from that just described. At one period an awful drama took the place
of lissome glee, when Hugh Brontë, “the giant,” in wild passion, sought
to come into actual bodily conflict with the devil.
The potato blight fell as a crushing blow on the hopes of the Brontës,
and proved the turning-point of their fortunes. They were growing in
prosperity, and had enlarged their farm by the savings of many years.
Through industry and frugality they had added field to field until
their material success seemed to be assured; but while they were
rejoicing in the position to which they had attained, the potato crop
blackened, and melted away before their eyes.
Ireland at that period had two kinds of tenant farmers. One resembled
the drowsy oriental, who basks in the sun, and seems content, not to
live, but to exist.
In Ireland a large number of people on the land simply existed in
those days. They knew that if they drained or improved their farms
the landlords would raise their rents, so as to sweep away the entire
profits arising from their improvements. They were well aware that any
enlargement or brightening of their homesteads would cause the agent to
scent superfluous money, and put on the screw; for a tenant would be
more likely to make an effort to hold on to a comfortable house than to
an uncomfortable one. Every staple of thatch put upon the leaky roof,
or bucket of whitewash brushed on to the sooty walls of the cabin, gave
the landlord a new hold on the tenant, and supplied the agent with
a new pretext for increasing the rent for his master, or securing a
present for himself. And there were agents so kindly disposed towards
the miserable tenants that they preferred one pound as a present to
themselves to two pounds added to the landlord’s rent-roll.
Under these circumstances tenants of the indolent type did not drain
their lands or improve the appearance of their houses; and if they
had thriving cattle they kept them concealed in remote fields when
the agent was about; and when they were obliged to meet either agent
or landlord, they decked themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged and
squalid garments. It thus happened that landlords and land agents never
saw their tenantry except in rags, and thus the tenants contrived to
order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters.
The land of the thriftless brought forth potatoes in plenty. A little
lime and dike scourings, mixed together, sufficed for manure. The
potato seed was planted on the lea-sod, and covered up in ridges four
or five feet wide. The elaborate preparation for planting potatoes in
drills was then unheard of. Cabbage plants were dibbled into the edges
of the ridges, and the potatoes and cabbages grew together. Abundant
supplies of _West-reds_ and _Yellow-legs_ and _Copper-duns_, with large
Savoy and Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be dug and gathered, to
maintain existence.
Oats, following the potato crop, provided rough, wholesome bread, and
little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied milk. Great stalwart men and
women lived on potatoes three times a day, with bread and buttermilk
and an occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn, a lean and venerable
cow would be fed for a few weeks on the after grass (flesh put on in
a hurry being considered more tender) and then killed, salted, and
hung up to the black back in the kitchen for family use. This _pièce
de résistance_ was the only flesh-meat ever known in the homes of such
people.
Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes, and a few lambs, taken from
the early clover, met the demands of the landlord. The wool of the
sheep, spun, knitted, or woven at home, supplied scant, but sufficient,
wardrobes. For fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from the fences, and
turf from the bogs. The fire was preserved by _raking_ a half-burned
turf every night in the ashes, but a coal to light the fire was
occasionally borrowed from more provident neighbors, and carried by a
pair of tongs from house to house. Matches were unknown in those days.
The men broke stones by the roadsides, on warm days, for pocket-money
or tobacco, and the women obtained their little extras by the produce
of their surplus eggs, which they carried to market in little osier
hand-baskets.
Existence in such homes flowed smoothly, one year being exactly like
another. The people had no prospects, no hopes, no ambitions. They
lived from hand to mouth, and, while all went well, the fulness of each
day was sufficient for their simple wants. In their diurnal rounds they
gathered their _creels_ of potatoes, and drove their Kerry cows to the
fields, golden with tufted ragweeds and purple with prickly thistles.
Such people seldom had their rents raised or their improvements
confiscated, for the simple reason that they never made improvements,
and never sought, through sustained effort, to better their conditions.
They had no margin beyond the bare necessaries of life, no resources to
fall back upon, in case of calamity. With barely enough to supply their
daily wants, they lived on the verge of starvation, and when the famine
came they starved.
