Old Country Life
by S. Baring-Gould · English · Gutenberg #48522 · 395,322 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Old Country Life
Author: S. Baring-Gould
Illustrator: F. D. Bedford
Francis Edward Masey
active 1883-1895 William Parkinson
Release date: March 18, 2015 [eBook #48522]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note
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OLD COUNTRY LIFE.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
=HISTORIC ODDITIES AND STRANGE EVENTS.=
Demy 8vo, 10s. 6d. [_Just published._
=ARMINELL=: =A Social Romance.=
3 vols., crown 8vo. [_Now 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., 3s. each,
_net_. Parts III. and IV. _in-preparation._
=STRANGE SURVIVALS AND POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.=
[_In Preparation._
=YORKSHIRE ODDITIES.=
New and Cheaper Edition. [_In the Press._
[Illustration: A Country Dance. _Frontispiece._]
OLD COUNTRY LIFE.
BY
S. BARING GOULD, M.A.,
AUTHOR OF
"MEHALAH," "JOHN HERRING," ETC.
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
BY W. PARKINSON, F. D. BEDFORD, AND F. MASEY.
LONDON:
METHUEN AND CO., 18, BURY STREET, W.C.
PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
1890.
[_The right of reproduction is reserved._]
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON & BUNGAY.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. Old County Families 1
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. Family Portraits 219
X. The Village Musician 239
XI. The Village Bard 259
XII. Old Servants 284
XIII. The Hunt 315
XIV. The County Town 334
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Head and tail pieces to each chapter by F. D. Bedford.
PAGE
Country Dance--_Frontispiece_ _W. Parkinson_
Old Dames with their Factotum Butler " " 5
Sydenham House, Devon _F. Masey_ 7
Wortham--An Empty Shell " " 24
Grimstone " " 29
Madame Grym _W. Parkinson_ 33
Gryms, A Group of _From painting_ 36
Courtyard, Little Hempston _F. Masey_ 57
House at Little Hempston " " 58
Willsworthy _F. B. Bond_ 59
" " Plan " " 60
Kew Palace _F. Masey_ 63
Tonacombe, North Cornwall " " 68
A Parlour Fireplace _F. B. Bond_ 73
Garden from Tapestry " " 98
Flaxley, from a print of 1714 _F. D. Bedford_ 100
A Town House Garden Front, Launceston _F. Masey_ 107
Old Country Parsonage, Bratton-Clovelly _F. D. Bedford_ 121
" " Parson in Cassock _W. Parkinson_ 133
Parson Chowne and Sally's Young Man " " 164
Hippoclides before Clisthenes " " 175
Minuet being Danced _W. Parkinson_ 196
Packman's Way _F. D. Bedford_ 204
By the Road-side " " 207
An Old Travelling Carriage _F. Masey_ 214
Sir Edward, a.d. 1668 _J. D. Cooper_ 227
N. a.d. 1888 " " 227
Lady Northcote _F. D. Bedford_ 232
Lady Young " " 232
Old Church Orchestra _W. Parkinson_ 243
James Olver _From photo_ 257
John Helmore _F. D. Bedford_ 278
Richard Hard " " 279
The Old Butler _W. Parkinson_ 285
The Hunt Passing " " 316
South Gate, Launceston _F. Masey_ 335
Cottages at Woking " " 339
London Inn, Launceston " " 343
Dockacre, " " " " 349
House at Launceston " " 353
Old Cart, Slate Quarry, Lew Trenchard _F. D. Bedford_ 358
OLD COUNTRY LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
OLD COUNTY FAMILIES.
[Illustration]
I wonder whether 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 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 nobility--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 country pursuits; they only visited their mansions for
about eight weeks in the year, for the _Sommer-frische_. Those who
could not afford to furnish 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 s'amuser_. 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 obligation to the landlord
into bondage to the Jew, who receives, but spends nothing. In France
the condition is much the same; the great house is a ruin, and so,
very generally, is the family that occupies and owns it, if it still
lingers on in it.
I remember a stately château 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 château
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 that season, as the people of the place know,
money begins to circulate.
[Illustration: Old Dames with their Factotum Butler.]
It is not, however, my intention to speak of the 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
families 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 after 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.
[Illustration: Sydenham House, Devon.]
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 gentle
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 families, all of
gentle blood, occupying good houses--the Spealts, 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 Fowells, 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 Fowells
that passed to the Savery family is in Chancery, deserted 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, Ellacots 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
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. He
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 grandchildren 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 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 of 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 the shop is peculiar, but I know that it
is one of 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 descendant 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 family 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 seated in their grand old mansion. Then--how I cannot
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 remarkable--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 1731, when the baronetcy fell to
Ralph Conyers, Chester-le-street, _a glazier_, whose father, John,
was grandson of the first Baronet. Sir Ralph intermarried 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 Cathcart's family. In three
years this young fellow squandered the property and died, leaving the
barren title to his uncle, Thomas Conyers, who, after an unsuccessful
attempt at a humble business, in his seventy-second year was residing
as a pauper in the workhouse of Chester-le-Street.
Mr. Surtees bestirred himself in his favour, collected 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
Coryndon, 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 it a family are to be found in humble
or comparatively 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 itinerant
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
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 an important county family
has resided for many generations, 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. Representatives 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 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 well-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 seventeenth 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 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 disappeared, 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 where 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 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 conclusions 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 disqualified
as _ignobiles_ 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, 1572, 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.
How are we to account for this amazing extinction? The families were
prolific, but apparently those most prolific 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 1551, and had four sons. Of these the descendants of
one alone can be traced to a certain Roseclear Arscott of Holsworthy,
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 £300; buried 23 March, 1704-5."
The third of the four--of whom John Arscott was the eldest--was
Richard, who left four sons. Of 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 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 family, as I have taken great
pains to trace all the ramifications. In the Visitation of 1620, John
Gould of Coombe in Staverton is represented as father of seven sons;
and Prince, who wrote his _Worthies of Devon_, published in 1701, in
mentioning the family, comments 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 representative 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-sheriff, the entire grand-jury, numbering about twenty,
was 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 lordships in Devon? 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 Levers, with the motto
"_Olim_" (Formerly); in the next the arms of the Ashtons, with the
legend, "_Heri_" (Yesterday); then his own, with the text, "_Hodie_"
(To-day); and he left the fourth and last compartment without a
blazoning, but with the motto, "_Cras, nescio cujus_" (Whose to-morrow,
I know not).
[Illustration: An Empty Shell.]
Possibly one reason for the extinction, or apparent extinction, of
the squirarchal families is, that the junior branches did not keep
up their connexion with the main family trunk, and so in time all
reminiscence 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 proposed 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 VIII., 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.
"When King James came into England," says Ward in his _Diary_, "he was
feasted at Boughton by Sir Edward Montague, and his six sons brought up
the six first dishes. Three of them were lords, and three more knights."
Fuller in his _Worthies_ 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 married 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 1611. 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.[1]
Innocent XIII. (1721-4) boasted that he had nine uncles, eight
brothers, four nephews, and seven grandnephews. He thought, and
others thought with him, 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.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Foster, _Baronetage_, 1880. See Chaos, p. 653.
CHAPTER II.
THE LAST SQUIRE.
[Illustration]
In a certain wild and picturesque 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' visitation,
consequently did not belong to the aboriginal gentry of the county. It
produced a chancellor, and an Archbishop of Canterbury.
[Illustration: Grimstone.]
The family mansion is still standing, with granite mullioned windows
and quaint projecting porch, over which is a parvise. A pair of carved
stone gate-posts give access to the turf plot in front of the house.
The mighty kitchen with three fireplaces shows that the Gryms were a
hospitable race, who would on high days feed a large number of guests,
and the ample cellars show that they did more than feed them. I cannot
recall any library in the house, unless, perhaps, the porch-room were
intended for books; if so, it continued to be intended for them only.
The first man of note in the family who lived at Grimstone was
Brigadier John Grym of the Guards, born in 1699, a fine man and a
gallant soldier. He had one son, of the same name as himself, a
man amiable, weakly in mind, and of no moral force and decision of
character. His father and mother were a little uneasy about him because
he was so infirm of purpose; they put their heads together, and
concluded that the best thing to do for him was to marry him to a woman
who had in abundance those qualities in which their son was deficient.
Now there lived about four miles off, in a similar quaint old mansion,
a young lady of very remarkable decision of character. She was poor,
and one of a large family. She at once accepted the offer made her in
John Grym's name by the Brigadier and his wife, and became Madame John
Grym, and on the death of the Brigadier, Madame Grym, and despotic
reigning queen of Grimstone, who took the reins of government into her
firm hands, and never let them out of them. The saying goes, when woman
drives she drives to the devil, and madame did not prove an exception.
The marriage had taken place in 1794; the husband died six years later,
but madame survived till 1835. Throughout the minority of her eldest
son John, that is to say, for sixteen or seventeen years, she had the
entire, uncontrolled management of the property, and she managed pretty
well in that time to ruin the estate.
She was a litigious woman, always at strife with her neighbours, proud
and ambitious. Her ambition was to extend the bounds of the property,
but she had not the capital to dispose of to enable her to pay for
the lands she purchased, and which were mortgaged to two-thirds of
their value. She borrowed money at five and six per cent., and bought
property with it that rendered only three and a half.
[Illustration: Madame Grym.]
She attended the parish vestries, where she made her will felt, and
pursued with implacable animosity such farmers or landowners as did
not submit to her dictation. She drove a pair of ponies herself, but
whilst driving had her mind so engaged in her schemes that she forgot
to attend to the beasts; they sometimes ran away with her, upset her,
and she was found on more than one occasion senseless by the roadside,
and her carriage shattered hard by.
As her affairs became worse, more and more intricately involved, she
began to be alarmed lest she should be arrested for debt. For security
she had a house or pavilion erected in which to take refuge should the
officers of the law come for her. This had a secret chamber, or well,
made in the thickness of the walls, accessible from an upper loft
through a trap-door. When she had received warning that she was being
looked for, she fled to the loft. The trap was raised, and madame was
lowered into the well on a carpet or sheet, then the trap was closed
and covered with a mat. She had recourse to this place of concealment
on several occasions, and the secret of the hiding-nest was not
revealed till after her death.
The pavilion still stands, but has been converted into a barn, and all
the internal arrangements have been altered.
When defeated in an action against a neighbour, on success in which she
had greatly set her heart, she brought an action against the lawyer who
had conducted her case, charging him with having wilfully understated
her claims, withheld evidence, and acted in collusion with the other
side. She lost, of course, and being unable to pay costs, escaped to
London; there she died. It is said that when the judgment was given
against her the church bells were rung, so unpopular had she become.
In London she died, and her son, fearing lest her body should be
arrested for debt, had her packed in bran, in a grand-piano case, and
sent down by water to Plymouth, whence it was conveyed by waggon, as
a piano, to Grimstone. The bill for the packing of madame in bran in
a piano case is still extant. The waggoner who drove her in this case
from Plymouth did not die till the other day.
At the time when she was in constant alarm of a warrant and execution,
the portable plate of the house, to the weight of about fifty pounds,
was daily intrusted to one of the labourers on the farm, who carried
it about with him, and when at work put it in the hedge, and threw his
jacket over it.
On one occasion, when the bailiffs were expected, she was afraid lest
her gig should be taken, and before retiring into her well, she had it
lifted by ropes and concealed under hay above the stable.
[Illustration: A Group of Gryms.]
She left two sons, John, the elder, the heir to Grimstone, and Ralph,
the younger. Both inherited the self-will, strength of character, and
vindictiveness of the mother, but the younger assuredly in double
measure. No sooner was she dead, than the brothers flew at each other's
throats, or, to be more exact, Ralph flew at that of his more fortunate
brother, if it can be called fortunate to inherit an encumbered estate,
mortgaged almost to its value. Ralph instituted a Chancery suit
against John. The younger brother remained in the parish, residing in
another house, and occasionally accompanied his brother John when out
shooting, and they met in the hunting-field.
One day when they were out rabbiting together, Ralph's gun suddenly
went off, and riddled his brother's beaver hat. John vowed that a
deliberate attempt had been made on his life by his brother. He
forbade him his house, and thenceforth would no more associate with
him in field sports. Ralph before his mother's death had been put in
a solicitor's office, but had been dismissed from it for falling on a
fellow-clerk with a pistol and attempting to shoot him. John remembered
this, and if he mistrusted his brother, it was not altogether without
cause.
Now that he could no longer go to Grimstone, and found himself regarded
askance by the neighbours, Ralph went up to town, where, having
connexions in good position, he got introduced into society, and he
made the acquaintance of a very charming girl with a small fortune at
her own disposal, of six thousand pounds. He was a remarkably handsome
young man, with flashing blue eyes, and bold, well-chiselled features,
an erect bearing, and a brusque, haughty manner. It is perhaps hardly
to be wondered at that, with his personal good looks, and with his
indomitable will, he should bear down all opposition on the part of the
young lady's friends, and induce her to throw in her lot with him.
