The early closing has been an unalloyed good in these rural districts. The labourer is a steady drinker. He does not toss down glasses of stiff brandy and whisky. His beer requires time to produce an effect. The last hour does the mischief. Since the earlier closing the village streets have been comparatively free from drunken men. In any case, the agricultural labourer is the most lamb-like of drunkards. He interferes with no one. He unhinges no gates, smashes no windows, does no injury. He either staggers home or quietly lies on the grass till the liquor passes off. He is not a quarrelsome man. He does not fight with knuckle-dusters or kick with his heavy boots. His fights, when he does fight, are very harmless affairs. No doubt his drunkenness is an offence; but it is comparatively innocuous to the general public.
Religious feeling does not run high among the labourers. A large proportion of them are Nonconformists – principally Methodists. But this is not out of any very decided notion as to the difference of ceremony or theological dogma; it arises out of a class feeling. They say, or rather they feel, that this is their church. The parish church is the church of the farmers and the gentry. There is no hostility to the clergyman of the parish, no bitter warfare of sect against sect, or of Methodist against Churchman. But you see very few of the farmers go to chapel. The labourer goes there, and finds his own friends – his cousins and uncles – his wife’s relations. He is among his own class. There is no feeling of inferiority. The religion taught, the service, the hymns, the preacher, all are his. He has a sense of proprietorship in them. He helps to pay for them. The French peasant replied to the English tourist, who expressed surprise at the fanatic love of the populace for the first Napoleon – ‘he was as much a tyrant as King Louis was.’ ‘Ah, but Napoleon was our king.’ So the labourers feel that this is their religion. Therefore it is that so many of them gather together (where there are no chapels) in the cottage of some man who takes the lead, and sit, with doors and windows shut, crammed together to pray and listen to others pray. Any of them who wishes can, as it were, ascend the pulpit here. This is why in so many parishes the pews of the parish church are comparatively empty so far as agricultural labourers are concerned. The best of clergymen must fail to fill them under such disadvantages.
It is very difficult not only for the clergyman, but for others who wish to improve the condition of the labourer, to reach him. Better cottages are, of course, a most effectual way, but it is not in the power of every one to confer so substantial a benefit. Perhaps one of the best means devised has been that of cottage flower-shows. These are, of course, not confined to flowers; in fact, the principal part of such shows consists of table vegetables and fruit. By rigidly excluding all gardeners, and all persons not strictly cottage people, the very best results have often been arrived at in this way. For if there is one thing in which the labourer takes an interest it is his garden and his allotment. To offer him prizes for the finest productions of his garden touches the most sensitive part of his moral organization. It is wonderful what an amount of emulation these prizes excite – emulation not so much for the value of the prize as for the distinction. These competitions tend besides to provide him with a better class of food, for he depends largely upon vegetables.
There is nothing connected with the condition of the agricultural poor that is better worth the attention of improvers than the style of cookery pursued in these cottages. A more wretched cookery probably does not exist on the face of the earth. The soddened cabbage is typical of the whole thing. Since higher wages have come in it has become possible for the labourer in many cases to provide himself with better food, such as mutton – the cheap parts – more bacon, pork, and so on; but the women do not know how to make the most of it. It is very difficult to lay down a way in which this defect may be remedied; for there is nothing a man, let him be never so poor, so deeply resents as an inspection of the contents of his pot. He would sooner eat half-raw bacon than have the teaching forced on him – how to make savoury meals of the simple provisions within his reach; nor can he be blamed for this sturdy independent feeling. Possibly the establishment of schools of cookery in villages might do much good. They might be attached to the new schools now building throughout the country. The labourer, from so long living upon coarse, ill-cooked food, acquires an artificial taste. Some men eat their bacon raw; others will drink large quantities of vinegar, and well they may need it to correct by its acidity the effects of strong unwholesome cabbage. The cottage cook has no idea of those nutritious and pleasant soups which can be made to form so important a feature in the economy of daily life.
