CHAPTER XL
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
To give a complete and truthful account of my own life, the name of Edward Everett Hale should appear on almost every page. I became a member of his parish in Worcester in August, 1849. Wherever I have been, or wherever he has been, I have been his parishioner ever since. I do not undertake to speak of him at length not only because he is alive, but because his countrymen know him through and through, almost as well as I do.
He has done work of the first quality in a great variety of fields. In each he has done work enough to fill the life and to fill the measure of fame of a busy and successful man. I have learned of him the great virtue of Hope; to judge of mankind by their merits and not their faults; to understand that the great currents of history, especially in a republic, more especially in our Republic, are determined by great and noble motives and not by mean and base motives.
In his very best work Dr. Hale seems always to be doing and saying what he does and says extempore, without premeditation. Where he gets the time to acquire his vast stores of knowledge, or to think the thoughts we all like to hear, nobody can tell. When he speaks or preaches or writes, he opens his intellectual box and takes the first appropriate thing that comes to hand.
I do not believe we have a more trustworthy historian than Dr. Hale, so far as giving us the motive and pith and essence of great transactions. He is sometimes criticised for inaccuracy in dates or matters that are trifling or incidental. I suppose that comes from the fact that while he stores away in his mind everything that is essential, and trusts to his memory for that, he has not the time, which less busy men have, to verify every unsubstantial detail before he speaks or writes. Sir Thomas Browne put on record his opinion of such critics in the "Christian Morals."
"Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition and human Lapses, may make not only Moles but Warts in learned Authors, who notwithstanding, being judged by the capital matter, admit not of disparagement. I should unwillingly affirm that Cicero was but slightly versed in Homer, because in his Work _De Gloria_ he ascribed those verses unto Ajax, which were delivered by Hector. Capital Truths are to be narrowly eyed, collateral Lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly from it."
When Dr. Hale was eighty years old, his countrymen manifested their affection for him in a manner which I think no other living man could have commanded. It was my great privilege to be asked to say to him what all men were thinking, at a great meeting in Boston. The large and beautiful hall was thronged with a very small portion of his friends. If they had all gathered, the City itself would have been thronged. I am glad to associate my name with that of my beloved teacher and friend by preserving here what I said. It is a feeble and inadequate tribute.
The President of the United States spoke for the whole country in the message which he sent:
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, Mar. 25, 1902.
_My dear Sen. Hoar:_ I very earnestly wish I could be at the meeting over which you are to preside in honor of the eightieth birthday of Edward Everett Hale. A classical allusion or comparison is always very trite; but I suppose all of us who have read the simpler classical books think of Timoleon in his last days at Syracuse, loved and honored in his old age by the fellow citizens in whose service he had spent the strength of his best years, as one of the noblest and most attractive figures in all history. Dr. Hale is just such a figure now.
We love him and we revere him. We are prouder of our citizenship because he is our fellow citizen; and we feel that his life and his writing, both alike, spur us steadily to fresh effort toward high thinking and right living. To have written "The Man Without a Country" by itself would be quite enough to make all the nation his debtor. I belong to the innumerable army of those who owe him much, and through you I wish him Godspeed now.
Ever faithfully yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
I spoke as follows:
"If I try to say all that is in my heart to-night, I do not know where to begin. If I try to say all that is in your hearts, or in the hearts of his countrymen, I do not know where to leave off. Yet I can only say what everybody here is silently saying to himself. When one of your kindred or neighbors comes to be eighty years old, after a useful and honored life, especially if he be still in the vigor of manly strength, his eye not dim or his natural force abated, his children and his friends like to gather at his dwelling in his honor, and tell him the story of their gratitude and love. They do not care about words. It is enough if there be pressure of the hand and a kindly and loving glance of the eye. That is all we can do now. But the trouble is to know how to do it when a man's friends and lovers and spiritual children are to be counted by the millions. I suppose if all the people in this country, and, indeed in all the quarters of the globe, who would like to tell their gratitude to Dr. Hale, were to come together to do it, Boston Common would not hold them.
"There is once in a while, through the quality is rare, an author, a historian, or a writer of fiction, or a preacher, or a pastor, or an orator or poet, or an influential or beloved citizen, who in everything he says or does seems to be sending a personal message from himself. The message is inspired and tinctured and charged and made electric with the quality of the individual soul. We know where it comes from. No mask, no shrinking modesty can hide the individuality. Every man knows from whom it comes, and hails it as a special message to himself. We say, That is from my friend to me! The message may be read by a million eyes and reach a million souls. But every one deems it private and confidential to him.
"This is only, when you come to think of it, carrying the genius for private and personal friendship into the man's dealing with mankind. I have never known anybody in all my long life who seemed to me to be joined by the heart- strings with so many men and women, wherever he goes, as Dr. Hale. I know in Worcester, where he used to live; I know in Washington, where he comes too seldom, and where for the last thirty-three years I have gone too often, poor women, men whose lives have gone wrong, or who are crippled in body or in mind, whose eyes watch for Dr. Hale's coming and going, and seem to make his coming and going, if they get a glimpse of him, the event they date from till he comes again. To me and my little household there, in which we never count more than two or three, his coming is the event of every winter.
"Dr. Hale has not been the founder of a sect. He has never been a builder of partition walls. He has helped throw down a good many. But still, without making proclamation, he has been the founder of a school which has enlarged and broadened the Church into the Congregation, and which has brought the whole Congregation into the Church.
"When he came, hardly out of his boyhood, to our little parish in Worcester, there was, so far as I know, no Congregational church in the country whether Unitarian or of the ancient Calvinistic faith, which did not require a special vote and ceremonial of admission to entitle any man to unite with his brethren in commemorating the Saviour as he desired his friends and brethren to remember him by the rite of the last supper. Until then, the Christian communion was but for a favored few. Mr. Hale believed that the greater the sinfulness of the individual soul the greater the need and the greater the title to be taken into the fellowship and the brotherhood of the Saviour of souls. So, without polemical discussion, or any heat of controversy, he set the example which has been so widely followed. This meant a great deal more than the abolition of a ceremonial or the change of a rubric. It was an assertion of the great doctrine, never till of late perfectly comprehended anywhere, that the Saviour of men came into the world inspired by the love of sinners, and not for an elect and an exclusive brotherhood of saints.
