Before the Great Pillage: With Other Miscellanies

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BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE

BY THB SAMB AUTHOR.

ARCADY : for Better, for Worse. By the Rev.

Doctor TE5BOPP. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo, limp
cloth, silk sewn, 3s. 6d.

— —

THE COMING OF THE FRIARS, and other
Mediaeval Sketches. By the Rev. Doctor Jessopp. Sixth
Edition. Crown 8vo, limp cloth, silk sewn, 3s. 6d.

RANDOM ROAMING, and other Papers. With
Portrait By the Rev. Doctor Jessopp. Second and
Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo, limp cloth, silk sewn, 3s. 6d.

STUDIES BY A RECLUSE: In Cloister,
Town, and Country. By the Rev. Doctor Jessopp.
Second Edition. Crown 8vo, limp cloth, silk sewn, 3s. 6d.

THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON :

Some Fugitive Papers. By the Rev. Doctor Jessopp.
Third Edition. Crown Svo, limp cloth, silk sewn, 3s. 6d.

FRIVOLA. By the Rev. Doctor Jessopp. Crown

Svo, cloth, 3s. 6d.

T. FISHER UXWIN, PATERXOSTER SQUARE, EC.

Before the Great Pillage

mitb HDtbet a9l0ceUame0

BY

AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D.,

RECTOR OF SCARXING

Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge
Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford
Honorary Canon in the Cathedral of Norwich

SECOND IMPRESSION

Xon^on
T. FISHER UNWIN

PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1901

{All rights resetved.)

CONTENTS

I

PAOB

PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE GREAT

PILLAGE (Part I.). . . . .3

PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE GREAT

PILLAGE (Part II.) . . • '35

II

THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE

REFORMATION . . . • • 75

III
"ROBBING god" . . . . . I23

IV
THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES .... 147

V

vi CONTENTS

V

PAOB

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS . . , . 183

VI
DAVID AND JONATHAN . . . .221

VII
ADAM AND EVE . . • • • 231

VIII

cu cu ! . , . • . . 239

IX
MOLES ..«.••. 249

PREFACE

•o*

T Tl THEN, some twenty years ago, the country
^ ^ living which I now hold was offered me by
the kind friend to whom the patronage belonged, I
accepted it with little hesitation, and I did so with
my eyes open and not without counting the cost.
I knew that in joining the ranks of the country
clergy I was burning my ships and that there was
no professional future before me.

I have never regretted my decision. I have
found an abiding joy and pride in doing my best
for my people and studying them and their ways in
the present, while trying to learn something about
their forefathers and their ways in the past.

vii

viii PREFACE

In my first volume — entitled Arcady^ for better
for worse — I gave the world the result of my
observations upon men and things as I found
them. I believe it was and is a faithful picture ;
but there was nothing retrospective in it reaching
further back than the first half of the eighteenth
century.

It so happened, however, tHat certain antiquarian
tastes, which were born with me, led me into
researches here and there which appeared to me
to throw some new light upon mediaeval history.

The discovery of the immense body of direct
evidence which the Manor Court Rolls afford
regarding the incidence of the great plague of 1349 ;
the study of the Rougham charters, which yielded
such a minute insight into the life of a village
community in the thirteenth century ; and the
extraordinary find of a prosperous country parson's
annual audit for the year ending Michaelmas, 1306,^
were instances of the fact that even in History there

* The first two of these papers are printed in my Coming of
the Friars; the third in Random Roamings,

PREFACE ix

are still many discoveries to be made, and also that
some men are curiously fortunate in their finds.

The essays in the present volume on Parish Life,
as distinct from village life, and on the Parish
Priest, as distinct from the country parson, are
in great measure supplementary to or elucidatory
of the earlier papers referred to. If it were at all
probable that a re-arrangement of my writings
should be undertaken, I should like to see these
five or six papers on Mediaeval Parish history
published in a volume by themselves, so only that
I were permitted to add two more contributions
on the same lines of research, supplementary to
these earlier ones.

To some readers the attempt to deal with the
Baptism of Clovis may appear out of place in
a volume so English as this is. Nevertheless, I
am sure that there are others who will readily
understand why this essay should be found in
such company. For the student of English Origins
when confronted by the thick darkness, say, of the
fifth century, often finds himself mastered by a

X PREFACE

kind of passionate impatience to break away from it
and to get into the light again — anyhow — anywhere.
^'I can find nothing/' he says to himself, "about
what was passing here when the Roman legions
deserted our island; let me follow if I can for a
while, the movements of those fierce barbarian hosts,
never at rest, a day's sail from our own coast line ! "
And so the historic instinct leads him to widen
his purview, and mental refreshment comes which
brings with it clearer vision and a profounder
appreciation of the unity of history.

As to the other trifles in the book, they must
apologise for themselves.

I

PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE
THE GREAT PILLAGE

PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND
BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE

I

WHEN the results of the Great Inquest,
commonly known as the Domesday Book,
were handed in to William the Conqueror in 1086,
this island had in the thousand years preceding that
great event suffered three conquests. That is, the
land and the people inhabiting it had been passed
over to the sway and dominion of three successive
masters.

The first conquest was that by the Romans, who
held the whole island from the Firth of Forth to the
Channel. Their rule lasted, roughly speaking, for
four centuries, and they abandoned the province of
Britain at the beginning of the fifth century of our
era, leaving the luckless people to take care of them-
selves.

The second conquest was that effected by the

4 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

Saxons and Angles — the English folk, if you prefer
it — whose rule, at its widest, extended over pretty
much the same stretch of territory as the Romans
had brought under their obedience, with the
exception of the Principality of Wales and the
north-western district known as Strathclyde. The
Saxons took another six centuries to consolidate the
kingdoms they had won, and during the last two of
those centuries they had hard work to hold their
own against the Danes, who were trying to super-
sede them.

Finally, the Normans under their great Duke
William got their firm footing here ; they were the
last successful invaders of our fatherland. They
won it literally by the sword, held it by the sword,
and in less than twenty years the Conqueror proved
how thoroughly he had made England into a
kingdom under a single master by the carrying out
of that magnificent survey to which allusion has
been made.

It was not till more than 700 years had gone
by since its compilation, that the Domesday Book
was printed, and only during the reign of Her
Majesty Queen Victoria has this unique document
been subjected to the minute and scholarly scrutiny
which it so well deserves, and which is being
bestowed upon it.

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 5

In the Domesday Book there is so much that
affords a basis of certainty from which inquiries
may be pushed forward into many unsolved
problems of history, that it is not to be wondered
at if the students of origins, and enthusiastic in-
quirers into the beginnings of our institutions
should be found embracing very diflferent views
on the questions that have arisen and still remain
to be answered finally. Any man less than a
specialisti and a specialist fully equipped for the
work, would be guilty of immense presumption
in pronouncing an opinion, and still more so if
he expressed himself as a dogmatist, upon the points
now under discussipn among some of the ablest and
keenest intellects in Europe. But we can hardly be
wrong in saying that the main questions which are
now occupying the attention of experts resolve
themselves into these : first, What did the several
conquerors — Roman, Saxon, and Norman — ^find
here when they settled among us ? and, secondly.
What did they do for the nation they subdued ?

The difl&culty of dealing with these two questions
in the case of the Roman occupation is rendered
almost insuperable, because it seems certain that
before the coming of the Romans there never had
been anything approaching to a united England.
We have to take into account differences of race

6 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

and differences in civilisation, which render it
impossible for us to make any generalisations that
can be relied on. Thus much, however, may be
safely affirmed : that our Roman conquerors did
find organised communities, settled in defined areas,
and probably differing in their constitution very
widely according as they were met with in the east
or the west, the north or the south. It is probable
that, with the wisdom which characterised their
foreign policy, the Romans did just what our
English rulers in India did, and are still doing —
1.^., they left the old areas, whether of the " village
community" or any other organised social or
political unit, as little disturbed as possible; they
left the people such self-government as they had
attained to. There is no evidence of such a clean
sweep of old laws, and old sentiments, and old
judicial procedure (if one may use the term) as was
made in Ireland by the English conquerors when
they suppressed the Brehon laws in that unhappy
island. The result was that when the next con-
querors took possession of the land they must have
found a number of survivals in the social, political,
and economical condition of different parts of the
country. But it is difficult to believe that the
centralising instincts of Rome did not impose upon
tb^ subject population some form of coercive

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 7

administration which, while leaving to the mixed
people, passing under the name of Britons, a certain
measure of self-government, superadded thereto
some machinery for dealing out even justice as
between man and man, such as might afford
security for the lives and property of all subjects
of the Roman Empire. How that machinery
worked in detail we shall never know, but that
it must have been carried on in certain definite
geographical areas we can hardly help assuming.
It will go some way towards helping us to a co-
herent theory if we take it for granted that what
Professor Maitland calls the geographical unit of the
Conqueror's survey, namely the vil^ was of Roman
origin ; that it was in the main identical with what
the Saxon folk called the tun^ the town, or the
township ; and that the dwellers in that area were
by those same Saxons organised into a community,
presided over by the reevt^ an official with fiscal
as well as judicial duties to discharge.

When the. Normans came in they found the vils
or townships still enjoying a certain measure of self-
government. It was the policy of the new con-
querors to substitute for this the government by
a lord over the inhabitants of the old area, the lord
to be responsible to the sovereign for the taxes
levied from the community, and the inhabitants

8 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

of the area being bound to render allegiance, service
and tribute to the lord, who was their master and
9wasi-chieftain. When this came to pass the vil of
the Romans had passed out of the stage of being
the township of the Saxons, and had become the
manor of the Norman rulers. The change was
gradual, and it must not be supposed that it was
effected by some coup de main, so that every vil
became at once a manor, or that every manor
constituted a vil. All that can be said seems to be
that in the course of a century or so the manorial
system, as it is called, became dominant, and that, as
a rule, over that geographical area which constituted
the Roman vil and the Saxon township the lords of
the manors were petty kings, exercising authority,
exacting homage, and imposing burdens on their
" tenants," i.e., on the inhabitants of the old town-
ships.

But long before this great revolution had come
about a much greater revolution had taken effect
up and down the length and breadth of the land.
When Rome loosened her hold of Britain, Christianity
was the established religion of the empire, and
Britain was in some sense or otlier a Christian
land* It was that or nothing. Two centuries later
the Saxons had almost as effectually blotted out
any organised Christian Church, in the eastern half

^ BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 9

at least, of Britain^ as the Moslems, a century later,
had blotted it out in North Africa, Asia Minor, and
Palestine. Then came the new era, the prodigious
awakening, and before the seventh century closed,
Britain was a Christian land once more.

A momentous change ensued. How it was
brought about at all, again it may be said, we
shall never know ; but that, /durin g the Saxon
occupation, the geographical areas of the town-
ships up and down the land became little
territories subject to the rule and influence of
another functionary — this time not a political,
but a religious, personage — to wit, the pHcst ; and
that the priest exercised a very real and sub-
stantial authority over the community inhabiting
the area of the township or the vilj admits of no
question. That it was Archbishop Theodore who,
in the seventh century, "divided England into
parishes " is a mere fable ; but the fact remains
that, however slowly or however gradually, it came
about at last, every geographical area, whether
occupied by a community of co-operative Socialists —
for it really amounted to that— or occupied by a com-
munity with a constitution^ which may be said to be
that of a limited monarchy on a small scale, became
also the home of a community which in religious
matters was brought under the rule of an ecclesiastical

10 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

Rector as he was in fact, and as he got to be called.
When this had come about the vil or the town-
ship, without ceasing to be either the one or the
other, became at the same time the priest's domain ;
and whatever designation the area might receive
viewed as a political unit, it was henceforth called
the parish^ and the people living in that area, of
whatever status, condition, or degree, became his
parishioners. As such they were members of a
community over which no lord of the manor nor
any other political magnate, had any sort of
authority ; in matters religious and ecclesiastical
these personages had not a word to say.

The word Parish indicated originally the geo-
graphical area over which the jurisdiction of a
Bishop extended. It was not till a later time, and
when that area had been subdivided into smaller
areas, each of which was committed to the over-
sight of a priest^ responsible for such functions as
only a priest could discharge, that the smaller area
got to be called the parish^ while the larger area,
comprehending an aggregate of parishes, was called
the bishop's diocese. As time went on, by a con-
fusion in language of which abundant examples
might be given, the name, which was strictly a
designation of the geographical area, got to be
applied to the community inhabiting that area j and

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE ii

thus the word parish is, even in our own days, used
sometimes to indicate the area inhabited by the
community, and sometimes the community itself.

In the latter sense the parish was a purely religious
organisation, distinct in its origin, its working, and
its aims from the manor, the township, or the
tithing, though composed of the same personnel, man
for man, " The parish was the community of the
township organised for Church purposes and sub-
ject to Church discipline, with a constitution which
recognised the rights of the whole body as an
aggregate, and the right of every adult member,
whether man or woman, to a voice in self-govern-
ment, but at the same time kept the self-governing
community under a system of inspection and
restraint by a central authority outside the parish
boundaries." ^

The community had its own assembly — the parish
meeting — which was a deliberative assembly. It
had its own ofi&cers, who might be either men or
women, duly elected, sometimes for a year, some-
times for life, but in all cases subject to being
dismissed for flagrant offences. The larger number
of these ofi&cials had well-defined duties to discharge,
and were paid for their services out of funds pro-

» Bishop Hobhouse, in " Somerset Record Society," vol. iy.
Preface, p. ix,

12 PARISH UFE IN ENGLAND

vided by the parishioners. The finance of the
parish presents some difficulty ; but a strict account
was kept of all moneys received and paid, and the
balance-sheet laid before the annual meeting of the
community assembled in the nave of the church,
where a kind of audit was held and discussion
ensued upon such measures as were of serious
importance and concern to the whole body of the
parishioners.

The president or chairman of the church council
or parish meeting was the rector of the parish or
his deputy ; but he was by no means a " lord over
God's heritage." There is no evidence — but quite
the contrary — to show that he initiated to any great
extent the subjects of debate ; and the income raised
for parish purposes, which not infrequently was
considerable, was not under his control, nor did it
pass through his hands.

The trustees for the parish property and the
responsible representatives of the parish were the
churchwardens, who were very rarely less than two
in number ; and in the case of the larger parishes
they had assessors, who shared with them the bur-
dens and the responsibilities of duties which were
not seldom irksome. The wardens were elected
annually. The office was an honorary one, and
often entailed some risk and expense.

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 13

The permanent oflBcials of the parish, beginning at
the parish clerk, the grave-digger, watchman, keeper
of the processional cross, and others who, for the
present at any rate, need not be specified, were f he paid
servants of the parish. They were in no sense the
nominees or subordinates of the rector ; they were
supported by the parishioners, and removable, when
removable at all, by the parishioners, who presented
the offender to the rural dean, from whom an appeal
lay to the archdeacon ; and occasionally such an
appeal might be carried to the bishop, whose
decision was final.

The property belonging to the parishes during
the centuries before the great spoliation was enor-
mous, and was always growing. It consisted of
houses and lands ; of flocks and herds ; of precious
jewels and costly vessels of silver and gold ; of
ornaments and church furniture ; of bells and
candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and
banners ; of vestments which were miracles of
splendour in their colours and materials and in-
comparable artistic finish of needlework ; not to
speak of the fine linen and the veils, the carpets and
the hangings ; and last, not least, the service-books,
which were continually needing to be mended,
bound, or replaced by new copies, and that at a
cost which we moderns even now find it difficult
to accept as credible.

14 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

All this immense accumulation of treasure and
wealth was strictly the property of the parish, and
was held, as I have said, in trust for the community
by the churchwardens, elected in the assembly of
the church council or parish meeting. In the
Record Office there is one most precious manu-
script, which contains a minute account of the
contents of every church in the Archdeaconry of
Norwich in the year 1368. It is, in fact, a return
of parish property to be found in the churches of
the Archdeaconry during that year. For years I
have been continually worried and consumed by
the desire to have that manuscript transcribed and
printed — a manuscript which would be hailed by
wise men as one of the most valuable contributions
to parochial history which has ever been made
public. But, alas 1 this is a wicked world, and I
have never been able to find the money to pay for
transcribing and publishing, for the benefit of a
favoured few, this deeply interesting record ; and
this generation has gone mad on bicycles and other
vanities, and has no money to spare for more
desirable and less dangerous amusements. And so
poor men, whose crime is that they love to peer
into the past — ^a crime that is quite unpardonable,
because it is so ridiculously useless — such poor men
are kept a great deal too short of the ways and means

^
\

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE t5

to allow of their indulging in a hobby whereby their
fellow-creatures would be greatly benefited, if only
they could be taught to see that the past— even the
queer old crumpled-up past — has something to
teach the present, for all the self-complacency
which contributes to make the aforesaid present so
cheerful and so proud.'

Now it must be understood that all this enormous
amount of property (which if it were in existence
now and were brought to the hammer would repre-
sent a gross value of several millions of pounds
sterling) belonged to the parishes. It no more
belonged to the clergy, the parsons, the parish
priests, than it belonged to the lords of the manors.
Hundreds of the vestments and ornaments are
expressly set down in these inventories as having
been presented by the officiating clergy themselves :
presented, ue., to the parishioners, and passing
over to the parishioners as parish property — the

* A few days after this paper appeared in print it was my
happiness to receive a letter from a lady, then an entire
stranger to me, offering to defray the expense of transcribing
the MS. referred to in the text. A week later came a similar
offer of a very liberal contribution towards the cost of printing
the work which, from its nature, could never pay its expenses
if thrown upon the market. The task of editing it is neces-
sarily very laborious, and some time must elapse before the
volume can be issued from the press.

i6 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

parishioners, who had the right of custody of
that property and the power, within certain limits,
of dealing with it as parish property.

And this property was, as I have said, always
growing and increasing in value. It was rare — ^very
rare — for any man or woman of substance enough
to make a will to forget to leave some sort of legacy
to the parish, uc^ to the community assembling in
the church. Those legacies varied greatly, accord-
ing to the wealth or poverty of the testators. Very
common were the bequests of a poor widow's
wedding-ring. Never a year passed without the
parish accounts showing that articles of dress, brass
pots, lamps, candlesticks, honey, wax, were left by
the poorest; sheep and cattle and lands, great
goblets, and occasionally considerable sums of
money, being bequeathed by the well-to-do. The
churchwardens, when at the end of the year they
went out of office, were required to hand in a strict
account for every pennyworth they had received.
They set down what this or that article had been
sold for — ^the rings, the kettles, the brooches, the
cups — ^the rents received for the houses, lands, or
for the use of the flocks and herds ; and per contra
they told what expenses they had been put to, and
they finished up the account by showing the balance,
whether in money or goods, which they handed

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 17

over to those who succeeded them in their office.
This brings me to the question what those expenses
were.

First and foremost, and of course by far the
largest portion of the expenditure, was that which
the maintenance of the fabric of the church and the
conduct of the worship in the church entailed.

As to the fabric, again, it must be borne in mind
that it was the property of the parish. There are
two most mischievous and widespread mistakes,
which people have been making and repeating
for the last two or three centiu-ies, with regard
to the building of the parish churches in England,
which I am never tired of protesting against. The
first is the stupid and ignorant assertion that the
monks built our parish churches.

It is impossible to enter into the matter here.
But it would be not a whit more absurd and non-
sensical to say that the wonderful amount of money
spent upon the rebuilding and restoration of our
parish churches during the last fifty years had been
contributed in the main by Nonconformists, than to
say that the monastic bodies built the parish churches
in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. It is
hardly too much to say that from some points of
view the monastic bodies were themselves noncon-
formists. The monster grievance against which

3

1 8 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

the beneficed clergy had to complain and which
thousands of parishes in England to this day have
to complain of, was and is that the monasteries
robbed the parishes of their endowments ; and as
for building churches for any one except themselves,
they were about as likely to build them as to build
cavalry barracks !

The second delusion — a delusion almost more
widespread than the other — is that the squires built
the churches. In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries there were no squires — ^that is the naked
truth. In the great majority of country places
there were no wealthy men to be found. The
country gentleman, as we understand the term now,
was a creature hardly known ; he had hardly come
into existence. Take note of that, you young men
and maidens with a taste for historical research, and
spend the next year or two in proving that I am
wrong, or in satisfying yourselves that I am right.
Correct me or confirm me.

Who did build the churches, then ? The parishes
built the churches, and the parishes in all cases kept
them in repair. In the fourteenth century it was far,
far more rare for a church to be built by some rich
man than it is now, just because the number of rich
men in the country was incomparably fewer than
Uieir number is to-day. But jis to keeping the

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 19

churches in repair, the parish had no choice in the
matter. The bishops and the archdeacons were
always looking after the parishioners. The
episcopal registers are full of instances of churches
that are ordered to be enlarged, re-roofed, reglazed,
rebuilt, after a fire or after being struck by lightning.
The work is ordered to be done by a certain date,
and in a manner to satisfy the requirements of the
said archdeacons, who stood to the parishioners
almost exactly in the same relation as H.M.
Inspectors do to the wretched inhabitants of a
district which is required to build a school, add on
a class-room, satisfy the requirements of the last
Code, and provide a new playground, a new floor,
new apparatus, new everything— and who do it, too,
to the amazement of themselves and their neigbours,
and who most wonderfully find the money (though
where it comes from in a thousand instances it
would take all the ingenuity of man or the beasts of
the field to explain), till the thing is actually done,
and then everybody is pleased, and they begin to
boast of the excellence of the school which they have
provided for themselves I

* When a man first comes to look into the injunc-
tions laid upon all sorts of poor little places to build,
to alter, to make additions to the churches, which
are to be found in the bishops' registers, his hair

20 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

almost stands on end. He is tempted to exclaimi
*' The people couldn't do it I Why, a seven-shilling
rate in the pound for three years would not pay for
it I They couldn't do it ! " By and by he is com-
pelled to exclaim again, " They couldn't do it — but
they did it for all that I " And when they had done
it — built their church, added a tower, then a spire,
then an aisle, then a side-chapel or two— then they
became so proud of their own achievements and
were so delighted with their churches that they made
up their minds to get all they could out of their
churches.

And thus it came to pass that all that was joyous
and gay in their lives, all that was beautiful and
ennobling, all that was happy in their recollections,
all that was best in what they imagined, all that was
elevating in their dreams and their hopes and their
aspirations — all came to them from the influence
which their churches exercised upon them. The
dreary round of toil, from which they could not
escape; the staggering behind the bullocks that
dragged the plough through the furrows ; the hovels
in which they huddled — ^such hovels as you may see
to-day in the clachans of the Highlands — ^where the
smoke from the smouldering fire escaped through
a hole in the roof ; the coarse food, that at
best brought them satiety without satisfaction ;

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE i\

the enforced labour; the aimless, purposeless
monotony —

The long mechanic pacings to and fro,
The set grey life and apathetic end ;

— ^what charm, what hope, what incentive to
honourable ambition could all this afiFord ?

If it had not been for the other side of the picture
— ^for the blessed relief and the utter change in their
surroundings which the churches afforded to the
villages of the fourteenth century — the people
must infallibly have become more brutal, stupid,
sodden, and cruel with every successive generation,
as some theorists have maintained that the Anglo-
Saxon invaders were in process of becoming during
the five centuries of their occupation — five centuries,
after all that can be said on the other side, which
were centuries of fearfully slow progress, till the
Norman Conquest came upon them with a thousand
new refinements and a thousand new interests, and
the revelation of a new horizon widening out in all
directions ; and not till then did what Carlyle calls
"Pot-bellied Saxondom" pass away and the real
development of the English people begin.

All the tendency of the feudal system, working
through the machinery of the manorial courts, was
to keep the people down. All the tendency of the

22 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

parochial system, working through the parish
council, holding its assemblies in the churches,
where the people met on equal terms as children
and servants of the living God and members of one
body in Christ Jesus, was to lift the people up.

In these assemblies there was no distinction
between lord and vassal, high and low, rich and
poor ; in them the people learnt the worth of being
free," Here were the schools in which, in the slow
course of centuries, they were diciplined to self-help,
self-reliance, and self-respect — virtues which, it may
be, are slowly learnt, but whereby alone a nation
acquires a true conception of what liberty means,
and at last gets to see that the ground of all our
claims to enjoy the rights of manhood or of citizen-
ship rests upon the grand fact of our being all
members of a Divine community, and so entitled to
the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

In proportion as the people realised that their
churches were, somehow or other — and of course
they realised it only very, very slowly and very
gradually — ^the very bulwarks of their liberty, and
that, however much they might be in bondage to
the lords of the manors, as parishioners^ at any
rate, they were free men and free women, in that
proportion did they love their churches : there, at
any rate, their rights w^re inviolable.

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE n

But, granted that the people in the villages found
the money or the materials for the fabrics, who
carried out the work, made the plans, and executed
them ? Who were the actual builders ?

The answer to this question used to be given in a
tone of unhesitating certainty, such as is eminently
comforting to people who are easily satisfied.
That answer used to be :" Oh I the builders of our
churches were the Freemasons. The Freemasons
went scampering about in great gangs, and they
settled themselves down in a district, and they ran
up a church in no time. . • ." And when any too
rudely inquisitive gentleman made so bold as to ask,
" Well, but who were the Freemasons ? " the crush-
ing reply was always ready, '' Pray, sir, are you a
Freemason ? " And if with shame and confusion
of face you said, " No," then you were asked, " How,
sir, can you seriously expect that the secrets of the
sacred craft will be revealed to you I " Of course
you felt small, and you naturally dropped the
subject.

But though I am no Freemason, and am there-
fore a despicable creature, I may be silenced and
yet not convinced. And I am bold to affirm that I
no more believe that the Freemasons, whoever the
Freemasons may have been, built our churches
than that they built Noah's ark.

U PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

The evidence is abundant and positive; and is
increasing upon us year by year, that the work done
upon the fabrics of our churches, and the other
work done in the beautifying of the interior of our
churches, such as the wood carving of our screens,
the painting of the lovely figures in the panels of
those screens, the embroidery of the banners and
vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving
of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the
windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic
achievements which existed in immense profusion
in our village churches till the frightful spoliation of
those churches in the sixteenth century stripped
them bare — all this was executed by local craftsmen.
The evidence for this is accumulating upon us every
year, as one antiquary after another succeeds in
unearthing fragments of pre-Reformation church-
wardens' accounts.

We have actual contracts for church building and
church repairing undertaken by village contractors.
We have the cost ot a rood-screen paid to a village
carpenter, of painting executed by local artists. We
find the names of artificers, described as aurifaber,
or worker in gold and silver, living in a parish which
could never have had five hundred inhabitants ; we
find the people in another place casting a new bell
and making the mould for it themselves ; we find

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 55

the blacksmith of another place forging the iron-
work for the church door, or we get a payment
entered for the carving of the bench-ends in a little
church five hundred years ago, which bench-ends
are to be seen in that church at the present moment.
And we get fairly bewildered by the astonishing
wealth of skill and artistic taste and aesthetic feeling
which there must have been in this England of ours
in times which till lately we had assumed to be
barbaric times. Bewildered, I say, because we
cannot understand how it all came to a dead-stop in
a single generation, not knowing that the frightful
spoliation of our churches and other parish
buildings, and the outrageous plunder of the parish
gilds in the reign of Edward the Sixth, by the
horrible band of robbers that carried on their
detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration,
such a clean sweep of the precious treasures that
were dispersed in rich profusion over the whole
land, that a dull despair of ever replacing what had
been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the
whole nation, and art died out in rural England,
and King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled
supreme for centuries.

But the keeping up of the mere fabric of the
church was but the beginning of the burdens so
cheerfully borne by the people of the mediaeval

26 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

parish. Only a little less onerous was the duty of
keeping up the religious services in the church.

The people were never weary of taking part in the
elaborate ritual which had been growing in pomp
and magnificence for hundreds of years, when the
sixteenth century opened. How was it that high
and low did so dearly love going to church ? How
was it that the more saints' days and church festivals
there were enjoined, the better the people liked it ?

There were many reasons which may be men-
tioned ; but there is one reason which has been, I
think, overlooked, and which affords an illustration
of what was said before, viz., that our churches were
the great strongholds of the sentiment of liberty and
the great reminders to the people of their rights as
freemen.

The tenants of a manor, from the very beginning
of the manorial system, were bound to render
certain personal services to the lord of the manor,
and actually to perform tasks of manual labour at
the lord's bidding, to an extent which it is very
difficult for us nowadays to understand.

These services implied that for so many days in
the year the lord might claim from the tenant his
best toil without paying him fair wages for that toil.
The tenant, in fact, had to keep the lord's demesne
land (which we may call the home farm) in

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 25

cultivation before he began upon his own little strip
or allotment.

There was no getting off these services, which
were all set down in what are called the Manorial
Extents. And as long as the services were
rigorously exacted the case of the tenants of a
manor was very little better than downright slavery.
But here the Church stepped in, and put forth its
counterclaim upon the time of the lord's tenants.
Roger and Hans and Hodge might be bound to
give so many days' work for the tillage of the
demesne land. But on this day, or that day, or the
other day, there was a feast of the Church to be
kept, and on each of those days Hans and Hodge
were bound to pay suit and service and do homage to
the Lord our God. There was a conflict between
the Divine and the human Lord.

To begin with, the seventh day is a holy day. On
that day, at any rate, the serf or the villein, the
cottager or the ploughman, shall do no manner of
work ! Or, again, Roger, the holder of such-and-
such a strip of land, was bound by what we should
now call his lease to do his prescribed task work on
every Thursday in the summer months. But on
Holy Thursday there is another great feast of the
Lord — the Feast of the Ascension. On that
Thursday he is due in the house of God. There-

28 PARISH UFE m ENGLAND

fore on that day he is a free man. Or it might be
that by the constitution of the manor a court ought
to be held on the second Tuesday in June, on which
day all the homage — ix.j all the tenants of the
manor— would be required to put in an appearance.
But suppose in the year 1340 the Feast of St
Barnabas chanced to fall upon that second Tuesday.
"Then we, the parishioners, are due at the church,
to keep the feast there ; for was not our church
dedicated to St. Barnabas ? And is it to be heard
of that we should be absent when the Feast of the
Dedication is going to be celebrated ? Clearly the
manor court must be held some other day, for our
festivals are high days and holy days, and we must
not appear before the Lord empty."

