ENGLISH.
I spent a few weeks in England in 1881, and visited three agricultural regions in the east, the north, and the south. An article on the last is to appear inHarpers’ Magazine. The following is drawn principally from my visit to the east. Some account of my stay in the north and of a few days in a manufacturing county may appear hereafter.
My authority for the statements in the following article is almost entirely notes taken at the time, assisted in a small degree by recollections. But it cannot be assumed that this essay is without faults.
With regard to another country, I was advised to tell what I saw and how it impressed my mind, and not to endeavor to draw conclusions. But what a traveller sees and hears is greatly influenced by his own opinions. He goes to a foreign land, and if of different religious institutions from his own, he inquires on this point; of a different form of government, he asks political questions. He notices, also, differences in dress, food, and manner of living.
The first family with whom I boarded in Huntingdonshire was that of Mr. Jackson, a carpenter, who, besides working at his trade, rented a few acres. His wife, whowas a farmer’s daughter, had a small dairy of three cows. Jackson appeared to have a splendid constitution. He was short and somewhat thick-set. He began his trade at eighteen, and was an apprentice five years and a journeyman three, when, having put by some money, he married at twenty-six. His wife was near thirty. One of them said that they had prospered with the help of the Lord.
Mrs. Jackson also had been able to save something wherewith to furnish a house. She learned a trade, and was also companion or lady’s-maid to sick ladies and those going to Brighton. One of them made her a wedding present of neat china.
Jackson and his wife have four children,—the eldest about six, or as she says, “Four little children, not one of them able to put on a shoe nor a stocking.” She attends to her dairy, boards the apprentice, and has no servant.
Their children are sweet and clean. Three of them go to the public school in the village. It is called the national school. Mrs. Jackson gave the eldest three pence to pay for their instruction for a week; which is at the rate of about twenty-four cents a quarter for each of them. The penny is a trifle over two cents, the shilling a little under a quarter of a dollar; but in turning sterling money into our own, it will avoid repetition to consider the English penny as two cents, and four shillings as a dollar.
The Jacksons’ house seemed a perfect palace compared to that of any working farmer that I saw in Ireland. Coming freshly from that country, I thought it must be the gem of the village, but I was mistaken.The busy activity of the Jacksons, who have a young family to keep, was more like what I have seen at home than what I saw in Ireland.
The house has a peculiar name placed on the front, something like Hallelujah House. Doubtless it was built by a dissenter. I saw another bearing title Bunyan Lodge.
A lodging-room was assigned to me, and I ate by myself in one of the front rooms below. (Thus to take lodgings is very common in England.) Jackson and his wife ate in the kitchen. When they had finished, she gave the apprentice what she chose. My room had strips of carpet on the floor, neat white curtains at the window, a suitable toilet service, linen sheets and pillow-cases. There stood in it a neat red chest with iron bands at the corners, and a white fringed cloth covering the top. It was locked, expressive of thrifty housekeeping.
Jackson and his wife do not go to the gray Church of England, which, with its spire, overlooks the trees. They attend the brick chapel, being Independents.
After he had taken me to see his calves and pigs, I asked him what proportion of the farmers in the neighborhood belonged to the Church of England.
He answered, “About one-half. I think that is just about the proportion that voted last year.”
This answer amused me much, but I feared that his wife would not understand why I laughed.
“You mean to say,” I said, “that large landed proprietors expect those who rent from them to go to church?”
“Yes,” he said, “or they would not rent to them.”
“Of course,” said I, “it is not put into the leases.But how can they know how they vote now that you have the secret ballot?”
“They go round and ask them, and if they would not promise, they would lose their farms. Many a farmer has been turned out because he would not vote for his landlord’s party.”
On another occasion I spoke to him of the wars which England had lately waged in Asia and South Africa, and Jackson spoke of the deficit in the finances when the Liberals came in. He said that he believed their country has had to smart very severely for unnecessary wars and bloodshed, and added, “Because it was a smart little country, what business had we to go and say to other nations, ‘You shall do as we please’?”
I did not stay many days with the Jacksons. Mrs. J. considered the burden of a dairy and of young children to be enough without taking lodgers. I was recommended to the house of Mr. Benton, the principal farmer in the village, and a friend called with me and introduced me to Mrs. B., who after an interval for deliberation consented to take me as a boarder at their family table.
Benton farmed about seven hundred acres, but not all in one tract. He owned a small part, and rented from various persons. One large farm he had taken at a heavy rent, and he was worried in these hard times. He used to follow the plough when a boy, but he cannot now, having so much to do in walking around and superintending work.
Mr. and Mrs. Benton adhered to the Established Church. He began to attend Sunday-school early, perhapsat two years, and had attended ever since, he being fifty, and a teacher. He was church-warden, and the most considerable parishioner in attendance; but was not on equal visiting terms with the clergyman.
He was more reserved than his wife; he said that the English did not incline to make new friends. He seemed to hold to the same opinions that he cherished in early life; to be of warm and constant attachments, and not free from prejudice. He said that Ireland should be sunk for twenty-four hours and repeopled with English and Scotch; that the reason the poor-rates are so heavy in Ireland is that the people are so lazy. He declined to tell to which political party he held, saying that the ballot is secret. He remarked of ourselves that he wished “the Americans would let our things go in there free, same as we let their things.”
The Bentons had seven children, five of them daughters. The eldest son was twenty-one, and was actively employed attending to farm operations. The girls had taken music lessons, and could play upon the piano. The eldest two were away learning dressmaking, and Mrs. Benton thought that she might be able to get a place as lady’s-maid for one or more of her girls.
