Rural Rides Page 46

  Just before I got into TUTBURY, I was met by a good many people, in twoes, threes, or fives, some running, and some walking fast, one of the first of whom asked me, if I had met an ‘old man’ some distance back. I asked, what sort of a man: ‘a poor man’. ‘I don’t recollect, indeed; but, what are you all pursuing him for?’ ‘He has been stealing.’ ‘What has he been stealing?’ ‘Cabbages.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Out of Mr GLOVER, the hatter’s, garden.’ ‘What! do you call that stealing; and would you punish a man, a poor man, and, therefore, in all likelihood, a hungry man too, and, moreover an old man; do you set up a hue-and-cry after, and would you punish, such a man for taking a few cabbages, when that Holy Bible, which, I dare say, you profess to believe in, and perhaps, assist to circulate, teaches you that the hungry man may, without committing any offence at all, go into his neighbour’s vineyard and eat his fill of grapes, one bunch of which is worth a sack-full of cabbages?’ ‘Yes; but he is a very bad character.’ ‘Why, my friend, very poor and almost starved people are apt to be “bad characters”; but the Bible, in both Testaments, commands us to be merciful to the poor, to feed the hungry, to have compassion on the aged; and it makes no exception as to the “character” of the parties.’ Another group or two of the pursuers had come up by this time; and I, bearing in mind the fate of DON QUIXOTE,1 when he interfered in somewhat similar cases, gave my horse the hint, and soon got away; but, though doubtless, I made no converts, I, upon looking back, perceived, that I had slackened the pursuit! The pursuers went more slowly; I could see that they got to talking; it was now the step of deliberation rather than that of decision; and, though I did not like to call upon Mr GLOVER, I hope he was merciful. It is impossible for me to witness scenes like this; to hear a man called a thief for such a cause; to see him thus eagerly and vindictively pursued for having taken some cabbages in a garden: it is impossible for me to behold such a scene, without calling to mind the practice in the United States of America, where, if a man were even to talk of prosecuting another (especially if that other were poor, or old) for taking from the land, or from the trees, any part of a growing crop, for his own personal and immediate use; if any man were even to talk of prosecuting another for such an act, such talker would be held in universal abhorrence: people would hate him; and, in short, if rich as Ricardo or Baring, he might live by himself; for no man would look upon him as a neighbour.

  TUTBURY is a very pretty town, and has a beautiful ancient church. The country is high along here for a mile or two towards AVENING, which begins a long and deep and narrow valley, that comes all the way down to Stroud. When I got to the end of the high country, and the lower country opened to my view, I was at about three miles from TUTBURY, on the road to AVENING, leaving the Minching-hampton road to my right. Here I was upon the edge of the high land, looking right down upon the village of AVENING, and seeing, just close to it, a large and fine mansion-house, a beautiful park, and, making part of the park, one of the finest, most magnificent woods (of 200 acres, I dare say), lying facing me, going from a valley up a gently-riding hill. While I was sitting on my horse, admiring this spot, a man came along with some tools in his hand, as if going somewhere to work as plumber. ‘Whose beautiful place is that?’ said I. ‘One ’SQUIRE RICARDO, I think they call him, but…’ – you might have ‘knocked me down with a feather’, as the old women say – ‘but’ (continued the plumber) ‘the Old Gentleman’s dead, and’… ‘God — the old gentleman and the young gentleman too!’ said I; and, giving my horse a blow, instead of a word, on I went down the hill. Before I got to the bottom, my reflections on the present state of the ‘market’ and on the probable results of ‘watching the turn of it’, had made me better humoured; and, as one of the first objects that struck my eye, in the village, was the sign of the CROSS, and of the Red, or Bloody, Cross too, I asked the landlord some questions, which began a series of joking and bantering that I had with the people, from one end of the village to the other. I set them all a laughing; and, though they could not know my name, they will remember me for a long while. – This estate of GATCOMB belonged, I am told, to a Mr SHEPPERD, and to his fathers before him. I asked, where this Shepperd was NOW? A tradesman-looking man told me, that he did not know where he was; but, that he had heard, that he was living somewhere near to Bath! Thus they go! Thus they are squeezed out of existence. The little ones are gone; and the big ones have nothing left for it, but to resort to the bands of holy matrimony with the turn of the market watchers and their breed. This the big ones are now doing apace; and there is this comfort at any rate; namely, that the connexion cannot make them baser than they are, a boroughmonger being, of all God’s creatures, the very basest.