"We are not thinking chiefly of another world when we think of Dr. Hale or when we listen to him. He has been telling us all his life that what the theologians call two worlds are but one; that the Kingdom of God is here, within and around you; that there is but one Universe and not two; that the relation of man to God is that of father and child, not of master and slave, or even of sovereign and subject; that when man wields any of the great forces of the Universe, it is God also who is wielding them through him; that the power of a good man is one of God's powers, and that when man is doing his work faithfully the supreme power of God's omnipotence is with him.
"Dr. Hale has done a good many things in his own matchless fashion. He would have left a remarkable name and fame behind him if he had been nothing but a student and narrator of history, as he has studied and told it; if he had been nothing but a writer of fiction--the author of 'The Man Without a Country,' or 'Ten Times One is Ten,' or 'In His Name'--if he had done nothing but organize the Lend a Hand clubs, now found in the four quarters of the world; if he had been nothing but an eloquent Christian preacher; if he had been nothing but a beloved pastor; if he had been only a voice which lifted to heaven in prayer the souls of great congregations; if he had been only a public-spirited citizen, active and powerful in every good word and work for the benefit of this people; it he had been only the man who devised the plan that might have saved Texas from slavery, and thereby prevented the Civil War, and which did thereafter save Kansas; if he had been only remembered as the spiritual friend and comforter of large numbers of men and women who were desolate and stricken by poverty and sorrow; if he had been only a zealous lover of his country, comprehending, as scarcely any other man has comprehended, the true spirit of the American people; if he had been any one of these things, as he has been, it would be enough to satisfy the most generous aspiration of any man, enough to make his life worth living for himself and his race. And yet, and yet, do I exaggerate one particle, when I say that Dr. Hale has been all these, and more?
"Edward Everett Hale has been the interpreter of a pure, simple loving and living faith to thousands and thousands of souls. He has taught us that the fatherhood and tenderness of God are manifested here and now in this world, as they will be hereafter; that the religion of Christ is a religion of daily living; that salvation is the purifying of the soul from sin, not its escape from the consequences of sin. He is the representative and the incarnation of the best and loftiest Americanism. He knows the history of his country, and knows his countrymen through and through. He does not fancy that he loves his country, while he dislikes and despises his countrymen and everything they have done and are doing. The history he loves and has helped to write and to make is not the history of a base and mean people, who have drifted by accident into empire. It is the history of such a nation as Milton conceived, led and guided by men whom Milton would have loved. He will have a high and a permanent place in literature, which none but Defoe shares. He possesses the two rarest of gifts, that to give history the fascination of fiction, and that to give fiction the verisimilitude of history. He has been the minister of comfort in sorrow and of joy in common life to countless persons to whom his friendship is among their most precious blessings, or by whose fireside he sits, personally unknown, yet a perpetual and welcome guest.
"Still, the first duty of every man is to his own family. He may be a warrior or a statesman, or reformer, or philanthropist, or prophet or poet, if he careth not first for his own household, he is worse than an infidel. So the first duty of a Christian minister is still that of a pastor to his own flock. You know better than I do how it has been here in Boston; but every one of our little parish in Worcester, man or woman, boy or girl, has felt from the first time he or she knew him, ever afterward, that Dr. Hale has been taking hold of his hand. That warmth and that pressure abide through all our lives, and will abide to the end. There are countless persons who never saw his face, who still deem themselves his obedient, loving and perpetual parishioners.
"I knew very well a beautiful woman, left widowed, and childless, and solitary, and forlorn, to whom, after every other consolation seemed to have failed to awake her from her sorrow and despair, a friend of her own sex said: 'I thought you were one of Edward Hale's girls.' The appeal touched the right chord and brought her back again to her life of courage and Christian well-doing.
"He has ever been a prophet of good hope and a preacher of good cheer. When you have listened to one of his sermons, you have listened to an evangel, to good tidings. He has never stood aloof from the great battles for righteousness or justice. When men were engaged in the struggle to elevate the race for the good of their fellow men, no word of discouragement has ever come from his lips. He has recalled no memory of old failure in the past. He has never been found outside the ranks railing at or criticising the men who were doing the best work, or were doing the best work they knew how to do. He has never been afraid to tackle the evils that other men think hopeless. He has uttered his brave challenge to foemen worthy of his steel. Poverty and war and crime and sorrow are the enemies with whom he has striven.
"I do not know another living man who has exercised a more powerful influence on the practical life of his generation. He has taught us the truth, very simple, but somehow nobody ever got hold of it till he did, that virtue and brave living, and helping other men, can be made to grow by geometrical progression. I am told that Dr. Hale has more correspondents in Asia than the London _Times._ I cannot tell how many persons are enrolled in the clubs of which he was the founder and inspirer.
"But I am disqualified to do justice to the theme you have assigned to me. For an impartial verdict you must get an impartial juryman. You will have to find somebody that loves him less than I do. You cannot find anybody who loves him more. To me he has been a friend and father and brother and counsellor and companion and leader and instructor; prophet of good hope, teacher of good cheer. His figure mingles with my household life, and with the life of my country. I can hardly imagine either without him. He has pictured for us the infinite desolation of the man without a country. But when his time shall come, what will be the desolation of the country without the man?
"And now what can we give you who have given us so much? We have something to give you on our side. We bring you a more costly and precious gift than any jewel or diadem, though it came from an Emperor's treasury.
Love is a present for a mighty King.
"We bring you the heart's love of Boston where you were born, and Worcester where you took the early vows you have kept so well; of Massachusetts who knows she has no worthier son, and of the great and free country to whom you have taught new lessons of patriotism, and whom you have served in a thousand ways.
"This prophet is honored in his own country. There will be a place found for him somewhere in the House of many Mansions. I do not know what will be the employment of our dear friend in the world whose messages he has been bringing to us so long. But I like to think he will be sent on some errands like that of the presence which came to Ben Adhem with a great wakening light, rich and like a lily in bloom, to tell him that the name of him who loved his fellow men led all the names of those the love of God had blessed."
APPENDIX THE FOREST OF DEAN BY JOHN BELLOWS
The Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, is one of the very few primeval Forests of Britain that have survived to this century. It has just been my privilege to accompany Senator Hoar on a drive through a portion of it, and he has asked me to write a few notes on this visit, for the American Antiquarian Society, in the hope that others of its members may share in the interest he has taken in its archaeology.
