The English Peasant/Sussex Shepherds
VIII.
Sussex Shepherds.
(Golden Hours, 1871.)
It was June, "rosy June," as old Waller calls her, when I set out on a ramble to Chanctonbery Ring. No one who has been in West Sussex can have failed to have noticed its dark crown of wood rising above the Downs, but it is just a little out of the beaten track, and few pedestrians ever make their way to it.
Starting from the little station at Goring, I found I had to go through the woods. At times the road became quite wild and picturesque the yellow iris was in bloom, "lighting up with its golden beam" the wayside marsh. Emerging from the woods, I turned into a path leading to Findon, a little village where I purposed resting.
Then my road skirted a chalk-pit and passed a mill, where I sought the miller, who was at his tea, but who readily give me all the information I required. What a curious race some of these South Down millers have been! Every visitor at Worthing has seen the miller's tomb at Highdown Hill. This worthy not only had his grave prepared long before his death, but kept his coffin ready, wheeling it on castors every night underneath his bed.
The South Down villages are amongst the quietest spots in the world. You see a cluster of lowly habitations built of flints or boulders, with little gardens stocked with roses and wallflowers. The cottages are mostly thatched, and look wonderfully cosy. Then amongst the tall elms or ashes—and they are tall in these sheltered spots, mighty giant—stands the old farmhouse, an ancient, high-roofed, gable-pointed building, surrounded by barns and stables and haystacks, with circular pigeon-house, all suggestive of a quiet patriarchal life. These South Down farmers have seen little change. Revolution after revolution has passed. The London of one decennary would hardly know the London of the next, and yet in these unchanging parts are to be found men tilling the same land over which their forefathers drove the plough in the days of Queen Elizabeth.
What curious people live in these out-of-the-way places! Wandering through a village a little nearer the coast, but of the same type, I came on a farm in ruins. The last time I walked to this place it was at this spot I had talked with an old man, an ancient worthy who had fallen in every way into the sere and yellow leaf. The tide of fortune had run out with the tide of life. He had evidently gone, for his house had fallen into sad decay. The broken windows, the wilderness garden, the barns unthatched, the rafters naked, seemed to suggest some melancholy tale. Perhaps his heirs had quarrelled, perhaps he was the last of his race, and there was no one to care for his honour or his house.
Stepping across a stone stile, I lifted the latch, and found myself in a kitchen with a large old-fashioned hearth, and I looked up at the sky through its chimney, blackened with smoking many a side of fat bacon. In one corner were some rickety stairs, up which I crept into a small, low-pitched bedroom. I opened the back door, and looked upon what was once a little fruit-garden. Through another I found the dining-room, and then up the front staircase into bedrooms, sad and dreary and tenantless.
I descended, and opened an outer door, expecting the same desolation, when I found a room, bright and cheerful, paved with red bricks, clean as the cleanest floor. All around seemed tidy and furnished. An old man, with a face like a russet apple, sitting cosily by a little fire, did not seem at all surprised at the intrusion; so begging his pardon, I turned it off by asking him to whom the ruined house belonged. Laughing at the idea of its being in Chancery, he told me that it was the property of an old lady who had too much money, and therefore chose to allow her houses to go to rack and ruin rather than let them.
The cheery little man hobbled off his chair, and came and stood at the door. Amongst other things he told me that an able-bodied man in these parts could earn thirteen shillings a week, a carter or a ploughman fourteen shillings, with his rent free into the bargain. On this he thought they might do well if they did not visit the public-house. Said he, "My wife and me, we scratches together about eight shilling a week, and we do pretty comfortable." Then he made a little money by selling manure, which he collected off the roads, and for which he got three shillings a cart-load. But he had children doing well, and perhaps they helped him a bit. One son had been on a man-of-war five-and-twenty years, and now had a pension of twelve shillings a week; another daughter was married to a pensioner who kept a beer-shop, and was doing a good trade; so that, if it was not for the "rheumatics," the old man would have been quite happy, and contented with his lot.
I asked him about the church, which was very picturesque, and evidently well cared for in every detail. He said, "Our parson do love the church, he do." Thinking this suggested ritualism, I asked him if the rector was a High Churchman. "Oh, dear no," he replied, "he be very low; you can't hear him at all unless maybe you sit close by."
