Rural Rides Page 48

  Stanford Park, Wednesday, 27th Sept. (Morning)

  In a letter which I received from SIR THOMAS WINNINGTON (one of the Members for this county), last year, he was good enough to request that I would call upon him, if I ever came into Worcestershire, which I told him I would do; and accordingly here we are in his house, situated, certainly, in one of the finest spots in all England. We left WORCESTER yesterday about ten o’clock, crossed the Severn, which runs close by the town, and came on to this place, which lies in a north-western direction from Worcester, at 14 miles distance from that city, and at about six from the borders of Shropshire. About four miles back we passed by the park and through the estate of LORD FOLEY to whom is due the praise of being a most indefatigable and successful planter of trees. He seems to have taken uncommon pains in the execution of this work; and he has the merit of disinterestedness, the trees being chiefly oaks, which he is sure he can never see grow to timber. We crossed the TEME RIVER just before we got here. SIR THOMAS was out shooting; but he soon came home, and gave us a very polite reception. I had time, yesterday, to see the place, to look at trees, and the like, and I wished to get away early this morning; but, being prevailed on to stay to breakfast, here I am, at six o’clock in the morning, in one of the best and best-stocked private libraries that I ever saw; and, what is more, the owner, from what passed yesterday, when he brought me hither, convinced me that he was acquainted with the insides of the books. I asked, and shall ask, no questions about who got these books together; but the collection is such as, I am sure, I never saw before in a private house.

  The house and stables and courts are such as they ought to be for the great estate that surrounds them; and the park is every thing that is beautiful. On one side of the house, looking over a fine piece of water, you see a distant valley, opening between lofty hills; on another side the ground descends a little at first, then goes gently rising for a while, and then rapidly, to the distance of a mile perhaps, where it is crowned with trees in irregular patches, or groups, single and most magnificent trees being scattered all over the whole of the park; on another side, there rise up beautiful little hills, some in the form of barrows on the downs, only forty or a hundred times as large, one or two with no trees on them, and others topped with trees; but, on one of these little hills, and some yards higher than the lofty trees which are on this little hill, you see rising up the tower of the parish church, which hill is, I think, taken all together, amongst the most delightful objects that I ever beheld.

  ‘Well, then,’ says the devil of laziness, ‘and could you not be contented to live here all the rest of your life; and never again pester yourself with the cursed politics?’ ‘Why, I think I have laboured enough. Let others work now. And such a pretty place for coursing and for hare-hunting and woodcock shooting, I dare say; and then those pretty wild-ducks in the water, and the flowers and the grass and the trees and all the birds in spring and the fresh air, and never, never again to be stifled with the smoke that from the infernal WEN ascendeth for ever more and that every easterly wind brings to choke me at Kensington!’ The last word of this soliloquy carried me back, slap, to my own study (very much unlike that which I am in), and bade me think of the GRIDIRON; bade me think of the complete triumph that I have yet to enjoy: promised me the pleasure of seeing a million of trees of my own, and sown by my own hands this very year. Ah! but the hares and the pheasants and the wild-ducks! Yes, but the delight of seeing PROSPERITY ROBINSON hang his head for shame: the delight of beholding the tormenting embarrassments of those who have so long retained crowds of base miscreants to revile me; the delight of ousting spitten-upon STANLEY and bound-over WOOD Yes, but, then, the flowers and the birds and the sweet air! What, then, shall CANNING never again hear of the ‘revered and ruptured Ogden’! Shall he go into his grave without being again reminded of ‘driving at the whole herd, in order to get at the ignoble animal’! Shall he never again be told of SIX ACTS and of his wish ‘to extinguish that accursed torch of discord for ever’! Oh! God forbid! farewell hares and dogs and birds! what! shall SIDMOUTH, then, never again hear of his Power-of-Imprisonment Bill, of his Circular, of his Letter of Thanks to the Manchester Yeomanry! I really jumped up when this thought came athwart my mind, and, without thinking of the breakfast, said to GEORGE who was sitting by me, ‘Go, George, and tell them to saddle the horses’; for, it seemed to me, that I had been meditating some crime. Upon George asking me, whether I would not stop to breakfast? I bade him not order the horses out yet; and here we are, waiting for breakfast.

  Ryall, Wednesday Night, 27th Sept.

  After breakfast we took our leave of SIR THOMAS WINNINGTON, and of STANFORD, very much pleased with our visit. We wished to reach Ryall as early as possible in the day, and we did not, therefore, stop at Worcester. We got here about three o’clock, and we intend to set off, in another direction, early in the morning.

