nests in spring, cages of young birds, and old birds, baskets of tame rabbits, and bunches of cowslips, primroses, and all kinds of flowers and country productions imaginable. The carriage-road is equally alive, with people riding and driving along; farmers and country gentlemen, country clergymen, parish overseers, and various other personages, drawn to the market-town by some real or imagined business, are rattling forward on horseback, or in carriages of various kinds, gigs, and spring-carts, and carts without springs. There are carriers’ wagons, and covered carts without end, many of them shewing from their open fronts, whole troops of women snugly seated; while their dogs chained beneath, go struggling and barking along, pushing their heads forward in their collars every minute as if they would hang themselves. This is in the morning; and in the afternoon you see them pouring out again, and directing their course to many a far-off hamlet and old-fashioned abode. But there is a wide difference between coming in and going out. The wagons and carts go heavily and soberly, for they are laden with good solid commodities, groceries and draperies, mops, brushes, hardware and crockery, newspapers for the politicians, and sundry parcels of teas, sugars, and soaps, and such et ceteras, for the village shops; but the farmers go riding and driving out three times as fast as they came in, for they are primed with good dinners and strong beer. They have chaffered, and smoked, and talked with the great grazier and the great corn-factor, and their horses are full of corn too, and away they go, in fours and fives, filling the whole width of the road, and raising a dust, if there be the least dust to be raised, or making the mud fly in all directions; away they go, talking all together, while their horses are trotting at such a pace as one would think would shake the very teeth out of their heads. The sober foot-people who are trudging homeward more soberly than they came, say, as they fly past, “One wouldn’t think times very bad neither.” And the carriers hold their horses’ heads as they rush past, and smiling significantly, say, just as they are gone past,--“Well done my lads! that’s it; go it my lads, go it! Yo riden, though your horses go a-foot!”
There is no class of men, if times are but tolerably good, that enjoy themselves so highly as farmers. They are little kings. Their concerns are not huddled into a corner, as those of the town tradesman are. In town, many a man who turns thousands of pounds per week, is hemmed in close by buildings, and cuts no figure at all. A narrow shop, a contracted warehouse, without an inch of room besides to turn him, on any hand; without a yard, a stable, or outhouse of any description; perhaps hoisted aloft, up three or four pair of dirty stairs, is all the room that the wealthy tradesman often can bless himself with; and there, day after day, month after month, year after year, he is to be found, like a bat in a hole of a wall, or a toad in the heart of a stone, or of an oak tree. Spring, and summer, and autumn, go round; sunshine and flowers spread over the world; the sweetest breezes blow, the sweetest waters murmur along the vales, but they are all lost upon him; he is the doleful prisoner of Mammon, and so he lives and dies. The farmer would not take the wealth of the world on such terms. His concerns, however small, spread themselves out in a pleasant amplitude both to his eye and heart. His house stands in its own stately solitude; his offices and outhouses stand round extensively, without any stubborn and limiting contraction; his acres stretch over hill and dale; there his flocks and herds are feeding; there his labourers are toiling,--he is king and sole commander there. He lives amongst the purest air and the most delicious quiet. Often when I see those healthy, hardy, full-grown sons of the soil going out of town, I envy them the freshness and the repose of the spots to which they are going. Ample old-fashioned kitchens, with their chimney-corners of the true, projecting, beamed and seated construction, still remaining; blazing fires in winter, shining on suspended hams and flitches, guns supported on hooks above, dogs basking on the hearth below; cool, shady parlours in summer, with open windows, and odours from garden and shrubbery blowing in; gardens wet with purest dews, and humming at noon-tide with bees; and green fields and verdurous trees, or deep woodlands lying all round, where a hundred rejoicing voices of birds or other creatures are heard, and winds blow to and fro, full of health and life-enjoyment. How enviable do such places seem to the fretted spirits of towns, who are compelled not only to bear their burthen of cares, but to enter daily into the public strife against selfish evil and ever-spreading corruption. When one calls to mind the simple abundance of farm-houses, their rich cream and milk, and unadulterated butter, and bread grown upon their own lands, sweet as that which Christ broke, and blessed as he gave to his disciples; their fruits ripe and fresh plucked from the sunny wall, or the garden bed, or the pleasant old orchard; when one casts one’s eyes upon, or calls to one’s memory the aspect of these houses, many of them so antiquely picturesque, or so bright-looking and comfortable, in deep retired valleys, by beautiful streams, or amongst fragrant woodlands, one cannot help saying with King James of Scotland, when he met Johnny Armstrong:--
What want these knaves that a king should have?
But they are not outward and surrounding advantages merely, which give zest to the life of the farmer. He is more proud of it, and more attached to it, than any other class of men, be they whom they may, are of theirs. The whole heart, soul, and being of the farmer are in his profession. The members of other professions and trades, however full they may be of their concerns, have their mouths tied up by the etiquette of society. A man is not allowed to talk of his trade concerns except at the risk of being laughed at, and being set down as an egotistic ignoramus. But who shall laugh at or scout the farmer for talking of his concerns? Of nothing else does he, in nine cases out of ten, think, talk, or care. And though he may be called a bore by all other classes, what concerns it him? for other classes are just as great bores to him, and he seeks not their company. The farmers are a large class, and they associate and converse principally with each other. “Their talk is of bullocks,” it is true, but to them it is the most interesting talk of all. What is so delightful to them as to meet at each other’s houses, and with bright glasses of nectarous ale, or more potent spirit sparkling before them, and pipe in mouth, to talk of markets, rents, tithes, new improvements, and the promise of crops? To walk over their lands of a Sunday afternoon together, and pronounce on the condition of growing corn, turnips, and grass; on this drainage, or that neighbour’s odd management; on the appearance of sheep, cattle, and horses. And this is to be excused, and in a great degree to be admired. For those are no artificial objects on which they expend their lives and souls; they are the delightful things of nature on which they operate; and nature operates with them in all their labours, and sweetens them to their spirits. This is the grand secret of their everlasting attachment to, and enjoyment of agricultural life. They work with nature, and only modulate and benefit by her functions, as she takes up, quickens, and completes the work of their hands. There is a living principle in all their labours, which distinguishes them from most other trades. The earth gives its strength to the seed they throw into it--to the cattle that walk upon it. The winds blow, the waters run for them; the very frosts and snows of winter give salutary checks to the rankness of vegetation, and lighten the soil, and destroy what is noxious for them; and every principle of animal and vegetable existence and organization co-operates to support and enrich them. There is a charm in this which must last while the spirit of man feels the stirrings of the spirit and power of God around him. It may be said that rude farmers do not reason on these things in this manner. No, in many, too many, instances I grant it; but they feel. There is scarcely any bosom so cloddish but feels more or less of this, and by no other cause can an explanation be given of the enthusiasm of farmers for their profession. It is not because they can sooner enrich themselves by it--that they are more independent in it--that they have greater social advantages in it. In all these particulars the balance is in favour of the active and enterprising tradesman; but it is this charm which has infused its sweetness into the bosoms of all rural people in all ages of the world. From the days of the patriarchs to the present, what expressions of delight the greatest minds have uttered on behalf of such a life. Think of Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, and Horace; of Cicero, whom I have elsewhere quoted; and of the many great men of this country, some of whom too I have noticed, who have devoted themselves with such eagerness to it.
That farmers are as intelligent as a parallel grade of society in large towns I do not mean to assert; that they are as truly aware of, and as united to defend, their real interests I will assert as little. Their solitary and isolated mode of existence weighs against them in these points; but that they have generally a sounder morality than a similar class of townsmen is indisputable. They have a simplicity of mind as well as manners that is more than an equivalent for the polish and conventional customs of society, and with this a cordiality that is very delightful, and very rarely now to be found--the good, homely heartiness of Old English days.
They, indeed, so vividly enjoy the common blessings of life, from their vigorous health, and unvitiated appetites, as well as from the cravings of their inner being, finding their food in the daily communion with nature, instead of that book-knowledge which is so extensively diffused through all classes of the city, and which, too commonly, while it quickens the intellect, and widens the sphere of observation, I am sorry to say, deadens the human sympathies and distorts the heart--that they make so much of their kindness appear in heaping upon you bodily comforts and refreshments as is often truly ludicrous. They would have you eat and drink for ever. One meal succeeds to another with a profusion and an importunity of hospitality that are overwhelming. They eat their bread with a sweetness and a capacity, generated by their active and laborious habits, that we, who lead more sedentary lives, and with minds and energies dissipated by a hundred objects unknown to them, have no idea of. People of all other classes place a great portion of their happiness in giving and eating great feasts; but a farmer seems to think all the good things of life are involved in feasting, and would feast you not once a year, but every day, and all day long, if he could.
Let us just glance at the routine of one day of good fellowship, such as is seen in farm-houses where there is plenty, and yet no great pretence to gentility. We have seen many such scenes.
The farmer invites his friends to dine with him. He will have a party. Suppose it at some period of the year when he is least busy; for his engagements depending on the progress of the seasons, and his whole wealth being at the mercy of the elements, he cannot postpone his duties, but must take them as they fall out. Suppose it then just before the commencement of hay-harvest, for then he has a short pause, between the putting in of his last crop of potatoes or corn, shutting up his fields, and clearing his green-corn lands, and that moment when the first scythe enters his hay-fields, when a course of arduous and anxious labours begins, that will not cease till all his crops are safely housed,--hay, corn, beans, pease, and potatoes. Suppose at this pause in the growing time of summer, or after harvest, or amid the festive days of Christmas, he feels himself comparatively at leisure, in good spirits, and disposed to enjoy himself. He and his wife arrange their plans. Invitations are sent. On market-day he lays in all necessaries,--tea, coffee, prime cuts of beef and other meat; wine and spirits; sugar and spices. At home there is busy preparation. His garden is cleaned up; an operation of rare occurrence with a busy farmer, who thinks so much of his fields that he thinks but little of his garden. His stables and his rick-yard are put in order. The very manes and tails of his horses are trimmed, for all will have to pass under the critical notice of his friends, and he feels his professional character at stake. In the house there is equal activity. There is a world of cleaning and setting in order. Floors are scoured. The best carpets are put down. This room is found to want fresh staining; painting wants doing here and there, both within and without. Trees also want nailing and trimming on the walls; and it is probable there may want some spout repairing, or tiles renewing, that have often been talked of, but never could have time found for their doing. The house and all about it look fifty per cent. the better. The neatly cleaned walks and closely mown grass-plots; the brightly cleaned windows, and the scarlet curtains, and the purely white blinds seen within, give an air of completeness that is very satisfactory.
And then within begin the mighty preparations for the feast. Geese, turkeys, ducks and fowls are killed and pulled, and part are cooked, and part are made ready for cooking. If the farmer shoots, and it be the season, there are hares and rabbits, pheasants and partridges, brought to the larder; if he do not, he makes friends with the keeper, who occasionally takes a social pipe and glass with him; or he makes a direct request to his landlord for this indulgence. Hams are boiled, pies are made, puddings of the richest composition are put together. If it be Christmas, loud is the chopping of meat for minced-pies, busy the mixing of spices; and the washing and picking of currants and raisins; and pork-pies and sausages of most savoury and approved manipulation are raised into material existence. If the sucking-pig escapes whipping--and we hope no honest farmer is now cruel enough for this operation--creams and syllabubs do not; they are whipped, not to death, but into life. There are blanc-mange and jellies, crystalline and fragrant; clouted creams, and cream of strawberries, raspberries, and I know not what melting and delicious things. And O! such cheesecakes, and such patties, and such little cakes of various names and natures, for tea, and entremets, and dessert. I see the oven-door open and shut, as the iron tray of nicely laden patty-pans goes into the oven, or comes out with a rich perfection, and with odours most delicious, most mouth-melting, most inexpressible! The good and skilful dame, and the no less skilful and comely daughters, if she have them, and they are grown up to years of discretion in these delicate and culinary arts--what is not their depth of occupation! What glowing looks are theirs; what speculations; what contrivances and anticipations! I would fain take an easy chair in some cool corner of this milk-and-honey-flowing kitchen, and watch all their sweet employment, and hear all their sweet words in a grateful silence. But they are far from the end of their labours. Nuts, walnuts, apples and pears, and other fruit, according as the season may be, are produced from their stores, or from the sunny walls and trees, wiped from every trace of mould or dust from the store-room, and placed in their proper receivers of glass, or china, or possibly of plate. Wine and spirit decanters are to be washed and carefully dried, and to be charged with their bright contents. The discovery of the richest cheese in the whole cheese-room is to be made by tasting; butter is to be moulded in small cakes, and imprinted with patterns of the deepest and most elegant figure, and a thousand other things made, or done, of which the tasting were to be desired rather than the catalogue to be particularized, for, wonderful and manifold are all thy works, O thou accomplished spouse of a wealthy farmer!
What dainties has that greater oven received into its more capacious cavern. Bread of the most exquisite fineness; and pies of varied character--fruit, pork, beef-steak, and giblet--if in Devon or Cornwall, sweet giblet, a pie that all England besides knows not of,--figgy-bread, and saffron-cake of transcendant brilliance and taste.
And then comes the great day! The guests are invited to dinner; but they have been enjoined to come early, and they come early with a vengeance. They will not come as the guests of night-loving citizens and aristocrats come, at from six to nine in the evening;--no, at ten and eleven in the morning you shall see their faces, that never yet were ashamed of day-light, and that tell of fresh air and early hours. Then come rattling in sundry vehicles with their cargoes of men and women; lively salutations are exchanged; the horses are led away to the stables, and the guests into the house to doff great coats and cloaks, hats and bonnets, and sit down to luncheon. And there it is ready set out. “They’ll want something after their drive,” says the host. “To be sure,” says the hostess; and there is plenty in truth. A boiled ham, a neat’s tongue; a piece of cold beef; fowls and beef-steak-pie; tarts, and bread, cheese and butter; coffee for the ladies, and fine old ale for the gentlemen.
“Now do help yourselves,” exclaims the host from one end of the table, “I am sure you must be very hungry after such a ride.” “I am sure you must indeed,” echoes the hostess from the other, while a dozen voices cry all at once, “O, really I don’t think I can touch a bit. We got breakfast the moment before we set off;” and all the time deep are the incisions made into the various viands: and plentifully heaped are plates; and bright liquor is poured into glasses, and a great deal of talk of this and that, and inquiries after this and that person go on; a hearty luncheon is made, and the gentlemen are ready to set out and look about them. They are warned by the hostess to remember that dinner will be on table at one o’clock--“exactly at one!” and assuming hats and sticks, away they go.
While they perambulate the farm, and pass learned judgments on land, cattle, and crops; and make besides excursions into neighbouring lands, to some particular experiment in management, or extraordinary production of combined art and nature, our hostess shews her female friends her dairy, her cheese-room, her poultry-yard, and discussions as scientific are going on, on the best modes of fattening calves, rearing turkey broods, and on all the most approved manipulations of cheese and butter. The quantities produced from a certain number of cows are compared, and many wonders expressed that lands of apparent equality of richness should some yield little butter and much cheese, and others little cheese and much butter; facts well known to all such ladies, but not easy of explanation by heads that pretend to see further into the heart of a difficulty than they do. A walk is probably proposed and undertaken through the garden and orchard, and flowers and fruits are descanted on; and all this time in the house roasting, and boiling, and baking, are going on gloriously. Savoury steams are rolling about under the ceilings; busy damsels with faces rosier than ever, are running to and fro on the floors; stable-boys are turned into knife-cleaners, and plough-lads into peelers of potatoes and watchers of boiling pots, and turnspits.
The hour arrives; and a sound of loud voices somewhere at hand announces that our agricultural friends are returned punctually to their time, with many a joke on their fears of the ladies’ tongues. Not that they seemed to want any dinner--no, they made such a luncheon; but they had such a natural fear of being scolded. Well, here they all are;--and here are the ladies all in full dress. Hands that have been handling prime stock, or rooting in the earth, or thrust into hay-ricks and corn-heaps, are washed, and down they sit to such a dinner as might satisfy a crew of shipwrecked men. There are seldom any of your “wishy-washy soups,” except it be very cold weather, and seldom more than two courses; but then they are courses! All of the meat kind seems set on the table at once. Off go the covers, and what a perplexing but unconsumable variety! Such pieces of roast beef, veal, and lamb; such hams, and turkeys, and geese; such game, and pies of pigeons or other things equally good, with vegetables of all kinds in season--peas, potatoes, cauliflowers, kidney-beans, lettuces, and whatever the season can produce. The most potent of ale and porter, the most crystalline and cool water, are freely supplied, and wine for those that will. When these things have had ample respect paid to them, they vanish, and the table is covered with plum-puddings and fruit tarts, cheesecakes, syllabubs, and all the nicknackery of whipped creams and jellies that female invention can produce. And then, a dessert of equal profusion. Why should we tantalize ourselves with the vision of all those nuts, walnuts, almonds, raisins, fruits, and confections? Enough that they are there; that the wine circulates--foreign and English--port and sherry--gooseberry and damson--malt and birch--elderflower and cowslip,--and loud is the clamour of voices male and female. If there be not quite so much refinement of tone and manner, quite so much fastidiousness of phrase and action, as in some other places, there is at least more hearty laughter, more natural jocularity, and many a
Random shot of country wit,
as Burns calls it. A vast of talk there is of all the country round; every strange circumstance; every incident and change of condition, and new alliance amongst their mutual friends and acquaintances, pass under review. The ladies withdraw; and the gentlemen draw together; spirits take place of wine, and pipes are lighted. We know what subjects will interest them--farming improvements and politics--and so it goes till tea-time.
