A FARMER OF THE OLDEN TIMES.
The winding paths traced by a hare in spring as he roams over an
arable field show that he must cover a mile within a furlong. From a
gateway one morning I watched a hare busy in this way, restlessly
passing to and fro over the 'lands.' Every motion was visible,
because, although the green wheat was rising in an adjacent field, no
crop had yet appeared here. Now the hare came direct towards me,
running down a furrow; then he turned short and followed a course like
the letter V; next he crossed the angle of the field and came back
along the shore of the ditch, under the hedge. Then away to the centre
of the field, where he stayed some time exploring up one furrow and
down another, his ears and the hump of his back only seen above the
clods.
But suddenly he caught a scent of something that alarmed him, and away
he went full speed: when on the open ground the peculiar way in which
the hind limbs are thrown forward right under the body, thus giving an
immense 'stride,' was clearly displayed. I had been so interested in
the hare that I had not observed Hilary coming along on the other side
of the low fence, looking at his wheat. The hare, busy as he was and
seeming to see nothing, had crossed his 'wind.' Hilary came to me, and
we walked together along the waggon-track, repassing the wheat. He was
full about it: he was always grieving over the decadence of the wheat
crop.
There was nothing, he went on, so pleasant to watch as it came up,
nothing that required so much care and skill, nothing so thoroughly
associated with the traditions of English farming as wheat, and yet
nothing so disappointing. Foreign importations had destroyed this the
very mainstay. Now, that crop which he had just left had 'tillered
out' well; but what profit should he get from the many stalks that had
tillered or sprung from each single grain, thus promising a fiftyfold
return? It had been well got in, and, as the old saw had it, 'Well
sown, half grown;' it had been in the ground the proper time ('Long in
the bed, big in the head'); but likely enough the price next autumn
would not much more than pay the expenses of preparation.
The thunderstorm before Christmas was not perhaps a favourable omen,
since
Winter's thunder and summer's flood
Bode old England no good.
Last year showed that 'summer's flood' was as destructive as in the
olden time. But then there would have been a rise of prices, according
to the saying,--
When the vale shall feed the hill,
Every man shall eat his fill.
But when the hill shall feed the vale,
The penny loaf shall be but small.
Now, last season, so far as our home harvests were concerned, the
'hill' did feed the 'vale,' but the penny loaves were as large and as
plentiful as usual, owing to foreign grain. In those old days, seventy
or eighty years since, the whole population of the kingdom watched the
weather with anxiety; and it was then that the signs and tokens of
birds and plants and the set of the wind at particular times were
regarded as veritable oracles to be inquired into not without fear and
trembling.
Hilary heard all about it when he was a lad from old Jonathan, who had
a corn-farm up on the hills, and where he used to go to plough. Hilary
never stated the exact degree, but there was some relationship between
them--two branches, I fancy, of the same family. He seemed to have a
very bitter memory of the old man (now dead), who had been a hard
master to him in his youth; besides which, some family jar had arisen
over money matters; still, he was fond of quoting Jonathan in reference
to wheat and the heyday of corn-farming. Jonathan remembered when a
load of wheat fetched 55_l._--a load being five quarters or ten
sacks--or 11_l._ a quarter. The present average of wheat was about
2_l._ 6_s._ per quarter. At the same time bread was at 3_s._ a gallon;
it is now about 1_s._ 6_d._ The wages of an agricultural labourer were
6_s._ a week. It was gambling, positive gambling, in the staff of
life.
No farmer was held in any esteem if he did not keep his wheat ricks
till harvest came again before threshing them out: men grew rich
suddenly and knew not what to do with their money. Farmers who had
been brought up 'hard,' living like labourers, working like labourers,
and with little more amusement than labourers, all at once found their
pockets full of coin. The wheat they had been selling at 5_l._ a load
ran up to 50_l._ With their purses thus crammed full, what were they
to do? There was nothing but drink, and they did drink.
In those days the farmer in his isolated homestead was more cut off
from the world than the settler at the present time in the backwoods
or on the prairies. The telegraph wires span the continent of America,
and are carried across the dry deserts of Australia. Wherever the
settler may be, he is never very far from the wires or the railway;
the railway meets the ocean steamer; and we can form no conception of
the utter lack of communication in the old world of our immediate
forefathers. The farmer, being away from the main road and the track
of the mail coaches, knew no one but his neighbours, saw no one, and
heard but little. Amusements there were none, other than could be had
at the alehouse or by riding into the market town to the inn there. So
that when this great flush of prosperity came upon them, old Jonathan
and his friends had nothing to do but drink.