The Brontës were people of a different fibre. They would not
succumb without a struggle. They had advanced from the Emdale cabin
to the Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the house and farm in
Ballynaskeagh. The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant and
precarious profits, had been abandoned for the lucrative occupation of
macadamizing roads, and cultivating the land.
The Brontës worked hard, and were frugal as well as industrious. They
had hoarded the savings of many years, and invested all in a new farm,
and they felt that they had a right to look forward to a condition of
prosperity and independence.
The class to which the Brontës belonged differed widely from the inert
and feckless farmers that encumbered many a bankrupt estate. They did
not live from hand to mouth, spending each day’s efforts on each day’s
wants, and passing the summer in an easy doze. No people on earth
slaved and saved as they did. They worked late and early. Their wives
and daughters and little children rose with the sun, and labored the
live-long day. Every good thing raised on the farm went to market, to
meet the landlord’s exactions, and to add to the little store. Butter,
bacon, fowl, eggs, and such like, raised by the laborious housewife,
were sacred to the landlord, and to the hoard accumulated against the
rainy day.
For such slaves there was little recreation except a half holiday
on Christmas Day, with a party display on the Twelfth of July or
the Seventeenth of March. No toil, however, could crush out of them
the desire to better their lot, but their moiling and saving seldom
resulted in anything more brilliant than a five-pound note to pay a
son’s passage to America, or a twenty-pound portion for the daughter.
The industry of the Brontës was not in vain. They lived under the
best landlords that Ireland has ever produced. “The Sharman estate,”
now known as “the Sharman-Crawford property,” has been blessed by a
succession of Christian landlords, who recognized that landed property
had duties as well as privileges, and who have made it their life work
to propagate their doctrines by peaceful persuasion.
On the Sharman estate the Brontës had a fair field for their
industries. They worked in absolute harmony, as far as appeared to the
outside world. They were a loving family in their way, but without the
shows of love. Their home was all the world to them, and they clung to
it, in early life, with something of the affectionate attachment that
Emily Brontë and her sisters afterwards manifested towards the sombre
parsonage at Haworth. They were healthful, hopeful and happy in their
farm, with the growing signs of plenty around them.
At this juncture the potato blight, which cracked the framework of
Ireland’s economic arrangements, blasted the Brontë paradise. The
affection of the farmer towards his growing crops is in proportion to
the solicitude with which he has watched over them; but the Brontës
only learned fully what a treasure the potato crop had been to them
when it was taken away. Never had their farm seemed so beautiful, or
the potatoes appeared so bountiful, but, in a night, the fields were
smitten black, and the stench of rotting leaves filled the air. The
tubers became rotten and repulsive, instead of being white and floury.
Many theories were advanced to account for the calamity. Pamphlets were
published and sermons preached, to show that national disaster had
followed on the heels of national wrongdoing. Seasons for humiliation
and fasting and prayer were set apart, to supplicate Almighty God to
take away the awful judgment.
The Brontë mind never ran smoothly with the common current. To them the
evil appeared to be simply the work of the devil. The Brontës held the
simple old Zoroastrian creed that everything beneficent was the work of
God, and everything maleficent the work of the Evil One.
Such opinions were not confined to the Brontës. As children we were
given to understand that frosted blackberries were _clubbed_ by the
devil, who had blown his breath upon them as he passed by; and of
course we all knew that the old Enemy, with the club foot, lurked in
the blackberry bushes.
Servants and common laborers held to the belief, no doubt prompted
and fortified by the action of the Brontës, that the devil went bodily
from potato field to potato field, in his work of destruction; and many
reports got into circulation, that he had been actually seen among the
potatoes, in the form of a black dog or black bull, but that he always
vanished in a flash of lurid light when challenged.
