Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  IX. THE STONE PIER

  Our ordinary evening promenade at King’s Peddington is on the old and curiously curved stone pier. This pier is half a breakwater and half a quay: it forms and protects the little artificial harbour, round three of whose sides it bends quaintly in an irregular semicircle. The top of the outer barrier (on which we walk) is not flat, but slopes gradually downward and outward, so as to throw off the breakers in heavy weather; and when the stones are wet with clammy spray it is by no means easy always to keep one’s footing without sliding quietly off into the sea on the outer side. To say the truth, the pier was never meant for a promenade: this high external barrier was intended merely to break the force of the waves; while the quay itself runs round the inside of the protecting semicircle at a lower level, so as entirely to cut off all view of the sea, restricting one’s prospect to the tiny harbour and the three or four coasting colliers which happen to be unloading there. But when King’s Peddington pier was first designed, the notion of promenading had never entered into anybody’s head: for it was originally built in the reign of Edward I.; and though it has since been remodelled many times over, it still preserves the main features of its primitive construction. So the old pier is really a memorial of the greatest revolution which ever affected the fate of Churnside and of England generally.

  One is often tempted to wonder why historians who are so minute and explicit about the changes in the mere external form of our social structure — who tell us so much and at such length about the glorious Reformation and the glorious Revolution and the signing of Magna Charta — should have usually passed over almost in silence the vast and all-affecting changes which at various times have come across the whole inner nature of the social structure itself. To a simple-minded Churnside antiquary, living remote from Courts and Parliaments, and wholly without curiosity as to Queen Elizabeth’s ruffs or King George’s periwigs, it would seem that the history of King’s Peddington and of Britain since the English settlement fell naturally into three great epochs of paramount importance. The first is the epoch when the whole country was entirely agricultural, and when every manor or every village was self-contained and self-supporting; and during this period there was no trade worth speaking of. The second is the epoch when the country began to export raw material to the more civilised Continent, and to receive in exchange Southern products and manufactured goods; and during this period England was in a position analogous to that of Australia or of the Western States, and local collecting and distributing centres or commercial towns sprang up at wide intervals among the agricultural tracts. The third is the epoch when England began to manufacture and export finished goods instead of raw material, and to import raw material instead of finished goods; and during this period the towns rise into prominence, the industrial class become the most important element of the population, and the whole social life of the community is utterly reversed. Compared with these momentous revolutions, a mere change of abstract religious opinions or of central administrative system sinks for the mind of the Churnside antiquary into complete insignificance. For that reason, the old stone pier, which marks and dates the beginning of the great industrial movement, must always be to every enlightened historian of King’s Peddington a critical turning-point in the long annals of the parish.

  The pier, in fact, shows us at once that by Edward’s time Churnside had cast off its old local isolation, and had begun to enter into the general current of European life. There was growing up a need for foreign products. The Norman gentlemen who owned the manors required tapestry, and Oriental steel, and better wine than that of the Gloucestershire vineyards; their wives needed velvets, and silk robes, and Rouen fashions, and Southern headgear. The churches and abbeys wanted glass, and incense, and vestments, and paintings, and Italian carvings. Ever since the Norman Conquest had dissevered England from the barbaric Scandinavian North, and bound it up with the civilised Romance South, trade in such articles had been going on to some extent; and though it was still carried on solely for the benefit of the governing few, political or ecclesiastical — for the Court, the knightly class, and the clergy — yet it had already begun to produce some little increase in the mercantile element of towns like London, Winchester, Exeter, and Norwich — where, indeed, large numbers of Norman artisans and traders had settled down after the conquest as a sort of commercial aristocracy. When Peddington pier was built, however, things had got a little beyond this first stage; and one can see easily enough why Edward’s reign should have been a natural time for the further development of the nascent industrial and commercial spirit. Of course the history books, with their ordinary love of personalities, have an easy ready-made personal explanation to offer:— “King Edward greatly encouraged trade, and induced Flemish weavers to settle in England.” But behind King Edward and his Flemings lay the nation, and the reason why the nation was now prepared to enter upon a commercial life is pretty clear. The Norman peace, the strong hands of William and Henry had put a stop to the old Danish plundering and the old English local anarchy. At the same time, the final separation from Normandy had turned the Norman and Angevin aristocracy into settled English landed proprietors, living on their own estates, and no longer engaged as of old in constant Continental warfare. Thus on the one hand population and wealth had increased during the long period of comparative peace; while, on the other hand, the class in whose hands wealth was entirely concentrated were left at home, and so compelled to spend their wealth where they gathered it. Here, then, we come upon the true mediæval England, the England of great castles and splendid abbeys, of merchant republics and special privileges, of a tinsel feudal chivalry and of abject peasant degradation. This was the England which first largely needed a foreign trade to supply those Southern luxuries and artistic products never dreamt of by the ruder old English thanes or Danish earls under Cnut or Edward the Confessor. And in this way it became practicable to ship bales of wool and tallow and hides from King’s Peddington for Flanders, France, and Italy; and to import in return wine from Bordeaux, silk mercery from Rouen, and textile fabrics from the rising cities of the Flemish industrial belt.