  From AVENING I came on through NAILSWORTH, WOODCHESTER, and RODBOROUGH, to this place. These villages lie on the sides of a narrow and deep valley, with a narrow stream of water running down the middle of it, and this stream turns the wheels of a great many mills and sets of machinery for the making of woollen-cloth. The factories begin at AVENING, and are scattered all the way down the valley. There are steam-engines as well as water-powers. The work and the trade is so flat, that, in, I should think, much more than a hundred acres of ground, which I have seen to-day, covered, with rails, or racks, for the drying of cloth, I do not think that I have seen one single acre where the racks had cloth upon them. The workmen do not get half wages; great numbers are thrown on the parish; but, overseers and magistrates, in this part of England do not presume that they are to leave any body to starve to death; there is law here; this is in England, and not in ‘the North’, where those who ought to see that the poor do not suffer, talk of their dying with hunger as Irish ’Squires do; aye, and applaud them for their patient resignation! The Gloucestershire people have no notion of dying with hunger; and it is with great pleasure that I remark, that I have seen no woe-worn creature this day. The subsoil here is a yellowish, ugly stone. The houses are all built with this; and, it being ugly, the stone is made white by a wash of some sort or other. The land, on both sides of the valley, and all down the bottom of it, has plenty of trees on it; it is chiefly pasture land, so that the green and the white colours, and the form and great variety of the ground, and the water, all together make this a very pretty ride. Here are a series of spots, every one of which a lover of landscapes would like to have painted. Even the buildings of the factories are not ugly. The people seem to have been constantly well off. A pig in almost every cottage sty; and that is the infallible mark of a happy people. At present, indeed, this valley suffers; and, though cloth will always be wanted, there will yet be much suffering even here, while at ULY and other places, they say that the suffering is great indeed.

  Huntley, between Gloucester and Ross

  From STROUD I came up to PITCHCOMB, leaving PAINSWICK on my right. From the lofty hill at PITCHCOMB I looked down into that great flat and almost circular vale, of which the city of Gloucester is in the centre. To the left I saw the SEVERN, become a sort of arm of the sea; and before me I saw the hills that divide this county from Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The hill is a mile down. When down, you are amongst dairy-farms, and orchards all the way to Gloucester, and, this year, the orchards, particularly those of pears, are greatly productive. I intended to sleep at Gloucester, as I had, when there, already come twenty-five miles, and, as the fourteen, which remained for me to go, in order to reach BOLLITREE, in Herefordshire, would make about nine more than either I or my horse had a taste for. But, when I came to Gloucester, I found, that I should run a risk of having no bed if I did not bow very low and pay very high; for, what should there be here, but one of those scandalous and beastly fruits of the system, called a ‘MUSIC-MEETING’2 Those who founded the CATHEDRALS never dreamed, I dare say, that they would have been put to such uses as this! They are, upon these occasions, made use of as Opera-Nouses; and, I am told, that the money, which is collected, goes, in some shape or another, to the Clergy of the Church, or their widows, or children, or something. These assemblages of player-
folks, half-rogues, and half-fools, began with the small paper-moneys and with it they will go. They are amongst the profligate pranks which idleness plays when fed by the sweat of a starving people. From this scene of prostitution and of pocket-picking I moved off with all convenient speed, but not before the ostler made me pay 9d. for merely letting my horse stand about ten minutes, and not before he had begun to abuse me for declining, though in a very polite manner, to make him a present in addition to the 9d. How he ended I do not know; for, I soon set the noise of the shoes of my horse to answer him. I got to this village, about eight miles from Gloucester, by five o’clock: it is now half past seven, and I am going to bed with an intention of getting to BOLLITREE (six miles only) early enough in the morning to catch my sons in bed if they play the sluggard.

  Bollitree, Wednesday, 13th Sept.

