Rural Rides Page 34
We got to PETWORTH pretty early in the day. On entering it you see the house of Lord Egremont, which is close up against the park-wall, and which wall bounds this little vale on two sides. There is a sort of town-hall here, and on one side of it there is the bust of Charles the Second, I should have thought; but they tell me it is that ofSIR WILLIAM WYNDHAM, from whom Lord Egremont is descended. But there is another building much more capacious and magnificent than the town-hall; namely, the Bridewell, which, from the moderness of its structure, appears to be one of those ‘wauste improvements, Ma’am’, which distinguish this enlightened age. This structure vies, in point of magnitude, with the house of Lord Egremont itself, though that is one of the largest mansions in the whole kingdom. The Bridewell has a wall round it that I should suppose to be twenty feet high. This place was not wanted, when the labourer got twice as much instead of half as much as the common standing solther. Here you see the true cause why the young labouring man is ‘content’ to exist upon 7d. a day, for six days in the week, and nothing for Sunday. Oh! we are a most free and enlightened people; our happy constitution in church and state has supplanted Popery and slavery; but we go to a Bridewell unless we quiedy exist upon 7d. a day!
Thursley, Sunday, 13th Nov.
To our great delight we found Richard’s horse quite well this morning, and off we set for this place. The first part of our road, for about three miles and a half, was through Lord Egremont’s Park. The morning was very fine; the sun shining; a sharp frost after a foggy evening; the grass all white; the twigs of the trees white, the ponds frozen over; and everything looked exceedingly beautiful. The spot itself being one of the very finest in the world, not excepting, I dare say, that of the father of Saxe Coburg itself,1 who has, doubtless, many such fine places. In a very fine pond, not far from the house and close by the road, there are some little artificial islands, upon one of which I observed an arbutus loaded with its beautiful fruit (quite ripe) even more thickly than any one I ever saw even in America. There were, on the side of the pond, a most numerous and beautiful collection of water-fowl, foreign as well as domestic. I never saw so great a variety of water-fowl collected together in my life. They had been ejected from the water by the frost, and were sitting apparently in a state of great dejection; but this circumstance had brought them into a comparatively small compass; and we, facing our horses about, sat and looked at them, at the pond, at the grass, at the house, till we were tired of admiring. Everything here is in the neatest and most beautiful state. Endless herds of deer, of all the varieties of colours; and, what adds greatly to your pleasure in such a case, you see comfortable retreats prepared for them in different parts of the woods. When we came to what we thought the end of the park, the gate-keeper told us that we should find other walls to pass through. We now entered upon woods, we then came to another wall, and there we entered upon farms to our right and to our left. At last we came to a third wall, and the gate in that let us out into the turnpike road. The gate-keeper here told us, that the whole enclosure was nine miles round: and this, after all, forms, not a quarter part of what this nobleman possesses. And, is it wrong that one man should possess so much? By no means; but in my opinion it is wrong that a system should exist which compels this man to have his estate taken away from him unless he throw the junior branches of his family for maintenance upon the public. Lord Egremont bears an excellent character. Every thing that I have ever heard of him makes me believe that he is worthy of this princely estate. But, I cannot forget that his two brothers, who are now very old men, have had from their infancy, enormous revenues in sinecure places in the West Inthes, while the general property and labour of England is taxed to maintain those West Inthes in their state of dependance upon England; and I cannot forget that the burden of these sinecures are amongst the grievances of which the West Indians justly complain. True, the taxing system has taken from the family of Wyndham, during the lives of these two gentlemen, as much, and even more, than what that family has gained by those sinecures; but then let it be recollected, that it is not the helpless people of England who have been the cause of this system. It is not the fault of those who receive 7d. a day. It is the fault of the family of Wyndham and such persons; and, if they have chosen to suffer the Jews and Jobbers to take away so large a part of their income, it is not fair for them to come to the people at large to make up for the loss.
Thus it has gone on. The great masses of property have, in general, been able to take care of themselves; but the little masses have melted away like butter before the sun. The little gentry have had not even any disposition to resist. They merit their fate most justly. They have vied with each other in endeavours to ingratiate themselves with power, and to obtain compensation for their losses. The big fishes have had no feeling for them; have seen them sink with a sneer, rather than with compassion; but, at last, the cormorant threatens even themselves; and they are struggling with might and main for their own preservation. They every where ’most liberally’ take the Stock-Jobber or the Jew by the hand, though they hate him mortally at the same time for his power to outdo them on the side-board, on the table, and in the equipage. They seem to think nothing of the extinguishment of the small fry; they hug themselves in the thought that they escape; and yet, at times, their minds misgive them, and they tremble for their own fate. The country people really gain by the change; for the small gentry have been rendered, by their miseries, so niggardly and so cruel, that it is quite a blessing, in a village, to see a rich Jew or Jobber come to supplant them. They come, too, with far less cunning than the half-broken gentry. Cunning as the Stock-Jobber is in Change Alley, I defy him to be cunning enough for the country people, brought to their present state of duplicity by a series of cruelties, which no pen can adequately describe. The Stock-Jobber goes from London with the cant of humanity upon his lips, at any rate; whereas the half-broken Squire, takes not the least pains to disguise the hardness of his heart.