  The way in which King’s Peddington came to be selected as a port for the new traffic is in itself sufficiently significant. For it was in the fourth of Edward I. that Peddington became a Royal manor. It had been sold by the descendants of Walter the Breton to the Bishop of Sarum, who exchanged it with the King for Walbury Eccles, Wilts. Ever since that period the town has borne its present title of King’s Peddington. But the change of master did much more than merely alter the name of the place: it changed the little village at the mouth of the Churn from a group of huts round the manor and the church into a Royal borough. Edward determined to make his new possession a port. He planned the original stone pier, and enclosed with it a harbour of the first class, as harbours then went, capable of holding a couple of dozen coasting vessels for the Rouen and Bordeaux trade. The town must clearly have been built at once on a fixed administrative pattern, and peopled with merchants, chapmen, sailors, and craftsmen by a regularly planned migration; for its walls are mentioned in the town charter, as are also its four chief streets, and its merchant guild and its craftsmen. Two burgesses were summoned to Parliament to the King at Westminster, and were fined for non-attendance under Edward’s son. The borough was also held answerable for four ships for the king’s wars; and it had to pay a pretty heavy tax for its privileges. This high-handed, regal way of manufacturing a commercial centre is thoroughly indicative of the first stage of industrialism, before it has yet begun to emancipate itself from rigid governmental control.

  X. CHURNEY ABBEY

  Among all the visible historical memorials of Churnside, none occupies a larger place in the public estimation than the stately ruins of the great Cistercian Abbey which stood in the centre of the little valley at its widest point, just below the old Roman villa homestead at Churney. Indeed, to most casual thinkers, the abbey seems to form the one salient historical feature of
the whole Peddington district. Talk to them about the numerous associations of the past which cluster so thickly around our beautiful dale, and they answer at once with a complacent smile: “Ah, yes, to be sure; immensely interesting place, isn’t it? Why, there’s Churney Abbey there, of course.” A monastic building always has an immense hold upon the romantic side of the public fancy. Half-educated minds, especially, are fond of peopling it with the few vague and essentially incorrect figures which make up their theatrical picture of mediæval life. The “olden time,” as they call it with a delicious indefiniteness, seems to their eyes a compound of mailed knights, cowled monks, and beautiful ladies (they prefer to spell it “ladyes”) in peaked head-dresses of the most impossible sort. To such minds, the notion that men, women, and children have gone on living, and working, and eating, and drinking, and suffering (especially the last) continuously here in Churnside for ten thousand years past, is something wholly alien and inconceivable. The olden time and the present, a brilliant phantasmagoria and an actual reality, make up their sole historical conception of the life of their own district. How much the history books have to answer for! and how long will it be before the children at the board school in the Vicarage Road are taught a little about the real past of England, instead of being crammed with facts and dates as to the murderous doings of Henry and Richard?

