while the yew is most dangerous because far more common. In one case the
Rector of a Berkshire village was made very ill by eating honey which had
been partly gathered from yew flowers. Green hellebore and monkshood are
also classed in the list of the ranker poisons. Deadly nightshade is
rather a rare plant, yet it may be seen often enough on the sides of woods
where there are old walls. It is poisonous throughout. The flowers are
large, single, purple bells, and the berries black and shiny like a black
cherry. It is said of this dangerous plant that the roots are computed to
be five times more poisonous than the berries, that human beings have been
found more susceptible to it than animals, and carnivorous animals more so
than others. Children suffer more in proportion to the quantity of poison
taken than do adults. But cases of nightshade poisoning are very rare,
though two were reported some three years ago. Possibly the berries often
fail to ripen, and so are less attractive in appearance. The poisonous
hemlocks are two, one of which, the common hemlock, is said to have been
the plant from which the Athenians prepared their poison for executing
citizens condemned to death; and the other, the water-hemlock, or cowbane,
is particularly deadly when eaten by cattle, to which it is fatal in a
very few hours. Another plant, used for preparing poison in India, which
produces a drug used by some tribes of Thugs for procuring the death of
their victims, datura or stramonium, has now found a place amongst our
wild flowers. It has an English name, thorn-apple, and is said to have
been naturalised by the gipsies, who used the seeds as a medicine and
narcotic, and carried them about with them in their wanderings. Like
henbane, it is often seen on rubbish-heaps and in old brickfields. The
leaf is very handsome, and the flower white and trumpet-shaped. Both this
plant and the henbane retain their poisonous properties even when dried in
hay, and stalled cows have been known to be poisoned by fodder containing
a mixture of the latter plant.
Cattle have a delicate sense of smell which warns them of the danger of
most poisonous English herbs, though apparently this warning odour is
absent from the plants which kill so many horses when the grass grows on
the South African veld, and also from our English yew. Yew was anciently
employed as a poison in Europe, much as is the curari to-day in Central
America. Dr. W.T. Fernie, the author of "Herbal Simples Approved for
Modern Use," says that its juice is a rapidly fatal poison, that it was
used for poisoning arrows, and that the symptoms correspond in a very
remarkable way with those which follow the bites of venomous snakes. It is
believed that in India there is a poison which produces the same effect.
An Indian Rajah once desired that a notice should be put in a well-known
paper that he did not intend to raise his rents on his accession to the
estates. The proprietor of the paper asked him his reasons for wishing for
such an advertisement. The Rajah said that his grandfather had raised the
rents, and had died of snake-bite; that his father had done the same, and
had also died of snake-bite; and that he concluded that there was some
connection of cause and effect. The notice was inserted, and this Rajah
did not die of snake-bite, or rather of the poison which simulates it.
[1] "Farm and Home" Year Book for 1902.
ANCIENT THAMES MILLS
Almost the greatest loss to country scenery is the decay of the ancient
windmills and water-mills. The first has robbed the hilltops of a most
picturesque feature, while in the valleys and little glens the roaring,
creaking, dripping wheel sounds no longer, except in favoured spots where
it still pays to grind the corn in the old way. The old town and city
mills often survived longer than the country ones, and those on the Thames
longer than those on smaller rivers. The corn and barley which was taken
to market in the town was easily transferred to the town mill, and thence
by water to the place of consumption. Every Wykehamist remembers the
ancient and picturesque mills of Winchester, with the mill-stream bridged
by the main street. At Oxford some of the most ancient mills remain to
this day, while others have only recently been destroyed, or have
undergone a curious conversion into dwelling-houses, beneath which the
mill-stream still rushes. One of these houses stands near Folly Bridge;
another old mill has just undergone the same process, that close to
Holywell Church. Some of these mills are the most ancient surviving
institutions in Oxford, far older than the colleges--older even than any
of the churches except perhaps one. Some of these--the Castle Mill, for
instance--have ground corn for centuries since the abbeys, for whose use
they were founded, utterly disappeared. Others were standing long before
abbeys or colleges were founded, and were part of their endowments. They
are the oldest link between town life and country life left in Oxford, or
indeed in England. For a thousand years the corn grown on the hills beyond
the Thames meadows has been drawn to their doors. Saxon churls dragged
wheat there on sledges, Danes rowed up the river to Oseney and stole the
flour when they sacked the abbey, Norman bishops stole the mills
themselves. That iniquitous Roger of Salisbury was "in" this, as we might
guess. Roger, who knew that attention to detail is the soul of business,
commandeered this particular mill with others in these parts, and, when
forced to let it go, with a fine sense of humour made it over to the
Godstone nunnery as a pious donor.
