Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

“She was terrible to meet,” continued Betty. “Once as I war walkin’ back to Homer after marketing at Wenlock, I looked up and Nan was full in my road, straight against the sky. How her had comed there, I don’t know, but there her war, terrible fierce and sudden, and her great eyes seemed to look through and through me, and I fair quailed before her, as they say a partridge does afore a hawk. Every one war feared of Nanny,” added old Betty, “for they felt before her as innocent as a child, and what war there as she couldn’t do to them?

“Nan lived on at Westwood and none dared say her nay, or to refuse her ought, and all the while she went on practising devil’s arts, till her got her death.”

“How was that?” I asked.

“Well, it war years agone.” And Betty thought for a moment and then added, “’Twas in the year 1857 that Nan got her deserts.

“There war a young lodger as had a bed at Nan’s, and Nan took to him terrible, and the lovinger her got the more he held back; and the witch played with ’um same as a cat does with a mouse, and wouldn’t let ’un off to marry his own sweetheart. So one evening, he went into Wenlock, and he bought a knife, and he stole back to her house, and she called him soft like a throstle. Then while she stirred her pot, he stabbed her to get free of her love philters. When Mr. Yates, who war mace-bearer and barber, comed up, he found Nan, they said, lying in a pool of blood, but they durst not undress her for fear of getting witch’s blood, and we all know that that is a special damnation.

“Her led a bad life, did Nan,” pursued old Betty; “her kept a swarm of cats, and one she called Hellblow and another Satan’s Smile, and her had a box of toads to work mysteries with, and these, they said, would hop at night, and leer and talk familiar as spirits, and besides these, there war a pack of wicked books. You yourself, mam, have her card-table where her used to sit. One leg of it higher than the rest, and the ledge below, was where her wickedest toad used to perch – it as they called ‘Dew,’ and that had been bred up on communion bread, to reveal secrets. Sometimes, I’ve heard, Nan would fall a-kissin’ that toad and whisper to it all sorts of unclean spells. I couldn’t abear the table. It might fall to speaking itself at nights, and then the devil only knows what it would say.”

There was a pause, and then old Betty went on to say —

“After Nan war buried, the books one and all war brought down to the Falcon’s Yard Inn and burnt publicly. So that war her end, and a wickeder woman never lived.”

As the sound of Betty’s last words died away, I heard the noise of horses’ feet gaily trotting up the lane.

“That will be my Bess,” I said, “and as the twilight is beginning, I must return.” Then I begged that Susie might come and tell me if there is anything I could send for Mrs. Harley, and we passed out of the door.

THE FIRST FLOWERS OF THE YEAR

As we neared the wicket, Bess called out, “Look, look, and see what I have found. Three snowdrops all white, a hazel nut-tail, and a nice sticky bud of a horse-chestnut; but never mind anything but the snowdrops, for they bring luck, Nana says.”

I took the first flowers of the year; what a dazzling white they were! And I recalled, as I held them, the old legend of the “white purification” as it was once called.

“And to think,” said Betty, smiling and noting our joy over the flowers, “as I haven’t a blow to give my pretty,” and she smiled at Bess; “but us has nought in blow, save a bud or two of the damsons, and I dursn’t pull it, for folks say, him as pulls fruit blossom deserves the same as her as burns bread-crumbs, and I wouldn’t bring her any ill-chance.”

Then I passed out of the little cottage precincts. I saw old Betty still holding the gate, a dim figure with a red shawl. Bess blew her a kiss, the dogs barked furiously; even Mouse joined in her deep bell notes, and once more we were under way on our own homeward journey.

A soft grey mist gathered round us, with the growing darkness. All was very still after a few minutes, and the only sound that we heard was the baying of a dog in the distance at some lonely farm.

Far away in the west gleamed a golden light. Once we passed a brown figure of some labouring man returning to his cottage, and as we neared a thicket of budding blackthorn we were greeted by the voice of a throstle singing his evening hymn. I carried my flowers reverently, for were they not the first promise of spring, the smile, as it were, of the scarce known year?

“Mum,” said Bess, as I lifted her off Jill’s back, “could you spare me one of the snowdrops to keep in my own nursery?”

I nodded acquiescence.

