The Bawcombes at Doveton Farm—Caleb finds favour with his master—Mrs. Ellerby and the shepherd's wife—The passion of a childless wife—The curse—A story of the "mob"—The attack on the farm—A man transported for life—The hundred and ninth Psalm—The end of the Ellerbys
Caleb and his wife invariably spoke of their time at Doveton Farm in a way which gave one the idea that they regarded it as the most important period of their lives. It had deeply impressed them, and doubtless it was a great change for them to leave their native village for the first time in their lives and go long miles from home among strangers to serve a new master. Above everything they felt leaving the old father who was angry with them, and had gone to the length of disowning them for taking such a step. But there was something besides all this which had served to give Doveton an enduring place in their memories, and after many talks with the old couple about their Warminster days I formed the idea that it was more to them than any other place where they had lived, because of a personal feeling they cherished for their master and mistress there.
Hitherto Caleb had been in the service of men who were but a little way removed in thought and feeling from those they employed. They were mostly small men, born and bred in the parish, some wholly self-made, with no interest or knowledge of anything outside their own affairs, and almost as far removed as the labourers themselves from the ranks above. The Ellerbys were of another stamp, or a different class. If not a gentleman, Mr. Ellerby was very like one and was accustomed to associate with gentlemen. He was a farmer, descended from a long line of farmers; but he owned his own land, and was an educated and travelled man, considered wealthy for a farmer; at all events he was able to keep his carriage and riding and hunting horses in his stables, and he was regarded as the best breeder of sheep in the district. He lived in a good house, which with its pictures and books and beautiful decorations and furniture appeared to their simple minds extremely luxurious. This atmosphere was somewhat disconcerting to them at first, for although he knew his own value, priding himself on being a "good shepherd," Caleb had up till now served with farmers who were in a sense on an equality with him, and they understood him and he them. But in a short time the feeling of strangeness vanished: personally, as a fellow-man, his master soon grew to be more to him than any farmer he had yet been with. And he saw a good deal of his master. Mr. Ellerby cultivated his acquaintance, and, as we have seen, got into the habit of seeking him out and talking to him even when he was at a distance out on the down with his flock. And Caleb could not but see that in this respect he was preferred above the other men employed on the farm—that he had "found favour" in his master's eyes.
When he had told me that story about Watch and the corn-crake, it stuck in my mind, and on the first opportunity I went back to that subject to ask what it really was that made his master act in such an extraordinary manner—to go out on a pouring wet day in a summer suit and straw hat, and walk a mile or two just to stand there in the rain talking to him about nothing in particular. What secret trouble had he—was it that his affairs were in a bad way, or was he quarrelling with his wife? No, nothing of the kind; it was a long story—this secret trouble of the Ellerbys, and with his unconquerable reticence in regard to other people's private affairs he would have passed it off with a few general remarks.
But there was his old wife listening to us, and, woman-like, eager to discuss such a subject, she would not let it pass. She would tell it and would not be silenced by him: they were all dead and gone—why should I not be told if I wanted to hear it? And so with a word put in here and there by him when she talked, and with a good many words interposed by her when he took up the tale, they unfolded the story, which was very long as they told it and must be given briefly here.
It happened that when the Bawcombes settled at Doveton, just as Mr. Ellerby had taken to the shepherd, making a friend of him, so Mrs. Ellerby took to the shepherd's wife, and fell into the habit of paying frequent visits to her in her cottage. She was a very handsome woman, of a somewhat stately presence, dignified in manner, and she wore her abundant hair in curls hanging on each side to her shoulders—a fashion common at that time. From the first she appeared to take a particular interest in the Bawcombes, and they could not but notice that she was more gracious and friendly towards them than to the others of their station on the farm. The Bawcombes had three children then, aged six, four, and two years respectively, all remarkably healthy, with rosy cheeks and black eyes, and they were merry-tempered little things. Mrs. Ellerby appeared much taken with the children; praised their mother for always keeping them so clean and nicely dressed, and wondered how she could manage it on their small earnings. The carter and his wife lived in a cottage close by, and they, too, had three little children, and next to the carter's was the bailiff's cottage, and he, too, was married and had children; but Mrs. Ellerby never went into their cottages, and the shepherd and his wife concluded that it was because in both cases the children were rather puny, sickly-looking little things and were never very clean. The carter's wife, too, was a slatternly woman. One day when Mrs. Ellerby came in to see Mrs. Bawcombe the carter's wife was just going out of the door, and Mrs. Ellerby appeared displeased, and before leaving she said, "I hope, Mrs. Bawcombe, you are not going to mix too freely with your neighbours or let your children go too much with them and fall into their ways." They also observed that when she passed their neighbours' children in the lane she spoke no word and appeared not to see them. Yet she was kind to them too, and whenever she brought a big parcel of cakes, fruit, and sweets for the children, which she often did, she would tell the shepherd's wife to divide it into three lots, one for her own children and the others for those of her two neighbours. It was clear to see that Mrs. Ellerby had grown fond of her children, especially of the eldest, the little rosy-cheeked six-year-old boy. Sitting in the cottage she would call him to her side and would hold his hand while conversing with his mother; she would also bare the child's arm just for the pleasure of rubbing it with her hand and clasping it round with her fingers, and sometimes when caressing the child in this way she would turn her face aside to hide the tears that dropped from her eyes.
She had no child of her own—the one happiness which she and her husband desired above all things. Six times in their ten married years they had hoped and rejoiced, although with fear and trembling, that their prayer would be answered, but in vain—every child born to them came lifeless into the world. "And so 'twould always be, for sure," said the villagers, "because of the curse."
For it was a cause of wonder to the shepherd and his wife that this couple, so strong and healthy, so noble-looking, so anxious to have children, should have been so unfortunate, and still the villagers repeated that it was the curse that was on them.
This made the shepherd angry. "What be you saying about a curse that is on them?—a good man and a good woman!" he would exclaim, and taking up his crook go out and leave them to their gossip. He would not ask them what they meant; he refused to listen when they tried to tell him; but in the end he could not help knowing, since the idea had become a fixed one in the minds of all the villagers, and he could not keep it out. "Look at them," the gossipers would say, "as fine a couple as you ever saw, and no child; and look at his two brothers, fine, big, strong, well-set-up men, both married to fine healthy women, and never a child living to any of them. And the sisters unmarried! 'Tis the curse and nothing else."
