Before visiting Selborne in October, it had seemed to me that hunting for this grasshopper was a most fascinating pursuit. It was very hard to find him by day, and when by chance you caught sight of him, sitting on a green leaf in the sun and looking like a small, very dark-coloured frog with abnormally long hind legs, it was generally in a bramble bush, into which he would vanish when approached too near.
When at Selborne, one evening I heard one singing among the herbage at the foot of the Hanger, and next morning I found one at the same spot—a female, sitting on a gold-red fallen beech leaf, her blackness on the brilliant leaf making her very conspicuous. A little later, when the wet weather improved, I found the grasshopper all about the village, and even in it; but it was most abundant near the Well Head and in the hedges between Selborne and Nore Hill. Here on a sunny morning I could find a score or more of them, and at dark they could be heard in numbers chirping in all the hedges.
CHAPTER IX
The Selborne atmosphere—Unhealthy faces—Selborne Common—Character of scenery—Wheatham Hill—Hampshire village churches—Gilbert White's strictures—Churches big and little—The peasants' religious feeling—Charm of old village churches—Seeking Priors Dean—Privett church—Blackmoor church—Churchyards—Change in gravestones—Beauty of old gravestones—Red alga on gravestones—Yew trees in churchyards—British dragon-tree—Farringdon village and yew—Crowhurst yew—Hurstbourne Priors yew—How yew trees are injured.
It is a pleasure to be at Selborne; nevertheless I find I always like Selborne best when I am out of it, especially when I am rambling about that bit of beautiful country on the border of which it lies. The memory of Gilbert White; the old church with its low, square tower and its famous yew tree; above all, the constant sight of the Hanger clothed in its beechen woods—green, or bronze and red-gold, or purple-brown in leafless winter—all these things do not prevent a sense of lassitude, of ill-being, which I experience in the village when I am too long in it, and which vanishes when I quit it, and seem to breathe a better air. This is no mere fancy, nor something peculiar to myself; the natives, too, are subject to this secret trouble, and are, some of them, conscious of it. Round about Selborne you will find those who were born and bred in the village, who say they were never well until they quitted it; and some of these declare that they would not return even if some generous person were to offer them a cottage rent free. The appearance of the people, too, may be considered in this connection. Mary Russell Mitford exclaims in one of her village sketches that there was not a pretty face in the country-side. The want of comeliness which is so noticeable in the southern parts of Berkshire is not confined to that county. The people of Berkshire and Hampshire, of the blonde type, are very much alike. But there are degrees; and if you want to see, I will not say a handsome, nor a pretty, but a passably fresh and pleasant face among the cottagers, you must go out of Selborne to some neighbouring village to look for it.
Selborne Common
But this question does not now concern us. The best of Selborne is the common on the hill—all the better for the steep hill which must be climbed to get to it, since that difficult way prevents the people from making too free use of it, and regarding it as a sort of back-yard or waste place to throw their rubbish on. It is a perpetual joy to the children. One morning in October I met there some youngsters gathering kindling-wood, and feasting at the same time on wild fruits—the sloes were just then at their best. They told me that they had only recently come to live in Selborne from Farringdon, their native village. "And which place do you like best?" I asked. "Selborne!" they shouted in a breath, and indeed appeared surprised that I had asked such a question. No wonder. This hill-top common is the most forest-like, the wildest in England, and the most beautiful as well, both in its trees and tangles of all kinds of wild plants that flourish in waste places, and in the prospects which one gets of the surrounding country. Here, seeing the happiness of the boys, I have wished to be a boy again. But one does not think so much of this spot when one comes to know the country round, and finds that Selborne Hill is but one of many hills of the same singular and beautiful type, sloping away gently on one side, and presenting a bold, almost precipitous front on the other, in most cases clothed on the steep side with dense beech woods. It is now eight years since I began to form an acquaintance with this east corner of Hampshire, but not until last October (1902) did I know how beautiful it was. From Selborne Hill one sees something of it; a better sight is obtained from Noire Hill, where one is able to get some idea of the peculiar character of the scenery. It is all wildly irregular, high and low grounds thrown together in a pretty confusion, and the soil everywhere fertile, so that the general effect is of extreme richness. One sees, too, that the human population is sparse, and that it has always been as it is now, and man's work—his old irregular fields, and the unkept hedges which, like the thickets on the waste places, are self-planted, and have been self-planted for centuries, and the old deep-winding lanes and by-roads—have come at last to seem one with nature's work. Out of this broken, variegated, richly green surface, here and there, in a sort of range, but irregular like all else, the hills, or hangers, lift their steep, bank-like fronts—splendid masses of red and russet gold against the soft grey-blue autumnal sky. It is delightful to walk through this bit of country from Nore Hill, and from hill to hill, across green fields, for the farms here are like wild lands that all are free to use, to Wheatham Hill, the highest point, which rises 800 feet above the sea-level. From this elevation one looks over a great part of that green variegated country of the Hangers, and sees on one hand where it fades close by into the sand and pine district beginning at Wolmer Forest, and on another side, beyond the little town of Petersfield, the region of great rolling downs stretching far away into Sussex.
