THE WATER-MILL. FIELD NAMES.
'Our time be a-most gone by,' said the miller looking up from his work
and laying aside the millpeck for a moment as he rubbed his eyes with
his white and greasy sleeve. From a window of the old mill by
Okebourne I was gazing over the plain green with rising wheat, where
the titlarks were singing joyously in the sunshine. A millstone had
been 'thrown off' on some full sacks--like cushions--and Tibbald, the
miller, was dexterously pecking the grooves afresh.
The millpeck is a little tool like a double adze, or perhaps rather
like two chisels set in the head of a mallet. Though age was stealing
upon him, Tibbald's eye and hand were still true, and his rude
sculpture was executed with curious precision. The grooves, which are
the teeth of the millstone, radiate from the centre, but do not
proceed direct to the edge: they slant slightly.
'There bean't many as can do this job,' he said, 'I can put in sixteen
or twenty to the inch. These old French burrs be the best stone; they
be hard, but they be mild and takes the peck well.' Ponderous as the
millstones appear, they are capable of being set so that their
surfaces shall grind with extreme accuracy. The nether, called the
'bed stone,' is stationary; the upper millstone, or 'runner,'
revolves, and the grain crushed between the two works out along the
furrows to the edge.
Now and then the miller feels the grain as it emerges with his pudgy
thumb and finger, and knows by touch how the stones are grinding. It
is perceptibly warm at the moment it issues forth, from the friction:
yet the stones must not grind too close, or they 'kill' the wheat,
which should be only just cracked, so as to skin well. To attain this
end, first, the surfaces of the stones must be level, and the grooves
must be exactly right; and, secondly, the upper stone must be hung at
the exact distance above the other to the smallest fraction of an
inch. The upper millstone is now sometimes balanced with lead, which
Tibbald said was not the case of old.
'We used to have a good trade at this mill,' he continued, as he
resumed his pecking; 'but our time be a-most gone by. We be too fur
away up in these here Downs. There! Listen to he!' A faint hollow
whistle came up over the plain, and I saw a long white cloud of steam
miles away, swiftly gliding above the trees beneath which in the
cutting the train was running.
'That be th' express. It be that there steam as have done for us.
Everything got to go according to that there whistle: they sets the
church clock by he. The big London mills as be driven by steam does
the most of the work; and this here foreign wheat, as comes over in
the steamers, puts the market down, so as we yent got a chance to buy
up a lot and keep it till the price gets better. I seed in the paper
as the rate is gone down a penny: the steamers be going to ship the
American wheat a penny a bushel cheaper. So it bean't much good for
Hilary to talk about his wheat. I thenks that'll about do.'
He laid down the millpeck, and took his millstaff to prove the work he
had done. This was made of well-seasoned oak, two pieces put together
so that they should not warp. He rubbed the edge with ruddle, and,
placing the millstaff on the stone, turned it about on its shorter
axis: where the ruddle left its red mark more pecking would be
required. There was but one small spot, and this he quickly put right.
Even the seasoned oak, however, is not always true, and to be certain
on the point Tibbald had a millstaff prover. This is of rigid steel,
and the staff is put on it; if any daylight is visible between the two
the staff is not accurate--so delicately must these great stones be
adjusted for successful grinding.
The largest of them are four feet two inches diameter; and dangerous
things they are to move, for if the men do not all heave or 'give' at
the same moment the stone may slip, and the edge will take off a row
of fingers as clean as the guillotine. Tibbald, of course, had his
joke about that part of the machinery which is called the 'damsel.' He
was a righteous man enough as millers go, but your miller was always a
bit of a knave; nor could he forbear from boasting to me how he had
been half an hour too soon for Hilary last Overboro' market.