Up at The Idovers, as his place was called, a lonely homestead on a
plain between the Downs, they used to assemble, and at once put up the
shutters, whether it was dark or not, not wishing to know whether it
was day or night. Sometimes the head carter would venture in for
instructions, and be gruffly told to take his team and do so and so.
'Eez, zur,' he would reply, 'uz did thuck job isterday.' His master
had ordered him to do it the day before, but was oblivious that
twenty-four hours had passed. The middle-aged men stood this
continuous drinking without much harm, their constitutions having
become hardened and 'set,' but it killed off numbers of the younger
men.
They drank ale principally--strong ale, for at that time in lonely
farmhouses they were guiltless of wines and spirits. But the enormous
price of 50_l._ per load suggested luxuries, and it was old Jonathan
at The Idovers who introduced gin. Till then no gin even--nothing but
ale--had been consumed in that far-away spot; but Jonathan brought in
the gin, which speedily became popular. He called it 'spoon-drink' (a
spoon being used with the sugar) as a distinguishing name, and as
spoon-drink accordingly it was known. When any one desired to reduce
the strength of his glass, they did indeed pour him out some more
water from the kettle; but having previously filled the kettle with
the spirit, his last state became worse than the first.
While thus they revelled, the labourers worked with the flails in the
barn threshing out the truly golden grain. The farmers used to take
pains to slip round upon them unexpectedly, or meet them as they were
going home from work, in order to check the pilfering of the wheat.
The labourer was not paid wholly in cash; he had a bushel of the
'tail,' or second flour, from the mill in lieu of money, settling once
a month. Their life was hard indeed. But the great prosperity which
had come upon the farmers did them no good. In too many cases it
melted away in drink. The habit of drinking became settled in a
family. Bad habits endured after the prosperity had departed; and in
some cases those who had once owned their farms as well as occupied
them had to quit the homes of their forefathers. Here and there one,
however, laid the foundation of a fortune, as fortunes are understood
in the country; and shrewd old Jonathan was one of these.
Even down to very recent days a spell of drinking--simple drinking--was
the staple amusement of many an otherwise respectable farmer. Not many
years since it was not unusual for some well-to-do farmer of the old
school to ride off on his nag, and not be heard of for a week, till he
was discovered at a distant roadside inn, where he had spent the
interval in straightforward drinking. These habits are now happily
extinct. It was in those old times that wheat was bought and hoarded
with the express object of raising the price to famine pitch: a thing
then sometimes practicable, though not always successful. Thus in 1801
the price of wheat in March was 55_l._ per load, while in October it
had fallen to 15_l._ Men forgot the misery of the poor in their
eagerness for guineas.
Hilary, with all his old prejudices, was not so foolish as to desire a
return of times like that. He had undergone privation himself in
youth, for farmers' sons were but a little better off than plough-lads
even in his early days; and he did not wish to make money by another
man's suffering. Still he was always grieving about the wheat crop,
and how it had fallen in estimation. It was a sight to see the gusto
with which he would run his hand into a sack of wheat to sample it.
'Here, feel this,' he would say to me, 'you can slip your hand in up
to your elbow; and now hold up your palm--see, the grains are as plump
as cherry-stones.'
After hearing Hilary talk so much of old Jonathan I thought I should
like to see the place where he had lived, and later in the season
walked up on the hills for that purpose. The stunted fir-trees on the
Down gave so little shadow that I was glad to find a hawthorn under
whose branches I could rest on the sward. The prevalent winds of
winter sweeping without check along the open slope had bent the
hawthorn before them, and the heat of the sultry summer day appeared
the greater on that exposed height. On either hand hills succeeded to
hills, and behind I knew they extended farther than the eye could
reach. Immediately beneath in front there was a plain, at its extreme
boundary a wood, and beyond that the horizon was lost in the summer
haze. Wheat, barley, and oats--barley and wheat and beans, completely
occupied the plain. It was one vast expanse of cereals, without a sign
of human life; for the reaper had not yet commenced, and the bailiffs'
cottages were hidden among the ricks. There was an utter silence at
noonday; nothing but yellowing wheat beneath, the ramparts of the
hills around, and the sun above.