According to the marriage settlement, half the wife's fortune was to
be at his disposal. It is almost unnecessary to say, that he managed
to get rid of that within a twelvemonth. Thereupon ensued a series of
persecutions as mean as they were cruel. His object was to force her
to surrender the second three thousand pounds. He attempted to cajole
her out of this, and when he failed by this means, he endeavoured to
frighten her into submission. To do this he put a pistol under the
pillow, and when she was asleep at his side, discharged the pistol over
her head. Then he pretended that he had missed his mark, but assured
her he would not fail another time.
She had, fortunately, sufficient resolution to resist intimidation.
Whether she would have succumbed in the end we cannot say, but,
luckily for her, he was arrested for costs in the Chancery suit
against his brother, and was lodged in the prison of King's Bench,
where he remained for seven years. Bethell, afterwards Lord Westbury,
was counsel against him. Ralph Grym conducted his own case. Every now
and then he was brought from prison into court, as some fresh stage
of the case was entered upon, and then returned to his detention. One
day Bethell informed the judge that he moved for an "abatement," owing
to the death of one of the parties involved in the suit. This was the
first tidings Ralph Grym received of the decease of his brother-in-law,
who with his brother John was party in the suit. His brother now
abandoned the action, and Ralph was let out of King's Bench. He at once
returned to the neighbourhood of Grimstone, and sent a message to his
brother on the very first night of his return that he had a gun; that
he was passionately fond of shooting; that for seven or eight years he
had been debarred the pleasure; that his hand had become shaky; and
that--in all human probability, when he was out shooting, should John
come in sight, his gun would go off accidentally, and on this occasion
_not_ perforate the beaver.
John took the hint and remained indoors, whilst Ralph shot when and
what he liked over his brother's grounds. But this was a condition of
affairs so intolerable, that John deemed it expedient to come to terms
with his brother, give him five hundred pounds, and pack him off to
London.
Furnished with this sum, Ralph returned to town, and there set up
livery stables. He was himself a first-rate rider, and he taught
ladies riding, and conducted riding parties in Epping forest. He made
money by purchasing good-looking horses that were faulty in one or two
particulars, at some ten pounds or fifteen pounds, and as his horses
were well turned out, and well bred, he had the credit of mounting his
customers well. And he was not indisposed to sell some of these for
very considerable sums.
Thus passed three or four years, the happiest in his life, and he
might have continued his livery stables, had he not quarrelled with
a groom and fought him. He was thrown, and dislocated his hip. This
was badly set; it was a long job, and he was never again able to ride
comfortably. His business went back, he lost his customers, and failed.
Then, without a penny in his pocket, he returned to Devon, and to the
neighbourhood of Grimstone, and lodged with the tenants on the estate.
Utterly ruined in means and in credit, he became a burden to his hosts.
They declined to entertain him wholly and severally, so he slept in one
farmhouse, and had his meals in one or another of the neighbouring
farms. His brother refused to see him, defied his threats, and denied
him money.
This went on for some time. At length his hosts plainly informed him
that he was no longer welcome. He was not an agreeable guest, was
exacting, insolent, and violent. They met in consultation, sent round
the hat, collected a small subvention; and then a gig was got ready,
the money thrust into his hand, and he was mounted in the trap to
be driven off to the nearest railway station, where he might take a
ticket for London, or Jericho. The gig was at the door, and Ralph was
settling himself into it, when a man, breathless and without a hat,
arrived running from Grimstone, to say that John Grym, his brother,
had suddenly fallen down dead. The trap that was to take Ralph away
now conveyed him to the mansion of his ancestors, to take possession
as heir, and he carried off with him the proceeds of the subscription
among the tenants.
John had died without issue, and intestate. Ralph found in the house
five hundred pounds in gold, a thousand pounds' worth of stock was on
the farm, three hundred pounds' worth of wool was in store, and there
was much family plate and some family jewels.
Ralph's character from this moment underwent a change. When in town
he had lived as a prodigal, and squandered his money as it came in,
was freehanded and genial. In the year of Bloomsbury, when the Derby
was run in snow, he won three thousand pounds by a bet, when he had
not three-halfpence of his own. Next year he won on the turf fifteen
hundred pounds; but money thus made slipped through his fingers. No
sooner, however, was he squire of Grimstone than he became a miser, and
that so suddenly, that he had to be sued in the County Court for the
cheap calico he had ordered for a shroud for his brother. He became the
hardest of landlords and the harshest of masters.
With his wife he was not reconciled. Repeated efforts were made by
well-intentioned persons to re-unite them. He protested his willingness
to receive her, but only on the condition that she made over to him the
remaining three thousand pounds of her property. To this condition she
had the wisdom not to accede. Before he was imprisoned she had borne
him a daughter, whom we will call Rosalind. He made many attempts to
get possession of the child, in the hopes of thereby extorting the
money from the mother.
Before he became squire, Mrs. Grym lived in a small house near
Grimstone, on the interest of the three thousand pounds, of course in a
very small way. On one occasion she was called to town, and was unable
to take little Rosalind with her. She accordingly conveyed the child
to the house of a neighbouring rector, and entreated that she might be
kept there till her return, and be on no account surrendered to the
father should he attempt to claim her.
A couple of Sundays after her departure, between ten and eleven in the
morning, Ralph Grym appeared at the parsonage, and asked to see the
rector. He was admitted, and after a little preliminary conversation,
stated his desire to have an interview with his child, then aged five.
This could not be refused. The little girl was introduced, and Ralph
talked to her, and played with her.
In the meantime the bells for service were ringing. The bell changed to
the last single toll, five minutes before divine worship began, and Mr.
Grym made no signs of being in a hurry to depart.
The rector, obliged to attend to his sacred duties, drew his son aside,
a boy of sixteen, and said to him, "Harry, keep your eye on Rosalind,
and on no account suffer Mr. Grym to carry her off."
The boy accordingly remained at home.
"Well, young shaver," said Ralph, "what are you staying here for?"
"My father does not wish me to go to church this morning."
"Rosalind," said her father, "go, fetch your bonnet, and come a walk
with me. I have some peppermints in my pocket."
The child, highly elated, got herself ready. Henry, the rector's son,
also prepared to go out.
"Young shaver, we don't want you," said Ralph, rudely.
"My father ordered me to take a walk this morning, sir."
"There are two ways--I and Rosalind go one, and you the other," said
Ralph.
"My father bade me on no account leave Rosalind."
Ralph growled and went on, the boy following. Mr. Grym led the way for
six miles, and the child became utterly wearied. The father made every
effort to shake off the boy. He swore at him, he threatened him, money
he had not got to offer him; all was in vain. At last, when the little
girl sat down exhausted, and began to cry, the father with an oath left
her.
"That," said Henry, in after life, "was the first time I had to do
with Ralph Grym, and then I beat him."
Many years after he had again to stand as Rosalind's protector against
Ralph, then striking at his child with a dead hand, and again he beat
him.
After her mother's death Ralph invited his daughter to Grimstone, but
only with the object of extorting from her the three thousand pounds
she had inherited from her mother. When she refused to surrender this,
he let her understand that her presence was irksome to him. He shifted
the hour of dinner from seven to nine, then to ten, and finally gave
orders that no dinner was to be served for a week. Still she did not go.
"I want your room, Rosalind," he said roughly; "I have a friend coming."
"The house is large, there are plenty of apartments; he shall have
mine, I will move into another."
"I want all the rooms."
"I see you want to drive me away."
"I beg you will suit yourself as to the precise hour to-morrow when you
leave."
Again, after some years, was Rosalind invited to Grimstone; but it
was with the same object, never abandoned. On this occasion, when old
Ralph found that she was resolute not to surrender the three thousand
pounds, he turned her out of doors at night, and she was forced to take
refuge at the poor little village tavern. He never forgave her.
Squire Grym was rough to his tenants. One man, the village clerk, had a
field of his, and Ralph suddenly demanded of him two pounds above the
rent the man had hitherto paid. As he refused, Ralph abruptly produced
a horse-pistol, presented it at the man's head, and said,
"Put down the extra two pounds, or I will blow your brains out."
The clerk was a sturdy fellow, and was undaunted. He looked the squire
steadily in the eye, and answered--
"I reckon _her_ (_i. e._ the pistol), though old and risty, won't miss,
for if her _does_, I reckon your brains 'll make a purty mess on the
carpet."
Ralph lowered the pistol with an oath, and said no more. He was a
suspicious man, and fancied that all those about him conspired to rob
him. When he bore a grudge against a man, or suspected him, he required
some of his tenants to give evidence against the man; he himself
prepared the story they were to swear to, and drilled them into the
evidence they were to give. The tenant who refused to do as he bid was
never forgiven.
He was never able to keep a bailiff over a twelvemonth. When he died,
at an age over eighty, in his vindictiveness against his daughter,
because she had refused him the three thousand pounds, he left
everything of which he was possessed to the bailiff then in his house.
How the boy who had saved Rosalind from being carried off by her father
many years before, and who was now a solicitor, came to her aid, and
secured for her something out of the spoils, is history too recent to
be told here.
Thus ended the family of Grym of Grimstone, and thus did the old house
and old acres pass away into new hands.
Such is the story of the extinction of one family. Others have been
snuffed out, or have snuffed themselves out, in other ways; strangely
true it is, that of the multitudes of old county families that once
lived in England, few remain on their paternal inheritance.
As I have told the story of the ruin of one family, I will conclude
this chapter with that of the saving of another when trembling on the
brink of ruin. Again I will give fictitious names. The St. Pierres
were divided into two main branches, the one seated on a considerable
estate on the Dart, near Ashburton, the other on a modest property near
the Tamar, on the Devonshire side. In 1736 died Edward St. Pierre, the
last male representative of the elder branch, when he left his property
to the representative of the junior, William Drake St. Pierre. This
latter had an only son, Edward, and a daughter. He was married to a
woman of considerable force of character. On his death in 1766, Edward,
then aged twenty-six, came in for a very large property indeed; he was
in the Dragoons, and a dare-devil, gambling fellow. He eloped with a
married lady, and lived with her for some years. She died, and was
buried at Bath Abbey. He never married, but continued his mad career
till his death.
One day he had been gambling till late, and had lost every guinea he
had about him. Then he rode off, put a black mask over his face, and
waylaid the man who had won the money of him, and on his appearance
challenged him to deliver. The man recognized him, and incautiously
exclaimed, "Oh, Edward St. Pierre! I did not think this of you!"
"You know me, do you?" was the reply, and Edward St. Pierre shot him
dead.
Now there had been a witness, a man who had seen Captain Edward take up
his position, and who, believing him to be a highwayman, had secreted
himself, and waited his time to escape.
Edward St. Pierre was tried for the murder. Dunning of Ashburton, then
a rising lawyer, was retained to defend him. It was essential to weaken
or destroy the testimony of the witness. Dunning had recourse to an
ingenious though dishonest device. The murder had been committed when
the moon was full, or nearly full, so that in the brilliant white light
every object was as clear as by day.
Dunning procured a pocket almanack, removed the sheet in which was the
calendar of the month of the murder, and had it reprinted at the same
press, or at all events with exactly similar type, altering the moons,
so as to make no moon on the night in question.
On the day of trial he left this almanack in his great-coat pocket,
hanging up in the ante-room of the court. The trial took place, and the
witness gave his evidence.
"How could you be sure that the man on horseback was Captain St.
Pierre?" asked the judge.
"My Lord, the full moon shone on him. I knew his horse; I knew his
coat. Besides, when he had shot the other he took off his mask."
"The full moon was shining, do you say?"
"Yes, my Lord; I saw his face by the clear moonlight."
"Pass me a calendar. Who has got a calendar?" asked the judge.
At that time almanacks were not so plentiful as they are now. As it
happened no one present had one. Then Dunning stood up, and said,--
"My Lord, I had one yesterday, and I put it, I think, in the pocket of
my overcoat. If your Lordship will send an apparitor into the ante-room
to search my pocket, it may there be found."
The calendar was produced--there was no moon. The evidence against the
accused broke down, and he was acquitted.
This was considered at the time a clever move of Mr. Dunning; it
occurred to no one that it was immoral. Captain St. Pierre had to pay
Dunning heavily; in fact, he made over to him a portion of the estate
in lieu of paying in cash, and later, when he became further involved,
he sold the property to the Barings. Dunning was created Baron
Ashburton, but the title became extinct with his son, who bequeathed
his property to Alexander Baring, his first cousin, who was elevated
to the peerage under the title of Baron Ashburton, and the St. Pierre
property now belongs to Lord Ashburton.
Captain Edward St. Pierre died in 1788, without issue, and his sister
became his heir; but he had got rid of everything he could get rid of.
Only the estate near the Tamar had been saved from sale by his mother
taking it of him on a lease for ninety-nine years. She was residing on
it when the news reached her that her good-for-nothing son was dead.
He had died at Shaldon, near Teignmouth, on the 29th June, and his last
request was that he might be carried to Bath, and laid by the side of
the woman he had wronged.
