EDITION IMPORTED BY
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY
156 FIFTH AVENUE, : NEW YORK
AN OLD ENGLISH HOME
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA
THE QUEEN OF LOVE
URITH
CHEAP JACK ZITA
MRS. CURGENVEN OF CURGENVEN
ARMINELL
KITTY ALONE
MARGERY OF QUETHER
JACQUETTA
NOÉMI
THE BROOM-SQUIRE
DARTMOOR IDYLLS
THE PENNYCOMEQUICKS
GUAVAS THE TINNER
BLADYS OF THE STEWPONEY
[Illustration: AN OLD ENGLISH HOME]
AN
OLD ENGLISH HOME
AND ITS DEPENDENCIES
BY
S. BARING-GOULD
ILLUSTRATED BY F. BLIGH BOND
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
1898
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PATERNAL ACRES 1
II. THE MANOR HOUSE 29
III. THE DOMESTIC HEARTH 49
IV. OLD FURNITURE 68
V. CEILINGS 85
VI. THE PARISH CHURCH 98
VII. THE VILLAGE INN 153
VIII. THE MANOR MILL 175
IX. THE FARMHOUSE 190
X. COTTAGES 216
XI. THE VILLAGE DOCTOR 243
XII. SCAPEGRACES 269
XIII. HEDGES 290
XIV. UNDERGROUND RIGHTS 307
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
An Old English Home _Frontispiece_
Marianne's Cottage 3
The Cottage of the "Savages" 11
The Manor House, South Wraxall, Wiltshire 31
Chateau de Tumilhac 41
Battlemented Transom 45
A Chimney-piece (End of Seventeenth Century) 51
The Settle 57
The Chimney-top, Ancient and Modern 63
Fireplace and Chimney-piece, York 65
Chair (1840) 69
Chair (Sixteenth Century) 70
A Chest of Drawers (1652) 75
The Livery Cupboard 77
Portion of an Old Plaster Ceiling near Leeds 85
The Drawing-room, Dunsland, Devon 87
The Old Pulpit, Kenton 101
The Modern-Gothic Pulpit, Kenton 104
Staverton Rood Screen 131
Inside the Village Inn 155
The Old George Inn, Glastonbury 169
Old Mill in Cornwall 183
Plan of Buildings at Anseremme 193
Anseremme, on the Meuse 197
An Essex Farmhouse 207
Old Cottages at Henbury 219
Wonson Manor 279
Alabaster Slab with Footprints, Vatican, Rome 295
Devonshire Hedges 306
[Illustration: PATERNAL ACRES]
CHAPTER I.
There lives in my neighbourhood a venerable dame, in an old bacon box
in a fallen cottage, whose condition will be best understood by the
annexed illustration.
Fifteen years ago the house was in habitable condition, that is to say
to such as are not particular. It was true that the thatched roof had
given way in places; but the proprietress obtained shelter for her head
by stuffing up the chimney of the bedroom fireplace with a sack filled
with chaff, and pushing her bed to the hearth and sleeping with her
head under the sack.
But access to this bedroom became difficult, as the stairs, exposed
to rain, rotted, and she was compelled to ascend and descend by an
improvised ladder.
After a while the ladder collapsed.
Then the old lady descended for good and all, and took up her abode on
the ground floor--kitchen, and parlour, and dining-room, and bedroom
all in one.
"And terr'ble warm and comfortable it be," said she, when the roof fell
in bodily, and covered the floor overhead.
But when the walls were exposed, rain and frost told on them, and also
on the beam ends sustaining the floor, and the next stage was that one
side of the floor gave way wholly.
"Tes best as it be," said the old woman; "now the rain runs off more
suant."
But in falling the floor blocked the fireplace and the doorway. The
consequences are--now we come to the present condition of affairs--that
the old lady has had to do without a fire for certainly three winters,
amongst others that bitter one of 1893-4, and her only means of egress
and ingress is through the window. Of that not one half of the panes
are whole; the gaps are stopped with rags.
[Illustration: MARIANNE'S COTTAGE]
And now the floor is rotted through overhead by the mouldering thatch
that covers it in part, and the rain drips through.[1]
Accordingly my lady has taken refuge in an old chest, and keeps the lid
up with a brick.
"Tes terr'ble cosy," says she.
Last year, having a Scottish gentleman staying with me, I took him
over to call on "Marianne." We had a long interview. As we left, he
turned to me with a look of dismay and said, "Good heavens! in the
wildest parts of the Highlands such a thing would be impossible--and in
England!"--he did not finish the sentence.
