CHAPTER II. THE TRANTER’S
CHAPTER III. THE ASSEMBLED QUIRE
CHAPTER IV. GOING THE ROUNDS
CHAPTER V. THE LISTENERS
CHAPTER VI. CHRISTMAS MORNING
CHAPTER VII. THE TRANTER’S PARTY
CHAPTER VIII. THEY DANCE MORE WILDLY
CHAPTER IX. DICK CALLS AT THE SCHOOL
PART THE SECOND—SPRING
CHAPTER I. PASSING BY THE SCHOOL
CHAPTER II. A MEETING OF THE QUIRE
CHAPTER III. A TURN IN THE DISCUSSION
CHAPTER IV. THE INTERVIEW WITH THE VICAR
CHAPTER V. RETURNING HOME WARD
CHAPTER VI. YALBURY WOOD AND THE KEEPER’S HOUSE
CHAPTER VII. DICK MAKES HIMSELF USEFUL
CHAPTER VIII. DICK MEETS HIS FATHER
PART THE THIRD—SUMMER
CHAPTER I. DRIVING OUT OF BUDMOUTH
CHAPTER II. FURTHER ALONG THE ROAD
CHAPTER III. A CONFESSION
CHAPTER IV. AN ARRANGEMENT
PART THE FOURTH—AUTUMN
CHAPTER I. GOING NUTTING
CHAPTER II. HONEY-TAKING, AND AFTERWARDS
CHAPTER III. FANCY IN THE RAIN
CHAPTER IV. THE SPELL
CHAPTER V. AFTER GAINING HER POINT
CHAPTER VI. INTO TEMPTATION
CHAPTER VII. SECOND THOUGHTS
PART THE FIFTH: CONCLUSION
CHAPTER I. ‘THE KNOT THERE’S NO UNTYING’
CHAPTER II. UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
PREFACE
This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery
musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in
_Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters_, and other places, is
intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages,
ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the
villages of fifty or sixty years ago.
One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical
bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist) or
harmonium player; and despite certain advantages in point of control
and accomplishment which were, no doubt, secured by installing the
single artist, the change has tended to stultify the professed aims of
the clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the
interest of parishioners in church doings. Under the old plan, from
half a dozen to ten full-grown players, in addition to the numerous
more or less grown-up singers, were officially occupied with the Sunday
routine, and concerned in trying their best to make it an artistic
outcome of the combined musical taste of the congregation. With a
musical executive limited, as it mostly is limited now, to the parson’s
wife or daughter and the school-children, or to the school-teacher and
the children, an important union of interests has disappeared.
The zest of these bygone instrumentalists must have been keen and
staying to take them, as it did, on foot every Sunday after a toilsome
week, through all weathers, to the church, which often lay at a
distance from their homes. They usually received so little in payment
for their performances that their efforts were really a labour of love.
In the parish I had in my mind when writing the present tale, the
gratuities received yearly by the musicians at Christmas were somewhat
as follows: From the manor-house ten shillings and a supper; from the
vicar ten shillings; from the farmers five shillings each; from each
cottage-household one shilling; amounting altogether to not more than
ten shillings a head annually—just enough, as an old executant told me,
to pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which
they mostly ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in
their own manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their
music-books were home-bound.
It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and ballads
in the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the insertions
being continued from front and back till sacred and secular met
together in the middle, often with bizarre effect, the words of some of
the songs exhibiting that ancient and broad humour which our
grandfathers, and possibly grandmothers, took delight in, and is in
these days unquotable.
The aforesaid fiddle-strings, rosin, and music-paper were supplied by a
pedlar, who travelled exclusively in such wares from parish to parish,
coming to each village about every six months. Tales are told of the
consternation once caused among the church fiddlers when, on the
occasion of their producing a new Christmas anthem, he did not come to
time, owing to being snowed up on the downs, and the straits they were
in through having to make shift with whipcord and twine for strings. He
was generally a musician himself, and sometimes a composer in a small
way, bringing his own new tunes, and tempting each choir to adopt them
for a consideration. Some of these compositions which now lie before
me, with their repetitions of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their
fugues and their intermediate symphonies, are good singing still,
though they would hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are
popular in the churches of fashionable society at the present time.
_August 1896._
_Under the Greenwood Tree_ was first brought out in the summer of 1872
in two volumes. The name of the story was originally intended to be,
more appropriately, _The Mellstock Quire_, and this has been appended
as a sub-title since the early editions, it having been thought
unadvisable to displace for it the title by which the book first became
known.
In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun were
material for another kind of study of this little group of church
musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so lightly, even so
farcically and flippantly at times. But circumstances would have
rendered any aim at a deeper, more essential, more transcendent
handling unadvisable at the date of writing; and the exhibition of the
Mellstock Quire in the following pages must remain the only extant one,
except for the few glimpses of that perished band which I have given in
verse elsewhere.
