CHAPTER XVII
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GAMEKEEPER.—GAME PRESERVES.—ECCLESTON, A PRETTY VILLAGE.—THE SCHOOL-HOUSE.—DRAINING.—CHILDREN PLAYING.—THE RIVER-SIDE WALK.—PLEASURE PARTIES.—A CONTRASTING GLIMPSE OF A SAD HEART.—SATURDAY NIGHT.—BALLAD SINGER.—MENDICANTS.—ROW IN THE TAP-ROOM.—WOMAN’S FEEBLENESS.—CHESTER BEER, AND BEER-DRINKING.
The gamekeeper advised us to return to Chester by another road, and following his direction, we found a delightful path by the river side. We had not gone far before we overtook another keeper carrying a gun. It is hard for us to look upon wild game as property, and it seemed as if the temptation to poach upon it must be often irresistible to a poor man. It must have a bad effect upon the moral character of a community for the law to deal with any man as a criminal for an act which in his own conscience is not deemed sinful. Even this keeper seemed to look upon poaching as not at all wrong—merely a trial of adroitness between the poacher and himself, though it was plain that detection would place the poacher among common swindlers and thieves, exclude him from the society of the religious, and from reputable employment, and make the future support of life by unlawful means almost a necessity. He said, however, there was very little poaching in the neighbourhood. Most of the farmers were allowed to shoot within certain limits, and the labouring class were generally wanting in either the means or the pluck to attempt it.
[Sidenote: _GAME PRESERVES._]
Evidently a man has a right to foster and increase the natural stock of wild game upon his own land, that is, in a degree to domesticate it; and the law should protect him in the enjoyment of the results of the labour and pains he has taken for this purpose. The exceedingly indefinite and undefinable character of such property, however, makes the attempt to preserve it inexpedient, and often leads to injustice; and when the preserve is sustained at the expense of very great injury to more important means of sustaining human life in a half-starved community, the poacher is more excusable than the proprietor.
That this is often the case in England I more than once saw evidence. A picture, drawn by the agricultural correspondent of the _London Times_ of Nov. 11, 1851, represents a scene of this kind, more remarkable however than any that came under my notice:
“At Stamford we passed into Northamptonshire, obtaining a glimpse of the Marquis of Exeter’s finely wooded park and mansion of Burleigh. This magnificent place, founded by Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer Cecil, with its grand old trees and noble park, is just the place to which a foreigner should be taken to give him an idea of the wealth of our English nobility.
“The tenants on this estate are represented as being in the most hopeless state of despondency on account of the present low prices of agricultural produce, and as they were complaining vehemently, the marquis offered to have the farms of any tenants who desired it revalued. Only one on this great estate accepted the offer. There have been no farms of any consequence yet given up, and for those which do come into the market there are plenty of offerers, though men of capital are becoming chary, and will only look at very desirable farms. The estate is said to be low-rented. Small farmers, of whom there are many, are suffering most severely, as they have not saved any thing in good times to fall back upon now. Some of them are, indeed, greatly reduced, and we heard of one who had applied to his parish for relief. Others have sold every thing off their farms, and some, we were told, had not even seed corn left with which to sow their fields.
“In a fine country, with a gently undulating surface and a soil dry and easy of culture, laid into large fields moderately rented, one is surprised to hear that there is so much complaint and so much real suffering among the poorer class of farmers. It is only in part accounted for by the devastation of game, which on this and some other noblemen’s estates in North Northamptonshire is still most strictly preserved. On the 24th of January last, seven guns, as we were told, on the marquis’s estate killed 430 head of game, a most immoderate quantity at such a late period of the season. The fields are all stuck about with bushes to prevent the poachers netting; and the farmers feel most severely the losses they sustain in order that their landlord and his friends may not be deprived of their sport. The strict preservation of game on this and some other estates in the northern parts of the county was described to us in the bitterest terms, as ‘completely eating up the tenant farmer, and against which no man can farm or live upon the farm.’ It is ‘the last ounce that breaks the camel’s back,’ and men who might have made a manful struggle against blighted crops and low prices, are overborne by a burden which they feel to be needlessly inflicted and of which they dare not openly complain.
“In consequence of the distress among the small farmers many of the labourers would have been thrown out of employment had work not been found for them by the marquis in stubbing and clearing woodland, which will thus be reclaimed for cultivation. The improvement is expected to be amply remunerative in the end, and it is one of the unlooked-for results of free trade, which are to be met with in every part of the country, that a landlord is compelled by circumstances, various in kind, to improve the neglected portions of his estate, and which, without such impelling cause, might have long lain unproductive. Every such improvement is not merely an addition to the arable land of the kingdom, but it becomes also an increased source of employment to the labourer.”