The Knights Templars had another mill at Cowley, and the king himself one
on the Cherwell, which was given to the Hospital of St. John, who
"swapped" it with Merton. Later on these mills helped King Charles's army
vastly, for all the flour needed for the Oxford garrison was ground inside
or close to the walls.
At present the Thames is mainly visited as a source of rest and
refreshment to tens of thousands of men "in cities pent," and of pleasure
rather than profit. In a secondary degree it is useful as a commercial
highway, the barge traffic being really useful to the people on its banks,
where coal, stone for road-mending, wood, flour, and other heavy and
necessary goods are delivered on the staithes almost at their doors. But
when the old mills were first founded, and for eight centuries onwards, it
was as a source of power, a substitute for steam, that the river was
valued. The times will probably alter, and the Thames currents turn mill
wheels again to generate electric light for the towns and villages on its
banks. The chance of this coming about is enough to make any one who owns
a mill right on the water keep it, even though not useful at present.
First the old roads with auto-cars, then the old mills with hydraulic
lighting and low-power dynamos will come to the front again. Whereof take
the old story of the Oxford river as full and sufficient witness, and
Antony Wood for storyteller. "Oxford," he says, "owed its prosperity to
its rivers," of which there were apparently as many branches and streams
then as now.
The rivers were "beneficial to the inhabitants, as anon shall be showed,"
though the Cherwell was "more like a tide" than a common river sometimes,
and once nearly overflowed all the physic garden. That garden stands there
still. So does the Cherwell still behave "more like a tide than a river,"
and the scene at the torpid races a few years ago is evidence that the
rivers have not diminished in volume. What, then, was the "great
commodity" given by them to the city? First and least, a water which was
good for dyeing cloth and for tanning leather; secondly, and by far the
greatest benefit, it turned the wheels of at least a dozen important
mills. As mills were always a monopoly, as much opposition was raised to
the making of a new one as would now be evoked by the proposal to
construct a new railway.
It was meddling with vested interests of a powerful kind, but there were
so many rivers at Oxford that each turned one or two mills without
injuring any one's water rights.
Of all these mills, the greatest advantage to the city came from the
Castle Mill. Notwithstanding its name, this was _not_ the property of
the Castle of Oxford, though it stood within arrow-shot of its towers, and
was thus protected from pillage in time of war. It stands under the
remaining tower, the water tower, of the castle still, and on exactly the
same site, and on the branch of the Thames which from the most ancient
days has been the waterway by which barges and merchandise came from the
country to the city, bringing goods from Abingdon or corn and fuel from
the upper river. And it is still called by its old name of the Weir
Stream. "There is one river called Weyre, where hath bin an Hythe, at
which place boatmen unload their vessels, which also maketh that antient
mill under the castle seldom or never to faile from going, to the great
convenience of the inhabitants." So says Antony Wood, adding that it stood
before the Norman conquest. After that it was forfeited to the Norman
kings, and then held in half shares by the burgesses of the town and the
abbots of Oseney, that once wealthy and now vanished abbey, which stood
close by where the railway station now is. They shared the fishery also,
and apparently this partnership prevented friction between the town and
the monks, as each could undersell the other, and prices for flour and
fish were kept down at a reasonable figure.
Henry VIII. gave the abbey's share to the new bishopric of Oxford, but the
funds of the bishopric were embezzled by some means, and the town
ultimately bought the mill for L566.
