by Adam Thorpe
you think we shall marry with or without Consent? If only I had inheritance! Seven hundred a year would do admirably. I dream of this while these fellows are shuffled in, clutching their Caps, and stand mumbling into their beards (tho’ I had the Rector Willington come yesterday – insufferably upright). Seven hundred! Surely that avuncular codicil shall be untied soon, my Emily – and my Devotion answered! I have broke a pen this morning – in the middle of Depositioning, as it were, a young Shepherd fellow who is accused of Arson. He cannot be more than fourteen, exceedingly thin-faced but scrofulous, with a tall stovepipe and a spattered smock to his ankles that was no doubt his grandfather’s – there are so many of these Wretches they do not clothe them in our dungy prison – he burnt an iron Plough. How extraordinary these actions, that destroy the very Property from whence the means of subsistence are to be supplied. At the very least he will be in Van Diemen’s Land before a twelvemonth is out – he cannot imagine what distance lies between. I mean – between here and that infernal burning place
Edmund Bunce. He had a tinderbox & I saw him put it to the straw
so many of these fellows he might do better to Say Nothing, than mitigate himself into lying. Starvation never loosened the rope, as one might say. Tho’ I am not wholly convinced of this hollow-belly wretchedness that The Times is so full of: most of these fellows look apple-cheeked enough to me, tho’ slow as oxen (whether from hunger I doubt) and with moist, red eyes – from a combination, I suspect, of wind and ale-house. Some, indeed, have an attenuated look – that have guttered, as it were, into a pool of pauperism, at the base of the Candle. I thought all Ploughmen to be strapping, yet half of these look hardly capable of the said task, with thin shoulders as tho’ they have sat at a desk since birth – and with whining, girlish voices that set my teeth on edge. But when I think what I have seen in London – that hardly bears the description of humanity – pestilential – hard by the Inns of
said they had nor warmth nor sufficient bread, and proceeded to abuse the said Edward Hobbs. I heard a gun let off, and saw a man fall. I don’t know who fired the gun. I struck the said Giles Griffin with my stick. Griffin kicked my person. Edward Hobbs knocked the said Griffin to the ground & he was trampled upon by diverse persons in the Mob, who were fleeing the horses. Griffin rose and thereupon struck this Examinant with a potato-lifter upon the jaw
digging began yesterday – and this being a most instructive business to witness, as I was able to do in my free hour: the turf is cut into squares – lifted like the peel of an apple – and thus revealing, as it were, the Flesh beneath
in Maddle Lane with my wife & five children. My mother lives with us also. I heard a horn blown & went to the Window. There were many persons outside: they said we are all one & I must go with them & I shd carry a stick. We have no fire so I took a spoon. They said we must collect money as at Whitsun feast.
The effect was dull, for the bared space was not sufficiently lily-white – as your arms are, my Emily – on account of a flintiness, and the sticky boots of the labourers. A quarry has been made for the chalk nearby, that replaces the removed soil, and as I write they are carrying the stone (from which all dark matter has been excised) to the equine place and tipping it & patting it in, this albescence being effected by manual means only – the Squire’s efforts are designed for the express purpose of keeping the Devil afar off from otherwise idle hands, and those inflammatory minds certain to see in our carriage of Justice a suitable Pyre for their needs. There has been a pamphlet circulating over the beer-pots that wd drain the bloom from your loveliness
said to him that we have no tatoes nor bread and our children cannot sleep, for they go bedward without sup, only watered milk & sugar, & hardly fire to cook by if we had these things: I said there is hardly ash to sweep into one hand at the end of the day. He answered this will turn to ashes in your mouth, & we must not be tearing the Notices down, for they are good advice. I said, D—n it, these people want money, & they shall have it. He answered that if we wd get money by any means in the open day, we would likewise pay in the open day
& the blacksmith, a great hairy fellow who blows out his cheeks before he speaks, and strikes his knees as tho’ they were his anvil (I colour the description somewhat – all tedious here – he is a smallish fellow that reeks of beer-shops and has grey hands) will Hang for certain, as he is down for robbery, Arson, machine-breaking, and extortion. He told me he had robbed only his own shop. He sobbed in the middle point of his Deposition. A fellow sobbing is a most ungainly sight, like seeing a horse limp.
