VI. CHRISTMAS
The next and last of these popular festivities that I shall notice at any length, is jolly old Christmas,--the festival of the fireside; the most domestic and heartfelt carnival of the year. It has changed its features with the change of national manners and notions, but still it is a time of gladness, of home re-union and rejoicing; a precious time, and one so thoroughly suited to the grave yet cheerful spirit of Englishmen, that it will not soon lose its hold on our affections. Its old usages are so well known; they have been so repeatedly of late years brought to our notice by Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Leigh Hunt in his most graphic and cordial-spirited Months, Indicator, and London Journal, and by many other lovers of the olden time, that I shall not now particularly describe them. We have already seen how, in all our religious festivals, the most ancient customs and rites have been interwoven with Catholicism. Who does not recognise in the decoration of our houses and churches with ivy, holly, and other evergreens, the decorations of the altars of Greece and Rome with laurels and bays as the symbols of the renewal of the year and the immortality of Nature? In our mistletoe branches the practice of Druidical times? Who does not see in the Abbot of Unreason, and his jolly crew, the Saturnalia of ancient times? Those who do not, may find in Brand’s Antiquities, the various volumes of Time’s Telescope, collected by my worthy friend John Millard, and in Hone’s Everyday Table, and Year Books, matter on these subjects, and on the Christmas pageants, rites, and processions of Rome, that would of itself fill a large volume. In old times it was from Christmas to Candlemas a period of general jollification; for the first twelve days--a general carnival. The churches were decorated with evergreens; midnight mass was celebrated with great pomp; according to Aubrey, they danced in the church after prayers, crying Yole, Yole, Yole, etc. For a fortnight before Christmas, and during its continuance, the mummers, or guisers, in their grotesque array, went from house to house, acting George and the Dragon, having the Princess Saba, the Doctor, and other characters all playing and saying their parts in verse. Others acted Alexander the Great, and the King of Egypt. Bands of carollers went about singing; and all the great gentry had
A good old fashion when Christmas was come, To call in their old neighbours with bagpipe and drum.
And then in those good old halls, what a feasting, and a sporting, and a clamour was there! The Yule block on the fire, the plum-porridge and mince-pies on the table, with mighty rounds of beef, plum-pudding, turkeys, capons, geese, goose-pies, herons, and sundry other game and good things. Ale of twelve months old circling round, and the old butler and his serving-men carrying up the boar’s head, singing in chorus the accustomed chant, as they set it before the lord of the feast:
Caput Apri defero Reddens laudes domino. The boar’s head in hand bring I, With garlands gay and rosemary; I pray you all sing merrily, Qui estis in convivio, etc.
Then, as Burton in his Anatomie of Melancholie, tells us,--“what cards, tables, dice, shovel-board, chesse-play, the philosopher’s game, small trunkes, billiards, musicke, singing, dancing, ale-games, catches, purposes, questions, merry tales of arrant knights, kings, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, fairies, goblins, friars, witches, and the rest. Then what kissing under the mistletoe! roaring of storms without, and blazing hearths and merry catches within!”
With all this rude happiness we cannot now linger; let us be thankful that our ancestors, rich and poor, enjoyed it so thoroughly, enjoyed it together, as became Christians, on the feast of the nativity of their common Saviour. We will just review this state of things as it existed in the time of old Wither, two hundred years ago; and the remembrance of it, as it glanced on the imagination of Scott, and then turn to it as it exists amongst us now.
CHRISTMAS.
So now is come our joyful’st feast; Let every man be jolly; Each room with ivy leaves is dressed, And every post with holly.
Though some churls at our mirth repine, Round your foreheads garlands twine; Drown sorrow in a cup of wine, And let us all be merry.
Now all our neighbours’ chimneys smoke, And Christmas blocks are burning, Their ovens they with baked meats choke, And all their spits are turning.
Without the door let sorrow lie; And if from cold it hap to die, We’ll bury it in a Christmas pie, And evermore be merry.
Now every lad is wondrous trim, And no man minds his labour; Our lasses have provided them A bagpipe and a tabor:
Young men and maids, and girls and boys, Give life to one another’s joys; And you anon shall by their noise Perceive that they are merry.
Rank misers now do sparing shun; Their hall of music soundeth; And dogs thence with whole shoulders run, So all things there aboundeth.
The country folks themselves advance With crowdy-muttons out of France; And Jack shall pipe, and Jyll shall dance, And all the town be merry.
Ned Squash hath fetched his bands from pawn, And all his best apparel; Brisk Nell hath bought a ruff of lawn With dropping of the barrel.
And those that hardly all the year Had bread to eat, or rags to wear, Will have both clothes and dainty fare, And all the day be merry.
Now poor men to the justices With capons make their errants; And if they hap to fail of these, They plague them with their warrants:
But now they find them with good cheer, And what they want, they take in beer, For Christmas comes but once a year, And then they shall be merry.
Good farmers in the country nurse The poor, that else were undone; Some landlords spend their money worse On lust and pride in London.
There the roysters they do play; Drab and dice their lands away, Which may be ours another day, And therefore let’s be merry.
The client now his suit forbears; The prisoner’s heart is eased; The debtor drinks away his cares, And for the time is pleased.
Though others’ purses be most fat, Why should we pine or grieve at that? Hang sorrow! care will kill a cat, And therefore let’s be merry.
Hark! now the wags abroad do call Each other forth to rambling; Anon you’ll see them in the hall For nuts and apples scrambling.
Hark how the roofs with laughter sound, Anon they’ll think the house goes round, For they the cellar’s depth have found, And then they will be merry.
The wenches with their wassail bowls About the streets are singing; The boys are come to catch the owls, The wild mare in it bringing.
Our kitchen-boy hath broke his box, And to the dealing of the ox Our honest neighbours come by flocks, And here they will be merry.
Now kings and queens poor sheepcotes have, And mute with every body; The lowest now may play the knave, And wise men play the noddy.
Some youths will now a mumming go, And others play at Rowland-bo, And twenty other games boys mo, Because they will be merry.
Then wherefore in these merry daies Should we, I pray, be duller? No, let us sing some roundelays, To make our mirth the fuller.
And while we thus inspired sing, Let all the streets with echoes ring; Woods and hills and every thing, Bear witness we are merry.
This is, at once, quaint and graphic. It shews us the joys of our ancestors in their homeliness and their strength. It is full of the spirit of the time, and the impressions of surrounding things. Let us now see the same days through the magic mist of a modern poet’s imagination--a poet whose soul turned to all the beauty and picturesque splendour, and the jollity of the past, with a passion never, in any bosom, living with a stronger delight. How, in reverted vision of his heart and mind is every thing purified, sanctified, and refined. What a force of enjoyment breathes through the whole: how vividly are all the characteristics of the time, its fable and its manners given; yet with what a grace and delicacy, unknown to the poet of the times themselves. We have here all the happiness, the hospitality, the generous simplicity of the past, tinged with the beautiful illusions of the present.
ANCIENT CHRISTMAS.
And well our Christian sires of old Loved, when the year its course had rolled, And brought blithe Christmas back again, With all its hospitable train. Domestic and religious rite Gave honour to the holy night: On Christmas-eve the bells were rung; On Christmas-eve the mass was sung; That only night of all the year Saw the stoled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donned her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go To gather in the mistletoe. Then opened wide the baron’s hall, To vassals, tenants, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doffed his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating share The vulgar game of “post and pair.” All hailed with uncontrolled delight And general voice the happy night, That to the cottage, as the crown, Brought tidings of Salvation down.
The fire with well-dried logs supplied, Went roaring up the chimney wide; The huge hall table’s oaken face, Scrubbed till it shone the day to grace, Bore then upon its massive board No mark to part the squire and lord. Then was brought in the lusty braun By old blue-coated serving-man; Then the grim boar’s-head frowned on high, Crested with bays and rosemary. Well can the green-garbed ranger tell How, when, and where the monster fell; What dogs before his death he tore, And all the baiting of the boar, While round the merry wassail bowl, Garnished with ribbons, blithe did trowl There the huge sirloin reeked; hard by Plum-porridge stood, and Christmas pie; Nor failed old Scotland to produce, At such high tide the savoury goose. Then came the merry maskers in, And carols roared with blithesome din; If unmelodious was the song, It was a hearty note and strong, Who lists may in their mumming see Traces of ancient mystery. White shirt supplied the masquerade, And smutted cheeks the vizor made; But oh! what maskers richly dight Can boast of bosoms half so light! England was merry England then, Old Christmas brought his sports again; ’Twas Christmas broached the mightiest ale; ’Twas Christmas told the merriest tale; A Christmas gambol oft would cheer A poor man’s heart through half the year.
Scott’s Marmion.
In these two poems we have sufficient picture of the past; what of these things continue with the present? In Catholic countries, indeed, much of the ancient show and circumstance remain. In Rome, all the splendour of the church is called forth. On Christmas-eve, the pipes of the Pifferari, or Calabrian minstrels, are heard in the streets. The decorators are busy in draping the churches, clothing altars, and festooning façades. Devout ladies and holy nuns are preparing dresses, crowns, necklaces, and cradles, for the Madonna and Child of their respective churches. The toilette of the Virgin is performed, and she blazes in diamonds, or shines in tin, according to the riches of the respective parish treasuries. In the Church of the Pantheon, says Lady Morgan, she was crowned with gilt paper, and decked with glass beads, and on the same day in Santa Maria Novella, we beheld the coal-black face set off with rubies and sapphires, which glittered on her dusky visage “like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.” The cannons of St. Angelo announce the festival; shops are shut, and saloons deserted. The midnight supper and the midnight bands begin the holy revel, and the splendid pomp in which the august ceremonies are performed at the churches of the Quirinal, St. Louis, and the Ara Cœli, is succeeded by a banquet of which even the poorest child of indigence contrives to partake. The people from the mountains and the Campagna flock in to witness and to enjoy the fête, and present a strange sight of wild figures amid the inhabitants of the city. The churches are lit up with thousands of wax tapers; the culla, or cradle of Christ, is removed from the shrine at the chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, and carried in procession to the chapel of the Santa Croce, where it is exposed on the high altar on Christmas-day to the admiration of the faithful. Musical masses are performed; the Pope himself performs service in the Sextine Chapel on Christmas-eve, and on Christmas-day his Holiness performs mass in St. Peter’s, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; amid a most brilliant assembly of people of all nations, princes, ambassadors, nobles, and distinguished strangers.
At Naples numbers of shepherds from the mountains of the Abruzzi and the neighbouring Apennines, flock in two or three weeks before Christmas, and go about the streets, playing on their bagpipes, as the Calabrians do both here and in Rome. Most of the Neapolitan families engage some of these itinerant musicians to play a quarter of an hour at their houses on each day of the Novena: the wild appearance of these mountaineers, and the shrill notes of their pipes attract the attention of travellers. Fireworks are displayed here in the most extraordinary manner; and, as in other parts of Italy, it is the custom to erect in the churches and in private houses, representations of the birth of our Saviour;--the stable, the shepherds, the oxen, the Virgin Mary, receiving the homage of kings and their trains, are all exhibited with great ingenuity. A similar custom prevailed in some parts of Spain. Such are the customs of these and other catholic countries. In the north, where Christmas was celebrated as a festival of the gods of the ancient Scandinavians, under the name of Yule, it is now celebrated with great devotion; and in Germany they have some domestic customs of a very interesting nature. Coleridge, in the FRIEND, gives the following account of what he witnessed himself. “The children make little presents to their parents, and to each other; and the parents to their children. For three or four months before Christmas, the girls are all busy; and the boys save their pocket-money to make or purchase these presents. What the present is to be, is cautiously kept secret, and the girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it--such as working when they are out on visits, and the others are not with them; getting up in the morning before daylight, etc. Then, on the evening before Christmas-day, one of the parlours is lighted up by the children, into which the parents must not go. A great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from the wall; a multitude of little tapers are fixed in the bough, but not so as to burn it till they are nearly consumed; and coloured paper, etc. hangs and flutters from the twigs. Under this bough, the children lay out in great order, the presents they mean for their parents, still concealing in their pockets, what they intend for each other. Then the parents are introduced, and each presents his little gift: they then bring out the remainder, one by one, from their pockets, and present them with kisses and embraces. When I witnessed this scene, there were eight or nine children, and the eldest daughter and mother wept aloud for joy and tenderness; and the tears ran down the face of the father, and he clasped all his children so tight to his breast, it seemed as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him. I was very much affected. The shadow of the bough and its appendages on the walls and arching over on the ceiling, made a pretty picture; and then the rapture of the very little ones, when at last the twigs and their needles began to take fire and snap,--O, it was a delight for them!
“On the next day, in the great parlour, the parents lay on the table the presents for the children. A scene of more sober joy succeeds; as on this day, after an old custom, the mother says privately to each of her daughters, and the father to his sons, that which he has observed most praiseworthy, and that which was most faulty in their conduct. Formerly, and still in all the smaller towns and villages throughout North Germany, these presents are sent by all the parents to some one fellow, who, in high buskins, a white robe, a mask, and an enormous flax wig, personates Knecht Rupert, i. e. the servant Rupert. On Christmas night he goes round to every house, and says that Jesus Christ, his master, sent him thither. The parents and elder children receive him with great pomp and reverence, while the little ones are most terribly frightened. He then inquires for the children, and according to the character which he hears from the parents he gives them the intended presents, as if they came out of heaven from Jesus Christ. Or if they should have been bad children, he gives the parents a rod, and, in the name of his master, recommends them to use it frequently. About seven or eight years old, the children are let into the secret, and it is curious how faithfully they keep it.”
The bough mentioned by Coleridge as yew, is by other writers said to be of birch. The Christ-child is said to come flying through the air on golden wings; and causes the birch-bough fixed in the corner of the room to grow, and to produce in the night, all manner of fruit; gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, etc., for the good children. Richter makes Quintus Fixlein recal one of these scenes of his youth, very beautifully. “I will,” said he to himself, “go through the whole Christmas-eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old. At his very rising he finds spangles on the table, sacred spangles from the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child has been emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the night. Then comes his mother, bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his trousers, she easily recapitulated the ten commandments; and in tying his garters, the Apostles’ creed. So soon as candlelight was over, and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of Christmas-birch. There was no such thing as school all day. About three o’clock the old gardener takes his place on his large chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe, and, after this, no mortal shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies, of the aeronautic Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dark our little Quintus takes an apple, and divides it with all the figures of stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table. Then, as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the unexpected present, and says to his mother, ‘Look what the good Christ-child has given thee and me, and I saw one of his wings glittering!’ And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the whole evening.
“About eight o’clock, both of them with necks almost excoriated with washing, and clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of dreaming hopes! The populous, motley, glittering cave of fancy opens itself in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreaming effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the waking gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout fancy, sounds out of heaven; singing voices of angels in the air; church music of the morning worship.
“At last come rapid lights from the neighbourhood, playing through the window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from the steeple hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the morning frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down stairs into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the still eclipsed treasures, and haunts her air-castles by the glimmering of the Hesperides-fruit with which the birch-tree is laden. While their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-coloured grove on the wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of Eden.”
I am informed by a lady friend that German families in Manchester have introduced this custom of the Christmas-tree, and that it is spreading fast amongst the English there,--pine-tops being brought to market for the pupose, which are generally illuminated with a taper for every day in the year.
Such are the rites, fancies, and ceremonies with which other, and especially Catholic countries, have invested this ancient festival. What now remain in our Protestant nation of these customs?--Much is gone; many are the changes that have taken place in our manners and opinions; and yet it is certain that we regard this season of festivity with a strong and sacred affection. It is true that there is commonly but one day of thorough holiday to the people; one day on which all shops are shut; on which labour in a great measure ceases, and the poor join with the rich in repose and worship. The poor, indeed, do not partake the benefit of this season, as the poor of old time did; the houses of the great are not, as they were then, open to all tenants and dependents. There is now, indeed, upon the great man’s table,
No mark to part the squire and lord;
but there is a mark more immobile than the salt, set in the grain of our minds. The distinctions of society have grown with our commercial wealth, and have multiplied grades and relations. A sense of independence too has sprung up in the lower classes, with commerce and the growth of intelligence. The great man might, indeed, condescend to call his tenants and dependents to his hall to a Christmas revel, but if they went at all they would go reluctantly, and feel ill at ease. They would feel it as a condescension, and not as springing out of the heartiness of old customs. They would feel that they were out of their element; for all classes know instinctively the broad differences of habits, manners, and modes of thinking that separate them from each other more effectually than any feudal institutions did their ancestors. The pride of the yeoman would be more in danger of suffering than the pride of the lord; the pride of the cottager than that of the farmer, if invited to his table. When the brick floor and the wooden bench gave way in the farm-house to the carpet and the mahogany chair, the feet of the labourer ceased to tread familiarly round the farmer’s table. Harvest meals and harvest-home suppers bring them together in rustic districts; they are the remaining links of the old chain of society; but the Christmas custom is broken, and is therefore no longer observable with full content. This great difference between the past and present exists, and therefore the rejoicing of the poor at this time is short and small: would to heaven that the kindly feeling of the community would make it greater!
But, independent of this, to the rest of the community Christmas brings much of its ancient pleasure. Each class within itself, enjoys it, perhaps more deeply, if less noisily than of old. It is, as I have before said, the festival of the fireside. Friends and families are brought together by many circumstances. Summer tourists and out-of-door pleasure-seekers have all turned home at the frown of winter. As it was their delight in the early year to plan excursions, to make parties, and then to fly forth in all directions, to enjoy new scenes, new faces, summer skies, and sea-breezes; it is now their delight to assemble again round their familiar firesides, with the old familiar faces, to talk over all that they have seen, and said, and done. Parliament has adjourned, and weary senators and their families have fled from London, and are, once more, at their country seats. Children are come home from school; business seems to pause, or to move less urgently in the dead season of the year, and releases numbers from its tread-mill round to an interval of relaxation. All the branches of families meet with spirits eager for enjoyment; and storms, frosts, and darkness without, send them for that enjoyment to the fire-bright hearth.
