II. NEW FOREST
This forest seems to retain not only more of the forest character than all our other forests, but to have maintained more exactly its ancient boundaries. William of Malmsbury says, the Conqueror laid waste thirty miles of country for this forest. The perambulation of the 22d of Charles II., extending from Milton south along the Avon west, to Bramshire north, and within Southampton Water east, by Fawley and Boldre back to Milton, includes about thirty miles square, and this is the extent that is now attributed to it by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. In the present hundred of New Forest, we have the parishes of Minstead, Fawley, and Boldre; the chapels, or curacies of Lyndhurst, Beaulieu, Exbury, and Brokenhurst. It is indeed the only one of our forests which now can give us a perfect idea of what an English forest was in the feudal ages. It has not acquired, like Windsor, too much of a park-like character by containing a royal residence; nor has it been enclosed, and shaped into quadrangular fields: but there it is, in its original extent,--vast, wild, stocked with deer; with its alternations of woods and heaths, morasses and thickets; interspersed with hamlets and farms, and forest-huts, as were the forests of old.
There are the glorious ruins of Beaulieu, of which the able historian of Winchester thus speaks:--“The curious traveller who visits Beaulieu, descends at once into a lovely vale, enclosed with lofty trees, covered with the richest verdure, and watered by a flowing river, the whole of which seem to be the effect of magic. In the most enchanting part of this scene stands the ancient abbey. He will see, in the first place, the outward gate of the sanctuary, to which the brave but unfortunate Margaret of Anjou, the venturous impostor, Perkin Warbeck, and other fugitive victims of the laws, fled, with breathless haste, for safety. He will next come to the abbot’s house, with its turrets, moats, and other miniature fortifications, as perfect, and in as good condition as when it was first built. Here fugitives of distinction were entertained. From this he will enter and survey the spacious and noble refectory, now the parish church, rich with innumerable ornaments and monuments of past ages. Finally, he will trace in the splendid remains of the cloisters, chapter-house, and church, the chief effort, if not of the piety, at least of the taste and magnificence of the unfortunate king John.”
As you go from Southampton to Lyndhurst, you have a fine ride through the lower regions of the forest, and see enough to make you desire to steal away into the beautiful woodlands. Lovely streams come winding out of its shades, and hasten towards the sea. You get glimpses of forest glades, and peeps under the trees into distant park-like expanses, or heathy-wastes. The deer are wandering here and there: here you see whole troops of those ponies peculiar to this forest; pheasants and partridges come often running out on the way before you. All about grow hollies, which were encouraged in most ancient forests for winter browze; and you have glimpses of forest trees that were enough to enrich all the landscape painters in the world. But if you wish to know really what New Forest is, you must plunge into its very heart, and explore its farthest recesses. You may go on from wood to wood, and from heath to heath; now coming out on the high ground, as on the Ringwood road, the wild forest lying visible for miles around, and the country towards Southampton and to the very sea, all spread out wide and beautifully to the eye;--now descending into profound solitudes, and the depth of woodland gloom. It is a wild, wide region, in which you may satiate yourselves with nature in its primitive freedom. In Bilhaghe, in the forest of Sherwood, you find a fragment of an ancient forest unique in its kind,--a region of old oaks, shattered by the tempests of five hundred years, and standing in all the hoary grandeur of age; and are thereby struck with a quick feeling of the mighty flight of time,--of the utter change and revolution of manners and government since those trees were in their prime; but when you step into the New Forest, you step at once out of the present world into the past. You do not see it existing before your eyes as a remnant of antiquity, but as a portion of it, into which, as by some charm, you are carried. It is not a decaying relic; it is a perfect and present thing. The trees are not scathed and hollow skeletons, except in some few places, but stand the full-grown and vigorous giants of the wood. This is owing to the timber being cut down for the navy ere it begins to perish, and yet being left to attain a sufficient growth, and to furnish vast woods that extend over hill and dale, and give you foot-room for days and weeks without fear of exhausting the novelty. It looks now as it must have looked to the eye of one of our Norman monarchs, except that the marks of the Conqueror’s ravages and fires are worn out; the ruins of churches and cottages are buried beneath the accumulated mosses and earth of ages; and peaceful smoke ascends from woodland habitations.
In my brief visit to it, I set out from Lyndhurst, and walked up to Stony-Cross, the place of Rufus’s death. From the moment that I turned up out of Lyndhurst, I seemed to have entered an ancient region. There was an old-world primitive air about every thing, that filled me with a peculiar feeling of poetry. I left behind the nineteenth century, and was existing in the twelfth or fourteenth. Open knolls, and ascending woodlands on one side, covered with majestic beeches, and the village children playing under them; on the other, the most rustic cottages, almost buried in the midst of their orchard trees, and thatched as Hampshire cottages only are--in such projecting abundance,--such flowing lines. Thatch does not here seem the stiff and intractable thing it does elsewhere; nor is it cut in that square, straight-haired fashion; but it seems the kindliest thing in the world. It bends over gables and antique casements in the roof, and comes sweeping down over fronts resting on pillars, and forming verandas and porches; or over the ends of the houses, down to the very ground, forming the nicest sheds for plants, or places to deposit garden-tools, milk-pails, or other rural apparatus. The whole of the cottages thereabout are in equal taste with the roof; so different to the red, staring, square brick houses of manufacturing districts. They seem, as no doubt they are, erected in the spirit, and under the influence, of the genius loci. The beehives in their rustic rows; the little crofts, all belong to a primitive country. I went on; now coming to small groups of such places; now to others of superior pretensions, but equally blent with the spirit of the surrounding nature;--little paradises of cultivated life. As I advanced, heathery hills stretched away on one hand; woods came down thickly and closely on the other, and a winding road beneath the shade of large old trees, conducted me to one of the most retired and peaceful of hamlets. It was Minstead. There was an old school-house; and beneath the large trees that overshadowed the way, lay huge trunks of trees cut ready for conveyance to the naval dockyards; and the forest children, on their way to school, were playing amongst them; now climbing upon them, now pushing each other off with merry laughter; boys and girls, as I approached, scampering away, and into the school.
I know not how it is, but such places of woodland and old-fashioned seclusion, of such repose and picturesque simplicity, always bring strongly to my mind the stories of Tieck. There must be a great similarity in the aspect of these scenes, and of those which he has so much delighted to describe. I thought of the old woman with her dog and bird. Every solitary cottage seemed just as hers was. I seemed to hear the birch-trees shiver in the breeze, the dog bark, and the bird sing its magic song:
Alone in wood so gay ’Tis good to stay, Morrow like to-day For ever and aye: O, I do love to stay Alone in wood so gay.
It was early autumn. All birds really had ceased to sing; and the deep hush of nature but made more distinct this spirit-song, amid the delicious reveries in which I went wandering along, enveloped as in a heavenly cloud. All over the moorland ground spread the crimson glow of the heather. I went onward and upward; passing the gates of forest lodges, and looking down into valleys, whence arose the smoke of huts and charcoal fires. And anon, I stood upon the airy height, and saw woods below, and felt near me solitude, and a spirit that had brooded there for ages. I passed over high, still heaths, treading on plants that grow only in nature’s most uncultivated soil, to the mighty beeches of Boldre Wood, and thence away to fresh masses of forest. Herds of red-deer rose from the fern, and went bounding away, and dashed into the depths of the woods; troops of those grey and long-tailed forest horses turned to gaze as I passed down the open glades; and the red squirrels in hundreds, scampered up from the ground where they were feeding on fallen mast and the kernels of pine-cones, and stamped and chattered on the boughs above me.
A lady who till recently lived on the skirts of the forest, and who moreover has walked through the spirit-land with power, and is known and honoured by all true lovers of pathos and imagination, had solemnly warned me not to attempt to pass through the larger woods without a guide; but what guide, except such as herself, or as the venerable William Gilpin would have been, could one have that we should not wish away ten times in a minute? If we must be lost, why, so let it be,--but let us be lost in the freedom of one’s own thoughts and feelings. Delighted with the true woodland wildness and solemnity of beauty, I roved onward through the widest woods that came in my way, and once, indeed, I imagined that a guide would really have been agreeable. Awaking as from a dream, I saw far around me one deep shadow, one thick and continuous roof of boughs, and thousands of hoary boles standing clothed, as it were, with the very spirit of silence. A track in the wood seemed to lead in the direction I aimed at; but having gone on for an hour, here admiring the magnificent sweep of some grand old trees as they hung into a glade or a ravine, some delicious opening in the deep woods, or the grotesque figures of particular trees which seemed to have been blasted into blackness, and contorted into inimitable crookedness by the savage genius of the place,--I found myself again before one of those very remarkable trees which I had passed long before. It was too singular to be mistaken, and I paused to hold a serious council with myself. As I stood, I became more than ever sensible of the tomb-like silence in which I was. There was not the slightest sound of running water, whispering leaf, or the voice of any creature; the beating of my own heart, the ticking of my watch, were alone heard. It was that deep stillness which has been felt there by others.
The watchmen from the castle top Almost might hear an acorn drop, It was so calm and still; Might hear the stags in Hocknell groan, And catch, by fits, the distant moan Of King-garn’s little rill.
The Red King.
Whichever way I looked the forest stretched in one dense twilight. It was the very realization of that appalling hush and bewildering continuity of shade so often described by travellers in the American woods. I had lost now all sense of any particular direction, and the only chance of reaching the outside of the wood was to go as much as possible in one direct line. Away then I went--but soon found myself entangled in the thickest underwood--actually overhead in rank weeds; now on the verge of an impassable bog, and now on that of a deep ravine. Fortunately for me, the summer had been remarkably dry, and the ravines were dry too,--I could descend into them, and climb out on the other side. But the more I struggled on, the more I became confounded. Pausing to consider my situation, I saw a hairy face and a large pair of eyes fixed on me. Had it been a satyr, I felt that I should not have been surprised, it seemed so satyr-like a place. It was only a stag--which, with its head just above the tall fern, and its antlers amongst the boughs, looked very much like Kühleborn of the Undine story. As I moved towards him he dashed away through the jungle, for so only could it be called, and I could long hear the crash of his progress. Ever and anon, huge swine with a fierce guffaw rushed from their lairs--one might have imagined them the wild boars of a German forest. At length I caught the tinkle of a cow-bell--a cheerful sound, for it must be in some open part of the forest, and from its distinctness not far distant. Thitherward I turned, and soon emerged into a sort of island in the sea of woods, a farm, like an American clearing. I sate down on a fallen tree to cool and rest myself, and was struck with the beauty of the place. These green fields lying so peacefully amid the woods, which, in one place pushed forward their scattered trees, in another retreated; here sprinkling them out thinly on the common, and there hanging their masses of dark foliage over a low-thatched hut or two. The quiet farm-house too, surrounded by its belt of tall hollies; the flocks of geese dispersed over the short turf, and the cows coming home out of the forest to be milked: it was a most peaceful picture, and unlike all that citizens are accustomed to contemplate, except in Spenser or the German writers. These cow-bells too, have something in their sound so quaint and woodland. They are slung by a leathern strap from the neck of the leader, having neither sound nor shape of a common bell, but are like a tin canister, with a ring at the bottom to suspend them by. They seem like the first rudimental attempt at a bell, and have a sound dull and horny, rather than clear and ringing. The leaders of these herds are said to have a singular sagacity in tracking the woods, and finding their way to particular spots and home again, by extraordinary and intricate ways.
Having now a clear conception of my position, I proceeded leisurely towards Stony-Cross, the reputed place of the catastrophe of Rufus. The tree whence the fatal arrow glanced, or, at least, the one marked by popular tradition as it, was standing till about a century ago, when a triangular stone was set down to identify the spot; with these inscriptions, one on each side:
1. Here stood the oak, on which an arrow, shot by Sir Walter Tyrrell at a stag, glanced and struck King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, in the breast, of which he instantly died, on the second of August, A.D. 1100.
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2. King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, being slain, as is before related, was laid in a cart belonging to one Purkess, and drawn from hence to Winchester, and was buried in the cathedral church of that city.
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3. A.D. 1745: That the place where an event so memorable had happened, might not be hereafter unknown, this stone was set up by John Lord Delawar, who has seen the tree growing in this place.
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This place is called in Doomsday Book, Truham, by Leland, Thorougham, by other writers, Choringham, and Chuham. It is now known by the name of Stony-Cross. Leland says that, in his time (the reign of Henry VIII.) a chapel was standing near the place, most probably built by some of King William’s descendants, to pray for his soul; it being the general opinion of the time, that the divine judgment for his cruelties in the forest had fallen upon him here more expressly, because here he had actually destroyed a church. No trace of such a thing is now visible, and indeed, it is one of the singularities of this spot, that so little vestige of the destroyed villages, churches, etc. is to be discovered.
Great numbers of people visit Stony-Cross in the summer. Large parties come out from Southampton, Winchester, and the neighbouring towns, and pic-nic under the trees that are scattered about; and a pleasanter place for a summer day’s excursion cannot be well imagined. There is a great charm in visiting a spot marked by a singular historical event 700 years ago, and finding it so similar in all its present features.
It lies on a wide slope amongst the woods. From the Ringwood road above, splendid views over the country present themselves; not far off is a capital inn, and below are a few scattered cottages, standing amid their orchards, a picture of forest simplicity and peace. When I was there, the trees hung with loads of fruit, yet the little wooden houses stood, some of them empty and unprotected; their inhabitants, I suppose, being out working in the woods. I sate on the trunk of a fallen tree, and contemplated them with a feeling of delight. Supposing that it might be in one of them that the descendants of the Purkess who conveyed the king’s body to Winchester, lived, I went to the only one where there appeared anybody at home, to inquire, and learned that Purkess had lived at Minstead, a mile off. This village is said to have received its name from the exclamation of Rufus, when the arrow struck him;--“O myne stede!” Yet he is said to have died instantly: if, therefore, this were the spot of his death, how came Minstead by the name? But the house of Purkess was at Minstead; and the man also is said to have lived near, in a small hut, and maintained his family by burning charcoal. Possibly the difficulty may be explained by what is very likely, that Purkess might be working in the wood at the time of the accident, and conveyed the body to his house before he conveyed it thence to Winchester in his cart. The name of Purkess is not mentioned by any historian, but the fact of the body being so conveyed is, and constant tradition says that Purkess was the man, and that he received as a reward the grant of an acre or two round his hut. His male descendants have continued to occupy the same house, and carry on the same trade from that time till very recently. The last of the lineal occupiers of the hut died an old man a few years ago; his daughter had married away, and his son, having learned some other trade, had gone to Southampton to practise it; so that here a singular residence of 700 years ends. The family is said to be the most ancient in the county. It was said that a piece of the wheel of the cart on which the body was conveyed, had always been preserved in the hut. When I asked if this were true, “Yes,” said the cottager, “the old man had a curious old piece of wood that he used to shew, and when the parties were gone, he used to laugh and say, ‘it did very well for the gentlemen.’” Alas! for the honour of all relics that are too shrewdly inquired into!
Mrs. Southey, on reading the former edition, wrote me the following interesting particulars of the Purkess family. “Many of the race and name are still living in and about Minstead. The old cottage of the Purkess who ‘found the monarch’s corse,’ stood close to an estate of my father’s, now in possession of the Buckleys, where some of my childish years were spent. A damsel of the family,--Lydia Purkess, a true forest damsel, who had three or four colts for her portion, and used to break them in herself without saddle or bridle, other than a rope,--was a great ally of mine, wee thing that I was, bringing me whortle-berries, and service-berries, and dormice, and all sorts of things, to our trysting-place in the holly hedge that divided our domains. The same damsel, when a little broken in herself, became in after years our servant, and lived here many years, till she married. She came to visit me the other day, and I made her vivify my recollection about the old cottage and the cart wheel. The forester you questioned on the subject was an envious churl. The cottage was pulled down when falling, about five years ago. The part of the wheel did exist (who dares question our forest creed?) in the possession of the same Purkesses till the death of my Lydia’s grandfather, and what became of it then she cannot tell. When George III. came last into Hampshire, taking up his abode at Cuffnell, near Minstead, he sent for the heir of the Purkesses and their heirloom, the wheel, but it was with ‘the things which have been and are no more.’ I have preserved a sketch of the old cottage; without doubt, I should think, one of the most ancient, if not the most, in the forest. The reed-pen drawing I send you is a fac-simile of that sketch.”
And still--so runs our forest creed, Flourish the pious yeoman’s seed, Ev’n in the self-same spot: One horse and cart their little store, Like their forefathers; neither more Nor less, the children’s lot.--The Red King.
Much interesting information respecting this fine old forest is to be found in “Gilpin’s Forest Scenery.” The Rev. William Gilpin lived at Boldre, in a sweet old parsonage, in a fine situation, facing noble woods. He built and endowed a school-house there, out of the profits of the sale of his drawings, and lies buried in that churchyard. I visited his tomb with Mrs. Southey, who lived near, and who, like all poetical people who live near one, has an attachment to the forest as enthusiastic as that of her venerable friend Gilpin himself.
Gilpin supposes that the peculiar breed of wild horses with which this forest abounds, are a race descended from the Spanish jennets, driven ashore on the coast of Hampshire in the dispersion of the Invincible Armada. Great numbers of these are annually taken and sold. They are useful for any kind of employment, and are remarkable for being sure-footed. The colts are either hunted down by horsemen, or caught by stratagem. He gives also a curious account of herding the hogs in this forest, which has been so frequently quoted that most readers must be familiar with it.