Hugh Brontë no more doubted that the devil, in bodily form, had
destroyed the potato crop than he doubted his own existence. He saw the
prop struck from under the family by a malignant enemy, and he would
not tamely submit to the personal injury. It was both cruel and unjust
that the devil, who never did any work, should pollute the fruits of
their toil. He would shame the fiend out of his foul work; and for this
purpose he would go deliberately to the field, and gather a basketful
of rotten potatoes. These he would carry solemnly to the brink of the
glen, and, standing on the edge of a precipice, call on the fiend to
behold his foul and filthy work; and then, with great violence, dash
them down as a feast for the fetid destroyer. This ceremony of feasting
the fiend on the proceeds of his own foul work was often repeated,
with fierce and desperate energy; and the Devil’s Dining-room is still
pointed out by the neighbors.
I knew a man who witnessed one of these scenes. He spoke of Hugh
Brontë’s address to the devil as being sublime in its ferocity. With
bare, outstretched arms, the veins in his neck and forehead standing
out like hempen cords, and his voice choking with concentrated passion,
he would apostrophize Beelzebub, as the bloated fly, and call upon him
to partake of the filthy repast he had provided. The address ended with
wild, scornful laughter as Brontë hurled the rotten potatoes down the
bank.
The dramatic power of the ceremony was so real, and the spell of
Brontë’s earnestness was so contagious, that my informant, who was
not a superstitious man, declared that for a few seconds after the
challenge was given he watched in terror, expecting the fiend to
appear.
III.
THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.
The fight between Welsh Brontë and Sam Clarke of Ballynaskeagh was an
era-making event. The contest took place long before my time, but I had
a precise and full account of the battle from two eye-witnesses. No
encounter of the kind in County Down ever made such a noise, or left
such a lasting impression. Like the flight of Mahomet or the founding
of Rome, it became a fixed point around which other events ranged
themselves.
Women would speak of their children as born, or their daughters
married, so many years before or after the fight; and old men, in
referring to their ages, would tell how they had been present when
Welsh Brontë licked Sam Clarke, and that they must have been of such
an age at the time. It was one of those famous encounters which only
required the pen of Pindar to give it immortality in epic form.
The history of the affair which I here submit embodies the conclusions
at which I have arrived, after comparing twenty or thirty versions;
but I am specially indebted to the late Mr. John Todd of Croan, who
was present at the battle with his brother James, and who narrated the
incidents of the contest, with many picturesque details. I should add,
however, that the Todds were friends of the Brontës, and told the story
with the warmth of partisans.
Welsh Brontë had a sweetheart called Peggy Campbell, and she had a
little, delicate, deformed brother who used to go to Ballynafern
school on crutches. Some of the big healthy boys thoughtlessly amused
themselves by tormenting the little cripple. He often arrived home with
his clothes torn and daubed with mud, and sometimes showing in his
person the signs of ill-treatment. After the manner of school-boys, he
would never tell on his tormentors. Welsh’s sweetheart, however, had
discovered the cowardly and cruel treatment to which her little brother
had been subjected, and appealed to Welsh to protect him.
Welsh had, no doubt, often heard the story of his father’s wrongs,
when a child, and, at a hint from Peggy, constituted himself the
champion of the injured boy. He went to Sam Clarke, who was a near
relative of the chief offenders, and begged him to interfere.
Clarke, who was said to be something of a bully, advised Brontë to
mind his own business, and Brontë replied that that was the exact
thing he was doing; and then he added, as a threat, that unless Clarke
restrained his brutal relatives he would chastise them himself. Hot
words ensued, and Brontë and Clarke parted with expressions of mutual
defiance.
Welsh Brontë’s blood was up. His sense of justice was roused on behalf
of an ill-used child, and his feelings of chivalry impelled him to
become the champion of his sweetheart’s brother.
Meanwhile the boys were meditating vengeance on their victim, who, in
addition to the crime of meek endurance, had, they believed, proved a
_sneak_, by telling of their misdeeds.
Welsh Brontë resolved to watch the children on their way home from
school on the following day. He took up his position in a clump of
trees somewhere near the glen. He waited long, but the school-children
did not appear, and, thinking that perhaps they had returned home by
another path, he left his ambush to resume his work. Suddenly he heard
hilarious cheering and piteous cries, and hurrying towards the spot
from which the noise came, he found the school engaged in the ceremony
of “_ducking_ the _clash beg_,” or tale-bearer.