  FROM RYALL, IN WORCESTERSHIRE, TO BURGHCLERE, IN HAMPSHIRE

  Ryall, Friday Morning, 29th September

  I have observed, in this country, and especially near Worcester, that the working people seem to be better off than in many other parts, one cause of which, is, I dare say, that glove-manufacturing, which cannot be carried on by fire or by wind or by water, and which is, therefore, carried on by the hands of human beings. It gives work to women and children as well as to men; and that work is, by a great part of the women and children, done in their cottages, and amidst the fields and hop-gardens, where the husbands and sons must live, in order to raise the food and the drink and the wool. This is a great thing for the land. If this glove-making were to cease, many of these women and children, now not upon the parish, must instantly be upon the parish. The glove-trade is, like all others, slack from this last change in the value of money; but, there is no horrible misery here, as at Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Paisley, and other Hell-Holes of 84 degrees of heat. There misery walks abroad in skin, bone and nakedness. There are no subscriptions wanted for Worcester; no militia-clothing. The working people suffer, trades-people suffer, and, who is to escape, except the monopolizers, the Jews, and the tax-eaters, when the Government chooses to raise the value of money, and lower the price of goods? The whole of the industrious part of the country must suffer in such a case; but, where manufacturing is mixed with agriculture, where the wife and daughters are at the needle, or the wheel, while the men and the boys are at plough, and where the manufacturing, of which one or two towns are the centres, is spread over the whole country round about, and particularly where it is, in very great part, performed by females at their own homes, and where the earnings come in aid of the man’s wages; in such case the misery cannot be so great; and, accordingly, while there is an absolute destruction of life going on in the hell-holes, there is no visible misery at, or near, Worcester; and I cannot take my leave of this county without observing, that I do not recollect to have seen one miserable object in it. The working people all seem to have good large gardens, and pigs in their styes; and this last, say the feelosofers what they will about her ‘antallectal enjoyments’, is the only security for happiness in a labourer’s family.

  Then, this glove-manufacturing is not like that of cottons, a mere gambing concern, making Baronets to-day and Bankrupts to-morrow, and making those who do the work slaves. Here are no masses of people, called together by a bell, and ‘kept to it’ by a driver; here are no ‘patriots’, who, while they keep Englishmen to it by fines, and almost by the scourge, in a heat of 84 degrees, are petitioning the Parliament to give freedom to the SOUTH AMERICANS, who, as these ‘patriots’ have been informed, use a great quantity of cottons!

  The dilapidation of parsonage-houses and the depopulation of villages appears not to have been so great just round about Worcester, as in some other parts; but, they have made great progress even here. No man appears to fat an Ox, or hardly a SHEEP, except with a view of sending it to London, or to some other infernal resort of monopolizers and tax-eaters. Here, as in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire and
Herefordshire, you find plenty of large churches without scarcely any people. I dare say, that, even in this county, more than one half of the parishes have either no parsonage-houses at all; or, have not one that a Parson thinks fit for him to live in; and, I venture to assert, that one or the other of these is the case in four parishes out of every five in Herefordshire! Is not this a monstrous shame? Is this ‘a church’? Is this ‘law’? The Parsons get the tithes and the rent of the glebe-lands, and the parsonage-houses are left to tumble down, and nettles and brambles to hide the spot where they stood. But, the fact is, the Jew-system has swept all the little gentry, the small farmers, and the domestic manufacturers away. The land is now used to raise food and drink for the monopolizers and the tax-eaters and their purveyors and lackeys and harlots; and they get together in WENS.

  Of all the mean, all the cowardly, reptiles, that ever crawled on the face of the earth, the English land-owners are the most mean and the most cowardly: for, while they support the churches in their several parishes, while they see the population drawn away from their parishes to the WENS, while they are taxed to keep the people in the WENS, and while they see their own Parsons pocket the tithes and the glebes-rents, and suffer the parsonage-houses to fall down; while they see all this, they, without uttering a word in the way of complaint, suffer themselves and their neighbours to be taxed, to build new churches for the monopolizers and tax-eaters in those WENS! Never was there in this world a set of reptiles so base as this. Stupid as many of them are, they must clearly see the flagrant injustice of making the depopulated parishes pay for the aggrandizement of those who have caused the depopulation, aye, actually pay taxes to add to the WENS, and, of course, to cause a further depopulation of the taxed villages; stupid beasts as many of them are, they must see the flagrant injustice of this, and mean and cowardly as many of them are, some of them would remonstrate against it; but, alas! the far greater part of them are, themselves, getting, or expecting, loaves and fishes,1 either in their own persons, or in those of their family. They smouch, or want to smouch, some of the taxes; and, therefore, they must not complain. And, thus the thing goes on. These land-owners see, too, the churches falling down and the parsonage-houses either tumbled down or dilapidated. But, then, mind, they have, amongst them, the giving away of the benefices! Of course, all they want is the income, and, the less the parsonage-house costs, the larger the spending income. But, in the meanwhile, here is a destruction of public property; and also, from a diversion of the income of the livings, a great injury, great injustice, to the middle and the working classes.