When his mother received the tidings of his death she was in
uncertainty what to do. All the last night of June to the dawn of July
1, she sat in one tall-backed arm-chair, musing what to do with the
rest of her life. Should she go to Bath, and spend the remainder of her
days at cards, amusing herself? or should she devote it to a country
life, and to repairing the shattered fortunes of the family?
When morning broke her mind was made up. She would adopt the nobler,
the better cause; and she carried it out to the end. As each farm fell
vacant in the parish she took it into her own hands, and farmed it
herself, and succeeded so well, that when the rival gentle family in
the parish, owning a handsome barton there, fell into difficulties,
she bought their estate, so as to make some amends for the loss of the
Ashburton property. That the chair in which the old lady sat meets with
respect _ça va sans dire_.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER III.
COUNTRY HOUSES.
[Illustration]
What a feature in English scenery is the old country house! Compare the
seat that has been occupied for many generations with the new mansion.
The former with its embowering trees, its lawns and ancient oaks, its
avenues of beech, the lofty, flaky Scotch pines in which the rooks
build, and about which they wheel and caw; and the latter with new
plantations, the evidence everywhere present of hedges pulled down,
manifest in the trees propped up on hunches of clay.
There is nothing so striking to the eye on a return to England from
the Continent as the stateliness of our trees. I do not know of any
trees in Europe to compare with ours. It is only with us that they
are allowed to grow to advanced age, and die by inches; only with us
are they given elbow-room to expand into the full plenitude of their
growth. On the Continent every tree is known to the police, when it was
planted, when it attains its maximum of growth; and then, down it comes.
Horace Walpole had no love of the country--indeed, he hated it, and
regarded the months that he spent in Norfolk as intolerable. He laments
in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (Oct. 3rd, 1743), that the country
houses of the nobility and gentry of England are scattered about in the
country, and are not moved up to town, where they would make streets
of palaces, like those of the great people of Florence, and Genoa, and
Bologna. "Think what London would be if the chief houses were in it,
as in the cities of other countries, and not dispersed, like great
rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country."
It is precisely because our most noble mansions are in the country, in
a setting of their own, absolutely incomparable, of park and grove,
that they are unsurpassed for loveliness anywhere. Framed in by pines
and deciduous trees, copper beech and silver poplar, with shrubberies
of azalea in every range of colour, from scarlet, through yellow to
white, and rhododendrons full of bloom from early spring to midsummer,
and double cherry, almond, medlar. Why, the very framing makes an ugly
country house look sweet and homelike.
But beautiful as are the parks and grounds about our gentlemen's
houses, they are but a remnant of what once was. We see in our old
churches, in our mansions, that oak grew in profusion in England at one
time, and reached sizes we cannot equal now. Great havoc was wrought
with the woods and parks in the time of the Commonwealth and at the
Restoration. The finest trees were cut down that ships might be built
of them for the royal navy; the commissioners marked and took what
trees they would. Thus in 1664 Pepys had to select trees in Clarendon
Park, near Salisbury, which the Chancellor had bought of the Duke of
Albemarle. Very angry the Chancellor was at having his park despoiled
of his best timber, and Pepys gives us in his _Diary_ an amusing
account of his trouble thereupon.
But to come to the houses themselves. Is there anything more sweet,
peaceful, comfortable than the aspect of an old country house, of
brick especially, with brown tiled roof and clustering chimneys backed
by woods, with pleasure gardens at its side, and open lawn and park
before it? No, its equal is to be found nowhere. The French château,
the Italian palace, the German schloss are not to be spoken of in the
same breath. Each has its charm, but there is a coldness and stiffness
in the first, a turned-inwardness in the second, and a nakedness in the
last that prevent us from associating with them the ideas of comfort
and peace.
The true English country house is a product of comparatively late
times, that is to say, from the reign of Henry VIII. onwards. Before
that, the great nobles lived in castles, and the smaller gentry in
houses of no great comfort and grandeur.
In the parish of Little Hempston, near Totnes, is a perfect mansion
of the fourteenth century, probably the original manor-house of the
Arundels, but given to the Church, when it became a parsonage. It is
now used as a farm, and a very uncomfortable farm-house it makes. As
one of the best preserved houses of that period I know, it deserves a
few words.
[Illustration: Courtyard: Little Hempston:]
This house consists of three courts; one is a mere garden court,
through which access was had to the main entrance; through this passed
the way into the principal quadrangle. The third court was for stables
and cattle-sheds. Now this house has but a single window in it looking
outwards, and that is the great hall window, all the rest look inwards
into the tiny quadrangle, which is almost like a well, never illumined
by the sun, so small is it.
[Illustration: House at Little Hempston: S: Devon:]
The hall had in it a brazier in the midst, which could never heat it,
though the numbed fingers might be thawed at it. Adjoining the hall
is the ladies' bower, a sitting-room dark as a vault, with indeed a
fireplace in it. These were the sole rooms that were occupied by day,
the hall and the bower.
The Arundels had another place at Ebbfleet, near Stratton, which was no
bigger, and only a little less gloomy; the windows were always made,
for protection, to look into a court. It was not till after the Wars of
the Roses that there was more light allowed into the chambers.
[Illustration: A West Country Manor House:]
I give a sketch and plan of a manor-house still almost unaltered,
called Willsworthy, in the parish of Peter Tavy in Devon. It is built
entirely of granite. It has near it a ruined chapel, but what family
occupied it and when I do not know; it has not certainly been tenanted
by gentlefolks since the reign of Henry VIII.
It was not till the Tudor period that the houses of our forefathers
became comfortable and cheerful.
[Illustration: Plan of an Ancient West-country Manor House]
We should be wrong, however, if we supposed that in the Elizabethan
period the windows were designed so much for looking out at as for
letting the sun look in at. The old idea of a quadrangle was not
discarded, but it was modified. The quadrangle became a pleasant garden
within walls; the destruction of the walls to afford vistas was the
work of a later age.
The normal plan of a house till the reign of Elizabeth was the
quadrangle; but then, in the more modest mansions, the house itself
did not occupy more than a single side of the court, all the rest was
taken up with barns and stables, and the windows of the house looked
into this great stable-yard. On the side of Coxtor, above Tavistock,
stands an interesting old yeoman's house, built of solid granite, which
has remained in the possession of the same worthy family for many
generations, and has remained unaltered. This house, in little, shows
us the disposition of the old squire's mansion, for the yeoman copied
the plan of the house of the lord of the manor. A granite doorway
gives admission to the court, surrounded on all sides but the north
by stabling. On the north side, raised above the yard by a flight of
steps, is a small terrace laid out in flower-beds; into this court all
the windows of the house look. We enter the porch, and find ourselves
in the hall, with its great fireplace, its large south window, where
sits the mistress at her needlework, as of old; and here is the high
table, the wall panelled and carved, where sit the yeoman and his
family at meals, whilst the labourers sit below. This very simple yet
interesting house is quite a fortress; it is walled up against the
stormy gales that sweep the moor. It is a prison too, for it catches
and holds captive the sunbeams that fall into the bright little court.
We are too ready to regard our forefathers as fools, but they knew a
thing or two; they were well aware that in England, if we want flowers
to blow early and freely, they must be sheltered.
It was not till the reign of Charles II. that the fancy came on English
people to do away with nooks and corners, and to build oblong blocks of
houses without projections anywhere.
[Illustration: Kew Palace:]
The new Italian, or French château style, had its advantages, but its
counterbalancing disadvantages. The main advantage was that the rooms
were loftier than before; the walls, white and gold, were more cheerful
at night; there may have been other advantages, but these are the only
two that are conspicuous. The disadvantages were many. In the first
place, no shelter was provided out of doors from the wind; no pleasant
nooks, no sun-traps. The block of building, naked and alone, stood in
the midst of a park, and the wind whistled round it, and the rain
drove against it. When the visitor arrived in bad weather, he was blown
in at the door, and nearly blown through the hall. In our eagerness
to make vistas, obtain extensive landscapes, we have levelled our
enclosing walls. But what could have been a sweeter prospect from a
hall or parlour window, than an enclosed garden full of flowers, with
bees humming, butterflies flitting, and fruit-trees ripening their
burdens against old red brick enclosing walls, tinted gorgeously with
lichens?
There is at present a fashion for being blown about by the wind, so we
unmuffle our mansions of their enclosing walls and hedges. But England
is a land of wind. Nothing strikes an Englishman more, when living
abroad, than the general stillness of the air. Look at the wonderful
bulbous spires and cupolas to towers on the Continent;--marvellously
picturesque they are. If examined, they are found to be very generally
covered with the most delicate slate work, that folds in and out of the
crinks and crannies, like chain mail. Such slating would not endure
three winters in England; it would be torn adrift and scattered like
autumn leaves before an equinoctial gale. We never had these bulbous
spires in England, because the climate would not permit of their
construction. Our forefathers knew that this was a windy world of ours--
"Sing heigh ho for the wind and the rain,
For the rain it raineth every day,"
and they built their houses accordingly--to provide the greatest
possible amount of shelter from the cold blasts of March, and from
the driving rains of winter. The house originally consisted on the
ground-floor of hall, parlour, kitchen, and entrance-porch and stairs.
In later times the side wing was carried further back, and a second
parlour was built, and the staircase erected between the parlours.
At Upcott, in Broadwood, in Devon, is a house that belonged to the
Upcotts. The plan is much the same as that of Willsworthy, even ruder,
though the house itself was finer. It had a porch, a hall, and a dairy
and kitchen. The parlour is of Queen Anne's reign, and probably takes
the place of one earlier on the same spot. The plan of Hurlditch is
the same, a mansion of the important family of Speccot. There also the
parlour is comparatively recent.
There was in a house previous to the reign of Henry VII. but one good
room, and that was the hall. It opened to the roof, and must have been
cold enough in winter, and draughty at all times.
At Wortham, the fine mansion of the Dynhams, there was an arrangement,
as far as I know, unique--two halls, one for winter with a fire-place
in it, serving as a sort of lower story to the summer-hall, clear to
the roof--thus one is superposed on the other.
Tonacombe, a mansion of the Leys and Kempthornes in Morwenstowe parish
in Cornwall, is a singularly untouched house of a somewhat similar
construction, but enlarged. Here there was the tiny entrance-court into
which the hall looked; the hall itself being open to the roof, with
its great fire-place, and the parlour panelled with oak. All other
reception-rooms are later additions or alterations of offices into
parlours.
[Illustration: Tonacombe: North Cornwall.]
With the reign of the Tudors a great sense of security and an increase
of wealth must have come to the country gentry, for they everywhere
began to rebuild their houses, to give them more air and light, and
completely shook off that fear which had possessed them previously of
looking out into the world. Then came in an age of great windows. It
would seem as though in the rebound they thought they could not have
light enough. Certainly glass must have been inexpensive in those
days. It was the same in the churches; the huge perpendicular windows
converted the sacred edifices into lanterns. The old halls open to
the roof gave way to ceiled halls, and the newel staircase in the
wall--very inconvenient, impossible for the carrying up or down-stairs
of large furniture--was discarded for the broad and stately staircase
of oak.
It seems to me that the loss of shelter that ensued on the abandonment
of the quadrangle, or of the E-shaped Elizabethan house, is not
counterbalanced by the compactness of the square or the oblong block
of the Queen Anne house. Moreover, the advantages internally were not
so great as might be supposed, for, to light the very lofty room the
windows were made narrow and tall; thus shaped they admitted far less
sun than when they were broad and not tall.
Only one who, like myself, has the happiness to occupy a room with a
six-light window, twelve feet wide and five feet high, through which
the sun pours in and floods the whole room, whilst without the keen
March wind is cutting, cold and cruel, can appreciate the blessedness
of such a window, can tell the exhilarating effect it has on the
spirits, how it lets the sun in, not only through the room, and on to
one's book or paper, but into the very heart and soul as well.
A long upright narrow window does not answer the purpose for which
it was constructed. The light enters the room from the sky, not from
the earth, therefore only through the upper portion of a window. The
wide window gives us the greatest possible amount of light. If we were
but to revert to the Elizabethan window, we would find a singular
improvement in our health and spirits.
Our old country houses were, say modern masons, shockingly badly
built. "Why, sir," said one to me, "do look here at this wall. It is
three foot six thick--what waste of room!--and then only the facing is
with mortar between the stones, all the rest of the stones are set in
clay." I was engaged building my porch when the man said this. So I,
convinced by his superior experience, apologized for my forbears, and
bade him rebuild with mortar throughout. What was the result? That wall
has been to me ever since a worry. The rain beats through it; every
course of mortar serves as an aqueduct, and the driving rain against
that wall traverses it as easily as if it were a sponge. Our old houses
were dry within--dry as snuff. Now we cannot keep the wet out without
cementing them externally. Those fools, our forefathers, by breaking
the connexion prevented the water from penetrating.
