3 ^ ^'t'AiJVfian-^ '?//( ''^ao: ■C. It T 5 V ^^ ^. -^^':i]/\INi1 ]\\V' ^^AliVJiaillV^ ^9 ^ ^OFCALI FO/?^^ ,-i,OFCALl F0%^ c^- ^Ei — n o c^ M ,^1 rtl^ Kf. ^l-UBRARYfl/ § 1 '\ < • ' - — , ^lOSANCFlfx^ ' o 'V/cuTAiMn.iviV/' OLD COUNTRY LIFE. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. HISTORIC ODDITIES AND STRANGE EVENTS. Demy 8vo, los. bd. [J"^( published. ARMINELL : A Social Romance. 3 vols., crown 8vo. ^Noiv ready. SONGS OF THE WEST; Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of Devon and Cornwall, with their Traditional Melodies, by Rev. S. Baring Gould, M.A., and Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard, M.A., arranged for voice and pianoforte. Parts I. and II., 35. each, net. Parts III. and IV. in-preparatiou. STRANGE SURVIVALS AND POPULAR SUPER- STITIONS. [In Preparation. YORKSHIRE ODDITIES. New and Cheaper Edition. [//; the Press. ■s- (A^ \j' OLD COUNTRY LIFE BV S. BARING GOULD, M.A. AUTHOR OK " MKHALAH," "JOHN HICKKING," ICTC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. PARKINSON, F. D. BEDFORD, AND F. MASKV LONDON : METHUEN AND CO., iS, BURY STREET, W.C. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott Company. 1890. [^/•e flight jf repVaciMcti'iii, 'is njervttf.\' \ < ■ \ ^ 1 « • J. 5 ) > RtCHARD Cl.AY & So\'S, LiMITKD, London & Bungay. ^c c, tec cc ctccccccc c c c c c c CONTENTS. CHAP. I. Old County Families i'A(;e I II. The Last Squire ... ... ... 28 III. Country Houses ... • 53 IV. The Old Garden ... •• 93 V. The Country Parson .. 116 VI. The Hunting Parson .. 146 VII. Country Dances ... ■• 174 VIII. Old Roads .. 198 IX. P'amily Portraits ... 219 X. The Village Musician ■ 239 XL The Village Eard ... 259 XII. Old Servants ... 284 XIII. The Hunt ••• 315 XIV. The County Town •• 334 455033 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Head and tail tieces to each chapter by F. D. Bedford. Country Dance — Frontispiece Oi.D Dames with their Factotum Butler . Sydenham House, Devon , WoRTHAM — An Empty Shell Grimstone Madame Grym Gryms, a Group of Courtyard, Little Hempston House at Little Hempston \VlLLS\VORTHY Plan Kew Palace Tonacombe, North Cornwall A Parlour Fireplace Garden from Tapestry Flaxley, from a print of 1714 A Town House Garden Front, Launceston . Old Country Parsonage, Bratton-Clovelly ,, ,, Parson in Cassock Parson Chowne and Sally's Young Man Hippoclides before Clisthenes »j *» F. Masey IV. Parkinson 5 7 ,, ,, 29 ]V. Parkinson 33 From painting 36 F. PJasey 57 „ „ 58 F. B. Bond 59 60 F. Masey 63 ,, ,, 68 F. B. Bond 73 98 F. D. Bedford ico F. Masey 107 F. D. Bedford 121 W. Parkinson 133 164 175 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Minuet being Danced Packman's Way By the Roadside ... An Old Travelling Carriage Sir Edward, a.d. 1668 .. ' N. A.D. 1888 Lady North cote Lady Young Old Church Orchestra James Olver John Helmore Richard Hard The Old Eutler The Hunt Passing South Gate, Launceston Cottages at Woking London Inn, Launceston dockacre, ,, ,, House at Launceston Old Cart, Slate Quarry, Lew Trenchard PAGE W. Parkinson 196 F. D. Bedford 204 >> >> 207 F. Masey 214 J. D. Cooper 227 ) » M 227 F. D. Bedford 232 )> )) 232 W. Parkinson 243 Fran photo 257 F. D. Bedford 278 I) >> 279 W. Parkinson 2S5 >! >> 316 F. Masey 335 •)■> ) » 339 : » M 343 >! !1 349 J > 3 J 353 F. D. Bedford 358 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. CHAPTER I. OLD COUNTY FAMILIES, Lilil WONDER wliether the day will ever dawn on England when our country houses will be as deserted as are those in France and Germany ? If so, that will be a sad day for England. I judge from Germany. There, after the Thirty Years' War, the nobles and gentry B 2 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. set-to to build themselves mansions in place of the castles that had been burnt or battered down. In them they lived till the great convulsion that shook Europe and upset existing conditions social as well as political. Napoleon overran Germany, and the nobles and gentry had not recovered their losses during that terrible period before the State took advantage of their condition to transfer the land to the peasantry. This was not done everywhere, but it was so to a large extent in the south. Money was advanced to the farmers to buy out their landlords, and the impoverished nobility were in most cases glad to sell. They disposed of the bulk of their land, retaining in some cases the ancestral nest, and that only. No doubt that the results were good in one way — but where is a good unmixed ? The qualifying evil is considerable in this case. The gentry or nobilitv — the terms are the same on the Continent — went to live in the towns. They could no longer afford to inhabit their country mansions. They acquired a taste for town life, its conveniences, its distractions, its amusements ; they ceased to feel interest in countr^^ pursuits ; they only visited their mansions for about eight weeks in the year, for the Sommer-fri&che. Those who could not afford to furnish OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 3 two houses, carted that amount of furniture which was absolutely necessary to their country houses for the holiday, and that concluded, carted it back to town again. This state of things continues. Whilst the family is in residence at the Schloss it lives economically ; it is there for a little holiday ; it does not concern itself with the peasants, the sick, the suffering, the necessitous. It is there — pour samu.ser. The consequence is that the Schloss is without a civilizing influence, without moral force in the place. The country folk have little interest in the family, and the family concerns itself less with the people. Not only so, but it brings little money into the place. It employs no labour. It is there not to keep open house, but to shut up the purse. In former days the landlord exacted his rents, but then he lived in the midst of his tenants, and the money that came in as rent went out as wage, and in payment for butter, eggs, meat, oats, and hay. The money collected out of a place returned to it again. It is so in many country places in England now where squire and parson live on the land. In Germany the peasant has stepped out of ob- ligation to the landlord into bondage to the Jew, who receives, but spends nothing. In France the B 2 4 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. condition is much the same ; the great house is a ruin, and so, very generally, is the family that occu- pies and owns it, if it still lingers on in it. I remember a stately chateau of the time of Louis XIV., tenanted by two charming old ladies of the ancienne noblesse, with grand historic names— the last leaves that fluttered on a great family tree, with roots in the remote past ; and they fluttered sere to their fall. They walked out every evening in the park attended by their factotum, an old serving-man, who was butler, coachman, gardener, and major-domo. They kept but one female servant, who was cook, lady's-maid, laundress, and house-maid. The old ladies are dead now, and the roof of the chateau has fallen in. They had no money to spend on the house or in the village, and never was there a village that more needed the circulation in it of a little coin. Great houses, with us, are only tenanted by their owners when the London season is over ; but that is for a good deal longer than the German Sommer- frische ; and when the family does come down, it is as rain on a fleece of wool and as the drops that water the earth. It fills the house with guests, and consumes nearly all the market produce of the parish ; and at OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 5 that season, as the people of the place know, money begins to circulate. 'n? Old Dames with their Factotum Butler. It is not, however, my intention to speak of the 6 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. great mansions of the nobility, but of those of the squirearchy, who are in residence on their estates all the year round. These houses are elements of considerable blessing to the country. The famihes of the squires are always in the midst of the people, know the history, and wants, and infirmities of every one. They care for the good of the district. The ladies look riter the girls; the squire attends to the condition of the roads and bridges ; money is freely spent in the district, and a considerable amount of culture and moral restraint is acquired by those in the classes below, in the farm- houses and the cottages. Such only who have been in parishes that have been for generations squireless, and also in those where a resident family has been planted for centuries, can appreciate the difference in general tone among the people. Should the time come when the county family will be taken away, then the parish will feel for some time like a mouth from which a molar has been drawn — there will be a vacancy that will cause unrest and discomfort. The molar does not grind and champ to sustain itself alone, but the entire body to which it belongs, and it is much the same with the country squire. o Q to D X 42 5"- OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 9 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were far more resident gentry in the country than there are at present. The number began to dwindle in the eighteenth century. The registers of parishes are instructive in this respect. In a parish there may have been but a single manor, nevertheless there were in it some three or four gende families, of as good blood as the lord of the manor, inhabiting bartons. Let us take a parish or two as examples. Ugborough in South Devon has valuable registers dating from 1538. In the sixteenth century we find in them the names of the following famihes, all of gentle blood, occupying good houses — the Speaks, the Prideaux, the Stures, the Fowels, the Drakes, the Glass family, the Wolcombes, the Fountaynes, the Heles, the Crokers, the Percivals. In the seventeenth century occur the Edgcumbes, the Spoores, the Stures, the Glass family again, the Hillerdons, Crokers, Coolings, Heles, Collings, Kempthornes, the Powells, Williams, Strodes, Fords, Prideaux, Stures, Furlongs, Reynolds, Hurrells, Fownes, Copplestons, and Saverys. In the eighteenth century there are only the Saverys and Prideaux; by the middle of the nineteenth these are gone. The grand old mansion of the Powells that passed to the Savery family is in Chancery, deserted 10 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. save by a caretaker, falling to ruins. What other mansions there were in the place are now farm-houses. Let us take another parish — Staverton. That had in it the grand mansion, Barkington, of the Rowes, who owned other estates in the same parish, in which were settled junior branches of the same family. All have vanished, root and branch. The Woolstones had a noble estate there. They are represented now by a clergyman in the neighbourhood. The Prestons were estated there also ; they are gone, and their place knoweth them no more. My own family had two good houses there, Coombe and Pridhamsleigh, from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Both were sold at the end of last century. The Worths of Worth had estates and a house there, and have only a fine monument in the church to testify that they ever lived and died there. In another book I have mentioned the instance of Bratton-Clovelly, where were the Coryndons, Burnabys, EUacots of Ellacot, Langfords of Langford, Calmadys, Willoughbys, Incledons — all gone, and not one of their houses remaining intact. The country gentry in those days were not very wealthy. They lived very much on the produce of the home farm, and their younger sons went into OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. n trade, and their daughters, without any sense of degradation, married yeomen. In South Devon, at Slapton, lived in state the Amerideths, deriving from Welsh princes. Griffith Amerideth was the first to settle in Devon ; he was a tailor and draper in Exeter, and died in 1559. -^^ married a daughter of a very good family, and his son married the eldest daughter of Lewis Fortescue, one of the Barons of the Exchequer, and his grand- children married into the Fortescue, Rolle and Loveys families, all of greatest position and fortune in the West. It has been claimed for the Glanvilles that they are of Norman extraction ; they, however, became tanners at Whitchurch, where their tan-pits remain to this day, though their mansion has lost all trace of antiquity. Chief Justice Glanville, who came from this house, and died in 1600, gave it splendour, yet his brother and nephew were not ashamed of the tan-pits, and even allowed a daughter of the house to marry a Tavistock blacksmith, and entered him as " faber " in the pedigree they enrolled with the heralds. The Courtenays of Molland married their daughters to farmers in the place. When, a few years ago, the late Earl of Devon visited Molland, he met a hale 12 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. old yeoman there named Moggridge. He held out his hand to him ; " Cousin," said he, "jump into the carriage with me, and let us have a drive together ; we have not met for one hundred and eighty years." When the Woolstones of Staverton registered their pedigree, they considered that there was nothing to be ashamed of to enter one daughter as married to a " clothier," another to an " agricola " — a yeoman. It was quite another matter when one of the sons or daughters was guilty of misconduct ; then he or she was struck out of the pedigree. I know ot one or two little domestic scandals to which the registers bear witness, and I know that in such cases those who have stained the family name have not been recorded in the heralds' book. But that Joan who married a blacksmith, or Nicolas who was an armourer in London should be cancelled — God forbid ! My own conviction is, confirmed by a very close study of parochial registers, that some of the very best blood in England is to be found among the tradesmen of our county towns. I know a little china and glass shop in the market- place of a small country town. The name over tlie shop is peculiar, but I know that it is one of OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 13 considerable antiquity. In the reign of Henry VII. a Jewish refugee settled in Cornwall. His son, a barber- surgeon, prospered, and became Mayor of Liskeard. His children married well, mostly with families of county position, and a son settled in the little town I speak of, where he married one of the honourable family of Edgecumbe. And now the lineal de- scendant of this man, in the male line, keeps a little china shop. I know — what perhaps he does not — his arms, crest, and motto, to which he has just claim. Let us take another instance. When the lands of the Abbey of Tavistock were made over to the Russell family, on one of the largest farms or estates that belonged to the Abbey was seated a familv that had been for a long time hereditary tenants under the Abbot. In the same position they continued, only under the Russells. In the reign of Elizabeth or of James I. they built themselves a handsome residence, with hall and mullioned windows, and laid out the grounds, and dug fish-ponds about this mansion. They also acquired lands of their own ; amongst other estates a house that had belonged to the Speccots. They produced a sheriff of the county in the eighteenth century. As late as 1820 they were 14 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. seated in their grand old mansion. Then — how I can- not tell — there came a collapse. They lost the house and lands they had held since the thirteenth century ; the Duke of Bedford pulled down the house, and the family is now represented by a surgeon, a hairdresser, and a hatter. The coat of arms borne by this family is found in every book of heraldry, it is so remark- able — a woman's breast distilling milk. Sir Bernard Burke, in his Vicissitudes of Families., tells the pathetic tale of the fall of the great baronial family of Conyers. The elder line became extinct in 1 73 1, when the baronetcy fell to Ralph Conyers, Chester-le-street, a glazier, whose father, John, was grandson of the first Baronet. Sir Ralph inter- married with Jane Blackiston, the eventual heiress of the Blackistons of Shieldun, a family not less ancient. His eldest son, Sir Blackiston Conyers, the heir of two ancient houses, derived from them little more than his name. He went into the navy, where he reached the rank of lieutenant, and became on leaving the navy collector of the port of Newcastle. He died without a son, and his title and property went to his nephew, Sir George, whose mother was a lady of Lord Cath cart's family. In three years this young fellow squandered the property and died, leaving OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 15 the barren title to his uncle, Thomas Conyers, who, after an unsuccessful attempt at a humble busmcss, in his seventy-second year was residing as a pauper in the workhouse of Chester-le-Street. Mr. Surtees bestirred himself in his favour, col- lected a little subscription, which enabled the old baronet to leave the workhouse. This was in 1810, and he died soon after, leaving three daughters married to labouring men in the little town of Chester-le-Street. I have already mentioned the Coryndons of Bratton-Clovelly. It was a family not of splendour but of antiquity. In 1620, when they registered their pedigree, they began with one Roger Coryndon, " who cam out of the Easterne parts and lived at Bratton neere 200 yeares since." There they remained till the beginning of this century, the property passing through the hands of a John Coryndon, barber of Exeter; a Thomas Coryndon, a tailor there ; and George Coryn- don, a wheelwright in Plymouth dockyard in 1748, whose son in a title-deed signs himself " gentleman," as he was perfectly justified in doing. A family may be ruined by extravagance, but it is not always through ruin that the representatives of a family are to be found in humble or comparatively 1 6 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. humble circumstances ; but that the junior members of a gentle family went into trade. The occasion of that irruption of false pride relative to "soiling the hands with trade,'" was the great change that ensued after Queen Anne's reign. When the trade of the country grew, great fortunes were made in business, at the same time that the landed gentry had become impoverished, first through their losses in the Civil War, then by the extravagance of the period of the Restoration, together with drinking and gambling. Vast numbers of estates changed hands, passed away from the old aristocracy into the possession of men who had amassed fortunes in trade, and it was among the children of these rich retired tradesmen that there sprang up such a contempt for whatever savoured of the shop and the counting-house. I know a horse that had been wont to draw an apple-cart for an itine- rant vendor of fruit. He had several admirable points about him, indications that showed he was qualified to make a good carriage-horse. He was bought by a dealer, and sold to a squire. Then he was groomed, put into silvered harness, and became a favourite with the ladies as a docile beast to drive in a low carriage. One day as his mistress was taking out a friend in the trap, she told her the story of the horse. At the OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. ,7 word " apple-cart " back went the ears of the brute, and he kicked the carriage to pieces. After this it was quite sufficient to visit the stable and to mention " apple-cart " to set the horse kicking. Which story may be applied to what has been said about the nouveaux-riches of Queen Anne's time and trade. It has often struck observers that wherever .-in important county family has resided for many genera- tions, there are to be found among the poor many families bearing the same name, and it is rashly concluded that these are scions of the ancient stock. It does so happen sometimes that these cottagers represent the old family, but only very rarely. Repre- sentatives are far more likely to be found as yeomen or tradesmen. The bearing of the name is no guarantee to filiation, even irregular; for it was by no means infrequent for servants to bear their masters' names; and the cottagers bearing the proud names of Courtenay, Berkley, Percy, Devereux, probably have not one drop of the noble blood of these families in their veins. But this is a subject to which I will return when speaking about old servants. Now let us consider what was the origin of our county families. Some have been estated, lords of manors, for many 1 8 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. centuries, but these are few and far between. Then comes a whole class of men who worked themselves up from being yeomen, small owners into great owners, by thrift and moderation. I know some cases of small holders of land, who have held their little properties for three or four centuries, but who have never advanced in the social scale. Others have added field to field, have taken advantage of the improvidence of their neighbours, and have bought them out. Then they have risen to become gentry. But the most numerous class is that of the w^ell-to-do merchants, who have bought lands and founded families. In my own county of Devon this is the history of the origin of a considerable number of those families which claimed a right to bear arms, and proved their pedigrees before the heralds at the beginning of the seventeeth century. Dartmouth, Totnes, Exeter, Bideford, Barnstaple — all the great commercial centres — saw the building up of county families. The same process which began in the reign of Elizabeth has continued to this day, and will continue so long as the possession of a country house and of acres proves attractive ; and may it long so continue, for what else does this mean than the bringing of money into country places, and not of OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 19 money only, but of intelligence, culture, and good fellowship ? One of the most extraordinary phenomena of social history in our land is the way in which the landed aristocracy have become extinct in the male line ; how families of note have disappeared, as though engulfed like Korah and his company. Recklessness of living and ruin will not account for this. It is not that they have parted with their acres that surprises us, but the way in which the families have dis- appeared, as if snuffed out altogether. It is feasible — I do not say easy — to trace a family of quite ordinary position with certainty through many generations. Whoever had any property made a will, or, if he neglected to make a will, had an administration of his effects taken by the next of kin after his death ; and will or administration tell us about the man and w^here he lived. Then we refer to the parish registers, and with their assistance get some more information. There are other means by which additional matter may be acquired. Thus it is quite possible to draw a pedigree — a genuine, well-authenticated one — of almost any tradesman's or yeoman's family from the time of Elizabeth. Now Lieutenant-Colonel Vivian has spent infinite c 2 20 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. pains in tracing the genealogies of those families in the West of England which bore arms, and were accounted gentle at the beginning of the seventeenth century down to the present day. For this purpose he has searched all the wills extant relative to Devon and Cornwall, and most of the parish registers in these counties. Consequently, we can take his con- clusions as being as reliable as they can well be made. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the heralds made periodical visitations of the counties, and noted down the pedigrees of the gentle families, enrolled such as had a right to bear arms, and dis- qualified as ignohiles such as had assumed the position and arms of a gentleman without legitimate title. In the county of Devon there were visitations by the heralds in 1531, 1564, 1372, and 1620, this last was the final visitation made. Now in the lists then drawn up appear fourteen gentle families under letter A, forty-seven under B, sixty-three under C. Of the fourteen whose names began with A, the Aclands alone remain. Of the forty-seven whose names began with B, only five remain. Of the sixty-three under C, fifty-eight are gone. Some few linger on, represented in the female line, but such are not included, though the descendants may have taken the ancient name. OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 21 How are we to account for this amazing extinction ? The families were prohfic, but apparently those most proHfic most rapidly exhausted their vitality. The Arscotts go back to the beginning of the reign of Henry VI., and spread over the north of Devon. John Arscott of Arscott, who died in 1563, had eight sons. His eldest son Humphry had indeed but two, but of these, the eldest and heir had two, and the second had six; yet in 1634 the estates devolved on a daughter. John Arscott in 1563 had three brothers. Of these the next, Thomas, married a Bligh in 155 1, and had four sons. Of these the descendants of one alone can be traced to a certain Roseclear Arscott of Hols- worthy, who left four sons ; all these died without issue. The son and heir is buried at Whitchurch, near Tavistock, with the laconic entry — " Charles Arscott, gent., of age, but not worth c^'300 ; buried 23 March, 1704-5." The third of the four — of whom John Arscott was the eldest — was Richard, who left four sons. Ot these the second, Humphry, was the father of seven, and Tristram, the eldest, of two. Tristram's family died out in the male line in 1620. Of the seven sons of Humphry all traces have disappeared. The 2 2 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. fourth was John Arscott of Tetcott, he, like his elder brothers, a man of good estate. His family became extinct in the male line in 1788. The Crymes family, of Buckland Monachorum, was vastly prolific. William Crymes, who died in 1621, had nine sons; of these, as far as is known, only three married — William, Lewis, and Ferdinando. William left but one son ; Lewis had a son who died in infancy, and that son only; Ferdinando had a son of the same name, whose only son died within a year of his birth. Ellis Crymes, the son of William, and inheritor of the estate, married twice, and had by his first wife, a daughter of Sir Francis Drake, as many as ten sons ; by his second wife he had six more. Of the ten first only eight had children ; and of the offspring of the second batch of six not a single grandchild male lived. In two generations after this prolific Ellis with his sixteen sons, the whole family disappears. I do not say that it is absolutely blotted out of the land of the living, but it is no longer represented in the county, nor can it be traced further. I can give an excellent example in my own famil}', as I have taken great pains to trace all the ramifi- cations. In the Visitation of 1620, John Gould of Coombe in Staverton is represented as father of seven OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 23 sons; and Prince, who wrote his JVorthies of Devon, pubhshed in 1701, in mentioning the tamilv, com- ments on its great expansion ; yet of all these sons, who, one would have supposed, would have half peopled the county, but a single male lineal repre- sentative remains, and he is over fifty, and unmarried. The Heles were one of the most widely-spread and deeply-rooted families in the West of England. At an assize in Exeter in 1660, when Matthew Hele was high-sheriif, the entire grand-jury, numbering about twenty, w^as all composed of men of substance and quality, and all bearing the name of Hele. Where are they now ? Vanished, root and branch. Where are the Dynhams, once holding many lord- ships in Devcn r Gone, leaving an empty shell — their old manor-house of Wortham — to show where they had been. In the seventeenth century John Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester, father of Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and ancestor of the Earl of Bradford, bought the fine old mansion, Great Levers, that had at one time belonged to the Lever family, then had passed to the Ashtons. He reglazed his hall window, that was in four compartments, with coats of arms. In the first light he inserted the armorial bearings of the 24 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Levers, with the motto " 0///» " (Formerly); in the next the arms of the Ashtons, with the legend, " Heri " (Yesterday) ; then his own, with the text, " Hod'ie " (To-day) ; and he left the fourth and last .