Pass through one of these villages on a summer's afternoon, and "all around is silence;" but return at evening, and at each cottage door groups are standing, while on every road one meets the labourer homeward bound. But Saturday is the evening to see the village wide awake; then all the world is out. It was on one such evening I was returning from Angmering across the meadows, when I passed an old man, blear-eyed, and clad in blue smock. He was seventy-five years of age. Early in life he wished to emigrate; but his father would not let him, lest people should say that he had wanted to get rid of him. He worked as a hedger in winter, at half-a-crown a day; and in summer by the piece, at odd jobs, making about the same. Sometimes he made only four days' work. He did not think much of benefit clubs, because the parish took advantage of them to lessen a man's allowance when he was sick. He greatly objected to steam ploughs and mowing machines, because they lessened men work. We passed a field where the clover was all tossed about by the rain, and the old man said, *' Perhaps it's my poor foolish way, but I think the Supreme Being has done this for the benefit of poor men." Railways it was a mistake to suppose took up much of the country; it was gentlemen's estates, where they enclosed the best land, and planted it with shrubs, that he disliked to see. "Vanity pleasures," the old labourer called them.
Of Saturday night in a village inn be warned, ye pedestrians, especially if it be haymaking or harvesting. It was not Saturday night when I tried to sleep at the inn at Findon; but it was the haymaking season. Hour after hour passed away in songs, always followed by the delighted thumping of hob-nailed boots. As the small hours drew nigh the riot seemed to grow worse. Forms were knocked down, and, as batch after batch turned out with yells and fearful whoops, I thought of Comus and his rout:—
"Midnight song and revelry,
Tipsy dance and jollity."
Next morning, as I ascended the hill-side, I met a group of children. One, an honest-faced little maid, with a good-natured snub, had been picking totter-grass with her chubby-faced baby brother. I spoke to them, and admired their little sheaf of grass. Sally put out her hand in an uncouth way. "Oo," she said; but it was courteously meant, and I never felt more pleasure in receiving any present than I did this.
The night before I met a gentle little fellow in the village, with blue eyes, high narrow forehead, and delicate complexion—just such a boy as John Clare might have been. His sleeves were tucked up to his elbows, and he was wheeling a barrow, but courtesy was inbred, and every time he spoke he touched his hat. He worked during summer, and went to school in winter; rose at six, and worked away from seven or eight until nine or ten in the evening—let us hope with plenty of time to play about a bit, as well as to eat his meals.
Higher and higher I mount over the soft green sward, until I reach my goal—Chanctonbery Ring. As I wandered round its base a panorama such as one sees nowhere else lay spread out before my eyes. Here, like a living map, the verdant weald, intersected by a thousand hedgerows, stretched for many a mile, dotted with leafy parks and dark umbrageous woodlands: while from among the trees peep the towns and villages, each nestling around its ancient church, the whole scene closed in by the forest ridge which rises far off, crowned with dark fir copses.
In the centre of the ring is an open space, soft with the debris of a hundred autumns. The giant elms stretch out their long arms and shade it from the sun; while those around send up their branches heavenwards. On one side is a wood of pines, through which the wind moans mournful as the roar of the waves on the sea-shore.
Beneath their shadow was an old shepherd tending his flock. He was an old man—seventy-five years of age, he said; but he looked much younger. His hair was only partially grey, and his honest face might have been quite handsome, had it not been for a rather Hebrew nose which the winds of sixty years had coloured into a bright red. He was a man of character, and spoke in a strong, decided manner, but with no roughness. "You be right, sir," said he again and again. "Sure it be, sir."
But when I tried to learn something about the way a shepherd was paid he would give me no direct answer. Perhaps he thought it beneath his self-respect to do so; or maybe it was his Sussex breeding, so that he naturally fenced with any question which he deemed important.
In former times the shepherd had an interest in the flock. Shepherds kept their own sheep amongst those of their masters, just as Jacob kept his among the flocks of Laban. Many, too, had their own little bits of land. "Shepherds' Acres" is still the name attached to some pieces of ground, but they are all absorbed into the larger properties. The possession of property, however small, gives a permanent character to a family, so that there were shepherding families on the South Downs who, if they had consulted the parish register, could have traced their ancestry as far back as the times of the Stuarts.
The old shepherd of Chanctonbery Ring was not, however, a hireling. He knew every sheep in his flock personally, and thought the sheep knew him. He had been "sixty years on the Downs, Sundays and week-days, and had his health, sure, thank God."
During the present summer[1] found my way into the cottage of a Southdown shepherd, who had pursued his calling for well-nigh seventy years. Old H—— was a fine intelligent man, with a forehead large enough for a professor, arched, characteristic eyebrows, and a mouth full of humour. In came his ancient comrade, Peter, an honest and true-hearted old worthy. They both complained sadly of the change in the position and prospects of the shepherding life now-a-days. They corroborated the fact that a shepherd was formerly allowed to keep his own sheep among the flocks of his master, and instanced the case of one shepherd who, if I remember right, possessed as many as seventy sheep, all bought out of his I own earnings. Now the masters objected even to their keeping a hog.