Do any of my readers know the cosiness of an oak-panelled or of a
tapestried room? There is nothing comparable to it for warmth. What
the reader certainly does know is, that from a papered wall and from
a plate-glass window there is ever a cold current of air setting
inwards. He supposes that there is a draught creeping round the walls
from the door, or that the window-frame does not fit; and he plugs,
but cannot exclude the cold air. But the origin of the draught is in
the room itself, and it is created by the fire. The wall is cold and
the plate-glass is cold, and the heated atmosphere of the room is
lowered in temperature against these cold surfaces, and returns in the
direction of the fire as a chill draught. But when the room is lined
with oak or with woven woollen tapestry, then the walls are warm, and
they give back none of these chill recoil currents. The fire has not
the double obligation laid on it of heating the air of the apartment
and the walls.
In Germany and Russia during the winter double windows are set up in
every room, and by this means a film of warm air is interposed between
the heated atmosphere of the room and the external cold air. That our
ancestors did not attempt,--plate-glass was not known to them,--but
they did what they could in the right direction. They covered the chill
stone and plaster walls of the rooms with non-conducting materials.
The oak-panelled room was, it can hardly be denied, difficult to light
at night, as the dark walls absorbed the candle rays. But that mattered
little at a time when every one went to bed with the sun. When later
hours were kept, then the oak panels were painted white. But now that
we have mineral oils, not to mention gas and electric lighting, we may
well scrape off the white paint and restore the dark oak. Then, for an
evening, the sombre background has quite a marvellous effect in setting
off the bright ladies' dresses, and showing off fresh pretty faces.
[Illustration: An Oak-panelled Parlour, Lew Trenchard.]
Before the reign of Elizabeth the staircase was not an important
feature in the house. The hall reached to the roof, and the stairs
were winding flights of stone steps in turrets, or in the thickness
of the wall; when the fashion set in to ceil the halls low, then the
staircase became a stately feature of the house. But it was more than
a stately feature, it was the great ventilating shaft of the house;
it was to the house what the tower is to the church, the chimney
by which the stale fumes might pass away. The great staircase window,
made up of thousands of little pieces of glass set in lead, acted
as a colander through which the outer air streamed in and the inner
vitiated air escaped. Where there is a central quadrangle, this was in
many cases glazed in; then a staircase led to a series of galleries
about it, lighted from above, communicating with the several suites of
apartments. Many of our old inns are thus constructed. The reader will
remember the picture of the court of the White Hart in _Pickwick_, with
the first introduction of Sam Weller. The central court serves as a
ventilator to the house, and so does its dwindled representative, the
well-staircase. Those fools, our forefathers, again, if they shut out
the winds and gave shelter to their houses, made ample provision for
internal ventilation.
What a degraded, miserable feature of the house is the staircase
now-a-days, with its steps seven inches instead of four, and the tread
nine and a half inches instead of thirteen. It takes an effort to go
up-stairs now, it is a scramble; it was an easy, a leisurely, and a
dignified ascent formerly. Then again, our staircases are narrow--one
of four feet is of quite a respectable width; but the old Elizabethan
staircase measured from six feet to eight feet wide. That of Blickling
Hall, Norfolk is seven feet eight inches. There the ascent is single
to the first landing; after that the stair branches off, one for the
ascent, the other for the descent. The first ascent is of eight steps;
then after the main landing, on each side eleven steps to the second
landing; then nine more lead to the level of the upper storys and
grand corridor. On such staircases as these furniture can be conveyed
up and down without damage to the walls, or injury to the furniture.
Architects who build modern narrow and steep staircases, forget that
often a coffin has to be conveyed with its tenant down them; and this
can be done neither with convenience nor dignity upon them.
But let us think of the staircase on a brighter occasion than a
funeral. The grand old flight of steps with its landings, and with
sometimes its bay-window with seats in it on one of the landings, how
it lends itself to the exigencies of a sitting-out place at a ball.
The window is filled with azaleas; the walls hung with full-length
family portraits; the broad dark oak stairs are carpeted with crimson;
a chandelier pendant from the moulded Elizabethan ceiling-drop sheds
a soft golden light over the scene; and on the landings, on the
steps themselves, sit the dancers after the exertions of a waltz or a
galop, enjoying the fresher air, and forming a picture of almost ideal
charm. Then also it is that the ventilating advantages of the great
staircase become most manifest. The dancing has been in the hall, which
has become hot; the door on to the stairs is thrown open; there is a
circulation of air at once, and in two minutes the atmosphere of the
ball-room has renewed itself.
In the matter of sleeping arrangements we have certainly made an
advance on those of our ancestors. I have already mentioned Upcott,
which belonged to a family of that name that expired in the reign of
Henry VII. The hall is small, but has a huge fire-place in it. In
the window is a coat of arms, in stained glass, representing Upcott
impaling an unknown coat, party per pale, argent and sable, three
dexter hands couped at the wrist, counterchanged. Now this house has
or had but a _single_ bedroom. There may have been, and there probably
was, a separate apartment for the squire and his wife, over the
parlour, which was rebuilt later; but for all the rest of the household
there existed but one large dormitory over the hall, in which slept
the unmarried ladies of the family, and the maid-servants, and where
was the nursery for the babies. All the men of the family, gentle and
serving, slept in the hall about the fire on the straw, and fern, and
broom that littered the pavement.
That house is a very astonishing one to me, for it reveals a state of
affairs singularly rude--at a comparatively late period. Things were
improved in this particular later; bedrooms many were constructed,
communicating with each other. At the head of the stairs slept the
squire and his wife, and all the rooms tenanted by the rest of the
household were accessible only through that. The females, daughters of
the house and maid-servants, lay in rooms on one side, say the right,
the maids in those most distant, reached through the apartments of the
young ladies; those of the men lay on the left, the sons of the house
nearest the chamber of the squire, the serving-men furthest off.
When the party in the house retired for the night, a file of damsels
marched up-stairs, domestic servants first, passed through the room
of their master and mistress, then through those of the young ladies,
and were shut in at the end; next entered the daughters of the house
to their several chambers, the youngest lying near the room of the
serving-maids, the eldest most outside, near that of her father and
mother. That procession disposed of, a second mounted the stairs,
consisting of the men of the house, the stable-boy first, and the son
and heir last, and were disposed of similarly to the females, but on
the opposite side of the staircase. Then, finally, the squire and his
wife retired to roost in the chamber that commanded those of all the
rest of the household. This arrangement still subsists in our old
fashioned farm-houses.
Now may be understood the odd provision in a will proved in the
Consistory Court of Canterbury in 1652 (Bowyer, f. 57)--"I give to my
son Thomas the sole fee-simple and inheritance of my dwelling-house,
and all my lands and hereditaments thereto belonging, to him and to his
heirs for ever. And my will is, that Joan my daughter shall have free
_ingress_, _egress_, and _regress_ to the bedd in the chambre where she
now lieth, so long as she continueth unmarried."
But to this arrangement followed another, more practical and
convenient, that of having a grand corridor up-stairs, out of which
opened the doors of the bedrooms; or, where there was a glazed-in
quadrangle with staircase and landings around it, there the doors of
the bedrooms opened from these landings. The corridor was used as a
room for dancing, or for music, or for games; it was the recreation
place of the house on a rainy day. Being up-stairs, and away from
library and parlours, the young people might skip, and play blind-man's
buff, dance, and disturb no one; nor was there much furniture in these
corridors to stand in the way and get knocked over.
This corridor is a feature of an old house so very dear to young folks,
and so very advantageous to their health, that it is a pity in our
modern houses we have got rid of it.
A word on the furniture of our old country houses must not be omitted.
Unfortunately there set in at the beginning of this century a most
detestable fashion in furniture, absolutely void of taste; and to make
room for the villainous articles then imported into our old country
houses, much beautiful old work was turned out, very often was given to
servants when they married. The consequence is, that much of it passed
into cottages, where it soon got destroyed. It was not only old carved
oak that was cast forth, for much of that had been got rid of in the
Georgian epoch, but even the beautiful polished wood cabinets, chests
of drawers, and Chippendale chairs of a more recent period.
Of early furniture, I mean mediæval, little remains in our houses, for
one reason, because there was in them very little. The era of furniture
was begun with the Tudor monarchs; it was all of oak, and the carving
was influenced much by Holbein, who inspired artists with admiration
for German Renaissance. Cabinets with architectural façades and heavy
oak furniture continued in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. The
date of a chair can be told approximately by the position of the rail
binding together the legs. The primary object of this brace was, to
hold the legs firmly, but it was also found to possess the not less
important advantage of providing a person sitting in the chair with the
means of keeping his feet from the cold stone-slabbed pavement. When
boarded floors came into fashion, it became no longer necessary to have
the front brace of the chair placed so near the floor, and to give more
freedom to the feet it was gradually heightened. Some time after this
the side braces were raised to the same level as the front brace, and
later still, as the first necessity for their use was gradually lost
sight of, they were dispensed with altogether. This was the first
step towards the bad system of construction now almost universally
practised, of leaving the legs of chairs without any support at their
lower extremities. At the beginning of this century a still further
deviation from right principles ensued. The legs of chairs were
made to curve, and often to curve in such a manner as to make them
unserviceable for supporting the weight reposed upon them.
"Let us examine an old oak chair, and see how it was constructed. In
the first place, we shall find that the whole of the work is executed
in solid oak, the uprights forming the back, and the back legs being
made of one continuous piece; this at once gives strength and backbone
to the whole structure. The framework holding the seat is next securely
tenoned, and pinned with oaken pegs into the four legs, thus binding
the whole of the parts firmly together. Even at this stage we have
a far more strongly constructed piece of work than the modern chair
when quite completed; the old workman, however, not content with this,
next turned his attention to the weakest part of all--the feet of the
chair--and securely fastened them together about three or four inches
from the floor with four strong braces, tenoning each brace at both
ends into the legs of the chair, and securing it, as before, with
oaken pegs. This last addition made the whole a perfectly strong and
almost indestructible piece of framing, and constitutes one of the
most essential differences in the construction of ancient and modern
furniture. The legs of most modern chairs are made to depend entirely
for strength on their hold, _at one end_, to the framing of the seat
of the chair, into which they are generally only glued. The legs of
the ancient chair, on the other hand, are secured at _both ends_; and
the four braces connecting them together act as struts as well as
ties; they form an admirable protection against any blow the chair may
receive at its lower extremities. Many of the old chairs constructed on
these excellent principles are now in good condition, after nearly two
hundred years of daily use."[2]
In mediæval times there were trestles and boards for a dining-table;
but in Chaucer's time fixed tables were coming into use. He tells how
that in the rich and luxurious Franklin's house there were--
"Alle deyntees that men cowde thynke,
* * * * *
His table dormant in his halle alway
Stood redy covered al the longe day."
The "table dormant" was used only by very rich people; it was a new
fashion at the close of the fourteenth century, and was expensive. It
took its name from the fact that it was slept upon at night; it served
as a bed for one of the men who lay in the hall. This table consisted
of a single long trestle with a plank on it. It had but two legs, one
at each end, and a beam between supported by struts. But at the same
time that these tables came into fashion, another variety was in use,
supported by a pair of short trestles at each end. The top of this
table was also formed of planks, but they were hinged together so as to
be easily folded up and removed, when additional space was required. A
table of this kind is referred to by Shakespeare in _Romeo and Juliet_,
when, as Capulet enters the hall with his guests, he exclaims--
"Come, musicians, play.
A hall! a hall! give room, and foot it, girls.
More light, you knaves; and turn the tables up."
A remarkably cleverly constructed table of the reign of Elizabeth
exists at Slade in South Devon. It is based on the plan of the table
dormant, but is convertible into a settle when no longer required as a
table; the planking rests on the settle arms when serving for a board,
and slides back and assumes an erect position when required as a settle
back.
A "drawing-table" was a third variety. It was one that was square
framed, but could be drawn out at both ends, so as to nearly double its
normal length.
In a paper on 'Our Household Furniture,' contributed to the _Art
Journal_ by Mr. G. T. Robinson, an illustration of one of these
tables is given; and in speaking of the ingenuity displayed in the
construction of the sliding leaves, he says, "The whole mechanism is
admirably considered for the purpose it has to fulfil. Indeed its
adaptation for its purpose was so good that the principle was long
retained; and Sheraton, so late as the commencement of the present
century, advocates its use for many writing or other tables, and gives
the rule for finding the exact rake of the slides, and the technical
details of all the other parts."
It is difficult to understand why so admirable and simple an
arrangement was abandoned, for anything more clumsy and unsatisfactory
than the method adopted in our modern dining-room tables for
accomplishing a similar result can hardly be imagined.[3] The only
modern examples I have seen are some manufactured by a firm in Brussels
(Wattier, Steenpoort).
I confess that I look back with regret to the old highly polished
mahogany table for dessert. The modern system of covering the table
with white, and strips of coloured silk, and setting it with sprigs
of ferns and flowers is very pretty, but then for the sake of this
prettiness we are letting the polish of our tables go down. Hardly
anywhere now does the butler care to keep up the polish of the table;
he used to take a pride in it, now he knows that it is never seen.