When summoned to tea, there are additional faces. The pastor and his wife, perhaps a son and daughter, or daughters, are there; and there is the clerk too,--the very model of respect and reverence towards his clerical superior. Whatever that learned authority asserts, this zealous and “dearly-beloved Moses” testifies. He calls attention to what the vicar says; he repeats with great satisfaction his sayings. There too, is the surgeon, and often the veterinary surgeon, especially as he also is often a farmer, and in intercourse with all the farmers far and near. This may seem an odd jumble of ranks, but it is no more odd than true. Who that has seen anything of rural life has not seen odder medleys? Besides, money in all grades of society can do miracles. There are clergymen in many parishes, who maintain their own ideas of dignity, and seldom move out of the circle of squires and dames; but there are others, and in perfectly rural districts there are abundance of others, that know how to mix more freely with the yeomanry of their flocks, and lose nothing neither. If they respect themselves, they insure the respect, and what is better, the attachment of their hearers.
But the vicar’s presence on such a day is felt. There is a more palpable approximation towards silence;--a drawing tighter of the reins of conversational freedom. The great talkers of after-dinner are now become great listeners, and often on such occasions I have seen a scene worthy of the sound sense of English yeomen; for the pastor addresses his observations and inquiries now to this individual, and now to that; and now converses in a tone of pleasant humour with the ladies; so that you may often hear as sober discussions on the passing topics of the day, and on the prospects of the country, and especially of that part of it to which they belong, delivered in a homely manner perhaps, but with a discrimination and practical knowledge that are very gratifying. And on the part of the females you shall see so many symptoms of good-heartedness and real matronly mind as make you feel that sense, soul, and true sympathies, are of no particular grade, or particular style of life.
But there must be a dance for the young, and there are cards for the more sedate; and then again, to a supper as profuse, with its hot game, and fowls, and fresh pastry, as if it had been the sole meal cooked in the house that day. The pastor and his company depart; the wine and spirits circulate; all begin to talk of parting, and are loth to part, till it grows late; and they have some of them six or seven miles to go, perhaps, on a pitch-dark night, through by-ways, and with roads not to be boasted of. All at once, however, up rise the men to go, for their wives, who asked and looked with imploring eyes in vain, now shew themselves cloaked and bonneted, and the carriages are heard with grinding wheels at the door. There is a boisterous shaking of hands, a score of invitations to come and do likewise, given to their entertainers, and they mount and away! When you see the blackness of the night, and consider that they have not eschewed good liquor, and perceive at what a rate they drive away, you expect nothing less than to hear the next day, that they have dashed their vehicles to atoms against some post, or precipitated themselves into some quarry; but all is right. They best know their own capabilities, and are at home, safe and sound.
Such is a specimen of the festivities of what may be called the middle and substantial class of farmers; and the same thing holds, in degree, to the very lowest grade of them. The smallest farmer will bring you out the very best he has; he will spare nothing, on a holiday occasion; and his wife will present you with her simple slice of cake, and a glass of currant or cowslip wine, with an empressement, and a welcome that you feel to the heart is real, and a bestowal of a real pleasure to the offerer.
Chapter II
THE ENGLISH FARMER, AS OPERATED UPON BY MODERN CAUSES AND THEORIES.
Cobbett complains that the farmer has been spoiled by the growth of luxurious habits and effeminacy in the nation. That the simple old furniture is cast out of their houses; that carpets are laid on their floors; that there are sofas and pianos to be found where there used to be wooden benches and the spinning-wheel; that the daughters are sent to boarding-school, instead of to market; and the sons, instead of growing up sturdy husbandmen, like their fathers, are made clerks, shopkeepers, or some such “skimmy-dish things.”
It is true enough that the general style of living and furnishing has progressed amongst the farmers as amongst all other classes of the community. And perhaps there has been too much of this. But it should be recollected that Cobbett was opposed to popular education altogether. He would have the rural population physically well off, but it should be physically only. He would have them feed and work and sleep like their sturdy horses or oxen: but is such a state desirable? Is it not far more noble, far more truly human, to have all classes partaking, as far as their circumstances will allow them, of the pleasures of mind? I would have real knowledge go hand in hand with real religious principle and moral feeling, and where they go, a certain and inseparable degree of refinement of manner and embellishment of abode will go with them. Would I have the follies and affectations of the modern boarding-school go into the farm-house? By no means. It is by the circulation of healthful knowledge that all this is to be rooted out, and the race of finical and half-genteel, and wholly ridiculous boarding-school misses to be changed into usefully taught and really valuable and amiable women. We should avoid one extreme as the other.
It should be recollected, too, that amongst farmers are to be found men of all ranks and grades. Farming has been, and is, a fashionable pursuit. We have ducal farmers, and from them all degrees downwards. Gentlemen’s stewards, educated men, are farmers; and many farmers are persons whose capital employed in their extensive concerns would purchase the estates of nobles. All these, of course, live and partake of the habits, general character, and refinements of the classes to which they, by their wealth, really belong: and amongst the medium class of farmers we find as little aspiring of gentility, as amongst the same grade of tradesmen. Nay, go into the really rural and retired parts of the country, and they are simple and rustic enough. Let those who doubt it go into the dales of Yorkshire; into the Peak, and retirements of Derbyshire; into the vales of Nottinghamshire, and midland counties; let them traverse Buckinghamshire and Shropshire; let them go into the wild valleys of Cornwall; ay, into the genuine country of almost any part of England, and they will find stone floors and naked tables, and pewter plates, and straw beds, and homely living enough in all conscience. They may see oxen ploughing in the fields with simple, heavy, wooden yokes, such as were used five hundred years ago; and horses harnessed with collars of straw, and an old rope or two, not altogether worth half-a-crown, doing the tillage of large farms. They may eat a turnip-pie in one place, and oatmeal cake, or an oatmeal pudding in another, and bless their stars if they see a bit of butcher’s meat once a week. Yes, there are primitive living and primitive habits left over vast districts of England yet, which, we trust, under a better view of things, will receive no change, except such as springs from the gradual and sound growth of true knowledge.
But they bring up their sons to be clerks and such “skimmy-dish things” in towns. Ay, there is the rub; and this we owe to the rage for large rentals inspired by the war prices; by false notions of improvement generated during the heyday of farming prosperity; by gentlemen making stewards of lawyers, who have no real knowledge of farming interests, and can, therefore, have no sympathies with the small farmer, or patience with him in the day of his difficulty, and whose only object is to get the greatest rent at the easiest rate. But above all, this we owe to the detestable doctrine of political economy, by which a dozen of moderate farms are swallowed up in one overgrown one,--a desert, from which both small farmers and labourers were compelled to depart, to make way for machinery, and Irish labourers at fourpence a day. Where were the farmers to put their sons when they were brought up? The small farms, the natural resource for divided capitals and commencements in agricultural life, were, in a great measure, annihilated; and a most useful race of men as far as possible rooted out. Thank God! this abomination and worse than Egyptian plague, is now seen through, and what is better, is felt. We shall yet have farms from fifty to a hundred acres, where men of small capital may try their fortunes, and have a chance of mounting up, instead of being thrust down into the hopeless condition of serfs. We may have humble homesteads, where a father and his sons may work together; where labour may await their days, and an independent fireside their hours of rest. Where a lowly, but a happy people may congregate at Christmas and other festivals, and the old games of blindman’s-buff, turn-trencher, and forfeits, may long be pursued in the evening firelight of rustic rooms.
The farmer has had his ups and downs. During the war he was too prosperous; since then he has been at times ground to the dust by low prices and high rents. Heaven send him a better day! We would see him as he is, in a healthy state of the country,--a rural king, sowing his corn and reaping his harvest with a glad heart, and amid the rejoicings of a numerous peasantry.
Of the great advance in the science of farming; of the various improved modes of management, and ingenious machines invented for facilitating the farmer’s labours, I have spoken under the head of the country gentleman’s pursuits and recreations. One or two other observations on the farmer and his life, may as well be given here.
One of the greatest drawbacks to the pleasantness of their abodes, is to be found in their miry roads and yards, and the stagnant pools and drainages that, in the greater number of instances, stand somewhere about them. One would think that the latter nuisances were intended by them to neutralize the effects of so much good fresh air as they have; to act as a check, lest they should, surrounded as they are, by every conducive to health and longevity, really live too long. There is scarcely a farm-house but has one of those drain pools, into which all the liquid refuse of their yards runs, and into which dead dogs and cats find their way as a matter of course. In summer, these places are green over, and often stand thick with the bubbles of a pestiferous fermentation; to all which they appear totally insensible, and must be really so, or they would contrive to locate them at a greater distance, or have them carried in a water-cart, and dispersed over their grass lands, where they would be of infinite service.
It is in winter that they are beset by miry roads; and have often yards so deep in dirt, that you cannot reach them on foot without getting over the shoes. They and their men stalk to and fro through a six-inch depth of mire as if they trod on a Turkey carpet; but I have often amused myself with imagining what would be the consternation of a cockney, or indeed of any townsman only accustomed to clean roads and good pavements, to find himself set down in the middle of one of those lanes that lead up to farm-houses, or away into their fields, or even in one of their fold-yards. But to find himself in one of these, as I have done many a time on a dark night, and with a necessity of proceeding,--oh patience! patience! then it is really felt to be a virtue. To slip, and plunge, and flounder on in such a darksome, deep-rutted, slipping and stick-fast road--sometimes the puddle soaking into your shoes, and sometimes sent by the pressure of your tread as from a squirt into your face:--“hic labor, hoc opus est.”
A few hours’ work now and then with an iron scraper in the yard, and a spade to let off the water in the lanes into the ditches, and the nuisance were prevented. One would have thought that the universal excellence of all the highways now would have made them sensible of the luxury of a good, dry footing; but they seem really quite unaware of it, except you point it out, and then they will tell you in good humour that they have road-menders at work regularly twice a-year--dry weather and frost!
I must here, too, say a word on the subject of small farms. Political economists, carrying out their theories of the power of capital, and the division of employments, have written many very plausible things in recommendation of large farms. They tell you that the men of capital, who alone can hold large farms, can alone afford to avail themselves of the aid of machinery for accelerating their operations; of expensive manures, such as bones, the ashes of bog-earth, such as are burnt in Berks and Wiltshire; and of new and improved breeds of sheep and cattle; all of which require long purses, that can pay, and wait for distant returns. These are all excellent reasons for having such men and such farms in the country, by which the march and spirit of improvement may be kept up, and from which, as from reservoirs, may, in due course, overflow the advantages they introduce to their less wealthy neighbours at a cheaper rate; but they are no arguments at all against the retention of less farms. It is, in fact, a well-known circumstance, that the speculative and amateur farmers generally farm at a greater expense than their neighbours, an expense, in most cases, never fully made up by the returns, and often really ruinous. That enlightened, systematic views, the division of employments, and a judicious outlay of capital, not always in every man’s power, enable large farmers to sell at a lower rate than smaller and poorer farmers, is to a certain degree true, but by no means to the extent supposed. No farm which exceeds the ready and daily survey of the cultivator will be found to produce these advantages. Beyond that extent, there must be overlookers employed, and these must be maintained at a great, and probably greater cost than a small farmer lives at on his rented farm; nor can such a system be expected to carry the intentions of the principal into effect with a success like that of his personal surveillance. The small farmer has motives to exertion which do not exist in a troop of hired labourers. Slave labour is notoriously inferior to the labour of freemen, because the freeman has internal motives that the slave never can have; and in the same manner a small farmer who labours on his own rented farm has motives to exertion that the common labourer, who labours for a daily sum, cannot have. If the small farmer employ any of these, he employs them under the influence of his own eye and example, and thereby communicates a stimulus that is absent on a larger scale of cultivation. The small farmer lives economically; frequently, there is no question, more economically, and yet better than the labourer, because he has all his faculties and energies at work to improve his farm and better his condition; circumstances that do not operate on the labourer, who receives just a bare sufficiency in his wage, and sees no possibility, and therefore entertains no hope, of accumulation. The small farmer works hard himself; his children, if he have them, assist him, and his wife too, who also is a manager and a worker. He looks round him, for his eyes are sharpened by his interests, and observes the plans, and measures, and improvements of his wealthier neighbour, adopts what he can of them, and often makes cheap and ingenious substitutes for others. Even if it were a fact, that the large farmer could drive the small farmer out of the country, it would be a circumstance most deeply to be deplored. It would extinguish a class of men of hardy, homely, and independent habits--a serious loss to the nation. It would break those steps out of the ladder of human aspiration, and the improvement of condition, that would have a most fatal influence on all society. An impassable gulf would be placed between the aristocracy of capital and the freedom of labour; which would produce, as its natural results, insolence, effeminacy, and corruption of manners, on the one side, and perpetual poverty, hopeless poverty, abjectness of spirit, or sullen and dangerous discontent, on the other. Even if, as Miss Martineau, in her interesting stories, has asserted, it were true that the labourer would be better clothed and fed than the small farmer, would the mere comfort of food and clothes make up, to men living in a free and Christian country, and within the daily reach of its influences, for the destruction of that ascending path which hope alone can travel? There would soon, on such a system, either in agriculture or manufactures, be but two classes in the country,--the great capitalist and the slave. The great capitalist would stand, like Aaron armed with his serpent rod, to eat up all the lesser serpents that attempted to lift their heads above that level which he had condemned them to. The mass would be doomed to a perpetual despair of even advancing one step out of the thraldom of labour and command, and their spirits would die within them, or live only to snatch and destroy what they could not legitimately reach.
But such, happily, is not the case. Circumstances place a limit to such things. The small farmer can and does exist, and has existed, and in many cases, flourished too, in the face of all changes, and surrounded by large farms cultivated with all the skill of modern art, and all the power of capital. I have seen and known such, and happier and more comfortable people do not exist. I do not mean by a small farm, what Miss Martineau has called such,--some dozen acres--mere cottage allotments--but farms of from fifty to a hundred acres. There must be full employment for a pair of horses, or there is created by their keep an undue charge for labour, which is a serious preventive of success. But where there is that full employment, a small farmer may live and prosper. The political economist generally reasons in straight lines. He will not turn aside to calculate the force of incidental circumstances; and yet, these incidental circumstances frequently alter a question entirely. For instance, a small farm may lie near a large town, and thereby furnish the tenant with a very lucrative trade in milk; and such incidental circumstances, owing to a location favourable for market, and other causes, frequently exist. Small farmers often pay attention to sources of profit, nearly, if not altogether, overlooked by larger ones. Who does not know what sums are made by cottagers and small occupiers, of the produce of their gardens and orchards, by carefully looking after it, and some one of the family bringing it to market, and standing with it themselves; while the great farmer seldom looks very narrowly to the growth or preservation of either, and therefore incurs both badness of crop and waste; and if he sends it to market, he sends it to the huckster at a wholesale price, to save the annoyance of standing with it. Small concerns, having small establishments, and no dignity to support, nor other cares to divert the attention, find in these resources alone frequently an income itself nearly equal to their expenditure.
To determine questions of this kind there requires a close examination into all their bearings, and into the habits and feelings of those concerned. The truth of the matter, as regards the most profitable size of farms, and their general benefit to the public, seems to be, that there should be some of various sizes, that various degrees of capital and capacity of management may be accommodated; that there may be a chance for those beginning who have little to begin with, and a chance of the active and enterprising rising, as activity and enterprise should. This seems the only system by which the healthful temperament of a community can be kept up; and that just equilibrium of interests, and that ascending scale of advantages maintained, by which not merely the wealth, but the real happiness of a state is promoted.
III. FARM-SERVANTS
The clown, the child of nature, without guile, Blessed with an infant’s ignorance of all But his own simple pleasures; now and then A wrestling match, a foot-race, or a fair.--Cowper.