  This morning was most beautiful. There has been rain here now, and the grass begins (but only begins) to grow. When I got within two hundred yards of Mr PALMER’S, I had the happiness to meet my son RICHARD, who said that he had been up an hour. As I came along I saw one of the prettiest sights in the flower way that I ever saw in my life. It was a little orchard; the grass in it had just taken a start, and was beautifully fresh; and, very thickly growing amongst the grass, was the purple flowered Colchicum, in full bloom. They say, that the leaves of this plant which come out in the spring and the away in the summer, are poisonous to cattle if they eat much of them in the spring. The flower, if standing by itself, would be no great beauty; but, contrasted thus, with the fresh grass, which was a little shorter than itself, it was very beautiful.

  Bollitree, Saturday, 23rd Sept.

  Upon my arrival here, which, as the reader has seen, was ten days ago, I had a parcel of letters to open, amongst which were a large lot from CORRESPONDENTS, who had been good enough to set me right with regard to that conceited and impudent plagiarist, or literary thief, ‘Sir JAMES GRAHAM, Baronet of Netherby’. One Correspondent says, that I have reversed the rule of the Decalogue by visiting the sins of the son upon the father. Another tells me anecdotes, about the ‘MAGNUS APOLLO’. Another, about the plagiarist’s marriage. I hereby do the father justice by saying, that, from what I have now heard of him, I am induced to believe, that he would have been ashamed to commit flagrant acts of plagiarism, which the son has been guilty of. The whole of this plagiarist’s pamphlet is bad enough. Every part of it is contemptible; but the passage, in which he says, that there was ‘no man, of any authority, who did not under-rate the distress that would arise out of Peel’s Bill’; this passage merits a broom-stick, at the hands of any Englishman that chooses to lay it on, and particularly from me.

  As to crops in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, they have been very bad. Even the wheat here has been only a two-third part crop. The barley and oats really next to nothing. Fed off by cattle and sheep in many places, partly for want of grass and partly from their worthlessness. The cattle have been nearly starved in many places; and we hear the same from Worcestershire. In some places one of these beautiful calves (last spring calves) will be given for the wintering of another. Hay at STROUD, was six pounds a ton: last year it was 3l. a ton: and yet meat and cheese are lower in price than they were last year. Mutton (I mean alive) was, last year at this time 7½d. it is now 6d. There has been in North Wilts and in Gloucestershire half quantity of CHEESE made this year, and yet the price is lower than it was last year. Wool is half the last year’s price. There has, within these three weeks, or a month, been a prodigious increase in the quantity of cattle food; the grass looks like the grass late in May; and the late and stubble-tumips (of which immense quantities have been sown) have grown very much, and promise large crops generally; yet lean sheep have, at the recent fairs, fallen in price; they have been lessening in price, while the facility of keeping them has been augmenting! Aye; but the paper-money has not been augmenting, notwidistanding the Branch-Bank at Gloucester! This bank is quite ready, they say, to take deposits; that is to say, to keep people’s spare money for them; but, to lend them none, without such security as would get money even from the claws of a miser. This trick is, then, what the French call a coup-manqué; or a missing of the mark. In spite of every thing, as to the season, calculated to cause lean sheep to rise in price, they fell, I hear, at WILTON fair (near Salisbury) on the 12th instant, from 2s. to 3s. a head. And yesterday, 22nd Sept., at NEWENT fair, there was a fall since the last fair in this neighbourhood. Mr PALMER sold, at this fair, sheep for twenty-three shillings a head, rather better than some which he sold at the same fair last year for thirty-four shillings a head: so that here is a falling off of a third! Think of the dreadful ruin, then, which must fall upon the renting farmers, whether they rent the land, or rent the money which enables them to call the land their own! The recent Order in Council has ruined many. I was, a few days after that Order reached us, in Wiltshire, in a rick yard, looking at the ricks, amongst which were two of beans. I asked the farmer how much the Order would take out of his pocket; and he said it had already taken out more than a hundred pounds! This is a pretty state of things for a man to live in! The winds are less uncertain than this calling of a farmer is now become, though it is a calling the affairs of which have always been deemed as little liable to accident as any thing human.