I went back to Marianne and said, "Now, tell me why you will go on
living in this ruin?"
"My dear," said she, "us landed proprietors must hold on to our houses
and acres. Tes a thing o' principle."
There is perhaps a margin of exaggeration in this--in speaking of
acres, as I believe the said estate spreads over hardly a quarter of an
acre.
How was it, and how were similar little properties acquired?
By squatting.
Formerly there was a considerable amount of common land, on which the
peasants turned out their asses and geese. Then some adventuresome man,
who took a wife and had no house into which to put her, annexed a piece
of the common, just enough for a cottage and a garden, and none said
him Nay. There was still plenty for all, and so, in time, it became his
own, and was lost to the rest of the parishioners. Little by little the
commons were thus encroached upon. Then, again, formerly there was much
open ground by the sides of the roads. Cattle were driven along the
highways often for great distances, and the turf and open spaces by the
sides of the roads were provision made for their needs.
But squatters took portions of this open ground, enclosed, and built
on it. There was no one to object. The lord of the manor might have
done so, but he was a little doubtful as to his right to forbid this
annexation of ground on the side of the highway, and he and the
parishioners generally agreed to let be. It might save the man coming
on the rates if he had a garden and house--no harm was done. There was
still plenty of food for the flocks and herds driven along. So we find
thousands and tens of thousands of these cottages thus planted by the
roadsides, with their gardens--all appropriations by squatters.
A curious thing happened to me when I was Rector of East Mersey in
Essex. At the edge of the Marshes were a couple of cottages near a
copious spring of limpid water. They had been built, and a tract of
garden enclosed, some two hundred years ago, and occupied, rent free,
by the descendants of the original appropriator. During my tenure
of the rectory, the last representatives left, in fact abandoned
the tenements. The Rector was lord of the manor. Accordingly these
cottages, in very bad repair, fell to me, and I suddenly found
myself responsible for them. Should I leave I could be come upon for
dilapidations, and it would have cost me something like three hundred
pounds to put these houses to right, from which I had not received a
penny. Moreover, when rebuilt, no one would have rented them, so aguish
and unhealthy was the spot. Accordingly I had to obtain, at some cost,
a faculty to enable me to pull them down.
Some years ago Mr. Greenwood drew attention to the "North Devon
Savages." These were squatters, or rather descendants of squatters, who
held a piece of land and occupied a ruinous habitation, and lived in a
primitive condition as to clothing and matrimonial arrangements.
A lady, who was very kind to the family, wrote to me relative to them,
in 1889: "Some fifteen or sixteen years ago there was a good deal of
talk about the Cheritons, or Savages as they were called. The family
had been long known as worthy of this latter name, by the manner
in which they lived, and their violence and depredations, real and
supposed, which caused them to be regarded with a great deal of dread
and almost superstitious awe. The article in the newspaper, written by
a correspondent, had called attention to them, and roused their bitter
resentment, and some of my menservants said that on one occasion, when
they tarried from curiosity on the confines of their little property,
they were almost surrounded by the family, young and old, and some
almost naked, with pitchforks and sticks, and that they had to continue
on their way with haste. I do not know from what cause, but I think
on account of some leniency he had showed them as a magistrate on one
occasion, they had not as inimical a feeling towards my husband as
towards the other landowners. One evening, on his return home from
hunting, he told me he had heard a sad story of the head of the family,
I suppose a man of thirty-eight or forty, having wounded himself badly
in the foot, when shooting or poaching, and that he stoutly refused
to see or have any help from clergyman or any other person; that the
doctor declared it was necessary the foot should be amputated, but
that the man had protested that he would sooner die as he was, and had
bid him depart; that he was lying in a most miserable state. I then
settled I would go to him, and if necessary stay the night there, and
supposing I could persuade him to permit the operation, that I would
nurse him through it, and then obtain further help. As Lord---- knew
that this might be permitted by the savages, possibly, to one of his
family, and as I was determined in the matter, I took a carriage and
one of my little children, who could look after the horse (as it was
deemed most inexpedient to have any servant with us); also all that
we could think of for the comfort of an invalid; and I knew I could
arrange to send back the child and trap with an escort, if I had to
stay.