It was inevitable that these holy days should tend
to increase in number, and equally inevitable that
the festivals, beginning by being holy days, would
rapidly become holidays^ feasting days, days of
revelry, days of merriment ; days when the young
men shot for a prize at the hulls ; ' days when the

^ There is a long strip of land immediately adjoining the
north boundary of the church)rard of Beeston-next-Mileham
in Norfolk which was formerly the practising ground for the
young archers of the parish. It is still called the bulls, and is,
if I mistake not, still parish land.

The croft on which the Free School at Swaffham in the
same county is built, " is now called the skooling land," says

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 29

maidens held the bridge over the stream, and
allowed none of the young men to pass without
paying toll, the sum levied being duly paid into the
hands of the churchwardens and accounted for in
the annual balance-sheet ; days when I suspect,
too, that the village alehouses were closed, and yet
when the people met together for a church ale, as
the gathering was called — days, above all, when
there were miracle plays acted, or historic plays,
when Robin Hood was the prominent figure, or
the great fight between St. George and the dragon
was represented with a gruesome realism, and the
unhappy dragon was cruelly battered by the mighty
Saint who showed oflF his terrible prowess. Then
there were the Rogation days, when the people —
mind I the parishioners — ^went in procession to walk
the bounds, not of the manor — ^that be far from us
— but of the parish, with the priest at their head and
the cross-bearer leading the way, and the minstrels
following after ; and there was much romping and
tumbling and practical joking, and often, I doubt
not, a good deal of very plain speaking against the
lord and the lord's steward, and the bailiflf and the
bailiff's wife, and all the unpopular functionaries.
But besides all this there were small associations,

Blomefield, writing about the year 1740" ("History of Nor-
folk," vol vi. p. 216, n. 2).

30 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

called gilds, the members of which were bound to
devote a certain portion of their time and their
money and their energies to keep up the special
commemoration and the special worship of some
saint's chapel or shrine, which was sometimes set
up in a corner of the church, and provided with an
altar of its own, and served by a chaplain who was
actually paid by the subscriptions or freewill offer-
ings of the members of the gild whose servant he
was. Frequently there were half a dozen of these
brotherhoods, who met on different days in the
year ; and frequently — indeed, one may say usually
— ^there was a church house, a kind of parish club,
in which the gilds held their meetings and trans-
acted their business. Sometimes this church house
was called the gild hall ; for you must not make the
mistake of thinking that the church houses were
places of residence for the clergy. Nothing of that
kind. The church house or gild hall grew up as an
institution which had become necessary when the
social life of the parish had outgrown the accom-
modation which the church could afford, and when,
indeed, there was just a trifle too much boisterous
merriment and too little religious seriousness and
sobriety to allow of the assemblies being held in the
church at all. The church house in many places
became one of the most important buildings in a

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 31

parish, and in the little town of Dereham, in Nor-
folk, the church house or gild hall is still, I think,
the largest house in the town, and is inhabited by
a gentleman who still points to the vestiges of its
former importance. When the great fire took place
at Dereham, in 1581, which destroyed almost the
whole town, the gild hall or church house, from
being well built of stone, was almost the only
building in the place which escaped the terrible
conflagration. These church houses, when the
parishes and the gilds were plundered of their
movables and money, appear to have been left
unnoticed by the robbers, and after being kept in
repair for a generation or two, and let at a low rent
to tenants who were not likely to spend anything
upon them, they were allowed to fall into ruins for
the most part, or were sold for the benefit of the
parishes, and the proceeds applied to such objects
as the churchwardens of a later time were inclined
to favour. This, however, is a branch of my subject
which requires much more attention than it has yet
received.

During the last twenty years much time and
research have been bestowed by students of our
social history upon a class of documents which
exist in immense numbers, and which are known as

32 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

the Rolls of the Manor Courts. These documents
tell us a great deal about the sins and offences,
the quarrels and the misdemeanors, sometimes too
about the troubles and the wrongs and the suffer-
ings, of the people during the centuries loosely
designated as the " Middle Ages." But these docu-
ments tell almost nothing about the other side — the
bright side of village life. Indeed, it may be said
that the Court Rolls give us pretty much the same
notion of the habits of the people in those days as
we should get from the reports of the police-courts
regarding the habits of the people in our own days.
When, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century,
naughty people cribbed their neighbour's apples ;
when they trespassed upon their neighbour's land,
and appropriated here a faggot or there a bough of
a tree that the wind had blown down ; when they
would not pay their debts, or punched one another's
noses, or cheated or slandered one another ; when
they milked a neighbour's cow, or ploughed up a
furrow from somebody else's land, or shouldered a
sheaf of oats from the other side of the boundary,
and pitched it on to their own stack ; when a young
man and a young woman fell so violently in love
with each other that nothing would stop them from
going and getting married without waiting to get
leave and licence from the lord of the manor — then

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 33

each and all of these peccadillos came under the
notice of the court leet or the manor court, as the
case might be, and the offender's name and his
ofiFence were duly entered upon the Rolls, and there
they are by the thousands and tens of thousands.

But though we are all miserable sinners, yet, be
it spoken in all seriousness and earnestness, our
lives are not passed in doing "what we hadn't ought
to," as we say in Norfolk ; life has its laughter as
well as its tears, and a nation grows up to great-
ness by its innocent amusements, by its gradual
rising in the scale of civilisation and intelligence,
by culture and refinement, by the potent influences
which a higher scale of comfort in the home and a
higher standard of beauty in art exercise upon the
generations as they pass. If you want to watch
this progress, or if you want to compare the
morals and manners of one age with those of
another, you must not confine yourself to the study
of the police-reports. There you will not find the
bright side of life, whether in the nineteenth century
or in the fourteenth. You must go elsewhere.

The main source of information on this side is to
be found in the accounts of the churchwardens,
which year by year have been made up for every
parish in England for many centuries, and which
at one time must have been only less voluminous

4

34 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

than the Rolls of the Manor Courts. Unhappily,
one of the inevitable consequences of what I have
called the pillage of the parishes was the neglect of
this class of records, insomuch that examples of
churchwardens' accounts earlier than the sixteenth
century are rarely to be met with; they are few
and far to seek. Nevertheless, there is reason for
believing that many more of them are still pre-
served in out-of-the-way nooks and corners than is
generally supposed, and that by careful search
many more may yet be recovered. The curious
facts which they reveal to us, the light they throw
upon the old life, the suggestions which they make
to us when we endeavour to utilise their evidence,
what they tell and what they hint, and what they
leave unsaid with the eloquence of silence — all this
must be dealt with in another chapter.

II

WHEN it is remembered that at the beginning
of the sixteenth century every parish in
England was an organised community, which
had for centuries enjoyed the management of its
own affairs according to a financial system that
was in the main identical through the length
and breadth of the land, it becomes obvious that
at the time referred to there must have existed
thousands, and tens of thousands, of records
containing important evidences of the social and
religious life of the parishes during ages past.

These records consisted chiefly of those balance
sheets laid before the parishioners in open meeting
at the annual audit, and known as the church-
wardens' accounts. It will be sufficient for the
present to confine our attention to these accounts,
though it may be as well to warn my readers that
there are other documents besides these which
inquirers who set themselves to make a thorough

35

36 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

study of parochial antiquities will have to reckon
with.

Down to within quite recent times so utterly
was the corporate life of our parishes neglected,
overlooked, and forgotten that it is only during
the last thirty years or so that the very existence
of the churchwardens' accounts has been noticed
even by county historians. It may safely be said
that up to the present moment hardly fifty of these
collections of parish balance sheets have been
printed; though, after all the wanton destruction
and ignorant neglect that has for so long
characterised our treatment of local records, it
will probably be proved that in hundreds of
parishes some fragments, more or less complete,
may be still hidden away in old corners and
mouldering in our village and town chests. These
are the drift and salvage of unnumbered books and
memoranda utilised for generations to light the
vestry fire on Sundays, or even for less honourable
purposes. Yet when we come to look into these
old-world story books — at first sight so dull and
monotonous — ^what a new light begins to shine
upon a condition of affairs which has now passed
away, upon the old order which has changed for
Qver, upon a phase of our national life which
helped so powerfully in the evolution of the new

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 57

order under which we live, and which itself in
its turn must pass and change into we know not
what.'

The first question that people ask when they
are told that our churches were built, kept in repair,
and furnished with a profusion of ornaments in the
old days is, Where did they get the money from ?
To answer this question it is necessary to deal with
the financial system in our parishes anterior to the
great pillage*

Let me, however, at this point explain what I do
not mean when I talk about the pillage. I have little
or nothing to say in these papers about the suppres-
sion of the monasteries ; I do not touch upon that ;
I am very little concerned with that. When I talk

' The most important collection of churchwardens' accounts
which has yet been published is that issued by the Somerset
Record Society in 1890, under the very able editorship of that
veteran scholar and antiquary Bishop Hobhouse. The volume
contains transcripts and full analyses of the accounts of six
parishes in Somerset ranging over a period of two hundred
years, the earliest beginning as far back as a.d. 1349, the latest
concerned with 1560. The Bishop's preface furnishes an
admirable introduction to the whole subject, and it is hardly
too much to say that its* appearance marks an era in a new
branch of historical investigation.

38 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

about the great pillage^ I mean that horrible and
outrageous looting of our churches other than con-
ventual, and the robbing of the people of this
country of property in land and movables, which
property had actually been inherited by them
as members of those organised religious com-
munities known as parishes. It is necessary to
emphasise the fact that in the general scramble
of the Terror under Henry the Eighth, and of the
anarchy in the days of Edward the Sixth, there was
only one class that was permitted to retain any large
portion of its endowments. The monasteries were
plundered even to their very pots and pans. Alms-
houses in which old men and women were fed and
clothed were robbed to the last pound, the poor
almsfolk being turned out in the cold at an hour's
warning to beg their bread. Hospitals for the sick
and needy, sometimes magnificently provided with
nurses and chaplains, whose very raison ditre was
that they were to look after and care for those
who were past caring for themselves, these were
stripped of all their belongings, the inmates sent out
to hobble into some convenient dry ditch to lie
down and die in, or to crawl into some barn or
hovel, there to be tended, not without fear of
consequences, by some kindly man or woman
who could not bear to see a suffering fellow-

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 39

creature drop down and die at their own door-
posts.'

We talk with a great deal of indignation of the
Tammany ring. The day will come when some one
will write the story of two other rings : the ring of
the miscreants who robbed the monasteries in the
reign of Henry the Eighth was the first; but the
ring of the robbers who robbed the poor and help-
less in the reign of Edward the Sixth was ten times
worse than the first.

The Universities only just escaped the general
confiscation ; the friendly societies and benefit clubs
and the gilds did not escape. The accumulated
wealth of centuries, their houses and lands, their
money, their vessels of silver and their vessels of
gold, their ancient cups and goblets and salvers,
even to their very chairs and tables, were all set
down in inventories and catalogues, and all swept

' Men and brethen, you doubtless think this mere exaggera-
tion. If you do, and if you have the will to learn the plain,
unvarnished truth and the means to pay an expert duly
equipped for the task, give that expert a commission to write
a history of the Grand Hospital of St. Mar/s, Newark (one
among many such hospitals), an account of what it was,
and what it was doing say in 1540, and of its utter desolation
and ruin less than ten years after, when the lust of gain in the
spirit of Cain was master of the situation, and men in high
places, of high birth, and even of high culture, found the spirit
of the age too strong for them.

40 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

into the great robbers' hoard. Last, not least, the
immense treasures in the churches, the joy and
boast of every man and woman and child in
England, who day by day and week by week
assembled to worship in the old houses of God,
which they and their fathers had built, and whose
every vestment and chalice, and candlestick and
banner, organs and beUs, and picture and image,
and altar and shrine they looked upon as their own,
and part of their birthright — all these were torn
away by the rudest spoilers, carted off, they knew
not whither, with jeers and scoffs and ribald shout-
ings, while none dared raise a hand or let his voice
be heard above the whisper of a prayer of bitter
grief and agony.

One class was spared. The clergy of this Church
of England of ours, managed to retain some of their
endowments ; but if the boy king had lived another
three years there is good reason for believing that
these too would have gone.

All this monstrous and incalculable havoc, lasting
hardly more than six years, is what I mean when I
talk about The Great Pillage.

The income of the Parish community was ad-
ministered, as we have seen, by the churchwardens,

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 4t

who had annually to give an account of the receipts
and expenditure. The wardens were not usually
the collectors of the revenues, two or more receivers
(receptores) being appointed for getting in the various
contributions or dues from the parishioners. The
sources of this annual income were very various.

(i) To begin with, most parishes — ^perhaps all
parishes — ^had some real property in land, and
occasionally in houses too. The land usually con-
sisted of a number of small and scattered parcels,
which had been left to the community from time
to time, or made over to them by well-disposed
parishioners, and were sometimes held under con-
ditions of providing for some special services in the
Church. Besides this it was not at all uncommon
for a parish to be possessed of a small flock of
sheep ; and many parishes owned a herd of cows,
usually let out to farm, and doubtless to the highest
bidder.i Thus, as late as 1552, the wardens of
Stanford-in -the- Vale, Berks, set down "the hire of
eight sheep that belongeth to the Church." At
Elmscote, in Essex, in 1543, there was a herd of
fifteen cows let out to provide for the lights at the
various altars. Twenty years later the fifteen had
been reduced to nine, the rent now being distributed
among the poor. We country folk know what that

.' See Ashley's " Economic History," vol. i. part ii. p. 311.

42 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

means, and we note, too, that in the old days there
was no such thing as a Poor Rate, the poor in the
old days having no need for any special tax or rate
or tribute to insure their being kept from starvation.

(2) The legacies bequeathed by the people in their
wills; money, jewelry, silver goblets, and other
valuables, rings, and "pairs of beads," or rosaries. I
have already mentioned that these ornaments were
sometimes, but not always, turned into money.
Sometimes they were utilised to adorn the images,
especially of the Blessed Virgin, or some favourite
saint ; sometimes they were kept as stock — Le.^ as a
"reserved fund," to be drawn upon in some financial
crisis.

(3) In many parishes the "upper classes," or those
who were well-to-do, were expected to submit to a
kind of assessment or voluntary rate, according to
methods which we cannot now explain. Thus, in
the wardens' accounts of Swaffham in Norfolk, and
in those of Walberswick and Blyburgh in Suffolk,
we meet with Hsts of proferers who are somewhat
large contributors to the Church funds. In the two
Suffolk parishes the proferers were evidently owners
of fishing boats, and their profers appear to have
been regulated according to the amount of fish taken
during the season.

(4) The collections in the churches — ^generally

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 43

designated as gatherings — seem to have been made
as occasion required. There seems to have been no
rule in making these gatherings, and it is probable
that they were resorted to when the funds in the
hands of the wardens were low. I have found as
many as ten gatherings in a single year.

(5) Another source of revenue was the fees ex-
acted by the parish for the burial of "people of
importance " who desired to be laid in the church
itself. The significance of this must not be passed
over. It should be remembered that the surface of
the soil of the churchjrard was part of the parson's
freehold. Any parishioner had a right of sepulture
in Gods acre; but the parson could always claim
his fee for "breaking the soil/' and this was a source
of income to him. So with the chancel — ^that too
was the parson's freehold — and for burial there, in
the most holy part of the church, very considerable
fees were from time to time claimed and paid. But
the church itself — 1.^., the nave — was the property of
the parish, and when a local magnate specially
desired to be buried there, he, or his executors, had
to make his bargain with the churchwardens, and
with them alone. This will explain the following
entries in the "Walberswick Accounts" (1498):
"Received for the soul of Sir Harry Barbour,
6s. 8d."; and again, in 1466: "Mem. Nicholas

44 PARISH LIFE M ENGLAND

Browne granted to the church 20s. for bringing of
his wife in the church* And a gravestone to be
laid upon the grave."

(6) Among the most profitable sources of revenue
known to the wardens were the great festive enter-
tainments called the church ales. They have almost
their exact counterparts in our modern public
dinners for charitable (?) purposes, such as the
annual dinner for the Literary Fund or for the
Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy ; and the
public teas so common among the Nonconformist
bodies. They were held in the church houses,
which were well furnished with all the necessary
appliances for cooking, brewing, and for giving
accommodation for a large company. Often a
generous parishioner would provide a bullock or a
sheep or two for the entertainment, and another
good-natured man would offer a quarter of malt to
be brewed for the occasion* The skins of the
slaughtered sheep are often entered on the credit
side of the accounts, and occasionally smaller
contributions of spices and other condiments
were offered. Of course the inevitable collection
followed ; and, according to the goodness of the
feast, the number of the guests, or their satisfaction
with the arrangements made, the amount of dona-
tions was large or small.

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 45

(7) Supplementary to all these ordinary sources
of income there came in the continual subsidiary
loans without interest, and liberal levies which the
gilds were continually affording to the parish funds.
I do not yet feel that I am qualified to speak with
any confidence or anything approaching authority
on the subject of the gilds. Indeed, I must confess
that many difficulties which beset the financial
arrangements of these bodies remain hitherto, for
me, unexplained. They were benefit clubs, they
were savings banks, they were social unions, and,
like every other association in the Middle Ages, they
were religious bodies, so religious that they were
continually building special chapels for themselves,
and they had chaplains of their own who received a
regular stipend. Frequently they were splendidly
provided with magnificent copes and banners and
hangings, and large stores of costly chalices and
jewelled service books used on festive occasions in
the worship of the gild chapel. I have never met
with the least indication that the gilds were at any
moment other than solvent. So far from this, the
gilds appear to have always had money in hand ;
and I suspect that in many cases they must have
done some banking business on a small scale by
taking care of thrifty people's savings, and by
lending money in small sums on security. This, at

46 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

I suspect, they did a little in the way of pawnbrok-
ing, guarding, however, against the risk of lending
"upon usury*' by charging not for the loan of money,
but perhaps charging fees for the custody of the
deposits on which advances were made. Be that as
it may, however, it is abundantly clear that the gilds
were very powerful supporters of the needs of the
parish. One meets with them continually making
large loans to the churchwardens when any extra-
ordinary expenses were being incurred. In fact,
when the parish was in a difficulty for money to
carry on any improvements or repairs, the gilds
were always to be relied on to afford the necessary
aid.

Over and above these regular sources of income
the wardens had other ways and means to trust to.
Certainly in the fifteenth century, and how much
earlier I cannot say, seats in the churches were
appropriated to "the better sort," and an annual rent
charged for them. These seats were assigned ap-
parently to women almost exclusively. The practice,
however, seems to have been by no means common,
and in the country churches was probably rare.

So entirely was the life of the parish saturated
with religious sentiment and with religious observ-
ances that even the most frivolous or the most
boisterous amusements of the people were, directly

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 47

or indirectly, under the supervision of the church-
wardens. And this brings us to the dramatic
entertainments so popular among all classes in the
Middle Ages. As in Pagan Greece and Pagan
Rome, the origin of dramatic performances and
dramatic literature must be sought in the rude
religious mummeries which formed part of the
worship of some heathen god ; so our own theatri-
cal representations, with all their modern splendour
and artistic display, are but the survivals— or must
we say they exhibit the evolution ? — of the pageants,
mysteries, or religious plays of the Middle Ages.
There is reason for believing that the performance
of these curious dramas to large assemblies of
ignorant Christian people dates back from very early
times. This is, however, not the place to plunge
into so obscure a subject as the history of the drama,
whether in England or elsewhere. There is no
need to try to get behind the twelfth century, when,
as Thomas of Walsingham tells us, a very learned
and otherwise estimable clergyman named Geoffrey
of Gorham, who afterwards became sixteenth abbot,
of St, Albans, distinguished himself by writing a
certain play — qtiem ^' Miracula*' vulgariter appellamus
—on Saint Catherine. Geoffrey was at the time
head master of the school at Dunstable, and, wishing
to make the first representation of his play con-

48 PARISH UFE IN ENGLAND

spicuously magnificent, he sent to . St. Albans to
borrow certain very precious copes, and possibly
other vestments, from his friend the abbot there.
By ill luck a fearful fire broke out in poor Geoffrey's
house, and all the copes, together with his own
books, were burnt, which so affected the poor man
that nothing would satisfy his anguished mind but
that then and there he must offer himself as a monk
to the great abbey and give himself to the strict
service of God — seipsum reddidit in holocaustum Deo.
In process of time he became abbot, and so was
able to make good the loss which had been sus-
tained.^ From this time notices of these sacred
dramas become frequent ; and if any one wants to
know more about them there are "lots of jolly
books " which he may refer to in the Chester Plays,
and the Coventry Plays, and the Townely Mysteries,
and a great deal more on which I cannot dwell
here.« Let me, however, suggest to any one in-
terested in such matters that if he can pick up a
copy of "A Collection of English Miracle Plays,"
published with a valuable introduction at Basle in

' ** Gesta Abbatum Monast. Si. Albani." Rolls series, vol. i.
p. 72.

' See the important extracts, &c., from the '' Lincoln Liber.
Albus/' on the gilds and miracle plays; and on the inven-
tories in "The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries,"
vol. xvii. (second series).

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 49

1838, by William Marriott, Ph.D. he should use his
opportunity and buy that book, for it is a scarce
one.

It is commonly believed that these plays were
acted in the churches. I have a strong suspicion
that instances of the church being used for such
representations except in very early times were rare.
Ecclesiastical feeling was soon opposed to such
desecration, and there were many orders issued
against the practice, and some against even using
the churchyard for such performances. I have met,
indeed, with one instance where the church porch
was fitted up with seats or benches for the spectators
to sit on, the stage being evidently set up outside in
the churchyard. But it is difficult to believe that as
the churches became more and more crowded with
monuments, ornaments, altars, and religious fur-
niture of all kinds, the naves could have lent them-
selves for scenic performance, and moreover the
sentiment of reverence for the church as a place of
worship was always growing, and the clergy and
religious orders set their faces against this dese-
cration of the house of God. Nor is this all. The
concourse of people attending these plays was
sometimes very large, the players many, and the
scenery and stage demanded a considerable space.
In the accounts of the churchwardens of Basing-

5

so PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

bourne, in Cambridgeshire, there is a notice of the
performance of the miracle play of St. George. It
was evidently a monster performance, for no fewer
than twenty-seven neighbouring parishes contributed
towards the expenses. Obviously such an audience
could not have been accommodated in any village
church, and accordingly a charge for the hire of a
field in which the performance took place is duly
entered. Similar entries for rent of a meadow or
piece of ground occur now and then elsewhere.
The attractions of these miracle plays went on
steadily increasing as the scenery and dresses
became more elaborate, and they continued to be
acted in the towns long after they had quite ceased
to be represented in the country ; for this very good
reason — ^if for no other — that in the towns here and
there the gilds managed to keep some portion of
their possessions, and among them their "stage
properties" and the buildings in which the plays
were acted.

The actors in these parish dramas appear to have
received no wages for their acting except the meat
and drink which was the inevitable concomitant of
all public gatherings; the honour of representing
St George or St. Catherine, Balaam or John the
Baptist, an angel or a demon, was its own reward.
As, they tell me, was the case at Ober Ammergau

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 51

till lately, so it was among us, a man who had taken
the part of Judas, or Moses, or Pharaoh seems to
have often retained the name of the character in
which he had appeared on the stage for some time
after the performance. Hence we get such grotesque
charges as the following : " For Adam to make a
pair of hosen," " for a coat to Robin Hood," " for
5 ells of canvas for a coat for Maid Marian," " for
a coat for God" (!) "for a pair of shoes for the
devil" (!)

This part of my subject is so full of interest, and
there is so much that might be said upon it, that I
have been tempted to dwell upon it at greater length
than I had intended. The point to be kept in view,
however, is that these plays were a considerable
source of revenue to the parishes in which they
were acted. The profits accrued to the parish
funds, and when one parish was fortunate enough
to have a large stock of dresses or other stage
apparatus, it was not uncommon for these to be
let out on hire to another parish which was less well
provided with such necessaries.

So far we have been dealing with the regular
income of the parishes. But, over and above these,
there was, as I have already noticed, an enormous
aggregate of dead capital which was always going

52 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

on growing, and which, while it was a source of
pride and delight to the members of the parish
communities — exactly as family jewels or other
heirlooms are to those who claim, during life, the
exclusive use of them — so it was now and then a
source of expense too to the parishes, which were
bound to keep these heirlooms in serviceable repair,
and from time to time to renew them. Edward the
Third (A.D. 13 27-1 377) is said to have taken great
interest in clocks, and to have given a great stimulus
to their general introduction in England. At the
beginning of the fifteenth century there seems to
have been quite a mania for setting up parish clocks.
They were, doubtless, clumsy affairs, and they were
certainly very expensive luxuries. It is rare to find
any parish accounts of the fifteenth century without
finding a clock mentioned. It was always wanting
mending, and it required a functionary to look after
it, who usually took a contract for a year, but it was
the joy and pride of the parish. After the middle of
the sixteenth century one rarely or ever meets with
any allusion to the clock in the country parishes.
Why ? Not only because the parish funds had been
stolen and the parish income had disappeared, but
because in the Pillage the parish bells had been
among the first things to pull down and sell. That
is, in Queen Elizabeth's days, there were no bells for
the clocks to strike on 1

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 53

The bells, too, were a constant expense to the
parish in the old days. They were always being
rung, and always wanting new bell-ropes, new
clappers, and new hanging. Not only so, but in the
incessant use to which they were put day and night
the bells were always getting cracked. Then there
was a new bell to be provided, or it might be a new
peal ; but so self-supporting were the parishes, even
in "the very country," that there was never any
difficulty in casting a new bell. There were no
great bell-founders in great centres of industry, as
is the case now. The constant demand for this or
that skilled artificer went far to create the supply ;
the bell was wanted, and somehow — ^somehow — it
was made on the spot, or by some cunning man a
few miles off. To carry a big bell, say twenty or
thirty miles, over such roads as existed in the
fifteenth century, would be a very serious expense
indeed. To the craftsmen of those days it was a
much easier matter to make the bell where it was
going to be hung than to drag it along up hill and
down dale at the serious risk of breaking it in
transit.

So with the church books. They were in constant
use, and though they were written On vellum or
parchment the wear and tear was always heavy.
When the archdeacon, or his official, made his

54 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

visitation to a church — ^and in the time we are
dealing with the visitations were very serious
inquests, and sometimes much dreaded — the first
thing he looked into was the condition of the service
books. They were brought before him for inspec-
tion, and every flaw or defect was noted. "Mr.
Churchwarden, I cannot let this missal pass or that
lectionary. You will provide new copies before I
come next, or the parish will, &c., &c." We actually
hear of churchwardens, in dread of what was hanging
over them, borrowing books and vestments from a
neighbouring parish and presenting them as their
own. The trick must have been practised pretty
often, for special pains and penalties were pro-
nounced upon such as should be guilty of such a
fraud. But when a service book was ordered to be
bound, or repaired, or condemned, the writing of a
new one or the mending of the old ones had to be
submitted to with the best grace possible, and no
time was to be lost. Very frequently we find a
charge on the accounts for the writing of a new
book ; and frequently the parish priest or one of the
chaplains has the job— he glad enough to get it —
and he is paid by the parish — observe again by the
parish — for his work.

Entries of money paid for "repairing of the
church books" and for "mending of vestments"

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 55

are constantly occurring. There seems to have been
a class of itinerant workmen who went from place
to place patching up the shabby vestments and re-
binding the books. Thus, in the accounts of the
parish of Denton, in Norfolk, we have (a.d, 1520)
charges "for mending of vestments ... for linen
cloth and buckram and satin of Cjrprus and ribbon
bought for the said vestments . . • and for
boarding of the said vestment-maker." Again, in
the wardens' accounts (a.d. 1525) of Bungay, in
Suffolk, we find "... paid to the bookbinder for
2 days and a half ... for his board . . . and for
parchment for to mend the said book." Two years
later there occurs "... paid to the embroiderer
[brawder] for his work and for his boarding." Two
years later again the charges for binding the service
books and repairing vestments are so unusually
heavy that one can hardly help guessing that the
Archdeacon had come down very severely upon the
parishioners of St. Mary in Bungay. One Gerrard
was paid for " 3 calf skins for the reparacion of the
books " ; another worthy named Gjrrling had fur-
nished " 3 skins [query sheepskins] to the reparacion
of the books" . . . and "4 red skins for the books";
while the bookbinder, whose name is not given, and
the writer had received liberal wages besides being
boarded for five weeks and an extra allowance for

56 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

*' certain skins, glue, vellum, and for mending certain
books " which had not been included in the original
contract. In the same account William Bode is
paid " for mending certain copes and vestments and
mending the best Banner," the wardens providing
*' sewing silk for the vestments." Eighty years
earlier one of the parish chaplains of Southwold,
in Suffolk, Sir Edmund by name, receives a sum
equal to £"] or ;^8 in our time "for making a
Manual " — one of the smaller service books — ^which
I think must have been somewhat liberally illumi-
nated by the worthy scribe. The organs — ^they are
always named in the plural — were another source of
expense to the parishes. They too were always
requiring mending or tuning or otherwise looking
to, and though they did not cost as much as the
articles above named, yet they were an ecclesiastical
luxury which, like all other luxuries in daily use,
entailed a frequent outlay upon their proud pos-
sessors.

The real wealth of the churches, however, con-
sisted in the vast accumulations of gold and silver
vessels of various kinds, and the gorgeous vestments
only used on special occasions, which were kept in
the Sacristies or Treasuries of the parish churches.
No one who has not had his attention drawn to the
old inventories of such splendid churches as the

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 57

cathedrals of Exeter or St. Paul's can have anything
like an adequate idea of the prodigious accumula-
tions of wealth which some of our more important
churches in England boasted of in the fifteenth
century. I am not dealing with these instances,
however ; I confine myself to such parish churches
as were to be found all over the land ; and if I had
not so strong a desire, as I have, to rescue the word
parish from the grip of ignorant blunderers who
have gone so far as to make us forget what that
word connotes, I should have spoken of village
churches rather than parish churches. My wish is,
however, to draw attention to the country parishes
and their churches rather than to the town parishes,
though, of course, on this subject what is true of
the country parishes was much more true of town
parishes. The more thriving the people were the
more they spent upon their churches, and the strong
feeling of proprietorship in those churches led to
great rivalry among contiguous parishes in the
towns as well as in the rural districts. Happily, the
inventories of the contents of chiu-ches which were
from time to time handed in to the bishops or arch-
deacons on their periodical visitation have been
preserved in larger numbers than the church-
wardens' accounts.
Many of them have been printed, and many more

58 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

are readily accessible to those who can read them.
The inventories of St, Lawrence, Reading, from
which Mr. Kerry has given some copious extracts,
show that the church plate of that parish — let alone
the vestments — ^was extremely magnificent, and he
estimates that its total weight must have exceeded
700 ounces when the inventory was made in 1523.
Much of this was of parcel gilt, and some of the
chalices, basins, crosses, and candlesticks were of
exquisite and priceless workmanship. Even more
remarkable than the Reading treasures, however,
were those which were set down in the inventory of
Long Melford church in 1529, from which it
appears that the gold and silver vessels almost
weighed 900 ounces, exclusive of jewels, rings,
enamelled girdles, buckles, and the like, some of
them studded with precious stones. The value of
the vestments of cloth of gold, and other costly
materials, miracles of daintiest needlework, is incal-
culable. Long Melford was at this time a flourishing
little Suffolk town, in which the clothiers were
carrying on a large trade, and money was being
made by employers and employed.