I am indebted for many years' acquaintance with George F. Hoar, through Oliver Wendell Holmes, to the circumstance that the Hoar family lived in Gloucester from the time of the Tudors, if not earlier; and this has led him to pay repeated visits to our old city, with the object of tracing the history of his forefathers. In doing this he has been very successful; and only within the last few months my friend H. Y. J. Taylor, who is an untiring searcher of our old records, has come upon an item in the expenses of the Mayor and Burgesses, of a payment to Charles Hoar, in the year 1588, for keeping a horse ready to carry to Cirencester the tidings of the arrival of the Spanish Armada. And Charles Hoar's house is with us to this day, quaintly gabled, and with over-hanging timber-framed stories, such as the Romans built here in the first century. It stands in Longsmith Street, just above the spot where forty years ago I looked down on a beautiful tessellated pavement of, perhaps, the time of Valentinian. It was eight feet below the present surface; for Gloucester, like Rome, has been a rising city.
Senator Hoar had been making his headquarters at Malvern, and he drove over from there one afternoon, with a view to our going on in the same carriage to the Forest. A better plan would have been to run by rail to Newnham or Lydney, to be met by a carriage from the "Speech House," a government hotel in the centre of the woods; but as the arrangement had been made we let it stand.
To give a general idea of the positions of the places we are dealing with, I may say that Upton Knoll, where I am writing, stands on the steep edge of a spur of the Cotteswold Hills, three and a half miles south of Gloucester. Looking north, we have before us the great vale, or rather plain, of the Severn, bounded on the right by the main chain of the Cotteswolds, rising to just over one thousand feet; and on the left by the hills of Herefordshire, and the beautiful blue peaks of the Malverns; these last being by far the most striking feature in the landscape, rising as they do in a sharp serrated line abruptly from the plain below. They are about ten miles in length, and the highest point, the Worcestershire Beacon, is some fourteen hundred feet above the sea. It is the spot alluded to in Macaulay's lines on the Armada--
Till twelve fair counties saw the blaze on Malvern's lonely height;
and two hundred years before the Armada it was on "Malvern hulles" that William Langland "forwandered" till he fell asleep and dreamed his fiery "Vision of Piers Plowman"--
In a somere season, when softe was the sonne
when, looking "esteward, after the sonne" he beheld a castle on Bredon Hill
Truth was ther-ynne
and this great plain, that to him symbolized the world.
A fair feld ful of folke fonde ich ther bytwyne; Alle manere of men; the meme and the ryche.
Now, in the afternoon light, we can see the towns of Great and North Malvern, and Malvern Wells, nestling at foot of the steep slant; and eight miles to the right, but over thirty from where we stand, the cathedral tower of Worcester. The whole plain is one sea of woods with towers and steeples glinting from every part of it; notably Tewkesbury Abbey, which shines white in the sunlight some fourteen miles from us. Nearer, and to the right, Cheltenham stretches out under Cleeve Hill, the highest of the Cotteswolds; and to the left Gloucester, with its Cathedral dwarfing all the buildings round it. This wooded plain before us dies away in the north into two of the great Forests of ancient Britain; Wyre, on the left, from which Worcester takes its name; and Feckenham, on the right, with Droitwich as its present centre. Everywhere through this area we come upon beautiful old timber-framed houses of the Tudor time or earlier; Roman of origin, and still met with in towns the Romans garrisoned, such as Chester and Gloucester, though they have modernized their roofs, and changed their diamond window panes for squares, as in the old house of Charles Hoar's, previously mentioned.
Now if we turn from the north view to the west, we get a different landscape. Right before us, a mile off, is Robin's Wood Hill, a Cotteswold outlier; in Saxon times called "Mattisdun" or "Meadow-hill," for it is grassed to the top, among its trees. "Matson" House, there at its foot, was the abode of Charles I. during his siege of Gloucester in 1643. To the left of this hill we have again the Vale of the Severn, and beyond it, a dozen miles away, and stretching for twenty miles to the southwest are the hills of the Forest of Dean. They are steep, but not lofty--eight hundred or nine hundred feet. At their foot yonder, fourteen miles off, is the lake-like expanse of the Severn; and where it narrows to something under a mile is the Severn Bridge that carries the line into the Forest from the Midland Railway. Berkeley Castle lies just on the left of it, but is buried in the trees. Thornbury Tower, if not Thornbury Castle, further south, is visible when the sun strikes on it. Close to the right of the bridge is an old house that belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh; and, curiously enough, another on the river bank not far above it is said to have been occupied by Sir Francis Drake just before the coming of the Armada. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, who commanded the Spanish fleet, was ordered to detach a force as soon as he landed, to destroy the Forest of Dean, which was a principal source for timber for the British navy; and it is probable that the Queen's ministers were aware of this and took measures in defence, with which Drake had to do.
Two miles lower than the bridge is the Forest port of Lydney, now chiefly used for shipping coal; and as the ex-Verderer of the Forest resides near it, and he would be able to furnish information of interest to our American visitor, we decided to drive to Lydney to begin.
It was too late to start the same day, however; and Senator Hoar stayed at Upton, where his visit happens to mark the close of what is known as the "open-field" system of tillage; a sort of midway between the full possession of land by freehold, and unrestricted common rights. The area over which he walked, and which for thousands of years has been divided by "meres" and boundary stones, is now to be enclosed, and so will lose its archaeological claims to interest. In one corner of it, however, there still remains a fragment of Roman road, with some of the paving stones showing through the grass of the pasture field. The name of this piece of land gives the clue to its history. It is called Sandford; a corruption of Sarn Ford, from _sarnu_ (pronounced "sarney") _to pave;_ and _fford,_ a road. These are Celtic Cornish and Welsh words; and it should be noted that the names of the Roman roads in the Island as well as those of the mountains and rivers, are nearly all Celtic, and not Latin or Saxon.*
[Footnote] * The Whitcombe Roman Villa, four miles east of Upton, stands in a field called Sandals. In Lyson's description of it, written in 1819 it stands as _Sarn_dells. The paved road ran through the dell. [End of Footnote]
We made a short delay in the morning, at Gloucester, to give Senator Hoar time to go on board the boat "Great Western" which had just arrived in our docks from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to visit the mother city, after a perilous voyage across the Atlantic by Captain Blackburn single-handed. Senator Hoar having welcomed the captain in his capacity of an old Englishman and a New Englander "rolled into one," we set out for Lydney, skirting the bank of one arm of the Severn which here forms an island. It was on this Isle of Alney that Canute and Edmund Ironside fought the single-handed battle that resulted in their dividing England between them.* We pass on to the Island at Westgate Bridge; and a quarter of a mile further leave it by Over Bridge; one of Telford's beautiful works. Just below it the Great Western Railway crosses the river by an iron bridge, the western piers of which rest upon Roman foundations.
