Rural Rides Page 49

  Cabbages have, generally, wholly failed. Those that I see are almost all too backward to make much of heads; though it is surprising how fast they will grow and come to perfection as soon as there is twelve hours of night. I am here, however, speaking of the large sorts of cabbage; for, the smaller sorts will loave in summer. Mr WALTER PALMER has now a piece of these, of which I think there are from 17 to 20 tons to the acre; and this, too, observe, after a season which, on the same farm, has not suffered a turnip of any sort to come. If he had had 20 acres of these, he might have almost laughed at the failure of his turnips, and at the short crop of hay. And, this is a crop of which a man may always be sure, if he take proper pains. These cabbages (Early Yorks or some such sort) should, if you want them in June or July, be sown early in the previous August. If you want them in winter, sown in April, and treated as pointed out in my COTTAGE-ECONOMY. These small sorts stand the winter better than the large; they are more nutritious; and they occupy the ground little more than half the time. Dwarf Savoys are the finest and richest and most nutritious of cabbages. Sown early in April, and planted out early in July, they will, at 18 inches apart each way, yield a crop of 30 to 40 tons by Christmas. But, all this supposes land very good, or, very well manured, and plants of a good sort, and well raised and planted, and the ground well tilled after planting; and a crop of 30 tons is worth all these and all the care and all the pains that a man can possibly take.

  I am here amongst the finest of cattle, and the finest sheep of the Leicester kind, that I ever saw. My host, Mr PRICE, is famed as a breeder of cattle and sheep. The cattle are of the Hereford kind, and the sheep surpassing any animals of the kind that I ever saw. The animals seem to be made for the soil, and the soil for them. In taking leave of this county, I repeat, with great satisfaction, what I before said about the apparent comparatively happy state of the labouring people; and I have been very much pleased with the tone and manner in which they are spoken to and spoken of by their superiors. I hear of no hard treatment of them here, such as I have but too often heard of in some counties, and too often witnessed in others; and I quit Worcestershire, and particularly the house in which I am, with all those feelings which are naturally produced by the kindest of receptions from frank and sensible people.

  Fairford (Gloucestershire), Saturday Morning, 30th Sept.

  Though we came about 45 miles yesterday, we are up by daylight, and just about to set off to sleep at HAYDEN, near SWINDON, in Wiltshire.

  Hayden, Saturday Night, 30th Sept.

