Wild Life in a Southern County. Richard Jefferies
of generations of ploughboys kicking against it in their rude play, and where they have not chipped it, filled with lichen. The sexton says that this tomb in the olden days was used as the pay-table upon which the poor received their weekly dole. His father told him that he had himself stood there hungry, with the rest—not broken-down cripples and widows, but strong, hale men, waiting till the loaves were placed upon the broad slab, so that the living were fed literally over the grave of the dead.
The farmers met every now and then in the vestry and arranged how many men each would find work for—or rather partial work—so that the amount of relief might be apportioned. Men coming from a distance, or even from the next parish, were jealously excluded from settling, lest there should be more mouths to feed; if a family, on the other hand, could by any possibility be got rid of, it was exiled. There were more hands than work; now the case is precisely opposite. A grim witness, this old tomb, to a traditionary fragment in that history of the people which is now placed above a mere list of monarchs.
The oldest person in the village was a woman—as is often the case—reputed to be over a hundred: a tidy cottager, well tended, feeble in body, but brisk of tongue. She reckoned her own age by the thatch of the roof. It had been completely new thatched five times since she could recollect. The first time she was a great girl, grown up: her father had it thatched twice afterwards; her husband had it done the fourth time, and the fifth was three years ago. That made about a hundred years altogether.
The straw had lasted better lately, because there were now no great elm trees to drip, drip on it in wet weather. Cottagers are frequently really squatters, building on the waste land beside the highway close to the hedgerow, and consequently under the trees. This dripping on the roof is very bad for thatch. Straw is remarkably durable, even when exposed to the weather, if good in the first place and well laid on. It may be reckoned to last twenty years on an average, perhaps more. Five thatchings, then, made eighty years; add three years since the last thatching; and the old lady supposed she was seventeen or eighteen at the first—i.e. just a century since. But in all likelihood her recollections of the first thatching were confused and uncertain: she was perhaps eight or ten at that time, which would reduce her real age to a little over ninety. A great part of the village had twice been destroyed by fire since she could remember. These fires are or were singularly destructive in villages—the flames running from thatch to thatch, and, as they express it, ‘wrastling’ across the intervening spaces. A pain is said to ‘wrastle,’ or shoot and burn. Such fires are often caused by wood ashes from the hearth thrown on the dustheap while yet some embers contain sufficient heat to fire straw or rubbish.
The old woman’s memories were wholly of gossipy family history; I have often found that the very aged have not half so much to tell as those of about sixty to seventy years. The next oldest was a man about eighty; all he knew of history was that once on a time some traitor withdrew the flints from the muskets of the English troops, substituting pieces of wood, which, of course, would not ignite the powder, and thus they were beaten. Of date, place, or persons he had no knowledge. He ‘minded’ a great snowfall when he was a boy, and helping to drag the coaches out and making a firm road for them with hurdles. Once while grubbing a hedge near the road he found five shillings’ worth of pennies—the great old ‘coppers’—doubtless hidden by a thief. He could not buy so much with one of the new sort of coppers: liked them as King George made best.
An old lady of about seventy, living at the village inn, a very brisk body, seemed quite unable to understand what was meant by history, but could tell me a story if I liked. The story was a rambling narrative of an amour in some foreign country. The lady, to conceal a meeting with her paramour, which took place in the presence of her son, who was an imbecile (or, in her own words, had ‘no more sense than God gave him,’ a common country expression for a fool), went upstairs and rained raisins on him from the window. The son told the husband what had happened; but, asked to specify the time, could only fix it by, ‘When it rained raisins.’ This was supposed to be merely a fresh proof of his imbecility, and the lady escaped.
In this imperfect narrative is there not a distorted version of a chapter in the ‘Pentameron’? But how did it get into the mind of an illiterate old woman in an out-of-the-way village? Nothing yet of Waterloo, Culloden, Sedgmoor, or the civil war; but in the end an old man declared that King Charles had once slept in an old house just about to be pulled down. But then ‘King Charles’ slept according to local tradition, in most of the old houses in the country. However, I resolved to visit the place.
Tall yew hedges, reaching high overhead, thick and impervious, such as could only be produced in a hundred years of growth and countless clippings, enclosing a green pleasaunce, the grass uncut for many a year, weeds overrunning the smooth surface on which the bowls once rolled true to their bias. In the shelter of these hedges, upon the sunny side, you might walk in early spring when the east wind is harshest, without a breath penetrating to chill the blood, warm as within a cloak of sables, enjoying that peculiar genial feeling which is induced by sunshine at that period only, and which is somewhat akin to the sense of convalescence after a weary illness. Thus, sauntering to and fro, your footstep, returning on itself, passed the thrush sitting on her nest calm and confident.
No modern exotic evergreens ever attract our English birds like the true old English trees and shrubs. In the box and yew they love to build; spindly laurels and rhododendrons, with vacant draughty spaces underneath, they detest, avoiding them as much as possible. The common hawthorn hedge round a country garden shall contain three times as many nests, and be visited by five times as many birds, as the foreign evergreens, so costly to rear and so sure to be killed by the first old-fashioned frost.
The thrushes are singularly fond of the yew berry; it is of a sticky substance, sweet and not unpleasant. Holly berries, too, are eaten; and holly hedges, despite their prickly leaves, are favourites with garden birds. It would be possible, I think, to so plan out a garden as to attract almost every feathered creature.
A fine old filbert walk extends far away towards the orchard: the branches meet overhead. In autumn the fruit hangs thick; and what is more exquisite, when gathered from the bough and eaten, as all fruit should be, on the spot? I cannot understand why filbert walks are not planted by our modern capitalists, who make nothing of spending a thousand pounds in forcing-houses. I cannot help thinking that true taste consists in the selection of what is thoroughly characteristic of soil and climate. Those magnificent yew hedges, the filbert walk—all, in fact are to be levelled to make way for a garish stucco-fronted hunting-box, with staring red stables and every modern convenience. The sun-dial shaft is already heaved up and broken.
The old mansion was used as a grammar school for a great many years, but has been deserted for the last quarter of a century; and melancholy indeed are the silent hollow halls and dormitories. The whitewashed walls are yellow and green from damp, and covered in patches with saltpetre efflorescence; but they still bear the hasty inscriptions scrawled on them by boyish hands—some far back in the eighteenth century. The history of this little kingdom, with its dynasties of tutors and masters, its succeeding generations of joyous youth, might be gathered from these writings on the walls: sketches in burned stick or charcoal of extinct monarchs of the desk; rude doggerel verses; curious jingles of Latin and English words of which every great school has its specimens; dates of day and month when doubtless some daring expedition was carried out; and here and there (originally hidden behind furniture, we may suppose) bitter words of hatred against the injustice of ruling authorities—arbitrary ushers and cruel masters.
The casements, broken and blown in, have permitted all the winds of heaven to wreak their will; and the storms sweeping over from the adjacent downs beat as they choose upon the floor. Within an upper window—now obviously enough a wind-door—two swallows’ nests have been built against the wall close to the ceiling, and their pleasant twitter greets you as you enter; and so does the whistling of the starlings on the roof. But without there, below, the ring of the bricklayer’s trowel as he chips a brick has already given them notice to quit.
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