We have in a preceding chapter, taken a view of the English farmer. We have seen him at market--in his fields, and in his house receiving his friends to a holiday feast. If we were to go to the farm-house on any other day, and at any season of the year, and survey the farmer and his men in their daily and ordinary course of life, we should always see something to interest us; and we should have to contemplate a mode of existence forming a strong contrast to that of townsmen; and, notwithstanding the innovation which the progress of modern habits has made on life in the country, still presenting a picture of simplicity, homeliness, and quiet, which no other life retains. Thousands, indeed, looking into a farm-house, surveying its furniture, the apparatus and supply of its table, the manners and the language of its inhabitants, would wonder where, after all, was the vast change said to have taken place in the habits of the agricultural population. O! rude and antiquated enough in all conscience, are hundreds of our farm-houses and their inmates, in many an obscure district of merry England yet. The spots are not difficult to be found even now, where the old oak table, with legs as thick and black as those of an elephant, is spread in the homely house-place, for the farmer and his family--wife, children, servants, male and female; and is heaped with the rude plenty of beans and bacon, beef and cabbage, fried potatoes and bacon, huge puddings with “dip” as it is called, that is, sauce of flour, butter, and water boiled, sharpened with vinegar or verjuice, and sweetened with brown sugar or more economical molasses--“dip,” so called, no doubt, because all formerly dipped their morsel into it; a table where bread and cheese, and beer, and good milk porridge and oatmeal porridge, or stirabout, still resist the introduction of tea and coffee and such trash, as the stout old husbandman terms it. Let no one say that modern language and modern habits have driven away the ancient rusticity, while such dialogues between the farmer and guest as the following may be heard--and such may yet be heard in the Peak of Derbyshire, where this really passed.
Farmer at table to his guest.--Ite, mon, ite!
Guest.--Au have iten, mon. Au’ve iten till Au’m weelly brussen.
Farmer.--Then ite, and brust thee out mon: au wooden we hadden to brussen thee wee.[2]
[2] This is the present genuine dialect of the Peak, and is nearly as pure Saxon. It is curious to see in the southern agricultural counties, how the old Saxon terms are worn out by a greater intercourse with London and townspeople, although the people themselves have a most Saxon look, with their fair complexions and light brown hair; while, as you proceed northward, the Saxon becomes more and more prevalent in the country dialects. In the midland counties bracken is the common term for fern--in the south not a peasant ever heard it. The dialects of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Staffordshire, are so similar to that of the Sassenach of Scotland, the Lowland Scots, that the language of Burns was nearly as familiar to me when I first read his poems, as that of my village neighbours; and the Scotch read that clever romance of low life, “Bilberry Thurland,” with a great relish, the dialogues of which are genuine Nottinghamshire, because they said, it was such good Scotch. I have noticed that the plays of the boys in Derbyshire and in the Scotch Lowlands have similar names, differing from the English names in general; as the English game of bandy, in Derbyshire is shinny, in Scotland shinty.
It is no rare sight to see the farmer himself, with his clouted shoon and his fustian coat, ribbed blue or black worsted stockings, and breeches of corduroy; to see him arousing his household, at five o’clock of a morning, and his wife hurrying the servant-wenches, as they call them, from their beds, crying,--“Up, up, boulder-heads!” that is pebble-heads, or heavy-heads, and asking them if they mean to lie till the sun burns their eyes out; having them up to light fires, sweep the hearth, and get to milking, cheese-making, churning, and what not; while he gets his men and boys to their duties,--in winter, to fodder the horses and cows, and prepare for ploughing, or carting out manure; to supply the “young beast,”--young cattle, in the straw-yard with food; to chop turnips, carrots, mangel-würzel, cut hay, boil potatoes for feeding pigs or bullocks; thrash, winnow, or sack corn. In summer, to be off to the harvest-field. The wife is ready to take a turn at the churn, or to turn up her gown-sleeves to the shoulders, and kneeling down on a straw cushion, to press the sweet curd to the bottom of the cheese-pan. To boil the whey for making whey butter, to press the curd into the cheese-vats; place the new cheese in the press; to salt and turn, and look after those cheeses which are in the different stages of the progress from perfect newness and white softness, to their investment with the unctuous coating of a goodly age. He is ready to go with the men into the farm; she is ready to see that the calves are properly fed, and to bargain with the butcher for the fat ones; to feed her geese, turkeys, guinea-fowls, and barn-door fowls; to see after the collection of eggs; how the milk is going on in the dairy, the cream churning, and moulding of butter for sale. In some counties, especially in the west of England, numerous are those homely and most useful dames that you see mounted on their horses with nothing but a flat pad, or a stuffed sack under them, jogging to market to dispose of the products of their dairy and poultry yard, as fresh, hale, and independent, as their grandmothers were. As to the farmer himself, he can hold the plough as his father did before him. He hates your newfangled notions; he despises your fine-fingered chaps, that are brought up at boarding-schools till they are fit for nothing but to ride on smart whisk-tailed nags to market, and carry a bit of a sample-bag in their pockets; and had rather, ten times, be off to the hunt or the race-course than to market at all; or to be running after a dog and gun, breaking down fences and trampling over turnip and potato crops, when they ought to be watching that other idlers did not commit such depredations. He sits with his men, and works with his men; and, while he does as much as the best of them--follows the plough, the harrow, or the drill, empties the manure-cart on his fallows, loads the hay or the corn-wagon,--he many a time says to himself that the “master’s eye does still more than his hand.” The celebrated Mr. Robinson of Cambridge, who was fond of farming, gives in a letter to a friend, a most striking view of the perpetual recurrence of the little occupations which present themselves to the practical farmer, and however apparently trivial, are really important, and full of pleasure to those whose hearts are in such pursuit.--“Rose at three o’clock; crawled into the library, and met one who said,--‘work while ye have the light; the night cometh, when no man can work: my father worketh hitherto, and I work.’ Rang the great bell, and roused the girls to milking, went up to the farm, roused the horsekeeper, fed the horses while he was getting up; called the boy to suckle the calves and clean out the cow-house; lighted the pipe, walked round the garden to see what was wanted there; went up to the paddock to see if the weaning calves were well; went down to the ferry to see if the boy had scooped and cleaned the boat; returned to the farm, examined the shoulders, heels, traces, chaff and corn of eight horses going to plough, mended the acre-staff, cut some thongs, whip-corded the plough-boys’ whips, pumped the troughs full, saw the hogs fed, examined the swill-tubs, and then the cellar; ordered a quarter of malt, for the hogs want grains, and the men want beer; filled the pipe again, returned to the river, and bought a lighter of turf for dairy fires, and another of sedge for ovens; hunted out the wheelbarrows, and set them a trundling; returned to the farm, called the men to breakfast, and cut the boys’ bread and cheese, and saw the wooden bottles filled; sent one plough to the three roods, another to the three half-acres, and so on; shut the gates, and the clock struck five; breakfasted; set two men to ditch the five roods, two men to chop sods, and spread about the land, two more to throw up manure in the yard, and three men and six women to weed wheat; set on the carpenter to repair cow-cribs, and set them up till winter; the wheeler, to mend the old carts, cart-ladders, rakes, etc., preparatory to hay-time and harvest; walked to the six-acres, found hogs in the grass, went back and set a man to hedge and thorn; sold the butcher a fat calf and the suckler a lean one.--The clock strikes nine; walked into the barley-field; barleys fine--picked off a few tiles and stones, and cut a few thistles; the peas fine but foul; the charlock must be topped; the tares doubtful, the fly seems to have taken them; prayed for rain, but could not see a cloud; came round to the wheat-field, wheats rather thin, but the finest colour in the world; sent four women on to the shortest wheats; ordered one man to weed along the ridge of the long wheats, and two women to keep rank and file with him in the furrows; thistles many, blue-bottles no end; traversed all the wheat-field, came to the fallow-field; the ditchers have run crooked, set them straight; the flag sods cut too much, the rush sods too little, strength wasted, shew the men how to three-corner them; laid out more work for the ditchers, went to the ploughs, set the foot a little higher, cut a wedge, set the coulter deeper, must go and get a new mould-board against to-morrow; went to the other plough, gathered up some wood and tied over the traces, mended a horse-tree, tied a thong to the plough-hammer, went to see which lands wanted ploughing first, sat down under a bush, wondered how any man could be so silly as to call me reverend; read two verses in the Bible of the loving-kindness of the Lord in the midst of his temple, hummed a tune of thankfulness, rose up, whistled, the dogs wagged their tails, and away we went, dined, drunk some milk and fell asleep, woke by the carpenter for some slats which the sawyers must cut, etc. etc.”
So spends many a farmer of the old stamp his day, and at night he takes his seat on the settle, under the old wide chimney--his wife has her little work-table set near--the “wenches” darning their stockings, or making up a cap for Sunday, and the men sitting on the other side of the hearth, with their shoes off. He now enjoys of all things, to talk over his labours and plans with the men,--they canvass the best method of doing this and that--lay out the course of to-morrow--what land is to be broke up, or laid down; where barley, wheat, oats, etc. shall be sown, or if they be growing, when they shall be cut. In harvest-time, lambing-time, in potato setting and gathering time, in fact, almost all summer long, there is no sitting on the hearth--it is out of bed with the sun, and after the long hard day--supper, and to bed again. It is only in winter that there is any sitting by the fire, which is seldom diversified further than by the coming in of a neighbouring farmer, or the reading of the weekly news.
Such is the rustic, plodding life of many a farmer in England, and there is no part of the population for which so little has been done, and of which so little is thought, as of their farm-servants. Scarcely any of these got any education before the establishment of Sunday schools--how few of them do yet, compared with the working population of towns? The girls help their mothers--the labourers’ wives--in their cottages, as soon almost as they can waddle about. They are scarcely more than infants themselves, when they are set to take care of other infants. The little creatures go lugging about great fat babies that really seem as heavy as themselves. You may see them on the commons, or little open green spots in the lanes near their homes, congregating together, two or three juvenile nurses, with their charges, carrying them along, or letting them roll on the sward, while they try to catch a few minutes of play with one another, or with that tribe of bairns at their heels--too old to need nursing, and too young to begin nursing others. As they get bigger they are found useful in the house--they mop and brush, and feed the pig, and run to the town for things; and as soon as they get to ten or twelve, out they go to nurse at the farm-houses; a little older, they “go to service;” there they soon aspire to be dairymaids, or housemaids, if their ambition does not prompt them to seek places in the towns,--and so they go on scrubbing and scouring, and lending a hand in the harvest-field, till they are married to some young fellow, who takes a cottage and sets up day-labourer. This is their life; and the men’s is just similar. As soon as they can run about, they are set to watch a gate that stands at the end of the lane or the common to stop cattle from straying, and there through long solitary days they pick up a few halfpence by opening it for travellers. They are sent to scare birds from corn just sown, or just ripening, where
They stroll, the lonely Crusoes of the fields--
as Bloomfield has beautifully described them from his own experience. They help to glean, to gather potatoes, to pop beans into holes in dibbling time, to pick hops, to gather up apples for the cider-mill, to gather mushrooms and blackberries for market, to herd flocks of geese, or young turkeys, or lambs at weaning time; they even help to drive sheep to market, or to the wash at shearing time; they can go to the town with a huge pair of clouted ancle-boots to be mended, as you may see them trudging along over the moors, or along the footpath of the fields, with the strings of the boots tied together, and slung over the shoulder--one boot behind and the other before; and then they are very useful to lift and carry about the farm-yard, to shred turnips, or beet-root--to hold a sack open--to bring in wood for the fire, or to rear turfs for drying on the moors, as the man cuts them with his paring shovel, or to rear peat-bricks for drying. They are mighty useful animals in their day and generation, and as they get bigger, they successively learn to drive plough, and then to hold it; to drive the team, and finally to do all the labours of a man. That is the growing up of a farm-servant. All this time he is learning his business, but he is learning nothing else,--he is growing up into a tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ancle-booted fellow, with a gait as graceful as one of his own plough-bullocks. He has grown up, and gone to service; and there he is, as simple, as ignorant, and as laborious a creature as one of the wagon-horses that he drives. The mechanic sees his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clodhopper, the chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name, in whatever district, he may be called, is every where the same; he sees no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it; and if he hears his master reading it, ten to one but he drops asleep over it. In fact, he has no interest in it. He knows there is such a place as the next town, for he goes there to statutes, and to the fair; and he has heard of Lunnon, and the French, and Buonaparte, and of late years of America, and he has some dreamy notion that he should like to go there if he could raise the wind, and thought he could find the way--and that is all that he knows of the globe and its concerns, beyond his own fields. The mechanic has his library, and he reads, and finds that he has a mind, and a hundred tastes and pleasures that he never dreamed of before; the clodhopper has no library, and if he had, books in his present state would be to him only so many things set on end upon shelves. He is as much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping, can make him, and he is nothing more. Just see the daily course of his life. Harvest-time is the jubilee of his year. It is a time of incessant and hurrying occupation--but that is a benefit to him--it is an excitement, and he wants exciting. It rouses him out of that beclouded and unimaginative dreamy state in which he stalks along the solitary fields, or wields the flail in the barn; digs the drain or the ditch, or plashes the fence, from day to day and week to week. The energies that he has, and they are chiefly physical, are all called forth. He is in a bustle. The weather is fine and warm--his blood flows quicker. The gates are thrown open--the hay rustles in the meadow, or the golden corn stands in shock amid the stubble: the wagons are rattling along the lanes and the fields. His neighbours are all called out to assist. The labourers leave every thing else, and are all in the harvest-field. The women leave their cottages, and are there too. Young, middle-aged, and old,--all are there, to work or to glean. The comely maiden with her rosy face, her beaming eyes, and fair figure, brings with her mirth and joke. The stout village matrons have drawn footless stockings on their arms to protect them from the sun and stubble--they have pinned up their bed-gowns behind, or doffed themselves to the brown stays and linsey-woolsey petticoat, and are amongst the best hands in the field. Even the old are feebly pulling at a rake, or putting hay into wain-row, or looking on, and telling what they have done in their time. The beer-keg is in the field, and the horn often goes round. The lunch is eaten under the tree, or amongst the sheaves. In the house at noon, there is a great setting out of dinner; beans and bacon, huge puddings and dumplings are plentiful,--it is a joyous and a stirring time. There is no other season of the year in which the farm-servant enjoys himself so much as in harvest; not even in his few other days of relaxation--on his visit to the fair, to the statutes, to the ploughing match, or on Mothering Sunday, when all the “servant-lads” and “servant-wenches” are, in some parts of the country, set at liberty for a day, to go and see their mothers. See him at any other time, and what a plodding, simple, monotonous life he leads! He rises at an early hour--we have seen in this chapter at what an hour the Rev. Mr. Robinson had his men up;--if he be going to work in the farm-yard, he goes out and gets to it till breakfast-time: but if he be going to plough, or to do work at a distance, or to carry corn home that has been sold at market by his master, or to fetch bones, rape-dust, or other manure from the town, or coals from the pit, he is up, whether it be summer or winter, at an hour at which townspeople are often not gone to bed. In early spring, and autumn he gets up to plough at five and six o’clock in a morning. It is pitch dark, and dismally cold. He strikes a light with his tinder, for lucifers he never saw, and has only heard of, as a horrible invention for setting ricks on fire. He slips on his ancle-boots without lacing them, and out he goes to fodder his horses, and rub them down. That done, he comes in again.
The “servant wench” has lit the fire and set out his breakfast for him and his fellows; huge basins of milk porridge, and loaves as big as beehives, and pretty much of the same shape, and as brown as the back of their own hands. To this fare he betakes himself with a capacity that only country air and hard labour can give. Having made havoc with as much of these as would serve a round family of citizens to breakfast, he then stretches out his hand to a capacious dish of cold fat bacon of about six inches thick; nay, I once saw bacon on such a table actually ten inches thick, and all one solid mass of fat. This is set on the top of half a peck of cold boiled beans that were left the day before, and however strange such viands might seem to a townsman at six o’clock, or earlier, in a morning, they vanish as rapidly as if they did not follow that mess of porridge, and those huge hunches of bread. Well, to a certainty he has now done. Nay, don’t be in such haste--he has not done; he has his eye on the great brown loaf again. He must have a snack of bread and cheese; so he takes his knife out of his waistcoat pocket, a gigantic clasp knife, assuredly made by the knowing Sheffielder to hew down such loaves, and lie in such pockets, and fill such stomachs, and for no other earthly purpose. See! he cuts a massy fragment of the rich curly kissing-crust, that hangs like a fretted cornice from the upper half of the loaf, and places it between the little finger and the thick of his left hand; he cuts a corresponding piece of cheese, and places it between the thumb and the two fore-fingers of the same hand, and alternately cutting his bread and cheese with his clasp-knife (for he would not use another for that purpose on any account), as Betty sets a mug of ale before him, he wipes his mouth and says, as he lifts the mug, to his younger companion, who has all this time been faithfully and valiantly imitating him,--“Well, Jack, we must be off, lad; take a draught, then get the horses out, and I’ll be with thee.”