There is a numerous population within the limits of this forest; having got a habitation there by one means or another. On the skirts of the forest, and round its vast heaths, are numbers of poor huts, whose inmates have very little visible means of existence, but profess themselves to be woodmen, charcoal-burners, and so on; but it is pretty well understood that poaching and smuggling are their more probable vocations. Some of their cabins are the rudest erections of boughs, turf, and heather. Their poles for charcoal-burning are reared in huge pyramids, with the smaller ends uppermost; and they tell a story in the forest, of a popular physician who was sent for on some urgent occasion, and coming to a certain place was met by a party of men, who told him he must submit to be blindfolded. He did not feel in a condition to resist, and therefore acquiesced in the proposal with an apparent good will, though inly not so well pleased with the adventure. He continued to see sufficiently to discover that they took him down a wild and dismal glen. It was evening; and the light of the charcoal fires was seen glimmering here and there. They came to a huge pile of poles, which the men partly removed, and led him through a sort of labyrinthine passage within them, where his bandage was removed, and he found his patient lying in the midst of a hut, which furnished plenty of evidence that it was not merely the retreat, but the depôt of smugglers. Without, however, seeming to notice anything but his patient, he prescribed, received his fee, was again bandaged, and reconducted to the spot where he had been met, and wished a very good night.
“Foresters and Borderers,” says John Evelyn, “are not generally so civil and reasonable as might be wished.” And that seems to be exactly the character of those in the New Forest. Many of them, like those in the woods of America, are mere squatters, but the attempt to disturb them is much the same as to disturb a hornets’ nest. Conscious that there is no strength but in making common cause, they are all up in arms at any attempt to dislodge any of them. A few years ago, I read in the newspapers of an attempt of the farmers to remove some of these suspicious neighbours to a greater distance, which brought out such a host of hostile foresters against them, threatening to burn their houses over their heads, as compelled them to send for the military. This is just in keeping with the character given of them in the neighbourhood. They are a fine race of men, say they, but many of them desperate. In severe winters the distress and destitution of these wild people have sometimes been found to be beyond description, both in intensity and extent.
In this forest are nine walks, and to each a keeper. It has also two rangers, a bowbearer, and landwarden. There is also an officer of modern date in the constitution of a forest, the purveyor, appointed by the commissioners of the dockyards at Plymouth, whose business is to assign timber for the use of the navy. There are also various inferior officers, as vermin killers, etc. Many of these offices are now merely sinecures, and are held by gentlemen who rarely see the forest; the greater part of their concern with it being to receive their salaries, and the number of fat bucks belonging by prescription to the office. The lodges were handsome buildings, fit for the residence of any gentleman, and were mostly so occupied. The one at Lyndhurst, called “The King’s House,” where George III. used to take up his residence during his hunting expeditions, is a substantial brick building close to the road. In it is preserved one of the stirrups of Rufus.
And still, in merry Lyndhurst hall, Red William’s stirrup decks the wall; Who lists, the sight may see; And a fair stone, in green Malwood, Informs the traveller where stood The memorable tree.
In a note to this stanza of “The Red King,” a poem on the death of Rufus, by William Stewart Rose, bowbearer of the New Forest, and therefore, as he himself tells us, successor to Sir Walter Tyrrell, Mr. Rose says--“the stirrup, suspended among smoked escutcheons of the royal arms, and stags’ antlers, makes a good addition to the forest ornaments of the hall of judicature. The justice-seat and bar are of ancient and massive oak; an enormous bacon-rack of the same age and materials, surmounts the whole. The green habits of the judge and officers assort well with the rest; and it is impossible to see a court held under this sylvan pomp and circumstance--to view the mixed and oddly accoutred rabble of people attached--to hear their defences, founded on some wild notions of natural law, delivered in an uncouth jargon, still considerably dashed with Anglo-Saxon--to observe the sang-froid with which they hear the decision of their judges, and, not least, to observe the prompt dispatch of justice--it is impossible, I say, to witness such a scene (as a spectator once observed to me), without being transported in imagination back to the fourteenth century.”
With the exception of this and Lady-Cross Lodge, all the forest lodges now standing are those appropriated to the use of the under-keepers. Those appropriated to the principal keeper were all pulled down on the decease of the last royal Lord Warden, H. R. H. the Duke of Gloucester. Boldrewood was the last that fell, on the death of the Dowager Lady Londonderry, to whom it was lent by her son, the present Marquess.
The fall of these fine old lodges reminds us of one feature which this forest and its neighbourhood possessed in Catholic times, and which it has never lost, the glorious old abbeys. We have already spoken of Beaulieu, but never of Netley and of Binstead in the Isle of Wight opposite, so beautifully alluded to by Mr. Moile in his most extraordinary poems. The State Trials, which few people are acquainted with, but all lovers of poetry ought to know, must have also conferred something of their own character.
“In Netley Abbey,--on the neighbouring isle, The woods of Binstead shade as fair a pile;-- Where sloping meadows fringe the shores with green, A river of the ocean rolls between, Whose murmurs, borne on sunny winds, disport Through oriel windows, and a cloistered court; O’er hills so fair, o’er terraces so sweet, The sea comes twice each day to kiss their feet;-- Where sounding caverns mine the garden bowers, Where groves intone where many an ilex towers, And many a fragrant breath exhales from fruit and flowers:-- And lowing herds and feathered warblers there Make mystic concords with repose and prayer; Mixed with the hum of apiaries near, The mill’s far cataract, and the sea-boy’s cheer, Whose oars beat time to litanies at noon, Or hymns at complin by the rising moon; Where, after chimes, each chapel echoes round Like one aerial instrument of sound, Some vast harmonious fabric of the Lord’s.”
The Commissioners of Woods and Forests have made extensive plantations in various parts of the forest, which appear in a thriving condition, and are belted with a variety of pines--Scotch, silver fir, Weymouth pine, pinasters, etc., whose contrasted foliage makes a rich appearance.
III. SHERWOOD FOREST
New Forest, as we have now seen, still retains its completeness as a forest--its herds of deer, its keepers going their daily rounds, its wild horses, and swine almost as wild, and all its ancient extent of wastes, woodlands, and forest people. A widely different condition does this once noble forest exhibit. It was more than all celebrated as the scene of the exploits of Robin Hood, and his merry men. In his day, it extended from the town of Nottingham to Whitby in Yorkshire, or rather it and the forest of Whitby lay open to each other, in perfect contiguity. At a much later day it extended far into Derbyshire; but, after many dis-afforestings and encroachments, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it contained an equal space with that of New Forest at present. Here our Norman kings delighted to come and enjoy their hunting in summer at their palace of Clypstone, built by Henry II.; and an especially favourite place of John, whose mark upon the forest trees growing in that neighbourhood, has been repeatedly found of late years, in cutting them up for timber.
It was a pleasant region; varied with its hill and dale, fair lakes,--some of which yet remain;--rivulets of most beautiful clearness; woods of noble growth; and the abundant Trent rolling along its southern side. In it lay Nottingham, Mansfield, Hardwick, Welbeck, Thoresby, since the birthplace of Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Newstead, the abode of Lord Byron; Annesley, the heritage of Mary Chaworth, and many another ample domain. It was governed by a warden, his lieutenant, and a steward; a bow-bearer, and a ranger; four verderers, twelve regarders, four agistors, and twelve keepers in the main forest, under the chief forester, who held it in fee, with liberty to destroy and kill at pleasure, reserving 100 deer in each walk. There were also several woodwards for every township within the forest, and one for every principal wood. It had also five hays, or royal parks, each fenced in, and furnished with its lodge; and having each a forester, going his rounds on horseback, with a page; and two foresters on foot without a page. These hays were Best-wood, Lindby-hay, Welhay, Birkland cum Bilhay, and Clypstone. “In these hays no man commons,” says the Inquisition of King Henry III., taken in the thirty-fifth year of his reign, at St. John’s house in Nottingham. They were especial reserves of game for the royal use, which was not to be disturbed by the intrusion of any other men, or their cattle, on any pretence.
Besides these, there were extensive woods and demesnes: Newstead, Lyndhurst, Welbeck, Rufford, Romewood, Clumber, Kingshaghe, Carburton, Arnall, Edwinstowe, Mansfield-Woodhouse, Hye Forest, Kyegill, and Ravenshede, Bulwell Risse, Outhesland (qy. the land of Robert Fitzouth, or Robin Hood’s land?) the barony of Southwell, and others, full of great woods of oak, many of them 700 years old; thirteen hundred head of red deer at the very last Inquisition, besides fallow deer without number.[22] All this is broken up, and dispersed as a dream. These royal hays and demesnes have been bestowed in grants by different monarchs: as Newstead by Henry VIII. to Sir John Byron; Bestwood by Charles II., to the Duke of St. Albans, his son by Nell Gwynn; and so on, or sold. The great woods have fallen under the axe; and repeated enclosures have reduced the open forest to that part which formerly went by the name of the Hye-Forest; a tract of land of about ten miles long, by three or four wide, extending from the Nottingham road, near Mansfield west, to Clipstone Park east. This tract is, for the most part, bare of trees. Near Mansfield there remains a considerable wood, Harlowe Wood, and a fine scattering of old oaks near Berry-hill, in the same neighbourhood; but the greater part is now an open waste, stretching in a succession of low hills, and long winding valleys dark with heather. A few solitary and battered oaks standing here and there, the last melancholy remnants of these vast and ancient woods; the beautiful springs; swift and crystaline brooks; and broad sheets of water lying abroad amid the dark heath, and haunted by numbers of wild ducks and the heron, still remain. Nature is not easily deprived of these; and in summer, when the plover and the lark build there, and send along those brown dales their merry whistle, or loud cries, and in autumn when the whole waste bursts into a blaze of crimson beauty with the blossoming heather, it is still, stripped as it is, a charming place for a contemplative ride or stroll. Here twenty years ago, Captain Cartwright might be seen following his hawks, and here still you meet a few sportsmen, with their fine dogs leaping amongst the long heather and red fern.
[22] A curious fact is apparent on the face of “A Vewe taken by special commandment from his Majesty to the Lord Warden of his forest, of all the Red Deer in this forest, 1616.” The warden was obliged to maintain 100 head of red deer in each of the twelve walks--1200 in the whole. In this inquiry there proved to be 1260; but in Annesley, the property of the Chaworths, and Newstead, the property of the Byrons, there were only ten deer altogether. These Byrons and Chaworths were always notorious Nimrods, and suffered none to escape them. In Papplewick too, the adjoining parish, there were only two! The keepers indeed affirmed that “some days” there were twenty in Annesley Hills, and fourteen in Newstead Woods, but they did not appear to the Commissioners. In another “Vewe,” taken in 1635, though the deer had increased in other walks, so that the total numbers were 1367, in Newstead and Annesley there were only 19!
But at the Clipstone extremity of the forest, still remains a remnant of its ancient woodlands unrifled, except of its deer--a specimen of what the whole once was, and a specimen of consummate beauty and interest. Birkland and Bilhaghe taken together form a tract of land extending from Ollerton, along the side of Thoresby Park, the seat of Earl Manvers, to Clipstone Park, of about five miles in length, and one or two in width,--Bilhaghe is a forest of oaks; and is clothed with the most impressive aspect of age that can perhaps be presented to the eye in these kingdoms. Stonehenge does not give you a feeling of greater eld, because it is not composed of a material so easily acted on by the elements. But the hand of time has been on these woods, and has stamped upon them a most imposing character. I cannot imagine a traveller coming upon this spot without being startled, and asking himself--“what have we got here?” It is the blasted and battered ruin of a forest. A thousand years, ten thousand tempests, lightnings, winds, and wintry violence, have all flung their utmost force on these trees, and there they stand, trunk after trunk, scathed, hollow, grey, gnarled; stretching out their bare, sturdy arms, or their mingled foliage and ruin--a life in death. All is grey and old. The ground is grey beneath, the trees are grey with clinging lichens, the very heather and fern that spring beneath them have a character of the past. If you turn aside, and step amongst them, your feet sink in a depth of moss and dry vegetation that is the growth of ages, or rather that ages have not been able to destroy. You stand and look round, and in the height of summer, all is silent; it is like the fragment of a world worn out and forsaken. These were the trees under which King John pursued the red deer 600 years ago. These were the oaks beneath which Robin Hood led up his bold band of outlaws. These are the oaks which have stood while king after king reigned; while the Edwards and Henrys subdued Ireland, and ravaged Scotland and France; while all Europe was seeking to rescue Jerusalem from the Saracens; while the wars of York and Lancaster deluged the soil of all this kingdom with blood; while Henry VIII. overthrew popery, wives, ministers, and martyrs with one strong, ruthless hand; while Elizabeth, with an equal hand of unshrinking might and decision, made all Europe tremble at a woman’s name, and stand astonished at a woman’s jealousy, when she butchered her cousin, the Queen of Scots. Here they stood, while the monarchy of England fell to the ground before Cromwell and the Covenanters; while Charles II., restored to his realm, but not to wisdom, revelled; while under a new dynasty, the fortunes of England have been urging through good and evil their course to a splendour and dominion strangely mingled with suffering and disquiet, yet giving prospect of a Christian glory beyond all precedent and conception. Through all this these trees have here stood silently--and here they are! monuments of ages that cannot be seen without raising in our souls remembrance of all these mighty things. To the contemplative mind they are inscribed all over with characters of strange power. They shew us at a glance, and with a palpableness which few things besides possess, how far the day of their first growth is past by; how far the ages of feudalism and civilization lie asunder. All around them, instead of that ocean of woods, heaths and morasses, come crowding up green fields, and the boundary-marks of free men; and if we were to see a hoary pilgrim suddenly make his appearance on the pavé of a great modern town, propped on his long staff, and belted in his grey robe, with his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell, we should not feel more strongly the discrepancy of life and character between him and the spruce population around him, than between these hoary and doddered oaks and the cultured country which hems them in.
But Bilhaghe is only the half of the forest-remains here: in a continuous line with it lies Birkland--a tract which bears its character in its name--the land of Birches! It is a forest perfectly unique. It is equally ancient with Bilhaghe, but it has a less dilapidated air. There are old and mighty oaks scattered through it, ay, some of them worn down to the very ultimatum of ruin, without leaf or bough, standing huge masses of blackness; but the birches, of which the main portion of the forest consists, cannot boast the longevity of oaks. Their predecessors have perished over and over, and they, though noble and unrivalled of their kind, are infants compared with the oaken trunks which stand amongst them. Birkland! it is a region of grace and poetry! I have seen many a wood, and many a wood of birches, and some of them amazingly beautiful too, in one quarter or another of this fair island, but in England nothing that can compare with this. It must be confessed that the birch woods which clothe the mountain sides, beautify the glens, and stud the romantic lochs of Scotland, derive a charm from the lovely and sublime forms of those mountains, glens, and waters, which is not to be expected in this lowland country. The birch trees which rear their silvery stems, tree above tree, on the rocks of the Trosachs; the birch woods that fill the delicious valleys of Rosshire--which imparadise the glens and feather the heathery mountain-sides of Glen-More nan Alpin--the great glen of Scotland, traversed by the Caledonian Canal--thousands of summer tourists can testify with me are lovely beyond description; but Birkland has some advantages which they have not. Its trees have reached a size that the northern ones have not; and the peculiar mixture of their lady-like grace with the stern and ample forms of these feudal oaks, produces an effect most fairylandish and unrivalled.
Advance up this long avenue, which the noble owner of this forest tract has cut through it, and looking right and left as you proceed, you shall not be able long to refrain from turning into the tempting openings that ever and anon present themselves. Enter which you please,--you cannot be wrong. You may wander for hours, and still find fresh aspects of woodland beauty. These winding tracks, just wide enough for a couple of people on horseback, or in a pony-phaeton to advance along, carpeted with a mossy turf that springs under your feet with a delicious elasticity, and closed in with shadowy trunks and flowery thickets--are they not lovely? And then you come to some sudden opening, where the long pensile branches of the birches, and the sweeping masses of oaken boughs surround and shut you in with a delectable solitude, where you may lie on the warm turf and read, or listen to the whispering leaves or the solemn sough of the forest; or a merry party of you may laugh and talk to your hearts’ content, glad as the blue sky above you; and vow that you will come and pitch your tents here for a fortnight,--a jocund company, like Shakspeare’s immortal troop in the forest of Arden. There never was scenery to realize more perfectly our idea of that forest. But go on: you enter on a wider expanse, on which a glorious oak stretches out its vast circumference of boughs that droop to the very ground, and form an ample tent, whose waving curtains fan you with the most grateful air. Here you come upon the solitary foot-path that crosses the forest. You hear the light clap of a gate, and presently beneath the glimpsing trees, you see some rustic personage pursuing this path, and going unconsciously past you as you stand amongst the thickets--some old man with heavy pace, or village girl hurrying along as if those woods were still haunted by dubious things. But advance, and here is a wide prospect. The woodmen have cleared away the underwood; they have felled trees that were overtopped and ruined by their fellows; and their billets and fallen trunks, and split-up piles of blocks, are lying about in pictorial simplicity. On all sides, standing in their solemn steadfastness, you see huge, gnarled, strangely-coloured, and mossed oaks, some riven and laid bare, from summit to root, with the thunderbolts of past tempests. An immense tree is called the Shamble-Oak, being said to be the one in which Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer; but which was more probably used by the keepers for that purpose. By whomsoever it was so used, however, there still remain the hooks within its vast hollow. The old birches, without doubt some of the largest in England, shew like true satyrs of the woods--to the height of a man, being shagged, indented, and cross-hatched, as it were, into a most satyrly roughness, and contrast well with the higher bole, which rises clear and shining as silver to the boughs, which sweep down again to the ground in graceful lightness.
