[22]A curious fact is apparent on the face of “A Vewe taken by special commandment from his Majesty to the Lord Warden of his forest, of all the Red Deer in this forest, 1616.” The warden was obliged to maintain 100 head of red deer in each of the twelve walks—1200 in the whole. In this inquiry there proved to be 1260; but in Annesley, the property of the Chaworths, and Newstead, the property of the Byrons, there were only ten deer altogether. These Byrons and Chaworths were always notorious Nimrods, and suffered none to escape them. In Papplewick too, the adjoining parish, there were only two! The keepers indeed affirmed that “some days” there were twenty in Annesley Hills, and fourteen in Newstead Woods, but they did not appear to the Commissioners. In another “Vewe,” taken in 1635, though the deer had increased in other walks, so that the total numbers were 1367, in Newstead and Annesley there were only 19!
[22]A curious fact is apparent on the face of “A Vewe taken by special commandment from his Majesty to the Lord Warden of his forest, of all the Red Deer in this forest, 1616.” The warden was obliged to maintain 100 head of red deer in each of the twelve walks—1200 in the whole. In this inquiry there proved to be 1260; but in Annesley, the property of the Chaworths, and Newstead, the property of the Byrons, there were only ten deer altogether. These Byrons and Chaworths were always notorious Nimrods, and suffered none to escape them. In Papplewick too, the adjoining parish, there were only two! The keepers indeed affirmed that “some days” there were twenty in Annesley Hills, and fourteen in Newstead Woods, but they did not appear to the Commissioners. In another “Vewe,” taken in 1635, though the deer had increased in other walks, so that the total numbers were 1367, in Newstead and Annesley there were only 19!
But at the Clipstone extremity of the forest, still remains a remnant of its ancient woodlands unrifled, except of its deer—a specimen of what the whole once was, and a specimen of consummate beauty and interest. Birkland and Bilhaghe taken together form a tract of land extending from Ollerton, along the side of Thoresby Park, the seat of Earl Manvers, to Clipstone Park, of about five miles in length, and one or two in width,—Bilhaghe is a forest of oaks; and is clothed with the most impressive aspect of age that can perhaps be presented to the eye in these kingdoms. Stonehenge does not give you a feeling of greater eld, because it is not composed of a material so easily acted on by the elements. But the hand of time has been on these woods, and has stamped upon them a most imposing character. I cannot imagine a traveller coming upon this spot without being startled, and asking himself—“what have we got here?” It is the blasted and battered ruinof a forest. A thousand years, ten thousand tempests, lightnings, winds, and wintry violence, have all flung their utmost force on these trees, and there they stand, trunk after trunk, scathed, hollow, grey, gnarled; stretching out their bare, sturdy arms, or their mingled foliage and ruin—a life in death. All is grey and old. The ground is grey beneath, the trees are grey with clinging lichens, the very heather and fern that spring beneath them have a character of the past. If you turn aside, and step amongst them, your feet sink in a depth of moss and dry vegetation that is the growth of ages, or rather that ages have not been able to destroy. You stand and look round, and in the height of summer, all is silent; it is like the fragment of a world worn out and forsaken. These were the trees under which King John pursued the red deer 600 years ago. These were the oaks beneath which Robin Hood led up his bold band of outlaws. These are the oaks which have stood while king after king reigned; while the Edwards and Henrys subdued Ireland, and ravaged Scotland and France; while all Europe was seeking to rescue Jerusalem from the Saracens; while the wars of York and Lancaster deluged the soil of all this kingdom with blood; while Henry VIII. overthrew popery, wives, ministers, and martyrs with one strong, ruthless hand; while Elizabeth, with an equal hand of unshrinking might and decision, made all Europe tremble at a woman’s name, and stand astonished at a woman’s jealousy, when she butchered her cousin, the Queen of Scots. Here they stood, while the monarchy of England fell to the ground before Cromwell and the Covenanters; while Charles II., restored to his realm, but not to wisdom, revelled; while under a new dynasty, the fortunes of England have been urging through good and evil their course to a splendour and dominion strangely mingled with suffering and disquiet, yet giving prospect of a Christian glory beyond all precedent and conception. Through all this these trees have here stood silently—and here they are! monuments of ages that cannot be seen without raising in our souls remembrance of all these mighty things. To the contemplative mind they are inscribed all over with characters of strange power. They shew us at a glance, and with a palpableness which few things besides possess, how far the day of their first growth is past by; how far the ages of feudalism and civilization lie asunder. All around them, instead of that ocean ofwoods, heaths and morasses, come crowding up green fields, and the boundary-marks of free men; and if we were to see a hoary pilgrim suddenly make his appearance on the pavé of a great modern town, propped on his long staff, and belted in his grey robe, with his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell, we should not feel more strongly the discrepancy of life and character between him and the spruce population around him, than between these hoary and doddered oaks and the cultured country which hems them in.
But Bilhaghe is only the half of the forest-remains here: in a continuous line with it lies Birkland—a tract which bears its character in its name—the land of Birches! It is a forest perfectly unique. It is equally ancient with Bilhaghe, but it has a less dilapidated air. There are old and mighty oaks scattered through it, ay, some of them worn down to the very ultimatum of ruin, without leaf or bough, standing huge masses of blackness; but the birches, of which the main portion of the forest consists, cannot boast the longevity of oaks. Their predecessors have perished over and over, and they, though noble and unrivalled of their kind, are infants compared with the oaken trunks which stand amongst them. Birkland! it is a region of grace and poetry! I have seen many a wood, and many a wood of birches, and some of them amazingly beautiful too, in one quarter or another of this fair island, but in England nothing that can compare with this. It must be confessed that the birch woods which clothe the mountain sides, beautify the glens, and stud the romantic lochs of Scotland, derive a charm from the lovely and sublime forms of those mountains, glens, and waters, which is not to be expected in this lowland country. The birch trees which rear their silvery stems, tree above tree, on the rocks of the Trosachs; the birch woods that fill the delicious valleys of Rosshire—which imparadise the glens and feather the heathery mountain-sides of Glen-More nan Alpin—the great glen of Scotland, traversed by the Caledonian Canal—thousands of summer tourists can testify with me are lovely beyond description; but Birkland has some advantages which they have not. Its trees have reached a size that the northern ones have not; and the peculiar mixture of their lady-like grace with the stern and ample forms of these feudal oaks, produces an effect most fairylandish and unrivalled.
