broad shadow so many centuries of village folk have gathered week
by week, when service was over, to talk of the haying, and the
weather, and even, it may be, of the business of their neighbours,
stands out a dark, funereal mass against the grey masonry behind
it. A nearer view would show that its heavy green is relieved by a
thousand points of gold, not yet wholly tarnished, but at this
distance they are lost in the surrounding gloom. The copper
beeches by the manor house, that of late gleamed like metal in the
brilliant sunshine, are darkening into black. The larch
plantations, marshalled in well-ordered phalanx along the old road
half up the hill, have long since lost their freshness, and the
leaves of this great pollard oak, whose maimed boughs throw a
shadow none too wide, are bright no longer.
For centuries has the old tree cooled its knotted roots in the
black earth of this swampy hollow. Signs of age are only too plain
to read. The furrowed bark has been split away in patches,
revealing underneath the galleries of wood-boring creatures; and
the old trunk is scarred with pits that the wood-peckers have been
digging, searching for fat white beetle grubs, or for the
evil-smelling caterpillar of the goat-moth. And just below the
pollarded branches there is a woodpecker's hole, whose well-worn
threshold suggests years of occupation.
Round the broad base of the tree marsh plants are
growing--spearwort and water-plantain, broad blades of iris, and
cool green plumes of marestail. In the long grass of the field
that stretches far on either hand, there are crimson spikes of
orchis, pale marsh valerian, and bright ragged robin, and here and
there nods a white plume of early cotton grass. It is a mere
thread of water that, loitering slowly through the meadow, seems
to pause round the roots of this old tree; the very slenderest of
streams. Even the reedy hollow where it steals along, a broken
line of silver, lost at times among sedges and brooklime and
strong meadow grasses, is hardly noticed as it wanders idly
through the field. Yet the birds know it well. Here the snipe lie
in the hard weather. Here, too, in winter, you may watch the
water-rail stealing in and out among the leafless thickets,
through the jungle of dead stems of fig-wort, and hemlock, and
tall hemp agrimony. On the black mud of the shore you may trace
to-day the light footprints of the wagtails that have their
lodging in a cranny of the ruined mill in the next meadow, the
broad sign manual of the moorhens whose nest is nearer still, and
the tracks of many a water-loving bird beside.
And, though the listening ear can but just catch the faint tinkle
of the tiny ripples that fret among the hemlock stems, there is as
much life along this little streamlet as by the mill pool yonder,
though the rumble of the old wheel and the plash of the mill-race
seem louder, even at this distance, than the low murmur of these
tiny waves. There, among the rafters of the boat-house, the
swallows build, and white-breasted martins have their nests under
the broad eaves of the mill. But it is here, by this oozy margin,
that they find the clay to frame their dwellings.
The moorhen rides in company with the little fleet of ducks upon
the pool, though she draws hastily away when the miller lounges
through the door to open the sluice, her nodding head keeping time
to the quick beating of her paddles. But it is here that she hides
her nest. It is behind the stems of that hazel bush, close down by
the stream. Last night, when the old bird went off with a splash
like a water-rat, there was just light enough to count the seven
eggs. But now, when you steal quietly up, there is no old bird on
guard. No eggs are in the nest. It is filled to the very brim with
something dark, like a black shadow. All at once, as you stand
peering down at it from the farther shore, hardly a yard away, the
shadow breaks into fragments that struggle over the edge and
plunge down into the water--seven fluffy little balls of sable
down, each with a touch of scarlet for a beak; seven bold young
moorhens, making their first venture into the great world;
argonauts born, paddling along the diminutive reaches of their
tiny river, and scrambling away into the green jungle on the shore
with a skill and readiness that is the heir-loom of untold
generations.
The sedge-warbler, too, loves the reedy fringe of the mill pond,
and he never shows to more advantage than when he balances on one
of those tall spears of bulrush. But his nest is here, in yonder
bush, whose foliage the cows have cropped so close. A strange song
is his, copied now from the skylark, and now from the swallow; and
now again you might think that a party of house-sparrows were
having a real good gossip down by the water.
