An Old English Home and Its Dependencies

But for all that he was regarded with suspicion, there was a sense of something picturesque, romantic about the miller. He was a type of the genial, self-reliant Englishman; and the writer of the well-known song of the Miller of Dee hit him off to a nicety: —

"There was a jolly miller once lived by the River Dee;He worked and sang from morn till night; no lark more blithe than he;And this the burden of his song for ever used to be,I care for nobody, no, not I, if nobody cares for me."

That the miller is esteemed to be a shrewd man appears from such songs and plays as the "Miller of Mansfield."

So also the miller's daughter forms a topic for many a story, play and song, never with a sneer, always spoken of with admiration, not only because she is goodly, but a type of neatness, and "cleanliness comes next to goodliness." The new machinery and steam are fast displacing the old mills that were turned by water, and the old dusty miller is giving place to the trim gentleman who does most of the work in the office, without whitening his coat.

I know an aged miller and his wife who had been for years occupying a quaint old-fashioned mill of the simplest construction, and which answered all purposes required in the village. But a few years ago a new venture was started – a great mill worked by steam, and with electric lighting through it, and now no corn is sent to the ancient mill that is crumbling and rotting away, and the old people are decaying within it.

"Thomas," said I one evening over the fire to this miller, "how long have you been married?"

"Fifty years next Michaelmas."

"And when did you court your wife? When did you find the right one?"

"Lor bless y', sir, I can't mind the time when we weren't courting each other. I b'lieve us began as babbies. Us knowed each other as long as us knowed anything at all. Us went to school together – us larned our letters together, us was vaccinated together, her was took from my arm; and us growed up together."

"And when did you first think of making her yours?"

"Bless y', sir, I never first thought on it at all; I never thought other from the time I began to think but that it must be – it wor ordained so."

"Have you children?"

"Yes; they be all out in the world and doing well. We haven't to blush for any of them – men and maids all alike – respectable."

"Then you ought to be very happy."

"I reckon us ought, and us should be but for that new mill."

"It is spoiling your custom?"

"It is killin' of us old folks out. It isn't so much that us gets no grinding I mind, but it leaves me and my Anne with no means in our old age, and us don't like to go on to the childer, and us don't like to go into the work'us. There it is. Us did reckon on being able honestly to get our bread for ourselves and ax nobody for nothing. But now this ere new mill wi' the steam ingens and the electric light – someone must pay for all that, and who is that but the customers? I've no electric light here, water costs nothing. Coals costs twenty-one shillings a ton, and it takes a deal o' coals to make the ingen march. Who pays for the coals? Who pays for the electric light? The customers get the flour at the same price as I send it out with none of them jangangles. How do they manage it? I reckon the corn is tampered with – there's white china-clay or something put wi' the flour. It can't be done otherwise. But I reckon folk like to say, 'Our flour comed from that there mill worked wi' steam and lighted by electric light,' and if they have those things, then, I say they can't have pure flour. So it must be, I think, but folk say that I am an old stoopid and don't understand nothing. All I can say is I can turn out wholesome flour, and niver put nothing in but corn grains, and niver turned out nothing but corn flour, wheat and oat and barley."

On the day of the golden wedding of the old couple I visited them. I made a point of this, and brought them some little comfort.

I found them very happy. A son and a daughter had taken a holiday to see their parents and congratulate them. The parson's wife had sent in a plum pudding, the squire a bottle of old port. Several friends had remembered them – even the miller in the new style, who had electric light and steam power, had contributed a cake. There were nuts and oranges – but perhaps the present which gave most gratification was a doll, a miller with a floured face, sent by a grandchild with a rough scrawl. I supply the stops to make it intelligible.

"Dear Grandada and Granny, – At skool, teacher said old pipple go into a sekond childood. So has you be so tremenjous old you must be orful babies. I think you will want a doll, so i sends you wun, with mutch love, and i drest the doll myself as a miller. Hever yors, dear grandada and granny. – Rosie."