The curse had been uttered against Mr. Ellerby's father, who was in his prime in the year 1831 at the time of the "mob," when the introduction of labour-saving machinery in agriculture sent the poor farm-labourers mad all over England. Wheat was at a high price at that time, and the farmers were exceedingly prosperous, but they paid no more than seven shillings a week to their miserable labourers. And if they were half-starved when there was work for all, when the corn was reaped with sickles, what would their condition be when reaping machines and other new implements of husbandry came into use? They would not suffer it; they would gather in bands everywhere and destroy the machinery, and being united they would be irresistible; and so it came about that there were risings or "mobs" all over the land.
Mr. Ellerby, the most prosperous and enterprising farmer in the parish, had been the first to introduce the new methods. He did not believe that the people would rise against him, for he well knew that he was regarded as a just and kind man and was even loved by his own labourers, but even if it had not been so he would not have hesitated to carry out his resolution, as he was a high-spirited man. But one day the villagers got together and came unexpectedly to his barns, where they set to work to destroy his new thrashing machine. When he was told he rushed out and went in hot haste to the scene, and as he drew near some person in the crowd threw a heavy hammer at him, which struck him on the head and brought him senseless to the ground.
He was not seriously injured, but when he recovered the work of destruction had been done and the men had gone back to their homes, and no one could say who had led them and who had thrown the hammer. But by and by the police discovered that the hammer was the property of a shoemaker in the village, and he was arrested and charged with injuring with intent to murder. Tried with many others from other villages in the district at the Salisbury Assizes, he was found guilty and sentenced to transportation for life. Yet the Doveton shoemaker was known to every one as a quiet, inoffensive young man, and to the last he protested his innocence, for although he had gone with the others to the farm he had not taken the hammer and was guiltless of having thrown it.
Two years after he had been sent away Mr. Ellerby received a letter with an Australian postmark on it, but on opening it found nothing but a long denunciatory passage from the Bible enclosed, with no name or address. Mr. Ellerby was much disturbed in his mind, and instead of burning the paper and holding his peace, he kept it and spoke about it to this person and that, and every one went to his Bible to find out what message the poor shoemaker had sent, for it had been discovered that it was the one hundred and ninth Psalm, or a great portion of it, and this is what they read:—
"Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
"Let them be before the Lord continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.
"Because that he remembered not to show mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart.
"As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him; as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.
"As he clothed himself with cursing like as with a garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones.
"Let it be unto him as a garment which covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually.
"But do Thou for me, O God the Lord, for Thy name's sake. For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me.
"I am come like the shadow when it declineth: I am tossed up and down as the locust.
"My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of fatness."
From that time the hundred and ninth Psalm became familiar to the villagers, and there were probably not many who did not get it by heart. There was no doubt in their minds of the poor shoemaker's innocence. Every one knew that he was incapable of hurting a fly. The crowd had gone into his shop and swept him away with them—all were in it; and some person seeing the hammer had taken it to help in smashing the machinery. And Mr. Ellerby had known in his heart that he was innocent, and if he had spoken a word for him in court he would have got the benefit of the doubt and been discharged. But no, he wanted to have his revenge on some one, and he held his peace and allowed this poor fellow to be made the victim. Then, when he died, and his eldest son succeeded him at Doveton Farm, and he and the other sons got married, and there were no children, or none born alive, they went back to the Psalm again and read and re-read and quoted the words: "Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out." Undoubtedly the curse was on them!
Alas! it was; the curse was their belief in the curse, and the dreadful effect of the knowledge of it on a woman's mind—all the result of Mr. Ellerby the father's fatal mistake in not having thrown the scrap of paper that came to him from the other side of the world into the fire. All the unhappiness of the "generation following" came about in this way, and the family came to an end; for when the last of the Ellerbys died at a great age there was not one person of the name left in that part of Wiltshire.
Old memories—Hindon as a borough and as a village—The Lamb Inn and its birds—The "mob" at Hindon—The blind smuggler—Rawlings of Lower Pertwood Farm—Reed, the thresher and deer-stealer—He leaves a fortune—Devotion to work—Old Father Time—Groveley Wood and the people's rights—Grace Reed and the Earl of Pembroke—An illusion of the very aged—Sedan-chairs in Bath—Stick-gathering by the poor—Game-preserving
The incident of the unhappy young man who was transported to Australia or Tasmania, which came out in the shepherd's history of the Ellerby family, put it in my mind to look up some of the very aged people of the downland villages, whose memories could go back to the events of eighty years ago. I found a few, "still lingering here," who were able to recall that miserable and memorable year of 1830 and had witnessed the doings of the "mobs." One was a woman, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop, now aged ninety-four, who was in her teens when the poor labourers, "a thousand strong," some say, armed with cudgels, hammers, and axes, visited her village and broke up the thrashing machines they found there.
Another person who remembered that time was an old but remarkably well-preserved man of eighty-nine at Hindon, a village a couple of miles distant from Fonthill Bishop. Hindon is a delightful little village, so rustic and pretty amidst its green, swelling downs, with great woods crowning the heights beyond, that one can hardly credit the fact that it was formerly an important market and session town and a Parliamentary borough returning two members; also that it boasted among other greatnesses thirteen public-houses. Now it has two, and not flourishing in these tea- and mineral-water drinking days. Naturally it was an exceeedingly corrupt little borough, where free beer for all was the order of the day for a period of four to six weeks before an election, and where every householder with a vote looked to receive twenty guineas from the candidate of his choice. It is still remembered that when a householder in those days was very hard up, owing, perhaps, to his too frequent visits to the thirteen public-houses, he would go to some substantial tradesman in the place and pledge his twenty guineas, due at the next election! In due time, after the Reform Bill, it was deprived of its glory, and later when the South-Western Railway built their line from Salisbury to Yeovil and left Hindon some miles away, making their station at Tisbury, it fell into decay, dwindling to the small village it now is; and its last state, sober and purified, is very much better than the old. For although sober, it is contented and even merry, and exhibits such a sweet friendliness toward the stranger within its gates as to make him remember it with pleasure and gratitude.
What a quiet little place Hindon has become, after its old noisy period, the following little bird story will show. For several weeks during the spring and summer of 1909 my home was at the Lamb Inn, a famous posting-house of the great old days, and we had three pairs of birds—throstle, pied wagtail, and flycatcher—breeding in the ivy covering the wall facing the village street, just over my window. I watched them when building, incubating, feeding their young, and bringing their young off. The villagers, too, were interested in the sight, and sometimes a dozen or more men and boys would gather and stand for half an hour watching the birds flying in and out of their nests when feeding their young. The last to come off were the flycatchers, on 18th June. It was on the morning of the day I left, and one of the little things flitted into the room where I was having my breakfast. I succeeded in capturing it before the cats found out, and put it back on the ivy. There were three young birds; I had watched them from the time they hatched, and when I returned a fortnight later, there were the three, still being fed by their parents in the trees and on the roof, their favourite perching-place being on the swinging sign of the "Lamb." Whenever an old bird darted at and captured a fly the three young would flutter round it like three butterflies to get the fly. This continued until 18th July, after which date I could not detect their feeding the young, although the hunger-call was occasionally heard.