Sparrow-like, too, is the note of a bird that sits motionless on
the topmost twig of a maple tree that leans over the brook. His
shape and his smart plumage, the flatness of his head and the rich
red brown of his back, mark him for a shrike, a butcher-bird. He,
too, is fond of this quiet corner. Year after year his mate and he
come back to the hawthorn bush below the maple, to repair the
great nest in which so many families have been reared. On a broad
flat stone that serves for a bridge over the meadow ditch near by
are strewn some broken snail shells and a half-eaten cockchafer.
But that was not his doing. If you look closely at the bush below
his perch, the bush that shelters his well-hidden nest, you may
discover the butcher-bird's "larder;" may see spitted on the long
thorns that help to guard his dwelling, beetles, or bees, or even
a young bird, or, it may be, a dragon-fly, who surely must have
been taken unaware, since with those strong gauzy wings it is said
he can distance even the swallow in his swift career.
A man with a pail slung on his shoulder, and with a milking stool
in his hand, comes slowly out from the farm buildings, a dog
following at his heels; a dog grey and shabby and unkempt, of
breed altogether past description. But he is a master of his art,
mongrel though he be. The man points to a group of cattle in the
far corner of the field. At once the dog goes off to bring them
in, heading and turning, and then urging them gently homeward,
with marvellous skill and patience, encouraged now and again by
his master's strange and inarticulate shouts. A troop of goslings
is grazing in the middle of the field, goose and gander standing
sentinel at either end of the extended line. The old birds sound a
challenge as the dog goes by, and lower their silly heads, and
hiss and charge at him; while he, his mind set wholly on the
business of the moment, canters past unmoved. An angry gander is
by no means an antagonist to be despised. There is something
particularly irritating, too, in the style of the attack. We can
hardly wonder at the village urchin who, having been sorely
harassed as to his unprotected legs by vicious digs of the old
bird's beak, tried to soothe his wounded feelings by stoning at
long range the unoffending goslings, blubbering out in mingled
pain and rage to the indignant farmer who presently seized on him
red-handed: "What for they goschicks' fayther bite I, then?"
Round the old farm yonder, whose weather-stained roofs and walls
half ruinous just show among its clustering trees, there is a
picture of quiet autumn life. In the spacious stack-yard a party
of labourers, whose sunburnt faces glow against the green
background of the trees like so many round red autumn suns, are
standing about a great waggon, tossing hay to men at work on the
fast-growing ricks of new, sweet-smelling aftermath. It is an
ancient homestead. A thousand summers, it may be, has hay been
cleared from these broad meadows. A thousand times, at the season
of mists and mellow fruitfulness, have the sheaves been piled in
this old stack-yard. The hamlet of three houses is little changed,
either in name or character, since the days of Edward the
Confessor, when Brictric held it, paying geld for one hide of
land; when two villeins, with as many boors and serfs, made up all
its scanty population. A pleasant place, this warm autumn
afternoon, is the hollow at the back of the farm; a broad space of
level grass land, once an orchard, and with a few forlorn old
apple trees still standing in it; bordered on one side by a green
lane, and on the other by a broken line of hedge-row, through
whose wide gaps the thistles and brake-fern are marching down like
caterans from the hills, bent on reconquering the pasture-land and
turning it once more into a wilderness. All round it rise the
hills, robbing it of some hours of sunshine indeed, yet sheltering
it from every wind that blows. Just showing over a steep brow
above are the white houses of a hill-side village, once in the
heart of a great mining field--the very place Macaulay had in
view when he described how
"The rugged miners poured to war from Mendip's sunless caves."
The mines have long been deserted. But here and there among the
villages you still may happen on some son of the soil, some
time-worn and bent and wrinkled patriarch, who, in his young days,
dug for ore among these hills; who remembers the time when a
miner, working here for his own hand, could earn a sovereign a
day. But although the miners have been gone these fifty years, the
whole country side is seamed and scarred with traces of their old
workings. There are fields on this farm where the ground is so
broken with heaps of rubbish from the pits, and so full of
barely-covered shafts, that the land is almost valueless. But
there are no buildings to spoil the landscape. There was no
machinery but the windlass and the bucket. And here, as ever,
Nature has done her best to hide the traces of man's ravages. The
heaps of stone and earth she has changed to grassy knolls, covered
them with lotus and burnet and scented clusters of the thyme, and
scattered over them little clumps of dark campanula. Under her
kindly touch the stony shafts are turned to bowery hollows,
green with moss and stone-crop, and long plumes of fern.