Advance up this long avenue, which the noble owner of this forest tract has cut through it, and looking right and left as you proceed, you shall not be able long to refrain from turning into the tempting openings that ever and anon present themselves. Enter which you please,—you cannot be wrong. You may wander for hours, and still find fresh aspects of woodland beauty. These winding tracks, just wide enough for a couple of people on horseback, or in a pony-phaeton to advance along, carpeted with a mossy turf that springs under your feet with a delicious elasticity, and closed in with shadowy trunks and flowery thickets—are they not lovely? And then you come to some sudden opening, where the long pensile branches of the birches, and the sweeping masses of oaken boughs surround and shut you in with a delectable solitude, where you may lie on the warm turf and read, or listen to the whispering leaves or the solemn sough of the forest; or a merry party of you may laugh and talk to your hearts’ content, glad as the blue sky above you; and vow that you will come and pitch your tents here for a fortnight,—a jocund company, like Shakspeare’s immortal troop in the forest of Arden. There never was scenery to realize more perfectly our idea of that forest. But go on: you enter on a wider expanse, on which a glorious oak stretches out its vast circumference of boughs that droop to the very ground, and form an ample tent, whose waving curtains fan you with the most grateful air. Here you come upon the solitary foot-path that crosses the forest. You hear the light clap of a gate, and presently beneath the glimpsing trees, you see some rustic personage pursuing this path, and going unconsciously past you as you stand amongst the thickets—some old man with heavy pace, or village girl hurrying along as if those woods were still haunted by dubious things. But advance, and here is a wide prospect. The woodmen have cleared away the underwood; they have felled trees that were overtopped and ruined by their fellows; and their billets and fallen trunks, and split-up piles of blocks, are lying about in pictorial simplicity. On all sides, standing in their solemn steadfastness, you see huge, gnarled, strangely-coloured, and mossed oaks, some riven and laid bare, from summit to root, with the thunderbolts of past tempests. An immense tree is called the Shamble-Oak, being said to be theone in which Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer; but which was more probably used by the keepers for that purpose. By whomsoever it was so used, however, there still remain the hooks within its vast hollow. The old birches, without doubt some of the largest in England, shew like true satyrs of the woods—to the height of a man, being shagged, indented, and cross-hatched, as it were, into a most satyrly roughness, and contrast well with the higher bole, which rises clear and shining as silver to the boughs, which sweep down again to the ground in graceful lightness.
There is no end to the variety of their aspect and grouping. From the sylvan loveliness around you, you might fancy yourself in the outer wilderness of some Armida’s garden. In spring, these woods are all alive with the cawing of jackdaws, which build in thousands in the hollow oaks; and as their bustle ceases as the evening falls, the nightingales are heard, and the owl and the dorhawk come soaring through the dusky air.
It is just the region to grow poetical in. I never walk these woods without forgetting for the time all the cares of towns and common life. It is to me a palpable introduction into the old world of poetry and romance. There is a spirit and feeling of the intellectual world that falls on you as the peculiar spirit of the place. It seems to me that if Milton, Shakspeare, Spenser, and all those noble poets whose minds have moulded the better mind and character of this great country, were to revisit it at times, when they had looked round them on the agitations of city-life, to some such place would they come awhile to refresh themselves with their old delights, and to hold high converse on the present fashion and prospects of humanity. Nothing seems so natural to these scenes, as to imagine their presence thus joined with the kindred spirits of a later day—Scott, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Hogg, and the like;—their religion, their passions, their doubts, their philosophical mysticism all now blended down into a heavenly nobility and union of heart and desire; their favourite fancies and pursuits still dear to them as ever, but their intellectual vision widened to the embracement of the universe. I seem to see Shelley and Keats going hand in hand along some fair glade; the one pouring out all that soul of love which possessed him, which he wished had been the foundation of the Christian religion instead of faith, andwho yet, blinded by the impetuosity of youth and indignation against the despotism of priestcraft, failed to see that this same love was the very life and glory of that system;—the other young poet still uttering aloud his longings for time! time! in which to achieve an eternity offame:—
Oh! for ten years, that I may do the deedThat my own soul has to itself decreed!
Oh! for ten years, that I may do the deedThat my own soul has to itself decreed!
Or Lamb, speaking to those old friends of his earthly sojourn, of some fair creature met in the valleys of heaven:
She loves to walkIn the bright regions of empyreal light,By the green pastures and the fragrant meads,Where the perpetual flowers of Eden blow!By crystal streams, and by the living waters,Along whose margin grows the wondrous treeWhose leaves shall heal the nations; underneathWhose holy shade a refuge shall be foundFrom pain and want, and all the ills that waitOn mortal life, from sin and death for ever.
She loves to walkIn the bright regions of empyreal light,By the green pastures and the fragrant meads,Where the perpetual flowers of Eden blow!By crystal streams, and by the living waters,Along whose margin grows the wondrous treeWhose leaves shall heal the nations; underneathWhose holy shade a refuge shall be foundFrom pain and want, and all the ills that waitOn mortal life, from sin and death for ever.
But away, spirit of the woods! Time urges; the world calls: and we are thrown once more into the midst of the stirring, rushing, unceasing stream of men. These woods and their fairyland dreams are but our luxuries; snatches of beauty and peace, caught as we go along the dusty path of duty. The town has engulphed us; a human hum is in our ears; and the thoughts and the cares of life are upon us once more.