They had taken the poor little cripple’s crutches from him, and had
placed him in the middle of a pond of water, up to his neck, and then,
having taken hands, they danced round the pond, chanting, “Clash beg!”
“Clash beg!” “Clash beg!”
Welsh Brontë took in the situation at a glance, and captured the two
biggest Clarkes before they knew he was near. He then compelled them
to wade into the pond, and support gently to the edge their victim.
When they had placed him on the dry ground, he was so exhausted that he
could neither stand nor support himself on his crutches, and Brontë
obliged the Clarkes to carry him home on their backs, time about, the
water dripping down their clothes. They did as Brontë directed them,
but only after considerable chastisement.
The other children had fled home in alarm, and had given a highly
colored description of the inhuman manner in which Brontë was treating
the Clarkes. Some of them reported that he had actually drowned them
in the pond. On that night a challenge from Sam Clarke reached Welsh
Brontë, and was instantly accepted.
The time for angry words had gone, and all preliminary formalities were
carried out according to rule, and with perfect courtesy. “Seconds”
were appointed, the day was fixed, and a professional pugilist, who
resided at Newry, was engaged to act as referee. Both men went into
close training, and the event was awaited with the most intense
excitement for ten miles round.
The day, a charming summer day, at last arrived. A crowd numbering
ten thousand--some estimated the number at from thirty to fifty
thousand--assembled. They came together from Newry, Banbridge,
Rathfriland, Dromore, Hilltown, Warrenpoint, Loughbrickland, and other
towns and districts. Such an assemblage of the scoundrelism of that
region had never been drawn together before. But they were not all
scoundrels, for public opinion had not, at that time, affixed the stamp
of infamy indelibly to the brutal exhibitions of the ring; and it was
said that a number of sporting clergymen and country gentlemen were
present, undisguised and unashamed.
Many circumstances rendered the field famous. The mothers of the
combatants had fed their sons for the fray like gamecocks; oat-bread
and new milk were the staple food which was supposed to give muscle,
strength, and endurance.
Shortly before the fight Clarke’s mother, when giving him his last meal
before the encounter, said to him, “Sam, my son, may you never get bit
or sup from me more, if you do not lick the mongrel.”
This Spartan speech spread through the field like wildfire, and such
was the code of honor, on that occasion, that the exhortation was much
blamed, and led to a strong current of popularity in favor of Brontë.
The word “mongrel,” referring to the fact that her son’s antagonist
had had a Catholic mother, was considered unfitting to be used in
connection with the noble encounter that was about to take place.
The ring was roped off in the hollow of a green field; the multitude
stood on the rising ground around, and all could see the entire ring.
Three or four hundred men were enrolled as “special order preservers,”
and stood in a circle round the ring, two or three deep. The seconds
and referee and umpire were in their places at the opposite sides of
the ring.
The hour fixed to begin was twelve o’clock, and prompt to the minute
the two combatants strode down leisurely through the crowd, each with
his sweetheart leaning on his arm; their mothers already occupied seats
of honor outside the ring.
Clarke was an older and maturer man than Brontë, and much bigger.
Beside him, Brontë, in his tight-fitting homespun, looked slender and
youthful and overmatched.
In consequence of the ungenerous and unguarded words spoken by Clarke’s
mother, sympathy, as we have seen, was already on Brontë’s side, and
this was greatly increased by the natural feeling that prompts the
generous to take the weak side.
As far as I have been able to ascertain, the original cause of the
quarrel was wholly lost sight of before the fight began. No one seemed
to give a thought to the circumstance that Brontë had got into the
affair by espousing the cause of a helpless boy. After listening to
an account of the fight, from some old man who had witnessed it, I
have often asked what it was about, and I have generally got for
answer, “Oh, it was just a fight,” my question being evidently deemed
irrelevant, and somewhat silly.
The champions stepped into the ring, and their sweethearts with them.
As each stripped he handed his clothes to his future wife, and these
two women stood, each with her lover’s garments on her arm, till the
matter was decided.