The " Black Book " of Swaffham, in Norfolk, con-
tains an earlier inventory of the church goods of this
parish ; unfortunately it is a mere fragment. Even
so, the list of vestments and ornaments fills seven

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 59

small folio pages, though some of the pages which
contained the lists of the church plate are missing.
It may be asked if all these vast accumulations of
treasure did not tempt the cupidity of robbers to
break in upon the sacristies of the churches, or the
''strong rooms" — the term occurs in the old
writings — of the gilds ? Of course they did. In
large and important churches, where it was well
known that there were great hoards stored up, it
was no uncommon practice for a watchman to sleep
in a chamber constructed for him in the church,
and in the articles of inquiry at the bishop's visita-
tions we find it asked : Whether such a watchman
regularly slept in the church, as his duty was ?
Ecclesiastical censures were frightfully severe upon
those guilty of the crime of sacrilege ; but they were
not terrible enough to prevent church robbers from
breaking open the sacristies when so much was to
be gained by a burglary. Thus in the Swaffham list
of plate — so provokingly defective — we are told that
on the night of Easter Sunday, 1475, three chalices
had been stolen and carried off. The thieves seem
to have been disturbed in their work, for a great
chalice of silver gilt, tnagni ponderis, a pix, and two
silver basins for the high altar had been left behind,
and how much more we shall never know. At
Long Melford, on the 13th of January, 1531, there

6o PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

appears to have been a great robbery of plate from

the treasury, which we learn was in a room over the

vestry, and the thieves got ojBf with a large amount

of plunder. There is no need to multiply instances,

for we are continually finding mention of such

robberies of church property, and I am sorry to say

the parsons did not always show an example of

strict honesty in these matters, as when one of them

appropriated a valuable cushion to his own use, and

another — I forget where — had filched an old but

handsomely broidered cloth from the church which

he served and used it as a coverlet for his own bed.

The poor man may have been cold, but he need not

have denied the theft when he was charged with it,

as it seems he did, for one witness came forward and

testified that he had himself seen the broidered cloth

upon the reverend gentleman's bed with his own

eyes!

• • • • •

I fear I have taxed my readers' patience more
than enough ; for most people hate details, and on
details they will not dwell for long. Having got
thus far in an inquiry which has been really of a
very superficial character, it must suffice to state my
conviction, which becomes stronger and stronger
the further that inquiry is carried, that the property
of one kind or another owned by the parish com-

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 6i

munities throughout England in the first half of the
fifteenth century must have amounted to an aggre-
gate which represented millions of money. It
remains to inquire what became of it, and how it
vanished as it did.

The ninth and last Parliament of King Henry the
Eighth assembled at Westminster on the 23rd of
November, 1545. The great Act of the session was
'' An Act for the dissolution of chantries, hospitals,
and free chapels," in which were included those
remarkable foundations known as secular colleges or
collegiate churches about which so little has hitherto
been written and about which much remains to be
written by some one qualified to treat of them.* It
was enacted that all these foundations with all that
belonged to them should be forthwith surrendered
to the King during the term of his natural life, without
inquest before a jury or any other circumstance,
and, before the end of the year, colleges, hospitals,
chantries, and free chapels were falling rapidly to
the King. Mr. Dixon, in his very able " History of
the Church of England from the Abolition of the

* I have touched lightly on the subject of these colleges, and
especially upon a group of them in Norfolk and Suffolk, which
were founded and endowed during the fourteenth century, in
my lamented friend Mr. Crabbe's " History of the Parish of
Thompson, co. Norfolk," 4to (A. H. Goose, Norwich, 1892),
p. 25, Introd. note.

62 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

Roman Jurisdiction/' has given a brief — too brief —
account of these institutions.^ They had long been
threatened, and it had long been felt that now that
the vast possessions of the monasteries great and
small had been squandered and nothing remained
of them, the colleges and chantries must be con-
fiscated next. The plundering went on apace.
" For all that, the King's purse remained as empty
as ever, and his mysterious beggary was unappeased
still." But though the Court of Augmentation did
its work with unparalleled expedition — or, as one
may say, with the most shameless haste — ^the
hundreds of hospitals and colleges that were waiting
for the spoilers could not be abolished without some
legal formalities, and when henry the Eighth died,
in January, 1547, there were hundreds of them still
standing, and the King's life interest (1) in them had
come to an end. That little difficulty was soon got
^ver, and what had been granted to King Henry
was soon granted to his son, now upon the throne.
It makes one sick to read the hateful story 1 Pro-
clamations, injunctions, orders of the council, and
what not came out in swarms, all having the same
object, the plundering of all corporate property —
chantries and chapels of ease, hospitals, colleges,
gilds— ^' all were handed over to the Crown." To

* Vol. ii. p. 379.

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 63

the Crown, forsooth ! the crown that weighed so
heavily upon the brows of the sad boy king, now
scarce twelve years old.

I am not qualified to tell the story of those three
or four years which were chiefly taken up with the
plunder of the poor by the rich. It is an unwritten
chapter of English history, and has long been
waiting to be told. But let one caution be offered
to those who may set themselves to this great task.
Let them beware how they fall into the old mistake
which has led us all astray for so long. Let them
get rid of the old assumption that this monstrous
robbery was a necessary part of what we call the
Reformation. Religion had just about as much to
do with this business as religion had to do with the
September massacres at Paris in 1792. In the latter
case, the mob went raving mad with the lust of
blood ; in the former case, the richer classes went
raving mad with the lust of gain.

The most startling fact in the long series of
surprises which meets us, as the events of the first
two years of King Edward's reign pass before our
view, is that during all this time the old ritual was
still kept up in all our churches. The Mass was
still said or sung, prayers for the dead were still
offered up, and in an unknown tongue ; and Henry
the Eighth in his last will left vast sums to be spent

64 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

in masses for his own soul. The church formularies
and church ritual had all this time been subjected
to very insignificant changes indeed. It was not till
May, 1549, that the first Prayer Book of Edward the
Sixth was issued. After its publication no other form
of prayer was allowed. The old service books were
at once doomed. Then, for the first time, the
people found themselves actually forbidden to use
those sacred vessels, ornaments, vestments, and the
like which they and their forefathers had delighted
in for centuries, which had been for them integral
parts of their religious observances, and had been
in their ignorance not only signs and symbols of the
faith they professed and had been taught, but their
helps and supports in every act of adoration, of
prayer and praise.

" But was it not all a ma'e mass of superstitious
and gross credulity, and were not these benighted
creatures grovelling in the mire and groping — if they
were groping — ^in a darkness that might be felt ? "

Well, suppose I say Yes ! and say it with a sigh.
Does that prevent me from calling to mind a pro-
found saying that Coleridge taught me, say, fifty
years ago ? " My friends, a clothing even of
withered leaves is better than bareness."

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 65

" Why, this man is a renegade. He wants all the
abominations of the scarlet woman brought back
again I "

Does he 7 How little you know him I
" He's a Crypto Papist 1 a mummer — a man who
scrapes and bows up and down the aisles, and kisses
the pavement, and is given over to antics.

'' He's a traitor, blasphemer, and what's wuss'n those.
He puts all his atheism in drefiFul bad prose ! "

Nevertheless, my friends, or my foes — if I have
any — ^truth has an awkward way of getting a hearing
sooner or later, and, while some yell and bawl
"Question," others wait and listen.

The plunderers were astute men in that age of

systematic plunder. Doubtless they had foreseen

what was coming. The spoil of the chantries and

hospitals and gilds had given them a grand haul ;

but if there was more to get, why should not they

have it 7 So an Act was passed that all such books

heretofore used or still preserved in the churches,

and all images, pictures, and other ornaments as

being " things corrupt . . . vain, and superstitious,

and, as it were, a preparation to superstition," should

be destroyed, burnt, or otherwise defaced. But the

6

66 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

scramble had begun long before this. Why should
people wait for the clumsy machinery of Parliament
to be set in motion ? There was such a general and
widespread anticipation of what was coming that
almost immediately after the death of King Henry
men of all classes began to fall upon the spoil.
Sometimes the churchwardens themselves were
authorised to lay hands on the church goods, and
were not slow to use their opportunities ; sometimes
commissioners were sent down to the parishes from
the council ; sometimes emissaries from the bishops
appear to have taken part in the confiscation. In
three years it may be said that almost all the parish
churches in England had been looted; before the
end of the King's reign there had been a clean
sweep of all that was worth stealing from the parish
chests, or the church walls, or the church treasuries.
In the next generation there were churches by the
score that possessed not even a surplice ; there were
others that had not even a chalice ; and others again
in considerable numbers which were described as
'* ruinated." When the Second Book of Homilies
was issued in 1562 already we find the homilist
indignantly exclaiming : ^' It is a sin and shame to
see so many churches so ruinous and so foully
decayed, almost in every corner. . . . Suffer them
not," he adds, ** to be defiled with rain and weather,

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 67

with dung of doves and owls, stares and choughs,
and other filthiness, as it is foul and lamentable
to behold in many places of this country." And
yet what else could have been looked for? The
great pillage was nothing less than this — ^the Disen-
dowment of all the Parishes in England. Nothing
was left to the parish community but the bare walls
of the church fabric, stripped of every "thing of
beauty" on which the eyes had delighted to rest.
No church was allowed to retain more than a single
bell. The beautiful art of campanology almost died
out. The organs were sold for the price of the
pipes ; the old music, the old melodies, were hushed,
for praising God in an unknown tongue was pro-
hibited. The old gatherings in the gildhalls came
to an end.

It is nonsense, it is absolutely contrary to fact, to
say that it was owing to the suppression of the
monasteries that new devices were resorted to to
save the poor from starving. Pauperism came in,
not by the Suppression of the Monasteries, but by
the Disendowment of the Parishes.

Compare the churchwardens' accounts of any
county parish in the fifteenth century with those of
the same parish in the se3/:enteetii or eighteenth, and
what a change has come over the scene 1 In the
earlier documents, when we have learnt to read

68 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

them aright, there is interest and liveliness in every
line. In the later ones there are everywhere indi-
cations that the parishioners are only vying with
one another to keep down the rates ; the lead is sold
off the roof and replaced by thatch ; there is hig-
gling between one party and another party as to
whether twopence or threepence a dozen shall be
paid for sparrows or their eggs ; there is a division,
decided in the negative, as to whether there shall be
a new rope to ring the solitary bell ; there is a
squabble about the fences of the churchyard ; there
is a presentment that hogs were rooting up the
graves ; the parish meeting is attended by threes
and fours, there is an atmosphere of meanness and
squalor pervading the shrivelled assemblies. The
one piece of property that remains to the parishioners
is the parish church : only the ghost of the old
parish community survived.

Then came a time when some cunning parishioners
here and there began to see a chance of getting rid
of their liabilities as' parishioners, and began to feel
'^ conscientious objections" to contribute to the
maintenance of the fabric in which they seldom or
ever appeared. The Quakers showed the first
example: it was soon followed. Thus far the
parishes were only disendowed^ it remained for
them to be disestablished. That began when, as the

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 69

phrase is, church rates were abolished — uc^ when
no one who objected to contribute to the main-
tenance of the church could be compelled to pay
for the use of it. As I read^ that act was a bribe
to people not to belong to the old parish com-
munity.

But the end came when the .Local Government
Act of 1894 became the law of the land. By that
Act the old parish communities were formally dis-
established. The parish was defined to be " a place
for which a separate overseer is or can be appointed."
In the new parish council or parish meeting the
parish priest as such has no locus standi^ nor have
the churchwardens : the old constitution of the
parish community has gone.

Meanwhile the parish churches remain. Again
I ask| as I have often asked before, To whom do the
churches belong ? There are some at any rate in
every " place for which a separate overseer is or can
be appointed " who still are joyfully willing to take
upon themselves the liability to keep the church in
repair ; some who gladly avail themselves of the
privilege of worshipping in the old houses of God
where generations of their fathers worshipped during
centuries gone by; some who have no wish to
interfere with the liberty of conscience and the free-
dom of worship which others so strongly claim.

70 PARISH UFE IN ENGLAND

But these men and women have their rights too,
and one of these rights is that they shall not be
liable to be interfered with, or their liberty be
restricted by every noisy brawler who may object,
or choose to protest, against the ritual sanctioned
by ecclesiastical authority, or the doctrine wisely or
unwisely preached in the churches maintained at
the " worshippers' " cost.

Some of us seeing things as they are, and accept-
ing the logic of facts, are not afraid of their parishes
being disestablished, any more than they are scared
when compelled to confess that they were disen-
dowed three centuries ago. Some of us are quite
awake to the fact that the disestablishment of the
Church is one thing, and that the disestablishment
of the parish is quite another. But we who take
up this position do think strongly that the time has
come when the ownership of the churches up and
down the land should be handed over to somebody,
and they count it an outrage and a monstrous in-
justice that every religious body in this land of ours
should be able to claim its place of worship as its
own, whether that body be Jew or Gentile, Roman,
Greek, or Mormonite, Quaker, Wesleyan, Muggle-
tonian, or Independent, but that they who for the
present have the use of the, say, 20,000 parish
churches in England should be enjoying that use

BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE l\

on little more than su£Ferance, and should not be
able to call their churches their own.

" Why can't we get the Bishops to move ? " asks
one and another. "They are our leaders, they
ought to know their own mind I " Alas ! only once
in the history of the Reformed Church of England
have the Bishops as a body known their own mind ;
then, when those seven were thrown into the Tower
— ^and then the hearts of Englishmen throbbed
with a mighty burst of enthusiastic loyalty — ^the
nation rose up as one man to acknowledge with
gratitude the heroism of their episcopal leaders.
Alas 1 again I say alas 1 there was another occasion
when the Bishops as a body "knew their own
minds." It was when twenty Bishops in the House
of Lords voted solid against Lord Grey's second
Reform Bill. There was only one dissentient I
The Bill was thrown out for that time : but what
next?

The Anglican Bishops of this Reformed Church
of England never have started any forward move-
ment : they have followed public opinion, not led
it. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,
the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the
Church Missionary Society did not enter upon their

73 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND

several magnificent careers at the suggestion of our
Bishops. Even in that glorious war against the
accursed horrors of slavery were they the Bishops
who led the van ? Of late years things have gone
from bad to worse ; we expect from ^' our leaders "
such restless activity (if that is the word) as leaves
no time for serious thought — such perpetual
"serving of tables" as, according to the Twelve
Apostles, was inconsistent with the exercise of the
higher Apostolic functions. We need statesman-
ship, and we look for it in vain.

Now, as heretofore, the hope of the future of the
Anglican Church in this crisis that we all have to
face is to be sought elsewhere than in the leadership
of those whom we should all be glad and proud to
follow, if they would or could lead us.

Note. — ^While the Council of Constance was holding its
sessions for the Reform of the Church and other good pur-
poses, the English Bishops gave a banquet to the Burghers of
the city on Sunday, January 24, 1417, '' followed by a ' Comoedia
sacra/ evidently a sort of mystery play in Latin on the subject
of the nativity of Christ, the worship of the magi, and the
worship of the Holy Innocents/' [Life of Robert Hallam,
Bishop of Salisbury, in the DicL of Nat. Biography,]

THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND
BEFORE THE REFORMATION

76 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

night at Oxford, where a certain measure of hospi-
tality would be offered by several of the colleges,
and where, brought into touch with academic life
and academic thought, they might be afforded the
opportunity of learning from the Divinity Professors
and others what were the latest results of research
and inquiry arrived at by professional students in
the domains of Exegesis, Scientific Theology, and
History.

The Oxford experiment proved successful ; and
during the Long Vacation of 1894 it was repeated
at Cambridge. The lecturers who took part in the
movement were professors of the University, and
such scholars and men of learning as were believed
to have something to say, and to be in some sort
specialists in this or that line of study. I could not
but feel gratified when a request was made to me
that I should deliver one of these lectures. The
subject was left to me, and the novelty of it com-
mended itself to the Committee. Since its delivery
I have been asked by many to publish it.

With some few excisions it is printed pretty much
as it was delivered.

By the term Parish Priest we understand an
official responsible for the spiritual oversight of the

BEFORE THE REFORM A TION 77

inhabitants of a certain geographical area which we
call the Parish.

But here we are at once face to face with a
problem surrounded with difEculties.

In the first five centuries at least after Christ, the
word vapoiKfa was used almost exclusively to denote
what we now call the Bishop's Diocese. The
province of Gaul — meaning by that the great
stretch of country now embracing Belgium and
France — was in the fifth century divided into some
sixty odd civitates ; and though I am not prepared
to say that each civitas had its bishop, yet it is, in
the main, true that to every civitas a bishop had
already been assigned, whose stool (as Mr. Freeman
was pleased to phrase it) was set up in the chief
town of that civitas. The chief town gave him his
title ; the civitas was his vapoiKta or parish.

It is to be remembered that, as in the Apostolic
age the work of converting the world started from
the great towns, so was this emphatically the case
in Gaul. How early or how late the practice became
general of calling the country cure the Parish and
the Episcopal See the Diocese I have never been
able to discover. As early as the fourth century we
find mention of country churches with lands belong-
ing to them, and in the next century the numbers of
these foundations so much increased that Sidonius

78 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

(a.d. 433-488) mentions a visitation he made of
the rural churches in his diocese (Auvergne), and
we notice that by this time these settlements are
sometimes called Parochice and sometimes Dioceses.
Later on, Gregory of Tours (a.d. 539-593) more
often calls the country cures Dioceses and the
Episcopal See the Parochia. But, call them what
you will, we are fairly well instructed as to the
manner in which the country parishes (as we call
them now) rose up in Gaul ; and I have a suspicion
that what was true of Gaul was true, mutatis
mutandis, of Britain. I have a suspicion that if we
had for British history anything approaching to that
wealth of original sources which we have for early
French history during the first five or six centuries
of our era, we should have evidence that some —
perhaps many— of our English parishes existed as
ecclesiastical parishes, with pretty much the same
boundaries as they have to-day, and are survivals
of a condition of affairs anterior to the Saxon
Conquest.^

Be that as it may, however, there are indications
that the parish priest all through the Saxon times
held a position of greater independence relatively

» Compare Haddan and Stubbs* "Councils," i. 124, "British
Church Endowments claimed by the Saxon Church."

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 79

to the bishops than he held on the other side of the
Channel.

Two of these indications are worth drawing your
attention to for more than one reason, (i) Among
us in pre-Norman times Archdeacons are hardly
heard of. Bishop Stubbs reminds us that the first
person who is called archdeacon is Wulfred, who
became Archbishop of Canterbury in 805 ; and he
adds that the office of archdeacon is only once
mentioned in the Northumbrian Priest's Laws.

The fact is so significant that I must beg you to
pardon a digression (which is really not a digression)
while I try to explain the significance.

You all remember that in the Apostolic age it was
found necessary very early to appoint deacons^ who
were to t>e the administrators of the finances of the
Church. In the same way it came to pass that,
when the revenues of the bishops in Gaul became
almost unwieldy, it became necessary that the
revenues of the see should be placed under the
management and supervision of an official who
should regulate the expenditure and its distribution,
keep the very voluminous accounts, and strike the
annual debit and credit balance.

This was all the more necessary in Gaul, because
all the endowments in a diocese were paid into the
episcopal exchequer and were under the bishop's

8o THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

control. He apportioned to each priest his income,
and, even where local funds were forthcoming, the
priest resident in a certain cure was required to
account for such rents or dues as were derived from
local sources, presumably paying the balance, if any,
to the common chest of the diocese. The accounts
in all cases were sent in to the archdeacon ; and if I
may be allowed the expression, the archdeacon
would annually present his Budget to the bishop,
whose First Lord of the Treasury or Chancellor of
the Exchequer he was.

This, I say, was the case in Gaul. It seems that
no such unification of diocesan revenues ever existed
in Britain. If anjrthing of the kind had prevailed
among us in Anglo-Saxon times we must have heard
of the archdeacon's work or of the archdeacon's
office. As it is, we hear almost nothing of the one
or the other till after the Norman Conquest, and
then we hear a great deal too much. But then the
titular and territorial archdeacon has become an
altogether different kind of functionary from him
with whom we are concerned when we speak of the
earlier archdeacons in the Gallican Church.

(2) Besides the archdeacons there was another
class of clergy whom we hear nothing of in England
till late in the eighth century, but of whom we are
perpetually hearing in Gaul almost from the earliest
times — I mean the Canons.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 8i

The first instance of the very name canons occur-
ring in English history is in the report of two
bishops who were sent into Britain in 789 by Pope
Adrian the First, and who were the first ambassadors
or (if you choose to call them by the term which
acquired a certain disagreeable meaning in the later
limes) the first legates who came to spy out the land
since the famous mission of Augustine two centuries
before.' And here again I am compelled to say
something to explain who these canons were. For
we hear so much of the canons in later times, of the
rivalry between them and the monks, and of their
relation to the parish priests, that it is almost impos-
sible to understand the ecclesiastical history of these
times — or indeed of later times either — ^until we get
something like a clear notion of who and what these
canons were.

As I have said before, the Gallican bishops were
very wealthy and very powerful territorial magnates;
they were, in fact, what many prelates in Austria
are called to this day — Prince- Bishops. The setting

' "This is probably the first use of the word canonki in
the sense of canons living in communities, but without monastic
vows, that occurs in English Church history ; indeed, the
rule of Chrodogang, the first canonical rule, was only published
about fifty years before this, and the titie does not become
common until much later." Haddan and Stubbs' "Councils
and Ecclesiastical Documents," iii. 461.

7

82 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

apart of separate estates for the maintenance of
clergy in this or that manor or district was hardly
heard of even so late as the fifth century. The
earliest authoritative ordinance laying it down that
every rural district should have a parsonage-house>
and that only after the building of that house
should the bishop allow a priest to take possession
of the church and officiate there, is to be found in a
Capitular of Louis le Debonnaire— or, as we ought
to translate his name, Louis the Devout — in the
year 8i8 or 819.^ In the same Capitular there
follows an ordinance that in future in all new villce^
where new churches were built, the tithes should be
bestowed upon those same churches — ue.y should
not be paid into the common chest of the episcopal
see. This appears to have been a novel arrange-
ment, and implies, I think, that a feeling was
growing against such centralisation of Church
revenues as tended to make the country clergy too
absolutely dependent upon their diocesan. Obvi-
ously the dealing with these huge revenues neces-
sitated the employment of a large staff of trained
subordinates engaged in mere office work, analogous
to what we understand among ourselves by the
Civil Service. This small army of officials was

» "Capitularia Regum Francorum." Ed. Boret, 1883, section
138, § 10-12.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 83

occupied mainly in dealing with the official business
of the see ; and, as there was a Chancellor of the
Exchequer as I have ventured to call him — the
archdeacon — so also there would be a certain
number of heads of departments or chief clerks,
who would be required to be more or less in strict
personal relations with the bishop from day to day.
These, as being more concerned with office work
than with pastoral work, were in the first instance,
and indeed for some centuries, called the Episcopal
Clerks, or Clericu They were entrusted with im-
portant responsibilities and sometimes very arduous
duties— education, church extension, discipline, and
the like, not to speak of the immense correspondence
which fell upon them and the delicate diplomacy
which they might be called on to undertake at an
hour's notice. These clerici were sure to be the
ablest and most efficient ecclesiastics in the diocese,
and had their residence in the episcopal house,
which soon got to be called the bishop's Palatium,
as the emperor's residence was called his Palatium,
the internal organisation of the one being modelled
upon that of the other.

In both cases the discipline of the palace was
necessarily as strict as the discipline of a man-of-
war ; but in the bishop's palace that discipline would
assume an ecclesiastical and religious character.

84 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

The great officials of the bishop's palace holding
high office were bound to conform to certain obser-
vances laid down in a certain code, differing in
different dioceses. But in all cases they lived by a
rule, a Kdvwvy as the Greek word called it. Not
improbably on entering upon their office they
*' kissed hands/' as the Ministers of the Crown do
now, and undertook formally to observe the Kavwvy
and so were included among the Canonici.

As time went on it became necessary to plant
more than one or two of these Government Houses,
as we may call them, in various parts of the diocese,
with a prior or superior as head ; such houses being
supposed to keep up the etiquette, and to observe
the rule or Kavwv of the episcopal Palatium. Little
by little the close connection between these houses,
lying at a distance from the central seat of govern-
ment became weakened. The discipline tended,
inevitably, to grow lax where the face of the bishop
was seldom seen, and his presence was not to be
feared. Gradually, too, the canons in the distant
houses were put upon their own resources, and were
allowed to appropriate to their own use — t.e., to the
support of the community — the revenues which in
the first instance they had been sent to administer
for diocesan purposes. Then a worse development
ensued. The canons in the outlying houses pro-

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 85

ceeded to apportion among themselves these estates,
and each canon became a tenant for life of his share
of the estates. Then came in the practice of non-
residence. There was no longer a common table,
nor any life in common, and, in point of fact, the
canonry or prebend became only a better and more
lucrative benefice with little work and a good income
— more or less of a sinecure ; though it must l>e
allowed that such prizes were for the most part
bestowed upon the better educated of the clergy —
for the most part they were the prizes which fell to
the abler, the more cultivated, the more deserving.

Many attempts were made from time to time to
restore discipline in these canon's houses. Chrodo-
gang. Bishop of Metz, in the eighth century, drew up
a Rule for his Canonici, and this rule was adopted
by other bishops, who, under the authority of
Charlemagne's Adtnonitio Genera lis (a.d. 789),*
attempted with more or less success to force it upon
their canons. Later, it seems that the canons them*
selves here and there showed a desire to return to a
better way ; and we find many of these corporations
associated, no one knows how, under a pretended
rule of St. Augustine, which they professed to
follow and conform to. These canons, who
observed a certain rule of life, which they were

' It is printed by Boret in the "Capitularia," section 22.

86 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

expected to obey even in small things, got to be
called the Canons Regular^ or canons living together
under a rule ; while the others, who somehow were
in possession of the estates, and lived pretty much
as they pleased, were known as Secular Canons, or
canons who were living in the world, and conforming
to the secular life under no particular rule or strict
canonical discipline.

Outside these canons, again, whether secular or
regular, were the monks or dwellers in the monas-
teries ; but about them, for many good reasons, I

can enter into no details now.

• • • • •

Having indulged in these two digressions by way
of introduction, I am the better able to enter now
upon the main subject before us.

Our sources of information regarding the Anglo-
Saxon parish priests are not so meagre as is gene-
rally assumed by those who have not given their
attention to the subject. They may be said to begin
with those documents which belong to the days of
Archbishop Theodore, who came among us in 668,
and who continued to preside over the Church of
England till 690.' Theodore's Penitential belongs

Mt is a very horrible document. It may be found in
Haddan and Stubbs' "Councils," vol. iii. pp. 173-203. On
the subject of these Penitentials, see Bishop Stubbs' " Lectures
on Mediaeval and Modern History/' p. 296.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 87

to a class of documents which the Bishop of Oxford
describes as "lists of sins and their penances," drawn
up for a people only partially delivered from heathen
abominations and superstitions, and which had
already been issued by the Prankish bishops and
the Merovingian kings under their influence. These
penitentials were, indeed, private or gwasj-private
compilations, and it was not till the eighth and
ninth centuries that even in Gaul they obtained the
force of legislative enactments. But, viewed as re-
flections of the age in which they were drawn up,
they are of inestimable value. Theodore's Penu
tential shows us that the organisation of the Church
in Britain was in many respects very unlike that of
Gaul, or as we might now call it, Frankland ; there
was, indeed, some discipline among the clergy, but
there was clearly more laxity than among their
brethren on the other side of the Channel. In some
important matters they did not conform to the
usages and practices of the Roman Church.

Sunday was strictly observed. The timber
churches were apparently often moved from one
place to another. Many of the clergy knew no
Latin ; ^ and, by what sounds like a compromise, it
was ordered that in future they should be required
at least to say the Creed and the Lord's Prayer and
» See Green's " Making of England," p. 139.

88 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

read the Lessons in that language. At the same
time, it is clear that these clergy were recognised as
the guides and teachers of the people, and that their
ministry was accepted with remarkable docility.
Their influence was an influence for good. Outside
the sphere in which these men were discharging
their functions there were monasteries, which were
the homes of such learning as was to be acquired
through the medium of Latin ; seminaries in which
the sons of wealthy men like the father of St Boni-
face, the apostle of Germany, sent their boys to
receive the higher education. But the epistles of
St. Boniface show us that outside the cloisters the
people at large were instructed in the elements of
the Christian faith by the secular priests, and that
they were probably the teachers of that native poetry
which was always becoming more and more Christian
in its character — ^such poetry as the people were
generally familiar with, such as Boniface himself had
learnt in his youth and did not forget in his man-
hood, such too, as Beda loved and quoted on his
deathbed. It was in Theodore's time that, on the
24th of September, 673, a council was held at Hert-
ford, where all the Anglo-Saxon bishops except one
assembled; and here, among other things, it was
resolved that in future a synod should be held
annually at a place called Clovesho, a place which

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 89

recent discoveries have gone far to show was situated
near Mildenhall, in Cambridgeshire; and the records
of at least ten of these Clovesho synods have been
preserved, bringing us down to the times when
the Danes were ravagmg the country with fire and
sword.