  From RYALL, in Worcestershire, we came, yesterday (Friday) morning, first to TEWKSBURY in Gloucestershire. This is a good, substantial town, which, for many years, sent to Parliament that sensible and honest and constant hater of PITT and his infernal politics, JAMES MARTIN, and which now sends to the same place, his son, Mr JOHN MARTIN, who, when the memorable Kentish petition was presented, in June 1822, proposed that it should not be received, or that, if it were received, ‘the House should not separate until it had RESOLVED, that the interest of the Debt should never be reduced!’ CASTLEREAGH abused the petition; but was for receiving it, in order to fix on it a mark of the House’s reprobation. I said, in the next Register, that this fellow was mad; and, in six or seven weeks from that day, he cut his own throat, and was declared to have been mad at the time when this petition was presented! The mess that ‘the House’ will be in will be bad enough as it is; but, what would have been its mess, if it had, in its strong fit of ‘good faith’, been furious enough to adopt MR MARTIN’S ‘resolution’! The Warwickshire AVON falis into the Severn here, and on the sides of both, for many miles back, there are the finest meadows that ever were seen. In looking over them, and beholding the endless flocks and herds, one wonders what can become of all the meat! By riding on about eight or nine miles farther, however, this wonder is a little diminished; for here we come to one of the devouring WENS; namely, CHELTENHAM, which is what they call a ‘watering place’; that is to say, a place, to which East India plunderers, West India floggers, English tax-gorgers, together with gluttons, drunkards, and debauchees of all descriptions, female as well as male, resort, at the suggestion of silently laughing quacks, in the hope of getting rid of the bodily consequences of their manifold sins and iniquities. When I enter a place like this, I always feel disposed to squeeze up my nose with my fingers. It is nonsense, to be sure; but I conceit that every two-legged creature, that I see coming near me, is about to cover me with the poisonous proceeds of its impurities. To places like this come all that is knavish and all that is foolish and all that is base; gamesters, pickpockets, and harlots; young wife-hunters in search of rich and ugly and old women, and young husband-hunters in search of rich and wrinkled or half-rotten men, the formerly resolutely bent, be the means what they may, to give the latter heirs to their lands and tenements. These things are notorious; and, SIR WILLIAM SCOTT, in his speech of 1802, in favour of the non-residence of the Clergy, expressly said, that they and their families ought to appear at watering places, and that this was amongst the means of making them respected by their flocks! Memorandum: he was a member for Oxford when he said this! Before we got into CHELTENHAM, I learned from a coal-carter which way we had to go, in order to see ‘The New Buildings’, which are now nearly at a stand. We rode up the main street of the town, for some distance, and then turned off to the left, which soon brought us to the ‘desolation of abomination’. I have seldom seen any thing with more heartfelt satisfaction. ‘Oh!’ said I to myself, ‘the accursed THING has certainly got a blow, then, in every part of its corrupt and corrupting carcass!’ The whole town (and it was now ten o’clock) looked delightfully dull. I did not see more than four or five carriages, and, perhaps, twenty people on horse-back; and these seemed, by their hook-noses and round eyes, and by the long and sooty necks of the women, to be, for the greater part Jews and Jewesses. The place really appears to be sinking very fast; and I have been told, and believe the fact, that houses, in Cheltenham, will now sell for only just about ONE-THIRD as much as the same would have sold for only in last October. It is curious to see the names which the vermin owners have put upon the houses here. There is a new row of most gaudy and fantastical dwelling places, called ‘COLOMBIA PLACE’, given it, doubtless, by some dealer in Bonds. There is what a boy told us was the ‘NEW SPA’; there is Waterloo house! Oh! how I rejoice at the ruin of the base creatures! There is ‘Liverpool-Cottage, Canning-Cottage, Peel-Cottage’; and, the good of it is, that the ridiculous beasts have put this word cottage upon scores of houses, and some very mean and shabby houses, standing along, and making part of an unbroken street! What a figure this place will cut in another year or two! I should not wonder to see it nearly wholly deserted. It is situated in a nasty, flat, stupid, spot, without any thing pleasant near it. A putting down of the one pound notes will soon take away its spa-people. Those of the notes, that have already been cut off, have, it seems, lessened the quantity of ailments very considerably; another brush will cure all the complaints!

  They have had some rains in the summer not far from this place; for we saw in the streets very fine turnips for sale as vegetables, and broccoli with heads six or eight inches over! But, as to the meat, it was nothing to be compared with that of Warminster, in Wiltshire; that is to say, the veal and lamb. I have paid particular attention to this matter, at Worcester and Tewksbury as well as at Cheltenham; and I have seen no veal and no lamb to be compared with those of Warminster. I have been thinking, but cannot imagine how it is, that the WEN-DEVILS, either at Bath or London, do not get this meat away from Warminster. I hope that my observations on it will not set them to work; for, if it do, the people of Warminster will never have a bit of good meat again.

  After CHELTENHAM we had to reach this pretty little town of FAIRFORD, the regular turnpike road to which lay through CIRENCESTER; but I had from a fine map at Sir THOMAS WINNINGTON’S, traced out a line for us along through a chain of villages, leaving CIRENCESTER away to our right, and never coming nearer than seven
or eight miles to it. We came through Dodeswell, Withington, Chedworth, Winston, and the two Colnes. At Dodeswell we came up a long and steep hill, which brought us out of the great vale of Gloucester and up upon the COTSWOLD HILLS, which name is tautological, I believe; for I think that wold meaned high lands of great extent. Such is the Cotswold, at any rate, for it is a tract of country stretching across, in a south-easterly direction from Dodeswell to near Fairford, and in a north-easterly direction, from PITCHCOMB HILL, in Gloucestershire (which, remember, I descended on 12th September) to near WITNEY in Oxfordshire. Here we were, then, when we got fairly up upon the Wold, with the vale of Gloucester at our back, Oxford and its vale to our left, the vale of Wiltshire to our right, and the vale of Berkshire in our front: and from one particular point, I could see a part of each of them. This Wold is, in itself, an ugly country. The soil is what is called a stone brash below, with a reddish earth mixed with little bits of this brash at top, and, for the greater part of the Wold, even this soil is very shallow; and, as fields are divided by walls made of this brash, and, as there are, for a mile or two together, no trees to be seen, and, as the surface is not smooth and green like the downs, this is a sort of country, having less to please the eye than any other that I have ever seen, always save and except the heaths like those of Bagshot and Hindhead. Yet, even this Wold has many fertile dells in it, and sends out, from its highest parts, several streams, each of which has its pretty valley and its meadows. And here has come down to us, from a distance of many centuries, a particular race of sheep, called the Cotswold breed, which are, of course, the best suited to the country. They are short and stocky, and appear to me to be about half way, in point of size, between the RYLANDS and the SOUTH DOWNS. When crossed with the LEICESTER, as they are pretty generally in the North of Wiltshire, they make very beautiful and even large sheep; quite large enough, and, people say, very profitable.