Before I quit this part of my volume, let me say a word on the subject of forest enclosures. There are certain persons who, from notions of national benefit, are very desirous that all crown lands should be disposed of; and all forests and wastes enclosed. As a matter of national benefit I think them considerably mistaken. For the very highest purposes of national benefit I desire, and that most earnestly, to see them kept open. I know the logic regularly employed by these people;—to make two blades of corn grow where one grew before; to make all our lands in the highest degree productive of food. Now, if we were cattle, or sheep, the great end of whose existence it was to graze well and get fat, then is their reasoning most excellent. But I look upon humanity as having other wants than mere physical ones. I too would have all our lands produce us food: but then it should be food of various kinds; food not only for one part, the corporeal, but for every part of our nature; and in these forests and open lands the intellectual part of the nation “have a food that these men know not of.” He who attends to our mere animal prosperity may call himself an utilitarian, but the true utilitarian comprehends in his scheme what is good for man in his integral nature; for his spiritual and intellectual needs, as well as for his bodily. But taking them on their own ground, these forest lands are not mere unproductive wastes. They supply our dockyards with an abundance ofvaluable timber; in them lie farms, and cottage homes, with their orchards, gardens, and little enclosures. They maintain a large population, and they pasture a vast quantity of cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses. Take even such a tract as that of Dartmoor, now stripped of its trees. There cattle and sheep run in great numbers; and there lies about in inexhaustible quantities, granite, which supplies labour in shaping it, and conveying it away, to a large body of men, and goes forth to build our public works and adorn our metropolis. And there too the mines employ, again, numerous people, and send up large quantities of valuable metal. And what should we gain by an enclosure? We should gain a greater supply of corn, which the farmers and landlords sometimes find they have actually too much of.[23]Having hedged about the kingdom with enactments to prevent the free importation of grain, they ever and anon find that they grow so much of it that they cannot really get a remunerating price for it. But even if we did want it, we have only to throw open our ports, and have as much as we want, at almost any price, and cattle too, which we could give our manufactures in exchange for. This is all that the most sanguine advocates of universal enclosure pretend that we should gain; and then let us see what we should lose by it. In the first place, these lands would go to swell the rentals of the rich, as all others enclosed have done. The enclosure system has been one of unexampled absurdity and injustice. It has been conducted on the principle of—“Unto him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Unto him who could shew that he had land lying in proximity to the waste about to be enclosed, has been given more, in the exact proportion to the quantity which he had. The more he had, the more was given him; and from him that had none, was taken away that which he had—the custom of commoning his beasts on the waste. One would naturally have supposed that in achristiancountry there would have been a desire to provide for those who had nothing. That in every parish the waste land should have been, if allotted at all to the inhabitants, allotted to those who had most need of it. The rule has always been exactly the reverse; and the consequence has been that ourpoor population, stripped of their old common rights, have been thrown upon the parish; their little flock of sheep, their few cows, their geese, their pigs, all gone; and no collateral help left them to eke out their small earnings; and in case of loss of work, or sickness, no resource but parish degradation;—the consequent evil influence upon the character of the rural population has been enormous. They have a sense of injustice, if they have not the power to resist it; and when they see a system of this kind, they say—“much will have more,” and their spirits are none the better for the feeling that accompanies the melancholy truth. Now, the same system would assuredly be continued, where common allotments took place; and in the sale of crown lands, a few great persons would purchase them; a few farmers would live and pay high rents, where hundreds of comfortable cottagers now live, who would then be added to the list of paupers.
[23]They did so especially in 1834 and 1835; when wheat was only 38s.and 40s.per quarter.
[23]They did so especially in 1834 and 1835; when wheat was only 38s.and 40s.per quarter.
But it is not merely the poor that would lose by it. The miner, the artist, the naturalist, the poet, the antiquarian, the lover of the country, and the frequenter of it for health or relaxation, all would suffer most seriously by it, and the country would suffer with them. In the wastes of Devon and Cornwall, in those of Derbyshire, Warwickshire, and Northumberland, the subterranean mass is worth, in many places, a hundred times the surface. Enclose and cover up with cultivation these wastes, and you bury by millions the wealth of the nation, and the bread of the miners. At present, they lie open to the foot and the eye of the scrutinizing and adventurous. They can traverse heaths and mountains, and amid the barely covered rocks beneath them, or in the precipices that tower above them, they can at leisure hunt out and discover the sparkling vein, or the dull and secret ore; and open up a fountain of labour and affluence that may run for ages. But enclose these wild regions; warn off the curious inquirers with boards threatening “prosecution as the law directs,” or as may now be seen on the premises of an old lady in Surrey—that “anybody trespassing will be shot at without farther notice!”—keep them out with fences, and cover up the surface with accumulating soil and manure, and there may the riches of Providence remain buried for ever. With the researches of the miner, you restrict those of the geologist too. With the naturalist it fares the same. Every spadegraft of your cultivationannihilates the habitats and localities of animals, insects, and plants, which can exist only in the unploughed wilderness. You destroy some of the most curious natural productions of your country for ever, and circumscribe some of the most healthful, heart-purifying, and spirit-cheering pursuits of men. Your ploughs and mattocks pierce through and erase immediately the earthy mounds, the circles, the stone vestiges of far-past ages, and with them the pleasant journeys and inspiring speculations of antiquarians; as well as a great portion of the historic light and evidences of the nation. If you could root out the New Forest, you might possibly get as well supplied with timber from some other quarter, but where would you find the landscape painter such a treasury of sylvan and picturesque beauty, such delicious nooks and hollows, and fair streams winding under forest boughs? Where such groupings and endless variety of foliage and forest stems? Where such lights and shades and colours as nature there diffuses over her own regions in the everlasting circulation of the seasons; and all within six or seven hours’ ride of the metropolis?[24]I should like to know where you will find him substitutes for the naked, waste, but glorious expanses of the Surrey heaths, of Dartmoor, Stainmore, the high moors of Derbyshire, those of Northumberland, Lancashire, or of Scotland—that land which has often been called poor, but which from the influence of its wild and magnificent scenery is continually pouring out a wealth of genius that is miraculous? Thank God; they never can pull down its mountains, and reduce them to the dead level, and quadrangular fields of cultivation; and into their fairyland recesses there will always be a retreat from the engrossing, engulphing spirit of mercantile calculation.
[24]By the Southampton Railway, now brought within about three hours’ journey of London.
[24]By the Southampton Railway, now brought within about three hours’ journey of London.