  The existing ruins of Churney Abbey belong to the last building raised by Thomas Peddington just before the dissolution — a tall, grand, but wholly chilly specimen of pure late Perpendicular architecture. Long before Abbot Thomas Peddington, however, the Cistercian monks had been settled at Churney; and long before the Cistercians a Benedictine community had raised a rude monastery on the same spot. Cynewulf the West Saxon in the early Christian days granted the land of Churney, with the manentes, being two hundred persons — Welsh serfs, no doubt, bound to the soil — as a gift to one Eadfrith, the mass-priest, to erect a minster at that spot, for love of God and St. Peter. Eadfrith made the men-serfs work at building his wooden church and the rough barracks where he and his monks lived; while he shipped many of the women and children as slaves over sea to Italy, by the hands of a Frisian skipper and monger at the port of Bristol, getting a return cargo for the value in pictures, incense, and the finger bones of St. Euphemia. In spite of these undoubted relics, however, the little minster seems never to have prospered. Even the elevation of Ælfric, a shepherd’s son in the monastery, to be Bishop of Sherborne, did it little good; for Ælfric was killed by the Danish invaders before he had time to carry out his pet design of enlarging the monastery as a rival to Glastonbury, in the neighbouring and therefore hostile diocese of Wells. Still, Churney Old Minster, as aftertimes called it, did no small amount of good work in the dale, in spite of its evil beginning; and among other things it gave the poorest Churnside lad a chance which he never had before, and has never had since, of rising by talent and merit to the highest position in the State. In all that rough predatory and aristocratic community it formed one among a great network of real democratic centres; and it worked honestly and hard, so far as its lights went, to promote culture, freedom, right, and industrialism, in a jarring and discordant world. That, perhaps, is a more important fact about Churney Old Minster than the fact that the foundations of its later stone church exhibit some traces of early Romanesque workmanship, and possibly even of very incipient dog-tooth ornamentation.

  Churney New Minster, the Cistercian Abbey, was founded by a great-granddaughter of Walter the Breton, who had an idea that the prayers of English monks could not be of much efficacy for the salvation of a Norman lady. So she bought out the rights of the old monastery, and packed off the brethren to Wallow Monachorum, where St. Euphemia’s fingers afterwards became the nucleus of a flourishing pilgrim trade under the more commercial abbots of the fourteenth century. In their place, a body of Cistercian monks was brought over from Fécamp, and settled in the Churney valley. The brethren of the old minster had long since drained the morass which spread around the eyot, and the Fécamp abbot came at once into possession of a considerable and fertile estate. For thirty or forty years the French element predominated in the monastery, as it predominated in the towns and the country at large; but as the effects of the two French immigrations — the Norman and the Angevin — gradually passed away after the loss of Normandy, English monks once more filled the chapel and the refectory, and the Churnside lads had again a chance of rising to high distinction by means of the education they received in the minster school. Culture, in fact, was then a special prerogative of the Church, and a certain ostentatious lack of it marked the military class. In time, however, Churney Abbey grew so rich, through the numerous donations made by various pious benefactors, that it became worth while to put boys of gentle birth as monks, in order to give them the chance of finally rising to be abbot. At the same time, under the later Plantagenets and the early Tudors, society had so far progressed and education had been so far popularised, that the special function of the monasteries seemed to be gone. The brothers became a mere close corporation of well-to-do old gentlemen, living easily off their lands, obstructive in politics and religion, and wholly opposed to the great movement of enlightenment which was beginning to spread from Italy and France to the Teutonic north. They had outlived their work and had grown in course of time to be an abuse — a greater abuse than even our own Merton or Christ Church, perhaps nearly as great as All Souls’ or the City companies at the present day. When the crash came, they suffered not undeservedly; though the revolution which put an end to their corporate existence was one of the most disgraceful in its motives and disastrous in its results that has ever been known in England.