[Footnote] * Sharon Turner's "Anglo Saxons," Vol. III., Chap. XV. [End of Footnote]
One remarkable thing which I believe I forgot to mention to George Hoar as we crossed the Island, is, that the meadows on both sides of the causeway belong to the "Freemen" of the city; and that, go back as far as we may in history, we cannot find any account of the original foundation of this body. But we have this clue to it--that Gloucester was made into a Colony in the reign of Nerva, just before the end of the first century; and in each Roman colony lands were allotted to the soldiers of the legions who had become freemen by reason of having served for twenty-five years. These lands were always on the side of the city nearest the enemy; and the lands we are crossing are on the western side of Glevum, nearest the _Silures,_ or South Welsh, who were always the most dangerous enemies the Romans had in Britain. Similarly, at Chester, the freemen's lands are on the west, or enemy's side, by the Dee. In Bath it was the same.
Immediately after passing "Over" Bridge we might turn off, it time permitted, to see Lassington Oak, a tree of giant size and unknown age; but as Emerson says--
There's not enough for this and that-- Make thy option which of two!
and we make ours for Lydney. A dozen miles drive, often skirting the right bank of the Severn, brings us to Newnham, a picturesque village opposite a vast bend, or horse-shoe, of the river, and over which we get a beautiful view from the burial ground on the cliff. The water expands like a lake, beyond which the woods, house-interspersed, stretch away to the blue Cotteswold Hills; the monument to William Tyndale being a landmark on one of them--Nibley Knoll. Just under that monument was fought the last great battle between Barons. This battle of Nibley Knoll, between Lord Berkeley and Lord Lisle, left the latter dead on the field, at night, with a thousand of the men of the two armies; and made Lord Berkeley undisputed master of the estates whose name he bore.
We now leave the river, and turn inland; and in a short time we have entered the Forest of Dean proper; that is, the lands that belong to the Crown. Their area may be roughly set down as fifteen miles by ten; but in the time of the Conqueror, and for many years after, it was much larger; extending from Ross on the north, to Gloucester on the east, and thence thirty miles to Chepstow on the south-west. That is, it filled the triangle formed by the Severn and the Wye between these towns. It is doubtless due to this circumstance of its being so completely cut off from the rest of the country by these rivers that it has preserved more remarkably than any other Forest, the characteristics and customs of ancient British life, to which we shall presently refer; for their isolation has kept the Dean Foresters to this hour a race apart.
Sir James Campbell, who was for between thirty and forty years the chief "Verderer," or principal government officer of the Forest, lives near Lydney. He received us with great kindness, and gave us statistics of the rate of grown of the oak, both with and without transplantation. Part of them are published in an official report on the Forest (A 12808. 6/1884. Wt. 3276. Eyre & Spottiswoode, London) and part are in manuscript with which Senator Hoar has been presented. Briefly, the chief points are these:
In 1784 or thereabouts acorns were planted in "Acorn Patch Enclosure" in the Forest; and in 1800 trees marked A and B were taken from this place and planted opposite the "Speech House." Two, marked D and F, were drawn out of Acorn Patch in 1807 and planted near the Speech House fence. Another, marked N, was planted in 1807, five and one-half feet high, in the Speech House grounds, next the road; and L, M, N, X, have remained untransplanted in the Acorn Patch.
The dimensions were (circumference, six feet from the ground), in inches-- A B D F L M N X In 1814, Oct. 5, 14-3/4 14 11 9-1/2 15-5/8 18-1/2 13 24-1/2 1824, Oct. 20, 29-1/2 28-3/4 25-3/8 22-1/8 22-1/2 23-3/4 30-1/8 32-1/8 1844, Oct. 5, 58-1/2 58 45 46 35 34-1/2 57 44-1/2 1864, Oct. 1, 73-1/2 71 59-1/2 67-3/4 46-1/2 44 73-1/4 56
Another experiment tried by Sir James Campbell himself gave the following results:
Experiment begun in 1861 to test the value, if any, of merely lifting and replanting oak trees in the same holes without change of soil, situation, or giving increased space; as compared with the experiment already detailed, which was begun in 1800.
In 1861, twelve oak trees of about 25 years' growth, which had been self-sown (dropping from old trees afterwards cut down) in a thick plantation, were selected, all within gunshot of each other, and circumferences measured at five feet from the ground. Of these, six were taken up and immediately replanted in the same holes. The other six were not interfered with at all.
Aggregate admeasurement of six Aggregate admeasurement of six dug up and replanted. Marked not interfered with. Marked in in _white_ paint 1, 2, 3, &c. _red_ paint 1, 2, 3, &c. 1861, 24-1/2 inches 27 inches (_i. e._, 2-1/2 inches more than the transplanted ones, at starting.) 1866, 37-3/4 " 46-1/2 " (_i. e._, 10-7/8 inches more than the transplanted ones at starting.) 1886, 118-1/4 " 118-5/8 " (_i. e._, the transplanted ones had now _regained_ 10-1/2 inches.) 1888, 125-1/2 " 123-1/2 " (The transplanted trees in '88 had outgrown the others by 2 ins.) 1890, 133-7/8 " 128 " (The transplanted trees in '90 had outgrown the others by 5-7/8 ins.) 1892, 141 " 131-1/4 " (The transplanted trees in '92 had outgrown the others by 9-3/4 ins.)