Mrs. Benton had a large house, kept in good order. She was tall, fair, good-looking, active, and sprightly. She said that she “would rather have a penny of her ownhearningthan tuppence that anybody should give her.” She did her housework with the help of the young daughters left at home. She said that, as a general rule, the tenant farmers had brought up their children too high, had hired servants, and now that these hard times had come, they had failed.
But Mrs. Benton’s housework is not like that of the wife of a large farmer in Pennsylvania. She does not board any of the farm hands; the only thing of the kind that they do now is to give them their beer in “’aytime.” She hires a woman to help wash. In summer they wash about once in eight weeks, and in winter more rarely, having plenty of clothes. The washing is done in two days, Saturday and Monday. Mrs. B. and her daughters do the ironing, though sometimes she puts out a frilled petticoat. They iron only the starched things; the others are mangled.
Nor does Mrs. Benton have the labor of milking, for it is done by one of the hired men. In the care of poultry she has the assistance of the shepherd’s wife, who raises chickens at their own house. Mrs. B. furnishes feed, and pays her eight cents for every fowl that she raises, and four for every twenty eggs that she brings her. She pays her own daughter a trifle for the eggs which she brings in at the home-place.
As regards the number of meals that she gave her family, we had four daily; for, in addition to the afternoon tea, we had a late supper. I noted one. All the young children had gone to bed, for Mrs. Benton was an excellent house-mother. For supper, we had onions, soft cheese, bread, cold pork, stout for the mother to drink, and ale for the father. After supper, Benton read aloud a small portion of the New Testament; the son of twenty-one before going to bed kissed his mother and bade his father good-night, and the daughter kissed both parents.
Mrs. Benton asked a blessing at meals: “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us thankful, forJesus Christ’s sake. Amen.” Thanks were returned by the young children. One said, “Thank God, father and mother, for a very good tea. Amen.”
Mrs. Benton delivers tracts. She takes them to dissenters’ houses; for the plan on which “the church” acts seems to be that all these are only stray sheep from their fold. They are indeed parishioners. Jackson, the carpenter with whom I boarded, as he rented land, was obliged to pay tithes for the support of the clergyman, although he himself was an Independent or Congregationalist.
Though she is a church-woman, Mrs. Benton tells me that one of her uncles is a bitter dissenter. He would not open a prayer-book, and even objected to the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer at the close of another supplication.
This village where the Bentons lived closely adjoins the fenny or swampy land of the east of England. Said Benton, “Perhaps a hundred years ago the fens grew nothing but reeds and rushes and produced a quantity of wild fowl.” “All the geese in Lincoln fens” I had before heard of. The water is now kept out of the fens by means of steam-engines. This level land is well fitted for tillage, but bad weather had been very unfortunate for the wheat farmer. He generally holds more land than the dairy farmer, but he had been suffering from a succession of wet harvests. Before the abolition of the corn laws, high prices were kept up by a duty on foreign grain, but now the farmer cannot compete with our Western grain. An experienced man told me thatthe man who held even as high as one thousand acres was going behind every year.
In the summer of 1881, before the harvest was gathered in, I was told that there had not been a dry harvest since 1874. Some idea of what an English summer can be was given to me by Benton, the farmer with whom I boarded. He said that in 1879, at a Royal Agricultural Show near London, the farm implements were up to the hub in mud, and boards were spread for people to walk upon. In meeting, some would get shoved off up to the knees in mud. Men did not go round offering to black shoes, but with pails of water to wash off the mud. Yet there were thousands there.
The average of wheat raised in England is much greater than ours. In this country we do not hoe wheat and then weed it. But the production of England is scarcely half the amount required for the population. In 1880 the amount raised was sixty-four millions of bushels; the amount needed, one hundred and seventy-six millions. In 1881 they hoped to get one hundred millions of their own produce. One of my friends said that they would have starved the last year or two but for America.
In considering the English climate it is well to remember the high northern latitude. There is no city on our continent, not even Quebec, which is so far north as Paris. London lies in the latitude of Newfoundland and Labrador. Whether wet climates like that of England and Ireland can successfully compete in wheat-raising in the long run with our drier ones may well be doubted.
Another acquaintance spoke to me of the depressed conditionof this district. He said that within a radius of six miles, six large farmers, cultivating three or four hundred acres each, had failed since the last harvest. “For four years,” he added, “the seasons have seemed to alter,—snow and rain fell in seed-time; there was little or no sun to mature the grain at harvest. There were floods of water covering acres of ground, so that one farmer holding perhaps five hundred or more acres, that had also been cultivated by his father and grandfather, lost in three years about twenty thousand dollars. Then he took his remaining capital and went into other business.”
It was surprising to one accustomed to the small farms of the fertile district in which I live to find such large farmers as many of the English. Said one of my acquaintances in Huntingdonshire, “One who farms fifty acres is scarcely called a farmer. He farms a little land. In another county I know a farmer who holds fifteen hundred acres.” The tendency of course is largely to increase the number of farm-laborers, while diminishing the number of those who farm themselves.
The farmer with whom I boarded employed a large number of hands, forty I think, in the spring. In July he had four men hoeing turnips, potatoes, “mangles” (mangel-wurzels?), and kohl-rabi. He had also about eleven children pulling weeds out of wheat, barley, and oats.
He kept twenty working horses, and with them had eight or ten hands. In the earlier season he had twenty hands hoeing wheat, barley, oats, beans, and peas. He had a shepherd to look after about two hundred sheep. He employs some women, girls, and boys. In theearly morning I heard a peculiar cry as of a boy calling the cows, but he was crying to keep away the birds that depredate on the wheat,—linnets, sparrows, and blackbirds in the hedges. Benton also employed hands to go over fields that were to be planted in potatoes, turnips, buckwheat, and to pick twitch out of them. This, he said, is a wild and very troublesome grass, that fills the ground with roots, so that nothing else can grow.