“Because,” pursued the child, “I should like one. Just one. It would help me, I think, to keep away eyes, and bad words, and perhaps might make me good and happy. Nan says they used to bring in snowdrops to make the children good, let me try, too.”

CHAPTER III

MARCH

“To birdes and beestesThat no blisse ne knoweth,And wild worms in wodesThrough wynter thou them grievest,And makest hem welneigh meke,And mylde for defaute,And after thou sendest hem somer,That is hiz sovereign joye,And blisse to all that be,Both wilde and tame.”Vision of Piers Ploughman.

The winds of heaven were blowing, blowing; dust was flying on the roads. The old saying that “a peck is worth a king’s ransom” returned to my mind. February fill-dyke had filled the springs and the streams, and now March with his gay sun, and wild winds was drying them as hard as he could. How pleasant it was to see the sun again! He had been almost a stranger in the cold dark months of the young year. Yet early as it was, Phœbus was proud and glorious and at his fiery darts all nature seemed to begin and start life afresh.

Man, beast, and bird, all felt the mysterious influence of spring, whilst up the stems of all the trees and plants, the sap began to mount again.

I woke up early, but the world had already commenced its work, golden rays of sunlight were pouring into the windows and I found, too, that the restlessness of nature had seized me also, so I went and peeped out of an old chamber that commanded the eastern garden.

Outside, there was a sense of great awakening – the sun flashed merrily down on the frosty turf, and the congealed drops were already fast disappearing into the ground. Starlings hurried, hither and thither, like iridescent jewels, snowdrops lifted their heads and waved them triumphantly in the breeze. The quice, as Shropshire folk call wood-pigeons, I heard cooing in their sweet persuasive note in a distant chestnut, and as I fastened back the window the musical hum of bees sporting in the crocuses, caught my ear.

From the end of the border ascended the fragrance of a clump of violets. How sweet is the return of spring, I murmured, and how wonderful. What a joy, one of the joys we can never grow tired of, or too old to feel afresh each year. Winter seems so long, and the awakening and sweet summer all too short.

I returned to my room, dressed quickly, and then went out into the garden.

THE SONG OF BIRDS

Life, life seemed everywhere. The wild birds were singing, calling, flying backwards and forwards and seeking food. The speckled storm-cock, as they call the missel thrush in Shropshire, was singing gloriously on the top branch of a gnarled apple tree, whilst from a bush of ribes as I passed along, a frightened blackbird lumbered away with his angry protesting rattle. How handsome he is, the cock blackbird, with his plumage of raven hue, and his golden dagger of a beak. In the twilight how irresistible is the deep regret of his song. It is a song, sweet, tender, full of old memories, and brings back in its subtle melancholy, dear faces, and the touch of dear lost hands that helped and loved us once. The blackbird’s note is quite different from the thrush; the thrush’s song is all pure joy, and glad expectation. He sings of morning, and all his notes are in a major key. He chants of wholesome work, of brave endeavour, and of spring gladness. His rapture is like that of the early poets. No note of sorrow dulls his glorious morning. Joy, health, happiness, these are the keynotes of his rhapsody – and we are grateful to him as we are grateful for the sunshine, for the laughter of children, and for the scent of flowers. It is hard to say which song we love best. But why choose, for are not both God’s feathered choristers, and their songs our earliest melodies of childhood?

How feverishly busy everything was that morning, and how seriously all living things took the annual dawn of life. The birds on the lawns were pecking, pecking everywhere, finding food and seeking materials for the future homes of their young.

I stood quite still, against an ivied wall, and watched an old thrush bring up a fat snail in her beak. In a second she had cracked the shell upon a monastic stone, and was feasting greedily on the contents. When she had flown away, I examined the bits of broken shell, and discovered that they were of a dull brownish colour, and that the snail was one of the kind that the Clugniac monks are said to have brought with them from France, when Roger the great Earl of Montgomery, brought over his band of monks from La Charité sur Loire, and founded his monastery at Wenlock soon after the Conquest.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth century snails of this kind, “Escargots” as they were then termed, and still are called in France, were constantly used as a remedy “for restoring a right motion of the heart, and for casting out melancholy.” A cure, it is said, was also wrought by a “cunning jelly” made from them, and this was supposed to be “proper” food for those who “dwindered” or who were “subject to a weak, or queasy stomach.”