If the flycatcher takes a month to teach its young to catch their own flies, it is not strange that it breeds but once in the year. It is a delicate art the bird practises and takes long to learn, but how different with the martin, which dismisses its young in a few days and begins breeding again, even to the third time!
These three broods over my window were not the only ones in the place; there were at least twenty other pairs in the garden and outhouses of the inn—sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, starlings, and swallows. Yet the inn was in the very centre of the village, and being an inn was the most frequented and noisiest spot.
To return to my old friend of eighty-nine. He was but a small boy, attending the Hindon school, when the rioters appeared on the scene, and he watched their entry from the schoolhouse window. It was market-day, and the market was stopped by the invaders, and the agricultural machines brought for sale and exhibition were broken up. The picture that remains in his mind is of a great excited crowd in which men and cattle and sheep were mixed together in the wide street, which was the market-place, and of shouting and noise of smashing machinery, and finally of the mob pouring forth over the down on its way to the next village, he and other little boys following their march.
The smuggling trade flourished greatly at that period, and there were receivers and distributors of smuggled wine, spirits, and other commodities in every town and in very many villages throughout the county in spite of its distance from the sea-coast. One of his memories is of a blind man of the village, or town as it was then, who was used as an assistant in this business. He had lost his sight in childhood, one eye having been destroyed by a ferret which got into his cradle; then, when he was about six years old he was running across the room one day with a fork it his hand when he stumbled, and falling on the floor had the other eye pierced by the prongs. But in spite of his blindness he became a good worker, and could make a fence, reap, trim hedges, feed the animals, and drive a horse as well as any man. His father had a small farm and was a carrier as well, a quiet, sober, industrious man who was never suspected by his neighbours of being a smuggler, for he never left his house and work, but from time to time he had little consignments of rum and brandy in casks received on a dark night and carefully stowed away in his manure heap and in a pit under the floor of his pigsty. Then the blind son would drive his old mother in the carrier's cart to Bath and call at a dozen or twenty private houses, leaving parcels which had been already ordered and paid for—a gallon of brandy at one, two or four gallons of rum at another, and so on, until all was got rid of, and on the following day they would return with goods to Hindon. This quiet little business went on satisfactorily for some years, during which the officers of the excise had stared a thousand times with their eagle's eyes at the quaint old woman in her poke bonnet and shawl, driven by a blind man with a vacant face, and had suspected nothing, when a little mistake was made and a jar of brandy delivered at a wrong address. The recipient was an honest gentleman, and in his anxiety to find the rightful owner of the brandy made extensive inquiries in his neighbourhood, and eventually the excisemen got wind of the affair, and on the very next visit of the old woman and her son to Bath they were captured. After an examination before a magistrate the son was discharged on account of his blindness, but the cart and horses, as well as the smuggled spirits, were confiscated, and the poor blind man had to make his way on foot to Hindon.
Another of his recollections is of a family named Rawlings, tenants of Lower Pertwood Farm, near Hindon, a lonely, desolate-looking house hidden away in a deep hollow among the high downs. The Farmer Rawlings of seventy or eighty years ago was a man of singular ideas, and that he was permitted to put them in practice shows that severe as was the law in those days, and dreadful the punishments inflicted on offenders, there was a kind of liberty which does not exist now—the liberty a man had of doing just what he thought proper in his own house. This Rawlings had a numerous family, and some died at home and others lived to grow up and go out into the world under strange names—Faith, Hope, and Charity were three of his daughters, and Justice, Morality, and Fortitude three of his sons. Now, for some reason Rawlings objected to the burial of his dead in the churchyard of the nearest village—Monkton Deverill, and the story is that he quarrelled with the rector over the question of the church bell being tolled for the funeral. He would have no bell tolled, he swore, and the rector would bury no one without the bell. Thereupon Rawlings had the coffined corpse deposited on a table in an outhouse and the door made fast. Later there was another death, then a third, and all three were kept in the same place for several years, and although it was known to the whole countryside no action was taken by the local authorities.
My old informant says that he was often at the farm when he was a young man, and he used to steal round to the "Dead House," as it was called, to peep through a crack in the door and see the three coffins resting on the table in the dim interior.
Eventually the dead disappeared a little while before the Rawlings gave up the farm, and it was supposed that the old farmer had buried them in the night-time in one of the neighbouring chalk-pits, but the spot has never been discovered.
One of the stories of the old Wiltshire days I picked up was from an old woman, aged eighty-seven, in the Wilton workhouse. She has a vivid recollection of a labourer named Reed, in Odstock, a village on the Ebble near Salisbury, a stern, silent man, who was a marvel of strength and endurance. The work in which he most delighted was precisely that which most labourers hated, before threshing machines came in despite the action of the "mobs"—threshing out corn with the flail. From earliest dawn till after dark he would sit or stand in a dim, dusty barn, monotonously pounding away, without an interval to rest, and without dinner, and with no food but a piece of bread and a pinch of salt. Without the salt he would not eat the bread. An hour after all others had ceased from work he would put on his coat and trudge home to his wife and family.
The woman in the workhouse remembers that once, when Reed was a very old man past work, he came to their cottage for something, and while he stood waiting at the entrance, a little boy ran in and asked his mother for a piece of bread and butter with sugar on it. Old Reed glared at him, and shaking his big stick, exclaimed, "I'd give you sugar with this if you were my boy!" and so terrible did he look in his anger at the luxury of the times, that the little boy burst out crying and ran away!
What chiefly interested me about this old man was that he was a deer-stealer of the days when that offence was common in the country. It was not so great a crime as sheep-stealing, for which men were hanged; taking a deer was punished with nothing worse than hard labour, as a rule. But Reed was never caught; he would labour his full time and steal away after dark over the downs, to return in the small hours with a deer on his back. It was not for his own consumption; he wanted the money for which he sold it in Salisbury; and it is probable that he was in league with other poachers, as it is hard to believe that he could capture the animals single-handed.
