The Age of Elegance (42 page)

pastoral year. Before Christmas the weavers of South Lancashire sang all night at their looms to keep themselves awake as they prepared for the holiday. In the West the yule-log was brought home and tales told over posset and frumenty, and the carollers and string-choirs went their frosty rounds:

"The holly bears a prickle

As sharp as any thorn;

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

On Christmas day in the morn."

With the farmhouses and cottages full of greenery and the kissing-bush hanging from the rafters, the traditional roast beef, plum pudding, mince-pie and roasted crab of the great Feast were eaten, while the mummers in painted paper and floral headgear—King George, the Doctor and the Turkey Snipe—recited traditional words and banged one another with their wooden swords. On New Year's Eve the wassailers came round with garlanded bowls, cleaving the wintry skies with their song:

"Here's to our horse and to his right ear,

God send our master a happy New Year;

A happy New Year as e'er he did see,

With my wassailing bowl I drink to thee!"

and neighbours, made kindly by the season, sat in one another's houses, "fadging" over cakes and wine. The same gatherings were repeated with differences on Twelfth Night, when fires were lit and the farm beasts and apple trees carolled. On Distaff's Day and Plough Monday the resumption of work was celebrated by labourers going round the parish in animal masks, blowing cows' horns and cracking whips.
¹

Such feasts succeeded one another throughout the year, hallowed by memory yet sources of recurring excitement and activity. On Shrove Tuesday the miners of the north
visited one another's h
ouses to turn their pancakes and "stang" whoever had not eaten theirs, carrying the laggards with laughter to the midden. Mothering Sunday was commemorated with a simnel cake, Good Friday
by
children going round with a fiddler "peace-egging." There were

¹
At Alkborough in Lincolnshire the masqueraders included a Fool, a Soldier, a Doctor, a Lady, an Indian King, a Hobby Horse, a Beelzebub and a character, met in many other parts of the country, called Besom Betty.
British Calendar Cu
stoms,
,
97.
See Howitt,
46
-71.

rituals that commemorated remote historical events, like the riding of the black man through the streets of Ashton-under-Lyne on Easter Monday, the torchlit procession of ropemakers at Chatham to celebrate the benefactions of Catherine of Aragon, the Pack Monday Fair at Sherborne on the anniversary of the completion of the Abbey nave. There were other days when the bonds of law were loosed, as at Michaelmas in Kidderminster when the gentry bombarded the Bailiff and Corporation with apples and for a "lawless hour" everyone threw cabbage stalks in the streets, St. Luke's Day in Cheshire when parsons were pelted with fruit, Tandering Day when schoolchildren barred out their teachers and men and women spent the evening drinking hot elderberry wine in one another's clothes, and the Mischief Meet on May Day when, so long as one was not caught, it was lawful to pay off old scores: to throw a neighbour's gate off its hinges, upset his cart or let out his cattle.

There were occasions, too, when the poor had a right to largesse from their neighbours, and when the hungry were filled with good things. There were rituals that marked the course of the farm year; the Whitsun Ale and the sheep-shearing festival, the Holy Night at Brough, when a burning ash was carried in front of the town band with everyone dancing and firing squibs behind, the hiring fairs when the markets were full of toys and ginger-bread stalls and young men and women stood in the streets wearing the emblems of their craft to sell their service for the next year. The greatest of all the farm feasts was Harvest Home when the Kern Dolly or Ivy girl, fashioned from the corn, was set upon a pole and borne home in the last cart, with music playing and the farmer and his men shouting in procession while the good-wife dished up the supper that was to crown the rustic year. There, at the long wooden tables, the reapers —"with sunburnt hands and ale-enlivened face"—rejoiced over their beef, beer and pipes, singing familiar songs and tossing down half-pint sconces with double forfeits for every drop spilt, until the time-honoured chorus was reached:

"Here's a health unto our master, the founder of this feast, I hope to God with all my heart his soul in Heaven may rest, And all his works may prosper that ere he takes in hand, For we are all his servants and all at his command—

So drink, boys, drink, and see you do not spill,

For if you do, you shall drink too, for 'tis our master's will!"