But I am passing from painting to poetry; and yet, one is so blended with the other that I would ask the shrewdest person living to shew me where they totally separate. Where then, I ask, will they find substitutes for the painter, for our wild and desolate moors? There the very air in its elastic freshness is full of health and inspiration to him. There he draws an indemnity for his constitution from the deadly effects of long and close confinement incities and painting rooms. There every turf is covered with a rude beauty to his eyes; there every rock and stone is piled in bold and inimitable shapes of savage grandeur by the spirit of nature for him; and the winds, and rains, and vegetative powers of centuries have been busy tinging them with the hues of his admiration. There, amid the sound of falling waters and the roar of coming tempests, he feels all his faculties called into power and life within him, and brings home, season after season, scenes that cover the walls of our city homes with a wild magnificence. Enclose these tracts; hem them in with walls and hedges, and he will no longer visit them. You will no longer find him sitting on some moorland stone, watching the stream which hurries with sea-like sound along its craggy bed; or gazing on those rocky banks and long lines of trees that overhang it, and mark its course along the desert. He will no longer fix the solitary labourer, or the passing group, in their own peculiar character, nor paint the lurid gloom of the storm as it comes with a frown and a thunder of rains and winds only known in such shelterless regions. And when you banish him, you banish the poet, and the lovers of poets too. It is on our moors and our mountains that the profoundest spirit of poetry dwells. There is an influence felt there, which has more than half created our Shakspeares, Miltons, Spensers, Wordsworths, Scotts, Coleridges, Shelleys, and other high spirits that have striven to elevate the English mind above the mere ordinary enjoyments of life. And is it true that any one ever felt the full charm of the works of Scott, who was not familiar with heaths and mountains? Did any one ever feel all the beauty of the opening of Ivanhoe who had not often lingered in our forests? Has any one a true conception of “As you like it,” of “Macbeth,” or of “The Midsummer Night’s Dream,” of “The Fairy Queen,” or of many another divine creation of the British Muse, who is not conversant with the free, beautiful, and untamed nature by whose influence they are shaped? It is one of the great offices of the poet to keep alive the love of nature; and it is, again, by a corresponding love of nature that they must be comprehended and relished. The more you reduce our whole island to a uniformity of colour and cultivation, the more effectually you extinguish this great action and reaction, which are health to the spirituality of the public mind.
We are now arrived at a crisis in which we can afford a few forests and moors to lie open; but we cannot afford to have our higher tastes and feeling deprived of their legitimate aliment. Shut us up in towns, or within an eternal continuity of hedges and ditches, and we shall cease to be the high-souled people we are. We shall become the drudges of selfish interests, or the victims of false taste. We must have some openness, some freedom, some breathing places left us. As Abernethy said, that the parks of London were its lungs; so our mountains, forests, and moorlands, are the lungs of the whole country. It is there that we rush away from counting-houses, factories, steam-engines, railroads, politics, and sectarian factions, and breathe for a season the air of physical and mental vigour; and feel the peace of nature; and drink in from all things around us a new life, a new feeling, full of the benevolent calm which is shed by its Creator over the world. Scott said he must see the heather at least once a year, or he should die. Crabbe mounted his horse in a passion of desire which could no longer be resisted, and rode fifty miles to see the sea; and more or less of this feeling lies in every bosom that is not totally dead to the true objects of life. The failing in health; the over-worn in spirit; the followers of a summer’s recreation, all seek our hills and sea-coasts, and plains, where the peace or magnificence of nature, or where some celebrated monument of the past is to be found. If any one would know the extent of this delight in such things, or the numbers who indulge in it, let him go, as I have elsewhere said, to any such place in this kingdom, on any day through the summer and autumn. If we had the amount of the numbers who make a summer excursion to the sea-side, or to our moorland and mountain districts, it would be amazing. The parties who swarm along our Derbyshire valleys, and in every nook of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the Western Isles, are apparently without end.
Now this is a very healthful taste, and one, that with all our trading, manufacturing, and money-getting habits, we cannot too much encourage. We complain of our countrymen seeking pleasure so much abroad, and shall we diminish the objects of popular attraction at home? No, there never was an age in which our forests and moorlands were of half the value they are of to us now. As true utilitarians, we have the strongest motives to keep themopen, as we mean to keep alive the fine arts, poetry, the love of antiquity, and the love of nature amongst us; as we would retain and invigorate in us that higher life by which we have climbed to our present national altitude; by which our sages and poets have been nourished, and become the true teachers and inspirers of virtue and nobility to the world; by which we are made to feel our animal life even with a double zest; and are yet, I trust, destined to make the name of England the greatest in the history of the world.
I do not mean to say that no waste lands should be henceforth enclosed. There are plenty, every one knows, that have no particular grace or interest about them. Let them, in the name of all that is reasonable, be hedged and ditched as soon as you please; but as for the village green, the common lying near a town, the forest, and the moorland that has a poetical charm about it, felt and acknowledged by the public—may the axe and the spade that are lifted up against them be shivered to atoms, and a curse, worse than the curse of Kehama, chase all commissioners, land-surveyors, petitioning lawyers, and every species of fencer and divider out of their boundaries for ever and ever.
Wild English cattle in Chillingham Park
We have a few herds of the original cattle which once abounded in England and Scotland, still remaining. We have long ago destroyed our wolves, bears, and boars; and it seems almost a miracle that a few of these inhabitants of our ancient forests have been preserved. They form the most interesting objects of those parts of the country where they exist. Every one knows the use Scott has made of them in the Bride of Lammermuir. There was formerly a fine herd of them at Drumlanrig in Scotland. In England they were to be found at Burton-Constable in Yorkshire; Wollaton near Nottingham; Gisburne in Craven; Lime-Hall in Cheshire; Chartley Castle in Staffordshire; and Chillingham Castle in Northumberland. That they were of the true old breed was sufficiently testified by their common resemblance; beinguniversally milk-white; having only the tips of their horns, and their muzzles and ears coloured. The only difference was, that in some herds, the tips and the whole of the inside of the ears, were black, in others red or brown. What may be the numbers remaining at Lime or Gisburne, I do not know. At Wollaton they have become mixed with the common breed; but at Chartley there are about twenty of them, where they retain their ancient characteristics, and their wildness. Here, there are sundry superstitions connected with them. It is believed and asserted, that if they amount to more than a certain number, or if a calf of an unusual colour is produced, some calamity happens in the family of the noble owner, Earl Ferrers. This, it is asserted, was the case when one of the earls was executed; and indeed, that every family calamity has been thus prognosticated.