^^s*- An Empty Shell. compartment without a blazoning, but with the motto, " C/T/.y, nescio cujus'' (Whose to-morrow, I know not). Possibly one reason for the extinction, or apparent extinction, of the squirarchal families is, that the OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 25 junior branches did not keep up their connexion with the main family trunk, and so in time all reminis- cence of cousinship disappeared ; and yet, this is not so likely to have occurred in former times, when families held together in a clannish fashion, as at present. When Charles, thirteenth Duke of Norfolk, had completed his restoration of Arundel Castle, he pro- posed to entertain all the descendants of his ancestor, Jock of Norfolk, who fell at Bosworth, but gave up the intention on finding that he would have to invite upwards of six thousand persons. In the reign of James I., Lord Montague desired leave of the king to cut off the entail of some land that had been given to his ancestor, Sir Edward Montague, chief justice in the reign of Henry YIII., with remainder to the Crown ; and he showed the king that it was most unlikely that it ever would revert to the Crown, as at that time there were alive four thousand persons derived from the body of Sir Edward, who died in 1556. In this case the noble race of Montague has lasted, and holds the Earldom of Sandwich, and the Dukedom and Earldom of Manchester. The name of Montague now borne by the holder of the Barony of Rokeby is an assumption, the proper family name being Robinson. 2 6 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. "When King James came into England," says Ward in his Dian/, " he was feasted at Boughton by Sir Edward Tvlontague, and his six sons brought up the six first dishes. Three of them were lords, and three more knights." Fuller in his JForthies records that " Hester Sandys, the wife of Sir Thomas Temple, of Stowe, Bart., had four sons and nine daughters, which lived to be married, and so exceedingly multiplied, that she saw seven hundred extracted from her body," yet — what became of the Temples ? The estate of Stowe passed out of the male line with Hester, second daughter of Sir Richard Temple, who niarried Richard Grenville, and she was created Countess Temple with limitation to the heirs male of her body. There is at present a (Sir) Grenville Louis John Temple, great-great- grandson to (Sir) John Temple, who in 1786 assumed the baronetcy conferred upon Sir Thomas Temple of Stowe in 161 1. This (Sir) John, who was born at Boston, in the United States, assumed the baronetcy on the receipt of a letter from the then Marquis of Buckingham, informing him of the death of Sir Richard Temple in 1786; but the heirship has not been proved, and there exists a doubt whether the claim can be substantiated.^ ^ Foster, Baronetage, 1880. See Chaos, p. 653. OLD COUNTY FAMILIES. 27 Innocent XIII. (i 721-4) boasted that he had nine uncles, eight brothers, four nephews, and seven grand- nephews. He thought, and others thought with liim, that the Conti family was safe to spread and flourish. Yet, a century later, and not a Conti remained. In the following chapter I will tell the story of the extinction of a family that was of consequence and wealth in the West of England, owning a good deal of land at one time. The story is not a little curious, and as all the particulars are known to me, I am able to relate it with some minuteness. It affords a picture of a condition of social life sufficiently surprising, and at a period by no means remote. jM FD&Eorof^O CHAl^TER II. THE LAST SQUIRE. ,«->;;??p^' ^ 'M N a certain wild and pictur- esque region of the west, which commands a noble prospect of Dartmoor, in a small but antique mansion, which we will call Grimstone, lived for generations a family called Grym. This family rose to consequence after the last heralds' z o H -J- N — n- -•- J- i±zd— 3V C zw~ -m- m -^- m m -• ■p--tZTj=»=zS=Szrt ■ft--pir::fezl:zt=z>:rzzt:=zk:: N--^!=t P — fr — • «- -p t^klzzzp :p=»z»: ::!tzkii^z;j«: lieard liow he the maid addressed, I heard how slie re - plied. The :z:sizz?:zzz - — -^ — ^-•-l-=|-3('i-^3~^-t^-»T^-,,"J-r3"^--"-^-«-a-'^-«-i- J-a i_Z!_,_(i — ,__._,_l.,-PJL_^.Jl^.i. , i_H-Z! \^9~-%'m-m-% aiz^ -e- It: -_^z;zz- :F=i^=t:zzz;^z|zr=zrzzz^ zz-;^= |z:F=^W:3t^z|z!!^:^;,-=: Pzf gar-den it was ve - ry great, With box trees in a row; And ,—r -m- — \- -^z?ii-« — • :qzzs:=z3.-i; ^z=dz-z:zvT -I — :>izzziz=p__^ -" ►:* i y 1 :lPZ » — • — ^e-T i^zit; -,v. 114 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. iii^^l^s^l^^; 1 \ up and down the grav - ell'd walk These lov-ers fond did go. *«•• ZJ__Ii — ^^_s.J --s- E^^si^.:ELtaf3 •-* : -i- -il- -1^-, -e- ?^/ »-P: _0_T !^ _..-,=]_ I 1 ii; •=5J z-i;_-q=z-j ST ^- -i:^^- ^ • -• V '- ?-r- r— r- " Said he, * I prithee fix the day Whereon we shall be wed.' Said she, ' Thou hast a wanton mind, I Hke thee not,' she said. * For now you look at brown Nancy, And dark eyes pleasure you ; But next declare you like the fair Julian with eyes of blue.' ' ' O pretty maid, in garden sweet, Are flowers in each parterre, I turn and gaze with fond amaze At all — for all are fair. THE OLD GARDEN. But one I find — best to my mind, Of all I choose but one ; I stoop and gather that choice flower, And wear that flower alone.'" 115 I 2 CHAPTER V. THE COUNTRY PARSON. NO class of men can it be more truly said that the good they do dies with them, and that the evil lives — in the memory of men — than the country parson. Of the thousands of old rectors and vicars of past gener- ations, how they have all slipped out of the memory of men, have left no tradition whatever behind them, if they were good ! but the few bad ones did so im- press themselves on their generation, that the stories THE CO UNTR V PARSON. i r 7 of their misconduct have been handed on, and are not forgotten in a century. In the floor of my own parish church, in the chancel, is a tombstone to a former incumbent. The name and the date have been ground away by the heels of the school-children who sit over it, but thus much of the inscription remains — "... The Psalmifts man of yeares hee lived a fcore, Tended his flocke allone ; theire oflpring did rertore By Water into life of Grace ; at font and grave, He ferved God devout : and ftrivd men's foules to fave. He fedd the poore, lov'd all, and did by Pattern lliovve, As paftor to his Flocke, ye way that they llioulde go." Not less effaced than the name is all tradition of the man whose monument proclaims his virtues. Now, I take it, for this very reason the tombstone bears true testimony. If it had told lies, every one would have known about it, and related this fact to their children ; would have told anecdotes of the parson wlio was so unworthy, but concerning whose virtues his stone made such boast. That our old country parsons were not, as a rule, a disreputable, drinking, neglectful set of men I believe, because so few traditions of their misconduct remain. There was a clever, pleasant book published at the beginning of this century, entitled, The Fehet ii8 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Cushion. It was written by the Rev. J. W. Cunning- ham, Vicar of Harrow. The seventh edition, from which I quote, appeared in 18:5. This book professes to tell the experiences of a pulpit cushion from pre- Reformation days to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Here is what the Cushion says — " Sir, you will be anxious, I am sure, to hear the history of some of your predecessors in the living ; and it is my intention to gratify you. I think it right, however, to observe, that of a large proportion of them no very interesting records remain. Mankind are much alike, and a little country village is not likely to call out their peculiarities. Some few were mere profligates, whose memory I do not wish to perpetuate." — But it is precisely these, and only these, that the less charitable memory of man does perpetuate. — " Many of them were persons of decent, cold, correct manners, varying slightly, perhaps, in the measure of their zeal, their doctrinal exactness, their benevolence, their industry, their talents — but, in general, of that neutral class which rarely affords materials for history, or subjects of instruction. They were men of that species who are too apt to spring up in the bosom of old and prosperous establishments, whose highest praise is, that they do no harm." THE COUNTRY PARSON. 119 No one can accuse this description as being coloured too high. It is, if I may judge by early recollections, applicable to those who occupied the parsonages twenty and thirty years later. In my own parish in which I was reared, Romaine, one of the most brilliant luminaries of the evangelical o revival, acted as curate for a while, but not the smallest trace of any tradition of his goodness, his eloquence, his zeal did I discover among the villagers. At the very time that Romaine was in this parish, there was a curate in an adjoining one who was over-fond of the bottle, and was picked up out of the ditch on more than one occasion. Neither his name nor his delin- quencies are forgotten to this day. I take it that the state in which the parish registers have been kept are a fair test as to what sort of parsons there were. Now certainly they were very neglectfully kept at the Restoration and for a short while afterwards. That is not to be wondered at. During the Common- wealth they had been taken from the parsons and committed to lay-registrars in the several parishes, who certainly kept them badly, and at the Restoration they were not at once and always reclaimed, but continued to be kept by the clerk, who stepped into the place of the registrar appointed by the Commonwealth. But I20 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. in the much-maligned Hanoverian period they were carefully kept by the clergy, and as a rule neatly entered. If such an indication be worth anything, it shows that the country parsons did take pains to discharge at least one of their duties. He that is faithful in a small matter, is faithful also, we may con- clude, in that which is great. I presume that Dr. Syntax may be regarded as typical of the class, and Combe says of him — " Of Church-preferment he had none ; Nay, all his hope of that was gone : He felt that he content must be With drudging in a curacy. Indeed, on ev'ry Sabbath-day, Through eight long miles he took bis way, To preach, to grumble, and to pray ; To cheer the good, to warn the sinner, And, if he got it, — eat a dinner : To bury these, to christen those. And marry such fond folks as chose To change the tenor of their life, And risk the matrimonial strife. Thus were his weekly journeys made, 'Neath summer suns and wintry shade ; And all his gains, it did appear, Were only thirty pounds a-year." And when he dies — "The village wept, the hamlets round Crowded the consecrated ground : THE COUNTRY PARSON. 121 And waited there to see the end Of Pastor, Teacher, Father, Friend." What a charming picture does Fielding draw in his Joseph Andrews of Mr. Abraham Adams, the parson — gentle, guileless, learned, and very poor. And Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield — was ever a An Old Country Parsonage, Bratton-Clovelly. purer, sweeter type of man delineated ? The de- scription given of his parsonage and mode of life is valuable, and must be quoted ; for it shows what a change has come over the parsonage and the parson's manner of intercourse with his parishioners since Goldsmith's time. 122 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. " Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and prattling river before ; on one side a meadow, on the other a green. My farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land, having given an hundred pounds for m.y predecessor's good-will. .... My house consisted of but one story, and was covered with thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness ; the walls on the inside were nicely white- washed, and my daughters undertook to adorn them with pictures of their own designing. Though the same room served us for parlour and kitchen, that only made it warmer. Besides, as it was kept with the utmost neatness, the dishes, plates, and coppers being well scoured, and all disposed in bright rows on the shelves, the eye was agreeably relieved, and did not want richer furniture. Tliere were three other apartments — one for my wife and me, another for our two daughters, within our own, and the third, with two beds for the rest of the children." Our old parsonage houses precisely resembled this description, but hardly any remain. They have given way for more pretentious houses ; and with the grander houses the habits and requirements of the parsons have grown. THE COUNTRY PARSON. 123 " Nor were we without guests ; sometimes Farmer Flamborough, and often the bhnd piper, would pay us a visit, and taste our gooseberry wine. These harmless people had several ways of being good company ; for while one played, the other would sing some soothing ballad — Johnny Armstrong s Last Good Night, or The Crueltij of Barbara Allen.''' Crabbe, himself a clergyman, dees not give the most favourable sketch of the village parsons ; and yet his country vicar is a man of perfect blamelessness. " Our Priest was cheerful, and in season gay ; His frequent visits seldom fail'd to please; Easy himself, he sought his neighbour's ease, ii^ ^ « « « ^ Simple he was, and loved the simple truth, Yet had some useful cunning from his youth ; A cunning never to dishonour lent. And rather for defence than conquest meant ; 'Twas fear of power, with some desire to rise, But not enough to make him enemies ; He ever aim'd to please ; and to offend Was ever cautious ; for he sought a friend. Fiddling and fishing were his arts : at times He alter'd sermons, and he aim'd at rhymes ; And his fair friends, not yet intent on cards, Oft he amussd with riddles and charades. Mild we e his doctrines, and not one discourse But gain'd in softness what it lost in force : 124 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Kind his opinions ; he would not receive An ill report, nor evil act believe. ****** Though mild benevolence cur Priest possess'd, 'Twas but by wishes or by words expressed. Circles in water, as they wider flow, The less conspicuous in their progress grow, And when, at last, they touch upon the shore, Distinction ceases, and they're viewed no more. His love, like the last circle, all embraced, But with effect that never could be traced. Now rests our Vicar. — They who knew him best Proclaim his life t' have been entirely — rest. The rich approved, — of them in awe he stood ; The poor admired, — they all believed him good; The old and serious of his habits spoke ; The frank and youthful loved his pleasant joke; Mothers approved a safe contented guest, And daughters one who backed each small request ; In him his flock found nothing to condemn ; Him sectaries liked, — he never troubled them: No trifles fail'd his yielding mind to please, And all his passions sunk in early ease ; Nor one so old has left this world of sin. More like the being that he entered in." Clever, true, and cutting. Crabbe knew the class, its excellences and its weaknesses. We are con- sidering the excellences now ; we will recur to the weaknesses later. Fielding does, in his Joseph ^indrews, give us a THE COUNTRY PARSON. 125 Study of another type of parson — Trulliber, " whom Adams found stript into his waistcoat, with an apron on, and a pail in his hands, just come from serving his hogs ; for Mr. Trulliber was a parson on Sundays, but all the other six might be more properly called a farmer. He occupied a small piece of land of his own, besides which he rented a considerable deal more. His wife milked his cows, managed his dairy, and followed the market with butter and eggs. The hogs fell chiefly to his care, which he carefully waited on at home, and attended to fairs ; on which oc- casion he was liable to many jokes, his own size being with much ale rendered little inferior to that of the beasts he sold. ... His voice was loud and hoarse, and his accent extremely broad. To complete the whole, he had a stateliness in his gait when he walked, not unlike of a goose, only he stalked slower." But this parson was only a boor, he was not dis- orderly. I have an old coachman, near eighty, who has been in the family since he was a boy, and of whom I get many stories of how the world went at the beginning of this century. Said he to me one day, " My old uncle he lived in Maristowe ; he was bedridden nigh on twenty years, and in all those years Parson 126 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Teasdale didn't miss coming to see and read and pray with him every day, Sunday and week-day alike." We make much fuss about parochial visiting now, but is there any visiting like that r In The Velvet Cushion, a dialogue between the Vicar and his wife is chronicled. " ' I am not sure,' said the Vicar, ' that it is not a presumptuous reliance upon the goodness of God, — an abuse of the doctrine of Divine mercy, that has kept me at home to-day, when I should have gone to visit old Dame Wilkins. An' so now, my dear, let us go to Mary V^^ilkins' directly.' Her bonnet was soon on, and they hobbled down the village almost as fast as if their house had been on fire. Mary Wilkins was a poor good woman, to whom the Vicar's visit three times a week had become almost one of the neces- saries of life. It was now two hours beyond the time he usually came ; and had she been awake, she would really have been pained by the delay. But, happily, she had fallen into a profound sleep, and when he put his foot on the threshold, and in his old-fashioned way said, ' Peace be with you,' she was just awaking. This comforted our good man, and, as he well knew where all comfort comes from, he thanked God in his heart even for this." THE COUNTRY PARSON. 127 The old parsons lived more on the social level of the farmers and yeomen than of the squires, but they were in many cases men of very considerable culture. It was not, however, those who were the best scholars who were the best parsons. I will give presently my reminiscences of one of the last of the old scholar- parsons. Unfortunately, scholarship is on the de- cline, at all events among those who occupy country parsonages. It has been often charged against the old parsons, that they preached mere morality, and above the heads of their people, interlarding their sermons with quotations in Greek and Latin. As for preaching morality — I do not care to apologize for their doing that. Nothing better can be preached ; nothing was more necessary to be preached in the last century. Judging by the registers of baptisms in parishes, at no time was there so much immorality among village people than at that period when our country parsons were charged with preaching morality — excepting always the present. Those who made this a matter of accusation, meant that the Gospel, as they called their peculiar view of religion, was not insisted on ; forgetting all the while that the Gospel is pretty well stuffed with exhortations to morality, and above all. 128 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. that model for all sermons, the one preached on the Mount. But I do not believe that mere morality, apart from Christian faith, was preached. There is a pretty passage in The Velvet Cushion descriptive of a sermon at the beginning of this century, which I cannot take to be a description of something quite extraordinary and out of the way. "'My love,' said the Vicar, 'this fact is worth a thousand arguments — the common people heard Christ gladly. Socinianism never fails to drive them away. A religion without a Saviour is the temple without the Shechinah, and its worshippers will all desert it. Few men in the world have less pretensions as a preacher than myself, — my voice, my look, my manner, all of a very ordinary nature, — and yet, I thank God, there is scarcely a corner of our little church where you might not find a streaming eye or a beating heart. The reason is — that I speak of Christ ; and if there is not a charm in the word, there is the train of fears, and hopes, and joys which it carries along with it. The people feel, and then they must listen.' " Evelyn in his Diary says, in 1683, '"A stranger, and old man, preached — much after Bishop Andrews' method, full of logical divisions, in short and broken THE CO UNTR Y PARSON. 1 2 9 periods, and Latin sentences, now quite out of fashion in the pulpit, vvliich is grown into a far more profit- able way of plain and practical discourses, of which sort this nation, or any other, never had greater plenty or more profitable, I am confident." Pepys is hardly to be quoted as a judge, as he went to church to see pretty faces, not, or not mainly, to hear sermons, and his criticism is not always to be trusted. " 1667, 26th May, the Lord's Day. I went by water to Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective glass up and down the church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women ; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till the sermon was done." " 1667, 20th August. Turned into St. Dunstan's church, where I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place ; and stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand ; but she would not, but got further and further from me ; and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again, — which seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another K I30 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me ; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours ended also." " 1667, 25th August, Lord's Day. Up and to church, thinking to see Betty Michell, and did stay an hour in the crowd, thinking, by the end of a nose that I saw, that it had been her ; but at last the head turned towards me, and it was her mother, which vexed me. So I back to my boat." No, Pepys was no judge of a good sermon, his mind was otherwise engaged. Sermons now-a-days produce little or no effect, be- cause there are too many of them. The ears of hearers have been tickled till they are no longer capable of sensation. One hears curates boast of having preached some seven sermons in one week, and miserable stuff it must have been that flowed so freely ; and yet good enough for the hearers, who, by accustoming their ears to be always hearing, are unable to appreciate a really good discourse, or if they aj^preciate, allow it to produce no effect whatever upon them. Our audiences in church are like those who live in railway arches, who become so accustomed to the rush overhead of THE CO UNTR Y PARSON. 1 3 1 trains, that none ever rouse them, and they cannot sleep without the intermittent rush to lull them. The sermons of the end of last century and the beginning of this do not please us, because they are cast in a different mould, they generally appeal to a different side of us than do those of the present day. They were addressed to the natural, healthy conscience, and to plain, everyday common-sense, such as all men possess. Modern sermons are appeals to the feelings, amiable, sentimental emotions, and these amiable, sentimental emotions have become accustomed to be scratched, like cats, and purr when that is done. It was an epithet of scorn launched on Pope Damasus, that he was " ear-scratcher " to the ladies, — such is, however, the highest glory of a modern preacher. Crabbe undoubtedly liit the old country parsons on their weak point when he said of his vicar, that his main characteristic was timidity. He was infinitely blameless, but also immeasurably afraid. " Thus he his race began, and to the end His constant care was, no man to oftend ; No haughty virtues stirr'd his peaceful mind ; Nor urged the Priest to leave the Flock behind ; He was his Master's soldier, but not one To lead an army of His martyrs on : Fear was his ruling passion." Courage is born of conviction, and our old English K 2 1^,2 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. J country parsons had no definite convictions, a sort of vague, nebulous, inchoate notion that Christianity was all right, and that the Church of England was a via media, and they deprecated anything like giving precision and outline to faith, and assuming a direct walk which was not a perpetual dodging between opposed errors. I ventured in one of my novels, Red-Spider, to sketch this sort of parson, who never in the pulpit insisted on a doctrine lest he should offend a Dissenter, nor on a duty lest he should make a Churchman uneasy. And it was characteristic of the race. In the Faroes there are sixteen different names for fogs, and the articles of the Christian faith were only varieties in fogs to these spiritual pastors. The nebulous theory prevailed in astronomy, and in divinity as well. Some old-fashioned people resented the reso- lution of the nebulcE into fixed stars; and so also in that other province do they look on it as next to sacrilege to give to faith definition. It is, however, only since parsons have begun to see definite ends that they have assumed any steadfastness in their walk and directness in their course. In Fielding's time the country parsons wore their cassocks as a usual dress. " Adams stood up," he relates, " and presented a figure to the gentleman THE COUNTRY PARSON. 133 which would have moved laughter in many, for his cassock had just fallen down below his great-coat, that is to say, it reached his knees, whereas the skirts of fltel!*;- Parson in Cassock. his great-coat descended no lower than half-way down his thighs." The bands were always worn, the makeshift for the 134 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. old Steenkirk tie of fine white linen eds;ed with more or less deep lace. Knee-breeches, buckled shoes, and a black cocked hat completed his attire. Some of the old Derby Uncle Toby jugs represent the beer-drinking parson of an age a little later. The cassock has disappeared, and he wears a clerical long black coat, with bands and white stockings. The apron of the bishop is the reminiscence of the cassock, as the hat tied up with strings of the archdeacon is the last survival of the cocked hat. The parson and his parishioners w^ere on very good terms. When the Vicar of Wakefield came to his new cure, the village turned out to meet him with pipe and drum. Nevertheless there was occasional friction, mainly, if not altogether, relative to tithe gathering. There is a harvest-home song Dryden wrote for, or introduced into his play, King Arthur ; or. The British fVorthy, in 1691, which forms part of the enchantments of Merlin, and is sung by Comus and a set of peasants — " We have cheated the parson, we'll cheat him again, For why should a blockhead have one in ten ? One in ten, One in ten ; For why should a blockhead have one in ten, For prating so long, like a book-learned sot, THE COUNTRY PARSON. 135 Till pudding and dumpling burn to pot? Burn to pot." There can be little question that the parson did get cheated over and over again, and bore it without a murmur. An amusing ballad is sung to this day in the west of England relative to the way in which parsons were treated by their parishioners — " There wor a man in our town, I knowed him well, 'twor Passon Brown, A man of credit and renown. For — he wor oiir Passon. Passon he had got a sheep, Merry Christmas he would keep ; Decent Passon he — and cheap, Well-spoke — and not a cross 'un. Us had gotten nort to eat, So Us stole the Passon's sheep — Merry Christmas us would keep ; We ate 'n for our dinner. Us enjoyed our Christmas day ; Passon preached, and said, ' Let's pray. But I'm a fasting saint ; aye, aye ! You'm each a wicked sinner.' Cruel vex'd wor Passon Brown, Sick to death he laid him down Passonless was soon our town, For why ? — we'd starved our Passon. 136 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Tell'y— did'y ever hear Such a story, true but queer, How 'twixt Christmas and New Year The flock had ate their Passon ? " There was non-residence undoubtedly previous to the Act against holding more than one living at a time, unless near together. Men of birth and influence obtained a good deal of preferment, but never in post-Reformation times to tl:e extent that this abuse existed before. To take but one instance. Tliomas Cantilupe, who died in 1282, was Precentor and Canon of York, Archdeacon of Stafford and Canon of Lichfield, Canon of London, Canon of Hereford, and held the livings of Doderholt, Hampton, Aston, Wintringham, Deighton, Rippel, Sunterfield, and apparently also Prestbury. Pretty well ! It was never so bad in the maligned Hanoverian period. I had a living in Essex which was held formerly by a certain Bramston Staynes, who was a squarson in Essex, and held simultaneously three other livings ; there was one curate to serve the three churches. The rector is said to have visited one of his livings twice only in the twenty years of his incumbency — once to read himself in, the other time to settle some dispute relative to the payment of his tithes. THE COUNTRY PARSON. 