[Illustration: WINTERHEAD: AN UPLAND PASTURE.]
A bird-haunted spot is this little hollow in the hills. The clump
of old Scotch firs looking down from the hill-slope yonder is the
harbour of crow and magpie, ever the hangers-on of a West Country
farm. The straggling hedge-rows that part these broad fields are
full of empty nests. Here, among the red fruit of rowan and
whitebeam, the ring-ousel lingers on his southward journey. In
this old apple tree, whose withered arms are hung for once with
fruit, like little golden balls, is a woodpecker's hole, with
marks of the maker's tool about it yet. That stately oak tree,
springing straight and tall in the line of the old
hedge-row--touched above with a hundred points of light where the
pale green acorns hang, and laced below, across its drooping
branches, with silver lines of gossamer--is a resting place for
all the birds of the air. In the spring the cuckoo alights upon
its topmost crown and calls his name to all the neighbourhood.
From its leafy crest the magpie looks down, meditating another
raid upon the hencoop. The brown squirrels too, love to frolic in
its dim green shadows, playing hide and seek among the branches,
and racing headlong down its wrinkled bark to scamper over the
short turf of the meadow. At this moment two linnets on its
topmost spray are filling the air with such a chorus of sweet
notes and breezy chattering that you might think a score of birds
were in the tree.
The sun is sinking low. The shadows of the hedge-row elms are
stealing far down the grassy slope. Sparrows that have been
gleaning in outlying stubble-fields are flying home to roost in
the ivy on the old barn wall, or in the sides of the stacks, or in
snug tunnels that they have made for themselves in the thatched
roof of their thankless lord and suzerain:--quarters infinitely
cleaner and sweeter and more wholesome altogether than those of
their smoke-blackened cousins in the city. The sun is down. A soft
blue mist is gathering in the red heart of the pines. And now
"The shadows veil the meadows,
And the sunset's golden ladders
Sink from twilight's walls of grey."
[Illustration: A GREY OLD HOUSE BY THE SEA.]
WOODSPRING: A GREY OLD HOUSE BY THE SEA.
The heat-glimmer is still quivering on the sand, and over the vast
mud-flats, bared by the retreating tide, a soft haze hangs. Yet
the sun, sinking slowly through a cloudless sky, reddens as it
nears the low horizon, and the grey grass of the old sea wall is
brightening in the glow of sunset. Over the long curve of the
sand-hills shows a wide sweep of plain, whose level meadows,
freshened by the welcome rain, are still a very blaze of gold.
Against the sky, where, at the far limit of the bay, the ragged
hillocks die away into the shore, stands the white shaft of a
lighthouse. Farther still, across the hazy mud-flats, rise the
faint shapes of shadowy hills. The tide is out. A sea of boulders,
shaggy with dark weed, look like a herd of strange monsters come
ashore to bask upon the sand. There is no sign of human presence
anywhere, save a house roof just showing here and there above the
sand-hills, the distant hamlets scattered at far intervals over
the moor, and the black stakes of fishing nets that stand out on
the grey mud like webs of giant spiders. There is no figure on the
shore, no stranded boat, no idle sail. Nor is there sound, save
the low monotonous murmur of the sea. But here and there over the
desolate expanse dark shapes of birds are moving. Now and then a
troop of dunlins careers along the sand. Surely they are soon back
after their brief northern summer. One can hardly think that they
and the brown whimbrels whose musical trill at times falls softly
on the ear can have been away at all. Now a party of gulls get up
with wild stormy crying, and wheel and eddy in the air, now light,
now dark on the grey sky of the horizon. All the while to the
cliff ledges overhead clamorous daws are drifting, passing to
their nests, or settling on storm-worn pinnacles of rock. That
shrill pipe was the cry of a kestrel. Two rock doves hurrying
homeward, cliff-dwellers like the rest, pay no heed. They know him
well, too well to fear at any time his beak or claw. Here he
comes, wheeling round the headland. With wings and tail spread
wide, he pauses a moment to hover in the air; then sails slowly
by. No shrill clamour from the cliff answers his challenge. No
fierce young eyases yet are on the watch for his return. He
alights on a ledge far overhead, where his mate no doubt is
brooding on her rich brown eggs. Over the sea, trembling in the
sinking sun, lies a gleam as of frosted silver. Suddenly, far out
on the grey level, breaks a line of light. A faint sound falls on
the ear--the low roar of the returning sea, the first wave of the
rising tide. Now troops of daws, rising from the fields along the
shore, fly homeward--a gathering cloud of dusky figures sweeping
towards the cliff, that echoes with their musical clamour.