I witnessed immense injury done to turnip crops by shooting over them in Scotland. I was once visiting a farmer there, when for a whole half day a “_gentleman_,” with three dogs, was trampling down his Swedes, not once going out of the field. He was a stranger, and the farmer said it would do no good to remonstrate; he would only be laughed at and insulted.
We passed near a rookery, and the keeper was good enough to shoot one of the rooks for us to look at. It was a shorter-winged and rather heavier bird than our crow, with also a larger head and a peculiar thick bill. At a distance the difference would not be readily distinguished. The _caw_ was on a lower note, and more of a parrot tone, much like the guttural croak of a fledgling crow. The keeper did not confirm the farmer’s statement of their quality for the table. When they were fat they made a tolerable pie only, he said, not as good as pigeons. The rookery was, as we have often seen it described, a collection of crows’-like nests among the tops of some large trees.
[Sidenote: _A PICTURESQUE VILLAGE._]
We turned off from the river a little ways to look at Eccleston, a kind of pet village of the marquis, on the border of the park, and about the prettiest we saw in England, though rather too evidently kept up for show.
The cottages were nearly all of the timber and _noggin_ walls I have described as common at Chester, covered with thick thatched roofs, with frequent and different-sized dormers, often with bow-windows, porches, well-houses, &c., of unpainted oak or of rustic work (boughs of trees with the bark on), broad latticed windows opening on hinges, a profusion of creeping vines on trellises, and often covering all the walls and hanging down over the windows, little flower gardens full of roses, and wallflowers, and violets, and mignonette, enclosed in front by a closely-trimmed hedge of yew, holly, or hawthorn, sometimes of both the latter together, and a nicely-sloped bank of turf between it and the road.
A cut from a sketch I made of one of the largest houses will be found on page 207. An intelligent labouring man talked with me while I was drawing it, and said it was the residence of the schoolmaster, and the village school was kept in it. The main part (which was covered with our American ivy) was over three hundred years old; a part of the wing was modern.
This labourer had been digging drains in the vicinity. He said the practice was to make them from 18 to 36 inches deep, and from 5 to 7 yards apart, or “in the old _buts_”—“The _buts_?” “Ay, the buts.” He meant what we sometimes call the “_’bouts_” (turnabouts?) or furrows between the _lands_ in ploughing, which here are often kept unaltered for generations for surface drainage, and, oddly enough, considering the many manifest inconveniences of retaining them, as we were often told, on account of the convenience of measuring or dividing fields by them (as our farmers are often guided in their sowing by the _lands_, and estimate areas by counting the panels of fence). Pipe-tiles, such as are being now introduced with us, an inch or an inch and a half in diameter (without collars), were laid in the drains to conduct the water. The usual crop of potatoes in the vicinity he thought about three _measures_ to a rood, or 225 bushels to an acre; of wheat, 30 bushels.
[Sidenote: _CHILDREN AT PLAY._]
We went into a stylish inn to get some refreshment, and while waiting for it, watched some little girls playing in the street. They stood, four, holding hands, dancing and singing round one (“Dobbin”) lying on the ground:
Old Dobbin is dead, Ay, ay; Dobbin is dead, He’s laid in his bed, Ay, ay.
There let him lie, Ay, ay; Keep watch for his eye, For if he gets up He’ll eat us all UP—
and away they scampered and Dobbin after them. The one he first catches lays down again for “Dobbin,” when it is repeated. (Shown in the cut page 207.)
The church was a little one side of the village on an elevation, and so hidden by trees that we could only see a square tower and vane. Near it, we passed a neat stone building, which I thought probably the parsonage, and pointing towards it soon after, asked a man if he knew who lived in it. His reply was, “Why, there’s none but poor peoples’ houses there, sir!” The vicarage he showed us in another direction—a fine house in spacious grounds.
From Eccleston we had a delightful walk in the evening to Chester. There is a good foot-path for miles along the river bank, with gates or stiles at all the fences that run down to it, and we met great numbers of persons, who generally seemed walking for pleasure. There were pleasure-boats, too, with parties of ladies under awnings, rowing up and down the river, sometimes with music.