He said the vast water-wheel was of elm, but it would not last so long
up so near the springs. Upon a river or brook the wheel might endure
for thirty years, and grind corn for a generation. His millpond was
close to the spring-head, and the spring-water ate into the wood and
caused it to decay much quicker. The spokes used to be mortised in,
now they used flanges, ironwork having almost destroyed the business
of the ancient millwright. Of all manual workers, probably the old
style of millwright employed the greatest variety of tools, and was
the cleverest in handling them. There seemed no end to the number of
his chisels and augers; some of the augers of immense size. In winter
time the millwright made the millstones, for the best stones are not
in one piece but composed of forty or fifty. The French burrs which
Tibbald preferred come over in fragments, and these are carefully
fitted together and stuck with plaster of Paris. Such work required
great nicety: the old millwright was, in fact, a kind of artist in his
handicraft.
I could not help regretting, as Tibbald dilated on these things, that
the village millwright no longer existed; the care, the skill, the
forethought, the sense of just proportion he exhibited quite took him
out of the ranks of the mere workman. He was a master of his craft,
and the mind he put into it made him an artist. Tibbald went on that
he did not care for the Derby or Welsh millstones. These were in one
piece, but they were too hard for the delicate grinding necessary to
make the fine flour needed for good bread. They answered best for
barley meal. Now, the French burr was not only hard but mild, and
seemed to feel the corn as it crushed it. A sack of wheat lost 4 lb.
in grinding. I asked about the toll: he showed me the old measure,
reckoned at the tenth of a sack; it was a square box. When the lord's
tenants in the olden times were forced to have their corn ground at
the lord's mill, the toll was liable to be abused in a cruel manner;
hence the universal opinion that a miller must be a knave. Even in
much more recent times, when the labourers took part of their wages in
flour, there is said to have been a great deal of sleight-of-hand in
using the toll-box, and the miller's thumb grew fat by continually
dipping into other folk's sacks.
But Tibbald had an argument even here, for he said that men nowadays
never grew so strong as they used to do when they brought their own
wheat to be ground at the mill, and when they made their bread and
baked it at home. His own father once carried the fattest man in the
parish on his back half a mile; I forget how much he weighed exactly,
but it was something enormous, and the fat man, moreover, held a 56
lb. weight in each hand. He himself remembered when Hilary used to be
the strongest man in the place; when the young men met together they
contended who should lift the heaviest weight, and he had seen Hilary
raise 5 cwt., fair lifting, with the hands only, and without any
mechanical appliance. Hilary, too, used to write his name with a
carpenter's flat cedar pencil on the whitewashed ceiling of the
brewhouse, holding the while a 1/2 cwt. of iron hung on his little
finger. The difficulty was to get the weight up, lifting it fairly
from the ground; you could lift it very well half-way, but it was just
when the arm was bent that the tug came to get it past the hip, after
which it would go up comparatively easily.
Now this great strength was not the result of long and special
training, or, indeed, of any training at all; it came naturally from
outdoor life, outdoor work, plain living (chiefly bacon), and good
bread baked at home. At the present time men ate the finest and
whitest of bread, but there was no good in it. Folk grew tall and
big--taller than they used to be, he thought--and they could run
quick, and so forth; but there was no stamina, no power of endurance,
of withstanding exposure like there was formerly. The mere measure of
a man, he was certain, had nothing to do with his strength; and he
could never understand how it was that the army folk would have men
precisely so high and so many inches round. Just then he was called
away to a carter who had brought up his team and waggon at the door,
and as he was gone some time I went up under the roof, whence there
was a beautiful view down over the plain.
The swifts, which had but just arrived, were rushing through the sky
in their headlong way; they would build presently in the roof. The
mill was built at the mouth of a coombe on the verge of the Downs; the
coombe was narrow and steep, as if nature had begun a cutting with the
view of tunnelling through the mass of the hills. At the upper end of
the coombe the spring issued, and at the lower was the millpond. There
is something peculiarly human in a mill--something that carries the
mind backwards into the past, the days of crossbow and lance and
armour. Possibly there was truth in Tibbald's idea that men grow
larger in the present time without corresponding strength, for is it
not on record that some at least of the armour preserved in
collections will not fit those who have tried it on in recent times?