Village churches
In my rambles about this corner of Hampshire, during which I visited all the villages nearest to Selborne—Empshott, Hawkley, Greatham, East and West Tisted, Worldham, Priors Dean, Colemore, Privett, Froxfield, Hartley Maudit, Blackmore, Oakhanger, Kingsley, Farringdon and Newton Valence—I could not help thinking a good deal about Hampshire village churches generally. It was a subject which had often enough been in my mind before in other parts of the county, but it now came back to me in connection with Gilbert White's strictures on these sacred buildings. Their "meanness" produced a feeling in him which is the nearest approach to indignation discoverable in his pages. He is speaking of jackdaws breeding in rabbit holes, and shrewdly conjectures that this habit has arisen on account of the absence of steeples and towers suitable as nesting-places. "Many Hampshire places of worship," he remarks, "make no better appearance than dovecotes." He envied Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, the Fens of Lincolnshire, and other districts, the number of spires which presented themselves in every point of view, and concludes: "As an admirer of prospects I have reason to lament this want in my own county, for such objects are very necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape."
The honoured historian of the parish of Selborne makes me shudder in this passage. But I am, perhaps, giving too much importance to his words, since one may judge, from his mention of Norfolk in this connection as being even worse off than his own county, that he was not well informed on the subject. Norfolk, like Somerset, abounds in grand old churches of the Perpendicular period. That smallness, or "meanness" as he expresses it, of the Hampshire churches, is, to my mind, one of their greatest merits. The Hampshire village would not possess that charm which we find in it—its sweet rusticity and homeliness, and its harmonious appearance in the midst of a nature green and soft and beautiful—but for that essential feature and part of it, the church which does not tower vast and conspicuous as a gigantic asylum or manufactory from among lowly cottages dwarfed by its proximity to the appearance of pigmy-built huts in the Aruwhimi forest. These immense churches which in recent years have lifted their tall spires and towers amidst lowly surroundings in many rural places, are, as a rule, the work of some zealot who has seared his sense of beauty with a hot iron, or else of a new over-rich lord of the manor, who must have all things new, including a big new church to worship a new God in—his own peculiar Stock Exchange God, who is a respecter of wealthy persons. Here in Hampshire we have seen the old but well preserved village church pulled down—doubtless with the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities—its ancient monuments broken up and carted away, its brasses made into fire ornaments by cottagers or sold as old metal, and the very gravestones used in paving the scullery and offices of the grand new parsonage built to match the grand new church.
Peasants' religious feeling
When coming upon one of these "necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape" in some rural spot I have sometimes wondered what the feeling of the people who have spent their lives there can be about it. What effect has the new vast building, with its highly decorated yet cold and vacant interior, on their dim minds—on their religion, let us say? It may be a poor unspiritual sort of religion, based on old traditions and associations, mostly local; but shall we scorn it on that account? If we look a little closely into the matter, we see that all men, even the most intellectual, the most spiritual, are subject to this feeling in some degree, that it is in all religions. That which from use, from association, becomes symbolic of faith is in itself sacred. At the present time the Church is torn with dissensions because of this very question. Certain bodily positions and signs and gestures, and woven fabrics and garments of many patterns and colours, and wood and stone and metal objects, and lighted candles and perfumes—mere hay and stubble to others who have different symbols—are things essential to worship in some. Touch these things and you hurt their souls; you deprive them of their means of communication with another world. So the poor peasant who was born and lives in a thatched cottage, with his limited intelligence, his animism, associates the idea of the unseen world with the sacred objects he has seen and known and handled—the small ancient building, the red-barked, dark-leafed yew, the green mounds and lichened gravestones among which he played as a child, and the dim, low-roofed interior of what was to him God's House. Whatever there is in his mind that is least earthly, whatever thoughts he may have of the unseen world and a life beyond this life, were inseparably bound up with these visible things.