Thus proving that merely transplanting is beneficial to oaks; the benefit, however, being greater when the soil is changed and more air given.*
[Footnote] * The Earl of Ducie, who has had very large experience as an arboriculturist, does _not_ hold the view that oaks are benefited by transplanting, if the acorns are sown _in good soil._ In the case of trees that show little or no satisfactory progress after four years, but are only just able to keep alive, he cuts them down to the root. In the next season 80 per cent. of them send up shoots from two to three feet high, and at once start off on their life's mission. [End of Footnote]
From Lydney a drive of a few miles through pleasant ups and downs of woodland and field, brings us to Whitemead Park, the official residence of the Verderer, Philip Baylis. The title "Verderer" is Norman, indicating the administration of all that relates to the "Vert" or "Greenery" of the Forest; that is, of the timber, the enclosures, the roads, and the surface generally. The Verderer's Court is held at the "Speech House," to which we shall presently come: but the Forest of Dean is also a mineral district, and the Miners have a separate Court of their own. That some of their customs go back to a very remote antiquity we may well believe when we find the scale of which the Romans worked iron in the Forest; a scale so great that with their imperfect method of smelting with Catalan furnaces, etc., so much metal was left in the Roman cinder that it has been sought after all the way down to within the present generation as a source of profit; and in the time of Edward I., one-fourth of the king's revenue from this Forest was derived from the remelted Roman refuse.
I have a beautiful Denarius of Hadrian which was found in the old Roman portion of the Lydney-Park Iron Mine in 1854, with a number of other silver coins, some of them earlier in date; but when we speak of the "mines," the very ancient ones in the Forest were rather deep quarries than what would now be termed mines. As we drive along we now and then notice near the roadside, nearly hidden by the dense foliage of the bushes, long dark hollows, which are locally known as _"scowles,"_ another Celtic word meaning gorges or hollows; something like ghyll in the Lake District, "Dungeon Ghyll," and so on. These were Roman and British Hematite mines. If we had been schoolboys I would have taken Senator Hoar down into a scowl and we should both have come back with our clothes spoiled, and our arms full of the splendid hartstongue ferns that cover the sides and edges of the ravine. But they are dangerous places for any but miners _or_ schoolboys; and I shrank from encouraging an enthusiastic American to risk being killed in a Roman pit, even with the ideal advantage of afterwards being buried with his own ancestors in England! So I said but little about them.
The Miners' Court is presided over by another government officer, called the "Gaveller"; from a Celtic word which means _holding;_ as in the Kentish custom of "Gavelkind."* These courts are held in "Saint Briavels" (pronounced "Brevels") Castle: a quaint old building of the thirteenth century, on the western edge of the Forest, where it was placed to keep the Welsh in check. It looks down on a beautiful reach of the river Wye at Bigswear; and it was just on this edge that Wordsworth stood in 1798, when he thought out his "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey," etc.
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters; and again I hear These waters rolling from their mountain springs With a soft inland murmur. Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs.
Senator Hoar will recall the scene from the railway below: the
"Plots of cottage ground" that "lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses";
and he will say how exactly the words describe
These hedge-rows; hardly hedge-rows; little lines Of sportive wood run wild,
for they cover yards in width in some places, as he will remember my pointing out to him. The castle is placed on the outside of the Forest and close on the Wye, to guard what was seven centuries ago the frontier of Wales; and the late William Philip Price (Commissioner of Railways and for many years member of Parliament for Gloucester) told me that when he was a boy the Welsh tongue was still spoken at Landogo, the next village down the river, midway between Bigswear and Tintern.
[Footnote] * I suspect "Gaffer," the English equivalent of "Boss," may be the same root: _i. e.,_ the _taker_ or contractor. [End of Footnote]
Philip Baylis showed us some of the old parchments connected with the Mine Court; one document especially precious being a copy of the "Book of Denys," made in the time of Edward III. It sets forth the ancient customs which formed the laws of the miners. At this point the Verderer had to settle some matter of the instant, but he put us under the care of a young man who acted as our guide to one of the ancient and giant oaks of the Forest, on the "Church Hill" enclosure, about three-quarters of a mile up the hill above the Park. Nicholls ("History of the Forest of Dean," page 20) thinks the name Church Hill comes from the setting apart of some land here for the Convent of _Grace Dieu_ to pay for masses for the souls of Richard II., his ancestors and successors.
It was a steep climb; and the evening twilight was coming on apace as we followed the little track to the spot where the old oak rises high above the general level of the wood, reminding one of Rinaldo's magical myrtle, in "Jerusalem Delivered":
O'er pine, and palm, and cypress it ascends; And towering thus all other trees above Looks like the elected queen and genius of the grove!
Only that for an _oak_ of similar standing we must say "king" instead of "queen"; emblem as it is of iron strength and endurance.
It is not so much the girth of the tree as its whole bearing that impresses a beholder; and I do not think either of us will forget its effect in the gloom and silence and mystery of the gathering night.
Resisting a kindly pressure to stay the night at Whitemead, that we might keep to our programme of sleeping at the Speech House, we started on the last portion of the long day's drive. The road from Parkend, after we have climbed a considerable hill, keeps mostly to the level of a high ridge. It is broad and smooth; and the moonlight and its accompanying black shadows on the trees made the journey one of great beauty; while the mountain air lessened the sense of fatigue that would otherwise have pressed heavily on us after so long a day amid such novel surroundings. The only thing to disturb the solitude is the clank of machinery; and the lurid lights, as we pass a colliery; and then a mile of two more with but the sound of our own wheels and the rhythm of the horses' feet, and we suddenly draw up at an hotel in the midst of the Forest, its quiet well-lighted interior inviting us through the doorway, left open to the cool summer night air. We are at the Speech House. We had bespoken our rooms by wire in the morning: Senator Hoar had a _chambre d'honneur,_ with a gigantic carved four-post bed that reminded him of the great bed of Ware. His room like my "No. 5," looked out over magnificent bays of woodland to the north. The Speech House is six hundred feet above the sea, and the mountain breeze coming through the wide open window, with this wonderful prospect of oak and beech and holly in the moonlight,--the distance veiled, but scarcely veiled, by the mist, suggest a poem untranslatable in words, and incommunicable except to those who have passed under the same spell. We speak of a light that makes darkness visible; and similarly there are sounds that deepen the long intervals of silence with which they alternate. One or two vehicles driving past; now and then the far-off call of owls answering one another in the woods--one of the sweetest sounds in nature--the varying cadence carrying with it a sense of boundlessness and infinite distance; and with it we fall asleep.