137 I can recall several instances of the old scholar- parson, a man chap-ful of quotations. One, a very able classic, and a great naturalist, was rather fond of the bottle. " Mr. West," said a neighbour one day, " I hear you have a wonderfully beautiful spring of water in your glebe." " Beautiful ! surpassing ! funs Blandusicp, splendidior vitro ! — -water so good that I never touch it — afraid of drinking too much of it," Some twenty-five years ago I knew another, a line scholar, an old bachelor, living in a very large rectory. He was a man of good presence, courteous, old-world manners, and something of old-world infirmities. His sense of his religious responsibilities in the parish was different in quality to that affected now-a-days. He was very old when I knew him, and was often laid up with gout. One day, hearing that he was thus crippled, I paid him a visit, and encountered a party of women descending the staircase from his room. When I entered he said to me, " I suppose you met litde Mary So-and-so and Janie What's- her- name going out? I've been churching them up here in my bed-room, as I can't go to church." When a labourer desired to have his child privately baptized, he provided a bottle of rum, a pack of cards, a lemon, and a basin of pure water, then sent for the 1^,8 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. J parson and the farmer for whom he worked. The rehgious rite over, the basin was removed, the table cleared, cards and rum produced, and sat dow^n to. On such occasions the rector did not return home till late, and the housekeeper left the library window . unhasped for the master, but locked the house doors. Under the library window was a violet bed, and it was commonly reported that the rector had on more than one occasion slept in that bed after a christening. Unable to heave up his big body to the sill of the window, he had fallen back among the violets, and there slept off the exertion. I never had the opportunity of hearing the old fellow preach. His conversation — whether addressing a gentleman, a lady, or one of the low^er classes — was garnished with quotations from the classic authors, Greek and Latin, with which his surprising memory was richly stored ; and I cannot think that he could resist the temptation of introducing them into his discourse from the pulpit, yet I heard no hint of this in the only sermon of his which was repeated to me by one of his congregation. The occasion of its delivery was this. He was highly incensed at a long engagement being broken off between some young people in his parish, so next Sunday he preached on " Let love be without THE COUNTRY PARSON. 139 (lissim Illation ; " and the sermon, which on this occasion was extempore, was reported by those who heard it to consist of little more than this — " You see, my dearly beloved brethren, what the Apostle says — Let love be without dissimulation. Now I'll tell y' what I think dissimulation is. When a young chap goes out a walking with a girl, — as nice a lass as ever you saw, with an uncommon fresh pair o' cheeks and pretty black eyes too, and not a word against her character, very respectably brought up, — when, I say, my dearly beloved brethren, a young chap goes out walking with such a young woman, after church of a summer evening, seen of every one, and offers her his arm, and they look friendly like at each other, and at times he buys her a present at the fair, a ribbon, or a bit of jewellery — I cannot say I have heard, and I don't say that I have seen, — when, I say, dearly beloved brethren, a young chap like this goes on for more than a year, and lets everybody fancy they are going to be married, — I don't mean to say that at times a young chap may see a nice lass and admire her, and talk to her a bit, and then go away and forget her — there's no dissimulation in that ; — but when it goes on a long time, and he makes her to think he's very sweet upon her, and that he can't live without I40 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. her, and he gives her ribbons and jewellery that I can't particularize, because I haven't seen them — ^when a young. chap, dearly beloved brethren — ■" and soon and so on, becoming more and more involved. The parties preached about were in the church, and the young man was just under the pulpit, with the eyes of the whole congregation turned on him. The sermon had its effect — he reverted to his love, and without any dissimulation, we trust, married her. The Christmas and the Easter decorations in this old fellow's church were very wonderful. There was a Christmas text, and that did service also for Easter. The decorating- of the church was intrusted to the schoolmaster, a lame man, and his wife, and consisted in a holly or laurel crutch set up on one side of the chancel, and a "jaws of death" on the other. This appalling symbol was constructed like a set of teeth in a dentist's shop-window — the fangs were made of snipped or indented white drawing paper, and the gums of over- lapping laurel leaves stitched down one on the other, A very good story was told of this old parson, which is, I believe, quite true. He was invited to spend a couple of days with a great squire some miles off. He went, stayed his allotted time, and disappeared. Two days later the lady of the house, happening to go THE COUNTRY PARSON. 141 into the servants'-hall in the evening, found, to her amazement, her late guest — there. After he had finished his visit up-stairs, at the invitation of the butler he spent the same time below. " Like Perse- phone, madam," he said, — '• half my time above, half in the nether world." In the matter of personal neatness he left much to be desired. His walled garden was famous for its jargonelle pears. Lady X — , one day coming over, said to him, " Will you come back in my carriage with me, and dine at the Park? You can stay the night, and be driven home to-morrow." "Thank you, my lady, delighted. I will bring with me some jargonelles. I'll go and fetch them." Presently he returned with a little open basket and some fine pears in it. Lady X — looked at him, with a troubled expression in her sweet face. The rector was hardly in dining suit ; moreover, there was apparent no equipment for the night. " Dear Mr. M — , will you not reallij want something further? You will dine with us, and sleep the nightj'' A vacant expression stole over his countenance, as he retired into himself in thought. Presently a flash of intelligence returned, and he said with briskness, " Ah ! to be sure ; I'll go and fetch two or three more jargonelles." 142 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. A kind, good- hearted man the scholar-parson was, always ready to put his hand into his pocket at a tale of distress, but quite incapable of understanding that his parishioners might have spiritual as well as material requirements. I remember a case of a very similar man — a fellow of his college, and professor at Cam- bridge — to whom a young student ventured to open some difficulties and doubts that tortured him. "Difficulties! doubts!" echoed the old gentleman. "Take a couple of glasses of port. If that don't dispel them, take two more, and continue the dose till you have found ease of mind." But to return to our country parson, who had the jargonelles. His church was always well attended. Quite as large a congregation was to be found in it as in other parish churches, where all the modern appli- ances of music, popular preaching, parish visitations, clubs and bible-classes were in force. Perhaps the reason was that he was not too spiritually exacting. Many of our enthusiastic modern parsons attempt to screw up their people into a condition of spiritual exaltation which they are quite unable to maintain permanently, and then they become discouraged at the inevitable, invariable relapse. We suppose that one main cause of dissent is the deadness and dulness of the Church service before the THE COUNTRY PARSON. 143 revival of late days ; and we attribute this deadness and dulness to the indifference of these betes noirs, the clergy of last century. I doubt it. At the time of the Commonwealth our churches had been gutted of everything ornamental and beautiful, and the ssrvices reduced to the most dreary performance of sermon and extempore prayer. At the Restoration, a very large number indeed of the Presbyterian ministers conformed, were ordained, and retained the benefices. Naturally they conducted the Common Prayer as nearly as they could on the lines of the service they were accustomed to. They had no tradition of what the Anglican liturgy was ; they did not understand it, and they served it up cold or lukewarm, as unpalatable as possible. They did not like it themselves, and they did not want their con- gregations to become partial to it. The old clergy who were restored were obliged to content themselves with the merest essentials of Divine worship ; their congregations had grown up without acquaintance with the liturgy — at all events for some nineteen years they had not heard it, and they did not want to shock their weak consciences by too sudden a transformation. When Pepys went to church on November 4, 1660, he entered in his Diary, " Mr. Mills did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer, by saying Glory be to the 144 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Father, &c., after he had read the two psalms ; but the people had been so little used to it, that they could not tell what to answer." The same afternoon he went to Westminster Abbey, " where the first time that ever I heard the organs in a cathedral." Evelyn enters, on March 22, 1678, " now was our Communion-table placed altar-wise," that is to say, not till eighteen years after the Restoration! so slowly were alterations made in the churches to bring them back to their former conditions of decency and order. Whatever has been done since has been done cautiously and with hesitation, lest offence should be given. It was not practicable in our village churches to have the hearty congregational singing that now pre- vails, for only a very few could read, and only such could join in the psalmody. I have in my possession a diary kept by a kins- woman in 1 8 13. She makes in that year an entry, " Walked over this Sunday to South Mimms church to hear a barrel-organ that has just been there erected. It made very beautiful and appropriate music, and admirably sustained the voices of the quire, but I do not myself admire these innovations in the conduct of Divine worship." What would she have said to the innovations that have taken place since then, had she THE COUNTRY PARSON. MS lived to see them ! And they have been, for the most part, in a right direction ; but we must be thankful, not only for them, but for the evidence they give that the clergy are somewhat emerging from that condition in which they were, as Crabbe describes them, when " Fear was their ruling passion " — " All things new Were deemed superfluous, useless, or untrue. Habit with him was all the test of truth ; It must be right ; I've done it from my youth. Questions he answer'd in as brief a way ; — It must be wrong — it was of yesterday." CHAPTER VI. THE HUNTING PARSON. HY not ? why f should not the parson mount his cob and go after the hounds ? A more fresh, invigor- ating pursuit is not to be found, not one in which he is brought more in contact with his fellow-men. There was a breezy goodness about many a hunting parson of the old times that was in itself a sermon, and was one on the topic that healthy amusement THE HUNTING PARSON 147 and Christianity go excellently well together. I had rather any day see a parson ride along with the pink, than sport the blue ribbon. The last of our genuine West Country hunting parsons was Jack Russell, whose life has already been written, but to whom I can bear testimony that he was a good specimen of the race. I was one day on top of a coach along with two farmers, one from the parish of Jack Russell, another from that of another hunting parson, whom we will call Jack Hannaford. They were discussing their relative parsons. Then he who was under Hannaford told a scurvy tale of him, whereat his companion said, " Telfee what, all the world knows what your pa'sson be; but as for old Jack Russell, up and down his backbone, he's as good a Christian, as worthy a pastor, and as true a gentleman as I ever seed." In a parish on the Cornish side of the estuary of the Tamar, some little wdiile ago, the newly appointed rector, turning over the register of bap- tisms in the vestry, was much astonished at seeing entries of the christening of boys only. " Why, Richard ! " said he to the clerk, " however comes this about — are there only boys born in this place ? " "Please your Reverence, 'tain't that; but as they L 2 148 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. won't take the girls into the dockyard at Devonport, 'tain't no good baptizing 'em." The boys were christened only for the sake of the register requisite to present on admission into the Government dock- yard. But if the boys were given baptism only, the girls devoted their efforts to show that they fell behind in masculine gifts in no sort, and the women of the village have approved themselves remarkable Amazons; they pull a boat, carry loads, speak gruff, wear moustache, verv much as does a man. Now, the unfortunate thing is, that the English clergy of the new epoch do seem to have been only ordained because they are feeble and effeminate youths. After ordination the curates are thrust into the society of pious and feeble women, and contract feeble and womanish ways. Just as in the Cornish parish only boys were baptized, so does it really seem as though only girlish youngsters pass under the bishop's hands, so that ordination becomes a pledge of effeminacy. Therefore, in my opinion, it would be a whole- some corrective if they could go after the hounds occasionally. It is one thing to make of hunting a pursuit, and another to take it as a relaxation. The apostles were sportsmen, that is to say, they fished ; and if it THE HUNTING PARSON. 149 is lawful to go after iish, I take it there can be no harm in going after a hare or a fox ; but then — only occasional Iv, and as a moral and constitutional bracer. As said of the ordinary country parson, the good is forgotten and the evil is remembered, so is it with the hunting parson. The simple worthy rector who attended his sick, was good to the poor, preached a wholesome sermon, and was seen occasionally at the meet, is not remembered, — Jack Russell is the exception, — but the memory of the bad hunting parson never dies. There is a characteristic song about the typical indifferent hunting parson that was much sung some fifty years ago. It ran thus ^ — PARSON HOGG. Arranged by the Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard, M.A. ,'. = 88. Bcldly. ^< r>-*. -1— „ JL - . -•- . -•- ^ ->-"* -p' ^" f P- . Xf-' -JZLtiz '-^- ?--r^ — f.-^-T ^ From Songs of the West : Traditional Sougs and Ballads of the West of England. Collected by S. Baring Gould and H. Fleet- wood Sheppard. London: Methuen & Co. 1889. 15° OLD COUNTRY LIFE. ■^-^-. &, H |-H 1 1 l-T , 1 I ^-N=^-T ^*»M^=1 1-^^— r — /- cres. _j :y?: ^fc#. s. =«=ti^_£EtE^=^=l Mess Par-son Hogg shall :t=^t eIIP =?! • • • * 2: i: -•- :jV now maintain The bur -den of my song, sir! A sin-gle life per- « — 1/ 1 ^ 3- -•- =f. q. 1 ^i=^5E^^^*^i^i^i^.r-i^lEL2| force he led, Of con - sti - tu - tion strong, sir. Sing tal-ly ho ! sing J , , . . ^k_J ^N^ ? — I — -_iTz:AT=t — \ — r^-i-+=1 — =S4-4— ^^Jz -•-J ± -•- -ll- -*■ i THE HUNTING PARSON. 151 tal-ly ho ! sing tal-ly ho ! why zounds, sir! He mounts his mare to i^!=l^= And every day he goes to mass He first pulls on his boot, sir ! That, should the beagles chance to pass, He may join in the pursuit, sir 1 Sing, Tally ho ! &c. That Parson little loveth prayer, And pater night and morn, sir ! For bell and book hath little care, But dearly loves the horn, sir 1 Sing, Tally ho ! &c. St. Stephen's day that holy man He went a pair to wed, sir ! When as the service was begun, Puss by the churchyard sped, sir ! Sing, Tally ho ! «Scc. 152 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. He shut his book. " Come on," he said, " I'll pray and bless no more, sir ! " He drew the surplice o'er his head, And started for the door, sir ! Sing, Tally ho ! &:c. In pulpit Parson Hogg was strong, He preached without a book, sir ! And to the point, but never long, And this the text he took, sir ! Tally ho ! O Tally ho ! Dearly Beloved — zounds, sir! 1 mount my mare to hunt the hare, Singing, Tally ho ! the hounds, sir ! One of the very worst types of the hunting parson was that man Chowne, whom Mr. Blackmore has immortalized in his dehghtful story of The Maid of Sker. Many of the tales told in that novel relative to Chowne — the name of course is fictitious — are quite true. As I happen to know a good many particulars of the life of this man, I will here give them. He was rector of a wild lonely parish situated on high ground — ground so high that trees did not flourish about the rectorv, nor did flowers thrive in his garden. Flowers in Chowne's garden ! the idea is in- conceivable. The people were wild and rough in those days, especially so in that storm-beaten, almost Alpine THE HUNTING PARSON. 153 spot, accessible still only by abominable roads up hill and down dale, like riding over the waves of a stormy sea. They were not, therefore, particularly shocked at their parson's lack of sweetness and light. Probablv, if they thought anything about this, they considered that sweetness and light were as ill adapted to Blacka- moor as lilies and roses. His force of character impressed them, and commanded and obtained respect. To shock moral feelings, moral feelings must first exist. The parson was not disliked, he was feared. A curious man he was in appearance, with eyes hard, boring, dark, that made a man on whom they were fixed shiver to his toes. The parishioners believed he had the evil eye, and " over-looked " or " ill-wished " those whom he desired to injure, or any one who had given him offence. There is no breaking such a spell save by drawing the blood of the " over-looker," and no one was hardy enough to attempt this of Chowne. When a woman is thought to have cast a spell through her malignant eye, the person that suffers scratches the infiicter of evil. The story told in The Maid of Sker, of Chowne breaking up the road to prevent the bishop visiting him, is true. Dr. Phillpotts was then bishop, and he was eminently dissatisfied with what he heard of the 154 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. ecclesiastical and moral condition of Blackamoor and its parson. He therefore drove there to make a personal visitation. Cliowne, forewarned, employed men to dig up the road for a space of about twenty feet, and the hole they made was filled in with bog- water, then the whole lightly covered over with turf and strewn with dust. The Bishop's carriage and horses floundered in and was upset. Henry of Exeter was, however, not the man to be daunted by such an accident — that it was not an accident, but a deliberate attempt to stay his course, he saw at once by the condition of the road. He went on to Blacka- moor, and reached the parsonage. There he found Chowne in his dining-room, sullen, with his wicked black eyes watching him. His head was for the most part bald, but he had one long wisp ot dark hair that he twisted about his bald pate. Chowne put a bottle of brandy on the table, and a couple of tumblers, and bade the Bishop help himself. "No, thank you, Mr. Chowne," said the Bishop briefly. "Ah! my lord, you may do without it, maybe, at Exeter, but up at this height we must drink or perish of dulness." THE HUNTING PARSON 155 Then he helped himself to a stiff glass, and relapsed into silence. Presently the Bishop said — " You keep hounds, I hear." " No, my lord, the hounds keep me." " I do not understand." " Well, then, you must be mighty stupid. They stock my larder with hares. You don't suppose I should have hares on my table unless they were caught for me. There's no butcher for miles and miles, and I can't get a joint but once in a fortnight maybe ; what should I do without rabbits and hares ? Forced to eat 'em, and they must be caught to be eaten." " Mr. Chowne," said Henry of Exeter, " I've been told that you have men in here with you drinking and fighting." " It's a lie. I admit that they drink, — every man drinks since he was a baby, — but fight in my dining- room ! No, my lord! Directly they begin to fight I take 'em by the scruff of the neck, and turn them out into the churchyard, and let 'em fight out their difference among the tombs." " I am sorry to say, Mr. Chowne, that I have heard some very queer and unsatisfactory tales concerning you." 156 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. " I dare say you have, my lord ; " he fixed his strong eyes on the Bishop. " So have I of your lordship, very unpleasant and nasty tales, when I've been to Torrington or Bideford fairs. But when I do, I say it's a parcel of lies. And when next you hear any of these tales about me, then you say, ' I know Tom Chowne very well — drunk out of his bottle of brandy — I swear that all these tales about him is also a parcel of lies." The story is told in The Maid of Sher of his having driven a horse mad by putting a hemp-grain into its eye. That story is thought to be true. The horse was one he coveted, but it was bought at a higher figure than he cared to give for it by Sir Walter C . Chowne shortly after was at a fair or market where Sir Walter was, who had ridden in on this very horse. He slipped out of the inn and into the stable, just before the Baronet left, and thus treated the unfortunate animal, which went almost mad with the pain, and threw his rider. He had certain men in the parish, not exactly in his pay, but so completely under his control, that they executed his suggestions without demur, whatever they might be, and never for a moment gave thought that they themselves were free agents. As Henry H. THE HUNTING PARSON 157 did not order the murder of Becket, hut threw out a hint that it would be an acceptable thing to him to be rid of the proud prelate, so was it with Chowne. He never ordered the commission of a crime, but he suggested the commission. For instance, if a farmer had offended him, he would say to one of these men subject to his influence, "As Fve been standing in the church porch, Harry, I thought what a terrible thing it would be if the rick of Farmer Greenaway which I can see over against me were to burn. 'Twould come home to him pretty sharp, I reckon." Next night the rick would be on fire. Or he would say to his groom, " Tom, there's Farmer Moyle going to sup with me at the parsonage to-night. Shocking thing were his linchpin to be gone, and as he was going down Blackamoor hill, the wheel were to come off." That night he would entertain Moyle with un- wonted cordiality, pass the bottle freely, whilst an ominous spark burnt in his pebbly eye. As the farmer that nio;ht drove awav, his wheel would come off, and he be thrown, and be found by the next passer along the road with dislocated thigh or broken arm and collar-bone. As already said, he kept a pack of harriers, but ' 158 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. in such a wretched, rattletrap set of kennels that they occasionally broke loose. This occurred once on Sunday, and just as Chowne was going to the pulpit, the pack went by. He halted with his hand on the banister, turned to the clerk, and said, "That's Towler giving voice. Run — he's got the lead, and will tear the hare to bits." Thereupon forth went the clerk, and succeeded in securing the hare from the hounds hunting on their own head. He brought the hare into church, and threw it under his seat till the sermon was done, the blessing given, and the congregation dismissed. Chowne had a housekeeper named Sally. One day Chowne came down very smartly dressed. " Where be you a-going to to-day r " asked Sally. "That's no concern of yours." answered the rector ; " but I don't mind telling you either — I'm going to be married." " Why ! for sure, you're not going to be such a fool as that ! " exclaimed the housekeeper. " I don't know but what it may be a folly," growled Chowne; "but, Sally, it's a folly you are bent on committing too." THE HUNTING PARSON 159 To this Sally, who for some time had been keeping company with one Joe, made no reply, " Now look'ye here," said Chowne. " I don't want -you to marry, Sally. It's no reason because I make a fool o' myself, that you should go and do likewise." " But why not, master?" " Because I want'y to stay here and see that my wife don't maltreat me," answered Chowne. " And I'll tell'y what, Sally — if you'll give up Joe, I'll give thee the fat pig. Which will'y now prefer, Joe or the porker ? " Sally considered for a moment, and then said, " Lauk ! sir, I'd rayther have the pig." And now must be told how it was that Chowne was brought to the marriage state. There was in the neighbourhood a yeoman family named Heathman, and there was a handsome daughter belonged to the house. Chowne had paid her some of his insolent attentions, that meant, if they meant anything, some contemptuous admiration. Her brothers were angry. It was reported that Chowne had spoken of their sister, moreover, in a manner they would not brook ; so they invited him to their house, made him drunk, and when drunk sign a paper i6d old country life. promising to marry Jane Heathman before three months were up, or to forfeit ^10,000. They took care to have this document well attested, and next morning presented it to Chowne, who had forgotten all about it. He was much put out, blustered, cajoled, tried to laugh it off — all to no purpose. The brothers insisted on his either taking Jane to wife, or paying the stipulated sum. He asked for delay, and rode off" to consult his friend Hannaford. " Bless 'y," said Hannaford, " ten thousand pounds is a terrible big sum to pay. Take the creature." Thus it came about that Chowne yielded to the less disagreeable alternative. Poor Jane Heathman ! she little thought of what was in store for her. Her brothers had shown her a cruel kindness in forcing her into the arms of a reluctant suitor. To return to the wedding day, after the offer made to and accepted by Sally. About one o'clock Chowne returned alone, seated himself composedly in his dining-room, and ordered dinner. "But where be the wife?" asked Sally. "Haven't 'ee been married then r " THE HUNTING PARSON ^ i6i " Aye, married I have been, though." " But where be Mistress Chowne ? " " She's at the pubUc-house good three miles from here, Sally. She said to me as we were coming along, ' That is a point on which I differ from you.' Some point on w^iich we were speaking. So I stopped, and looked her in the face, and I said to her, ' Mrs Chowne, I never allow any one outside my house to differ from me, and not everlastingly repent it afterwards. And I won't allow any one inside my house to differ from me. So you can remain at this tavern and turn the matter over in your mind. If you intend to have no will of your own, and no opinion other than mine, then you can walk on at your leisure to Blackamoor. If not, you can turn back and go home to where you came from. Nobody expects you at Blackamoor, and nobody wants you there. So you are heartily welcome to keep away. So — serve the dinner, Sally, for oner An hour and a half later the bride arrived on foot, forlorn and humbled, and met with an ungracious reception from Sally. * Sally had the pig that had been promised her killed, cut up, and sold. After a while Chowne M 1 62 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. suspected that she was still keeping company with Joe. He was very angry, for he felt that he had been done out of the pig on false pre- tences; so he went off with his wife to stay with Parson Hannaford, and gave out he would not return for a week. On the second evening, however, he suddenly returned, and came bounding in at the door ; and sure enough Joe was there, come courting, and to eat his supper with Sally. The housekeeper, hearing the tread of her master, bade Joe fly and get out of his reach. But the back-door was fastened, and Joe, in his alarm, jumped into the copper. Sally put the lid on, and dashed into the passage to meet her master. "Where's Joe r I'm sure he's here. You've cut too much of my ham to fry for yourself alone. You've drawn too much ale. I'm sure Joe is here! " shouted Chowne, looking about him. "Deary life, sir!" exclaimed the housekeeper, "I protest ! I don't know where he can be. Why, master, you know I gave him up for the sake of the pig." Chowne's eve wandered about the kitchen, and noticed — what was unusual — the lid on the copper in the adjoining back-kitchen, that served also as laundry. THE HUNTING PARSON 163 " Sally," said he, " put some water into the copper to boil. I'm going to dip the pups. They've got the mange." " Ain't there enough in the kettle, master ? " "No, there is not. Put water into the copper." Accordingly Sally was forced to fill a can at the pump, and pour water into the copper over her lover, removing for the purpose only a corner of the cover. " There, master. Do'y let me serve you up some supper, and I'll get the water heated after." " No," said Chowne, " I'll stand here till it boils. Shove in some browse " (light firewood). Reluctantly the browse was put in under the caul- dron, and was lighted. It flared up. " Now some hard wood, Sally," said the parson. Still more reluctantly were sawn logs inserted. A moment after up went the copper lid, and out scrambled Joe, hot and dripping, " Ah ! I reckoned you was there," shouted Chowne, and went at him with his horse-whip, and lashed the fellow about the kitchen, down the passage, into the hall, and out at the front door, where he dismissed him with a kick. :m 2 i64 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. I tell the tale as it was told to me, but I suspect the conclusion of this story. It reminds me of a familiar folk-tale. But then — is it not the prerogative ^ \^ 'f^'itA i,^^ until the ccurt mourning for her had been laid aside ; and in the churches of Orkney prayers were put up for King James II. three months after he had abdicated. " However," I asked of Caleb, " could the huge OLD ROADS. 