Though the village mill usually – almost always – presents a pleasant picture in one's memory, a picture of cheerfulness and content, of good nature and neatness, it is not always so. I remember one mill which carries with it a sadness whenever I recall it. Not that the mill was gloomy in itself, but that the story connected with it was such as to make one sad.

The miller, whom we will call Pike, was unhappily somewhat inclined to drink. He was not an intemperate man at home, far from it; and in his mill, at his work, he was always sober. But when he went to market, when he got among boon companions, he was unable to resist the temptation of taking more than was good for his head. He did a very respectable business, and turned over a good deal of money, and was altogether a "warm" man. One day he went to market and gathered in there several debts that were owing him, and put all his money, amounting to twenty-five pounds seventeen and sixpence, in a pouch of leather, tied a bit of string round the neck, put it in his pocket – that of his overcoat as it happened, and not in his trousers or his breast pocket – and, mounting his tax cart, drove home.

The evening had closed in, and part of his way was through a wood, where the shadows lay thick and inky. Whether it were that he had drunk too much or that the road was too dark to see his way well, I cannot say, but it is certain that the miller was upset and flung into the hedge.

Just then up came a workman, a man named Richard Crooke, who caught the horse, righted the cart, and helped Pike, the miller, into his seat again. Pike was shaken but not hurt. He was confused in his mind, not, however, so much so as to fail to know who had assisted him, and to thank him for it.

On reaching home he at once put up his horse, and entering his house, and going upstairs, took off his overcoat, found it was torn and in a shocking condition of dirt, wherefore he threw it aside and went to bed.

He slept till late next morning, and when he woke he remembered but uncertainly the events of the previous evening. However, after he had had a cup of strong tea made for him by his mother – he was a widower without children, and his mother kept house for him – he began to recall events more distinctly, and then, with a start, he remembered his money bag. He hastily ran upstairs to the torn and soiled overcoat and felt in all the pockets. The bag of gold and silver was gone.

In a panic Pike rushed out of the house and ran to the scene of his accident. He searched there wherever there were tokens of the upset, and they were plain in the mud and the bruised twigs of the bushes. Not a trace of the bag that contained so much money could he find, not one ha'penny out of the twenty-five pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence did he recover.

He went to Crooke's cottage to question him. The man was out. He was horseman to one of the farmers, so Pike pursued him to the farm and found him ploughing. He asked him if he had seen – picked up anything. No – Crooke had not observed anything. Indeed, as he remarked, the night was too dark, and the blackness under the trees was too complete for him to have seen anything that had been dropped. Crooke seemed somewhat nettled at being questioned. Of course, had he noticed anything belonging to the miller fallen out of his trap, or out of his pockets, he would have handed it to the owner.

Pike was not satisfied. He was convinced that no one had been over the by-road that morning before he examined it, as it led only to the mill and to the farm where Crooke worked.

What had become of the money? Had anyone retained it?

Not long afterwards, to the astonishment of the miller and some of the farmers, Crooke bought a little property, a cottage and a couple of fields. There was no doubt that he had borrowed some of the money requisite; he said he had saved the rest. Was that possible? From that moment a strong and ineradicable conviction formed in Pike's mind that he had been robbed by Richard Crooke.

With envy and rage he watched the husbandman move into his little tenement, and begin to till his field. Pike considered that this tenement was his own by rights. Crooke had bought it with the miller's money taken from him on the night when he was upset. Crooke had taken advantage of his being a little fresh, and a little confused by the fall, to purloin the bag containing twenty-five pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence.

From this time all joy, all cheeriness was gone from the life of the miller; his heart turned bitter as gall, and all his bitterness was directed against Richard Crooke. He brooded over his wrong. He did not venture openly to accuse the man he suspected, but he dropped hints which prejudiced opinion against Crooke. But everyone knew that this Richard had been a careful man, saving his money.

Pike watched the corn grow on Crooke's field; he wished a blight might fall upon it. But it throve, the ears were heavy, it was harvested in splendid condition, and stacked in the corner of the field.

Then, one night the corn rick was on fire. This was the work of an incendiary. It must have been done wilfully, and by someone who bore Crooke a grudge. Richard had not insured, and the loss to him was a very serious matter. It might have been ruin had not a "brief" been got up and some pounds subscribed to relieve him.