The noblest herd is to be found at Chillingham Castle, on the Northumbrian borders, the seat of the Earl of Tankerville. The park is well calculated for the use of such animals. It lies in a solitary country. Care seems taken to render the isolation as complete as possible;—there is not even a public-house permitted by his lordship in the small hamlet, which seems to exist just as the ancient, dependent hamlet of the feudal castle did in the feudal times themselves. The castle, a fine fabric, in true castellated style, and well befitting the classic land of Northumberland—the region of Alnwick, Warkworth, and Chevy-Chace—of the skirmishes of Douglas and Percy—of many an ancient cross, convent, battle-stone, and hermit-cell, lies embosomed in its woods at the foot of wild hills, which ascend eastward for a mile or more, and terminate in a range of bare and craggy eminences of a fine woodland character. This steep slope between the castle and these heights is the park. Various woods and deep dells are scattered over it, so that the cattle can choose a high and airy pasture between them, where they see afar off any approach—a situation they seem particularly to enjoy; or can, at the slightest alarm, plunge into the depth of woods and glens.
Bewick, who visited them, has given capital portraits of this interesting race of cattle, and the following passages from his account of them are marked by his usual accuracy. “At the first appearance of any person, they set off in full gallop, and at thedistance of two or three hundred yards make a wheel round, and come boldly up again, tossing their heads in a menacing manner. On a sudden they make a full stop at the distance of forty or fifty yards, looking wildly at the objects of their surprise; but on the least motion being made, they all again turn round, and run off with equal speed, but not to the same distance: forming a shorter circle, and again returning with a bolder and more threatening aspect than before, they approach much nearer, probably within thirty yards; when they make another stand, and again run off. This they do several times, shortening their distance, and advancing nearer, till they come within ten yards; when most people think it prudent to leave them, not choosing to provoke them further; for there is little doubt but in two or three times more they would make an attack.
“The mode of killing them was, perhaps, the only modern remains of the grandeur of ancient hunting. On notice being given that a wild bull would be killed on a certain day, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood came mounted and armed with guns, etc., sometimes to the amount of a hundred horse, and four or five hundred foot, who stood upon walls or got into trees, while the horsemen rode out the bull from the rest of the herd, until he stood at bay; when a marksman dismounted and shot. At some of these huntings twenty or thirty of these shots have been fired before he was subdued. On such occasions the bleeding victim grew desperately furious, from the smarting of his wounds, and the shouts of savage joy that were echoing from every side; but, from the number of accidents that happened, this dangerous mode has been little practised of late years; the park-keeper alone generally shooting them with a rifled gun, at one shot.
“When the cows calve, they hide their calves for a week or ten days, in some sequestered situation, and go and suckle them two or three times a-day. If any person come near the calves, they clap their heads close to the ground, and lie like a hare in form to hide themselves. This is a proof of their native wildness, and is corroborated by the following circumstance, that happened to the writer of this narrative, who found a hidden calf of two days old, very lean and very weak. On stroking its head, it got up,pawed two or three times like an old bull, bellowed very loud, stepped back a few steps, and bolted at his legs with all his force. It then began to paw again, bellowed, stepped back, and bolted as before; but knowing its intention, he stepped aside, and it missed him, fell, and was so very weak, that it could not rise, though it made several efforts. But it had done enough: the whole herd was alarmed, and coming to its rescue, obliged him to retire; for the dams will allow no person to touch their calves, without attacking them with impetuous ferocity.
“When any one happens to be wounded, or is grown feeble through age or sickness, the rest of the herd set upon it and gore it to death.
“The weight of the bulls is generally from forty to fifty stone the four quarters; of the cows about thirty. The beef is finely marbled, and of excellent flavour.”
We visited the park in 1836, and were at great pains to get a sight of this noble herd. We were told that the keeper was in the park and would get us a view of it; but on going into it, we found him, and some others of the household busily engaged in shooting fawns. For this purpose some men on horseback were galloping round a herd of deer, and driving them in a particular direction, where a keeper lay in ambush, near a narrow opening between the woods, and when they came near enough, shot with his rifle such fawns as he wanted. It was a scene of great animation: the galloping men—the keeper seen cautiously peeping out, to watch for the approach of the herd—the herd here collected into a dense group, in watchfulness and alarm—and again streaming off in a long line across the park, in some direction which seemed most to promise escape. The cries of the old—the shriller cries of the young—the sudden flash and report from the thicket—the fall of the fawn—and the flying of the herd in some other direction, made up a lively though painful scene.
But this spoiled our peculiar sport. The wild cattle, accustomed to be fired at themselves occasionally, alarmed at the sound of the guns, had retired to the most obscure woodland retreats of the park. Several persons told us that they had seen the whole herd a few minutes before, in the highest part of the park; but we traversed the woods in every direction, and penetrated into theirdarkest recesses without getting a glimpse of them. This we did for a couple of hours, and spite of the warnings of those who were well acquainted with them, so great was my anxiety to have a view of these fine animals. Two sawyers, who were sawing timber at a pit up in a glade of the park, told us that a few mornings before, on coming to their work, they found several bulls in the glade, which began to shake their heads, and tear up the ground in a style which induced them to betake themselves to the wood as nimbly as possible. We were told too, that Mr. Landseer, while sketching some of these cattle, found it advisable to retreat more than once; and that people are not only frequently pursued, but that one man had been killed by them the previous summer. However, trusting to my ability to mount a tree, in case of need, I determined to hold on till I found them; and having thus gone through all the woods but one, not excepting Robin Hood’s Cleuch, for Robin has a traditionary retreat in many a place of the north. I was certain they must be there, and therefore gave way to the remonstrances of wiser heads, and retired to a distance to watch their issuing forth. The firing of the guns in the lower part of the park had ceased, and we were assured that the cattle would not be long before they made their appearance. And sure enough, in about half an hour, this grand herd of wild cattle came streaming out of this very wood. There were upwards of a hundred of them; and they spread themselves at equal distances across the steep glade, between this and the next wood, and commenced a steady graze, ever and anon lifting up a cautious head, to ascertain the actual absence of danger. It was a sight well worthy of a long journey to see. Their number, their uniformity of colour and shape, the wild shy look of the cows, the sturdy strength of the bulls—some of them of a large size—and their clear snowy hue, which made them conspicuous for many miles distant, as we occasionally turned, on our way over the moors to Wooller, and saw them still grazing in the very same spot and order. They reminded us of the herds of the sun, amongst which Ulysses’ hungry crew made such havoc in the meads of Trinacria.
