The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
THE ENGLISH VIA DOLOROSA;
OR,
GLIMPSES OF THE HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURER.
THE ENGLISH VIA DOLOROSA.
(1884.)
I.
An English Epiphany.
About the year 680 there lived near the monastery of Whitby a herdsman who knew so little of music and singing that when he saw the harp coming towards him at festival gatherings, he, for shame, rose up, and went home.
Having on one occasion thus left his companions, he withdrew to the stable to tend the cattle. Here he lay down to rest, and dreaming saw a man standing by his bedside, who said, "Cœdmon, sing me something;" to whom he answered, "I cannot sing anything; therefore it was that I left my companions and came hither." "Yet thou must sing to me," the visitor replied. "What must I sing?" said the dreamer. "Sing me the origin of created things." Thereupon the herdsman began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator, the words of which he had never before heard. Then he arose from his sleep, and having in mind all that he had sung, he added to the words many others worthy of God in the same measure.
In the morning he went to the town-reeve, under whose authority he served, and told him of the gift he had received, who forthwith brought him to the abbess. St. Hild caused Cœdmon to sing the poem in the presence of all the learned men in the monastery, to whom it seemed that the herdsman had, from the Lord Himself, received a heavenly gift. So they expounded to him more of the sacred history, bidding him, if he could, turn the words into melody of song, which he did, returning the next morning with another poem. Then the abbess began to make much of and to love the grace of God that was in the man, exhorting him to forsake the secular life and to become a monk. And she received him into the monastery with all his, causing him to be taught the Holy History and the Gospel, which he, pondering over, turned into sweetest verse, his song and his verse being so winsome to hear that his teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth.
Thus King Alfred relates Bede's story of the inspiration of the Father of English Poetry. The Divine Messenger came and awoke the Soul of this English Labourer in a stable; fitting birthplace for the first cry of the humble representative throughout English History, of the Man of Sorrows and the Acquaintance of grief.
Over its cradle bent holy women like St. Hild, saintly men like the venerable Bede, and godly kings like Alfred the Great.
If twelve hundred years ago an English Labourer was capable of writing poems which would appear the prototype of Paradise Lost, what treasures must have lain hid in the souls of the agricultural poor, condemned through all these long ages to ignorance, to heavy labour and grinding poverty: an ignorance, a labour, a poverty ever increasing.
To trace this Via Dolorosa is a sad work; but the poet will come who will find in it the material not only of a Paradise Lost, but of a Paradise Regained, for if he has to tell how this great mute Soul was made an offering for National wrong-doing and has to describe its suffering even unto death, he will have the joy of singing its resurrection, an event accomplished in our own day.
II.
In Worse than Egyptian Bondage.
Those crouching figures that we see sometimes supporting the roof of a great building are fit emblems of the vast mass of the European peoples during the Middle Ages. Both in the lands under Roman and under Teutonic law, the great majority were in a state of slavery. Among the Saxons the landless man must belong to somebody, or he had no legal existence; he became an outlaw, and anyone might slay him.
This servile condition rendered him the man of his lord; he could be bought and sold together with his family and his goods and chattels; he could not marry nor give his daughter in marriage without permission of the lord; a serf, in fact, was so entirely at the mercy of his master, that where the latter had judicial authority he could torture his serf and put him to death. Outside the manor-house stood the dreadful symbols of his power: the gallows whereon to hang the men, the pit wherein to drown the women.
Nevertheless a serf could, saving his lord's right, possess property; and there must have been a certain limit to the torture that could be inflicted, since the German law fixed the highest number of blows a slave could receive at two hundred and twenty. When it was his fate to have a good master, existence was not intolerable; but under a bad one, or in times of anarchy, human imagination could hardly outstrip the fiendish cruelty of his tyrants.
The process by which the fat kine eat up the lean kine had been going on in England long before the Conquest, the old Saxon freeman losing ground before the new noble class. The Norman Conquest drove him down still lower, levelling into one common condition of serfdom, the ceorles and thrælls on the confiscated estates. The old order, however, was not swept away everywhere. Sir Henry Maine seems to think that the Village Community which arose out of relationship and the common possession of a tract of land maintained itself in England through all the revolutions of the feudal system.
This primeval communism which secured its members in the enjoyment of a certain degree of liberty, equality, and fraternity was continually broken up and lessened in its area by the ravages of the banditti, who, step by step, had founded another social system. That the Norman rulers were capable of anything, we may learn from the well-known passage in the Saxon Chronicle, describing the atrocities practised on the people by some of the barons in the reign of Stephen, and by the fact that, in 1102, the Synod of Westminster, over which Anslem presided, denounced "the wicked trade of selling men like brute beasts, which had," they said, "hitherto been the common custom."
Under the Normans all except the higher classes of villeins whose services were limited to seed-time and harvest, were bound to do the work needed on their lord's private domain. By them his land was ploughed, dunged, and dyked, his harvests reaped, his barns filled with sheaves, his stables provided with stubble, his cattle, sheep, and pigs tended, his grain turned into malt, his nuts gathered, his woods cut, his fires kept alive with fuel. A whole army of slaves toiled for him as ploughmen, herdsmen, shepherds, malsters, woodmen, carpenters, and smiths, while the borderers scattered on the edges of the commons were bound to provide him with a good stock of poultry and eggs.
The sole reward for all this labour was the right to existence and protection. The only consolations the labourers enjoyed, were the pleasures in which they could indulge on holidays, or the mystic hopes which the services of the Church inspired. Dwelling in dark cottages made of wattles and daubed with mud, they lived on salt meat half the year, and for vegetables, ate onions, cabbages, and nettles.
How the lords fared we may judge from an account Holingshed has preserved of the Earl of Leicester's expenses in 1313. By that time there were labourers in the country working for daily wages; a thatcher in this same year received 3¼d. a day. If we deduct Sundays and Holidays, such a labourer would have been able to earn about £4 a year; and as the Earl's expenses reached £7,309, less £8, 16s. 7d. given in charity, it appears that the latter spent on his family and people an amount equal to the wages of 1825 labourers. More than half of this went on eating alone, while an idea of the revelry indulged in may be gathered from the fact that the Earl's household drank 371 pipes of wine, and burnt 2,319 pounds of tallow candles as well as 1,870 pounds of Paris candles.
Well might a deep-seated ill-will exist between the oppressor and the oppressed. It comes out in the legendary Vision of Henry I., who one night dreamt that he saw gathered round him a number of labourers bearing scythes, spades, and pitchforks, looking angry and threatening. And reason enough they had, if Walter Mapes, a clerical pluralist, royal favourite, friend of Beket, and author of the "Quest of the Holy Graal,"