If there is anything more beautiful than a moonlight summer night in the heart of the Forest of Dean, it is its transformation into a summer morning, with the sparkle of dew on the grass, and the sunrise on the trees; with the music of birds, and the freshness that gives all these their charm.
As soon as we are dressed we take a stroll out among the trees. In whichever direction we turn we are struck by the abundance of hollies. I believe there are some three thousand full grown specimens within a radius of a mile of the Speech House. This may be due to the spot having been from time immemorial the central and most important place in the Forest. The roads that lead to it still show the Roman paving-stones in many places, as Senator Hoar can bear witness; and the central point of a British Forest before the Roman time would be occupied by a sacred oak. The Forest into which Julius Caesar pursued the Britons to their stronghold, was Anderida, that is, the Holy Oak; from _dar,_ oak (Sanskrit, daru, a tree), and _da,_ good. It is worth remarking that this idea survives in the personal name, Holyoak; for who ever heard of "Holyelm," or "Holyash," or a similar form compounded of the adjective and the name of any other tree than the oak. If there is an exception it is in the name of the _holly_. The Cornish Celtic word for holly was Celyn, from Celli (or Kelli), a grove; literally a _grove-one;_ so that the holly was probably planted as a grove or screen round the sacred oak. Such a planting of a holly grove in the central spot of the Forest in the Druid time, would account for these trees being now so much more numerous round the Speech House than they are in any other part of the woods. The Saxon name is merely the word _holy_ with the vowel shortened, as in _holi_day; and that the tree really was regarded as holy is shown by the custom in the Forest Mine Court of taking the oath on a stick of holly held in the hand. This custom survived down to our own times; for Kedgwin H. Fryer, the late Town Clerk of Gloucester, told me he had often seen a miner sworn in the Court, touching the Bible with the holly stick! The men always kept their caps on when giving evidence to show they were "Free miners."
The oaks, marked A. B., of whose growth statistics have already been given, stand on the side of the Newnham road opposite the Speech House. The Verderer is carrying on the annual record of their measurements.
We return to the house by the door on the west; the one at which we arrived last evening. It was then too dark to observe that the stone above it, of which I took a careful sketch several years ago, is crumbling from the effects of weather, after having withstood them perfectly for two centuries. The crown on it is scarcely recognizable; and the lettering has all disappeared except part of the R.
We breakfast in the quaint old Court room. Before us is the railed-off dais, at the end, where the Verderer and his assistants sit to administer the law. On the wall behind them are the antlers of a dozen stags; reminders of the time, about the middle of the present century, when the herds of deer were destroyed on account of the continual poaching to which they gave occasion. Many of the cases that come before the Court now are of simple trespass.
This quaint old room, with its great oak beam overhead, and its kitchen grate wide enough to roast a deer--this strange blending of an hotel dining-room and a Court of Justice, has nevertheless a link with the far distant past more wonderful than anything that has come down to us in the ruins of Greece or Rome.
Look at the simple card that notifies the dates of holding the Vederer's Court. Here is an old one which the Verderer, Philip Baylis, has kindly sent to Senator Hoar in response to his request for a copy.
V. R. Her Majesty's Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, VERDERERS' COURT. Verderers: Charles Bathurst, Esq. Sir Thomas H. Crawley-Boevey, Bart. Maynard Willoughby Colchester-Wemyss, Esq. Russell James Kerr, Esq. Deputy-Surveyor: Philip Baylis, Esq. Steward: James Wintle. ----NOTICE---- The VERDERERS of Her Majesty's Forest of Dean hereby give Notice that the COURT of ATTACHMENT of our Sovereign Lady the Queen for the said Forest will be holden by adjournment, at the Speech House, in the said Forest, at half-past Two o'clock, in the afternoon, on the following days during the year 1897, viz.: Wednesday, the 27th January; Monday, the 8th March; Saturday, the 17th April; Thursday, the 27th May; Tuesday, the 6th July; Monday, the 16th August; Friday, the 24th September; Wednesday, the 3rd November; Monday, the 13th December; James Wintle, Steward. Newnham, 1st January, 1897.
Many years ago I stood in the Court Room examining a similar notice, puzzled at the absence of any system or order in the times appointed for the sittings, which did not come once a month, or every six weeks; and did not even fall twice in succession on the same day of the week. Turning to the landlord of the hotel I asked, "What is the rule for holding the Court? _When_ is it held?" _"Every forty days at twelve o'clock at noon"_ was the reply. Reflection showed that so strange a periodicity related to no notation of time with which we are now in touch; it must belong to a system that has passed away; but what could this be?
We are reminded by the date of the building we are in (1680), that the room itself cannot have been used for much more than two centuries for holding the Courts.
But there was a Verderer's Court held in several Forests besides this Forest of Dean, long before the Stuart days. The office itself is mentioned in Canute's Forest charter, dating back nearly nine hundred years; and as at that period about a third of England was covered with Forests, their influence must have been very powerful; and local laws and customs in them must have been far too firmly established for such a man as Canute to alter them. He could only have confirmed what he found; much as he confirmed the laws of nature as they affected the tides at Southampton!
The next Forest Charter of national importance after Canute's, is that of Henry III., in 1225. It is clear that he, again, made no material change in the old order of things; and in recapitulating the old order of the Forest Courts, he ordains that the Court of Attachment (called in Dean Forest the Court of the Speech) was to be held _every forty days._ This Court was one of first instance, simply for the hearing of evidence and getting up the cases for the "Swainmote,"* which came _three times a year._ The Swains were free man; and at their _mote_ evidence was required from _three_ witnesses in each case, on which the Verderer and other officers of the king passed sentence in accordance with the laws laid down in this Charter. From this Swainmote there was a final appeal to the High Court of the Judges in Eyre (Eyre, from "errer" to wander, being the Norman French for Itinerant, or, on Circuit) which was held _once in three years._
[Footnote] * That the Forest Charter of Hen. III. did not establish these courts is proved from a passage in Manwood, cap. 8, which runs thus: "And the said Swainmotes shal not be kept but within the counties in the which they have been used to be kept." [End of Footnote]
The forty-day court was common to all the ancient forests of Britain; and that they go back to _before_ the time of Henry III. is clear from the following extracts from Coke's Fourth Institute, for which I am indebted to the kindness of James G. Wood, of Lincoln's Inn.