It is impossible for any just man to regret the sweeping away of this base race of Squires; but, the sweeping of them away is produced by causes that have a wider extent. These causes reach the good as well as the bad: all are involved alike: like the pestilence, this horrible system is no respecter of persons: and decay and beggary mark the whole face of the country.
NORTH CHAPEL is a little town in the Wield of Sussex, where there were formerly post-chaises kept; but where there are none kept now. And here is another complete revolution. In almost every country-town the post-chaise houses have been lessened in number, and those that remain have become comparatively solitary and mean. The guests at inns are not now gentlemen, but bumpers, who, from being called (at the inns) ’riders’, became ’travellers’, and are now ‘commercialgentlemen’, who go about in gigs, instead of on horseback, and who are in such numbers as to occupy a great part of the room in all the inns, in every part of the country. There are, probably, twenty thousand of them always out, who may perhaps have, on an average throughout the year, three or four thousand ‘lathes’ travelling with them. The expense of this can be little short of fifteen millions a year, all to be paid by the country-people who consume the goods, and a large part of it to be drawn up to the WEN.
From NORTH CHAPEL we came to CHIDDINGFOLD, which is in the Wield of Surrey; that is to say, the country of oak-timber. Between these two places, there are a couple of pieces of that famous commodity, called ‘Government property’. It seems, that these places, which have extensive buildings on them, were for the purpose of making gunpowder. Like most other of these enterprises, they have been given up, after a time, and so the ground, and all the buildings, and the monstrous fences, erected at enormous expense, have been sold. They were sold, it seems, some time ago, in lots, with the intention of being pulled down and carried away, though they are now nearly new, and built in the most solid, substantial and expensive manner; brick walls eighteen inches through, and the buildings covered with lead and slate. It appears that they have been purchased by a Mr Stovell, a S
ussex banker; but, for some reason or other, though the purchase was made long ago, ‘Government’ still holds the possession; and, what is more, it keeps people there to take care of the premises. It would be curious to have a complete history of these pretty establishments at Chiddingfold; but, this is a sort of history that we shall never be treated with until there be somebody in Parliament to rummage things to the bottom. It would be very easy to call for a specific account of the cost of these establishments, and also of the quantity of powder made at them. I should not be at all surprised, if the concern, all taken together, brought the powder to a hundred times the price at which similar powder could have been purchased.
When we came through CHIDDINGFOLD, the people were just going to church; and we saw a carriage and pair conveying an old gentleman and some lathes to the churchyard steps. Upon inquiry, we found that this was LORD WINTERTON, whose name, they told us, was Tumour. I thought I had heard of all the Lords, first or last; but, if I had ever heard of this one before, I had forgotten him. He lives down in the Wield, between the gunpowder establishments and Horsham, and has the reputation of being a harmless, good sort of man, and that being the case I was sorry to see that he appeared to be greatly afflicted with the gout, being obliged to be helped up the steps by a stout man. However, it is as broad, perhaps, as it is long: a man is not to have all the enjoyments of making the gout, and the enjoyments of abstinence too: that would not be fair play; and I dare say that Lord Winterton is just enough to be content with the consequences of his enjoyments. This CHIDDINGFOLD is a very pretty place. There is a very pretty and extensive green opposite the church; and we were at the proper time of the day to perceive that the modern system of education had by no means overlooked this little village. We saw the schools marching towards the church in military order. Two of them passed us on our road. The boys looked very hard at us, and I saluted them with ‘There’s brave boys, you’ll all be parsons or lawyers or doctors.’ Another school seemed to be in a less happy state. The scholars were too much in uniform to have had their clothes purchased by their parents; and they looked, besides, as if a little more victuals and a little less education would have done as well. There were about twenty of them without one single tinge of red in their whole twenty faces. In short I never saw more deplorable looking objects since I was born. And can it be of any use to expend money in this sort of way upon poor creatures that have not half a bellyful of food! We had not breakfasted when we passed them. We felt, at that moment, what hunger was. We had some bits of bread and meat in our pockets, however; and these, which were merely intended as stay-stomachs, amounted, I dare say, to the allowance of any half dozen of these poor boys for the day. I could, with all my heart, have pulled the victuals out of my pocket and given it to them; but I did not like to do that which would have interrupted the march, and might have been construed into a sort of insult. To quiet my conscience, however, I gave a poor man that I met soon afterwards sixpence, under pretence of rewarding him for telling me the way to Thursley, which I knew as well as he, and which I had determined, in my own mind, not to follow.