This is pretty well for five or six o’clock in a morning; but it is quite as likely that it is only one or two in the morning, as it certainly is, if he be going to a distance with a load, or for a load of any thing. The breakfast is as liberally handled, and Betty mean time has put up their luncheons or “ten-o’clocks”--huge masses of bread and cheese, or cold bacon, or cold meat, and a bottle of ale if they are going to plough. Having now breakfasted, he has only to lace his boots, which he generally does in the most inconvenient posture, and not before he has filled himself till it is tenfold additionally inconvenient--so with a face into which all the blood in his body seems to rush, and with many a grunt, he accomplishes his task, and away he goes;--his whip cracks, his gears jingle, his wagon rumbles, and he is gone. If, however, he be going to plough, he will duly about eleven o’clock lunch under a tree, while his horses rest and eat their hay; and then, at three or four o’clock, he will loose them from the plough, and return home to a dinner as plentiful as his breakfast; his horses are fed, and he goes to bed. If he be going out with corn, or for coals, he is off, as I have said, probably by two o’clock, and in his wagon he duly takes with him a truss of hay and a truss of straw. The hay is for his horses to eat at some wayside public-house, and the straw is for payment for their standing in the stable. The straw is worth a shilling, and in some places, at certain seasons, eighteen-pence. If he does not take straw, he takes a shilling in money. He carries his luncheon and eats it in the alehouse, and he has a shilling for himself and companion to drink, and treat the hostler. This is a custom as old as farms and corn-mills themselves. If it be winter weather, you shall meet him, probably, with straw-bands wrapped round his legs, or even round his hat for warmth; and in heavy rain his Macintosh is a sack-bag, which he throws over his shoulders, and goes on defying the weather for a whole day. In sudden squalls and thunder showers in summer, you may see him, and frequently a whole cluster of harvesters, take shelter under his wagon till the storm is over. By the evening fire, in some farm-houses, they mend their shoes, or shape and polish the heads of flails which they have cut from the black-thorn bush, and have had in a loft or under their bed seasoning for the last six months, or they get into some horse-play, or they doze
Till chilblains wake them, or the snapping fire.
And on Sundays they go to church in the morning to get a quiet nod. Perhaps it is to them that the Apostle alludes when he says--“And your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” For the only chance of their worship seems to be in their dreams--the daily exposure to the air on the six days making them as drowsy as bats on the seventh. In the afternoon they lean over gates, or play at quoits:--and there is the life of a farmer man-servant, till he is metamorphosed into a labourer by marrying and setting up his cottage, finding himself, and receiving weekly instead of yearly wages. Such is the farm-servant, whether you see him in his white, his blue, his tawny, or his olive-green smock-frock, in his straw-hat, or his wide-awake, according to the prevailing fashion of different parts of the country--and truly, seeing him and his fellows, we may ask with Wordsworth--
What kindly warmth from touch of fostering hand, What penetrating power of sun or breeze Shall e’er dissolve the crust wherein his soul Sleeps, like a caterpillar sheathed in ice? This torpor is no pitiable work Of modern ingenuity; no town Or crowded city may be taxed with aught Of sottish vice, or desperate breach of law, To which in after years he may be roused. This boy the fields produce:--his spade and hoe-- The carter’s whip that on his shoulder rests, In air high-towering with a boorish pomp, The sceptre of his sway: his country’s name, Her equal rights, her churches and her schools-- What have they done for him? And, let me ask, For tens of thousands, uninformed as he?[3]
[3] Who would believe it, that such is the profound ignorance amongst the peasantry even of the Cumberland hills--amongst that peasantry where Wordsworth himself has found his Michaels, his Matthews, and many another man and woman that in his hands have become classical and enduring specimens of rustic heart and mind, that such facts as the following could occur, and yet this did occur there not very long ago. The “statesmen,” that is, small proprietors there, are a people very little susceptible of religious excitement; and, we may believe, have, in past years, been very much neglected by their natural instructors. You hear of no “revivals” amongst them, and the Methodists have little success amongst them. Some person, speaking with the wife of one of these “statesmen” on religious subjects, found that she had not even heard of such a person as Jesus Christ! Astonished at the discovery, he began to tell her of his history; of his coming to save the world, and of his being put to death. Having listened to all this very attentively, she inquired where this occured; and that being answered, she asked, “and when was it?” this being also told her, she very gravely observed--“Well, its sae far off, and sae lang since, we’ll fain believe that it isna true!”
IV. THE BONDAGE SYSTEM OF THE NORTH OF ENGLAND
A person from the south or midland counties of England, journeying northward, is struck when he enters Durham, or Northumberland, with the sight of bands of women working in the fields under the surveillance of one man. One or two such bands, of from half a dozen to a dozen women, generally young, might be passed over; but when they recur again and again, and you observe them wherever you go, they become a marked feature of the agricultural system of the country, and you naturally inquire how it is that such regular bands of female labourers prevail there. The answer, in the provincial tongue, is--“O they are the Boneditchers,” i. e. Bondagers. Bondagers! that is an odd sound, you think, in England. What, have we bondage, a rural serfdom, still existing in free and fair England? Even so. The thing is astounding enough, but it is a fact. As I cast my eyes for the first time on these female bands in the fields, working under their drivers, I was, before making any inquiry respecting them, irresistibly reminded of the slave-gangs of the West Indies: turnip-hoeing, somehow, associated itself strangely in my brain with sugar-cane dressing; but when I heard these women called Bondagers, the association became tenfold strong.
On all the large estates in these counties, and in the south of Scotland, the bondage system prevails. No married labourer is permitted to dwell on these estates unless he enters into bond to comply with this system. These labourers are termed hinds. Small houses are built for them on the farms, and on some of the estates--as those of the Duke of Northumberland--all these cottages are numbered, and the number is painted on the door. A hind, therefore, engaging to work on one of the farms belonging to the estate, has a house assigned him. He has 4_l._ a year in money; the keep of a cow; his fuel found him,--a prescribed quantity of coal, wood, or peat, to each cottage; he is allowed to plant a certain quantity of land with potatoes; and has thirteen boles of corn furnished him for his family consumption; one-third being oats, one-third barley, and one-third peas. In return for these advantages, he is bound to give his labour the year round, and also to furnish a woman labourer at 1_s._ per day during harvest, and 8_d._ per day for the rest of the year. Now it appears, at once, that this is no hereditary serfdom--such a thing could not exist in this country; but it is the next thing to it, and no doubt has descended from it; being serfdom in its mitigated form, in which alone modern notions and feelings would tolerate it. It may even be said that it is a voluntary system; that it is merely married hinds doing that which unmarried farm-servants do everywhere else--hire themselves on certain conditions from year to year. The great question is, whether these conditions are just, and favourable to the social and moral improvement of the labouring class. Whether, indeed, it be quite of so voluntary a nature as, at first sight, appears; whether it be favourable to the onward movement of the community in knowledge, virtue, and active and enterprising habits. These are questions which concern the public; and these I shall endeavour to answer in that candid and dispassionate spirit which public good requires.
In the first place, then, it is only just to say that their cottages, though they vary a good deal on different estates, are in themselves, in some cases, not bad. Indeed, some of those which we entered on the estates of the Duke of Northumberland, were much more comfortable than labourers’ cottages often are. Each has its number painted on the door, within a crescent,--the crest of the Northumberland family; and though this has a look rather savouring too much of a badge of servitude, yet within many of them are very comfortable. They are all built pretty much on one principle, and that very different to the labourers’ houses of the south. They are copied, in fact, from the Scotch cottages. They are of one story, and generally of one room. On one side is the fireplace, with an oven on one hand and a boiler on the other; on the opposite side of the cottage is the great partition for the beds, which are two in number, with sliding doors or curtains. The ceiling is formed by poles nailed across from one side of the roof to the other, about half a yard above where it begins to slope, and covered with matting. From the matting to the wall the slope is covered with a piece of chintz in the best cottages; in others, with some showy calico print, with ordinary wall-paper, or even with paper daubed with various colours and patterns. This is the regular style of the hind’s cottage; varying in neatness and comfort, it must be confessed, however, from one another by many degrees. Many are very naked, dirty, and squalid. Where they happen to stand separate, on open heaths, and in glens of the hills, nature throws around them so much of wild freedom and picturesqueness as makes them very agreeable. The cottages of the shepherds are often very snug and curious. We went into the cottage of the herd of Middleton, at the foot of the Cheviots, an estate formerly belonging to Greenwich Hospital. This hut was of more than ordinary size, as it was required to accommodate several shepherds. The part of the house on your left as you entered was divided into two rooms. The one was a sort of entrance lobby, where stood the cheese-press and the pails, and where hung up various shepherds’ plaids, great coats, and strong shoes. In one place hung a mass of little caps with strings to them, ready to tie upon the sheeps’ heads when they become galled by the fly in summer; in another were suspended wool-shears and crooks. The other little room was the dairy, with the oddest assemblage of wooden quaighs or little pails imaginable. Over these rooms, a step-ladder led to an open attic in the roof, which formed at once the sleeping apartment of the shepherds and a store-room. Here were three or four beds, some of them woollen mattresses on rude stump-bedsteads; others pieces of wicker-work, like the lower half of a pot-crate cut off, about half a yard high, filled with straw, and a few blankets laid upon it. There were lots of fleeces of wool stowed away; and lasts and awls stuck into the spars, shewed that the herds occasionally amused their leisure in winter and bad weather by cobbling their shoes. The half of the house on your right hand on entering, was at all points such as I have before described, with its coved and matted ceiling, its chintz cornice, and its two beds with sliding doors. But the majority of the cottages of the hinds about the great farm-houses, are dismal abodes. They are generally built in a low, and sometimes in a dreary quadrangle, without those additions of gardens, piggeries, etc., which so much enrich and embellish the cottages of the labourers in many parts of the kingdom. And what is the state of feeling within? is it that of contentment or acquiescence? I am bound to say that many inquiries made in various places, discovered one general sentiment of discontent with the system. But in the first place, let us take a view of the general aspect of the country under this system as it appears to a stranger from the south, and here we have at hand the graphic descriptions of Cobbett, from his tour in Scotland and the northern counties of England, in 1832.
He does not seem to have become aware of the existence of the system while in Durham and Northumberland. He perceived, what no man can pass through those counties without seeing, the large-farm system in full operation, and with all its consequences in its face. “From Morpeth to within four miles of Hexham the land is very indifferent; the farms of an enormous extent. I saw in one place more than a hundred corn-stacks in one yard, each having from six to seven Surrey wagon-loads of sheaves in one stack; and not another house to be seen within a mile or two of the farm-house. There appears to be no such thing as barns, but merely a place to take in a stack at a time, and thrash it out by a machine. The country seems to be almost wholly destitute of people: immense tracts of corn land, but neither cottages nor churches.” p. 56. This was the first glimpse of the thing; it had not yet broken fully upon him; but he had not gone much further before the vast solitude of the depopulative system began to press upon his brain, and to set those indignant feelings and theorizings at work in him, which belonged so peculiarly to his nature. “From Morpeth to Alnwick, the country, generally speaking, is very poor as to land, scarcely any trees at all; the farms enormously extensive: only two churches, I think, in the whole of the twenty miles, i. e. from Newcastle to Alnwick. Scarcely any thing worthy the name of a tree, and not one single dwelling having the appearance of a labourer’s house. Here appears to be neither hedging nor ditching; no such thing as a sheep-fold or a hurdle to be seen; the cattle and sheep very few in number; the farm-servants living in the farm-houses, and very few of them; the thrashing done by machinery and horses; a country without people. This is a pretty country to take a minister from, to govern the south of England! a pretty country to take a Lord Chancellor from, to prattle about poor-laws, and about surplus population! My LORD GREY has, in fact, spent his life here, and BROUGHAM has spent his life in the inns of court, or in the botheration of speculative books. How should either of them know any thing about the eastern, southern, or western counties? I wish I had my dignitary, DR. BLACK, here; I would soon make him see that he has all these number of years been talking about the bull’s horns instead of his tail and buttocks. Besides the indescribable pleasure of having seen NEWCASTLE, the SHIELDSES, SUNDERLAND, DURHAM, and HEXHAM, I have now discovered the true ground of all the errors of the Scotch feelosophers, with regard to population, and with regard to poor-laws. The two countries are as different as any things of the same nature can possibly be; that which applies to the one does not at all apply to the other. The agricultural counties are covered all over with parish churches, and with people thinly distributed here and there. Only look at the two counties of Dorset and Durham. Dorset contains 1005 square miles; Durham contains 1061 square miles. Dorset has 271 parishes; Durham has 75 parishes. The population of Dorset is scattered all over the whole county; there being no town of any magnitude in it. The population of Durham, though larger than that of Dorset, is almost all gathered together at the mouths of the TYNE, the WEAR, and the TEES. Northumberland has 1871 square miles; and Suffolk has 1512 square miles. Northumberland has eighty-eight parishes; and Suffolk has five hundred and ten parishes. So here is a county one-third part smaller than that of Northumberland, with six times as many villages in it! What comparison is there to be made between states of society so essentially different? What rule is there, with regard to population and poor-laws, which can apply to both cases? * * * Blind and thoughtless must that man be, who imagines that all but farms in the south are unproductive. I much question whether, taking a strip three miles each way from the road, coming from NEWCASTLE to ALNWICK, an equal quantity of what is called waste ground in Surrey, together with the cottages that skirt it, do not exceed such strip of ground in point of produce. Yes; the cows, pigs, geese, poultry, gardens, bees, and fuel that arise from these wastes, far exceed, even in the capacity of sustaining people, similar breadths of ground, distributed into these large farms, in the poorer parts of Northumberland. I have seen not less than ten thousand geese in one tract of common, in about six miles, going from CHOBHAM towards FARNHAM in Surrey. I believe these geese alone, raised entirely by care and the common, to be worth more than the clear profit that can be drawn from any similar breadth of land between MORPETH and ALNWICK.”
There are two important particulars connected with this statement: one regards the sustenance of life, and the other morals. Much has been said of the morals of the hinds of Northumberland under this system, and in the main their morals may be good; but one or two facts I can state, as it regards the morals of the common people in general in both counties. In going over this very ground, of which Cobbett has been speaking, we witnessed such a scene as we never witnessed in any other part of England. We had taken our places in an afternoon coach, going from Newcastle to Morpeth. It was market-day, and we had not proceeded far out of Newcastle when we found that the coach in which we were, had actually two-and-thirty passengers. They consisted of country-people returning from market, who were taken up principally on the road. There were nine inside, and twenty-three outside; six of whom sat piled on each other’s knees, on the driving-box! The greater part of them were drunk; and the number of tipsy fellows staggering along the road, exceeded what we ever saw in any other quarter. We happened to be too at Alnwick fair, and we never saw the farmers and drovers more freely indulge in drink and noise. Moreover, from Alnwick to Belford we had a wealthy farmer in the coach, who was raving drunk, shouted out of the windows, chafed like a wild beast in a cage, and presented a spectacle such as I have never seen in a coach elsewhere. So much for the morals of that region.
But Cobbett had not yet seen the finest lands, or got a glimpse of the Bondage System. He still goes on expressing his astonishment at the solitude, the vast farms with their steam thrashing-machines; “so that the elements seem to be pressed into the amiable service of sweeping the people from the earth, in order that the whole amount may go into the hands of a small number of persons, that they may squander it at London, Paris, or Rome.” It was only after he had traversed the Lothians that the full discovery broke upon him; so that, after all, he never seems to have perceived that the Bondage System was prevalent in England, but speaks of it as exclusively a Scotch system. There is every reason to believe it a relic of ancient feudalism; but it is certain that but for the doctrines of the Edinburgh Economists it would have long ago vanished from our soil. When Cobbett arrived at Edinburgh, there he seemed to take breath, and clear his lungs for a good tirade against the system; which he does thus, in his first letter to the Chopsticks of the south. “This city is fifty-six miles from the Tweed, which separates England from Scotland. I have come through the country in a post-chaise, stopped one night upon the road, and have made every inquiry, in order that I might be able to ascertain the exact state of the labourers on the land. With the exception of about seven miles, the land is the finest that I ever saw in my life, though I have seen every fine vale in every county in England, and in the United States of America. I never saw any land a tenth-part so good. You will know what the land is, when I tell you that it is by no means uncommon for it to produce seven English quarters of wheat upon one English acre; and forty tons of turnips upon one English acre; and that there are, almost in every half mile, from fifty to a hundred acres of turnips in one piece, sometimes white turnips, and sometimes Swedes; all in rows, as straight as a line, and without a weed to be seen in any of these beautiful fields.
“Oh! how you will wish to be here! ‘Lord,’ you will say to yourselves, ‘what pretty villages there must be; what nice churches and churchyards. Oh! and what preciously nice alehouses! Come, Jack, let us set off to Scotland! What nice gardens we shall have to our cottages there! What beautiful flowers our wives will have, climbing up about the windows, and on both sides of the paths leading from the wicket up to the door! And what prancing and barking pigs we shall have running out upon the common, and what a flock of geese grazing upon the green!’
