astounded at the audacity of this upstart, plebeian race. “What! they
actually claimed Rockville, the heritage of a hundred successive
Rockvilles, as their own. Sir Roger determined to carry it to the
Sessions; and at the Sessions was a magnificent muster of all his
friends. There was Sir Roger himself in the chair; and on either
hand, a prodigious row of county squirearchy. There was Sir
Benjamin Bullockshed, and Sir Thomas Tenterhook, and all the
squires,--Sheepshank, Ramsbottom, Turnbull, Otterbrook, and Swagsides.
The Clerk of the Session read the notice for the closing of all the
footpaths through the woods of Rockville, and declared that this notice
had been duly, and for the required period publicly posted. The
Stockingtonians protested by their able lawyer Daredeville, against any
order for the closing of these ancient woods--the inestimable property
of the public.
“Property of the public!” exclaimed Sir Roger. “Property of the public!”
echoed the multitudinous voices of indignant Bullocksheds, Tenterhooks,
and Ramsbottoms. “Why, Sir, do you dispute the right of Sir Roger
Rockville to his own estate?”
“By no means;” replied the undaunted Daredeville; “the estate of
Rockville is unquestionably the property of the honorable baronet, Sir
Roger Rockville; but the roads through it are the as unquestionable
property of the public.”
The whole bench looked at itself; that is, at each other, in wrathful
astonishment. The swelling in the diaphragms of the squires Otterbrook,
Turnbull, and Swagsides, and all the rest of the worshipful row, was too
big to admit of utterance. Only Sir Roger himself burst forth with an
abrupt--
“Impudent fellows! But I’ll see them ---- first!”
“Grant the order!” said Sir Benjamin Bullockshed; and the whole bench
nodded assent. The able lawyer Daredeville retired with a pleasant
smile. He saw an agreeable prospect of plenty of grist to his mill. Sir
Roger was rich, and so was Great Stockington. He rubbed his hands, not
in the least like a man defeated, and thought to himself, “Let them go
at it--all right.”
The next day the placards on the Rockville estate were changed for
others bearing “STOPPED BY ORDER OF SESSIONS!” and alongside of them
were huge carefully painted boards, denouncing on all trespassers
prosecutions according to law. The same evening came a prodigious
invasion of Stockingtonians--tore all the boards and placards down, and
carried them on their shoulders to Great Stockington, singing as they
went, “See, the Conquering Heroes come!” They set them up in the centre
of the Stockington market-place, and burnt them, along with an effigy of
Sir Roger Rockville.
That was grist at once to the mill of the able lawyer Daredeville. He
looked on, and rubbed his hands. Warrants were speedily issued by the
Baronets of Bullockshed and Tenterhook, for the apprehension of the
individuals who had been seen carrying off the notice-boards, for
larceny, and against a number of others for trespass. There was plenty
of work for Daredeville and his brethren of the robe; but it all ended,
after the flying about of sundry mandamuses and assize trials, in Sir
Roger finding that though Rockville was his, the roads through it were
the public’s.
As Sir Roger drove homeward from the assize, which finally settled the
question of these footpaths, he heard the bells in all the steeples of
Great Stockington burst forth with a grand peal of triumph. He closed
fast the windows of his fine old carriage, and sunk into a corner; but
he could not drown the intolerable sound. “But,” said he, “I’ll stop
their pic-nic-ing. I’ll stop their fishing. I’ll have hold of them for
trespassing and poaching!” There was war henceforth between Rockville
and Great Stockington.
On the very next Sunday there came literally thousands of the jubilant
Stockingtonians to Rockville. They had brought baskets, and were for
dining, and drinking success to all footpaths. But in the great grove
there were keepers, and watchers, who warned them to keep the path, that
narrow well-worn line up the middle of the grove. “What! were they not
to sit on the grass?”--“No!”--“What! were they not to pic-nic?”--“No!
not there!”
The Stockingtonians felt a sudden damp on their spirits. But the river
bank! The cry was. “To the river bank! There they _would_ pic-nic.” The
crowd rushed away down the wood, but on the river bank they found a
whole regiment of watchers, who pointed again to the narrow line of
footpath, and told them not to trespass beyond it. But the islands! they
went over to the islands. But there too were Sir Roger’s forces, who
warned them back! There was no road there--- all found there would be
trespassers, and be duly punished.
The Stockingtonians discovered that their triumph was not quite so
complete as they had flattered themselves. The footpaths were theirs,
but that was all. Their ancient license was at an end. If they came
there, there was no more fishing; if they came in crowds, there was no
more pic-nic-ing; if they walked through the woods in numbers, they must
keep to Indian file, or they were summoned before the county magistrates
for trespass, and were soundly fined; and not even the able Daredeville
would undertake to defend them.