Christmas-eve approaches, and with it signs of observance, and feasting, and amusement. Holly, ivy, and mistletoe appear in vast quantities in the markets, and almost every housekeeper, except those of the Society of Friends, furnishes herself with a quantity to decorate her windows, if not always to sport a kissing-bush. Churches, halls, city houses and country cottages, are all seen with their windows stuck over with sprigs of green and scarlet-berried holly. Mistletoe is said never to be introduced into churches except by ignorance of the sextons, being held in abhorrence by the early Christians on account of its prominence in the Druidical ceremonies. And this is likely enough; but in the house it maintains its station, and well merits it, by the beauty of its divaricated branches of pale-green, and its pearly-white berries. But Christmas-eve brings not only evergreens into request, but abundance of more substantial things. The coaches to town are fairly loaded to the utmost with geese, turkeys and game, as those downwards are with barrels of oysters. The grocers are busy selling currants, raisins, spices, and other good things, for the composition of mince-pies and Christmas sweetmeats. Pigs are killed, and pork-pies, sausages, and spareribs abound, from the greatest hall to the lowest hut. Heaven be thanked that the blessing goes so far in this instance. It is a delight to think of all the little children in the poor man’s house, that the year through have lived coarsely if not sparely, now watching the fat pig from their own sty cut up, and pies and spareribs, boiling pieces, black puddings and sausages, springing up as from a magical storehouse unlocked by the key of Old Christmas. O! it is a delicious time, when the father and the mother can sit down amongst their throng of eager little ones, that “feel their life in every limb,” and feast them to their hearts’ content; and live with them for a short time amid substantial things and savoury smells, and, after all, hang in the chimney-corner two noble flitches for the coming year.
These good things come with Christmas-eve, and with them come the WAITES. Except in some few very primitive districts, these do not go about for a week or more as they used to do, but merely on this night. And it is a fact singularly unfortunate for Mr. Bulwer’s theory of the effect of Methodism noticed before, that wherever Methodists exist they are sure to be amongst these waites, and are, in many places, the only ones. The strange, dreamy, yet delightful effect of the music and singing of these waites, as you hear them in a state rather of sleep than waking, who has not experienced? They are, as Fixlein expresses it, to our conscious senses, but half dormant understandings, “sounds out of heaven, singing voices of angels in the air.” I shall never forget the delicious impressions of this midnight music on my childish spirit, and would fain hear such strains on every returning Christmas-eve till I cease to hear any mortal sounds.
But Christmas morning comes; and ere daylight dawns, you are awoke by the rejoicing music of all the village or the city bells, as it may be; and cannot help feeling, spite of all that puritans and grave denouncers of times and seasons have said, that there is something holy in the remembrance of the time, which does your spirit good. Who can read these verses of, Wordsworth’s addressed to his brother, without feeling the truth of this?
TO THE REV. DR. WORDSWORTH.
The minstrels played their Christmas tune To-night beneath my cottage eaves; While, smitten by the lofty moon, The encircling laurels thick with leaves, Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen, That overpowered their natural green.
Through hill and valley every breeze Had sank to rest with folded wings; Keen was the air but could not freeze Nor check the music of their strings; So stout and hardy were the band That scraped the chords with strenuous hand.
And who but listened?--till was paid Respect to every inmate’s claim; The greeting given, the music played, In honour of each household name, Duly pronounced with lusty call, And “merry Christmas” wished to all!
O Brother! I revere the choice Which took thee from thy native hills; And it is given thee to rejoice; Though public care full often tills (Heaven only witness of the toil) A barren and ungrateful soil.
Yet would that thou with me and mine Hadst heard this never-failing rite; And seen on other faces shine A true revival of the light-- Which Nature and these rustic Powers, In simple childhood, spread on ours!
For pleasure hath not ceased to wait On these expected, annual rounds, Whether the rich man’s sumptuous gate Call forth the unelaborate sounds, Or they are offered at the door That guards the dwelling of the poor.
How touching when at midnight sweep Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark, To hear--and sink again to sleep! Or, at an earlier call, to mark, By blazing fire, the still suspense Of self-complacent innocence.
The mutual nod,--the grave disguise Of hearts with gladness brimming o’er; And some unbidden tears that rise For names once heard, and heard no more: Tears brightened by the serenade, For infant in the cradle laid!
Ah! not for emerald fields alone, With ambient streams more pure and bright Than fabled Cytherea’s zone Glittering before the Thunderer’s sight, Is to my heart of hearts endeared The ground where we were born and reared!
Hail! ancient Manners! sure defence, Where they survive, of wholesome laws; Remnants of love whose modest sense Thus into narrow room withdraws; Hail, Usages of pristine mould, And ye, that guard them, Mountains old!
Christmas-day then is come! and with it begins a heartfelt season of social delight, and interchanges of kindred enjoyments. In large houses are large parties, music and feasting, dancing and cards. Beautiful faces and noble forms, the most fair and accomplished of England’s sons and daughters, beautify the ample firesides of aristocratic halls. Senators and judges, lawyers and clergymen, poets and philosophers, there meet in cheerful and even sportive ease, amid the elegances of polished life. In more old-fashioned, but substantial country abodes, old-fashioned hilarity prevails. In the farm-house hearty spirits are met. Here are dancing and feasting too; and often blindman’s-buff, turn-trencher, and some of the simple games of the last age remain. In all families, except the families of the poor, who seem too much forgotten at this, as at other times in this refined age, there are visits paid and received; parties going out, or coming in; and everywhere abound, as indispensable to the season, mince-pies, and wishes for “a merry Christmas and a happy New-Year.”
It is only in the more primitive parts of the country that the olden customs remain. The Christmas carols which were sung about from door to door, for a week at least, not twenty years ago, are rarely heard now in the midland counties. More northward, from the hills of Derbyshire, and the bordering ones of Staffordshire, up through Lancashire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Durham, you may frequently meet with them. The late Mrs. Fletcher (Miss Jewsbury) one of the most highly-gifted, both in talents and principle, of those who are early lost to the world, collected a volume of such as are sung in the neighbourhood of Manchester, and presented it to Mrs. Howitt. Amongst them are many of the most ancient, such as--“Under the Leaves, or the Seven Virgins,” beginning--
All under the leaves, and the leaves of life, I met with virgins seven; And one of them was Mary mild, Our Lord’s Mother in Heaven.
“The Moon shone bright,”--beginning with
The moon shone bright, and the stars gave a light A little before it was day, The Lord our God he called to us, And bade us awake and pray.
Awake, awake, good people all, Awake and you shall hear, Our blessed Lord died on the cross For us whom he loved so dear;
and ending thus--
To day, though you’re alive and well, Worth many a thousand pound, To-morrow dead, and cold as clay, Your corpse lies under ground.
God bless the master of this house, Mistress and children dear; Joyful may their Christmas be, And happy their New-Year.
That singular old ballad of Dives and Lazarus, in which occur these stanzas:--
As it fell out upon a day, Poor Lazarus sickened and died; There came two angels out of heaven His soul therein to guide.
“Rise up, rise up, brother Lazarus, Thine heavenly guides are we; Thy place it is provided in heaven, To sit on an angel’s knee.”
As it fell out upon a day, Rich Dives sickened and died; There came two serpents out of hell His soul therein to guide.
“Rise up, rise up, brother Dives, Thine evil; guides are we; Thy place it is provided in hell, To sit on a serpent’s knee!”
One has this home-thrusting stanza:
So proud and lofty do some people grow, Dressing themselves like players in a show; They patch and paint, and dress like idle stuff, As if God had not made them good enough.
The well-known TWELVE JOYS:
The first good joy that Mary had, it was the joy of one, To see her own son Jesus to suck at her breast-bone; To suck at her breast-bone, good man, and blessed shall he be, Through, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the One United Three! etc.
The equally popular one:
God rest you, merry gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay; Remember Christ our Saviour Was born on Christmas-day, To save poor souls from Satan’s power, Who’ve long time gone astray.
Which ends thus:
God bless the master of this house, And mistress also; And all the little children That round the table go; With their pockets full of money, And their cellars full of beer; And God send you a happy New-Year.
Amongst them is found BETHLEHEM CITY.
In Bethlehem city, in Jewry it was, That Joseph and Mary together did pass; And there to be tax’d, as many one mo, When Cæsar commanded, in truth it was so. etc.
And that fine hymn which is sung in some places at midnight by the Waites, and which the Methodists have adopted for their early morning service:
Christians, awake! salute the happy morn, Whereon the Saviour of the world was born.
And the following, which, though evidently in a most defective state, I shall give entire, as exhibiting a striking impress of the character of the middle ages; and shewing how well they understood the true spirit of Christ.
Honour the leaves and the leaves of life, Upon this blest holiday, When Jesus asked his mother dear, Whether he might go to play.
To play! to play! said blessed Mary, To play, then get you gone; And see there be no complaint of you At night when you come home.
Sweet Jesus, he ran unto yonder town, As far as the holy well; And there he saw three as fine children As ever eyes beheld. He said, “God bless you every one, And sweet may your sleep be; And now, little children, I’ll play with you, And you shall play with me.”
“Nay, nay, we are lords’ and ladies’ sons-- Thou art meaner than us all; Thou art but a silly fair maid’s child, Born in an oxen’s stall.”
Sweet Jesus he turned himself about, Neither laughed, nor smiled, nor spoke, But the tears trickled down from his pretty little eyes, Like waters from the rock.
Sweet Jesus he ran to his mother dear, As fast as he could run-- O mother, I saw three as fine children As ever were eyes set on. I said “God bless you every one, And sweet may your sleep be-- And now, little children, I’ll play with you, And you shall play with me.” “Nay,” said they, “we’re lords’ and ladies’ sons, Thou art meaner than us all; For thou art but a poor fair maid’s child, Born in an oxen’s stall.” Then the tears trickled down from his pretty little eyes As fast as they could fall.
“Then,” said she, “go down to yonder town, As far as the holy well, And there take up those infants’ souls, And dip them deep in hell.”
“O no! O no!” sweet Jesus then said, “O no! that never can be; For there are many of those infants’ souls Crying out for the help of me!”
I must not close this article either without recalling to the recollection of some of my readers that quaint old carol, which was sung by bands of little children at Christmas, and which brings fairly before us the paintings of the old masters, where Joseph is always represented as so old a man, and Mary sits in the “oxen’s stall” with her crown on her head.
Joseph was an old man, and an old man was he, And he married Mary, the Queen of Galilee.
It goes on to describe how they went into the garden, and Queen Mary asked Joseph to gather her some cherries, on which he turned very crabbed, made Mary weep, and then all the cherry-trees made their obeisance;
And bowed down to Mary’s knee-- And she gathered cherries by one, two, and three.
These are in the spirit of the legend which relates that Jesus, when a boy, was playing with other boys, when they made sparrows of clay, and he made a sparrow too, but his sparrow became instantly alive, and flew away.
Simple were the times when such rude rhymes as these were framed, to be sung before the doors and by the blazing yule-clogs of gentle and simple. They are not calculated to stand the test of these days; the schoolmaster will root them all out: but it is to be hoped that he will leave untouched the cordial spirit of piety and affection so fitted to make happy this desolate period of the year.
In Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Cornwall, and Devon, the old spirit of Christmas seems to be kept up more earnestly than in most other counties. In Cornwall, they still exhibit the old dance of St. George and the Dragon. A young friend of ours happening to be at Calden-Low in the Staffordshire hills at Christmas, in came the band of bedizened actors, and performed the whole ancient drama, personating St. George, the King of Egypt, the fair Saba, the king’s daughter, the Doctor, and other characters, with great energy and in rude verse. In Devon they still bless the orchards on Christmas-eve, according to the old verses:--
Wassail the trees, that they may beare You many a plum, and many a peare: For more or less fruits they will bring As you do give them wassailing.
In some places, they walk in procession to the principal orchards in the parish. In each orchard one tree is selected as the representative of the rest; and is saluted with a certain form of words. They then either sprinkle the tree with cider, or dash a bowl of cider against it. In other places, only the farmer and his servants assemble on the occasion, and after immersing cakes in cider, hang them on the apple-trees. They then sprinkle the trees with cider; pronounce their incantation; dance about the tree, and then go home to feast.
In Mr. Grant Stewart’s “Popular Superstitions of the Highlands,” may be found an account of the Highland mode of celebrating Christmas; and here we say a hearty good-bye to Jolly Old Christmas.
* * * * *
We have now made a hasty sketch of those old festivals which still retain more or less of their ancient influence. We have endeavoured to shew what is the present state of custom and feeling in these particulars by contrasting it with the past. New Year’s-day is yet a day of salutations; Valentine’s-day has yet some sportive observance amongst the young; and Plough-Monday, here and there, in the thoroughly agricultural districts, sends out its motley team. This consists of the farm-servants and labourers. They are dressed in harlequin guise, with wooden swords, plenty of ribbons, faces daubed with white-lead, red ochre, and lamp-black. One is always dressed in woman’s clothes and armed with a besom, a sort of burlesque mixture of Witch and Columbine. Another drives the team of men-horses with a long wand, at the end of which is tied a bladder instead of a lash; so that blows are given without pain, but with plenty of noise. The insolence of these Plough-bullocks, as they are called, which might accord with ancient license, but does not at all suit modern habits, has contributed more than anything else to put them down. They visited every house of any account, and solicited a contribution in no very humble terms. If it was refused, their practice was to plough up the garden walk, or do some other mischief. One band ploughed up the palisades of a widow lady of our acquaintance, and having to appear before a magistrate for it, and to pay damages, never afterwards visited that neighbourhood. In some places I have known them enter houses, whence they could only be ejected by the main power of the collected neighbours; for they extended their excursions often to the distance of ten miles or more, and where they were the most unknown, there practised the most insolence. Nobody regrets the discontinuance of this usage.
VII. THE FAIRY SUPERSTITIONS
The Fairies, which gave in old times one of the most interesting and poetical features to the country, have all vanished clean away. Of those supernatural and airy beings who used to haunt the woodlands, hamlets, and solitary houses of Old England, they were the first to depart. “They were of the old profession”--true Catholics; and with Catholicism they departed; and have only left their interest in the pages of our poets, who still cling with fondness to the fairy mythology. Bogards, barguests, ghosts, and hobgoblins, still, in many an obscure hamlet and the more primitive parts of the country, maintain much of their ancient power, and continue to quicken the steps of the clown in lonely places, of the schoolboy past the churchyard, and to add a fearful interest to the winter fireside stories in cottages and farms. Witchcraft, spite of what Sir Walter Scott asserted in his Demonology, is far from having ceased to have stanch believers in numerous places. Are not many of the Methodists firmly persuaded of demoniacal possession? It is not long ago that Mr. Heaton, one of their ministers, published a volume in support of this doctrine, and detailed a very extraordinary case of possession of a boy who mounted on the surbase of the room, and danced there, on a space where he could not for a moment support himself when not under this influence. In this curious book, which I sent to Sir Walter Scott, and which he assured me he meant to make use of, but was, no doubt, prevented by his quickly succeeding decline, is a minute account of all the process of praying the spirit out of the lad, of the dogged resistance of the demon, and their final triumph over him. John Wesley was strongly impressed with a belief of such things, as may be seen in his “News from the Invisible World,” and in the pages of the old series of the Wesleyan Magazine. And if recent demoniacal possession be a living faith of the nineteenth century, witchcraft has no lack of votaries. In Nottingham, a town of seventy thousand inhabitants, I knew a shoemaker who stood six feet in height, and “might dance in iron mail,” who lately lived, and probably still lives, in constant dread of the evil arts of witches and wizards. On the lintel and sill of his door, he had the ancient charm of reversed horse-shoes nailed; but he said, he found them of little use against the audacious malice of witchcraft. He had standing regularly by his fireside a sack-bag of salt, for he bought it by a sack at a time for the purpose, and of this he frequently, during the day, but more especially on dark and stormy nights, took a handful, with a few horsenail stumps, and crooked pins, and casting them into the fire together, prayed to the Lord to torment all witches and wizards in the neighbourhood, and he believed that they were tormented. As I stood by the man’s fire while he related this, it was burning with the beautiful purple hue of salt. On all other subjects he appeared as grave and sober as his neighbours.
In the obscure alleys of large towns, as well as in solitary situations, fortunetellers still live, and to my own knowledge draw many customers, besides the gipsies, who haunt there in winter time, and are the regular professors of palmistry. Witches, spectres, gipsies, and cunning people, still remain to diversify common life, spite of all the spread of education; but the fairies, pleasant little people, are gone for ever, and have been gone long. Chaucer, indeed, says that they were gone in his day.
In olde dayes of the king Artour, Of which that Bretons speke gret honour, All was this land ful filled of faerie; The elf-quene, with her joly compagnie Danced ful oft in many a grene mede. This was the old opinion as I rede; I speke of many hundred yeres ago; But now can no man see non elves mo, For now the grete charitee and prayeres Of limitoures and other holy freeres, That serchen every land and every streme, As thikke as motes in the sonne beme, Blissing halles, chambres, kitchenes and boures, Citees and burghes, castles highe and toures, Thropes and bernes, shepenes and dairies, This maketh that ther ben no fairies; For ther as wont to walken was an elf, Ther walketh now the limitour himself.
And Dr. Corbet, bishop of Norwich, who died in 1635, wrote the following interesting--
FAREWELL TO THE FAIRIES.
Farewell rewards and fairies! Good housewives now may say; For now foule sluts in dairies, Doe fare as well as they; And though they sweepe their hearths no less Than mayds were wont to doe, Yet who of late for cleanliness Finds sixpence in her shoe? Lament, lament old Abbies, The Fairies’ lost command; They did but change priests’ babies, But some have changed your land: And all your children stolen from thence Are now growne Puritanes, Who live as changelings ever since For love of your demesnes. At morning and at evening both You merry were and glad, So little care of sleepe and sloth Those pretty ladies had. When Tom came home from labour, Or Ciss to milking rose, Then merrily went their tabour, And merrily went their toes.
Witness those rings and roundelayes Of theirs which yet remain; Were footed in Queen Mary’s days On many a grassy playne. But since of late Elizabeth, And later James came in, They never danced on any heath As when the time hath bin.
By which we note the fairies Were of the old profession, Their songs were Ave Maries, Their dances were procession. But now, alas! they all are dead, Or gone beyond the seas, Or farther for religion fled, Or else they take their ease.
A tell-tale in their company They never could endure; And whoso kept not secretly Their mirth was punished sure. It was a just and Christian deed To pinch such black and blue; O how the commonwealth doth need Such justices as you.