I have just mentioned buckwheat. Benton had about thirty acres in this grain. It is fed to pigs and other animals; he said that he had never heard of its being eaten by men.
One of the most surprising things to me was the short number of hours that the farm-laborers made. That men should quit farm-work in July at or before six in the evening was novel to me. But all the work that is possible Benton puts out by the piece.
The price of land in this arable region is differently reported. One told me that it can be bought in fee simple for from two to three hundred dollars per acre. Perhaps this is the fen land and more valuable. The village in which I boarded was at a small distance from the fens. Land around this village sells at from one hundred to five hundred dollars per acre, but the latter are nice bits around the village. Land can be rented in this or the fenny region for farming at about nine dollars per acre. The tenure on which lands are held it was hard for me to understand. For instance, I was told that copyhold is nearly as good as freehold. At some length a friend endeavored to explain to me copyholdfine arbitrary, and then said that copyhold fine certain is more desirable.
In the depressed condition of farming of which I have spoken, it has been found that grazing and dairy farms are more profitable than grain. The abolition of the corn laws, said a friend, made bread cheap and enabled the mechanic and manufacturer to live, and they can buy more meat than before, and grazing and dairy farms are very profitable. Grain, which can readily be transported by sea, comes more closely into competition with the English grain than meat does.
One of the persons whom I met in Huntingdonshire was a retired farmer, and must have been a successful one. When he began to farm the fen land, that which he held had lately been brought under complete drainage, and was comparatively new. About 1835, on twenty-four acres of land he had the exceptional crop of sixty-four bushels of wheat to the acre. He has often grown four hundred bushels of potatoes to the acre on twenty-five acres, and he thought that his average yield had been three hundred bushels. He has had potatoes growing to the height of three feet, level as a floor, and not a weed to be seen. “There should not be a weed seen in an acre. I have grown,” he continued, “one hundred and twelve bushels of oats to the acre, and did not think that I had a crop under eighty-four. However, I did what none of you Americans do. In the latter part of my time, when I farmed only one hundred acres, I used six thousand dollars a year (twelve hundred pounds) in fertilizing my farm. Thus I bought six thousand dollars’ worth of grain and fed animals, especially pigs. Further, I sold the best of my wheat, oats,and potatoes, and consumed all the rest of my produce on the farm. I find no one who has fed so much on one hundred acres.”
Mrs. Benton took me one evening to see a steam-plough or cultivator at work. It did the ploughing well here when the weather was sufficiently dry. It was an immense affair. There were two steam-engines, one on each side of the field, sending the cultivator back and forth. The whole cost of the machine (including the van for the men to sleep in) was about ten thousand dollars. The charge for ploughing was three dollars per acre (twelve shillings), and the farmer furnished coal and perhaps also one hand. The men who brought the plough boarded themselves. They were making long days, from four in the morning to nine at night. By working until ten, they could cultivate twenty acres per day, and in these high northern latitudes summer days are very long.
During my short stay in the east I heard the price of a few articles, principally farm products. Mrs. Jackson, wife of the carpenter with whom I boarded, had prepared for me (in July) a very nice sparerib of pork, for which she paid eighteen cents per pound. She thought that no mutton could be bought under twenty. She had understood that meat was dearer than with us and clothing cheaper. Bread was cheap, she said. But I have before quoted the saying that they would have starved lately but for America.
“After midsummer is turned,” said Mrs. Jackson, “butter grows dearer. The pasture is shorter, and milk will not keep.” It was then selling at thirty-two centsthe pound, but last summer it was dearer. At supper she and her husband had a large piece of good cheese. I heard that the best American was bringing sixteen cents (eight pence). Leicester cheese, which used to cost about twenty-four cents, no longer sells here.
Benton, the farmer, said that American hams are very poor. I endeavored to inform him how finely swine are fed on corn in Illinois, but he said that the difficulty is not in the feeding, but in the manner of curing the meat. For American bacon they thought that they paid thirteen cents.
In conversation, Benton spoke of eleven fat beasts (beeves) that would have brought two hundred and fifty dollars last year, but had sold much lower this year, on account of the American beef coming in.
As regards milk, a retired farmer told me that he used to sell it at about ten cents the imperial gallon in summer and twelve in winter, and he had to convey it five miles to the railroad station. It had now risen a penny the gallon.
Two adjacent villages formed here one parish, which may be called Haddenham cum Stonea, from said villages. The living was a good one, as the rector received his house and six thousand dollars a year. This income was principally drawn from tithes, which amounted to about two dollars per acre on the arable land in the parish, and to near five thousand five hundred dollars yearly. From glebe land he drew the remainder of his income. He was, however, bound to keep his housein repair, and for the last eighteen months he had not drawn his full income.
Benton was the principal parishioner in attendance at church. His family, however, did not associate on equal terms with that of Mr. Rounce, the rector. On the occasion of a wedding-breakfast, Mr. Rounce had taken a meal at the farmer’s, and Benton had dined at the rectory on the occasion of a church meeting. But Mrs. Benton did not expect the rector and his daughters to associate with them equally. I heard an intimation that the rector was originally poor, but no one who attended the church was now on a social level with himself.
I attended one Sunday afternoon. The congregation was not large, and very few looked well-to-do. The number of communicants, I was told, was over sixty. One young man, who came into church, was showy in appearance. He was neatly dressed, with plenty of large, silvery-looking buttons. He was the rector’s footman.