The Stockingtonians were chop-fallen, but they were angry and dogged;
and they thronged up to the village and the front of the hall. They
filled the little inn in the hamlet--they went by scores, and roving all
over the churchyard, read epitaphs
That teach the rustic moralists to die,
but don’t teach them to give up their old indulgences very
good-humoredly. They went and sat in rows on the old churchyard wall,
opposite to the very windows of the irate Sir Roger. They felt
themselves beaten, and Sir Roger felt himself beaten. True, he could
coerce them to the keeping of the footpaths--but, then, they had the
footpaths! True, thought the Stockingtonians, we have the footpaths, but
then the pic-nic-ing, and the fishing, and the islands! The
Stockingtonians were full of sullen wrath, and Sir Roger was--oh, most
expressive old Saxon phrase--HAIRSORE! Yes, he was one universal wound
of vexation and jealousy of his rights. Every hair in his body was like
a pin sticking into him. Come within a dozen yards of him; nay, at the
most, blow on him, and he was excruciated--you rubbed his sensitive
hairs at a furlong’s distance.
The next Sunday the people found the churchyard locked up, except during
service, when beadles walked there, and desired them not to loiter and
disturb the congregation, closing the gates, and showing them out like a
flock of sheep the moment the service was over. This was fuel to the
already boiling blood of Stockington. The week following, what was their
astonishment to find the much frequented inn gone! it was actually gone!
not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed,
planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail! The
exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations
against the churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of them resolved to
come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but
a terrific thunderstorm, which seemed in league with Sir Roger, soon
routed them, drenched them through, and on attempting to seek shelter in
the cottages, the poor people said they were very sorry, but it was as
much as their holdings were worth, and they dare not admit them.
Sir Roger had triumphed! It was all over with the old delightful days at
Rockville. There was an end of pic-nic-ing, of fishing, and of roving in
the islands. One sturdy disciple of Izaak Walton, indeed, dared to fling
a line from the banks of Rockville grove, but Sir Roger came upon him
and endeavored to seize him. The man coolly walked into the middle of
the river, and, without a word, continued his fishing.
“Get out there!” exclaimed Sir Roger, “that is still on my property.”
The man walked through the river to the other bank, where he knew that
the land was rented by a farmer. “Give over,” shouted Sir Roger, “I tell
you the water is mine.”
“Then,” said the fellow, “bottle it up, and be hanged to you! Don’t you
see it is running away to Stockington?”
There was bad blood between Rockville and Stockington forever.
Stockington was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.
A new nuisance sprung up. The people of Stockington looked on the
cottagers of Rockville as sunk in deepest darkness under such a man as
Sir Roger and his cousin the vicar. They could not pic-nic, but they
thought they could hold a camp-meeting; they could not fish for roach,
but they thought they might for souls. Accordingly there assembled
crowds of Stockingtonians on the green of Rockville, with a chair and a
table, and a preacher with his head bound in a red handkerchief; and
soon there was a sound of hymns, and a zealous call to come out of the
darkness of the spiritual Babylon. But this was more than Sir Roger
could bear; he rushed forth with all his servants, keepers, and
cottagers, overthrew the table, and routing the assembly, chased them to
the boundary of his estate.
The discomfited Stockingtonians now fulminated awful judgments on the
unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and a malignant. They dared not enter
again on his parish, but they came to the very verge of it, and held
weekly meetings on the highway, in which they sang and declaimed as
loudly as possible, that the winds might bear their voices to Sir
Roger’s ears.
To such a position was now reduced the last of the long line of
Rockville. The spirit of a policeman had taken possession of him. He had
keepers and watchers out on all sides, but that did not satisfy him. He
was perpetually haunted with the idea that poachers were after his game,
that trespassers were in his woods. His whole life was now spent in
stealing to and fro in his fields and plantations, and prowling along
his river side. He lurked under hedges, and watched for long hours
under the forest trees. If any one had a curiosity to see Sir Roger,
they had only to enter his fields by the wood side, and wander a few
yards from the path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the
hedge, and in angry tones demand their name and address. The descendant
of the chivalrous and steel-clad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless
spy on his own ample property. There was but one idea in his
mind--encroachment. It was destitute of all other furniture but the
musty technicalities of warrants and commitments. There was a stealthy
and skulking manner in everything that he did. He went to church on
Sundays, but it was no longer by the grand iron gate opposite to his
house, that stood generally with a large spider’s web woven over the
lock, and several others in different corners of the fine iron tracery,
bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened. How
different to the time when the Sir Roger and Lady of Rockville had had
these gates thrown wide on a Sunday morning, and, with all their train
of household servants at their back, with true antique dignity, marched
with much proud humility into the house of God. Now, Sir Roger--the
solitary, suspicious, undignified Sir Roger, the keeper and policeman of
his own property--stole in at a little side gate from his paddock, and
back the same way, wondering all the time whether there was not somebody
in his pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers in his grove.