St. George's Tower, the only remaining fragment of the castle, is built of
stones and mortar, so compact that though the walls have stood since
Robert d'Oily reared it, late in the reign of the Conqueror, the stones
and mortar had to be cut out as if from a mass of rock when a water-pipe
was recently taken through the walls. It is now the water tower which
holds the supply for Oxford prison.
Old Holywell Mill was on a branch of the Cherwell, and stood just behind
Magdalen Walks, whence a charming view was had of its wheel and lasher. It
belonged to the Abbey of Oseney, who gave it to Merton College in exchange
for value. Now it is a handsome dwelling-house, below which the mill
stream rushes.
[Illustration: BOTLEY MILL. _From a photograph by Taunt & Co_.]
[Illustration: EEL BUCKS. _From a photograph by Taunt & Co_.]
Merton College seems to have had a fancy for owning mills, for it also
acquired by exchange the King's Mill. Only the house and lasher are left
to show where this old mill stood. It had a narrow but very strong mill
stream, which in winter used to come down in a sheet of solid water like
green jade, a beautiful object among the walks and willows of Mesopotamia.
It was an outpost of the King's forces when Oxford was held for the
Royalists.
Botley Mill, though on the westernmost of the many streams into which the
Thames divides at Oxford, was outside the walls. It dates from before the
Conquest. This belonged to the Abbey of Abingdon, in the chronicles of
which are some records of an injury done to the "aqueduct, which is
vulgarly called the lake." This name is still the local term for all side
streams and artificial cuts from the Upper Thames. The men of a now
vanished village of Seckworth broke the banks of the "lake" when Odo,
Bishop of Bayeux, was being besieged in Rochester Castle. The lord of the
manor was subsequently sued for this by the abbot of Abingdon, and had to
pay ten shillings damages. Doubtless the men of Seckworth had to
contribute to pay for their indulgence in this mischief, but it looks as
if the abbot's miller had been cheating them.
THE BIRDS THAT STAY
In the Vision of the Lots and Lives, when the souls chose their careers on
a fresh register before taking another chance in the world above, Ulysses
chose that of a stay-at-home proprietor, with a resolve, born of
experience, never again to roam. If Plato had made a Myth of the Birds, he
might have alleged some such reason to explain how it is that while most
of them are incessant wanderers, ever flitting uncertain between momentary
points of rest, so few remain fixed and constant, as if they had sworn at
some distant date never more to make trial of the wine-dark sea. In the
still, November woods, when the vapours curl like smoke among the dripping
boughs, leaving a diamond on each sprouting bud where next year's leaf is
hid; by the moorland river, on bright December mornings, when the grayling
are lying on the shallows below the ripple where the rock breaks the
surface; by the frozen shore where the land-springs lie fast, drawn into
icicles or smeared in slippery slabs on the cliff faces, and hoar frost
powders the black sea-wrack; on the lawns of gardens, where the winter
roses linger and open dew-drenched and rain-washed in the watery
sunbeams--there we see, hear, and welcome the birds that stay. Then and
there we note their fewness, their lameness, and feel that they are really
fellow-countrymen, native to the soil. The list of these home-loving birds
is short; and those commonly seen are only a few of the total. In a winter
stroll by the upper Thames, the absence of the birds which flocked along
the banks in summer and spring, when the May was in blossom and the willow
covered with cotton fleck, is among the first seasonal changes noticed.
The chiff-chaffs, turtledoves, sedge-warblers, whitethroats, coots,
sandpipers, and all the little river birds are gone. So are the greater
number of the blackbirds, thrushes and missel-thrushes. All the fisherman
sees, his daily companions by the deserted river, are the wren creeping in
the flood-drift, the tits working over the alder bushes to see if any
seeds are left in the cones, and the kingfishers. The grayling fisherman
on the Northern streams has the water ousels for his constant and charming
companions, true to the mountain river as in the days of Merlin and
Vivien, busy as big black-and-white bees as they flit up-stream and
down-stream, flying boldly into the waterfalls, dropping silently from
mossy stones into the clear brown eddies, singing when the sunbeams shine
and warm the crag-tops, and even floating and singing on the water, like
aquatic robins. The ousels must have been the sacred birds of Tana, the
Water Goddess, the ever attached votaries of her dripping and rustic
shrines.