In the fourteenth century, I have been told, snails were sold at Bath and in other towns in the west, to such as had consumptive tendencies. Knowing this, and seeing how much escargots were used in the Middle Ages, not only as a delicacy by the monks and nobles, but also in medicine with herbs, presumably amongst the poor, it is curious now, the horror that exists at the thought of eating either snails or frogs. At first, when I gave some dinners to the very needy, they would hardly dare come for them, and declared that they were sure that in Auguste’s ragouts there would be found some lurking, somewhere.

“Us doesn’t dare to search in the broth,” one old man said, “for us doesn’t know what low beasts, slugs, snails, tadpoles, and what not a foreigner mightn’t mix in.” But now happily they are reassured, and old Ged Bebb told me only last week, “That, for all that they war heathan (the cook men), the meat war good, and proper, and what Christian folks cud eat.”

FLOWERS OF TWILIGHT

I passed into the old red-walled garden and stopped to admire the long line of brilliant yellow crocuses. They were all aglow in the brilliant sunlight, and stood drawn up like a regiment of soldiers in line. I stood entranced, for each soldier seemed to be holding a lamp, and in each lamp, or cup, the sun was reflected in a wonderful golden glory. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the beauty of golden crocuses in golden sunlight. They seem to fill the world with gladness and to be March’s crowning glory. I stopped and looked at my clumps of crocuses, they were coming up gaily, but were yet hardly in blossom.

Burbidge put in for me strong clumps of Sir Walter Scott, Rizzio, and of beautiful Mont Blanc. All these were pushing up bravely, out of their mother earth. In fact, they were bursting, as Bess calls it, to be out.

A minute later, I turned to inspect my chionodoxas and scillas. A few were coming into bloom. Luciliae had several sprays of delicate china blue and white flowers, and coppery two-blade leaves, and a patch of blue Scilla Sibirica had reared already a spray or two of gorgeous ultramarine blossoms; but it was still early in March, and that is the time of the promise of beautiful things, not yet the realization of Flora’s fête.

As I went by a bush of white Daphne, I heard that the bees had discovered this spring delight – they were buzzing quite fiercely round its tiny flowerets. What a perfume the Daphne has! What an enchantment of rich odours! The pink bush on the other side of the garden I noted would blossom shortly, but there is quite ten days’ difference in the flowering of the two varieties. The white follows “on the feet of snow,” as Burbidge expresses it, and the pink, “when the spring has come.” Of daffodils there was no sign as yet, save the little hard green spikes, but the purple hellebores were proud in their sombre magnificence. These always seem to me flowers that might fitly have decked the brows of some great enchantress, Morgan le Fay, or the Lady of the Lake. They vary from green to darkest purple, and they seem hardly flowers of gaiety or morning, but rather the shadowy blooms of twilight. Unlike their sister, the beautiful Helleborus niger, they will not live, plucked, in water. When gathered, they fade almost instantaneously and hang their heads in spite of salt or charcoal being added to the water. I have heard it said that if the stalks be cunningly split first, before being put in water, that they will last some time; but I cannot say I have ever found this plan successful, and have come to the conclusion that if you want to see your purple hellebores in beauty, you must go into the garden to do so.

Then, as I walked on, I noted that the white arabis was flowering in places. Such a dear, homely little flower as it is, much loved by the bees who had gathered to it like to a honey jar. As I stood watching “the little brown people,” I heard the guttural click-click of the little common wren. What a tiny little bird she is, the Jenny Wren of the old nursery rhyme – “God Almighty’s hen,” some of the old folk still call her here. It is wonderful to think that so deep a note can come out of so small a body.

Jenny hopped about from twig to twig, gaily enough, cocked her tail, and was, according to Burbidge, as “nimble as ninepence.”