After his death it was found that old Reed had left a hundred pounds to each of his two surviving daughters, and it was a wonder to everybody how he had managed not only to bring up a family and keep himself out of the workhouse to the end of his long life, but to leave so large a sum of money. One can only suppose that he was a rigid economist and never had a week's illness, and that by abstaining from beer and tobacco he was able to save a couple of shillings each week out of his wages of seven or eight shillings; this, in forty years, would make the two hundred pounds with something over.
It is not a very rare thing to find a farm-labourer like old Reed of Odstock, with not only a strong preference for a particular kind of work, but a love of it as compelling as that of an artist for his art. Some friends of mine whom I went to visit over the border in Dorset told me of an enthusiast of this description who had recently died in the village. "What a pity you did not come sooner," they said. Alas! it is nearly always so; on first coming to stay at a village one is told that it has but just lost its oldest and most interesting inhabitant—a relic of the olden time.
This man had taken to the scythe as Reed had to the flail, and was never happy unless he had a field to mow. He was a very tall old man, so lean that he looked like a skeleton, the bones covered with a skin as brown as old leather, and he wore his thin grey hair and snow-white beard very long. He rode on a white donkey, and was usually seen mounted galloping down the village street, hatless, his old brown, bare feet and legs drawn up to keep them from the ground, his scythe over his shoulder. "Here comes old Father Time," they would cry, as they called him, and run to the door to gaze with ever fresh delight at the wonderful old man as he rushed by, kicking and shouting at his donkey to make him go faster. He was always in a hurry, hunting for work with furious zeal, and when he got a field to mow so eager was he that he would not sleep at home, even if it was close by, but would lie down on the grass at the side of the field and start working at dawn, between two and three o'clock, quite three hours before the world woke up to its daily toil.
The name of Reed, the zealous thresher with the flail, serves to remind me of yet another Reed, a woman who died a few years ago aged ninety-four, and whose name should be cherished in one of the downland villages. She was a native of Barford St. Martin on the Nadder, one of two villages, the other being Wishford, on the Wylye river, the inhabitants of which have the right to go into Groveley Wood, an immense forest on the Wilton estate, to obtain wood for burning, each person being entitled to take home as much wood as he or she can carry. The people of Wishford take green wood, but those of Barford only dead, they having bartered their right at a remote period to cut growing trees for a yearly sum of five pounds, which the lord of the manor still pays to the village, and, in addition, the right to take dead wood.
It will be readily understood that this right possessed by the people of two villages, both situated within a mile of the forest, has been a perpetual source of annoyance to the noble owners in modern times, since the strict preservation of game, especially of pheasants, has grown to be almost a religion to the landowners. Now it came to pass that about half a century or longer ago, the Pembroke of that time made the happy discovery, as he imagined, that there was nothing to show that the Barford people had any right to the dead wood. They had been graciously allowed to take it, as was the case all over the country at that time, and that was all. At once he issued an edict prohibiting the taking of dead wood from the forest by the villagers, and great as the loss was to them they acquiesced; not a man of Barford St. Martin dared to disobey the prohibition or raise his voice against it. Grace Reed then determined to oppose the mighty earl, and accompanied by four other women of the village boldly went to the wood and gathered their sticks and brought them home. They were summoned before the magistrates and fined, and on their refusal to pay were sent to prison; but the very next day they were liberated and told that a mistake had been made, that the matter had been inquired into, and it had been found that the people of Barford did really have the right they had exercised so long to take dead wood from the forest.
As a result of the action of these women the right has not been challenged since, and on my last visit to Barford, a few days before writing this chapter, I saw three women coming down from the forest with as much dead wood as they could carry on their heads and backs. But how near they came to losing their right! It was a bold, an unheard-of thing which they did, and if there had not been a poor cottage woman with the spirit to do it at the proper moment the right could never have been revived.
Grace Reed's children's children are living at Barford now; they say that to the very end of her long life she preserved a very clear memory of the people and events of the village in the old days early in the last century. They say, too, that in recalling the far past, the old people and scenes would present themselves so vividly to her mind that she would speak of them as of recent things, and would say to some one fifty years younger than herself, "Can't you remember it? Surely you haven't forgotten it when 'twas the talk of the village!"
It is a common illusion of the very aged, and I had an amusing instance of it in my old Hindon friend when he gave me his first impressions of Bath as he saw it about the year 1835. What astonished him most were the sedan-chairs, for he had never even heard of such a conveyance, but here in this city of wonders you met them in every street. Then he added, "But you've been to Bath and of course you've seen them, and know all about it."
About firewood-gathering by the poor in woods and forests, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop says that the people of the villages adjacent to the Fonthill and Great Ridge Woods were allowed to take as much dead wood as they wanted from those places. She was accustomed to go to the Great Ridge Wood, which was even wilder and more like a natural forest in those days than it is now. It was fully two miles from her village, a longish distance to carry a heavy load, and it was her custom after getting the wood out to bind it firmly in a large barrel-shaped bundle or faggot, as in that way she could roll it down the smooth steep slopes of the down and so get her burden home without so much groaning and sweating. The great wood was then full of hazel-trees, and produced such an abundance of nuts that from mid-July to September people flocked to it for the nutting from all the country round, coming even from Bath and Bristol to load their carts with nuts in sacks for the market. Later, when the wood began to be more strictly preserved for sporting purposes, the rabbits were allowed to increase excessively, and during the hard winters they attacked the hazel-trees, gnawing off the bark, until this most useful and profitable wood the forest produced—the scrubby oaks having little value—was well-nigh extirpated. By and by pheasants as well as rabbits were strictly preserved, and the firewood-gatherers were excluded altogether. At present you find dead wood lying about all over the place, abundantly as in any primitive forest, where trees die of old age or disease, or are blown down or broken off by the winds and are left to rot on the ground, overgrown with ivy and brambles. But of all this dead wood not a stick to boil a kettle may be taken by the neighbouring poor lest the pheasants should be disturbed or a rabbit be picked up.
Some more of the old dame's recollections will be given in the next chapter, showing what the condition of the people was in this district about the year 1830, when the poor farm-labourers were driven by hunger and misery to revolt against their masters—the farmers who were everywhere breaking up the downs with the plough to sow more and still more corn, who were growing very fat and paying higher and higher rents to their fat landlords, while the wretched men that drove the plough had hardly enough to satisfy their hunger.