By the winter shore, untrodden by any but the fisher going down at the ebb
to seek king-crab for bait, or by his children, gathering driftwood on the
stones, one little bird stays ever faithful to the same short range of
shore. This is the rock-pipit--the "sea-lark" of Browning's verse. But
that is a summer song. It is not only when the cliff--
"Sets his bones,
To bask i' the sun,"
but in the short winter days, that the sea-lark keeps constant to the
fringe of ocean. It is the most narrowly local and stay-at-home of all
birds, never leaving the very fringe and margin, not of sea, but of land,
haunting only the last edge and precipice of the coast, nesting on those
upright walls of granite or chalk, and creeping, flying, and twittering
among the crumbling stones, the water-worn boulders, and the tufts of
sea-pink and samphire. When the winter storms slam the roaring billows
against the cliff faces and the spray flies up a hundred feet from the
exploding mass, the little sea-larks only mount to higher levels of the
cliff, never coming inland or forsaking its salt-spattered resting-place.
Compared with these home-loving birds, all the gulls are wanderers, even
though they do not desert our shores and come fifty miles up the Thames.
Of the rock-fowl, the puffins fly straight away to the Mediterranean, and
the guillemots and razorbills go out to sea and leave their nesting crags.
Only the cormorants stay at home, flying in to roost on the same lofty
crag every autumn and winter night, from the fishing grounds which the
sea-crows have frequented for longer years even than the "many-wintered
crow" of inland rookeries has his fat and smiling fields.
The discovery that rooks, with their reputation for staunch attachment to
locality, are regular and irrepressible migrants, crossing from Denmark
and Holland to England, and from England to Ireland, has been followed by
other curious revelations about the mobility of what were believed to be
stationary birds. Our own beloved garden robin, whom we feed till he
becomes a sturdy beggar, though he pays us with a song, stays with us, as
we know, because he applies regularly for his rations. But he sends all
his children away to seek their fortunes elsewhere, and on our coasts
flights of migrant robins, whom either their parents, or the bad weather,
have sent from Norway over the foam, arrive all through the autumn. Even
the jenny-wrens migrate to some extent.
Because we see birds of certain kinds near our farms, gardens, and hedges
it does not follow that these are those which were there in summer and
spring. Such common finches as the greenfinches and chaffinches migrate in
immense flocks, and over vast distances, considering their short wings and
small size. In the gardens and shrubberies round the houses the parent
robins stay. So do some of the blackbirds, the thrushes (except in very
hard weather), the hedge-sparrow, the nuthatch (more in evidence in winter
than at any other time, and a firm believer in eleemosynary nuts), all the
tits, except the long-tailed tit, a little gipsy bird wandering in family
hordes, and the crested and marsh tits (dwellers in the pine forest and
sedge-beds), and the wood pigeon. Occasionally that shy bird, the
hawfinch, is seen on a wet, quiet day picking up white-beam kernels and
seeds. Except this, every one of the garden birds comes to be fed, and is
well known and appreciated. It is in the woods and the hedges of the
rain-soaked meadows that the general absence of bird life in winter is
most marked, and the presence of the few which stay most appreciated.
Those who, on sport intent, go round the hedges in November and December,
or wait in rides while the woods are driven, or lie up quietly in the big
covers for a shot at wood pigeons in the evening, are almost startled by
the tameness and indifference of the birds, eagerly feeding so as to make
the most of the short, dark days. When the hedges are beaten for rabbits
the bullfinches appear in families, their beautiful grey backs and
exquisite rosy breasts looking their very best against the dark-brown,
purply twigs. Another home-staying bird of the hedgerows, or rather of the
hedgerow timber, is the tree-creeper. It has no local habitation, being a
bird which migrates in a drifting way from tree to tree, and so bound by
no ties to mother-earth. But it is in the woods that the stay-at-home
birds are most in evidence in winter. There they find abundant food, and
there they make their home. The woodpeckers, the magpie, and the jay, the
brown owl, the sparrow-hawk, the kestrel, the pheasant, the long-tailed
tit, and all the rest of the tribe; and in the clearings where the teazle
grows, the goldfinches feed. The barn owl and brown owl both stay with us.