Yet I know of two or three old country houses into which the Russian
fashion has not penetrated, and where even to this day the mahogany is
shown, and shines like a mirror.
"Hail, good comrades, every one,
Round the polished table;
Pass the bottle with the sun,
Drink, sirs! whilst ye're able.
Life is but a little span,
Full of painful thinking;
Let us live as fits a man,
No good liquors blinking!"
So sang our grandfathers; but the song has gone out with the polished
table, and with the polished table the quiet enjoyable drinking of good
port and sherry after the retirement of the ladies. The cigarette is
lighted--and who can enjoy port with the air full of its perfumes?--and
no sooner is the wine begun to be appreciated, than the tray of coffee
is presented, dug into the side, as a reminder that now-a-days the
pleasant hour with good wine and agreeable male companions is cut
down to a quarter of an hour--has gone out of fashion, along with the
polished table, and we must away into the drawing-room to talk empty
nothingnesses, and listen to bad music.
But we must not spend too much time over tables and chairs. Marquetry
became the fashion under William and Mary, when upright clocks,
bureaux, and chairs were thus decorated. Under Louis XIV. a new style
of decoration was introduced by one André Charles Buhl, who gave his
name to it. He was chief upholsterer to the king, and his rich and
brilliant marquetry of tortoise-shell and brass, so combined as to form
figures and subjects, was extensively used in the furnishing of the new
palace at Versailles.
The fashion extended to England, and where tortoise-shell was not
employed, the ground was gilt, then painted over with black, leaving
a pattern in gold uncovered, and the whole was washed over with a
reddish-brown lacquer, which gave the effect of tortoise-shell. Spaces
thus treated were relieved by raised work in wood carved and gilt in
relief, in representation of Buhl's brass work. We find this chiefly in
mirror and picture-frames.
Then followed the reign of Louis XV., the age of _rococo_, of
shell-shaped curves set against each other back to back. It may
have been barbarous, but it was rich and beautiful. Then walls were
painted white and picked out with gold, the clearest, most brilliant,
turquoise-blues and rose-carmines came in. Painters devoted themselves
to the decoration of panels in the walls of rooms and to ceilings, the
_dessus-de-portes_, over-doors, generally in chiaroscuro, shepherds
and shepherdesses, nymphs, cherubs. There was a certain amount of
sombreness in the old Elizabethan house, in the dark oak panelling, in
the olive-greens of the tapestry, that was distasteful to the merry
men of the epoch from Charles II. to the first Georges, and they set
themselves to make their interiors as sparkling with gold and brilliant
colour as possible on a white instead of a dark ground.
The discovery of Pompeii caused a return to a simpler style of
decoration, to purer forms; and marquetry furniture was manufactured in
exotic woods, enriched with ormolu mountings. Paintings were executed
on copper and let into chimney-pieces, of great delicacy and charm.
Chippendale, Heppelwhite, and Sheraton are names associated with the
mahogany furniture of the last century, with tables with pierced
galleries, chairs with open strap work backs, cabinets of graceful
curves, all of admirable workmanship. Indeed cabinet-making never
attained a higher degree of delicacy and perfection than at this
period. I would point to some of the bureaux of this date as real
marvels of workmanship. And look at the backs of the chairs--a good
Chippendale chair has the upright curled back at the top, in a manner
remarkable for beauty, and right in principle, for it exposes no sharp
angles to suffer from a blow. The satin-wood furniture, some of it
with medallions painted on it, sideboards, work-tables, chiffoniers,
sometimes only decorated with delicate garlands of laurel or bay
painted or inlaid on the satin-wood, is not to be disregarded. The only
furniture that cannot be loved is that of the first thirty years of
this century, when it violated all true principles of construction,
and manifested neither invention nor taste in design.
Before leaving the consideration of old country houses, one word
must be said about their _setting_. We now-a-days, when we build a
mansion, look out for the top of a hill, a good windy, exposed spot.
It never occurs to us that half the charm of a house consists in the
way in which it is framed. The mediæval Germans lived on the tops
of rocks, but then their houses were castles, partly for defence,
and partly because they knew what was fit to be done. Artistically,
they made these castles eminently picturesque with towers and gables
that cut the sky. We do not now build castles, but--well, the word
is suitable--boxes; and a box looks like a box on the top of a hill
against the sky, and nothing can make it look other. Our English
forefathers, in their sense of security, and in their love of sun and
shelter, sought out a hillside, and built their mansions so as to have
rising ground behind it, to back it, and where they had not a hill,
there they had a wood of tall trees. A house thus set is like a picture
in a frame, a pretty face in a real bonnet. I do not think that ladies
who, in pursuance of a vile fashion, wear hats, can be aware of the
loss of charm to the face. Let them take an ancestral portrait out
of its frame, and hang it thus naked against the wall. They will see
at once that the frame insulates it, draws attention to its beauties
and enhances them. It is the same with a house. It may be good
architecturally, but unless it be backed up by a green hill covered
with wood, tall Scotch pines, the haunt of rooks, umbrageous beech, in
autumn trees of gold, it is nothing but an architectural study. How
naked, how forlorn a dear old house looks that has lost its timber
that surrounded it! I know one or two old mansions that have been
converted into farm-houses, and their rear-guard of timber hewn down
and sold. There is a broken-hearted look about them that reminds one of
a carriage-horse degraded to go in a cart. It feels its degradation,
loses flesh, gloss, and spirit.
I was one day walking with an old friend whom fate doomed to live
abroad all his life, but whose heart was ever in his native land. We
were strolling near an old mansion, in its park, when he stopped,
looked at it, and said, "Ye gentlemen of England, that dwell at home at
ease--and in what ease! in what peace and beauty! Indeed, I think that,
as in all the world there is not a type of man nobler, better, more
complete in every way than the true English gentleman, so do I think
that nowhere--not approachably even, anywhere--is there to be found a
house like the old English country house." And in my heart I responded,
Amen--It is so.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _Examples of Carved Oak Woodwork_, by W. Bliss Sanders. London:
1883.
[3] Mr. Bliss Saunders gives details of one of these in the work above
referred to.
CHAPTER IV.
THE OLD GARDEN.
[Illustration]
Just before the breaking forth of the French Revolution, the Abbé de
Lille composed a poem in four cantos, entitled _Les Jardins_, in which
he enthusiastically urged the abandonment of all formality in the
laying out of a garden, and the adoption of the new English style of
irregularity.
"Avant de planter, avant que du terrain
Votre béche imprudente entame le sein,
Pour donnez aux jardins une forme plus pure,
Observez, connoissez, imitez la nature."
An agreeable wildness--that was what was to be sought. The Revolution
came in, and hacked the gardens about, and reduced them all to the
state of wildness.
What the Abbé de Lille wrote against was the artificiality of the
garden arrangement that had been in vogue till then. Horace Walpole
had already written in the same strain. A rage had set in in England
for remodelling the gardens, and the new fashion was called "English
gardening."
Pliny the younger, in his delightful letters, speaks of his gardens.
As his Laurentine villa was his winter retreat, it is not surprising
that the gardens there take no prominent part of his account. All he
says of them is, that the _gestatio_, or exercise ground, surrounded
the garden, and was bounded by a box-hedge; where the box had perished,
there were planted tufts of rosemary. He mentions his vine-walk and his
trees, mostly mulberry and fig, as the soil was unsuited for other
trees. On his Tuscan villa he is more diffuse; the garden takes up
a good part of the description. He tells of the strange shapes into
which his box-trees were clipped, his slopes, his terraces, shrubs
methodically trimmed, a marble basin, fountain, a cascade, bay-trees
alternating with plane-trees, a long straight walk, from which
branched off others hedged by apple-trees in espalier, and by box, and
ornamented with obelisks. Something like a rural view was, indeed,
contrived amidst so much artificiality, but was speedily forgotten
amidst the stiff lines of box and the trimmed cypresses.
In the paintings of Herculaneum we see the representations of gardens;
they are square enclosures, formed by trellis-work and espaliers, and
regularly ornamented with vases, fountains, and statues, elegantly
symmetrical. Now this arrangement of a garden continued in Italy. It
never changed, and the villa gardens in and about Rome to this day
reproduce the plans and character of those that flourished there in the
classic age.
The villa-gardens in and about Rome! I cannot write the words
without an ache of heart, for I know that they are disappearing
rapidly, inevitably. Along the Via Salaria I saw three in process of
destruction during the late winter and spring of 1889. A great slice
of the Borghese grounds is being devastated to make room for hideous
streets and squares. The Wolkonski gardens have been curtailed; those
of Villa Massimo Arsoli adjoining, almost destroyed and built over;
the Rospigliosi gardens gone; others doomed; the glorious Ludovisi
gardens, with their cypresses and ilexes towering above the closed
Porta Pinciana and the ancient boundary wall, are in process of
extermination. "The grounds, which were of an extent extraordinary when
considered as being within the walls of a capital, were laid out by
Le Nôtre, and were in the stiff French style of high-clipped hedges,
and avenues adorned with vases and sarcophagi. With the fury against
trees which characterizes Italians, all the magnificent ilexes and
cypresses were cut down as soon as the land was secured, and the plots
of building-land rendered altogether hideous and undesirable. In a
few years not a trace will remain of the picturesque glories of this
once noble villa, which, if acquired by the municipality, who refused
to purchase it, might have been made into public gardens of beauty
unrivalled in any European capital."[4]
The railway station, with its sheds and sidings, occupies the once
matchless gardens of the Villa Massimo Negroni, celebrated for its
exquisite cypress avenues and its stately terrace, lined with ancient
orange-trees and noble sarcophagi. The ground was confiscated by the
State, and the destruction of this fair scene broke the heart of the
owner, Prince Massimo. The sweet gardens of the Villa Strozzi are
gone, now built over with ugly houses. Outside the Porta Pia grand old
gardens are being devastated also.
The Medici gardens remain; Hawthorn thus described them. "They are laid
out in the old fashion of straight paths, with borders of box, which
form hedges of great height and density, and are shorn and trimmed to
the evenness of a wall of stone at the top and sides. There are green
alleys, with long vistas, overshadowed by ilex-trees; and at each
intersection of the paths the visitor finds seats of lichen-covered
stone to repose on, and marble statues that look forlornly at him,
regretful of their lost noses. In the more open portions of the
gardens, before the sculptured front of the villa, you see fountains
and flower-beds; and, in their season, a profusion of roses, from which
the genial sun of Italy distils a fragrance to be scattered abroad by
the no less genial breeze."
The Boboli gardens at Florence remain to testify to the ancient
arrangement, with high walls of evergreens and long avenues hedged up
ten or twelve feet, dense and impervious, above which rise the spires
of cypress and the domes of the stone-pine.
[Illustration: Garden from Tapestry.]
Our English gardens were modelled on those of the Italian palaces, the
same subdivision of squares into sections, with trimmed box enclosing
them, and with a statue or a fountain, or a carved and shaped yew in
the midst. The gardens were invariably enclosed within walls. Where the
ground sloped, at great expense it was shaped into terraces, reached by
flights of steps. The greatest exactness in the design was aimed at. As
Pope observed--
"Each alley has a brother,
And half the garden just reflects the other."
When Pamela endured her persecution she was allowed to walk in
the garden, but this was so walled round that escape from it was
impossible. There were seats in it on which she might repose in the
sun. There was a fish-pond in which she might angle, but there was only
one garden-door by which egress could be obtained, and that was locked.
It was the same with Clarissa Harlowe. The garden of her father's house
was walled round.
The pleached alleys were constructed of lime or beech trees platted
and trimmed so as to form walls of green. They were over-arched, and
those walking in them were as in a green bower. I know an old château
on the Moselle with such a _berceau_, it has in it windows commanding
beautiful reaches of the river; otherwise it is completely enclosed by
leaves, and fresh and sweet it is as a walk on a hot day. In England
we required shade less than shelter, and the green funnels were not in
such request as the long lines of lofty yew or box hedge.
In King's _Views of the Seats of our Nobility and Gentry_, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, we see the utmost formality. Every
house is approached by two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of
a gravel-walk and two grass-plats, or borders of flowers. Each rises
above the other by two or three steps, and as many walls and terraces,
and so many iron gates.
[Illustration: Flaxley, from a print of 1714.]
Sir William Temple gives us his view of what constituted a perfect
garden in his day. "The perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw,
either at home or abroad, was that of Moor Park, in Hertfordshire. I
will describe it for a model to those that meet with such a situation,
and are above the regards of common expense. It lies on the side of a
hill, upon which the house stands, but not very steep. The length of
the house, where the best rooms and of most use or pleasure are, lies
upon the breadth of the garden; the great parlour opens into the midst
of a terrace gravel-walk that lies even with it, and which may lie
about three hundred paces long, and broad in proportion; the border set
with standard laurels and at large distances, which have the beauty of
orange-trees out of flower and fruit. From this walk are three descents
by many stone steps, in the middle and at each end, into a very large
parterre. This is divided into quarters by gravel-walks, and adorned
with two fountains and eight statues, at the several quarters. At the
end of the terrace-walk are two summer-houses, and the sides of the
parterre are ranged with two large cloisters open to the garden; over
these two cloisters are two terraces covered with lead and fenced with
balusters; and the passage into these airy walks is out of the two
summer-houses at the end of the first terrace-walk. The cloister facing
the south is covered with vines. From the middle of the parterre is a
descent by many steps into the lower garden, which is all fruit-trees,
ranged about the several quarters of a wilderness, which is very
shady; the walks here are all green, and there is a grotto embellished
with figures of shell rock-work, fountains, and water-works."