The labourer is in a lower degree of the same class as the third-rate working farmer of the past. He is the old small dairy farmer in a coarser shape. With a little less education, ruder manners, with the instincts of eating, drinking, and avarice more prominently displayed, he presents in his actual condition at this day a striking analogy to the agriculturist of a bygone time. In fact, those farmers of twenty or thirty acres, living in cottage-like homesteads, were barely distinguishable as far as personnel went from the labourers among whom they lived. This being the case, it is not surprising to find that the labourer of this day presents in general characteristics a marked affinity in ideas and sentiments to those entertained by the old farmer. He has the same paternal creed in a more primeval form. He considers his children as his absolute property. He rules them with a rod of iron, or rather of ground-ash. In fact, the ground-ash stick is his social religion. The agricultural labouring poor are very rough and even brutal towards their children. Not that they are without affection towards them, but they are used to thrash them into obedience instead of leading them into it by the gentle means of moral persuasion.
Bystanders would call the agricultural labourer cruel. Carters, for instance, had till lately a habit of knocking the boys under their control about in a brutal manner. But I do not think that in the mass of cases it arose from deliberate cruelty, but from a species of stolid indifference or insensibility to suffering. Somehow they do not seem to understand that others suffer, whether this arises from the rough life they lead, the endless battle with the weather, the hard fare – whether it has grown up out of the circumstances surrounding them. The same unfeeling brutality often extends to the cattle under their care. In this there has been a decided improvement of late years; but it is not yet extinct.
These are some of the lights and shades of the labourer’s daily life impartially presented.
The Gamekeeper at Home: The Man Himself – His House, and Tools
First published as a serial in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1877–8
First collected in The Gamekeeper at Home, 1878
The keeper’s cottage stands in a sheltered ‘coombe’, or narrow hollow of the woodlands, overshadowed by a mighty Spanish chestnut, bare now of leaves, but in summer a noble tree. The ash wood covers the slope at the rear; on one side is a garden, and on the other a long strip of meadow with elms. In front, and somewhat lower, a streamlet winds, fringing the sward, and across it the fir plantations begin, their dark sombre foliage hanging over the water. A dead willow trunk thrown from bank to bank forms a rude bridge; the tree, not even squared, gives little surface for the foot, and in frosty weather a slip is easy. From this primitive contrivance a path, out of which others fork, leads into the intricacies of the covers, and from the garden a wicket-gate opens on the ash wood. The elms in the meadow are full of rooks’ nests, and in the spring the coombe will resound with their cawing; these black bandits, who do not touch it at other times, will then ravage the garden to feed their hungry young, despite ingenious scarecrows. A row of kennels, tenanted by a dozen dogs, extends behind the cottage: lean retrievers yet unbroken, yelping spaniels, pointers, and perhaps a few greyhounds or fancy breeds, if ‘young master’ has a taste that way.
Beside the kennels is a shed ornamented with rows upon rows of dead and dried vermin, furred and feathered, impaled for their misdeeds; and over the door a couple of horseshoes nailed for luck – a superstiti
on yet lingering in the by-ways of the woods and hills. Within are the ferret hutches, warm and dry; for the ferret is a shivery creature, and likes nothing so well as to nozzle down in a coat-pocket with a little hay. Here are spades and billhooks, twine and rabbit nets, traps, and other odds and ends scattered about with the wires and poacher’s implements impounded from time to time.
In a dark corner there lies a singular-looking piece of mechanism, a relic of the olden times, which when dragged into the light turns out to be a man-trap. These terrible engines have long since been disused – being illegal, like spring-guns – and the rust has gathered thickly on the metal. But, old though it be, it still acts perfectly, and can be ‘set’ as well now as when in bygone days poachers and thieves used to prod the ground and the long grass, before they stepped among it, with a stick, for fear of mutilation.
The trap is almost precisely similar to the common rat-trap or gin still employed to destroy vermin, but greatly exaggerated in size, so that if stood on end it reaches to the waist, or above. The jaws of this iron wolf are horrible to contemplate – rows of serrated projections, which fit into each other when closed, alternating with spikes a couple of inches long, like tusks. To set the trap you have to stand on the spring – the weight of a man is about sufficient to press it down; and, to avoid danger to the person preparing this little surprise, a band of iron can be pushed forward to hold the spring while the catch is put into position, and the machine itself is hidden among the bushes or covered with dead leaves. Now touch the pan with a stout walking-stick – the jaws cut it in two in the twinkling of an eye. They seem to snap together with a vicious energy, powerful enough to break the bone of the leg; and assuredly no man ever got free whose foot was once caught by these terrible teeth.