215 masses of granite have been moved that form the pillars in the church, and the gate-posts, and the fireplace in the hall ? " " \¥ell, sir, on truckamucks." " Truck amucks!" "In the old times they didn't have wheels, but a sort of cart with the ends of the shafts carried out behind and dragging on the ground. In fact, the cart was nothing but two young trees, and the roots dragged, and the tops were fastened to the horse. When they wanted to move a heavy weight they used four trees, and lashed the middle ones together." " No carts or waggons, then r " "Only one waggon in the parish, and that your grandfather's, and that could travel only on the high- road. Not many other conveyances either." It is a marvel to us how the old china and glass travelled in those days ; but the packer was a man of infinite care and skill in the management of fragile wares. Does the reader remember the time when all such goods were brought by carriers ? How often they got broken if intrusted to the stage-coaches, how rarely if they came by the carrier. The carrier's waggon was securely packed, and time was ot no object to the driver, he went very slowly and very 2i6 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. carefully over bad ground. The carrier's life was a very jolly one, and few songs were more popular in the west of England than that of The Jolly IVaggoner — " When first I went a-waggoning, a-waggoning did go, I filled my parents' hearts with sorrow, trouble, grief, and woe ; And many are the hardships too, that since I have gone through. Sing Wo ! my lads, sing wo ! Drive on, my lads, heigh-ho ! Who would not live the life of the jolly waggoner? It is a cold and stormy night, and I'm wet to the skin, I'll bear it with contentment till I get to the inn. And then I'll sit a-drinking with the landlord and his kin. Sin 2; Wo ! &c. Now summer is a-coming on — what pleasure we shall see ! The small birds blithely singing, so sweet on every tree, The blackbirds and the thrushes, too, are whistling merrily. Sing Wo ! &c. Now Michaelmas is coming — what pleasure we shall find ! 'Twill make the gold to fly, my lads, like chaff before the wind, And every lad shall kiss his lass, so loving and so kind. Sing Wo! &c." Since the introduction of steam two additional verses have been added to this song— "Along the country roads, alas ! but waggons kw are seen, The world is topsy-turvy turned, and all things go by steam, And all the past is passed away, like to a morning dream. Sing Wo ! &c. The landlords cry, What shall we do? our business is no more, The railroad it has ruined us, who badly fared before; 'Tis luck and gold to one or two, but ruined are a score. Sing Wo ! &c." OLD ROADS. 217 The leathern belt worn by the groom nowadays is the survival of the strap to which the lady held, as she sat on a pillion behind her groom. The horses ridden in those days must have been strong, or the distances not considerable, and the pace moderate, for to carry two full-grown persons cannot have been a trifle for a horse on bad roads. " It is of some importance," said Sydney Smith, " at what period a man is born. A young man alive at this period hardly knows to what improvements of human life he has been introduced ; and I would bring before his notice the changes that have taken place in England since I began to breathe the breath of life — a period of seventy years. 1 have been nine hours sailino; from Dover to Calais before the in- vention of steam. It took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath before the invention of railroads. In going from Taunton to Bath I suffered between ten thousand and twelve thousand severe contusions before stone-breaking MacAdam was born. I paid fifteen pounds in a single year for repair of carriage- springs on the pavement of London, and I now glide without noise or fracture on wooden pavement. I can walk without molestation from one end of London to another ; or, if tired, get into a cheap and active 2l8 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. cab, instead of those cottages on wheels which the hackney coaches w^ere at the beginning of my life. I forgot to add, that as the basket of the stage- coaches in which luggage was then carried had no springs, your clothes were rubbed all to pieces ; and that even in the best society, one-third of the gentle- men w^ere always drunk. I am now ashamed that I was not formerly more discontented, and am utterly surprised that all these changes and inventions did not occur tw^o centuries ago." CHAPTER IX. FAMILY PORTRAITS. NE day a very grand and, as she conceived, original idea came into my grandmother's head. She was resolved to represent pictorially, on a sheet of cartridge-paper, all the confluent streams of blood in her children's veins, of the families to which they were entitled to draw blood through past alliances. 2 20 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. So my grandmother got out her ruler and colour- box, and a pallet and brushes, and filled a little glass with water. Presently a pedigree was drawn out by the aid of compasses and a parallel ruler. Then she rubbed her paints and set to work colouring. She dabbed some vermilion on Father A, and gamboge on Mother B ; then on the next in the same generation, Father C, she put scge-green ; and his wife, Mother D, she indicated with Prussian blue. The son of vermilion A and gamboge B was R. That was simple enough ; in his arteries flowed a vivid tide of combined vermilion and gamboge. He married S, who was the offspring of sage-green C and Prussian blue D ; consequently her arteries were flow- ing with rather a dingy mixture of sage-green and Prussian blue. Now R and S had a child, P, and his veins were charged with a combination of ver- milion and gamboge and sage-green and Prussian blue. When my grandmother had got so far, she bit the end of her paint-brush: for P, who was her husband's father, of course married, and her mother- in-law must be also represented by a combination of four colours. She took the end of the brush out of her mouth and rubbed emerald green and carmine. FAMILY PORTRAITS. 221 E and F should symbolize her husband's mother's grandparents, E brought into the family a stream of carmine blood, and F one of vivid emerald. Then the veins of her step-mother represented a mixed tide of carmine and emerald and of two other families, as yet unindicated. To these she promptly appropriated violet and orange. Now at last was she able to tabulate the constituents of her husband's blood : it was composed of minute rills of vermilion, gamboge, sage-green, Prussian blue, carmine, emerald green, violet, and orange. Already she had trenched on the composite colours. Now a great dismay fell on my grandmother ; for she had to complete the same process for the exemplification of her own blood; and for her ancestry not only were no primary colours left, but even no secondary. She had to represent them with brown, lavender, slate, — yes, oh joy ! there was another blue, cobalt ! — verdegris, lem.on yellow, black, and white. She hesitated some while before employing the verdegris. She never completed that table ; for she was aghast at the rivers of mud, literal mud, which, according to her scheme, flowed through the arteries of her offspring. Now look at this table. Consider, it is only one of a pedigree through five generations. 222 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. o pa ►J •2 "^ a o _rt ^ -N -o pa •a o o S ^ + + o g + o U + + >■ rt pa + rt o + + "rt rt rt U + II— I pa 3 bJO ^ o pa -P^ :,rt O o •"s < FAMILY PORTRAITS. 223 Every one of my readers, every human being, nay, every beast, and bird, and fish, and reptile, rejiresents the 16 ancestors of four generations, that means 32 independent streams of blood in the fifth generation, and 1004 currents in the tenth generation, and 32,128 rivulets of distinct blood in the fifteenth generation, and 1,028,096, if we go back to the twentieth gener- ation. Take thirty years as a generation, then, in the reign of Henry III., there were over a million independent individuals, walking, talking, eating, marrying, whose united blood was to be, in 1889, blended in your veins. Why, that ogre of a sailor in the Bab Ballads, who represented a whole ship's crew, because, when shipwrecked, he had eaten them, is nothing to you. The whole population of London, of Middlesex, was not a million, then. You represent a large county — Yorkshire, for instance. Our arteries are very sluices, through which an incredible amount of confluent rills unite to rush, the drainage of the whole social country-side. Such being the case, does it not seem a farce to talk about family types, and family likenesses, and family peculiarities beyond one or two generations at most ? And yet it is not a farce ; for what comes out abundantly clear is, that certain streams are stronger 2 24 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. than others, and colour and affect for several gener- ations the quality of the blood with which they mingle. Not so only, but earlier types reappear after the lapse of time as distinct as though there had been no inter- mediate blood mixture, as though there had been filiation by gemmation, as is the case with sponges. One day I was visiting a friend, when I was struck by the excellence of a portrait in his hall of a very refined and beautiful old lady ; there was nothing characteristic in the dress. Being a fancier in portraiture, and being mightily ill-contented with modern portrait-painting, this picture pleased me especially ; it was a picture as well as a portrait, harmonious in colour and tone, and artistically focussed. Moreover, it was a perfectly life-like " pre- sentiment " of my friend's wife. He and she were both old people. Said I to my friend, " What an admirable likeness ! The artist has not only made a good picture, but he has caught your wife's expres- sion as well as features and peculiar colouring. Who is the painter ? I did not know we had the man now- adays who could have painted such a portrait." " Oh," he answered, " that is not my wife — it is her great-grandmother." Thus the wife represented four united streams of FAMILY PORTRAITS. 225 two generations back, but she represented in face, and represented exactly, only one of them. Now for another instance. In a certain family that I know intimately, a son and a female cous'n are as much alike as though they were twin brother and sister ; what is the more remarkable is, that they deviate altogether from the type of their brothers and sisters, jiarents, uncles, and aunts. But., and here is the curious fact, they resemble, even ludicrously, an ancestor whose miniature and portrait in oils are in the possession of the family. I draw out the pedi- gree. I must premise that the portrait is of a gentleman in forget-me-not blue velvet, and he goes in the family by the name of the Blue Man. Blue Man = A J r B = C 1 1 .1 gJ- ^ = . ^-I r-J M N ^ M and N are the cousins, male and female, who are as alike as twins, and they are exact reproductions of the Blue Man, notwithstanding that through C, D, G, and I come in fresh streams of blood, that two Q 2 26 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. entirely independent rivers flush the veins of M and N respectively, coming in from G and I. They have the blood of C and D in common, but alike disregard their qualities ; so also do they reject the blood of their respective mothers, and go back to a common ancestor in the reign of Queen Anne. But I can give a still more remarkable instance of atavism, which also must be illustrated by a table. Here the likeness goes back even further, and, like that above, also through the maternal line. There is in the same old manor-house as that in which hangs the Blue Man another picture, painted by Carlo Maratti, in or about 1672, of a certain Sir Edward, a dandy, in long flowing curls, a beautiful Steenkirk, a cherry ribbon round his neck, and also about his wrists. The face is fine, haughty, some- what dreamy. It was painted of him when he was a young man of about five-and-twenty. Hanging near him is his elder brother, also with flowing hair, a bluff', good-natured man in appearance, quite diff^erent in character from the knight, one may judge, and cer- tainly not like him in feature. Now the knight. Sir Edward, died without issue, and left all his property to his great-nephew, the grandson of his elder brother James. That nephew bought estates in Nottingham- FAMILY PORTRAITS. 227 shire, and for two hundred years the family he founded has been apart from the elder branch, which hves in the west of England, and which owns tlie picture. One day recently there came into the neighbour- hood a descendant of James, and calling at the house of his kinsman, unconsciously seated himself beneath Sir Edward, a.d. 1668. From a j>aiiitiiig by Carlo Maratti. N. a.d. 1888. Front a Photograph, the picture of Sir Edward. He was a young man of about four - and - twenty. He was at once greeted with an exclamation of astonishment and amusement. He was extraordinarily like the portrait; had he but Q 2 2 28 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. been dressed in stamped black velvet, worn curls, a Steenkirk, and cherry ribbons, he might have been the same man. Now look at this pedigree, and note the remarkable fact. He did not hail from the knight, whom he resembled, but from his brother James, whom he did not resemble. The knight, Sir Edward, must therefore have inherited the features of an earlier ancestor, who was also, of course, the ancestor of his brother; so that this young man in 1888 bore the face and features of a still earlier member of the family, whose likeness has not been preserved, if it were ever taken. Here is a family likeness going back six or seven generations. We cannot be A = B b. 1602. I III. i6'8. + 1659. J + t688. I <— I I Sir Edward James = C b. 1648 b. 1641. j m 1676. + 1728 + 1680. + 1697. D = E b. 1677. I m. 1701. + 1721. j + 1747. I F = G I m. 1725. + 1775- + 1811. I H = Elizabeth I m. 1781. + 1833.J + 1821. I I = K + 1848. j m. i8iq. I L = M b. 1827. J FAMILY PORTRAITS. 229 certain that the characteristic features of Sir Edward were derived from his father or his mother. Nor is this likeness found only in N. It exists also in his father L, though not in so strong a degree, or, at all events, it is less apparent in an old man of sixty than in a young man of four-and-twenty. Curiously enough, the portrait of Elizabeth, the ancestress through whom these two, L and N, derive their likeness to Sir Edward, shows none of these characteristics. They remained latent in her, but reappeared in her grandson and great-grandson. Unfortunately the pictures of ID and F, who intervened, hav^e not been preserved, or their whereabouts have not been discovered, so that it is not possible to track the likeness through two generations that intervene between Elizabeth in 1780 and James in 1680. It has been conjectured that a child sitting daily in the presence of a certain portrait insensibly assumes a likeness to it ; but such a conjecture will not satisfy the case just mentioned, for L and N till recently had never seen the picture which they so closely resembled. There is another point connected with family por- traits that has given me occasion of thought and speculation ; and that is, the way in which those 2 30 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. children who are named after an ancestor or ancestress sometimes, I do not say often or always, but certainly sometimes, do in a very remarkable manner receive the stamp of the features of that ancestor after whom named. This has nothing to do with the naming of the child at baptism because of a supposed resemblance, for in very young infants none such can be traced, but the likeness grows in the child to the person whose name it bears. Now here is a bit of pedigree, with the likenesses that exist curiously agreeing with the Christian names. W D = MB CB = M L , I V/D = DA I E = S C r T^ M E 2 S = G T r T — T ^~i E2 WD2 MBS DA- In this relation of a new generation to an old there is a point to be remarked. E^ is in character, in manner, and in tastes and pursuits exactly what E was, but does not resemble him in face. W D Ms just like W D, his great-great-great-grandfather, whose double Christian name he bears. M B^ and M B^ are like FA MIL } ' FOU TRAITS. 2 3 1 M B in flice, and M B ' resembles her great-great- grandmother in face and in character. D A ^ is absurdly like her great-grandmother, whose double name she bears, but is as yet too young for the mental characteristics to show themselves, or at all events to have become sufficiently emphasized to enable one to say whether, in mind as in face, she resembles her great-grandmother. Now this may be accidental, but if so, it is a very curious and remarkable accident. Noticing it in other cases, I have sometimes wondered whether there may be in it more than accident. The old Norsemen believed that by calling a child after a certain great man, some of that great man's luck and spiritual force passed with his name to the child. The idea among Roman Catholic parents of giving their offspring the names of saints is, that they put the children under the special patronage, influence, and tutelage of the saint after whom they are called. Now — is there in these ideas anything more than a fancy, a delusion, a superstition ? Is it possible that a mysterious effluence should pass fiom the spirit ot the departed to the child that reproduces his or her name, and that this effluence should affect, modify, and impress the features and character of the child ? 232 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. It is remarkable the way in which tricks perpetuate themselves. I know some one who, when a boy, had to be broken of the absurd habit of slapping the sole of his right boot with his right hand every now and then behind his back, as he walked. An old aunt saw him do this one day, and she said, " How odd ! we had a world of trouble with his father when he was a child — about this very thing." FD."3 Lady Xorthcote (Jacquetta Baking). Lady Young (Emily Baring I may, in connection with this, mention a personal matter. My paternal grandfather's sister, Jacquetta Baring, married Sir Stafford Northcote, in 1791 ; she was the grandmother of the late Lord Iddesleigh, who FAMILY PORTRAITS. 233 was, accordingly, my cousin, but whom I never met. One clay I was with one of his sons, who, whilst in conversation with me, laughed, and then said, " Excuse me, but there are many little ways you have, both of turn of the head and movements of the hand, that bring my father continually before my mind whilst you are speaking with me." These little tricks of manner are therefore not personal, are not the result of association and imita- tion, but travel through the blood. But to return to family portraits. That, in spite of the influx of fresh blood from all quarters, a certain family type remains, one can hardly doubt in looking through a genuine series of family pictures. I knew a case of an artist who had been employed in a certain house, where he had become familiar with the family portraits, which he had cleaned, relined and restored. Some of the early pictures of the family had been lost, in fact sold, by a spendthrift — another Charles Surface — who did not shrink from disposing of his mother's picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The head of the family knew where some two or three of these pictures had gone ; they had been bought by a family akin to his, and the repre- sentative of that family very kindly acceded to his 2 34 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. request that he might have them copied. The artist was sent to that gentleman's house to do what was desired. He was introduced into the dining-room, where hung over a score of portraits, but he went directiy to the two which belonged to the family whose paintings he had cleaned, singled them out from the rest, and said, " These I am sure belong to the X — s. I know the type of face." He was right ; he had spotted the only two which were not pictures of the A family, but were of the family X. The delight of watching the re-emergence of a disappeared family likeness, as generations pass, is, no doubt, the chief delight of having a good series of family pictures. But there is an advantage in such a series which is not perhaps much considered, and that is the linking of the present generation in thought with the past. Since, with the Reformation, prayer for the dead ceased, our association with the w^orld of the departed has fallen into total disregard, and we neither think of holding any communion of thought and good-will with our forebears, nor suppose that they can entertain any kindly thought of and wishes for us and our welfare. And yet, how much we owe them ! Our beautiful estates, our dear old houses, the laying out of the parks and grounds, the cutting of the FAMILY PORTRAITS. 235 terraces, the digging of the ponds, the planting of the stately trees, the gathering together of our plate, our books, our pictures, our old furniture. Nay, more, if we have not inherited these, we have from them some twists in our mind, some terms in our speech, some physical or psychical characteristics, some virtues and some faults. We owe to those old people more than we suppose. To their self-restraint, their guileless walk, their frugal ways, we owe our own hale bodies and strict con- sciences. Consider what misery a strain of tainted blood brings into a family — ^a strain of blood that carries vicious propensities with it. Well, it we have good in us, if we are scrupulous, honest, truthful, self-controlled, it comes to us in a large measure along with our pure blood from honest ancestry. How can we sit in the beautiful halls and panelled boudoirs of the old people, and not be thankful to them for having made them so charming ? How can we walk in the avenues they planted, pick the flower- ing shrubs they grouped and bedded, and not be grateful to them ? M To plant a tree is a most unselfish work, for very few men live to see the trees they have planted reach such a size as to give pleasure to themselves. Men 236 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. plant for their sons and grandsons; and their sons and grandsons who enjoy these trees should think for a moment of those to whose forethought they owe them, I confess I like, when I have enjoyed the beauty of some avenue, or clump of stately trees, to look at the picture of the planter of them, and say, " Thank you, dear old man, for the pleasure you have given to me, and will give to my children after me." We have something yet to learn from the Chinese. The only religion of the Celestials is the worship of their ancestors. Every race probably inherits some truth that it can and is destined to impart to the world. The Chinese lack the deeper vision which can look up to the great Father of spirits above, but yet from them we may acquire thought of and love for our forebears. " They are all gone into a world of light, And I alone sit lingering here ! Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts does clear. It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, Like stars upon some gloomy grove ; Or those faint beams in which this hill is dressed After the sun's remove." So sang Vaughan, a poet of the Restoration ; and if one attempts it one can feel with him, that it is a FAMILY PORTRAITS. 237 pleasure and a rest to think of, and cultivate affection for, those of our family who belong to the past. In many an old mansion the story goes that an ancestor or ancestress icalh there, is to be seen occasionally between the glimpses of the moon visiting the old house, and generally as foretoken of some event intimately concerning the family. Such a story is common enough. We think that possibly these ancient ghosts may reappear to acquaint themselves how we are getting on, but it never occurs to us to visit them, and walk in spirit their desolate region, and cheer them with a kindly expression, and a word of good-will. Well, I think that a set of family portraits does help one to that, does link us somehow to these dead forefathers, and serves as a vehicle of mental communication between us. Then, again, the family scamp is of use. We had one in our family. I am thankful to say we do not inherit his wild blood, as he died unmarried. He sold the bulk of the ancestral estates, and got rid of every- thing he could get rid of. But then — since his death he has stood as a warning to each successive gener- ation. The children go before his picture and hear the story of his misdeeds, and it sinks into their hearts, and they learn frugality. They go over the 238 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. acres that would have been theirs, hut for the scamp ; they see the old mansion, a quadrangle, which they would have had a dance about, had it not been for the scamp ; they know that there are gaps in the series of family portraiture, because the pictures were sold by the scam]); and so they grow up with great fear in their minds lest they also should by any chance be e\'en as he ; and so the scamp is of good after all. CHAPTER X. THE VILLAGE MUSICIAN. HE press and the railway are all the old individualities and peculiarities that marked the country. It has been said, and said truly, that the railway has abolished everywhere in Europe a local cuisine, so that the traveller, whether in England, France, in Italy, Russia, at Constantinople, and even 240 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. at Cairo, has the same menu at tahle-cVhote. There was a time when, by travelling, you could pick up culinary ideas. That time is now past. You find exactly the same dishes, served in the same order, everywhere ; and when fowl and salad come on, you know everywhere that the m.eat courses have arrived at their full stop. Costumes also are disappearing everywhere, no men now wear them, hardly any women, except a few artists' models on the steps of the Trinita at Rome, and a few German tourists who dress up like mountaineers when excursioning among the Tyrolean Alps. It is said that the Chinese all dress alike, think alike, talk alike, act alike, eat the same food, take the same amusements, and look alike. Civilization is making us all Chinese, we are losing our indi- viduality and our independence, and, it must be admitted, casting away behind us what constituted the picturesqueness and variety of life. In the old times in country places, away from towns, there was much that was of interest ; men and women had then quaint ways, stood out as characters, and impressed themselves on those who were around them. Now, all are afraid of being peculiar, of not being like every one else, of using THE VILLAGE MUSICIAN. 