The church was a gray stone building. Though plain, its appearance over the level fields was agreeable. The curtains within were rather shabby. From one at the end the rector emerged, so I suppose it concealed the vestry-room. In appearance Mr. Rounce, the rector, was blustering and brawny. His lungs seemed brazen, but perhaps some of the congregation were deaf. He wore a white linen robe, and upon his shoulders behind lay a mantle or hood of black, faced with magenta color. The text of the sermon was, “Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” I took some brief notes, which I reproduce. They contained one veryhappy, and, as adapted to the congregation, one very unhappy, remark. He said that it is difficult to continue piety amidst the cares of daily business. “I was going to compare this to tar, to being surrounded by tar; very dirty, very sticky.
“There are people who shut themselves up in cells with one small bed, a chair, and a candle. This is the way that many are taking to become fervent in spirit, forgetting the first part of the text, diligent in business. In my young days there were but six monasteries and nunneries in all England, Scotland, and Wales; now they number over six hundred.
“There are some who think that their religious exercises should be confined to Sunday. There are various things that we shouldn’t do on Sunday; it’s quite right we shouldn’t read newspapers on Sunday. But religion has thus been defined: it is the art of being and doing good.”
As we left the church, I asked its age, and the rector said that it was of the time of Henry VII. (who died in 1509). What is old has a great attraction to the people of our new country, and I looked in the churchyard for interesting monumental stones. The oldest that could be deciphered bore date 1672, and seemed to be that of a great pugilist. The gravestones were not numerous and showy. Some one told me afterwards that those who attend the church are the poorest of the poor, and are generally buried without tombstones.
Concerning the rector, I ventured to draw some conclusions as follows: Mr. Rounce is a strict Sabbatarian, between two fires,—Dissent on the one hand and High-Churchdom and Papacy on the other. In the eyes of azealous incumbent of the English Church, even of a zealous low-churchman, all the people living in the parish are his people. But many, very many of them, are like lost sheep wandering on the barren mountains of Dissent, and so long have they refused to hear even the church that they have become to him like heathen men and publicans, and with them he does not wish to hold intercourse. He employs members of his own church, however, to distribute tracts among them as regularly as among his chosen people, even although these dissenters are full communicants in their own “chapels.”
I was allowed to visit the rectory grounds and afterward to see the house itself, through the courtesy of an assistant in the National school, who was also a servant in the rector’s family. The house was not so much distinguished by the elegance of its carpets and other furniture as by the number and variety of its cabinets (among them I may reckon a great carved chest), by the quantity of china displayed, and to some extent by paintings and natural history collections. The ladies were absent, but I met the rector for a moment or two, and it seemed to me that he considered me to need pruning or cutting down. But he was kind enough to allow the lady’s-maid who conducted me to find for me in the library one or two works which I wished to consult, and she was sufficiently intelligent to aid me, and obliging enough to do so.
When we walked through the garden I observed that a net was spread to protect cherries from the birds, and that currants were trained to the top of the wall, about eight feet.
Mrs. Benton, the farmer’s wife, received a letter fromthe former rector. She said that he had removed to the “’op” country, to Kent. She described him as a tiny little man, over eighty, a very stanch liberal in politics; a clever, very learned man.
While I was still in the village, Mr. Rounce’s two daughters had a lawn-tennis party on their grounds, and the guests could be seen from the road. Three of the men appeared to be “in their shirt-sleeves.” I learned at Mr. Benton’s that the guests would be about fifty in number, the farmer’s young daughters being permitted to look on. It was thought that the refreshments would be tea, coffee, and cakes, handed round,—Miss Rounce being a teetotaller.
A rector of the Established Church, whom I met upon a railroad train, spoke to me of there being here one hundred and fifty different religious sects, but the number seemed incredible. Afterwards, however, an acquaintance pointed out to me the list in Whitaker’s Almanac for 1881. This list is headed
“Religious sects. Places of Worship.“Places of meeting for religious worship in England and Wales have been certified to the Registrar-General on behalf of persons described as follows.”
“Religious sects. Places of Worship.
“Places of meeting for religious worship in England and Wales have been certified to the Registrar-General on behalf of persons described as follows.”
And the list, instead of numbering one hundred and fifty only, goes up at least to one hundred and sixty-nine.
The dissenting chapel in the village which I am endeavoring to describe was a brick edifice, and the yard contained a number of conspicuous monumental stones.Two prominent sects were united to compose the congregation, and the number of communicants was one hundred and thirty. I call the building a chapel, as the English do; nothing is a church, in fashionable speech, that does not belong to the establishment.
There was within the bounds of the parish a third “meeting-house,” where the assembly is composed mainly of a few members of a religious body, generally respected, but declining in numbers. I had a letter of introduction to one of the members here, and when I spoke of her to Mrs. Jackson, the carpenter’s wife, Mrs. J. told me that I might be able to receive an introduction to others by means of her to whom the letter was addressed, who was a person of education and the wife of a retired farmer.
“Now,” I asked, “how likely shall I be to see the rector?”
“Oh, not at all!” There is such a strong feeling against dissenters is one reason why I should not meet him.
On the other hand, a dissenting minister, in speaking to me of the Established Church, remarked that the feeling against it is more political than religious. There is nothing, he added, in the doctrines of the Church of England that is repugnant to a vast number of people who attend dissenting churches; the objection is to a religious denomination which is elevated by the state over others, and consequently has greater social power and prestige.
But one whom I met at a neighboring town spoke more strongly. He was a retired farmer who had travelled in our country. He brought forward the followingobjections to an established church. The people have little or no choice as regards their own clergyman; they have no control over their own forms of worship; and all spiritual life is destroyed in the church.
