by Betty Burton
Ben Hannable and Bella, being much of an age, had known one another since childhood. In those days, the Estover’s social status was somewhat above the Hannable’s, but by the time he was ready to marry their positions were about equal. Long ago he had known a fancy for Bella, but it was at a time when he was just the elliman’s boy and then she married Tomas Nugent.
His search for a wife had not been directed towards Croud Cantle until he saw Jude in Blackbrook market: she was Bella Estover all over again.
He rode to Cantle and called at the farm.
“You done pretty well, Bella, seeing as you been a woman on your own all these years.”
“You come up in the world yourself, Ben. I’m glad to see it. You’ve worked hard.”
Ben didn’t let on at that time that he had his eye on Jude.
“I seed your girl in the market, reading a notice. She been learning?”
“Ah, she’s taken to it. Took it into her head when Jaen left home. Something to keep her mind offJaen: they was always in each other’s pockets up till then. I didn’t know she would get so keen on it though.”
Ben laughed his jolly laugh that had helped him in many a deal.
“A husband and house to keep and she’ll forget all them fancies.”
It was one thing for Bella to deride Jude’s skill, but quite another for a man like Ben Hannable – he wasn’t nothing to write home about.
“Not so much of the fancies; neither you nor me can’t do no better than make our marks.”
Ben Hannable looked smug.
“I learnt to write ten years back, Bella. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to keep my business in order. Men in business needs it.”
Bella was impressed.
After he had broken the ice with his first visit, he called more often.
“Mother, I think he’s courting you.”
“My dear girl, I’m a grandmother.”
That summer Ben Hannable called formally to ask Bella for Jude. Formally Bella said that she would give him her answer on his next visit.
“You’ll never get a better offer than Ben Hannable.”
“If I had a hundred better, I shouldn’t take none of them.”
The threads of veins on Bella’s cheeks and the fox-red hair seemed brighter in her worry and anger.
“He’s a bit rough, but he has tried. If you had seen the start he had, and look now at what he’s made of himself. He’s good at making a living, and that’s security in later years.”
“You’re good at making a living. What has he got that we want for?”
“Gold coin, that’s what!”
“Whatever do I want with money like that?”
“And whatever will you do without it?”
“Same as you.”
Jude adopted her mother’s stance and they stood facing one another, Jude grinning until Bella capitulated and sank on to the hearthside stool.
“Jude girl, you haven’t got the brains of a louse. Haven’t you seen enough of me to know what it’s like for a woman to keep going on her own?”
“I’ve seen you. And I’ve seen Jaen. And I’ve seen Mary and Catherine and Cilia and all the rest of them I used to play with. I shall never do it. Never! I shan’t be bound to any man, not Ben Hannable nor nobody else. Coming here flaunting a watch-chain on his belly and thinking I’d be fool enough to settle for a slave-chain. I should rather be like you any day than tied down like the rest.”
Bella opened her mouth to protest, to put again the arguments for security, respectability, comfort in old age, children, but closed it again. She hadn’t got much, but she was as much her own mistress as a woman could be. And she always had to keep going in any argument.
“You’re headstrong and foolish.”
“I’m like you.”
Ben Hannable tried once more before he gave up: he tried Bella. Bella knew that she was second choice – perhaps not even second, for it took him two years before he got round to asking her – and she told him not to be such a damned old fool, and he said, “Hang it, Bella, we’d a made a good pair.”
Mister Warren has given to me a pamphlet which is very interesting about common people, and this is why I record it here.
It concerns some people of Norfolk county who had poor treatment and tried to get certain things changed. Their leaders put forward twenty-nine complaints. Anyone reading them can see it, that these were just. Such as, Lords should not freely use commons, that rivers be free to all men and that rabbits not be kept unless they be paled in. The people got together in the town of Norfolk where, on order of the government the earl of Warwick with thousands of soldiers cut down the reformers.
It is two hundred years since this was done, and still things are not changed. The poor people of these four parishes would find no difficulty in finding the same number of grievances, and many more. I think that they would be set upon in the same manner by the lords and earls.
One of the reforms was amusing to me today because Mr Benjamin Hannable, an old man who has made money from selling dear oil to poor people, has made a proposal of marriage to me. The reform was that a child “if he live to his full age shall be at his own chosen concerning his marriage”.
I was at my own chosen and did not choose Mister Hannable.
J. Nugent 1786
After Ben Hannable there were one or two other men who thought they might like to capture Jude Nugent’s interest. One of the Hazelhurst Boys, Edwin, rode over from Up Teg for weeks. Jaen hoped that Jude might take to him. Then it would be like when they were girls. She did not think too deeply about it because of the complications to do with Hanna, who now seemed settled with her aunt and grandmother, but she would give a lot to have Ju living near.
As it was, Jude would have no more to do with Edwin Hazelhurst than any of the others.
People said that Jude Nugent wants a man tailored from her own pattern, and Jude would have agreed. Not only her own pattern, her own special cloth and all.
They made changes at Croud Cantle. Gradually Jude persuaded Bella that they would do better making products than selling their stuff fresh. These days, Bella took serious note of any suggestion from Jude.