We need not follow this line any farther; those who believe with me that the sense of the beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul will see that I have put the matter on other and higher grounds. The small village church with its low tower or grey-shingled spire among the shade trees, is beautiful chiefly because man and nature with its softening processes have combined to make it a fit part of the scene, a building which looks as natural and harmonious as an old hedge which man planted once and nature replanted many times, and as many an old thatched timbered cottage, and many an old grey ruin, ivy-grown, with red valerian blooming on its walls.
To pull down one of these churches to put in its place a gigantic Gothic structure in brick or stone, better suited in size (and ugliness) for a London or Liverpool church than for a small rustic village in Hampshire, is nothing less than a crime.
Seeking Priors Dean
When calling to mind the churches known to me in this part of Hampshire, I always think with peculiar pleasure of the smaller ones, and perhaps with the most pleasure of the smallest of all—Priors Dean.
It happened that the maps which I use in my Hampshire rambles and which I always considered the best—Bartholomew's two miles to the inch—did not mark Priors Dean, so that I had to go and find it for myself. I went with a friend one excessively hot day in July, by Empshott and Hawkley through deep by-roads so deep and narrow and roofed over with branches as to seem in places like tunnels. On that hot day in the silent time of year it was strangely still, and gave one the feeling of being in a country long deserted by man. Its only inhabitants now appeared to be the bullfinches. In these deep shaded lanes one constantly hears the faint plaintive little piping sound, the almost inaudible alarm note of the concealed bird; and at intervals, following the sound, he suddenly dashes out, showing his sharp-winged shape and clear grey and black upper plumage marked with white for a moment or two before vanishing once more in the overhanging foliage.
We went a long way round, but at last coming to an open spot we saw two cottages and two women and a boy standing talking by a gate, and of these people we asked the way to Priors Dean. They could not tell us. They knew it was not far away—a mile perhaps; but they had never been to it, nor seen it, and didn't well know the direction. The boy when asked shook his head. A middle-aged man was digging about thirty yards away, and to him one of the women now called, "Can you tell them the way to Priors Dean?"
The man left off digging, straightened himself, and gazed steadily at us for some moments. He was one of the usual type—nine in every ten farm labourers in this corner of Hampshire are of it—thinnish, of medium height, a pale, parchment face, rather large straightish nose, pale eyes with little speculation in them, shaved mouth and chin, and small side whiskers as our fathers wore them. The moustache has not yet been adopted by these conservatives. The one change they have made is, alas! in their dress—the rusty black coat for the smock frock.
When he had had his long gaze, he said, "Priors Dean?"
"Yes, Priors Dean," repeated the woman, raising her voice.
He turned up two spadefuls of earth, then asked again, "Priors Dean?"
"Priors Dean!" shouted the woman. "Can't you tell 'em how to get to it?" Then she laughed. She had perhaps come from some other part of the country where minds are not quite so slow, and where the slow-minded person is treated as being deaf and shouted at.
Then, at last, he stuck his spade into the soil, and leaving it, slowly advanced to the gate and told us to follow a path which he pointed out, and when we got on the hill we would see Priors Dean before us.
Churches old and new
And that was how we found it. There is a satirical saying in the other villages that if you want to find the church at Priors Dean you must first cut down the nettles. There were no nettles nor weeds of any kind, only the small ancient church with its little shingled spire standing in the middle of a large green graveyard with about a dozen or fifteen gravestones scattered about, three old tombs, and, close to the building, an ancient yew tree. This is a big, and has been a bigger, tree, as a large part of the trunk has perished on one side, but as it stands it measures nearly twenty-four feet round a yard from the earth. This, with a small farmhouse, in old times a manor house, and its outbuildings and a cottage or two, make the village. So quiet a spot is it that to see a human form or hear a human voice comes almost as a surprise. The little antique church, the few stones, the dark ancient tree—these are everything, and the effect on the mind is strangely grateful—a sense of enduring peace, with something of that solitariness and desolation which we find in unspoilt wildernesses.
