INTRODUCES THE READER TO A PHILANTHROPIC PARSON AND A GREAT SQUIRE.
In the years that elapsed between the close of the Napoleonic wars and
the passing of the Reform Bill, as indeed often since, the debasement
and misery of the agricultural poor rose to agony point, and soon after
Thomas Wanless's marriage an outbreak of popular discontent, based on
hunger, stirred a little the smooth surface of society. It became
necessary, for very shame, to at least appear to do something for the
pauperised masses on whose backs "society" was supported. Accordingly, a
pseudo philanthropic agitation was started in the rural districts with
the object of bettering, or rather of seeming to better, the peasant's
lot. Mass meetings were held, parsons and even bishops threw themselves
into the movement, patronised it, and sought to guide it to a
consummation safe for themselves and their "dear church," itself then so
great a landowner.
For rustic miseries these high personages had one main panacea, and one
only. This was not free land, fixity of tenure for the besotted farmers
always so content to lie at the feet of their earthly lords; it was not
disendowment of the Church and the distribution of its lands among the
people from whom they had been taken originally by chicane and greed;
nor was it the dismissal, with due payment, of those inheritors of the
ancient marauders and appropriators of the soil, with all that is on it
and under it, for whom the people have been kept as slaves for many
generations. No; none of these things did the servants of the British
deity, that idealisation of the sacred rights of feudal property,
advocate. Far be such traitor conduct from them. Their cure for the
agricultural distress was the "allotment system." To these reformers the
free migration of labour, the abolition of that abomination of the poor
law which prevented the poor from leaving their parishes, was as nothing
compared with allotments. Landlords and parish authorities had but to
permit the labourers to cultivate for themselves little patches of land,
let to them at a good rent, and what opulence would these serfs not
reach.
In the agitation on this tremendous reform, Thomas Wanless took a keen
interest, and then first felt sorely his inability to read. He tried to
recall the lessons of his childhood, but could not, and was ashamed to
apply for help. Few, indeed, amongst his neighbours could have helped
him. His wife was as uneducated as himself, so he had to be contented
with gathering the purport of what was going on from those he met at
market or mill. As far as his mind could comprehend the question it was
very clearly made up. He was convinced that all this agitation about
professed interest in the down-trodden labourers would do them no good,
and he doubted whether any good was meant.
"It's not a bit of charity land we want," he always said. "What I
maintain is that you and me an' the likes of us ought to get 10 acres or
more at a fair honest rent if we can do wi' it, and let's take our
chance. Why shouldn't I be able to keep cows and grow corn as well as
the farmer? He often wastes more than three labourers' families could
live on, and yet pays his rent. I tell ye, lads, this talk of 'lotments
and half acres, and all that, is just damned nonsense, an' that's what
it be."
Sentiments like these did not make Thomas popular with the upper powers,
and had old Parson Field been alive he might have smarted for his
freedom of speech. But the old parson had died shortly before the noise
about allotments came to a head, and the new vicar was supposed to be of
a different stamp. He was reputed to be a favourite of one of those
strange fungoid excrescences of Christianity, the "Lord" Bishop of the
diocese, who recommended him for the vacancy, and as he was young and
ignorant of the world, he began his work with some moral fervour and a
tendency to religious zeal. The Rev. Josiah Codling, M.A., of Jesus
College, Cambridge, was in fact a young man of liberal, not to say
democratic tendencies. He had been sufficiently impressed by some of the
more glorious precepts of the faith he came to teach to wish in a
general sort of a way to do good. Left to follow his higher impulses he
probably might have led a life of active philanthropy, and the
democratic thoroughness of the Christian faith might have enabled him to
do something to lift the down-trodden people who formed the bulk of his
flock. It was well, at all events, that Mr. Codling began with good
intent. He was hardly warm in the parish before he went into the
allotment agitation with the feverish enthusiasm of inexperience, and he
also had the temerity to start a school. Dismissing the old parish clerk
who had drowsily mumbled the "amens" and "we beseech Thee's" for nigh
forty years, he brought a young man from Birmingham who knew something
of the three R's, and was rumoured to have even conned a Latin primer,
and constituted him parish clerk and schoolmaster. The vicarage
coach-house was turned into a schoolroom till better could be provided,
and the vicar and his assistant began, the one to hunt up pupils, and
the other to guide their feet in the way of knowledge.