No one could say who had done the deed. Yet nobody doubted who the incendiary had been. Nothing could be proved against anyone.

A twelvemonth passed. A malevolent pleasure had filled the heart of the miller when he had heard that Crooke's stack was consumed, and he somewhat ostentatiously gave half a sovereign to the brief. He was angry and offended when the half-sovereign was returned him. Richard Crooke declined to receive his contribution.

During the year Pike's character deteriorated; he went more frequently to the public-house, he neglected his work, and what he did was done badly.

Then one morning – on opening his eyes in bed, they fell on a little recess in the wall, high up beyond most people's reach, a place where he had been wont to put away things he valued and did not desire should be meddled with. A sudden thought, a suspicion, flashed across his mind. He started from bed, put his hand into the recess, and drew forth his money bag, opened it and counted out twenty-five pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence.

On returning home, the night of his accident, he had taken the bag out of his torn and sullied overcoat pocket, had put it in this hiding-place, and forgotten all about it. He hastily dressed himself – he would eat no breakfast, but drank brandy, several glasses full – went out, and when next seen was a corpse, dragged out of his mill-pond, hugging his money bag.

Not till then were mouths unlocked, and men said that Pike, angered at his loss, believing that Crooke had robbed him, had fired the stack; and that when he found out his mistake, in shame and remorse, and uncertain how he could remedy the wrong done – he had destroyed himself.

CHAPTER IX.

The Farmhouse

As the sun to the planets so stands the manor-house to the farms on the manor; that is to say, so far as the relations of dignity and dependence go. But the sun gives to its satellites and receives nothing, whereas from the lord of the manor come the loan of land, of house, and of farm-buildings, for which loan the tenant pays a rent, that is to say, so much interest on so much capital placed at his disposal. An old English farmhouse that has not been meddled with is a very interesting study. It represents to us the type of our manor-houses before the reign of the Tudors. Owing to the prosperity which England enjoyed at the cessation of the Wars of the Roses our gentry rebuilt their houses, and rebuilt yet again, as fashions changed, so that we have very few of the manor-houses left that were erected before Tudor times.

The old farmhouse in England is in plan very much what the old manoir was in France. I will take a plan and give a drawing of that of Anseremme on the Meuse near Dinant. This has the parish church attached to it, as it not infrequently was to the manor-house in England.

The dwelling-house forms one side of the courtyard. The other sides are occupied by farm-buildings, stables, cart-sheds, granaries, etc.

To reach the front door of the house one must wade through straw trampled by cattle and oozing with manure. Our forefathers did not mind that. Our farmers of the right sort love it. A farmer whose heart does not glow at stable and cowstall manure has missed his vocation. But everything in its place, and the unfortunate feature of this paving of manure was that it adhered to boots and entered the house. This mattered little when halls were strewn with rushes. But when polished oak boards and next carpets came in, the entrance to the house had to be altered, so that at least the women-kind need not tread over ankles in manure before entering the house.

Where there is a farmhouse there must be a court in which the cattle can run, and where better than under the eye of the master and mistress.

But there was, and is, another, and more serious, drawback. Wells have been sunk close to the houses, and very generally in intimate relation to the courtyard. The result is that in a great many cases the water in the wells becomes contaminated. It is really amazing how many centuries have rolled by without people discovering the fact that such proximity produces contamination, and such contamination leads to diphtheria, or typhoid fever. But stupidity is ever with us, so I do not wonder. Here is a fact. In a certain village of over a thousand inhabitants, that I knew, there is a National School, which having an endowment commands the services of a first-class schoolmaster.

Now it fell out that water from a beautiful spring among the hills was brought into this village, and a tap placed outside the schoolmasters residence.

Said the village schoolmaster to himself, "If I use this water I shall have to pay the rate. If I don't I cannot be called upon for it. I will get all my water from the well in the adjoining farmyard." He did so, and his young wife and child died of diphtheria.