There is no end to the variety of their aspect and grouping. From the sylvan loveliness around you, you might fancy yourself in the outer wilderness of some Armida’s garden. In spring, these woods are all alive with the cawing of jackdaws, which build in thousands in the hollow oaks; and as their bustle ceases as the evening falls, the nightingales are heard, and the owl and the dorhawk come soaring through the dusky air.
It is just the region to grow poetical in. I never walk these woods without forgetting for the time all the cares of towns and common life. It is to me a palpable introduction into the old world of poetry and romance. There is a spirit and feeling of the intellectual world that falls on you as the peculiar spirit of the place. It seems to me that if Milton, Shakspeare, Spenser, and all those noble poets whose minds have moulded the better mind and character of this great country, were to revisit it at times, when they had looked round them on the agitations of city-life, to some such place would they come awhile to refresh themselves with their old delights, and to hold high converse on the present fashion and prospects of humanity. Nothing seems so natural to these scenes, as to imagine their presence thus joined with the kindred spirits of a later day--Scott, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Hogg, and the like;--their religion, their passions, their doubts, their philosophical mysticism all now blended down into a heavenly nobility and union of heart and desire; their favourite fancies and pursuits still dear to them as ever, but their intellectual vision widened to the embracement of the universe. I seem to see Shelley and Keats going hand in hand along some fair glade; the one pouring out all that soul of love which possessed him, which he wished had been the foundation of the Christian religion instead of faith, and who yet, blinded by the impetuosity of youth and indignation against the despotism of priestcraft, failed to see that this same love was the very life and glory of that system;--the other young poet still uttering aloud his longings for time! time! in which to achieve an eternity of fame:--
Oh! for ten years, that I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed!
Or Lamb, speaking to those old friends of his earthly sojourn, of some fair creature met in the valleys of heaven:
She loves to walk In the bright regions of empyreal light, By the green pastures and the fragrant meads, Where the perpetual flowers of Eden blow! By crystal streams, and by the living waters, Along whose margin grows the wondrous tree Whose leaves shall heal the nations; underneath Whose holy shade a refuge shall be found From pain and want, and all the ills that wait On mortal life, from sin and death for ever.
But away, spirit of the woods! Time urges; the world calls: and we are thrown once more into the midst of the stirring, rushing, unceasing stream of men. These woods and their fairyland dreams are but our luxuries; snatches of beauty and peace, caught as we go along the dusty path of duty. The town has engulphed us; a human hum is in our ears; and the thoughts and the cares of life are upon us once more.
IV. FOREST ENCLOSURES
Before I quit this part of my volume, let me say a word on the subject of forest enclosures. There are certain persons who, from notions of national benefit, are very desirous that all crown lands should be disposed of; and all forests and wastes enclosed. As a matter of national benefit I think them considerably mistaken. For the very highest purposes of national benefit I desire, and that most earnestly, to see them kept open. I know the logic regularly employed by these people;--to make two blades of corn grow where one grew before; to make all our lands in the highest degree productive of food. Now, if we were cattle, or sheep, the great end of whose existence it was to graze well and get fat, then is their reasoning most excellent. But I look upon humanity as having other wants than mere physical ones. I too would have all our lands produce us food: but then it should be food of various kinds; food not only for one part, the corporeal, but for every part of our nature; and in these forests and open lands the intellectual part of the nation “have a food that these men know not of.” He who attends to our mere animal prosperity may call himself an utilitarian, but the true utilitarian comprehends in his scheme what is good for man in his integral nature; for his spiritual and intellectual needs, as well as for his bodily. But taking them on their own ground, these forest lands are not mere unproductive wastes. They supply our dockyards with an abundance of valuable timber; in them lie farms, and cottage homes, with their orchards, gardens, and little enclosures. They maintain a large population, and they pasture a vast quantity of cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses. Take even such a tract as that of Dartmoor, now stripped of its trees. There cattle and sheep run in great numbers; and there lies about in inexhaustible quantities, granite, which supplies labour in shaping it, and conveying it away, to a large body of men, and goes forth to build our public works and adorn our metropolis. And there too the mines employ, again, numerous people, and send up large quantities of valuable metal. And what should we gain by an enclosure? We should gain a greater supply of corn, which the farmers and landlords sometimes find they have actually too much of.[23] Having hedged about the kingdom with enactments to prevent the free importation of grain, they ever and anon find that they grow so much of it that they cannot really get a remunerating price for it. But even if we did want it, we have only to throw open our ports, and have as much as we want, at almost any price, and cattle too, which we could give our manufactures in exchange for. This is all that the most sanguine advocates of universal enclosure pretend that we should gain; and then let us see what we should lose by it. In the first place, these lands would go to swell the rentals of the rich, as all others enclosed have done. The enclosure system has been one of unexampled absurdity and injustice. It has been conducted on the principle of--“Unto him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Unto him who could shew that he had land lying in proximity to the waste about to be enclosed, has been given more, in the exact proportion to the quantity which he had. The more he had, the more was given him; and from him that had none, was taken away that which he had--the custom of commoning his beasts on the waste. One would naturally have supposed that in a christian country there would have been a desire to provide for those who had nothing. That in every parish the waste land should have been, if allotted at all to the inhabitants, allotted to those who had most need of it. The rule has always been exactly the reverse; and the consequence has been that our poor population, stripped of their old common rights, have been thrown upon the parish; their little flock of sheep, their few cows, their geese, their pigs, all gone; and no collateral help left them to eke out their small earnings; and in case of loss of work, or sickness, no resource but parish degradation;--the consequent evil influence upon the character of the rural population has been enormous. They have a sense of injustice, if they have not the power to resist it; and when they see a system of this kind, they say--“much will have more,” and their spirits are none the better for the feeling that accompanies the melancholy truth. Now, the same system would assuredly be continued, where common allotments took place; and in the sale of crown lands, a few great persons would purchase them; a few farmers would live and pay high rents, where hundreds of comfortable cottagers now live, who would then be added to the list of paupers.
[23] They did so especially in 1834 and 1835; when wheat was only 38_s._ and 40_s._ per quarter.
But it is not merely the poor that would lose by it. The miner, the artist, the naturalist, the poet, the antiquarian, the lover of the country, and the frequenter of it for health or relaxation, all would suffer most seriously by it, and the country would suffer with them. In the wastes of Devon and Cornwall, in those of Derbyshire, Warwickshire, and Northumberland, the subterranean mass is worth, in many places, a hundred times the surface. Enclose and cover up with cultivation these wastes, and you bury by millions the wealth of the nation, and the bread of the miners. At present, they lie open to the foot and the eye of the scrutinizing and adventurous. They can traverse heaths and mountains, and amid the barely covered rocks beneath them, or in the precipices that tower above them, they can at leisure hunt out and discover the sparkling vein, or the dull and secret ore; and open up a fountain of labour and affluence that may run for ages. But enclose these wild regions; warn off the curious inquirers with boards threatening “prosecution as the law directs,” or as may now be seen on the premises of an old lady in Surrey--that “anybody trespassing will be shot at without farther notice!”--keep them out with fences, and cover up the surface with accumulating soil and manure, and there may the riches of Providence remain buried for ever. With the researches of the miner, you restrict those of the geologist too. With the naturalist it fares the same. Every spadegraft of your cultivation annihilates the habitats and localities of animals, insects, and plants, which can exist only in the unploughed wilderness. You destroy some of the most curious natural productions of your country for ever, and circumscribe some of the most healthful, heart-purifying, and spirit-cheering pursuits of men. Your ploughs and mattocks pierce through and erase immediately the earthy mounds, the circles, the stone vestiges of far-past ages, and with them the pleasant journeys and inspiring speculations of antiquarians; as well as a great portion of the historic light and evidences of the nation. If you could root out the New Forest, you might possibly get as well supplied with timber from some other quarter, but where would you find the landscape painter such a treasury of sylvan and picturesque beauty, such delicious nooks and hollows, and fair streams winding under forest boughs? Where such groupings and endless variety of foliage and forest stems? Where such lights and shades and colours as nature there diffuses over her own regions in the everlasting circulation of the seasons; and all within six or seven hours’ ride of the metropolis?[24] I should like to know where you will find him substitutes for the naked, waste, but glorious expanses of the Surrey heaths, of Dartmoor, Stainmore, the high moors of Derbyshire, those of Northumberland, Lancashire, or of Scotland--that land which has often been called poor, but which from the influence of its wild and magnificent scenery is continually pouring out a wealth of genius that is miraculous? Thank God; they never can pull down its mountains, and reduce them to the dead level, and quadrangular fields of cultivation; and into their fairyland recesses there will always be a retreat from the engrossing, engulphing spirit of mercantile calculation.
[24] By the Southampton Railway, now brought within about three hours’ journey of London.
But I am passing from painting to poetry; and yet, one is so blended with the other that I would ask the shrewdest person living to shew me where they totally separate. Where then, I ask, will they find substitutes for the painter, for our wild and desolate moors? There the very air in its elastic freshness is full of health and inspiration to him. There he draws an indemnity for his constitution from the deadly effects of long and close confinement in cities and painting rooms. There every turf is covered with a rude beauty to his eyes; there every rock and stone is piled in bold and inimitable shapes of savage grandeur by the spirit of nature for him; and the winds, and rains, and vegetative powers of centuries have been busy tinging them with the hues of his admiration. There, amid the sound of falling waters and the roar of coming tempests, he feels all his faculties called into power and life within him, and brings home, season after season, scenes that cover the walls of our city homes with a wild magnificence. Enclose these tracts; hem them in with walls and hedges, and he will no longer visit them. You will no longer find him sitting on some moorland stone, watching the stream which hurries with sea-like sound along its craggy bed; or gazing on those rocky banks and long lines of trees that overhang it, and mark its course along the desert. He will no longer fix the solitary labourer, or the passing group, in their own peculiar character, nor paint the lurid gloom of the storm as it comes with a frown and a thunder of rains and winds only known in such shelterless regions. And when you banish him, you banish the poet, and the lovers of poets too. It is on our moors and our mountains that the profoundest spirit of poetry dwells. There is an influence felt there, which has more than half created our Shakspeares, Miltons, Spensers, Wordsworths, Scotts, Coleridges, Shelleys, and other high spirits that have striven to elevate the English mind above the mere ordinary enjoyments of life. And is it true that any one ever felt the full charm of the works of Scott, who was not familiar with heaths and mountains? Did any one ever feel all the beauty of the opening of Ivanhoe who had not often lingered in our forests? Has any one a true conception of “As you like it,” of “Macbeth,” or of “The Midsummer Night’s Dream,” of “The Fairy Queen,” or of many another divine creation of the British Muse, who is not conversant with the free, beautiful, and untamed nature by whose influence they are shaped? It is one of the great offices of the poet to keep alive the love of nature; and it is, again, by a corresponding love of nature that they must be comprehended and relished. The more you reduce our whole island to a uniformity of colour and cultivation, the more effectually you extinguish this great action and reaction, which are health to the spirituality of the public mind.
We are now arrived at a crisis in which we can afford a few forests and moors to lie open; but we cannot afford to have our higher tastes and feeling deprived of their legitimate aliment. Shut us up in towns, or within an eternal continuity of hedges and ditches, and we shall cease to be the high-souled people we are. We shall become the drudges of selfish interests, or the victims of false taste. We must have some openness, some freedom, some breathing places left us. As Abernethy said, that the parks of London were its lungs; so our mountains, forests, and moorlands, are the lungs of the whole country. It is there that we rush away from counting-houses, factories, steam-engines, railroads, politics, and sectarian factions, and breathe for a season the air of physical and mental vigour; and feel the peace of nature; and drink in from all things around us a new life, a new feeling, full of the benevolent calm which is shed by its Creator over the world. Scott said he must see the heather at least once a year, or he should die. Crabbe mounted his horse in a passion of desire which could no longer be resisted, and rode fifty miles to see the sea; and more or less of this feeling lies in every bosom that is not totally dead to the true objects of life. The failing in health; the over-worn in spirit; the followers of a summer’s recreation, all seek our hills and sea-coasts, and plains, where the peace or magnificence of nature, or where some celebrated monument of the past is to be found. If any one would know the extent of this delight in such things, or the numbers who indulge in it, let him go, as I have elsewhere said, to any such place in this kingdom, on any day through the summer and autumn. If we had the amount of the numbers who make a summer excursion to the sea-side, or to our moorland and mountain districts, it would be amazing. The parties who swarm along our Derbyshire valleys, and in every nook of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the Western Isles, are apparently without end.
Now this is a very healthful taste, and one, that with all our trading, manufacturing, and money-getting habits, we cannot too much encourage. We complain of our countrymen seeking pleasure so much abroad, and shall we diminish the objects of popular attraction at home? No, there never was an age in which our forests and moorlands were of half the value they are of to us now. As true utilitarians, we have the strongest motives to keep them open, as we mean to keep alive the fine arts, poetry, the love of antiquity, and the love of nature amongst us; as we would retain and invigorate in us that higher life by which we have climbed to our present national altitude; by which our sages and poets have been nourished, and become the true teachers and inspirers of virtue and nobility to the world; by which we are made to feel our animal life even with a double zest; and are yet, I trust, destined to make the name of England the greatest in the history of the world.
I do not mean to say that no waste lands should be henceforth enclosed. There are plenty, every one knows, that have no particular grace or interest about them. Let them, in the name of all that is reasonable, be hedged and ditched as soon as you please; but as for the village green, the common lying near a town, the forest, and the moorland that has a poetical charm about it, felt and acknowledged by the public--may the axe and the spade that are lifted up against them be shivered to atoms, and a curse, worse than the curse of Kehama, chase all commissioners, land-surveyors, petitioning lawyers, and every species of fencer and divider out of their boundaries for ever and ever.
V. WILD ENGLISH CATTLE
We have a few herds of the original cattle which once abounded in England and Scotland, still remaining. We have long ago destroyed our wolves, bears, and boars; and it seems almost a miracle that a few of these inhabitants of our ancient forests have been preserved. They form the most interesting objects of those parts of the country where they exist. Every one knows the use Scott has made of them in the Bride of Lammermuir. There was formerly a fine herd of them at Drumlanrig in Scotland. In England they were to be found at Burton-Constable in Yorkshire; Wollaton near Nottingham; Gisburne in Craven; Lime-Hall in Cheshire; Chartley Castle in Staffordshire; and Chillingham Castle in Northumberland. That they were of the true old breed was sufficiently testified by their common resemblance; being universally milk-white; having only the tips of their horns, and their muzzles and ears coloured. The only difference was, that in some herds, the tips and the whole of the inside of the ears, were black, in others red or brown. What may be the numbers remaining at Lime or Gisburne, I do not know. At Wollaton they have become mixed with the common breed; but at Chartley there are about twenty of them, where they retain their ancient characteristics, and their wildness. Here, there are sundry superstitions connected with them. It is believed and asserted, that if they amount to more than a certain number, or if a calf of an unusual colour is produced, some calamity happens in the family of the noble owner, Earl Ferrers. This, it is asserted, was the case when one of the earls was executed; and indeed, that every family calamity has been thus prognosticated.
The noblest herd is to be found at Chillingham Castle, on the Northumbrian borders, the seat of the Earl of Tankerville. The park is well calculated for the use of such animals. It lies in a solitary country. Care seems taken to render the isolation as complete as possible;--there is not even a public-house permitted by his lordship in the small hamlet, which seems to exist just as the ancient, dependent hamlet of the feudal castle did in the feudal times themselves. The castle, a fine fabric, in true castellated style, and well befitting the classic land of Northumberland--the region of Alnwick, Warkworth, and Chevy-Chace--of the skirmishes of Douglas and Percy--of many an ancient cross, convent, battle-stone, and hermit-cell, lies embosomed in its woods at the foot of wild hills, which ascend eastward for a mile or more, and terminate in a range of bare and craggy eminences of a fine woodland character. This steep slope between the castle and these heights is the park. Various woods and deep dells are scattered over it, so that the cattle can choose a high and airy pasture between them, where they see afar off any approach--a situation they seem particularly to enjoy; or can, at the slightest alarm, plunge into the depth of woods and glens.
Bewick, who visited them, has given capital portraits of this interesting race of cattle, and the following passages from his account of them are marked by his usual accuracy. “At the first appearance of any person, they set off in full gallop, and at the distance of two or three hundred yards make a wheel round, and come boldly up again, tossing their heads in a menacing manner. On a sudden they make a full stop at the distance of forty or fifty yards, looking wildly at the objects of their surprise; but on the least motion being made, they all again turn round, and run off with equal speed, but not to the same distance: forming a shorter circle, and again returning with a bolder and more threatening aspect than before, they approach much nearer, probably within thirty yards; when they make another stand, and again run off. This they do several times, shortening their distance, and advancing nearer, till they come within ten yards; when most people think it prudent to leave them, not choosing to provoke them further; for there is little doubt but in two or three times more they would make an attack.
“The mode of killing them was, perhaps, the only modern remains of the grandeur of ancient hunting. On notice being given that a wild bull would be killed on a certain day, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood came mounted and armed with guns, etc., sometimes to the amount of a hundred horse, and four or five hundred foot, who stood upon walls or got into trees, while the horsemen rode out the bull from the rest of the herd, until he stood at bay; when a marksman dismounted and shot. At some of these huntings twenty or thirty of these shots have been fired before he was subdued. On such occasions the bleeding victim grew desperately furious, from the smarting of his wounds, and the shouts of savage joy that were echoing from every side; but, from the number of accidents that happened, this dangerous mode has been little practised of late years; the park-keeper alone generally shooting them with a rifled gun, at one shot.