Now they have left our quarters; A Register they have, Who can peruse their charters, A man both wise and grave. A hundred of their merry pranks By one that I could name Are kept in store; con twenty marks To William for the same.
To William Churne of Staffordshire Give laud and praises due, Who every meal can mend your cheer With tales both old and true: To William all give audience, And pray ye for his noddle; For all the fairies’ evidence Were lost if it were addle.
Possibly the fairies may yet linger in the dales of Ettrick Forest, where poor Hogg used to see them, and sung so many beautiful lays in their honour that he may be styled the Poet Laureate of the Fairies. But he is gone now--gone after many another great and shining light of the age, having made the shepherd’s plaid almost as glorious as the prophet’s mantle--and they may not choose to reveal themselves to another. They may possibly yet pay an occasional visit to Staffordshire, the county of William Churne; and we have, indeed, heard of them doing some pleasant miracles on Midsummer-eve on Calden-Low. If we are to believe the report of a certain little damsel, as given in Tait’s Magazine, of June 1835--
Some, they played with the water, And rolled it down the hill; And this, they said, shall merrily turn The poor old miller’s mill.
For there has been no water Ever since the first of May, And a blithe man shall the miller be By the dawning of the day.
O, the miller, how he will laugh As he sees the mill-dam rise-- The jolly old miller how he will laugh Till the tears fill both his eyes.
And some they seized the little winds, That sounded over the hill, And each put a horn into his mouth, And blew so sharp and shrill.
“And there,” said one, “the merry winds go Away from every horn, And these shall clear the mildew dank From the blind old widow’s corn.”
O! the poor blind widow-- Though she has mourned so long, She’ll be merry enough when the mildew’s gone, And the corn stands stiff and strong.
And some they brought the brown lintseed, And flung it down from the Low; “And this,” said they, “by the sunrise, In the weaver’s croft shall grow.”
O! the poor, lame weaver, How he will laugh outright, When he sees his dwindling flax-field All full of flowers by night.
Then up and spoke a brownie, With a long beard on his chin, “And I have spun the tow,” said he, “And I want some more to spin.
“I’ve spun a piece of hempen cloth, And I want to spin another; A little sheet for Mary’s bed, And an apron for her mother.”
And with that I could not help but laugh, And I laugh’d out loud and free, And then on the top of the Calden-Low There was no one left but me. And all on the top of the Calden-Low The mists were cold and grey, And nothing I saw but the mossy stones, That round about me lay.
This deponent saith, that coming down from the Low, she saw all their benevolent intentions already realized. It is to be hoped that such visits may be again paid to Calden-Low, but we have our doubts.
The Pixies may possibly still haunt those caves and dells in Devonshire where Coleridge and Carrington saw them; but with those exceptions--and they received on the faith of poets, who take license--we believe they have all emigrated. In the lays of Shakspeare and Milton, they are made immortal denizens of our soil; and we shall never see moonlight, or come upon the VER-RINGS that still mark our plains and downs, without feeling and poetically believing that the fairies have been there. In Wales, however, the common people still declare that they abide. Scotland may have given up the brownies, and kelpies, and urisks; and we may no longer have hobthrushes dwelling amongst our rocks, or Robin Goodfellow, alias Puck, alias Hobgoblin, playing his pranks, as in this confession:
Whene’er night-wanderers I meet, As from their night-sports they trudge home, With counterfeiting voice I greete, And call them on with me to roame, Through woods, through lakes, Through bogs, through brakes; Or else unseen with them I go, All in the nicke, To play some tricke, And frolicke it with ho, ho, ho! Sometimes I meet them like a man; Sometimes an ox, sometimes a hound; And to a horse I turn me can, To trip and trot about them round. But if to ride My backe they stride, More swift than wind away I go, O’er hedge and lands, Through pools and ponds I winny, laughing ho, ho, ho!
He may not come to play those pranks, nor as Milton has described his visits to the farm:
To earn the cream-bowl duly set.
The thrashing-machine has thrown the lubber-fiend out of employment; but the Welsh still declare themselves honoured by the continuance of these night-wanderers. They have still the corpse-candles; and hear Gabriel’s hounds hunting over the hills by night, and stoutly avow that the fairies are as numerous there as ever. There is a waterfall at Aberpergum, called the Fairies’ Waterfall, where they are, almost any night to be heard singing; and I have heard a very grave Friend declare that he has seen them dancing in a green meadow, as he rode home at night. How long, indeed, this may continue, one cannot tell; for old Morgan Lewis, who for fifty years has acted as guide to the beautiful waterfalls of Neath Valley, and is a most firm believer in all the Fairy faith, especially of their luring children away by assuming the forms of their deceased relatives, and offering them fairy-bread to eat, which changes their natures, and they are compelled to join the Elfin troop--declares that they are now gone from that neighbourhood; that “the spirit of man is become too strong for them.” A fair friend has sketched for me, the old man in the attitude of describing to a party the exact spot on which his father saw their very last appearance. Behind him rises the Dînas Rock, from time immemorial the sanctum sanctorum of Welsh fairyland; and old Morgan is exclaiming, “They are gone! they are gone! and we’ll never see them more!”
VIII. THE VILLAGE INN
There is nothing more characteristic in rural life than a village alehouse, or inn. It is the centre of information, and the regular, or occasional rendezvous of almost everybody in the neighbourhood. You there see all sorts of characters, or you hear of them. The whereabout of everybody all around is there perfectly understood. I do not mean the low pothouse--the new beer-shop of the new Beer-bill, with LICENSED TO BE DRUNK ON THE PREMISES blazoned over the door in staring characters--the Tom-and-Jerry of the midland counties--the Kidley-Wink of the west of England. No, I mean the good old-fashioned country alehouse; the substantial, well-to-do old country alehouse--situated on a village green, or by the road-side, with a comfortable sweep out of the road itself for carriages or carts to come round to the door, and stand out of all harm’s way. The nice old-fashioned house, in a quiet, rural, out-of-the-way, old-fashioned district. The very house which Goldsmith in his day described--
Where grey-beard mirth and smiling toil retired, Where village statesmen talked with looks profound, And news much older than their ale went round.
It is a low, white-washed, or slap-dashed, or stuccoed, or timber-framed house, with its various roof, and steep gables; its casement windows above, bright and clean, peeping out from amongst vines or jasmines, where the innkeeper’s neat daughter, who acts the parts of chambermaid, barmaid, and waiter, may be seen looking abroad; and its ample bay-windows below, where parties may do the same, and where, as you pass, you may occasionally see such parties--a pleasant-looking family, or a group of young, gay people, with merry, and often very sweet faces amongst them;--their post-chaise, travelling-carriage, barouche, or spring-cart, according to their several styles and dignities, standing at the door, under the great spreading tree. Ay, there is the old spreading tree, that is as old, and probably older than the inn itself. It is an elm, with a knotty mass of root swelled out around the base of its sturdy stem into a prodigious heap--into a seat, in fact, on holiday occasions, for a score of rustic revellers, or resters. In some cases, where the root has not been so accommodating, a good stout bench runs round it; or where the root is at all endangered by scratching dogs, picking and hewing children, or rooting pigs of the village, it has heaped up a good mound of earth round it; or it is protected by a circle of wattled fence.
You see the tree is a tree of mark and consequence; it is, indeed, the tree. It is looked upon as part and parcel of the concern; of as much consequence to the house as its sign; and it is often the sign itself:--THE OLD ELM-TREE! Or it may be a yew--the very yew out of which Robin Hood and Little John, Will Scarlett, or Will Stutely cut their bows--yes, that house is “The Robin Hood.” Or it may be a mighty ash--the One-Ash, or the Mony-Ash, as in the Peak of Derbyshire. Or it is an oak of as much dignity--The Royal-Oak. Or it is a whole grove or cluster, by character or tradition--The Seven-Sisters--or The Four-Brothers--or The Nine-Oaks--all of which sisters, brothers, or nine companions, except one, are decayed, dropped off, or thrown down, as many a family beside has been. See!--the sign hangs in it, or is suspended on its post just by, bearing the likeness of the original tree, attempted by some village artist.
Just such a tree and such a house, all my Surrey, and many of my metropolitan readers are familiar with at the foot of St. Anne’s Hill, by Chertsey. The Golden-Grove, kept by James Snowden,--who does not know it, that loves sweet scenery, sweet associations, or a pleasant steak and pipe, or a tea-party on a holiday of nature, in one of the most delicious nests imaginable? Yes! there is a nice old village inn for you; and such a tree! There you have the picture of the Golden-Grove all in a blaze of gold--somewhat dashed and dimmed, it is true, by the blaze of many suns,--but there it is, in front of the inn, and by the old tree. The inn, the hanging gardens and orchards, the rustic cottages scattered about, the rich woods and splendid prospects above, the beautiful meadows and winding streams below; why, they are enough to arrest any traveller, and make him put up his horse, and determine to breathe a little of this sweet air, and indulge in this Arcadian calm, amid these embowering woodlands. And where is he? Below, in those fair meadows, amid those cottage roofs and orchard trees, rises the low, square church-tower of Chertsey:--Chertsey, where Cowley lived and died; and where his garden still remains, as delicious as ever, with its grassy walk winding by his favourite brook, and the little wooden bridge leading into the richest meadows. And where his old house yet remains, saving the porch pointing to the street, which was taken down for the public safety, but the circumstance and its cause recorded on a tablet on the wall, with this concluding line--
Here the last accents flowed from Cowley’s tongue.
You then, poetical or enthusiastic traveller or visitant, tread the ground which Abraham Cowley trod in his retirement; and what is more, you tread the ground which Charles James Fox trod in his retirement. The hill above is St. Anne’s,--conspicuous through a great part of Surrey, Berks, Bucks, Herts, and Middlesex, delightful for its woods and for its splendid panoramic views, including the winding Thames, Cooper’s Hill, celebrated by Sir John Denham, Hampstead, Highgate, Harrow, and mighty London itself, but still more delightful to the patriotic visitant, as the place where Fox retired to refresh himself after his parliamentary contests, and to recruit himself for fresh struggles for his country. It is a place which Rogers by his pen, and Turner by his pencil, have made still more sacred. Who does not know the lines of Rogers in his poem of Human Life, in his last splendidly-embellished edition of his works, referring to Fox?--
And now once more where most he wished to be, In his own fields, breathing tranquillity-- We hail him--not less happy Fox, than thee! Thee at St. Anne’s so soon of care beguiled, Playful, sincere, and artless as a child! Thee, who wouldst watch a bird’s nest on the spray, Through the green leaves exploring, day by day. How oft from grove to grove, from seat to seat, With thee conversing in thy loved retreat, I saw the sun go down!--Ah, then ’twas thine, Ne’er to forget some volume half divine, Shakspeare’s or Dryden’s--through the chequered shade Borne in thy hand behind thee as we strayed; And where we sate (and many a halt we made), To read there with a fervour all thine own, And in thy grand and melancholy tone, Some splendid passage, not to thee unknown, Fit theme for long discourse.--Thy bell has tolled! --But in thy place among us we behold One who resembles thee.
There is the place, drawn by Turner, exactly as it is; and there is still living the widow of the great statesman, at the advanced age of upwards of ninety years.
It must be confessed that the Golden-Grove is located in a very golden situation, and then--its tree! I suppose that is scarcely to be rivalled. I have placed on my title-page the King of Belgium’s tree, but James Snowden’s tree is every whit as remarkable.
It is a grand old elm, with massy, wide-spreading horizontal branches, on which is laid a stout oaken floor, fenced in by a strong parapet of boards and palisades. It is an aerial, arborean lodge, reached by an easy flight of steps, furnished with seats and tables, and canopied by the green awning of the whole tree’s foliage--just the sylvan bower that makes one long to see a joyous party in it on a summer’s day, looking out with glad faces on the passers by; or a rustic company, with their homely pots of ale, and the smoke of their pipes circling out amongst the green leaves about them.
This is the old-fashioned country alehouse, such as I am speaking of, only that we are still merely at the entrance of it, still lingering and haunting about the door, while the landlady and her daughter are on the fidgets to receive us, and the old landlord comes out with his bare head, and his rustic bow, and greets us with--“A fine old tree that, sir! Their heads don’t ache as planted it, sir;” and the hostler is advancing from the stable to take charge of our vehicle. But walk in. How clean it is! Bless us, what a nice snug parlour! What an ample, comfortable kitchen, or house-place as they call it, with its wide fireplace! What an array of plates, dishes, and bright pewter pots on the shelves around, and of hams and flitches dangling from the ceiling. It is a substantial place; there is no fear of starvation here. The joint is turning at the fire, and the tea-kitchen stands for ever boiling, ready to mix a tumbler of spirits, or to make coffee or tea at all hours.
These country inns are, of course, some greater, some less; some richer, some more simple--according to their custom, situation, or other contingent circumstances; but they are generally clean to a miracle, and plentiful places. The travelling carriages stop to bait there, for it is between towns; the squire comes there occasionally, for he patronizes it, and has all private and public meetings held there. Most probably it is his own property, and its sign the arms of his family; and what is quite as likely, the landlord is his old servant. Half of these places are kept by old servants of the neighbouring families, who have married and retired to public life. The groom, the coachman, nay the valet or the butler, has married the lady’s maid, or the comely laundress, or a daughter of a neighbouring farmer, and there is nothing he can so readily fashion himself to as an inn. It is something after his own way--he is still waiting on somebody at table or at carriage. He is knowing in horses and dogs, and he can’t be well spared out of the neighbourhood. He is acquainted with all the farmers, and their acquaintance all round, and they come to the house. In nine cases out of ten he has a farm attached to his inn. In other cases, our country innkeeper is a maltster too, or a miller; and these are the country inns for good cheer. O, what cream, what fresh butter, what fresh eggs, what fresh vegetables, what plump tender pullets, what geese and ducks for the roasting, with all appendages of peas and onions, cucumbers and asparagus, can that larder produce which is situated in the Goshen of rural plenty; where the malt-kiln is at hand instead of the druggist’s shop; where barley is steeped instead of coculus; where the hostel has a plentiful garden at its back, and a good farm behind that.
Go up to your bed-chamber; you are delighted with its sweetness--its freshness--its cleanness. You fairly stand to snuff up the air that comes in at the open window. You turn to admire the clean white bed--the snowy sheets--the fresh carpet--the old-fashioned walnut drawers, and wide elbow-chairs of massy workmanship, with damask cushions, clean, though much worn, which have been purchased at the sale of some ancient manor-house. All is as bright and clean as busy and country hands can make them. There is lavender in the drawers! You may, indeed, if you please, be laid in lavender; for you have only to look out of your window, and the garden below has whole hedges of lavender, and there are trees of rosemary nailed up your walls to the very window-sills of the room. And then you see such filbert-bushes, such damson, and plum, and apple, and pear trees, that you have visions of apple dumplings, damson tarts, and a hundred other rural dainties. And now, if you want to study the character of the place; if you are staying some few days, and are curious in “the short and simple annals of the poor;” if you want to paint like Moreland or Gainsborough; or to vie with Miss Mitford in sunshiny pictures of an English village, there you are in the very watch-tower of observation.
You look out on the green, and there comes all the population--the old to talk and smoke their pipes, the young to play at skittles, nine-pins, quoits, or cricket. You see out over fields and farms; whatever, or whoever you meet with in your walks,--cottage or hall, man, woman, or child,--your landlord can give the whole history and mystery of it; and besides, as I have said, there every body comes. The clergyman himself comes there sometimes to meet his neighbours, on parish or other affairs. All the gentlemen farmers and plodding farmers, the keepers, the labourers,--every body has some business at one time or another there. There are the privileged guests of the bar, the frequenters of the best parlour, the rustic circle of the kitchen fireside. There the wedding-party comes, and often dines there. There the very followers of the funeral find some occasion or need of comfort to draw them.[28] There the soldier on furlough halts--the recruits marching to their destination halt too. If it be a country that is at all frequented for its natural beauty or curiosities, or for sporting, there is always some wild-looking animal or other, a “man at a loose end,” ready to guide you to the moors, to act as a marker, to carry your game-bag, or your fishing-basket. In all such places there is a wit, an eccentric, a good singer. The Will Wimbles, the broken-down gentlemen, the never-do-wells, all come there. You may see them, and hear them, and when they are gone, may hear all their oddities and their histories; and every evening you shall hear every piece of news, for five miles round, as related and canvassed over by the guests amongst themselves. Many of these landlords are themselves perfect originals; and by their humour, their racy anecdotes, and “random shots of country wit,” draw numbers to their ingle. If any of my readers have heard old Matthew Jobson, of the Nag’s Head, Wythburn, at the foot of Helvelyn, holding forth in the midst of the rustic frequenters of his hearth, they have a good notion of such Bonifaces,--men that can furnish a Wordsworth or a Crabbe with the rough diamond of a story which they set in imperishable gold,--or flash out sparks of native wit that afterwards set the tables of city palaces in a roar.
[28] In Wales the attenders of a country funeral adjourn, as regularly as they attend the funeral itself, to the alehouse; and it strikes an Englishman very strangely, to meet a funeral going to the church, and to hear the chief mourner, perhaps the widow, crying aloud, and repeating as she goes, all the virtues of the deceased; and in an hour after, to find the whole company seated in the public house, enveloped in a canopy of tobacco-smoke, loud in talk, and drowning their sorrow in their cups. I recollect how my feelings were harrowed by meeting such a funeral, and a widow just so lamenting; but the gentleman with me, a resident of the place, said “O, it is all the better--they run off the poignancy of their feelings by their lamentations. Their grief seems like one of their mountain torrents--loud and rapid, and then it is gone.”