We were told that the hunting of the bulls had been renewed by Lord Ossulston, the eldest son of the Earl of Tankerville, with whom it was a very favourite pursuit—certainly the grandestspecies of chase yet left in Britain, and the only one which the sense of danger incurred can heighten and ennoble to anything like the same level as that of hunting the tiger in India, or the bear in the northern countries of Europe. It seems, as well he may, that the Earl is proud of this fine herd of cattle, and, it is said, refuses on any terms to furnish any of his noble neighbours with a pair of them to stock their parks similarly. It is to be hoped that this interesting remnant of the native herd will long be preserved in its present magnificent number and purity of breed.
At the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Newcastle, in August 1838, a paper was read on these wild cattle by Mr. L. Hindmarsh. The only additional facts respecting them were contained in a letter of Lord Tankerville to the writer. His lordship stated that nothing had for generations been known of the origin of these cattle in his family; and that they were mentioned in no family document. That there was great probability of their location there being very ancient. He describes them, as we found them, retiring into the woods on any alarm, and having a faculty of traversing the woods so quietly that it is difficult to obtain a sight of them. He states that he himself has not been able in summer time to get a sight of them for weeks together. That on the contrary, in winter time, being fed in the inner park, they become pretty familiar, and will let you go near them, especially when on horseback. His lordship describes them as very uncertain in their disposition, sometimes struck with sudden panics, and at others very fierce. “When they come down into the lower part of the park, which they do at stated hours, they move like a regiment of cavalry in single files, the bulls leading the van, or in retreat it is the bulls which bring up the rear. Lord Ossulston was witness to a curious way in which they took possession, as it were, of some new pasture recently laid open to them. It was in the evening about sunset. They began by lining the front of a small wood, which seemed quite alive with them, when all of a sudden, they made a dart forward altogether in a line, and charging close by him across the plain, they spread out, and after a little time began feeding.” His lordship says, “Many stories might be told of hair-breadth escapes, accidents of sundry kinds from thesecattle,” and gives an instance of a bull attacking a keeper, whom he tossed three times, then knelt down on him, breaking several of his ribs, and would soon have killed him, had not a number of gentlemen from the castle with rifles succeeded in destroying the furious beast, but not till they had lodged six or seven bullets in his skull.
What a mighty space lies between the palace and the cottage in this country! ay, what a mighty space between the mansion of the private gentleman and the hut of the labourer on his estate! To enter the one: to see its stateliness and extent; all its offices, outbuildings, gardens, greenhouses, hothouses; its extensive fruit-walls, and the people labouring to furnish the table simply with fruit, vegetables, and flowers; its coach-houses, harness-houses, stables, and all the steeds, draught-horses, and saddle-horses, hunters, and ladies’ pads, ponies for ladies’ airing-carriages, and ponies for children; and all the grooms and attendants thereon; to see the waters for fish, the woods for game, the elegant dairy for the supply of milk and cream, curds and butter, and the dairymaids and managers belonging to them;—and then, to enter the house itself, and see all its different suites of apartments, drawing-rooms, boudoirs, sleeping-rooms, dining and breakfast rooms; its steward’s, housekeeper’s and butler’s rooms; its ample kitchens and larders, with their stores of provisions, fresh and dried; itsstores of costly plate, porcelain and crockery apparatus of a hundred kinds; its cellars of wine and strong beer; its stores of linen; its library of books; its collections of paintings, engravings, and statuary; the jewels, musical instruments, and expensive and interminable nick-knackery of the ladies; the guns and dogs; the cross-bows, long-bows, nets, and other implements of amusement of the gentlemen; all the rich carpeting and fittings-up of day-rooms, and night-rooms, with every contrivance and luxury which a most ingenious and luxurious age can furnish; and all the troops of servants, male and female, having their own exclusive offices, to wait upon the person of lady or gentleman, upon table, or carriage, or upon some one ministration of pleasure or necessity: I say, to see all this, and then to enter the cottage of a labourer, we must certainly think that one has too much for the insurance of comfort, or the other must have extremely too little. If the peasant can be satisfied with his establishment, and the gentleman could not tell how to live without his, one would be almost persuaded that they could not be of the same class of animals. Knowing, however, that they are of the same species, it only shews of what elastic stuff human nature is made; into what a nutshell it can compress its cravings, and how immensely it can expand itself when the pressure of necessity is withdrawn. I am not going here to moot the old question of whereabout happiness lies in this strange disparity of circumstance; it, no doubt, lies somewhere between the extremes. It certainly cannot be created by external superfluities.Theylay open their possessors to the exercise of despotic power; to the corruptions of pride and luxury; to false taste, frivolous pursuits, and the diffusion of the attention over so many objects as to prevent the heart from settling firmly on any. They have a tendency to weaken the domestic attachments, and the love of solid pursuits. On the other hand, the pressure of poverty and ignorance certainly can, and too often does, lie so heavily as to destroy the relish of life’s enjoyments in the cottager. Yet happiness is a fireside thing; and the simplicity of cottage life, the fewness of its objects, and the strong sympathies awakened by its trials and sufferings, tend to condense the affections, and to strike deep the roots of happiness in the sacred soil of consanguinity. When wealth is accompanied by a desire to do good, it is a glorious and a happy destiny; when lowly life is virtuous,easy, and enlightened, it is a happy destiny too—for it is full of the strong zest of existence, and strong affections. But this is not my present subject.