  A route, when it lies through villages, is one thing on a map, and quite another thing on the ground. Our line of villages, from Cheltenham to Fairford was very nearly straight upon the map; but, upon the ground, it took us round about a great many miles, besides now and then a little going back, to get into the right road; and, which was a great inconvenience, not a public-house was there on our road, until we got within eight miles of Fairford. Resolved that not one single farthing of my money should be spent in the WEN of Cheltenham, we came through that place, expecting to find a public-house in the first or second of the villages; but not one was there, over the whole of the WOLD; and though I had, by pocketing some slices of meat and bread at Ryall, provided against this contingency, as far as related to ourselves, I could make no such provision for our horses, and they went a great deal too far without baiting. Plenty of farm-houses, and, if they had been in America, we need have looked for no other. Very likely (I hope it at any rate) almost any farmer on the Cotswold would have given us what we wanted, if we had asked for it; but the fashion, the good old fashion, was, by the hellish system of funding and taxing and monopolizing, driven across the Atlantic. And is England never to see it return? Is the hellish system to last for ever?

  DOCTOR BLACK, in remarking upon my RIDE down the vale of the SALISBURY AVON, says, that there has, doubtless, been a falling off in the population of the villages, ‘lying amongst the chalk-hills’; aye, and lying every where else too; or, how comes it, that FOUR-FIFTHS of the parishes of Herefordshire; abounding in rich land, in meadows, orchards, and pastures, have either no parsonage-houses at all, or have none that a Parson thinks fit for him to live in? I vouch for the fact; I will, whether in parliament or not, prove the fact to the parliament: and, if the fact be such the conclusion is inevitable. But how melancholy is the sight of these decayed and still decaying villages in the dells of the Cotswold, where the building materials, being stone, the ruins do not totally disappear for ages! The village of WITHINGTON (mentioned above) has a church like a small cathedral, and the whole of the population is now only 603 persons, men, women, and children! So that, according to the Scotch fellows, this immense and fine church, which is as sound as it was 7 or 800 years ago, was built by and for a population, containing, at most only about 120 grown up and able-bodied men! But here, in this once populous village, or I think town, you see all the indubitable marks of most melancholy decay. There are several lanes, crossing each other, which must have been streets formerly. There is a large open space where the principal streets meet. There are, against this open space, two large, old, roomy houses, with gateways into back parts of them, and with large stone upping-blocks against the walls of them in the street. These were manifestly considerable inns, and, in this open place, markets or fairs, or both used to be held. I asked two men, who were threshing in a barn, how long it was since their public-house was put down, or dropped? They told me about sixteen years. One of these men, who was about fifty years of age, could remember three public-houses, one of which was what was called an inn! The place stands by the side of a little brook, which here rises, or rather issues, from a high hill, and which, when it has winded down for some miles, and through several villages, begins to be called the RIVER COLNE, and continues on, under this name, through Fairford and along, I suppose, till it falls into the Thames. Withington is very prettily situated; it was, and not very long ago, a gay and happy place; but it now presents a picture of dilapidation and shabbiness scarcely to be equalled. Here are the yet visible remains of two gentlemen’s houses. Great farmers have supplied their place, as to inhabiting; and, I dare say, that some tax-eater, or some blaspheming Jew, or some still more base and wicked loan-mongering robber is now the owner of the land; aye, and all these people are his slaves as completely, and more to their wrong, than the blacks are the slaves of the planters in Jamaica, the farmers here, acting, in fact, in a capacity corresponding with that of the negro-drivers there.