  Abbot Thomas Peddington had just completed the magnificent Perpendicular structure on whose battlements you may still read his name [in a rebus cut in stone], when King Henry’s Commissioners came down to inquire into the revenues and management of the Abbey. Their report was decidedly unfavourable, and was couched in terms which in our own days would unquestionably be held as unnecessarily strong language for an official document. Its details, indeed, contain some of the foulest and most palpable slanders ever committed to paper by party spite. But King Henry was prepared to fabricate or accept any evidence, however disgraceful, that helped him to carry out his intended measure of spoliation. Abbot Thomas Peddington and his monks were pensioned off on a pittance — lucky to have escaped with their heads; and the abbey lands and buildings were sold for a nominal price to Lord Clairvaux, whose aid Henry needed in securing the loyalty of the west-country gentlemen. The havoc that followed was too hideous a piece of vandalism to detail at full. Lord Clairvaux’s agent writes to his master, “The workmen have fully carried out your Lordship’s commands in the pulling off the roof of the church and selling the lead thereof; also in taking out the glass windows [and the brazenwork], and in stripping the high altar and the Lady Chapel; and they now humbly await your lordship’s good pleasure that they may know whether they shall further break down the walls, whose fair stone is much commended for the repairing of the pier at Peddington.” His lordship’s pleasure was fortunately to leave us the bare shell of the church and refectory, as he had thoughts of utilising them hereafter for his projected country seat. Thus the people of Churnside lost their last hold upon some small fragment of their native soil. Even the Conqueror had spared the lands of the monasteries; and though he put Norman monks in many of them, that was an evil which soon cured itself. Ever since the time of the Conquest, more and more land, in spite of hostile statutes, had continuously been given back to the Church, and so indirectly to the people; but with Henry’s spoliation the one remaining democratic element in our landowning system was swept away at once. The present earl lives in the abbey, is feudal lord of the whole valley, and generously permits the public to look at the outside of his house, under guidance of his gardener, on every second Tuesday. The historian of Churnside, with the rest of the Peddington Archæological Association, has more than once asked in vain for permission
to examine the ground-plan on the spot. His lordship’s convenience did not permit of it. Sir John Lubbock long sought ineffectually for an Act which may barely prevent the earl from pulling down or defacing the historical monument of which he has thus become the legal possessor; in how many centuries may we hope for an Act which will allow the people free access once a week to this building, which the earl’s ancestors did not raise, and for which the earl has done nothing, except to spoil the west wing with an absurd restoration? Of course, Mr. Williams, the Bradford cloth-weaver, who has built a fine modern house on the opposite hill, throws open his picture gallery and ethnological collection, after the industrial fashion, every Wednesday. “It’s the way of these nouveaux riches,” says the earl, with a superior smile of condescending exclusiveness.

  XI. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF KING’S PEDDINGTON

  Just above the point where the Churn falls into the sea, its pretty grassy valley narrows to a small gorge, through whose midst the river, here known as the Buddle, winds its way among the back slums of the village to the little bar, where its polluted stream finally slinks, as if ashamed of itself, into the purer waters of the bay. For on the banks of the gorge the oldest houses of King’s Peddington are built; and their backyards open out upon the Buddle, into which all their drainage still flows, in the good old fashion, poisoning the fish outright and giving rise to an epidemic of scarlet fever once every five years or so among the human inhabitants. Conspicuous among these lower quarters of the little town are four large gaunt buildings, overhanging the very edge of the stream, each with three tiers of paneless windows, and each with a disused water-wheel rotting by its side. They are the outward and visible signs of the decline and fall of King’s Peddington; and their present condition largely accounts for the startling decrease in the population which local curiosity has already deduced from the unofficial gossip of the census enumerators. For the empty mills are all that now remains to us of the west country cloth trade, gone northward to the coal regions, leaving King’s Peddington in these its latter days wholly dependent upon its fishermen and its summer visitors.