At one of these synods, held under the presidency
of Archbishop Cuthbert in 747 — ue.^ about fifty years
after Theodore's death — ^the decrees, though, as usual,
in great part imported from abroad, contain some
enactments of peculiar interest.^ The bishops are to
visit their several dioceses (Parochice) every year to
make themselves known to their people, and to
warn them against heathen practices. They are to be
careful to ordain no one to the priesthood till they
are assured that the candidate is fitted by his life and
doctrine to act as a shepherd of souls (c. 6). The
priests themselves are (c. 8) to give themselves heart
and life to the ministry of the Word and Sacraments,
and to keep themselves from all worldly callings ; they
are to be diligent in visiting their people, and to be
sober in their talk and in their conduct (c. 9). They
are to explain the meaning of the Sacrament, translat-
ing to those who do not understand them the words
used in the prayers offered, and especially to teach

* Haddan and Stubbs, "Councils and Documents," vol. iii.
p. 362.

90 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

them the Creed and the Lord's Prayer and the
spiritual significance of the ritual, in which the people
were to bear a part (c. lo). They are warned against
any unauthorised departure from the order of ser-
vice. They are not to sing in the churches like the
heathen bards did, nor in theatrical fashion to play
tricks with sacred words, but to follow the established
order of plain song in a simple and serious manner,
and if they cannot sing (c. 12) they are to read dis-
tinctly, and unpretentiously.

These and other ordinances of the council the
bishops are to make known to all at their visitations,
and command all to observe, trying to correct that
which needs mending and enforce that which is
enjoined.

In the MS. records of this council which have
come down to us the names of the bishops only who
were present have been preserved. It is otherwise
with some other of the synods which were assembled
afterwards at Clovesho and elsewhere.

Thus, at a Clovesho council held on the 12th of
October, 803, under the presidency of Archbishop
iEthelheard, we get what appears to be a complete
list of those who were summoned and attended.^

Thirteen bishops, including the Primate, were
present. The normal number of representatives
' Haddan and Stubbs, u.s., iii. 541.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 91

from each diocese (including the bishop of the
see) was seven. But among these seven the abbots
of the monasteries in the several dioceses appear to
have taken their seats as representatives of the regulars
or monastic bodies; though where there was no mon-
astery, as in the dioceses of Elmham and of Rochester,
the six who came with their bishop were all parish
priests. From Canterbury the single archdeacon
mentioned attends as a supernumerary. The num-
ber of signatures all told is ninety-three, of whom
the secular or parish priests are fifty-five, while the
regulars number only twenty-five.

Twenty-one years later — i.^., when the incursions
of the Danes were beginning to cause serious anxiety
— ^we have the record of another Clovesho synod at
which Archbishop Wulfred presided. Eleven bishops
attended, and, according to one account, fifty parish
priests, though the signatures of only thirty-seven
have been preserved. The monasteries by this time
had suffered grievously in some parts of the country
from the Danes, and we need not be surprised that
no more than seven abbots were among the signa-
tories. The significance of these lists is very great.
It is clear that at the beginning of the ninth century
— thirty or forty years before Alfred was- born — ^the
parish priests were by no means the poor creatures
that a cursory reader of such history as emanated

92 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

from the cloisters would lead us to believe they
were. On the contrary, there were among them
men of consideration and weight who were perfectly
qualified to take their places in council side by side
with the greatest abbots in the land, to travel from
one end of England to the other that their voices
might be heard in the debates, and, moreover, when
the religious houses had been harried and burnt
by the Vikings, these same priests were ready to
fill up the vacant seats in the assemblies of the
Church and to rally round their bishops whenever
and withersoever they might be summoned to attend
and deliver their judgments or tender their advice in
times of peril and perplexity.

Unhappily, so great has been at all times the
exclusiveness and arrogance which have character-*
ised monastic literature, and especially when monks
have been writing about the past of their own houses
or their own Order, that they have taken little or no
account of the parish priests and their doings ; but
have adopted when speaking of them precisely the
same tone which is observable in the language of
some among ourselves. The very name of secular
clergy was to the monk almost a name of reproach ;
and, just as among our Nonconformists nowadays
no man is a " member of a Christian Church " ex-
cept he be a member of a Dissenting congregation.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 93

so, for centuries, only they who were members of a
monastic body and under monastic vows were
spoken of as religious. Then, and then only, was
he or she (as the case might be) said to have " en-
tered religion." The phrase is still used in the
present day.

Meanwhile, all through the Anglo-Saxon era we
find the parish priests quite able to hold their own
as teaching, preaching, working clergymen. In the
monasteries the Latin language appears to have
been used as a rule, and among them the Roman
ritual was universal. There are good reasons for
believing that in the parish churches the Latin
service was disliked, and even translated into the
vernacular ; for everybody in Gaul could speak
Latin or understood it. In Britain the people loved
their own language ; to them the Roman speech was
jargon and something worse.

The people could not be induced to learn Latin
except in the monasteries and in some few schools
more or less in connection with them. It was the
interest of the parish priests to keep up the senti-
ment of the people in favour of their native
language, and the people would have translations
of the Scriptures, which the parish priests could

94 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

supply and did supply ; and that there were among
those parish priests no inconsiderable number of
men deserving in that age to be called scholars and
students is abundantly evident.

Bede himself {oh. 732) acknowledges his great
obligations to a certain London priest — I suppose
we may call him a London clergyman — named
Nothelm, who had made transcripts for him of
valuable documents. Nothelm appears to have
been one of the most learned men of his time, and
eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury, dying
there in 739.^^ In the British Museum, among the
Cotton MSS., we have a remarkable catalogue which
a certain Athelstan, in the pride of his heart, drew
up of the books which he had collected and was
apparently very proud of. Athelstan appears to have
lived about a generation after Bede. I hold him
to have been a country parson, and shall continue
to assert and maintain the same till some personage
of adequate audacity shall succeed in proving the
negative. Athelstan names with a certain serious
joy two important volumes which he says he had
obtained from another parish priest named Alfwold.

* On Nothelm, see Mr. Plummer's " Bede," vol. ii. p. 2. He
was apparently in communication with Bede at least fifteen
or twenty years before Bede's death, and long before his own
promotion to the Episcopate.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 95

But Athelstan and Alfwold are only two of many
such clergymen as were men of books and study in
that eighth century. Alcuin — of whom it may be
said that Charlemagne looked to him for efiFecting
the great educational reform which the illustrious
Emperor hoped to bring about — ^Alcuin writes of
England at this time as the home of libraries and
learned men. And this is just what oiu* King Alfred
says of his country in the next century, when he
deplores the havoc and ruin which the Danes had
wrought. In the preface to Gregory's '* Pastorale " he
mentions how " before all was spoiled and burned,
the churches throughout the whole English nation stood
filled with treasures and with books, and also with a
great multitude of God's servants;" but he adds
elsewhere that, in making this very translation in
which such a memorable lament occiu's, he had
received important help, not only from Archbishop
Plegmund and Bishop Asser, but from two mass
priests — i.e.^ parish priests — ^whom he names.

But when the great King bewails the decay of
learning in Britain during the generation or so
preceding his own, we must take such laments with
some little reserve, just as we must receive the
language of JEMric the grammarian in the next
century with all cautious allowance; for iElfric
himself tells us that a parish priest was his own first

96 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

teacher. And we may take it as pretty certain that
when iEIfric wrote those homilies of his which
were so widely circulated, they were the parish
priests who bought them or copied them, and
preached them in their churches. People came
and listened to them too; and preaching other
people's sermons is not such a very reprehensible
practice — it rather goes a little way to prove that
the preachers are not idlers, not drones. And let
me, before I pass on, remind you that the saintly
Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, was one of these
good people who busied themselves in writing
sermons for others to preach, and that he tells us
himself that he was no monk, but that he began his
career as a country parson quietly doing his best
for his people, making no bounce and never
dreaming of promotion.

Nor was the social position of the Saxon working
clergy by any means as low as some have been
inclined to infer from the silence or the covert
sneers of writers who breathed the air of the
cloisters.

There is in the ''Cartularium Saxonicum" a very
interesting will, made by a certain priest named
Werhard, about the year 832.' He describes him-

* " Cartularium Saxonicum." W. de Gray Birch, vol. i.
p. 558, No. 402.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 97

self as a kinsman of Archbishop Wulfred, who had
lately died. The Archbishop had purchased some
property in Kent and Middlesex, which he made
over to Werhard in honourable trust. The income
was to be applied, not for the enrichment of any
monastery, but for the support of the poor in certain
parishes which are named. As for Werhard's own
property (which he expressly tells us was his
patrimony), that he bequeaths to Christ Church,
Canterbury. The monks at Christ Church took
very good care of their evidences, and to this we
owe our knowledge of Werhard ; his will was the
title to the lands he bequeathed to their house, and
if he had not so bequeathed it we should never
have heard of him or of Wulfred's bequest to the
poor. Exactly in the same way do we owe our
knowledge of another parish priest, Erdulf (" Cart."
ii., 589), to whom King Edred, Alfred's grandson, left
a life interest in a considerable estate. The re-
version of that estate devolved to the new Minster
at Winchester, and Erdulf's will, as a matter of
course, would be deposited among the archives of
the monastery. So, again, we owe our knowledge
of the bequests made to some parish priests by a
great personage named Byhrtric, because Byhrtric
left also large legacies to the Canterbury monasteries.
The great Alfred himself left legacies to fifty parish

8

98 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

priests, as no doubt other rich men did from time to
time.

If the working clergy suffered, as of course they
did, by the frightful ravages of the Danes, they
certainly did not suffer to anything approaching the
extent that the monasteries suffered. How greatly
they suffered may be learnt by the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, where we read, under the year 870,
that Archbishop Ceolnoth " commanded his private
priests, and also some of the Vill priests, that they
should help the few monks who remained to do
God's service . • . for," it adds, "there was strife
and sorrow over England ; and therefore the clerks
remained with the monks."

I beg you to note these words. The Archbishop's
private priests in the one clause are the clerks of the
other, and they are the same Clerici whom we have
heard of before as secular canons ; that is, they are
the staff-officers or officials of the bishops, while the
Vill priests are the country parsons or parish priests,
with whom we are now immediately concerned.

It has been said that this entry in the Chronicle
marks the extinction of the old monasticism in
England. Extinction is, perhaps, too strong a
word ; but it is undoubtedly true that in this, the
first year of King Alfred's reign, things were at their
worst in the religious houses throughout the land.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 99

It looks very much as if this measure of the Arch-
bishop's was a desperate attempt to fill the ruined
monasteries, where possible, with the secular or
parish clergy, rather than allow the conventual life
and the conventual buildings to be abandoned.

The attempt may be said to have proved a failure.
It was inevitable that it should be a failure ; for the
single reason that the secular clergy were as a rule
married men, and when they were draughted into
the old monasteries they took their wives and
children with them. This was not only true of the
parish priests, but it was true even of the secular
canons, if we may judge from the Rule of Chrodo-
gang. They, too, were bound originally by no
vows; nor does the obligation of celibacy appear
to have been imposed upon them by any other
penalty than such as was enforced in the case of
fellows of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge fifty
years ago.

When, in the tenth century, the great revival of
monasticism came about all over Europe and the
wave of enthusiasm rolled on to England, then the
cry of the monks was loud against the scandal of
the old monasteries being filled by the secular
canons, and the contest between the one Order and
the other went on actually down to the Norman
Conquest. Five years before that event, Edward

100 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

the Confessor was engaged in building his famous
monastery at Westminster for monks who, with
their abbot at their head, officiated at the King's
funeral; while Harold, who claimed the other's
crown, was building his famous college at Waltham
for secular canons, some of whom were, and all
might have been, married men.

It really seemed a matter of uncertainty down to
the coming of the Normans which were to gain the
day — ^the men of Rule, whose idol was the artificial
and unnatural life of celibates in the cloister, or the
men of Principle, whose contention was that the
law of Christ allowed of freedom, and who claimed
that Christ's ministers might be of Paul the celibate
or of Peter the married man, and yet both might be
of Christ and doing His work in the world.

During the first half of the eleventh century there
is good reason for believing that the secular clergy,
including the parish priests, in England had never
before been so numerous. Not only so, but that
relatively to the rest of th^ population they have never
since been so rich or occupied so strong a position.
In the Domsday Survey hardly more than 1,700
churches are mentioned, but it is agreed on all
hands that this represents very inadequately indeed

BEFORE THE REFORMATION loi

the whole number that must have been in existence
at the time of the Conquest. That number must
certainly have run into thousands. Every one of
these churches had its endowments in the shape of
tithes and offerings. Every one had its glebe.

On the other hand, the monasteries had by no
means recovered from the devastation wrought by
the Danes. Many of the smaller houses had been
entirely blotted out, and it may be doubted whether
there were forty monasteries worth mentioning that
were at this time in working order from the Tyne to
the Exe.i It may indeed almost be said that at this
time the parish priests had it all their own way;
and I am afraid that these clergy were none the
better for their prosperity, rather that their riches
had done them harm in more ways than one.

Soon the fashion began of founding new monas-
teries. The cry was raised that only by the revival
of the stricter religious life of the cloister could
priests and people be reformed. The tide turned
against the seculars. The monasteries rapidly
became wealthy corporations enriched by lands and
manors. In many instances the ownership of these

' How large was the number of religious houses founded in
England during the period anterior to the Norman Conquest,
and how terrible the devastation wrought among them by the
Danes, may be estimated approximately by referring to Mr.
Birch's " Fasti Monastici CEvi Saxonici," 1872.

f

102 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

manors carried with it the patronage of the churches
upon those manors — ue.j the advowsons of many
parishes passed into the hands of the abbeys and
priories. Then we begin to hear of a very odious
form of trading in these benefices. The rectors
were in many cases compelled to pay an annual
rent or pension to the monastery, the compact
being made with the incumbent conditionally upon
his being admitted to his cure. Protests were made
against these simoniacal bargains and councils
legislated against them, but it still went on. Of
course the parishes, the parishioners, and the clergy
suflfered injury and wrong ; but this was as nothing
to the mischief wrought by the appropriation of the
income of a benefice to the support of a monastery,
whereby the monasteries became the rectors of the
parish, taking the whole endowment and leaving the
inhabitants of the place to the care of a stipendiary.
This kind of spoliation went on wholesale for more
than two centuries, till at last thoughtful and right-
thinking men lifted up their voices against the
abomination, and by the middle of the fifteenth
century the appropriations began to be discouraged,
but not before well-nigh half the benefices in
England had been plundered of their great tithes
and glebe lands.
Concurrently with this process of disendowment,

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 103

the wealth of the clergy had made them fair game
for those in power to levy from them all sorts of
exactions, civil and ecclesiastical.

Twice a year they were compelled, or supposed,
to attend the Diocesan Synods, and, whether they
attended or not, they had to pay their fees, and
perhaps higher fees for non-attendance. By this
time, too, the archdeacons had become active
diocesan inspectors, and their courts of inquiry
were very terrible assemblies, at which heavy dues
had to be paid to the officials. You catch a glimpse
in Chaucer of the Archdeacon's Summoner or
"Sompnour" in the "Friar's Tale." The summoner
was a common informer who lived by his vile
trade, and woe to the luckless parson who had
incurred the enmity of some aggrieved parishioner
looking out for a chance of paying off an old
grudge against the rector or vicar who had been
too zealous or a trifle indiscreet. The best he could
do was to bribe the summoner not to bring his
cause into court, where, even if the parson gained
the day, the expenses might easily cripple him for
months or years.

Then there were the taxes (for we may as well
use our modern language), those terrible tenths and
fifteenths of which we hear so much. In the year
1294 Edward the First actually demanded half a

X04 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

year's income from the clergy, and, dreadful as the
impost was, it had to be paid, though how the
parsons found the money it is difficult to imagine.

By this time, however, the country parsons had
almost ceased to be married men, though we meet
with them frequently till quite the end of the
thirteenth century. After that the archdeacons and
the summoners between them effectually put a stop
to holy matrimony among the priests of the Lord.

Nor did the steady progress of impoverishment
of the working clergy end with the appropriations,
the fees, and the taxes, ordinary and extraordinary.
The friars had not long been working in England
before they were found to be acting very seriously
in the direction of lessening the income of the
clergy, and especially of the town clergy, so far as
their resources were derived from freewill offerings
and the like.

Finally, the incomes of the clergy derivable from
tuition and educational work fell off seriously with
the development of the universities. Lads of pro-
mise began more and more to be sent from home
to take up their residence at Cambridge or Oxford
for better tuition than the parochial clergy could
provide, and that happened which has come about
in our own time — viz., that the income of the
country parsons greatly decreased when the demand

BEFORE THE REFORMATION ic^

for clerical private tutors well-nigh came to an
end.

It is hardly to be wondered at if, as all these
worries and exactions, this gradual shrinkage in
the clerical incomes, went on so steadily, we should
find indications of the social position of the country
clergy beginning to decline towards the end of the
fourteenth century. And these indications are not
to be mistaken.

Taking the lists of presentations to our Norfolk
benefices, which go back to the thirteenth century,
and which in the main give the succession of
incumbents in the East Anglian diocese down to
the present day, and examining these lists as I
find them in a single volume of Blomefield's history
of the county, the following results must strike any
reader : —

The great family of the Bardolfs were lords of
the manor of Cantley, on the river Yare, from
Norman times down to the reign of Henry the
Fourth. As lords of the manor they were patrons
of the rectory, and they resided in the parish. The
rectors for nearly two centuries were either Bardolfs
or bore the names of the great county families. The
last of these aristocratic parsons of Cantley, as I
may call them, was presented in 1372. After that
date the rectors are evidently plebeians, of whose
origin we know nothing.

io6 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

The same is true in the neighbouring parish of
Plumstead Parva. Down to 1360 the patrons
appear to have always presented one of their own
kindred. After that date the rectors are taken from
a lower stratum.

At Barton, again, where the ancient family of the
Lovells were resident and patrons of the living till
late in the seventeenth century, the first four rectors
whose appointment is recorded are Lovells— that is,
the living was a family living, which was always held
by some younger brother or poorer kinsman. After
1349 there are no more Lovells to be found among
the rectors, nor any one else of whom there is any-
thing to tell.

Once more. The rectory of St. Mary Beecham-
well was for ages in the gift of presentation of the
Chervilles (another of the proud old houses), and
for generations they appear to have presented the
benefice to one of their own class. After the
presentation of Thomas Cherville by his father or
brother Robert de Cherville about the middle of
the fourteenth century, the parsons are evidently
new men, and few of them even bear Norfolk
names. If these instances stood alone, they would
be suggestive ; but they do not by any means stand
alone, and I commend this line of research to those
who possess or have access to our great county

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 107

histories, or such valuable works as Mr. Hingeston-
Randolph's " Registers of the Diocese of Exeter." I
can only glance at the subject here.

Nevertheless, though the parish priests were
growing poorer and poorer from the Conquest to
the Reformation, it is noticeable that they never
ceased to retain the confidence and esteem of their
people from first to last. My impression is that, as
they ceased to belong to the gentry class by birth,
they grew into more and more favour with the
commonalty. In the thousands of early charters
— ix.^ conveyances of land and the like — which I
have had the eccentric pleasure of handling and
reading in my leisure hours, the names of the
county parsons actually swarm among the feoffees
or trustees to whom settled estates, small or large,
are conveyed. So, too, in the wills of the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries the parish priests are
so frequently appointed supervisors of wills that it
is evident they were regarded as the men most to be
trusted for settling any such disputes as might arise
between executors and legatees. As for instances of
their putting pressure upon the dying that so some
benefits might accrue to themselves, 1 can only say
that I have never met with a single instance of any-
thing of the kind, though for thirty years I have
been on the watch for one, and I have examined

I

io8 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

and made extracts from a good many wills and
testaments in my time. There's no accounting for
tastes, and some monomaniacs have a taste even for
old wills 1

On the other hand, when we come to the wills of
the clergy themselves, we see that though among
them there were all those differences in wealth, birth,
culture, and habits of life which are to be found
among the beneficed clergy nowadays, from the
successful pluralist who held two or three pieces
of preferment simultaneously or the rollicking
squarson who hung loosely to his clerical income
because he had landed property of his own, down
to the humble vicar who had hard work to make
two ends meet, or the needy chaplain who had only
his few household utensils and half a dozen shabby
books to leave behind him, yet it is the rarest thing
to meet with a parson's will in which some legacy
is not left to the church in which he oflSciates.

And here let me observe in passing that it is a
deep-rooted delusion, against which I have made
it my business to protest for many years, that the
great landlords forsooth built all our mediaeval
churches. I hold that to be an utter and mis-
chievous delusion. Everything goes to show that
the immense majority of the old churches of
England were built not by the great men, but by

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 109

the small people with the clergy at their head.
Where some great noble or county magnate did
build a church, there you may always find his
mark ; his coat armour is sure to be carved upon
every available stone or beam ; it tells its own tale.
But the small folk and the large majority of the four-
teenth-century parsons had no escutcheon to display,
and the sculptor amused himself in something else
than heraldic shields carved upon the battlements of
a tower. In the famous " Black Book of SwaflFham"
in Norfolk, where the names of the chief benefactors
to the church are set down with rare minutenesses,
there appear the names of not less than nine rectors
and vicars of the parish who, in a period of less
than a century, had very materially contributed to
the sustentation of the fabric of the church (one of
the finest in Norfolk), and had restored some really
splendid gifts in the shape of service books, plate,
vestments, candlesticks, and ornaments of all kinds
for rendering the ritual and the service of the
sanctuary as splendid and imposing as it could be
made. John Bury, appointed rector of the parish
in 1414, actually built the chancel as we see it now.
He evidently intended to rebuild the whole church,
but he was cut short in the middle of his work, and
in his will he provided for the ceiling of the chancel
with panels. He left his successor to complete what

112 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools nowadays.
" My Lords require you to enlarge your school and
to provide a class-room 1 " Alas 1 what lamenta-
tions follow 1 Take an instance or two.

Bishop Stapeldon had come down and paid a
visit to the church of Staverton, near Totnes, in
1301. He had found some fault with the accommoda*
tion in the nave of the church, and apparently made
some recommendations. When he came again in
July, 1314, his lordship was evidently out of temper
and dissatisfied. He would not be trifled with this
time. He declared that the chancel was too narrow
and dark, and the nave was worse. Wherefore he
made order that the rector, the vicar, and the
parishioners, should remedy these defects without
delay, and you may depend upon it it had to be
done at whatever inconvenience.' Some years
later, the bishop paid a visit to Bradninch, near
CoUumpton. He found the roof of the church in
a bad state (as Mr. Inspector has found perhaps
yours or mine), and the parishioners are peremptorily
ordered to put it in a condition of complete repair,
and are allowed six months to do it in. As for the
ways and means, that was their concern 1 Just about

« "The Register of Walter dc Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter
(1307-1326)." By Rev. F. C. Hingeston-Randolph, 1892, p. 379.

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 113

the same time, again, the bishop appeared at Ilfra-
combe.^ It had been represented to him that the
parish church was too small. His lordship declared
that was his opinion also. Wherefore it was ordered
that the parishioners should lengthen their church
twenty-four feet at least before next Michaelmas
twelvemonth. Was there any penalty ? Yes, there
was ; and in this case the penalty in default of
carrying out the bishop's order was a sum of money
to be paid to the mother church at Exeter, equivalent
to an amount which in our time would be represented
by ;^7oo or ;^8oo.

But how did the unhappy creatures get the money ?
For instance, how did the poor people of Broad-
hempston — z, little country parish of 2,000 acres —
manage to build a brand new church on a larger
scale than the old one, in the year 1401, and finish
it in two years ? How did the parishioners of
Buckland Brewer in 1399, when their church
and almost all its contents were destroyed by
lightning — ^how did they propose to build or repair
the sacred edifice ? How did the parishioners of
Downe St. Mary in 141 3 and many another little
place that might be named — ^how did they all
manage it; and manage it, too, without being re-
duced to beggary? Why, exactly as you and I

» U.S., p. 182.
9

114 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

do it now 1 The bishop, in cases where the poor
people sued humbly to him, and told him they were
absolutely and utterly unable to bear the expense,
gave them leave and licence to go a-begging. And
who was the man who had to do the bulk of the
work ? And, mind, it was very hard work indeed,
in days when the roads were bad and the penny
post had not been dreamt of even by the most
imaginative. The man who did the work then,
as now, was the parson. And how well he did it
the houses of God in the land testify from John
o' Groat's House to the Land's End.

Before I close I must needs offer you one or two
more hints and suggestions.

(i) The lists of ordinations in the several dioceses
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which
have come down to us are more numerous than might
have been expected. They show that the number
of ordained persons of all ranks was very large,
and they show us also plainly that instances of parish
priests living isolated and lonely lives must have
been rare. There were huge numbers of unbeneficed
men picking up a precarious livelihood in town and
country, and subsisting upon a pittance which only
celibates could have managed to exist upon. The

BEFORE THE REFORMATION X15

prizes were to the blanks even fewer than they are
now. But this had its advantages, such as they
were. The beneficed clergy had no difficulty in
finding assistance in their duties, and they were
never at a loss for companionship. Moreover,
licence of non-residence was very easily procured
by a parson who wished to spend a year or two at
the university. In many cases that licence was
renewed from year to year, and it was specially
common when a young man had been appointed to
a benefice early in his career. In such cases the
bishops occasionally insisted on his residing at
Cambridge or Oxford for a time.

(2) While he was away there were sure to be two
or three or sometimes half a dozen "chaplains"
or chantry priests, to whom the routine work of the
p;u:ish was entrusted. These men were carefully
watched by the churchwardens, and any irregularities
were promptly reported to the archdeacons, who did
not spare them. Of course there were many clerical
scamps who were a disgrace to their profession and
who drifted into the ranks of the loafers. There
are scamps in the medical profession, rogues in the
legal profession, blacklegs among the financiers, and
bankrupts among the most virtuous and upright
commercial classes. But where the competition
increases for every post and every place of prefer-

116 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

ment, there is at least an even chance that the best
men come to the fore, and we don't judge of a class
by taking the convicts and ticket-of-leave men as fair
specimens of the morale prevalent in the rank of life
to which those unfortunate persons respectively
belong at their start in life.

(3) The quiet, devout, and conscientious parson,
doing his duty day by day among his people, is the
last man who attains to notoriety. Unless a clergy-
man is bent on advertising himself, the less notorious
he is the better. Rogues do become notorious as
soon as they are found out and their names appear in
the police reports. The secular clergy before the
Reformation had a very sharp look-out kept upon
them, and when they tripped or went astray there
were only too many people who were on the watch
to expose them. Then they were heard of indeed.
It is clear from such books as John Myrc's
"Instructions for Parish Priests," printed by the
E.E.T.S., that there was a much higher standard of
feeling in a wide stratum of the people than some
would have us believe. Nor were the congregations
of the fourteenth century a whit less inclined to be
censorious than those of the nineteenth. When the
representatives of the parish of Colbroke were
questioned authoritatively by their bishop regarding
Sir William their vicar in the regular course of his

BEFORE THE REFORMATION 117

visitation in 1301, they said that he preached "well
enough" {suo modo), that, "as far as he knew"
(quantum novit)^ he expounded the Gospels to them,
but he did not teach them much {non multum eos
informat). In fact he was a very harmless sort of a
humdrum man. There were lies told about him,
but they were lies.

Pretty much the same answers are given by the
chief men in the little town of Colyton. Sir Robert
Blund, the vicar, was a good man (probus homo) ;
he preached quantum novit again, but not as much
as he ought in their opinion. His predecessor was
a man ; he had been wont to have classes for the
instruction of all the chaplains and clerks of the
Church. (Note that !) But this one was remiss in
this duty. Would the lord bishop be pleased to pull
him up ? {i>etunt quod corripiatur.)

Take them all in all, I cannot resist the impression,
which has become deeper and deeper upon me the
more I have read and pondered, that the parochial
clergy in England during the centuries between the
Conquest and the Reformation numbered amongst
them at all times some of the best men of their
generation. To begin with, they were always loyal
Englishmen. The same can at no time be said of

118 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

the monks, who from first to last were much less
true subjects of the King than at heart bigoted
adherents of the Pope of Rome. Chaucer's
manner of speaking of the poor parson of a
town reflects the feeling not only of his own
time, but really reflects the estimation in which
they were held at all times. Not once, not twice
in our history these parish priests are to be found
siding with the people against those in power, and
chosen by the people to be their spokesmen when
their grievances were becoming unbearable. When
that great awakening came which in the good
Providence of God the friars were permitted to
stir, and a new life, and a new enthusiasm, and a
new hunger and thirst after holiness thrilled through
the throbbing heart of the nation, the response
came first from the working clergy, who joined the
new Reformers wherever they appeared — not with-
out some grumbling that the new men absorbed
large sums, in the shape of burial and marriage
fees, from the poor parish priests, who could. ill
afford to lose them. To the last the wills of the
clergy were full of legacies to the preaching friars.
When, again, a new awakening came, and the
Lollards went about as they did protesting against
errors which were real errors, though in the way of
doing it there was all the usual violence and

BEFORE THE REFORMATION \\^

exaggeration of men stirred by a fiery earnestness
— ^again they were the clergy, the working parish
priests, who gave that movement its impetus ; and
among the parish priests there were those who did
not shrink then from giving their bodies to be
burned, and who showed noble instances of
suffering for conscience' sake. So, too, when
Wycliffe was dreaming of a great religious revolu-
tion — ^hoping, in fact, for the Millennium which is
so long in coming — they were the poor priests of
townlet and village to whom he appealed for
sympathy and support, and he did not appeal in
vain.

It always has been so. The men that move the
world and keep it moving ; the men that carry the
truths of the Gospel to the hearts and consciences
of a nation — and more than that, bring those truths
into a nation's hearths and homes — are not the
monks in the cloister, so anxious about their own
precious souls that they hide themselves from their
fellow-sinners till they become the victims of that
pride which apes humility. More and more it is
becoming evident that the men who are to act upon
the masses must be in personal touch with the
masses — the working clergy in hamlet and village
and town.