They continued selling their staple products – milk, cheese, butter and eggs – but Jude’s interest in making notes about anything and everything, then observing and comparing, resulted in her discovery that their most profitable sales were their preserves and pickles and, to Bella’s amazement, a savoury tart ofJude’s own invention. It was a buttermilk tart.
Jude experimented. She thickened buttermilk with corn, put in curd-cheese, herbs and onion and baked it as an open tart. Locally, Croud Tarts became well-known as a savoury that would not disturb even the most delicate digestion. So instead of the hard outdoor work of their previous livelihood from small crops and a few animals, they worked more and more in the kitchen. They had a large cooking-range installed in the scullery and in ever-increasing numbers produced buttermilk tarts and preserves.
With the changes, their work patterns altered. Bella was a bit concerned about the men who had worked at Croud Cantle for years, hired and re-hired time and again. Things sorted themselves out.
Bob left to go in with his brother some miles away at Fordingbridge. Dicken took over the livestock, and although he grumbled that chickens was ’ooman’s work, knew, when he was honest with himself, that he was a lot better off than many another man of his age who had got the screws in his joints. Rob, though still attached to Croud Cantle by casual arrangement, took on more and more fencing, hedge-laying and unskilled repairs in and around Cantle and Motte, working further and further afield until he met an Andover woman and moved there to live.
Johnny-twoey, since his defection from the rest of the Toose family, had become indispensable to life at Croud Cantle, and at about eleven years of age was a healthy lad. He turned the soil of the vegetable plot in November to catch the winter frosts, then he broke it down in spring; planted brassicas, beans, peas, potatoes and sa
lads and brought on fruit and rhubarb.
What he was really good at was the ever-expanding herb garden that he had started when Jude made her first experimental buttermilk tarts. He was good at taking cuttings, cross-pollinating and developing new varieties. His collection of mint appeared at one time to be taking over the kitchen garden. But Jude liked his way of working and would not let Bella make him dig it up.
Mr Warren has brought me recently a great many broadsheets and pamphlets from his travelling in the north of the county. Many of them deal with the great riches and great poverty in the country and what should be done to make things fairer. Some were not very well written and I think I could write better myself except that I do not know anything of the arguments about such as tithes and taxes.
I have invented a good pie which sells very well at the cost of a loaf Poor people cannot buy Croud Cantle pies, which causes me much argument with myself, for if we should give them away, then we should not make a living, yet it does not seem too great a thing that all people should have such a small treat as a pie.
Judeth Nugent 1787
With this slightly less hard-wearing life-style, Jude and Bella had a bit of leisure and more time to spend with Hanna.
They took her regularly to Newton Clare so that no one could ever suggest that they kept her from the Hazelhursts. As Jaen and Dan’s family grew in number and size, the cottage appeared to grow smaller. Young Dan’l now had brothers: Baxter, Francis, Richard and Gregory. Eventually The Boys built an extension, which ruined the proportions of the original place. Jaen was pleased, but only because it gave them room to breathe: she found little else in life pleasing. Only Ju’s occasional visits.
Hanna didn’t mind spending a day with her mother and father, nor did she mind taking a look at each new brother when it was just a day or so old, but when it was time to return to Croud Cantle she was always ready to go.
“Why don’t you have another girl baby?” she once asked Jaen, and Jaen had looked at Hanna slightly puzzled, for she had got into the habit of not really counting Hanna.
“We do seem to get all boys, don’t we?” she said.
When she was quite little and they had not visited Jaen and Dan for several weeks, Hanna had asked Jude: “Why haven’t I got a mother too?”
“Jaen’s your mother.”
“Jaen’s Dan’l’s mother, and Baxter’s.”
For a while, Bella and Jude were concerned, so took turns in going more frequently to the Ham Ford cottage with Hanna.
Bella once, straight out, not beating about the bush, brought it up with Dan.
“What about Hanna?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She has been over Cantle near on three years.”
“Is it so long?” Dan asked.
“Is she to come back?”
Bella, having taken the bull by the horns, was at once filled with a dread, and Dan’s reply seemed long in coming. What if they said Hanna should go back to them? The hole in her life without Hanna would be too enormous to fill.
Dan said, “Is she too much for you?”
“Oh no, no, she isn’t the slightest trouble. We hardly know she’s there.” Bella forgave herself this untruth, for she knew that Hanna was there every moment of the day. A baby to care for with all the experience and maturity that made it a pleasure.
“She seems to be happy enough, if you wants to let her stay on a bit,” said Dan.
Bella never knew whether Dan could have taken to any child that was not all Hazelhurst and he was never tested, for he never fathered another at all resembling Jaen’s family. And she never wholly knew what Jaen felt, but suspected that she would have preferred to be entirely childless. The misery that Bella had seen that Christmas when she and Jude had brought Hanna over to Cantle never entirely left Jaen’s eyes.