  Is this, then, is this ‘church’ a thing to remain untouched? Shall the widow and the orphan, whose money has been borrowed by the land-owners (including the Parsons) to purchase ‘victories’ with; shall they be stripped of their interest, of their very bread, and shall the Parsons, who have let half the parsonage-houses fall down or become unfit to live in, still keep all the tithes and the glebe-lands and the immense landed estates, called Church-Lands? Oh, no! Sir JAMES GRAHAM ‘of Netherby’, though you are a descendant of the Earls of Monteith, of John of the bright sword, and of the Seventh Earl of Galloway, K. T. (taking care, for God’s sake, not to omit the K. T.); though you may be the Magnus Apollo; and, in short, be what you may, you shall never execute your project of sponging the fund-holders and of leaving Messieurs the Parsons untouched! In many parishes, where the livings are good too, there is neither parsonage-house nor church! This is the case at DRAYCOT FOLIOT, in Wiltshire. The living is a RECTORY; the Parson has, of course, both great and small tithes; these tithes and the glebe-land are worth, I am told, more than three hundred pounds a year; and yet there is neither church nor parsonage-house; both have been suffered to fall down and disappear; and, when a new Parson comes to take possession of the living, there is, I am told, a temporary tent, or booth, erected, upon the spot where the church ought to be, for the performance of the ceremony of induction! What, then! – Ought not this church to be repealed? An Act of Parliament made this church; an Act of Parliament can unmake it; and, is there any but a monster who would suffer this Parson to retain this income, while that of the widow and the orphan was taken away? Oh, no! Sir JAMES GRAHAM of Netherby, who, with the gridiron before you, say, that there was ‘no man, OF ANY AUTHORITY, who foresaw the effects of Peel’s Bill’; oh, no! thou stupid, thou empty-headed, thou insolent aristocratic pamphleteer, the widow and the orphan shall not be robbed of their bread, while this Parson of DRAYCOT FOLIOT keeps the income of his living!

  On my return from Worcester to this place, yesterday, I noticed, at a village called SEVERN STOKE, a very curiously-constructed grape house; that is to say a hot-house for the raising of grapes. Upon inquiry, I found, that it belonged to a Parson of the name of ST JOHN, whose parsonage house is very near to it, and who, being sure of having the benefice when the then Rector SHOULD DIE, bought a piece of land, and erected his grapery on it, just facing, and only about 50 yards from, the windows, out of which the old parson had to look until the day of his death, with a view, doubtless, of piously furnishing his aged brother with a memento mori (remember death), quite as significant as a death’s head and cross-bones, and yet done in a manner expressive of that fellow-feeling, that delicacy, that abstinence from self-gratification, which are well known to be characterictics almost peculiar to ‘the cloth’! To those, if there be such, who may be disposed to suspect that the grapery arose, upon the spot where it stands, merely from the desire to have the vines in bearing state, against the time that the old Parson should die, or, as I heard the Botley Parson once call it, ‘kick the bucket’; to such persons I would just put this one question: did they ever either from Scripture or tradition, learn that any of the Apostles or their disciples, erected graperies from motives such as this? They may, indeed, say, that they never heard of the Apostles erecting any graperies at all, much less of their having erected them from such a motive. Nor, to say the truth, did I ever hear of any such erections on the part of those Apostles and those whom they commissioned to preach the word of God; and, SIR WILLIAM SCOTT (now a lord of some sort) never convinced me, by his parson-praising speech of 1802, that to give the church-clergy a due degree of influence over the minds of the people, to make the people revere them, it was necessary that the Parsons and their wives should shine at balls and in pump-rooms. On the contrary, these and the like have taken away almost the whole of their spiritual influence. They never had much; but, lately, and especially since 1793, they have had hardly any at all; and, wherever I go, I find them much better known as Justices of the Peace than as Clergymen. What they would come to, if this system could go on for only a few years longer, I know not: but go on, as it is now going, it cannot much longer: there must be a settlement of some sort: and that settlement never can leave that mass, that immense mass, of public property, called ‘church property’, to be used as it now is.

  I have seen, in this county, and in Herefordshire, several pieces of MANGEL WURZEL; and, I hear, that it has nowhere failed, as the turnips have. Even the Lucerne has, in some places, failed to a certain extent; but, Mr WALTER PALMER, at PENCOYD, in Herefordshire, has cut a piece of Lucerne four times this last summer, and, when I saw it, on the 17th Sept. (12 days ago), it was got a foot high towards another cut. But, with one exception (too trifling to mention), Mr WALTER PALMER’S Lucerne is on the TULLIAN plan; that is, it is in rows at four feet distance from each other; so that you plough between as often as you please, and thus, together with a little hand weeding between the plants, keep the ground, at all times, clear of weeds and grass. Mr PALMER says, that his acre (he has no more) has kept two horses all the summer; and he seems to complain, that it has done no more. Indeed! A stout horse will eat much more than a fatting ox. This grass will fat any ox, or sheep; and would not Mr PALMER like to have ten acres of land that would fat a score of oxen? They would do this, if they were managed well. But, is it nothing to keep a team of four horses, for five months in the year, on the produce of two acres of land?
If a man say that, he must, of course, be eagerly looking forward to another world; for nothing will satisfy him in this. A good crop of early cabbages may be had between the rows of Lucerne.