[Illustration: THE COTTAGE OF THE "SAVAGES"]
"When we reached that part of the road to Nymet Rowland where their
field touched, we stopped, and in a moment some very angry, excited
women and children rushed out. I bade them be quiet and hear what I had
to say, and then told them that Lord ---- had asked me to bring these
comforts to the sick man, and that I was come to offer him my services
in his illness. They were instantly pacified and pleased, and begged
me to come to what they called the farm--a place with half a roof and
three walls. There were, I should think, three generations who lived
in this place. An old woman, not altogether illiterate, the wounded
man, his son, and his wife, and three or four children, and one or two
sisters of his, children of the old woman.
"I did not see anything that answered to a bed there; the man was
lying on two settles or sets of stools, with, I think, a blanket and
something which might, or might not, have been a mattress under him.
"In order to get his head under some certain shelter, it was resting on
a settle in the chimney, side by side with a fire; his body and legs
were on a settle in the room, if you could call a place with only three
walls and half a roof by that name, and I think that the floor was in
many places bare earth, and that the grass grew on it. The family were
all pleasant enough--rough but grateful--and I found that though the
doctor had thought amputation necessary, he now believed it might be
avoided--that the man had decided against it, but allowed the doctor
to continue to visit him. They were delighted with all I brought, and
begged me to return soon to them, which I promised to do, and to send
my children when I could not come. The old woman was a character, and
quoted Scripture--certainly at random--but with some shrewdness.
"After that time I and mine were always welcome. One of the married
sisters of the wounded Cheriton, who quite recovered, had bad
bronchitis, and some of my family visited her continually, and on one
occasion found her sitting on the thatched _bit_ of roof, against
the chimney, for 'change of air' in her convalescence. She was a big
powerful woman, who had on one occasion knocked down a policeman who
was taking her brother to Exeter gaol, and her mother, the old woman,
told me with pride that they had had to send a cart and three men to
take _her_ away. She afterwards married a labourer. The rest of the
family sold their property, and only the other day when I revisited
the place for the first time after many years, I found a smart house
erected in the place of the old 'Cheritons.' The women became great
beggars till the death of the old mother, and the dispersion on the
sale of the property.
"I remember once meeting the man Cheriton in the lane. He had decorated
the collar of his horse that he was driving with horrible entrails of a
sheep or pig. This was just the kind of savage ornament that would suit
them.
"In the case of the woman who married the labourer, this was brought
about by the Rector of Nymet, but I fancy, according to any usually
received ideas, that was the _one_ marriage; and that my use of the
words _wife_, etc., would not stand legal interpretation."
I remember these savages between forty and fifty years ago, and then
their manner of life was the same; the only clothes they wore were what
they could pick from hedges where they had been put out after a wash to
dry. A policeman told me he had seen one of the women in a condition
of absolute nudity sitting in a hedge of their garden, suckling a
child. The curate of the parish incurred their resentment because he
endeavoured to interfere with their primitive ways. One night, as he
was riding up a lane in the dark, he thought he observed a shadow move
in the darkness and steal into the hedge. Suspicious of evil, as he was
near the habitation of the Cheritons, he dismounted and led his horse,
and found that a gate had been taken off its hinges and laid across the
way so as to throw his horse, and possibly break his neck. He at once
made a dash to arrest the shadow that lurked in the hedge, but it made
a bolt over the bank, and by its nakedness and fluttering rags, he was
certain that the figure was that of one of the savages.
The old man, or one of the old men, finished his days--not on the
paternal acres, but in a barrel littered with straw, chained to a post
in an outhouse in an adjoining parish. I used him up in my story of
"John Herring."
The usual end of these little holdings is that the proprietor either
gets into some poaching affray, or quarrels with a neighbour, and so
makes the acquaintanceship of a local lawyer, and this acquaintance
leads to a loan of a little money, when the holder of the land is
short of cash, on the security of the tenement. The sequel need not be
further described than by saying that the property changes hands.
These are instances of paternal bits of acre rather than of acres, and
such pieces are very liable to pass away, as not enough in themselves
to support a family. But these are instances in small of the manner
in which the manors were formed in ancient times. The manor was that
estate which a man was able to get his hand upon and to hold and work
through his serfs.
There is an idyllic old English home that belonged to an ancient
family of the same name, the Penfounds of Penfound, in the parish of
Poundstock, on the north Cornish coast.
