that money did pass and that the contractor of the new marriage believed
it was a right and proper union, although perhaps irregular; and the
first wife unquestionably believed that she was acting in observance
of a legal right in transferring her husband to her sister. There are
instances in which country people have gone before a local solicitor and
have had a contract of sale drawn up for the disposal of their wives. The
Birmingham police court in 1853 had to adjudicate on such a case, and the
astounding thing in this instance was that a lawyer could be found to
draw up the contract. It is no wonder that the magistrates administered
a very severe reprimand. But there was a far earlier case than this—that
of Sir William de Paganel. The lady stoutly and indignantly resisted the
transfer, and appealed against the contract to the law, which declared
the sale to be null and void.
In 1815 a man held a regular auction in the market-place at Pontefract,
offering his wife at a minimum bidding of one shilling, but he managed
to excite a competition, and she was finally knocked down for eleven
shillings.
In 1820 a man named Brouchet led his wife, a decent, pleasant-looking
woman, but with a tongue in her mouth, into the cattle-market at
Canterbury from the neighbouring village of Broughton. He required a
salesman to dispose of her, but the salesman replied that his dealings
were with cattle only, and not with women. Brouchet, not to be beaten,
thereupon hired a cattle-pen, paying sixpence for the hire, and led his
wife into it by the halter that was round her neck. She did not fetch
a high figure, being disposed of to a young man of Canterbury for five
shillings.
In 1832, on 7th April, a farmer named Joseph Thomson came into Carlisle
with his wife, to whom he had been married three years before; he sent
the bellman round the town to announce a sale, and this attracted a great
crowd. At noon the sale took place. Thomson placed his wife on a chair,
with a rope of straw round her neck. He then said—according to the report
in the “Annual Register,”—“Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice, my
wife, Mary Anne Thomson, otherwise Williams, whom I mean to sell to the
highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it is her wish as well as mine
to part for ever. She has been to me only a born serpent. I took her
for my comfort, and the good of my home; but she became my tormentor, a
domestic curse. Gentlemen, I speak the truth from my heart when I say—may
God deliver us from troublesome wives and frolicsome women! Avoid them
as you would a mad dog, or a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera
morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential thing in nature. Now I have
shown you the dark side of my wife, and told you her faults and failings,
I will introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her
qualifications and goodness. She can read novels and milk cows; she can
laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when
thirsty. Indeed, gentlemen, she reminds me of what the poet says of women
in general—
‘Heaven gave to women the peculiar grace
To laugh, to weep, to cheat the human race.’
She can make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s melodies,
and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin, or whisky, but
she is a good judge of the quality from long experience in tasting them.
I therefore offer her with all her perfections and imperfections for the
sum of fifty shillings.”
That this sermon was spoken by Thomson is most improbable—it is doubtless
put into his mouth by the editor of the “Annual Register”; it was not to
his interest to depreciate the article he desired to sell. After about an
hour the woman was knocked down to one Henry Mears, for twenty shillings
and a Newfoundland dog. They then parted company in perfect good-humour,
each satisfied with his bargain; Mears and the woman went one way, and
Thomson and the dog another.
In 1835 a man led his wife by a halter, in precisely the same way, into
the market at Birmingham, and sold her for fifteen pounds. She at once
went home with the purchaser. She survived both buyer and seller, and
then married again. Some property came to her in the course of years from
her first husband; for notwithstanding claims put forth by his relatives
she was able to maintain in a court of law that the sale did not and
could not vitiate her rights as his widow.
Much astonishment was caused in 1837 in the West Riding of Yorkshire by a
man being committed to prison for a month with hard labour for selling or
attempting to sell his wife by auction in the manner already described.
It was generally and firmly believed that he was acting within his rights.
In 1858, in a tavern at Little Horton, near Bradford, a man named Hartley
Thomson put up his wife, who is described by the local journals as a
pretty young woman, for sale by auction, and he had the sale previously
announced by sending round the bellman. He led her into the market with a
ribbon round her neck, which exhibits an advance in refinement over the
straw halter; and again in 1859, a man at Dudley disposed of his wife in
a somewhat similar manner for sixpence. A feature in all these instances
is the docility with which the wife submits to be haltered and sold.