Now, if a man like a cultured schoolmaster at the close of the nineteenth century will act like this, is it a marvel that our forefathers, who were without the means of knowing better, should have made such mistakes?

A merciful Providence must have brooded over our ancestors and protected them; how else is it possible that they were not all swept away, and none left to be the progenitors of our own enlightened selves?

I suppose that systems adapted themselves to their surroundings and to what they assimilated, and our forbears got into the way of fattening and thriving on bacilli, germs, and all like horrors.

But to return to the farmhouse.

In one that is well-conducted, the court in which pigs wallow, bullocks poach the litter, ducks waddle, and find nutriment in what would be death to all other creatures, is the nucleus and treasury, the cream of the whole farm. Having considered the plan of the Walloon Manoir, look at a plan of an old English farm congeries of buildings. Is it not clear that – omitting the church – the type is the same?

The old-fashioned farmer, like the old-fashioned squire, did not ask to have a view of distant horizons from his windows, but sought to look upon his stock and see that it throve.

It was, may be, more riskful to leave cattle about in the fields in former days, though I am not very sure of that. England was always a quiet, law-abiding, well-conducted country. And perhaps the cattle at one time may have been driven into the pen for the night, about the masters house. His court was his kraal. But that was long, long ago, when there were wolves and cattle-lifters in the land. In ordered times only ewes at lambing time, and cows about to calve, and young bullocks were kept in the courtyard; and the calves that the dairymaid had to feed, by dipping her hand in milk and then giving it to the long-legged, silly creatures to suck.

The cows were milked in the fields, and milked by the dairymaids. Then that fashion was abandoned, and cows were driven to the stables to be there milked, and these cowhouses were so deep in manure as to dirty the skirts and white stockings of the maids, so they withdrew from the task, and now only men milk the cows.

Alas for the dairymaid! That charming, merry, innocent ideal of a country girl. Indeed to be a milkmaid and to be merry were almost synonymous in the olden time. Sir Thomas Overbury, in his "Character of a Milkmaid," says: "She dares go alone, and unfold her sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none; yet, to say truth, she is never alone: she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones."

In the "Character of a Ballad-monger," in Whimzies, 1631, we find: "Stale ballad news, cashiered the city, must now ride fast for the country, where it is no less admired than a giant in a pageant: till at last it grows so common there, too, as every poor milkmaid can chant and chirp it under her cow, which she useth as a harmless charm to make her let down her milk."

In Beaumont and Fletcher's play, The Coxcomb, Nan, the Milkmaid, says:

"Come, you shall e'en home with me, and be our fellow;Our home is so honest!And we serve a very good woman, and a gentlewoman;And we live as merrily, and dance o' good daysAfter evensong. Our wake shall be on Sunday:Do you know what a wake is? – we have mighty cheer then."

Who does not remember old Isaac Walton and his merry ballad-singing dairymaid?

Pepys, in his Diary, 13th October, 1662, writes: "With my father took a melancholy walk to Portholme, seeing the country-maids milking their cows there, they being there now at grass; and to see with what mirth they come all home together in pomp with their milk, and sometimes they have music go before them."

"When cold bleak winds do roar,And flowers can spring no more,The fields that were seenSo pleasant and greenBy winter all candied o'er:Oh! how the town lassLooks, with her white faceAnd lips so deadly pale.But it is not soWith those that goThrough frost and snow,With cheeks that glow,To carry the milking pail."

On May-day was the festival of the milkmaids. I can remember, in 1845, seeing Jack in the Green and Maid Marian parading in the Strand.

Pepys, in his Diary, on the 1st May, 1667, enters – "To Westminster; on the way meeting many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them."

In a set of prints called "Tempest's Cryes of Lon'on," one is called "The Merry Milkmaid," whose proper name was Kate Smith. She is dancing with her milk-pail on her head, decorated with silver cups, tankards, and salvers, borrowed for the purpose, and tied together with ribbands, and ornamented with flowers. "Of later years, the plate, with other decorations, were placed in a pyramidical form, and carried by two chairmen upon a wooden horse. The milkmaids walked before it, and performed the dance without any encumbrance."