Yet the knight for whom it was originally made, though less in stature
and size, may have had much more vigour and power of endurance.
The ceaseless rains last year sent the farmers in some places to the
local millers once more somewhat in the old style. Part of their wheat
proved so poor that they could not sell it at market; and, rather than
waste it, they had it ground at the village mills with the idea of
consuming as much of the flour as possible at home. But the flour was
so bad as to be uneatable. As I parted with Tibbald that morning he
whispered to me, as he leaned over the hatch, to say a good word for
him with Hilary about the throw of oak that was going on in one part
of the Chace. 'If you was to speak to he, he could speak to the
steward, and may be I could get a stick or two at a bargain'--with a
wink. Tibbald did a little in buying and selling timber, and, indeed,
in many other things. Pleased as he was to show me the mill, and to
talk about it by the hour together, the shrewd old fellow still had an
eye to business.
After a while, in walking along the footpaths of the meadows and by
the woods, a feeling grew upon me that it would be pleasant to know
something of their history. It was through inquiring about the age of
the rookery that this thought took shape. No one could tell me how
long the rooks had built there, nor were there any passing allusions
in old papers to fix the date. There was no tradition of it among the
oldest people; all they knew was that the rooks had always been there,
and they seemed to indicate a belief that there the rooks would always
remain. It seemed to me, however, that the site of their city was
slowly travelling, and in a few generations might be found on the
other side of the Chace. Some of the trees where the nests were most
numerous were decaying, and several were already deserted. As the
trees died, the rooks moved to the next clump, and thus gradually
shifted their city.
This inquiry led to further reflections about the past of the woods
and meadows. Besides the birds, the flowers, and animals that had been
there for so many, many centuries, there were the folk in the
scattered homesteads, whose ancestors might have left some record. In
these times history is concerned only with great cities or strategical
positions of world-wide renown; interest is concentrated on a siege of
Paris or a march towards Constantinople. In days of yore battles were
often fought in or near what seem to us mere villages; little places
whose very names are uncertain and exact site unascertainable were the
centres of strife. Some of these places are buried under the sward as
completely as Herculaneum under the lava. The green turf covers them,
the mower passes over with his scythe and knows not of them.
Hilary had observed in one of his meadows that the turf turned brown
or burnt up in squares during hot summer weather. This he conjectured
to be caused by the shallowness of the soil over some ancient
foundations; and some years before he had had the curiosity to open a
hole, and soon came upon a hidden wall. He did not excavate farther,
but the old folk, when they heard of it, remembered a tradition of a
village having once existed there. At present there were no houses
near; the place, whatever it was, had disappeared. The mention of this
meadow led to some conversation about the names of the fields, which
are often very curious.
Such names as Lea, Leaze, Croft, and so on, are readily explained; but
what was the original meaning of The Cossicles? Then there were
Zacker's Hook, the Conigers,[3] Cheesecake, Hawkes, Rials, Purley,
Strongbowls, Thrupp, Laines, Sannetts, Gaston, Wexils, Wernils,
Glacemere, several Hams, Haddons, and Weddingtons, Slades, and so on,
and a Truelocks. These were quickly put down; scores of still more
singular names might be collected in every parish. It is the meadows
and pastures which usually bear these designations; the ploughed
fields are often only known by their acreage, as the Ten Acre Piece,
or the Twelve Acres. Some of them are undoubtedly the personal names
of former owners. But in others ancient customs, allusions to
traditions, fragments of history, or of languages now extinct, may
survive.
[3] See Notes.