“When the cows calve, they hide their calves for a week or ten days, in some sequestered situation, and go and suckle them two or three times a-day. If any person come near the calves, they clap their heads close to the ground, and lie like a hare in form to hide themselves. This is a proof of their native wildness, and is corroborated by the following circumstance, that happened to the writer of this narrative, who found a hidden calf of two days old, very lean and very weak. On stroking its head, it got up, pawed two or three times like an old bull, bellowed very loud, stepped back a few steps, and bolted at his legs with all his force. It then began to paw again, bellowed, stepped back, and bolted as before; but knowing its intention, he stepped aside, and it missed him, fell, and was so very weak, that it could not rise, though it made several efforts. But it had done enough: the whole herd was alarmed, and coming to its rescue, obliged him to retire; for the dams will allow no person to touch their calves, without attacking them with impetuous ferocity.
“When any one happens to be wounded, or is grown feeble through age or sickness, the rest of the herd set upon it and gore it to death.
“The weight of the bulls is generally from forty to fifty stone the four quarters; of the cows about thirty. The beef is finely marbled, and of excellent flavour.”
We visited the park in 1836, and were at great pains to get a sight of this noble herd. We were told that the keeper was in the park and would get us a view of it; but on going into it, we found him, and some others of the household busily engaged in shooting fawns. For this purpose some men on horseback were galloping round a herd of deer, and driving them in a particular direction, where a keeper lay in ambush, near a narrow opening between the woods, and when they came near enough, shot with his rifle such fawns as he wanted. It was a scene of great animation: the galloping men--the keeper seen cautiously peeping out, to watch for the approach of the herd--the herd here collected into a dense group, in watchfulness and alarm--and again streaming off in a long line across the park, in some direction which seemed most to promise escape. The cries of the old--the shriller cries of the young--the sudden flash and report from the thicket--the fall of the fawn--and the flying of the herd in some other direction, made up a lively though painful scene.
But this spoiled our peculiar sport. The wild cattle, accustomed to be fired at themselves occasionally, alarmed at the sound of the guns, had retired to the most obscure woodland retreats of the park. Several persons told us that they had seen the whole herd a few minutes before, in the highest part of the park; but we traversed the woods in every direction, and penetrated into their darkest recesses without getting a glimpse of them. This we did for a couple of hours, and spite of the warnings of those who were well acquainted with them, so great was my anxiety to have a view of these fine animals. Two sawyers, who were sawing timber at a pit up in a glade of the park, told us that a few mornings before, on coming to their work, they found several bulls in the glade, which began to shake their heads, and tear up the ground in a style which induced them to betake themselves to the wood as nimbly as possible. We were told too, that Mr. Landseer, while sketching some of these cattle, found it advisable to retreat more than once; and that people are not only frequently pursued, but that one man had been killed by them the previous summer. However, trusting to my ability to mount a tree, in case of need, I determined to hold on till I found them; and having thus gone through all the woods but one, not excepting Robin Hood’s Cleuch, for Robin has a traditionary retreat in many a place of the north. I was certain they must be there, and therefore gave way to the remonstrances of wiser heads, and retired to a distance to watch their issuing forth. The firing of the guns in the lower part of the park had ceased, and we were assured that the cattle would not be long before they made their appearance. And sure enough, in about half an hour, this grand herd of wild cattle came streaming out of this very wood. There were upwards of a hundred of them; and they spread themselves at equal distances across the steep glade, between this and the next wood, and commenced a steady graze, ever and anon lifting up a cautious head, to ascertain the actual absence of danger. It was a sight well worthy of a long journey to see. Their number, their uniformity of colour and shape, the wild shy look of the cows, the sturdy strength of the bulls--some of them of a large size--and their clear snowy hue, which made them conspicuous for many miles distant, as we occasionally turned, on our way over the moors to Wooller, and saw them still grazing in the very same spot and order. They reminded us of the herds of the sun, amongst which Ulysses’ hungry crew made such havoc in the meads of Trinacria.
We were told that the hunting of the bulls had been renewed by Lord Ossulston, the eldest son of the Earl of Tankerville, with whom it was a very favourite pursuit--certainly the grandest species of chase yet left in Britain, and the only one which the sense of danger incurred can heighten and ennoble to anything like the same level as that of hunting the tiger in India, or the bear in the northern countries of Europe. It seems, as well he may, that the Earl is proud of this fine herd of cattle, and, it is said, refuses on any terms to furnish any of his noble neighbours with a pair of them to stock their parks similarly. It is to be hoped that this interesting remnant of the native herd will long be preserved in its present magnificent number and purity of breed.
At the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Newcastle, in August 1838, a paper was read on these wild cattle by Mr. L. Hindmarsh. The only additional facts respecting them were contained in a letter of Lord Tankerville to the writer. His lordship stated that nothing had for generations been known of the origin of these cattle in his family; and that they were mentioned in no family document. That there was great probability of their location there being very ancient. He describes them, as we found them, retiring into the woods on any alarm, and having a faculty of traversing the woods so quietly that it is difficult to obtain a sight of them. He states that he himself has not been able in summer time to get a sight of them for weeks together. That on the contrary, in winter time, being fed in the inner park, they become pretty familiar, and will let you go near them, especially when on horseback. His lordship describes them as very uncertain in their disposition, sometimes struck with sudden panics, and at others very fierce. “When they come down into the lower part of the park, which they do at stated hours, they move like a regiment of cavalry in single files, the bulls leading the van, or in retreat it is the bulls which bring up the rear. Lord Ossulston was witness to a curious way in which they took possession, as it were, of some new pasture recently laid open to them. It was in the evening about sunset. They began by lining the front of a small wood, which seemed quite alive with them, when all of a sudden, they made a dart forward altogether in a line, and charging close by him across the plain, they spread out, and after a little time began feeding.” His lordship says, “Many stories might be told of hair-breadth escapes, accidents of sundry kinds from these cattle,” and gives an instance of a bull attacking a keeper, whom he tossed three times, then knelt down on him, breaking several of his ribs, and would soon have killed him, had not a number of gentlemen from the castle with rifles succeeded in destroying the furious beast, but not till they had lodged six or seven bullets in his skull.
I. COTTAGE LIFE
What a mighty space lies between the palace and the cottage in this country! ay, what a mighty space between the mansion of the private gentleman and the hut of the labourer on his estate! To enter the one: to see its stateliness and extent; all its offices, outbuildings, gardens, greenhouses, hothouses; its extensive fruit-walls, and the people labouring to furnish the table simply with fruit, vegetables, and flowers; its coach-houses, harness-houses, stables, and all the steeds, draught-horses, and saddle-horses, hunters, and ladies’ pads, ponies for ladies’ airing-carriages, and ponies for children; and all the grooms and attendants thereon; to see the waters for fish, the woods for game, the elegant dairy for the supply of milk and cream, curds and butter, and the dairymaids and managers belonging to them;--and then, to enter the house itself, and see all its different suites of apartments, drawing-rooms, boudoirs, sleeping-rooms, dining and breakfast rooms; its steward’s, housekeeper’s and butler’s rooms; its ample kitchens and larders, with their stores of provisions, fresh and dried; its stores of costly plate, porcelain and crockery apparatus of a hundred kinds; its cellars of wine and strong beer; its stores of linen; its library of books; its collections of paintings, engravings, and statuary; the jewels, musical instruments, and expensive and interminable nick-knackery of the ladies; the guns and dogs; the cross-bows, long-bows, nets, and other implements of amusement of the gentlemen; all the rich carpeting and fittings-up of day-rooms, and night-rooms, with every contrivance and luxury which a most ingenious and luxurious age can furnish; and all the troops of servants, male and female, having their own exclusive offices, to wait upon the person of lady or gentleman, upon table, or carriage, or upon some one ministration of pleasure or necessity: I say, to see all this, and then to enter the cottage of a labourer, we must certainly think that one has too much for the insurance of comfort, or the other must have extremely too little. If the peasant can be satisfied with his establishment, and the gentleman could not tell how to live without his, one would be almost persuaded that they could not be of the same class of animals. Knowing, however, that they are of the same species, it only shews of what elastic stuff human nature is made; into what a nutshell it can compress its cravings, and how immensely it can expand itself when the pressure of necessity is withdrawn. I am not going here to moot the old question of whereabout happiness lies in this strange disparity of circumstance; it, no doubt, lies somewhere between the extremes. It certainly cannot be created by external superfluities. They lay open their possessors to the exercise of despotic power; to the corruptions of pride and luxury; to false taste, frivolous pursuits, and the diffusion of the attention over so many objects as to prevent the heart from settling firmly on any. They have a tendency to weaken the domestic attachments, and the love of solid pursuits. On the other hand, the pressure of poverty and ignorance certainly can, and too often does, lie so heavily as to destroy the relish of life’s enjoyments in the cottager. Yet happiness is a fireside thing; and the simplicity of cottage life, the fewness of its objects, and the strong sympathies awakened by its trials and sufferings, tend to condense the affections, and to strike deep the roots of happiness in the sacred soil of consanguinity. When wealth is accompanied by a desire to do good, it is a glorious and a happy destiny; when lowly life is virtuous, easy, and enlightened, it is a happy destiny too--for it is full of the strong zest of existence, and strong affections. But this is not my present subject.
When we go into the cottage of the working man, how forcibly are we struck with the difference between his mode of life and our own. There is his tenement of, at most, one or two rooms. His naked walls; bare brick, stone or mud floor, as it may be: a few wooden, or rush-bottomed chairs; a deal, or old oak table; a simple fireplace, with its oven beside it, or, in many parts of the kingdom, no other fireplace than the hearth; a few pots and pans--and you have his whole abode, goods and chattels. He comes home weary from his out-door work, having eaten his dinner under hedge or tree, and seats himself for a few hours with his wife and children, then turns into a rude bed, standing perhaps on the farther side of his only room, and out again before daylight, if it be winter. He has no one to make a fire in his dressing-room, to lay out his clothes, to assist him in his toilet; he flings on his patched garments, washes his face in a wooden or earthen dish at the door; blows up the fire, often gets ready his own breakfast, and is gone.
Such is the routine of his life, from week to week and year to year; Sundays, and a few holidays, are white days in his calendar. On them he shaves, and puts on a clean shirt and better coat, drawn from that old chest which contains the whole wardrobe of himself and children; his wife has generally some separate drawer or bandbox, in which to stow her lighter and more fragile gear. Then he walks round his little garden, if he have it; goes with his wife and children to church or meeting; to sit with a neighbour, or have a neighbour look in upon him. There he sits, his children upon his knee, and tells them how his father used to talk to him.
This is cottage life in its best estate; in its unsophisticated and unpauperised condition. He has no carriages, no horses, no cards of invitation, or of admittance to places of amusement; none of the luxuries, fascinations, or embellishments of life belong to him. It is existence shorn of all its spreading and flowering branches, but not pared to the quick. This is supposing the father of the family is sober and industrious;--that he is neither a pot-house haunter, a gambler at the cockpit, a boxer, a dog-fighter, a poacher, an idle, rackety and demoralized fellow, as thousands are. This is supposing that he brings home his week’s wages, and puts them into the hands of his wife, as their best guardian and distributer;--saying,--“Here, my lass, this is all that I have earned; thou must lay it out for the best; I have enough to do to win it.”
And what are these wages, out of which to maintain his family, aided by the lesser earnings of his wife, by taking in washing, helping in harvest-fields, charring in more affluent people’s houses, and so on, and the earnings of the children in similar ways, or in some neighbouring factory? His own probably amount to nine, or, at most, twelve shillings, and if his family be large, and there are several workers among them, the whole united earnings may reach twenty shillings per week; a sum which will hardly find other men wherewith to pay toll-bars, or purchase gunpowder; a sum which we throw away repeatedly on some bauble; and yet, on this will a whole family maintain life and credit for a week, ay, and on much less too. In this little hut, which we should hardly think would do for a cowshed or a hayloft, and to which the stables of many gentlemen are real palaces, is the poor man packed with all his kindred lives, interests, and affections: and so he carries on the warfare of humanity, till He, who is no respecter of persons, calls him to stand, side by side, before his throne with the rich man who “has fared sumptuously every day.”
Such are “the short and simple annals” of thousands and tens of thousands in these kingdoms; and yet what fine strapping young fellows spring up in these little cabins, men who have tilled the soil of England and wielded at home her mechanic tools, and borne her arms abroad, till their industry and genius, under the direction of higher minds, have raised her to her present pitch of eminence; and what sweet faces and lovely forms issue thence to Sunday worship, to village feast and dance; or are seen by the evening passer-by in the light of the ingle, amid the family group, making some smoky-raftered hut a little temple of rare beauty, and of filial or sisterly affections. I often thank God that the poor have their objects of admiration and attraction; their domestic affections and their family ties, out of which spring a thousand simple and substantial pleasures; that beauty and ability are not the exclusive growth of hall and palace; and that, in this country at least, the hand of arbitrary power dare seldom enter this charmed circle, and tear asunder husband from wife, parent from children, brother from sister, as it does in the lands of slavery. Yet our New Poor Laws have aimed a deadly blow at this blessed security; and, till the sound feeling of the nation shall have again disarmed them of this fearful authority, every poor man’s family is liable, on the occurrence of some chance stroke of destitution, to have to their misfortune, bitter enough in itself, added the tenfold aggravation of being torn asunder, and immured in the separate wards of a POVERTY PRISON. The very supposition is horrible; and, if this system, this iron and indiscriminating system,--a blind tyranny, knowing no difference between accidental misfortune and habitual idleness, between worthy poverty and audacious imposition, between misfortune and crime,--be the product of Philanthropy, may Philanthropy be sunk to the bottom of the sea!
But the cottage life I have been speaking of, is that of the better class of cottagers; the sober and industrious peasantry: but how far short of this condition is that of millions in this empire! To say nothing of Irish cabins, the examples of what a state of destitution, misery, and squalor men may sink into; how much below this is the comfort of a Highland hut? What a contrast is there often between the cottage of an English labourer, and the steading of a Highland farmer. There it stands, in a deep glen, between high, rocky mountains. His farm is a wild sheep-track among the hills. Wheat, he grows none, for it is too cold and weeping a climate. He has a little patch of oats for crowdie and oatcake; potatoes he has, if the torrent has not risen during sudden rains so high in the glen as to sweep his crop away. He has contrived a little stock of hay for his cows, but where it can have grown you cannot conceive, till some day, as you see a woman or a boy herding the cattle amongst the patches of cultivation--for there are no fences between the grass and arable land--you find one or the other cutting the longer grass from the boggy waste with a sickle, and drying it often in little sheaves as our farmers dry corn. But the house itself;--it is a little, low, long building of mud, or rough stones; the chimney composed of four short poles wrapped round with hay-bands; a flat stone laid upon it to prevent the smoke being driven down into the hut by the tempestuous winds from the hills; and another stone laid upon that, to keep it from being blown away. The roof is thatched with bracken, with the roots outermost; or often the same roof is a patchwork of bracken, ling, broom, and turf. A little window of perhaps one pane of thick glass, or of four of oiled paper. The door, which reaches to the eaves, is so low that you must stoop to enter; and the smoke is pouring out of it faster than it ascends from the chimney. A few goats are, most likely, lying or standing about the door. You enter, and as soon as you can discern anything through the eternal cloud of smoke, you most probably find yourself in a crowd. The fire of peat lies in the centre of the hut, surrounded by a few stones; wooden benches are nailed on one side against the wall, and the other is partitioned off like a large wooden cupboard, with sliding doors or curtains, for the family bed, as you find all over Scotland, and even in Northumberland. The pigs are running about the floor; hens are roosting over your head; the cows are lowing in, what we should call, the parlour; nine or ten children, or weans, as they call them, and a callant, or boy, who teaches the weans, and the father and mother, and very probably their father and mother, or one of them, in extreme age, are fixing their eyes on the stranger.
In the summer of 1836, Mrs. Howitt and myself passed the night in such a dwelling, and a slight notice of the place may present, to many of our readers, a new view of cottage life. It was in Rosshire, some thirty or forty miles north-west of Inverness, at a spot called the Comrie, lying between Loch Echilty and Loch Luichart. A wild, and yet most beautiful spot it was,--a little strath opening itself out between the wooded mountains which surround Loch Echilty, and the bare stony hills in the direction of Strath Conan. We came upon it after wandering through the delicious fairyland of birch woods that clothe that Loch in the very romance of picturesque beauty, springing up amongst the wildest chaos of crags, here hanging over the water, and here surrounding the ruinous blackness of some solitary hut, that, but for children playing before it, would appear to have been tenantless for years. A stern defile guarded by vast masses of projecting rocks, by places clothed with the richest drapery of crimson heather, by places naked and lividly grey, and height above height still scattered with climbing birch trees, brought us to a little nameless loch hidden in the woods, girt with a dense margin of reeds, and covered with the most magnificent display of white water-lilies, and then appeared two of those little huts in this Highland solitude. The evening was rapidly sinking into night, and we were uncertain how far it was to the next inn. Two women appeared at the door of one of the huts, and rather startled us with the information, that the nearest inn in the way we proposed to go, was distant five-and-twenty miles! That another mile brought us to the ferry over the Conan, where the carriage-road ceased, and all beyond was mountain and moorland waste. We seemed, as it were, to be on the very verge of civilization; and there appeared to be nothing for us but to retrace our way for some miles, or to take up our lodging in this house.