An old Wiltshire woman's memories—Her home—Work on a farm—A little bird-scarer—Housekeeping—The agricultural labourers' rising—Villagers out of work—Relief work—A game of ball with barley bannocks—Sheep-stealing—A poor man hanged—Temptations to steal—A sheep-stealing shepherd—A sheep-stealing farmer—Story of Ebenezer Garlick—A sheep-stealer at Chitterne—The law and the judges—A "human devil" in a black cap—How the revolting labourers were punished—A last scene at Salisbury Court House—Inquest on a murdered man—Policy of the farmers
The story of her early life told by my old friend Joan, aged ninety-four, will serve to give some idea of the extreme poverty and hard suffering life of the agricultural labourers during the thirties of last century, at a time when farmers were exceedingly prosperous and landlords drawing high rents.
She was three years old when her mother died, after the birth of a boy, the last of eleven children. There was a dame's school in their little village of Fonthill Abbey, but the poverty of the family would have made it impossible for Joan to attend had it not been for an unselfish person residing there, a Mr. King, who was anxious that every child should be taught its letters. He paid for little Joan's schooling from the age of four to eight; and now, in the evening of her life, when she sits by the fire with her book, she blesses the memory of the man, dead these seventy or eighty years, who made this solace possible for her.
After the age of eight there could be no more school, for now all the older children had gone out into the world to make their own poor living, the boys to work on distant farms, the girls to service or to be wives, and Joan was wanted at home to keep house for her father, to do the washing, mending, cleaning, cooking, and to be mother to her little brother as well.
Her father was a ploughman, at seven shillings a week; but when Joan was ten he met with a dreadful accident when ploughing with a couple of young or intractable oxen; in trying to stop them he got entangled in the ropes and one of his legs badly broken by the plough. As a result it was six months before he could leave his cottage. The overseer of the parish, a prosperous farmer who had a large farm a couple of miles away, came to inquire into the matter and see what was to be done. His decision was that the man would receive three shillings a week until able to start work again, and as that would just serve to keep him, the children must go out to work. Meanwhile, one of the married daughters had come to look after her father in the cottage, and that set the little ones free.
The overseer said he would give them work on his farm and pay them a few pence apiece and give them their meals; so to his farm they went, returning each evening home. That was her first place, and from that time on she was a toiler, indoors and out, but mainly in the fields, till she was past eighty-five;—seventy-five years of hard work—then less and less as her wonderful strength diminished, and her sons and daughters were getting grey, until now at the age of ninety-four she does very little—practically nothing.
In that first place she had a very hard master in the farmer and overseer. He was known in all the neighbourhood as "Devil Turner," and even at that time, when farmers had their men under their heel as it were, he was noted for his savage tyrannical disposition; also for a curious sardonic humour, which displayed itself in the forms of punishment he inflicted on the workmen who had the ill-luck to offend him. The man had to take the punishment, however painful or disgraceful, without a murmur, or go and starve. Every morning thereafter Joan and her little brother, aged seven, had to be up in time to get to the farm at five o'clock in the morning, and if it was raining or snowing or bitterly cold, so much the worse for them, but they had to be there, for Devil Turner's bad temper was harder to bear than bad weather. Joan was a girl of all work, in and out of doors, and, in severe weather, when there was nothing else for her to do, she would be sent into the fields to gather flints, the coldest of all tasks for her little hands.
"But what could your little brother, a child of seven, do in such a place?" I asked.
She laughed when she told me of her little brother's very first day at the farm. The farmer was, for a devil, considerate, and gave him something very light for a beginning, which was to scare the birds from the ricks. "And if they will come back you must catch them," he said, and left the little fellow to obey the difficult command as he could. The birds that worried him most were the fowls, for however often he hunted them away they would come back again. Eventually, he found some string, with which he made some little loops fastened to sticks, and these he arranged on a spot of ground he had cleared, scattering a few grains of corn on it to attract the "birds." By this means he succeeded in capturing three of the robbers, and when the farmer came round at noon to see how he was getting on, the little fellow showed him his captures. "These are not birds," said the farmer, "they are fowls, and don't you trouble yourself any more about them, but keep your eye on the sparrows and little birds and rooks and jackdaws that come to pull the straws out."
That was how he started; then from the ricks to bird-scaring in the fields and to other tasks suited to one of his age, not without much suffering and many tears. The worst experience was the punishment of standing motionless for long hours at a time on a chair placed out in the yard, full in sight of the windows of the house, so that he could be seen by the inmates; the hardest, the cruellest task that could be imposed on him would come as a relief after this. Joan suffered no punishment of that kind; she was very anxious to please her master and worked hard; but she was an intelligent and spirited child, and as the sole result of her best efforts was that more and more work was put on her, she revolted against such injustice, and eventually, tried beyond endurance, she ran away home and refused to go back to the farm any more. She found some work in the village; for now her sister had to go back to her husband, and Joan had to take her place and look after her father and the house as well as earn something to supplement the three shillings a week they had to live on.
After about nine months her father was up and out again and went back to the plough; for just then a great deal of down was being broken up and brought under cultivation on account of the high price of wheat and good ploughmen were in request. He was lame, the injured limb being now considerably shorter than the other, and when ploughing he could only manage to keep on his legs by walking with the longer one in the furrow and the other on the higher ground. But after struggling on for some months in this way, suffering much pain and his strength declining, he met with a fresh accident and was laid up once more in his cottage, and from that time until his death he did no more farm work. Joan and her little brother lived or slept at home and worked to keep themselves and him.
Now in this, her own little story, and in her account of the condition of the people at that time; also in the histories of other old men and women whose memories go back as far as hers, supplemented by a little reading in the newspapers of that day, I can understand how it came about that these poor labourers, poor, spiritless slaves as they had been made by long years of extremest poverty and systematic oppression, rose at last against their hard masters and smashed the agricultural machines, and burnt ricks and broke into houses to destroy and plunder their contents. It was a desperate, a mad adventure—these gatherings of half-starved yokels, armed with sticks and axes, and they were quickly put down and punished in a way that even William the Bastard would not have considered as too lenient. But oppression had made them mad; the introduction of thrashing machines was but the last straw, the culminating act of the hideous system followed by landlords and their tenants—the former to get the highest possible rent for his land, the other to get his labour at the lowest possible rate. It was a compact between landlord and tenant aimed against the labourer. It was not merely the fact that the wages of a strong man were only seven shillings a week at the outside, a sum barely sufficient to keep him and his family from starvation and rags (as a fact it was not enough, and but for a little poaching and stealing he could not have lived), but it was customary, especially on the small farms, to get rid of the men after the harvest and leave them to exist the best way they could during the bitter winter months. Thus every village, as a rule, had its dozen or twenty or more men thrown out each year—good steady men, with families dependent on them; and besides these there were the aged and weaklings and the lads who had not yet got a place. The misery of these out-of-work labourers was extreme. They would go to the woods and gather faggots of dead wood, which they would try to sell in the villages; but there were few who could afford to buy of them; and at night they would skulk about the fields to rob a swede or two to satisfy the cravings of hunger.