In further conversation he said, “Can I forget that I am socially persecuted because I am a dissenter; that my father was commercially persecuted for being a dissenter,—he could not rent a farm on equal terms; that my grandfather was probably excluded from holding office for being a dissenter; and my great-grandfather, if a dissenter, would have been thrown into jail for attending a conventicle. But it may be said, ‘Why rake up old sores?’ Simply because the same persecuting spirit remains, and if the dissenters were not so strong in numbers, and consequently in political power and wealth, the same things would be done again.” He added that no farmer should be a dissenter. He himself belonged to a Liberation society. He wondered at the apathy of the Americans in not sympathizing with them in their efforts against an established church. (I have given my friend’s words from my notes, but I suspect that the date at which Quakers and others were imprisoned in England was not so recent as that of the gentleman’s great-grandfather.)
The following anecdote was given to me by another person, also a retired farmer. It concerns a man of some distinction, now dead, and who did not bear the name which I assign him. This as well as others are substitutes. My friend told me that when Carter Gray rented a mill from Lady Letitia Robyn he also rented from her a large farm, which he conducted to much profit. He built schools in his neighborhood and also a dissentingchapel, and the clergy got at the Lady Letitia and induced her to take the farm from him. But she did not take away the mill. Carter Gray was so popular that although a dissenter he was appointed a magistrate. The lord lieutenant of the county has the recommendation for magistrates and had declared against a dissenter, but Lord John Russell is supposed to have been in Mr. Gray’s favor. “Lord John was a great liberal,” added my acquaintance. “Until his persevering action in Parliament the dissenters had a hard time of it.”
In the English village I describe, I called at the modest residence of the dissenting minister. He had studied at the Baptist Theological Seminary in London. I found him to be interested in several of our home authors. Among his books were the complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (London: Bell & Daldy). He said that there is no one he honors more than Emerson, except, perhaps, their own Carlyle. He said that he had in his theological library Channing’s works and another man’s, Beecher,—Ward Beecher. “I have a great admiration for that man.” He had Lowell’s poems, and rejoiced in Lowell. He spoke of the “Biglow Papers,” and of the pious editor’s creed, repeating,
“I du believe in principle,But oh! I du in interest.”
“I du believe in principle,But oh! I du in interest.”
“I du believe in principle,But oh! I du in interest.”
“I du believe in principle,
But oh! I du in interest.”
The rates for the poor, for repair of roads, for police (for there is a policeman in every village), and for the county prison amounted in the parish I speak of to abouttwo shillings and sixpence in the pound of the assessed annual value of the land. As the pound is twenty shillings, the assessment consequently is over twelve per cent.
The burden of supporting the poor, while much lighter than in Ireland, must be far heavier than in our country. Huntingdonshire is one of the smallest counties in England. In 1871 it contained less than seventy thousand people, and at the time of my visit had four unions or poor-houses. But this does not altogether represent the amount of poverty. In another farming region, I understood that the farm-laborer, even though he be sober, honest, and industrious, seldom or never lays by enough to support his family in his age, but becomes partially or entirely dependent on parish relief. But out-door relief in the parish I have been describing, and perhaps in England generally, is granted only to the aged; young people must go into “The House.” There they pick oakum and work garden ground. Children are put out at fourteen or earlier, if they have passed in the school “the fourth standard.” No child is allowed during the period that school is open to go to work under the age of ten.
Tithes in this parish of Haddenham cum Stonea average about one dollar and eighty cents to the acre. If there were sufficient land attached to the rectory for the income to support Mr. Rounce there would be no tithes, but there are only sixty acres of glebe land, and the living is worth, as I have stated, about six thousand dollars yearly. The sixty acres of glebe land bring in about five hundred dollars, hence the remainder is to be raised by tithes.
I have spoken of Jackson, the carpenter with whomI boarded. He was a dissenter, and they attended the chapel. He rented, however, six acres of land, and his tithes to the English Church were about ten dollars yearly.
Formerly Quakers resisted the payment of tithes. A friend told me that his father, uncle, and grandfather were imprisoned in the county jail for non-payment. When he himself farmed three hundred and twenty-two acres, he paid five hundred and twenty pounds rent and one hundred and twenty pounds for tithes. This money was generally seized from him. He had land in three parishes, and numerous warrants were out against him. The officers would come with cart or wagon, and seize his grain while he was threshing. In his father’s time they would have green boughs, and stick one into every tenth shock of grain or hay. But Friends have now given up this contest, and pay tithes quietly. Apparently he did not think them burdensome.
Tolls on roads were abolished in England only a few years ago, and the expense now falls on the landholder. We do not often see in our country such a road as connects the two villages which I describe under the name Haddenham and Stonea. It is a highway in splendid form and order, with a wide grassy margin and a ditch on each side. On one is a wide, gravelled footpath, and fine green hedges separate the road from the fields.
There are three schools in these two villages. One of them is a Dame school, or an unpretending private one,which I did not visit; but the two principal ones deserve attention from the students of our institutions and of English ones. They are public schools, although people pay for tuition. That in Haddenham is a National school, that in Stonea a British school. In the former, Mr. Rounce, the rector, is manager, and the doctrines of the Church of England are taught. The other, the British school, is under charge of a board, or of a committee, of which several members are dissenters.
I first visited the National or Church of England school. Eighty-one names were upon the roll and fifty in attendance at one of my visits. (Some little ones were at work in the fields, weeding, or perhaps hay-making.) Pupils may enter at two years. The printed form issued by government asks, “How many have you under three?” And by the obligatory law the schools can claim them at five.