241 a word, doing an act, thinking a thought which has not the sanction of — vulgarity, in the true acceptation of the term, according to its derivation — of being common. One looks back, with a little compunction, on those old times. There was a freshness and charm about them which can never be recovered. Every one in a village knew every one else, and all his belongings ; every one was related, and a stranger from a few miles off passed as a foreigner. To " go foreign " was to leave the parish. This was, of course, carried to extraordinary lengths in some places, and neighbouring villages regarded each other with traditional jealousy. This was not commendable. There is a story told of two villages, one called Mary Tavy, the adjoining called Peter Tavy, that is to say, St. Mary on the Tavy and St. Peter on the Tavy, on the borders of Dartmoor, that regarded each other for ages with animosity. One day after a storm of rain the river Tavy rolled down volumes of water, and a poor wretch was caught by the flood on a rock in mid-stream ; he was unable to reach the bank. He screamed for assistance. Presently a man came along the side and halted, and called to the fellow in danger, " I say, be you a Peter 242 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Tavy or a Mary Tavy man ? " " Peter Tavy," answered the wretch in danger. "Throw me a rope, or I shall be drownded." "No, no," answered he on the land, "I be a Mary Tavy man ; so go on hollering till a Peter Tavy chap comes by ; " and he left the fellow in distress to his fate. This exclusiveness had its bad side, but it had its redeeming side also. There can be no question that the force of popular feeling, the sense of relation- ship, the feeling of belonging to a certain village, or class, did act as a strong moral support to many a young man and woman. They felt that they dared not bring disgrace on their whole class, or village, by misconduct. The sense of belonging to, being one member of a community, in which, if one member were honoured, all the members rejoiced with it, and if one were disgraced, the humiliation fell on all, was very strong and tough. That is to an immense extent gone, and can never be restored. We are all cosmopolitan now, and live and die to ourselves. But let us come to some of the peculiar features of old village life, before there were railways, and when the post did not come every day. At that time most villages had their feasts, revels, THE VILLAGE MUSICIAN. 243 harvest homes, ringers' suppers, shearing feasts, and other entertainments. Some of us can remember i^f^''---' Old Church Orchestra. when in the village churches the gallery was occupied by the village band, fiddles and viol, ophicleide, fl ute &:c. They were done away with, and the hand-organ R 2 244 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. took its place in some churches, a real organ or a harmonium in others. It was a sad mistake of the clergy to try to abolish the old orchestra; — no doubt the playing was not very good, and the in- struments were out of tune ; no doubt also there was much quarrelling and little harmony among the performers, but an institution should be improved, not abolished. That gave the death-blow to instru- mental music in our villages. Previously the smallest village had its half-dozen men who could play on some instruments. Now you find that there are half a dozen boys who can manage the concertina — that is all. These instrumentalists attended all the festivities in a village, wakes, harvest homes, revels, and weddings, and were well received and well treated. They played old country dances, old ballads, old concerted pieces of no ordinary merit. In some parish chests may be found volumes of rudely written music, which belonged to these performers, mostly sacred, but not always so. When in 1617 James I. was making a progress through Lancashire, he found that the Puritan magistrates had prohibited and unlawfully punished the people for using their "lawful recreations and THE VILLAGE MUSICIAN. 245 honest exercises " on holidays ; and next year he issued a declaration concerning sports and merry- makings, such as May-games, morris-dances, Whit- sun-ales, the setting up of maypoles ; and James very wisely said, " If these be taken away from the meaner sort, who labour hard all the week, they will have no recreations at all to refresh their spirits ; and in place thereof it will set up filthy tipplings and drunkenness, and breed a number of idle and discontented speeches in their ale-houses." Also it would " hinder the conversion of many, whom their priests will take occasion hereby to vex, persuading them that no honest mirth or recreation is lawfully tolerable in our religion." At the present day we hardly realize the extent to which music was cultivated in old times, so that England — not Italy, Germany, or France — was the great musical nation of Europe. What astonished foreigners, when they visited England in the reign of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, was the perfection to which music was brought here, and the wide- spread knowledge of music that prevailed. P'rance had its music school created by Sully, a Florentine by birth, who was placed at the head of a band ot violins by Louis XIV. At that time "not half the 246 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. musicians of France were able to play at sight." Even that band, got together with difficulty, could play nothing at sight. Nor did Sully effect any great reform in this respect, for when the Regent, Duke of Orleans, wished to hear Corelli's sonatas, which were newly brought from Rome, no three persons were to be found in Paris who could play them, and he was obliged to content himself with having them sung to him by three voices. On the other hand, in England at that time every gentleman was expected to be able either to sing a part at sight, or play a part on some instrument or other. As a regular thing after supper, the party in a country house adjourned to the music-room, and there spent the rest of the evening in singing or in instrumental music. Nor was this knowledge of music confined to the upper classes. A curious instance of this we find in Pepys' diary. That diary extends between the years 1660 — 1669. In the course of his diary, four maids are mentioned as being in his household, to attend on his wife, and a boy who waited on himself. All of these seem to have possessed, as an ordinary qualification, some musical skill and knowledge. Of the first of the serving-maids he says (November 17, 1662), "After dinner, talking THE VILLAGE MUSICIAN. 247 with my wife, and making Mrs. Gosnell (the maid) sing — I am mightily pleased with her humour and singing." And again, on December 5, " She sings exceedino;lv well." Within a few months Gosnell was succeeded by Mary Ashwell ; and he tells us in March, " I heard Ashwell play first upon the harp- sicon, and I find she do play pretty well. Then home by coach, buying at the Temple the printed virginal book for her." The harpsicon and the virginal were the pianofortes of the period, some- thing like scpare pianos ; in the virginal the strings were struck by quills. Of the third maid Mrs. Pepys had, Mary Mercer, he says on September 9, 1664, that she was "a pretty, modest, quiet maid. After dinner my wife and Mercer, Tom (the boy) and I, sat till eleven at night, singing and fiddling, and a great joy it is to see me master of so much pleasure in my house. The girle (Mercer) plays pretty w^ell upon the harpsicon, but only ordinary tunes, but hath a good hand ; sings a little, but hath a good voyce and eare. Aly boy, a brave boy, sings finely, and is the most pleasant boy at present, while his ignorant boy's tricks last, that ever I see." After some time Mercer went to see her mother, and Mrs. Pepys, finding her absent without leave, went after 248 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. her, found her in her mother's house, and there heat her. The mother having urged that Mary was " not a common prentice girl," and therefore ought not to have been thus chastized, Mrs. Pepys construed it into a question of her right to inflict corporal chastisement, and dismissed Mary. In October, 1666, says Pepys, " my wife brought a new girle. She is wretched poor, and but ordinary favoured, and we fain to lay out seven or eight pounds worth of clothes upon her back : and I do not think I can esteem her as I could have done another, that had come fine and handsome ; and, which is more, her voice, through want of use, is so furred that it do not at present please me ; but her manner of singing is such that I shall, I think, take great pleasure in it." After a while Mary Mercer was taken back, and then we hear of singing on the water, especially after a trip to Greenwich when returning by moonlight. The boy Tom was usually of the party. Of him Pepys says (Oct. 25, 1664), " My boy could not sleep, but wakes about four in the morning, and in bed laying playing on his lute till daylight, and it seems did the like last night, till twelve o'clock." And again, Dec. 26, 1668, "After supper I made the boy play THE VILLAGE MUSIC LAN. 249 upon his lute, and so, my mind is miglity content, — to bed." We do not in the least suppose that Pepys' house- hold was singular in the respect of having a succession of musical servants. All people in those times were musical — men, boys, women, and girls, of all classes and degrees. At the fire of London in 1666, Pepys, who was an eye-witness, tells us that the Thames was full of lighters and boats taking in goods, and that he " observed that hardly one ligliter or boat in three, that had the goods of a house, but there was a pair of virginals in it." How those old fellows loved and cared for their instruments! Mace, a writer of 1676, tells how a lute should be treated. " You shall do well," he writes, " even when you lay it by in the day-time, to put it into a bed that is constantly used, between the rug and the blanket, but never between the sheets, because they may be moist. There are great com- modities (advantages) in so doing; it will save the strings from breaking ; it will keep your lute in good order." He enumerates six conveniences of so doing. At that time a lute, a good one, cost about ^100. So completely was it a matter of course to have music after supper, that Cromwell, a lover of music, 2 50 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. only altered the character of the performance. When the ambassadors of Holland came to him, as Lord Protector, on the occasion of peace between the two Commonwealths, after having entertained them at a repast, he and the " Lady Protectrice " led them into the music-hall, where they had a psalm sung. This was in 1654. The dissolution of the cathedral choirs, the abolition of sacred music in the churches, scattered professional musicians over the country. There is a very curious traditional song relative to this change, sung in Devonshire, and called Brixham Toivn, It relates how — "In Brixham town so rare For singing sweet and fair, With none that may compair." The instrumentalists and singers considered that they were the best anywhere. But — "There came a man to our town, A man of office and in gown, Strove to put music down, Which most men do adore." Then the §tory goes on to exhort him and all others who love not music — " Go search out Holy Writ, And you will find in it, THE VILLAGE MUSLCLAN. 251 That it is right and fit To praise the Lord. On cymbal and with lute, On organ and with flute, And voices sweet that suit All in accord." Very pointedly the song goes on to mention how an evil spirit haunted Saul, and how it proved that this devil also hated music, and how that when David played on his harp the evil spirit fled. The song ends — " So now, my friends, adieu ; I hope that all of you Will pull most just and true In serving the Lord. God grant that all of we, Like angels may agree, Singing in harmony. And sweet concord." There was a great effort made at the time of the Commonwealth to put down all kinds of music. In 1648 the Provost-marshal was given power to arrest all ballad-singers. Organs were everywhere destroyed, and probably a great many viols, lutes, and other instru- ments. One gentleman, when he adopted Puritanism, had a deep hole dug in his garden, and buried in it " ,^200 worth of music-books, six feet underground, 252 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. being, as he said, love-songs and vanity." This was a considerable sum indeed for an amateur to have spent in books of vocal music only ; and as he con- tinued to play " psalms and religious hymns on the theorbo," it may be presumed that what was interred formed but a portion of his musical collection. The singers and instrumentalists dispersed by the orders of Parliament were reduced to the greatest poverty, and went round the country taking up their abode in gentlemen's houses, where they were gladly given quarters, when these gentlemen could afford it ; but as many were utterly impoverished, often the musicians frequented the ale-houses, and picked up a precarious subsistence from the tavern frequenters. This had one advantage, for it no doubt helped to educate the village people generally in music. But even thus they got into trouble, for Oliver Cromwell's third Parliament passed an Act ordering the arrest and punishment of all minstrels and musicians who performed in taverns. Hitherto in country places the only instruments used had been rude, and the only music known was the ballad air, which also served as a dance-tune. Hence most of our old dances are known by the names of the ballads to which they were sung. But the dispersion THE VILLAGE MUSICIAN. 253 of the orchestras from cathedrals and theatres and large town churches throughout the country places not only brought in a new notion of music, the playing of concerted pieces, but also in a great many cases placed the costly instruments at the disposal of village musicians. The old instrumentalists were obliged to part with their lutes and theorbos, their viol de gambas and violins, at a low price ; or dying in the villages where they had settled, they left their loved instru- ments to such men in the place as seemed likely to make good use of them. These old musicians in country places gathered men about them in their lodgings in the village ale-houses, and taught them a more artistic method of playing, and a higher class of music, and they really gave that impetus to orchestral church music which only died out — shall we not rather say was killed ? — within the memory of man. The old village musician was a man remarkable in his way. One, David Turton, of Horbury, in Yorkshire, was perhaps typical of the better class. A man of intense enthusiasm for his art, and passionate love of his viol ; one may be quite sure that his viol shared his bed, taking it by day when Turton was out of it, like Box and Cox. The story was told of him, that he was returning one night from 254 OLD COUNTRY LILE. a concert at Wakefield, where he had been performing, when he passed through a field in which was a savage bull. The bull seeing him began to bellow, and run at him with lowered horns. "Now then," said old David, " that note must be double B." He whipped the bass viol out of the green bag, set it down, and drew his bow over the strings, to try to hit the note bellowed. The bull, staggered at the response, stopped, threw up his head, and — turned tail. But there were musicians of a less dignified char- acter, jolly, reckless, drinking dogs, who fiddled at every festive gathering till they could fiddle no more. They were invariably present at a wedding. In a popular song called Clmmmies IFedding, it is said of the merry-makers — " The fiddler did stop, and he struck up a hop, Whilst seated on top of a trunk, But not one of the batch could come up to the scratch. They were all so outrageously drunk." Very quaint old tunes were played ; as the space for dancing in cottages was extremely limited, the performance was often confined to one couple, some- times to a single performer — a man, who took off" his shoes and went through really marvellous steps. The step-dance is now gone, or all but gone, but was THE VILLAGE MUSICIAN. 255 at one time much cultivated among the peasantry of the west of England. Much depended on the fiddler, who j)layed fast or slow% and changed his air, the dancer altering his pace and step, and the whole character of his dance, to suit the music. The village clerk was generally the great musical authority in the parish ; he led the orchestra in the church, and not unusuaMy also played at merry- makings. It may be remembered that in Doctor Syntax is a plate representing the parson in his black cocked hat and bushy wig performing on his violin to the rustics as they dance about the Mr.y- pole ; and again, fiddling, he leads the harvest-home procession. Such conduct would be regarded as highlv indecorous now; but was there harm in it ? Was it not well that the parson should be associated with the merry-makings of his flock? that he should lead and direct their music ? Those old orchestras were, I fear, subject to out- breaks of discord, and that w^as one reason why they were displaced first by the barrel organ, then by the harmonium. Well, but the solar envelope is always torn by tempests, and yet it diffuses a light in which w^e live and enjoy ourselves, regardless of these storms. The very necessity for living together in some sort 256 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. of agreement, in order that they might be able to perform concerted pieces, was of educative advantage to the old musicians. It taught them to subdue their individuality to the common welfare. And so, not only because it gave more persons an interest in the conduct of Divine worship than at present is the case, but also because the orchestra was a great educative school of self-control, its disappearance from every village is to be regretted. JAMF.S OLVKK. Fyciii a Photogiaph by IIavman, Launxeston. CHAPTER XI. THE VILLAGE BARD. il N the Vicar of JFcikefield, the parsonage is visited periodically by a poor man of the name of Burchell. " He was fondest of the company of children, whom he used to call harmless little men. He was famous, I found, for singing them ballads and telling them stories. . . . He generally came for a few days into our neighbourhood once a year, and lived upon the S 2 2 6o OLD COUNTRY LIFE. neighbours' hospitality. He sat down to supper among us, and my wife was not sparing of her goose- berry wine. The tale went round; he sung us old songs, and gave the children the story of the Buck of Beverland, with the history of Patient Grizzel, the Adventures of Catskin, and then Fair Rosamund's Bower." How completely the itinerant singer of ballads and teller of folk-tales has disappeared — driven from the houses of the gentle, because the young people have books now, and amuse themselves with them, and he lingers on only in the ale-houses; such men are few and far between, feeble old men, who can now hardly obtain a hearing for their quaint stories, and whose minor melodies are voted intolerable by young ears, disciplined only to appreciate music-hall inanities. There are still a few of these men about, and as I have taken a good deal of pains to get into their confidence, and collect from them the remains — there exist only remains — of their stories, musical and poetical, I am able to give an account of them which ought to interest, for the old village bard or song- man is rapidly becoming as extinct as the dodo and the great auk. The village bard or song-man is the descendant THE VILLAGE BARD. 261 of the minstrel. Now the minstrels were put down by Act of Parliament in 1597, and were to be dealt with by the magistrates with severity as rogues and vagabonds. That sealed the doom of the old ballad. All such as were produced later are tame and flat in comparison with the genuine songs of the old times, and can at best be regarded only as modern imitations. The press has preserved in Broadsides a good number of ballads, and T/ie Complete Dancing Master and other collections have saved a good number of the old tunes from being irrevocably lost. But by no means all were thus preserved ; a great many more continued to be sung by our peasantry, and I quite believe the old men when they say, that at one time they knew some one hundred and fifty to two hundred distinct songs and melodies ; their memories were really extraordinary. But then they could neither read nor write, and the faculty of remembering was developed in them to a remarkable extent. I have heard of two of these men meeting to sing against each other for a wager. They began at sunset ; one started a ballad, sang it through, then his opponent sang one, and so on. The object was to ascertain which knew most. The sun rose on them, and neither had come to an end of his store, so the stakes were drawn. 262 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. These old minstrels all are in the same tale, when asked to sing, " Lord, your honour, I haven't a sung these thirty year. Volks now don't care to hear my songs. Most on 'em be gone right out o' my head." Yet a good many come back ; and I lind that when I read over the first verse or two of a series of ballads in any collection, that the majority are either known to them, or suggest to them another, or a variant. It is not ballads only that are stored in their memories — many ballads that go back for their origin to before the reign of Henry VII., but also songs that breathe the atmosphere of the time of Elizabeth. Mr. R. Bell, in his introduction to his Songs from, the Dramatists, says, " The superiority in all qualities of sweetness, thoughtfulness, and purity of the writers of the sixteenth century over their successors is strikingly exhibited in these productions. " The songs of the age of Elizabeth and James I. are distinguished as much by their delicacy and chastity of feeling, as by their vigour and beauty. The change that took place under Charles II. was sudden and complete. With the Restoration love disappears, and sensuousness takes its place. Volup- tuous without taste or sentimicnt, the songs of that period may be said to dissect in broad daylight the THE VILLAGE BARD. 263 life of the town, laying bare with revolting shame- lessness the tissues of its most secret vices. But as this morbid anatomy required some variation to relieve its sameness, the song sometimes transported the libertinism into the countrv, and throuoli the medium of a sort of Covent Garden pastoral exhibited the fashionabb delinquencies in a masquerade of Strephons and Chlorises, no better than the Courtalls and Loveits of the comedies. The costume of in- nocence gave increased zest to the dissolute wit, and the audiences seem to have been delighted with the representation of their own licentiousness in the trans- jiarent disguise of verdant images, and the affectation of rural simplicity." Very few of the songs of the Restoration have lingered on in the memory of our minstrels, if ever they were taken into their store. Many of the songs of that period were set to tunes that have passed on from generation to generation, up to the present age, when they are all being neglected for wretched, vulgar songs, without fun and without melody. The ballad especially is death-smitten. Folks nowadays lack patience, and will not endure a song that is not finished in three minutes. The old ballad was a folk-tale run into jingling rhyme, and sung to a traditional air; 2 64 OLD COUNTRY LILE. it is often very long. One I have recovered, The Gipsij Countess, runs through over twenty verses. Tile very popular Saddle to Rags runs through some twenty-two, Lord Bateman has about fifty, and Arthur of Bradley has hardly any end to it. A ballad cannot be pared down greatly, as that destroys the story, which is set to verse to be told leisurely, with great variety of expression. In 1846 the Percy Society issued to its members a volume entitled yincient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, edited by Mr. J. H. Dixon, who gives in his preface the following account of the sources whence he collected them : — " He who, in travelling through the rural districts of England, has made the roadside inn his resting-place, who has visited the lowly dwellings of the villagers and yeomanry, and been present at their feasts and festivals, must have observed that there are certain old poems, ballads, and songs which are favourites wdth the masses, and have been said and sung from gener- ation to generation." When I was a boy I was wont to ride about my native county, putting up at little village inns for the night, and there I often came in for gatherings where the local song-man entertained the company. Unfortunately I did not make any THE VILLAGE BARD. 265 collection at the time, though snatches of the songs and wafts of the strains lingered in my head. I dare say that there are still singers of ballads in other parts of England, but my researches have been confined to the west. Somerset had its own type of songs with peculiar cadences, and Devon and Cornwall were rich to overflow in melodies. Wherever I go in quest of a song-man, I hear the same story, " Ah ! there was old So-and-so, eighty years of age, died last winter of bronchitis, he was a singer and no mistake."' They have been struck down, those old men, and therefore we must prize the more those that are left. Anciently — well, not so very anciently either, for it was within my memory — almost every parish had its bard, a man generally the descendant of a still more famous father, who was himself but the legatee of a race of song-men. This village bard had his memory stored with traditional melodies and songs and ballads, committed to him as a valuable deposit by his father, wedded to well-known ancient airs, and the country singer not only turned from the affect- ation of the new melodies, but with jealous tenacity clung to the familiar words. Words became so wedded to airs that the minstrels, and their hearers and imitators, could not endure to have them dissociated. 