Weary as we were, this appeared the less objectionable alternative, and we accepted the offer which the elder woman made us. The moment we did so, the poor woman seemed struck with the rashness of her act. “What shall I do for the like of you? What shall I find for the like of you?” We assured her we should not be very fastidious guests, and in we went. It was such a hut as I have just described. The fire lay on a hearth of stones, with a few large stones built up against the mud wall to prevent the house from being burnt. The woman’s husband, a farmer, was gone into Morayshire with lambs; a hired shepherd sat on the side of the partitioned bed, such as I have already described; two fine sheep-dogs lay before the fire, and a troop of barelegged and kilted boys came running in from some distant school. They were Macgregors, having come hither from Dumbartonshire, and could, fortunately for us, speak English. We sate on a bench in the ingle, and all these little Macgregors, Grigor Macgregor, Peter and Duncan, and the rest, squatted on the mud-floor, and alternately watched us and their eldest sister, a fine barelegged lassie of eighteen, who was busy baking oatcakes for us. It was a hot post both for herself and for us. She put on peats till the hut was like an oven, and the smoke made our eyes smart almost past endurance. Yet we watched the progress of her operation with great interest, as she made a paste of oatmeal and water, rolled it out in cakes, cut it into segments, baked them on an iron girdle over the fire, and then reared them before the glowing peats to make them crisp. This done, she found us some tea, and that was our supper. They had two or three cows, but their milk was already in the process of being converted into cheese; the potatoes and the oats of the last crop were exhausted, and the wet season had prevented the ripening of the present. “There was,” said our hostess, “a great cry in the country for food!” Our fatigue, and this announcement, induced us to think we fared well. They made us a comfortable bed in the spence, where we found four Gaelic Bibles, and the History of Robinson Crusoe! Early in the morning we pursued our way; but ere we took our leave, the poor woman came in from fetching up her cows, her clothes wet to the very knees. When we expressed our surprise--“O,” said she, “that is what we are used to every day of our lives. While you have been in your bed, the herdboy has three times gone round the corn-fields with his dogs, to chase away the stags and roes into the woods. The last thing every night, while the corn is growing in the field, he goes round--once again at midnight, and then at the earliest dawn of day. Every night it must be done, or a green blade would not be left. If you went in the gloaming with the man into the wood, sir, you would see twenty stags as big as our cows. O it’s an awful place for wild beasts--foxes and badgers, and serpents! did you ever see a serpent, ma’am? Sometimes in a morning they rear themselves up in a narrow path, and hiss at me bitterly.” As the poor woman spoke, we stood at the door of her little tenement, and saw the heavy dew lie glittering on the grass all round; and the primitive cheese-press, consisting of a pole, one end of which was thrust into a crevice of a rock, and the other weighted with a huge stone; and around us were the heathy mountains and the woods; the mists and clouds clinging to the sides of wild hills, or rolling away before the breeze of morning; and the sound of the neighbouring torrent alone disturbing the deep solitude. We could not avoid feeling how far was all this from the cottage-life of England. We gave the poor woman what we thought a fitting return for her hospitality, and left her overwhelmed with a grateful astonishment, which shewed what was there the real value of money.
This is a scene in the scale of comfort far below the general run of labourers’ houses in England; but yet how far, infinitely far lower, do many of our working people’s abodes sink. What dens have we in manufacturing towns! What little, filthy, dismal, yet high-rented dens! What cabins do some of our colliers and miners inhabit! What noisome, amphibious abodes abound in our fishing villages, such as Crabbe has painted! What places have I seen in different parts of England, which everywhere obtain the name of Rookeries,--huge piles built for some purpose which has not answered; or some deserted hall, let off in little tenements; the windows broken, and stopped with old rags and hats; the ground all round trodden down, covered with ash-heaps; a few stunted bushes, or gooseberry trees, where once had been a garden, displaying the ragged and tattered wash of the indigence of indigence: altogether exhibiting such an air of poverty as impoverishes one’s very spirit, and fills it with a nameless feeling of disgust and despondence for days after. Such a place I particularly recollect seeing somewhere between Netherby and Gretna-Green; and, observing an old man “daundering about,” as he called it, as without hope and object, I asked him how this place came to look so forlorn--“O,” said he, “we once could run our cows on the waste, and did very well, but that is taken away. Sir James asked the steward what the poor people must do, ‘O, they will all hooly[25] away,’ said he; but where are we to hooly to?”
[25] Slip quietly away. A word often found in the old Border Ballads, as “Then hooly, hooly up she rose,” etc.
Ah! cottage life! There is much more hidden under that name than ever inspired the wish to build cottages ornées, or to inhabit them. There is a vast mass of human interests within its circle, of which the world takes little note. The loves and hopes; the trials and struggles; the sufferings, deaths, and burials; the festivities and religious confraternities; the indignities that fret, and the necessities that compel, to action and union our simple brethren and sisters. How little is truly known; how much is consequently misjudged; how great is the indifference concerning them in those who have the power to work miracles of love and happiness amongst them, and must one day stand with them at the footstool of our common Father, who will demand of his children how each has loved his brethren.
Let us turn our eyes, however, a moment from the dark side to the light one. There is not a more beautiful sight in the world than that of our English cottages, in those parts of the country where the violent changes of the times have not been so sensibly felt. Where manufactures have not introduced their red, staring, bald brick-houses, and what is worse, their beershops and demoralization: where, in fact, a more primitive simplicity remains. There, on the edges of the forests, in quiet hamlets and sweet woody valleys, the little grey-thatched cottages, with their gardens and old orchards, their rows of beehives, and their porches clustered with jasmines and roses, stand:--
Hundreds of huts All hidden in a sylvan gloom,--some perched On verdant slopes from the low coppice cleared; Some in deep dingles, secret as the nest Of Robin Redbreast, built amongst the roots Of pine, on whose tall top the throstle sings. Hundreds of huts, yet all apart, and felt Far from each other; ’mid the multitude Of intervening stems; each glen or glade By its own self a perfect solitude, Hushed, but not mute.
John Wilson.
There they stand, and give one a poetical idea of peace and happiness which is inexpressible. Well may they be the admiration of foreigners. In many of the southern counties, but I think nowhere more than in Hampshire, do the cottages realize, in my view, every conception that our poets have given us of them. One does, no doubt, when looking on their quiet beauty, endow them with a repose and exemption from mortal sufferings that can belong to no human dwelling; and Professor Wilson, in his poem called “An Evening in Furness Abbey,” which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, September, 1829,--a poem flushed all over with the violet hues of poetry, and overflowing with tenderness and grace, gives one this very delightful expression of a thought which has occurred to many of us--
The day goes by On which our soul’s beloved dies! The day On which the body of the dead is stretched By hands that decked it when alive; the day On which the dead is shrouded; and the day Of burial--one and all go by! The grave Grows green ere long; the churchyard seems a place Of pleasant rest, and all the cottages, That keep for ever sending funerals Within its gates, look cheerful every one, As if the dwellers therein never died, And this earth slumbered in perpetual peace.
But sobering down by such sad, yet sweet thoughts as these, our poetical fancies of cottage life, and bringing them within the range of human trouble and suffering, still these rustic abodes must inspire us with ideas of a peace and purity of life, in most soothing contrast with the hurry and immorality of cities. Blessings be on them wherever they stand, in woodland valleys, or on open heaths, throughout fair England; and may growing knowledge bring growth of happiness, widening the capacity of enjoyment without touching the simplicity of feeling and the strength of principle. Well may the weary wayfarer--
Lean on such humble gate and think the while, O! that for me some home like this would smile; Some cottage home to yield my aged form, Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm.
There are thousands of them inhabited by woodmen, labourers, or keepers, that are fit dwellings for the truest poet that ever lived; and it is the ideal of these picturesque and peace-breathing English cottages that has given origin to some of the sweetest paradises in the world--the cottages of the wealthy and the tasteful. What most lovely creations of this description now abound in the finest parts of England, with their delicious shrubberies, velvet lawns, hidden walks, and rustic garden-huts; their little paddocks lying amid woods, and skirted with waters; spots breathing the odour of dewy flowers, and containing in small space all the elegance and the country enjoyments of life.
Happiness, it is true, is not to be dragged into such places; but what places they are for the genuine lover of the country to invite her into! The very feeling of the cumbrous pomp and circumstance of aristocratic establishments in this country, makes one think of such sweet hermitages with a sense of relief and congratulation. What more charming abode has the wide earth for a spirit soothing itself with the pleasures of literature and the consolation of genuine religion, far from the wranglings pf political life, than such a one as the cottage, formerly that of Mrs. Southey, at Buckland, on the border of the New Forest; of Miss Mitford, at Three-Mile-Cross; or that of Wordsworth at Rydal? But we must quit these earthly paradises to speak of other things.
II. POPULAR FESTIVALS AND FESTIVITIES
What a revolution of taste has taken place in the English people as it regards popular festivals and festivities! Our ancestors were passionately fond of shows, pageants, processions, and maskings. They were fond of garlands and ribbons, dancing and festive merriment. May-day, Easter, Whitsuntide, St. John’s Day, Yule, and many other times, were times of general sport and gaiety. Music and flowers abounded; mumming, morris-dancing, and many a quaint display of humour and frolic spread over the country. The times, and the spirit of the times, are changed:--we are become a sober people. England is no longer merry England, but busy England; England full of wealth and poverty--extravagance and care. There has been no small lamentation over this change; and many of our writers have laboured hard to bring us once more to adopt this state of things. They might as well attempt to bring back jousts and tourneys[26], popery, and government without representation. The times, and the spirit of the times are changed. Strutt, Hone, Leigh Hunt, Miss Laurence, and many others, may expatiate on the poetic beauty of these things: they may deplore the extinction of this graceful rite, that jocund festivity, and pray us earnestly to resume them once more; but can they give us our light hearts again? Can they make the nation young again? Can they make us the simple, ignorant, confiding people, living in the present, careless of the future, as our ancestors were? Till they can do this, they must lament and exhort us in vain. As soon might they bid the sun to retrace his path; the seasons reverse their course; earth and heaven turn back in the path of their years. What our ancestors were, they were from circumstances that are gone for ever; and what we are, we are from another mighty succession of circumstances, of which the memory and effect may no more be blotted out, than the stars can be blotted out of the clear heavens of midnight. The country has passed through deep baptisms, and processes of fermentation which have worked out the lighter external characters, and totally reorganised the moral as well as the political constitution of the kingdom. The better qualities of the old English character I trust we fully retain, but the more juvenile and fantastic ones are irrevocably destroyed in the shock of most momentous convulsions.
[26] Since the former edition of this work was written, that even has been attempted.
Amongst the many attempts to account for the sedater cast of the modern popular mind, Sir E. Bulwer, in “England and the English,” has attributed it to the spread of Methodism. Had he attributed it to Puritanism he would have been nearer the mark. Methodism may possibly have done something towards it, but it neither began early enough, nor spread universally enough, to have the credit of this change. The decay of popular festivities has been noticed and lamented by writers for the last century. It has been going on both before and since the rise of Methodism, with much the same pace of progression, and is equally felt where Methodism is not allowed to shew its face, as where it exercises its fullest power. Over what a great extent of this country does the influence of high-church landlords prevail, where Methodism cannot get footing; where the people are all expected to go soberly to church as in the good old times; and yet there the people are just as grave, have grown out of the sports and pastimes of their ancestors, just as much as in the most Methodistic districts. In the manufacturing districts, where the Methodists have gained most influence, it is true enough that they have helped to expel an immense quantity of dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, badger-baiting, boxing, and such blackguard amusements; but Maying, guising, plough-bullocking, morris-dancing, were gone before, or would have gone had not Methodism appeared.
Mighty and many are the causes which have wrought this great national change; causes which have been operating upon us for the last three hundred years; and are so intimately connected with our whole national progress, political and intellectual--with all our growing greatness, with all our glory and our sorrows, that had not Methodism existed, that character would have been exactly what it is.
The Reformation laid the foundation of this change. While we had an absolute pope, and an absolute king; while the people were neither educated, nor allowed to read the Bible, nor to be represented in Parliament; while the monarch and a few noble families held all the lands of the kingdom, the lower classes had nothing to do but to follow their masters to the wars, or live easily and dance gaily in times of peace. The retainers of great houses, the labourers in the fields, foresters and shepherds, following their solitary occupations, constituted the bulk of the nation. Merchants and merchandise were few; our great trading towns and interests did not exist; the days of newspapers, of religious disputes, of literature and periodicals, were not come. The people were either at work or at play. When their work was over, play was their sole resource. They danced, they acted rude plays and pantomimes, with all the zest and gaiety of children, for their heads were as unoccupied with knowledge and grave concerns as those of children. They lived in poverty it may be, but still they lived in that state of simplicity and dependence which left them little care; and they were cut off, by the impossibility of rising out of their original rank, from all troublesome excitement. It was equally the concern of the civil government and the hierarchy to encourage sports and festivities, to keep them out of dangerous inquiries into their own condition, or rights. In the great feudal halls, the minstrel, the jongleur, the jester, and other ministers of gaiety; hawks and hounds abroad, jollity and drinking at home, kept the minds of all idlers occupied with matters to their taste. The clergy and monks promoted with an equal zeal of policy, the festivals of saints, keeping of high days and holidays, processions, games, and even acting the mysteries and miracle-plays. While the system continued, this spirit and national character must have continued likewise; but the Reformation burst like a volcano from beneath, and scattered the whole smiling surface into disjointed fragments, or buried it beneath the lava of ruin.
Henry VIII. at once destroyed Monkery and the Catholic church. He at once seized on the ecclesiastical lands, and snapped asunder the ecclesiastical policy. The translation of the Bible let in a flood of light that revealed all the phantasmagoria of the past, and prepared a train of everlasting inquiries, disquietudes, and intellectual and political triumphs for the future. The people saw they had been treated as children, but they now awoke to the passions and the conscious power of men. They had tasted of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were opened to their actual condition, never more to be closed. The lands that were rudely seized and arbitrarily distributed, created a new class in the community--the gentry--a link between the aristocracy and the people;--possessing the knowledge of the one, and sharing the interests of the other. Henry’s predecessors had hastened this new era by curtailing the wealth and power of the nobility; and the long wars of the houses of York and Lancaster had already done much of this work for him; exterminating some, humbling others, and embarrassing with debts the remainder. So were the elements of a more popular career thrown into the midst of the nation; and the religious persecutions on the Continent, by sending us swarms of jewellers, weavers, and other artificers, laid the foundation of those trading propensities which have now carried us to such a marvellous length. We came to be a trading and colonizing people, and to possess a fleet in order to protect our new interests. How rapidly this navy grew, indicating by its own growth that of the general wealth and commercial enterprise of England, of which it was the consequence, is seen by this circumstance. In that fine old ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, Lord Howard is made to say to Henry VIII. in 1511--
Sir Andrew’s shipp I bring with mee; A braver shipp was never none; Now hath your grace two shipps of warr, Before in England was but one!
This one was the Great Harry, built in 1504. In about 80 years only afterwards, the English had thirty vessels of war at sea, and with these dared to attack the Invincible Armada of Spain, consisting of one hundred and thirty vessels, and by the assistance of a providential tempest, totally dispersed and destroyed it. Then Howard of Effingham, Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins, were the names of our commanders,--names which thenceforward filled all the known world with terror, and gave to England the empire of the seas. With this extension of national interests, a more active and earnest spirit was diffused through the people. The struggle with enemies abroad, and with the rapidly maturing spirit of religious freedom at home, kept Elizabeth engaged, and induced in her a rigour of persecution, and in the people a rigour of resistance and the soul of martyrdom. Before the development of these antagonist powers, all lightness fled; singing gave way to preaching and listening; dancing, to running anxiously to know the fate of sufferers, and the doctrines of fresh-springing teachers. So completely had the old relish for merriment and pastimes died out, that her successor, James, endeavoured to compel the people, by the publication of his “Book of Sports” to be jocose and gamesome. But it would not do. The soul of the people was now up in arms for their rights; and the despotic nature of himself and his son, resisting their claims, kept up such a fever of political strife in the kingdom as would have put out all jesting and capering if they had not gone before. The hierarchy fell,--fell in one wide chaos of civil contention; and, as if torrents of blood and volumes of fire, and the trampling hoofs of thousands of careering cavalry had not been enough to overwhelm and dash to pieces every remaining fragment of jollity and popular fête,--in came Puritanism from Geneva, and the Solemn League and Covenant from Scotland. There was a final close to all the pageantry of processions and the merry saintliness of festivals: they were denounced and abhorred as the carnality of Anti-Christ and the rags of the scarlet woman. Charles II. indeed, could revive licentiousness, but he could not bring back the holiday guise of “the old profession.” And what has been the course of England since? One ever-widening and ascending course of mighty wars, expanding commerce, vast colonization, and the growth of science, literature, and general knowledge. We are no longer a nation of feudal combatants, of piping shepherds, and thoughtless peasantry,--but of busy, scheming, money-collecting, family-creating men. Our last tremendous war put the climax to this amazing career. In it all Europe seemed torn to pieces and organized anew. We, as a people, were led by circumstances to put forth the most stupendous energies that perhaps any nation ever did. To defend our colonies; to support the interests of our allies with arms and subsidies; to supply the whole of Europe with all species of manufactures, and almost all species of merchandise, and through this demand stimulating into existence the powers of steam and machinery, a population of amazing numbers to maintain. And then, the shock and the revulsion when this great war-system suddenly ceased! An immense debt, vast taxes, the necessity of maintaining high prices, the necessity of boundless competition and low wages that we might so compete with the continent, returning to its old habits.