She would seem to have been equally imbued with the idea that there was
nothing to be ashamed of in the transaction, and that it was perfectly
legal.
If we look to see whence originated the idea, we shall probably find
it in the conception of marriage as a purchase. Among savage races, the
candidate for marriage is expected to pay the father for his daughter.
A marriageable girl is worth so many cows or so many reindeer. The man
pays over a sum of money or its equivalent to the father, and in exchange
receives the girl. If he desires to be separated from her he has no idea
of giving her away, but receives what is calculated to be her market
value from the man who is disposed to relieve him of her. In all dealings
for cattle, or horses, or sheep, a handsel is paid, half-a-crown to
clinch the bargain, and the transfer of coin constitutes a legal transfer
of authority and property over the animal. This is applied to a woman,
and when a coin, even a sixpence, is paid over and received, the receiver
regards this as releasing him from all further possession of the wife,
who at once passes under the hand of the purchaser. There is probably
no trace in our laws of women having been thus regarded as negotiable
properties, but it is unquestionable that at an early period, before
Christianity invaded the island, such a view was held, and if here and
there the rustic mind is unable to rise to a higher view of the marriage
state, it shows how extremely slow it is for opinions to alter when
education has been neglected.
MILK-MAIDS
MILK-MAIDS
It is a sad subject for reflection that, among the extinct animals, we
should have to reckon the milk-maids of Old England—the theme of so much
poetry, the subject of such charming pictures.
The dodo exists now solely in a few specimens preserved in glass cases
in two or at the outside three museums. The mammoth is discovered rarely
embedded in blocks of ice under the Arctic Circle. The gigantic moa of
New Zealand is recovered only from its scattered bones. The Great Auk was
last seen off the coast of Waterford in 1834. Her egg sells for about
a hundred pounds. A species of the English milk-maid is said to exist
on the High Alps, and is called the _Sennerin_, but is so unlike the
milk-maid of English picture and story, that naturalists are disposed
to dispute it as a species, and regard it as belonging to a different
_genus_.
Again, those temperate and frugal beings who frequent the A.B.C.
establishments in London, and get a drink of milk for a penny and
sandwiches for twopence, will see there very interesting and even
charming specimens of the modern milk-maid, but in build, in plumage, and
in habit, totally unlike the milk-maid we knew from nursery rhyme, and
from illustrations. The old milk-maid—save the mark! the milk-maid was
never old, her youth was perennial—I mean the milk-maid who lived and
flourished in Britain till about 1834, when she disappeared along with
the _alca impennis_—was fresh faced, rosy cheeked, strongly built, wore
light cotton gowns and white aprons; carried her arms bare, sang cheerily
as she went about her work, and had a tendency to become “bouncing.”
Her habitat was a country farm, and she was to be found frequenting the
fields, the cowshed, and the dairy.
The specimens exhibited by the Aerated Bread Company, on the other
hand, are pale complexioned, somewhat lily faced, of a willowy build,
always with plumage that is black, except for a white apron, the arms
are clothed in black save for neat white cuffs about the wrists; they
move silently, and are never seen in country pastures, only in A.B.C.
refreshment places in London, and such large towns as can maintain these
useful establishments.
But the difference extends further. The milk-maid of olden time was not
exactly a wading, web-footed being, but she had large feet and shoes of
the most solid, broad description, very necessary, as she was constrained
to make her way through farm-yards over ankles in mud, or to go through
the task of milking cows in byres or linneys that were—well, the reverse
of clean. As to the modern milk-maid, it suffices to look at her
feet—like those described by Sir John Suckling,
“Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, steal in and out
As if they feared the light,”—
to be quite satisfied that she is not descended from, nor is a true
variant of the milk-maid of olden time. The same Sir John Suckling
admirably portrays the latter—
“No grape that’s kindly ripe could be,
So round, so plump, so soft as she,
Nor half so full of juice.”
It is obvious this does not describe the A.B.C. milk-lass. The latter is
a banana, the former an apple.
“Where are you going, my pretty maid?
I’m going a-milking, sir, she said.”
No maids now go a-milking, that is why there are no true milk-maids. The
old order changeth. Nowadays in the country it is the men who milk. Women
cannot be found to do it. They object to the trudge through the dirt, and
the planting of the three-legged peggy-stool, and their feet in the oozy
substance that forms the cushion enveloping the floor of the cow stall. I
do not blame them. It is a dirty place.