T. H.
_April_ 1912.
PART THE FIRST—WINTER
CHAPTER I.
MELLSTOCK-LANE
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as
well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and
moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it
battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech
rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies
the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its
individuality.
On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was
passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a
plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence. All
the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of his
footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the
liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence:
“With the rose and the lily
And the daffodowndilly,
The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go.”
The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of
Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes,
casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with
their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the
dark-creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the
sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their
flickering seemed like the flapping of wings. Within the woody pass, at
a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark as the grave. The
copse-wood forming the sides of the bower interlaced its branches so
densely, even at this season of the year, that the draught from the
north-east flew along the channel with scarcely an interruption from
lateral breezes.
After passing the plantation and reaching Mellstock Cross the white
surface of the lane revealed itself between the dark hedgerows like a
ribbon jagged at the edges; the irregularity being caused by temporary
accumulations of leaves extending from the ditch on either side.
The song (many times interrupted by flitting thoughts which took the
place of several bars, and resumed at a point it would have reached had
its continuity been unbroken) now received a more palpable check, in
the shape of “Ho-i-i-i-i-i!” from the crossing lane to Lower Mellstock,
on the right of the singer who had just emerged from the trees.
“Ho-i-i-i-i-i!” he answered, stopping and looking round, though with no
idea of seeing anything more than imagination pictured.
“Is that thee, young Dick Dewy?” came from the darkness.
“Ay, sure, Michael Mail.”
“Then why not stop for fellow-craters—going to thy own father’s house
too, as we be, and knowen us so well?”
Dick Dewy faced about and continued his tune in an under-whistle,
implying that the business of his mouth could not be checked at a
moment’s notice by the placid emotion of friendship.
Having come more into the open he could now be seen rising against the
sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the portrait of
a gentleman in black cardboard. It assumed the form of a low-crowned
hat, an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck, and
ordinary shoulders. What he consisted of further down was invisible
from lack of sky low enough to picture him on.
Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now heard
coming up the hill, and presently there emerged from the shade
severally five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working
villagers of the parish of Mellstock. They, too, had lost their
rotundity with the daylight, and advanced against the sky in flat
outlines, which suggested some processional design on Greek or Etruscan
pottery. They represented the chief portion of Mellstock parish choir.
The first was a bowed and bent man, who carried a fiddle under his arm,
and walked as if engaged in studying some subject connected with the
surface of the road. He was Michael Mail, the man who had hallooed to
Dick.
The next was Mr. Robert Penny, boot- and shoemaker; a little man, who,
though rather round-shouldered, walked as if that fact had not come to
his own knowledge, moving on with his back very hollow and his face
fixed on the north-east quarter of the heavens before him, so that his
lower waist-coat-buttons came first, and then the remainder of his
figure. His features were invisible; yet when he occasionally looked
round, two faint moons of light gleamed for an instant from the
precincts of his eyes, denoting that he wore spectacles of a circular
form.
The third was Elias Spinks, who walked perpendicularly and
dramatically. The fourth outline was Joseph Bowman’s, who had now no
distinctive appearance beyond that of a human being. Finally came a
weak lath-like form, trotting and stumbling along with one shoulder
forward and his head inclined to the left, his arms dangling
nervelessly in the wind as if they were empty sleeves. This was Thomas
Leaf.
“Where be the boys?” said Dick to this somewhat indifferently-matched
assembly.
The eldest of the group, Michael Mail, cleared his throat from a great
depth.
“We told them to keep back at home for a time, thinken they wouldn’t be
wanted yet awhile; and we could choose the tuens, and so on.”
“Father and grandfather William have expected ye a little sooner. I
have just been for a run round by Ewelease Stile and Hollow Hill to
warm my feet.”
“To be sure father did! To be sure ’a did expect us—to taste the little
barrel beyond compare that he’s going to tap.”
“’Od rabbit it all! Never heard a word of it!” said Mr. Penny, gleams
of delight appearing upon his spectacle-glasses, Dick meanwhile singing
parenthetically—
“The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go.”
“Neighbours, there’s time enough to drink a sight of drink now afore
bedtime?” said Mail.
“True, true—time enough to get as drunk as lords!” replied Bowman
cheerfully.
This opinion being taken as convincing they all advanced between the
varying hedges and the trees dotting them here and there, kicking their
toes occasionally among the crumpled leaves. Soon appeared glimmering
indications of the few cottages forming the small hamlet of Upper
Mellstock for which they were bound, whilst the faint sound of
church-bells ringing a Christmas peal could be heard floating over upon
the breeze from the direction of Longpuddle and Weatherbury parishes on
the other side of the hills. A little wicket admitted them to the
garden, and they proceeded up the path to Dick’s house.