Right overhead they go, clustering like bees on ledges and
pinnacles and grassy slopes, and settle down to gossip over the
experiences of the day. Again they rise into the air, and wheel
over the sea, and again turn homeward, darkening the cliff as with
innumerable points of shadow. Once more they rise in eddying
crowd. The troop divides. With sharp chorus of farewell one party
flies straight over the hill. Their resting-place is farther on.
They are not dwellers in the cliff. They are making for the low
hills to the northward, a ridge of limestone dwindling into such
another rocky headland. There, in the shelter of the hills, stand
the ruins of a priory, in the niches of whose crumbling tower, or
on the dusty floor of its neglected belfry, their sires and they
have built for generations their untidy nests. It is an ancient
pile. Founded now nearly seven centuries ago, its grey walls
harboured for three hundred years a handful of monks,
black-stoled, black-hooded, darker even than these daws. It has
long been an article of faith in the countryside that the old
tower was
"... built
To purge de Traci's soul from guilt,
Of Becket foully slain."
But in the original letter, still to be read in the Cottonian
library, in which William de Curtenai, grandson of Traci, made
known to the Bishop of the diocese his intention of founding a
"monastic house of the order of monks of St. Augustine," there is
no hint at all of expiation. Nor, indeed, have we any evidence
that the guilt of murder ever did lie heavy on de Traci's soul:
though there is an old tradition that, after a brief reappearance
at Court, he spent the remainder of his stormy life in seclusion
on his manor near Morthoe, where in the old churchyard by the sea
"Lie all the Tracies, with the wind in their faces."
The founder of the priory seems to have had no other object in
view than "the welfare of the soul of Robert de Curtenai, my
father, ... and of my mother and myself; also of my wife, my
ancestors and descendants." For rather more than three centuries
the "Worspryng" canons, never probably more than ten in number,
lived and died in this grey old house by the sea. We know little
of their story; but the document is still in existence to which
the last of their priors set his name in acknowledgment that the
Pope was a usurper, and that King Henry alone was true head of the
Church. Two years later all the minor monasteries were forfeited
to the Crown--"forasmoche as manifest synne, vicious, carnall and
abomynable lyving is dayly used and comitted amonges the lytell
Abbeys and Pryories." This was one of the "lytell Pryories." Its
revenues from all sources, whether from rents that were reckoned
in horseshoes, or from "arable at iv_d._," or from "wode and waste
at j_d._ the acre," amounted to rather under a hundred a year.
When the little party of friars turned their backs upon their
home, they appear to have carried with them what was probably the
most sacred of their relics: one of those small wooden cups which,
filled with "Canterbury Water"--that is, with water containing a
minute quantity of the martyr's blood--were sold to visitors at
Becket's shrine. Marvellous are the tales related by the
chroniclers of the time as to the virtue of this wonderful water.
By its use sight, hearing, speech, reason, and even life were
restored.
The pavement was in fact still sprinkled with his blood when those
supernatural manifestations began, which were to make the martyr's
shrine the richest in the world. On the very day of the murder, a
blind man on his way to seek aid at the church of St. Nicholas,
was accosted by "an appearance in the form of a man, who warned
him to betake himself to the new martyr of Christ." He groped his
way to Becket's body. He touched his own sightless eyes with the
sacred blood, and his vision was immediately restored. This was
the first of many miracles. The pious chroniclers record how men,
women, and children flocked to the shrine from every corner of the
Kingdom, some to ask aid, others to return thanks for favours
granted: as Chaucer puts it:
"The holy, blisful martyr for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke."
Captives, who had been taken by the Saracens, travelled all the
way from Damascus, to return thanks at the shrine of Canterbury,
because St. Thomas had appeared to them in the visions of the
night and helped them to escape.