Time was not accurately kept, but the battle was said to have lasted
three or four hours. At first Clarke had the advantage in strength
and weight, but Brontë, who had long arms, was lithe and active and
wiry, and did not seem to weary as the day wore on. On the contrary,
Clarke began to show signs of fatigue, but the spectators thought he
was simply husbanding his strength. Throughout the whole contest not a
word was heard. Suddenly, Miss Campbell’s voice rang out clear in the
silence: “Welsh, my boy, go in and avenge my brother, and the mongrel.”
Peggy Campbell, by her woman’s instinct, discerned that the hour for
the final effort and victory had come. Welsh responded like a lightning
flash. A few awful moments followed. The spectators held their breaths
and some fainted, others covered their eyes with their hands, or
averted their faces. Terrific crushing and crashing blows were heard
all over the field, and when the blows ceased to resound, Sam Clarke
was lying a motionless heap in the ring.
The crowd, after the long suspense and hushed silence, lost all control
of themselves, and wanted to rush in and chair the victor, but the
“special order preservers” held the ring, and the sea of human beings
surged against them in vain.
Welsh Brontë declined to receive congratulations until he had deposited
his antagonist safely at home in bed. The fight was followed by no evil
consequences, and Sam Clarke and Welsh Brontë became fast friends from
that day forth.
All were agreed as to the closing scene. During the last few seconds
the fight became so fierce and furious that the blood of the spectators
ran cold. Nothing like it for wild fury and Titanic ferocity had ever
been witnessed, and no such battle has ever, since or before, been
fought in County Down.
IV.
THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.
The glen, on the edge of which the Brontës lived, lay secluded among
the hills, remote from the more frequented thoroughfares of the
country. It was a beautiful and romantic spot by day, but lonesome
and desolate at night. For miles round it had the reputation of being
haunted, and few passed that way after dark. Those who were obliged to
do so heard unnatural splashes in the stream, and rustlings among the
bracken, and strange moanings and sobbings among the trees, when there
was not a breath of air stirring.
Strange and fitful cries were said to be heard in the glen, and doleful
wailings, as of some one in agony.
Long ago, according to tradition, a woman had been murdered in the
glen by her false lover and betrayer. Hugh Brontë had told the story,
with minute details and local color, till everybody who frequented the
gatherings at the kiln knew it by heart.
The villain had enticed his victim to Rathfriland fair, on pretence
of getting the wedding ring. He had there attempted to strangle her,
but she had escaped from his grasp, and was making her way home to her
mother, through fields and byways, when, according to one of Patrick
Brontë’s unpublished songs:
“Over hedges and ditches he took the near way,
Until he got before her on that dismal day.”
He waylaid her in the lonely glen, and murdered her under circumstances
of great atrocity. On that night the ghost of the murdered woman
rushed upon the assassin, and, with a wild scream, dragged him from
his bed and through the window of his cabin, and down, down, down,
with unearthly yells, to the bottomless pit. The whole story was told
in verse, I believe, by Patrick Brontë, and sung to a sad air at local
gatherings. It ran partly thus:
“This young man he went to his bed all in a dreadful fright.
And Kitty’s ghost appeared to him, it was an awful sight.
She clasped her a-rums round him, saying, You’re a false young man,
But now I’ll be avenged of you, so do the best you can.”
The punishment was, according to local sentiment, well deserved; but
both were doomed to walk the earth for a thousand years. They had made
their abode in the glen, hence the doleful and dismal voices.
Another circumstance added to the horror with which the glen was
regarded at night. It was said that, at a remote period, a man who had
been robbed committed suicide, at a crossing of the brook. He was still
living when found with his throat cut, and up to his last breath he
continued to moan, with a gurgling sound, “There were ten tenpennies in
my pocket at the river.”
I believe the story was founded on fact. A man had committed suicide
under the circumstances narrated, but in quite a different part of
the country. The deed, however, had come to be located in the Brontë
glen, and increased the superstitious awe with which the place was then
regarded. A snipe frequented the spot at night, and as people attempted
to cross, it would start with a sudden screech from almost beneath
their feet. The bird with the unearthly yell was supposed to be the
spirit of the unfortunate man.