that he has nothing to say.
it aid matters and move your father to be more disposed to this legal fellow who is swollen with love for his daughter more than a Judge with muffins, if this said legal fellow rapt with speechless admiration for a certain countenance was to place his spectacles firmly on his nose – and dip his pen – and commiserate whole-heartedly with said paternal being in his mercantile misfortune?
no answer to this Charge.
ing the sole path, as the said legal fellow sees it, out of anguish and sobs and into illumination namely that glittering Paradise of unearthly delights namely betrothal to said counten
hedging in Little Hangy, by the crab-apple. I saw the Mob come over the crest towards me & I thought it was Whitsun, for they were merry & dressed in their best cloathes & wore ribands. They broke the hedge in many places. Some of them came up to me. I asked them why it was Whitsun now, & where was the feast
I merely blackly gloom my days away to an attenuated end – forever yearning – in the Exile, as it were, of love? No more of this. The Horse proceeds upon the hill in all its creamy glory with men about it like flies, tho’ this horse cannot flick its mane. There is a frosty glistening to it of a morning and when the mist settles of a late afternoon I almost think it looms like a spectre, like some ideal mount searching for its rider
I read the Riot Act to the assembled Mob. Upon perceiving the riotousness of the said persons to be unabated, I returned immediately to the House, to await the said force of Yeomanry Cavalry. The force came at about eight o’clock. It was fully light by then and the force proceeded to position itself in the woods behind the Doric Temple as it had been ascertained that the Mob were feloniously intent on causing destruction to my own Household,
most tedious supper, announced by a gong, and a gurgle in the throat from the housekeeper, who does not speak, and has a chin mottled in the pattern of a leaf – as if one has fallen thereupon, and sunk in long ago. The Squire, when intoxicated, glares across the dining-table as if intent on finding in one’s waistcoat the horizon that might settle him, and his voice has no need of a speaking-trumpet were it to be issuing instructions on a battlefield. He has eyes like a cotter’s windows under thatch – suspicious, yet promising warmth that on further exploration – turns to a chill – and grows damper by the long hour, until it altogether hisses into a kind of well, dark and dismal. Yet on the morrow he will be in a crumpled cheerfulness, and all bustle – if the weather allows it. His White Horse has turned him boyish, tho’ he powders his head in the fashion of his portraits. Several of the farmers here wear pigtails still. Yesterday I visited the House (a stiff and lofty pile) to Examine (if that term might be used of the discourse) his Lordship Chalmers. His ears are uncommonly large, and his nose looks at you in the place of eyes. He has a thumb-joint that clicks alarmingly in the spaces between words, like a fowling-piece. But I don’t think him a bad fellow.
saith: he does not answer the Charge for it will not stand
& we went riding. The rides here are thro’ beech. Beech and more beech, and then downland – nay more more & more downland. The whole world might be composed of turf & nibbling sheep, were one to be as these peasants, and not venture forth enough miles to break the downland spell – and see happy clay, and our sweet Thames. There is a dreadful Rollingness to these wretched minds, that need a right-angle sorely to shake them up. I am not a bad rider over gates and hedgerows, tho�
�� I have never taken horse out of London before. I stumbled only once – in an infernal patch of briar and mud that nearly had me threwn headlong. How does Matlock, sweetest Emily? The Special Commission arrives in a fortnight: I must have all the Briefs ready. We hear report that Field Marshal the Duke of W. himself will sit with the Judges, as if their scarlet will not terrify these wretches enough without that great Nose. They shall be dealt with in batches of twenty, or the assize will last till Doomsday – or certainly over Christmas. Alas – still a hundred remain. I must haste them on – they persevere in telling one every twist and turn, as if they are embarked on a yarn of the sea – of marvellous Adventure, such as I would hear from my father as a boy. One has to cut these yards of fustian cloth, as a tailor for a dwarf. A few, I am grateful to report (these the hardest & most guilty) say nothing, and set their jaws (tho’ their hands tremble). Sometimes I am in a fog of accent, that is made blinder by the majority of the labourers having severe catarrh, arising (or so I am informed by the Doctor, a bristly young fellow) from the draughts in their dwellings, or the wet straw they reportedly sleep on – but whatever the origin of the Complaint, it causes their accents to sound as tho’ slinking past – sunk into themselves, as it were – a quality that makes interpretation a deal more difficult. I have a man beside me, a local fellow of some education (he writes verse) – who lights my way by Translation. So the days pass without you, sweetest Emily.
