Dickens's England (20 page)

A COUNTRY CRICKET MATCH

I doubt if there be any scene in the world more animating or delightful than a cricket match! I do not mean a set match at Lord's ground for money, hard money, between a certain number of gentlemen and players, as they are called, people who make a trade of that noble sport, and degrade it into an affair of bettings, and hedgings, and cheatings, it may be, like boxing or horse-racing . . . No! the cricket that I mean is a real solid old-fashioned match between neighbouring parishes, where each attacks the other for honour and a supper, glory and half a crown [2s 6d] a man. . . . Our country lads, accustomed to the flail or the hammer (your blacksmiths are capital hitters), have the free use of their arms; they know how to move their shoulders; and they can move their feet too – they can run; then they are so much better made, so much more athletic, and yet so much lissomer – to use a Hampshire phrase which deserves at least to be good English. Here and there, indeed, one meets with an old Etonian who retains his boyish love for that game which formed so considerable a branch of his education; some even preserve their boyish proficiency, but in general it wears away like the Greek, quite as certainly, and almost as fast. . . . No! a village match is the thing, where our highest officer, our conductor (to borrow a musical term), is but a little farmer's second son; where a day labourer is our bowler, and a blacksmith our long-stop; where the spectators consist of the retired cricketers, the veterans of the green, the careful mothers, the girls, and all the boys of two parishes, together with a few amateurs, little above them in rank, and not at all in pretension; where laughing and shouting and the very ecstasy of merriment and good humour prevail – such a match, in short, as I attended yesterday, at the expense of getting twice wet through, and as I would attend tomorrow at the certainty of having that ducking doubled.

For the last three weeks our village has been in a state of great excitement, occasioned by a challenge from our north-western neighbours, the men of B., to contend with us at cricket. . . .

There is something strangely delightful in the innocent spirit of party. To be one of a numerous body, to be authorised to say
we,
to have a rightful interest in triumph or defeat, is gratifying at once to social feeling and to personal pride. There was not a ten-year-old urchin, or a septuagenery woman in the parish, who did not feel an additional importance, a reflected consequence, in speaking of ‘our side'. An election interests in the same way; but that feeling is less pure. Money is there, and hatred, and politics, and lies. Oh, to be a voter, or a voter's wife, comes nothing near the genuine and hearty sympathy of belonging to a parish . . . The sky promised a series of deluging showers, and kept its word, as English skies are wont to do on such occasions . . .

They
began the warfare – those boastful men of B. And what think you, gentle reader, was the amount of their innings? These challengers – the famous eleven – how many did they get? Think! imagine! guess! You cannot? Well, they got twenty-two, or rather they got twenty; for two of them were short notches, and would never have been allowed, only that, seeing what they were made of, we and our umpires were not particular. They should have had twenty more, if they had chosen to claim them. Oh, how well we fielded! and how well we bowled! Our good play had quite as much to do with their miserable failure as their bad. Samuel Long is a slow bowler, George Simmons a fast one, and the change from Long's lobbing to Simmons's fast balls posed them completely. Poor simpletons! they were always wrong; expecting the slow for the quick, and the quick for the slow. Well, we went in. And what were our innings? Guess again! – guess! A hundred and sixty-nine! In spite of soaking showers, and wretched ground, where the ball would not run a yard, we headed them by a hundred and forty-seven; and then they gave in, as well they might. . . .

Mary Russell Mitford,
Tales of Our Village
(1823–32)

FROM ‘OUR VILLAGE – BY A VILLAGER'

Our village, that's to say not Miss Mitford's village, but our village of Bullock Smithy,

Is come into by an avenue of trees, three oak pollards, two elders, and a withy;

And in the middle, there's a green of about not exceeding an acre and a half;

It's common to all, and fed off by nineteen cows, six ponies, three horses, five asses, two foals, seven pigs and a calf!

Besides a pond in the middle, as is held by a similar sort of common law lease,

And contains twenty ducks, six drakes, three ganders, two dead dogs, four drowned kittens, and twelve geese.

Of course the green's cropped very close, and does famous for bowling when the little village boys play at cricket;

Only some horse, or pig, or cow, or great jackass, is sure to come and stand right before the wicket.