If you entered his house, it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its
owner. There was the conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and
flowers in his mother’s time--now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken
hand-glasses, and garden tools. These tools could never be used, for the
gardens were grown wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge
unpruned shrubs disputed the passage with you. In the wood above the
gardens, reached by several flights of fine, but now moss-grown, steps,
there stood a pavilion, once clearly very beautiful. It was now damp and
ruinous--its walls covered with greenness and crawling insects. It was
a great lurking-place of Sir Roger when on the watch for poachers.
The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out. It had
reached the extremity of imbecility and contempt--it must soon reach its
close.
Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late,
when there, he had wandered restlessly about the streets, peeping into
the shop-windows; and if it rained, standing under entries for hours
together, till it was gone over. The habit of lurking and peering about,
was upon him; and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and
crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city--the trespassers and
anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity. He had lost all
pleasures in his club; the most exciting themes of political life
retained no piquancy for him. His old friends ceased to find any
pleasure in him. He was become the driest of all dry wells. Poachers,
and anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his fast
fading-out mind, and he resolved to go to town no more. His whole
nature was centred in his woods. He was forever on the watch; and when
at Rockville again, if he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a
gun in his woods, and started up, and was out with his keepers.
Of what value was that magnificent estate to him?--those superb woods;
those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and _riant_ river coming
travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his windows,--that
glorious expanse of neat verdant meadows stretching almost to
Stockington, and enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful
cattle--those old farms and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild
rose; the glittering brook, and the songs of woodland birds--what were
they to that worn-out old man, that victim of the delusive doctrine of
blood, of the man-trap of an hereditary name?
There the poet could come, and feel the presence of divinity in that
noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new
heavens and earths from the glorious chaos of nature around him, and in
one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could
come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a throb
of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very
flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And
poor Sir Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in
a region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and
trespassers--no more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of
hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bull-dog. He
was a specimen of human nature degenerated, retrograded from the divine
to the bestial, through the long-operating influences of false notions
and institutions, continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a
keeper. Had he been only a keeper, he had been a much happier man.
His time was at hand. The severity which he had long dealt out towards
all sorts of offenders made him the object of the deepest vengeance. In
a lonely hollow of his woods, watching at midnight with two of his men,
there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An affray ensued. The men
perceived that their old enemy, Sir Roger, was there; and the blow of a
hedge-stake stretched him on the earth. His keepers fled--and thus
ignominiously terminated the long line of the Rockvilles. Sir Roger was
the last of his line, but not of his class. There is a feudal art of
sinking, which requires no study; and the Rockvilles are but one family
among thousands who have perished in its practice.
* * * * *
In Great Stockington there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the
42d of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race
maintained an uninterrupted descent. They were a steady and unbroken
line of paupers, as the parish books testify. From generation to
generation their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were
no _lacunæ_ in their career; there never failed an heir to these
families; fed on the bread of idleness and legal provision, these people
nourished, increased, and multiplied. Sometimes compelled to work for
the weekly dole which they received, they never acquired a taste for
labor, or lost the taste for the bread for which they did not labor.
These paupers regarded this maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They
claimed it as a right,--as their patrimony. They contended that
one-third of the property of the Church had been given by benevolent
individuals for the support of the poor, and that what the Reformation
wrongfully deprived them of, the great enactment of Elizabeth
rightfully--and only rightfully--restored.
Those who imagine that all paupers merely claimed parish relief because
the law ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers who were
hereditary paupers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that
they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims
from the most ancient feudal times, when the lord was as much bound to
maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord.
These paupers were, in fact, or claimed to be, the original _adscripti
glebæ_, and to have as much a claim to parish support as the landed
proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times,
after they had escaped from villenage by running away and remaining
absent from their hundred for a year and a day, dwelling for that period
in a walled town, these people were among the most diligent attendants
at the Abbey doors, and when the Abbeys were dissolved, were, no doubt,
among the most daring of these thieves, vagabonds, and sturdy rogues,
who, after the Robin Hood fashion, beset the highways and solitary farms
of England, and claimed their black mail in a very unceremonious style.
It was out of this class that Henry VIII. hanged his seventy-two
thousand during his reign, and, as it is said, without appearing
materially to diminish their number.
That they continued to “increase, multiply, and replenish the earth,”
overflowing all bounds, overpowering by mere populousness all the severe
laws against them of whipping, burning in the hand, in the forehead or
the breast, and hanging, and filling the whole country with alarm, is
evident by the very act itself of Elizabeth.