I do not know who carried the shillings
My regards to your Uncle, & Mrs Hawkes.
Lancelot Heddin of Ulverton labourer aged 27 who was apprehended at Ulverton House on the morning of the 22nd of November and has been discharged on his own recognizance to appear and answer at the Sessions – stated on his Examination on the 5th of December as follows
not a carpet or rug in the place: all is beeswaxed floors and the whole resounds like a perpetual thunderstorm when persons are moving about. The distance the Examinants must cross to stand before my table is a decent one, and I must wait until the echoes of their approach have taken leave of the room (by dint of not finding another wooden surface to bounce off) before I open my mouth at all. It is a very old house, with a groaning flight of stairs too dark – and grim diamond-paned windows – and more beam than is good for the constitution of one’s pate. There is a smell of stabies throughout. I will soon be munching oats. Please to send more water-colourings – to see the brush of your fair hand in a blue wash of sky is to see Heaven through a sunlit cloud
forced the unwilling. We passed the Gore and into Gumbledons Bush
Horse – who be truly very large – is now complete, barring the eye, which is to be made of smashed glass (Norcoat’s servants have been breaking drained Port and Brandy bottles against the walls all morning, an infernal clatter that has set my teeth on edge) – I find the idea vulgar, but appropriately reflective of the progenitor’s thirst as much as soul. I had to Examine a beggar this morning, who used foul language against the Squire in his capacity as justice of the Peace, upon which insult our good fellow clapped the bad fellow (who stinks unmercifully) in the Cage, or Blind House – this being a place as small and low as those confined there, off the aforementioned Square – dating from the halcyon days when this settlement was sufficiently swaggering to have its own penal dwelling. The poor fellow being almost blind, I could not draw a word of sense out of him, but only a kind of self-pitying jabber. If he had not been released – he would not now be up for robbery and extortion: he was unlocked by the Rioters. That is an anecdote for your uncle’s supper-table, a perfect Exemplum to puff his melancholy. How does his illness fare? If my readings of judicial oratory (I know Lord Erskine almost by heart) has served any purpose, it would be to move your uncle to spill his doubloons out of his codicil as your beauty evidently has not. ‘I say by G—d that man is a ruffian who shall, after this, presume to build upon such honest artless conduct as an evidence of guilt.’ I have been practising my Lord Erskine in the mirror. I will solicit with the eye and the hand & the voice and woo him from your father. ‘Such, my lords, is the case.’ I am not very good at tones of thunder, however: my frame buckles frigh
‘Why beest thee here, John? What beest thee about?’ He answered that it was because they were starving, and that I knew the state of the Poor, who had not enough maintenance to keep a wife and children, and that I must support them and break my machine, that was taking the bread from their mouths, and raise my wages to 2s a day, and half a crown after Ladyday, & they wd have £4 from me. Then Moses Perry came forward & said he was the treasurer, for he was always so for the collection at Whitsun. He had a basket. I took them to the Barn and shewed them as I had already broke my machine, but if the Rector did not lower his tithes, I could not be giving them 2s a
the Eye is in. From afar, it looks quite horrid – it has struck the children here quite dumb with fear. Indeed – this is a quiet place. I am, I must confess, treated without civility: a kind of contemptuous pall of neglect towards betters hangs over the cotters – who seem alarmingly swarthy, as tho’ rubbed in charcoal – O for thy fair curls, thy angel’s countenance, my Emily! I ope your Locket with abandon. Here is too grim, for so many men have been taken into custody that there is an effect as after war, when the women folk slouch about in shawls and turn their heads as one passes. I do not know how they will deal with the Rioters, my heart. Lord Melbourne at the Home Office was appointed in the middle of all this Trouble, and is more resolute than Peel. I think we shall have some Examples made. But surely not 2,000, which is the full number. Melbourne has made Norcoat furious, for Squire Norcoat cannot sit on the bench – local magistrates are perceived too soft for this, tho’ some are harder than flint, & clamour for the rope – for all breakers – without reprieve. I do not feel hard, but I had a stone cast at me last week, & I have had a letter, in a very poor orthography, informing me that my name ‘is drawn amongst the Black Harts in the Black Booke’, that I am ‘a blaggard Enmy of the Peeple’, and I must make my Will. Do not fear a moment, my sweet child: these fellows are thoroughly cowed, and this is but the twitch of the dying
bee a hard task, Tom.’