It may be true that the parish priests rarely have

120 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND

been the intellectual leaders of their generation or
the pioneers of science, discovery, or curious
learning, though there have been times when their
names, even in these matters, have not been
unknown. It may, again, be true that for the trained
academic intellects and the great scholars who are
such by profession and who lead the van of the
army of intellectual progress, such are not to be
sought in the humble villages, where, perhaps,
students are few. No ! You must look for them
here — ^here, where their home is ; here, where you
have come to listen to them and be taught by them.
The gifted and the privileged few are not to be
found in the lonely parsonage or the clergy house,
where the ceaseless toilers among the submerged
tenth and the dreadful residuum are knocking and
pressing at their doors. Yet it must be calamitous,
at any time, for the Church and the nation, if the
leaders of the blind are growing blinder than the
led, and if they who are groping and crying out so
piteously for the light should find fewer and fewer
of their appointed teachers qualified to show them
where such light is to be found

"ROBBING GOD"

((

ROBBING GOD''

1

IT must have pained many a loyal Churchman
during the past month to read some of the
speeches delivered at meetings held up and down
the country to protest against the Welsh Suspensory
Bill.i For myself, I should look upon the passing
of such a measure with grief and dismay, for more
reasons than I care to set down here. But even
were I prepared to admit that the alienation of any
portion of the revenues of the Church in Wales and
the diverting them into any other channel would be
an unmixed evil, or were 1 even convinced that any
measure having such an object in view would be
necessarily impolitic or actually dishonest, I should
still feel called upon to protest against some argu-
ments that have been resorted to by too many of

« June, 1893.
123

124 ''ROBBING GOD'^

the fervid orators who have denounced the Bill, and
to put in an earnest caveat against the assumptions
made by speakers whose position and learning and
unselfish zeal deserve the respect of us all.

If it were a mere question of bowing to the
authority of our ecclesiastical superiors, and the
duty of remaining silent when a powerful consensus
of opinion has found a voice which speaks with
authority, it would be presumption on the part of
any clergyman in my position to ask for a hearing ;
but the interests at stake are so very grave that I
feel impelled to take part in the discussion that is
going on, though I do so with the utmost reluc-
tance and sorely against the grain. I do so now
because I am convinced that it is of supreme
importance, not only to the Church and Church-
men, but to the nation at large, that at this crisis
the army of defence and the army of attack should
if possible be warned against taking up positions
which are untenable, and so engaging in the con-
flict without due consideration of the issues that
are really involved.

Again and again it has been said, and continues
to be said, that the spoliation of the endowments of
the Established Church and their redistribution
would be robbwgOod. The expression is one which
I cannot but think wholly indefensible, look at the

"^ ROBBING GOD'' 125

matter in what way we may. Of course I know as
well as most men do, that when in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries a great or small landowner was
moved to surrender a portion of his estates to what is
called " pious uses," the deed of gift was worded in
the form that X or Y " gave to God and the Church
or the abbey of Z" this or that tract of land, or other
endowment. I know that such transfer was, after
the Conquest, almost invariably made by men or
women during their lifetime, and was not the gift
of the dead hand, as it is so frequently but erro-
neously represented to have been. But I know,
too, that this expression "giving to God" meant
primarily that the donors had performed an act
of surrender and sacrifice whereby they deprived
themselves of the enjoyment of this or that source
of wealth that God might be glorified, and that
others might derive benefit by the usufruct of such
property as the good men or women had stript
themselves of from more or less high and conscien-
tious motives. When, as was often the case, forms
of malediction were added upon all who should at
any future time alienate or diminish the "free
alms," this addition goes far to show that even in
the " ages of faith " the gift to God was not always
regarded as inviolable. Indeed, as time went on
much of the property which had been regarded as
essentially inalienable got into strange hands.

128 ** ROBBING GOD"

thing more, something much more, which the
Seculars were not doing and were not qualified
to do.

(2) The second assumption was, that wherever it
became apparent that the needs of the nation, the
spiritual or the educational needs, could not be
adequately supplied by the old functionaries — while
a new order of volunteers had arisen who claimed
to be able to supply the new needs — then it was
allowable, in foro conscientice, to divert endowments
held under conditions supposed to be adequate
formerly, and to allocate them for the maintenance
of the new functionaries.

Such alienation was carried out accordingly, that
so the requirements of a wider culture, a deeper
sense of moral and spiritual responsibility, and a
steady advance in our civilisation (using that word
in its widest sense) might be to some extent pro-
vided for and their stability be secured, by at least
a grant in aid, from the reserve of ecclesiastical
property.

Thus when tha rage for the cloister life was
running its course and monasteries were springing
up in every shire it was loudly proclaimed that
these institutions were the only possible abodes of
holiness. It was said and believed that only among
"the religious" — i.e,, the men and women who

'* ROBBING GOD"* 129

were subject to a rule of discipline, framed so as to
minimise worldliness and to train the Regulars in
the ways of godliness — could the conscience, the
sentiment of aspiration, and the habits of devotion
and self-surrender be quickened, stimulated, and
lifted to a higher plane than the parish priests had
been aiming at.

It began to be believed that the nation needed to
be taught "the ways of holiness;" and in proportion
as this conviction gained ground, in that proportion
did fresh endowments pour in for the enrichment
of the new order. The monks and nuns — ^rightly
or wrongly — ^got to be looked upon as a supplemen-
tary force who were doing that which the parish
priests could not do ; and it was hardly a step
further to claim for the newly organised volunteers
a share of the ancient revenues which, it was almost
broadly asserted, were not doing for the nation all
that might be done with them in the interest of the
community at large.

But these alienations of Church property did not

stop at this point. It would be difficult to say how

soon and when first the clergy began to claim

immunity from taxation ; but among us at the time

of the Conquest they certainly were called upon to

contribute towards the defence of the realm, and

the episcopal lands especially were held under con-

10

130 "" ROBBING GOD''

dition of providing contingents of armed retainers
who should support the King in his wars. Scarcely
fifty years after the Conqueror's death the crusading
mania had passed like a conflagration over the
Continent of Europe. In process of time it
reached us, with what results most people know.
A belief prevailed extensively that battle with the
infidels was the highest act of piety and self-
sacrifice, and, as the child of that mischievous
delusion, there grew up the strange institution of
ecclesiastical orders of knighthood, among whom
the order of the Knights Templars became the most
renowned.

The Templars were looked upon as the champions
of Christendom, the keepers of the Holy Sepulchre,
the army of occupation in the Holy Land. Of
course they were laymen^ and their occupation was
war. But the war was a holy war, forsooth ; they
were emphatically fighters for God. As such they
too put forth their claim to participate in the income
derivable from the Ecclesiastical Reserve, and the
claim was very soon allowed. The consciences of
the more enlightened may have been shocked, the
voices of some may have been lifted up with
indignation against the impudent fraud, but the
twelfth century was not half over before the wealth
of the Templars had become the occasion of scandal

''ROBBING GOD'^ 13!

and offence, and the more so because churcJies,
benefices, and tithes had been extensively alienated
in their favour ; the excuse for such alienation, and
its justification in Church law, being that the
Templars were fighting God's battles and so were
doing for the Church what the clergy could not do
for themselves.

Another century went by and a new movement
began. Originating in the religious upheaval which
the enthusiasm of the mendicant orders gave rise to,
it speedily took the form of an intellectual awaken-
ing. As educationists the Secular clergy had been
found wanting : they had not been efficient as the
teachers of the people. To some small extent the
monks had taken over the work of their rivals in
this respect. Perhaps it may be said that the
Regulars had posed as " men of light and leading."
Yet after a trial of some two or three centuries the
monks too had fallen very far behind their ideal.
As the homes for the studious, as nurseries for
scholars pursuing their researches, as schools for
the rising generation, the religious houses too had
proved a failure.

The few splendid exceptions only proved the rule
that the monasteries were doing less than was
expected of them in the way of raising the standard
of morals, devotion, and, least of all, of learning.

132 ''ROBBING GOD''

It was found that young Englishmen of exceptional
gifts and ambitions were seeking at Paris, at Padua,
at Bologna or Palermo, that education in law,
medicine, or theology which they could not find
at home. Thoughtful and patriotic students and
scholars set themselves to supply the want of a
higher culture in England, which was making itself
felt unmistakably. Walter de Merton led the way,
and Merton College was founded. His example
was quickly followed, and Cambridge and Oxford
became the real homes of learning among us before
the fourteenth century was half over. But so far
from the new colleges being narrowly ecclesiastical
in the studies they promoted, so far from their being
theological seminaries as we understand that desig-
nation now, so far from being religious houses —
that is, monastic in Ihcir character — it is certain
that from two at least of them monks and friars
were expressly excluded, and one of the new colleges
was founded for students of the Civil and Canon
Law, and for such alone.

The founders of these colleges were pre-eminently
educational reformers. They came forward nobly
to head the party of progress in this direction, and
they, in their generosity, made large sacrifices of
their substance to further the great ends they had
in view — sacrifices which the nation sanctioned by
silencing the alienation of lands for the endowments.

''ROBBING GOD'' 133

But this was not all. Once more the tithes of
country parishes, glebe lands, and parsonages were
diverted and made over to the new foundations ;
the common sense of the community tacitly express-
ing its conviction that it was for the advantage of
the people at large — yes I and for the advantage of
the Church of God too — that the standard of educa-
tion should be raised, and that (inasmuch as the
great reserve had been handed down to promote
the spiritual, moral, and intellectual well-being of
the nation) it was legitimate to subsidise, from the
common stock, any of those bringers-in of new
things whose lives were devoted to the furtherance
of any one of these ends.

All this is demonstrable from history. It is not
needful, it would be mere waste of time, to prove
the point with minute elaboration. To this hour
such of our colleges and schools as date back to
pre-Reformation days derive large portions of their
incomes from Church lands and tithes which for
ages had been devoted exclusively to the support
of the ministers of the sanctuary. The process has
always been going on. Are we now going to
denounce the principle which has guided our course
for well-nigh a thousand years as sacrilege ? Can
we seriously pretend that all these successive diver-
sions of Church property deserved to be stigmatised
as robbery ?

II

THE generation of Englishmen whose happiness
it was in their youth to be brought under
the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is passing
away. The number of those who actually knew
him, saw him, heard him, and were subjected to
the sway of his attractive personality is now very
small. He died when I was a child ; but I had
hardly grown up to manhood before I had been
taught to reverence his name, to give myself to
an enthusiastic study of his writings, and to accept
his teaching as the teaching of one whom it was
almost always safe and wise to follow as a guide.
No man who watches the currents of thought
that are setting in this direction or in that, and
which are the resultants of forces brought into
action by the onward march of discovery and the
progress of science, can hold exactly to the views

which sufficed for him in his younger days ; for

134

''ROBBING GOD'' 13S

bigotry in his political or philosophic creed can
only be the intellectual vice of him whose mind
does not grow.

Nevertheless, for myself, I still hold that Coleridge
was one of the profound thinkers of his time, and
almost the most philosophic Conservative that this
country has ever produced. My conviction is still
strong that his tractate, " On the Constitution of the
Church and State according to the Idea of Each," is
one of those monumental works which no thought-
ful man among us ought to leave unread — and, I
may add, unstudied.

If the book were always attractive in its every
page ; if it did not contain many curious and
characteristic weaknesses — sometimes irritating,
sometimes saddening ; if it did not occasionally
put a certain strain upon a disciple's loyalty, it
would not be Coleridge's. But accept it for what
it is and what it professes to be — not a scholastic
treatise, but something more if also something less
— and the propositions enunciated seem to me
irrefragable, the conclusions arrived at unanswer-
able.

The two fundamental positions laid down by
Coleridge are concerned, the one with the true
idea of the National Church, the other with the
idea of what I have called the reserve fund of that

136 ''ROBBING GOD''

National Church; and which Coleridge calls the
Nationalty.

Of the first he says : " The Clerisy of the nation,
or National Church, in its primary acceptation and
original intention, comprehended the learned of all
denominations, the sages and professors of the law
and jurisprudence, of medicine and physiology, of
music, of military and civil architecture, of the
physical sciences, with the mathematical as the
common organ of the preceding ; in short, all the
so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession
and application of which constitute the civilisation
of a country, as well as the theological."

(2) Of the second — that is, the Nationalty, or what
in common parlance we are wont to call Church
property — he says as distinctly and emphatically as
before : ^M do not assert that the proceeds from the
Nationalty cannot be rightfully vested except in
what we now mean by clergymen and the estab-
lished clergy. / have everywhere implied the contrary.
. . . Had every rood, every peppercorn, every
stone, brick, and beam been retransferred and made
heritable at the ' Reformation,' no right would have
been invaded, no principle of justice violated.
What the State by law — ^that is, by the collective
will of its functionaries at any one time assembled —
can do or suffer to be done, that the State by law can
undo or inhibit"

''ROBBING GOD'' 137

Let it be noted that these are the words of a
thinker who has again and again been called the
Tory Philosopher — ^whose name for more than seventy
years has been a name to conjure by among those
who consider themselves and claim to be considered
the only true Conservatives — ^the thinker whom not
a few Progressionists (because they have never read
his writings) have superciliously derided as a dreamer
of whom the best that could be said was that his
writings were harmless and his theories consigned
to oblivion.

Yet Coleridge's " Church and State " has worked
as such leaven always does work, and it would be
very hard to say how much its pregnant hints and
suggestions have affected the legislation of the last
sixty years.

Five years after the book appeared a commission
of inquiry into the state of the Church of England
was issued, and in 1836 the Ecclesiastical Commis-
sioners became a Corporation with perpetual succes-
sion and a common seal. It was the beginning of
a new era. Since then we have dealt with ecclesias-
tical property — the Nationalty— on the assumption
that it constitutes a fund which the Legislature had
not only the right to administer for the well-being
of the people, but that it was the duty of the nation
too to guard against its being in any way wastefuUy

138 ''ROBBING GOD**

administered. The episcopal and capitular estates
have been taken out of the control of those bodies,
and readjustment of the revenues has been carried
out with a high hand. Restrictions have been
imposed upon the granting of leases by the tenants
for life. Benefices have been divided or consoli-
dated with small regard to the real or supposed
rights of patrons. We have recognised that the
Naiionalty might legitimately be treated as a fund
not necessarily limited in its application to the
maintenance of clerks in Holy Orders. We have
materially altered the constitution of our older
Universities ; we have imposed new statutes upon the
older colleges ; we have very seriously diminished
their available incomes ; we have changed the
tenure by which Fellowships were held ; we have
almost abolished their ecclesiastical character ; we
have dealt in the same way with our endowed
schools, and at this moment the headmasters of
some of the most important among them are lay-
men. What results have followed upon these
changes ?

Fifty years ago there were twenty-four professors
in the University of Cambridge, of whom five only
were laymen. There are now forty professors, of
whom, excluding the professors of Divinity, only
three are in Holy Orders ; while at Oxford, of the

'* ROBBING GOD'' 139

forty-eight professors, excluding the professors of
Divinity, again only three are clergymen. If it
were worth while to compare the numbers of lay
and " clerical " Fellows of Colleges respectively as
they stood in 1843 and as they stand at present, the
change that has come over the Universities in half
a century would be even more striking.

The change may be, and is to many, a matter to
be mourned over ; it may have, and it has, occa-
sioned melancholy and lugubrious vaticinations ; it
may or may not augur ill for the future ; but the
facts are not to be gainsaid. Nor can we shut our
eyes to another fact — deplorable or not according to
our several points of view — a fact to which attention
has not been drawn with that serious insistence
which its significance might well justify — a fact, too,
which it is hardly conceivable should not affect our
legislation in the future, because it is the outcome of
our legislation in the past.

The leaders in thought and culture, in mathe-
matical and physical science, in history, economics,
linguistics, even in classical learning — the leaders in
literature in its widest acceptation — are no longer
to be found among the ordained clergy of the
Church of England, but outside their ranks. One
fact alone may serve as a most startling confirma-
tion of these assertions. In 1843 there were ninety

140 ''ROBBING GOD''

Fellows of the Royal Society who were in Holy
Orders. In 1893 the names of no more than sixteen
clergymen of the Established Church are to be
found in the roll-call of England's most illustrious
brotherhood. It is worse than idle to shut our eyes
to all this — ^the logic of facts is irresistible^

Meanwhile it is no more than their due to protest
for the clergy of the Established Church that, as a
body, they were never doing their pastoral work
better than they are doing it now ; never were they
less worldly and mercenary ; never were their lives
more exemplary; never were they making greater
sacrifices ; never were they more earnestly devoted
to their sacred calling. Their very zeal and un-
wearied labours have taught the laity to expect ever
more and more at their hands. Yet with the
increasing claims that have been and are made
upon their services, the immense increase of the
population brings home to us the certainty that it
is no longer possible for the Anglican clergy to
discharge all those duties — the spiritual and the
religious duties — which it is of supreme importance,
in the highest interest of the community, should not
be neglected. It is not conceivable that we should
stop at the point we have reached.

Doubtless, in the old dajrs, the parish priests pro-
tested against the alienation of their incomes for

''ROBBING GOD'' 141

subsidising the monastic orders. They were not
likely "to take joyfully the spoiHng of their goods"
when the great educational movement set in, and
the founders of schools and colleges levied large
contributions from the Nationalty, and to that
extent impoverished the parish priests. But in each
case the new impropriators proved to be powerful
auxiliaries, stimulating the Seculars, elevating their
tone, and provoking them to jealousy. In any case,
the question was far less whether the alienation of
the old endowments and the diversion of them into
a new channel of usefulness was defensible, than
whether there was not some danger of this being
carried too far in favour of the new order.

What, then, is the attitude which it behoves us all
to adopt when a senseless and ignorant cry has been
raised for the disestablishment and disendowment
of the Church of England ? Surely our first
business is to press for an answer to the question.
What do these men mean who take it as their
shibboleth ?

If they mean nothing more and nothing less than
indiscriminate pillage, ending in a scramble for the
spoils ; if they mean stripping the clergy of their
incomes, driving them out from their homes, and
leaving the poor of the land to find religious
teachers and pastors for themselves — ^then their

142 *' ROBBING GOD'*

object is to bring about an incomparable national
calamity. The inevitable consequence of such a
catastrophe would be that in the domain of morals
and religious sentiment, when our nobler emotions
and spiritual aspirations and gentler sympathies are
appealed to, there the forces of disintegration would
have their full play, unchecked, uncontrolled— chaos
would come again. But that cry may be changed
for a better cry ; it may, in God's providence, be
taught to take another form, and it may then express
the conviction of the people that the time has come
for making a step, not backwards into darkness and
religious anarchy, but forwards upon the road of
intelligent reform. Whatever it may mean, it is the
utmost madness and stupidity to attempt to raise
against it a louder but scarcely less misleading and
mischievous cry, because one which is in its essence
an assumptio falsi.

Base the title of the Established Church to her
endowments upon considerations of the highest
political expediency, and you choose ground from
which it will be difficult to be dislodged. Appeal
to the gratitude of our countrymen, and teach them
what the Anglican clergy have been and have done
for their ancestors and their fatherland in the past,
and you will not appeal in vain. Nay, appeal to the
hopes and f^rs of the future if you will, and, rightly

'* ROBBING GOD'* 143

instructed, the nation will no longer surrender
themselves to those who would " make a desert and
call it peace." But beware how you rashly and
stubbornly insist that the formulae, the ritual, the
discipline, the general regimen of the Church as by
law established, are each and all equally and in-
dubitably of Divine origin, and that to alienate one
jot or tittle of her property is to ^* rob GOD " I

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

II

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

I AM continually worried by a kind ot dream
which disturbs my peace of mind by day and
by night, and which yet I cannot bring myself to
believe is anything more than an ignorant and
foolish dream, deluding me into the acceptance of
half a truth as though that were as true as the whole.
Call my dream a delusion if you will, but this is
what it says to me with a cruel insistence.

There is, says the voice in my dream, a great and
dreadful law working through all the Universe and
operating in the direction of glorifying mere bigness
at the expense of littleness, so that the little is for
ever being absorbed and consumed, even annihi-
lated by the huge. Moreover, this law prevails " in
morals as well as mechanics," so to speak, insomuch
that there are large souls that will swallow up small
souls in the lapse of ages. And there are great

personalities that represent a conglomerate of little

147

148 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

personalities devouring the feebler individuals who
will be taken up and turned to better account when
they cease to be separate existences at all.

My transcendental friends assure me that the
Material Universe — ^that is the immense aggregate
of worlds which are made of fnatter — so far from
being infinite is demonstrably not infinite ; on the
contrary, that it is probably only one of many
Universes, held in solution by the much more
widely diffused something which is called Ether ;
and that there was a time when Matter existed as a
vast chaos whose constituent atoms were floating in
this all-embracing Ether ; each separate atom self*
asserting and yet acting upon and being acted upon
by the rest. Then the aforesaid atoms proceeded to
combine and cohere into molecules ; the molecules
tended to grow into masses, and the masses could
not but associate into worlds. Thus, too, worlds
were evolved into systems with central suns round
which they moved in their orbits, while the suns sup*
ported themselves by feeding upon the vagrant
refuse meteors, and occasionally devouring as their
prey some unhappy little worldling which per-
adventure had been rejoicing in its prosperous
independence. Thus the big from the beginning of
time has always swallowed up the little, and so it
will go on for ever and ever.

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 149

Yes I And observe, moreover, what an object
lesson this little proud planet of ours affords to all
beholders ! There were aeons during which the
living creatures upon its surface ran to Bigness.
Monstrous saurians — mastodons — ^what not, here in
our northern latitudes ; while down there on the
distant Australian continent there grew up grim
marsupial lions, voiceless, wdl-nigh brainless, but
enormous, devouring gluttonously the lesser
creatures, good only for filling the maws of th^
bigger brethren. Down in New Zealand there —
think of the tremendous birds — Dinornis, Moas,
what not? — ^stalking even the terrified mannikins
that doubtless they put into their crops by the dozen.
The same law— one is almost inclined to call it a
grotesque law. And yet — ^and yet — ^and yet — some-
how — another law came into force, correcting,
counteracting, supplementing, the former law, till
lo I Bigness had to give way to something better.
But about that other law this worrying dream of
mine has told me nothing. Only sometimes my
mind — in revolt against the tyranny of a lopsided
theory — insists on asking itself. Who knows, while
all this tyranny of the Big was going on — ^who
knows, I say, how many worlds may have exploded
into their initial molecules, or died off as our little
moon did, starved, in fact, by mere cold ?

ISO THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

" Work it out into your next month's article, Mr.
Gigadibs ! " as Bishop Blougram says.

No better illustration of the operation of this law
that I speak of can be found than in the way in
which money tends to increase in downright bulk —
huge, unwieldy, portentous — till in our days the
millionaires are not only becoming every year more
numerous, but the colossal fortunes in the hands of
private persons are assuming proportions which
ba£Be our imaginations when we try to understand
what they mean! Think of the stupendous accu-
mulations of X. and Y. and Z. in England and
America I Think of the late Baron Hirsch and his
excellent lady having died only the other day,
possessed, between them, of upwards of twenty-
four millions sterling ! Think of the absolute
impossibility of any citizen of any nation upon
earth being able to spend year after year the
income of such a gigantic capital on any l^iti-
mate objects ! What is to be the end of it ?
What is to come of it ? This seems at any rate
inevitable, namely, that the value of mere money
must go on decreasing, and probably that such
decrease, when once it begins, must go on by leaps
and bounds. Already we observe that some of

THE CRY OP THE VILLAGES 151

those precious objects which we call luxuries are
fetching ever higher and higher prices. And yet, en
revanche^ the necessaries of life are getting cheaper
and cheaper. Not only so, but there is one com-
modity which, in the lifetime of men not yet old, used
to be regarded as the*most certain and stable and im-
movable source of wealth — I mean the agricultural
land of this country — has, during the last twenty
years or so, immensely deteriorated in value, and is
actually tending to become less and less a safe or
desirable investment for capital. There are tens of
thousands of acres — say hundreds of thousands —
of land in England at this moment which may be
bought for a sixth of what they would have fetched
twenty years ago. Nor is this all. The tillers of the
soil who are employers of labour, after all that has
been done for them by successive Governments,
declare that it is well-nigh impossible to farm at a
profit by working their land after the fashion of their
fathers ; and the tillers of the soil who are the work-
ing peasantry in receipt of wages show an increasing
reluctance to remain " upon the land " ; and that
though a very large number acknowledge in so
many words, and others are not careful to dispute
the fact, that unskilled labour in the towns is little
if at all more remunerative, and leaves little if at all
more margin of profit which may be laid by

151 THE CRY Of THE VILLAGES

than the wages now earned by the agricultural
labourer.

We have no horrible slums in the villages. We have
no submerged tenth of vicious and degraded men
and women. We don't know what ragged children
and starving, shoeless families mean. Stop your
bicycles where you will at the door of any Norfolk
village school — you happy ones who roam over the
length and breadth of the land nowadays — ^go in
and look at the bright, clean, joyous, and well-
dressed children at their work, hear them sing, see
them drawing, notice them at their play, and listen
to their speech in anger or in joy. Why, the rising
generation of our village children have doubled the
vocabulary of their grandfathers, and the words that
have dropped out and are almost quite forgotten, so
far from being any loss, constitute a clear gain.

But when these children leave our schools they
are unsettled, dissatisfied ; they will not stay in the
old village homes. The girls find places in the
towns as domestic servants, and come back to us
for a few days' holiday with the manners of gentle-
women (not merely lyedies), and become eloquent
propagandists of the abominable doctrine that there
is nothing like life in the towns. Their brothers
believe them, and look out with keen eyes for em-
ployment upon the railway, in the police force, in

X

THE CRY OP THE VILLAGES IS3

some town factory, anything except settling down
upon the land. The farmers grumble, they tell you
that it all comes of this high-flying education,
they insist warmly and angrily that "you are
educating the labouring class above their station."
If you mean by " station " their present surroundings,
the farmers are right after all. But our educational
"forwards" are ready with their remedy. "Give
them continuation classes," they cry; "provide
night schools ! Teach them shorthand 1 Try
lantern slides I "

You do try these interesting experiments —
especially the lantern slides — ^and yet it is plain
that the response is languid, very discouragingly
languid. The exodus from the villages goes on.
The young fellows tire of being lectured and taught
the methods of culture which you proclaim to be
sovereign remedies to stir and vitalise the vis
inertice of the bucolic mind. The County
Councils are at their wits' ends to know what to
do with the money at their disposal. There are
whole districts which are tending to fall out of
cultivation, and tending, too, to become mere
deserts like the Campagna, or like the morne and
melancholy wilderness where the great temples of
Paestum stand staring at the sea in their sullen lone-
liness, sorrowing — if ruins ever do sorrow — for the

154 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

good old times. For there were times when
myriads of worshippers thronged into those stately
fanes, and all the air was full of sweetest perfume
travelling on and on from those famous rose
gardens which supplied Baias and Pompeii and
Naples with "table decorations" for the countless
banquets, and were even hurried off to Rome itself
when the south wind blew strong enough to fill the
lateen sail, and the light barge laden with blossoms
scudded before the breeze, making for Ostia and the
Tiber.

Alas I for the dreary wastes now I Ala$ I for the
deadly desolation ! What brought it all about, that
this land of flowers and fruit and busy life should
have become derelict ? " Oh ! It was the malaria, of
course ! Men could not live in that pestilential air.
Don't you know ? "

No, I don't know I I know just the contrary.
Men did not run away from the malaria. The
malaria came when men had run away from the
land. It is the mission of man to make the wilder-
ness and the solitary place glad, and to make the
desert rejoice ; and he has done it, and is doing it
for ever, consciously or unconsciously, since the
beginning of time. Again and again the children of
men have reclaimed the barren wastes, reclaimed
them, settled upon them, subdued and mastered the

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 155

rebel swamps and jungles; bade the crawling
poisonous vapours — Pass ! And they did pass, till
by and by the fever-haunted soil became like the
Paradise of Eden, and a happy people gave thanks
to the gods after their fashion, and set up their
altars, and round about them youths and maidens
trooped in long procession, marching in pomp of
exultant festival "to the beds of spices, to feed in
the gardens, and to gather the lilies."

To think of this dear land of ours, that was once
called Merry England, becoming spotted about with
huge cankerous ulcers of pampas or prairie — ^with
never a sound of a human voice to stir the echoes,
and never a happy human face to make the sunshine
glad in heaven — is a thought that turns my heart
sick with terror. I do not want to see our father-
land what she was — that, and only that. No putting
back the clock for me. Nor should I be content
to leave her as she is, and calmly speak of her as if
she were no other than a faded beauty past her
prime, and suflFering from incipient decay. Oh,
shameful ! that we should acquiesce in that reproach
upon ourselves, when nothing more is needed than
for the sons and daughters whom she reared and
fosters to be loyal to their mother.

t t • • •

At this stage it may be worth our while to inquire

IS6 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

whether there may not be after all some sense in
that not infrequent saying of our farmers that '^ the
labourers' children are being educated above their
station." For let it be said, as has often been said
before, though it needs repeating, that the employers
of labour in our country villages are not invariably
fools — not even when they may happen to have no
more than ten or twelve thousand pounds or so
of capital embarked in the tillage of the soil. Of
course the poor clodhoppers cannot be, and do not
pretend to be, as omniscient as you wiseacres of the
streets. You know everything. The incapables of
the broad-acres at best know only one thing —
namely, their own business — and this one thing
must obviously be included in your everything.
Nevertheless, you might stretch a point, and give
them the credit of knowing just a little about their
peculiar one.

'^ I pity his ignorance and despise him," said Miss
Squeers. Could she not have got on without the
contempt, and yet afforded the pity ?

• • • • .

To any thoughtful student of our social history
during the last thirty years, few facts are more
worthy of notice than the wholly different way in
which our elementary schools are regarded by the
dwellers in the town and country respectively. In

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 157

our country villages the school is the be-all and
the end-all of human cultiu-e. The child who has
passed his standards is reckoned a perfectly educated
boy or girl, and it must be added that, as a rule,
among our elementary teachers themselves there are
few who care to dissipate this delusion. In the
town, on the other hand, the elementary school is
looked upon as the mere beginning and starting
point from which all noble endeavours to raise the
intellectual level of the masses must proceed. That
the children must be taught, and taught as well as
may be, has been assumed as a necessity; but
that having been taught a minimum of elementary
knowledge they should be left to take their chance
and run wild for the rest of their lives is not to be
heard of. Some of them — ^perhaps many of them —
came from vicious homes, and live in squalid dens
and cellars. Then the Augean stables must be
cleansed, and the slums must be got rid of if
possible, in the interest of the children that are
and of those that are to be. So you set yourselves
to improve your toilers' dwellings, and you erect
sanitary dwellings for the poor, and you issue your
appeals to the rich for this good cause and that.
The more you ask the more you get, till ungrudging
benevolence seems actually tending to overtake the
needs of your crowded millions.