When we go into the cottage of the working man, how forcibly are we struck with the difference between his mode of life and our own. There is his tenement of, at most, one or two rooms. His naked walls; bare brick, stone or mud floor, as it may be: a few wooden, or rush-bottomed chairs; a deal, or old oak table; a simple fireplace, with its oven beside it, or, in many parts of the kingdom, no other fireplace than the hearth; a few pots and pans—and you have his whole abode, goods and chattels. He comes home weary from his out-door work, having eaten his dinner under hedge or tree, and seats himself for a few hours with his wife and children, then turns into a rude bed, standing perhaps on the farther side of his only room, and out again before daylight, if it be winter. He has no one to make a fire in his dressing-room, to lay out his clothes, to assist him in his toilet; he flings on his patched garments, washes his face in a wooden or earthen dish at the door; blows up the fire, often gets ready his own breakfast, and is gone.
Such is the routine of his life, from week to week and year to year; Sundays, and a few holidays, are white days in his calendar. On them he shaves, and puts on a clean shirt and better coat, drawn from that old chest which contains the whole wardrobe of himself and children; his wife has generally some separate drawer or bandbox, in which to stow her lighter and more fragile gear. Then he walks round his little garden, if he have it; goes with his wife and children to church or meeting; to sit with a neighbour, or have a neighbour look in upon him. There he sits, his children upon his knee, and tells them how his father used to talk tohim.
This is cottage life in its best estate; in its unsophisticated and unpauperised condition. He has no carriages, no horses, no cards of invitation, or of admittance to places of amusement; none of the luxuries, fascinations, or embellishments of life belong to him. It is existence shorn of all its spreading and flowering branches, but not pared to the quick. This is supposing the father of the family is sober and industrious;—that he isneither a pot-house haunter, a gambler at the cockpit, a boxer, a dog-fighter, a poacher, an idle, rackety and demoralized fellow, as thousands are. This is supposing that he brings home his week’s wages, and puts them into the hands of his wife, as their best guardian and distributer;—saying,—“Here, my lass, this is all that I have earned; thou must lay it out for the best;Ihave enough to do to win it.”
And what are these wages, out of which to maintain his family, aided by the lesser earnings of his wife, by taking in washing, helping in harvest-fields, charring in more affluent people’s houses, and so on, and the earnings of the children in similar ways, or in some neighbouring factory? His own probably amount to nine, or, at most, twelve shillings, and if his family be large, and there are several workers among them, the whole united earnings may reach twenty shillings per week; a sum which will hardly find other men wherewith to pay toll-bars, or purchase gunpowder; a sum which we throw away repeatedly on some bauble; and yet, on this will a whole family maintain life and credit for a week, ay, and on much less too. In this little hut, which we should hardly think would do for a cowshed or a hayloft, and to which the stables of many gentlemen are real palaces, is the poor man packed with all his kindred lives, interests, and affections: and so he carries on the warfare of humanity, till He, who is no respecter of persons, calls him to stand, side by side, before his throne with the rich man who “has fared sumptuously every day.”
Such are “the short and simple annals” of thousands and tens of thousands in these kingdoms; and yet what fine strapping young fellows spring up in these little cabins, men who have tilled the soil of England and wielded at home her mechanic tools, and borne her arms abroad, till their industry and genius, under the direction of higher minds, have raised her to her present pitch of eminence; and what sweet faces and lovely forms issue thence to Sunday worship, to village feast and dance; or are seen by the evening passer-by in the light of the ingle, amid the family group, making some smoky-raftered hut a little temple of rare beauty, and of filial or sisterly affections. I often thank God that the poor have their objects of admiration and attraction; their domestic affections and their family ties, out of which spring a thousandsimple and substantial pleasures; that beauty and ability are not the exclusive growth of hall and palace; and that, in this country at least, the hand of arbitrary power dare seldom enter this charmed circle, and tear asunder husband from wife, parent from children, brother from sister, as it does in the lands of slavery. Yet our New Poor Laws have aimed a deadly blow at this blessed security; and, till the sound feeling of the nation shall have again disarmed them of this fearful authority, every poor man’s family is liable, on the occurrence of some chance stroke of destitution, to have to their misfortune, bitter enough in itself, added the tenfold aggravation of being torn asunder, and immured in the separate wards of aPoverty Prison. The very supposition is horrible; and, if this system, this iron and indiscriminating system,—a blind tyranny, knowing no difference between accidental misfortune and habitual idleness, between worthy poverty and audacious imposition, between misfortune and crime,—be the product of Philanthropy, may Philanthropy be sunk to the bottom of the sea!
But the cottage life I have been speaking of, is that of the better class of cottagers; the sober and industrious peasantry: but how far short of this condition is that of millions in this empire! To say nothing of Irish cabins, the examples of what a state of destitution, misery, and squalor men may sink into; how much below this is the comfort of a Highland hut? What a contrast is there often between the cottage of an English labourer, and thesteadingof a Highland farmer. There it stands, in a deep glen, between high, rocky mountains. His farm is a wild sheep-track among the hills. Wheat, he grows none, for it is too cold and weeping a climate. He has a little patch of oats for crowdie and oatcake; potatoes he has, if the torrent has not risen during sudden rains so high in the glen as to sweep his crop away. He has contrived a little stock of hay for his cows, but where it can have grown you cannot conceive, till some day, as you see a woman or a boy herding the cattle amongst the patches of cultivation—for there are no fences between the grass and arable land—you find one or the other cutting the longer grass from the boggy waste with a sickle, and drying it often in little sheaves as our farmers dry corn. But the house itself;—it is a little, low, long building of mud, or rough stones; the chimney composed of four short poleswrapped round with hay-bands; a flat stone laid upon it to prevent the smoke being driven down into the hut by the tempestuous winds from the hills; and another stone laid upon that, to keep it from being blown away. The roof is thatched with bracken, with the roots outermost; or often the same roof is a patchwork of bracken, ling, broom, and turf. A little window of perhaps one pane of thick glass, or of four of oiled paper. The door, which reaches to the eaves, is so low that you must stoop to enter; and the smoke is pouring out of it faster than it ascends from the chimney. A few goats are, most likely, lying or standing about the door. You enter, and as soon as you can discern anything through the eternal cloud of smoke, you most probably find yourself in a crowd. The fire of peat lies in the centre of the hut, surrounded by a few stones; wooden benches are nailed on one side against the wall, and the other is partitioned off like a large wooden cupboard, with sliding doors or curtains, for the family bed, as you find all over Scotland, and even in Northumberland. The pigs are running about the floor; hens are roosting over your head; the cows are lowing in, what we should call, the parlour; nine or ten children, or weans, as they call them, and a callant, or boy, who teaches the weans, and the father and mother, and very probably their father and mother, or one of them, in extreme age, are fixing their eyes on the stranger.