But the milking of the cows in the byre was itself a novelty. Formerly
the operation took place in the meadows, where it was clean enough,
and the feet were in the sweet grass. The milk-girl filled her pails,
adjusted a hoop that they might not swing against and spill over her
cotton dress, and carried the pails to the dairy, singing as she went.
But the weather is not always bright, and it was not only unpleasant, but
unsafe, to milk out of doors in the rain; so the cattle were driven under
cover, and there the dirt speedily grew to be deep, and presently the
girls found it intolerable to have to wade in mire, so the final stage
was that they abandoned the milking to the men.
Do the cows like it as well? I trow not. Surely the woman’s hand is best
for the process. A woman instinctively knows how to milk. All men cannot
acquire the art, and cows are well aware as to which are skilful milkers
and which are not. A man may be a good milker, a woman always is one.
That is the difference. What a charming sketch that is of Caldecott’s of
the “maid who milked the cow with the crumpled horn,” in his illustrated
story of the House that Jack Built! When our children nowadays recite
that nursery doggerel, the words concerning that maid who milked the cow
are not understood by them. They are an anachronism; for as soon as they
know anything they know that no maiden all forlorn or all smiles, no
maiden whatever, does now milk cows. And to conceive the idea of a “man
all tattered and torn” approach and kiss such a milk-maid as occupies a
position in an Aerated Bread Company’s establishment, is to demand of
their young intelligences something too preposterous.
Do you remember old Izaak Walton’s account of the milk-maid with her
merry songs? How he asked her to sing to him. “What song was it?” she
inquired. “I pray—was it ‘Come, shepherds, deck your heads’; or ‘As
at noon Dulcina rested’; or ‘Philida flouts me’; or ‘Chevy Chace’;
or ‘Johnny Armstrong’; or ‘Troy Town’?” The memories of the ancient
milk-maids were storehouses of delightful old English ballads; now the
only persons who know any are ancient silver-headed topers in taverns.
It was formerly the custom for the bonny milk-maids to dance before
the houses of their customers in the month of May, to obtain a small
gratuity; and there is a dear old English tune, “The merry milk-maids in
green,” that was probably the one to which they were wont to dance. To be
a milk-maid and to be merry were synonymous terms in the olden time.
Pepys, in his diary, 13th October 1662, says, “With my father took a
melancholy walk to Portholme, seeing the country-maids milking their cows
there, they being there now at grass; and to see with what mirth they
come all home together in pomp with their milk, and sometimes they have
music go before them.”
In Beaumont and Fletcher’s play, “The Coxcomb,” printed in 1647, two
milk-maids are introduced, Nan and Madge, and the scene in which they
are on the stage is so charming, that I venture to quote a good deal of
it—the authors have so happily caught the kindliness, the simplicity, the
joyousness of the English milk-maid of yore.
But one word I must premise. Viola, the heroine of the play is astray and
wandering over the country seeking to conceal whence she is and who she
is.
Viola wearied and lost sighs—
“The evening comes and every little flower
Droops now, as well as I.”
Then enter Nan and Madge with milk pails.
“_Nan._ Good Madge,
Let’s rest a little; by my troth, I’m weary.
This new pail is a plaguy heavy one.
_Madge._ With all my heart.
_Viola (aside)._ What true contented happiness dwells here,
More than in cities! Would to God my father
Had lived like one of these, and bred me up
To milk, and do as they do. Methinks ’tis
A life that I would choose.
Maids!
For charity, give a poor wench one draught of milk,
That weariness and hunger have nigh famished!
_Nan._ If I’d but one cow’s milk in all the world
You should have some on’t: There, drink.
_Madge._ Do you dwell hereabouts?
_Viola._ No; would I did.
_Nan._ Madge, if she does not look as like my cousin Sue
O’ th’ Moor Lane, as one thing can look like another.
_Madge._ Nay; Sue has a hazel eye, I know Sue well;
And, by your leave, not so trim a body, neither;
This is a flat-bodied thing, I can tell you.
_Nan._ She laces close,
By the Mass, I warrant you; and so does Sue too.”