Upon the walls of the school were several maps, a large printed copy of the Creed, large tablets of the Commandments, and little pictures from the Bible, with perhaps a few from natural history. The blackboard was an insignificant one, about four feet square. I observed the small amount of blackboard surface provided, and the youngest teacher said that in the British schools there is blackboard on the sides of the room.
There was in the school a little picture of the royal family. “We teach them loyalty to the queen,” said one of the teachers.
Connected with the school was an infant department. Here the blackboard measured about one foot by eighteen inches. There were a few objects upon the walls,but there seemed to me a general bareness of appliances for instruction.
This school is an endowed one, having fourteen acres of land; it has always been a National school, or one where the principles of the Church of England are taught. Five years ago it became a government school,—i.e., it has become an “efficient elementary school” under the government; it is examined by a government inspector, and for children coming up to the government standard the school receives a small sum in payment on each. These “results,” as they are called, all pass into the rector’s hands, as manager of the school, to be appropriated either toward the payment of teachers or for school apparatus. Here all apparatus is paid for from this fund.
For instruction of children farmers pay four cents a week for each child; others two. The parish pays for pauper children. The amount of the endowment and the government grant are not even enough, I am told, to pay the principal; and the two assistants are paid by the rector.
National or, in other words, Church of England schools are also visited by a diocesan inspector, appointed by the bishop to report their progress in “Holy Scripture, Prayer-Book, and Catechism.” This school having been reported very good last year, a gift of about seven dollars was made to the teacher and monitor.
Instruction must be given for four hundred sessions yearly, equivalent to two hundred days.
Some teachers in government schools receive pensions, but as the number of pensions in England and Scotland is limited to two hundred and seventy, there are not enough for all. Before leaving this school, I may mentionthat I made some inquiry about the chapel, which stood not far off. One of the teachers answered, “I know nothing about dissent; I never go into those places.”
The school in the other village of Stonea (Haddenham cum Stonea) was called the British school, and was much larger, having one hundred and forty pupils. The room was large and well lighted, and there was an appearance of thrift and animation in the scholars. It is not under the control of the Church of England; neither are members of that church excluded from its management. It is managed by a committee of seven, of whom two or three are members of the church. The services of the committee, including the secretary, are gratuitous. The school has an income of three hundred dollars, drawn from a gift in land, made many years ago for the free education of village-born children. This sum is supplemented by subscription. This school also is visited by the government inspector, and a certain sum is paid, according to the attainments of the children, called, as I have said, “the results.” The committee decides what shall be done with this sum.
The school funds are further supplemented thus: In the village the children pay two cents a week. Those out of the village pay, if laborers, four cents for the first child, and two for each of the others. Persons of means pay twelve cents a week, but there are very few such.
Members of the Society of Friends, “who have always been active in education,” raised a general subscription for building a new school-house, and the government added a grant; “the government would always thus assist to build a public school.”
Religious instruction is not obligatory here as in the National school; it is at the option of the committee, who have decided to have Bible instruction for the first hour in the morning. The government allows any one who brings a written request from his father to absent himself from this instruction. No such case has ever arisen here. It may in towns where there are Free-thinkers and Catholics.
This school is plentifully supplied with blackboards. The principal difference that I observed in instruction between this and some public ones I have known at home was in arithmetic. A series of six small practical arithmetics was in use. At the close of each were examination questions. Here is the last in Standard 6, the highest: “If 27 men build 54 roods of garden wall in 26 days, how many roods will 32 men, working equally well, build in 39 days?” Perhaps twice in a week they have mental arithmetic. Here is the last question in Standard 5, mental: “A yard at half a guinea an inch?”
These elementary schools in villages are mixed, or for both sexes; in towns they are not. By the act of 1870, a pupil must enter school at five (education being obligatory), and remain until thirteen. There are, however, six standards in the school, and a pupil who wishes to go to work sooner may demand a certificate if he has finished the fourth standard, and is not obliged to finish the term.
I asked of one of the teachers or monitors in this British school whether she had ever visited the other, the National school. She replied that she would not like to go there. She seemed to fear that she would be thoughta spy. The rector does not visit this British school. “Unfortunately,” said one to me, “in our country the Church of England people think themselves above everybody else, and unless they can have the management of affairs will have nothing to do with them. The rector feels that he ought to have the management of the school, and is sore on that point; but it has been a successful school for forty years, and nothing that the rector can do can injure it.”
I asked, “Has the teacher of the National school ever visited this one?”
“No; where the rector does not go, his people may not. We have tried every means to unite with them, but without effect. All the exertions here are for the good of the school, but in the other village for the good of the church. They want a teacher who will serve them in the school, the Sunday-school, and the choir.”
But on this parish controversy a few words were spoken to me by a diligent member of the Established Church. He said, “The rector thinks he ought to be one of the trustees of the British school, as a bequest upon which it is in part founded says that the clergyman of the parish shall be one of the trustees, but they say that they will wait until the trusteeship is vacant.” The place was filled, I understood, by the former rector, who, as I have said, was described as a tiny little man; a clever, very learned man; a stanch liberal in politics, over eighty years of age.
Afterwards, in Manchester, I met a person who spoke further on the subject of public schools. I give what he said, as drawn from my notes, on his own authority; foralthough it does not especially concern the parish of Haddenham cum Stonea, yet it does the general subject of English schools.
He said that the members of the Church of England support National or Church of England schools. The Roman Catholics support their own. The dissenters support unsectarian British schools, which receive all denominations. There is yet another class of elementary ones, namely, School Board schools. These boards are elected by the rate- or tax-payers. The schools are established in districts where there are not enough others to educate the children. It not unfrequently happens that a Church school or a British one which is unable to support itself, in spite of the government assistance before described, is turned over by its conductors to the school board. In Manchester this board has now in its schools about two-fifths of the children.