266 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. I had an instance of this three winters ago, when, at a village concert, I sang an old ballad, The Sun was Set behind the Hill, set by a friend to a melody he had composed for it. A very old labourer who was present began to grumble. " He's gotten the words right, but he's not got the right tune. He should zing 'un right or not at all," and he got up and left the room in disdain. The village minstrel did certainly compose some of the melodies he sang, generally to a new ballad, or song that was acquired from a broadside, or to one he had himself made. This the old men have distinctly assured me of. They did not all, or a large number of them did not, pretend to the faculty of musical composition, but they have named to me men so gifted, and have told me of melodies they composed. There was, and is, a blacksmith in a remote village in Devon, who is reported to be able to play any musical instrument put into his hands, at all events after a little trial of its peculiarities. He is said to be able to set any copy of verses offered him to original melodies. Davey, the writer of TVill JVatch, and other pleasant songs of the Dibdin period and character, was a Devonshire blacksmith. But, as already hinted. THE VILLAGE BARD. 267 these men also composed verses. There was such an one, a village poet in the parish where I lived as a child. His story was curious. He had bought his wife in Okehampton market for half-a-crown. Her husband, weary of her temper and tongue, brought her to the " Gig?;let " fair with a rope round her neck, and the minstrel had the hardi- hood to buy her. I know that it has often been charged by foreigners on English people that they sell their wives thus, but this was a fact. The woman was so sold, and so bought ; the buyer and seller quite believed that the transaction was legal. She lived with the purchaser till her death, and a very clean, decent, hard-working woman she was. She had, indeed, a tongue; but when she began to let it wag, then the minstrel clapped his hands to his ears, ran out of the house, and betook himself to the ale-house, where he was always welcome, and from which he did not himself return, but was conveyed home — in a wheel- barrow. This man regarded himself as the poet of the place, and nothing of importance took place in my grandfathers family without his coming to the house to sing a copy of verses he had composed on the occasion. Many a good laugh was had over his verses, which, like those of Orlando, " had in them 2 68 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. more feet than the verses would bear; and the feet were lame, and could not bear themselves without the verse." There was one, made on the occasion of some new arrangement with the farmers relative to the game entered into by my father, and which gave general satis- faction, of which each stanza ended with the refrain — " For he had, he had, he had, he had, O he had a most expansive mind." The reader will conclude that the world has not lost much in that Jim's poems have not been preserved. One very odd feature, by the way, of these singers is the manner in which they manufacture syllables where the verse halts. Thus when " gold-en " comes in place of two trochees, they convert it into " guddle- old-en " ; even, when the line is still more halting, into " gud-dle-udd-le-old-en." In like manner "soul" or " tree " is turned into " suddle-ole " or " tur-rur-ree." There was another village poet who flourished in the same epoch as the Jim cited above. His name was Rab Downe., He had a remarkable facility for running off impromptu verses. On one occasion at a wrestling match, he began swinging himself from foot to foot, and to a chant — these fellows alwavs THE VILLAGE BARD. 269 sing their verses — described the match as it went on before him, versifying all the turns and inci- dents of the struggle, throwing in words relative to the onlookers, their names and complementary expletives. No doubt that much of the compositions of these men was mere doggerel, but it was not always so. In their songs gleam out here and there a poetic, or, at all events, a fresh and quaint thought. What is always difficult to ascertain is what is original and what traditional, for when they do pretend to originality they often import into their verses whole passages from ancient ballads. But in this they are not peculiar. Hindley in his Life of James Catnach, the Broadside publisher, gives some verses on the death of the Princess Charlotte, which Catnach claimed as his own composition. The first verse runs — " She is gone ! sweet Charlotte's gone, Gone to the silent bourne ; She is gone, she's gone for ever more, — She never can return." But this was a mere adaptation of a song of The Drowned Lover, which is a favourite with the old singers — 2 70 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. " He is gone ! my love is drowned ! My love whom I deplore. He is gone ! he's gone ! I never, No I never shall see him more." Catnach corruscated into brilliant originality in the next sranza — " She is gone with her joy — her darling boy, The son of Leopold, blythe and keen ; She Died the sixtli of November, Eighteen hundred and seventeen." There is nothing lilie this in the original Droicned Lover that influenced the opening of his elegy. " Catnach," says Mr. Hindley — the italics are his own — ^' made the following lines out of his oiun head!'' Our village bards never reached a lower bathos. The reader may perhaps like to hear the story of the lives of some of these old fellows. One, James Parsons, a very infirm man, over seventy, asthmatic and failing, has been a labourer all his life, and for the greater part of it on one farm. His father was famed through the whole country side as "The Singing Machine," he was considered to be inexhaustible. Alas! he is no more, and his old son shakes his head and professes to have but half the ability, memory, and musical faculty that were possessed by his father. He can neither read nor THE VILLAGE BARD. 271 write. From him I have obtained some of the earHest melodies and most archaic forms of ballads. Indeed the majority of his airs are in the old church modes, and generally end on the dominant. At one time his master sent him to Lydford on the edge of Dartmoor, to look after a farm he had bought. Whilst there. Parsons went every pay-day to a little moorland tavern, where the miners met to drink, and there he invariably got his "entertainment" for his singing. " I'd been zinging there," said he, " one evening till I got a bit fresh, and I thought 'twere time for me to be off. So I stood up to go, and then one chap, he said to me, 'Got to the end o' your zoiigs, old man ? ' ' Not I,' said I, ' not by a long ways; but I reckon it be time for me to be going.' ' Looky here, Jim,' said he. ' I'll give you a quart of ale for every fresh song you sing us to-night.' Well, your honour, I sat down again, and I zinged on — I zinged sixteen fresh songs, and that chap had to pay for sixteen quarts." " Pints, surely," I said. "No, zur!" bridling up. "No, zur — not pints, good English quarts. And then — I hadn't come to the end o' my zongs, only I were that fuddled, I couldn't remember no more." 2 72 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. " Sixteen quarts between feeling fresh and getting fuddled ! " " Sixteen. Ask Voysey ; he paid for'n." Now this Voysey is a man working for me, so I did ask him. He laughed and said, "Sure enough, I had to pay for sixteen quarts that evening." Another of my old singers is James Olver, a fine, hale old man, with a face fresh as a rose, and silver hair, a grand old patriarchal man, who has been all his life a tanner. He is a Cornishman, a native of St. Kewe. His father was musical, but a Methodist, and so strict that he would never allow his children to sing a ballad or any profane song in his hearing, and fondly fancied that they grew up in ignorance of such things. But the very fact that they were tabooed gave young Olver and his sister a great thirst to learn, digest, and sing them. He acquired them from itinerant ballad-singers, from miners, and from the village song-men. Olver was apprenticed to a tanner at Liskeard. " Tell'y," said he, " at Liskeard, sixty years ago, all the youngsters on summer evenings used to meet in a field outside the town called Gurt Lane., and the ground were strewed wi' tan, and there every evening us had wrastling (wrestling), and single-stick, and THE VILLAGE BARD. 273 boxing. Look'y here," — he put his white head near me and raised the hair, — " do'y see now how my head be a cut about ? and look to my forehead and cheek as was cut open wi' single-stick. I wor a famous player in them days ; and the gentlefolks and ladies 'ud come out and see us at our sports, just as they goes now to cricket-matches." Whilst the games went on, or between the intervals, songs were sung. " FU sing'y one," said Olver, "was a favourite, and were sung to encourage the youngsters." 1. "I sing of champions bold, That wrestled — not for gold ; And all the cry- Was ' Will Trefry/ That he would win the day. So Will Trefry, huzzah ! The ladies clap their hands and cry, ' Trefry ! Trefry ! huzzah ! ' 2. Then up sprang little Jan, A lad scarce grown a man. He said, ' Trefry, I wot I'll try A hitch with you this day.' So little Jan, huzzah ! The ladies clap their hands and cry, ' O little Jan, huzzah ! ' 2 7 4 OLD CO UNTR V LIFE. 3. He stript him to the waist, He boldly Trefry faced ; 'I'll let him know- That I can throw As well as he to-day.' So httle Jan, huzzah ! And some said so ; but others, ' No, Trefry ! Trefry ! huzzah ! ' 4. They wrestled on the ground, His match Trefry had found ; And back he bore In struggle sore, And felt his force give way. So little Jan, huzzah ! So fome did say ; but others, ' Nay, Trefry ! Trefry ! huzzah ! ' 5. Then with a desperate toss, Will showed the flying hoss,^ And little Jan Fell on the tan, And never more he spake. O ! little Jan, alack ! The ladies say, ' Oh, woe's the day ! O ! little Jan, alack ! ' 6. Now little Jan, I ween. That day had married been ; ^ The Flying Horse is a peculiarly dangerous throw over the head, and usually breaks or severely injures the spine of the wrestler thus thrown. THE VILLAGE BARD. 275 Had he not died, A gentle bride That day he home had led. The ladies sigh — the ladies cry, ' O ! little Jan is dead.' " At Halwell, in North Devon, lives a fine old man named Roger Luxton, aged seventy-six, a great- grandfather, with bright eyes and an intelligent face. He stays about among his grandchildren, but is usually found at the picturesque farm-house of a daughter at Halwell, called Croft. This old man was once very famous as a song-man, but his memory fails him as to a good number of the ballads he was wont to sing. " Ah, your honour," said he, " in old times us used to be welcome in every farm-house, at all shearing and haysel and harvest feasts; but, bless'y ! now the farmers' da'ters all learn the pianny, and zing nort but twittery sort of pieces that have nother music nor sense in them ; and they don't care to hear us, and any decent sort of music. And there be now no more shearing and haysel and harvest feasts. All them things be given up. 'Tain't the same world as used to be — 'tain't so cheerful. Folks don't zing over their work, and laugh after it. There be no dances for the youngsters as there used to was. The farmers be too grand to care to talk T 2 276 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. to us old chaps, and for certain don't care to hear us zing. Why for nigh on forty years us old zinging- fcllows have been drove to the public-houses to zing, and to a different quality of hearers too. And now I reckon the labouring folk be so tree-mendious edicated that they don't care to hear our old songs nother. 'Tis all Fop goes the JVeasel and Ehren on the Rhine now. I reckon folks now have got differ- ent ears from what they used to have, and different hearts too. More's the pity." In the very heart of Dartmoor lives a very aged blind man, by name Jonas Coaker, himself a poet, after an illiterate fashion. He is only able to leave his bed for a few hours in the dav. He has a retentive memory, and recalls many very old ballads. From being blind he is thrown in on himself, and works on his memory till he digs out some of the old treasures buried there long ago. Unhappily his voice is completely gone, so that melodies cannot be recovered through him. There is a Cornishman whose name I will give as Elias Keate — a pseudonym — a thatcher, a very fine, big-built, florid man, with big, sturdy sons. This man goes round to all sheep-shearings, harvest homes, fairs, etc., and sings. He has a round, rich voice, a THE VILLAGE BARD. 277 splendid pair of bellows ; but he has an infirmity, he is liable to become the worse for the liquor he freely imbibes, and to be quarrelsome over his cups. He belongs to a family of hereditary singers and drinkers. In his possession is a pewter spirit-bottle — a pint bottle — that belonged to his great-grandfather in the latter part of the last century. That old fellow used to drink his pint of raw spirit every day ; so did the grandfather of Elias ; so did the father of Elias ; so would Elias — if he had it ; but so do not his sons, for they are teetotalers. Another minstrel is a little blacksmith ; he is a younger man than the others, but he is, to me, a valuable man. He was one of fourteen children, and so his mother sent him, wdien he was four years old, to his grandmother, and he remained with his grandmother till he was ten. From his grandmother he acquired a considerable number of old dames' songs and ballads. His father was a singer ; he had inherited both the hereditary faculty and the stock- in-trade. Thus my little blacksmith learned a whole series which were different from those acquired from the grandmother. At the age of sixteen he left home, finding he was a burden, and since that age has shifted for himself. This man tells me that he can 278 OLD COUNTRY LITE. generally pick up a melody and retain it, if he has heard it sung once; that of a song twice sung, he knows words and music, and rarely, if ever, requires to have it sung a third time to perfect him. John Helmore. On the south of Dartmoor live two men also re- markable in their way — Richard Hard and John Helmore. The latter is an old miller, with a fine intelligent face and a retentive memory. He can read, and his songs have to be accepted with caution. THE VILLAGE BARD. 279 Some are very old, others have been picked up from song-books. Hard is a poor cripple, walking only with the aid of two sticks, with sharply-chiselled Richard Hard. features, — he must have been a handsome man in his youth, — bright eyes, a gentle, courteous manner, and a marvellous store of old words and tunes in his head. He is now past stone-breaking on the 2So OLD COUNTRY LIFE. roadside, and lives on ^4 per annum. He lias a charming old wife ; and he and the old woman sing together in parts their quaint ancient ballads. That man has yielded up something like eighty distinct melodies. His memory, however, is failing ; for when the hrst lines of a ballad in some published collection is read to him, he will sometimes say, " I did know that some forty years ago, but I can't sing it through now." However, he can very generally " put the time to it." The days of these old singers is over. What festive gatherings there are now are altered in character. The harvest home is no more. We have instead harvest festivals, tea and cake at sixpence a head in the school-room, and a choral service and a sermon in the church. Village weddings are now quiet enough, no feasting, no dancing. There are no more shearing feasts; what remain are shorn of all their festive character. Instead, we have cottage garden produce shows. The old village " revels " linger on in the most emaciated and expiring semblance of the old feast. The old ballad-seller no more appears in the fair. I wrote to a famous broadside house in the west the other day, to ask if they still produced sheet-ballads, and the answer was, " We abandoned THE VILLAGE BARD. 28 c that line thirty years ago ; " and no one else took it up. " I love a ballad but even too well," says the Clown in JVinters Tale, and " I love a ballad in print, a'-life ! " sighs Mopsa ; but there are no Clowns and Mopsas now. Clever Board School scholars and misses who despise ballads, and love dear as life your coarse, vulgar, music-hall buffoonery. 1 " I reckon the days is departed When folks 'iid 'a listened to me ; I feels like as one broken-hearted, A thinking of what used to be. And I dun' know as much is amended Than was in them merry old times, When, wi' pipes and good ale, folks attended To me and my purty old rhymes. To me and my purty old rhymes. 'Tes true, I be cruel asthmatic, I've lost ivry tooth i' my head, And my limbs be crim'd up wi' rheumatic — D'rsay I were better in bed. But Lor' ! wi' that dratted blue ribbon, Tay-totals and chapels — the lot ! ^ From Songs oj the West, by S. Baring Gould and H. Fleet- wood Sheppard. Methuen & Co. : 1S89. 2S2 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. A leckturing, canting and fibbin', The old zinging man is forgot. Tiie old zinging man is forgot. I reckon, that wi' my brown fiddle, I'd go from this cottage to that, All the youngsters 'ud dance in the middle, Their pulses and feet pit-a-pat. I cu'd zing — if you'd stand me the liquor, All night, and 'ud never give o'er ; My voice — I don't deny't getting thicker. But never exhausting my store. But never exhausting my store. 'Tes politics now is tlie fashion, As sets folks about by the ear. And slops makes the poorest o' lushing, No zinging for me wi'out beer. I reckon the days be departed For such jolly gaffers as I ; Folks will never again be light-hearted, As they was in the days that's gone by. As they w^as in the days that's gone by. Lor ! what wi' their edi'cation, And me — neither cipher nor write ; But in zinging the best in the nation, And give the whole parish delight. 1 be going, I reckon, full mellow, To lay in the churchyard my head ; THE VILLAGE BARD. So say — God be wi' you, old fellow ! The last o' the singers is dead. The last o' the singers is dead." 283 CHAPTER XII. OLD SERVANTS. HEN Doomsdaij Booh was drawn up, there was but one female domestic servant in the county of Devon, that covers one million six hundred and fifty-five thousand acres. When I mentioned that fact to a lady of my acquaintance, she heaved a deep-drawn sigh, and said, " I wish I had lived in the times of The Old Butler. OLD SERVANTS. 287 Doomsday, and had not been the mistress of that one servant-maid." I believe that, were we lords of creation to have earlet holes communicating with our lady's bowers, as in the middle ages the ladies of creation had openings into their lords' halls, we would hear that much of their conversation turned on the rest- lessness and misdemeanours of their female servants. I do not mean for a moment to deny or excuse these defects, but to explain the cause of the restlessness complained of. Polly is out of a situation, she can neither boil a potato properly nor cook a mutton- chop. She advertises in the local paper for a situation as cook, from her parents' cottage, where the w^hole family pig in one room. The post arrives next morning wdth forty or fifty answers from ladies asking, pleading for her services. Half an hour kter up drives a squire's carriage with coach and footman on the box, then the humble pony carriage of the rector, next the jingle of a maiden lady who lives two niiles off. All day long carriages of every description are staying at the door, and ladies are visiting, entreating for the services of Polly. Polly spreads the forty or fifty letters she has received on the table. 2 38 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. 1. "Is there a kitchen-maid kept r " " No." " Then I won't go to you." 2. " What wages ? " " Twenty pounds." " I take nothing under twenty-eight, and all found," 3. " Any men-servants ? " " A butler." "Married or single ? " " Married — wife lives out." " I can go nowhere where there are not one or two unmarried and agreeable footmen." 4. " You want a character, ma'am ? Very sorry — if you doubts my respectability we shan't agree." 5. "How many in family?" "Thirteen." "No good. I go nowhere but to a single gentleman who waits on himself, and cooks his own dinner." 6. " Church or chapel, ma'am, did you ask ? I keeps my religious opinions to myself, and won't be dictated to. No female Jesuits for me." 7. " Early riser ? No, ma'am, I am not an early riser, and don't intend to demean myself by being such, I expecks a cup o' tea and a slice of bread and butter brought me in bed by the kitchen-maid afore I gets up." 8. " Do I know how to cook entrees P There's nothink I can't do ; I can do better than a thousand perfessionals." OLD SERVANTS. 289 9. " Don't allow but alternate Sunday evenings out ? I expecks to hav^e wot evenings out I likes." 10. "Object to waste, do you, ma'am. Very sorry, you must go elsewhere. I wastes on principle. I wouldn't be so unladylike as to save what belongs to others. Chuck away what I can't use is my scripture, praises be." Now is it to be wondered at that with such a crowd of applicants Polly's head should be turned, and that she should think herself the greatest person in the world, so that she will not stay in any place where she has not everything her own way ? Anciently but few people kept servants, and the servants they kept were to a large extent drawn from their own class, were often their own relatives. Pepys took his own sister to be servant in his house. 1660, Nov. 1 2. " My father and I discoursed seriously about my sister coming to live with me, and yet I am much afraid of her ill-nature. I told her plainly my mind was to have her come, not as a sister but as a servant, which she promised me she could, and with many thanks did weep for joy." 1 660-1, Jan. 2. " Home to dinner, where I found Pal (my sister) was come ; but I do not let her sit down at the table u 290 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. with me, which I do at first that she may not expect it hereafter from me." Sister Paulinas temper proved unendurable. On November 12, 1662, Pepys writes — "By my wife's appointment came two young ladies, sisters, acquaint- ances of my wife's brothers, who are desirous to wait upon some ladies, and who proffer their services to my wife. The youngest hath a good voice, and sings very w^ell, besides other good qualitys, but I fear hath been bred up with too great libertys for my family, and I fear greater inconveniences of expenses — though I confess the gentlewoman being pretty handsome and singing, makes me have a good mind to her." This girl, the younger Gosnell, w^as engaged. On the 22nd he writes, " This day I bought the book of country dances against my wife's woman Gosnell comes, who dances finely." On November 29. "My wife and I in discourse do pleasantly call Gosnell over Marmotte." On January 4, 1662-3. "My wife did propound my having of my sister Pal again to be her w^oman, since one we must have." — Gosnell had been required to attend on her uncle, a justice. — " It being a great trouble to me that I should have a sister of so ill a nature, that I must be forced to spend money upon OLD SERVANTS. 291 a stranger, when it might better be upon her if she were good for anything." Here are a couple of entries that came close to- gether in the register of Ottery St. Mary concerning marriages — " 1657, September 7. George Trobridge, Gentle- man, servant unto John Vaughan, Esq., married Elizabeth, daughter of Nicolas Hancock." " 1658, April 8. Jonathan Browne, of Bridport, Gent, and Margaret Harris, servant to Richard Arundell, gent." That Margaret Harris w^as a gentlewoman admits of little doubt. In the register of Woolbrough I remember seeing that the Yarde family of Bradley had a cousin or two of the same name in service in their house. The usual term for a valet to a man of estate was — his gentleman, and a lady's maid-servant w^as — her gentlew^oman. The apostle commands, " By love serve one another," and our forefathers do not seem at one time to have thouo;ht that domestic service was de- rogatory to gentility ; and I do not myself see how that any one who considers that his supreme Master and Lord humbled Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and stooped to wash His disciples u 2 292 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. feet, can sneer at menial service. Nothing is menial but what is done in a base, cantankerous, unloving- spirit. It is usually found that such domestics as come out of the lowest slums are they who are most particular not to do anything that is not precisely their work, who are most choice and most exacting. When the relatives of the family ceased to be servants in the house, then came in the daughters of farmers, the cleanest, most thrifty, obliging, sensible, and alto- gether admirable domestics that ever were. Who that is over fifty does not remember them ? They were conscientious, they took an interest in the family, their mistresses liked — even loved them. Then the farmers became too grand in their ideas » to send out their girls into service, and consequently one class alone was drained of its young w^omen, the labourer class, the uneducated, undisciplined, the class that had no idea of thrift ; and is it to be wondered at that the girls' heads should be turned when they find in what demand thev were ? I do not mean to say that, taken as a whole, a more respectable, nice, honest, cleanly set of girls is anywhere to be found than our English serving lasses; but we live in an age of transition — they who w^ere formerly only re- quired as drudges in farm-houses, suddenly discover OLD SERVANTS. 293 themselves in huge request, and that has upset them. The trouble there is in households now about domestic servants is said by some to be due to the mistresses — they do not make friends of their slavies, as did the ancient mistresses of theirs. But how can they, when the girl does not stay in the house over three months or half a year, and when she belongs to a class intellectually, socially, educationally removed from her mistress by a great cultural gulf as wide as that which separated Lazarus from Dives ? There are few more charming figures in fiction and in retrospect than the " old blue-coated serving- man," devoted to his master's interests, and living and dying in his service ; but I doubt whether he deserved the halo with which he has been invested. He was a bit of an imposture. Devoted he was to his master's interests, because he lived on his master, and just on the same principle as any parasite desires the welfare, the fatness, and full-bloodedness of the mammal on which it is itself battening. A French cynic in his will bequeathed to his valet " all that of which he has robbed me." There have been old and faithful servants, but that there were many of them unself- seeking I do not believe ; and I remember a very 2 94 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. considerable number of them who became intolerable nuisances — exacting, despotic, believing that the family on which they depended could not get on without them, as the fly said of itself when it sat on the coach, " How I am getting the carriage along ! " I also know that a good many have carried on gross depredations on their masters for many years unsuspected and undetected, all the while believed to have but one object of love and care in the world — the master and his house. If we were to make a graduated scale of servants, according to their merits and demerits, I should put the butler at one end and the coachman at the other ; in the former the imposition reaches its maximum, and the minimum is in the coachman, or, to put it the other way, I think that the dear old coachman is the most genuine, true-hearted, and deepest imbued with love of his master and the familv, and that there is the least of this unselfish love in the butler. Very un- grateful and unjust would I be were I not to acknow- ledge the excellence in the old coachman, for have I not one of my own, now indeed for his age dethroned from his box but not from my service, who carried me in his arms to the hay field when I was a little fellow, hardly able to toddle, and who now loves OLD SERVANTS. 295 above everything to take my youngest into the stables, and perch the little fellow on the back of one of the carriage horses. A worthy old servant, who had been with my grandfather, then my father, then with me, and — who knows ? for he is green still — may serve my son. The old notion was, that a servant was engaged for a year, and that a servant could not leave, nor a master discharge a servant, under a quarter's notice. The servants within a house were recognized by law as menials, from the Latin intra menia^ within walls. As late as last century, all single men between twelve years old and sixty, and married ones under thirty years of age, and all single women between twelve and forty, not having any visible livelihood, were compellable by two justices to go into service of some sort. The ajjjjrentice, from the French apprendre, to learn, was usually bound for a term of years, by indenture, to serve the master, and be maintained and instructed by him. Landowners and farmers had their apprentices as well as their menials. Orphan children were apprenticed by the parish, and an almost filial relation and affection grew up between master and mistress and their apprentices. This was specially noticeable among farm-servants. I knew an old man 296 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. who had been apprenticed to my great-great-grand- mother, that died at the end of last century, and he always spoke of her with the tenderest respect, and was proud to the last hour of his life that he had been apprenticed to the old madame. The farm-servants and the inferior servants to the gentry were hired at certain fairs, generally at Martin- mas ; in the west of England these are called (jif/lt'i fairs, but they exist in Yorkshire, and indeed in many other parts of England. The word giglet m.eans a girl. The girls and young m.en were wont to stand in rows in the market-place, to be looked at and selected. They wore ribands according to the sort of service they desired to enter upon. A carter carried in his hat a tuft of white ribands, a cook wore a red riband, and a housemaid a bunch of blue. The giglet fairs continue, and are attended by all the labouring population of the country side, especially by the young of both sexes, but there is very little hiring now done at them. One of the most perplexing facts to the student of genealogy, in making out the pedigree of an im- portant family from registers of births, deaths, and marriages in a parish, is that wherever a great family was seated, there are found also a shoal of individuals. OLD SERVANTS. 297 (]istinctly of an inferior social class, bearing the same patronymic. That these were no blood relatives is almost certain, for they are not mentioned in the wills of those belonging to the aristocratic family ; and we find no evidence in registers or elsewhere of any family relation. It has often been conjectured, that these individuals and families did really derive from the main aristocratic stem, perhaps not legitimately but left-handedly. But the evidence for this is w^anting — it may be forthcoming here and there in individual cases, but there is no proof that this was generally so. To this day we iind among the labourers names of historical and great landed families, and we are dis- posed to think that these are actual lineal offshoots from such families, and sometimes fancy we trace a certain dignity of bearing and aristocratic cast in their features. But I believe that these humble Cour- tenays, Cliffords, Veres, Devereux, &c., have not a drop of the blood in their veins belonging to these great families, that, in fact, they are descendants of menial servants, who were once in the castle or manor- house of these barons and knights and squires, and that they ate their beef and drank their ale, but drew no blood from their veins. In the fifteenth century surnames were by no means general, and even in the 298 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. sixteenth were not of general adoption. To this day in the western hills of Yorkshire, separating that county from Lancashire, persons are known by their pedigrees, and very often their surnames are generally unknown. Tom is not Tom Greenwood, but Tom o' Jakes, that is, Tom the son of Jack ; and if there be two Toms in a parish both sons of Jack, then one is distinguished from the other by carrying the pedigree further back a stage. One is Tom o' Jakes o' Wilfs, and the other is Tom o' Jakes o' Harry's. In early parish registers such an entry as this may occur — " 1596) 3 J^i'y- Buried, William, servant to Arthur Carew, Esq., commonly called William Carew." Later than that — in 1 660-1 — Pepys enters on Feb. 14, " My boy Wareman (his servant lad) hath all this day been called young Pepys, as Sir W. Pen's boy (servant) is young Pen." At the end of last century and the beginning of this it was a common custom for servant men to assume the titles of their masters, and to address each other under their master's names. This was not an affectation, it was a survival of the old custom of every servant taking his master's surname, as he wore his liverv. In High Life Below Stairs we have this scene — OLD SERVANTS. 