But, though out of sight, there was a farmhouse behind a small copse
and clump of elms full of rooks' nests, a short way from the foot of
the Down. This was The Idovers, once the residence of old Jonathan; it
was the last farm before reaching the hill district proper, and from
the slope here all the fields of which it consisted were visible. The
house was small, for in those days farmers did not look to live in
villas, and till within the last few years even the parlour floor was
of stone flags. Rushes used to be strewn in the halls of palaces in
ancient times, and seventy years ago old Jonathan grew his own
carpets.
The softest and best of the bean straw grown on the farm was selected
and scattered on the floor of the sitting-rooms as warm and dry to the
feet, and that was all the carpet in the house. Just before
sheep-shearing time, too, Jonathan used to have the nettles cut that
flourished round the back of the sheds, and strewn on the floor of the
barn. The nettles shrivelled up dry, and the wool did not stick to
them, but could be gathered easily.
With his own hands he would carry out a quart of beans to the
pigs---just a quart at a time and no more, that they might eat every
one and that none might be wasted. So, too, he would carry them a few
acorns in his coat-pocket, and watch the relish with which the swine
devoured their favourite food. He saved every bit of crooked wood that
was found about the place; for at that date iron was expensive, and
wood that had grown crooked and was therefore strong as well as curved
was useful for a hundred purposes. Fastened to a wall, for instance,
it did for a hook upon which to hang things. If an apple-tree died in
the orchard it was cut out to form part of a plough and saved till
wanted.
Jonathan's hard head withstood even the whirl of the days when corn
was at famine prices. But these careful economies, this continual
saving, put more money in his purse than all that sudden flush of
prosperity. Every groat thus saved was as a nail driven into an oak,
fixed and stable, becoming firmer as time went on. How strangely
different the farmers of to-day, with a score of machines and
appliances, with expensive feeding-stuffs, with well-furnished villas!
Each one of Jonathan's beans in his quart mug, each one of the acorns
in his pocket became a guinea.
Jonathan's hat was made to measure on his own special block by the
hatter in Overboro' town, and it was so hard and stout that he could
sit upon it without injury. His top-boots always hung near the
fireplace, that they might not get mouldy; and he rode into market
upon his 'short-tail horse,' as he called his crop-tail nag. A farmer
was nothing thought of unless he wore top-boots, which seemed a
distinguishing mark, as it were, of the equestrian order of
agriculture.
But his shoes were made straight; not as now one to each foot--a right
and left--but each exactly alike; and he changed his shoes every
morning, wearing one on one foot one day and on the other the next,
that they might not get worn to either foot in particular. Shoes
lasted a great length of time in those days, the leather being all
tanned with oak bark only, and thoroughly seasoned before it was cut
up. There is even a story of a farmer who wore his best shoes every
Sunday for seven years in Sundays--fifty years--and when he died had
them buried with him, still far from worn out.
A traveller once returned from America--in those days a very far-off
land--and was recounting the wonders he had seen, and among them how
the folk there used sleighs, not only for driving in but for the
removal of heavy goods. But Jonathan did not think it strange, since
when he was young wheeled vehicles were not so common. He had himself
seen loads of hay drawn home on 'sleds' from English meadows, and
could tell where a 'sled' had last been used. There were aged men
living about the hamlet in his day--if that could be called a hamlet
in which there were barely a score of people, all told--who could
recollect when the first waggon came to The Idovers. At all events,
they pointed out a large field, called the Conigers, where it was
taken to turn it round; for it was constructed in so primitive a style
that the forewheels would not pass under the body, and thus required a
whole field to turn in.
At that date folk had no banking accounts, but kept their coin in a
strong chest under the bed, sometimes hiding it in strange places.
Jonathan was once visiting a friend, and after they had hobnobbed a
while the old fellow took him, with many precautions that they should
not be observed, into the pig-sty and showed him fifty guineas hid in
the thatch. That was by no means all his property, but the old fellow
said, with a wink, that he liked to have a little hoard of his own
that his wife knew nothing about.