Nothing could be more formal, and nothing, I think, could be more
charming. Why should we imitate wild nature? The garden is a product of
civilization. Why any more make of our gardens imitation wild nature,
than paint our children with woad, and make them run about naked in an
effort to imitate nature unadorned? The very charm of a garden is that
it is taken out of savagery, trimmed, clothed, and disciplined. The
wall and hedge are almost necessaries with us, to cut off the wind. See
how flowers of all kinds luxuriate, if given the screen from the biting
blast! If they like it, why should not we?
I allow that the hacking of trees into fantastical shapes deserved the
scourge administered in the one hundred and seventy-third number of
_The Guardian_, Sept. 29th, 1713. The writer there says--"How contrary
to simplicity is the modern practice of gardening; we seem to make it
our study to recede from nature, not only in the various tonsure of
greens into the most regular and formal shapes, but even in monstrous
attempts beyond the reach of the art itself; we run into sculpture,
and are yet better pleased to have our trees in the most awkward
figures of men and animals, than in the most regular of their own. A
citizen is no sooner proprietor of a couple of yews, but he entertains
thoughts of erecting them into giants, like those of Guildhall. I know
an eminent cook, who beautified his country-seat with a coronation
dinner in greens, where you see the champion flourishing on horseback
at one end of the table, and the queen in perpetual youth at the other.
"For the benefit of all my loving countrymen of this curious taste,
I shall here publish a catalogue of greens to be disposed of by an
eminent town gardener, who has lately applied to me upon this head. My
correspondent is arrived at such perfection, that he cuts family pieces
of men, women, or children. Any ladies that please may have their own
effigies in myrtle, or their husbands in horn-beam. I shall proceed to
his catalogue, as he sent it for my recommendation.
"'Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the tree
of knowledge in the great storm, Eve and the serpent very flourishing.
"'The Tower of Babel, not yet finished.
"'St. George in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in
condition to strike the dragon by next April.
"'A Queen Elizabeth in phylyræa, a little inclining to the
green-sickness, but of full growth.
"'An old maid-of-honour in worm-wood.
"'Divers eminent poets in bays, somewhat blighted, to be disposed of a
pennyworth.
"'A quickset hog shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week
in rainy weather,' &c."
But these absurdities do not affect the question of hedges. I know a
hedge of clay and stone built up eight feet, and above that crowned
with holly and thorn, running from east to west, but with a point or
two of west in its face. I remember an old man, a rector, chronically
affected with bronchitis for fifteen years, who felt the solace of this
charming hedge through the whole time. He could crawl out there when
the sun shone, and disregard the north and east winds. In that hedge
the primrose and the foxglove were out prematurely. The rabbits loved
it dearly, and made it untidy with their burrowings in the warm dry
clay under the roots of the bushes.
If a ruthless craving for vistas had not prevailed in and after Horace
Walpole's time, every one of our country houses and parsonages would
have had these sweet sheltered walks, where invalids could creep along
and bask in the sun. We have had them demolished, and so must away to
the Riviera. Evelyn had a great holly hedge in his garden at Sayes
Court, four hundred feet in length, five feet in diameter, and nine
feet high; and when the Court was let to the Czar Peter, during his
visit to the Deptford dockyard, that barbarian drove his wheel-barrow
through it, and so injured the hedge that Evelyn claimed damages, and
received one hundred and fifty pounds in compensation.
Another charming feature of the old garden--and one that was costly
to execute--was the terrace. The slope of the hillside was taken in
hand and was cut away, so as to produce a level lawn with a level,
horizontal terrace-walk above it, and perhaps, where the slope admitted
of it, a second and superior terrace. These terrace walls gave shelter,
and as walks were always dry, the drainage from them being rapid.
Trees, shrubs, flowers planted on them throve; there was no stagnation
of water about their roots, and the sun, striking against the wall that
enclosed the earth for their roots, made it warm, cherishing to the
plants, as a hot bottle is a comfort to you who suffer from cold feet
in your bed.
Nowhere have I seen roses so revel, go mad with delight and gratitude
as in these terrace gardens. The rose is peculiarly averse to wet feet.
See how the wild rose thrives in the clay-banked-up hedge!--a hedge
that seems to have no moisture in it, the earth of which crumbles
between the finger and thumb like snuff.
Then, again, the rose hates wind, and the terrace wall serves as a
screen to it against its enemy. And--for human roses!
Last summer I attended a garden-party at an ancient country house
with an old-fashioned garden. From the lawn in front of the porch a
flight of granite steps led to a terrace nine feet above the lawn. This
terrace was planted with venerable yew-trees, under which were little
tables spread with fruit and cool drinks, and cakes. A second flight
of steps gave access to a second terrace some twelve or fourteen feet
higher, planted with flowers, and backed to the north by a lofty garden
wall.
I do not think that, off the stage, I have seen any effect more
beautiful than that of the young girls in their bright and many-tinted
summer dresses, flitting about; some under the shade of the yews on
terrace number one, some looking at the flowers a stage higher, on
terrace number two, and some ascending and others descending the broad
flight of steps that led to these terraces, like the angels in Jacob's
vision.
[Illustration: A Town-House Garden Front, Launceston.]
The walls supporting the terraces served another purpose than that
of sustaining the roots of trees and flowers on the stages; as rain
fell on the terraces, it exuded between the joints of the stones and
nourished a fairy world of lichen, moss, and ferns. This was the wall
shaded by the yews. The other was hugged and laughed over by roses,
honeysuckle, and wisteria.
We have got almost no gardens left in England in their primitive
condition, only the wreckage of their beauty. But, as the old woman
said who sniffed the empty amphora of old Falernian wine, "If what
remains be so good, what must you have been when full!"
Now let us see what Horace Walpole tells us of the devastation of
these beautiful old gardens. "No succeeding generation," he says, "in
an opulent and luxurious country contents itself with the perfection
established by its ancestors; more perfect perfection was still sought,
and improvements had gone on, till London and Wise had stocked all our
gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms and mottoes,
in yew, box, and holly. Bridgman, the next fashionable designer of
gardens, was far more chaste--he banished verdant sculpture, and
did not even revert to the square precision of the foregoing age.
He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to
its opposite, and though he still adhered much to straight walks
with high-clipped hedges, they were only his great lines; the rest
he diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak, though
still within surrounding hedges. As his reformation gained footing,
he ventured to introduce cultivated fields and even morsels of forest
appearance, by the sides of those endless and tiresome walks.
"But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed,"--I
shiver as I write these words,--"_was the destruction of walls for
boundaries_, and the invention of fosses--an attempt then deemed so
astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha's! to express
their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk.
No sooner was this simple enchantment made, than levelling, mowing, and
rolling followed. The contiguous ground of the park without the sunk
fence was to be harmonized with the lawn within; and the garden in its
turn was to be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort
with the wilder country without. At that moment appeared Kent, painter
enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough
to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great
system from the twilight of imperfect essays."
The man Kent deserved the gallows much more than many who have been
hung. No one who pretended to be in fashion dared to maintain a hedge
or a wall. Down went the walls, and the beautiful roses bent their
heads and died; the great yew hedges were stubbed up, and the delicate
children and feeble old gentlemen who had basked under the lea, also,
like the roses, stooped to earth and died. All the shelter, sweetness,
sun, restfulness went away. These hedges had taken a century and more
to grow, they were levelled without compunction, never perhaps again to
reappear.[5]
No doubt there was folly in our forefathers in trimming yews into
fantastical shapes; but Kent and his followers were as extravagant in
their way. Kent actually planted _dead_ trees in lawns and parks, to
give a greater air of reality to the scene. Where he was allowed he cut
down, or mutilated avenues, because unnatural; but just as unnatural
were his absurd vistas, dug through woods so that the eye might reach a
pagoda, an obelisk, or a temple at the end.
A traveller in France in 1788, on the eve of the Revolution, gives an
account of the garden of Ermenonville, laid out by M. de Girardin on
the English system. "He has succeeded better in closely imitating the
steps of nature than any spot I have ever seen; nothing seems laboured,
nothing artificial. The ground is irregular, and the ornaments rude,
though the latter approach to too great an excess. I can see no reason,
if ornaments are to be made use of in such places as these (which in
itself is a deviation from nature), why they should not be handsome. To
see a miserable obelisk built of brick, and resembling more a chimney
than a monument, is carrying the refinement of wildness to too high
a pitch. If they are designed to be rude and natural, they may at
the same time be grotesque and elegant. Winding along a lovely walk,
through the bosom of a young wood, a gentle stream meandering by its
side, we reached a charming and retired spot. A large space here opens,
shaded by the thick branches of the trees, which just leave room for
a softened light to insinuate itself, and for the zephyrs to breathe
through; over interrupting rocks and heaps of pebbles, the water dashes
along with a noise grateful and composing. Here an altar is erected,
sacred to Reverie; on a rock that overhangs the stream are inscribed
some pleasing lines. Hence through a varied and highly pleasing
path we continued our route along the grove, meeting with different
inscriptions. From thence we ascended the forest, and traversing a path
rugged and grotesque, were presented with many interesting and pleasing
views. Arriving on the plain, in the bosom of a wood, we reached an
extended area, in the midst of which stood a large oak, and at the end
an edifice."[6]
I had written thus far, when last night there came to see me an old
village singer of nigh on eighty years, always to me a welcome guest.
I seated him by the fireside on a settle, and we fell to talking
about gardens, when he said, "I reckon, your honour, I know a rare
old-fashioned song about flowers and gardings, and them like. If your
honour 'ud plase to hear me, I'll zing 'n."
Then he struck up the following quaint ballad, to an air certainly two
hundred years old--
[Music: "IN A GARDEN SWEET."
_Arranged by_ F. W. Bussell, Esq., M.A.]
Two lovers in a garden sweet
Were walking side by side,
I heard how he the maid addressed,
I heard how she replied.
The garden it was very great,
With box trees in a row;
And up and down the gravell'd walk
These lovers fond did go.
"Said he, 'I prithee fix the day
Whereon we shall be wed.'
Said she, 'Thou hast a wanton mind,
I like 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.
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.'"
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Hare, _Walks in Rome_.
[5] Having got rid of the wall, and finding that flowers now suffer
from the wind, gardeners are fond of _sinking_ beds, and not a few
gardens are thus furnished.
[6] _A Reflective Tour through Part of France._ London: 1789.
CHAPTER V.
THE COUNTRY PARSON.
[Illustration]
Of 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
generations, 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 impress themselves on their generation, that the
stories 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 Psalmists man of yeares hee lived a score,
Tended his flocke allone; theire ofspring did restore
By Water into life of Grace; at font and grave,
He served God devout: and strivd men's soules to save.
He fedd the poore, lov'd all, and did by Pattern showe,
As pastor to his Flocke, ye way that they shoulde 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 who 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 Velvet Cushion_. It was written by the Rev.
J. W. Cunningham, Vicar of Harrow. The seventh edition, from which I
quote, appeared in 1815. 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."
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 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
delinquencies 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
Commonwealth 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 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
conclude, 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 his 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;
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 purer, sweeter
type of man delineated? The description 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.
[Illustration: An Old Country Parsonage, Bratton-Clovelly.]
"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 my 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 whitewashed, 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. There 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.
"Nor were we without guests; sometimes Farmer Flamborough, and often
the blind 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 Cruelty of Barbara Allen_."
Crabbe, himself a clergyman, does 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.
* * * * *
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 amused with riddles and charades.
Mild were his doctrines, and not one discourse
But gain'd in softness what it lost in force:
Kind his opinions; he would not receive
An ill report, nor evil act believe.
* * * * *
Though mild benevolence our 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 considering the excellences now; we will recur
to the weaknesses later.
Fielding does, in his _Joseph Andrews_, give us a 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 occasion 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 disorderly.
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 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? 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 Wilkins'
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 necessaries 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 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 decline, 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, 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 periods, and Latin sentences, _now quite out of
fashion_ in the pulpit, which is grown into a far more profitable 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 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, because 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 appreciate, 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 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 hit 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 offend;
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 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
resolution of the nebulæ 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 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 his great-coat descended no
lower than half-way down his thighs."
[Illustration: Parson in cassock.]
The bands were always worn, the makeshift for the old Steenkirk tie
of fine white linen edged 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 were 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 Worthy_, 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,
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 _our_ 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.
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 the extent that this abuse existed before.
To take but one instance. Thomas 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.