There was a meadow where deep trenches could be traced, green now, but
clearly once a moat, but there was not even a tradition about it. On
the Downs overlooking the Idovers was an earthwork or entrenchment, of
which no one knew anything. Hilary believed there was an old book--a
history of Overboro' town--which might perhaps contain some
information, but where it could be found he did not know. After some
consideration, however, he thought there might be a copy at the Crown,
once an old posting-inn, at Overboro': that was about the only place
where I should be likely to find it. So one warm summer day I walked
into Overboro', following a path over the Downs, whose short sward
affords the best walking in the world.
At the Crown, now no more an inn but an hotel, the archway was blocked
up with two hand-trucks piled with trunks and portmanteaus, the
property of commercial gentlemen and just about to be conveyed to the
station. What with the ostler and the 'boots' and the errand-boys, all
hanging about for their fees, it was a push to enter; and the waiters
within seemed to equally occupy the passage, fetching the dust-coats
and walking-sticks and flourishing coat-brushes. Seeing a door marked
'Coffee-room,' I took refuge, and having ordered luncheon began to
consider how I should open my subject with the landlord, who was
clearly as much up to the requirements of modern life as if his house
had been by a London terminus. Time-tables in gilt-stamped covers
strewed the tables; wine lists stood on edge; a card of the local
omnibus to the station was stuck up where all could see it; the daily
papers hung over the arm of a cosy chair; the furniture was new; the
whole place, it must be owned, extremely comfortable and the service
good.
But it was town and not country--to-day and not the olden time; and I
did not feel courage enough to ask for the book. I believe I should
have left the place without mentioning it, but, fortunately looking
round the room while the lunch was prepared, I found it in the
bookcase, where there was a strange mixture of the modern and antique.
I took down the history from between Rich's thin grey 'Ruins of
Babylon' and a yellow-bound railway novel.
Towards the close of the eighteenth century a learned gentleman had
taken much pains to gather together this account of the town. He began
with the story of Brutus, and showed that one of the monarchs
descended from the illustrious Trojan founded a city here. Some fossil
shells, indeed, that had been dug up furnished him with conclusive
proof that the Deluge had not left the site uncovered, since no how
else could they have got there: an argument commonly accepted in his
day. Thus he commenced, like the monks themselves, with the beginning
of the world; but then came a wide gap down to Domesday Book. The
hides and yardlands held by the conquerors--how much was in demesne,
how many acres were wood and how many meadow--the number of servi, and
what the mill paid were duly translated and recorded.
The descent of the manors through the monasteries and the persons who
purchased them at the Dissolution filled several pages, and was
supplemented with a charter recognising rights of infang and outfang,
assize of bread and ale, and so forth. Finally, there was a list of
the mayors, which some one had carried on in manuscript on a fly-leaf
to within ten years of date. There was an air of precision in the
exact sentences, and the writer garnished his tale with frequent
quotations from Latin writers. In the midst was a wood-cut of a plant
having no sort of relevancy to the subject-matter, but for which he
returned thanks for the loan of the block.
But he had totally omitted his own times. These quotations, these
lists and charters, the extracts from Domesday, read dry and
formal--curious, and yet not interesting. Had he described the squires
and yeomen, the townspeople of his own day, their lives and manner of
thinking, how invaluable and pleasing his work would have been!
Hilary said that in these little country towns years ago people had to
be very careful how they acted, lest they should offend some local
magnate. He remembered a tradesman telling him how once he had got
into great disgrace for putting a new knocker on his private side
door, without first asking permission and sending round to obtain the
opinion of an old gentleman. This person had nothing whatever to do
with the property, but lived retired and ruled his neighbours with a
rod of iron. The old knocker was quite worn out, but the new one had
scarcely been fastened on when the unfortunate owner was summoned to
the presence of the irate old gentleman, who demanded with great wrath
what on earth he meant by setting himself up above his station in this
way. It was only by a humble answer, and by begging the old gentleman
to walk down and look at the discarded knocker, promising that it
should be replaced if he thought proper, that he could be appeased. A
man then hardly dared appear in a new hat without first suggesting the
idea to his social superior.