But lest I should be accused of tempting my readers into the abodes of publicans and sinners, I must again remind them that I am only talking of those quiet, respectable old country inns, where the master and mistress had a character to maintain, had a regard to the opinion of the parson and the squire; and of those only as places of necessary refreshment. As parts and parcels of English rural life, I am bound to describe them; and who has not spent a pleasant hour in such a place with a friend, on a pedestrianizing excursion, or with a rural party at dinner or tea? And who has not rejoiced to escape from night and storms, on wide heaths or amongst the mountains, to the “shelter of such rustic roof?” Into such a house I remember, years ago, being driven by a wild night of wind, rain, and pitchy darkness, on the edge of Yorkshire, and the cheerful blaze of the fire, and the rustic group round it, as I entered, were a right welcome contrast to the tempestuous blackness without. Wet, and cold, and weary as I was, I had no intention of being conducted to the best parlour of so small a house as this was, in so secluded a part of the country, on a dismal night in October. Whoever is obliged at such a season to betake himself to such humble hostel, let him, if he do not find a good fire blazing in the parlour, seat himself in the old chimney-corner: there he is sure of warmth and comfort in a homely way. In summer a rustic inn, in the most obscure district, is pleasant enough; but in winter beware! Travellers are few--the best parlour is probably not used once a month, for all country incomers know that the old chimney-corner is always warm. Instead, therefore, of being led, as is the regular custom, on the arrival of a respectable looking stranger, into the best parlour, while a fire is lighted, and of waiting, chill and miserable, for its burning up, and for the coming of your tea or supper, watching the smoking, snapping, fizzing sticks, and the reek, refused ascent up the damp chimney, ever and anon puffing out into the room in clouds--march at once into the common room, or ensconce yourself as a privileged guest in the bar. If you find a fire blazing in the parlour, that is indication that there is passing enough on that road to keep one burning there: if not, the blazing ingle is your spot. There I took my station, with a high wooden screen behind me, a bright hearth before me; and having ordered a beef-steak and coffee, and secured the room over this very one for my lodging, knowing that that too is always dry in winter, I began to notice what company I had got. The scene presented is worth describing, as a bit of rural life. About half a dozen villagers occupied the centre of the great circular wooden screen, at one end of which I was seated. Before them stood the common three-legged round table of the country public-house, on which stood their mugs of ale. The table, screen, fire-irons, floor, every thing had an air of the greatest cleanness. Opposite to me, in one of the great old elbow-chairs, so common in country inns in the north, some of them, indeed, with rockers to them, in which full-grown people sit rocking themselves with as much satisfaction as children, sate an old man in duffil-grey trousers and jacket, and with his hat on; and close at my left hand a tall, good-looking fellow of apparently fifty-five, who had the dress of a master stonemason, but a look of vivacity and knowingness, very different to the rest of the company. There was a look of the wag, or the rake about him. He was, in fact, evidently a fellow that in any place or station would be a gay, roystering blade; and if dressed in a court dress, would cut a gallant figure too. He eyed me with that expression which said he only wanted half a word to make himself very communicative. The check which my entrance had given to the talk and laughter which I heard on first opening the door, had now passed, and I found a keen dispute going on, upon the important question of how many quicksets there are in a yard, when planted four inches asunder. The old man opposite I found was what a punster would term a fencing-master,--a planter of fences,--a founder and establisher of hawthorn hedges for the whole country round; and out of his profession the dispute had arisen. The whole question hinged on the simple inquiry, whether a quickset was put in at the very commencement of the line of fence, or only at the end of the first four inches. In the first case there would be evidently nine--in the latter only eight. The matter in dispute was so simple and demonstrable, that one wondered how it could afford a dispute at all. Some, however, contended there were eight quicksets, and some that there were nine; and to demonstrate, they had chalked out the line of fence with its division into yards, and sub-division into four inches, on the hearth with a cinder; but the dispute still went on as keenly as if the thing were not thus plainly before their eyes, or as disputes continue in a more national assembly on things as self-evident: and many an earnest appeal was made from both sides to the old hedger, who having once given his decision, disdained to return any further reply than by a quiet withdrawal of his pipe from his mouth, a quiet draught of ale, and the simple asseveration of--“Nay, I’m sure!” The debate might have grown as tediously prolix as the debates just alluded to, had not my left-hand neighbour, the tall man of lively aspect, turned to me, and, pointing to the cindery diagram on the hearth, said, “What things these stay-at-home neighbours of mine can make a dispute out of! What would Ben Jonson have thought of such simpletons? Look here! if these noisy chaps had ever read a line of Homer or Hesiod, they wouldn’t plague their seven senses out about nothing at all. Why, any child of a twelvemonth old would settle their mighty question with the first word it learned to speak. Eight or nine quicksets indeed! and James Broadfoot there, who should know rather better than them, for he has planted as many in his time as would reach all round England, and Ireland to boot, has told them ten times over. Eight or nine numbskulls, I say!”
“O!” said I, a good deal surprised--“and so you have read Homer and Hesiod, have you?”
“To be sure I have,” replied my mercurial neighbour, “and a few other poets too. I have not spent all my life in this sleepy-headed place, I can assure you.”
“What, you have travelled as well as read, then?”
“Yes, and I have travelled too, master. Ben Jonson was a stonemason; and if I am not a stonemason I am a sculptor, and that is first-cousin to it. When Ben Jonson first entered London with a hod of mortar on his head, and a two-foot rule in his pocket, I dare say he knew no more that he had twenty plays in his head, than I knew of all the cherubims I should carve, and the epitaphs I should cut; and yet I have cut a few in my time, and written them too beforehand.”
“O! and you are a poet too?”
He nodded assent, and taking up his mug of ale, and fixing his eyes stedfastly on me over the top of it as he drank with a look of triumph,--then setting down his mug--“And if you want to know that, you have only to walk into the churchyard in the morning, and there you’ll find plenty of my verses, and cut with a pen of iron too, as Job wished his elegy to be.” Here, however, lest I should not walk into the churchyard, he recited a whole host of epitaphs, many of which must have made epitaph-hunters stare, if they really were put on headstones.
“Well,” I said, “you astonish me with your learning and wit. I certainly did not look for such a person in this village--but pray where have you travelled?”
“O! it’s a long story--but this I can tell you--I have gone so near to the end of the world that I could not put sixpence between my head and the sky.”
At this the whole company of disputants forgot their quicksets, lifted their heads and cried--“Well done Septimus Scallop! That’s a good ’un. If the gentleman can swallow that, he can anything.”
“O!” said I, “I don’t doubt it.”
“Don’t doubt it!” they shouted all at once--“don’t doubt it? Why, do you think any man ever could get to where the sky was so low as he couldn’t get in sixpence between his head and it?”
“Yes he could, and often has done--make yourself sure of that. If a man has not a sixpence he cannot put it between his head and the sky; and he is pretty near the world’s end too, I think.”
Here they all burst into a shout of laughter, in the midst of which open flew the door, and a tall figure rushed into the middle of the house, wrapped in a shaggy coat of many capes, dripping with wet, and holding up a huge horn lantern. A face of wonderful length and of a ghastly aspect glared from behind the lantern, and a voice of the most ludicrous lamentation bawled out--“For God’s sake, lads, come and help me to find my wagon and horses! I’ve lost my wagon! I’ve lost my wagon!” Up jumped the whole knot of disputants, and demanded where he had lost it. The man said that while he went to deliver a parcel in the village, the wagon had gone on. That he heard it at a distance, and cried, “woa! woa!” but the harder he cried, and the farther he went, the faster it went too. At this intelligence away marched every one of the good-natured crew excepting the wit. “And why don’t you go?” I asked.--“Go! pugh! It’s only that soft brother of mine, Tim Scallop, the Doncaster carrier. I’ll be bound now that the wagon hasn’t moved an inch from the spot he left it in. He has heard the wind roaring, and doesn’t know it from his own wagon wheels. Here these poor simpletons will go running their hearts out for some miles, and then they will come back and find the horses where he left them. I could go and lay my hand on them in five minutes. But they are just as well employed as in griming Mrs. Tappit’s hearthstone. Never mind;--I was telling you of what the hostler said to Ben Jonson when Ben was reeling home early one morning from a carouse, and Ben declared that he was never so pricked with a horsenail-stump in his life--
BEN.--Thou silly groom Take away thy broom, And let Ben Jonson pass:
GROOM.--O! rare Ben! Turn back again, And take another glass!”
Septimus Scallop laughed at the hostler’s repartee, and I laughed too, but my amusement had a different source from his. There was something irresistibly ludicrous in the generous rushing forth of the whole company to the aid of the poor carrier, except the witty brother! But he was quite right: in about an hour, in came the good-natured men, streaming with rain like drowned rats, and declaring that after running three miles and finding no wagon, they bethought themselves of turning back to where the carrier said it was lost; and there they had nearly run their noses against it, standing exactly where he left it.
So much for the village inn. Every traveller must have seen in such a place many a similar piece of country life. A new class of alehouses has sprung up under the New Beer Act, which being generally kept by people without capital, often without character; their liquor supplied by the public brewers, and adulterated by themselves; have done more to demoralize the population of both town and country, than any other legislative measure within the last century. In these low, dirty, fuddling places, you may look in vain for
The whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor, The varnished clock that clicked behind the door.
In manufacturing towns, and agricultural districts, they alike multiply the temptations to the poor man, and by their low character are sure to deteriorate his own. Against the swarms of these, in many places, the quiet respectable old village inn has little chance. It must disappear, or be kept by a different and a worse class of people; and when it goes, it goes with Goldsmith’s graphic lamentation--for very different are the shops that succeed it:
Vain transitory splendours! could not all Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall! Obscure it sinks, nor shall it more impart An hour’s importance to the poor man’s heart. Thither no more the peasant shall repair, To sweet oblivion of his daily care; No more the farmer’s news, the barber’s tale, No more the woodman’s ballad shall prevail; No more the smith his dusky brow shall clear, Relax his ponderous strength, and lean to hear; The host himself no longer shall be found, Careful to see the mantling bliss go round; Nor the coy maid, half willing to be prest, Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the rest.
IX. POPULAR PLACES OF RESORT.--WAKES, STATUTES, AND FAIRS
Besides the remains of the ancient festivals, the country people find a great source of amusement in these gatherings. The WAKE is the parochial feast of the dedication of the church. It has now dwindled into a village holiday, shorn by the Reformation of all its ecclesiastical and sacred character. But it furnishes a certain point in every year, in every individual parish, to which the rural people can look forward as a point of rest and mutual rejoicing. It is a time which leads them to clean up their houses, to look forward and prepare for a renewal of their wardrobe; and which cheers the spirit of many an otherwise solitary and labouring person with the prospect of a short season of relaxation, a short pause in the otherwise ever-going machinery of servitude. The old people--parents, and grand-parents, say--when telling of their children out at service, in some distant place, or married and settled far off: “Well, well, we shall see them at the wake. They’ll all be here, thank God, well and hearty, I hope.” The children, as they groan at times under the tedium of perpetual labour, suddenly cheer up, and say,--“Well, but we shall go home at the wake;”--a thing which is regularly stipulated for at hiring; and the vision of that joyful time, though but a moment in itself, puts out all the twilight of their weary waiting. The time comes. The merry bells of the church are ringing on the anniversary of that church’s completion, perhaps five or seven hundred years ago. Merrily they ring; and simple and glad creatures, young maidens, and youths, and comely pairs with a troop of children round them, hear them, as they come over hill and dale, approaching from all quarters the place of their nativity, and the place of their ancestors: the one place, however small and however obscure, tinged all over with the memories of childhood, and filled with the stories and legends that were interwoven with the very grain of their minds by their parents’ recitals in early life--the one place, therefore, which seems the most important in the universe. They, like the Chinese, always place in the maps of their simple thoughts their native village in the centre of the earth. Over hill and dale they are coming, all in their holiday array; and in many a bright little cottage, basking in the sunshine of morning, are eager hearts looking out for them; wondering how Grace and Thomas will look; whether they are much altered; and whether the children of the married ones will be much grown. The beauty of these village feasts is, that they do not occur all at one time, so that the friends and acquaintance of the inhabitants of one place, come pouring in to see them, and are ready in their turn to receive them at their feast.
They are times of pleasant exchange of hospitalities and renewals of simple friendships. Out of doors there are stalls of toys and sweetmeats, and whirligigs for the children; within, there is, for once, plum-pudding and roast beef, and an infinity of such talk as best pleases their tastes. Old notes of by-gone years are compared. Many are recalled to remembrance who have not been thought of for a long time. The hearts of the old are warmed by retracing their early exploits, and early acquaintance, with all the pleasant exaggerations of memory; and the young listen, and think with wonder on those good old times.
In some old-fashioned places, these feasts are named from and mingled with the remains of other old church rites. At Ilkeston in Derbyshire, it is called the Cross-Dressing, and the cross in the village is dressed up with oaken boughs, with their leaves gilt and spangled. At Tissington, near Dovedale, the Well-Dressing or Well-Flowering, when they dress up a beautiful spring with flowers, and have dances and processions and much merriment, is their great feast, though it may not happen to fall exactly on the day of the dedication of the church. At Blidworth, in the old demesnes of Sherwood, it is their Rocking; I suppose from its happening to fall on the day after Twelfth-day, or St. Distaff’s-day, the custom of which is described by Herrick:--
Partly work, and partly play, Ye must on St. Distaff’s-day: From the plough soone free your teame, Then come home and fother them. If the maides a spinning goe, Burn the flax and fire the tow. Bring in pails of water then, Let the maides bewash the men: Give St. Distaff all the right, Then bid Christmas sport good night. And next morrow every one, To his owne vocation.
In different villages, different customs have allied themselves to the great annual feast, the season of meeting of friends and relatives. Long may these meetings remain bound up with, at least, one bright day in the year. I trust, however knowledge and refinement may extend themselves, they will never refine these rural holidays away. Let them root out cruelty and rudeness, and drunkenness, as they have done already in a great degree--for where now are bull-baitings, bear-baitings, dog-fights, and cock-fights, which twenty years ago were the invariable accompaniments and great attraction of these wakes? Let Christian knowledge root out these things, and thus perfect this one white season of the cottager’s year--making it entirely an occasion for cultivating the best affections, and knitting together family ties.
STATUTES.
These, which are called provincially STATITZ, or STATICE, are meetings for hiring of farm and household servants, “according to statutes made and provided,” and are held in certain central and convenient places. They are attended merely by farmers, and people who happen to want men or maid-servants, and by the servants themselves. By the latter they are looked forward to with much interest. They furnish occasion for a holiday. They are for the time their own masters, having left, or being about to leave their places, and either to re-engage themselves, or to seek new ones. They here meet their old acquaintances, and compare notes of the past year, of the character of the different places they have had; of what extraordinary has befallen them; and are full of new schemes and speculations as to where they shall go; what advance of wages they shall obtain; in what capacity they shall hire themselves. In many parts of the country he who offers himself as a shepherd appears with a lock of wool in his hat, placed under the band; the wagoner has a bit of whipcord stuck there; the groom a bit of sponge; the milkmaid in her bonnet a tuft of cow-hair; and the general run of farm-servants are conspicuous enough as to what they are, by their carters’-frocks, or slops, hob-nailed ankle boots, and out-of-door, half-waggish, half-sheepish looks.
It is a true country scene, to see all these rude sons of the soil collected together from their farm-yards and solitary fields, where, far from towns, they have gone whistling after the plough, sowing, or gathering in harvest; and the girls that have been scrubbing, churning, and milking, and occasionally helping in the hay or corn fields, here dressed out in their rustic finery, and shewing such robust forms and rosy faces as might astonish our over-delicate citizens. To see the farmers going amongst them, inquiring after their accomplishments and qualities, and cheapening them much as they would cheapen a horse; and their no less wary wives negotiating with the buxom damsels of the mop and pail. These matters all satisfactorily disposed of, and the Earnest, or money given on account of future services, or as it is otherwise called, the Fastening-penny, from its formerly being a penny, though now a shilling, being given, away go the farmers and farmeresses, and leave the lads and lasses to a day of jollity and fun. The swains lose no time in selecting each his chere-amie for the day; and the afternoon is spent in eating, flirting, drinking, and dancing, and then all separate their several ways, for at least another year.
Some of these STATUTES in agricultural districts bring together a vast concourse of people. In Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and many other parts of the country, these statutes are held about Old Michaelmas-day, when all the servants, men and women, are at liberty from their servitude, and have a week’s holiday to attend the different neighbouring statutes, mops, or bull-roastings, as they are called. All work is at an end. Day-labourers are the only men who can be got to do out-of-doors offices; charwomen take the place of housemaids within; and good housewives are often at their wits’ end what to do. As you enter towns you find them swarming with the country lads and lasses, and oxen roasting in the streets; booths, shows, eating, treating, and dancing the order of the day. As you go along the highways you meet the young country people streaming along in their rustic finery to or from the towns; and when you arrive at a country inn, probably the door is barred and bolted, if it be towards evening,--the servants being all gone to be hired, the master to hire, and the mistress left alone, and no little afraid of the loose strolling fellows who are abroad at this unsettled time. I once went, when a boy, with my schoolmaster to Polesworth Statute, in Warwickshire, and well remember that such was the crowd, that although I saw a penny on the ground, and made many attempts to stoop down and pick it up, I found it impossible to do it. In Northumberland, Durham, and the south of Scotland, similar meetings are held, where the hinds hire their Bondagers.
FAIRS.
Statutes are places where the working class of the rural districts amuse themselves, but fairs are great sources of pleasure to all classes of country people. The farmers, and their wives and daughters; the villagers of all descriptions; the cottagers from the most secluded retreats; the squire and his family from the hall--all flock to the fair of their county town, and find some business to be transacted, and a world of pleasure to be enjoyed. There are cheese, cattle, horses, poultry, geese, and a hundred other things, to be sold; and multitudes of household articles, clothing, and trinkets to be bought; and, besides all this, a vast of seeing and being seen to be done. I will describe the great October Fair of Nottingham, called Goose-Fair, as a good specimen of a country fair on a large scale.
In the country, for many miles round, this fair is looked forward to by young and old with views of business and recreation for months; and what was done, and said, and seen at Goose-Fair; who was met there, and what matches were made, serve for conversation for months afterwards. The buyers and sellers of cheese, apples, onions, and a variety of other articles, are making their preparations to be there; some of them from distant counties; horse-jockeys are getting ready their strings of horses; young people are putting their wardrobes in order, and expecting all that such young people do expect on such occasions. In the town, two or three days before, the signs of the approaching fair increase. Huge caravans incessantly arrive, with their wild beasts, theatricals, dwarfs, giants, and other prodigies and wonders. Then come trotting in those light, neat covered wagons, containing the contents of sundry bazaars that are speedily to spring up. As you go out of the town at any end, you meet caravan after caravan, cart after cart, long troops of horses tied head and tail, and groups of those wild and peculiar-looking people, that are as necessary to a fair as flowers are to May;--all kinds of strollers, beggars, gipsies, singers, dancers, players on harps, Indian jugglers, Punch and Judy exhibitors, and similar wandering artists and professors.