299 "The Park. Duke's sen'ant. What wretches are ordinary servants, that go on in the same vulgar track every day ! eating, working, and sleep- ing ! — Bat we, who have the honour to serve the nobility, are of another species. We are above the common forms, have servants to wait upon us, and are as lazy and luxurious as our masters. Ha ! — my dear Sir Harry — ■ {Enter Sir Harry's Servant.) How have you done these thousand years ? Sir H.'s serv. My Lord Duke !— your grace's most obedient servant ! Duke's serv. Well, Baronet, and where have you been ? Sir H.'s serv. At Newmarket, my Lord. — We have had dev'lish fine sport. After a 7ohile they retire, fJien efiter Lady Bab's Maid and Lady Charlotte's Maid. Lady B.'s maid. O fie, Lady Charlotte ! you are quite indelicate. I am sorry for your taste. Lady C.'s maid. Well, I say it again, I love Vauxhall." The Spectator (June nth, 171 1) says, " FalUng in the other Day at a Victualling-House near the House of Peers, I heard the Maid come down and tcU the Landlady at the Bar, That my Lord Bishop swore he would throw her out at Window, if she did not bring up more Mild Beer, and that my Lord Duke would have a double Mug of Purle. My Surprize was encreased, in hearmg loud and rustick Voices speak and answer to each other upon the publick Affairs, by the Names of the most Illustrious of our Nobility ; till 300 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. of a sudden one came running in, and cry'd the House was rising. Down came all the Company together, and away I The Alehouse was immediately filled wich Clamour, and scoring one Mug to the Marquis of such a Place, Oyl and Vinegar to such an Earl, three Quarts to my new Lord for wetting his Title, and so forth. ... It is a common Humour among the Retinue of People of Quality, when they are in their Revels, ... to assume in a humorous Way the Names and Titles of those whose Liveries they wear." What was done in a " humorous Way" in the days of Addison, was a relic of what was actually done in sober seriousness a couple of centuries earlier, when surnames were possessed by the few only, and these men of consequence. Does the reader remember the charming account of the servants in the household of Sir Roger de Coverly ? " There is one Particular which I have seldom seen but at Sir Roger's : it is usual in all other Places, that Servants fly from the Parts of the House through which their Master is passing; on the contrary, here they industriously place themselves in his way ; and it is on both Sides, as it were, under- stood as a Visit, when the Servants appear without calling. . . . Thus Respect and Love go together; OLD SERVANTS. 301 and a certain Chearfulness in Performance of their Duty is the particular Distinction of the lower Part of his Family. When a Servant is called before his Master, he does not come with an Expectation to hear himself rated for some trivial Fault, threatned to be stripped, or used with any other unbecoming Lan- guage, which mean Masters often give to worthy Servants ; but it is often to know, what Road he took that he came so readily back according to Order ; whether he passed by such a Ground ; if the old Man who rents it is in good health : or wdiether he gave Sir Roger's Love to him, or the like. "A Man who preserves a Respect, founded on his Benevolence to his Dependants, lives rather like a Prince than a Master in his Family ; his Orders are received as Favours, rather than Duties ; and the Dis- tinction of approaching him is Part of the Reward for executing what is commanded by him," It is singular to see how small the wages paid were formerly for domestics, and what a leap up they have made of late, synchronous with deterioration of quality and character. For a farmer's daughter ^7 w^as a high wage, and now ^17 is sniffed at by a ploughman's wench. Pepys took a cook from the house of his Grace the Duke of Albemarle, and paid her ^'4 per 30 2 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. annum, and complains at the wage. He says he never before did spend so big a sum on a wage. She must have been an energetic and active woman, for here is the ine.nu of a dinner she cooked. " We had a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie, a most rare pie, a dish of anchovies, good wdne of several sorts — most neatly dressed by our own only mayde." How did she manage it with- out a kitchen range with hot plates ? The account-book of Mrs. Joyce Jefferies, a lady resident in Herefordshire and Worcestershire during the Civil War, comprises the receipt and expenditure of nine years. She lived a single person in her house in Hereford, and by no means on a contracted scale. Many female servants are mentioned, two having wages from ^3 to ^3 4.?. per annum, with gowns of dark stuff at midsummer. Her coachman, receiv- ing 40.V. per annum, had at Whitsuntide, 1639, a new cloth suit and cloak ; and when he was dressed in his best, wore fine blue silk ribbon at the knees of his hose. The liveries of this and another man-servant were, in 1641, of green Spanish cloth, and cost up- wards of nine pounds. Her steward received a salary OLD SERVANTS. 303 of ^5 16.V., and she kept for him a liorse, which he rode to collect her rents and dues, and to see to the management of her estate. I have myself a book of accounts, a little later, where the " mayde of my wyfe " gets c5£'3, and the footman ^4 and his hvery. In some houses a whole series of account-books has been preserved, showing, among other things, the rise in wages paid for servants, and very instructive thev are. Here is from an account-book of 1777, in a country squire's house. Wages were paid on Lady Day for the whole year, and' not quarterly. 1777- £ s. d. Sarah's wages 4 19 Old Becky's -^ Anne, half-year I Nanny 5 5 Cook 7 7 Gardener ... • . • 2 7 Bray the waggoner 9 A certain Betty had for wages and bill • . . 6 In an account-book for 1 8 1 1 the wages are a little higher — 304 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. £ s. d. Footman ... lO Coachman 14 Cook 8 8 Housemaid 6 6 Scullery-maid 2 5 The Boy 3 There died only a year ago an old woman who had been a servant since she was eighteen in two of the greatest houses in the neighbourhood. When she first went into service, she told me, it was at K — . She received ^4 as her wage, and managed to save money on that. She was, however, given a washing- dress by her mistress at Lady Day. After some years she went to L — Park, where she received ^BS. This was after a while raised to c^J, and she invariably put awav some of her wage. When after tried service her wage was raised to ^£10, the climax of her ambition was reached, she regarded herself as passing rich, and never hoped tp obtain more. " For certain, sir," she said, " my work wasn't worth more. In my own parish churchyard, one of the best of the monuments is that raised by my grandfather to the memory of an old servant of his grand- mother's. OLD SERVANTS. 305 MR. THOMAS HILSDEN, WHO DIED FEB. 21, 1806, AGED 70, having lived in the family of Mrs. Margaret Gould, of Lew House, 44 YEARS. THIS STONE WAS ERECTED IN CONSIDERATION OF HIS FAITHFUL SERVICE. There is an ancient family I know of historic chgnity. It has lost its ancestral estates, lost almost all of its family portraits ; but one great picture remains to it, so poorly painted, that at the sale of the Manor-house and its contents no one would buy it, — it is the portrait of an old servant, a giant, a tall and powerful ranger, who, partly for his size, chiefly for his fidelity, was painted and hung up in the hall along with the knights and squires and ladies of the family which he had served so well. The mention of this picture leads me to say a few words about a worthy man who died some twenty years ago. Rawle was hind to the late Sir Thomas Acland of Killerton. Sir Thomas introduced Arab blood among the Exmoor ponies, and greatly improved the breed. About 1810 he appointed Rawle in charge of these ponies. He was a fine man, fully six feet high, and big in proportion. His power of breaking X 3o6 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. in the ponies was extraordinary. He was quite indif- ferent to falls, often pony and man rolling over and over each other. The sale of the ponies generally took place at Bampton and at Taunton fairs. The system was this — a herd of the wild little creatures was driven into the fair. Buyers attended from all parts of the country, and when a dealer took a fancy to a pony, he pointed him out to the moor-man in attendance, who went into the herd, seized upon the selected one, and brought him out by sheer strength. This is no easy matter, for the Exmoor pony fights with his fore-feet in desperate fashion. It usually took, and takes, two men to do this, but Rawle did not require assistance, such was his strength. Indeed so strong was Rawle, that he would put a hand under the feet of a maid- servant on each side of him, and raise himself and at the same time both of them, till he was upright, and he held each woman on the palm of his hand, one on each side of him, level with his waist. Sir Thomas Acland was wont, when he had friends with him, to get the man to make this exhibition of his strength before them. Sir Thomas had a hunting box at Higher Combe (called in the district Yarcombe) ; he occupied one portion of the house when there, a farmer occupied OLD SERVANTS. 307 the rest. It was a curious scene — a remnant of feudal times — when Sir Thomas came there. His tenants, summoned for the purpose, had accompanied him in a cavalcade from Winsford, or Hornicott. John Rawle could never be persuaded to eat a bite or take a draught w^hen his master was in a house ; he planted himself as a sentry upright before the door when Sir Thomas went in to refresh himself anywhere, and nothing could withdraw him from his post. In connexion with these expeditions to Higher Combe, it may be added that the cavalcade of tenants would attend Sir Thomas to the wood where a statr had been harboured. Among them was a band, each member of the band played one note only ; but it w^as so arranged that a hunting tune was formed by these notes being played in succession. When the stag was unharboured, and started across the moor, the band commenced this tune, and undl it was played out the hounds were kept in leash. The time occupied by this tune was the "law" given to the stag, and when it was ended the hounds were laid on. A famous china bowl was made in China, and presented to Sir Thomas by the Hunt. This bowl used to be kept at Higher Combe; it represented a stag-hunt. And twelve glasses were presented to Sir X 2 3o8 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Thomas along with it, each engraved with a stag, and the words, " Success to the hunting." One day Sir Thomas said to Rawle, " Rawle, I want to send a gelding and a mare in foal to Duke Ludwig of Baden, at Baden Baden. Can you take them?" " Certainly, Sir Thomas." , . The man could neither read nor write, and of course knew no other language than the broadest Exmoor dialect — and this was at the beginning of the century, when there were not the facilities for travelling that there are now. He started for Baden Baden, and took his charges there in safety, and delivered them over to the Grand Duke. He had, however, an added difficulty, in that the mare foaled en route, and he had a pass for two ponies only. Is the old " good and faithful servant " a thing of the past ? Not perhaps the good servant, but the servant who continues in a family through the greatest portion of his or her life, who becomes a part of the family, is probably gone for ever; the change in the signification of words tells us of social changes. A man's family, even in Addison's time, comprised his servants. "Of what does your family consist?" A hundred and fifty years ago this would have been OLD SERVANTS. 309 answered by an enumeration of those comprising the household, from the children to the scullion. Now who would even think of a servant when such a question is asked ? The family is shrunk to the blood- relatives, and the servants are outside the family circle. We are in a condition of transformation in our relations to our servants ; we no longer dream of making them our friends, and consequently they no longer regard us with devotion. But I am not sure that the fault lies with the master. The spirit of unrest is in the land ; the uneducated and the partially educated crave for excitement, and find it in change ; they can no longer content themselves with remaining in one situation, and when the servants shift quarters every year or two, how can master and mistress feel affection for them, or take interest in them ? Does the reader know Swift's Rules and Direc- tions for SeTvantsf They occupy one hundred and eighteen pages of volume twelve of his works, in the edition of 1 768, and comprise instructions to butler, cook, footman, coachman, groom, steward, chamber- maid, housemaid, nurse, etc. They show us that human nature among servants was much the same in the middle of last century as in this. Only a scanty extract must be given. 310 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. "When your master or lady calls a servant by name, if that servant be not in the way, none of you are to answer, for then there will be no end of your drudgery. " When you have done a fault be always pert and insolent, and behave yourself as if you were the injured person. " The cook, the butler, the groom, and every other servant should act as if his master's whole estate ought to be applied to that particular servant's business. " Take all tradesmen's parts against your master. You are to consider if your master hath paid too much, he can better afford the loss than a poor tradesman. "Never submit to stir a finger in any business but that for which you were particularly hired. For example, if the groom be drunk or absent, and the butler be ordered to shut the stable-door, the answer is ready, "^ An' please, your honour, I don't understand horses.' " If you find yourself to grow into favour with your master or lady, take some opportunity to give them warning, and when they ask the reason, and seem loath to part with you, answer that a poor servant is not to be blamed if he strives to better himself. OLD SERVANTS. 311 Upon which, if your master hath any generosity, he will add five or ten shillings a quarter rather than let you go. " Write your own name and your sweetheart's with the smoke of a candle on the roof of the kitchen, to show your learning. If you are a young sightly fellow, whenever you whisper your mistress at the table, run your nose full into her cheek, or breathe full in her face. " Never come till you have been called three or four times, for none but dogs will come at the first whistle. " When you have broken all your earthen vessels below stairs — which is usually done in a week — the copper-pot will do as well; it can boil milk, heat porridge, hold small beer — apply it indifferently to all these uses, but never wash or scour it. " Although you are allow^ed knives for the servants' hall at meals, yet you ought to spare them, and make use of your master's. " Let it be a constant rule, that no chair or table in the servants' hall have above three legs. " Quarrel with each other as much as you please, only always bear in mind that you have a common enemy, which is your master and lady. 312 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. " When your master and lady go abroad together to dine, you need leave only one servant in the house to answer the door and attend the children. Who is to stay at home is to be determined by short and long cuts, and the stayer at home may be comforted by a visit from a sweetheart. " AVhen your master or lady comes home, and wants a servant who happens to be abroad, your answer must be, that he had but just that minute stepped out, being sent for by a cousin who was dying. When you are chidden for a fault, as you go out of the room mutter loud enough to be plainly heard. " When your lady sends for you to her chamber to give you orders, be sure to stand at the door and keep it open, fiddling with the lock all the while she is talking to you. " When you want proper instruments for any work you are about, use all expedients you can invent. For instance, if the poker be out of the way, stir the lire with the tongs; if the tongs be not at hand, use the muzzle of the bellows, the wrong end of the shovel, or the handle of the hre-brush. If you want paper to singe a fowl, tear the first book you see about the house. Wipe you shoes, for want of a clout, on the bottom of a curtain or a damask napkin. OLD SERVANTS. 313 "There are several ways of putting out a candle, and you ought to be instructed in them all : you may run the candle-end against the wainscot, which puts the snufF out immediately ; you may lay it on the ground and tread the snufF out with your foot ; you mry hold it upside down until it is choked in its own grease, or cram it into the socket of the candlestick ; you may whirl it round in your hand till it goes out. " Clean your plate, wipe your knives, and rub the dirty tables with the napkins and tablecloths used that day, for it is but one washing. " When a butler cleans the plate, leave the whiting plainly to be seen in all the chinks, for fear your lady should not believe you had cleaned it. "You need not wipe your knife to cut bread for the table, because in cutting a slice or two it will wipe itself. "A butler must always put his finger into every bottle to feel whether it be full. " Whet the backs of your knives until they are as sharp as the edge, that when gentlemen find them blunt on one side they may try the other. "Cooks should scrape the bottom of pots and kettles with a silver spoon, for fear of giving them a taste of copper. 314 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. " Get three or four charwomen to attend you constantly in the kitchen, whom you pay with the broken meat, a few coals, and all the cinders. " Never make use of a spoon in anything that you can do with your hands, for fear of wearing out your master's plate. " In roasting and boiling use none but the large coals, and save the small ones for the fires above stairs." And so on. If the old servants had their merits, they had also their demerits. Have they not bequeathed the latter to their successors, and carried away their merits with them into a better world ? fD'> CHAPTER XIII. THE HUNT. HE genuine Englishman loves a hunt, loves sport, above everything else ; I do not mean only those who can aiford to ride and shoot, but every Englishman born and bred in the country. One day the masons were engaged on my house, on the top of a scaffold, the carpenters were occupied 3i6 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. within laying a floor, some painters were employed on doors and windows, the gardener w^as putting into a bed some roses ; in the back-yard a youth was chop- ping up wood ; in the stable-yard the coachman was washing the body of the carriage, and in the stable itself the groom was currycombing a horse. Suddenly from the hillside opposite, mantled with oak, came the sound of the hounds in cry, and then the call of the horn. Down from the scaffold came the masons, head over heels, at the risk of their necks ; out through the windows shot the carpenters and painters, throw- ing aside hammers, nails, paint-pot and brushes ; down went the roses in the garden ; from behind the house leaped the wood-chopper ; the coach was left half- washed, and the horse half-currycombed ; and over the lawn and through the grounds, regardless of every- thing, went a wild excited throng of masons, carpenters, woodcutter, coachman, stable-boy, gardener, my own sons, then my own self, having dropped pen, and, for- gotten on the terrace was left only the baby — a male, erect in its perambulator, with arms extended, scream- ing to follow the rout and go after the hounds. Let asitators come and storm and denounce in the midst of our people ; they cannot rouse them to fury against the gentry, because they and the gentry run mm \r'3^^ ''^-^' ft IM Sii~'-^ ,^^^-.|lj J The Hunt Passing. THE HUNT. 319 after the hounds togetlier, enjoy a hunt together, and are the best of friends in the field. No, the great sociahstic revolution will not take place till the hunt is abolished. That is the great solvent of all prejudices, that the great festival that binds all in one common bond of sympathy. This season there has appeared at our meets an old man of seventy-five, who was for many years a butler to a rector, a quiet, studious man, who died a few years ago. After the death of his master the butler retired on his savings, and built himself a house. Then — this winter he appeared on a cob at the meet of the fox- hounds. " Sir," said he to the Master, " now the ambition of my life is satisfied. Since I was a boy I have wished, and all my days have worked, that I might have a cob on which I could hunt." Alas ! the old fellow found himself so stiff after the first hunt, that at the next meet of the harriers he appeared on foot. He had walked four miles to it ; and he ran with the hounds, and was in at the death. After the hunt he walked home hot and happy, and elastic in step. The farmers naturally like a hunt, as it affords them, apart from the sport, an occasion of showing off and selling their horses. The workmen like a hunt,, 320 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. especially after the hare, for it forms a break in their work. They have their half day's sport, and their masters pay wage just the same as if they had been at work. The hare hunt naturally lends itself to footers, as the hare runs in a circle, and not straight with the wind in his tail like reynard. Here and there is to be found a cantankerous farmer w4io objects to having his hedges broken down and his land trampled by the hunters, but he is looked on with distrust and dislike by all in every class, and spoken of as a curmudgeon. Of course, also, there are to be found men who trap and kill foxes, but I verily believe those men's consciences sting them far more on this account than if thev had committed a fraud or become drunk. And — by the way, that reminds me of a story. There came a Hungarian nobleman, whom we will call the Baron Hounymhum, to England. His Chris- tian name was Arpad. He came to England, having a title, but having nothing else ; he came, in fact, to seek there his fortuue. Belonging to a good family, he was well supplied with letters of introduction, and he was received into society. On more than one occasion he donned his uniform, and had reason to THE HUNT. 321 believe that the uniform as well as his handsome face was much admired by the ladies, and envied by the men. Among the acquaintances he made was the Hon. Cecil Blank, through whom he was introduced to one of the first clubs in Piccadilly. He also got acquainted with Lord Ashwater. This nobleman was fond of collecting around him notabilities of all kinds, literary, scientific, and political. He himself was in his politics an advanced Liberal. The Baron Arpad found, to his astonishment, soon after his arrival in town, that a rumour had got about that he had been implicated in an attempt to assas- sinate his most gracious sovereign Franz Joseph, King of Hungary and Bohemia, and Emperor of Austria. The idea was absolutely baseless. The fact that he was received at the embassy ought to have shut men's mouths, but no — he w^as credited with having con- trived an infernal machine for the destruction of his beloved sovereign. He found, to his amazement, that this rumour did him good. He became an interesting foreigner ; hitherto he had been only a foreigner. Quite an eager feeling manifested itself among persons of rank and position for having him at their parties ; not only so, but he was solicited by magazine editors to Y 322 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. write for them articles on the Anarchist party in Hungary and Austria. Scarce had this odious rumour died away, before he became the victim of another, equally false and equally detestable. A distant cousin, the Baron Adorian Hounymhum, ran away with the Princess Nornenstein, the mother of three sweet little children. The elopement caused a great sensation at Vienna, as the princess was much esteemed by her Majesty the Empress. Prince Nornenstein pursued the fugitives, overtook them in Belgium, fought a duel with the baron, and was shot through the heart. Well, the report got about that it was Baron Arpad who had run away with the princess, ruined her home, deprived her sweet children of father and mother, and shot the aggrieved husband. It was in vain for him to protest, he was credited with these infamies — and rose in popular estimation. The Duchess of Belgravia at once invited him to her dances. The ladies now courted his society, as before the gentlemen had courted it, when they held him to be a would-be regicide. These two rumours, crediting him with crimes of which he was incapable, did a great deal towards pushing him in society. Among the many acquaintances the Baron made in THE HUNT. 323 town was Mr. Wildbrough, a country squire, M.F.H., a man of wealth, and an M.P. for his county. He had but one daughter, who would be his heiress, and who did not seem insensible to the good looks of the Baron. Now, thought the Hungarian, his opportunity had arrived. The position of landed proprietor in England was in prospect. Moreover, Mr. Wildbrough had invited the Baron to come to Wildbrough Hall in October to see the first meet of the foxhounds. At the time appointed the Baron arrived, and was cordially received by the squire ; Mrs. Wildbrough was gracious, but not gushing ; Mary Wildbrough was manifestly pleased to see him — the tell-tale blood assured him of that. A large party was assembled at the hall for the first meet of the season. The masters of other packs in the county were present. The meet was picturesque, the run excellent. The Baron w^as in at the death, and received the brush, wdiich he at once presented to Mary Wildbrough. He had ridden beside her, and he felt that his prospects were brightening. He pro- posed to make the offer that evening at the dance after dinner, when, at Mary's particular request, he was to appear in his Magyar Hussar uniform, in which, as he well knew, he would be irresistible. The Baron took Y 2 324 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. in Mary to dinner, and had an agreeable chat with her, which was only interrupted by Sir Harry Tread- win, a sporting baronet, who said across the table to him, " Baron, I suppose that you have foxes in Hungary ? " " Oh, yes," answered he, " / have shot as many as Jive or six in a clayT The Baron spoke loud, so as to be heard by all. He was quite unprepared for the consequences. Sir Harry stared at him as at a ghost, with eyes and nostrils and mouth distended. A dead silence fell on the whole company. The host's red face changed colour, and became as collared brawn. The master of another pack became purple as a plum. Mrs. Wild- brough fanned herself vigorously. Mary became white as a lily and trembled, whilst tears welled up in her beautiful eyes. The lady of the house bowed to the lady whom the squire had taken in, and in silence all rose, and the ladies without a word left the room. The gentlemen remained ; conversation slowly un- thawed. The Baron turned to the gentleman nearest him, and spoke about matters of general interest. He answered shortly, almost rudely, and turned to converse with his neighbour on the other side. Then the Baron addressed Sir Harry, but he seemed deaf, THE HUNT. 325 he stared icily, but made no reply. It was a relief to an intolerable restraint when the gentlemen joined the ladies. The Baron knew that with his handsome face and gorgeous uniform he could command as many partners in the dance as he desired ; but what was his chagrin to find that his anticipations were dis- appointed. One young lady was engaged, another did not dance the mazurka, a third had forgotten the lancers, a fourth was tired, and a fifth indisposed. After a while he seized his chance, and caught Mary Wildbrough in the conservatory, — she was crying. " Miss Wildbrough," said he, " are you ill ? What ails you ? " " Oh, Baron ! " Then she burst into an uncontrol- lable flood of tears. " I am so — so unhappy ! Five or six foxes! Oh, Baron Hounymhum ! " Next day he left. His host would not shake hands with him when he departed. On reaching town he felt dull, and sauntered to the club, but no one would speak to him there. Next day he received this letter from the secretary — " The secretary of the Club regrets to be obliged to inform the Baron Hounymhum that he can no longer be considered the guest of the Club." 326 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. After that London society was sealed to him. It was nothing that he had been thought guilty of an attempt to assassinate his sovereign, nothing that he was thought to have eloped with a married woman, wrecked her home and shot her husband, but that he should have shot foxes was The Unpardonable Sin. We have a peculiar institution in the county of Devon — a week of hare-hunting on Dartmoor after hare-hunting has ceased everywhere else. Dartmoor is a high elevated region totally treeless, with peaks covered with granite, having brawling streams that foam down the valleys between. One main road crosses this vast desolate region, as far as Two Bridges, where is an inn. The Saracen's Head, and there it divides, and runs for many miles more over moor to Moreton Hampstead on one side, and to Ashburton on the other. In the fork of this Y stands an eminently picturesque rugged tor, crested by and strewn with granite, called Believer. About Easter — anyhow, after hare-hunting has ceased elsewhere — the country-side gathers at Believer for a week, and nothing can be conceived more changed than the scene at this time from the usual solitude and still- ness. The tor is covered with horses, traps, carriages, THE BUNT. 327 footers ; and if the spring sun be shining, nothing can well be more picturesque. Whatever may be said or sung to the contrary, hunting on Dartmoor is dangerous work. There are no hedges there, only walls, and these walls are set up round what are locally termed " takes," or en- closures, and are made of the granite stones found lying about in the take ; they are not put together with mortar, but are loosely built up one stone on another, and the wind blows through the interstices. . More nasty accidents would happen over these walls, were it not that the moor turf is spongy and boggy, so that when a man is thrown he is lightly received. Concerning this Believer week there exists a song — " Believer week is the bravest week Of fifty-two in the year. 