Who does not know with what a fiery force this has fallen on the working classes? What distress, what pauperization, what desperation, brought to the very pitch of rebellion, they have gone through; and recollecting this, can any one think otherwise than that it has been enough to sober any people that is not destitute of every element of high character. If we could, after a baptism like this, be still like the French, a dancing, dissipation-loving people, we should, like them, have but a fitful care to secure our liberties, and the comforts of good government; like them, at this moment, we should be the victims of successive revolutions, yielding no fruit but tyranny. But we are a sober and a thoughtful people, and are therefore working out of the mass of our difficulties the form of a renewed constitution, adapted to our present enlarged views and experience. But besides this, our energies have not been called forth for this good end alone; they have brought with their exercise a high relish for intellectual pleasures. Our minds have been stirred mightily, and, like animals that during their wintry torpor feel no hunger, yet feel it keenly the moment they are awake, they have become hungry for congenial aliment. We have fed on much knowledge, and are no longer children, but full-grown men, with manly appetites and experienced tastes. Could we now sit, as our ancestors did, for nine hours together at a mystery? Could we endure to read through the chronicles and romances of the middle ages,--books which spun out their recitals to the most extraordinary length, and were never too long; for books then were few? If we could not, so neither could the simple pleasures and rural festivities satisfy the peasantry of this. We are the creatures of new circumstances, and of a higher reach of knowledge. A combination of causes, too puissant to be resisted, has made hopeless all return to the juvenilities of the past. And after all, happiness--of which the people, however unwisely, are always in quest, does not consist in booths and garlands, drums and horns, or in capering round a May-pole. Happiness is a fireside thing. It is a thing of grave and earnest tone; and the deeper and truer it is, the more is it removed from the riot of mere merriment:
The highest mood allowed To sinful creatures, for all happiness Worthy that holy name, seems steeped in tears, Like flowers in dew, or tinged with misty hues, Like stars in halo.
John Wilson.
And the more our humble classes come to taste of the pleasures of books and intellect, and the deep fireside affections which grow out of the growth of heart and mind, the less charms will the outward forms of rejoicing have for them. Beautiful and poetical, I grant, are many of the old rites and customs of which we have been speaking; but they are beautiful and poetical as belonging to their own times,--and many of them, I am inclined to believe, as seen in the distance; for, seen at hand, there is a vulgarity in most popular customs that offends invariably our present tastes. Nor do I mean to say that our present population cannot be cheerful. A more truly cheerful people never existed; and they can dance and be merry too when they will; as Christmas, and Whitsuntide, and their annual village feasts and their harvest-homes can testify. Since the Reformation, the saints of the calendar having become mere names in this country, their festivals have accordingly died away. Whitsuntide, Easter, and Christmas seem almost all that have maintained their stand; and of these we will speak a little; but in the first place let us have a few words on May-Day.
III. MAY-DAY
May-day was celebrated with a gaiety and poetical grace far beyond all other festivals. It had come down from the pagan times with all its Arcadian beauty, and seemed to belong to those seasons more than to any Christian occasions. It is one that the poets have all combined to lavish their most delicious strains upon. The time of the year was itself so inspiring,--with all its newness of feeling, its buds and blossoms and smiling skies. It seemed just the chosen period for heaven and earth and youth to mingle their gladness together. There is no festivity that is so totally gone! Washington Irving in his very interesting account of his visit to Newstead Abbey, takes the opportunity to say, that he had been accused by the critics of describing in his Sketch Book popular manners and customs that had gone by, but that he had found those very customs existing in that neighbourhood. That those who doubted the accuracy of his statements must go north of the Trent. That he found May-poles standing in the old-fashioned villages, and that a band of plough-bullocks even came to the abbey while he was there.
Washington Irving certainly seemed most agreeably impressed with the primitive air of that part of Nottinghamshire, and it is interesting to see the effect which places most familiar to you produce on the minds of strangers of taste and poetical feeling. His delight at finding himself in old Sherwood, the haunt of Robin Hood; in hearing the bells of Mansfield at a distance; and his remarking the names of Wagstaff, Hardstaff, Beardall, as names abounding about the forest, naturally suggesting the character of those who first bore them--names so common to our eyes as never to have awakened any such idea;--all this is very agreeable; but let no lover of ancient customs go thither on the strength of Washington Irving’s report, unless he means to travel much farther north of the Trent than Newstead. There is certainly a May-pole standing in the village of Linby near Newstead, and there is one in the village of Farnsfield near Southwell; but I have been endeavouring to recollect any others for twenty miles round and cannot do it, and though garlands are generally hung on these poles on May-day, wreathed by the hands of some fair damsel who has a lingering affection for the olden times, and carried up by some adventurous lad; alas! the dance beneath it, where is it? In the dales of Derbyshire, May-poles are more frequent, but the dancing I never saw. In my own recollection, the appearance of morris-dancers, guisers, plough-bullocks, and Christmas carollers, has become more and more rare, and to find them we must go into the retired hamlets of Staffordshire, and the dales of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
One would have thought that the May-day fête would have outlasted all others, except it were Christmas, on the strength of the poetical wealth of heart and fancy woven with it through our literature. Every writer of any taste and fancy has referred with enthusiasm to May-day. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Fletcher, Milton, Browne, Herrick, and all our later poets, have sung of it with all their hearts. Chaucer, in Palamon and Arcite, describes Arcite going to the woods for garlands on May morning, according to the old custom. He
Is risen, and looketh on the merry day; And for to do his observance to May, Remembering on the point of his desire, He on the courser, starting as the fire, Is risen to the fieldés him to playe; Out of the court were it a mile or tway: And to the grove of which that I you told, By Aventine his way began to hold, To maken him a garland of the greves, Were it of woodbine, or of hawthorn leaves, And loud he sung, against the sunny sheen: “O May, with all thy flowers and thy green, Right welcome be thou, fairé, freshé May; I hope that I some green here getten may.” And from his courser with a lusty heart, Into the grove full hastily he start, And in a path he roamed up and down.
Milton has many beautiful glances at it, and Shakspeare touches on it in a hundred places, as in “The Midsummer Night’s Dream:”
If thou lovest me then, Steal forth thy father’s house to-morrow night; And in a wood, a league without the town, Where I did meet thee once with Helena, To do observance to a morn of May, There will I stay for thee.
The European observance of this custom is principally derived from the Romans, who have left traces of it in all the countries they subdued. It was their festival of Flora. It was the time in which they sacrificed to Maia; and in Spain, where this custom seems to remain much as they left it, the village-queen still is called Maia. But we have traces of it as it existed amongst the Saxons, whose barons at this time going to their Wittenagemote, or Assembly of Wise Men, left their peasantry to a sort of saturnalia, in which they chose a king, who chose his queen. He wore an oaken, and she a hawthorn wreath; and together they gave laws to the rustic sports, during those sweet days of freedom. The May-pole too, or the column of May, was the grand standard of justice amongst these people, in the EY-COMMONS, or fields of May: and the garland hung on its top, was the signal for convening the people. Here it was that the people, if they saw cause, deposed or punished their governors, their barons and kings. It was one of the most ancient customs, which, says Brande, has by repetition been from year to year perpetuated.
But we have traces also of its mode of celebration among our Druid ancestors, for it is certainly one of the old customs of the world, having come down from the earliest ages of Paganism through various channels. Dr. Clarke in his Travels, vol. ii. p. 229, has shewn that the custom of blowing horns on this day, still continued at Oxford, Cambridge, London, and other places, is derived from a festival of Diana. These ancient customs of the country did not escape the notice of Erasmus when in England, nor the ceremony of placing a deer’s head upon the altar of St. Paul’s church, which was built upon the site of a temple of Diana, by Ethelbert, king of Kent. Mr. Johnson, in his “Indian Field Sports,” also states the curious circumstance, that the Hindoos hold a vernal feast called BHUVIZAH, on the 9th of Baisach, exclusively for such as keep horned cattle for use or profit, when they erect a pole and adorn it with garlands; and perform much the same rites as used to be adopted by the English on the first of May. Thus it appears how ancient and how widely spread was this custom; and its celebration by the Druids and Celts points it out as belonging to the worship of the sun. In Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, the people still kindle fires on the tops of their mountains on this day, called Beal Fires, and the festival then celebrated Beltane, or Bealtane. The practice is to be traced in the mountainous and uncultivated parts of Cumberland, amongst the Cheviots, and in many parts of Scotland. Mr. Pennant says--“On the first of May, in the Highlands of Scotland, the herdsmen of every district hold their Beltein. They cut a square trench in the ground, leaving the turf in the middle. On that they make a fire of wood, on which they dress a large caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal, and milk, and bring, besides the ingredients of the caudle, plenty of beer and whisky; for each of the company must contribute something. The rite begins with spilling some of the caudle on the ground, by way of libation. On that every one takes a cake of oatmeal, on which are raised nine square knobs, each dedicated to some particular being, the supposed preserver of their flocks and herds; or to some particular animal, the real destroyer of them. Each person then turns his face to the fire, breaks off a knob, and flinging it over his shoulder, says--“This I give to thee; preserve thou my sheep: this I give to thee; preserve thou my horses:” and so on. After that they use the same ceremony to the noxious animals--“This I give to thee O Fox! spare thou my lambs; this to thee O hooded Crow! this to thee Eagle! When the ceremony is over they dine on the caudle, etc. etc.”
Something of this kind is retained in Northumberland, in the syllabub prepared for the May-feast, which is made of warm milk from the cow, sweet cake, and wine; and a kind of divination is practised by fishing with a ladle for a wedding-ring, which is dropped into it for the purpose of prognosticating who shall be first married. This divination of the wedding-ring is practised in the midland counties on Christmas-eve; and they have a peculiar kind of tall pots made expressly for this purpose, called posset-pots. I have myself fished for the ring on many a merry Christmas-eve.
One cannot avoid seeing in these ceremonies their most ancient origin and consequently wide-spread adoption. The throwing over the shoulder offerings to good and evil powers is exactly that of all savage nations, the effect of one uniform tradition. The American Indians, indeed, seldom propitiate the good, but are very careful to appease, or prevent the evil Manitou. These notions have, no doubt, everywhere contributed to connect ideas of the presence and power of spiritual and fairy creatures, and the extraordinary license of witchcraft on this night and day. We cannot avoid thinking of the wizard rites of the Blocksburg in Germany, made so familiar by Goëthe; and we see the reason why all houses were defended by forest boughs, gathered with peculiar ceremonies, and worn by the young on May-eve, in almost every European country.
What then were the exact ceremonies of May-day? The Romans celebrated the feast of Flora in this manner. The young people went to the woods, and brought back a quantity of boughs, with which they adorned their houses. Women ran through the streets, and had the privilege of insulting every one who came in their way. And here may we not see the custom, still continued in France, though fallen into desuetude here, of the epousées (brides) of the month of May? The epousées are the little daughters of the common people, dressed in their best, and placed on a chair, or bank, in the streets and public walks, on the first Sunday in May. Other little girls, the brides’ companions, stand near with plates, and tease the passengers for some money for their epousées.
Like the Romans, then, our ancestors celebrated May-day as a festival of the young. The youth of both sexes rose shortly after midnight, and went to some neighbouring wood, attended by songs and music, and breaking green branches from the trees, adorned themselves with wreaths and crowns of flowers. They returned home at the rising of the sun, and made their windows and doors gay with garlands. In the villages they danced during the day round the May-pole, which was hung to the very top with wreaths and garlands, and afterwards remained the whole year untouched, except by the seasons,--a fading emblem and consecrated offering to the Goddess of Flowers. At night the villagers lighted up fires, and indulged in revellings, after the Roman fashion. In this country they added the pageant of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, with Friar Tuck, Will Stutely, and others of their merry company; the dragon and the hobby-horse,--all of which may be found fully described in Strutt’s Queenhoo-Hall.
Spenser and Herrick give very graphic pictures of these popular festivities, which I shall here transcribe; and first, Spenser from the Shepherds’ Calendar.
Young folke now flocken in everywhere To gather May buskets,[27] and smelling brere; And home they hasten the posts to dight, And all the kirk pillars, ere daylight: With hawthorne buds, and sweet eglantine, And garlands of roses, and sops-in-wine. Sicker this morrow, no longer agoe, I sawe a shole of shepherds outgoe With singing and shouting, and jolly chere; Before them rode a lustie tabrere, That to the many a hornpipe played, Wherto they dauncen, eche one with his mayd. To see these folks make such jovisaunce Made my heart after the pipe to daunce. Tho to the greene-wood they speeden hem all, To fetchen home May with their musicall, And home they bringen, in a royall throne, Crowned as king, and his queen attone Was Lady Flora, on whome did attend A fayre flock of faeries, and a fresh band Of lovely nymphs. O that I were there To helpen the ladies their May-bush beer!
[27] Bushes.
Herrick’s poem is in the form of a lover inviting his sweetheart to go out a May-gathering.
CORINNA’S GOING A-MAYING.
Get up, get up for shame: the blooming morn Upon her wings presents the God unshorn: See how Aurora throws her fair Fresh-quilted colours through the air: Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see The dew bespangling herb and tree.
Each flower has wept and bowed towards the east Above an hour ago, yet you not dressed: Nay, not so much as out of bed When all the birds have matins said, And sung their thankful hymns; ’tis sin, Nay, profanation to keep in; When as a thousand virgins on this day Spring sooner than the lark to fetch in May!
Rise and put on your foliage, and be seen To come forth like the spring time, fresh and green, And sweet as Flora. Take no care For jewels for your crown, or hair; Fear not, the leaves will strew Gems in abundance upon you: Besides, the childhood of the day has kept, Against you come, some orient pearls unwept. Come and receive them, while the light Hangs on the dew-locks of the night, And Titan, on the eastern hill Retires himself, or else stands still Till you come forth. Wash, dress, be brief in praying; Few beads are best when once we go a-Maying!
Come, my Corinna, come, and coming mark How each field turns a street, each street a park, Made green and trimmed with trees; see how Devotion gives each house a bough, A branch; each porch, and door, ere this, An ark, a tabernacle is, Made up of whitethorn, neatly interwove, As if here were those cooler shades of love. Can such delights be in the street, And open fields, and we not see ’t? Come, we’ll abroad, and let’s obey The proclamation made for May; And sin no more, as we have done, by staying; But my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying!
There’s not a budding boy or girl, this day, But is got up and gone to bring in May: A deal of youth, ere this, is come Back, and with whitethorn laden home: Some have despatched their cakes and cream, Before that we have left to dream; And some have wept, and wooed, and plighted troth, And chose their priest, ere we can cast off sloth. Many a green gown has been given; Many a kiss both odd and even; Many a glance too has been sent From out the eye, love’s firmament; Many a jest told, of the key’s betraying This night, and locks picked; yet we’re not a-Maying!
Come, let us go while we are in our prime, And take the harmless folly of the time; We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty: Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun: And as a vapour or a drop of rain, Once lost can ne’er be formed again: So when, or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight, Lie down with us in endless night, Then, while time serves, and we are but decaying, Come, my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying!
Such were the festivities of youth and nature to which our monarchs, especially Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and James, used to go forth and participate. In the reign of the Maiden Queen, pageant seemed to arrive at its greatest height, and the May-day festivities were celebrated in their fullest manner; and so they continued, attracting the attention of the royal and noble, as well as the vulgar, till the close of the reign of James I. In “The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth,” vol. iv. part i., is this entry: “May 8th, 1602. On May-day, the queen went a-Maying to Sir Rich. Buckley’s, at Lewisham, some three or four miles off Greenwich.” This may be supposed to be one of those scenes represented in Mr. Leslie’s magnificent picture of May-day, in which Elizabeth is a conspicuous object. It is recorded by Chambers that Henry VIII. made a grand procession, with his queen Katherine and many lords and ladies, from Greenwich to Shooter’s Hill, where they were met by a Robin Hood pageant. In Henry VI.’s time, the aldermen and sheriffs of London went to the Bishop of London’s wood, in the parish of Stebenheath, and there had a worshipful dinner for themselves and other comers; and Lydgate the poet, a monk of Bury, sent them by a pursuivant “a joyful commendation of that season, containing sixteen stanzas in metre royall.”
In April, 1644, there was an ordinance of the two houses of Parliament for taking down all and singular May-poles; and in 1654, the Moderate Intelligencer says--“this day was more observed by people’s going a-Maying, than for divers years past, and indeed much sin committed by wicked meetings, with fighting, drunkenness, ribaldry and the like. Great resort came to Hyde Park; many hundred of rich coaches, and gallants in rich attire, but most shameful powdered-hair men, and painted and spotted women.” And this before my Lord Protector! so that the old spirit was rising up again from beneath the influence of Puritanism; and the Restoration was again the signal for hoisting the May-poles. In Hone’s Everyday Book, and in that valuable miscellany, Time’s Telescope, many particulars of the rearing again the great May-pole in the Strand, and of the latest May-pole standing in London, may be found.