For some days before the general fair commences, the horse-fair is going on. You recognise all the knowing-ones in horse-flesh from all the country round; country gentlemen and smart young farmers, and cunning jockeys with their long drab great coats, short old boots, and their jockey whips stuck carelessly under their arm. Horses of all kinds, light and heavy, full blood, half blood, and no blood at all, are ridden and driven to shew their action, along the pavement in all directions, as if the aim of the riders was to run over everybody they could, and break their own necks into the bargain.
Then on the authentic day of the fair, forth comes the procession of the corporation to proclaim the fair, and march up the market-place and down again in their scarlet robes, mayor and aldermen, the mace borne and the trumpet blown before them, and the beadles with their staves behind. Having made this procession to the wonder of all children, and sight-loving adults, they ascend into the Town-Hall, there, oddly enough, called the Exchange, and the crier proclaims the fair from the charter, at the prompting of the town-clerk. The fair is proclaimed, and is already in existence. There is the market-place, an area of six acres, jammed full of stalls, shows, bazaars, and people. From the earliest hour of the morning, wagons loaded with cheese have been arriving, which are now seen on one side of the market-place, pitched down in piles, and in quantities enough, one would think, to serve all England for a twelvemonth. There are the farmers, and their wives and daughters, well wrapped up in good market coats, with numerous capes, surveying with pride the workmanship of their hands, and the product of their summer’s dairy; and there are the dealers busy amongst it with their cheese-tasters, tasting and chaffering, and buying, and sending off their purchases by wagons to the wharfs. It is incredible in what a little time those great heaps of cheese vanish from the stones, and nuts and onions in abundance.
The whole market-place is now one mass of moving people, and unintermitted din. Wombwell’s Menagerie displays all its gigantic animals on its scenes; Holloway’s “Travelling Company of Comedians” are dancing with harlequin and clown in front of their locomotive theatre; wonderful women, and children, and animals; wonderful machinery, panoramas, and prodigies are displayed on all sides in pictorial enormity, and the united sounds of Wombwell’s fine band of musicians in their beef-eater costume, the band of Holloway, the smaller ones of other shows, and the bawlings, and invitings, and oratorical declamation of a dozen different showmen, with bellowing of gongs and clashing of cymbals, make up a sound enough to drive to distraction more swine than ran into the sea of Gennesaret, but which seems, notwithstanding, wonderfully delightful to ears grown weary of country quiet. It is curious to see the numbers pouring in and out of these places; to see the dense crowd of upturned faces collected before every show where there are antics playing, and clowns and fools talking nonsense for their entertainment. To hear the hearty laughs which follow their standing jokes, is to feel how cheaply pleasure can be furnished to hungry spirits.
But the crowd of fair-goers walking round and round this annual Babel! During the morning, business is the chief engrossment; but from noon till eleven or twelve o’clock at night, pleasure is the pursuit. The farmers’ daughters, who stood in their caped coats before their piles of cheese, are now metamorphosed into most extraordinary belles, and have found beaus as dashing as themselves. At all the stalls, purchases of gingerbread, sweetmeats, nuts and oranges, are going on; and through the bazaars--those modern additions to fairs, goes a perpetual stream of gay people, admiring the endless variety of things that are there displayed on either hand. Tea-caddies, workboxes of rosewood and pearl, china, cut-glass, drums and trumpets, and all kinds of toys; bracelets and necklaces, and all species of female trinkets; fans, and parlour bellows, figures in porcelain and painted wood; purses, musical boxes, and, in short, all the thousand contents of a bazaar.
This afternoon portion of the fair is called the gig-fair, because people come driving in their gigs to it; i. e. it is the pleasure-fair, where smart people from all quarters come to see, and to be seen. The second day of the fair, I believe, is the earliest on which very genteel people make their appearance, and then you may often see numbers of country families of good standing mingling in the moving mass of Vanity Fair. It is amusing enough to sit at a window, and look over all the stirring and motley scene. To see the eternal stream of smart dresses and fair faces go by. Round and round they move, in one dense throng, every one apparently driven forward by the weight of the coming crowd; and, taking into consideration the press, the noise, the weariness of such thronged and continued walking, one is apt to wonder how any human beings can find pleasure in it. But that they do find pleasure, and an intense pleasure, their eager and multitudinous flocking thither sufficiently denote. They come out of a quietness that presents a little noise and dissipation as an agreeable contrast. They come to attractions adapted to their taste. The greater part of them are full of youth and expectation. There is no occasion on which so many country flames are struck up as at a fair. And in truth, you see numbers of fine healthy forms of both sexes in this crowd, and beautiful faces in numbers sufficient to make you feel with the poet:
The ancient spirit is not dead; Old times, thought I, are breathing there; Proud was I that my country bred Such strength, a dignity so fair.
It is a time, in fact, of universal country jollity, pleasure-taking, love-making, present-making, treating, and youthful entertainment, enjoyed to an extent that people of different tastes can form no conception of. Many an important connexion is dated from the fair; many a freak, a pleasure, a piece of wit and fun, are thence registered, and talked of at country firesides to the latest period of life; and these are all so much part and parcel of our common nature, that there must be a stony place in the heart which does not strongly sympathise with the actors and partakers of them. Joy, therefore, to all fair-goers! and with the growth of greater intelligence and taste, long may the healthy capacity of being lightly pleased retain its hold on the robust forms and sweet faces of English Rural Life.
I have often thought that we have artists who go all over the world in quest of novelties of scene, costume, character, and grouping, many of whom, if they came to an English fair, with minds capable of entering into what they saw, might give us scenes and figures of more real interest than they often bring back after years of absence. The dancing-scene before Holloway’s; the figures and coquetting of country belles and their lovers; and the picturesque simplicity of the old men gazing like children on some wonder-promising showman, and now full of consternation and amaze at some of them finding their purses clean vanished from their pockets, would form good subjects for the pencil.
X. THE RURAL WATERING-PLACE
A great deal has been written about our fashionable watering-places, but there is another class of watering-places quite as amusing in their way, of which the public knows little or nothing. There are the rural watering-places, which are part and parcel of our subject, without which any picture of rural life would be incomplete; and which I shall here therefore take due notice of. These are the resort of what may be styled the burgher and agricultural part of our population. The farmer, the shopkeeper, the occupant of the clerk’s desk, or the mercantile warehouse,--each and all of these feel the want of a periodical relaxation from business and care, and the want of that change of scene and circumstance, that may give a fresh feeling of both mental and physical renovation. These, as they stand wearily sweltering in the hot field, or bending over the everlasting counter, suddenly see in their mind’s eye the flashing of the sea, and feel the breezes blow upon them like a new life. They resolve on the instant “to go to the salt-water” before the summer is over, and begin contriving when and how it shall be, and what wives and children, or old cronies, can go with them. The farmer sees that the only time for him will be in the interval between hay and corn harvest, and speedily he has inoculated some of his friends with the same desire. Many a jolly company is thus speedily made, and at the fixed time away they go, in gigs and tax-carts, or on scampering horses, with more life and spirit than most people return from more celebrated places. In Lancashire the better class of the operatives in the manufacturing districts, consider it as necessary “to go to the salt-water” in the summer, as to be clothed and fed all the rest of the year. From Preston, Blackburn, Bolton, Oldham, and all those great spinning and weaving towns, you see them turning out by whole wagon and cart-loads, bound for Blackpool and such places; and they who have not seen the swarming loads of these men and women and children, their fast driving, and their obstreperous merriment, have not seen one of the most curious scenes of English life.
In one of those strolls through different parts of the country in which I have so often indulged myself, and in which I have always found so much enjoyment, from the varieties of scenery and character which they laid open to me, I once came upon a watering-place on the coast, that afforded me no small matter for a day or two’s amusement. What could have been the cause of the setting up of such a place as a scene of pleasurable resort, it would be difficult to tell, except that it possessed a most bounteous provision of two great articles in demand in the autumnal months in cities--salt water and fresh air, for which a thousand inconveniences would be endured. It was situated quite on the flat coast of a flat country, a few miles from one of its sea-ports, yet near enough to obtain speedily thence all those good things which hungry mortals require--and who are so hungry as people bathing in sea water, and imbibing sea air, and taking three times their usual exercise without being distinctly aware of it?
Strolling along the coast, I found a good hotel, with all the usual marks of such an establishment about it. There were quantities of people loitering about the sands in front and in the garden, and other quantities looking out of windows with the sashes up; some of them, particularly the ladies, holding colloquies out of the windows of upper stories with some of the strollers below; post-chaises, and gigs, and shandray carts, standing here and there in the side scenes; a row of bathing-machines on the shore, awaiting the hour of the tide; and a loud noise of voices from a neighbouring bowling-green. The odours of roasting and baking that came from the hotel, were of the most inviting description. I inclined to take up my abode there for a few hours at least, but on entering, I found that as to obtaining a room, or a tithe of a room, or even a chair at the table of the ordinary, it was quite out of the question. “Lord bless you, sir,” said the landlady, a woman of most surprising corporeal dimensions, in a white gown, an orange-coloured neckerchief, and a large and very rosy face, as she stood before the bar, filling the whole width of the passage; “Lord bless you, sir, if you’d give me a thousand golden guineas in a silken purse, I should not know where to put you. We’ve turned hundreds and hundreds of most genteel people away, that we have, within this very week, and the house is fit to burst now, it’s so hugeous full. But you’ll get accommodated at the town.” “What town?” said I; “is there a town near?” “Why, town we call it, but it’s the village, you know; it’s Fastside here, not more than a mile off; if you follow the bank along the shore, you’ll go straight to it. You can’t miss it.” Accordingly, following the raised embankment along the shore, I soon descried Fastside, a few scattered cottages, placed amongst their respective crofts and gardens, and here and there a farm-house, with its substantial array of ricks about it, denoting that the dwellers were well off in the world. But I soon found that all the cottages, and many of the farm-houses, had their boarders for the season, and that there was scarcely one but was full. I had the good luck to spy an equipage, and something like a departing group at the door of one of the cottages, and as it moved away, to find that I could have the use of two rooms, a parlour and chamber over it, if I liked to go to the expense. “Perhaps,” said the neat cottage housewife, “as a single gentleman, you may not like to occupy so much room, for just at this season we charge rather high.” “And pray,” said I, “what may be the enormous price you are charging for these rooms, then?” “Seven shillings a-week each room, and half-a-crown for attendance,” looking at me with an inquiring eye, as if apprehensive that I should be astounded at the sum. “What! the vast charge of sixteen and sixpence per week,” I replied, smiling, “for two rooms and attendance?” “Yes,” said the simple dame; “but then, you see, you will have to live besides, and it all comes to a good deal. But may be you are a gentleman, that doesn’t mind a trifle.” Having assured her that there would, at all events, be no insurmountable obstacle in her terms, I entered and took possession of two as rustic and nicely clean rooms as could be found under such a humble roof. I had taken a fancy to spend a few days, or a week at least, there. It was a new scene, and peopled with new characters, that might be worth studying. The cottage stood in a thoroughly rural garden, full of peas, beans, and cabbages, with a little plot round the house, gay with marigolds, hollyhocks, and roses, and sweet with rosemary and lavender. The old dame’s husband was a shrimper, or fisher for shrimps, whom I soon came to see regularly tracing the edge of the tide with his old white horse and net hung behind him. She had, besides me, it seemed, another lodger, who, she assured me, “was a very nice young man indeed, but, poor young gentleman, he enjoyed but very indifferent health. Sometimes I think he’s been crossed in love, for I happened to cast my eye on one of his books--he reads a power of books--and there was a deal about love in it. It was all in poetry, you see, and so on; and then again, I fancy he’s consumptive, though I wouldn’t like to say a word to him, lest it should cast him down, poor young man; but he reads too much, in my opinion, a great deal too much; he’s never without a book in his hands when he’s in doors; and that’s not wholesome, you are sure, to be sitting so many hours in one posture, and with his eyes fixed in one place. But God knows best what’s good for us all; and I often wonder whether he has a mother. I should be sorely uneasy on his account, if I were her.” So the good dame ran on, while she cooked me a mutton chop and took an account of what tea and sugar and such things she must send for by the postman, who was their daily carrier to the town. I listened to her talk, and looked at the pot of balm of Gilead, and the red and white balsams standing in the cottage window, and the large sleek and well-fed tabby cat sleeping on the cushion of the old man’s chair, and was sure that I was in good hands, and grew quite fond of my quarters. Before the day was over, I became acquainted with the old shrimper, who came in after his journey to the next town with his shrimps, and who was as picturesque an old fellow as you would wish to see, and full of character and anecdotes of the wrecks and sea accidents on that coast for forty years past. I had been informed all about who were the neighbours inhabiting the other cottages and farms, and had a good inkling of their different characters too. I had walked out to the bank when the tide was up, and round the garden, and actually got into conversation with “the poor young man,” my fellow lodger.
The next morning I was up early, and out to reconnoitre the place and neighbourhood; and this young man having found out that I was also addicted to the unwholesome practice of reading books, took at once a great fancy to me, and went with me as guide and cicerone. I found that all the mystery about him was, that he was a youth articled to an attorney in great practice, and had stooped over the desk a little too much, but was soon likely to be as strong and sound as ever, being neither consumptive nor crossed in love, although in love he certainly was. A more simple-hearted, good-natured fellow, it was impossible could exist. He had the most profound admiration of all poets and philosophers, and read Goldsmith, Shenstone, and Addison, with a relish that one would give a good deal for. As for Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, and Tom Moore, he knew half of their voluminous poetical works by heart; mention any fine passage, and he immediately spouted you the whole of it; and as for the Waverley Novels, he had evidently devoured them entire, and was full of their wonders and characters. Yet, thus fond of poetry and romance, it was not the less true that he had a fancy for mathematics, and played on the fiddle and the flute into the bargain. Nor was this all the extent of his tastes, he had quite a penchant for natural history; had he time, he declared he would study botany, ornithology, geology, and conchology too; and yet, although such a book-worm himself, he seemed to enjoy the company of the other visiters there who never read at all. There was a whole troop that he made acquaintance with, and whose characters he sketched to me, particularly those of a merry set who lodged at a cottage opposite, where he often went to amuse them with his fiddle. As my business was to see what were the characters and the amusements of such a place, I desired him to introduce me to them, but in the first place to let us run a little over the country.
The country was rich and flat, divided into great meadows full of luxuriant grass, grazed by herds of fine cattle, and surrounded by noble trees, which served to break up the monotony of the landscape. Here and there you saw the tall, square, substantial tower of a village church peeping over its surrounding screen of noble elms. We were accustomed to stroll into these churchyards, admiring the singularly large and excellent churches, all of solid stone; the spacious graveyard and the large heavy headstones, adorned with carved skulls and cross-bones; and gilded angels with long trumpets figured above the simple epitaphs of the departed villagers. The farm-houses, too, surrounded also with tall elms, and with a great air of wealth and comfort, drew our attention. As we approached nearer to the sea, the country was more destitute of wood; consisted of very large fields of corn, then beginning to change into the rich hues of ripeness; fields also of woad, a plant used in dyeing, and there extensively cultivated; and these fields intersected no longer by hedges, but by deep wide ditches called dykes, in which grew plenty of reeds, water-flags, a tall and splendid species of marsh ranunculus (R. lingua) and yellow and white water-lilies. As we drew near to the village, if village such scattered dwellings could be called, we were struck with the peculiar aspect of the dry lanes, and the plants which grew there, so different to those of an inland neighbourhood. They were exactly such as Crabbe has described them in such a situation:--
There, fed by food they love, to rankest size, Around the dwelling docks and wormwood rise; Here the strong mallow strikes her slimy root; Here the dull nightshade hangs her deadly fruit; On hills of dust the henbane’s faded green, And pencilled flower of sickly scent is seen; At the wall’s base the fiery nettle springs, With fruit globose and fierce with poisoned stings. Above, the growth of many a year, is spread The yellow level of the stonecrop’s bed; In every chink delights the fern to grow, With glossy leaf and tawny bloom below.
The great embankment secured all this from the invasion of the sea, and, winding along the flat sands, formed a delightful walk when the tide was roaring up against it. Here also the male portion of the visiters came to bathe; and, when the tide was up, nothing could be more delicious. They could undress on the sunny sward of the mound at whatever distance from the others they pleased, for there were many miles of the bank; and the waves dashing gently against the grassy slope, received them on a secure and smooth sand, at a depth sufficient to allow them either to wade or swim. They generally, however, undressed near enough to swim or wade in company, and to splash one another and play all manner of practical jokes.
When the tide was out, from this bank you had a view of a great extent of level sands, monotonous enough in themselves, but animated by the view of vessels in full sail passing along the Channel to or from the neighbouring port, and by the flight and cries of the sea-birds. Along these sands we ranged every day to a great distance, collecting shells, leaping the narrow channels of salt water left in the hollows, shooting gulls, watching the shrimps that were floating in the tide, and amusing ourselves with the crabs, which, left in the holes in the strand, were running sideways here and there in great trepidation, yet never so much alarmed as not to be ready to seize and devour those of their own species that were less in personal bulk and prowess than themselves. Then, again, we found a good deal of employment in botanising amongst the patches of sea-wilderness, which were not so often submersed by the tide as to destroy the vegetation altogether, or to produce only fucus and other sea-weeds. The rest-harrow, the eringo with its cerulean leaves, the stag’s horn plantain, the glasswort or common (not the true) samphire--these and many others had all an interest for us. In one place we found the sea-convolvulus blowing in its rich and prodigal beauty on the sands; and then we came to wild hills of sand thrown up by the billows of ages, a whole region of desolation, overgrown with the sea-wheat, and the tall yellow stems and umbels of the wild celery.