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! _fons Blandusiæ, 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 fine 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 little 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 parson and the farmer for whom he worked. The
religious rite over, the basin was removed, the table cleared, cards
and rum produced, and sat down 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
lower 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 dissimulation;" 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 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
so on 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 overlapping 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
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
Persephone, 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 _really_ want something further? You will
dine with us, _and sleep the night_."
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."
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 Cambridge--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
appliances 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 revival of late days; and we
attribute this deadness and dulness to the indifference of these _bêtes
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 services 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 congregations 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 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 prevails, 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 kinswoman in 1813. 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 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."
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VI.
THE HUNTING PARSON.
[Illustration]
Why not? why should not the parson mount his cob and go after the
hounds? A more fresh, invigorating 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
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, "Tell'ee 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 while ago, the newly appointed rector, turning over the register
of baptisms 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 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 dockyard. 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, very 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 wholesome 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 is lawful to go after fish, I take it there can be no harm
in going after a hare or a fox; but then--only occasionally, 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[7]--
[Music: PARSON HOGG.
_Arranged by the_ Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard, M.A.]
[Music]
Mess Parson Hogg shall now maintain
The burden of my song, sir!
A single life perforce he led,
Of constitution strong, sir.
Sing tally ho! sing tally ho!
sing tally ho! why zounds, sir!
He mounts his mare to hunt the hare,
Sing Tally ho! the hounds, sir.
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!
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!
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! &c.
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!
O Tally ho! O Tally ho!
Dearly Beloved--zounds, sir!
I 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 delightful 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 rectory, nor did
flowers thrive in his garden. Flowers in Chowne's garden! the idea is
inconceivable. The people were wild and rough in those days, especially
so in that storm-beaten, almost Alpine 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. Probably, if they thought
anything about this, they considered that sweetness and light were as
ill adapted to Blackamoor 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 inflicter 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
ecclesiastical and moral condition of Blackamoor and its parson.
He therefore drove there to make a personal visitation. Chowne,
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 Blackamoor,
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 of 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."
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."
"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 Sker_ 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 II. did not
order the murder of Becket, but 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 I've 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 unwonted cordiality, pass the
bottle freely, whilst an ominous spark burnt in his pebbly eye. As
the farmer that night drove away, 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 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?" 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."
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 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?"
"Aye, married I have been, though."
"But where be Mistress Chowne?"
"She's at the public-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 which 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 _one_."
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 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 pretences; 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? 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 eye wandered about the kitchen, and noticed--what was
unusual--the lid on the copper in the adjoining back-kitchen, that
served also as laundry.
"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 cauldron, 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.
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 of such tales to attach themselves to the last human
notoriety?
[Illustration: Parson Chowne and Sally's young Man.]
That this same crop, or hunting-whip, was applied to Mrs. Chowne's
shoulders and back was commonly reported in Blackamoor, and indeed is
so reported even unto this day.
The following story is on the authority of Jack Russell, Vicar of
Swimbridge. He had called one day at Blackamoor parsonage, and found
Chowne sitting over his fire smoking, and Mrs. Chowne sitting in one
corner of the room, against the wall. Her husband had turned his back
on her. Russell was uneasy, and asked if Mrs. Chowne were unwell.
Chowne turned his head over his shoulder and asked, "Mrs. Chowne, be
you satisfied or be you not? You know the terms of agreement come to
between us. If you are not satisfied, you can go home to your friends,
and I won't hinder you from going. I don't care a hang myself whether
you stay or whether you go."
"I am content," said the lady faintly.
"Very well," said Chowne. "Then we'll have a drop of cider, Jack. Go
and fetch us a jug and tumblers, madam."
In _The Maid of Sker_ Chowne is represented as torn to pieces by his
hounds. The real Chowne did not meet this fate. His death was, however,
tragic in another aspect. He had left his rectory, and lived in a
more sheltered spot in a house of his own. Before the windows grew a
particularly handsome box-tree. Now Chowne had done some dastardly mean
and cruel act to a young farmer near, tricking him out of a large sum
of money in a way peculiarly base.
One night the box-tree was taken up and carried away, no one knew
whither, though every one suspected by whom. Chowne raged over this
insult; and as he was unable to bring the act home to the culprit, his
rage was impotent. But the uprooting of the box-tree was apparently
the death of him. He felt that the dread he had inspired was gone, his
control over the neighbourhood was lost, the spell of his personality
was broken. This thought, even more than mortified rage at being unable
to discover and punish the man who had pulled up his box-tree, broke
him down, and he rapidly sank, intellectually and physically, into a
ruin, and died.
Chowne had a friend, a man, if possible, worse than himself, him whom
we will call Jack Hannaford, who was Vicar of Wellclose. It was said
that Hannaford was brutal, but Chowne fiendish.
Hannaford was an immensely powerful man. He said one day to his
groom, "Come on, Bill, we'll go over to Bidlake and take a rise out
of Welford"--afterwards Lord Lundy. So they blackened their faces,
disguised themselves in cast-off clothes, and went to the lodge at
Bidlake. They were denied admittance, but forced their way in and
walked up the drive. The lodge-keeper ran after them and attacked the
groom, who at once buckled-to for a fight. Then a couple of keepers
burst out from the shrubbery.
"Leave them alone," said Hannaford. "It's a pretty sight. Don't
interfere to spoil sport."
However, one of the keepers went at the groom, to the relief of the
lodge-keeper.
"Oh, you will, will you," said Hannaford. He caught him with his huge
hand and cast him on the gravel. The other keeper fared no better. The
groom had in the meantime demolished his man; so he and his master
sauntered along the drive without further molestation till they reached
the house. Hannaford went to the door to ring, when the Hon. Mr.
Welford appeared, and angrily inquired what was their business.
"Work, your honour," answered Hannaford, pulling a forelock.
"Work is it you want? But did not my keepers stop your coming up this
way?"
"They tried it, but they couldn't do it," answered Hannaford. "There
they be--skulking along."
"They could not stop you?"
"We flung three of them in the road," answered Hannaford. "And now I
reckon your honour will give us something to drink your health."
Mr. Welford gave them a crown and dismissed them--also, it is said,
the keepers. If so, that was hardly fair, for Hannaford was the
strongest man in England. He was beaten but once, and that was in
Exeter, when drunk. He had gone over to the city for a spree, and had
put up at a low public-house. There he met with a Welshman, and had a
fight with him, and was horribly mauled about the head and body. Next
day, when sober, Hannaford followed the man by train to Bristol, and
thence tracked him to some little out-of-the-way place in Wales. He
proceeded to his door, knocked, called the man out, and fought him
there and then--and this time utterly thrashed him. When the fellow was
so knocked about that he could not speak and hold up, "There," said
the Devonshire parson, "now take care how you lay a finger on Jack
Hannaford again when he is drunk. If you wish for a return bout, call
at your will at Wellclose Parsonage, and you'll find him ready."
Some years ago a famous prize-fighter went about England on exhibition.
He came to Taunton, but was there taken ill, and unable to show
himself. The manager at once wrote or telegraphed to Jack Hannaford,
and he went up with alacrity to supply his place. He was stripped,
showed his muscles, and his mode of hitting, as the advertised
pugilist. The Taunton people would have been none the wiser, but, as it
happened, Lord Lundy was in the tent. Hannaford caught his eye, and saw
that he was recognized; so he went over to his lordship and whispered,
"Mum, my lord. The second best man in England was laid on the shelf, so
they had to telegraph for the best man to take his place."
Hannaford would never give any pocket-money to his sons till they were
strong enough to knock him down. Then each received a five-pound note,
which he was considered at length to have deserved by having made proof
of his manhood.
It is a fact that on market days, when Hannaford was seen on the
platform with his ticket for the market town, the farmers would bribe
the guard to put him into a carriage by himself and lock him in, so
afraid were they of being in the same compartment with the parson, who
would challenge and fight a man in a railway carriage as readily as
anywhere else.
Though a hunting parson, of altogether different character was Jack
Russell. He was a sporting man to the end of his fingers and toes, but
a most worthy, kind-hearted, God-fearing, righteous man.
One story of Jack Russell that is not, I believe, told in his _Life_,
is worth repeating. When he was over eighty, he started keeping a pack
of harriers. The then Bishop of Exeter sent for him.
"Mr. Russell, I hear you have got a pack of hounds. Is it true?"
"It is. I won't deny it, my lord."
"Well, Mr. Russell, it seems to me rather unsuitable for a clergyman
to keep a pack. I do not ask you to give up hunting, for I know it
would not be possible for you to exist without _that_. But will you, to
oblige me, give up the pack?"
"Do'y ask it as a personal favour, my lord?"
"Yes, Mr. Russell, as a personal favour."
"Very well, then, my lord, I will."
"Thank you, thank you." The Bishop, moved by his readiness, held out
his hand. "Give me your hand, Mr. Russell; you are--you really are--a
good fellow."
Jack Russell gave his great fist to the Bishop, who pressed it warmly.
As they thus stood hand in hand, Jack said,
"I won't deceive you--not for the world, my lord. I'll give up the
pack, sure enough--but Mrs. Russell will keep it instead of me."
The Bishop dropped his hand.
That men like Chowne and Hannaford were unpopular in their parishes
I have never heard. I do not believe they were troubled with any
aggrieved parishioners. The unpopular man in his parish is he who tries
to raise the moral and spiritual tone of his people. They do not like
to be made to think that all is not well with them, and it affords them
satisfaction to think that they are not worse, if no better, than their
pastor.
I know a parish in quite another part of England where the attendance
at church was very thin, till the incumbent was one day accidentally, I
believe, overtaken with drink, and was had up before the magistrates.
After that his church filled, he became a popular man--he had come down
to the level of his people.
But, as already said, it is of the bad parsons, as of the bad squires,
that stories are told, and told from generation to generation; whereas
those of spotless life--the vast bulk of them are such--drop year by
year out of existence, and at the same time out of memory.
In the parish in which I live there was a rector, about seventy years
ago, who in his old age went to the neighbouring town, nine miles off,
to live, and when asked by the Bishop why he was non-resident, said
that there was no barber nearer who could curl his wig.
That man held the living for a long term of years; he may have done
good,--that he did evil I do not think, because the only thing
remembered against him is, that he did not live in a place where his
wig could not be curled. But is it not sad!--a long life's labour spent
among the poor, preaching God's word, ministering to the sick and
afflicted and broken-hearted, and all passing away without leaving the
smallest trace, indeed the only reminiscence of the man being, that he
hurt the _amour propre_ of the parish by telling the Bishop there was
no one in it competent to curl his wig.
[Illustration: Old Chained Bibles.]
FOOTNOTE:
[7] From _Songs of the West: Traditional Songs and Ballads of the West
of England._ Collected by S. Baring Gould and H. Fleetwood Sheppard.
London: Methuen & Co. 1889.
CHAPTER VII.
COUNTRY DANCES.
[Illustration]
Clisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, says Herodotus, had a beautiful daughter
whom he resolved to marry to the most accomplished of the Greeks.
Accordingly all the eligible young men of Greece resorted to the court
of Sicyon to offer for the hand of the lovely Agarista. Among these,
the most distinguished was Hippoclides, and the king decided to take
him as his son-in-law.
[Illustration: Hippoclides before Clisthenes.]
Clisthenes had already invited the guests to the nuptial feast, and had
slaughtered one hundred oxen to the gods to obtain a blessing on the
union, when Hippoclides offered to exhibit the crown and climax of his
many accomplishments.
He ordered a flute-player to play a dance tune, and when the musician
obeyed, he (Hippoclides) began to dance before the king and court and
guests, and danced to his own supreme satisfaction.
After the first bout, and he had rested awhile and recovered breath,
he ordered a table to be introduced, and he danced figures on it, and
finally set his head on the table and gesticulated with his legs.
When the applause had ceased, Clisthenes said--as the young man had
reverted to his feet and stood expectantly before him--"You have danced
very well, but I don't want a dancing son-in-law."
How greatly we should like to know what Herodotus does not tell us,
whether the tyrant of Sicyon was of a sour and puritanical mind,
objecting to dancing on principle, or whether he objected to the
peculiar kind of dance performed by Hippoclides, notably that with his
head on the table and his legs kicking in the air.
I do not think that such a thing existed at that period as puritanical
objection to dancing, but I imagine that it was the sort of dance
which offended Clisthenes. Lucian in one of his Dialogues introduces
a philosopher who reproaches a friend for being addicted to dancing,
whereupon the other replies that dancing was of Divine invention, for
the goddess Rhæa first composed set dances about the infant Jupiter to
hide him from the eyes of his father Saturn, who wanted to eat him.
Moreover, Homer speaks with high respect of dancing, and declares that
the grace and nimbleness of Merion in the dance distinguished him
above the rest of the heroes in the contending hosts of Greeks and
Trojans. He adds that in Greece statues were erected to the honour of
the best dancers, so highly was the art held in repute, and that Hesiod
places on one footing valour and dancing, when he says that "The gods
have bestowed fortitude on some men, and on others a disposition for
dancing!" Lastly, he puts the philosopher in mind that Socrates not
only admired the saltatory exercise in others, but learned it himself
when he was an old man.