This coast is wind-swept, yet the winds from the sea are never cold,
so that wherever there is shelter there trees, shrubs, and flowers
luxuriate. In a dip in the land, at the source of a little stream,
snuggling into the folds of the down, bedded in foliage, open to the
sun, hummed about by bees, twinkled over by butterflies, lies this
lovely old house. The neighbourhood has been modernized and vulgarized
distressingly, but as yet this dear old house has not been trodden
out of existence. It remains on the verge of ruin, with its old hall,
old garden, and stately granite doorway into the latter. A sad record
belongs to this venerable manor. The family pedigree goes back to
before the Wars of the Roses. The Penfounds mated with the bluest blood
of the west, the Trevillians, the Kelloways, the Darells, the Pollards,
the Grenvilles, the Chamonds, the Pollexfens--and the last Penfound who
sat on the paternal acres died in the poorhouse of his native parish,
Poundstock, in 1847, leaving issue, now poor labouring people tilling
the land at so much a week--where for centuries they were manorial
lords.
In ancient British times the whole country belonged to tribes, and the
tribes owned their several districts. At the head of each tribe was
the chief. He claimed and was given right to free maintenance by the
tribesmen, and he distributed the land among the householders of the
tribe. These householders owed no allegiance to any other authority
than the chief, on whom they depended for everything and to whom they
owed implicit obedience.
Every man who was not a tribesman was an enemy. If the tribe increased
beyond what the land could maintain, it fought another tribe and
wrested from it the land and drove it away or exterminated it, with
complete indifference to the fact that this dispossessed tribe spoke
the same tongue, had the same social organism, was of the same blood.
The tribal system from which the Celt never freed himself entirely was
the curse of the Celtic race, predooming it to ruin. The history of
the Welsh, the Irish, the Highlanders, is just the same as that of the
Gauls, one of internecine feud, no political cohesion, no capacity for
merging private interests, forgetting private grudges for a patriotic
cause.
And at the bottom of all this lay the absence among the clansmen of the
principle of private property. The land was possessed by all in common,
subject to allotment by the chief, and among the tribal chiefs there
was no link; each coveted the lands of the other. This it was which
made the Celt to be everywhere a prey to such races as knew how to put
self-interest in the background.
When the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, came to Britain they brought with them
another social system altogether. They were possessed with the sense
of the importance of private property. So deficient had the Britons
been in this that they had not other than the most elementary notions
of house building. Timber and wattle sufficed for them, but the Saxon,
and afterwards the Norman, had a higher conception of the home, and
he began at once to fashion himself a permanent abode, and to make it
not solid only but beautiful. And he did more than that, he brought
the idea of hedges with him wherewith to enclose the land he chose to
consider his own.
Saxon, Angle, or Jute put his hand down on the tribal territory, after
having destroyed the tribal organization, leaving only a portion of
wild moor and a tract of forest land, also a little arable land, for
the members of the community whom he converted into serfs. They tilled
the land, kept flocks and herds, and supplied him with what meat, wool,
yarn, and grain he required; they met under his presidency in the hall
at his courts. The tenants were of various sorts; some were bordarii or
cotters, rendering occasional service for the use of their houses and
bits of land; others, the villains, in complete servitude.
At the Norman Invasion, the Saxon thanes were themselves humbled in
turn; the manors were given a more legal character and transferred to
favourites of William the Conqueror. But the old Saxon chiefs in each
manor were probably very rarely turned out neck and crop, but were
retained as holders of the estate subject to the new lords, managing
them and rendering to their masters certain dues.
In Saxon times there were book-land and folk-land, the former the
private property of thanes and churls, the latter common land of the
community. But after the Norman Conquest most, if not all, of the
latter fell under the hand of the lord of the manor. Here and there the
village community still continued to exercise its right to grant tracts
to be enclosed, but usually the manorial lord claimed and exercised
this right. At the present time, in my own county, this is being done
in a certain parish that possessed a vast tract of common land on the
confines of Dartmoor Forest. The farmers and cottagers are enclosing
at a rapid rate, paying the lord of the manor a trifling fine, and
thus making the land their own for ever. There can be no question that
originally the fine would have gone into the parish cash-box; now it
goes into the landlord's pocket.