In some parishes the farmer overseers were allowed to give relief work—out of the rates, it goes without saying—to these unemployed men of the village who had been discharged in October or November and would be wanted again when the winter was over. They would be put to flint-gathering in the fields, their wages being four shillings a week. Some of the very old people of Winterbourne Bishop, when speaking of the principal food of the labourers at that time, the barley bannock and its exceeding toughness, gave me an amusing account of a game of balls invented by the flint-gatherers, just for the sake of a little fun during their long weary day in the fields, especially in cold, frosty weather. The men would take their dinners with them, consisting of a few barley balls or cakes, in their coat pockets, and at noon they would gather at one spot to enjoy their meal, and seat themselves on the ground in a very wide circle, the men about ten yards apart, then each one would produce his bannocks and start throwing, aiming at some other man's face; there were hits and misses and great excitement and hilarity for twenty or thirty minutes, after which the earth and gravel adhering to the balls would be wiped off, and they would set themselves to the hard task of masticating and swallowing the heavy stuff.
At sunset they would go home to a supper of more barley bannocks, washed down with hot water flavoured with some aromatic herb or weed, and then straight to bed to get warm, for there was little firing.
It was not strange that sheep-stealing was one of the commonest offences against the law at that time, in spite of the dreadful penalty. Hunger made the people reckless. My old friend Joan, and other old persons, have said to me that it appeared in those days that the men were strangely indifferent and did not seem to care whether they were hanged or not. It is true they did not hang very many of them—the judge, as a rule, after putting on his black cap and ordering them to the gallows, would send in a recommendation to mercy for most of them; but the mercy of that time was like that of the wicked, exceedingly cruel. Instead of swinging, it was transportation for life, or for fourteen, and, at the very least, seven years. Those who have read Clarke's terrible book "For the Term of His Natural Life" know (in a way) what these poor Wiltshire labourers, who in most cases were never more heard of by their wives and children, were sent to endure in Australia and Tasmania.
And some were hanged; my friend Joan named some people she knows in the neighbourhood who are the grandchildren of a young man with a wife and family of small children who was hanged at Salisbury. She had a vivid recollection of this case because it had seemed so hard, the man having been maddened by want when he took a sheep; also because when he was hanged his poor young wife travelled to the place of slaughter to beg for his body, and had it brought home and buried decently in the village churchyard.
How great the temptation to steal sheep must have been, anyone may know now by merely walking about among the fields in this part of the country to see how the sheep are folded and left by night unguarded, often at long distances from the village, in distant fields and on the downs. Even in the worst times it was never customary, never thought necessary, to guard the flock by night. Many cases could be given to show how easy it was to steal sheep. One quite recent, about twenty years ago, is of a shepherd who was frequently sent with sheep to the fairs, and who on his way to Wilton fair with a flock one night turned aside to open a fold and let out nineteen sheep. On arriving at the fair he took out the stolen sheep and sold them to a butcher of his acquaintance who sent them up to London. But he had taken too many from one flock; they were quickly missed, and by some lucky chance it was found out and the shepherd arrested. He was sentenced to eight months' hard labour, and it came out during the trial that this poor shepherd, whose wages were fourteen shillings a week, had a sum of L400 to his credit in a Salisbury bank!
Another case which dates far back is that of a farmer named Day, who employed a shepherd or drover to take sheep to the fairs and markets and steal sheep for him on the way. It is said that he went on at this game for years before it was discovered. Eventually master and man quarrelled and the drover gave information, whereupon Day was arrested and lodged in Fisherton Jail at Salisbury. Later he was sent to take his trial at Devizes, on horseback, accompanied by two constables. At the "Druid's Head," a public-house on the way, the three travellers alighted for refreshments, and there Day succeeded in giving them the slip, and jumping on a fast horse, standing ready saddled for him, made his escape. Farmer Day never returned to the Plain and was never heard of again.
There is an element of humour in some of the sheep-stealing stories of the old days. At one village where I often stayed, I heard about a certain Ebenezer Garlick, who was commonly called, in allusion no doubt to his surname, "Sweet Vi'lets." He was a sober, hard-working man, an example to most, but there was this against him, that he cherished a very close friendship with a poor, disreputable, drunken loafer nicknamed "Flittermouse," who spent most of his time hanging about the old coaching inn at the place for the sake of tips. Sweet Vi'lets was always giving coppers and sixpences to this man, but one day they fell out when Flittermouse begged for a shilling. He must, he said, have a shilling, he couldn't do with less, and when the other refused he followed him, demanding the money with abusive words, to everybody's astonishment. Finally Sweet Vi'lets turned on him and told him to go to the devil. Flittermouse in a rage went straight to the constable and denounced his patron as a sheep-stealer. He, Flittermouse, had been his servant and helper, and on the very last occasion of stealing a sheep he had got rid of the skin and offal by throwing them down an old disused well at the top of the village street. To the well the constable went with ropes and hooks, and succeeded in fishing up the remains described, and he thereupon arrested Garlick and took him before a magistrate, who committed him for trial. Flittermouse was the only witness for the prosecution, and the judge in his summing up said that, taking into consideration Garlick's known character in the village as a sober, diligent, honest man, it would be a little too much to hang him on the unsupported testimony of a creature like Flittermouse, who was half fool and half scoundrel. The jury, pleased and very much surprised at being directed to let a man off, obediently returned a verdict of Not Guilty, and Sweet Vi'lets returned from Salisbury triumphant, to be congratulated on his escape by all the villagers, who, however, slyly winked and smiled at one another.
Of sheep-stealing stories I will relate one more—a case which never came into court and was never discovered. It was related to me by a middle-aged man, a shepherd of Warminster, who had it from his father, a shepherd of Chitterne, one of the lonely, isolated villages on Salisbury Plain, between the Avon and the Wylye. His father had it from the person who committed the crime and was anxious to tell it to some one, and knew that the shepherd was his true friend, a silent, safe man. He was a farm-labourer, named Shergold—one of the South Wiltshire surnames very common in the early part of last century, which now appear to be dying out—described as a very big, powerful man, full of life and energy. He had a wife and several young children to keep, and the time was near mid-winter; Shergold was out of work, having been discharged from the farm at the end of the harvest; it was an exceptionally cold season and there was no food and no firing in the house.