The farmers for a time looked on, scarce able to realise the meaning of
this innovation, but the more they looked the less they liked what they
saw. So they grumbled when they met in the churchyard on Sundays, and
shook their heads portentously over their beer or brandy punch at market
ordinaries, hinting that the "Squoire" should interfere. In their bovine
manner they soon began to place stumbling-blocks in the vicar's path. A
sudden demand for the services of boys and girls sprang up. Nearly every
farmer in the district found that he needed a new ploughboy or kitchen
wench, and the universal shilling rose to eighteenpence a week, from the
sheer pressure of this demand. Nothing daunted, Parson Codling
determined to start a night school, and if possible get the grown lads
and young men to attend. He succeeded in inducing nearly thirty youths
to come to this night class, and among the first to do so was Thomas
Wanless. Here was his chance, he thought, and he seized it with avidity.
Soon the numbers thinned away. Some left because they could see no good
in learning, but most of them because their masters on hearing of the
class threatened to dismiss them at once unless they promised to stop
"going to play the fool with that young Varsity ninny o' a parson, as
knew nowt o' plain country folks' wants;" and at the end of a month the
young schoolmaster had only seven pupils. To these he stuck fast, and
they made great progress that winter, for the poor pale-faced Birmingham
lad was an enthusiast in his way. Thomas and he became close friends,
and the former drank in the current political ideas which William Brown
brought with him from Birmingham as a sponge drinks up water. Early and
late, at every spare moment, Thomas was busy with his book, and by the
time spring came round again he was able to read with tolerable ease the
small county newspaper that found its way a week old from the Grange to
the village inn. He had read the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe,
and some other books lent him by the vicar, who looked upon him as his
model scholar, and took glory to himself over the labourer's success.
From that winter forth, however, the enthusiasm of the new vicar for
education sensibly died away. Naturally fitful in disposition, he craved
for immediate results, and, if they came not, his hopes were
disappointed, and his efforts at once relaxed. The pressure of the upper
powers of his parish was also beginning to tell on his unsophisticated
mind. He met with little overt opposition, for that might have been
both troublesome and impolitic. But quiet social forces worked on him
continually to bring him round to a proper sense of his position as
local priest of feudalism. When he dined out, which often happened, his
host would chaff him on his attempts to make scholars of those loafing
rascals of labourers. Squire Wiseman in particular gravely assured him
that he was encouraging dangerous ideas among a very dissolute and
indefinitely corrupt lot of pariahs. Educate them and they would
altogether go to the devil.
"Tell you what it is, sir," shouted a half-drunk J.P. one evening as the
vicar and some half dozen others sat over their wine after dinner at
Squire Wiseman's: "Tell you what it is; we must get you a wife; blest if
that wouldn't give you something better to do, my boy, than trying to
make gentlemen of those damn'd skulking labourers."
The company ha ha'd with delight, and the parson blushed to the very
root of his hair.
"Capital idea, 'pon my life!" said the host; "and I know just the girl
for you, Codling--at least my wife does, for she was remarking only last
night what a pity it was--"
"Please, sir," said the butler suddenly, after whispering for a short
time with a maid who had entered the room, "Timms would like to speak
wi' you. He says he's found poacher's snares in the Ashwood coppice, and
he wants two or three fellows to help him watch the place."
"Damn the fellow! can't he let a man eat his dinner in peace! Tell him
to go to the devil, Robins, and--and I'll see him to-morrow morning."
"Yes, sir. But, sir, Timms says--"
"Curse Timms, and you too! Do you hear what I say?" roared the squire,
and Robins vanished.
The conversation did not get back to the subject of Codling's marriage;
and the host, after playing absently with his glass for a minute or two,
got up hastily, and muttering, "Excuse me, gentlemen, only I think I had
better see Timms after all," left the room.
That night three poachers--a Warford villager and two shoemakers from
Warwick--were caught in the coppice, and lodged in Warwick jail.
In two days it was all over Ashbrook village that the vicar was going to
get married. The servants at the Grange had told the news to their
friends in confidence.