From these smallest churches, which appear like a natural growth where they are seen, I turn to the large and new, and the largest of all at this place—that of Privett. From its gorgeous yet vacant and cold interior, and from the whole vast structure, including that necessary ingredient in an elegant landscape, the soaring spire visible for many miles around, I turn away as from a jarring and discordant thing—the feeling one experiences at the sight of those brand-new big houses built by over-rich stock-jobbers on many hills and open heaths in Surrey and, alas! in Hampshire.
I do not, however, say that all new and large churches raised in small rustic centres appear as discordant things. Even in the group of villages which I have named there is a new and comparatively large one which moves one to admiration the church of Blackmoor. Here the vegetation and surroundings are unlike those which accord best with the small typical structures, the low tower and shingled spire. The tall, square tower of Blackmoor, of white stone roofed with red tiles, rises amid the pines of Wolmer Forest, simple and beautiful in shape, and gives a touch of grace and grateful colour to that darker, austere nature. From every point of view it is a pleasure to the eye, and because of its enduring beauty the memory of the man who raised it is like a perfume in the wilderness.
It is, however, time that bestows the best grace, the indescribable charm to the village church—long centuries of time, which gives the feeling, the expression, of immemorial peace to the weathered and ivied building itself and the surrounding space, the churchyard, with its green heaps, and scattered stones, and funeral yew.
Change in gravestones
The associated feeling, the expression, is undoubtedly the chief thing in the general effect, but the constituents or objects which compose the scene are in themselves pleasing; and one scarcely less important than the building itself, the universal grass, the dark, red-barked tree, is the gravestone. I mean the gravestone that is attractive in shape, which may be seen in every old village churchyard in Hampshire; for not all the stones are of this character. The stone that is beautiful dates back half a century at least, but very few are as old as a century and a half. When we get that far and farther back the inscription is obliterated or indecipherable. Only here and there we may by chance find some stone, half buried in the soil, of an exceptional hardness, marking the spot where lieth one who departed this life in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century. There are many old stones, it is true, with nothing legible on them, but one does not know how old they are. It is not that these gravestones are beautiful only because they are old, and have had their hard surface softened and embroidered with green moss and lichen of many shades from pale-grey to orange and red and brown. The form of the stone, the stone-cutter's work, was beautiful before Nature began to work on it with her sunshine, her rain, her invisible seed. I cannot think why this old fashion, or rather, let us say, this tender, sacred custom, of marking the last resting-place of the dead with a memorial satisfying to the æsthetic sense, should have gone or died out. The gravestones used at the present time are, as a rule, twice as big as the old ones, and are perfectly plain—immense stone slabs, inscribed with big, fat, black letters differing in size, the whole inscription curiously resembling the local auctioneer's bills to be seen pasted up on barn-doors, fences, and other suitable places. So big and hard, and bold, and ugly—I try not to see them!
Look from these at the old stone which the earthworms have been busy trying to bury for a century, until the lower half of the inscription is underground; the stone which the lichen has embossed and richly coloured; round which the grass grows so close and lovingly, and the small creeping ivy tries to cover. This which has been added to it is but a part of its beauty: you see that its lines are graceful, that they were made so; that the inscription—"Here lyeth the body," etc.—is not cut in letters in use in newspapers and advertising placards, and have therefore no common nor degrading associations, but are letters of other forms, graceful, too, in their lines; and that above the inscription there are sculptured and symbolic figures and lines—emblems of mortality, eternal hope, and a future life—heads of cherubs, winged and blowing on horns, and the sun and wings; skulls and crossbones, and hour-glass and scythe; the funeral urn and weeping-willow; the lighted torch; the heart in flames, or bleeding, or transfixed with arrows; the angel's trumpet, the crown of glory, the palm and the lily, the laurel leaf, and many more.