If the board wishes to establish a new school it has first to obtain leave from the committee on education of the Privy Council, belonging to the general government or to the ministry for the time being. The policy of the government is to prevent school boards from supplanting the sectarian schools; they are only allowed to supplement them, and no matter how poor the sectarian school may be, there is no way of getting it closed so long as Her Majesty’s inspector pronounces it efficient. The reports of the inspectors show that Board schools are improving more rapidly than others.
When by the act of 1870 these schools were first established they were regarded by the conductors of the others with contempt, especially by those of the Roman Catholic and Church schools; but such has been theirprogress within this brief period that they are now regarded with jealousy.
As to the prices charged by the Board schools, they must submit the payment of their proposed fees to the committee of Privy Council. The others mentioned may charge up to eighteen cents a week for instruction.
If a private school be inefficient, the school board may prosecute the parents of the children. But this applies to schools which teach pupils at less than eighteen cents per week; such as the old “Dame schools,” now nearly extinct, at least in Manchester.
Ways of living in England differ from those I am accustomed to in points before mentioned, such as the large number of meals, and the short hours of farm labor. A Lancashire youth complained that they clemmed or starved him in America on three meals a day. In this rural region those who can afford it take four, tea being in the afternoon and supper before going to bed.
Of articles of furniture I especially noticed two. One of them, which is nearly universal in England and Ireland, is entirely out of date where I live. It is the old-fashioned dressing-glass, which swings in a frame and stands upon a table. I do not remember its absence in any house that could afford it. Another article that I saw more rarely, but in both England and Ireland, was the canopy over the head of the bed. Of one I saw the framework was of heavy wood, with curtains at the side running on rings. A straight piece of the same materialhung down behind the head of the bed. At my hotel in Cork this canopy was of faded blue damask; at the carpenter’s in the village, of faded red, and above trimmed with heavy woollen fringe. A handsomer one was on my bed in London. Perhaps this canopy is all that remains of curtains that formerly surrounded the bed.
I have spoken of mangling as used in England. Mrs. Jackson, the carpenter’s wife, hired a woman to come to the house once a month to wash. It took them both two days to do it, and Mrs. Jackson paid regularly about twenty-four cents a day; or if the woman made a long day, twenty-eight. In harvest she must pay higher. (When Benton, the farmer with whom I boarded, heard me speak of our paying washer-women here seventy-five cents or a dollar, he said that before he would pay so much he would turn his shirt or throw it into a pool and give it a slop wash.)
After Mrs. Jackson’s clothes were dried she took them to a neighbor’s to be mangled. The mangle is not unlike a great wringer with rollers; and if the clothes are damp, it rolls them smooth. Mrs. Jackson’s neighbor allowed people to do their own mangling at “tuppence ha’penny or thruppence,” according to the size of the basket. This is a great saving of fuel, and Mrs. Jackson said that they look just as well.
Active sports seem to have more prominence in England than in our own country. At Haddenham I called toward evening at the teacher’s, and found that he had gone to play cricket. And young Benton,son of the farmer, had gone too. He seemed actively engaged in business, but one morning he was up early, as he wished to go that day to a cricket-match, eleven miles distant. At Benton’s, mention was made of one of their relatives, who had been much given to cricket and other sports, and who had gone to Canada. He said that if he had worked as hard in England as he did in America, he would have got on there.
Yet Benton, the farmer, thinks it strange that I do not want to see the races in their county town.
Skating is a favorite amusement. On a meadow near by, which is always covered with water in the winter, they have skating-matches. On the fens are great skaters, I hear, and people come from all parts to compete with them.
One of the strongest evidences of a higher state of civilization than ours (and perhaps of a different climate) is that Mrs. Benton, the farmer’s wife, told me that she had never seen a man without stockings in her life. All the children in the British school (I think in both schools) wore both shoes and stockings, and some woollen stockings, though the month was July. However, the teacher said that in the north of England children go barefoot; and I had just come from Ireland, where I had heard of laborers’ children that passed the winter without stockings or shoes.
In our own country I had read or heard of English farmers who rode in handsome vehicles, who wore silk hats, who occasionally drank champagne. But great farmers, cultivating hundreds of acres, must be capitalists.Of course there will be less luxury in straitened times. I heard, however, that a respectable farmer would never go to church, or especially to a funeral, places where he wished to show respect, without a silk hat. At market he might wear one of felt or straw.
Other matters being equal, the retired farmer is more nearly one of the gentry than the retired tradesman. In the parish of Haddenham cum Stonea, where I dwelt, perhaps the only person that came within that charmed circle, the nobility and gentry, was the rector of the church, and he did not stand high in it. I heard of the daughters of one clergyman who invited another to dine, and told him that it would be a nice party, “nobody who did not keep a footman or lady’s-maid.” If a distinguished dissenting minister like Spurgeon should come to a country town to lecture, in all probability he would not be socially noticed by the nobility and gentry.
A young Englishwoman told me that her sister, who lived in our country, said that the Americans are more polite than the English; and two Englishmen who had travelled here spoke of the many attentions which they had received.
In this region of eastern England villages are found bearing names derived from the Saxon. I have called this parish Haddenham cum Stonea. The syllable ham comes from the Saxon, and means a dwelling, hence our word home. The syllableea, in Stonea, means water.
Said the dissenting minister, “There is no part of England where the people are freer and more independent in thought than in these eastern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdon, and parts of Cambridgeand Lincoln.” And he inferred that from these counties our Pilgrim fathers must have sprung. About fifty miles from the parish I describe lies the city of Boston, from which came Mr. Cotton, the preacher in whose honor our own city of Boston was named.