158 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

But pari passu with the magnificent activity
shown in providing suitable dwellings for the
workers, others are showing as great and noble
a zeal in their endeavours to make the lives of
their poor brethren more joyous, more interesting,
more rational, more human. You lay out parks
and recreation grounds, build museums and art
galleries, libraries, and lecture halls. You make
vice difiGicult, and amusement refining. There is
nothing in the whole world that can compare
with the exhibitions which are open to the poorest
in London, and no better music than that which a
poor fellow out of work may listen to at his leisure
when the bands play.

Nor is it only in the great capital of the Empire
that all this wealth in the means of innocent enjoy-
ment is provided for the million. Birmingham and
Liverpool and Manchester and ShefiGield, and many
another of our large cities, vie with one another in
the conspicuous examples they a£Ford of that mag-
nanimous foresight which is always on the look-out
for new channels of beneficence. For let it be
remembered that only a small part of all this
money spent in advancing the happiness and
well-being of the wage-earners has been paid for
out of Imperial or local taxation.

Even granting that the great bulk of the cost of

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 159

building and keeping up our schools has come out
of rates and taxes, our hospitals in the main are
supported by voluntary contributions, and churches
" of all denominations " are being built with more
or less splendour every year by private munificence.
Even colleges and universities are founded and
endowed by the grand liberality of rich men here
and there and everywhere. What can be more
splendid than the starting up of the University of
Liverpool, as if by magic, during the too short
career of its first accomplished principal, at whose
suggestion a dozen or more Liverpool merchants
have provided for the maintenance in perpetuity of
as many professorial chairs ? Even this glorious
generosity seems not unlikely to be surpassed by
the men of Birmingham, who have resolved to have
another university of their own. But, indeed, the
wonderful work done, and the sacrifices made by the
citizens of Birmingham in the interest of the working
classes, are almost bewildering when one comes to
count up the vast sums that have been expended in
a city which as yet only takes the sixth place in the
Empire, and whose population hardly amounts to a
ninth of the enormous aggregate of London .^

' See a remarkable article in the May number of the
Century Magazine^ by an American gentleman, Mr. George
F. Parker, entitled " An Object Lesson in Municipal Govern-
ment."

l6o THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

It would be beyond my purpose to deal with all
those schemes for improving the condition of the
working classes which are occupying the attention
and stimulating the expenditure of such bodies as
the London County Council and their humbler and
only a little less ambitious urban imitators. The
point which requires to be insisted on is that in the
large towns the munificence of the rich is rapidly
tending to overtake the legitimate needs of the
masses, and that quite new dangers are threatening
us. Already the administration of our charity funds
requires close and continued watching to minimise
the leakage, to detect the frauds, to stop the extrava-
gance and waste which seem almost inseparable
from the dispensing of large funds among those
for whom they were intended. The existence of
the Charity Organisation Society indicates that
already the army of well-meaning philanthropists
requires a vigilance committee to supervise their
varied, ever-varying operations, and a special force
of detective officers to protect them from the
organised robbery of begging-letter impostors and
the knavery of professional tramps. A comfortable
income may be made by plausible plunderers who
prey upon the weak and indolent ; and there is no
lack of foolish, mischievous people, who recklessly
throw about guineas without caring who gets

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES i6i

them, and can never be brought to understand
that scrambling money in the streets with lavish
profusion is very much nearer to a crime than a
virtue.

Yet, on the whole, the munificence of the rich in
the towns has been directed with a certain measure
of wisdom and prudence to a great end ; and that
end has been to afford every kind of chance to the
working-man to rise step by step to the top of that
ladder which we have heard so much of. The
elementary school is but the beginning of the
townsman's education ; there the children of the
operatives are not "educated above their station,"
because education with them is a continuous process
always going on ; all their surroundings exercising
upon them a refining and elevating influence through
an elaborate machinery which the best men are
proud to help in keeping at work, and in enlarging
its sphere of usefulness, till it is as if among the
favoured townsfolk the path of vice and crime were
becoming the only way which it is hard to tread,
and the broad and smooth way the road that leads
upwards towards the higher life and higher ideal^
The artisans of the towns have everything within
their reach that may conduce to their happiness and
well-being. Is there not some little risk of turning
them into the spoilt children of this our age ?

12

i62 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES.

When they call out for sugar-plums they get them.
Anything to keep them quiet — sometimes a bicycle,
sometimes a pianoforte, sometimes a holiday at the
seaside. We shall hear them crying for the moon
before long. When they get there they'll want to
get back again, and you'll have to fetch them
home 1

Contrast all these surroundings with those of the
young agricultural labourer. He has "passed his
standards," as the phrase is— and what then ? He
goes to work upon the land. There is a common
belief that this is a dull and stupid life, dismally
lacking in interest, and that the labour required is
such as any half-witted bumpkin can do as well as
another. I recommend my omniscient friends of
the cities who are possessed by this delusion to get
up at six o'clock one fine autumn morning and look
on while a field of twenty or thirty acres is being
set out for ploughing ; or to try his hand at thatching
a stack or making a wattle fence. The first of these
tasks is what the lie-a-bed very rarely sees, but when
he does see he will look on with no little perplexity
and amazement. Unhappily, we in the country do
not use the terms "skilled and unskilled labour,"
but the things signified by those terms respectively
we have a very clear appreciation of. The mischief
is that we are losing all skilled labourers alarmingly.

THE CRY OP THE VILLAGES 163

We have ourselves to blame in great measure for
this. The root of the evil may be traced very far
back, and this is not the time to dwell upon it ; but
the reason of our best men going from us is not far
to seek. It lies in this, that all agricultural labourers
are supposed to have a right to receive the same
wage, whatever the quality and character of their
work may be ; till it has become an axiom that the
worst man should get the same pay as the best, and
the best has no such career before him as the
consciousness of superiority over his fellows con-
vinces him he has a right to look forward to. A
lad of seventeen or eighteen may have learnt the
trick of hanging on to a plough after a fashion ; he
can hoe ; he can dig ; he can load a cart with
manure ; but he is afraid of a horse (not at all an
uncommon failing), and he's not much to be trusted
with the cows. Nevertheless, he claims "a man's
wages." Yes ! and he gets them. That is, he earns
as much as his father or his brothers do ; they may
be " skilled labourers," if we only used that term ;
he may be " half a fool " — ^that term we have !

But he's a man, and a man's wage he claims. On
the other hand, he may be the only really skilled
labourer of the family, and he knows that he will
earn no more than they or a dozen shifty fellows
who are hardly worth their salt Except only in

i64 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

harvest time, all the year round his work is over
at four o'clock in the afternoon. What is he to
do with his magnificent allowance of leisure ?
Libraries? Reading Rooms? Museums? Recrea-
tion Ground ? Picture Gallery ? Lecture Hall ?
Public Garden ? Swimming Bath ? Gymnasium ?
Who is to find any of these things for him ? A
paternal Government ? What ! a paternal Govern-
ment have any care for Hodge ? Or the ratepayers ?
Well, that may come when all the rates are laid
upon the parson's tithe ; but as long as the farmers
and shopkeepers are still called upon to pay sow^
rates, you'll not get quite unnecessary luxuries pro-
vided for the labourers, young and old, at the
expense of the ratepayers.

Even in the towns these things, as I have said,
were provided in the first instance by the rich for
the poor. Think of what Mr. Quintin Hogg has-
been doing for the children of the working classes
for years past through that unique '* means of
grace " — the Polytechnic ! It is to me a subject of
continual wonder that there is so very little coarse
vice to be found in our villages. The young fellows
have simply nothing to do for a good thousand
hours a year. Has Satan forsaken them that their
idle hands hang down by their sides, numbed by
mere apathy that makes one yawn to watch ? Put

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 165

the case of two harmless, hulking lads when the
day's work is done lighting upon the original idea of
taking a stroll in the gleesome isle of Ely.

" Where shall us go, Tom ? "

" Dunno I Fur as Forty-foot drain ? "

*' Come on 1 "

Not a hedge to blur the horizon. Not a tree few
a bird to build in. Not a '' public " to stop at. Not a
human being to " holler " to. Not a log to sit down
on. Not a rat to throw a stone at. Straight as a
ruler lies the road — it lies^ it never runs — between a
pair of black and forbidding dykes too wide to jump
over. Why in the name of common sense should
those two lads go shambling along together for
miles at a stretch, only to reach the Forty-foot drain
— unless it be to drown themselves in the dark
water, the only conceivable form of pleasurable
excitement which could oflFer itself to such forlorn
ones?

We in the land of sweetness and light— of course
I mean Norfolk — are not as yet so badly off as that,
and yet things are not very gay with us. We have
still some aspects of nature to charm and allure us ;
but the old village life has all faded away — vanished.
The rollicking and the practical joking, the dancing
round the Maypole, the fighting in the backyard of
the alehouse, the stone-throwing, and the mischief

|66 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

— we can't bring it back. Who would wish to bring
it all back? Barbarism has been replaced by
respectability. But is there nothing between bull-
baiting and cockfighting, with all the evil that was
inseparable from these things, and the condition of
moral, social, and intellectual atrophy into which
we are sinking, till the very bullocks are scared and
the lambs begin to scamper away in fear at the
sound of a boisterous laugh ?

Pillion and pack have left their track :

Dead is the ''Tally-ho."
Steam rails cut down each festive crown

Of the old world and slow.
Jack-in-the-green no more is seen,

Nor Ma3rpole in the street ;
No mummers play on Christmas Day :

St. George is obsolete.

By no means the least serious trouble that we are
suffering from is that love-making — " sweethearting "
we call it among us — is positively dying out. The
girls run away from us before the lads are old
enough to take to " spooning." By all but universal
assent it is agreed among the townsfolk that domestic
servants cannot be bred and reared in the streets.
So nothing remains but that the housemaids and the
nurses and the parlourmaids should be hunted down
from every happy village in the east or the west, and
so our girls get snapped up like the bullfinches by

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 167

the birdcatchers. At fourteen years of age away they '
go into service, receiving even at starting such wages
as are enough to turn their young heads. Our
farmers meet with the greatest difficulty in finding a
maid-of-all-work. There are no girls of sixteen or
seventeen to be found in our villages. Do you
expect the nightingales to sing in your thickets when
there are no hen birds to reward them for their
song ? Not they. They'll set the leaves a-tremble
for a day or two, but their amorous patience is soon
exhausted. Away they fly to where the bride hides
and flutters — et se cupit ante videri I

If perad venture there should appear a comely lass
or two at the Rectory, or at the gentleman farmer's
or the doctor's yonder, she is just a trifle coy —
" praywd," Colin calls her when her chin is perked
up at sermon time. She will not walk with the first
aspirant to her attention. She somehow makes it
felt, if she does not make it known, that she expects
a house to live in ; and if she is to settle down in
the village that house must be other than a couple
of rooms in a Peabody mansion five floors up from
the basement. Yes ! and to the honour of the young
suitor, he too thinks that such a bride as she is
worthier of something better than the wretched
tumble-down shanty in which he himself was born
and bred. It is hardly more than a year ago since

i68 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

a fine manly lad said to me : " I ain't a-going to
marry till we've got some better housen than they
places down there 1 " pointing over his shoulder. It
is curious to note how this sentiment is slowly acting
in the direction of lessening the number of early
marriages amongst young men. I know of ten or a
dozen unmarried men in a parish of less than seven
hundred inhabitants, varying in age from five and
twenty to two or three and forty — ^and four of these
are looked upon as " confirmed old bachelors," who
profess themselves to be averse from matrimony.
This is how the education of the rustics has been
"above their station." They are educated above
their station — that is, they revolt from being housed
worse than the cattle.

But who is to provide decent houses for the
agricultural labourer ? The landlords nowadays
cannot live in their own houses, and eagerly let
them to provide themselves with more modest
homes elsewhere. The land may actually be said
not to be paying its expenses.

If you doubt that, take the trouble to read the
Duke of Bedford's remarkable account of his
stewardship in regard to his immense landed estates.
Even in the best days it appears, according to his
Grace's summary, that there is nothing to be made
in the long run out of the broad acres, if generous

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 169

treatment or even justice is shown to the wage-
earners among the peasantry. But when extensive
tracts of land, with good buildings too, are letting
in Essex and Suffolk and Norfolk at a rental of five
or six shillings an acre, where is the margin to come
from wherewith to build houses for the labourers ?

It is, however, when some outbreak of serious
sickness falls upon our villages that the dreadful
condition of the cottages in some of our country
parishes becomes shockingly apparent. When a
whole family has been stricken, and the worst is
over; and the weakened and the half-alive cannot
render to the delirious or the half-dead the simplest
service — when a house is reeking with fever or small-
pox, God help those who cannot help themselves I
The excellent association for providing nurses for
the poor in the county of Norfolk, which has been
worked so well for many years past, and is working
so well under very able management, has been an
untold blessing to many poor sufferers. But there
are whole parishes where a night nurse could not
find a bed for herself to lie on, and where a day
nurse could not find a slop-pail. I must needs put
the matter bluntly; they who have had some
experience of grave sickness in out-of-the-way
hamlets — and they only — ^know what I mean.

I never heard of a country village in my

I70 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

experience, with even a rudimentary dispensary,
where the most simple means and appliances
absolutely necessary for accidents and sudden
emergencies are kept ready at hand. Yet there
are many parishes where the nearest medical man
lives five miles ofiF. On one occasion I happened to
drop in at a cottage where a girl had tripped and
fallen against a. pane of glass and ^'punctured an
artery," as I was afterwards informed on the
authority of the sapient medico. Gush ! gush 1
gush I spurted the red blood out from near the
temple. I put my finger upon the spot and shrieked
for something — anything to stop the flow ! The
girl would have bled to death in an hour. I rigged
up a tourniquet — is that what they call the thing ? —
with a bit of cheese-rind — ^which " lent itself to the
occasion " — some dirty rag, string, and two broken
lead pencils. And if that young person's forehead
wasn't pretty deeply seamed with the whipcord
before the surgeon appeared, it wasn't my fault I
But the most pitiable object in our village com-
munities is a poor fellow '' on his club," as the
phrase goes ; that is, a man suffering from a hurt or
some chronic malady, and whom the doctor has
certified is unable to work, and who therefore
receives a weekly allowance from his club as long as
be remains on the sick list. The unhappy wretch

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 171

may not even handle a tool ; he may not drive in a
nail ; he may not carry a parcel or go on a message ;
he may not sit down in a public-house — during all
his sick time. Moreover, he is jealously watched by
the other members of the club, and if he be of a
cheerful temperament, he is pretty sure to be
reported as shamming. As often as not the poor
fellow has a garden where the potatoes want
moulding up, or an allotment where the wheat
badly wants hoeing. Not a bit of it I He may
stare at the tall thistles and sigh, but anything in the
semblance of labour is denied him I How he must
envy his children at the school 1 And what a
warning he must be to those same children if they
ever think of their poor father's station in life,
beyond which they are being educated so fast I
Some few years ago I put up a seat for these unfor-
tunates with a fairly comfortable back, at what used
to be called " Wicked Corner " in the old days, and
now bears the honoured name of " Church Corner."
It is pathetic to see the sickly and the old slowly
making their way there and sitting in the sunshine.
Now and then a tired tramp sits himself down in a
slouching way. He's not allowed to stay there many
minutes. ''That ain't made for the like o' he,"
growled a soured old pauper in explanation to me
one day. " Lawk ! If we let him alone, he'd lie

172 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

down there and go to sleep and usurp [There's a
pretty word for you I] other folks' rec-re-a-tion ! "

So it has come to this, that our only notion of a
recreation ground is a deal board with a rail to lean
against, at the edge of a ditch and facing the north-
east wind I Not that we have not our cricket field,
and a good one too ; but we hold it on the kindly
suflFerance of Farmer Wade, who keeps it in order
and lets us have the use of it rent free. But then he's
a trump, he is, and if he's not a lineal descendent
of the General Wade who made the great military
roads up in the north there, and has the credit of
having invented the kilt to clothe the nakedness of
the Highlanders, he deserves to be !

" What fun it must be to look down from the
Pleiades 1 " said Euphemia Maud the sly and too
poetical ! " What fun it must be ! " she cried,
taking very good care to be within earshot of the
jM-esent writer when the cricket match was going on.
But Laura Gladys — z, little monitor she — ^was equal
to the occasion. " Ah I But I'd rather be a mermaid,
while all the merry mermen under the sea would
feel their immortality die in their hearts for the love
of me 1 " "Ah I sir, that's what's ruining us ! the
gals a-talking that kind of stuff. It ain't Christian-
like, that ain't I " growled old Jim Dawes, one of the
old but extinct King Coles, who, " though a learned

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 173

soul, neither write nor read could he ! " " They're
a-educating 'em above their station, that's where
it is I"

No I No 1 Why shouldn't they learn their
poetry, and write it, too, if they like ? Bless their
darling bright eyes ! The real mischief is that the
education all comes to a dead stop among us when
they've done with the school. The grim prose of
life supervenes with a cruel solution of continuity,
and the future is mere vacuity.

We want our " station " improved — not our
education lessened and impaired.

The poor in the towns have had everything done
for them ; thetr cry is listened to almost before it
is uttered. The poor toilers in the rural districts
are fretfully told to help themselves. How can they
help themselves ? They must^ unless they are to
disappear out of the land — they must sue in forma
pauperis. They want everything that the towns-
man claims already as his right : water to drink —
houses to live m — ^resting-places in their weariness —
nursing in their sore sickness — common halls, be
they ever so humble, where they may hope to get
some innocent amusement, diversion, instruction,
and rational companionship. Who is to give them
these things ? — tlie landlords ? the tenant farmers ?
the parsons ? Such an one as " this humble indi-

174 THE CRY OP THE VILLAGES

vidual who now addresses you," and who for years
past has not derived from his fat benefice enough
to provide him with house rent in a second-rate
country town ?

What mockery to bid our poor rustics look to
the old helpers, who themselves are hanging on by
their eye-lids to their ever-waning resources ! This
is no pessimist's whine. It is but the sad cry of
those who beg only for the crumbs which fall from
the rich man's table.

Of late we have had more than enough talk about
the crisis in the Church, and been working ourselves
into a kind of St. Vitus dance because a few hundred
clerical nondescripts are threatening to bring back
Paganism into our worship, and offering to rid us
of the burden of our innermost secrets by polluting
others with the recitals of things which we would
fain hide from our very selves. Tush 1 This is not
the crisis. It is only one of the many tricks of the
devil and his angels to throw dust in our eyes and
to keep us from seeing what the real social and
national crisis is which confronts us in very
truth.

With fair land and good land literally dirt cheapo
with vast accumulations of untold wealth for which
the owners can find no investment, with men and
women positively troubled and perplexed by the

THE CRV OF THE VILLAGES 175

burden of their riches, and an anxious question,
increasing in distinctness, coming up from many a
conscience-stricken heart, and asking painfully,
" Men and brethren, what shall we do ? " — here is
a blessed opportunity for adding to the sum of
happiness among the peasantry of England such
as never offered itself before, such as may never —
will never — occur again if we let this chance go by.
After painfully studying this matter in many of
its aspects, and especially as it affects what we may
call the open parishes^ I affirm without hesitation
that almost any village in England might be
changed in a few years into '' a model parish " by
the wise expenditure of such an amount of capital
as would be a mere insignificant contribution to the
vast outlay which our large towns are absorbing
annually. Moreover that such an outlay would
provide for all the needs of our villagers in per-
petuity. God knows I do not grudge the townsmen
anything that may promote their happiness and
well-being — in the best sense of those words.
What I do deeply deplore and protest against is
that our poor peasantry should have been so abso-
lutely neglected by the philanthropists as they have
been during the time when they were least able to
help themselves, until at last they are being driven
away from the homes of their fathers in despair of

176 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

ever seeing any improvement in their own sur-
roundings.

Actually as I was writing these lines certain Reports
of the Peabody Fund and of the Guinness Trust
were laid upon my table. From the Report of
the Peabody Trustees it appears that at the end
of the year 1898 their capital expenditure in land
and buildings had amounted to ;^i,25o,390 los. 8d.,
which had been spent in providing 5,121 separate
dwellings comprising 11,367 rooms, the average
rent of each room being 2s. 6d. a week. The rent
in all cases including the free use of water, laundries,
sculleries, and bathrooms.

The Guinness Trustees report that at an outlay of
less than ;£300,ooo, they "have provided 2,208
separate dwellings containing 4,568 rooms, besides
laundries, club-rooms, costers' sheds, ferambulatot
sheds, &c. . . . The average weekly earnings of each
family in residence was i8s. ijd. The average
weekly rent of each room was is. lojd., covering
chimney sweeping and the use of Venetian blinds,
baths, and hof-water supply" It is added, " club or
common rooms are provided and supplied with
papers, books, games, &c. ; " this last " &c." refers
among other luxuries to " the boiling water supplied
from urns morning and evening for making tea.**

With us in the country things have been allowed

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 177

to slide too long to permit of our hoping that we
can recover lost ground by any cfiup de main. But
is there not splendid encouragement for all good
men and women of large resources to abstain from
frittering away their money in a lavish and an
inconsiderate way, and to urge them to concentrate
their eflforts upon some really great object ? What
greater encouragement could be looked for than
that which the immense improvement in the con-
dition of the poor in our large cities during a single
generation affords ? What greater encouragement,
I say, than the success of the noble sacrifices made
and the example set by such benefactors as Mr.
Peabody and Lord Iveagh ?

History repeats itself. The time has come when
one of those great repetitions of history, which are
never mere imitations, seems to invite us to make a
new departure. I plead for our rural communities ;
I plead for what remains of that sturdy peasantry
which were not so very long ago the very pith and
marrow, the very backbone of a great people. I
plead to you, the rich in this world's wealth, that
you should be as ready to give of your overflowing
resources only as freely, and not less grandly, in
the direction of Social Reform as your fathers did,
centuries ago, in the direction of Religious Reform.
Their immense sacrifices for the furtherance of

^3

178 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES

what they believed to be the religious elevation of
their generation succeeded in exercising an incal-
culable leverage upon all classes, and all classes,
high and low, were verily and indeed lifted up
thereby.

It remains for the men of the present generation
to work on different lines, and peradventure by a
somewhat different machinery, for the moral and
social uplifting of their contemporaries, and for
those that may come after. The masses can no
longer be left to the Church alone, to deal with
as may seem good in the sight of the very best
and most earnest and most high-minded of her
hierarchy. The masses will not rest satisfied with
all that the Church or the Churches have to o£Fer.
Let us not be ashamed or afraid to make that
confession, however humiliating it may seem to
the pride or the assumption of some good men
among us.

That the masses, whether in town or country,
can do without religion, I, for one, no more believe
than I believe that they can do without water or air.
But for all that, I can just as little believe that you
can feed and clothe, or even educate the masses by
religion alone. It seems to me conceivable that
the day may come when men, looking back with
larger, other eyes than ours upon the long processes

THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 179

and successive steps whereby God has been school-
ing and training the successive generations of
mankind, may recognise with thankfulness and awe
that He has used the magnificent sacrifices and the
magnificent labours of His chosen servants in His
Church to prepare the men of the future for a
higher order of things than that we can yet forecast
or imagine. The end of things is not yet. May it
not be that we are but at the beginning of the new
order which shall change and transcend the old ?

Be that as it may, we have much work to do if
we are not content basely to leave things as they
are — tamely acquiescing in a condition of affairs
which will take some generous endeavours to
amend.

*' The inhabitants of the village ceased I " pealed
forth the fiery-hearted prophetess in the bad times,
her soul aflame with indignant grief at the craven
hearts among the princes. Ay, "the inhabitants
of the villages ceased — until that I Deborah arose —
I arose a mother in Israel ! " Is there no patriot
Deborah in our times, to rise above the wail of
lamentation, and to take the gallant leadership of
those " who willingly offer themselves " ?

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

THERE is nothing which indicates more
strikingly the growth of the historic senti-
ment among all classes during the last twenty or
thirty years than the fashion which has sprung up
of celebrating the anniversary of some great event
in the remote past, or the birth or death of some
distinguished or heroic personage* These celebra-
tions have been rapidly increasing upon us of late,
not without causing some little bewilderment to
worthy people whose knowledge of history is not
their strong point. They are surprised to hear
that Hungary, for instance, can lay daim to a
millennium of anything ; or that there could be any
reason why excited experts should go into hysterics
because eight centuries had actually been completed
since the Domesday Book was drawn up ; or that
there was so much that was worth remembering at
Durham or Ely or Norwich all those hundreds and

hundreds of years ago. Cynical Philistines; on the

183'

i84 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

other hand, have been prone to ask whether it
might not be just as well to let bygones be bygones
— whether we are any the better for loading our
memories with facts which have travelled down to
us from so very long ago that a critical age may be
prepared to question whether they are likely to be
true ; or whether, if true in the main, much of the
glamour which surrounds them may not be due to
the mists through which we look back at them —
inasmuch as "the past will win a glory from its
being far," and also inasmuch as we are agreed that
" distance lends enchantment to the view."

It is always better to let the cynics have their say
and to forbear from arguing with them. We and
they do not stand upon the same platform, nor
start from the same premises. In this particular
to instance they are in an evil case as being a small
sect of unfortunates who count themselves wiser
than the rest of us, and yet who are bound to find
themselves more and more in a hopeless and soured
minority. The spirit of the age is against them, and,
however little they may be able to understand it, the
truth is that the cynics are always behind, never
before, their time.

Our near neighbours across the Channel have of
late been throwing themselves with a great deal of
excitement into one anniversary which in its multi-

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 185

farious pomps and ceremonies made a strong
appeal on the one side to the patriotism of
Frenchmen, and on the other side to the religious
beliefs and aspirations and hopes of the devout and
fervent millions of the CathoHc population of the
great Republic. The Government betrayed no
little anxiety as to what might come of it all,
and actually put forth stringent orders to restrain
the French bishops from meeting in too large
numbers simultaneously, lest a religious demonstra-
tion on too large a scale should result in some
frenzied outbreak which might be dangerous to the
public welfare. Surtout pas trap de religion ! seems
to be the ruling principle of philosophers who
profess unbounded liberty of thought.

And yet this great French anniversary cele-
brated nothing worse than the baptism of Clovis,
King of the Franks, in the Cathedral of Reims, on
Christmas Day, 496— the baptism, that is, of the
man whom Frenchmen regard as the founder of
their national institutions, the beginner of their
national life^ the establisher of their national faith,
the saviour of European society in an age when
things were tending towards chaos. Whether this
view of the case be anything but a hugely exag-
gerated view is one question — ^that it is the view of
the average Frenchman whom one meets by the

i86 THE BAPTISM OP CLOVIS

wayside, and who has anything to say of Clovis, is
hardly a question at all. Much less is it a question
that the event commemorated by this anni-
versary in France was one of almost incalcu-
lable importance in its influence upon the social,
religious, and political sentiments and beliefs of
European peoples, nations and languages down to
the present hour, and that it marked an epoch in
the history of the world.

Who were these Franks? When Julius Caesar,
after eight years of ceaseless warfare, effected the
complete subjugation of Gaul, fifty-one years before
our era, Rome found herself not only with a new
dependency to govern, but she found herself with
a new race to take account of — z, race which for
centuries afterwards became an enormous source
of wealth and power to the Empire. Gaul in its
widest extent comprehended all that is now in-
cluded in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and
Alsace-Lorraine.

The inhabitants of this wide territory were of the
same blood, with a religion and with a polity of
their own. They had something like national
assemblies ; they had a powerful priesthood, which
exercised great influence over the people ; they
were brave, intelligent, rich, and civilised up to that

THE BAPTTSM OF CLOVIS 187

point at which a nation is prepared to assimilate
and absorb whatever better things its neighbotfrs or
its masters may have to oflFer. What the Celts are
to-day, that they were on the Loire and Seine in
Caesar's days ; and what that means I must refer to
the great historian of Rome to tell those who would
fain know.^ The point is, those Gauls were Celts ;
while on the other side of the Rhine there were the
teeming and restless Teutonic peoples, who for
some time past had been finding their own land too
strait for them. Not only that, but the climate and
the soil of the South were a clime and a soil of a land
of promise ; for generations the Teutons had longed
to possess that good land so much better than their
own. It was in consequence of a great emigration
from the upper Rhine by some of these German
tribes, resolved on finding a new home for them-
selves across the river that Caesar was sent to drive
them back. The end was that the Rhine became
the boundary between Rome and Germany. When
Gaul became a Roman province it was supremely
necessary to defend it against the barbarians who
should try to cross over. All along its left bank,
from Mayence to Cologne, there was a wide belt
which was in fact a gigantic military district

* Mommsen, '* History of Rome," book v. chap. vii. vol i,
part i. p. 286, English translation.

i88 THE BAPTISM OP CLOVIS

occupied by an army of no less than eight legions^
or an aggregate of 100,000 men, cantoned in fifty
fortresses or fortified camps. Up and down the
stream two fleets were always moving, watching the
navigation and the movements of the dwellers on
the opposite bank, who were continually threatening
to force a passage across the barrier and pour in
upon the plains of Gaul.

It was not long before it was found politic to cut
oflF the northern portion of the new territory, and
make of it a new prefecture, under the name of
Gallia Belgica. Draw a line on the map from
Dieppe to Strasburg, and you may take it that the
triangle of which this line is the base, and the Rhine
with the coast along the North Sea and the Channel
the other two sides, roughly indicates the boundaries
of this province, of which in the fourth century the
father of St. Ambrose was the governor. Under
the wise administration of the Romans this country
became one of the most thriving and prosperous
dependencies of the Empire. When the poet
Ausonius made a voyage hither in the middle of the
fourth century, he was enraptured with what he saw
as he sailed down the Moselle, more beautiful and
more populous than it is to-day. Trfeves was ac-
counted the fourth city of the Empire. It possessed
what may be called a university, in which, under the

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 189

supervision of Lactantius, Constantine's son Crispus
probably pursued his studies. Here St. Ambrose
was born, and here St. Jerome seems to have spent
some years ; and here we are told he went through
one of those religious crises in his life which deter-
mined his after career. By this time, and perhaps
a century at least before this time, the Belgic Gaul
was emphatically a Christian land. Soissons, Stras-
burg, and Reims had each its bishop, and at Trfeves
there was an archbishop or metropolitan. Trade,
commerce, manufactures, and literature too,
flourished to a far greater extent than, till com-
paratively lately, has been thought. Paris, or
Lutetia, in the fourth century could not compare
with the splendour of the Belgic cities. Between
Reims or Treves and Bordeaux there was no city of
any great extent and importance, except perhaps
Tours, which was the centre of South Gallic as
Reims was of Belgic Christianity.