Some land being put up for sale, after biddings by the well-to-do
residents, an old dealer in a very small way, as was supposed, bid
above them all. The company looked upon him with contempt, and his
offer was regarded as mere folly; but he produced a nail-bag from
under his coat and counted out the money. A nail-bag is made of the
coarsest of all kinds of sacking. In this manner the former
generation, eschewing outward show, collected their money coin by
coin, till at last they became substantial men and owners of real
estate. So few were the conveniences of life that men had often to
leave the road and cross several fields out of their way to light
their pipes at a burning couch-heap or lime-kiln.
They prided themselves then in that hill district that they had
neither a cow nor a poor married man in the parish. There was no cow,
because it was entirely a corn-growing place. The whole resident
population was not much over a score, and of the labourers they
boasted not one was married. For in those old times each parish kept
its own poor, and consequently disliked an increase of the population.
The farmers met in vestry from time to time to arrange for the support
of the surplus labour; the appearance of a fresh family would have
meant a fresh tax upon them. They regarded additional human beings as
an incumbrance.
The millers sent their flour round the country then on packhorses;
waggons and carts were not so common as now, while the ways, when you
once quitted the main road, were scarcely passable. Even the main
roads were often in such a state that foot-passengers could not get
along, but left the road and followed a footpath just inside the
hedge. Such footpaths ran beside the roads for miles; here and there
in country places a short section of such tracks may still be found.
'Pack-roads,' too, may be occasionally met with, retaining their
designation to this day. It was the time of the great wars with the
First Napoleon; and the poor people, as the wheat went up to famine
prices, were often in a strait for bread. When the miller's packhorse
appeared the cottagers crowded round and demanded the price: if it had
risen a penny, the infuriated mob of women would sometimes pull the
miller's boy off the horse and duck him in the village pond.
The memory of those old times is still vivid in farmhouses, and at
Hilary's I have myself handled old Jonathan's walking-staff, which he
and his father before him used in traversing on foot those perilous
roads. It was about five feet long, perhaps more, an inch and a half
in diameter, and shod with an iron ferrule and stout spike. With this
he could prod the sloughs and ascertain their depth, or use it as a
leaping-pole; and if threatened by sturdy rogues whirl it about their
heads as a quarter-staff.
Wars and famines were then terrible realities--men's minds were full
of them, and superstition flourished. The foggers and shepherds saw
signs in the sky and read the stars. Down at Lucketts' Place one
winter's night, when folk almost fancied they could hear the roar of
Napoleon's cannon, the old fogger came rushing in with the news that
the armies could be seen fighting in the heavens. It was an aurora,
the streamers shooting up towards the zenith, and great red spots
among the stars, the ghastly stains of the wounded. The old fogger
declared that as he went out with his lantern to attend to the cows
calving he could see the blood dripping on the back of his hand as it
fell down from the battling hosts above.
To us the ignorance even of such comparatively recent times is almost
incredible. As Hilary was telling me of such things as we sat in his
house one evening, there grew upon our ears a peculiar sound, a
humming deep bass, somewhat resembling the low notes of a piano with a
pressure on the pedal. It increased and became louder, coming from the
road which passed the house; it was caused by a very large flock of
sheep driven slowly. The individual 'baa' of each lamb was so mixed,
as it were, with the bleat of its fellow that the swelling sound took
a strange, mysterious tone; a voice that seemed to speak of trouble,
and perplexity, and anxiety for rest. Hilary, as a farmer, must of
course go out to see whose they were, and I went with him; but before
he reached the garden gate he turned back, remarking, 'It's Johnson's
flock; I know the tang of his tankards.' The flat-shaped bells hung on
a sheep's neck are called tankards; and Hilary could distinguish one
flock from another by the varying notes of their bells.
Reclining on the sweet short sward under the hawthorn on the Down I
looked over the Idover plain, and thought of the olden times. As I
gazed I presently observed, far away beside some ricks, the short
black funnel of an engine, and made it out to be a steam-plough
waiting till the corn should be garnered to tear up the stubble. How
much meaning there lay in the presence of that black funnel! There
were the same broad open fields, the same beautiful crops of golden
wheat, the same green hills, and the same sun ripening the grain. But
how strangely changed all human affairs since old Jonathan, in his
straight-made shoes, with his pike-staff, and the acorns in his
pocket, trudged along the footpaths!