Such was the scenery; the people of the cottages were generally fishermen, with their families; and the visiters, farmers and persons of that class, often with their families. At the house opposite us, as I have said, was the merriest crew. My friend the young lawyer was in the habit of running in and out amongst them as he pleased. He proposed that we should go and dine with them, as they had a sort of ordinary table, where you could dine at a fixed and very moderate charge, as all charges indeed were there. Here we found about a dozen people. One, who appeared and proved an old gentleman-farmer, a Mr. Milly, always took the head of the table; and a merrier mortal could not have been there, except he who occupied the other end, a fellow of infinite jest, like Sir John Falstaff, and to the full as corpulent. Who and what he was, I know not, save that he was a most fat and merry fellow, and went by the name of Sir John between the young lawyer, whom I shall call Wilson, and myself. This joyous old gentleman had his wife and son and daughter with him. The son was a young man as fond of a practical joke as his father was of a verbal one; nay, he was not short of a verbal one too, on occasions. He was of a remarkably dark-brown complexion, and on some one asking him how he came to be so dark, when the rest of his family were fair, he at once replied, “Oh, can’t you fancy how that was? It happened when I was a child in the cradle. I got turned on my face, and had like to have been smothered. I got so black in the face, I have never recovered my colour again. My mother can tell you all about it--can’t you mother?” At this repartee, all the company laughed heartily, and truly it was a company that could laugh heartily. They had merry hearts. Then there was a good worthy farmer of the real old school. I was near saying that John Farn was old, but, in fact, he was not more than five-and-thirty, but his gravity gave him an appearance of something like age. He was dressed in a suit of drab, with an ample coat of the good old farmerly cut, and jack-boots like a trooper. But John Farn had a deal of sober sound sense, and a mind that, had it been called out, would have been found noble. I became very fond of John. The rest were young farmers and tradesmen, full of youth and life. They had brought their horses with them, and some of them gigs, and were fond of all mounting and scouring away on the shore for miles together.
The great business, indeed, was to bathe, and eat and drink, and ride or walk, and play at quoits or bowls. If the tide was up early in the morning, all would be up and out, and have their dip before breakfast. Then they would come back hungry as hunters, and devour their coffee, beef, and broiled ham, and shrimps fresh from the cauldron, and then out, some to ride round to have a look at the neighbouring farms, or on the shore to see the fishing smacks go out or come in. Others got to quoits or bowls till dinner; and after a hearty meal and a good long chat, they would slowly saunter up to the hotel, and see what company was there, and take a glass and a pipe with some of them, and see the newspaper, and perhaps have a game at bowls there, and then back to tea; after which they grew very social, and called on the other boarders at the cottages near, and strolled out with the ladies to the bank, which was not far off; and so wiled the time away till supper. Four meals a-day did they regularly sit down to, and enjoy themselves as much as if they had not eaten for a day or two, praising all the time the wonderful property of sea-air for getting an appetite. As sure as shrimps appeared at breakfast, did soles at supper; and after supper one drew out his bottle of wine, and another got his brandy and water, and all grew merry. Those that liked it took a pipe, and it annoyed nobody. There was plenty of joking and laughter, that it would have done the most fastidious good to hear, and as much wit, and perhaps a good deal more, than where there does not exist the same freedom. More jovial evenings I never saw. Wilson gave them a tune on his flute, or took his fiddle; they cleared the floor of the largest room, invited some of the neighbouring visiters who had wives or daughters with them, and had a dance. On such evenings Sir John Falstaff sat in the large bay-window of the apartment for coolness, and wiped his brow and sang his merriest songs. His songs were all merry, and he had a host of them: it was a wonder where he had picked them up. His son often joined him, sometimes his wife and daughter too. It was a merry family. Surely never could care have found a way into their house. Not even the young man’s brown complexion could give him a care; it only furnished him with a joke, and made laughter contagious. Never could the old man have been so fat, had care been able to lay hold on him. The whole of that huge bulk was a mass of rejoicing. How his eyes did shine and twinkle with delight as he sang! what silent laughter played around his mouth, and stole over his ruddy cheeks, like gleams of pleasantest lightning of a summer’s night, as he lifted his glass to his head, and listened to some one else! But, alas! all his mirth was well-nigh closed one day. He was tempted by the fineness of the weather into the tide, contrary to his wont, and his doctor’s order. Some one suddenly missed him; all looked round: at a distance something like a buoy was seen floating; it was Sir John; his fat floated; his head had gone down like a stone; they just pulled him up time enough to save him, but he was blacker in the face than ever his son had been in the cradle, and got a fright that spoiled all his mirth for some days.
But there was a ball at the hotel, and every body was off to it; all except Wilson, who was not well, and myself, who stayed to keep him company. Even grave John Farn, in his drab suit and jackboots, would go. Who would have thought that there was such a taste for pleasure in John Farn? John Farn was very fond of hearing Wilson and myself talk of books. He would come to our cottage, and sit and listen for hours to our conversation, or take up some of our books himself, and read. I perceived that there was an appetite for knowledge in him that had never been called out, because it had had nothing to feed on; but it was clear that it would soon, if it was in the way of aliment and excitement, become fearfully voracious. When he found the name of Dryden in a volume, he declared that he was born in the same parish. He put the book into his pocket, and was missed all that day. Somebody, by chance, saw him issue out of a great reed bed towards evening; he had read the volume through, and declared that he should think ten times better of his parish now for having produced such a man. Who would have thought that John Farn, the Northamptonshire farmer and grazier, and who had lived all his life amongst bullocks, and whose whole talk was of them, would have fastened thus suddenly on a volume of Dryden’s poems? But John used to accompany Wilson and myself, botanising along the shore and the inland dykes; and it was curious to see with what a grave enthusiasm he would climb in his great jack-boots over the roughest fences; how he would leap across those wide dykes; how he would splash through the salt-water pools and streams to tear up a flower or a sea-weed that he wanted; and with what an earnest eye he would look and listen as we mentioned its name, and pointed out its class in the volume, or related its uses! There was an undiscovered world, and a great one, in the soul of that John Farn.
The more I saw of that man, the more I liked him. The stores of yet unstirred life, both of intellect and feeling in his frame, became every day more strongly apparent. He would sit with us on the sea-bank for hours watching the tide come up, or watching its play and the play of light and shadow over it when at flood, and drink down greedily all that was said of this or other countries, all that had in it knowledge of any kind. His whole body seemed full of the joyous excitement of a youth that in years should have passed over him, but was yet unspent, and was now only found. He rose up one day and said, “Let us hire a ship, and sail out to some other country.” At the moment we laughed at the idea, but John Farn persisted with the utmost gravity in his proposal, and eventually we did hire a smack and sailed across to Norfolk. We visited Lynn; walked over the grounds of the school where Eugene Aram was an usher when he was taken for the murder; and nothing but the threatening of the weather would have prevented us crossing over to the Continent. As it was, it was delightful to see the childlike enjoyment with which that grave man saw the breezy expanse of ocean, the fiery colour of its waters as the vessel cut through them in the night, the seals that lay on a mid-sea rock as we sailed along, and the birds of ocean screaming and plunging in its billows.
There was a legion of things in the bosom of John Farn that he knew nothing of all the years that he had been buying and selling cattle, but were now all bursting to the light with a startling vigour. I wonder whether they have since troubled him, like blind giants groping their way to the face of heaven, or whether, amid his cattle and his quiet fields, they have collapsed again into dim and unconscious dreams; but the last action which I witnessed in him, made me sure that his moral feeling was as noble as I suspected his intellectual strength to be great.
There was a robbery at Uriah Sparey’s. Money and other articles were missed from the packages of the guests. The suspicion fell on a servant girl. Great was the stir, the inquiry, and the indignation. Mrs. Uriah Sparey was vehement in her wrath. She insisted that the affair should not be talked of lest it should bring discredit on her house; but to satisfy her guests, she would turn the girl out of it that instant. The girl with tears protested her innocence, but in vain. When she came to open her own box, she declared that she was robbed too. Her wages, and the money given her by visiters, were all gone. Mrs. Sparey exclaimed, that “never did she see such an instance of guilty art as this! The girl to remove from herself the charge of theft, to pretend that she herself was robbed!”
If the girl was guilty, she most admirably affected innocence; if she was of a thievish nature, never did nature so defend vice under the fair shield of virtuous lineaments. All saw and felt this; all had been much pleased with the appearance and behaviour of the girl. Her vows of innocence were now most natural; her tears fell with all the hot vehemence of wronged truth; she earnestly implored that every search and every inquiry should be made, that she might at least regain her character; her money she cared little for. But Mrs. Uriah Sparey only exclaimed, “Minx! get out of my house! I see what you want; you want to fix the theft upon me!” All started at that singular exclamation, and fixed their eyes on Mrs. Sparey; she coloured; but no one spoke. The girl stood weeping by the door. Then said John Earn, “Go home, my girl, go home, and let thy father and mother see into the matter for thee.” At these words, the girl, whose tears were before flowing fast but freely, burst into a sudden paroxysm of sobs and cries, and wrung her hands in agony. “What is the matter?” asked John Farn; “has the poor girl no parents?” “Yes, yes!” she exclaimed, suddenly looking at him, and the tears stopping as if choked in their bed; “but how can I go to them with the name of a thief?” The colour passed from her face, and she laid hold on a chair to save herself from falling. “Mary!” said John Farn, “I will not say who is the thief; but this I say, I will hire thee for a year and a day, and there is a guinea for earnest, and another to pay thy coach fare down. Be at my house in a fortnight, and till then go and see thy mother. Let them call thee thief that dare!” With that he rose up, gave Mary his address, paid his bill to Mrs. Sparey, and marched out of the house with his little round portmanteau under his arm. We all hurried out after him, gave him by turns a hearty rattling shake of the hand as he was about to mount his horse; and that was the last I saw of John Farn. I know no more of him, yet would I, at a venture, rather take the heart of that man, though compelled to take the long drab coat and the jack-boots with it, than that of many a lord with his robes of state, and all his lands and tenements besides.
Such were a few days and their real incidents passed by me at a Rural Watering-place some years ago.
Chapter XI
SPORTS AND PASTIMES OF THE PEOPLE. HISTORY OF THEIR CHANGES, AND PRESENT STATE.
A mighty revolution has taken place in the sports and pastimes of the common people. They, indeed, furnish a certain indication of the real character of a people, and change with the changing spirit of a state. A mighty revolution has taken place in this respect, within the last thirty years, in England, and that entirely produced by the change of feeling, and advance of character. But if we look back through the whole course of English history, we shall find the sports and pastimes of the people taking their form and character from the predominant spirit of the age; in a great measure copied from the amusements and practices of their superiors, and always influenced by them. While the feudal constitution of society prevailed, and chivalry was in vogue, the sports of the common people had a certain chivalric character. They saw jousts and tourneys and feats of archery, and they jousted and tilted, and shot at butts. Tilting at the quintain was, in all the chivalric ages, a popular game. It was a Roman pastime, instituted for military practice, and continued for the same object by the feudal nations; and was adopted by the common people as a favourite game, because both the laws of chivalry and their slender finances prevented them taking part in jousts and tourneys. In Strutt may be found descriptions and quaint illustrative engravings of the various kinds of this game. “The Quintain,” says Strutt, quoting from Vegetius, de re militari, Menestrier and others, “originally, was nothing more than the trunk of a tree, or post set up for the practice of the tyroes in chivalry. Afterwards a staff or spear was fixed in the earth, and a shield being hung upon it, was the mark to strike at; the dexterity of the performance consisted in striking the shield in such a manner as to break the ligatures and bear it to the ground. In process of time this diversion was improved, and instead of the staff and the shield, the resemblance of a human figure, carved in wood, was introduced. To render the appearance of this figure more formidable, it was generally made in the likeness of a Turk, or a Saracen, armed at all points, having a shield upon his left arm, and brandishing a club or a sabre in his right. Hence this exercise was called by the Italians--‘running at the armed man, or at the Saracen.’ The quintain thus fashioned, was placed upon a pivot, and so contrived as to move round with facility. In running at this figure, it was necessary for the tilter to direct his lance with great adroitness, and make his stroke upon the forehead, between the eyes, or upon the nose; for if he struck wide of those parts, especially upon the shield, the quintain turned about with much velocity, and in case he was not exceedingly careful, would give him a severe blow upon the back with the wooden sabre held in the right hand, which was considered as highly disgraceful to the performer, while it excited the laughter and ridicule of the spectators. When many were engaged in running at the Saracen, the conqueror was declared from the number of strokes he had made, and the value of them. For instance, if he struck the image upon the top of the nose between the eyes, it was reckoned for three; if below the eyes upon the nose, for two; if under the nose to the point of the chin, for one; all other strokes were not counted: but, whoever struck upon the shield, and turned the quintain round, was not permitted to run again upon the same day, but forfeited his courses as a punishment for his unskilfulness.” Brande, in his Popular Antiquities, tells us that the Saracen was often armed with a bag of sand instead of a sabre, which came upon the back of the unlucky tilter with such violence as to fling him to the earth with no enviable shock. Various were the quintains, according to the age in which they were used, or the means of the players. In some cases the quintain was merely a common stake with a board fastened to it; in others, it was a post with a cross-bar moving on a pivot, something like a turnstile, with the sand-bag at one end of the bar, and the board, or shield, at the other. In others, it was a water-butt set upon a post, so as to throw its contents over the tilter if he struck it unskilfully. In others, it was a living person holding a shield. There was also the water-quintain. “A pole or a mast,” says Fitzstephen, “is fixed in the midst of the Thames, during the Easter holidays, with a strong shield attached to it; and a boat being previously placed at some distance, is driven swiftly towards it by the force of oars, and the violence of the tide, having a young man standing at the prow, who holds a lance in his hand, with which he is to strike the shield; and if he be dexterous enough to break the lance against it, and retain his place, his most sanguine wishes are satisfied. On the contrary, if the lance be not broken, he is sure to be thrown into the water, and the vessel goes away without him; but, at the same time, two other boats are stationed near to the shield, and furnished with many young persons, who are in readiness to rescue the champion from danger.” It appears to have been a very popular pastime, for the bridge, the wharfs, and the houses near the river, were crowded with people on this occasion, who came, says the author, to see the sports, and make themselves merry.
Running at the quintain continued to be a favourite game till Queen Elizabeth’s time; and was universal throughout the country. Plott, in his History of Oxfordshire, mentions it, and Laneham describes a curious instance of it exhibited at Kenilworth during the entertainment given by the Earl of Leicester to Queen Elizabeth. “There was,” he says, “a solemn country bridal; when in the castle was set up a quintain for feats of arms, where, in a great company of men and lasses, the bridegroom had the first course at the quintain, and broke his spear très hardiment. But his mare in his manage did a little stumble, that much-adoe had his manhood to sit in his saddle. But after the bridegroom had made his course, rose the rest of the band, awhile in some order; but soon after tag and rag, cut and long tail; where the specialty of the sport was to see how some for his slackness had a good bob with the bag, and some for his haste to topple downright, and come tumbling to the post. Some striving so much at the first setting out that it seemed a question between man and beast whether the race should be performed on horseback or on foot; and some put forth with spurs, would run his race byas, among the thickness of the throng, that down they came together, hand over head. Another, while he directed his course to the quintain, his judgment would carry him to a man among the people; another would run and miss the quintain with his staff, and hit the board with his hand.”
Boys imitated this game on their own scale, drawing one another on wooden horses to the quintain, or running at it on foot; and various other rustic exercises were derived from it. Of archery we need not speak, every one knowing how universal it was during the feudal ages; and quarter-staff, quoits, flinging the hammer, pitching the bar, and similar games were the offspring of the same state of society. Playing at ball and at bowls were very ancient and kingly sports, and became general amongst the people. They were ancient classical games, and no doubt were introduced by the Romans into this country. They are mentioned both in the oldest metrical romances, and the oldest of our popular ballads. Tennis courts were common in England in the sixteenth century, and the establishment of such places countenanced by the monarchs. Henry VIII. was a tennis player. Fives courts, and places for the practice of a variety of ball-games,--hand-ball, balloon-ball, stool-ball, principally played at by women; hurling, foot-ball, golf, bandy, stow-ball, pall-mall, club-ball, trap-ball, tip-ball, and that which is now become the prince of English ball-games, cricket.
Another circumstance in the feudal ages, which contributed to promote these and other games, was, that towns were few. The majority of the common people, living in the country; in forests and fields; watching the game, or cultivating the lands, or tending the herds and flocks of their lords, on open downs and wastes, naturally congregated with greater zest in villages after the day’s tasks were over, and entered into amusements with the lightheartedness of children; for they were as ignorant of all other cares, of book-learning, and what was going on in the world at a distance, as children. Hence their social pleasures were of an Arcadian stamp--they danced, they leaped, they wrestled, they kicked the foot-ball, or flung the hand-ball, the quoit, or the bar.
But another circumstance which tended to fashion their amusements was that the feudal ages were also the ages of the Catholic church; a church which delighted to amuse the imaginations of the people with shows, pageants, miracle-plays, and mysteries. The church festivals were all scenes of holiday, feasting, and wonderment. Processions, and representations of the acts and persons of their religious faith, kept them fixed in admiration and insatiable delight. The churches were the first and only theatres. In them all scripture subjects, personages, doctrines, and even opinions were represented, and brought palpably before the wondering people, in mysteries, moralities, and miracle-plays. Things which now would justly be deemed the most revolting blasphemies and desecrations of holy things, were then gravely brought out by the church, for the entertainment and edification of the people. I have already shewn something of this in speaking of the religious festivals, as celebrated in Catholic countries, but we can only see these things in their full growth, by looking back into the middle ages. The theatrical exhibitions of London in the twelfth century were of this kind; representations of the miracles wrought by confessors, and the sufferings of holy martyrs. But these did not suffice. These ecclesiastical actors penetrated into the Holy of Holies, and dared to represent the sacred Trinity before the eyes of the mob. In the mystery called Corpus-Christi, or Coventry-Play, being played in a moveable theatre, by the mendicant friars of Coventry, the Deity himself is represented seated on his throne, delivering a speech commencing thus:
Ego sum de Alpha et Omega, principium et finis. My name is knowyn God and Kynge, My worke for to make now wyl I wende, In myself now resteth my reyninge, It hath no gynnyng, ne noe ende.
The angels then enter, singing from the church service, “To Thee all angels cry aloud, the heavens and all the powers therein; to Thee the cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts.” Lucifer next makes his appearance, and desires to know if the hymn they sang was in honour of God or of himself? The good angels readily reply, in honour of God; the evil angels incline to worship Lucifer, and he presumes to seat himself on the throne of the Deity, who then banishes him into hell.