  The ‘best public instructor’ tells us, that the Ministers are about to give the Militia-Clothing to the poor Manufacturers! Coats, waistcoats, trousers, shoes and stockings! Oh, what a kind as well as wise ‘envy of surrounding nations’ this is! Dear good souls! But what are the women to do? No smocks pretty gentlemen! No royal commission to be appointed to distribute smocks to the suffering ‘females’ of the ‘disturbed districts’! How fine our ‘manufacturing population’ will look all dressed in red! Then indeed, will the farming fellows have to repent, that they did not follow the advice of Dr BLACK, and fly to the ‘happy manufacturing districts’ where employment, as the Doctor affirmed, was so abundant and so permanent, and where wages were so high! Out of evil comes good; and this state of things has blown the Scotch poleeteecal ecoonoomy to the devil, at any rate. In spite of all their plausibility and persevering brass, the Scotch writers are now generally looked upon as so many tricky humbugs. Mr SEDGWICK’S affair is enough, one would think, to open men’s eyes to the character of this greedy band of invaders; for invaders they are, and of the very worst sort: they come only to live on the labour of others; never to work themselves; and, while they do this, they are everlastingly publishing essays, the object of which is, TO KEEP THE IRISH OUT OF ENGLAND! Dr BLACK has, within these four years, published more than a hundred articles, in which he has represented the invasion of the Irish as being ruinous to England! What monstrous impudence! The Irish come to help do the work; the Scotch to help eat the taxes; or, to tramp ‘about mon’ with a pack and licence; or, in other words, to cheat upon a small scale, as their superiors do upon a large one. This tricky and greedy set have however, at last, over-reached themselves, after having so long over-reached all the rest of mankind that have had the misfortune to come in contact with them. They are now smarting under the scourge, the torments of which they have long made others feel. They have been the principal inventors and executors of all that has been damnable to England. They are NOW bothered; and I thank God for it. It may, and it must, finally deliver us from their baleful influence.

  To return to the kind and pretty gentlemen of Whitehall, and their Militia-Clothing: if they refuse to supply the women with smocks, perhaps they would have no objection to hand them over some petticoats; or at any rate, to give their husbands a musket a piece, and a little powder and ball, just to amuse themselves with, instead of the employment of ‘digging holes one day and filling them up the next’ as suggested by ‘the great statesman, now no more’,3 who was one of that ‘noble, honourable and venerable body’ the Privy Council (to which Sturges Bourne belongs), and who cut his own throat at North Cray, in Kent, just about three years after he had brought in the bill, which compelled me t
o make the Register contain two sheets and a quarter, and to compel printers to give, before they began to print, bail to pay any fines that might be inflicted on them for any thing that they might print. Let me see: where was I? Oh! the muskets and powder and ball ought, certainly, to go with the red clothes; but how strange it is, that the real relief never seems to occur, even for one single moment, to the minds of these pretty gentlemen; namely, taking off the taxes. What a thing it is to behold, poor people receiving rates, or alms, to prevent them from starving; and to behold one half, at least, of what they receive, taken from them in taxes! What a sight to behold soldiers, horse and foot, employed to prevent a distressed people from committing acts of violence, when the cost of the horse and foot would, probably, if applied in the way of relief to the sufferers, prevent the existence of the distress! A cavalry horse has, I think, ten pounds of oats a day and twenty pounds of hay. These at present prices, cost 16s. a week. Then there is stable room, barracks, straw, saddle and all the trappings. Then there is the wear of the horse. Then the pay of them. So that one single horseman, with his horse, do not cost so little as 36s. a week; and that is more than the parish allowance to five labourers’ or manufacturers’ families, at five to a family: so that one horseman and his horse cost what would feed twenty-five of the distressed creatures. If there be ten thousand of these horsemen, they cost as much as would keep, at the parish rate, two hundred and fifty thousand of the distressed persons! Aye; it is even so, parson HAY, stare at it as long as you like. But, suppose it to be only half as much: then it would maintain a hundred and twenty-five thousand persons. However, to get rid of all dispute, and to state one staring and undeniable fact, let me first observe, that it is notorious, that the poor-rates are looked upon as enormous; that they are deemed an insupportable burden; that SCARLETT and NOLAN have asserted, that they threaten to swallow up the land; that it is equally notorious that a large part of the poor-rates ought to be called wages: all this is undeniable, and now comes the damning fact; namely, that the whole amount of these poor-rates falls far short of the cost of the standing army in time of peace! So that, take away this army, which is to keep the distressed people from committing acts of violence, and you have, at once, ample means of removing all the distress and all the danger of acts of violence! When will this be done? Do not say, ‘NEVER’, reader: if you do, you are not only a slave, but you ought to be one.