We were stopped by some labouring people going home, who asked us to look after a poor woman we should see sitting by the water side over the next stile, who, they feared, had been unfortunate, and was going to drown herself. She had been there for an hour, and they had been for some time trying to prevail on her to get up and go home, but she would not reply to them. We found her as they had said—a very tall, thin woman, without hat or cap on her head, sitting under the bank behind some bushes, a little bundle in a handkerchief on her knees, her head thrown forward, resting upon it, her hands clasped over her forehead, and looking moodily into the dark stream. We drew back and sat on the stile, where we could see if she stepped into the water. In a few minutes she arose, and avoiding to turn her face towards us, walked rapidly towards the town. We followed her until she was lost in a crowd near the gate.
We found the streets within the walls all flaring with gas-light, and crowded with hawkers and hucksters with donkey-carts, soldiers, and policemen, and labouring men and women making purchases with their week’s earnings, which it is a universal custom in England to have paid on Saturday night. We heard a ballad-monger singing with a long, drawling, nasal tone, on a high key, and listened for awhile to see what he had. One after another he would hold them up by a gas-light, and sing them. The greater number were protection songs, with “free trade” and “ruin” oft repeated, and were the worst kind of doggerel. One (sung to “Oh, Susannah!”) I recollect as follows:—
“Oh, poor farmers, Don’t wait and cry in vain, But be off to Californy, If you cannot drive the _wain_.”
[Sidenote: _MENDICANTS._]
He read also choice scraps from confessions of murderers; parts of the prayer-book travestied so as to tell against free-trade; and other such literature. In another place we found a crowd about a man with a flute, a woman with a hurdy-gurdy, and three little children singing what we guessed must be Welsh songs—regular wails. The youngest was a boy, not appearing to be over five years old, and was all but naked.
In front of our inn a man held in his arms a fine, well-dressed little boy, and cried in a high, loud, measured, monotonous drawl, continuously over and over—“His mother died in Carlisle we have travelled twenty-seven miles to-day I have no money she left this boy yesterday he walked eighteen miles I have no supper he is five years old I have walked two hundred miles this is no deception I have seen better days friends his feet are macerated I am in search of work I am young and strong he cannot walk his mother died in Carlisle help me in my lamentations I have but sixpence for myself and boy friends I am compelled to beg I am young and strong his mother died in Carlisle I am in search of work his feet are lacerated”—and so on. We watched him from the rows perhaps two minutes, and saw seven persons drop coppers into his hat: two little girls that a man was leading, a boy, a German lace-pedler, a woman with a basket of linen on her head, another woman, and a well-dressed gentleman.
The rest of the evening we sat round a bright coal fire, in what had been the great fireplace of the long back parlour. We are the only inmates of the inn except Mrs. Jones, the landlady, and her maid. About eleven o’clock we were disturbed by some riotous men in the tap-room, which is the other side of the big chimney. Mrs. Jones seemed trying to prevail on them to leave the house, which they refused to do, singing “We won’t go home till morning.” Mrs. Jones is a little, quiet, meek, soft-spoken woman, and we were apprehensive for her safety. I was about to go to her assistance, when the maid entered and said, “If you please, sir, my mistress would like to see you.” I went hastily round into the tap-room, and found two stout, dirty, drunken men, swinging pewter mugs, and trying to sing “There was a jolly collier.” Mrs. Jones stood between them. I pushed one of them aside, and asked her what she wished me to do—expecting that she would want me to try to put him into the street. The men made such a noise that I could not hear her mild voice in reply, which, she perceiving, turned again and said, in a tone that at once quelled them, “Stop your noise, you brutes!”—and then to me, “will you please step into the kitchen, sir?” She only wished to know what we would like to have for our breakfast and dinner, as the shops would close soon, and, to-morrow being Sunday, they would not be open before noon. You talk about woman’s feebleness!
The next morning, when we were going out, she came to unlock the door of the passage or entry, and told us she was obliged by law to keep it locked till two o’clock. At two o’clock we found it open, and immediately after saw a man drinking beer in the tap-room again.
[Sidenote: _SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE INN._]
There is a continual and universal beer-drinking in Chester. Mrs. Jones tells us that the quality of the beer made here has long been a matter of town pride, though now there is very little brewed in families, every one almost being supplied, at a great saving of trouble, from the large breweries. She says there used to be a town law that whoever brewed poor beer should be publicly ducked. Sunday night, young men with their sweethearts and sisters, of very reputable appearance, and quiet, decent behaviour, came into our back-parlour, and sitting by the round-table ordered and drank each their glass or two of beer, as in an American town they would take ice-cream. Now and then a few remarks would be made about the sermon and who had been at church, or about those who had been, or were soon going to be, married, or other town gossip; but for the most, they would sit and drink their beer in silence, perhaps embarrassed by our presence.
[Illustration: SKETCH IN CHESTER.]
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