On hearing this defence of dancing, the morose philosopher in Lucian's
Dialogue professes himself a convert, and requests his friend to take
him to the next subscription ball.
Steele, in the _Spectator_, declared that "no one ever was a good
dancer that had not a good understanding," and that it is an art
whereby mechanically, so to speak, "a sense of good-breeding and virtue
are insensibly implanted in minds not capable of receiving it so well
in any other rules."
I cannot help thinking that the dancing commended by the _Spectator_,
learned in old age by Socrates, and that in which the Greeks won the
honour of statues, was something far removed from that which incurred
the displeasure of Clisthenes, and lost Hippoclides the hand of his
beautiful mistress.
Here is a letter in the _Spectator_, given in Steele's article. It
purports to be from a father, Philipater: "I am a widower, with one
daughter; she was by nature much inclined to be a romp, and I had no
way of educating her, but commanding a young woman, whom I entertained
to take care of her, to be very watchful in her care and attendance
about her. I am a man of business and obliged to be much abroad. The
neighbours have told me, that in my absence our maid has let in the
spruce servants in the neighbourhood to junketings, while my girl
play'd and romped even in the street. To tell you the plain truth, I
catched her once, at eleven years old, at chuck-farthing, among the
boys. This put me upon new thoughts about my child, and I determined
to place her at a boarding-school. I took little notice of my girl
from time to time, but saw her now and then in good health, out of
harm's way, and was satisfied. But by much importunity, I was lately
prevailed with to go to one of their balls. I cannot express to you
the anxiety my silly heart was in, when I saw my romp, now fifteen,
taken out. I could not have suffered more, had my whole fortune been
at stake. My girl came on with the most becoming modesty I had ever
seen, and casting a respectful eye, as if she feared me more than all
the audiency, I gave a nod, which, I think, gave her all the spirit
she assumed upon it, but she rose properly to that dignity of aspect.
My romp, now the most graceful person of her sex, assumed a majesty
which commanded the highest respect. You, Mr. Spectator, will, better
than I can tell you, imagine all the different beauties and changes of
aspect in an accomplished young woman, setting forth all her beauties
with a design to please no one so much as her father. My girl's lover
can never know half the satisfaction that I did in her that day. I
could not possibly have imagined that so great improvement could have
been wrought by an art that I always held in itself ridiculous and
contemptible. There is, I am convinced, no method like this, to give
young women a sense of their own value and dignity; and I am sure there
can be none so expeditious to communicate that value to others. For my
part, my child has danced herself into my esteem, and I have as great
an honour of her as ever I had for her mother, from whom she derived
those latent good qualities which appeared in her countenance when she
was dancing; for my girl showed in one quarter of an hour the innate
principles of a modest virgin, a tender wife, and generous friend, a
kind mother, and an indulgent mistress."
It is a curious fact that the beautiful and graceful dance, the dance
as a fine art, is extinct among us. It has been expelled by the
intrusive waltz. And if in the waltz any of that charm of modesty,
grace of action, and dignity of posture can be found, which delighted
our forefathers and made them esteem dancing, then let it be shown. It
was not waltzing which made Merion to be esteemed among the heroes of
the Trojan war; it was not waltzing certainly that Socrates acquired
in his old age; and it most assuredly was not whilst she was waltzing
that the correspondent of the _Spectator_ admired in his daughter the
modest virgin. It is possible that it was a sort of topsy-turvy waltz
Hippoclides performed, and which lost him the daughter of Clisthenes.
The dance is not properly the spinning around of two persons of
opposite sex hugging each other, and imitating the motion of a
teetotum. The dance is an assemblage of graceful movements and figures
performed by a set number of persons. There is singular beauty in the
dance proper. The eye is pleased by a display of graceful and changing
outline, by bringing into play the muscles of well-moulded limbs. But
where many performers take part the enchantment is increased, just as
part-singing is more lovely than solo-singing; for to the satisfaction
derived from the graceful attitude of one performer is added that of
beautiful grouping. A single well-proportioned figure is a goodly
sight; several well-proportioned figures in shifting groups, now in
clusters, now swinging loose in wreaths, now falling into line or
circles; whilst an individual, or a pair, focus the interest, is very
beautiful. It is the change in a concert from chorus to solo; and
when, whilst the single dance, projected into prominence, attracts the
delighted eye, the rest of the dancers keep rhythmic motion, subdued,
in simple change, the effect is exquisite. It is the accompaniment on a
living instrument to a solo.
A correspondent of the _Times_ recently gave us an account of the
Japanese ballet, which illustrates what I insist on. He tells us
that the Maikos or Japanese ballet-dancers are girls of from sixteen
to eighteen years of age; they wear long fine silk dresses, natural
flowers in their hair, and hold fans in their hands. Their dance is
perfectly decorous, exquisitely graceful, and of marvellous artistic
beauty. It partakes of the nature of the minuet and the gavotte; it
makes no violent demands on lungs and muscles; its object is to give
pleasure to the spectators through the exhibition of harmony of lines,
elegance of posture, beauty of dress, grace with which the folds of
the long drapery fall, the play of light, and change of arrangement
of colour. It is a dance full of noble and stately beauty, and has
nothing in common with our European ballet, with its extravagance and
indelicacy, and--it must be added--inelegance. It is a play without
words, and a feast of pure delight to the artistic eye.
Æsthetically, the dance is, or may be, one of the most beautiful
creations of man, an art, and an art of no mean order. In it each
man and woman has to sustain a part, is one of many, a member of a
company, enchained to it by laws which all must obey. And yet each has
in his part a certain scope for individual expansion, for the exercise
of liberty. It is a figure of the world of men, in which each has a
part to perform in relation to all the rest. If the performer uses
his freedom to excess, the dancers in the social ball are thrown into
disorder, and the beauty and unity of the performance is lost.
Now all this beauty is taken from us. The waltz has invaded our
ball-rooms, and drives all other dances out of it. Next to the polka,
the waltz is the rudest and most elementary of step and figure-dances;
it has extirpated before it the lovely and intricate dances, highly
artistic, and of elaborate organization, which were performed a century
ago. How is it now in a ball? Even the quadrille and lancers, the sole
remnants of an art beautiful to lookers-on, are sat out, or, after
having been entered on the list, are omitted, and a waltz substituted
for it. "_Valse, valse, toujours valse!_" A book on dances, published
in 1821, speaks of the introduction of the waltz as a new thing, and of
the rarity of finding persons at a ball who could dance it.
"The company at balls having no partners who are acquainted with
waltzing or quadrilles, generally become spectators of each other
in a promenade round the rooms, so that the waltz or quadrille ball
ends in country dances, sometimes not one of these dances being
performed during the evening." That was a little over sixty years
ago. Waltz and quadrille came in hand-in-hand, and displaced the old
artistic and picturesque country dances, and then waltz prevailed,
and kicked quadrille out at the door. The country dance is the old
English dance--the dance of our forefathers--the dance which worked
such wonders in the heart of the old father in Steele's paper in the
_Spectator_.
The English have always been a dancing people, only during the
Commonwealth did they kick their heels, dancing being unallowed;
and at the beginning of this century dancing was discountenanced
among the upper classes by the Evangelicals, and among villagers
almost completely put down, or driven into low public-houses, by the
Dissenters. In 1598 Hentzner describes the English as "excelling in
dancing, and in the art of music;" and says that whilst a man might
hope to become Lord Chancellor through dancing, without being bred to
the law, like Sir Christopher Hatton, it was certainly worth while to
endeavour to excel. According to Barnaby Rich, in 1581 the dances in
vogue were measures--a grave and stately performance, like the minuet,
galliards, jigs, braules, rounds, and hornpipes. In 1602 the Earl of
Worcester writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury, "We are frolic here in
Court, much dancing in the privy chamber of _country dances_ before the
Queen's Majesty, who is exceedingly pleased therewith." In the reign
of James I., Waldon, sneering at Buckingham's kindred, observes that
it is easier to put fine clothes on the back than to learn the French
dances, and therefore that "none but country dances" must be used at
Court. At Christmas, 1622-3, the Prince Charles "did lead the measures
with the French ambassador's wife. The measures--braules, corrantoes,
and galliards--being ended, the masquers with the ladies did dance two
country dances."
In Pepys' _Diary_ we read how he went to see the King dance in
Whitehall. "By and by comes the King and Queen, the Duke (of York) and
the Duchess, and all the great ones; and after seating themselves,
the King takes out the Duchess of York; and the Duke, the Duchess of
Buckingham; the Duke of Monmouth, my Lady Castlemaine; and so other
lords other ladies; and they danced the Brantle. After that the King
led a lady a single coranto; and then the rest of the lords, one after
another, other ladies; very noble it was, and great pleasure to see.
Then to country dances, the King leading the first, which he called
for, which was, says he, '_Cuckolds all awry_,' the old dance of
England. Of the ladies that danced, the Duke of Monmouth's mistress,
and my Lady Castlemaine, and a daughter of Sir Harry de Vicke's, were
the best. The manner was, when the King dances, all the ladies in the
room, and the Queen herself, stand up; and indeed, he dances rarely,
and much better than the Duke of York. Having staid here as long as I
thought fit, to my infinite content, it being the greatest pleasure I
could wish now to see at Court, I went home, leaving them dancing."
All old ballads are set to dance tunes, and derive their name from
_ballet_. Where no instruments were to be had, the dancers sang the
ballad, and so gave the time to their feet. The fact of ballad tunes
being dance tunes has been the occasion of their preservation; for
in _The Compleate Dancing Master_, a collection of dance tunes, the
first edition of which was published in 1650, and which went through
eighteen editions to 1728, a great number have been preserved as dance
tunes, with the titles of the ballads sung to them. In the old country
dances the number of performers was unlimited, but could not consist of
less than six.
What is the origin of our title for certain dances--"Country Dances"?
I venture to think it has nothing to do with the country, though
I have Chappell's weighty opinion against me. The designation was
properly given to all those counter-dances, _contre-dances_, which were
performed by the gentlemen standing on one side, and the ladies on the
other, in lines, in contra-distinction to all round and square dances.
As a general rule, foreign dances are circular or square. In Brittany
is La Boulangère, and among the Basques, La Tapageuse, which are set
in lines; but with a few exceptions, most continental dances were
differentiated from the general type of English dances by being square
or round. There were, no doubt, among our peasantry dances in a ring
about the May-pole, but this was exceptional. A writer at the beginning
of this century says,--"An English country dance differs from any other
known dance in form and construction, except _Ecossaise_ and quadrille
country dances, as most others composed of a number of persons are
either round, octagon, circular, or angular. The pastoral dances on the
stage approximate the nearest to English country dances, being formed
longways."
The song and the dance were closely associated; indeed, as already
said, the word _ballet_ is derived from "ballad," or _vice-versâ_; and
all our old dance tunes had appropriate words set to them.
Dargason, a country dance older than the Reformation, found its way
into Wales, where it was set to Welsh words; the English ballad to
which it was usually sung was--
"It was a maid of my country,
As she came by a hawthorn tree,
As full of flowers as might be seen,
She marvelled to see the tree so green.
At last she asked of this tree
How came this freshness unto thee?
And every branch so fair and clean?
I marvel that you grow so green."
Doubtless half the charm of a country dance consisted in the dancers
singing the words of the familiar ballad as they went through the
movements of the dance, the burden often occurring at a general joining
of hands and united movement.
An English country dance was composed of the putting together of
several figures, and it allowed of almost infinite variation, according
to the number and arrangement of the figures introduced. Sir Roger de
Coverley, which is not quite driven out, consists of seven figures.
Some figures are quite elementary, as turning the partner, setting,
leading down the middle. Others are more elaborate, as Turn Corners,
and Swing Corners; some are called Short Figures, as requiring in their
performance a whole strain of short measure, or half a strain of long
measure. Long Figures, on the other hand, occupy a strain of eight bars
in long measure--a strain being that part of an air which is terminated
by a double bar, and usually consists in country dances of four, eight,
or sixteen single bars. Country dance tunes usually consist of two
strains, though they sometimes extend to three, four, or five, and of
eight bars each.
The names and character of the old country dances are quite forgotten.
The following is a list of some of the dances given in _The Complete
Country Dancing Master_, published near the beginning of last century--
Whitehall.
Ackroyd's Pad.
The Whirligig.
Amarillis.
Buttered Pease.
Bravo and Florimel.
Pope Joan.
Have at thy coat, old woman.
The Battle of the Boyne.
The Gossip's Frolic.
The Intrigue.
Prince and Princess.
A Health to Betty.
Bobbing Joan.
Sweet Kate.
Granny's Delight.
Essex Buildings.
Lord Byron's Maggot.
Ballamera.
The Dumps.
Rub her down with straw.
Moll Peatley.
Cheerily and Merrily.
In Waylet's _Colle
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