Old Aubrey says, that in Holland they had their May-booms before their doors, but that he did not recollect seeing a May-pole in France. Yet nothing is more certain than the custom of the French of planting tall trees in their villages at this time, and of adorning their houses with boughs, and of planting a shrub of some pleasant kind under the window, or by the door of their sweethearts, before day-break, on a May-morning. Aubrey complains himself bitterly of the people taking up great trees in the forest of Woodstock to plant before their doors; and John Evelyn as bitterly laments the havoc made in the woods in his time. They are safe from such depredations now. Yet in different parts of England still, till within these few years, lingered vestiges of this once great day. At Horncastle in Lincolnshire, the young people used to come marching up to the May-pole with wands wreathed with cowslips, which they there struck together in a wild enthusiasm, and scattered in a shower around them. At Padstow in Cornwall, they have, or had lately, the procession of the hobby-horse. At Oxford on May-day, at four o’clock in the morning, they ascend to the top of the tower of Magdalen College, and used to sing a requiem for the soul of Henry VII., the founder, which was afterwards changed to a concert of vocal and instrumental music, consisting of several merry catches, and a concluding peal of the bells. The clerks and choristers, with the rest of the performers, afterwards breakfasted on a side of lamb. At Arthur’s Seat, at Edinburgh, they make a grand assembly of young people about sunrise, to gather May-dew, and dance. In Huntingdonshire, a correspondent of Time’s Telescope says, that the children still exhibit garlands. They suspend a sort of crown of hoops, wreathed and ornamented with flowers, ribbons, handkerchiefs, necklaces, silver spoons, and whatever finery can be procured, at a considerable height above the road, by a rope extending from chimney to chimney of the cottages, while they attempt to throw their balls over it from side to side, singing, and begging halfpence from the passengers. A May-lady, or doll, or larger figure, sometimes makes an appendage in some side nook. The money collected is afterwards spent in a tea-drinking, with cakes, etc. May-garlands with dolls are carried at Northampton by the neighbouring villagers, and at other places. At Great Gransden in Cambridgeshire, at Hitchin, and elsewhere, they make a lord and lady of May. At night, the farmers’ young servants go and cut hawthorn, singing what they call the Night-song. They leave a bough at each house, according to the number of young persons in it. On the evening of May-day, and the following evening, they go round to every house where they left a bush, singing The May-Song. One has a handkerchief on a long wand for a flag, with which he keeps off the crowd. The rest have ribbons in their hats. The May-Song consists of sixteen verses, of a very religious cast. At Penzance, and in Wales, they keep up May dances and other peculiar ceremonies.
I have been more particular in detailing the rites and customs of this festivity, because, once more popular than any, they are now become more disused. There have been more attempts to revive the celebration of May-day, from its supposed congeniality to the spirit of youth, than that of any other festivity, but all in vain. The times, and the spirit of the times, are changed.
IV. EASTER FESTIVITIES
May-day was the great festival of the young. Easter was the great festival of the church. It followed the dismal and abstemious time of Lent, and came heralded by Palm-Sunday, the commemoration of our Saviour’s riding into Jerusalem; Maundy-Thursday, the day on which he washed the feet of his disciples; and Good-Friday, the day of his death. All these days were kept with great circumstance. On Palm-Sunday there was, and still is, in Catholic countries, a great procession to church, with tapers and palm-branches, or sprigs of box as a substitute. Stowe says that in the week before Easter, “had ye great shows made for the fetching in of a twisted tree, or withe, as they termed it, out of the woods into the king’s house, and the like into every man’s house of honour and worship.”
This was the sallow or large-leaved willow, whose catkins are now in full bloom, and are still called palms by the country people. Maundy-Thursday, or Dies Mandati, the day of the command to wash each other’s feet, was a great day of humiliation and profession of Christian benevolence. The pope washed the feet of certain poor men; kings and princes did the same; in the monasteries the custom was general, and long retained. After the ceremony, liberal donations were made to the poor, of clothing, and of silver money; and refreshments were given them to mitigate the severity of the fast; on the 15th of April, 1731, Maundy-Thursday, a distribution was made at Whitehall, to 48 poor men and 48 poor women, the king’s age then being 48--of boiled beef and shoulders of mutton; loaves and fishes; shoes, stockings, linen, and woollen cloth; and leathern bags with one, two, three, and four penny pieces of silver, and shillings to each; about four pounds in value. The Archbishop of York also washed the feet of a certain number of poor persons. James II. was the last king who performed this in person: but a relic of this custom is still preserved in the donations dispensed at St. James’s on this day. In 1814, this donation was made with great ceremony at Whitehall Chapel. In the morning, Dr. Carey, the sub-almoner, and Mr. Hanley, the secretary of the Lord High Almoner, Mr. Nost, and others belonging to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, attended by 40 yeomen of the guard, distributed to 75 poor women and 75 poor men--being as many as the king was years old--a quantity of salt fish, consisting of salmon, cod, and herrings; pieces of very fine beef, five loaves of bread, and some ale to drink the king’s health. At three o’clock they met again; the men on one side of the chapel, the women on the other. A procession entered, consisting of a party of yeomen of the guard, one of them carrying a large gold dish on his head, containing 150 bags with 75 silver pennies in each, for the poor people, which was placed in the royal closet. They were followed by the sub-almoner in his robes, with a sash of fine linen over his shoulder and crossing his waist. He was followed by two boys, two girls, the secretary, and another gentleman, with similar sashes, etc. etc.: all carrying large nosegays. The church evening service was then performed; at the conclusion of which the silver pennies were distributed, and woollen cloth, linen, shoes and stockings, to the poor men and women, and, according to ancient custom, a cup of wine, to drink the king’s health. This ceremony is still continued in similar style.
At Rome, the altar of the Capella Paolina is illuminated with more than 4000 wax tapers; and the pope and cardinals go thither in procession, bringing the sacrament along with them, and leaving it there. Then the pope blesses the people, and washes the feet of some pilgrims, and serves them at dinner. At Moscow, Dr. Clarke says, the Archbishop washes the feet of the Apostles, that is, twelve monks designed to represent them. The archbishop takes off his robes, girds his loins with a towel, and proceeds to wash their feet, till he comes to St. Peter, who rises up, and the same interlocution takes place between him and the prelate as is said to have done between our Saviour and that Apostle.
The next day is GOOD-FRIDAY, so called by the English, but HOLY-FRIDAY on the continent--the day of our Saviour’s death. Thousands of English travellers have witnessed, and many described, the splendid pageant of this night at St. Peter’s at Rome, on which the hundred lamps which burn over the apostle’s tomb are extinguished, and a stupendous cross of light appears suspended from the dome, between the altar and the nave, shedding over the whole edifice a soft lustre delightful to the eye, and highly favourable to picturesque representations. This exhibition is supposed to have originated in the sublime imagination of Michael Angelo, and he who beholds it will acknowledge that it is not unworthy of the inventor. The magnitude of the cross, hanging as if self-suspended, and like a meteor streaming in the air; the blaze that it pours forth; the mixture of light and shade cast on the pillars, arches, statues, and altars; the crowd of spectators placed in all the different attitudes of curiosity, wonder, and devotion; the processions, with their banners and crosses gliding successively in silence along the nave, and kneeling around the altar: the penitents of all nations and dresses collected in groups near the confessionals of their respective languages; a cardinal occasionally advancing through the crowd, and as he kneels, humbly bending his head to the pavement; in fine, the pontiff himself without pomp and pageantry, prostrate before the altar, offering up his adorations in silence, form a scene singularly striking.
In various Catholic countries the lights are suddenly put out at the sound of a bell, and a flagellation, in imitation of Christ’s sufferings, commences in the dark, with such cries as make it a truly terrific scene. The effect of the singing of the Miserere at Rome, in the time of the darkness, has been described by several writers as inexpressibly sublime.
At Jerusalem the monks go in procession to Mount Calvary with a large crucifix and image, where they take down the image from it with all the minute procedure of taking down, unnailing, taking off the crown of thorns, etc. etc. In Portugal, they act in the chapel the whole scene of the Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary sitting at the foot of the cross with Mary Magdalene and St. John; the coming of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea; the taking down by order of Pilate, and bringing the body in procession to the tomb.
Such are the ceremonies of Catholic countries: here the people eat hot-cross buns, and go to church, and that is all. The first sound you hear on awaking in the morning, is that of numerous voices crying hot-cross buns, for every little boy has got a basket, and sets out with a venture of buns on this day. Yet how few know or call to mind the amazing antiquity of this custom. Mr. Bryant traces it to the time of early Paganism, when little cakes called bown were offered to Astarte, the Catholics having politically engrafted all the Gentile customs on their form of Christianity.
Then came Easter-eve, on which the fast was most rigorous; and then broke Easter-day, the joyous Sunday, the day of the resurrection. All sorrow, fasting, and care now gave way to gaiety; and religious pageants were established, and are so still in Catholic countries, to edify the people. Goëthe gives a lively description of the effect of the coming Easter morn upon Faust. He is just wearied out of life with ambitious cravings, and about to swallow poison, when he hears the sound of bells, and voices in chorus, singing--Christ ist erstanden!
EASTER HYMN.--CHORUS OF ANGELS.
Christ is from the grave arisen! Joy is his. For him the weary Earth has ceased its thraldom dreary, And the cares that prey on mortals; He hath burst the grave’s stern portals; The grave is no prison: The Lord hath arisen!
FAUSTUS--O, those deep sounds, those voices rich and heavenly! How powerfully they sway the soul, and force The cup uplifted from the eager lips! Proud bells, and do your peals already ring, To greet the joyous dawn of Easter morn?
Hymn continued.--CHORUS OF WOMEN.
We laid him for burial ’Mong aloes and myrrh, His children and friends Laid their dead master there! All wrapped in his grave-dress We left him in fear, Ah! where shall we seek him? The Lord is not here!
CHORUS OF ANGELS.
The Lord hath arisen-- Sorrow no longer; Temptation hath tried him, But he was the stronger!
Happy, happy victory! Love, submission, self-denial Marked the strengthening agony, Marked the purifying trial: The grave is no prison: The Lord is arisen.
FAUSTUS--Those bells announced the merry sports of youth; This music welcomed in the happy spring; And now am I once more a happy child, And old remembrance twining round my heart, Forbids this act, and checks my daring steps-- Then sing ye forth--sweet songs that breathe of heaven! Tears come, and earth hath won her child again.
Dr. Anster’s Translation.
In this beautiful incident, purely English readers may be apt to attribute to German extravagance the chorus of angels; but Goëthe had in his eye the Catholic pageants--pageants that once were common here. The only theatres of the people were the churches, and the monks were the actors. Plays were got up with a full dramatis personæ of monks, in dresses according to the characters they assumed. The sepulchre was erected in the church near the altar, to represent the tomb wherein the body of Christ was laid. At this tomb, which was built at an enormous cost, and lighted at an equal one, and for which there was a gathering from the people, there was a grand performance on Easter day. In some churches Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and Mary of Nain, were represented by three deacons clothed in dalmatics and amisses, with their heads covered in the manner of women, and holding a vase in their hands. These performers came through the middle of the choir, and hastening towards the sepulchre with downcast looks, said together this verse, “Who shall remove the stone for us?” Upon this, a boy clothed as an angel, in albs, and holding a wheat-ear in his hand before the sepulchre, said, “Whom do you seek in the sepulchre?” The Marys answered, “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.” The boy-angel answered, “He is not here, but is risen,” and pointed to the place with his finger. The boy-angel departed very quickly, and two priests in tunics, sitting without the sepulchre, said, “Women, whom do you seek?” The middle one of the three said, “Sir, if you have taken him away, say so.” The priest, shewing the cross, said, “They have taken away the Lord.” The two sitting priests said, “Whom do you seek, women?” The Marys, kissing the place, afterwards went from the sepulchre. In the meantime a priest, in the character of Christ, in an alb, with a stole, holding a cross, met them on the left horn of the altar, and said, “Mary!” Upon hearing this, the mock Mary threw herself at his feet, and with a loud voice, cried, “Cabboin!” The priest representing Christ, replied, nodding, “Noli me tangere;” touch me not. This being finished, he again appeared at the right horn of the altar, and said to them as they passed before it, “Haik,” do not fear. This being finished, he concealed himself, and the women-priests, as though joyful at hearing this, bowed to the altar, and turning towards the choir, sung “Alleluia, the Lord is risen!” This was the signal for the bishop or priest to begin and sing aloud, Te Deum.
Brand quotes, from the churchwardens’ accounts at Reading, several items paid, for nails for the sepulchre; for rosin for the Resurrection-play; for making a Judas; for writing the plays themselves; and other such purposes. Fosbrooke gives “the properties” of the Sepulchre-show of St. Mary Redcliff church, at Bristol, from an original MS. in his possession, formerly belonging to Chatterton, viz. “Memorandum:--That Master Cannings hath delivered, the 4th day of July, in the year of our Lord 1470, to Master Nicolas Pelles, vicar of Redcliff, Moses Conterin, Philip Barthelmew, and John Brown, procurators of Redcliff aforesaid, a new sepulchre, well gilt with fine gold, and a civer thereto; a image of God Almighty rising out of the same sepulchre, with all the ordinance that longeth thereto; that is to say, a lath made of timber and iron-work thereto. Item; hereto longeth Heven made of timber and strined cloths. Item; Hell made of timber, and iron-work thereto, with Devils the number of thirteen. Item; four knights keeping the sepulchre with their weapons in their hands; that is to say, two spears, two axes, with two shields. Item; four pair of angels’ wings, for four angels, made of timber and well painted. Item; the Fadre, the crown and visage; the ball with a cross upon it, well gilt with fine gold. Item; the Holy Ghost, coming out of Heven into the sepulchre. Item; longeth to the four angels four Perukes.”--Fosbroke’s British Monachism.
Throughout the Christian world, wherever the Catholic and Greek churches extend, great and magnificent are the pageants, processions, and rejoicings still of this day. The lights themselves at the sepulchre are objects of great admiration. When this kingdom was catholic, the paschal, or great Easter taper at Westminster Abbey, was three hundred pounds weight. Sometimes a large wax light called a serpent was used; its name being derived from its form, which was spiral, and was wound round a rod. To light it, fire was struck from a flint consecrated by the abbot. The paschal in Durham cathedral was square wax, and reached to within a man’s length of the roof, from whence this waxen enormity was lighted by “a fine convenience.” From this superior light all others were taken. Every taper in the church was purposely extinguished, in order that this might supply a fresh stock of consecrated light, till at the same season of the next year a similar parent torch was prepared.
Of the lighting of the annual fire at the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, Turner, in his Tour to the Levant, gives a similar account. “We entered the church of the Holy Sepulchre with difficulty, our janizary carrying before us a whip of several leathern thongs, which he used most liberally. The church was filled with pilgrims and spectators, not less in number than 7000. What a scene was before me! The Greek and Armenian galleries overlooking the dome, were filled with female pilgrims of those nations, enthusiastically looking towards the sepulchre, and crossing themselves. Below me, the whole church, and particularly the circular apartment containing the dome, was absolutely crammed with pilgrims, men and women, hallooing, shouting, singing, and violently struggling to be near the sepulchre, while the Turkish soldiers were driving them back with their whips. One man I saw in the contention had his right ear literally torn off. The place immediately near the window whence the fire was given, was occupied by the richest pilgrims, who, for this precedence, pay to the Turks 200 or 300 sequins. An old woman sitting on the step of the door of the Greek church, had kept that seat for a day and a night without moving, and paid two dollars to get it. A ring was kept, as well as the tumult would allow, by the crowd around the sepulchre, round which pilgrims were carried on others’ shoulders, singing religious songs in Arabic and Greek; while, at other times, a party of ten or twelve ran rioting round it, knocking down every one that stood in their way. The Greek and Armenian bishops were shut in the sepulchre at two o’clock with a single Turk, who is well paid to declare that he saw the fire descend miraculously, or, at least, to keep silence. Before they enter, the sepulchre is publicly inspected, and all the lamps extinguished.
“At twenty minutes to three, the fire was given from the window, and was received with a tremendous and universal shout through the whole church. On its first appearance, the torch was seized by a boy who rubbed it against his face, hand, and neck, with such vehemence as to extinguish it, for which he was well beaten by those near him. Eight different times was the fire given from the window, and as every pilgrim carried candles in his hand, in bunches of four, six, eight, or twelve, in ten minutes the whole church was in a flame, and in five more nearly every candle was extinguished. But what enthusiasm! The men rubbed them against their heads and faces, their caps, and handkerchiefs; and the women uncovered the bosom, directing the flame along their heads, necks, and faces, and all crossing themselves during the operation, with the utmost devotion and velocity. The candles, when a little of them is burnt, are carried home, and ever afterwards preserved as sacred. Messengers with lanterns, stood ready at the door, to carry the fire to the Greek convent of Bethlehem, of the Cross at Sullah, and of St. Saba, near the Dead Sea.”
Equally curious, and far more splendid, are the ceremonies at Rome on this day. The moment they suppose our Saviour is risen, the cannons of the castle of St. Angelo are fired, and all the bells in the city begin ringing at once. The people, throwing off their fasting weeds, give themselves up to rejoicing. The church of St. Peter, and the whole piazza before it, are crowded with all classes of persons in gala dresses. The pope is carried in magnificent state, through the church, shaded by waving peacocks’ feathers, attended by his guardia nobile, in princely uniform, glittering with gold, their helmets adorned with plumes of feathers; the ambassadors and their wives; the senators and their trains; the Armenian bishops and priests, in very splendid robes; the cardinals, bishops, and all the Roman troops in grand procession. The pope blesses the people from the terrace, who receive the benediction on their knees, and look up with eager eyes for the indulgences that are scattered amongst them by some of the cardinals. In the evening there is a grand illumination of St. Peter’s. “On entering the Piazza,” says a traveller, “we beheld the architecture of the dome, façade, and colonnade, all marked out by soft lamps: a bell tolled, and in a moment, as if struck by a magical wand, the whole fabric burst into a dazzling blaze of the most beautiful light; nor could we conceive how the sudden transition was effected. Fireworks and festivities concluded the evening.”