It was within the borders of this much-ifavoured
land that the Franks had succeeded in establishing
themselves at least as early as the beginning of the
fifth century, when Rome had been compelled to
withdraw the legions from the defence of the Rhine,
and had left the Belgian Celts to protect themselves.
We first meet with the name of Franks in the year
242, when they were so inconsiderable a company

190 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

that a tribune of a legion could disperse and crush
them ; and during the third and fourth centuries
we come upon them as mere bands of marauders,
always beaten and put to flight, but collecting again
in formidable associations, as gatherings of outlaws
on a small scale have been wont to do in unsettled
times, and are likely to do again. In the latter half
of the fourth century the pressure upon the Goths
and German tribes by the movements of the Huns
was continually increasing, and forcing the former
across the Danube and the latter across the Rhine.
Gradually and somewhat rapidly these Franks
appear to have become constituted into something
like a nation, and under the name of Ripuarian and
Salian Franks — ^the one hovering upon the right
bank of the Rhine, the others roaming among the
fastnesses of the lowlands at the mouth of the
Schelde or the great forests of the Silva Carbonaria
and the Ardennes — ^had developed into a disciplined
force which even Attila and Aetius had to reckon
with, and whose tactics in warfare were peculiarly
their own. When Attila crossed the Rhine some-
where near its mouth, he appears to have driven the
Franks before him, only to make them join the
legions of Aetius ; and under this commander they
contributed materially to the reverse which the
Huns suffered at Chalons. Attila led his hosts back

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 191

across the Rhine at Cologne, and as he retreated we
may reasonably infer that the Franks followed in
his wake and returned to their settlements in the
Belgian province.

At this point in Prankish history we find our-
selves very much in the dark. We are confronted
by legend and fable; mythical personages appear
out of the mists, and names of kings who are
like the knights of King Arthur, and of whose actual
existence grave doubts have been expressed by
scholars with a right to the opinions they hold.
Meanwhile we have not yet found a distinct answer
to the question who these Franks were, and whether
they were in any true sense a nation when we hear
of them first, or whether they only grew into an
organic polity out of a mere aggregate of hungry
and desperate vagabonds, pretty much in the same
way that Saxons and Frisians and Angles, and other
marauders who poured into Britian when the island
was deserted by the Roman legions, became con-
solidated into a nation among ourselves.

The tendency of German scholars is to maintain
the view that the Franks were the lineal descendants
of one or other of those Teutonic peoples whose
valour and whose virtues Tacitus has immortalised ;*

* Not " German scholars," however, only. The most extra-
vagant of the supporters of this view was Mt Moet de la Forte

192 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

and one of the last supporters of this theory has
gone so far as to suggest that they were the
decendants of that great group of tribes whom
Tacitus calls the Istaevones, and who claimed
to be descended from the gods of the land. How
these people lost the old name and got to adopt
the more modern one we are not informed.
Gibbon, with that unique sagacity of his, forbears
from anything which could pledge himself to more
than a single phrase might express, and speaks as if
there could be no doubt that the Franks were a
confederacy; implying that their early organisation
was the result of a settled compact among the
members of which it was composed. On the
other hand, the French school of historians,
under the inspiration of a thinker of brilliant
genius, the late M. Fustel de Coulanges, rejects
even the theory of a confederacy of Germanic
tribes, and, dismissing it as a pure hypothesis
lacking any evidence for its support, denounces
with vehement emphasis the notion that the Franks,
when we come upon them first in the third century,
were a nation at all.' M. Fustel, with his usual

Maison in his extremely learned work " Les France, cur origin
et leur histoire/' 2 vols., 8vo (Paris, 1868).

* "L'Invasion Germanique et la fin de 'Empire" (Paris,
1891). See the brilliant tenth chapter of the Second Book,
p. 460 ci seq.

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 193

exhaustive elaboration and argumentative force,
insists that, long before the third century, those
German tribes of whom Tacitus wrote — ^perhaps
more as a philosopher than as an historian — ^had,
by their continual internecine wars and by the
frightful and pitiless slaughter inflicted upon them
by Rome, ceased to exist as organised clans or
tribes ; and that the Franks were the mere scattered
survivors — ^the wrecks — of the Chauci, Catti,
Cherusci, and Sigambri, who were simply swept
away like the doomed aborigines of America and
Africa ; that their very names would have been
blotted out of human memory if it had not been
that the bards and popular singers of a later time
kept up the old traditions of their fabled prowess.
This view, in the main, seems to the present writer
the only view that serves to explain the facts that
have come down to us, and the only view that helps
us to account for the origin and significance of
the name Franks which these people earned or
adopted, and in which they gloried. For the
word seems to mean Roamers or WandererSy and
may well have been applied to restless companies of
soldiers of fortune who, as we know they did,
were ready to take service in the Roman armies
(in which some of them rose to be commanders
of eminence) or, failing to find what they sought in

194 T'HE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

the way of pay, engage in expeditions on their
own account — like the White Companies of the
Middle Ages— wandering as far as Spain, or preying
upon the outskirts of the Rhenish border when the
chance of making a raid occurred, as it must have
done from time to time.

The passage of the Danube by the Visigoths
in 376 was the beginning of the end for Rome's
imperial prestige. The passage of the Rhine thirty
years later was, as Gibbon pronounced, the invasion
that sealed the fate of Roman civilisation. Bur-
gundians and Suevi and Vandals came pouring
in upon the broad lands and cities made ready
for the spoil. The stream went rushing over
Western Europe; it did not stop till it had over-
flowed Gaul and Spain and North Africa. Every-
where there was pillage, devastation, obliteration.
Four times during that dreadful fifth century was
Rome herself stormed and sacked. Practically,
however much theorists of the doctrinaire class
may protest against the admission, the Roman
Empire in the West came to an end in the year
476 ; it was Charlemagne who restored it and once
again made the name of Roman Emperor a reality.
But while the Teuton hordes were spreading them-
selves over the more southerly regions, plundering^
burning, and slaying, the Franks in the old Belgic

/
t

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 195

province were, as far as appears, content to remain
at home. They were not all men of war, there
were those who were tillers of the soil; the land
could not be left desert Moreover, though the
fighting class might be pagans, if anything, all
below the heroes were Christians, with a strong
attachment for and confidence in their clergy,
and an almost unbounded reverence for their
bishops, in whose hands the civil administration
was left : they were the arbiters of all disputes
which did not require to be settled by the sword —
their word was law. The true Franks, as by this
time they had got to call themselves — ^the Franks
who were the warrior class and looked down with
immeasurable contempt upon priests and people in
whose veins no royal blood was coursing — ^they
let their hair grow to its full length and fall over
their shoulders (in battle they managed to pack
it under their helmets); ferocious and careless of life,
they knew no fear, and loved fighting for fighting's
sake, as men love hunting for hunting's sake while
recking nothing of the quarry. But these haughty
swashbucklers all boasted of their divine origin —
whatever that might mean — and every one of them,
in his own opinion, was worthy to be a king. Such
"kings" were for ever starting up among them,
enjoying here and there a brief reign. The time

196 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

was sure to come when some strong man, higher by
a head and shoulders than all the rest, like Saul, the
son of Kish — a man of force of will and power of brain,
masterful, irresistible — a king by the grace of God
indeed — should win the ascendency which none
could gainsay, and who at some great crisis should
be recognised as the peerless leader and comniander
of the people. When such a man was firmly
seated on his throne he would be likely to think of
founding a dynasty. And thus it came to pass.

When, in the spring of that dreadful year 451,
Attila led his enormous hosts across the Rhine,
he seems to have passed that river at several points,
extending his front all along the bank from Stras-
burg as far as Cologne.^ He himself with the
central force appears to have got possession of
Coblentz and laid waste the valley of the Moselle.
The right wing of the invading army, crossing
at Cologne, made straight for the valley of the
Meuse, and, finding themselves in face of the
Carbonarian forest, revenged themselves for their
disappointment at discovering less booty than
they looked for by perpetrating every kind of
hideous cruelty upon the miserable inhabitants
wherever they came. This seems to have been

' See M. Amedee Thierry's "AttUa" (Paris, 1865), vol, i.
p. 136 ci seq.

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 197

the army that at one time threatened Paris and
spread agonies of terror among the panic-stricken
inhabitants. What Joan of Arc did for Orleans
a thousand years later, that Genoveva, the sainted
heroine of the fifth century, is said to have done
for Paris. But the truth seems to be that Attila,
though giving a certain measure of licence to
his auxiliaries, had no design of letting them go
their own way. He had a definite plan of cam-
paign : his objective was Orleans, and the scattered
hosts, though allowed to ravage and slay, were to be
concentrated at Chalons-sur-Marne for a forward
movement against the Visigoths, At the right
moment the pack of bloodhounds that were
plundering here and there were called back to
heel when they had advanced no further to the west
than Reims, from which place the legends seem to
indicate that they were summoned to headquarters
before they had had time to complete the looting of
the defenceless city. All that portion of Belgic Gaul
to the west of a line from the right bank of the
Marne below Chalons, and taking in the whole basin
of the Schelde, suffered comparatively little from the
Huns; and when Attila, foiled at Orleans and com-
pelled to retreat from Chalons, made his way back
again to the right bank of the Rhine, Belgic Gaul
found itself nominally indeed still a Roman province

198 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

— but in point of fact it was a territory that was
derelict. If the people could find themselves a
king, there was little or nothing to prevent them
from making their choice.

Some ten years after the death of Attila^ two
strong men were rivals for the supremacy over this
no man's land : Egidius, a representative of a
powerful family among the Gallo-Romans of the
south, and therefore probably of Celtic blood,
represented the old Roman domination; and
Childeric, son of Meroveus the Frank, and there-
fore presumably sprung from a Teutonic stock.
Egidius perhaps bore the title of "King of the
Romans/' Childeric that of King of the Franks;
the first held his court at Soissons, the second at
Tournay.*

In the autumn of 464 Egidius died of the plague ;
he left a son behind him, Syagrius by name, who
succeeded to his father's possessions and was
"king" at Soissons. Two years later to Childeric
a son was born, Clovis, the real founder of the
empire of the Franks. Of his boyhood and early
youth we knOw hardly anything ; indeed only this,
that his father died in 481 and that the lad of fifteen
succeeded to the crown. From the time of the

' Soissons, on the left bank of the Aisne, midway between
Reims and Compiegne. Toumay, on the Upper Schelde.

I

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 199

young hero's birth till the year 486, ue.^ till he was
twenty years old, there is a provoking blank in
Prankish history. We are left to conjecture what
course events were taking by reasoning back from
the crisis that came at last. It looks as if CloviS;
during the first five years of his reign, was making
his preparations for what was inevitable, and was
extending his influence in the basin of the Schelde
and along the left bank of the Meuse. Probably,
too, he pushed southward and westward as far
as the Somme, making himself master of Cam-
bray, Arras, and Th6rouanne — ^possibly too of
Boulogne.

To the south of the Somme were the rich valleys
of the Aisne and of the Marne, and further still there
were the boundless possibilities which invited with
irresistible allurement the ambition of a young
warrior whose heart was all aflame with thoughts
of conquest.

Observe that Soissons was at this time almost the
richest and the most beautiful city of Belgic Gaul.
When the mixed multitude of barbarians rushed
across the Rhine in 406, Soissons had escaped the
havoc. When Attila, again, and his motley host
spread themselves over the Belgic plains, Soissons
once more was spared. It had its aqueducts, its
churches — six or eight of them, it seems — its

200 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

splendid palace for the governors of the city in the
old Roman times ; great roads ran from it to
Amiens on the west, to Reims on the south-eas^
to Vermand on the north. There had been great
factories here of military engines, and farms ; out-
side the city walls there were splendid monuments
to the nobles whom Soissons delighted to honour.
And but a day's journey off there were Rouen and
Beauvais, and Senlis and Meaux and, noblest and
grandest of all, Reims, where the great bishop, the
sainted Remigius (about whom there is so much to
tell, if this were the time and place to tell it), was
exercising a mighty moral and intellectual influence
which to the fierce men of battle was inexplicable,
awful, and at times inspired in them a mysterious,
overmastering dread. All this goodly region seems
to have been in some sort Syagrius's patrimony ; it
counted as his kingdom. And he called himself a
king by right of imperial appointment; he and none
other was Rex Romanorum.

A Roman forsooth 1 A Roman 1 When there
was no longer any emperor nearer than Constanti-
nople, and when ten years before this the giant
Odoacer had scornfully flouted the puppets that
were playing at sovereignty on the Tiber and had
gone very far indeed to make the world recognise
that Rome's empire, in the West at any rate, was a

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 201

sham. Let the new nationalities rouse themselves
and awake from their dreams ; there had been
enough of dreaming I The time had come when
such a born king of men as Clovis — he was twenty
years old now — could no longer tolerate the empty
fiction of a Rex Romanorum on his borders.

" Let us bring this matter to an issue, thou and L
Let us look one another in the face and play the
game of battle for high stakes and not for love. Let
us see which is the stronger, thou of the Celtic
blood or I the Teuton — thou the Roman, I the
barbarian. Let us see whether the land shall be
mine or thine I "

So they joined battle a league or two to the north
of Soissons. ^ Syagrius, with the remnants, or it may
be the shadows, of the Roman legions in Gaul and
such other men-at-war as he could muster, was
smitten hip and thigh and his army was scattered,
and he himself fled away to the court of the
Visigoths at Toulouse. Thence they sent him back
in chains to Soissons ; and there Clovis smote
off his head. For the duties of hospitality — or
any other duties for that matter — and the softer
emotions of pity or generosity — or any other soft
emotions — existed only in embryo in those terrible
days ; such virtues were for women and priests to
talk about, not for men of the. flowing locks and

3oa THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

the sword that wins plunder and carves out empires
for such as can greatly dare.<

There was no stopping now. To the long-haired
Franks victory meant pillage unsparing. Soissons
was sacked, the churches looted, the sacred vessels
piled up in giant mounds of plunder for division
among the spoilers. Hence that famous incident
of the chalice or vase that St. Remigius — if it were
he — ^begged might be reserved. Clovis would fain
have kept it back; an unnamed fierce soldier
shivered it with his battle-axe. But take note that
already we find the grim king in some intimate
relations with the Gallic episcopate. The bishops
were clearly a power to reckon with ; if the Franks
were to go on conquering and to conquer, the
Church, through her clergy, must be left to govern
the lands that were won. In that fifth century
there was no country — not even Italy — that was
from end to end so completely Christianised as Gaul.
The Church was the only organised force that men
looked to for protection, for justice, for hope of
salvation in this world and the next. "The Church,"
as one has well put it,^ " had grown in esteem and

' Fustel do Coulanges, "L'Invasion Germanique/' p. 490,
where all accessible original sources are not only referred to
but quoted.

' Dean Kitchin, *' History of France," vol. i. book i. chap. vii.

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 203

wealth . • . the bishops became both spiritual and
temporal lords. The bishop, invested by the simple
barbarians with a strange sanctity, was listened to
with awe. His confidence in his mission, his high
training, his dress, his education, the spiritual power
he asserted — all deeply touched his conqueror. It
is said that even Attila carried Lupus, Bishop of
Troyes, with him to the Rhine that he might get
the benefit of his sanctity as a kind of charm.
Remigius certainly acquired a mighty influence
over Clovis."

The king had by this time deserted Tournay ; he
made Soissons his residence now. But Soissons
might be a fortress or might be a palace ; forty miles
off to the eastward lay Reims, the city which was
regarded in the fifth century as the religious metro-
polis of all Gaul to the north of the Loire, as Tours
was, and perhaps more truly was, the sacred city of
the south. Reims had not only its amphitheatre, its
baths, "which Constantine the Great had built
there," its triumphal arches, "one of which
remains," its circuit of walls, and, outside these,
splendid villas which represented the wealth and
grandeur of the neighbourhood, in that happy
fourth century of our era when there were no
dangers from barbarian invasions ; but the city was
rich in churches and oratories, tombs of saints and

204 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

martyrs with a local reputation, and, above all, the
cathedral, then of small proportions as compared
with the superb and magnificent edifice which now
stands up proudly as the matchless triumph of
mediaeval architecture and the despair of our modern
artists, who have lost touch with the enthusiasm and
the aspirations of the past. Obviously Reims in
that year, 486, swarmed with clergy, all held well in
hand under the authority and discipline of a prelate
whose courage, sanctity, elevation of character,
quickness of wit, and lofty wisdom contributed to
secure to him as boundless an ascendency over
those who had everything to gain by peace as Clovis
himself, colossal as his image appears to us as we
look back upon him, could exercise by the tremen-
dous force of his irresistible will upon the grizzly
warriors who had everything to gain by war. A
sort of tacit understanding seems to have been come
to, which was but the continuation of the under-
standing between the Romans and the Celtic nobility
and landed gentry in the earlier times. The Franks
were to be men of the sword. The bishops were to
be the civil rulers — of the subdued.

The men who make empires for themselves are
and must always be men of policy as well as men of
war. Clovis was both to a pre-eminent degree. He
saw that with the effective support of the bishops.

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 205

in whose hands the administration of the country
lay, there would be no fear of any revolt of the
people. He was a pagan, as were the majority of
his Prankish captains, but this paganism of theirs
was rather a confused superstition than a religion ;
a matter of omens and magic and sorcery, of witches
and prophetesses and unmeaning observances and
irrational terrors. We hardly hear anything of gods
or demons, and, I think, nothing of temples or idols
or sacrifices — ^the Franks knew not what they
believed. As for these Christian folk, somehow
they were the better for their creed ; let them keep
to it, why meddle with them ? Yes ! and there was
something more. Those other barbarian invaders
had got themselves wrong with the bishops and
clergy in the lands where they had settled. Vandals
and Visigoths and Burgundians were not pagans ;
they were professing Christians, and had brought a
form of Christianity with them which was hateful to
the people whom they had subdued. These latter
called it a degradation of Christianity ; they branded
it with the name of Heresy; they spat at the heretics
whom they stigmatised as the worst of all heretics,
Arians to wit, and shut them out of their churches
where they dared till they should renounce and
abjure their errors. Then was war in the gates I
Visigoths and Burgundians and Vandals turned

2o6 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

persecutors of the orthodox creed, and there was
variance and hatred between ithe new comers and
the old dwellers in the conquered lands. Dissension
everywhere, harmony nowhere. Only Theodoric
the Great, Arian though he were, let his people
believe and worship pretty much as they pleased ;
even the very Jews he would protect and defend.
Clovis saw that the man who had the bishops of
Gaul on his side would become master of Gaul from
end to end. From the first he pursued the policy
of conciliating them ; and in all the wars and
annexations of territory that were crowded into the
next few years, and which ended in making him
master of all Gaul north of the Loire, the clergy
were his staunch supporters. In humbling the
Arians he was strengthening his bishops and
himself.

Then came a proud moment for the king. In 492
Theodoric the Great asked for the hand of Adolfleda,
one of the sisters of Clovis, in marriage. It was an
alliance which brought together in friendly rela-
tions the two greatest potentates in Europe, though
the empire of Theodoric did not last. Clovis was
in his twenty-sixth year, and was still unmarried;
he, too, determined to take a wife, but she should
be a princess. Along the eastern borders of his
dominions there lay the Burgundian kingdom. This

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 207

people were settled in the valley of the Rhone ;
they, too, were Arians, Be it remembered, as I
hinted just now, that this Arianism — this exotic as I
may say — this outlandish religion imported from
foreign parts, necessarily brought it about that
between the dominant new rulers of the land and
the older tillers of the soil, with their bishops and
clergy at their head, there were " strained relations " ;
much in the same way as it is over more than half
of Ireland now, when the landlords profess one
faith and the masses another.

In these days there were two brothers who were
" kings " of the Burgundians ; the one, Gondebald,
reigned at Vienne on the Rhone, the other, Godegisil,
at Geneva. There had been a third brother, Chil-
perc, who had reigned at Lyon, but he had lately
died, leaving a widow — she was not an Arian, but
one of the orthodox Catholics — ^and a daughter
Clotilda, who was being brought up under her
mother's care. When Chilperic died, mother and
daughter put themselves under the protection of
Godegisil at Geneva, and there, says the chronicler,
they busied themselves in works of charity and
devotion. Of course we are told that Clotilda was
beautiful as well as good, and certainly she was
zealous for her religion and true to her mother's
creed. There are some reasons for believing that

2o8 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

Godegisil himself had less sympathy with the Arian
heresy than his brother Gondebald. Clovis asked
for the hand of Clotilda, apparently at the same
time that Theodoric had made his advances to
Clovis for his sister's hand; and in the year 492
[or 493 ?] the nuptials of the pagan king of the
Franks with the Christian maiden were celebrated
with great pomp at Soissons. The event produced
a profound impression ; it clearly was sanctioned by
the Church, it opened out a great future for the faith
once delivered to the saints — for is it not written
that " the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the
wife?" — it seemed to foreshadow that the Gospel
might have great triumphs to exult in even in the
near future. In very truth the marriage of Clovis
was one of those events the consequences of which
it is difficult to exaggerate.

Clovis, looked at from our modern standpoint,
was a monster of wickedness — cruel, false, relentless,
implacable, fiercely vindictive, sparing none in his
wrath, and, if we may believe all that is told of his
atrocities, with a certain wild beast's joy in blood-
shed. But this savage with the tiger's temper was
not profligate. He was the only one of his race
who, as far as we know, was true to the woman who
was his wife, and the only one whose relations with
the other sex exhibit anything approaching to tender-

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 209

ness and romance. The wandering loves of the
Merovingians are continually befouling the pages of
Gregory of Tours. They are scarcely less shocking
and detestable than the wanton carnage. But on
Clovis his wife Clotilda never ceased to exercise an
influence for good.

In her presence there appears to have flashed
upon him now and then gleams of the inner light
that comes from God. She spoke to him out of her
own experience of the beauty of holiness. She had
a mysterious language which prattled of " the soul "
and "the spirit," words that, coming from her,
might for all he knew have some occult meaning.
So much of the thing men call their hearts this
woman had made him suspect there might be
under that shaggy bosom of his, something that
thrilled with a tremor that was not all animal
passion as he gazed into her unfathomable eyes.
She spoke to him of the Crucified — ^the highest,
holiest manhood, the human and Divine — ^that came
to suffer and save ; the strong Son of God, " stronger
even than thou, my Clovis I Yea, very much
stronger than thou I "

Then a child was born to the pair. There was an
heir to the throne. ** Christ claims him," said
Clotilda, and Clovis acknowledged the claim. So
the babe was brought to the font in the Cathedral of

15

212 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

Bishop of Soissons. The fame of the elder brother
and the splendour of his genius — his moral and his
intellectual genius — have tended, perhaps unfairly,
to rob the younger of his due. It can hardly have
been but that the continued presence of one or
other of the brothers — their example, their con-
versation, and the high estimation in which they
were held — must have made itself felt, and that
the *' continual dropping" was doing its work.

In the year 496 the crisis came. The Franks by
this time had become what the Roman legions were
in the first half of the fourth century, the warders
of the left bank of the Rhine. On the right bank
there had grown up a strong people whom Julian
had tried conclusions with — whom Probus, a
hundred years before Julian, had attempted to
keep back by constructing that tremendous rampart
known as the "Devil's Dyke," and which proved
such a vain defence against these same Alamanni
only a few years later. Gradually the Alamanni
had become a great host, fierce and aggressive,
bent on conquest. They seem to have crossed
the Rhine at Coblentz, and were threatening to
wrest the valley of the Moselle from the Franks
now settled there. What followed we are not told,
(or at this point we are once more tantalised by the

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 213

silence of historians ; and where the final conflict
took place we cannot tell. As the battle raged, the
issue seemed to be dreadfully doubtful, for the
Alamanni were gaining ground, the Franks were
giving way. In the heart of their great leader there
came a horror, a weird shiver of dread. Were the
gods, from whom he was sprung, forsaking him at
this supreme moment ? Was there to be no more
help from them ? He lifted up his hands to heaven
and a cry came from his lips : " O Thou, Jesus
Christ, whom my Clotilda proclaims to be the
Son of the living God Thou who art said to
give help to those in trouble and victory to those
that hope in Thee. Give me but a token of that
power of Thine which the people called by Thy
name affirm that they have found in Thee, and I
too will believe in Thee and be baptized in Thy
name ! For, lo I my gods have gone away from
me, and I find they have no might. Thee now I
call to mine aid ! In Thee will I trust to grant me
deliverance from the foe I " The answer came with
no lightnings from heaven nor any thunders from
the clouds ; but in the king's heart there blazed
forth the flame of a new enthusiasm. The wavering
and half-beaten Franks rallied, charged, and drove
the barbarian host before them as chaff before the
wind. Their leader was slain on the field. Of the

214 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

Alamanni we hear no more. '' On that day," says
one, " the centre of gravity of history was changed/'
By which I suppose he means that stable equili-
brium for European society in the future was to
depend not upon the support which mere brute
force could supply, but upon that which it could
receive from the spiritual and moral forces which
are the real arbiters of human destiny. On that
day, whatever there was that was good in the old
civilisation was saved from shipwreck. The cause
of progress for our race became identified with the
cause of the Christian Church. A new era had
begun.

Clovis kept his promise. It was a hard promise
to keep, and nothing can show how immense was
the influence which the barbarian conqueror exer-
cised over those wild warriors than that they joined
him by the thousand in renouncing the old gods of
war and in bowing their knees to the Prince of
Peace. History has many instances of the same
acceptance of the gospel by a rude people where
their king has had the courage to show them the
way. But the significance of this great event lay
here, in that Clovis dared to take the first great step.
Others might follow, he led.

Between the great victory over the Alamanni and
Christmas Day 496 some months elapsed. Of course

THE BAPTISM OP' CLOVtS 115

there are the usual traditions, legends, peradventure
too, devout inventions, some of them one would
wish to be able to believe ; but for the most part
they come to us from sources that are not above
suspicion. As for the magnificence of the cere-
monial when the king was admitted to the font,
it may be read in the pages of Gregory of Tours,
and in this instance we can hardly be wrong in
thinking that the good man's pen, so far from
exaggerating, was not by any means equal to the
occasion. Reims was all astir with the men of
war and the men of peace. No such magnificent
ceremonial had ever been seen, at any rate north of
the Alps. Through the streets of Reims, lined by
his Franks on this side and on that, Clovis walked,
the Bishop Remigius holding him by the hand,
conducting him on his way to the cathedral church.
Banners and tapestry were, we are told, hung out
from the windows as the procession moved on —
bishops of the province and ecclesiastics of this
grade and of that, in cope and chasuble and
dalmatic, gorgeous in colour and dazzling with
gems and gold, singing the praises of the Lamb
of God in barbaric tones that a hundred years
later were brought into new measures and lifted
to the glol-ious level of the Gregorian chants. As
they entered the great w^estern doors, where the

Ii6 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

blaze of a myriad tapers was wellnigh lost in the
clouds of incense that filled the church with an
overpowering fragrance, Clovis for one moment
paused. " Is this the heaven that ye bring me to ? "
he asked of the Bishop, who still held his hand.
" Nay ! my king ; this is not heaven, but it is the
way to heaven for thee I "

The great moment came at last. The saintly
Bishop, standing by the font, was really the com-
manding figure at that solemn moment. **Bend
low thy head, Sigambrian," cried he. '* Adore thou
that which aforetime thou gavest to the flames 1
Let the flames have now what aforetime thou didst
adore I "

There is no need to carry on the story of Clovis
and his conquests to the end. It is a story which
is not edifying — at any rate not edifying to those
who, as they read the great dramas of the ages
behind us, have no eyes but for the acting of the
puppets on the stage. It is for the philosophic
historian to justify the ways of God to men. I
do but aim at pointing out briefly the meaning of
a single anniversary and the transcendent impor-
tance of the event. Few great conquerors have
achieved so much as Clovis with resources, at first

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 217

sight, so inadequate to the success achieved. When
he died he was but forty-five years old. At fifteen
he began his career as little more than a leader
of outlaws ; he ended by being king of almost
the whole land from the Pyrenees to the Rhine.
He founded a dynasty, but he did very much more :
he founded an empire. The dynasty catoie to an
end, the empire lasted. For wellnigh four hundred
years after that Christmas baptism at Reims, there
was no people in Europe, except the Franks, which
developed into an organised national community
or could boast of an uninterrupted national history.
If the title of the First Christian King which has
been bestowed upon him be something more than
he deserved, it still remains true that he was the
first barbarian chieftain whose profession of Chris-
tianity was the beginning of that recognition of the
Gospel as the religion of his people which since his
days no European sovereign has ventured to regard
as the ground of his claim to rule. If in any real
sense he was a Christian at all, if his daily life was
in hidieous contrast to the creed he professed, and
his career was a hideous reproach upon the religion
which he called his own — so much the worse for
him, we may perhaps be inclined to say. But he
was not the first, nor by any means the last, whom
God has used to work out His divine purposes and,

218 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS

in spite of themselves, their errors, or their crimes,
to assist in the evolution of the Kingdom of Heaven.'

[In writing about Prankish history I adhere to
the French way of spelling proper names. I do
so for more reasons than one, but especially for
this reason — that it is the simplest way of escaping
from the chaotic orthography (?) which modern
writers with Germanic tendencies seem to flounder
about in. M. Fustel gives a dozen forms of the
name '' Clovis," and Guizot almost as many of the
name "Clotilda," for which authorities may be
adduced. Romans and Teutons were sorely puzzled
to spell the Celtic names phonetically.]

» This Essay was written and ready for the press before
the magnificent monograph on Clovis by Professor Kurth, of
Liege, came under my notice. This book, published by
Mame at Tours in 1896, was issued as a memorial volume —
**consacrl , , , au glorieux anniversaire du Bapthmc de Reims
qui a fait de la France, il y a quatorze cent ans, la fille ainic de
Viglise" — In all respects it is a book worthy of the occasion.