In the mysteries, the Devil and his angels seem to have been the principal comic actors; and by all kind of noises, strange gestures, and contortions, excited the laughter of the people. At many of these plays the kings and their courts, all the nobility and gentry of the time, as well as the people, would sit with the highest delight, nine hours a day, for six and eight days together. Nay, at the moralities, which were not representations of facts, but moral reasonings and dialogues, carried on by Virtues, Vices, Good Doctrine, Charity, Faith, Prudence, Discretion, Death, and the like, they would sit equally long. The Scotch were as persevering in these amusements as our own ancestors. They are represented as sitting “frae nine houris afoir none till six houris at evin,” at the representation of Sir David Lindsay’s “Satyr of the Three Estates,” and in 1535, in the reign of the accomplished James IV. Here, however, Sir David, the Chaucer of Scotland, had turned the weapons of the church against itself, and through its favourite medium, the drama, uttered the most caustic satire against it from the mouths of Rex Humanitas, Wantonness, Solace, Placebo, Sensualitie, Homeliness, Flattery, Falsehood, Deceit, Chastity, Divine Correction, etc. etc.
Besides the church too, during the feudal times, there were the festivities kept up in the castles and halls at Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and other great days, on which all kinds of pageants, mimings, masks, and frolics, were shewn to their followers and dependents, by the great feudal lords; and their minstrels, mimes, and jesters were made to exert their arts for their gratification. Wandering minstrels and jongleurs went from house to house, and from village to village, following their profession of entertainers of the people. All these things combined to fashion the popular taste, and the popular amusements, and all at the Reformation received their death-blow. It was not, indeed, an instant death, but it was a slow and certain one; for though the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth seemed to carry pageants and tourneys to their climax, the living principle of them was dying out. The Catholic church, the great mother of all festivals and mysteries, was overturned, and in the dispersion of its property the rise of new classes and a new state of things originated; and so far had these causes taken effect in the reign of James I., that he made public proclamation in 1618, that “Whereas, we did justly, in our progress through Lancashire, rebuke some Puritans and precise people, in prohibiting and unlawfully punishing of our good people for using their lawful recreations and honest exercises on Sundays and other holidays after the afternoon service, it is our will that, at the end of Divine service, our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged, from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either for men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other harmless recreation; nor for having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of May-poles, and other sports therewith used.”
But the day was gone by. A new spirit was arisen, and was destined soon to shew itself with overwhelming power. The days of Cromwell and the Puritans were coming, when all these things were to be denounced as popish and heathenish. The spirit and language at that time becoming universally such as that displayed by Thomas Hall, B.D., Pastor of King’s-Norton, in his Funebria Floræ, or the Downfall of May-games in 1660, in which he says, “The city of Rome, in the county of Babylon, has contrary to the peace of our lord, his crown and dignity, brought in a pack of practical fanatics, viz.: ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swashbucklers, maid-marians, morris-dancers, maskes, mummers, May-pole stealers, health-drinkers, gamesters, lewd men, light women, contemners of magistrates, affronters of ministers, rebellious to masters, disobedient to parents, misspenders of time, and abusers of the creature, etc.”
This republican Puritanism, in its genuine style, was now again about to cease, but the effects of it could never be obliterated by subsequent kings. Compare the popular amusements as enumerated by Burton in his “Anatomie of Melancholie,” a short time before the Commonwealth, with those which remained thirty years ago,--the period when they expired nearly altogether, and gave way to a new era. “Cards, dice, hawks, and hounds,” he says, “are the recreations of the gentry; ringing, bowling, shooting, playing with keel-pins, tronks, coits, foot-balls, balowns, running at the quintain, and the like, are the common recreations of country folk. Riding of great horses, running of rings, tilts and tournaments, horse-races and wild-goose chases, are desports of greater men. The country hath its recreations of May-games, feasts, fairs and wakes; both town and country, bull-baitings and bear-baitings, in which the countrymen and citizens greatly delight; dancing of ropes, jugglings, comedies, tragedies, artillery-gardens, and cock-fightings, Whitsun-ales, maskes, jesters, gladiators, and tumblers.”
Thirty years ago, tilts and tournaments had gone after their parent chivalry; archery had fallen before gunpowder; Whitsun-ales had followed many another ecclesiastical merriment; comedies and tragedies had set up their own secular houses apart from the church; and scarcely any of the other amusements were left but bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and similar barbarities. The public mind had become vulgarized and brutalized. The spirit of chivalry, with its pageants and knightly feats, had diffused some sense of grace and graceful emulation amongst the people; the church, amid all its ludicrous shows and absurdities, had conveyed some moral principles; the wandering minstrels had in their lays and ballads excited some feelings of honour, and many a feeling of true nature and homely poetry: but all these sources of inspiration, feeble and mingled with evil as they were, were dried up, and during the long wars of the Hanoverian dynasty the common people seem to have been neglected as rational and immortal beings, and cultivated and educated only as the instruments and the food of war. Accordingly, the minstrels had dwindled into ballad-singers, the jongleurs into jugglers and mountebanks; the Arcadian amusements of the country--May-games, dances on the green, wrestling and leaping, were nearly extinct; and there remained the very characteristic sports of bull-baiting, bear-baiting, badger-baiting, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, and throwing at cocks on Shrove-Tuesday. Bear and bull baitings were games that our queens Elizabeth and Anne had both delighted in, but the more elegant pastimes of those queens and their subjects had fallen into disuetude, the savage and brutal alone remaining. This was natural enough. From the days of Marlborough to those of Wellington, the common people had been bred for the battle-field,--the food of the great European Moloch of war; and the bloody spirit which casts out all the fairer spirits of grace and gaiety, had been purposely and avowedly cherished, as the true English spirit. Who that remembers these times, does not recollect the famous speeches of Wyndham and his colleagues in favour of these brutal sports? Who forgets their prognostics that if this spirit was destroyed, there was an end of our martial ascendency? But the point of time had arrived beyond which this spirit could not endure. The brutal and vulgarized condition of the people flashed on the perception of the middle classes, which amid all the noise of war had been progressing in intelligence and refinement. Robert Raikes and Sunday-schools arose. A better spirit, a better sense of our duties and responsibilities towards the people awoke. It was seen that all over the country the more laudable sports of the village green, and the village wakes, as quoits, nine-pins, skittles, wrestling, leaping, cricket, and the other ball games; will-pegs, jumping in sacks, and other athletic amusements, had lost much of their relish, and were abandoned for the bloody spectacles of the bull-ring and the cock-pit. Attempts were made to counteract this spirit; Parliament was petitioned on the subject, and after the repulse given to these attempts by the senators I have alluded to, nothing was so common as to see the bulls led through the villages adorned with ribbons, and bearing on their necks large placards of--“SANCTIONED BY WYNDHAM AND PARLIAMENT!”
I have before me now a curious specimen of the effect of such doctrines on the minds of those even who are, by national authority, the public teachers of the country, in a little volume published in 1819, by a clergyman of the name of Chafin--“An Account of Cranbourn Chase.” He says, “cockfighting also, in the last century was a favourite diversion, greatly delighted in by persons of all ranks; and there was a nobleman, Lord Albemarle Bertie, who was so fond of the amusement, that he attended cock-pits when he was totally blind. And there were but few gentlemen in the country, who did not keep and breed game cocks, and were very anxious and careful in the breeding of them. Frequent matches were made, and there were cock-pits in almost every village, the remains of which are still visible. To this amusement also Cranbourn Chase contributed, for the cocks bred in it were superior to others, both in shape and make, and, as the feeders name it, handled better when brought to their pens; insomuch that Lord Weymouth, of Longleat, an ancestor of the present Marquis of Bath, for many years had a cock at walk at every lodge in the chase, and the keepers were well rewarded for taking care of them; and when they were brought chickens from Longleat, annually, each game cock was accompanied with two dunghill hens, which became the perquisite of the keeper when the cock was taken away. But in our days of refinement, this amusement of cock-fighting hath been exploded, and, in a great measure, abandoned, being deemed to be barbarous and cruel; but in this respect the writer thinks differently, and believes it to be the least so of any diversions now in vogue, and nothing equal as to cruelty, to horse-racing, in which poor animals are involuntarily forced against their nature to performances against their strength, with whips and spurs, which, in jockey phrase, is styled cutting up. But in fighting of cocks the case is totally different; for, instead of a force against nature, it is an indulgence of natural propensities; for cocks at their walks, and at full liberty, will seek each other for battle as far as they can hear each other’s crowing; and the arming them with artificial weapons, when they are brought in the pit to fight, is the very reverse of cruelty, for the contest is sooner ended, and sufferings trifling, in comparison to what they would have been had they fought with their own natural weapons, by lacerating their bodies, and bruising each other in every tender part.”
Now, to feel the full force of the Rev. William Chafin’s notion of a game that is the least cruel of any diversions now in vogue, it is necessary to consider that these cocks are stimulated to contest by heating food and artificial contrivances, such as keeping them within the sight or crow of their rivals; that they are then clipped almost bare of feathers; the feathers are clipped off their stomachs; their heads cut clean of their wattles; their wings and tails cut short and square; that they are, in fact, metamorphosed from the most gallant-looking of birds into the most bare, comical, quaint, and strutting objects in nature, I was going to say; but they are put out of all nature, and are, lastly, armed with steel or silver spurs of an inch long, sharp as needles. With these they kick and pierce each other, “lacerating their bodies, and bruising each other in every tender part;” fighting till their heads are all one mass of gore; till they are often stark blind, and go staggering about like drunken men, till one has the luck to strike the other clean through the head with his artificial spur. This is a game which a clergyman, a teacher of Christianity, could by custom come to think “the least cruel of all the diversions now in vogue.” It is impossible to produce more striking evidence of the effect of a familiarity with cruelty. It is just by the same process that men come to approve of war and slavery. God be praised that all these bloody sports are gone for ever from the soil of England. That bull, bear, and badger baiting, have all, after many a hard contest, been eventually put down; that for some years, so much has the mind of the common people been raised and softened, there have scarcely been any cock-fighters, except noblemen and gentlemen, whose cock-pits have been the nuisances of their neighbourhoods, and their game-cock caravans, travelling from place to place with these cocks, have offended the public eye. It is a satisfaction to record that in the year 1835, even this brutal game was made illegal by Act of Parliament, and that through the exertions of Joseph Pease, the only member of Parliament who is a member of the Society of Friends.
Since these atrocities have been exploded, their place has not been supplied by an equal number of more commendable amusements. The people of large towns, in particular, have not substituted a sufficient equivalent. Politics and alehouses seem, till lately, to have furnished their sole stimulants. There appears to have been a pause in that important portion of human life, amusement, so far as the common people are concerned; but it has been in appearance only. One of the greatest changes that ever took place in human society, has been in this interval maturing;--the change from the last stage of worn-out feudalism to the commencement of the era of social regeneration;--a change from a system in which the largest portion of mankind was regarded but as the instruments of the luxury and revenge of the wealthy few,--to one in which every part of the human family will be recognised as possessing the same nature, and worthy of enjoying the same domestic and intellectual blessings;--a change, in fact, from Gentilism to Christianity; from the condition in which the great of the earth lorded it over the poor, to that in which the common sympathies of our nature will be honoured and obeyed; and a career of intelligence, benevolence, and mutual good-will and good works will begin, to end in a prosperity beyond our present imagination. And already what symptoms of this better state of things break upon us! What schools, and Mechanics’ Libraries and Institutes; what Friendly Societies, and plans on the part of the wealthy for the benefit of the poor. For amusements there has been no time. All workers, both in town and country, have been compelled to plod on solemnly and half-despairingly from day to day, and from year to year. But pleasures of a higher order, and more akin to genuine happiness,--social pleasures and pleasures of the intellect, will open upon and grow upon our more numerous brethren of the operative class. They will find pleasures in books--boundless, unimagined, inexhaustible, inexpressible pleasures;--pleasures in their wives and children, pleasures in their firesides, and in the glorious face of nature, which have hitherto been unknown to their eyes and hearts, sealed up in the frost of ignorance and the contempt of the proud. And already we see the commencement of that new order of pastimes which will assuredly result from this new order of mind. In the country, indeed, you find with pleasure occasionally, in some old-fashioned hamlet, the villagers and farm-servants in an evening tossing the quoit, that relic of the ancient discus; bowling, or playing at skittles; but rustics, in general, look to wakes and fairs for amusement; and yet at wakes you do not see half the sports there used to be,--as running, leaping, jumping in sacks; or aiming at the snuff-boxes balanced on the will-pegs; and where these games do remain, they are too frequently attached to alehouses, and made gambling baits of. But, in town and country, it is the noble, and as Miss Mitford, the fair historian of rural life, justly calls it, the true English game of cricket, which shews whither the mind of the people is tending, and what will be the future character of English popular sports.
This game seems to have absorbed into itself every other kind of ball-game, trap-ball, tip-cat, or foot-ball. Foot-ball, indeed, seems to have almost gone out of use with the enclosure of wastes and commons, requiring a wide space for its exercise; but far and wide is spread the love of cricketing, and it may now be safely ranked as the prince of English athletic games. I will here describe a match of this fine sport, which was played on the 7th and 9th of September 1835, between the Sussex and the Nottingham Club, and the thoughts which it produced in me at the time.
The Nottingham Club challenged the Sussex to a match for fifty guineas a-side; and played first at Brighton, where the Sussex men were beaten, who then went to play the Nottingham men on their own ground. The match commenced on Monday, September 7th, and was finished on Wednesday the 9th, about half-past four o’clock. Tuesday having been a wet day, there was no playing. The Nottingham men beat again, having three wickets to go down. A more animating sight of the kind never was seen.
On Sunday morning early, we saw a crowd going up the street, and immediately perceived that, in the centre of it, were the Sussex cricketers, just arrived by the London coach, and going to an inn kept by one of the Nottingham cricketers. They looked exceedingly interesting, being a very fine set of fellows, in their white hats, and with all their trunks, carpet-bags, and cloaks, coming, as we verily believed, to be beaten. Our interest was strongly excited; and on Monday morning we set off to the cricket-ground, which lies about a mile from the town, in the Forest, as it is still called, though not a tree is left upon it,--a long, furzy common, crowned at the top by about twenty windmills, and descending in a steep slope to a fine level, round which the race-course runs. Within the race-course lies the cricket-ground, which was enclosed at each end with booths; and all up the forest-hill were scattered booths, and tents with flags flying, fires burning, pots boiling, ale-barrels standing, and asses, carts, and people bringing still more good things. There were plenty of apple and ginger-beer stalls; and lads going round with nuts and with waggish looks, crying--“nuts, lads! nuts, lads!” In little hollows the nine-pin and will-peg men had fixed themselves, to occupy loiterers; and, in short, there was all the appearance of a fair.
Standing at the farther side of the cricket-ground, it gave me the most vivid idea possible of an amphitheatre filled with people. In fact, it was an amphitheatre. Along each side of the ground ran a bank sloping down to it, and it, and the booths and tents at the ends were occupied with a dense mass of people, all as silent as the ground beneath them; and all up the hill were groups, and on the race-stand an eager, forward-leaning throng. There were said to be twenty thousand people, all hushed as death, except when some exploit of the players produced a thunder of applause. The playing was beautiful. Mr. Ward, late member of Parliament for London, a great cricket-player, came from the Isle of Wight to see the game, and declared himself highly delighted. But nothing was so beautiful as the sudden shout, the rush, and breaking up of the crowd, when the last decisive match was gained. To see the scorers suddenly snatch up their chairs, and run off with them towards the players’ tent; to see the bat of Bart Goode, the batsman on whom the fate of the game depended, spinning up in the air, where he had sent it in the ecstasy of the moment; and the crowd, that the instant before was fixed and silent as the world itself, spreading all over the green space where the white figures of the players had till then been so gravely and apparently calmly contending,--spreading with a murmur as of the sea; and over their heads, amid the deafening clamour and confusion, the carrier-pigeon with a red ribbon tied to its tail, the signal of loss, beating round and round as to ascertain its precise position, and then flying off to bear the tidings to Brighton,--it was a beautiful sight, and one that the most sedate person must have delighted to see.
My thoughts on such occasions overpass the things moving before me, and run on into consequences; and I could not help feeling what a great change the last thirty years had produced in the mind, taste, feeling, and moral character of our working population. What a wide difference was here presented, to the rude rabbles formerly assembled to the most barbarous and blackguard amusements imaginable. Why this is a near approach to the athletic games of the Greeks; and no Greek crowd could have behaved with more order and propriety, and evincing an intense interest, excited not by any vulgar and unworthy cause, but by a fine trial of skill and activity between their townsmen and their countrymen of a distant county. Such an interest, arising out of such an emulation, not only shews a great progression of the public taste, but will wonderfully promote that progression. Here, if we have been disappointed in many other instances, we see the actual and legitimate effect of general education. It is because the general mind is quickened, raised, and made capable of more refined impulses, that twenty thousand people can now sit, day after day, to witness a contest of manly activity and pure skill, and enjoy a high delight without drunkenness and brutal rows. Never was a more respectable collection of people seen; and although there were plenty of booths and tents well supplied with all sorts of eatables and drinkables, and a good many took a necessary refreshment, or a comfortable glass and a pipe, as they sat and looked on, at the time we left there were no symptoms of drunkenness, but a sight the most gratifying imaginable--thousands of poor workmen streaming off homewards the moment the game was over, many of them with their children, wives, or sweethearts.
I say, therefore, that my thoughts ran on into consequences, and I saw, in prospect, the great good which this better taste for amusement, this purer species of emulation will produce. It is a beautiful sight to see men coming from a distant part of England to contend in a noble gymnastic exercise with those of another part of the country; and the spirit of generous rivalry thus is spread wider and wider. You see while a match is impending, what numbers of cricket-players are out in the fields, from grown men to boys that can but just wield the lightest bat. You see, even while the great game is going on, boys playing their lesser games in the outskirts of the crowd; and when the match is decided, the spirit is kindled and diffused farther than ever, by the warm discussions of the various merits of the players, and the glory acquired by the best.
This is a spirit which deserves the attention both of the public and the legislature, and if ever we come to see public grounds appropriated to every large town for such exercises, as has been proposed in Parliament by Mr. Buckingham, then not merely cricket but kindred sports will be pursued, quoits, nine-pins, bowls, archery, leaping, and running; all having a direct tendency to strengthen the body and quicken the mind; to counteract both the physical and moral poisons of crowded factories and thickly-populated towns.