In Spain, Portugal, South America, wherever indeed the Catholic religion extends, similar church plays, pageants and rejoicings prevail. In the Greek church, nay even in Turkey, Easter is a great festival. The Russians celebrate it with extraordinary zeal. At Moscow no meetings of any kind take place without repeating the expressions of peace and joy, CHRISTOS VOSCRESS! Christ is risen! To which the answer always is the same; VOISTINEY VOSCRESS! He is risen indeed! On Easter-Monday begins the presentation of the Paschal eggs. Lovers to their mistresses, relations to each other, servants to their masters, all bring ornamented eggs. The meanest pauper in the street presenting an egg, and repeating the words CHRISTOS VOSCRESS, may demand a salute even of the empress. All business is laid aside; the upper ranks are engaged in visiting, balls, dinners, suppers, masquerades; while boors fill the air with their songs, or roll about the streets drunk. Servants appear in new and tawdry liveries, and carriages in the most sumptuous parade.
In all this may be seen what Easter was in England when it was a Catholic country--what a change in our observance of times the Reformation has produced! Fifteen days were the festivities usually kept up; in many places servants were permitted to rest from their labours; all courts of justice were shut up, and all public games of a worldly nature were forbidden. Still in London it is a great week of relaxation to the mechanics, who pour out to Greenwich and other places by thousands to enjoy themselves. On Easter Monday 1834, as stated under the head of “Sunday in the Country,” it appeared that no less than 100,000 persons went by the steam-vessels to different places. In large towns, Easter-Monday is a holiday, and you may see a few swings, shows, and whirligigs for the children; but as you go farther into the country, all trace of this once great festival fades away. In the midland counties you rarely see a Paschal, or as it is more commonly called, a Pace-Egg. These eggs, which are almost as ancient as the Ark, of which they are a symbol, are to be found in almost all civilized countries. They are an emblem of the resurrection. As the whole living world went into the ark, and were shut up for a season, like the life in the egg, so by the egg, the ancients for ages symbolized the tradition of that great event, bringing eggs to the altars of their gods. The Hindoos even conceive their god Brahme, once in a cycle of ages, to enter into the egg, with the whole animated universe, and to float, like the ark, on the waters of eternity, till the time comes to reproduce himself and all things with him. So the Gnostics engrafted this idea on the Christian religion; for the entrance of Christ into the tomb, and his resurrection, were at once typified by the ark, and the egg, its symbol. This adopted custom, as all such customs do which have a sentiment in them dear to the human heart, flew far and wide. We have seen that the Russians give paschal-eggs: but what is more singular, the Mohammedans do the same. In France, in the week preceding Easter, baskets full of eggs boiled hard, of a red or violet colour, are seen in the streets, and the children amuse themselves with playing with, and afterwards eating them. In Egypt, the cattle and trees were coloured red at this period, because, they said, the world was once on fire at this time. The egg, placed on the paschal table of the Jews, was a symbol of the destruction of the human race, and of its regeneration. The egg entered into all the mysterious ceremonies called apocalyptic; and the Persians, who present it at the commencement of the new year, know that an egg is the symbol of the world. Throughout the country of Bonneval, on the day preceding Easter Sunday, and during the first days of that week, the clerks of the different parishes, beadles, and certain artisans, go about from house to house to ask for their Easter eggs. In many places the children make a sort of feast at breakfast in Easter on red or yellow eggs. The Druids had the egg in their ceremonies; and near Dieppe is a Druidical barrow, where a fête used to be held by the country people, till the Revolution, where vast crowds of both sexes assembled from the neighbouring villages, and gave themselves up to a day of sports and rejoicing, in which eggs figured most singularly.
The Pace-Eggs seem now to have retired northward in England. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, and so northward, they may be found. They are boiled hard, and beautifully coloured with various colours, some by boiling them with different coloured ribbons bound round them; others by colouring them of one colour, and scraping it away in a variety of figures; others by boiling them within the coating of an onion, which imparts to them the admired dye. Early in the morning of Easter-Monday, in the Lancashire towns and villages where wooden clogs are worn, you may hear a strange clatter on the pavement under your window. It is the children, who are running to and fro, begging their Pace-Eggs.
In Staffordshire, Shropshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, and Durham, they still retain the custom of heaving or lifting on Easter Monday and Tuesday. In some of these counties on Monday, the men lift the women by taking hold of their arms and legs, which is repeated nine times; and on Tuesday the women use the like ceremony with the men. In other places, the men on one day go decorated with ribbons into every house into which they can get an entrance, force every woman to be seated in this vehicle, and lift her up three times with loud huzzas; and on the next the women claim the same privilege. In some places the women sit out in the streets, and practise this odd ceremony on every male passenger that they can catch, giving him a salute round; afterwards laying him under contribution, and the sum thus derived they lay out in a tea-drinking.
Ball-play used to be practised on Easter-Sunday in the church, the clergy and dignitaries joining in it. Corporations with the mace, sword, and cap of maintenance, carried before them, used to go out on Monday, to play at ball, and dance with the ladies. They used to eat tansy-pudding and bacon as customary to the time. These, and many other, to us, ridiculous customs were all of ancient pagan origin engrafted on Christianity, and had all a symbolical meaning, most probably unperceived by the multitude who used them. The lifting three times had reference to the resurrection after three days; the ball was a symbol of the world; tansy the bitter herbs of the passion, and bacon to express their abhorrence of Jews, the destroyers of the Saviour.
We now see how all these festivities were kept alive by the art and power of the church, and how soon they fell into mere pageants when the Reformation poured in a truer light.
That the Reformation did effect this change is most convincingly proved by the retention of the old Catholic religious plays still in Catholic countries. Mr. Hone, in his “Ancient Mysteries,” brings together a variety of modern instances of such things on the continent; and our travellers can furnish us with more. Moore’s mention of these plays in his “Fudge Family in Paris,” in 1817, must be familiar to everybody:
What folly To say that the French are not pious, dear Dolly, When here one beholds so correctly and rightly, The Testament turned into melo-drames nightly; And doubtless, so fond they’re of scriptural facts, They will soon get the Pentateuch up in five acts. Here Daniel, in pantomime, bids bold defiance To Nebuchadnezzar and all his stuffed lions.
In a note, he adds, that in this “Daniel, ou la Fosse aux Lions,” JEHOVAH himself is made to appear! In 1822, M. Michelot, the Editor of the Mirour, was arraigned at the tribunal for having ridiculed the state religion, because he had published a description of a puppet-play just then witnessed at Dieppe, consisting of the birth of Christ, the passion, and the resurrection! and in which our Saviour, the Virgin, Judas, Herod, etc., were most revoltingly introduced. During Congress at Vienna in 1815, the Allied Monarchs used to attend a sacred comedy, of David, performed by the comedians of the National Theatre, in which Austrian soldiers fired off their muskets and artillery in the character of Jews and Philistines! It is needless to say that nothing of the kind could be tolerated in this country.
V. WHITSUNTIDE
This is the only ancient religious festival that has become a popular one since the Reformation, through the addition of a modern circumstance. Clubs, or Friendly Societies, have substituted for the old church ceremonies, a strong motive to assemble in the early days of this week as their anniversary; and the time of the year being so delightful, this holiday has, in fact, become more than any other, what May-day was to the people. Both men and women have their Friendly Societies, in which every member pays a certain weekly or monthly sum, and on occasions of sickness or misfortune, claims a weekly stipend, or a sum of money to bury their dead. These Societies were very prudential things, especially before the institution of Savings’ Banks, which are still better; and in the vicinity of towns have become most important resources for the working class, and especially servants. In the country, Friendly Societies still do, and will probably long remain, because Savings’ Banks are not easily introduced there. In a Savings’ Bank, whatever a person deposits he receives with interest. It is safe, and may be demanded any time. On the other hand, a man may contribute for years to a club, and not want a penny for himself on account of sickness, and at his death, with the exception of a fixed sum to bury him, and one for his widow, all his fund goes from his family; or, what is worse, he may pay for many years, and just when he wants help, he finds the box empty, through the great run upon it by the sickness or accidental disabling of his fellows; or the steward has proved dishonest and has decamped; or he has failed. Many such cases have occurred, especially during the violent changes of the last twenty years. In some particular cases the capital of a dozen Friendly Societies has, by some strange infatuation or artifice, been lodged in the hands of the same man, who has proved bankrupt and ruined them all. These are the drawbacks on Friendly Societies; and yet with these, they were better than nothing for the poor, and some of them have, in many cases, been remedied by the members sharing their fund amongst them once every seven years. They were, and are often, the poor man’s sole resource and refuge against the horror of falling on the parish, and have helped him through his time of affliction without burthening his mind with a sense of shame and dependence.
Well then may they come together on one certain day or days throughout the country, to hold a feast of fellowship and mutual congratulation in a common hope. Their wealthier neighbours have encouraged them in this bond of union and mutual help, and have become honorary members of their clubs. It is a friendly and christian act. Accordingly, on Whit-Monday, the sunshiny morning has broke over the villages of England with its most holiday smile. All work has ceased. There has been, at first, a Sabbath stillness, a repose, a display of holiday costume. Groups of men have met here and there in the streets in quiet talk; the children have begun to play, and make their shrill voices heard through the hamlets. There have been stalls of sweetmeats and toys set out in the little market-place on the green, by the shady walk, or under the well-known tree. Suddenly the bells have struck up a joyous peal, and a spirit of delight is diffused all over the rustic place, ay, all over every rustic place in merry England. Forth comes streaming the village procession of hardy men or comely women, all arrayed in their best, gay with ribbons and scarfs, a band of music sounding before them; their broad banner of peace and union flapping over their heads, and their wands shouldered like the spears of an ancient army, or used as walking-staves. Forth they stream from their club-room at the village alehouse.
’T is merry Whitsuntide, and merrily Holiday goes in hamlet and green field; Nature and men seem joined, for once, to try The strength of Care, and force the carle to yield: Summer abroad holds flow’ry revelry: For revelry, the village bells are pealed; The season’s self seems made for rural pleasure, And rural joy flows with o’erflowing measure.
Go where you will through England’s happy valleys, Deep grows the grass, flowers bask, and wild bees hum; And ever and anon, with joyous sallies, Shouting, and music, and the busy drum Tell you afar where mirth her rustics rallies, In dusty sports, or ’mid the song and hum Of Royal Oak, or bowling-green enclosure, With bower and bench for smoking and composure.
May’s jolly dance is past, and hanging high, Her garlands swing and wither in the sun; And now abroad gay posied banners fly, Followed by peaceful troops, and boys that run To see their sires go marching solemnly, Shouldering their wands; and youths with ribbons won From fond fair hands, that yielded them with pride, And proudly worn this merry Whitsuntide.
And then succeeds a lovelier sight,--the dames, Wives, mothers, and arch sigh-awakening lasses, Filling each gazing wight with wounds and flames, Yet looking each demurely as she passes, With flower-tipped wand, and bloom that flower outshames; And, in the van of these sweet, happy faces Marches the priest, whose sermon says, “be merry,” The frank, good squire, and sage apothecary.
W. H.
Forth stream these happy bands from their club-room, making the procession of the town before they go to church, and then again after church and before going to dinner, for then begins the serious business of feasting, too important to admit of any fresh holiday parade for the rest of the day. Nothing can be more joyously picturesque than this rural holiday. The time of the year--the latter end of May, or early part of June, is itself jubilant. The new leaves are just out in all their tender freshness: the flowers are engoldening the fields, and making odorous the garden: there are sunshine and brightness to gladden this festival of the lowly. In my mind are associated with this time, from the earliest childhood, sunshine, flowers, the sound of bells, and village bands of music. I see the clubs, as they are called, coming down the village; a procession of its rustic population all in their best attire. In front of them comes bearing the great banner, emblazoned with some fitting scene and motto, old Harry Lomax the blacksmith, deputed to that office for the brawny strength of his arms, and yet, if the wind be stirring, evidently staggering under its weight, and finding enough to do to hold it aloft. There it floats its length of blue and yellow, and on its top nods the huge posy of peonies, laburnum flowers, and lilachs, which our own garden has duly furnished. Then comes sounding the band of drums, bassoons, hautboys, flutes, and clarionets: then the honorary members--the freeholders of the place--the sage apothecary, and the priest whose sermon says “be merry”--literally, for years, his text being on this the words of Solomon--“Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”--and then the simple sons of the hamlet, walking as stately and as gravely as they can for the nods and smiles of all their neighbours who do not join in the procession, but are all at door and window to see them go by. There they go, passing down the shady lane with all the village children at their heels, to the next hamlet half a mile off, which furnishes members to the club, and must therefore witness their glory. Now the banner and the gilded tops of their wands are seen glancing between the hedge-row trees; their music comes merrily up the hill; and as it dies away at the next turn, the drumming of distant villages becomes audible in half a dozen different quarters. Then come, one after another, the clubs of the neighbouring hamlets, as the old ballad of the Earl of Murray very expressively says, “sounding through the town;” giving occasion to a world of criticism and comparison to the village gossips, no doubt always terminating in favour of their own folk.
But the most beautiful sight is that of the women’s clubs, which in some places walk on the same day with those of the men, but more commonly on Tuesday. Here the contrast between the band and banner-bearer, and the female array that follows them, gives great effect. In some places they are graced with the presence of some of the ladies of the neighbourhood who are honorary members, and their cultivated countenances, and style of bearing, again contrast with the simple elegance or showy finery of the rustic train which succeeds, consisting of the sedate matrons and blooming damsels of the village. Their light dresses, their gay ribbons and bonnets, their happy, and often very handsome faces, cannot be seen without feeling with Wordsworth, that
Their beauty makes you glad.
In all the pageants and processions that were ever seen, there is nothing more beautiful than those light wands with which they walk, each crowned with a nosegay of fresh flowers. These posied wands were worthy of the most chastely graceful times of Greece; and amongst the youthful forms are often such as Stothard would have gloried in seizing upon to figure in his charming procession pieces. Indeed a Whitsuntide procession in his hands would have formed altogether a picture equal to his Canterbury Pilgrimage, and the Procession of the Flitch of Bacon. It has never had justice done it, and Stothard is gone; but we have artists remaining from whose pencil it may, and I trust will, receive honour due. Why not Leslie add it to his Sir Roger Coverley going to church, or Sir Roger and the Gipsies? I can see the painting already in my mind’s eye. The village church is in one extremity; the banner of the men’s club is stooping at the porch as the train is about to enter, and the women’s club is advancing up the street in the foreground: the band composed of figures full of strong character; the female figures full of simple elegance and arch beauty,--their posied wands depicted with the force of reality; the village street in perspective; the village alehouse with depending sign; booths and stalls, and all round merry faces and holiday forms.
These love-feasts of the Friendly Societies seem very appropriately celebrated at this festival, which was originally derived from the AGAPAI, or love-feasts of the early Christians. It is, indeed, a great improvement on the Whitsun-Ales, which succeeded the Agapai in the Roman church. It is, as I have before observed, the happiest and almost sole adaptation of a modern institution to an ancient custom by the Church of England; a policy, on the contrary, so closely studied and extensively practised by the Catholic church. The Whitsun-Ales were so called from the churchwardens buying, and laying in from presents also, a large quantity of malt, which they brewed into beer, and sold out in the church or elsewhere. The profits, as well as those from Sunday games--there being no poor-rates--were given to the poor, for whom this was one mode of provision, according to the Christian rule, that all festivities should be rendered innocent by alms. “In every parish,” says Aubrey, “was a church-house, to which belonged spits, crocks, and other utensils for dressing provisions. Here the housekeepers met. The young people were there too; and had dancing, bowling, shooting at butts, etc., the ancients sitting gravely by, and looking on.”
King James, to check the progress of nonconformity, and keep people to church, published his “Book of Sports,” and commanded attendance on Whitsun-ales, church-ales, etc.; but he soon found that forced sport is no sport at all. These Friendly Societies, however, by adopting this day, have revived the Agapai in a more popular shape, and long may they continue, refined indeed, and made more temperate by better information, and a better morality. These being held at public-houses, and their monthly nights, on which they pay their contributions, being held there too, has made many persons object to them; and the utilitarian spirit, especially during periods of general distress, has induced many of them to give up their bands, banners, and ribbons, and to throw the money thus saved into the general stock: but if we are to retain any rustic festival at all, we cannot, I think, have a more picturesque one, or at a pleasanter time. Let all means be used to preserve a day of relaxation and good-fellowship from gross intemperance, but let not the external grace and rustic pageantry be shorn away. As I have met these Whitsuntide processions in the retired villages of Staffordshire, or as I saw them in the summer of 1835 at Warsop in Nottinghamshire, I would wish to see them as many years hence as I may live. In the latter village, Miss Hamilton, a lady of poetical taste, and author of several poetical works, had painted the banner for this rural fête with her own hands, and the flowers with which the wands were crowned were selected and disposed in a spirit of true poetry. Long, I say, may this bright day of rejoicing come to the hamlet; and the musing poet stop in the glades of the near woodlands, and exclaim with Kirk White:
Hark how the merry bells ring jocund round, And now they die upon the veering breeze; Anon they thunder loud, Full on the musing ear.
Wafted in varying cadence, by the shore Of the still twinkling river, they bespeak A day of jubilee, An ancient holiday.
And lo! the rural revels are begun, And gaily echoing to the laughing sky, On the smooth-shaven green Resounds the voice of mirth.
Mortals! be gladsome while ye have the power, And laugh, and seize the glittering lapse of joy; In time the bell will toll That warns ye to your graves.