PART II

MISCELLANEA
DAVID AND JONATHAN

DAVID AND JONATHAN

TWO or three times in my life have I kept a
tortoise. No ! That is an exaggeration. I have
never succeeded in keeping one ; he never would stay.
He crawled about fitfully, for the most part hiding
himself from human eyes, till the autumn drew on ;
then he vanished and never appeared again. The
last tortoise I had I bought out of a large tray of
tortoises in Croton market. He was a fraud. I put
him in my garden, and he was no more seen — not
a vestige of him ever turned up again. Yet it was
in the month of June, when, if ever, tortoises ought
to be lively and gay. I suppose he was too gay,
and finding himself at liberty he started upon his
Wanderjahr, and continued roaming till he fell
asleep, famished and lonely. I had arrived at the
conviction that, as a class, tortoises were uninterest-
ing creatures, when, as summer was fainting away
in the arms of autumn this year, I went to visit my

kinsfolk in Devon, and lo ! to my unspeakable

921

222 DAVID AND JONATHAN

amazement; I made the acquaintance of a tortoise
who answered to his name and who came when he
was called.

Life is full of mysteries, but among the most
unfathomable of those mysteries is the strange
power that some men have over the lower animals.
Have I not seen with my own eyes a lumbering,
coarse lout of eighteen, whom all the laws on the
Statute Book could not deter from rambling in the
copses by day and poaching obstinately by night —
have I not seen him with a full-grown stoat in his
breeches pocket, which he handled as carelessly as
if it had been a bunch of tow I I would not have
had that stoat in my breeches pockets for ten
minutes at the price of one thousand pounds
sterling. The fierce little devil would have bur-
rowed into my bowels in five seconds and left me
a mangled corpse. Yet " the varmint," as his owner
called him, was on terms of the most affectionate
intimacy with this lout of a lad, though the acquaint-
ance between the two was not of a week's standing.
But I never heard of or saw a tame tortoise till the
other day, and his name is David.

The Lady Laura is my cousin, and if I choose to
give her brevet rank who shall hinder me ? She is
sweet to look at, gentle and good — the very ideal of
what an English lady should be. '* She must have

DAVID AND JONATHAN 223

been very lovely sixty years ago/' said one to me,
and I made reply, "She couldn't have been as
beautiful as now ! '' All her life she has been a
tamer of birds and dogs and horses, and it has all
been effected by infinite gentleness, infinite patience,
an almost entire absence of fear, perfect health and
a full measure of physical strength and brain power,
a vivacious manner, and a temper always under
control ; if, indeed, it could be conceived that she
ever "lost her temper," as the phrase is, or ever
discovered that she had one.

The Lady Laura lives in a cottage, with a garden
in front of the house and another behind; and
with her live her daughter and her servants. They
form a quiet, happy household, and they find their
joy in the round of their domestic duties. It is
a life which may be called Idyllic. Five years ago
David appeared upon the scene. He was young
then, very inexperienced, and of small proportions —
say, four inches across. The Lady Laura resolved
she would win his confidence, improve his manners,
develop his intellect, and give him a first-rate
education. Every day during that first summer he
was looked after, and not allowed to go his own
way. Half a dozen times every morning he was
called by his name and bribed with a lettuce-leaf or
some other favourite vegetable. In the midst of

324 DA VID AND JON A THAN

a meal he had his food taken from him and only
restored when he moved in answer to the sound of
his name. As the sunmier began to wane David
had begun to exhibit some intelligence ; at any rate,
to this extent — ^that as the noontide was drawing on
he would appear at the drawing-room windows
waiting for his lettuce, and feebly notice the Lady
Laura only, stolidly hiding his diminished head
when any one else ventured to address him with
unbecoming familiarity. In October he ceased to
feed; and began to hide himself. Then he set
himself to burrow, slowly working away as a mole
does, until he had gone below stairs, as you may
say; and being covered over with soil, and ap-
parently nothing else, he fell asleep and woke no
more, and never came to any call. In April next
year he appeared one sunny morning at his old
place quietly waiting. His mistress opened the
windows softly and called the creature loudly by his
name. David put forth his head, looked out, peered
round, and seemed to be asking for food. It was
evident that he had not forgotten his name. After
this the second year's training began. Before the
second summer was ended David not only came
whenever his name was called, but he had begun to
exhibit something like personal attachment for his
mistress, and to follow her about the garden,

PA VID AND JON A THAN ii^

Before the second summer was ended he was
looked upon as having arrived at years of discretion,
and they gave him his liberty without watching him
as much as heretofore. Next year his education
appeared to be complete. He would frequently
wander into the drawing-room, climbing queerly
over the sill of the French windows, and usually
finding his way to his mistress's feet, who was never
tired of calling him David. It was clear that the
sound of her voice exercised a certain fascination
upon him ; it was pleasant music to his rudimentary
ears.

But people will be so officious ! One day a well-
meaning person brought a second tortoise as an
offering to the Lady Laura, and as it was a four-
footed thing, and so incapable of talking nonsense
or gossip, it was accepted as a welcome accession
to the small menagerie. Of course, it was turned
loose in the front garden. What do you suppose
was the effect upon David ? David ran away !

It was in the dog days. There could be no

thought of David burying himself at such a time.

Moreover, he had increased so much in bulk that he

was more than double the size he had been when

first he appeared on the scene; he could not so

easily be hidden now. But he had run away.

There could be no doubt about it. There was

i6

226 DA VID AND JON A THAN

sadness and lamentation, and much calling for
David, but David had run away; Later in the
evening, as the sun was going down, a young man
from the village, five hundred yards off, brought the
tidings that the truant might be recovered and
brought back by any one who had the courage to
pick him up and carry him off ; as for himself, he
had a superstitious horror of poisonous reptiles,
and touch him he would not, " if it was ever so."

David was restored to the bosom of his family 1
But next morning there came a new surprise. The
second tortoise had been promptly named Jonathan,
in the confident hope that a firm friendship would
be cemented between the two Chersians, and David
and Jonathan were introduced to one another in
form. Then Jonathan slowly walked off, and David
followed him. I regret to say that he hissed at the
interloper; he positively jeered at him, as who
should say, '* What have I to do with thee ? "

An hour later there were strange sounds, as of
one tapping at a nail. They went out to see what
it was all about, and lo ! there was David pounding
at Jonathan after a fashion which few human eyes
have seen in this island. Jonathan was far the
smaller and weaker of the two, and David was
evidently bent on driving him off the premises. It
was a deadly fight, and there could be little doubt

DAVID AND JONATHAN 227

as to what the issue would be. David had a method
of his own. He got himself abreast of his smaller
rival, then with a sort of a spring — ^think of a
jumping tortoise ! — ^he drew in his head, and at the
same moment butted fiercely at little Jonathan with
a bang, doing his best to turn him over, but only
succeeding in dreadfully shaking his interior. In
a minute or so came a second assault, and then
a third, and how it would have ended none can
say, for at this point the mistress of the garden
intervened, and the battle was brought to a close.

Since that day David and Jonathan have managed
to live together with only an occasional fight. But
they are not friends. No I they are not friends.
Jonathan seems to be a stupid tortoise ; will not
answer to his name, is timid, solitary in his habits,
, accepts the lower position which alone he is able to
occupy; he never presumes to creep up into the
drawing-room frequented by David when the whim
takes him, and he keeps away from the favourite
haunt of his superior congener. In fact, he is sad
and cowed. But even Jonathan is beginning to
exhibit signs of a kind of embryonic intelligence.
He is young and inexperienced as yet; but my
gentle cousin will tame him too some day. Even
he will come to her at last, for she is too patient
and too fascinating to be other than irresistible.

228 DAVID AND JONATHAN

Nevertheless, I have some misgivings ; I cannot but
think that Jonathan is not a name to which even an
intelligent tortoise would ever respond with alacrity.
It is a dull and deadening sound to most ears, like
the boom of a big cannon. Whereas those sharp
dentals, one at the beginning the other at the end of
"David," would appeal to the tympanum of any
living thing that has the ghost of an ear. Whether
a tortoise has a tympanum I am not, however, in
a position to decide.

ADAM AND EVE

\

ADAM AND EVE

IN the Illustrated London News of November 20,
1894, there appeared a certain frivolous paper
upon the life and doings of two happy tortoises that
had been living for a few years under the benign
influences which a gracious kinswoman of mine is
wont to shed upon all things animate and inanimate
that bask in the sunshine of her smile. It is not to
report upon these two favoured creatures that I write
to-day — they are alive and well, thank you ; but I
have a little lost my interest in them, my pride in
them, in fact. If I may use a vulgar expression, I
will venture to say that the noses of these tortoises
of the Lady Laura have been put out of joint of late.
I have come into relation with other tortoises that
are more noticeable than they. First and foremost,
I have discovered that the city of Norwich is famous
for tortoises, and deserves to be more famous still by
reason of their being able to boast of a very accom-
plished historiographer, who has written more

231

23a ADAAf AND EVE

intelligently and more gracefully about these animals
than any naturalist ever wrote before. Sir Peter
Eade is a physician and a man of science, and has
been a keeper of tortoises thirteen years and more.
He weighs them, he watches them, he feeds them,
he appeals to their intellects, to their memory of
the past, to their hopes of the future ; but he finds
them deaf to his voice, charm he never so wisely.
The worst of it, however, is that he has arrived at
the belief that his two tortoises are both males, each
pursuing his monotonous celibate life, and each
avoiding to some extent the society of the other.
I suspect that they are moody^ disappointed animals,
that one would slay the other if there were a lettuce
to gain by the crime, and that no love is lost between
them. I 'know not what their names are, but I
know what they ought to be called. Clearly they
should be known among tortoises as Cain and Abel.
One of them, indeed, shows a marked preference to
slices of apple — hence the suggestion of his name ;
the other, just because his brother prefers that fruit,
turns away from it with marks of displeasure. This
brother must be Cain. These tortoises are ambitious
tortoises. Sir Peter tells how when green peas are
in season, Cain and Abel make violent efforts to
climb up his trousers to get at the green peas in his
pockets. Nay I that even without any thought of

ADAM AND EVE 233

satisfying the cravings of his maw, one of them has
been known to try and climb a tree — or something
like it — only to get nearer the sun in the heavens.
Both are moody and rageful when the clouds come
and darken the heavens with their gloom. The
larger of these brethren, is, however, but a poor
little object — in 1892 he weighed no more than
3 lbs. 3J oz. — and when he does not thrive, may-
hap he is pining for he Icnows not what. He has a
heart brimful of love to give away, and none comes
to claim it Poor, desolate Abel I

In that same city of Norwich, however, there is
another tortoise, who may well be called Methuselah.
He is said to be " an old inhabitant of this city."
-He is known to have lived there for at least thirty
years. He shows no signs of infirmity, and he
weighs 6J lbs. The hermit life seems to suit him,
and all I have to say of him is that his life has been
virtuous, his tastes innocent, and his deportment
grave, not to say sanctimonious — a good specimen,
in short, of what an anchorite ought to be : frugal
in his diet, seldom smiling, never violent.

Within the last week or so I have had the privilege
of being introduced to a Happy wedded pair of
tortoises who exhibit all the signs of perfect con-
nubial felicity. In the year 1845 they were pre-
sented to Miss Bidden, of Ipswich, and under her

236 ADAM AND EVE •

rowing under the carpet, conscious that to do so is
wrong, but sure at the same time that what is wrong
is pleasant. Observe that even among the dreamy
tortoises the beHef is prevalent that Paradise with-
out the excitement of disobedience would lose some
of its charm.

CU GUI

CU CU!

" Am I your bird ? I mean to shift my bush." — Taming of
THE Shrew.

I HAVE lately learnt a new fact about the Cu Cu :
I am seriously assured that he is a bird of ill-
omen. I was visiting Maria Games, struck down
with somewhat serious symptoms. Her aunt was
sitting by the bedside. Twenty yards or so from
the window stands an old ash with a dead branch,
looking gaunt and forbidding. Suddenly the familiar
voice greeted us— ^'Cu Cu! Cu Cu ! Cu Cul" I
went to the window, looked out, and saw the bird
moving about in its restless way, calling and calling,
again and again ; then away it flew, its voice seeming
to gather strength in its flight till it disappeared from
the view. When I turned round from the window
I saw Aunt Jane with both hands up to her ears.
" Has he stopped, sir ? " I nodded. Then she took
her hands down. " Oh, sir I I can't abear that

839

240 CU CU!

bird ! " She looked scared and mysterious. She
followed me downstairs to the door. '' I doubt we
shall never keep our M'roiah 1 My husband is
quite upset wi' it; he says he'd like to borrow a
gun ; he can't abear it neither. Two years ago that
bird came just in the same way, and then father
died ; and last year that came again, and my baby
died ; and now it's always here, and you may
depend M'roiah '11 go next. Some folks call him
the coffin bird, and I'm thinking they're right, sir —
I can't abear it I "

Hereupon I laughed lightly. " Afraid of a Cu Cu ?
Why, he's only crowing. He is only calling to the
other Cu Cus to come and fight him if they dare.
That sort of bird is a poor, forlorn sort of a thing.
There are half a dozen cocks for every hen, and so
the cocks won't let the hen have a house of her
own, and they hunt her about, and they never give
her a chance of bringing up her family as decent
mothers should. But as to coffins, pooh I They
know nothing about coffins ; unless you mean that
' Cu Cu 1 ' sounds like a cough."

Aunt Jane was more than incredulous ; she was
irritated by my scepticism. Then, in a vain attempt
to comfort her, I told her how, a year ago, I was
driving on a certain road, and checked my horse as
we were going up a hill, when, lo 1 almost within

CU CUI 241

reach of my whip a Cu Cu lit upon the fence and
called to me as I passed, and I told her how it
followed me for some minutes, passing and lighting
on the rails, and staring at me quite close, and, as it
were, talking to me, till I pulled up to look more
closely at it, and then it flew away. The good
woman was awestruck. "What, on dead wood^
sir t " " Dead wood ! Why, it was a rotten old
post and rail fence." " Wasn't you afraid, sir ? "
No, I was not afraid, and no harm came to me, and
I wished I could see that Cu Cu again. As for
killing the poor bird, let her tell her husband from
me that mischief would be sure to come of that.
Certain siu-e. I wouldn't have the man to kill a
Cu Cu, I wouldn't. Let him be warned in time 1
I believe and hope that I have saved that Cu Cu's
life for once. You don't know how solemnly I can
speak when I try. But has any one else ever heard
of the coffin birdf And is the funereal character
which this name seems to have given him to be
accounted for by his being called in some places
the coughing bird ? The name and the ill-omens
attached to his appearance are, at any rate, quite
new to me !

I am afraid my poor jackdaws have suffered very

17

24a cu cut

severely this winter. I have not seen one wheeling
round the church-tower this spring ; and I cannot
account for the fact that never once during the hard
winter did a single jackdaw come down to our
feeding-ground. But our thrushes and blackbirds
are quite multitudinous, and I am sure they ought
to be, for the bushels of provender that have been
provided for them in various forms are past telling.
A great neighbour of mine was lamenting the other
day that hardly a thrush was to be seen in his park.
" How often did they feed them ? " " Never missed
a day," was the reply. " Every day after breakfast."
Alas I woe to the bird that has one meal a day, and
only one, when the snow is eighteen inches deep on
the ground and the thermometer below zero ! Fancy
you and me being satisfied with afternoon tea — one
cup, with two pieces of thin bread and butter — to
keep body and soul together for four-and-twenty
hours, and that liberal fare being all we had to
depend upon for two months together I The terrible
discipline of the monks of La Trappe would be
luxurious gluttony compared with that. But how
many days should we last ? Try it, my robust
brothers, and advertise yourselves for exhibition at
the Royal Aquarium as miracles of prolonged
abstinence ! We were very proud indeed to hear
of a little damsel's lament as she passed our gate

CU CUI 243

in that dreadful January, and saw the crowd of
blackbirds gobbling up their supper : " Oh, mother,
why can't we have such fat birds as the lady shepherd
has ? " Are the little darlings grateful ? I am afraid
I must answer, " Not a bit of it." They no more trust
me than if I were a torn cat. Though the thrushes
have been building in the yew-hedges close by the
front door, yet the first brood, of four, has cleared
out without saying a word of thank you or good-
bye. Between the lower nature and the higher
there is apt to be a great gulf fixed ; the two have
so little in common. Moreover, taking man in the
concrete, I often doubt where the higher nature is
to be found. Looking back upon the ages of pillage
and slaughter — and slave-hunting, for has there not
been enough and to spare of that, too ? — what has
man done to the birds that they should trust us ?
I have lost irretrievably, and quite undeservedly, the
confidence even of my sweet-voiced canary. It is
enough to make any man sad at heart to think
about it. There was a time when he would come
and take a hemp-seed from between my lips, and
a prinu-ose from my fingers. But these are things
of the past. One day, two summers ago, the door
of his cage and the window were both left open, and
he vanished. What weeping there would have been
if there had been children in the house ! As it was,

244 ^U CU!

we were only very silent — a little gulpy, and curiously
disinclined to look one another in the face. Eight-
and-forty hours later came hopeful tidings. One of
our cottagers two miles off had captured a " yaller
sparrer/' and had got it in a basket.

It was eventide, but a horse was harnessed and
a man sent for it with the dog-cart, and a cage with
him, and in half an hour back came our little Pippi,
only just alive, and unable to stand. The man had
seen the poor bird, who had taken refuge in a barn,
faint and frightened of course, and in the excitement
of the chase had put his big-booted foot upon the
poor thing, and so secured his prey. We did what
we could, but he has only one foot left, and that has
no more than three claws, one behind and two in
front. You see I spare you technicalities, but the
other leg is footless and sadly maimed. Well ! well I
That's nearly two years ago, and as I write he is
singing his old gentle song — that bird never screamed
a scream in his life — and he must be happy after a
fashion, for he sings from morn to dewy eve, but he
has never trusted me since that sad occurrence with
the outer world and that enlarged experience of man
and his ways. He bids me good morning regularly ;
sometimes he speaks to me with an air of half-
forgiving tolerance ; but he cannot forget that I am
human, and in his heart of hearts I verily believe he

CU CU! 245

thinks, and cannot get rid of the conviction, that I
set that shepherd to tread upon him ; and let me
and mine say what we will, his opinion is that all
men are alike — ^some a good deal worse, but none
much better than beasts of prey.

-¥

MOLES '

MOLES

I AM the man who hath seen a mole's eye
glittering at him 1 Yes I It was on a day
when we were on a roaming ramble in Rox-
burghshire, and sauntering about somewhere near
Melrose. As we were peering about in a pleasant
shady something or other, lo 1 I saw a mighty
Scotchman plucking away from a moving piece of
earth a tiny little human creature, dangerously full
of curiosity, who was burning with a desire to
find out what that diminutive earthquake meant.
" Coom awa' 1 coom awa' 1 " said the big giant
[N.B, I do not pretend to be able to transliterate
that barbaric dialect, the writing of which some
deluded ones regard as a beautiful though difficult
accomplishment]. "Coom awa' 1 Et'U bite ye I"
I made a grab at the embryo earthquake and
clutched a baby mole I The giant, with all the
signs of hysterical terror, started back, plucking the
child from the impending perils that loomed so

249

V

250 MOLES

horribly near ; but when he saw that I had the lovely
little mole in my hand and was examining it
minutely, was just a little reassured, and even bent
over to look. " Ah ! weel noo 1 " said the giant in
his barbaric and raucous form of speech, "es et
verry ferocious ? " I said " No," and I showed him
the strange little animal, clothed in a beautiful silver
grey satin. The orbit of its eye had not yet closed
up, as the learned tell me it does soon after the
young mole is born, and there was the bright little
eye exposed to mine and glittering with a quite
indescribable glitter as I gazed. Whether there
was any "speculation in those orbs" I will not
undertake to say, but I feasted on the strange sight,
which I suspect hardly one man in a hundred thou-
sand in Great Britain has seen ; and, having finished
with this atom of subterraneous life, I gently laid it
down in the centre of the earthquake, watched it
give a sly little wriggle, and bestowed upon it my
blessing, thanking the powers that be that I was not
a " collector," and that I did not go about slaying
things to put their shrivelled carcasses in a glass
case, and gloat over my skill in lessening the sum
total of animal life, which I like to think has its
rich abundance of enjoyment while it lasts. Why
should we murder the poor moles ? Why should
we sanction the murder of them ? Why should

N

MOLES 251

we not protest against their being massacred
wholesale ?

When I was a child, my nurse used to make my
flesh creep by threatening me, when I was naughty,
that I should be " put in the bury-hole and be dug
up by the resurrection man, and have my teeth sold
to the dentist, to make sets of 'em for the fine
ladies 1 " To be dug up by " a resurrection man "
was no uncommon thing in those days, or at any
rate it had been common enough not very long
before I was born, as a recent writer on this grue-
some subject has shown. Of course a resurrection
man was to my childish imagination the most grim
of all conceivable ogres ; but when it came to such
frightful details of anticipation, as one may say, and
I had to imagine the extraction of my teeth from
my young jaw for trade purposes, and was moreover
left quite uncertain as to whether this diabolical and
ultra-diabolical operation would be performed upon
me alive or dead, can you wonder if I got to regard
a resurrection man as a very prince of demons— an
unearthly because an unearthing demon who would
stop at nothing? But, when we come to reflect
upon his crimes, is not a mole-catcher worse — very
much worse — than the old-fashioned resurrection
man ? The old culprit at any rate waited to
operate upon the buried dead : he waited till his

252 MOLES

victim was cold in his grave. The other traps the
living and catches him in his infernally contrived
snares when he is " all alive, oh 1 " ; has no pity,
no shame, no remorse, and, when all is said and
done, makes a contemptibly small profit by his
trade of murder.

The district in which I pass my lowly life is just
now suffering for its sins in the way of mole-slaying,
by the natural operation of those Divine laws, which
grind slowly, though they grind exceeding small.
There is a deeply-rooted superstition prevalent
among the peasantry that moles are only mischie-
vous and destructive vermin. Nay, there is a little
bunch or collection of idle superstitions acting to
the discredit of the moles — ^for instance, that they
bring rain when it is not wanted ; that they haunt
the churchyards and prey upon our forefathers ;
that they cause tremendous floods by burrowing
through great embankments that keep back the sea
from lands that, but for those banks, would be
submerged ; that their earth putts (such is the pro-
nunciation of that obscure expression) are poisonous
to the soil around them ; and other such slanderous
and malignant accusations. For there were days
when men believed in the devil very much more
firmly, and, I may add, more intelligently and
practically, than they believed in the Heavenly

MOLES 253

Father ; when evil was far, far more present with
them than good ; when " Wight and famine, plague
and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands"
were brought home to them with much more
aggressive and unceasing menace and mischief than
those gracious and beneficent forces which help to
rid us of these manifestations of the malignity of
matter ; times when Nature was so tyrannous and
man so weak, when the evil one was always haunt-
ing their infantine imaginations, and when goodness
was so very far away, had to be waited for so long,
to be hoped for against hope, and was so very rare
and so hard to find out — in those days men found
that the easiest explanation of everything that hap-
pened to them was to say the devil did it. Every-
thing that brought pain and loss and ruin came
from the goblins that were grubbing and growling
in the bowels of the cruel earth, where Hate was
king, restless for ever 1

Meanwhile the best way to escape his ire
Was not to seem too happy !

So the poor little moles came in for their share of
the blame that attached to all the things that were ;
and we, the heirs of all the ages, have an heritage of
mischief from our distant progenitors, the gibbering

254 MOLES

bipeds with their haunting fears and rudimentary
speech and "foreheads villanous low."

And now we are beginning to suffer for our mis-
beHefs. I know I speak for the unpitied. I belong
to the unpitied classes ; for who pities the parsons
in what Donne calls " the very country " ? Yet our
sorrows may come to extend even to you, you of the
breed of Dives, who fare sumptuously every day.
Would it be a small thing to you if you should find
yourselves suddenly robbed of the joy of straw-
berry jam ? Yet that is what we are coming to,
perhaps much sooner than you know. We, the
unpitied, have few luxuries left us, but among those
few are our strawberry beds. In my humble way I
am proud of mine. This year I had about one
hundred and fifty square yards of strawberry beds
in this garden of mine. A month ago the promise
of a crop was so great, and the unripe fruit so
splendid to look at, that I began to think I might
turn an honest penny by them to help to pay, per-
haps, a penny in the pound of my land tax. Alas I
I have not had six strawberries to eat ; the whole
surface of the beds is one picture of devastation
and repulsive rottenness. They have been con-
sumed by millions of ground beetles^ Ophonus
ruficorius or Pteristochus vulgaris; it makes the
smallest possible difference to me which, but some

MOLES 255

people do dearly love long names. These beetles
are in my garden as common as dirt ; they are
winged things ; they burrow in the ground, and
there, it is said, they propagate their detestable
progeny in the day time ; in the night season they
come up from their lairs and cover the surface of
the beds till the foliage is overspread with them as
by a quivering pall. Bring a lantern, and lo ! they
scuttle away. The fiends have one remnant of
virtue left to them : they know what a guilty shame
means. Creeping things they are not, for they run
mutatis mutandis with the speed of antelopes when
disturbed. "The land is as the Garden of Eden
before them ; behind them a desolate wilderness."
Already in this district men have begun to call them
locusts. This, to us, terrible scourge has come upon
us as a veritable visitation. The market gardeners
are walking about with tears in their eyes. Some
sanguine optimists are suggesting that the Lord
Mayor — I mean the Lord Mayor — should at once
set on foot a public subscription for all sufferers
from the plague — except only the country parsons.
Some politicians suggest that we should move for
a commission of inquiry. One man — you need not
ask who — wrote up straight to the Royal Agricul-
tural Society, and received by return of post a very
interesting pamphlet, affording a vast deal of infor-

256 MOLES

mation on the subject of ground beetles in general
and of these beetles in particular, by Mr. Cecil
Warburton, which will delight the curious ; but
when it comes to deal with the remedies, alas !
there are none that the gifted author of the pamphlet
believes in. The real fact is that these " locusts "
are by nature carnivorous^ and have suddenly given
up eating other pests like themselves because they
have increased so enorihously upon their prey that
they have b^en driven to devour fruits and even
flowers now that they cannot find such flesh meat
as they would dine upon if it were there. But there
is another melancholy fact concerning them, and
that is that these ground beetles^ who have begun to
eat up the fruits of the soil, and who by and by will
return to their carnivorous habits by feeding upon
babies in their cradles and the two-year-old little
toddlers in their perambulators, have gone on in-
creasing at an awful and inconceivable rate of
geometrical progression, because their natural
enemies, the wofes, have been for a long time in
this district undergoing a process of extermina-
tion ; and what is to be the end of it all none can
say.

And this brings me back to my moles. A mole
is one of the most interesting and instructive of
animals, if only you take the trouble to study him.

MOLES 257

We have had delightful monographs on the frog, on
the crayfish, on the common domestic fly ; but I
know no satisfactory bookling on the mole. May I
suggest that some gifted naturalist should set to
work upon this subject and witch the world with
the tale that he might unfold ? There are those who
assure us that the mole is a survival of the mega-
therium, and that he is the only living thing which
still possesses a peculiarly formed ^w^^r on his broad
hand, the only known analogue of a similar toe on
the hind foot of the extinct glypiodon. Also it is
certain that, though the mole has no external ears,
yet no animal that we are familiar with has such
exquisite sense of hearing. His sense of touch
seems to be diffused over all the surface of his little
body, and some of the learned assure us that
those little eyes, which in the full-grown animal
are hard to find, are furnished with a certain
muscle which can be contracted or expanded at
will, insomuch that your mole may just keep
his eyes open or closed, according to circum-
stances — an invaluable accomplishment, such as
courtiers, diplomatists, et hoc genus omne may be
forgiven if, when they hear of, they too desire
to have.

Then there are those marvellous fortresses, habi-
tations, hunting-grounds, and the rest which the

18

258 MOLES

moles construct, and about which it is not my pro-
vince to speak — ^the domed citadel, the tortuous
galleries, the dormitory, the magazines of food, and
the wells or reservoirs of water — yes, actually wells !
— that they dig; and then the romance of their
lives 1 their loves and wars and bloody battles,
with the plentiful banquet and repast when the
conqueror comes home, and where Mrs. Mole
receives her lord to four o'clock tea (some seri-
ously insist that literally and punctually it is always
at four o'clock), though, instead of mufi&ns, there
is a plate of skinned earthworms provided for
her dainty lord — only as a treat, though ! only as
a treat !

The main point to be kept in view, however, in all
this is that the voracity of the mole is prodigious.
The number of wireworms found in a mole's
stomach, as it has been reported to me, is almost
incredible. The larvae of beetles and other wild
beasts hostile to man and enemies to human pro-
gress, civilization, and culture that a hundred moles
would consume in a year, they say, we could count
by millions ; and some calculators, great in mathe-
matics, talk even of millions of millions. Certain it
it that in the present depressed condition of agricul-
ture it is difficult to estimate how much serious
mischief is being done by exterminating one of the

MOLES 259

farmer's best and most influential friends — ^the mole.
To wage a stupid and ignorant war against this
beneficent ally of his is "to give himself away"
indeed.

What I want to know — speaking as a very humble
inquirer, speaking as a poor down-trodden sufferer,
speaking as an irritated Esquimaux or Greenlander
might speak if, to his dismay, he arrived at that
mountain — I forget where — on which the stunted
brambles grow that afford the poor wretch his one
annual treat of vegetable food, which gladdens his
heart during his fortnight's holiday while he gorges
himself with whale blubber and blackberries — speak-
ing, I say, as that poor savage might be expected to
speak who should find that that mountain of joy
and hope had been devastated of all its stunted
brambles by a convulsion of nature ; what I want
to know, and what I suspect others will soon be
longing and asking eagerly to know, is. How can we
get back our moles ? How can we allure them
hither ? Can any one make it known to the moles
that we have hereabouts such a wealth of ground
beetles and wireworms as would suffice to fatten
whole legions of moles for years ? They shall not
be molested (no pun, if you please !), but treated
with the utmost respect and consideration ; and
already there is a talk of saddling the resurrection