Five writers of the time did their best to record for the benefit
of future ages the miracles of the blessed martyr. These were
Benedict, sometime Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, and
afterwards Abbot of Peterborough; William of Canterbury, who,
perhaps, held office at the shrine after Benedict; Alan, Abbot of
Tewkesbury; John of Salisbury, who witnessed the murder, and whom
de Traci thought was the man he had wounded; and Grim of
Cambridge,--not a monk, in all probability, nor really connected
in any way with Becket, but his great admirer. It was Grim, it
will be remembered, who was wounded in the vain attempt to save
the Archbishop. The minutest particulars are given in these
chronicles. The names and professions, the counties, the native
towns of many of the pilgrims are recorded.
There are exceptions. In the case of a man who came from "the
province of Surrey," Benedict says "the barbarous name of the town
has not stuck in my memory." The miracles were of every imaginable
description. A sick monk, near Sedan, too ill to leave his cell,
was touched with a mere list of the Saint's achievements, and in a
short time he was able to resume his duties. A monk of Byland was
dying. He had already received the _Viaticum_, when the Abbot,
having made the sign of the Cross in water upon a piece of
Becket's hair-shirt, caused the dying man's mouth to be opened,
and the water administered. Instantly, we are told, the sick man
recovered speech and appetite. It was a common thing to promise a
candle to the Saint. There were men who were too ill to go in
person to Canterbury, and who dated their recovery from the
instant that the candle was lighted for them at the shrine.
There is a description of five widows who tried in vain to restore
life to a child who had been three hours under water. They held
him up by the feet; they repeated nine Paternosters over him in
the name of the blessed St. Thomas, but all with no effect. Then
one of them said to the child's mother: "Run and fetch a piece of
string and measure the child, and promise to the martyr a candle
of the same length." It was done, and the boy at once recovered.
The smallest offerings were not disdained. A Flemish bird-catcher,
having tried in vain for some days to trap a certain falcon, cried
out, "O Blessed Thomas, glorious martyr, I will give thee a penny
if thou wilt give me the falcon." Benedict tells us that "it came
instantly to the bird-catcher, as if used to his hand. We both saw
the falcon," he goes on, "and received the money."
Even more marvellous still are the legends that passed current as
to the wonders wrought by the martyr's blood, which in quantities
about the bulk of a hazel nut, and largely diluted, were sold to
pilgrims under the name of Canterbury Water. A man, journeying
home after visiting the shrine, was belated at Rochester. In vain
he sought shelter for the night. At door after door he was refused
admittance. At last, "for the sake of the blessed martyr," he was
taken in. In the night the town caught fire. When the citizens
were fleeing, panic-stricken, "the pilgrim, whose faith was more
fervent than the material flame, remaining boldly on the roof,
called for a spear, or something long. A fork (hayfork, perhaps)
was handed up to him. Then, taking the reliquary (containing
Canterbury Water) from his neck ... he fastened it to the fork,
held it out towards the fire," and thus kept the flames at bay.
For "the fire, as if fearing a contrary element, turned aside."
Finally the whole town was burnt, with the single exception of its
one hospitable house.
A few drops of Canterbury Water swallowed or administered
externally sufficed to cure the most desperate diseases, and were
quite as efficacious as the pilgrimage itself. By its use the
blind, the deaf, the lame, the palsied, were cured, and even the
dead brought back to life.
The precious liquid was sold at first in small wooden vessels,
fitted with lids, in which mirrors were sometimes fixed, "_specula
mulierum_," as the monkish writer puts it. But as the wood was apt
to split, flasks of lead or earthenware were used instead. These
were hung from the neck, and came to be regarded, like the palm
branch of Jerusalem or the escalop shell of Compostella, as an
emblem of the pilgrimage. It was not an uncommon practice, in old
days, to place in a martyr's tomb a small vessel filled with his
blood. Many such have been discovered in the Catacombs. In the
Kircher Museum at Rome there is an agate cup, containing the
remains of blood, which was found in the Catacombs of St.
Callixtus.
A special point of interest attaches to these legends in that
there is reason to think that one of these very reliquaries, one
of the earliest and most primitive form and still actually
containing traces of blood, has been preserved to the present day.
Forty years ago, or rather more--the actual date was 1849--some
workmen, while repairing the interior of a little West Country
church, at Kewstoke in Somersetshire, had occasion to remove an
old carved stone, which had been built into the masonry. It was
apparently the head of a column, worked in Caen stone, a material
not used elsewhere in the building, and the style was earlier than
anything else in the church.