We had now come on the Turnpike road from my Lord EGREMONT’S Park to Chiddingfold. I had made two or three attempts to get out of it, and to bear away to the north-west, to get through the oak-woods to Thursley; but I was constandy prevented by being told that the road which I wished to take would lead me to Haslemere. If you talk to ostlers, or landlords, or post-boys; or, indeed, to almost any body else, they mean by a road a Turnpike road: and they positively will not talk to you about any other. Now, just after quitting Chiddingfold, Thursley lies over fine woods and coppices, in a north-west direction, or there-abouts; and the Turnpike road, which goes from Petworth to Godalming, goes in a north-north-east direction. I was resolved, be the consequences what they might, not to follow the Turnpike road one single inch further; for I had not above three miles or thereabouts to get to Thursley, through the woods; and I had, perhaps, six miles at least to get to it the other way; but the great thing was to see the interior of these woods; see the stems of the trees, as well as the tops of them. I saw a lane opening in the right direction; I saw, indeed, that my horses must go up to their knees in clay; but I resolved to enter and go along that lane, and long before the end of my journey I found myself most amply compensated for the toil that I was about to encounter. But talk of toil! It was the horse that had the toil; and I had nothing to do but to sit upon his back, turn my head from side to side and admire the fine trees in every direction. Little bits of fields and meadows here and there, shaded all over, or nearly all over, by the surrounding trees. Here and there a labourer’s house buried in the woods. We had drawn out our luncheons and eaten them while the horses took us through the clay; but I stopped at a little house, and asked the woman, who looked very clean and nice, whether she would let us dine with her. She said ‘Yes’, with all her heart, but that she had no place to put our horses in, and that her dinner would not be ready for an hour, when she expected her husband home from church. She said they had a bit of bacon and a pudding and some cabbage; but that she had not much bread in the house. She had only one child, and that was not very old, so we left her, quite convinced that my old observation is true, that people in the woodland countries are best off, and that it is absolutely impossible to reduce them to that state of starvation in which they are in the corn-growing part of the kingdom. Here is that great blessing, abundance of fuel at all times of the year, and particularly in the winter.
We came on for about a mile in these clayey lanes, when we renewed our inquiries as to our course, as our road now seemed to point towards Godalming again. I asked a man how I should get to Thursley? He pointed to some fir-trees upon a hill, told me I must go by them, and that there was no other way. ‘Where, then,’ said I, ‘is Thursley?’ He pointed with his hand, and said, ‘Right over those woods; but there is no road there, and it is impossible for you to get through those woods.’ ‘Thank you,’ said I; ‘but through those woods we mean to go.’ Just at the border of the woods I saw a cottage. There must be some way to that cottage; and we soon found a gate that let us into a field, across which we went to this cottage. We there found an old man and a young one. Upon inquiry, we found that it was possible to get through these woods. Richard gave the old man threepence to buy a pint of beer, and I gave the young one a shilling to pilot us through the woods. These were oak woods, with underwood beneath; and there was a little stream of water running down the middle of the woods, the annual and long overflowings of which has formed a meadow sometimes a rod wide, and sometimes twenty rods wide, while the bed of the stream itself was the most serpentine that can possibly be imagined, describing, in many places, nearly a complete circle, going round for many rods together, and coming within a rod or two of a point that it had passed before. I stopped the man several times, to sit and admire this beautiful spot, shaded in great part by lofty and widespreading oak trees. We had to cross this brook several times, over bridges that the owner had erected for the convenience of the fox-hunters. At last, we came into an ash coppice, which had been planted in regular rows, at about four feet distances, which had been once cut, and which was now in the state of six years’ growth. A road through it, made for the fox-hunters, was as straight as a line, and of so great a length that, on entering it, the further end appeared not to be a foot wide. Upon seeing this, I asked the man whom these coppices belonged to, and he told me to Squire LEECH, at LEA. My surprise ceased, but my admiration did not. A piece of ordinary coppice ground, close adjoining this, and with no timber in it, and upon just the same soil, (if there had been such a piece,) would, at ten years’ growth, be worth, at present prices, from five to seven pounds the acre. This coppice, at ten years’ growth, will be worth twenty pounds the acre; and, at the next cutting, when the stems will send out so many more shoots, it will be worth thirty pounds the acre. I did not ask the question when I afterwards saw Mr LEECH, but, I dare say, the ground was trenched before it was planted; but, what is th
at expense when compared with the great, the permanent profit of such an undertaking! And, above all things, what a convenient species of property does a man here create. Here are no tenants’ rack, no anxiety about crops and seasons; the rust and the mildew never come here; a man knows what he has got, and he knows that nothing short of an earthquake can take it from him, unless, indeed, by attempting to vie with the stock-jobber in the expense of living, he enable the stock-jobber to come and perform the office of the earthquake. Mr LEECH’s father planted, I think it was, forty acres of such coppice in the same manner; and, at the same time, he sowed the ground with acorns. The acorns have become oak trees, and have begun and made great progress in diminishing the value of the ash, which have to contend against the shade and the roots of the oak. For present profit, and, indeed, for permanent profit, it would be judicious to grub up the oak; but the owner has determined otherwise. He cannot endure the idea of destroying an oak wood.