CAP. LXXIII. Of the Forests and the Jurisdiction of the Courts [p 289] of the Forest. * * * * * * * And now let us set down the Courts of the Forests--Within _every_ Forest there are these Courts 1. The Court of the Attachments or the Woodmote Court. This is to kept before the Verderors every forty days throughout the year --and thereupon it is called the Forty-day Court--At this Court the Foresters bring in the Attachments de viridi et venalione [&c &c] * * * * * * * 2. The Court of regard or Survey of days is holden every third year [&c &c] * * * * * * * 3. The Court of Swainmote is to be holden before the Verderors as judges by the Steward of the Swainmote thrice in every year [&c] * * * * * * * 4. ------ The Court of the Justice Seat holden before the Chief Justice of the Forest ---- aptly called Justice in eire ------ and this Court of the Justice Seat cannot be kept oftener than every third year. * * * * * * * [319] _For the antiquity of such Forests within England as we have treated of the best and surest argument therof is that the Forests in England (being in number 69) except the New Forest in Hampshire erected by William the Conqueror as a conqueror, and Hampton Court Forest by Hy 3, by authority of Parliament, are so ancient as no record or history doth make any mention of any of their Erections or beginnings._
Here then we have clear evidence that nearly seven hundred years ago the Verderer's Court was being held at periods of time that bore no relation to any division of the year known to the Normans or Plantagenets, or, before them, to the Saxons, or even, still earlier, to the Romans. We are, therefore, driven back to the period before the Roman invasion in Britain, and when the Forest legislation was, as Caesar found it, in the hands of the Druids. In his brief and vivid account of these people he tells us that they used the Greek alphabet; and as he also says they were very proficient in astronomy, it seems clear that they had their astronomy from the same source as their literature. Their astronomy involved of necessity their notation of time. And the Greeks, in turn, owed their astronomy to the Egyptians, with whom the year was reckoned as of three hundred and sixty days; and this three hundred and sixty-day year gives us the clue to the forty-day period for holding the Forest Courts in Ancient Britain.
We cannot fail to be struck, as we examine the old Forest customs, with the constant use of the _number three,_ as a sacred or "lucky" number, on every possible occasion. We have just seen the role it plays in the Mine Court, with its _three_ presiding officials, its jury of multiples of _three_ (twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight); its holly stick oath sworn by _three_ witnesses. We have notice the Swainmote Court, also requiring _three_ witnesses, held _three_ times a year, and subordinate to the Court of Eyre held once in _three_ years; to which should be added the perambulation of the Forest bounds at the same triennial visit in Eyre, when the king's officers were accompanied by nine foresters in fee (_three threes_) and twenty-four jurors (_eight threes_).
To go fully into the role of the number three in British traditions would require a profound study; but it may be useful briefly to note its influence on the Bardic poetry-- the Triads, where the subjects are all grouped in threes. Nor was this predilection confined to the Island. We find it affecting the earliest history of Rome itself, with its _nine_ gods ("By the nine gods he swore") and the _nine_ books which the Sibyl destroyed by _threes,_ till the last _three_ were saved. Then we have the evidence in the name _nundina_* for a market, that the week was originally a cycle not of seven, but of _nine_ days; and our own saying that a given thing is a _"nine days wonder"_ is undoubtedly a survival from the period when the nine days made a week,** for such a phrase expresses a round number or unit of time; not nine _separate_ days.
[Footnotes] * The Romans meant by _nundinae_ periods that were really of eight days; but they made them nine by counting in the one _from_ which they started. So accustomed were they to this method of notation that the priests who had the control of the calendar, upset Julius Caesar's plan for intercalating a day once in _four_ years ("Bissextile") by insisting that the interval intended was _three_ years! Augustus was obliged to rectify this by dropping the overplus day it occasioned. It is this Roman custom of _inclusive_ reckoning which has led to the French calling a week _huit jours_, and a fortnight, _une quinzaine_.
** The word week comes from _wika_ (= Norsk _vika_) to bend or _turn_. The idea connected with it was no doubt that of the moon's turning from one of its quarters to the next. I can remember when some of the people in "the Island" in Gloucester always made a point of _turning_ any coins they had in their pockets when it was new moon and repeating a sort of invocation to the moon! How or when the nine day week was exchanged by western nations for the seven day one, we do not know; but it is likely that it may have been brought about by the Phoenicians and Jews, who regarded the number _seven_ as the Druids regarded _three_--as something especially sacred. They had much of the commerce of Southern Europe in their hands, and, therefore, a certain power in controlling the markets, which it would be a convenience to Jews to _prevent_ falling on the sabbath day. The circumstance that the lunar month fitted in with four weeks of seven days no doubt made it easier to effect the change from _nundinae_. [End of Footnotes]
Shakespeare had been struck with the relationship of the _nine_ day week, alluded to in the proverb, to the more modern one of seven days, as is shown by his very clever juxtaposition of the two in "As You Like It." In Act III., Scene 2, he makes Celia say to Rosalind
"But didst thou hear _without wondering_ how thy name should be hanged and carved upon these trees?"