In a curious German account of London and London life, written by Otto Von Rosenberg, and published at Leipzig in 1834, is a picture of a milkmaids' May dance; but in London it had become a chimney-sweeps' performance in place of one of milkmaids. In the country it maintained its character as a festival of dairymaids. Rosenberg thus describes it:

"A hobbledehoy youth leads the procession with a three-cornered cocked hat on his head, pasted over with gilt paper. Eyebrows and cheeks are strongly marked with paint. A coat of gay colour flaps about his body, and this coat is imitated from the uniform of a French field-marshal, and is sown over with flowers and ornaments of gilt paper. Over his right shoulder hangs a red silk band, to which a wooden sword is attached. His knee-breeches and stockings are white. He is followed by a figure from head to toe buried under a conical structure, which is woven round with fresh may, and at the summit has a crown. This object has no other purport than to hobble after the rest.

"To complete the trefoil is a girl who stands in no way behind Netherland damsels in beauty and lively movements. Her hair, which in the morning had been carefully done up in braids, becomes disengaged by the action and heat, and her incessant leaps and twirls, and finally falls about her shoulders like that of a fury. She wears a low dress and short sleeves of white very transparent texture reaching to her calves, and exposing below rather massive feet, which are wound about with green. In her hand she waves a great wooden spoon, and this she extends to the windows for gratuities. But as she dances through the streets she brandishes this great spoon above her head, like a witch who is invoking a spirit."6

Alack-a-day! The milkmaid is a creature of the past. Now in farmhouses there is great difficulty in getting any girl to work. They want to go to the towns, or consider themselves too highly educated to do menial work.

And the sower, the mower, the reaper and thrasher are also extinct.

I remember as a boy repeatedly watching a sower pacing up and down a field strewing the corn to right and left from the wooden seed-lap carried in front, and thinking what a picture it made. Now corn is sown with a drill.

In the very early morning, as the sun rose and the dew was on the grass, it was pleasant of old to hear the musical whetting of the scythe, and then the hiss as the blade swept through the herb and shore it down. That is no more. The grass is mown in the meadows by the mechanical mower, and on the lawn by a contrivance whose movements are anything but musical. In former days also the harvesting was a real delight. The reapers, with their hooks, worked their way along in rows. It cannot be better described than in the Harvest Song, well known in the south-west of England:

"The corn is all ripe, and the reapings begin,The fruits of the earth, O we gather them in;At morning so early the reap-hooks we grind,And away to the fields for to reap and to bind;The foreman goes first in the hot summer glow,And he sings with a laugh, my lads, all of a row.Then, all of a row! then  all of a row!And to-night we  will sing boys  All of a row!"We're in, says the catchpole, behind and before,We'll have a fresh edge and a sheaf or two more.The master stands back for to see us behind;Well done, honest fellow's, bring the sheaves to the bind.Well done, honest fellows, pare up your first brink,You shall have a fresh edge, and a half pint to drink.Then, all of a row! etc."And so we go through the heat of the day,Some reaping, some binding, all merry and gay.We'll reap and we'll bind, we will whistle and sing,Unflagging until the last sheaf we bring in.It's all our enjoyment wherever we go,To work and to sing, Brothers, all of a row.Then, all of a row! etc."Our day's work is done, to the farmhouse we steer,To eat a good supper and drink humming beer;We wish the good farmer all blessings in life,And drink to his health, and as well to his wife.God prosper the grain for next harvest we sow,When again in the arrish we'll sing, Boys, hallo!Then, all in a row! etc."

When the reapers had cut nearly the whole field they reached a portion that had been purposely left, and this, instead of attacking in row, they surrounded, shouting "A neck! a neck!" and of this the last sheaf was fashioned, and on top of it was a little figure formed of plaited corn, and this was conveyed in triumph to the garner.

My old coachman, who had served three generations of my family and had seen four, was the last man who made these corn-men in our neighbourhood, and long after the custom had been abandoned, he was wont on every harvest thanksgiving to produce one of these comical figures for suspension in the church. The head was made of a tuft of barley, and flowers were interwoven with the rest.