“Stop! stop! I have not come to listen to you, but to make you listen to me. Let me tell you, then, that there is neither village, nor church, nor alehouse, nor garden, nor cottage, nor flowers, nor pig, nor goose, nor common, nor green; but the thing is thus:--1. The farms of a whole county are, generally speaking, the property of one lord. 2. They are so large, that the corn-stacks frequently amount to more than a hundred upon one farm, each stack having in it, on an average, from fifteen to twenty English quarters of corn. 3. The farmer’s house is a house big enough and fine enough for a gentleman to live in; the farm-yard is a square, with buildings on the sides of it for horses, cattle, and implements; the stack-yard is on one side of this, the stacks all in rows, and the place as big as a little town. 4. On the side of the farm-yard next to the stack-yard, there is a place to thrash the corn in; and there is, close by this, always a thrashing-machine, sometimes worked by horses, sometimes by water, sometimes by wind, and sometimes by steam, there being no such thing as a barn or a flail in the whole country.
“‘Well,’ say you, ‘but out of such a quantity of corn, and of beef, and of mutton, there must some come to the share of the chopsticks, to be sure!’ Don’t be too sure yet; but hold your tongue, and hear my story. The single labourers are kept in this manner: about four of them are put into a shed, quite away from the farm-house, and out of the farm-yard; which shed, Dr. Jameson, in his Dictionary, calls a ‘boothie,’ a place, says he, where labouring servants are lodged. A boothie means a little booth; and here these men live and sleep, having a certain allowance of oat, barley, and pea meal, upon which they live, mixing it with water, or with milk when they are allowed the use of a cow, which they have to milk themselves. They are allowed some little matter of money besides, to buy clothes with, but never dream of being allowed to set foot within the walls of the farm-house. They hire for the year, under very severe punishment in case of misbehaviour, or quitting service; and cannot have fresh service, without a character from the last master, and also from the minister of the parish!
“Pretty well that for a knife and fork chopstick of Sussex, who has been used to sit round the fire with the master and mistress, and pull about and tickle the laughing maids! Pretty well that! But it is the life of the married labourer that will delight you. Upon a steam-engine farm, there are perhaps eight or ten of these. There is, at a considerable distance from the farm-yard, a sort of barrack erected for these to live in. It is a long shed, stone walls and pantile roof, and divided into a certain number of boothies, each having a door and one little window, all the doors being on one side of the shed, and there being no back-doors; no such thing, for them, appears ever to be thought of. The ground in front of the shed is wide or narrow according to circumstances, but quite smooth; merely a place to walk upon. Each distinct boothie is about seventeen feet one way, and fifteen feet the other way, as nearly as my eye could determine. There is no ceiling, and no floor but the earth. In this place, a man and his wife and family have to live. When they go into it there is nothing but the four bare walls, and the tiles over their head, and a small fireplace. To make the most of the room, they at their own cost erect berths, like those in a barrack-room, which they get up into when they go to bed; and here they are, a man, and his wife, and a parcel of children, squeezed up in this miserable hole, with their meal and their washing tackle, and all their other things; and yet it is quite surprising how decent the women endeavour to keep the place. These women, for I found all the men out at work, appeared to be most industrious creatures, to be extremely obliging, and of good disposition; and the shame is, that they are permitted to enjoy so small a portion of the fruit of all their labours, of all their cares.
“But if their dwelling-places be bad, their food is worse, being fed upon exactly that which we feed hogs and horses upon. The married man receives in money about four pounds for the whole year: and he has besides sixty bushels of oats, thirty bushels of barley, twelve bushels of peas, and three bushels of potatoes, with ground allowed him to plant the potatoes. The master gives him the keep of a cow the year round; but he must find the cow himself; he pays for his own fuel; he must find a woman to reap for twenty whole days in the harvest, as payment for the rent of his boothie. He has no wheat,--the meal altogether amounts to about six pounds for every day in the year; the oatmeal is eaten in porridge; the barley-meal and pea-meal are mixed together, and baked into a sort of cakes, upon an iron plate put over the fire; they sometimes get a pig, and feed it upon the potatoes.
“Thus they never have one bit of wheaten bread, or of wheaten flour, nor of beef, nor mutton, though the land is covered with wheat and with cattle. The hiring is for a year, beginning on the 26th of May, and not at Michaelmas. The farmer takes the man just at the season to get the sweat out of him; and if he dies, he dies when the main work is done. The labourer is wholly at the mercy of the master, who, if he will not keep him beyond the year, can totally ruin him, by refusing him a character. The cow is a thing more in name than in reality; she may be about to calve when the 26th of May comes: the wife may be in such a situation as to make removal perilous to her life. This family has no home; and no home can any man be said to have, who can thus be dislodged every year of his life at the will of his master. It frequently happens, that the poor creatures are compelled to sell their cow for next to nothing; and, indeed, the necessity of character from the last employer, makes the man a real slave, worse off than the negro by many degrees; for here there is neither law to ensure him relief, nor motive in the master to attend to his health, or to preserve his life.
“Six days from daylight to dark these good, and laborious, and patient, and kind people labour. On an average they have six English miles to go to church. Here are therefore twelve miles to walk on Sunday; and the consequence is, that they very seldom go. But, say you, what do they do with all the wheat, and all the beef, and all the mutton? and what becomes of all the money that they are sold for? Why, the cattle and sheep walk into England upon their legs; the wheat is put into ships to be sent to London or elsewhere; and as to the money, the farmer is allowed to have a little of it, but almost the whole of it is sent to the landlord, to be gambled, or otherwise squandered away at London, at Paris, or at Rome. The rent of the land is enormous; four, five, six, or seven pounds for an English acre. The farmer is not allowed to get much; almost the whole goes into the pockets of the lords; the labourers are their slaves, and the farmers their slave-drivers. The farm-yards are, in fact, factories for making corn and meat, carried on principally by the means of horses and machinery. There are no people; and these men seem to think that people are not necessary to a state. I came over a tract of country a great deal bigger than the county of Suffolk, with only three towns in it, and a couple of villages, while the county of Suffolk has 29 market-towns and 491 villages. Yet our precious government seems to wish to reduce England to the state of this part of Scotland; and you are abused and reproached, and called ignorant, because you will not reside in a boothie, and live upon the food which we give to horses and hogs.” pp. 102-7.
This is the description of one of the most accurate observers of all that related to the working man that ever lived. Such is the comparison which he draws between the condition of the hinds, and of the southern chopsticks. Such is his opinion of the superior condition of the southern peasantry, that he says he would not be the man who should propose to one of them to adopt the condition of a hind, especially if the fellow should have a bill-hook in his hand. Cobbett’s description is as accurate as it is graphic. Let any one compare it with my own in the early part of this paper, made from personal observation in the summer of 1836. Such was the painful impression left upon Cobbett’s mind, that he reverts to it again and again. He tells us of a visit made to a farm near Dunfermline, and of the wretched abodes and food of the men he found there; but the last extract contains the substance of the Bondage System.
Let it be understood that the system to the Bondagers, so called, is no hardship. They are principally girls from sixteen to twenty years of age. Full of health and spirits, and glad enough to range over the farm fields in a troop, with a stout young fellow, laughing and gossiping,--the grievance is none of theirs; but the poor hind’s, who has to maintain them. Just when his family becomes large, and he has need of all his earnings to feed, and clothe, and educate his troop of children, then he is compelled to hire and maintain a woman to eat up his children’s food; and to take away in her wages that little pittance of cash that is allowed him, as many a wife with tears in her eyes has said, “to clothe the puir bairns and put them to school.” But the system is not without its injurious effect on the Bondager herself. It has been said that the Bondagers are of service in the hind’s cottage, but the wives over the whole space where the bondage system prevails tell you that the Bondagers are of little or no use in the house. They look upon themselves as hired to work on the farm, and they neither are very willing to work in the house, nor very capable. They get out-of-door tastes and habits; they loathe the confinement of the house; they dislike its duties. “They are fit only,” say the women, to “mind the bairns a bit about the door.” And this is one of the evils of the system. Instead of women brought up to manage a house, to care for children, to make a fireside comfortable, and to manage the domestic resources well, they come to housekeeping ignorant, unprepared, and in a great measure disqualified for it. They can hoe turnips and potatoes to a miracle, but know very little about the most approved methods of cooking them. They can rake hay better than comb children’s hair; drive a cart or a harrow with a better grace than rock a cradle, and help more nimbly in the barn than in the ingle.
The two points of most importance are those of the hind’s being compelled to have a character from the last master, and of being at his mercy, to turn him not only out of employ, but out of house and home. I think little of their having no wheaten flour. Many a hardy race of peasants, and even farmers, both in Scotland and England, in mountain districts, never see any thing in the shape of bread but oat-cake. In Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland, and the Peak of Derbyshire, there are thousands that would not thank you for wheaten bread. The girdle-cakes, as they call them, which the wives of the hinds make, of mixed barley and pea meal, I frequently ate of and enjoyed. They are about an inch thick, and eight or ten inches in diameter, and taste perceptibly of the pea. These, and milk, are a simple, but not a despicable food; but the fact, that these poor people must bring a character from the last master before they can be employed again, is one which may seem at first sight a reasonable demand, but is in fact the binding link of a most subtle and consummate slavery. I have seen the effect of this system in the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire collieries. There, amongst the master colliers, a combination was entered into, and for aught I know still exists, to regulate the price of coal, and the quantity each master should relatively get. This rule, that no man should be employed except he brought a character from his last master, was adopted; and what was the consequence? That every man was the bounden slave of him in whose employment he was; and that soon the price of coals was raised to three times their actual value, and the labour of the men restricted to about three half-days, or a day and a half, per week.
Let any one imagine a body of men bound by one common interest, holding in their possession all the population of several counties, and subjecting their men to this rule. Can there be a more positive despotism? The hind is at the mercy of the caprice, the anger, or the cupidity of the man in whose hand he is; and if he dismiss him, as I said in the early part of this paper, where is he to go? As Cobbett justly remarks, he has NO HOME; and nothing but utter and irretrievable ruin is before him. Such a condition is unfit for any Englishman; such power as that of the master no man ought to hold. A condition like this must generate a slavish character. Can that noble independence of feeling belong to a hind, which is the boast of the humblest Englishman, while he holds employment, home, character, everything at the utter mercy of another? I have now laid before the reader the combined evidence of my own observation and that of a great observer of the working classes, both in town and country, in the north and the south, and I leave it to the judgment of any man whether such a system is good or bad: but I cannot help picturing to myself what would be the consequence of the spread of this system of large farm and bondage all over England. Let us suppose, as we must in that case, almost all our working population cooped up in large towns in shops and factories, and all the country thrown into large farms to provide them with corn--what an England would it then be! The poetry and the picturesque of rural life would be annihilated; the delicious cottages and gardens, the open common, and the shouting of children would vanish; the scores of sweet old-fashioned hamlets, where an humble sociality and primitive simplicity yet remain, would no more be found; all those charms and amenities of country life, which have inspired poets and patriots with strains and with deeds that have crowned England with half her glory, would have perished; all that series of gradations of rank and character, from the plough-boy and the milk-maid, the free labourer, the yeoman, the small farmer, the substantial farmer, up to the gentleman, would have gone too;
And a bold peasantry, its country’s pride,
would be replaced by a race of stupid and sequacious slaves, tilling the solitary lands of vast landholders, who must become selfish and hardened in their natures, from the want of all those claims upon their better sympathies which the more varied state of society at present presents. The question, therefore, does not merely involve the comforts of the hind, but the welfare and character of the country at large; and I think no man who desires England not merely to maintain its noble reputation, but to advance in social wisdom and benevolence, can wish for the wider spread, or even the continuance of the Bondage System. I think all must unite with me in saying, let the very name perish from the plains of England, where it sounds like a Siberian word.[4] Let labour be free; and this TRUCK SYSTEM of the agriculturists be abolished, not by Act of Parliament, but by public principle and sound policy. It is a system which wrongs all parties. It wrongs the hind, for it robs his children of comfort and knowledge; it wrongs the farmer, for what he saves in labour he pays in rent, while he gains only the character of a taskmaster; and it wrongs the landholder, for it puts his petty pecuniary interest into the balance against his honour and integrity; and causes him to be regarded as a tyrant, in hearts where he might be honoured as a natural protector, and revered as a father.
[4] Since the publication of the former edition of this work, I understand the name has been changed; that, in May 1839, it was agreed to call the Bondagers Woman’s-workers; a clumsy appellation, and which does not at all do away with anything more in the system than its name.
* * * * *
This account of the Bondage System in the first edition, excited, as was to be expected, a strong feeling in the public mind, both in the north and the south. In the south great surprise, for it was a system totally unknown to nine-tenths of readers; in the north great indignation on the part of the supporters of the system. I have received many conflicting statements from the Bondage district,--some thanking me for having made public so accurate a description of an objectionable system; others vindicating the system, and applauding it. I need not here notice those communications which accorded with my own personal observations and inquiries; but as my object is simply truth, I am more desirous to give a counter-statement, so that all readers may draw their own inferences. The most able, and in itself most interesting, defence of the system, I received from the lady of John Grey, Esq. of Dilstone House, Northumberland. Mr. Grey is well known as an active magistrate, an eminent agriculturist and promoter of the interests of the agricultural class; and Mrs. Grey is evidently a lady of a vigorous intellect and a noble nature. She is a native of Northumberland, proud of her county, and thoroughly persuaded of the excellence of its agricultural system. I regret that my space will not permit me to give more than a very summary notice of her vindication, nor more than a mere reference to the documents by Mr. Grey, Mr. Gilly of Norham, the author of the “Life of Felix Neff,” and Mr. Blackden of Ford Castle, which, however, may be found in Mr. Frederick Hill’s works on National Education, under the head of “Northern District.”
Mrs. Grey denies that Cobbett, though a graphic writer, is an accurate one. She denies that a character is required with a hind from his last master, but merely a certificate called “The Lines,” stating that he is free from his former service. She asserts that all hinds have gardens; and that Bondagers make good domestic servants, and wives. She reports that Mr. Grey only remembers two instances of his hinds receiving parochial relief, and adds that she never saw two instances of their own hinds being intoxicated.
But her description of the cottages of hinds and their way of life, is perfectly Arcadian. “In a glance at cottage life in Northumberland, such as 20 years of intimate observation has shewn it to me, let me introduce you into one of the ‘miserable holes’ where, according to Cobbett, this ‘slave population’ are ‘squeezed up.’ Observe, if you please, its furniture. There are a couple of neatly painted or fir-wood press-beds; a dresser and shelves, on which are ranged a goodly display of well-hoarded delf, or of modern blue-and-white Staffordshire ware. There is also a press or cupboard, in which are kept the nicer articles of food, and below which are drawers for the clothes of the family. A clock, in a handsome oaken case, ticks, not behind the door, but in some conspicuous situation; and, in many families, is added a mahogany half-chest of drawers for the female finery. I admit that the houses are generally too small, and the want of a back-door and a commodious second apartment, are great evils; but this is the landlord’s blame; and my object is only to shew that the hind, though esteemed by you ‘many degrees worse than a negro,’ has yet the means of making these insufficient abodes look most respectable and comfortable. The press-beds form a partition, behind which is a small space containing in one part a bed for the Bondager, and in another, a little dairy and pantry containing stores of meat, flour, etc. This space ought to be larger, and to form a second respectable apartment, but, such as it is, it is well filled with the necessaries of life, which is no small matter to the inhabitant. We might censure, too, the matted ceiling, were not the eye immediately attracted from it by the plentiful store of bacon which hangs below it, together with hanging shelves containing a supply of cheeses, pot-herbs, etc., and in other parts bunches of yarn ready for making into stockings or blankets. Then, as to clothing, the men on Sundays are both respectably and handsomely dressed, and the women,--yes, these very ‘slaves’, the Bondagers, may be seen with their light print or Merino gowns, their winter’s plaid, and their summer’s Thibet, or spun silk shawls; their Tuscan or Dunstable bonnets; and their open-work cotton stockings, or smart boots. A tawdry figure is a rare sight; the generality are comfortably and neatly attired, and their dress good in quality.
“When the ‘slave-gangs’ are at work in the fields under their ‘driver’ in winter, they are certainly a motley and uncouth group; many of them having on their fathers’ great coats, and others long woollen dresses, reaching to their ankles, above their other clothes, to defend them from the cold. But in summer, the jaunty air of their short white, or light cotton jackets, an article of dress which has somewhat the appearance of the waist of a lady’s riding-habit, with its open collar displaying a gay handkerchief beneath, with their pink or blue gingham petticoats, give them quite a picturesque appearance.