One evening in late December a drover arrived at Chitterne with a flock of sheep which he was driving to Tilshead, another downland village several miles away. He was anxious to get to Tilshead that night and wanted a man to help him. Shergold was on the spot and undertook to go with him for the sum of fourpence. They set out when it was getting dark; the sheep were put on the road, the drover going before the flock and Shergold following at the tail. It was a cold, cloudy night, threatening snow, and so dark that he could hardly distinguish the dim forms of even the hindmost sheep, and by and by the temptation to steal one assailed him. For how easy it would be for him to do it! With his tremendous strength he could kill and hide a sheep very quickly without making any sound whatever to alarm the drover. He was very far ahead; Shergold could judge the distance by the sound of his voice when he uttered a call or shout from time to time, and by the barking of the dog, as he flew up and down, first on one side of the road, then on the other, to keep the flock well on it. And he thought of what a sheep would be to him and to his hungry ones at home until the temptation was too strong, and suddenly lifting his big, heavy stick he brought it down with such force on the head of a sheep as to drop it with its skull crushed, dead as a stone. Hastily picking it up he ran a few yards away, and placed it among the furze-bushes, intending to take it home on his way back, and then returned to the flock.
They arrived at Tilshead in the small hours, and after receiving his fourpence he started for home, walking rapidly and then running to be in time, but when he got back to where the sheep was lying the dawn was coming, and he knew that before he could get to Chitterne with that heavy burden on his back people would be getting up in the village and he would perhaps be seen. The only thing to do was to hide the sheep and return for it on the following night. Accordingly he carried it away a couple of hundred yards to a pit or small hollow in the down full of bramble and furze-bushes, and here he concealed it, covering it with a mass of dead bracken and herbage, and left it. That afternoon the long-threatening snow began to fall, and with snow on the ground he dared not go to recover his sheep, since his footprints would betray him; he must wait once more for the snow to melt. But the snow fell all night, and what must his feelings have been when he looked at it still falling in the morning and knew that he could have gone for the sheep with safety, since all traces would have been quickly obliterated!
Once more there was nothing to do but wait patiently for the snow to cease falling and for the thaw. But how intolerable it was; for the weather continued bitterly cold for many days, and the whole country was white. During those hungry days even that poor comfort of sleeping or dozing away the time was denied him, for the danger of discovery was ever present to his mind, and Shergold was not one of the callous men who had become indifferent to their fate; it was his first crime, and he loved his own life and his wife and children, crying to him for food. And the food for them was lying there on the down, close by, and he could not get it! Roast mutton, boiled mutton—mutton in a dozen delicious forms—the thought of it was as distressing, as maddening, as that of the peril he was in.
It was a full fortnight before the wished thaw came; then with fear and trembling he went for his sheep, only to find that it had been pulled to pieces and the flesh devoured by dogs and foxes!
From these memories of the old villagers I turn to the newspapers of the day to make a few citations.
The law as it was did not distinguish between a case of the kind just related, of the starving, sorely tempted Shergold, and that of the systematic thief: sheep-stealing was a capital offence and the man must hang, unless recommended to mercy, and we know what was meant by "mercy" in those days. That so barbarous a law existed within memory of people to be found living in most villages appears almost incredible to us; but despite the recommendations to "mercy" usual in a large majority of cases, the law of that time was not more horrible than the temper of the men who administered it. There are good and bad among all, and in all professions, but there is also a black spot in most, possibly in all hearts, which may be developed to almost any extent, and change the justest, wisest, most moral men into "human devils"—the phrase invented by Canon Wilberforce in another connexion. In reading the old reports and the expressions used by the judges in their summings up and sentences, it is impossible not to believe that the awful power they possessed, and its constant exercise, had not only produced the inevitable hardening effect, but had made them cruel in the true sense of the word. Their pleasure in passing dreadful sentences was very thinly disguised, indeed, by certain lofty conventional phrases as to the necessity of upholding the law, morality, and religion; they were, indeed, as familiar with the name of the Deity as any ranter in a conventicle, and the "enormity of the crime" was an expression as constantly used in the case of the theft of a loaf of bread, or of an old coat left hanging on a hedge, by some ill-clad, half-starved wretch, as in cases of burglary, arson, rape, and murder.
It is surprising to find how very few the real crimes were in those days, despite the misery of the people; that nearly all the "crimes" for which men were sentenced to the gallows and to transportation for life, or for long terms, were offences which would now be sufficiently punished by a few weeks', or even a few days', imprisonment. Thus in April 1825, I note that Mr. Justice Park commented on the heavy appearance of the calendar. It was not so much the number (170) of the offenders that excited his concern as it was the nature of the crimes with which they were charged. The worst crime in this instance was sheep-stealing!
Again, this same Mr. Justice Park, at the Spring Assizes at Salisbury 1827, said that though the calendar was a heavy one, he was happy to find on looking at the depositions of the principal cases, that they were not of a very serious character. Nevertheless he passed sentence of death on twenty-eight persons, among them being one for stealing half a crown!
Of the twenty-eight all but three were eventually reprieved, one of the fated three being a youth of nineteen, who was charged with stealing a mare and pleaded guilty in spite of a warning from the judge not to do so. This irritated the great man who had the power of life and death in his hand. In passing sentence the judge "expatiated on the prevalence of the crime of horse-stealing and the necessity of making an example. The enormity of Read's crime rendered him a proper example, and he would therefore hold out no hope of mercy towards him." As to the plea of guilty, he remarked that nowadays too many persons pleaded guilty, deluded with the hope that it would be taken into consideration and they would escape the severer penalty. He was determined to put a stop to that sort of thing; if Read had not pleaded guilty no doubt some extenuating circumstance would have come up during the trial and he would have saved his life.
There, if ever, spoke the "human devil" in a black cap!
I find another case of a sentence of transportation for life on a youth of eighteen, named Edward Baker, for stealing a pocket-handkerchief. Had he pleaded guilty it might have been worse for him.
At the Salisbury Spring Assizes, 1830, Mr. Justice Gazalee, addressing the grand jury, said that none of the crimes appeared to be marked with circumstances of great moral turpitude. The prisoners numbered one hundred and thirty; he passed sentences of death on twenty-nine, life transportations on five, fourteen years on five, seven years on eleven, and various terms of hard labour on the others.
The severity of the magistrates at the quarter-sessions was equally revolting. I notice in one case, where the leading magistrate on the bench was a great local magnate, an M.P. for Salisbury, etc., a poor fellow with the unfortunate name of Moses Snook was charged with stealing a plank ten feet long, the property of the aforesaid local magnate, M.P., etc., and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. Sentenced by the man who owned the plank, worth perhaps a shilling or two!