So does the long-eared owl. But the short-eared owl is a regular migrant,
coming over in flights like woodcock. No one has satisfactorily answered
the question why there are sedentary species and migratory species so
closely allied in habits and food that the quest for a living must be
ruled as outside the motive for migration.
If the long-eared owl can remain and find a living all the year round in
the copses on the downs, why should not the short-eared owl make a
practice of what is its occasional custom, and nest in the fens and
marshes? If the kingfisher can find a living and abundant fish in our
rivers and brooks, why does the dabchick migrate? The migration is only a
partial one, for many remain on the Thames all the year round, especially
near the eyots by Tilehurst; but it vanishes from most of the Northern
pools and returns almost on the same date. Perhaps a conclusion might be
hazarded from the behaviour of wild migratory birds which have become
semi-domesticated. In Canada, the largest and best known of the wild geese
is the black-necked Canadian goose. It is a regular migrant. The Indians
believe it brings little birds on its back when it comes. At Holkham,
where a large flock of these is acclimatised, but lives under perfectly
wild conditions, the Canadian geese never attempt to migrate, though they
often fly out on to the sands at ebb-tide. They show less disposition to
leave the estate than the herons in the park. Yet during the winter they
feed every day with flocks of wild geese in the marshes. These geese fly
every spring away to the Lapland mountains or the tundras, and could show
the Canada geese the way northwards if they wished to follow. The
conclusion is that the Canada geese have no desire for change; and the
reason that other birds do not migrate is probably the same.
ANCIENT HEDGES
In the upper Thames valley, both in May and autumn, one of the prettiest
sights is the great hedges which divide the meadows. In spring, those
above Oxford look as though covered with snow, and in early October they
are loaded with hips and haws, just turned red, with blackberries,
elderberries (though the starlings have eaten most of these), with crab
apples, with hazel nuts, scarlet wild guelder-rose berries, dog-wood
berries, and sloes. Except the fields themselves, our hedges are almost
the oldest feature with which Englishmen adorned rural England. They have
gone on making them until the last parish "enclosures," some of which were
made as late as thirty years ago, and when made they have always been
regarded as property of a valuable kind. When Christ's Hospital was
founded in Ipswich in Tudor days, partly as a reformatory for bad
characters, "hedge-breakers" were more particularly specified as eligible
for temporary domicile and discipline. "Hedges even pleached" were always
a symbol of prosperity, care, and order. "Her fruit trees all unpruned,
her hedges ruined," a token that something was amiss in our country
economy.
One untidy habit, which the writer remembers as very common, has been
discontinued in this connection. Twenty years ago the linen drying on the
hedge, which Shakespeare evidently regarded as a "common object of the
country," was constantly seen. It was always laid on well-trimmed hedges,
or otherwise it would have been torn. Now it is always hung on lines,
possibly because the hedges are not so well trimmed and kept. Bad times in
farming have greatly helped the beauty of hedges. They are mostly
overgrown, hung with masses of dog-rose, trailed over by clematis, grown
up at bottom with flowers, ferns, and fox-gloves, festooned with
belladonna, padded with bracken. The Surrey hedges are mostly on banks, a
sign that the soil is light, and that a bank is needed because the hedge
will not thicken into a barrier. But these, like most others, are set with
the charming hedgerow timber that makes half England look like a forest at
a distance of a mile or so. It is difficult to reconstruct our landscape
as it was before the hedges were made. But any one curious as to the
comparative antiquity of the fields can perhaps detect the nucleus or
centre where enclosure started. Those having the ditch on the outer side
are always the earlier, the ditch being the defence against the cattle
that strayed on the unenclosed common or grazings outside.