There's fifty-five private houses, let alone barns and workshops, and pigsties, and poultry huts, and suchlike sheds;

With plenty of public-houses – two Foxes, one Green Man, three Bunch of Grapes, one Crown, and six King's Heads. . . .

There's one parish church for all the people, whatsoever may be their ranks in life or their degrees,

Except one very damp, small, dark, freezing cold, little Methodist chapel of ease;

And close by the churchyard there's a stonemason's yard, that when the time is seasonable

Will furnish with afflictions sore and marble urns and cherubins very low and reasonable. . . .

There's a shop of all sorts, that sells everything, kept by the widow of Mr Task;

But when you go there it's ten to one she's out of everything you ask. . . .

That's the Doctor's with a green door, where the garden pots in the windows is seen;

A weakly monthly rose that don't blow, and a dead geranium, and a tea-plant with five black leaves and one green.

As for hollyoaks at the cottage doors, and honeysuckles and jasmines, you may go and whistle;

But the tailor's front garden grows two cabbages, a dock, a ha'porth of pennyroyal, two dandelions and a thistle. . . .

There's another small day-school too, kept by the respectable Mrs Gaby,

A select establishment, for six little boys and one big, and four little girls and a baby.

There's a rectory, with pointed gables and strange odd chimneys that never smokes,

For the rector don't live on his living like other Christian sort of folks; . . .

There's a butcher's and a carpenter's and a plumber's and a small greengrocer's, and a baker,

But he won't bake on a Sunday, and there's a sexton that's a coal-merchant besides, and an undertaker; . . .

Now I've gone through all the village – aye, from end to end, save and except one house,

But I haven't come to that – and I hope I never shall – and that's the village poorhouse!

Thomas Hood (mid-nineteenth century)

CAPTAIN SWING

(I)

[In the 1820s and especially the 1830s, gangs of farm labourers went machine-wrecking, ascribing their actions to ‘Captain Swing'.]

All across the south, from Kent to Cornwall, and from Sussex to Lincolnshire, the commotion extends.

The labourers of England see, at any rate, that the
threshing-machines
rob them of the wages that they ought to receive. They, therefore, began by demolishing these machines. This was a
crime;
the magistrates and jailers were ready with punishments; soldiers, well fed and well clothed out of the taxes, were ready to shoot or cut down the offenders. Unable to resist these united forces, the labourers resorted to the use of
fire,
secretly put to the barns and stacks of those who had the machines, or whom they deemed the cause of their poverty and misery. The mischief and the alarm that they have caused by this means are beyond all calculation. They go in bands of from 100 to 1,000 men, and summon the farmers to come forth, and then they demand that they shall agree to pay them such wages as they think right; and you will please to observe, that even the wages that they demand are not so high by one third as their grandfathers received, taking into consideration
the taxes
that they have now to pay. . . .

The millions have, at last, broken forth; hunger has, at last, set stone walls at defiance, and braved the fetters and the gallows; nature has, at last, commanded the famishing man to get food. All the base and foolish endeavours to cause it to be believed that the fires are the work of
foreigners,
or of a
conspiracy,
or of
instigation
from others than labourers, only show that those who make these endeavours are conscious that they share, in some way or other, in the guilt of having been the real cause of the mischief.

William Cobbett,
The Political Register
(4 December 1830)

(II)

No one that had the misfortune to reside during the last winter in the disturbed districts of the south of England, will ever forget the awful impression of that terrible time. The stilly gatherings of the misguided peasantry amongst the wild hills, partly heath and partly woodland, of which so much of the northern part of Hampshire is composed . . . or the open and noisy meetings of determined men at noontide in the streets and greens of our Berkshire villages, and even sometimes in the very churchyards, sallying forth in small but resolute numbers to collect money or destroy machinery, and compelling or persuading their fellow labourers to join them at every farm they visited; or the sudden appearance and disappearance of these large bodies, who sometimes remained together to the amount of several hundreds for many days, and sometimes dispersed, one scarcely knew how, in a few hours; their daylight marches on the high road, regular and orderly as those of an army, or their midnight visits to lonely houses, lawless and terrific as the descent of pirates . . . all brought close to us a state of things which we never thought to have witnessed in peaceful and happy England. . . .