After which those able wound their way home, and those who could not slept where they lay, well content, in barn or stable.

Other dates in the calendar linked craft or calling to the Christian faith: the Spinners' Feast at Peterborough when workhouse children in white dresses and scarlet ribbons, the tallest girl in sceptre and crown, marched through the streets singing the spinning song; the processions of woolcombers on St. Blase's Day in the cloth towns of Yorkshire and East Anglia, with their heralds, banners and bands, wool-staplers on horseback, spinners in white stuff-waistcoats and silver sashes, wagoned pageants of Jason with Golden Fleece, Castor and Pollux, shepherds and shepherdesses, and good Bishop Blase in mitre and gown. Before the Lancashire Wakes, proclaimed by the bellmen in the churchyards on successive Sundays, every fold and hamlet vied in preparing the rush cart, decking its ornamental sheet with ribbons, streamers and silver ornaments. With lanes resounding with fife, drum and fiddle, the girls all flounces and frills in new kirtles and bonnets, the lads in jingling horse-collars and bright with ribbon and tinsel, the whole community followed the cart to the parish church, while the morrice dancers leaped and spun before:

"My new shoon they are so good,

I cou'd doance morrice if I wou'd

An' if hat an' sark be drest

I will doance morrice w' the best."

When Keats, in his
Ode on a Grecian Urn,
asked

"What little town by river or sea-shore . . .

Is emptied of this folk this pious morn?"

he may have recalled the customary rites—doomed by the advance of an iron economy—of the Lancashire villages through which he had recently passed.
¹

Though all this pageantry was beginning to wear a little thin, and sophisticated folk to sneer and denigrate, it still served its purpose of enriching the imagination of successive generations. Men felt at one

¹
For an account of the Wakes see Bamford, I,
130-5,146-7.188,
and Howitt,
493-5-
See also for a detailed account of English social and ritual custom before it was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution,
A.
R. Wright's great compilation,
British Calendar Customs
(1936-40).
See, too, Bamford, I,
120, 122-4, 127-8;
Fowler,
250-1;
T. Hardy,
Under the Greenwood Tree;
Howitt,
Boy's Country Book,
93;
English Spy,
I,
97

with their native place, loved its beauty and took pride in its history. Old castles and monastic ruins, whose crumbling stones reflected the light of vanished sunsets, were sources not only of intellectual interest to the few but of wonder and poetry to the many. So were the rude signs in bright colours swinging over the tavern doors, of Admiral Keppel or Vernon braving the battle and the breeze, the Marquis of Granby in scarlet coat, or St. George busy, with plumed helm and shield, slaying dragons. The rich might take the country's traditions for granted, but unlettered lads from
Tyneside colliers stood "beneath the wondrous dome of St. Paul's with almost awful surprise," and Bewick's neighbours, the Northumbrian peasants, spent their winter evenings
li
stening to the tales and ballads of the Border. The earliest rhymes that Thom
as Cooper, the Chartist leader,
remembered were those of Chevy Chase. He used to repeat them until they made him feel as warlike as the sight of Matthew Goy riding into the town with news of a victory in the Peninsula or the scarlet-coated volunteers marching through Gainsborough on exercise days to the sound of fife and drum.

The English loved to voice their patriotism in a song. Bob Johnson, the jockey, after his victories on the turf, would climb on the table and strike up his favourite:

"If ye ax wheer oi comes fra,

I'll say the Fell side;

Where fayther and mither

And honest folk bide."

The love of singing came out in the folk songs which, despite enclosure, lingered on in the villages like the string choirs and morrice dancers.

"Now when we did rise from that green, bushy grove,"

sang the old men recalling their days of love,

"In the meadows we wandered away,

And I placed my true love on a primrose bank,

While I picked her a handful of may."