When such was the law of the land and the temper of those who administered it—judges and magistrates or landlords—what must the misery of the people have been to cause them to rise in revolt against their masters! They did nothing outrageous even in the height of their frenzy; they smashed the thrashing machines, burnt some ricks, while the maddest of them broke into a few houses and destroyed their contents; but they injured no man; yet they knew what they were facing—the gallows or transportation to the penal settlements ready for their reception at the Antipodes. It is a pity that the history of this rising of the agricultural labourer, the most patient and submissive of men, has never been written. Nothing, in fact, has ever been said of it except from the point of view of landowners and farmers, but there is ample material for a truer and a moving narrative, not only in the brief reports in the papers of the time, but also in the memories of many persons still living, and of their children and children's children, preserved in many a cottage throughout the south of England.
Hopeless as the revolt was and quickly suppressed, it had served to alarm the landlords and their tenants, and taken in conjunction with other outbreaks, notably at Bristol, it produced a sense of anxiety in the mind of the country generally. The feeling found a somewhat amusing expression in the House of Commons, in a motion of Mr. Perceval, on 14th February 1831. This was to move an address to His Majesty to appoint a day for a general fast throughout the United Kingdom. He said that "the state of the country called for a measure like this—that it was a state of political and religious disorganization—that the elements of the Constitution were being hourly loosened—that in this land there was no attachment, no control, no humility of spirit, no mutual confidence between the poor man and the rich, the employer and the employed; but fear and mistrust and aversion, where, in the time of our fathers, there was nothing but brotherly love and rejoicing before the Lord."
The House was cynical and smilingly put the matter by, but the anxiety was manifested plainly enough in the treatment meted out to the poor men who had been arrested and were tried before the Special Commissions sent down to Salisbury, Winchester, and other towns. No doubt it was a pleasant time for the judges; at Salisbury thirty-four poor fellows were sentenced to death; thirty-three to be transported for life, ten for fourteen years, and so on.
And here is one last little scene about which the reports in the newspapers of the time say nothing, but which I have from one who witnessed and clearly remembers it, a woman of ninety-five, whose whole life has been passed at a village within sound of the Salisbury Cathedral bells.
It was when the trial was ended, when those who were found guilty and had been sentenced were brought out of the court-house to be taken back to prison, and from all over the Plain and from all parts of Wiltshire their womenfolk had come to learn their fate, and were gathered, a pale, anxious, weeping crowd, outside the gates. The sentenced men came out looking eagerly at the people until they recognized their own and cried out to them to be of good cheer. "'Tis hanging for me," one would say, "but there'll perhaps be a recommendation to mercy, so don't you fret till you know." Then another: "Don't go on so, old mother, 'tis only for life I'm sent." And yet another: "Don't you cry, old girl, 'tis only fourteen years I've got, and maybe I'll live to see you all again." And so on, as they filed out past their weeping women on their way to Fisherton Jail, to be taken thence to the transports in Portsmouth and Plymouth harbours waiting to convey their living freights to that hell on earth so far from home. Not criminals but good, brave men were these!—Wiltshiremen of that strong, enduring, patient class, who not only as labourers on the land but on many a hard-fought field in many parts of the world from of old down to our war of a few years ago in Africa, have shown the stuff that was in them!
But, alas! for the poor women who were left—for the old mother who could never hope to see her boy again, and for the wife and her children who waited and hoped against hope through long toiling years,
And dreamed and started as they sleptFor joy that he was come,
but waking saw his face no more. Very few, so far as I can make out, not more than one in five or six, ever returned.
This, it may be said, was only what they might have expected, the law being what it was—just the ordinary thing. The hideous part of the business was that, as an effect of the alarm created in the minds of those who feared injury to their property and loss of power to oppress the poor labourers, there was money in plenty subscribed to hire witnesses for the prosecution. It was necessary to strike terror into the people. The smell of blood-money brought out a number of scoundrels who for a few pounds were only too ready to swear away the life of any man, and it was notorious that numbers of poor fellows were condemned in this way.
One incident as to this point may be given in conclusion of this chapter about old unhappy things. It relates not to one of those who were sentenced to the gallows or to transportation, but to an inquest and the treatment of the dead.
I have spoken in the last chapter of the mob that visited Hindon, Fonthill, and other villages. They ended their round at Pytt House, near Tisbury, where they broke up the machinery. On that occasion a body of yeomanry came on the scene, but arrived only after the mob had accomplished its purpose of breaking up the thrashing machines. When the troops appeared the "rioters," as they were called, made off into the woods and escaped; but before they fled one of them had met his death. A number of persons from the farms and villages around had gathered at the spot and were looking on, when one, a farmer from the neighbouring village of Chilmark, snatched a gun from a gamekeeper's hand and shot one of the rioters, killing him dead. On 27th January 1831 an inquest was held on the body, and some one was found to swear that the man had been shot by one of the yeomanry, although it was known to everybody that, when the man was shot, the troop had not yet arrived on the scene. The man, this witness stated, had attacked, or threatened, one of the soldiers with his stick, and had been shot. This was sufficient for the coroner; he instructed his jury to bring in a verdict of "Justifiable homicide," which they obediently did. "This verdict," the coroner then said, "entailed the same consequences as an act offelo-de-se, and he felt that he could not give a warrant for the burial of the deceased. However painful the duty devolved on him in thus adding to the sorrows of the surviving relations, the law appeared too clear to him to admit of an alternative."
The coroner was just as eager as the judges to exhibit his zeal for the gentry, who were being injured in their interests by these disturbances; and though he could not hang anybody, being only a coroner, he could at any rate kick the one corpse brought before him. Doubtless the "surviving relations," for whose sorrows he had expressed sympathy, carried the poor murdered man off by night to hide him somewhere in the earth.
After the law had been thus vindicated and all the business done with, even to the corpse-kicking by the coroner, the farmers were still anxious, and began to show it by holding meetings and discussions on the condition of the labourers. Everybody said that the men had been very properly punished; but at the same time it was admitted that they had some reason for their discontent, that, with bread so dear, it was hardly possible for a man with a family to support himself on seven shillings a week, and it was generally agreed to raise the wages one shilling. But by and by when the anxiety had quite died out, when it was found that the men were more submissive than they had ever been, the lesson they had received having sunk deep into their minds, they cut off the extra shilling and wages were what they had been—seven shillings a week for a hard-working seasoned labourer, with a family to keep, and from four to six shillings for young unmarried men and for women, even for those who did as much work in the field as any man.