It may, indeed, be objected, that all such games would lead to betting; but are we to shrink from every useful measure through fear of its abuse? I say fearlessly, let us set the brand of public abhorrence on such a practice, boldly and firmly, and the practice will disappear. It is not long since the brutal practice of boxing had become a mania, and seemed to set all public censure at defiance, but it did but seem--public censure put it down. Let the higher classes too sanction these laudable exercises by their presence as a public duty, and the British people will, in my opinion, in coming years, exhibit scenes of beautiful skill, activity, and grace, as imposing as Greece ever saw. In the instance here selected, the two most obvious circumstances were,--first, the absence of the higher classes, especially of the ladies; and secondly, the most perfect and admirable decorum of the people.
XII. WRESTLING
We must not close this department of our subject without saying a word or two on wrestling. This exercise, which at one time was almost universal, is now, like many others, fallen into general disuse; and is confined almost entirely to Cornwall and Devon in the west, and the counties of Chester, Lancaster, Cumberland, and Westmoreland in the north. These counties, indeed, have always been pre-eminent in the science of wrestling, and have possessed practices peculiar to themselves. Formerly, the citizens of London were great wrestlers. Stow tells us, that in the month of August, about the feast of St. Bartholomew, there were divers days spent in wrestling. The lord mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs being present, in a large tent pitched for that purpose, near Clerkenwell; the officers of the city, namely, the sheriffs, sergeants, and yeomen; the porters of the king’s beam, or weighing-house, etc., gave a general challenge to such of the inhabitants of the suburbs as thought themselves expert in this exercise. In Sewell’s History of the Society of Friends, a curious circumstance is recorded connected with this taste of the Londoners for wrestling. Edward Burrough, a young and enthusiastic preacher in that society, which then was newly formed, seeing a ring made for a wrestling match in some part of the city where he was passing, and a man in it awaiting the acceptance of his challenge by some one, suddenly stepped into it, to the great amazement both of the champion and the spectators, “who,” say the historian, “instead of some light and airy person, seeing a grave and awful young man,” were utterly posed and confounded; and the eloquent and zealous minister, taking advantage of this surprise, told them he was prepared for a contest, but of another sort to what they were looking for; and forthwith gave them such a sermon in his fiery and vehement style of eloquence, which had gained him the name of Boanerges, or the Son of Thunder, as wonderfully quieted them down, and sent them away in a solemn frame of mind.
This wrestling spirit, however, appears to have vanished for a long period from London as well as the country, and to have been only of late years revived by the West of England, and the Westmoreland, and Cumberland Clubs. These have drawn together great numbers; the spectators at the anniversary display of the Westmoreland club at Chalk-Farm, in the spring of 1837, being about 8000.
Sir Thomas Parkyn, of Bunny Park, in Nottinghamshire, who was a zealous advocate and patron of wrestling, gave an annual prize for the best wrestler, and ordered the continuance of the same in his will; but it would not take root there, and the only remaining traces of his endeavour are, his book on the Cornish Hug, and his effigy in a niche in Bunny church, in the attitude in which a wrestler receives his antagonist, with his favourite title of Thomas Luctator inscribed over his head.
It is singular that in the two extremities of the country, where wrestling maintains its ancient popularity, adjoining counties, whose rivalry, no doubt, keeps alive the interest in it, should maintain such opposite practices. In some of the northern counties, kicking is allowed, in others it is not. In Devon, kicking shins is a great part of the game; in Cornwall it forms no part of it. Lancashire is famous for its cross-buttock, and Cornwall for its hug. Cornwall and Devon, however, possess unquestionably the pre-eminence in this ancient art, an art which held an eminent rank in the Olympic games of Greece. “The Cornish,” says Fuller, “are masters of the art of wrestling, so that if the Olympian Games were now in fashion, they would come away with the victory. Their hug is a crowning close with their fellow combatant, the fruits whereof is his fair fall, or foil at the least.” “They learn the art,” says Carew, “early in life, for you shall hardly find an assembly of boys in Devon and Cornwall, where the untowardly among them will not as readily give you a muster of this exercise, as you are prone to require it.”
A writer in Hone’s Every-Day Book, in 1828, says, “No kicks are allowed in Cornwall except the players who are in the ring mutually agree to it. A hat is thrown in as a challenge, which being accepted by another, the combatants strip, and put on a coarse loose kind of jacket, of which they take hold, and of nothing else. Play then commences. To constitute a fair fall, both shoulders must touch the ground at or nearly the same moment. To guard against foul play, to decide on the falls, and manage the affairs of the day, four or six STICKLERS, as the umpires are called, are chosen, to whom all these matters are left. Wrestling thrives in the eastern part of Cornwall, particularly about Saint Austle and Saint Columb. At the latter place, resides Polkinhorne, the champion of Cornwall, and by many considered entitled to the championship of the four western counties; Cann, the Devonshire champion, having declined to meet him, Polkinhorne has not practised wrestling for several years past, while Cann has carried off the prize at every place in Devon that he shewed at. They certainly are both good ones. Parkins, a friend of Polkinhorne’s, is a famous hand at these games; and so was Warner of Redruth, till disabled in February 1825, by over-exertion on board the Cambria brig, bound for Mexico.”
This writer proceeds to state that John Knill, Esq. bequeathed the income of an estate to be given in various prizes for racing, rowing, and wrestling; these games to be held every fifth year for ever; and that the first was celebrated in July 1801, around a mausoleum which he erected in his lifetime on a high rock near St. Ives. “Early in the morning, the roads from Helston, Truro, and Penzance, were lined with horses and vehicles of every description, while thousands of travellers on foot poured in from all quarters till noon, when the assembly formed. The wrestlers entered the ring; a troop of virgins dressed in white, danced and chanted a hymn composed for the occasion; the spectators ranged themselves along the hills, and, at length, the mayor of St. Ives appeared in his robes of state. The signal was given; the flags were displayed from the towers of the castle; here the wrestlers exerted their sinewy strength; here the rowers dashed through the waves, and the songs of the damsels added delight to the scene. A dinner and ball at the Union Hotel concluded the day. The games were again celebrated in 1806, 1811, 1816, and 1821, with increased favour and admiration.”
So much for Cornish play; that of Devon, I have already said, is of a different kind. The Devon wrestlers don’t practice the hug, but kick shins dreadfully. For this purpose they have their shoes armed with iron, and before going into the ring, they wrap up their legs with numerous folds of carpeting to defend themselves from the violence of the kicks. “The Devonshire men,” says the same writer, who professes to be of neither county, and to admire the champions of both, “have no under-play, nor have they one heaver. Visit a Devon ring, and you will wait a tedious time after a man is thrown ere another appear. After undergoing the necessary preparation for a good kicking, he enters, and shakes his adversary by the hand, and kicks, and lays hold when he can get a fit opportunity. If he is conscious of superior strength, he goes to work, and by force of arm wrests his opponent off his legs, and lays him flat; or if too heavy for this, he carries him round by the hip. But when the men find that they are ‘much of a muchness,’ it is really tiresome; caution is the word, and the hardest shoe, and the best kicker, carries it. I have seen in Cornwall more persons at these games when the prize has been a gold-laced hat, a waistcoat, or a pair of gloves, than ever attend the sports in Devon, where the prizes are liberal, for they don’t like to be kicked for a trifle; or even at the famed meetings of later days in London, at the Eagle in the City-Road, or the Golden Eagle in Mile-End. How is this? Why, in the latter places, six, eight, and at farthest twelve standards, are as much as a day’s play will admit of; while in Cornwall I have seen forty made in one day. At Penzance, on Monday, 24th ultimo, thirty standards were made, and the match concluded the day following. In Devon, what with the heavy shoes, and thick padding, and time lost in equipment and kicking, half that number cannot be made in a day. I have frequently seen men obliged to leave the ring, and abandon the chance of a prize, owing solely to hurts they have received by kicks from the knee downwards; nay, I have seen Cann’s brothers, or relations, obliged to do so. To the eye of a beholder unacquainted with wrestling, the Cornish mode must appear as play; that of Devon--barbarous. It is an indisputable fact that no Cornish wrestler of any note ever frequents the games in Devon, and that whenever those from Devon have played in Cornwall, they have been thrown--Jordans by Parkins, and so on.”
I think any person not of Devon must give the preference to the play of Cornwall as more scientific and less savage; but before we proceed to compare the rival champions, let us give a little more display of the Devonshire men by an eye-witness in 1820, who has related his visit to the ring at Exmouth, in the London Magazine, with a great feeling of enjoyment. He was told one morning that there was going to be a wrestling, and that “the Canns would be there; and young Brockenden; and Thorne, from Dawlish; and the men from the moors!” This excited his imagination; as well it might, for there is something about the names of these men, the Canns, the Brockendens, the Widdicombs of the moors, that has a wild, grim, and wrestlerish sound; and accords well with those grey, ancient, and romantic moorlands of the western regions of our island. On approaching the ring he found a champion in it. “He was a young man of extremely prepossessing appearance, stripped to the shirt, and enclothed with the linen jacket with a green cock on the back, which I have noticed to be the customary garment. His figure, which in its country garb had not particularly impressed me with its size or strength, now struck me as highly powerful, compact, and beautiful. His limbs were well grown, and strongly set--yet rather slight than otherwise--and his body was easy, slim, and yet peculiarly expressive of power. The fronts of his legs from the knee to the ankle, were armed with thick carpeting, to protect them from the kicks of his antagonist; and even this strange armour did not give to his person the appearance of clumsiness. His neck was bare, and certainly very fine;--but the shape of his head struck me as being the most expressive and poetical (I use the term under correction) I had for a long time beheld--being set off, I conceive, by the way in which his hair was arranged;--and this was dark, hanging in thick snakish curls on each side of his forehead, and down the back part of his head: add to all this, a handsome, melancholy, thin countenance, and you will have at once some idea of the young man who now stood before me. I turned to a countryman near me, and inquired who this youth might be, whose undaunted mien and comely port had so taken my favour captive. ‘Who is that?’ said the man, with a tone of surprise, accompanied with a look of profound pity at my ignorance--‘why, one of the Canns to be sure!’” But we will pass over the first day’s play, and come to the evening of the second day’s play. “The first shout of the master of the revels was--‘The younger Cann, and Widdicomb of the Moors!’ and this was received with a low murmur, and a deep interest which almost smothered sound. The younger Cann was the stoutest of the brotherhood, finely formed and fair-haired. He stripped and accoutred himself immediately: his brothers assisting in buckling his leg-armour and fastening his jacket. There was evidently a great anxiety in this group, but still the utmost confidence in ultimate success; and I could not help taking part in the interest of the brothers, and at the same time entertaining a full share of their faith in their champion’s triumph. ‘And who,’ said I to a neighbour, ‘are these Canns?’ ‘They are farmers; and there are five brothers, all excellent wrestlers; but you only see three here to-night.’ But the fine young wrestler stepped into the ring, and our conversation ceased.
“The moon was now very clear, full, and bright; and its light fell upon the noble person of Cann, and shewed every curl of his hair. The Moor-man soon joined him--prepared for the conflict. He was a giant in size, and from what I gathered around me, a man of most savage nature. The popular feeling was painfully on Cann’s side. After the cup had been pledged, the opponents seized each other with an iron grasp. Cann stood boldly, but cautiously up, as conscious that he had much to do; and the Moorman opposed him resolutely and grandly. The struggle was immediate; and Cann, with one terrific wrench, threw his antagonist to the earth; but he fell so doubtfully on his shoulder, that it seemed uncertain whether he would fall on his back, which is necessary to victory, or recover himself by rolling on his face. Cann looked proudly down upon him, and saw him by a miraculous strain, which resembled that of a Titan in pain, save the fall, by wrenching himself down on his face. His shoulder and side were soiled--but he was not deemed vanquished.
“By the order of the umpires the struggle was renewed, when owing, as I conceived, to the slippery state of the grass, Cann fell on his knees, and the Moor-man instantly hurled him on his back. All was uproar and confusion--but Cann was declared to have received a fall--and gloom spread itself over all! He could not be convinced of the justice of his judges--a common case when the verdict is adverse--and it was in real pain of spirit that he pulled off the jacket.
“Young Brockenden followed next, with another man from the Moors; and he received a doubtful fall, which was much cavilled at, but which the judges, nevertheless, gave against him. It now grew late, and the clouds thickened around, so that the wrestlers could scarcely be perceived. I left the sports somewhat unwillingly; but I could not distinguish the parties, and in truth, I was dispirited at my favourite’s being foiled. I heard that the brother Canns retrieved the fame of the family--but the darkness of the night, and the state of the grass, gave no chance, either to the spectators or to the wrestlers. In the morning, the ring, the awning, the scaffolding--had vanished; and the young fellows had separated; the Canns to their farms--the men to the moors.”
Having now taken a peep at both the Cornish and Devonshire men, let us bring them into contact. In 1826, at the Eagle-Tavern Green, City-Road, several matches took place between Devonshire and Cornish men, on the 19th, 20th, and 21st of September. The following exhibition of the struggle between Abraham Cann, the champion of Dartmoor, and Warren of Cornwall, is equal to a bass-relief from a Grecian frieze, and gives a most graphic view of the systems of the two counties. It is from the London Magazine, and evidently by the same writer.
“The contest between Abraham Cann and Warren not only displayed this difference of style, but was attended with a degree of suspense between skill and strength, that rendered it extremely interesting. The former, who is a son of a Devonshire farmer, has been backed against any man in England for 500_l._ His figure is of the finest athletic proportions, and his arm realizes the muscularity of ancient specimens. His power in it is surprising: his hold is like that of a vice, and with ease he can pinion the arms of the strongest adversary, if he once grips them, and keep them as close together, or as far asunder, as he chooses. He stands with his legs apart, his body quite upright, looking down good-humouredly on his crouching opponent. In this instance, his opponent, Warren, a miner, was a man of superior size, and of amazing strength, not so well distributed, however, throughout his frame: his arms and body being too lengthy in proportion to their bulk. His visage was harsh beyond measure, and he did not disdain to use a little craft with eye and hand, in order to distract his enemy’s attention. But he had to deal with a man as collected as ever entered a ring. Cann put in his hand as quietly as if he were going to seize a shy horse, and at length, caught a slight hold between finger and thumb of Warren’s sleeve. At this Warren flung away with the impetuosity of a surprised horse. But it was in vain; there was no escape from Cann’s pinch, so the miner seized his adversary in his turn, and at length both of them grappled each other by the arm and the breast of the jacket. In a trice Cann tripped his opponent with the toe in a most scientific but ineffectual manner, throwing him clean to the ground, but not on his back, as required. The second heat began similarly. Warren stooped more, so as to keep his legs out of Cann’s reach, who punished him for it by several kicks below the knee, which must have told severely if his shoes had been on, after his country’s fashion. They shook each other rudely--strained knee to knee--forced each other’s shoulders down, so as to overbalance the body--but all ineffectually. They seemed to be quite secure from each other’s efforts, as long as they held by the arm and breast-collar, as ordinary wrestlers do. A new grip was to be effected. Cann liberated one arm of his adversary, to seize him by the cape behind; at that instant, Warren, profiting by his inclined posture and his long arm, threw himself round the body of the Devon champion, and fairly lifted him a foot from the ground, clutching him in his arms with the grasp of a second Antæus. The Cornish men shouted aloud, ‘Well done, Warren!’ to their hero, whose naturally pale visage glowed with the hope of success. He seemed to have his opponent at his will, and to be fit to fling him, as Hercules flung Lycas, any how he pleased. Devonshire then trembled for its champion, and was mute. Indeed it was a moment of heart-quaking suspense. But Cann was not daunted; his countenance expressed anxiety, but not discomfiture. He was off terra firma, clasped in the embrace of a powerful man, who waited but a single struggle of his, to pitch him more effectually from him to the ground. Without straining to disengage himself, Cann with unimaginable dexterity, glued his back firmly to his opponent’s chest, lacing his feet round the other’s knee-joints, and throwing one arm backward over Warren’s shoulders so as to keep his own enormous shoulders pressed upon the breast of his uplifter. In this position they stood, at least twenty seconds, each labouring in one continuous strain, to bend the other, one forward, the other backwards. Such a struggle could not last. Warren, with the might of the other upon his stomach and chest, felt his balance almost gone, as the energetic movements of his countenance indicated. His feet too were motionless, by the coil of his adversary’s legs round his; so, to save himself from falling backward, he stiffened his whole body from the ankles upwards, and these last being the only liberated joints, he inclined forward from them, so as to project both bodies, and prostrate them in one column to the ground together. It was like the slow and poising fall of an undermined tower. You had time to contemplate the injury which Cann, the undermost, would sustain, if they fell in that solid, unbending posture to the earth. But Cann ceased bearing upon the spine as soon as he found his supporter going in an adverse direction. With a presence of mind unrateable, he relaxed his strain upon one of his adversary’s stretched legs, forcing the other outwards with all the might of his foot, and pressing his elbow on the opposite shoulder. This was sufficient to whisk his man undermost the instant he unstiffened his knee--which Warren did not do till more than half-way to the ground, when from the acquired rapidity of the falling bodies, nothing was discernible. At the end of the fall, Warren was seen sprawling on his back, and Cann, whom he had liberated to save himself, had been thrown a few yards off, on all fours. Of course the victory should have been adjudged to this last. When the partial referee was appealed to, he decided that it was not a fair fall, as only one shoulder had bulged the ground, though there was evidence on the back of Warren that both had touched it pretty rudely. After much debating, a new referee was appointed, and the old one expelled: when the candidates again entered the lists. The crowning beauty of the whole was, that the second fall was precisely a counterpart of the first. Warren made the same move, only lifting his antagonist higher, with the view to throw the upper part of his frame out of play. Cann turned himself exactly in the same manner, using much greater effort than before, and apparently more put to it by his opponent’s great strength. His share, however, in upsetting his supporter was greater this time, as he relaxed one leg much sooner, and adhered closer to the chest during the fall; for at the close he was seen uppermost, still coiled round his massive adversary, who admitted the fall, starting up, and offering his hand to the victor.”
Since then Polkinhorne of St. Columb has encountered Cann, and thrown him, and is, or was, the acknowledged champion of the West. He is the keeper of the principal inn at St. Columb, where I on one occasion stopped, having shortly before taken a halfpenny ticket from his dethroned rival, Cann of Dartmoor, at the foot-bridge between Plymouth and Devonport, where he was, if he be not yet, stationed.