TO conjure, even for a moment, the wistfulness which is the past is
like trying to gather in one’s arms the hyacinthine colour of the
distance. But if it is once achieved, what sweetness!—like the gentle,
fugitive fragrance of spring flowers, dried with bergamot and bay. How
the tears will spring in the reading of some old parchment—“to my dear
child, my tablets and my ring”—or of yellow letters, with the love
still fresh and fair in them though the ink is faded—“and so good
night, my dearest heart, and God send you happy.” That vivid present of
theirs, how faint it grows! The past is only the present become
invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried
glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are to-morrow’s
past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving
dials of antique clocks—a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The
dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun
has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go. The
whirr of the spinning-wheels has ceased in our parlours, and we hear no
more the treadles of the loom, the swift, silken noise of the flung
shuttle, the intermittent thud of the batten. But the imagination hears
them, and theirs is the melody of romance.
When antique things are also country things, they are easier to write
about, for there is a permanence, a continuity in country life which
makes the lapse of centuries seem of little moment.
Shropshire is a county where the dignity and beauty of ancient things
lingers long, and I have been fortunate not only in being born and
brought up in its magical atmosphere, and in having many friends in farm
and cottage who, by pleasant talk and reminiscence have fired the
imagination, but also in having the companionship of such a mind as was
my father’s—a mind stored with old tales and legends that did not come
from books, and rich with an abiding love for the beauty of forest and
harvest field, all the more intense, perhaps, because it found little
opportunity for expression.
In treating of the old subject of sin-eating I am aware that William
Sharpe has forestalled me and has written with consummate art. But
sin-eaters were as well known on the Welsh border as in Scotland, and
John Aubrey tells of one who lived “in a cottage on Rosse highway,” and
was a “lamentable poore raskell.”
My thanks are due to the authors of _Shropshire Folk Lore_ for the
rhymes of “Green Gravel” and “Barley Bridge,” and for the verification
of various customs which I had otherwise only known by hearsay, and to
the Somerset weavers, who recently let me see both hand looms and
spinning-wheels in use.
MARY WEBB
March, 1926.
Contents
BOOK ONE
CHAP. PAGE
1 SARN MERE 1
2 TELLING THE BEES 7
3 PRUE TAKES THE BIDDING LETTERS 22
4 TORCHES AND ROSEMARY 27
5 THE FIRST SWATH FALLS 36
6 “SADDLE YOUR DREAMS BEFORE YOU RIDE ’EM” 47
7 PIPPINS AND JARGONELLES 57