Your father has been written to.
& staid the evening
then to exercise my hand, grown crabbed from the pen and these desultory tales, I walk briskly up the road swinging my arms
said ‘That’s a good little lot there, Mr Stiff.’ He answered that they would be having no less, or there wd be more agitation. He threw it upon the stone of the Court yard. The said John Oadam gathered it up and holloed: he wore a crown of bedwine, that was in beard
uire looks through his telescope at the infernal Horse, tho’ he has no need: it struts over us big as a clou
He had some wild Clymatis wound about his head that resembled a Savage’s cap of feathers, I believe this was to denote his captainship. I heard one of the Mob refer to him as ‘Captain Swing’. He called out we are all one,
capons boiled in their bladders, roasted venison with a marinade of veal, fried ducklings, a complete little cygnet from the Lake, Westphalia ham and a calf’s head hashed with larded liver, with ice cream and blancmange as an afterthought. I was the lowliest fellow there, but acted royally. Lady Chalmers referred to me throughout as the Bench: she has a grip like sugar-tongs.
John Oadam saith: that he has nothing to say to these Charges.
but took a coach to Bath. I had to wrest myself from there on the Sunday evening but I staid one night & sipped and ate and Conversed with the civilised. I noted, to my horror, halfway to a theatre, that my waistcoat sported a splash of Chalk upon the breast. It will not remove itself with water. The stagecoach dropped me very late at the turnpike crossing & I walked back without a moon: white to my knees, my cloathes ruined. Infernal country!
I saw the said shepherd Bunce kneel and fire the straw beneath the said iron Plough.
opening ceremony was conducted with appalling seriousness, and All who Matter in the neighbourhood stood about this muddy t
urf silently cursing its blanched steed, that is taking the field at full stretch – tho’ on the grassy lip of its haunches one recognises nothing but a deal of white chalk and the fact one is chilled to the bone. It is attempting to outflank, as it were, the ancient at Uffingdon, to which attaches much superstition: indeed – I have heard it stated that its eye is hollowed by generations of barren females coupling with the moon. I doubt our Squire Norcoat’s equestrian challenge to be efficacious in this respect, or to attach to its bony fetlocks and glistening retina anything more than amused indifference. But the fellow is exceedingly puffed up with his creation. I will retain the sight of him bellowing through his Speaking-Trumpet on that far hill for the rest of my years, and shall (I warn you now) regale it to my grandchildren long after all memory of the Law has departed my brain.
doused the candles in the stable. A man with a basket stood against the Door & the carters came out with straw. Some others heaped straw beneath the iron Plough. It was not light enough to see their Faces, tho’ I heard one say
round and about again, the identical histories – or histories I must hope are identical, else the mis-match might prolong the Prosecution to a tedious extent. I nudge here and there – for one will have a lanthorn where there has been always a candle – and another a candle where there has been always a tinderbox. Dearest Emily, I have numbed you with my Legal gossip: how does your breathing now, out of the city? And what of Uncle after your father’s visit? Does he still smile on us from his ebbing bed? Have you broached the Subject again? A simple stroke of the pen would do it, but can he see? Did your father meddle in his drawer? I am exceeding vexed. My coat is almost out at elbow. Your father cannot have all. How long it takes to weave the cobweb (which is the Will) and how quick to tear it down (which is the Codicil). How, if we are to hang upon your father alas – am I to shift his judgement of me? My letter to him has not been answered. My head swims with all this – round and about – like a whirl-