"There is much that is primitive and simple to be met with, but nothing
of barbarism in the land institutions of Saxon England, unless,
indeed, an excessive love for it, and an almost exaggerated deference
for its possession may be so classed. In an age when freedom was the
exceptional condition, the ownership of land was the mark of a free
man, and ample territory the inseparable appanage of rank. No amount
of gold or chattel property conferred the franchise: land alone was
recognized as the vehicle of all personal privilege, and the basis of
civil rank. Centuries have not obliterated these features in their
descendants to this day; the love of land, its estimation above all
other forms of property, and its political preponderance."[2]
Reformers have roundly abused, and striven to break down our land
system, especially the right of primogeniture, and to resolve the land
into small holdings to be cultivated by small owners. There are, as
in all social and political questions, two sides to this. I do not
deny for a moment that much is to be said in favour of equal partition
of land among all the children, and of the multiplication of peasant
proprietors. But I venture to think that the system that has prevailed
in England has produced results that could have been attained by no
other. In this especially, that it has provided at once a stable core,
with a body of fluid, migratory, and energetic young people, who have
not been bound to the clod.
A man, knowing that his land will descend to his son and son's son,
will plant and improve, and spend his money most unselfishly on the
land, for the family advantage. But if he thinks that it will go into
other hands, will he for this purpose deny himself present luxuries and
amusements?
I suppose such an alternative as this has presented itself to many a
landowner. "I ought to spend from £150 to £200 in planting this autumn.
Shall I do it, or run up to town, go to the opera, eat, drink, and
enjoy myself, and spend the money on myself?"
There is, surely, something very beautiful and wholesome in the manner
in which an Englishman of means lives for, and cares for the family,
as a whole--the generations unborn, as well as his own children--and
builds, plants, provides for the future, furnishing it with a lovable
centre, from which it may radiate into all lands.
It was, unless I am greatly mistaken, the principle of equal
subdivision, or of gavelkind, that existed among the Welsh, which
ruined their cause. The Celt has more originality, genius, energy than
the Saxon, but he was paralyzed in his attempts to resist the invader
by the interminable break-up of power and of property at the death
of every prince. The kinglet of Glamorgan had ten sons--one became a
monk, and the rest parcelled up his lands and his authority over men.
A great prince like Howel Dda was able to consolidate the nation, but
only for his lifetime; at his death it was torn into petty factions by
his sons. It was this that maimed the Briton before the Saxon, not the
superiority in genius, numbers, character in the latter; and it was
this again which threw Wales at the feet of the Norman kings.
Now look at almost all the farm-buildings in France. Everything there
is in ruin, all the outward tokens of decay are manifest. Why is this?
Because no owner cares to spend money on putting the place to rights.
Everything will be divided at his death, and he must hoard his money
for division among those children who do not take the farm. So one
gets a tumble-down tenement, and the rest the money that might make it
habitable. Moreover, this continued to the next generation ends in the
disappearance of the family from its paternal acres. In the Limousin
there is hardly a family that retains its hold on its land over the
third generation.
I know four delightful old ladies, all unmarried, inheriting a
well-known and honoured name in Perigord. On the fathers death
everything was divided. One took the château, without having the money
to repair it, and she lives under the ruins. The second took a farm and
lives with the _paysan_ and _paysanne_. The third took the family plate
and china and family portraits, and lives over a _modiste_ in small
lodgings, and is obliged to sell her ancestral goods piecemeal to keep
herself going. The fourth took some shares the father had in a _Pâté de
Foix gras_ factory; it failed, and she has to scramble on upon the alms
of her sisters.
Among the peasants the tenure of small holdings is mischievous; they
are chained to the soil, whereas, if set free, they might emigrate
and become energetic colonists, or go into the towns and become
intelligent, active artisans. It is just when a young man ought to be
starting on a career that he acquires a few acres, and at once he is
paralyzed. Those acres hold him, he cannot do justice to them, he has
not the means. He does not like to part with them, and he spends his
life bowed over them. Worse than this, unable to avert the further
dismemberment of his estate on his death, he resolves in compact with
his wife to have no more than one, or at the most two children. Now,
with us, the younger son of a landed proprietor knows he must push his
way in the world, and from the moment his intelligence begins to act
he looks about him for openings. Our labourers also, unchained to the
soil, go about wherever work may be had. Where there is a market for
their abilities, thither they go, but go they would not, if they owned
their little plot of land and house.
And, if I am not much mistaken, it is this early developed sense of
independence that has been the making of Englishmen all over the world;
but, then, it is the conservative element, the holding to the paternal
acres, that has made of dear old England one great garden and park, the
proprietor spending his money on the land, instead of on his pleasures
or self, as elsewhere.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE MANOR HOUSE]