“I should like to shew you too, what a pleasant sight it is when you pay a visit of enquiry on the occasion of a birth. You will find the mother laid among her well-bleached sheets, and comfortable home-made blankets, surmounted by a gaily-patched quilt; and though you may be no admirer--as gentlemen seldom are--of new-born babies, yet, when the little thing is brought out of its snug cradle for your inspection, you cannot but cast an approving glance on its nicely-plaited cap, and the warm flannels and neatly made frock (often ornamented with braiding), which bespeak it the child of competence and comfort. The Bondager too is there, rather dressed for the occasion (though ‘said by the wives to be of little or no use to them’), it being customary for her to stay at home to look after the house and nurse the mother, till she is well enough to resume her duties. Should it be a first-born, you are invited to inspect the baby’s wardrobe, and there is little appearance of wretchedness in the sufficient stock of neat little garments ‘laid up in lavender’ for the little stranger. It is expected, too, that you should drink the child’s health, and a bottle of wine or spirits is produced from the cupboard, along with a noble cheese, and a loaf to match it, which it would be thought very ‘mean’ not to have to offer on such occasions.” Mrs. Grey luxuriates in descriptions of the “white loaf which the women always have, and the dainty white cake for tea, kneaded with butter or cream, when a friend comes to visit them; of the fat things with which their cows and their pigs overflow their dairy and larder; of their general good fare; and of the many days when the Bondager is not at field-work, but stays to spin, knit, wash and iron for the household,-- always milking the cow, and frequently churning and making cheese.” She adds that the hinds’ wives make great profit of their butter, about 5_l._ a year; and that they have “great spinning matches, and spin all the woollen articles that they use.”
Mr. Grey in “Two Letters on the State of the Agricultural Interests, and the Condition of the Labouring Poor,” published by Ridgway, London, 1831, draws a similar picture, describing the hind’s cottage as “a scene of comfort and contentment.”
Now these hinds must be very unreasonable fellows. Spite of all their bounteous and Arcadian lot; spite of their cottages being “scenes of comfort and contentment,” they certainly were, as described in the preceding pages, found by us, in 1836, in a most _dis_contented state. And since then they have turned out in great numbers, calling upon their employers to abolish the system. In public meetings held at Wooller, and elsewhere, they described their situation as wretched, and their average weekly gains at about 5_s._ 6¾_d._ Mr. L. Hindmarsh, in a paper on the Bondage System, read at Newcastle, in August, 1838, bears testimony to the great dissatisfaction of the hinds. Mr. Grey, in his pamphlet alluded to above, states, on the other hand, that the “conditions” of the hind, as they are called, were in 1831, the year of its publication, as follows; and that however the market-price may vary the quantities are invariably the same, and always of the very best quality; varying with the price of grain from £30 to £40 a year.
£. s. d. 36 bushels of oats 6 12 0 24 ditto barley 5 12 0 12 ditto peas 3 0 0 3 ditto wheat 1 5 0 3 ditto rye 0 15 0 36 ditto potatoes, at 1_s._ 6_d._ 2 14 0 24 pounds of wool 1 0 0 A cow’s keep for the year 9 0 0 Cottage and garden 3 0 0 Coals, carrying from the pit 2 0 0 Cash 3 10 0 ----------- £ 38 8 0 -----------
This is also exclusive of what the other branches of the family earn; the females receiving 10_d._ or 1_s._ a day generally, and 2_s._ or 2_s._ 6_d._ in harvest.
Besides the general discontent and turn-out just noticed, which Mrs. Grey attributes to the waywardness of human nature, we must introduce these facts. The morals of these districts have been highly extolled, and both Mr. and Mrs. Grey strongly reiterate the eulogium. Mrs. Grey does not recollect two instances of intoxication amongst the hinds in her life; we saw many one day, as already stated. In the Fourth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, even while advocating “the hinding system,” we find these singular paragraphs: “Whatever general merits may or may not otherwise have distinguished Northumberland and Durham from more pauperized districts, these counties must not lay claim to superiority in reference to bastardy, for in no part of England was bastardy more prevalent than in portions of this district, and in none was the practice of relief to the mother more pertinaciously upheld. The Newcastle parishes of All Saints’ and St. Andrews, together with the parishes of Sunderland and Berwick, are the only places we can call to mind where a weekly allowance for every legitimate child was not a matter of course.
“The difficulties of inducing children in competent circumstances to contribute to the support of their aged parents (whose maintenance the parish had hitherto taken off their hands), were quite as great, if not relatively greater, considering the wages of labour, in the north as in the south.”
So much for morals; now for the Arcadian cottages. The Newcastle Courant of November 23d, 1838, stated that “Thomas Dodds, Esq., surgeon, read a very valuable paper on ‘Improvement in Cottage Architecture, and the domestic comfort of the peasantry of North Northumberland.’ Mr. Dodds’ long personal observation, arising from his medical practice,” it is stated, “peculiarly qualified him for the discussion of this important and interesting subject,” and Mr. Dodds very summarily and pithily characterized these abodes as “a disgrace to Northumberland.” He contrasted them with “the splendid edifices, commemorative columns, and magnificent streets, which the people of Northumberland are raising.” He said, “The miserable tenements of numbers of this class are less carefully constructed than the stables of their horses, formed, as they are, in a majority of cases, of only one apartment, open to the roof, with earthen floor, and four-paned windows that dim the light of day, a part of which is often occupied by the cow; and where the decencies of life cannot be observed, there being no separate apartments for the females of the family, one of whom is often a stranger in the capacity of a servant to work ‘the bondage.’” He represented them equally detrimental to health as to comfort and morals; and gave many instances from personal observation, especially a case at that moment of a family of eight persons, near Alnwick, all lying ill of typhus fever in their one room with the corpse of one of them laid out in the midst of them. He added a ludicrous anecdote of a cow which, in the night, leaped, in some sudden fear, from its fastening behind the bed of a hind at Hawkhill, right through the bed, and alighted on the hearth, bringing the bed at one crash upon the people in it, and severely injuring the man’s wife. Mr. Dodds called the attention of his hearers to some cottages of the Duke of Northumberland erected at Brislee, as models for cottage architecture, and strongly urged that “the hinds should be no longer compelled to seek in sleep and oblivion the only solace of his cheerless dwelling,” but have “an ingle blinking bonnily,” where he might “spend his hours of relaxation in innocent amusements, or in reading books suited to his way of life.”
“A vote of thanks to Mr. Dodds for this address was moved by John Lambert, Esq., and carried by acclamation.”
What then are we to infer from these very conflicting statements? Why, that where the people are discontented, and the appeal to their wealthy neighbours on their behalf is received with acclamation,--the evil must be the actual condition, and the “cottage scenes of comfort and contentment,” the exceptions. Mrs. Grey admits that she “has endeavoured to present the sunny side of the picture as the reverse of my gloomy one.” I can well believe that she lives on the sunny side of humanity; and that her enlightened husband, and the most liberal portion of the agriculturists, so treat their hinds as to form the exception. It is only another proof of the wisdom of Pope’s words that “whate’er is best administered is best.” That, under a pure despotism, people may be perfectly happy if they happen to have a kind tyrant. That the hinds under the bondage system may be, moral, flourishing, and happy, when they have kind and sympathizing employers but that does not prove that the system itself has a tendency to such happy results, nor consequently remove our objections to it. Any condition of the people is good where Christian benevolence and enlightened regard are exercised towards them, and any system, even the bondage system, is better than that deadly neglect of the peasantry by the landowners, which too much prevails in many parts of the south.
V. THE TERRORS OF A SOLITARY HOUSE
The citizen who lives in a compact house in the centre of a great city; whose doors and windows are secured at night by bars, bolts, shutters, locks, and hinges of the most approved and patented construction; who, if he look out of doors, looks upon splendid rows of lamps; upon human habitations all about him; whose house can only be assailed behind by climbing over the tops of other houses; or before, by eluding troops of passengers and watchmen, whom the smallest alarm would hurry to the spot: I say, if such a man could be suddenly set down in one of our many thousand country houses, what a feeling of unprotected solitude would fall upon him. To sit by the fire of many a farm-house, or cottage, and hear the unopposed wind come sighing and howling about it; to hear the trees swaying and rustling in the gale, infusing a most forlorn sense of the absence of all neighbouring abodes; to look on the simple casements and the old-fashioned locks and bolts, and to think what would their resistance be to the determined attack of bold thieves;--I imagine it would give many such worthy citizen a new and not very enviable feeling. But if he were to step out before the door of such a house at nine or ten o’clock of a winter or autumnal night, what a state of naked jeopardy it would seem to stand in! Perhaps all solitary darkness;--nothing to be heard but the sound of neighbouring woods; or the roar of distant waters; or the baying of the ban-dogs at the scattered and far-off farm-houses; the wind puffing upon him with a wild freshness, as from the face of vast and solitary moors; or perhaps some gleam of moonlight, or the wild, lurid light which hovers in the horizon of a winter-night sky, revealing to him desolate wastes, or gloomy surrounding woods. In truth, there is many a sweet spot that, in summer weather, and by fair daylight, do seem very paradises; of which we exclaim, in passing, “Ay! there could I live and die, and never desire to leave it!” There are thousands of such sweet places, which, when night drops down, assume strange horrors, and make us wish for towers and towns, watchmen, walkers of streets, and gaslight. One seems to have no security in any thing. A single house five or six miles from a neighbour. Mercy! why it is the very place for a murder! What would it avail there to cry help! murder! Murder might be perpetrated a dozen times before help could come!
Just one such fancy as that, and what a prison! a trap! does such a place become to a fearful heart. We look on the walls, and think them slight as card-board; on the roof, and it becomes in our eyes no better than a layer of rushes. If we were attacked here, it were all over! This gimcrack tenement would be crushed in before the brawny hand of a thief. And to think of out-of-doors! Yes! of that pleasant out-of-doors, which in the day we glorified ourselves in. Those forest tracts of heath, and gorse, and flowering broom, where the trout hid themselves beneath the overhanging banks of the most transparent streams--ugh! they are now the very lurking-places of danger! What admirable concealment for liers-in-wait, are the deep beds of heather. How black do those bushes of broom and gorse look to a suspicious fancy! They are just the very things for lurking assassins to crouch behind. And what is worse, those woods! those woods that come straggling up to the very doors; putting forward a single tree here and there, as advanced guards of picturesque beauty in the glowing summer noon, or in the spring, when their leaves are all delicately new. Beauty! how could we ever think them beautiful, though we saw them stand in their assembled majesty; though they did tower aloft with their rugged, gashed, and deeply-indented stems, and make a sound as of many waters in their tops, and cast down pleasant shadows on the mossy turf beneath; and though the thrush and the nightingale did sing triumphantly in their thickets. Beautiful! they are horrible! Their blackness of darkness now makes us shudder. Their breezy roar is fearful beyond description. Let daylight and summer sunshine come, and make them look as pleasant as they will, we would not have a wood henceforward within a mile of us. Why, up to the walls of your house, under your very windows, may evil eyes now be glaring from behind those sturdy boles;--they seem to have grown there just to suit the purposes of robbery and murder. We look now to the dogs and guns for assistance, but they give us but cold comfort: for the guns only remind us that at this moment the muzzle of one may be at that chink in the shutter, at that hole out of which a knot has dropped, and in another moment we are in eternity! And the dogs!--see, they rise! they set up the bristles on their backs! they growl! they bark! our fears are true! the place is beset!
This may seem rather exaggerated, read by good daylight, or by the fire of a city hearth; but this is the natural spirit of the solitary house. It is that which many a one has felt. It has cured many a one of longing to live in a “sweet sequestered cot;” nay, it is the spirit felt by the naturalized inhabitants of such solitary places. I look upon such places to generate fears and superstitions too, in no ordinary degree. The inhabitants of solitary houses are often most arrant cowards; and for this there are many causes. A sense of exposure to danger if it be not lost by time, is more likely to generate timidity of disposition than courage. Then, the sound of woods and waters; the mysterious sighings and moanings, and lumberings, that winds and other causes occasion amongst the old walls and decayed roofs, and ill-fastened doors and casements of large old country houses, have a wonderful influence on the minds of the ignorant and simple, who pass their lives in the solitude of fields; and go to and fro between their homes and the scene of their duties, often through deep and lonesome dells, through deep, o’ershadowed lanes by night; by the cross-road, and over the dreary moor: all places of no good character. Superstitious legends hang all about such neighbourhoods; and traditions enough to freeze the blood of the ignorant, taint a dozen spots round every such place. In this field a girl was killed by her jealous, or only too favoured lover: to the boughs of that old oak, a man was found hanging: in that deep dark pool the poor blind fiddler was found drowned: in that old stone-quarry, and under that high cliff, deeds were done that have mingled a blackness with their name. Nay, in one such locality, the head of a woodman was found by some mowers returning in the evening from their work. There it lay in the green path of a narrow dingle, horrid and blackening in the sun. It was supposed to have been severed from the wretched man’s body with his own axe, by a band of poachers, who charged him with being a spy upon them. The body was found cast into a neighbouring marsh.
What lonely country but has these petrifying horrors? And is it wonderful that they have their effect on the simple peasantry? especially as they are the constant topics round the evening fire, along with a thousand haunted-house and churchyard stories; ghosts, and highway robberies, and
Horrid stabs in groves forlorn, And murders done in caves.--Hood.
The very means of defence sometimes become the aggravators of their evils. The dogs and guns have added to the catalogue of their tales of horror. The dogs, as conscious of their solitary station as their masters, and with true canine instinct, feeling a great charge and responsibility upon them, set up the most clamourous barkings at the least noise in the night, and often seem to take a melancholy pleasure, a whole night through, in uttering such awful and long-spun howls as are seldom heard in more secure and cheerful situations. These are often looked upon as prognostics of family troubles, and occasion great fears. Who has not heard these dismal howlings at old halls, and been witness to the anxiety they occasioned? And, if a branch blown by the wind do but scrape against a pane, or an unlucky pig get into the garden, the dogs are all barking outrageously, and the family is up, in the certain belief that they are beset with thieves; and it has been no unfrequent circumstance, on retiring to rest again, that loaded pistols have been left about on tables, and the servants on coming down next morning, with that fatal propensity to sport with fire-arms, have playfully menaced, and actually shot one another in their rashness. Such a catastrophe occurred in the family of a relative of mine, on just such an occasion. But truly, the horrors and depredations which formerly were perpetrated in such places, were enough to make a solitary house a terrible sojourn in the night. A single cottage on a great heath; a toll-bar on a wild road, far from a town; a wealthy farm-house in a retired region; an old hall or grange, amongst gloomy woods. These were places in which such outrages were committed in former years as filled the newspapers of the time with continual details of terror; and would furnish volumes of the most dreadful stories. It is said that the diminution of highway robberies and stopping of mails, once so frequent, has been in a great measure occasioned by the system of banking and paper-money. Instead of travellers, carrying with them large bags of gold, a letter by post transmits a bill to any amount, which, if intercepted is of no use to the thief, because the fact is immediately notified to the bank, and payment prevented; and notes being numbered, makes it a matter of the highest risk to offer them, lest the public be apprized of the numbers, and the offender be secured. But the wonderful improvement of all our roads since the days of M‘Adam, the consequently increased speed of travelling--the increased population and cultivation of the country, all have combined to spoil the trade of the public plunderer. And the press, as in other respects so in this, has added a marvellous influence. Scarcely has a crime of any sort against society been committed, but it raises a hue and cry; handbills and paragraphs in newspapers are flying far and wide, and dexterous must be the offender who escapes. The house of a friend of mine was entered on a Sunday night, and by means of handbills four of the thieves were secured on the Monday, and tried and transported on the Tuesday. But fifty years ago this could not have been done in a country place. The traveller had to wade through mud and deep ruts, along our well-frequented roads; and if assailed it was impossible to fly. Desperate bands of thieves made nocturnal assaults upon solitary houses; and, long ere a hue and cry could be raised, they had vanished into woods and heaths, or had fled beyond the slow flight of lumbering mails, and newspapers that did not reach their readers sometimes for a fortnight. Those were the times for fearful tragedies in lonely dwellings, which even yet furnish thrilling themes for winter firesides.
There is an account of the attack of the house of Colonel Purcell, which appeared in the newspapers at the time, and was twice reprinted in the Kaleidoscope, a Liverpool literary paper; the last time soon after the gallant Colonel’s death, in 1822, which, although it belongs to Ireland, a country whence not volumes, but whole libraries of such recitals might be imported, I shall insert here, because it so well illustrates the sort of horrors to which lonely houses were, in this country, formerly very much exposed; and from which they are not now entirely exempt; and because perhaps no greater instance of manly courage is upon record. A similar one, of female intrepidity, in a young woman who defended a toll-bar, in which she was alone, against a band of thieves, and shot several of them, I recollect seeing some years ago in the newspapers.
EXTRAORDINARY INTREPIDITY OF SIR JOHN PURCELL.
At the Cork Assizes, Maurice Noonan stood indicted for a burglary, and attempting to rob the house of Sir John Purcell, at Highfort, on the night of the 11th of March, 1812.