Then Viola entreats the two girls to find her where she may not only
lodge, but also find work.
“_Nan._ Uds me, our Dorothy went away but last week,
And I know my mistress wants a maid, and why
May she not be placed there? This is a likely wench,
I tell you truly, and a good wench, I warrant her.
_Madge._ And ’tis a hard case if we, that have served
Four years apiece, cannot bring in one servant.
We will prefer her.… Can you milk a cow?
And make a merry-bush?
_Viola._ I shall learn quickly.
_Nan._ And dress a house with flowers? and—
This you must do, for we deal in the dairy—
And make a bed or two?
_Viola._ I hope I shall.
_Nan._ But be sure to keep the men out; they will mar
All that you make else, I know that by myself;
For I have been so touz’d among ’em in
My days! Come, you shall e’en home with us,
And be our fellow; our house is honest,
And we serve a very good woman and a gentle woman,
And we live as merrily, and dance o’ good days
After evensong. Our wake shall be on Sunday;
Do you know what a wake is? we have mighty cheer then,
And such a coil, ’twould bless ye!
You must be our sister, and love us best,
And tell us everything: and when cold weather
Comes, we’ll lie together: will you do this?
_Viola._ Yes.
_Nan._ Then home again, o’ God’s name.”
We learn that Princess Elizabeth, in Queen Mary’s reign, was closely
guarded and only suffered to walk in the gardens of the palace, and not
abroad. “In this situation,” says Holingshed, “no marvell if she, hearing
upon a time out of her garden at Woodstock, a certain milk-maid singing
pleasantlie, wished herself to be a milk-maid as she was; saying that her
case was better, and life merrier.”
Sir Thomas Overbury in his “Character of a milk-maid,” in the reign of
James I., says, “She dares go alone, and unfold her sheep in the night,
and fears no manner of ill, because she means none: yet, to say truth,
she is never alone, she is still accompanied with old songs, honest
thoughts, and prayers, but short ones.”
There is still a reminiscence of the milk-maid that comes to us every
spring, in the fresh flickering cuckoo-flower of the delicate lilac,
like the pale cotton, of which the dresses of the girls were made. It
is the _Cardamine pratensis_ that bears both the name of “Milk-maids”
and “Cuckoo-flower.” The latter name it obtains, says old Gerarde,
because it “doth flower in April and Maie, when the cuckoo doth begin
to sing her pleasant notes without stammering.” The same plant is also
the “Lady’s Smock” of Shakespeare. I suppose it will retain the name
of cuckoo-flower, for the cuckoo is still with us, but lose that of
“milk-maids,” for, alas—milk-maids are no more.
The Alpine representative of the class is quite distinct. As soon as the
high pastures are free from snow, the cattle are driven up the mountains
and the women go with them. They remain at these high altitudes all the
summer till the first frosts and snows come, when they, with the cattle,
return. On the high Alps they have to milk the cows and make cheeses.
They live in _senn hüte_ (wooden hovels), and sleep in the lofts among
the hay. Here is a description by a native of the Alps.
“The Sennerin is engaged through the summer with tubs and churns; she
attends to the milking and the fodder. An Almbub, a little boy, is with
her, and he has to look after the herds, drive the cattle to pasture, and
bring them back at even. Both live on the boiled milk and some lard out
of a pot. Then when darkness comes on they light the _kichspan_, a bit
of firwood dipped in pitch that serves as a candle, and by its flare she
mends his torn garments which must be made to last till they return in
October; and the boy in turn takes between his knees her shoes which have
been torn in the rocks, and sews the rents with waxed thread, and tells
tales or sings songs.
“For the most part the sennerin is not under twenty. She is generally
over forty, one who has spent her life in making butter, and understands
the cows. And every summer she is aloft since she became old enough to be
trusted. Young women, the farmer knows well, do not answer on the Alpine
pastures exposed to every sort of climate and weather. And yet—sometimes,
a young one is there aloft, and then romance steps in.”
These sennerins, old, withered, for the most part, in rusty and dark
dresses, with storm and sun-tanned faces, wrinkled, eminently unpoetical
objects, how can we consider them as of the same race as our recently
extinct dairy-maids?
I will end with a couple of verses of Martin Parker’s ballad on the
Milk-maids, composed in the reign of James I. or Charles I.