And Rosalind replies
"I was _seven_ of the _nine days out of the wonder_ before you came"--_etc._
Gloucester, down till the Norman time, and after, was the great manufactory of the iron brought from the Forest of Dean. The metal was brought up the Severn by barges, to the quay which stood at the road running straight down from Longsmith Street (in which Charles Hoar's house stands), and buried under all this street we find the cinder and slag of the Roman forges. In Domesday book (which was ordered to be drawn up at a Parliament in Gloucester in 1083) it states that the City had paid to the King (_i. e.,_ Edward the Confessor) ten _dicres_ of iron yearly. This is very remarkable, for a dicre was three dozen rods or bars; so that the whole tribute was three hundred and sixty bars, or _one bar per day for the Druid year of three hundred and sixty days._*
[Footnote] * For more than a century after Julius Caesar had altered the year to three hundred and sixty-five days, the Roman soldiers were still paid at the ancient rate of three hundred and sixty days only, losing the rest as _"terminalia,"_ or days not counted as belonging to the year! The proof of this is that in the time of Domitian a soldier's _year's_ pay divided by three hundred and sixty gives an even number of _ases_. [End of Footnote]
And now we come back to the Verderer's Court at the Speech House with a clear reason for its being held _"every forty days at twelve o'clock at noon."_
Forty days was the _ninth_ of the Druid year of three hundred and sixty, and was a period of five weeks of eight days each, but which according to the ancient method of counting were called _"nine-days."_ And the reason the Court sits "at Twelve o'clock at noon" is because the Druid day began at noon. Even now, within ten miles of where I write, the children on Minchinhampton Common, on the Cotteswold hills, keep up _"old May Day,"_ which was the opening of the Druid year, though they are ignorant of this. Boys and girls arm themselves on that day with boughs of the beech, and go through certain games with them; but exactly as the clock strikes _twelve_ they throw them away, under pain of being stigmatized as _"May fools!"_
Well has Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, that _"All_ things are _in all_ things!" Even this commonplace list of Court days in the Forest of Dean becomes a beautiful poem when the light of such a past shines on it; just as the veriest dust of the Krakatoan volcano evolves itself into every color of the rainbow when it rises into the sunset sky.
Since writing this paper I find that Philip Baylis, the Verderer of the Forest of Dean, has kindly sent three or four dozen of young oak trees from the Government plantations, to Washington, in order that they may be planted there and in some other places in the United States, to begin the century with. The State Department of Agriculture has arranged for the planting of these oaks, and the periodical record of their measurements, so that a valuable basis will be established for an experiment that may be carried on for a century, or more; and we, the archaeologists of the nineteenth century, shall have wiped away the stigma implied in the old Aberdeen Baillie's remark, that as _Posteerity_ had never done anything for us, we ought not to do anything for _posteerity!_
The Earl of Ducie has sent, accompanying these Forest of Dean oaks, four small plants, seedlings from the great Chestnut Tree on his Estate at Tortworth; the largest and oldest of its sort in Great Britain. It measures forty-nine feet round the trunk.
Leaving the Speech House for Coleford and Newland we descend a steep hill for half a mile, and crossing the rail at the Station we begin to ascend the opposite rise through the woods. As the carriage climbs slowly up we keep on the lookout for the margin-stones of the Roman paving which here and there show through the modern metaled surface--pieces fifteen to twenty inches long by about five inches in thickness, and set so deep in the ground that eighteen hundred years' wear has never moved them. They are buttressed on the outer edge by similar blocks set four or five inches lower, and themselves forming one side of the solidly paved water-way or gutter which was constructed as part of every such road on a steep gradient, to secure it from abrasion by flood or sudden rush from heavy rainfall. There are many excellent examples of this in the Forest of Dean. We are on the watch, however, for some part where the _"margines"_ remain on _both_ sides of the way. At last we come upon such a place, and alighting from the carriage we strain the tape measure across at two or three points. The mean we find to be thirteen feet and seven inches. As the Roman foot was just over three per cent. less than ours, this means that the Romans built the road here for a fourteen-foot way. So far as I have examined their roads they were always constructed to certain standard widths--seven feet, nine feet, eleven feet, thirteen feet, fourteen feet, or fifteen feet.
It is not too much to say that most of the main roads in England are Roman; but the very continuity of their use has caused this to be overlooked. All the _old_ roads in the Forest of Dean have been pronounced by the Ordnance Surveyors, after close examination, to bear evidences of Roman paving, although for some centuries since then wheel carriages went out of use here!
There is a vivid description in Statius of the making of an imperial-road through such another Forest (if not indeed this very one!) especially worth recalling here, because it was written at very nearly the period of the building of this track over which we are journeying; _i. e.,_ near the end of the first century.
The poet stands on a hill from which he can see the effect of the united work of the army of men who are engaged in the construction: perhaps a hundred thousand forced laborers, under the control of the legionary soldiers who act as the engineers. He makes us see and hear with him the tens of thousands of stone cutters and the ring of their tools squaring the "setts"; and then one platoon after another stepping forward and laying down its row of stones followed by rank after rank of men with the paviours' rammers, which rise and fall at the sweep of the band-master's rods, keeping time in a stately music as they advance; the continuous falling and crashing of the trees as other thousands of hands ply the axes along the lines, that creep, slowly, but visibly, on through the Forest that no foot had ever trodden--the thud of the multitudinous machines driving the piles in the marshy spaces; the whole innumerable sounds falling on the ear like the roaring of a great and vast sea.
The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness, in one day, of an iron way that shall last for all time.
We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.
"I intended to ask you just now whether the man you spoke to in the road was a typical native of the district?" said Senator Hoar. "He was dark and swarthy, with very black hair and piercing eyes; not at all like the majority of people we see in Gloucester for instance." "Yes, he is a typical Forester"; exactly such a man as Tacitus describes his Silurian ancestors; so Spanish in appearance that he tries to account for it by remarking that _"that part of Britain lies over against Spain";_ as if it was such a short run across the Bay of Biscay to the upper end of the Bristol Channel that nothing would be more natural than for Spaniards to sail over here with their wives and families and become Silures!
These Western Britons, both here in the Forest and in Cornwall certainly remind one of Spaniards. The type is of an older Celtic than that of the present Welsh people proper, as some evidences in the language also point to the occupation being an older one. With respect to this particular district of the Forest and the East of Monmouthshire, one more element must not be left out of the account; and that is, that Caerleon was founded by the second legion being removed to it from Gloucester about the time this road was made; and that it remained for three hundred years the headquarters of that legion, which was a Spanish one raised in the time of Augustus. Forty years ago I remember being at Caerleon (two and one half miles from Newport), when I met the children of the village coming out of school. It was hard to believe they were not Spanish or Italian!
At all events this part of Britain lies over against Boston; and Americans can cross over and see Caerleon for themselves more easily than the people could, of whom Tacitus wrote.
INDEX [omitted]
[Transcriber's notes:
Typed into MS-DOS Editor under Windows XP, using 7-bit characters only. Several errors of punctuation or of single letters have been corrected. The author uses both "contemporary" and "cotemporary."
The Latin has not been checked for spelling, grammar, or sense. The one Greek quotation (of two words) has been omitted.
Words have been hyphenated at the ends of lines only when the words are hyphenated elsewhere in the text or in common usage.]