Sir John Purcell said, that, on the night of the 11th of March last, after he had retired to bed, he heard some noise outside the window of his parlour. He slept on the ground-floor, in a room immediately adjoining the parlour. There was a door from one room into the other; but this having been found inconvenient, and there being another passage from the bed-chamber more accommodating, it was nailed up, and some of the furniture of the parlour placed against it. Shortly after Sir John heard the noise in the front of his house, the windows of the parlour were dashed in, and the noise, occasioned by the feet of the robbers in leaping from the windows down upon the floor, appeared to denote a gang not less than fourteen in number, as it struck him. He immediately got out of bed; and the first resolution he took being to make resistance, it was with no small mortification that he reflected upon the unarmed condition in which he was placed, being destitute of a single weapon of the ordinary sort. In this state he spent little time in deliberation, as it almost immediately occurred to him, that, having supped in the bed-chamber on that night, a knife had been left behind by accident, and he instantly proceeded to grope in the dark for this weapon, which happily he found, before the door leading from the parlour into the bed-chamber had been broken. While he stood in calm but resolute expectation that the progress of the robbers would soon lead them to the bed-chamber, he heard the furniture which had been placed against the nailed-up door, expeditiously displaced, and immediately afterwards the door was burst open. The moon shone with great brightness, and when the door was thrown open, the light streaming in through three large windows in the parlour, afforded Sir John a view that might have made an intrepid spirit not a little apprehensive. His bed-room was darkened to excess, in consequence of the shutters of the windows, as well as the curtains being closed; and thus while he stood enveloped in darkness, he saw standing before him, by the brightness of the moonlight, a body of men well armed; and of those who were in the van of the gang, he observed that a few were blackened. Armed only with this case-knife, and aided only by a dauntless heart, he took his station by the side of the door, and in a moment after one of the villains entered from the parlour into the dark room. Instantly upon advancing, Sir John plunged the knife at him, the point of which entered under the right arm, and in a line with the nipple, and so home was the blow sent, that the knife passed into the robber’s body, until Sir John’s hand stopped its further progress. Upon receiving this thrust, the villain reeled back into the parlour, crying out blasphemously that he was killed; and shortly after another advanced, who was received in a similar manner, and who also staggered back into the parlour, crying out that he was wounded. A voice from the outside gave orders to fire into the dark room. Upon which, a man stepped forward with a short gun in his hand, which had the butt broke off at the small, and which had a piece of cord tied round the barrel and stock near the swell. As this fellow stood in the act to fire, Sir John had the amazing coolness to look at his intended murderer, and without betraying any audible emotion whatever, which might point out the exact spot which he was standing in, he calmly calculated his own safety from the shot which was preparing for him. He saw that the contents of the piece were likely to pass close to his breast without menacing him with, at least, any serious wound, and in this state of pain and manly expectation, he stood without flinching until the piece was fired, and its contents harmlessly lodged in the wall. It was loaded with a brace of bullets and three slugs. As soon as the robber fired, Sir John made a pass at him with the knife, and wounded him in the arm, which he repeated again in a moment with similar effect; and as the others had done, the villain after being wounded, retired, exclaiming that he was wounded. The robbers immediately rushed forward from the parlour into the dark room, and then it was that Sir John’s mind recognised the deepest sense of danger, not to be oppressed by it, however, but to surmount it. He thought that all chance of preserving his own life was over; and he resolved to sell that life still dearer to his intended murderers, than even what they had already paid for the attempt to deprive him of it. He did not lose a moment after the villains had entered the room, to act with the determination he had so instantaneously adopted. He struck at the fourth fellow with his knife, and wounded him, and at the same instant he received a blow on the head, and found himself grappled with. He shortened his hold of the knife, and stabbed repeatedly at the fellow with whom he found himself engaged. The floor being slippery with the blood of the wounded men, Sir John and his adversary both fell, and while they were on the ground, Sir John thinking that his thrusts with his knife, though made with all his force, did not seem to produce the decisive effect, which they had in the beginning of the conflict, he examined the point of his weapon with his finger, and found that the blade of it had been bent near the point. As he lay struggling on the ground, he endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to straighten the curvature of the knife; but while one hand was employed in this attempt, he perceived that the grasp of his adversary was losing its constraint and pressure, and in a moment or two after, he found himself released from it; the limbs of the robber were, in fact, by this time, unnerved by death. Sir John found that this fellow had a sword in his hand, and this he immediately seized, and gave several blows with it, his knife being no longer serviceable. At length the robbers, finding so many of their party had been killed or wounded, employed themselves in removing the bodies; and Sir John took this opportunity of retiring to a place a little apart from the house, where he remained a short time. They dragged their companions into the parlour, and having placed chairs with the backs upwards, by means of these they lifted the bodies out of the windows, and afterwards took them away. When the robbers retired, Sir John returned to the house, and called up a man-servant from his bed, who, during this long and bloody conflict, had not appeared, and had consequently received from his master warm and loud upbraiding for his cowardice. Sir John then placed his daughter-in-law, and grandchild, who were his only inmates, in places of safety, and took such precautions as circumstances pointed out, till the daylight appeared. The next day, the alarm having been given, search was made after the robbers, and Sir John, having gone to the house of the prisoner Noonan, upon searching, he found concealed under his bed, the identical short gun with which one of the robbers had fired at him. Noonan was immediately secured and sent to gaol, and upon being visited by Sir John Purcell, he acknowledged that Sir John “had like to do for him,” and was proceeding to show, until Sir John prevented him, the wounds he had received from the knife in his arm.
An accomplice of the name of John Daniel Sullivan was produced, who deposed to the same effect. The party met at Noonan’s house; that they were nine in number, and had arms; that the prisoner was one of the number, and that he carried a small gun. Upon the gun, which was in the court, being produced, with which Sir John had been fired at, the witness said it was that with which the prisoner was armed the night of the attack; that two men were killed, and three dreadfully wounded. The witness stood a long and rigorous examination by Mr. Counsellor O’Connell; but none of the facts seemed to be shaken, though every use was made of the guilty character of the witness. The prisoner made no defence, and Judge Mayne then proceeded to charge the jury, and commended with approbation the bravery and presence of mind displayed throughout a conflict so very unequal and bloody, by Sir John Purcell. The jury, after a few minutes, returned their verdict--guilty.
But it was not only plunder which excited these fearful attacks; party and family feuds were prosecuted in the same savage spirit, even by the light of day. I have heard my wife’s mother relate the following incident, which occurred in her own neighbourhood. About sixty-five years ago there lived at Llanelwth Hall, midway between Llandilo and Llandovery, a gentleman of considerable fortune of the name of Powell. He had separated from his wife, by whom he had two daughters,--and her brother, Captain Bowen, inflamed by the animosity which naturally arises out of such family divisions, and supposed to be instigated by a paramour of the lady’s of the name of Williams, engaged, in concert with this Williams, a band of men to accompany him on a pretended smuggling expedition; and having plied them well with promises of ample payment and plenty of liquor--a bottle of brandy and a pair of new shoes for the day--marched up to Powell’s house at twelve o’clock at noon, and at the time of Llandilo fair, when the conspirators knew that Powell’s servants would be absent. The only persons actually left in the house with him, were an old woman, and a daughter of this very Bowen’s. The conspirators advanced to the front door, and entered the hall, where the old woman met them. Her they seized, and bound to the leg of an old massy oak table. Powell, attracted to the hall by the noise, was immediately seized and literally hewn to pieces in the most horrible manner in the presence of the old woman, and of the murderer’s own daughter, who alarmed at the entrance of so grim a band, had concealed herself under this table. The girl from that hour lost her senses, and wandered about the country, a confirmed maniac. My informant often saw this girl at her mother’s, who was kind to her, and where she often therefore came, having a particular seat by the fire always left for her. In a lucid interval, they once ventured to ask her what she recollected of this shocking event. She said that she believed she had fainted, and on coming to herself, saw her father stand with a hatchet over her uncle in the act to give him another blow, and that she actually saw her uncle’s face hanging over his shoulder. At this point of the recital, the recollection of the horrors of it came upon her so strongly, that she fell into one of her most violent fits of madness, and they never dared to mention the subject afterwards in her presence.
A fall of snow happening while the murderers were in the house, caused them to be tracked and secured, and Bowen and several, if not all, of his accomplices were executed. Williams made his escape, and was afterwards taken as a sailor on board an American vessel during the war, where he was recognised by some of his countrymen. He made, however, a second escape, as is supposed through the connivance of some relenting neighbour, and never was heard of afterwards. My informant well recollects two of these murderers coming to her mother’s house at Cyfarthfa, a few days after the perpetration of the outrage, having so long managed to elude their pursuers. They were equipped as travelling tinkers; but they had new knapsacks, and what was more provocative of notice at that moment, very downcast and melancholy aspects. They felt by the looks which the mistress of the house fixed on them, that they were suspected, and immediately hastened away over the hills towards Aberdare, where they were secured the next day.
A fact related by a minister of the Society of Friends, shews at once the primitive simplicity which still prevails in some retired districts, and the evident power of faith in Providence over the spirit of evil. In one of the thinly-peopled dales of that very beautiful, and yet by parts, very bleak and dreary region--the Peak of Derbyshire, stood a single house far from neighbours. It was inhabited by a farmer and his family, who lived in such a state of isolation, so unmolested by intruders, and unapprehensive of danger, that they were hardly in the habit of fastening their door at night. The farmer who had a great distance to go to market, was sometimes late before he got back,--late it may be supposed according to their habits; for in such old-fashioned places, where there is nothing to excite and keep alive the attention but their daily labour, the good people when the day’s duties are at an end, drop into bed almost before the sun himself; and are all up, and pursuing their several occupations, almost before the sun too. On these occasions, the good woman used to retire to rest at the usual time, and her husband returning found no latch nor bolt to obstruct his entrance. But one time the wife hearing some one come up to the door, and enter the house, supposed it was her husband; but, after the usual time had elapsed, and he did not come to bed, she got up and went down stairs, when her terror and astonishment may be imagined, for she saw a great sturdy fellow in the act of reconnoitring for plunder. At the first view of him, she afterwards said, she felt ready to drop; but being naturally courageous, and of a deeply religious disposition, she immediately recovered sufficient self-possession to avoid any outcry, and to walk with apparent firmness to a chair which stood on one side of the fireplace. The marauder immediately seated himself in another chair which stood opposite, and fixed his eyes upon her with a most savage expression. Her courage was now almost spent; but recollecting herself, she put up an inward prayer to the Almighty for protection, and threw herself upon his providence. She immediately felt her internal strength revive, and looked steadfastly at the man, who now had drawn from his pocket a large clasp-knife, opened it, and with a murderous expression in his eyes, appeared ready to spring upon her. She however evinced no visible emotion; she said not a word; but continued to pray for deliverance, or resignation; and to look on the fearful man with a calm seriousness. He rose up, looked at her, then at the knife; then wiped it across his hand; then again eagerly glanced at her; when, at once, a sudden damp seemed to fall upon him; his eyes seemed to blench before her still fixed gaze; he closed his knife, and went out. At a single spring she reached the door; shot the bolt with a convulsive rapidity, and fell senseless on the floor. When she recovered from her swoon, she was filled with the utmost anxiety on account of her husband, lest the villain should meet him by the way. But presently, she heard his well-known step; his well-known voice on finding the door fastened; and let him in with a heart trembling with mingled agitation and thankfulness. Great as had been her faith on this occasion, and great the interposition of Providence, we may be sure that she would not risk the exercise of the one, or tempt the other, by neglecting in future to shoot the bolt of the door; and her husband, at once taught the danger of his house and of his own passage home, made it a rule to leave the market-town at least an hour earlier after the winter markets.
The unwelcome visitant in this anecdote is one of that class of offenders called “sturdy rogues.” Of the real “sturdy rogue” the city, amongst all its numerous varieties of rogues, knows nothing. He forms one of the terrors of the solitary house. They are such places that he haunts, because he there finds opportunities in the absence of the men to frighten and bully the women. If he find only a single woman left, as is often the case in harvest time, or at fair or market time, when all the family that can leave have left, he then makes the terror of his presence a means of extorting large booty. What can be more fearful than for a single individual, but especially for a woman, at a lonely house, while all the men are absent in the fields, or elsewhere, to see a huge brawny fellow of ill looks come to the door, peering about with a suspicious inquisitiveness, armed with a sturdy staff, followed, perhaps, by a strong sullen bull-dog, professing himself a tinker, a rag-gatherer, a rat-catcher--anything, under which to hide evil designs? Nothing, truly, can be more appalling, except when under the garb of a woman, you feel assured that you have a man before you; or a troop of fellows acting the distressed tradesmen, or sailors with nothing on their bodies, perhaps, but a pair of trousers, and on their heads a handkerchief tied. When such sturdy vagabonds come, and first cringe and beg in a piteous tone, till, having spied out the real nakedness of the place, as to physical strength, they rise in their demands, hint strange things; instead of going away when desired, walk into the house, grow insolent, and at length downright thievish and outrageous,--these are circumstances of peculiar terror not to be exceeded in human experience, and which yet have been often experienced by the dwellers in solitary houses.
I have heard a lady describe her sensations in such a situation. A figure in a man’s hat, tied down with an India silk handkerchief, blue cloak and stuff petticoat, suddenly appeared before her, and demanded a supply of articles of female attire. She offered half-a-crown to be rid of this unpleasant guest, for there was something about her which filled the lady with apprehension; but the money was refused, and with a gesture that threw open the cloak, and revealed the real figure of a man, with naked arms, and in a white Marseilles waistcoat. The demand for women’s garments was complied with as speedily as possible, and the person hastily went away. The next day, the lady on going to the neighbouring town, beheld a large handbill in the post-office window, offering a reward of 100_l._ for the apprehension of a delinquent charged with high crimes and misdemeanours, and described as “a Dane well known to the nobility and gentry, having been master of the ceremonies at Brighton and Tunbridge Wells.” It was the very description of her yesterday’s guest.
But when night is added to such a situation, how much is its fearfulness increased! Imagine one or two unprotected women sitting by the fire of a lone house, on a winter’s evening, with a consciousness of the insecurity of their situation upon them. How instinct with danger becomes every thing, every movement, every sound!--the stirring of the trees--the whispering of the wind--the rustling of a leaf--the cry of a bird. They are not wishing to listen, but cannot help it; they are all sense; all eye and ear. A foot is heard without, and is lost again! A face is suddenly placed against a pane in the window! the latch of the door is slowly raised in their sight, or the click of one is heard where it is not seen. Imagine this, and you imagine what has thrilled through the heart, and frozen the blood of many a tenant of a solitary house.
These are not the least of the causes that contribute to produce that timidity of disposition which, in an early part of the chapter, I have said to belong to many country people. My grandfather’s house was such a place. It stood in a solitary valley, with a great wood flanking the northern side. It had all sorts of legends and superstitions hanging about it. This field, and that lane, and one chamber or outbuilding or another, had a character that made them all hermetically sealed to a human foot after dark-hour, as it is there called. My grandmother was a bold woman in some respects, but these fears were perfectly triumphant over her; and she had, on one occasion, met with an incident which did not make her feel very comfortable alone in her house, in the day time. An Ajax of a woman once besieged her when left entirely by herself; who finding the doors secured against her, began smashing the windows with her fists, as with two sledge-hammers; and declared she would wash her hands in her heart’s blood. My grandfather too, had had a little adventure which just served to shew what courage he had, or rather had not. In that primitive time and place, if a tailor were wanted, he did not do his work at his own house, but came to that of his employer, and there worked, day after day, till the job was finished; that is, till all making and mending that could possibly be found about the house by a general examination of garments, was completed. He then adjourned to another house, and so went the round of the parish. I know not whether the tailors of those primitive times were as philosophical as Heinrich Johann Jung Stilling, and his fellows of Germany, who thus went from house to house, and both there with their employers, and on Sundays when they wandered into the woods, held the most interesting conversations on religion, philosophy, and literature: if this were the case, our country tailors have very much retrograded; and yet it would almost seem so, for my grandfather was passionately fond of Paradise Lost, and on a terribly snowy day had been reading it all day to the tailor, who had established himself by the parlour fire, with all his implements and work before him. He had been thus employed; but the tailor was gone, and the old gentleman having supped, dropped asleep on the sofa. When he awoke it was late in the night; no one had ventured to disturb him, but all had gone to bed. The house was still; the fire burning low; but he had scarcely become aware of his situation before he was aware also of the presence of some one. As he lay, he saw a man step out of the next room into the one in which he was. The man immediately caught sight of the old gentleman, and suddenly stopped, fixing his eyes upon him; and perhaps to ascertain whether he were asleep, he stepped back and drew himself up in the shadow of the clock-case. The old gentleman slowly raised himself up without a word, keeping his eyes fixed on the shadow of the clock-case, till he had gained his feet, when with a hop, stride, and jump, he cleared the floor, and flew up stairs at three steps at a time. Here he raised a fierce alarm, crying--“there is a sturdy rogue in the house! there is a sturdy rogue in the house!” But this alarm, instead of getting anybody up, only kept them faster in bed. Neither man, woman, nor child, would stir; neither son nor servant, except to bolt every one his own chamber door. In the morning they found the thief had taken himself off through a window, with the modest loan of a piece of bacon.