“The bravest lasses gay
Live not so merry as they;
In honest civil sort
They make each other sport,
As they trudge on their way.
Come fair or foul weather,
They’re fearful of neither—
Their courages never quail:
In wet and dry, though winds be high,
And dark’s the sky, they ne’er deny
To carry the milking pail.
Their hearts are free from care,
They never will despair;
Whatever may befall,
They bravely bear out all,
And Fortune’s frowns out-dare.
They pleasantly sing
To welcome the spring—
’Gainst heaven they never rail;
If grass will grow, their shanks they show;
And, frost or snow, they merrily go
Along with the milking pail.”
THE BRIDE’S WELL
THE BRIDE’S WELL
On what is locally called a Ramp, that is to say the refuse thrown out
of a quarry, and left to decay or become covered with mould, was, in our
quiet parish, a long white-washed cottage thatched. It was planted in a
peculiar position: its back was against a dense oak wood, out of which
shot up Scotch firs, and the portion of ramp it occupied was of very
old standing, and was a good way from that part of the quarry on which
workmen were engaged.
In front of the cottage was a garden, always well kept, and on the
farther side of the garden, the inevitable pig-sty. But then—what would
the garden have produced without the pig?
When I said that the cottage was on the ramp, I was not quite exact, it
was on the slope of the hill, but ramp had been thrown up before it even
to a level above the garden, so that the dwellers in the cottage were
almost as much shut in as was Noah in his ark.
The ramp was not hideous, as new ramps are. It was so ancient that it
was overgrown with trees, and moss, and fern. The crane’s-bill loved
to ramble about it, and the wild strawberry covered it in June with a
network of rubies.
The cottage was so closed about that every wind was shut out, but the
sun flowed over it, frost rarely smote and killed the vegetables in the
garden, and flowers came there earlier than elsewhere.
A great monthly rose was trained over the front of the house, and I
believe that there were flowers on it all the year round.
Near the cottage stood a very ancient and wide-spreading oak, stunted
and contorted, because growing in a minimum of soil and a maximum of
slate rock. But in spite of disadvantages, the oak was very aged and
bore innumerable acorns. Under the shade of the tree, rained over with
shed acorns at the fall of the year, was a slab of rock, and it went by
the name of the Conjuring Table. There was a certain Lady who was fondly
believed, though dead for over a century, to haunt the parish. The story
went that Seven Parsons met at this natural table to lay the Lady’s
ghost. They would have succeeded but that one of the party was so tipsy
that he said the wrong words and forgot the right.
But that which haunted the ramp was not a ghost, it was vipers, locally
called “Long Cripples.” These creatures loved to lie in the sun on the
hot slates, and they became so comatose in the heat, or perhaps with
repletion from the number of flies and beetles they ate, that they were
easily killed there by the village lads.
Now, although the cottage was in a lonely place, and was shut in from
wind and from the sight of men, unless these latter came there purposely
to see it, yet there was that in it which precluded its being out of
mind, however much out of sight, and that was—an uncommonly pretty girl
who lived in it with her father and mother.
Their name was Worden, and her Christian name was Prue, that is to say,
Prudence.
Not only was she vastly pretty, but she was one of the happiest,
brightest dispositioned girls in the place. The sun that loved the
cottage seems to have been drunk in by her heart and to brim at her eyes.
Prue managed the beehives, of which there was a row in the garden, and
she moved among the winged creatures without their attempting to sting
her. “Talk to them, sing to them, and they become your friends,” she said.
They buzzed round her, as though she were a flower, as though they would
light on her laughing lips, and she scolded them and away they flew—it
was their fun, that was all, she explained. But it was not bees only
that came about Prue. Village youths are not blind to female beauty, and
hearts open at once to a bright spirit, as celandines open to the sun.
Prue had plenty of admirers, but her head was not turned; she laughingly
kept them at a distance—that is to say, all but one, George Kennaway, and
it soon became an understood thing that George also would not allow other
young men to buzz about Prue. That flower was for his own sipping, not
for another’s.
How this came about was as follows:—
The plank on which stood the beehives had become so rotten that Prue’s
father, Roger Worden, purchased a good new Dantzic pine plank to replace
that which was decayed.