Nor were the preparations for defence, however necessary, less shocking than the apprehensions of attack. The hourly visits of bustling parish officers, bristling with importance (for our village, though in the centre of the insurgents, continued uncontaminated – ‘faithful amidst the unfaithful found' – and was, therefore, quite a rallying point for loyal men and true); the swearing in of whole regiments of petty constables; the stationary watchmen, who every hour, to prove their vigilance, sent in some poor wretch, beggar or match-seller, or rambling child, under the denomination of suspicious persons; the mounted patrol, whose deep ‘all's well', which ought to have been consolatory, was about the most alarming of all alarming sounds; the soldiers, transported from place to place in carts the better to catch the rogues, whose local knowledge gave them great advantage in a dispersal; the grave processions of magistrates and gentlemen on horseback; and above all, the nightly collecting of arms and armed men within our own dwelling [her father was chairman of the local bench of magistrates] kept up a continual sense of nervous inquietude.

Mary Russell Mitford,
Tales of Our Village
(1823–32)

NO FULL STOP

The celebrated Mr Robinson of Cambridge, who was fond of farming, gives in a letter to a friend a most striking view of the perpetual recurrence of the little occupations which present themselves to the practical farmer and, however apparently trivial, are really important, and full of pleasure to those whose hearts are in such pursuit. – ‘Rose at three o'clock; crawled into the library, and met one who said, “Work while ye have the light; the night cometh, when no man can work: my father worketh hitherto, and I work.” Rang the great bell, and roused the girls to milking, went up to the farm, roused the horsekeeper, fed the horses while he was getting up; called the boy to suckle the calves and clean out the cowhouse; lighted the pipe, walked round the garden to see what was wanted there; went up to the paddock to see if the boy had scooped and cleaned the boat; returned to the farm, examined the shoulders, heels, traces, chaff and corn of eight horses going to plough, mended the acre-staff [to scrape earth off the plough], cut some thongs, whipcorded the ploughboys' whips, pumped the troughs full, saw the hogs fed, examined the swill-tubs, and then the cellar; ordered a quarter of malt, for the hogs want grains, and the men want beer; filled the pipe again, returned to the river, and bought a lighter of turf for dairy fires, and another of sedge for ovens; hunted out the wheelbarrows and set them a-trundling; returned to the farm, called the men to breakfast, and cut the boys' bread and cheese, and saw the wooden bottles filled; sent one plough to the three roods, another to the three half-acres, and so on; shut the gates, and the clock struck five; breakfasted; set two men to ditch the five roods, two men to chop sods and spread about the land, two more to throw up manure in the yard, and three men and six women to weed wheat; set on the carpenter to repair cow-cribs and set them up till winter; the wheeler, to mend the old carts, cart-ladders, rakes, etc., preparatory to haytime and harvest; walked to the six-acres, found hogs in the grass, went back and set a man to hedge and thorn; sold the butcher a fat calf and the suckler a lean one. The clock strikes nine; walked into the barley-field; barleys fine – picked off a few tiles and stones, and cut a few thistles; the peas fine but foul; the charlock must be topped; the tares doubtful, the fly seems to have taken them; prayed for rain, but could not see a cloud; came round to the wheatfield, wheats rather thin, but the finest colour in the world; sent four women on to the shortest wheats; ordered one man to weed along the ridge of the long wheats, and two women to keep rank and file with him in the furrows; thistles many, bluebottles no end; traversed all the wheatfield, came to the fallow field; the ditchers have run crooked, set them straight; the flag sods cut too much, the rush sods too little, strength wasted, show the men how to three-corner them; laid out more work for the ditchers, went to the ploughs, set the foot a little higher, cut a wedge, set the coulter deeper, must go and get a new mould[earth]-board against tomorrow; went to the other plough, gathered up some wood and tied over the traces, mended a horse-tree, tied a thong to the plough-hammer, went to see which lands wanted ploughing first, sat down under a bush, wondered how any man could be so silly as to call me
reverend,
read two verses in the Bible of the loving-kindness of the Lord in the midst of his temple, hummed a tune of thankfulness, rose up, whistled, the dogs wagged their tails, and away we went, dined, drank some milk and fell asleep, woke by the carpenter for some slats which the sawyers must cut, etc., etc.'