In the summer of 1836, Mrs. Howitt and myself passed the night in such a dwelling, and a slight notice of the place may present, to many of our readers, a new view of cottage life. It was in Rosshire, some thirty or forty miles north-west of Inverness, at a spot called the Comrie, lying between Loch Echilty and Loch Luichart. A wild, and yet most beautiful spot it was,—a little strath opening itself out between the wooded mountains which surround Loch Echilty, and the bare stony hills in the direction of Strath Conan. We came upon it after wandering through the delicious fairyland of birch woods that clothe that Loch in the very romance of picturesque beauty, springing up amongst the wildest chaos of crags, here hanging over the water, and here surrounding the ruinous blackness of some solitary hut, that, but for children playing before it, would appear to have been tenantless for years. A stern defile guarded by vast masses of projecting rocks, by placesclothed with the richest drapery of crimson heather, by places naked and lividly grey, and height above height still scattered with climbing birch trees, brought us to a little nameless loch hidden in the woods, girt with a dense margin of reeds, and covered with the most magnificent display of white water-lilies, and then appeared two of those little huts in this Highland solitude. The evening was rapidly sinking into night, and we were uncertain how far it was to the next inn. Two women appeared at the door of one of the huts, and rather startled us with the information, that the nearest inn in the way we proposed to go, was distant five-and-twenty miles! That another mile brought us to the ferry over the Conan, where the carriage-road ceased, and all beyond was mountain and moorland waste. We seemed, as it were, to be on the very verge of civilization; and there appeared to be nothing for us but to retrace our way for some miles, or to take up our lodging in this house.
Weary as we were, this appeared the less objectionable alternative, and we accepted the offer which the elder woman made us. The moment we did so, the poor woman seemed struck with the rashness of her act. “What shall I do for the like of you? What shall I find for the like of you?” We assured her we should not be very fastidious guests, and in we went. It was such a hut as I have just described. The fire lay on a hearth of stones, with a few large stones built up against the mud wall to prevent the house from being burnt. The woman’s husband, a farmer, was gone into Morayshire with lambs; a hired shepherd sat on the side of the partitioned bed, such as I have already described; two fine sheep-dogs lay before the fire, and a troop of barelegged and kilted boys came running in from some distant school. They were Macgregors, having come hither from Dumbartonshire, and could, fortunately for us, speak English. We sate on a bench in the ingle, and all these little Macgregors, Grigor Macgregor, Peter and Duncan, and the rest, squatted on the mud-floor, and alternately watched us and their eldest sister, a fine barelegged lassie of eighteen, who was busy baking oatcakes for us. It was a hot post both for herself and for us. She put on peats till the hut was like an oven, and the smoke made our eyes smart almost past endurance. Yet we watched the progress of her operation with great interest,as she made a paste of oatmeal and water, rolled it out in cakes, cut it into segments, baked them on an iron girdle over the fire, and then reared them before the glowing peats to make them crisp. This done, she found us some tea, and that was our supper. They had two or three cows, but their milk was already in the process of being converted into cheese; the potatoes and the oats of the last crop were exhausted, and the wet season had prevented the ripening of the present. “There was,” said our hostess, “a great cry in the country for food!” Our fatigue, and this announcement, induced us to think we fared well. They made us a comfortable bed in the spence, where we found four Gaelic Bibles, and the History of Robinson Crusoe! Early in the morning we pursued our way; but ere we took our leave, the poor woman came in from fetching up her cows, her clothes wet to the very knees. When we expressed our surprise—“O,” said she, “that is what we are used to every day of our lives. While you have been in your bed, the herdboy has three times gone round the corn-fields with his dogs, to chase away the stags and roes into the woods. The last thing every night, while the corn is growing in the field, he goes round—once again at midnight, and then at the earliest dawn of day. Every night it must be done, or a green blade would not be left. If you went in the gloaming with the man into the wood, sir, you would see twenty stags as big as our cows. O it’s an awful place for wild beasts—foxes and badgers, and serpents! did you ever see a serpent, ma’am? Sometimes in a morning they rear themselves up in a narrow path, and hiss at me bitterly.” As the poor woman spoke, we stood at the door of her little tenement, and saw the heavy dew lie glittering on the grass all round; and the primitive cheese-press, consisting of a pole, one end of which was thrust into a crevice of a rock, and the other weighted with a huge stone; and around us were the heathy mountains and the woods; the mists and clouds clinging to the sides of wild hills, or rolling away before the breeze of morning; and the sound of the neighbouring torrent alone disturbing the deep solitude. We could not avoid feeling how far was all this from the cottage-life of England. We gave the poor woman what we thought a fitting return for her hospitality, and left her overwhelmed with a grateful astonishment, which shewed what was there the real value of money.
This is a scene in the scale of comfort far below the general run of labourers’ houses in England; but yet how far, infinitely far lower, do many of our working people’s abodes sink. What dens have we in manufacturing towns! What little, filthy, dismal, yet high-rented dens! What cabins do some of our colliers and miners inhabit! What noisome, amphibious abodes abound in our fishing villages, such as Crabbe has painted! What places have I seen in different parts of England, which everywhere obtain the name ofRookeries,—huge piles built for some purpose which has not answered; or some deserted hall, let off in little tenements; the windows broken, and stopped with old rags and hats; the ground all round trodden down, covered with ash-heaps; a few stunted bushes, or gooseberry trees, where once had been a garden, displaying the ragged and tattered wash of the indigence of indigence: altogether exhibiting such an air of poverty as impoverishes one’s very spirit, and fills it with a nameless feeling of disgust and despondence for days after. Such a place I particularly recollect seeing somewhere between Netherby and Gretna-Green; and, observing an old man “daundering about,” as he called it, as without hope and object, I asked him how this place came to look so forlorn—“O,” said he, “we once could run our cows on the waste, and did very well, but that is taken away. Sir James asked the steward what the poor people must do, ‘O, they will all hooly[25]away,’ said he; but where are we to hooly to?”