This house, however, was not quite out of hearing of neighbours. Beyond the wood was a village, thence called Wood-end; and a large horn was hung in the kitchen at the Fall,--so this house was named, which was blown on any occasion of alarm, and brought the inhabitants of the Wood-end thither speedily. The cowardice which had grown upon this family in such matters,--for in others they were bold as lions, and one son was actually killed in a duel,--was become so notorious, that it once brought a good joke upon them. The farm-servants were sitting, after their day’s labour, by the kitchen fire at the close of a winter’s day. Preparation was making for tea, and there were some of those rich tea-cakes which wealthy country ladies know so well how to make, in the act of buttering. Now I dare say that the sight of those delicious cakes set the mouths of all those hearty working men a-watering; but there was a cunning rogue of a lad amongst them, who immediately conceived the felicitous design of getting possession of them. It is only necessary to say that his name was Jack; for all Jacks have a spice of roguery in them. Jack was just cogitating on this enterprise, when his mistress said, “Jack, those sheep in the Hard-meadow have not been seen to-day. Your legs are younger than anybody else’s; so up and count them before you go to bed;--it is moonlight.” Jack, whose blood after the chill of the day was circulating most luxuriously in his veins before that warm hearth, felt inwardly chagrined that so many great lubberly fellows should be passed over, and this unwelcome business be put upon him. “Ay,” thought he, “they may talk of young legs, but mistress knows very well that none of those burly fellows dare go all the way to the Hard-meadow to-night,--through the dingle; over the brook; and past the hovel where old Chalkings was found dead last August, with his hand still holding fast his tramp-basket, though his clothes were rotten on his back! No! Jack must trudge, though the old gentleman himself were in the way!” This persuasion furnished him at once with a scheme of revenge, and of coming at the tea-cakes. He therefore rose slowly, and with well-feigned reluctance; put on his clouted shoes, which he had put off to indulge his feet with their accustomed portion of liberty and warmth before he went to bed; and folding round him a sack-bag, the common mantle and dread-naught of carters and farmers in wet or cold weather, he went out. Instead of marching off to the Hard-meadow, however, of which he had not the most remote intention, he went leisurely round to the front door, which he knew would be unfastened; for what inhabitants of an old country-house would think of fastening doors till bed-time? He entered quietly; ascended the front stairs; and reaching a large, old oaken chest which stood on the landing-place, all carved and adorned with minster-work, he struck three bold strokes on the lid with a pebble which he had picked up in the yard for the purpose.
At the sound, up started every soul in the kitchen. “What is that?” said every one at once in consternation. The mistress ordered the maid to run and see; but the maid declared that she would not go for the world. “Go you, then, Betty cook--go Joe--go Harry!” No, neither Betty, Joe, Harry, nor anybody else would stir a foot. They all stood together aghast, when a strange rumbling and grinding sound assailed their ears. It was Jack rubbing the pebble a few times over the carved lid of the chest. This was too much for endurance. A great fellow in a paroxysm of terror, snatched down the horn from its nail, and blew a tremendous blast. It was not long neither before its effect was seen. The people of Wood-end came running in a wild troop, armed with brooms, pitchforks, spits, scythes, and rusty swords. They were already assured by the dismal blast of the horn that something fearful had occurred, but the sight of the white faces of the family made them grow white too. “What is the matter! What is the matter in heaven’s name?” “O! such sounds, such rumblings, somewhere upstairs!” In the heat of the moment, if heat it could be called, it was resolved to move in a body to the mysterious spot. Swords, scythes, pitchforks fell into due rank; candles were held by trembling hands; and in a truly fearful phalanx they marched across the sitting-room and reached the stair-foot. Here was a sudden pause; for there seemed to be heavy footsteps actually descending. They listened--tramp! tramp! it was true; and back fled the whole armed and alarmed troop into the kitchen, and banged the door after them. What was now to be done? Every thing which fear could suggest or terror could enact was done. They were on the crisis of flying out of the house, and taking refuge at Wood-end, when Jack was heard cheerfully whistling as if returning from the field. Jack had made the tramp upon the stairs; for, hearing the sound of the horn, and the approach of many feet below, he thought it was time to be going; and had the armed troop been courageous enough, they would have taken him in the fact. But their fears saved both him and his joke. He came up with a well-affected astonishment at seeing such a body of wild and strangely armed folk. “What is the matter?” exclaimed Jack; and the matter was detailed by a dozen voices, and with a dozen embellishments. “Pshaw!” said Jack, “it is all nonsense, I know. It is a horse kicking in the stable; or a cat that has chucked a tile out of the gutter, or something. Give me a candle; I durst go!” A candle was readily put into his hands, and he marched off, all following him to the foot of the staircase, but not a soul daring to mount a single step after him. Up Jack went--“Why,” he shouted, “here’s nothing!” “O!” they cried from below, “look under the beds; look into the closets,” and look into every imaginable place. Jack went very obediently, and duly and successively returned a shout, that there was nothing; it was all nonsense! At this there was more fear and consternation than ever. A thief might have been tolerated; but these supernatural noises! Who was to sleep in such a house? There was nothing for it, however, but for them to adjourn and move to the kitchen, and talk it all over; and torture it into a thousand forms; and exaggerate it into something unprecedentedly awful and ominous. The Wood-endians were regaled with a good portion of brown-stout; thanked for their valuable services, and they set off. The family was left alone. “Mistress,” said Jack, “now you’d better get your tea; I am sure you must want it.” “Nay Jack,” said she, “I have had my tea: no tea for me to-night. I haven’t a heart like thee, Jack; take my share and welcome.”
Jack sate down with the servant maids, and talked of this strange affair, which he persisted in calling “all nonsense;” and devoured the cakes which he had determined to win. Many a time did he laugh in his sleeve as he heard this “great fright,” as it came to be called, talked over, and painted in many new colours by the fireside; but he kept his counsel strictly while he continued to live there; for he knew a terrible castigation would be the sure consequence of a disclosure; but after he quitted the place, he made a full and merry confession to his new comrades, and occasioned one long laughter to run all the country round. The people of the Fall, backed by the Wood-endians, persisted that the noises were something supernatural, and that this was an after-invention of Jack’s to disgrace them; but Jack and the public continued to have the laugh on their side.
After all, I know not whether the world of sprites and hobgoblins may not assume a greater latitude of action and revelation in these out-of-the-world places than in populous ones; whether the Lars and Lemures, the Fairies, Robin-goodfellows, Hobthrushes and Barguests, may not linger about the regions where there is a certain quietness, a simplicity of heart and faith, and ample old rooms, attics, galleries and grim halls to range over, seeing that they hate cities, and knowledge, and the conceit that attends upon them; for certainly, I myself have seen such sights and heard such sounds as would puzzle Dr. Brewster himself, with all his natural magic, to account for. In an old house in which my father lived when I was a boy, we had such a capering of the chairs, or what seemed such in the rooms over our heads; such aerial music in a certain chimney corner, as if Puck himself were playing on the bagpipes; such running of black cats up the bed-curtains and down again, and disappearing no one knew how; and such a variety of similar supernatural exhibitions, as was truly amusing. And a friend of mine, having suffered a joiner to lay a quantity of elm boards in a little room near a kitchen chimney to dry, was so annoyed by their tumbling and jumbling about, that when the man came the next day to fetch part of them, he desired him to take the whole, giving him the reason for it. “O!” said the man, “you need not be alarmed at that--that is always the way before a coffin is wanted!” As if the ghost of the deceased came and selected the boards for the coffin of its old world-mate the body.
But enough of the terrors of solitary houses without those of superstition. I close my chapter; and yet I expect, dear readers, that in every place where you peruse this, you will say, “O, these are nothing to what I could have told. If Mr. Howitt had but heard so and so.” Thank you, my kind and fair friends in a thousand places--I wish I had.
VI. MIDSUMMER IN THE FIELDS
I never see a clear stream running through the fields at this beautiful time of the year but I wish, like old Izaak Walton, to take rod and line and a pleasant book, and wander away into some sylvan, or romantic region, and give myself up wholly to the influence of the season; to angle, and read, and dream by the ever-lapsing water, in green and flowery meadows, for days and weeks, caring no more for all that is going on in this great and many-coloured world, than if there was no world at all beyond these happy meadows so full of sunshine and quietness. Truly that good old man had hit on one of the ways to true enjoyment of life. He knew that simple habits and desires were mighty ingredients in genuine happiness; that to enjoy ourselves, we must first cast the world and all its cares out of our hearts; we must actually renounce its pomps and vanities; and then how sweet becomes every summer bank; how bright every summer stream; what a delicious tranquillity falls upon our hearts; what a self-enjoyment reigns all through it; what a love of God kindles in it from all the fair things around. They may say what they will of the old prince of anglers, of his cruelty and inconsistency; from those charges I have vindicated him in another place,--we know that he was pious and humane. We know that, in the stillness of his haunts, and the leisure of his latter days, wise and kind thoughts flowed in upon his soul, and that the beauty and sweetness of nature which surrounded him, inspired him with feelings of joy and admiration, that streamed up towards the clear heavens above him in grateful thanksgiving. It is these things which have given to his volume an everlasting charm; and that affect me, at this particular time of the year, with a desire to haunt like places It may be the green banks of the beautiful streams of Derbyshire--the Wye, or the Dove; for now are they most lovely, running on amongst the verdant hills and bosky dales of the Peak, surrounded by summer’s richest charms. Their banks are overhung with deep grass, and many a fair flower droops over them; the foliage of the trees that shroud their many windings, is most delicate; and above them grey rocks lift their heads, or greenest hills swell away to the blue sky. And as evening falls over them what a softness clothes those verdant mountains! what a depth of shadow fills those hollows! what a voice of waters rises on the hushed landscape! But even here, in the vale of Trent, it is beautiful. There are a thousand charms gathered about one of these little streams that are hastening towards our fair river. They are charms that belong to this point of time, and that in a week or two will be gone. The spring is gone, with all her long anticipated pleasures. The snowdrop, the crocus, the blue-bell, the primrose, and the cowslip, where are they? They are all buried children of a delicate time, too soon hurried by.
But see! here are delights that will presently be as irrevocably gone. It is evening. What a calm and basking sunshine lies on the green landscape. Look round,--all is richness, and beauty, and glory. Those tall elms which surround the churchyard, letting the grey tower get but a passing glimpse of the river, and that other magnificent arcade of similar trees which stretch up the side of the same fair stream,--how they hang in the most verdant and luxuriant masses of foliage! What a soft, hazy twilight floats about them! What a slumberous calm rests on them! Slumberous did I say? no, it is not slumberous; it has nothing of sleep in its profound repose. It is the depth of a contemplative trance; as if every tree were a living, thinking spirit, lost in the vastness of some absorbing thought. It is the hush of a dream-land; the motionless majesty of an enchanted forest, bearing the spell of an infrangible silence. And see, over those wide meadows, what an affluence of vegetation! See how that herd of cattle, in colour and form, and grouping, worthy of the pencil of Cuyp or Ruysdael, graces the plenty of that field of most lustrous gold; and all round, the grass growing for the scythe almost overtops the hedges in its abundance. As we track the narrow footpath through them, we cannot avoid a lively admiration of the rich mosaic of colours that are woven all amongst them--the yellow rattle--the crimson stems and heads of the burnet, that plant of beautiful leaves--the golden trifolium--the light quake-grass--the azure milkwort, and clover scenting all the air. Hark! the cuckoo sends her voice from the distance, clear and continuous:--
Hail to thee, shouting Cuckoo! in my youth Thou wert long time, the Ariel of my hope, The marvel of a summer! it did soothe To listen to thee on some sunny slope, Where the high oaks forbade an ampler scope, Than of the blue skies upward--and to sit, Canopied, in the gladdening horoscope Which thou, my planet, flung--a pleasant fit, Long time my hours endeared, my kindling fancy smit.
And thus I love thee still--thy monotone, The selfsame transport flashes through my frame, And when thy voice, sweet sibyl, all is flown My eager ear, I cannot choose but blame. O may the world these feelings never tame! If age o’er me her silver tresses spread, I still would call thee by a lover’s name, And deem the spirit of delight unfled, Nor bear, though grey without, a heart to Nature dead!
Wiffen’s Aonian Hours.
And lo! there are the mowers at work! there are the hay-makers! Green swaths of mown grass--haycocks, and wagons ready to bear them away--it is summer, indeed! What a fragrance comes floating on the gale from the clover in the standing grass, from the new-mown hay; and from those sycamore trees, with all their pendant flowers. It is delicious; and yet one cannot help regretting that the year has advanced so far. There, the wild rose is putting out; the elder is already in flower; they are all beautiful, but saddening signs of the swift-winged time. Let us sit down by this little stream, and enjoy the pleasantness that it presents; without a thought of the future. Ah! this sweet place is just in its pride. The flags have sprung thickly in the bed of the brook, and their yellow flowers are beginning to shew themselves. The green locks of the water-ranunculuses are lifted by the stream, and their flowers form snowy islands on the surface; the water-lilies spread out their leaves upon it, like the palettes of fairy painters; and that opposite bank, what a prodigal scene of vigorous and abundant vegetation it is. There are the blue geraniums, as lovely as ever; the meadow-sweet is hastening to put out its foam-like flowers, that species of golden-flowered mustard occupies the connecting space between the land and water; and hare-bells, the jagged pink lychnis, and flowering grass of various kinds, make the whole bank beautiful. Every plant that is wont to shew itself at this season, is in its place, to give its quota of the accustomed character to the spot; every insect, to beautify it with its hues, and enliven it with its peculiar sound:--
There is the grashopper, my summer friend,-- The minute sound of many a sunny hour Passed on a thymy hill, when I could send My soul in search thereof by bank and bower, Till lured far from it by a foxglove flower, Nodding too dangerously above the crag, Not to excite the passion and the power To climb the steep, and down the blossom drag:-- Them the marsh-crocus joined, and yellow water-flag.
Shrill sings the drowsy wassailer in his dome, Yon grassy wilderness, where curls the fern, And creeps the ivy; with the wish to roam He spreads his sails, and bright is his sojourn, ’Mid chalices with dews in every urn; All flying things a like delight have found-- Where’er I gaze, to what new region turn, Ten thousand insects in the air abound, Flitting on glancing wings that yield a summer’s sound.
Wiffen’s Aonian Hours.
The May-flies, in thousands, are come forth to their little day of life, and are flying up, and dropping again in their own peculiar way. The stone-fly is found head downwards on the bole of that tree. The midges are celebrating their airy and labyrinthine dances with an amazing adroitness. These little creatures pass through a metamorphosis, as they settle on you in your summer walks by river sides, that must strike the careful observer with admiration. You may sometimes see a column of them by the margin of the river, like a column of smoke; and when you come near, numbers of them will settle upon your clothes--small, white, and fleecy creatures. Observe them carefully, and you will see them shake their wings, as in a little convulsive agony, press them to the sides of their body, and fairly creep out of their skins. These skins, fine white films, drawn like a glove from their bodies, and from their very legs, which are but like fine hairs themselves, they leave behind, and dart off into the air as to a new life, and with an accession of new beauty. Dragon-flies of all sizes and colours are hovering, and skimming, and settling amongst the water-plants, or on some natural twig, evidently full of enjoyment. The great azure-bodied one, with its filmy wings, darts past with reckless speed; and slender ones--blue and purple, and dun, and black, with long jointed bodies, made as of shining silk by the fingers of some fair lady, and animated for a week or two of summer sunshine by some frolic spell, now pursue each other, and now rest as in sleep. The whitethroat goes flying with a curious cowering motion over the top of the tall grass from one bush to another, where it hops unseen, and repeats its favourite “chaw-chaw.” The willow-warbler, the mocking-bird of England, maintains its incessant imitations of the swallow, the sparrow, the chaffinch, and the whitethroat, flitting and chattering in the bushes that overhang the stream. The landrail repeats its continuous “crake-crake” from the meadow grass, and the water itself ripples on, clear and musical, and chequered with small shadows from many a leaf and bent and moving bough. We lift up our heads--and in the west what a ruby sun--what a gorgeous assemblage of sunset clouds!
Readers and friends, are these not the characters of June fields and June brook-sides? Do they not recal to your memory many a pleasant walk, many a pleasant place, and many pleasant friends? They must: for there is nothing gives us so vivid a sense of the careering of time as the passing of spring and summer.