THE NEST IN THE KETTLE

Here in Shropshire, in spite of the superstition that she was under special Divine Providence, the wren was often hunted at Yule-tide. Gangs of boys used formerly to chase poor Jenny with sticks, in and out of hedgerows, and over banks and stones. Particularly did this ignoble sport take place on the sides of the Clee Hills, and on the flanks of the Wrekin. Now, happily, the time of persecution is past, and Jenny no longer suffers ill from the hands of men. Hopping fearlessly near me was the pet robin that I fed through the evil days of snow and frost. How gorgeous he looked, with his scarlet waistcoat, how sleek and plump; and how full and liquid was his great brown eye. I begged Burbidge to leave, as last year, the old iron kettle in the arbour of honeysuckle, where he and Madam had their nest and reared their offspring last spring. How tame she was, with her little breast of yellowish brown and her liquid great eyes that used to watch me so keenly when I looked down upon her in the kettle. How patiently she sat, and how sweetly he sang to her, amongst the blossoms, his whole throat moving with his trilling rapture. For two years he and “Madam Buttons” have built in the kettle and brought up their nestlings there, and preferred that site to a hole in bank or wall, branch of tree, or to the thick shelter of the yews.

The robin is looked upon in Shropshire as a sacred bird. Folks here believe that some terrible calamity will surely overtake him who robs a nest or kills “God’s cock.” A poor woman once gravely told me that her little son’s arm was withered, “be like,” she considered, “that he had robbed a robin’s nest.”

“Him who slays a robin, may look to his special damnation,” an old man once said to me, who had seen what he termed a “gallous lad” throw a stone at one.

“Why thee cannot be content to rob the other birds, and leave God Almighty’s fowls alone, I canna’ understand,” was also an angry remark I once heard addressed by a mother to a seven-year-old lad, and the remark was followed by sharp correction with a hazel switch. The old fear of, and reverence for the robin comes doubtless from the legend that the robin pricked his breast against the nails of the cross, and ministered by song and devotion to the Divine Master in His agony, and thus gained for himself and for all his posterity the affection of God, and the gratitude of man. In the old miracle plays the robin was often spoken of as “God’s bird,” and this also may have gained for him the love of many generations.

I passed out of the wrought-iron gates, and went into the meadows on the east side of the Abbey. The fields lay brown still, and were as bare as a billiard-table. They had been closely nipped by industrious sheep during long winter months, and now there was but little for the young life to feed on. Old, heavy, grey-faced ewes were bleating and baaing, whilst skipping, capering and leaping about were some eight or nine lambs. What jocund games theirs were, what heights they jumped, and with all four legs off the ground at once. As I looked, I wondered what were the rules of the game, and what impulse directed their sport; for there seemed to be a leader in the revels, who ran and skipped first, after which they all ran round, mounted an incline, descended and mounted it afresh, cutting a hundred capers, and playing a hundred pranks, but all according to some old unwritten law and regulation. After a few moments of watching the pretty little creatures, I made my way to the old embankment which runs across the meadows on the southern side, and which formed once the mighty dam of the artificial lake from which the prior of Wenlock drew up his fish in Lent and on special fast days. There probably during the Middle Ages the lake was well supplied with carp, eels, trout, and perch. Old Dame Juliana Berners, the prioress of Sopwell, near St. Albans, wrote much and praised warmly the pleasures of angling.

“If the sport fail,” she wrote, “at least the angler hath his holsom walke, and may enjoy at his ease the ayre and swete savoure of the medes of floures that maketh him hungry and he may hear also the melodious harmony of fowles.” She then goes on to say that he can see also, thus happily employed, “the wild broods of young swannes, heerons, duckes, cotes and all other fowles,” and declares that a silent walk by stream or lake in her eyes confers a greater and deeper happiness upon the angler “than all the noyse of hounds,” than “the blasts of hornes,” or “the wilde scrye that hunters of fawkeners can make.”

I like to think of the holy brothers fishing here in their hours of recreation, after their vigils, fasts, and prayers. As I walked along I saw the group of willows that had turned crimson and brilliant amber, and far away I heard the cawing of the rooks as they flew over the plantation of poplars, which, too, were turning red. I followed along the Abbot’s Walk, as the townspeople term the dam, and then passed through a hunting gate across a wild field of scrubby bushes and rough herbage where the wild plover was uttering her melancholy cry and wheeled in circles overhead. The mole-catcher had been at work, a string of velvety moles hung like grapes upon a thorn.

Some years ago, “the ount catcher,” as he is called here, old Peter Purslowe, appeared in a moleskin waistcoat. Since then, however, he has never worn another. “The missus,” I was told, “found it too weedy a job ever to make a second, although it furnishes well, but it had more stitches than ever there be stones at the Abbey.”