Forty or fifty years ago a shepherd's wages were seventeen or eighteen shillings a week; at present sixteen or seventeen is the highest amount he can get. Everything is dearer now than then, except bread, which old H—— had known as high as three shillings and a penny the gallon since he had been married. They reckoned that every member in a household consumed a gallon of flour per week, so that one may readily calculate from' this what a man, his wife, and six children would require.
Peter had to pay two and sixpence a week for his cottage, and it had, I think he said, no garden.
Old H—— had been in one situation where he never went home to his dinner from year's end to year's end, Sundays and Christmas Day included.
Winter was bad enough, what with wind, and rain, and cold; but summer was worse. It was anxious work to keep the sheep from straying, but the great trouble was to keep the flock free from their terrible enemy, the blow-fly. This miserable insect lays its eggs in the wool of the poor sheep, and the maggots become alive in four-and-twenty hours, and begin at once to feed on their victims. Directly a sheep is "struck," as they call it, the only remedy is to shear it at once, for if not quickly relieved it will faint from exhaustion.
These men were respectable in the best sense, yet they evidently thought it no degradation to take the parish money. At the basis of all their thoughts about life lay quite unconsciously communist principles. They had a right to live; and if they, by hard labour, could not keep themselves and their families, then the parish was bound to step in and provide whatever was necessary. Therefore it appeared to them that the increased strictness of the parish now-a-days in giving relief was an additional element of hardness in the poor man's lot. In former times, they said, every man who had more than three children received a gallon of flour per week from the parish for each additional child; now nothing is given, except in the case of absolute need.
They had both gone to work when about seven years of age, and had never had a day's schooling in their lives. Peter could read a little, but old H—— could not read at all. They could scarcely ever go to church. Sometimes, if they happened to have two or three trusty boys, they might venture to leave the flock.
Old H—— had had several children, but like most other grown-up families—
"Some were wed, and some were dead,
And some were gone to sea."
Lately he had lost his wife and a poor deaf and dumb son, who had notwithstanding been a great comfort to him. Both the old father and Peter were loud in his praise. It was good to see the affection the old friends had for each other.
All of a sudden Peter rose and bid me good-night. I took out a shilling, remarking that perhaps he knew some poor man who might want it. He looked at the shilling, and, turning round, gave it to his old comrade, saying, "Well, I do know a poor man, and this is him;" and then, without waiting for thanks, he was gone. Old H—— received it with a meek dignity truly admirable.
In former times every shepherd had his hut on the Downs. Sometimes it was a cave scooped out of the side of a bank, lined with heath or straw, and covered with sods of turf or hawthorn boughs. Here in rough weather the shepherd took refuge and watched his sheep. Sometimes he would read or otherwise amuse himself. "It was in my hut," said one of these worthies to Mr Lower, "that I first read about Moses and his shepherding life and about David's killing of the lion and the bear. Ah, how glad I felt that we hadn't such wild beastes to frighten, and maybe kill our sheep and us."
But still they had some enemies to contend with that do not exist now. Foxes would sometimes kill the young lambs, and ravens pick out the eyes of a poor ewe that had fallen down some steep part of the hill. Buzzards and wild turkeys frequented the Downs, and at times even an eagle made its appearance.
When June came sheep-shearing was performed with patriarchal joviality and good-fellowship. The men formed themselves into companies, and appointed a captain and a lieutenant. The former was distinguished by a cap with a gold band, the latter wore a silver one. Then they met at the cottage of the captain, where they had a feast and arranged their plans.
On the morning appointed they all assemble at the spot by seven o'clock: breakfast over they set to work. Clip, clip, went the shears, with many a merry laugh and shout; but the men worked with a will, only stopping for a short breathing-time, which they called lighting up, when they refreshed themselves with draughts of home-brewed ale, poured out by the farmer's daughter with no stinted hand. Dinner was a short meal, for they all looked forward to the event of the day—the sheep-shearing supper. And what a feast it was!—held in the barn or great kitchen of the farmhouse. The farmer and his wife would be present, and "Eat, drink, and spare not" was the welcome given to the guests.
Merry became the company as the evening advanced. Ere long they began to clear their throats, and pipe in hand, out came the old traditional songs sung to the old traditional tunes. Here is a true old Sussex sheep-shearing song. It has real pastoral flavour about it, and looks as if it might be co-eval with Shakespere. The first and last stanzas will afford a specimen of the rest:—
"Here's the rosebuds in June and the violets are blowing,
The small birds they warble from every green bough;
Here's the pink and the lily,
And the daffydowndilly,
To perfume and adorn the sweet meadows in June
'Tis all before the plough the fat oxen go slow,
But the lads and the lassies to the sheep-shearing go.······
When the sheep-shearing's over and harvest draws nigh,
We'll prepare for the fields our strength for to try;
We'll reap and we'll mow,
We'll plough and we'll sow.
Oh, the pink and the lily,
And the dafifydowndilly!" etc.
- ↑ 1871.