The keeper will tell you that it used to be set up in the corner of the gardens and orchard belonging to the great house, and which in the pre-policemen days were almost nightly robbed. He thinks there were quite as many such traps set in the gardens just outside the towns as ever there were in the woods and preserves of the country proper. He recollects but one old man (a mole-catcher) who actually had experienced in his youth the sensation of being caught; he went lame on one foot, the sinews having been cut or divided. The trap could be chained to its place if desired; but, as a matter of fact, a chain was unnecessary, for no man could possibly drag this torturing clog along.
Another outhouse attached to the cottage contains a copper for preparing the food for both quadrupeds and birds. Some poultry run about the mead, and perhaps with them are feeding the fancy foreign ducks which in summer swim in the lake before the hall.
The cottage is thatched and oddly gabled – built before ‘improvements’ came into fashion – yet cosy; with walls three feet thick, which keep out the cold of winter and the heat of summer. This is not solid masonry; there are two shells, as it were, filled up between with rubble and mortar rammed down hard.
Inside the door the floor of brick is a step below the level of the ground. Sometimes a peculiar but not altogether unpleasant odour fills the low-pitched sitting room – it is emitted by the roots burning upon the fire, hissing as the sap exudes and boils in the fierce heat. When the annual fall of timber takes place the butts of the trees are often left in the earth, to be afterwards grubbed and split for firewood, which goes to the great house or is sold. There still remain the roots, which are cut into useful lengths and divided among the upper employés. From elm and oak and ash, and the crude turpentine of the fir, this aromatic odour, the scent of the earth in which they grew, is exhaled as they burn.
The ceiling is low and crossed by one huge square beam of oak, darkened by smoke and age. The keeper’s double-barrelled gun is suspended from this beam: there are several other guns in the house, but this, the favourite, alone hangs where it did before he had children – so strong is habit; the rest are yet more out of danger. It has been a noble weapon, though now showing signs of age – the interior of the breech worn larger than the rest of the barrel from constant use; so much so that, before it was converted to a breech-loader, the wad when the ramrod pushed it down would slip the last six inches, so loosely fitting as to barely answer its purpose of retaining the shot; so that when cleaned out, before the smoke fouled it again, he had to load with paper. This in a measure anticipated the ‘choke-bore’, and his gun was always famous for its killing power. The varnish is worn from the stock by incessant friction against his coat, showing the real grain of the walnut-wood, and the trigger-guard with the polish of the sleeve shines like silver. It has been his companion for so many years that it is not strange he should feel an affection for it; no other ever fitted the shoulder so well, or came with such delicate precision to the ‘present’ position. So accustomed is he to its balance and ‘hang’ in the hand that he never thinks of aiming; he simply looks at the object, still or moving, throws the gun up from the hollow of his arm, and instantly pulls the trigger, staying not a second to glance along the barrel. It has become almost a portion of his body, answering like a limb to the volition of will without the intervention of reflection. The hammers are chased and elegantly shaped – perfectly matching: when once the screw came loose, and the jar of a shot jerked one off among the dead leaves apparently beyond hope of recovery, he never rested night or day till by continuous search and sifting the artistic piece of metal was found. Nothing destroys the symmetry of a gun so much as hammers which are not pairs; and well he knew that he should never get a smith to replace that delicate piece of workmanship, for this gun came originally from the hands of a famous maker, who got fifty, or perhaps even seventy guineas for it years ago. It did not shoot to please the purchaser – guns of the very best character sometimes take use to get into thorough order – and was thrown aside, and so the gun became the keeper’s.
These fine old guns often have a romance clinging to them, and sometimes the history is a sad one. Upstairs he still keeps the old copper powder-flask curiously chased and engraved, yet strong enough to bear the weight of the bearer, if by chance he sat down upon it while in his pocket, together with the shot-belt and punch for cutting out the wads from cardboard or an old felt hat. These the modern system of loading at the breech has cast aside. Here, also, is the apparatus for filling empty cartridge-cases – a work which in the season occupies him many hours.
Landscape with Figures Page 7