THE RETURN OF THE ROOKS

I approached the rookery; what a babel greeted my ears, yet if you have ever listened carefully you will perceive that each rook has a different note of voice, and I suspect, if you knew rooks individually, you would notice, like in the songs of canaries, that no two rooks ever caw precisely alike.

What a wonderful thing it is, the return of the rooks to any given place.

For months they had been absent from this spot, gone nobody knows where. Not a sign of them. And then, almost to a day, they reappeared, and claimed their own tree and branch; and each pair, I fancy, went back to the site of its former nest. Curious stories are told of the sagacity of rooks, of their self-government, and of how offenders who have disobeyed some common law have been executed before large numbers, evidently as a judgment, and as a warning to others.

As I watched them, a story bearing out the truth of this statement came back to me. In the rookery of a friend there was hatched, I was told, a rook with white wings. The community did not make any objection to the youngster being reared there; but when, the following year, the white-winged bird returned to an old avenue of elms, where he had been hatched, exception was taken to his desire to nest there. It seemed, said my friend, as if a congress was called, and as if the strangely marked rook and his mate were given the option to fly elsewhere, or receive some dire punishment; for at intervals they were chased away, but kept on returning to the same spot. All day, rooks seemed, said my informant, to flock to the avenue, till the air seemed almost black with them. They flew, cawed wildly, and seemed in a highly excited state. This went on hour after hour, without any apparent change; until at last one old bird descended from the branch on which he had been perched, and standing on the grass, flapped his wings slowly, uttering a strange, low, mysterious cry, more like the husky croaking of a carrion crow than the cawing of a rook. In a moment the whole grove, said my informant, resounded with the cries of the rooks, and one and all simultaneously fell upon the unfortunate bird with the white wings, screaming and cawing, and never rested until they had pecked him to death, and torn almost every feather out of his helpless body.

I recalled this curious story, and then watched the birds as they flew round, finding sticks for their nests. Ash sticks seemed to be their favourite material, or twigs from the great wych-elm a field away.

The rooks seemed, to quote a boyish expression, “to build fair,” quite different from the mischievous jackdaws, “who will allus rather thieve than work,” as an old keeper once said to me.

It is curious how rooks change their food during the different months of the year. They feed their young almost entirely on animal food till they leave the nest. As a rule, they give the young rooks, grubs, worms and cockchafers; but during the very dry summers that closed the nineteenth century, being short of insect food, the old birds took to robbing hen-coops, and fell also upon young pheasants and partridges in the grass. Several keepers have told me that they were obliged to destroy whole rookeries on this account, for when a rook once takes to chickens or pheasants, like a man-eating tiger, he will never return to humbler diet.

It is wonderful how tenacious rooks are, of returning year after year to the same place, and how difficult it is for any one to start a new colony. Nests may be put up, and young birds partially tamed, but it is a hard matter, as a gardener once said to me, “to ’tice the rooks against their will; ’tis like callin’ the wild geese, unless they wish to hear.”

ROOKS LEAVE FOR A DEATH

In the South there is a strong belief that when the rooks abandon a rookery some misfortune will happen to the owner. At Chilton Candover it is said, there was much excitement because the rooks in Lady Ashburton’s park unaccountably forsook their nests. Almost immediately afterwards occurred Lady Ashburton’s death, and many stories of a similar character are told.

As I leant over the fence, watching what was going on in the rookery, I heard a strange low cry in the distance, as of something unearthly and eërie – what Bess once said sounded like the “call-note of a witch.” I remarked in the great black bird that came overhead, a different flight, slower and heavier than that of a rook, and I recognized in the bird approaching a carrion crow.

I stood motionless. The rooks were too much occupied with their building operations to notice the enemy, but the peewits, who lay earlier in the meadow beyond, were calling uneasily, uttering that strange cry of alarm which is their special note of warning. On flew the carrion crow, the bird of ill-omen in the old ballads and a messenger of death according to old belief. Anyway, if not quite so evil as he has been represented, the crow is a bird that does great damage to keepers and farmers and has few friends. As he flew away, I heard at regular intervals, his creepy wicked cry.