Nance Hazelhurst’s comment to Bella that, “She’s one of yourn,” was a lot to do with why the child was better suited to life at Croud Cantle rather than at Ham Ford. By the time that she was seven, even the Hazelhurst mouth had altered. Like Jude and Jaen she was an Estover to her fingertips. Nugents were never mentioned.
During these years, Jude read everything that she could get hold of. If a subject caught her interest, then she followed it as far as resources and resourcefulness allowed. Her room had shelves on every available bit of wall-space and each shelf was gradually filled with piles of papers, pamphlets, tracts and a few books.
Fred Warren had moved off his high clerk’s stool and had become indispensable to his gouty senior partner. He spent much of his working life travelling round the southern counties of England, looking at fields of standing cereal and estimating their worth, or perhaps handling threshed grain, trickling it from hand to hand, biting into it to test the quality. Over the years he expanded his knowledge and area of trade, dealing in barley and hops for brewing, even malt and honey.
Fred Warren had become a man of substance in more ways than one; he put on a bit of weight. Beneath his more substantial exterior and under his superficial appearance as a man of business, the poverty-stricken clerk remained always at his core: the radical idealist who had taught Jude to write in exchange for the luxury of cream and butter for his family. The hard early years had left him looking older than he was, but his enthusiasm and passion for living made him seem far more youthful than his peers.
To Jude, a luxury meant a book. At Croud Cantle they never went short of food and had a change of clothes, but there was never a penny to spare, certainly not for such inessentials as books. Jude was so hungry for reading matter that she read the same things over and over again.
Here are two maps which are of the village of Cantle. The top one is the village when the land was shared by all. It is clear how, except for the Manor and Manor Farm, the land was all open. The bottom one shows that it has all been taken by enclosure. The Goodenstones have now got everything west of the Dunnock, and the church holdings are large. The cross shows Croud Cantle which is but a flea-bite of land. Fred has told me about how people got the land taken from them legal, but it was hard to take in. A map such as this makes it clear to me. I have put it in this book, because my promise to myself was to put down my thoughts and things that may be of interest to people who come after.
J. Nugent 1787
The open fields of Cantle, which had once spread into surrounding wastelands and commons had, by the late eighteenth century, largely disappeared: much of the land had been hedged, ditched, enclosed and claimed. There was still some common land, but most of the great acreage was now safely out of the reach of the villagers behind the high walls and iron gates of Goodenstone Manor.
The lands of Goodenstone had been enclosed quite legally. A Commissioner was appointed by Parliament. He visited Cantle, surveyed and valued the land and checked legal claims. Claimants were then free to hedge, ditch and build walls around their land. That is to say, they were free to do so if they could afford the labour and materials. The Goodenstones could afford to enclose every acre they could lay claim to; practically every other Claimant could not.
When the re-allocation of village land was complete, the Goodenstone family found that it now owned most of Cantle, while other Claimants discovered that they were left with meagre acres on which they could not keep body and soul together. People became hired labour on land they considered their own.
One of the few exceptions to the absorption into the Goodenstone estates was Croud Cantle. Croud Cantle retained its identity, not because of foresight by the Nugents or any ability to enclose, but because the land had always needed draining ditches. When the time came to fulfil the requirements of the Commissioner, it was found that most of the common land sharing the Croud Cantle boundary had been hedged and ditched, and was considered to be part of the farm.
Three other holdings remained outside the Goodenstone enclosure: Willow, Meadow and Eastfield farms. A fourth, Church farm, was too closely connected by patronage to the Goodenstones’ estate to be anything bu
t Goodenstone land in the minds of the villagers.
At the lodge gates, Harry Goodenstone stuck his head out of the carriage window and called to his driver.
“Maytes, let me down here. I will walk up to the house.”
He jumped down and strode off through the trees towards the house. Striding did something to enhance Harry Goodenstone’s gait, for he was a small man, greatly encumbered by clothes of the latest London fashion: cords, toggles, buttons, tabs, fobs, frills, braid, lace and a cut-away coat and tricorn hat trimmed with fur.
For much of the time Manor House was occupied only by servants. In the past, it had awoken once or twice a year like a creature from hibernation. Smoke from kitchen ranges and log fires drifted over the cedar trees. Lamps and candles made prisms flash from crystal drops on chandeliers and glitter on polished window-panes. The house breathed out odours of spices and roasting meats, of toilet water, yellow soap, metal polish and boot-black. Doors opened and closed, releasing sounds of silver clinking on fine china; of music, laughter and dancing.
Now, though, the house awoke only on rare occasions.
Harry Goodenstone had not been home for a year and felt pleased at the prospect. His father had died. The funeral would take place in a day or so. There had been no love lost between Old “Sir” Henry and his sole heir. Young Harry had quite a spring in his step. As he approached the house, he became aware that he had changed in the last year. He had at last come into his own. Harry Goodenstone had inherited.
Young Harry Goodenstone, at thirty, now had in his charge the well-being of most of the villagers of Cantle. Land, property, wealth, investments, plantations and people who had no choice but to see that he retained it all. People such as the Cantle villagers, who would labour on Goodenstone land from dawn to dusk, year in year out, for the whole of their lives. It was they who kept him in braid and toggles.