“The last struggles of the Anglo-Saxons against the Normans were in these counties,” said one. “At Ely, then an island in the centre of the fens, Hereward fortified himself for a while, and made the last struggles against the Normans.”
An acquaintance who had visited America remarked to me that the district of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, where we were, is typically agricultural; that there are very few resident gentry; therefore the social life of this region more resembles that of the United States than does that of most other sections of England.
In this county of Huntingdonshire was born Oliver Cromwell, and at its town of St. Ives he lived. In this section he probably raised his celebrated soldiers called Ironsides. But the conservatives of England do not admire Cromwell. About twenty years ago in his native county it was found impossible to raise means to erect his statue.[169]
On this side of the county are no county families bearing the title Esquire. ⸺ Farrar, Esq., north of us, is a great landed proprietor, with an income of about two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. The Earlof S. and the Duke of M. are also large landed proprietors. The Duke of Bedford owns an estate in Thorny Fen of perhaps ten to fifteen thousand acres. My friend who tells me this thinks that the estate, however, is in another county from this. He understands that the duke expects each tenant to take one thousand acres and to keep a hunter. The duke is a liberal in politics.
The subject of politics was alluded to in the opening of this article, in the remarks of Jackson, the carpenter. Another acquaintance said, “If you go to a nobleman or great landed proprietor to rent a farm, you must be deferential and, as a general thing, you must vote on his side. If a man is a liberal, he must go under a liberal landlord; and if a tory, under a tory. Perhaps one-third of the House of Lords are liberals,” he added.
Benton, the farmer, did not tell me his political opinions. He said that the ballot is secret. But he added that a man’s political opinions have not now anything to do with renting the land.
But a person whom I afterward met in Manchester said that the agricultural districts were in the main thoroughly tory, the farmers being dependent on the landlords. He added that the late Lord Derby used to say, “Tell me what the landlords are and I will tell you what the vote will be.”
Haddenham cum Stonea has declined in population. In 1840 the parish had nearly one thousand four hundred inhabitants. It now has about one thousand. Many went to America; now many go north into the manufacturing regions. Nor are these two villagesalone in this. Jackson, the carpenter, told me of one where he had lived which, at the last census, had three hundred and thirty people. Twenty years back, he said, it had over five hundred.
Public-houses are numerous in these villages. They are mostly simple ale-houses, with such titles as the Three Horse-Shoes, the Rose and Crown, the Three Jolly Butchers. I counted at least eleven in a village of less than seven hundred people.
The wages of a farm-laborer here are under two dollars and seventy-five cents a week, and he boards himself. The cottagers on the farm where I boarded got their houses free and a rood of ground in which to plant potatoes. While at Haddenham I visited a friend in a near village, who took me to ride upon the fens, and her husband particularly desired her to show me some cottages, or laborers’ houses, that he had built. The point that I was especially to observe was the rooms provided for sleeping, there being a bedroom down-stairs and two or more above. On this subject I spoke to Mrs. Benton, the farmer’s wife, who said that the laborers here have generally a kitchen, I believe a better room, and two chambers. She admitted that the boys and girls have to sleep in the same room.
Mrs. Benton said that if the laborer’s wife, who has a number of young children, is kind and considerate of her husband, she will try to provide him a bit of meat daily, but it will be but a little bit; and the children will not taste meat oftener than once a week.
As I have before intimated, hours of labor are easy,—farm hands getting half an hour for lunch, and an hour for dinner. (But I cannot say whether this lunch-timeis allowed at other than harvest.) In hay and harvest they work overtime, and are paid for overwork.
Fruit-picking was going on while I was at Haddenham. In fruit-gathering times, when the wives and boys get out a little, meat may be more plentiful in laborers’ houses. There is a great press at fruit-gathering. The people go out in gangs about six or seven o’clock, and return about seven. The wages are about thirty-two cents a day. A market for the fruit is furnished by the manufacturing regions, where farm produce is more scarce.
At Haddenham I heard that after harvest they have a thanksgiving festival. There is a village flower-show in the rectory grounds and a public tea. They deck the church with wheat, barley, oats, beans, grapes, apples, and pears, and have a service in the evening. A collection is taken up for the county hospital, which is supported almost entirely by voluntary subscription.
To return once more to education. It is now compulsory, as I have said; but a friend estimated that of the people over thirty, a large proportion could not read and write.
To us that one by which the English drop the letter h where it belongs, and put it on where it does not, is one of the most striking; as, Harable land is ’eavier taxed; my huncle is not very ’ealthy.
Two ways of speaking that are called Yankee with us are found here; one is the sharpou.
“Please tell me,” I inquired, “where Mr. G.’s house is.”
“It’s the last hayoose in tayoon; a big hayoose,” answered the boy.
The other “Yankee” peculiarity is dropping the letter r. School-children said ’osses for horses. Buttah was said for butter, and Hemmingford sounded like Emmenfauld. A woman spoke of a certain Mr. Halbut. I had thought that his name was Wiseman. Yes; Mr. Halbut (Albert) Wiseman.
Comin’ I heard for coming; they used to say shay-house for chaise-house; and I am told that in Norfolk they sayduandtufor do and to.
The carpenter’s wife said, “The bread is silly,” meaning heavy.
A spinney is a grove.
Laboring men call a lunch a dockey; and in another neighborhood a beaver.
Said an innkeeper, “The people come to flit them,”—to help them move.
Frequently “I dare say” becomesdessay, orI’d say.
We say to-day; they also say to-year. And when it begins to thaw, they say the weather is ungiving, it ungives.