In the alehouse or in the fields over the midday cheese and ale, countrymen sang of their craft and skill, prizing them the more for the singing:

" 'Hold, gard'ner,' says the ploughman, 'my calling don't despise, Since each man for his living upon his trade relies, Were it not for the ploughman both rich and poor would rue, For we are all dependent upon the painful plough.' "

Often such songs, with their scope for character, would be acted, some elder piping up,

"O true love, have you seen my gold?

And can you set me free?

Or are you come to see me hung

All on the gallows tree?"

and the hearer, to whom the words were so familiar as to be automatic, joining in. They voiced the sentiment, honour, memory, poetry, and robust coarseness of the race. "So fleet runs the hare," chanted the drovers at the Weyhill alehouse:

"and so cunning runs the fox,

Why shouldn't this young calf live to grow an old ox?

O! for to get his living among the briars and thorns

And drink like his daddy with a large pair of horns."

The seamen, roughest and hardest-used of men, had their traditional songs and shanties, whose rhythm served their work and whose poetry sprang from the element they sailed:

"Then a-weigh our anchor, my jolly, jolly tars,

For the winter star I see."

Having to make their own music, many Englishmen knew how to perform both vocally and instrumentally; at a homecoming, a wedding, a gathering of neighbours, a man would take down his fiddle or send for his neighbour's. Bamford's weaver father could read from the book and play both fiddle and flute, and even composed. The yeomen of Cranborne Chase gathered weekly at an inn on Salisbury Plain for instrumental music and part singing; the poor artisans of Lincoln formed a choral society to render Handel's Oratorios.

Deep down a vein of poetry, simple, sensuous and strangely delicate, ran through this healthy, courageous, cohesive people.

"Rosy apple, lemon and pear,"

sang the children of the Dorset villages at their traditional games:

"A bunch of roses she shall wear,

Gold and silver by her side,

I know who'll take her as his bride;

Take her by her lily-white hand

And lead her to the altar;

Give her kisses one, two, three,

Mrs. So-and-so's daughter."

And in the sturdy north—the land of Bobby Shaftoe—the wives of Tyneside dandled their babies to the lilt:

"Dance ti thy daddy Sing ti thy mammy

Dance ti thy daddy Ti thy mammy sing!

"Thou shall hev a fishy

On a little dishy, Thou shall hev a fishy

When the boat comes in."

There were songs that kept England's history bright; of ships with names like poems, of pastoral duties transformed
by
imagination into acts of significance and beauty, of courtship, tender, tragic or bawdy, but always shot with the haunting loveliness of the green, peaceful land that gave them birth; of wild rovers and the misfortunes that befall poor men when passion sounds and the reckless heart tries to transcend the iron bars of destiny; of indignation against cruel laws and injustice and foul play; and, underlying all, the moral sense of a great people and their perception of the sweetness of love, courage and loyalty to wife and home, and of the unchanging goodness of laughter and comradeship, striking, as the pewter pots beat time on the dark, dented, malt-stained alehouse table, chords that rose from the very depths of the English heart.
¹

¹
Proceedings of the
Dorset Natural History and Antiquaries Field Club,
XXXVIII, Rev. H. Pentin,
Dorset Children's Doggerel Rhymes,
112-52.
See also Francis Collinson and Francis Dillon,
Songs of the Countryside;
Asnton,
213-18;
Bamford, I,
27, 87, 91, 97;
II,
262, 274;
Bewick,
52;
Broughton, II,
153;
Colchester, II,
503;
Cooper,
107-10;
Cranbourn Chase,
107-10;
Dixon,
70, 201, 204;
Espriella,
I,
167;
Fowler,
253, 264;
H. Lea,
Thomas Hardy's Wessex,
86;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
II,
15, 207;
Keats, IV,
91-2;
Lamb, VI,
510-12;
VII,
828;
Lockhart, IV,
167;
V,
16, 40;
Dudley,
293-4;
Mitford,
Our Village, 67, 146; Old Oak,
187;
Real Life in London,
I,
158;
Simond, II,
34, 83, 240.