  A part, and, perhaps, a considerable part, of the decay and misery of this place, is owing to the use of machinery, and to the monopolizing, in the manufacture of Blankets, of which fabric the town of WITNEY (above mentioned) was the centre, and from which town the wool used to be sent round to, and the yarn, or warp, come back from, all these Cotswold villages, and quite into a part of Wiltshire. This work is all now gone, and so the women and the girls are a ‘surplus popalashon, mon’, and are, of course, to be dealt with by the ‘Emigration Committee’ of the ‘Collective Wisdom’! There were, only a few years ago, above thirty blanket-manufacturers at WITNEY: twenty-five of these have been swallowed up by the five that now have all the manufacture in their hands! And all this has been done by that system of gambling and of fictitious money, which has conveyed property from the hands of the many into the hands of the few. But, wise Burdett likes this! He wants the land to be cultivated by few hands, and he wants machinery, and all those things, which draw money into large masses; that make a nation consist of a few of very rich and of millions of very poor! BURDETT must look sharp; or this system will play him a trick before it come to an end.

  The crops on the Cotswold have been pretty good; and I was very much surprised to see a scattering of early turnips, and in some places, decent crops. Upon this Wold I saw more early turnips in a mile or two, than I saw in all Herefordshire and Worcestershire and in all the rich and low part of Gloucestershire. The high lands always, during the year, and especially during the summer, receive much more of rain than the low lands. The clouds hang about the hills, and the dews, when they rise, go, most frequently, and cap the hills.

  Wheat-sowing is yet going on on the Wold; but, the greater part of it is sown, and not only sown, but up, and in some places, high, enough to ‘hide a hare’. What a difference! In some parts of England, no man thinks of sowing wheat till November, and it is often done in March. If the latter were done on this Wold there would not be a bushel on an acre. The ploughing, and other work, on the Wold, is done, in great part, by oxen, and here are some of the finest ox-teams that I ever saw.

  All the villages down to Fairford are pretty muc
h in the same dismal condition as that of WITHINGTON. Fairford, which is quite on the border of Gloucestershire, is a very pretty little market-town, and has one of the prettiest churches in the kingdom. It was, they say, built in the reign of Henry VII; and one is naturally surprised to see, that its windows of beautiful stained glass had the luck to escape, not only the fangs of the ferocious ‘good Queen Bess’; not only the unsparing plundering minions of James I; but, even the devastating ruffians of Cromwell. We got in here about four o’clock, and at the house of Mr ILES, where we slept, passed, amongst several friends, a very pleasant evening. This morning, Mr ILES was so good as to ride with us as far as the house of another friend at KEMPSFORD, which is the last Gloucestershire parish in our route. At this friend’s, Mr ARKALL, we saw a fine dairy of about 60 or 80 cows, and a cheese loft with, perhaps, more than two thousand cheeses in it; at least, there were many hundreds. This village contains what are said to be the remnants and ruins of a mansion of JOHN OF GAUNT. The church is very ancient and very capacious. What tales these churches do tell upon us! What fools, what lazy dogs, what presumptuous asses, what lying braggarts, they make us appear! No people here, ‘mon, teel the Scots cam to sevelize’ us! Impudent, lying beggars! Their stinking ‘kelts’ ought to be taken up, and the brazen and insolent vagabonds whipped back to their heaths and their rocks. Let them go and thrive by their ‘cash-credits’, and let their paper-money poet, WALTER SCOTT, immortalize their deeds. That conceited, dunder-headed fellow, GEORGE CHALMERS, estimated the whole of the population of England and Wales at a few persons more than two millions, when England was just at the highest point of her power and glory, and when all these churches had long been built and were resounding with the voice of priests, who resided in their parishes, and who relieved all the poor out of their tithes! But, this same CHALMERS, SIGNED his solemn conviction, that VORTIGERN and the other Ireland-manuscripts,2 which were written by a lad of sixteen, were written by SHAKESPEARE!