Among these hereditary paupers who, as we have said, were found in
Stockington, there was a family of the name of Deg. This family had
never failed to demand and enjoy what it held to be its share of its
ancient inheritance. It appeared from the parish records, that they had
practised in different periods the crafts of shoe-making, tailoring, and
chimney-sweeping; but since the invention of the stocking frame, they
had, one and all of them, followed the profession of stocking-weavers,
or as they were there called, stockingers. This was a trade which
required no extreme exertion of the physical or intellectual powers. To
sit in a frame, and throw the arms to and fro, was a thing that might
either be carried to a degree of extreme diligence, or be let down into
a mere apology for idleness. An “idle stockinger” was there no very
uncommon phrase, and the Degs were always classed under that head.
Nothing could be more admirably adapted than this trade for building a
plan of parish relief upon. The Degs did not pretend to be absolutely
without work, or the parish authorities would soon have set them to some
real labor,--a thing that they particularly recoiled from, having a very
old adage in the family, that “hard work was enough to kill a man.” The
Degs were seldom, therefore, out of work, but they did not get enough to
meet and tie. They had but little work if times were bad, and if they
were good, they had large families and sickly wives or children. Be
times what they would, therefore, the Degs were due and successful
attendants at the parish pay-table. Nay, so much was this a matter of
course, that they came at length not even to trouble themselves to
receive their pay, but sent their young children for it; and it was duly
paid. Did any parish officer, indeed, turn restive, and decline to pay a
Deg, he soon found himself summoned before a magistrate, and such pleas
of sickness, want of work, and poor earnings brought up, that he most
likely got a sharp rebuke from the benevolent but uninquiring
magistrate, and acquired a character for hard-heartedness that stuck to
him.
So parish overseers learned to let the Degs alone; and their children
regularly brought up to receive the parish money for their parents, were
impatient as they grew up to receive it for themselves. Marriages in the
Deg family were consequently very early, and there were plenty of
instances of married Degs claiming parish relief under the age of
twenty, on the plea of being the parent of two children. One such
precocious individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he had
married before he was able to maintain a family, replied, in much
astonishment, that he had married in order to maintain himself by parish
assistance. That he never had been able to maintain himself by his
labor, nor ever expected to do it; his only hope, therefore, lay in
marrying and becoming the father of two children, to which patriarchal
rank he had now attained, and demanded his “pay.”
Thus had lived and flourished the Degs on their ancient patrimony, the
parish, for upwards of two hundred years. Nay, we have no doubt whatever
that, if it could have been traced, they had enjoyed an ancestry of
paupers as long as the pedigree of Sir Roger Rockville himself. In the
days of the most perfect villenage, they had, doubtless, eaten the bread
of idleness, and claimed it as a right. They were numerous, improvident,
ragged in dress, and fond of an ale-house and of gossip. Like the blood
of Sir Roger, their blood had become peculiar through a long persistence
of the same circumstances. It was become pure pauper blood. The Degs
married, if not entirely among Degs, yet among the same class. None but
a pauper would dream of marrying a Deg. The Degs, therefore, were in
constitution, in mind, in habit, and in inclination, paupers. But a pure
and unmixed class of this kind does not die out like an aristocratic
stereotype. It increases and multiplies. The lower the grade, the more
prolific, as is sometimes seen on a large and even national scale. The
Degs threatened, therefore, to become a most formidable clan in the
lower purlieus of Stockington, but luckily there is so much virtue even
in evils, that one, not rarely cures another. War, the great evil,
cleared the town of Degs.
Fond of idleness, of indulgence, of money easily got, and as easily
spent, the Degs were rapidly drained off by recruiting parties during
the last war. The young men enlisted, and were marched away; the young
women married soldiers that were quartered in the town from time to
time, and marched away with them. There were, eventually, none of the
once numerous Degs left except a few old people, whom death was sure to
draft off at no distant period with his regiment of the line which has
no end. Parish overseers, magistrates, and master manufacturers,
felicitated themselves at this unhoped-for deliverance from the ancient
family of the Degs.
But one cold, clear winter evening, the east wind piping its sharp
sibilant ditty in the bare-shorn hedges, and poking his sharp fingers
into the sides of well broad-clothed men by way of passing jest, Mr.
Spires, a great manufacturer of Stockington, driving in his gig some
seven miles from the town, passed a poor woman with a stout child on her
back. The large ruddy-looking man in the prime of life, and in the
great-coat and thick-worsted gloves of a wealthy traveller, cast a
glance at the wretched creature trudging heavily on, expecting a pitiful
appeal to his sensibilities, and thinking it a bore to have to pull off
a glove and dive into his pocket for a copper; but to his surprise there
was no demand, only a low curtsey, and the glimpse of a face of singular
honesty of expression, and of excessive weariness.
Spires was a man of warm feelings; he looked earnestly at the woman, and
thought he had never seen such a picture of fatigue in his life. He
pulled up and said,
“You seem very tired, my good woman.”
“Awfully tired, sir.”
“And are you going far to-night?”
“To Great Stockington, sir, if God give me strength.”