'Tis one to tweak a teetotaller's beak, And to make a Methody swear. We leave our troubles and toils behind, Forget if we've got gray hair — A parcel of boys, all frolic and noise, Bidding begone dull care. Believer week is the bravest, &c. There's never a run so brimming with fun, Nor a pastime that may compare. 328 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. For master or horse, o'er heather and gorse, As hunting a Dartmoor hare. Though sure of a stogg to the girths in a bog, Or a turn up of heels at a wall, Yet never a jot of damage was got By a flounder there, or a fall. Believer week, &c. There's nowhere a puss deserving a cuss For running as on the moor. In Believer week the harriers speak As they never spoke before. The Saracen's Head is full as an egg, And every farm and cot. The joUiest set together are met In the out and out jolliest spot. Believer week, &c. Nowhere else does a joke such laughter provoke, Or a tale so hearty a roar, Or a song that is sung with stentorian lung, More certain of an encore ! When Believer week returns again, My wife — ^let her storm and sneer ; If not tucked into bed with a stone at my head, By Ginger ! — I will be there. Believer week, &c." How full life is of coincidences ! We are always encountering and wondering at them. To some the coincidences that we know to be true seem incredible. Here is one. THE HUNT. 329 The master of a very notable pack of foxhounds died. He had been master for something hke thirty years ; his father was master before him, and his son is master after him. A man of intense love of the sport. In the dirring-room hang the portraits of three generations, all in pink. He died and was buried amidst universal sorrow. Of course the pack did not go out that week. The first meet after the funeral was at a distance of very many miles. The fox was started, and ran, straight as an arrow, towards the residence of the late master, ran through the park, pursued by the hounds, ran across the garden to the churchyard, ran to the vault, and took refuge against the iron door that closed it, and con- cealed the coffin of the dead M.F.H. And there, against his vault door, the fox was killed, and the yelping, bounding, barking pack careered within a few feet of his coffin. This story I believe to be perfectly true. It was a coincidence, and a singular one. Till the end of the seventeenth century fox-hunting can scarcely be said to have existed as a sport in England, the stag, the buck, and the hare taking the precedence with our forefathers as objects of the chase, which in a still earlier period had included 330 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. the wolf and the boar. And yet I have over my hall fireplace, in the carved oak chimney-piece, a representation of a fox-hunt that certainly belongs to the reign of Elizabeth. The hunters are armed with pitchforks, or something much like them ; one is holding back a greyhound by a leash ; another is winding a horn. There are ten dogs in the pack, long-eared beagles or dachshunds, it is hard to say what. The fox has eaten one goose all but the head and wings, and has killed a second, and is taking refuge in a pinery among the pine-apples. Our deer-parks about the great mansions are the remnants of deer-parks or chases that were originally found about the manor-houses in most places. They were not always very extensive, very often were only small paddocks where the deer were kept ; and one was let run occasionally for a grand chase. These old paddocks with the ruined walls about them, or without, when they were surrounded by palings, that have long ago rotted away, still go by the name of the Chase, and so remind us of the sports of our forefathers. James I. was an enthusiastic sportsman. Although in his various kennels he had little short of two hundred couple of hounds, and the cost of their THE HUNT. y:,^ maintenance was a serious draught upon his privy purse, yet he never seemed satisfied that he had enough, so long as he heard of any good hound in the possession of a subject. Among the State Papers is an amusing letter relative to a piece of ill-luck that befell a favourite dog, "The king is at Tibbalds, and the queen gone or going to him. At this last meeting, being at Tibbalds, which was about a fortnight since, the queen, shooting at a deer with her crossbow, mistook her mark, and killed Jewell, the king's most special and principal hound, at which he stormed exceeding awhile, swearing many and great oaths. None would undertake to break unto him the news, so they were fain to send Archie the fool on the errand. But after he knew who did it, he was soon pacified, and with much kindness wished her not to be troubled with it, for he should love her never the worse, and the next day sent her a Jewell worth ^2000, ' as a legacy from his dead dog.' Love and kindness increase daily between them, and it is thought they were never on better terms." Our early hunting songs all concern the stag. One of the very " ancientest ditties" we have is, The Hunt is upp — 332 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. " The hunt is up, the hunt is up, And it is well-nigh day ; And Harry our king is gone hunting, To bring his deer to bay." A very pretty song it is of the reign of bluff Hal, but the earliest song relating to a fox that I know is that of To-morrow the Fox will come to Toivn, of the same period, and in that there is no mention of reynard as an object of sport. His thievish qualities are recorded, that is all. "To-morrow the fox will come to town, Keep, keep, keep, keep ! To-morrow the fox will come to town, O keep you all well there. I must desire you neighbours all, To hallo the fox out of the hall, And cry as loud as you can call, Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop ! And cry as loud as you can call, O keep you all well there." In the porch of Lewanick church, in Cornwall, the piece of freestone that supports the seat on which the gaffers sat before and after church is sculptured with a hare-hunt. Tlie date is about the fifteenth century. In the popular mind the hare-hunt, for the reason already given, that it allows of better sport for the footers, is a favourite subject of song rather than THE HUNT. 333 the fox-hunt, the delights of which are sung by huntsmen more than by the peasants. It is curious how the reminiscence of famous runs hngers on among the people. There is a great song that used to be sung at all hunting dinners in Devon relative to the achieve- ments of one Arscott of Tetcott, who is supposed still to hunt the country in spirit with a ghostly pack — " When the tempest is howUng his horn you may hear, And the bay of his hounds in their headlong career ; For Arscott of Tetcott loves hunting so well, That he breaks for the pastime from heaven — or hell." Fox-hunt, from Hall Chimney-piece, Lew Tkenchard. CHAPTER XIV. THE COUNTY TOWN. OES the reader know one of the most fascinating books of a most fascinating of our old writers, Belford Regis, by Miss Mary Russell Mitford ? If not, and he or she desires to be carried back on the broad, sweeping, somewhat sad-coloured wings of fancy to the past, to a time before railways, then let Be/Jura Regis be procured, and read, and smiled, and perhaps a THE COUNTY TOWN. 337 little sighed over. As in Our Pillage the authoress sketched the country, so in Belford Regis did she sketch the little county town at the beginning of the present century. "About three miles to the north of our village stands the good town of Belford Regis. The approach to it, straight as a dart, runs along a wide and populous turnpike road, all alive with carts and coaches, waggons and phaetons, horse-people and foot-people, sweeping rapidly or creeping lazily up and down the gentle undulations with which the surface of the country is varied ; and the borders, checkered by patches of common, rich with hedge- row timber, and sprinkled with cottages, and, I grieve to say, with that cottage pest, the beer-house, — and here and there enlivened by dwellings of more preten- sion and gentility, — become more thickly inhabited as we draw nearer the metropolis of the county, to say nothing of the three cottages all in a row, with two small houses attached, which a board affixed to one of them informs the passer-by is Two-mile Cross ; or of these opposite neighbours, the wheelwrights and the blacksmiths, about half a mile further; or the little farm close by the pound ; or the series of buildings called the Long Row, terminating at the z V.8 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. oo end next the road with an old-fashioned and most picturesque pubhc-house, with painted roofs, and benches at the door and round the large elm before it — benches which are generally filled by thirsty wayfarers and waggoners watering their horses, and partaking of a more generous liquor themselv^es. "Leaving these objects undescribed, no sooner do we get within a mile of the town, than our approach is indicated by successive market-gardens on either side, crowned, as we ascend the long hill on which the turnpike-gate stands, by an extensive nursery- ground, gay with long beds of flowers, with trellised walks covered with creepers, with whole acres of flowering shrubs, and ranges of green-houses, the glass glittering in the southern sun. Then the turnpike gate, with its civil keeper, then another public-house, then the clear bright pond on tlie top of the hill, and then the rows of small tenements, with here and there a more ambitious single cottage standing in its own pretty garden, which forms the usual gradation from the country to the town. " About this point, where one road, skirting the great pond and edged by small houses, diverges from the great southern entrance, and where two streets, meet- ing or parting, lead by separate ways down the steep '^mt^b^'f Cottages at the entrance to a Town. Z 2 I THE COUNTY TOWN. 341 hill to the centre of the town, stands a handsome mansion, surrounded by orchards and pleasure- grounds, across which is perhaps to be seen the very best view of Belford, with its long ranges of modern buildings in the outskirts, mingled with picturesque old streets, the venerable towers of St. Stephen's and St. Nicholas', the light and tapering spire of St. John's, the huge monastic ruins of the abbey, the massive walls of the county gaol, the great river winding along like a thread of silver, trees and gardens mingling amongst all, and the whole landscape environed and lightened by the drooping elms of the foreground, adding an illusive beauty to the picture by breaking the too formal outlme, and veiling just exactly those parts which most require concealment. " Nobody can look at Belford from this point with- out feeling that it is a very English and very charm- ing scene, and the impression does not diminish on farther acquaintance. We see at once the history of the place, that it is an antique borough town, which has recently been extended to nearly double its former size ; so that it unites in no common degree the old romantic, irregular structures in which our ancestors delighted, with the handsome and uniform buildings which are the fashion now-a-days. I 342 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. suppose that people are right in their taste, and that the modern houses are pleasantest to hve in, but, beyond all question, those antique streets are the prettiest to look at. The occasional blending too is good. Witness the striking piece of street scenery which was once accidentally forced upon my attention as I took shelter from a shower of rain in a shop about ten doors up the right-hand side of Friar Street — the old vicarage-house of St. Nicholas em- bowered in greens, the lofty town-hall, and the hand- some modern house of my friend Mr. Beauchamp, the fine church tower of St. Nicholas, the picturesque piazza underneath, the jutting corner of Friar Street, the old irregular shops in the market-place, and the trees of the Forbury just peeping between, with all their varieties of light and shadow. I went to tlie door to see if the shower was over, was caught by its beauty, and stood looking at it in the sunshine long after the rain had ceased." I make no apology for this long extract. Miss Mitford is not much read now, and those who read her are always glad to re-read a passage from Jier fresh and graphic pen. That there may be more picturesqueness in an old German, Italian, and French town may be admitted, Street in Launcestox. THE COUNTY TOWN. 345 but it is of a more salient, obtrusive character than that which exists in our old county towns. The continental architects ain:ied at bold effects. I do not say that they were wrong. They achieved great success. Our architects built what was wanted, in a quiet, undemonstrative manner, and left effect to chance, and chance gave what they did not seek. The charms of an old English county town do not force themselves on our notice, are missed altogether by the hasty visitor ; they have to be found out, they come by surprises, they depend on certain lights and plays of shadow, on the bursting into leaf of certain trees, on the setting up of certain hucksters' stalls. That a great deal of their picturesqueness is passing away is, alas ! only too true. The tradesmen want huge window spaces for the display of their goods, so away is knocked the quaint old frontage of the house, and is replaced by something that can be sustained on iron supports between wide sheets of plate-glass. The suburbs are being made hideous with rows of model cottages, all precisely alike, roofed with blue slate. Nevertheless a great deal remains, and it is fortunately now something like a fashicn to give us Queen Anne (so-called) gables in the streets, which at all events afford a pretty broken 346 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. sky-line, and a play of light and shade on the frontage. Then how different are the outskirts of a foreign town to an English country town. In Italy there are miles of lanes between high stone walls, over which indeed lemons show their glorious fruit and blaze in the sun ; nevertheless, the sorry fact remains, that for as far as one cares to walk there is no prospect save by favour through a gate. At Florence, for instance, it is wall, wall, on the right hand and on the left, all the way to Fiesole ; and to the south, beyond S. Miniato, up and down the hills, wall, wall, on the right hand and on the left. At Genoa the city is engirded with hills, indeed the town lies in a crater, broken down to the west to the sea. Climb near two thousand feet to the en- circling fortresses, and you go between wall, wall, all the way. Escape along the sea to Sampierdarema on one side, on the other to St. Fruttuoso, and it is a way between wall and house, house and wall. And a French town, or a German town, or a Belgian town, starts up suddenly out of bare fields, without trees, without hedges, with a suburb of tall, hideous, stuccoed, badly-built houses, all precisely alike and equally ugly. There are no cottages. Come back to THE COUNTY TOWN. 347 England, and at once you discover tliat \\\z cottage is that which gives charm to the approacli of a town, it is the moss, the Hchen that adheres to the wall, a softening, beautiful feature in itself. Then there are our hedges and hedgerow trees, and how different from the stiff avenues of poplar, and the boulevards of set planes, exactly ten paces apart. Every foreign city was fortified, and outside the fortifications the glacis had to be kept clear of trees and buildings, so as not to give cover to the enemy. This fact has influenced the approach to all continental towns, they are not led up to as in England; and the poor are lodged differently — they occupy big houses, which they delight in making untidy, and exposing the dishevelled condition of their dwellings to every passer-by. The very lanes between walls are untidy — • every possible scrap of refuse collects in them, the stray feathers of fowls that have been plucked through- out the year eddy there, old rags — discarded only when dropping off — rot there, scraps of tin canister are kicked about there, old boots get sodden there. But there is always an effort after tidiness about English cottages ; and somehow the approaches to our towns are not offensive to eye and nose, but quite the reverse; the pretty cottages, their well-care d-for 348 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. gardens, the villas with bosquets of seringa and lilac, combine in making the approach full of studies for the painter — reposeful pictures of general comfort and happiness. In a foreign town the palace jostles with the gaunt house in which the poor herd. In England there are no palaces in our country towns, but there are excellent middle-class mansions, the Queen Anne red brick tall house, with stone quoins, where lives the substantial solicitor, who makes the wills and draws up the leases for all the squires of the neigh- bourhood, who is clerk of the Petty Sessions, and is consulted by every one more as a confidential friend than as a professional man. There is the prim house, with exactly as many windows on one side of the door as on the other, and a round-headed window over it, where three old ladies keep a school for girls. There is the many-gabled house inhabited by the late rector's widow. There is the quaint slated house with its bow -windows, within rich with beautiful plaster work and carved wood, supposed to be by Grinling Gibbons. It has a garden in terraces descending to the river, with vases on the balustrade of the terraces full of scarlet geraniums. Then there comes the modern county bank of cut stone, and of THE COUNTY TOWN. 351 inconceivable incongruity and ugliness ; then an old inn frequented by the Tory squires in past days. There is the old grammar school with its pedimented door and ivy creeping over the red-brick walls, fought with every year, and forced back from overrunning the windows, as it has overrun the walls. There is the doctor's house, with a j}ortico supported by slim Corinthian pillars, and with a lead above, on which the doctor's wife sets out her flowers, tliat make a blaze of colour up and down the street. There is the stuccoed wine merchant's house — always painted drab every third year — that has red blinds, through which the lamps at night diff^use a ruby glow into the street. There is that long wall with an elaborately wrought iron gate, with link extinguishers to the side posts, and a small but overgrown garden of shrubs, behind which lurks a thatched cottage where lives a widow — Lady This or That, the mother of the present baronet who resides three miles off at the park. There is the rectory, with its back to the street, and winelows so low that the passers-by can see in — -or could till they were furnished with twisted cane screens. But then the other side of the parsonage looks into the most charming of gardens, on what was the city wall, whence a glorious view is obtained. But the space would 352 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. fail me were I to describe, or merely indicate, the various houses of people, some professional, some retired gentry, some retired tradespeople, in a country town, all speaking of comfort, ease, and peace. Thus wrote Horace Walpole in 1741, on his return to England from Italy — "The country-town (and you will believe me, who you know am not prejudiced) delights me; the populousness, the ease, the gaiety, the well-dressed everybody amaze me. Canterbury — which on my setting out I thought deplorable — is a paradise to Modena, Reggio, Parma, etc. I had before discovered that there was nowhere but in England the distinction oi middling people ; I perceive now that there is peculiar to us middling houses ; — how snug they are ! " How sleepy the dear old country town is on all days of the week save market-day. The shopkeepers do not think it necessary to remain behind their counters, but run across the street or the square to have a chat with each other, and should a purchaser appear, it interrupts a gossip where two or three tradesmen are together ; or if the purchaser goes into a deserted shop, he has to wait whilst the owner is fetched from some neighbour's, whither he has gone to discuss the new scheme for water supply, or the bad quality of the Queen Anne Town House. ^irSiSS^^ A A THE COUNTY TOWN. 355 gas. Every squire's carriage, ev^ery parson's trap of the neiglibourhood is known to every one in the town ; and should one come in on a day that is not market- day, the reason of its appearance is a subject of much conjecture and discussion. But how the town wakes up on market-day ; how all the tradesmen recover from somnolence, and are nimble on their feet, and full of promises to get this bit of ironmongery attended to at once, such lamp- chimneys fitted, to write to London to order such a lace or such a silk matched — out of stock only yes- terday, and to get this watch cleaned, or to reset a stone in that ring, or to alter the stuffing of such a lady's saddle that galls, or to provide so many pounds of cake for a school-treat; and the milliner is hard at work all day fitting gowns, or trying on hats ; and the hairdresser's fingers are never resting from snip, snip, snip, and the boy from working the treadmill that sets the rotary-brush in motion; and the ostler is engaged in taking his shillings ; and the fish- monger in serving up his baskets of soles and mackerel ; and the nursery-gardener in making up bouquets ; and the oil-man in filling cans with ben- zoline, which have to go back under the coachman's feet, as has also a crate with plates from the crockery- 356 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. shop — that tiresome kitchen-maid does bang the plates about so that she has not left one unsnipped ; and the photographer is occupied the whole day setting heads into an apparatus for holding them steady, and pulling down or drawing up bhnds ; and the dentist is also engaged in relieving persons with swollen cheeks ; and in the workhouse congregate the Board of Guardians, and talk over the merits of such and such a case, and the allowance to be made per week. There are notices about on all the walls that amateur theatricals will be ' given in the new Town Hall in behalf of the local Hunt; and the neighbours are bringing in their fox's brushes and masks where- with to decorate the proscenium and the walls of the hall. The poor old Assembly Room, something like a Grecian temple, but copied — and badly copied — in stucco, is now given up to a dealer in antiquides, second-hand furniture, and old china. That Assembly Room in which our grandmothers danced is now piled up with beds, large oil-paintings, chiffoniers, fire-irons and fenders, staircase clocks, and an endless amount of rubbish for which no one, one would suppose, could be found to be purchaser. The assembly balls, the hunt balls, the bachelors' balls, 777^ COUNTY TOWN. 357 the concerts, and, as we have seen, the dramatical entertainments, now take place in the new Town Hall. The old county town is thriving. It is a place to which all the neighbourhood gravitates. There is now a setting of the tide into towns, and ebb in the country places. Servants will not go to the country. Meat, dairy produce, fowls, are as dear in the country as in the towns. In the towns it is not necessary to keej) a pony carriage ; in the towns there is escape from those village parasites who fall on and eat up those who settle in the country ; and in the towns there is more going on. In the towns educa- tional advantages are to be had which are lacking in the country. So, not only do old ladies go to towns, but also families fairly well off; and the country is becoming deserted. Small, pretty houses do not let well there ; great houses not at all. So the country towns are eating up the country. " Clean, airy, and affluent ; well paved, well lighted, well watched ; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops and handsome houses ; — such is the outward appearance, the bodily form, of our market town," says Miss Mitford concerning Belford ; and the description applies to every other county town m England. As for the vital-spark, the A A ■$f ;58 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. life-blood that glows and circulates through the dead mass of mortar and masonry, that I have neither space to describe, nor would one description apply to every other. I December, 1S89. MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST. By the Author of "MEHALAH," "JOHN HERRING," &c. Nozu ready at all Libraries. ARMINELL: A Social Romance. 3 vols. Crown 8vo, 3ijr. bd. By the SAME A UTHOR. OLD COUNTRY LIFE. By S. Baring Gould, M.A. With numerous H'ustrations and Initial Letters by W. Parkinson, F. U. Bedford, and F. Masey. Large crown 8vo, \os. 6d. A Limited Edition on Large Paper has also been printed, 21s. net. \_Just out. Contents: — Chaps, i. Old County Families.— 2. The Last Squire. — 3. Country Houses. — 4. The Old Garden.— 5. The Country Parson. — 6. The Hunting Parson. — 7. Country Dances. — 8. Old Roads.— 9. Family Portraits. — 10. The Village Musician. — 11. The Village Bard.— 12. Old Servants. — 13. The Hunt. — 14. The County Town. By the SAME A UTHOR. HISTORIC ODDITIES AND STRANGE EVENTS. By S. B.aring Gould, M.A. Demy 8vo, 1 o.f. 6^/. \_Notv ready. " h collection of exciting and entertaining chapters. The whole volume is delightful reading." — Times. "Tlie stories are well retailed, with admirable conciseness and point." — Aiheiiceuni. "The work, besides being agreeable to read, is valuable for purposes of reference. The entire contents are stimulating and delightful." — Xotcs and Queries. By the SAME A UTHOR. SONGS OF THE WEST: Traditional Ballads and Songs of the West of England, with their Traditional INIelodies. Collected by S. Baring (jOULD, M.A., and H. Fleetwood Sheppard, ]\I.A. Arranged for Voice and Piano. In 4 Parts (containing 25 Songs each), 3j>. each net. [Farts I. a?id II. now ready. ".A rich and varied collection of humour, pathos, grace, and poetic fancy." — Saturday Review. By the SAME A UTHOR. YORKSHIRE ODDITIES. New and cheaper Edition, i vol. Crown Svo. [/// the Press. JAEL, and other STORIES, i vol. Crown Svo. [/;/ the Press. By MAJOR N. PAUL. ALDERDENE. By Major Norris Paul. Crown 8vo, 3^. dd. \_Rcady. "A very remarkable story, which is sure to attract attention." — Newcastle Chronicle. " Interesting, not to say fascinating." — Birmingham Gazette. By T. RALEIGH, M,A. IRISH POLITICS: An Elementary Sketch. By T. Raleigh, ALA., Fellow of All Souls', Oxford, Author of "Elementary Politics." Fcap. 8vo, paper boards, \s. ; cloth, IS. 6d. [Ready. " A very clever work." — Mr. Gladstone. 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