Did we think this art, or this custom, too little a thing to cherish any longer? I cannot find any person with a word to say about it. I have tried and the result was curious. I have invited persons of my acquaintance into an old churchyard and begged them to look on this stone and on this—the hard ugliness of one, an insult to the dead, and the beauty, the pathos, of the other. And they have immediately fallen into a melancholy silence, or else they have suddenly become angry, apparently for no cause. But the reason probably was that they had never given a thought to the subject, that when they had buried someone dear to them—a mother or wife or daughter—they simply went to the stonemason and ordered a gravestone, leaving him to fashion it in his own way. The reason of the reason—the full explanation of the singular fact that they, in these house-beautiful and generally art-worshipping times, had given no thought to the matter until it was unexpectedly sprung upon them; and that if they had lived, say, a hundred years ago, they would have given it some thought—this the reader will easily find out for himself.
Beauty of old gravestones
It is comforting to reflect that gravestones do not last for ever, nor for very long; and in the meantime Nature is doing what she can with our ugly modern memorials, touching, softening, and tingeing them with her mosses, lichens, and with algæ—her beautiful iolithus. In most churchyards in southern England we see many stones stained a peculiar colour, a bright rust-red, darkest in dry weather, and brightest in wet summers, often varying to pink and purple and orange; but whatever the hue or shade the effect on the grey stone, lichened or not, is always beautiful. It is not a lichen; when the staining is looked closely at nothing is seen but a roughness, a powdery appearance, on the stone's surface. It is an aerial alga of the genus Croöleptus, confined to the southern half of England, and most common in Hampshire, where its beautifying blush may sometimes be seen on old stone walls of churches, and old houses and ruins; but it flourishes most on gravestones, especially in moist situations. The stone must not be too hard, and must, moreover, be acted on by the weather for well-nigh half a century before the alga begins to show on it; but you will sometimes see it on an exceptionally soft stone dating no more than thirty or forty years back. On old stones it is very common, and peculiarly beautiful in wet summers. In June 1902, after many days of rain, I stood one evening at the little gate at Brockenhurst churchyard, and counted between me and the church twenty gravestones stained with the red alga, showing a richness and variety of colouring never seen before, the result of so much wet weather. For this alga, which plays so important a part in nature's softening and beautifying effect on man's work—which is mentioned in no book unless it be some purely technical treatise dealing with the lower vegetable forms—this alga, despite its aerial habit, is still in essence a water-plant: the sun and dry wind burn its life out and darken it to the colour of ironstone, so that to anyone who may notice the dark stain it seems a colour of the stone itself; but when rain falls the colour freshens and brightens as if the old grey stone had miraculously been made to live.
Churchyard yews
If never a word has been written about that red colour with which Nature touches the old stones to make them beautiful, a thousand or ten thousand things have been said about the yew, the chief feature and ornament of the village churchyard, and many conjectures have we seen as to the reason of the very ancient custom of planting this tree where the dead are laid. The tree itself gives a better reason than any contained in books. It says something to the soul in man which the talking or chattering yew omitted to tell the modern poet; but very long ago someone said, in the Death of Fergus, "Patriarch of long-lasting woods is the yew; sacred to forests as is well known." That ancient sacred character, which survived the introduction of Christianity, lives still in every mind that has kept any vestige of animism, the root and essence of all that is wonderful and sacred in nature. That red and purple bark is the very colour of life, and this tree's life, compared with other things, is everlasting. The stones we set up as memorials grow worn and seamed and hoary with age, even like men, and crumble to dust at last; in time new stones are put in their place, and these, too, grow old and perish, and are succeeded by others; and through all changes, through the ages, the tree lives on unchanged. With its huge, tough, red trunk; its vast, knotted arms outstretched; its rich, dark mantle of undying foliage, it stands like a protecting god on the earth, patriarch and monarch of woods; and indeed it seems but right and natural that not to oak nor holly, nor any other reverenced tree, but to the yew it was given to keep guard over the bodies and souls of those who have been laid in the earth.
The yew is sometimes called the "Hampshire weed," on account of its abundance in the county; if it must have a second name, I suggest that the Hampshire or British dragon-tree would be a better and more worthy one. It would admirably fit some ancient churchyard yews in the neighbourhood of Selborne, especially that of Farringdon.
In the great mass of literature concerning Gilbert White, there is curiously little said about this village; yet it has one of the most interesting old churches in the county—the church in which White officiated for over a quarter of a century, during all the best years of his life, in fact; for when he resigned the curacy at Farringdon to take that of Selborne, for which he had waited so long, he was within two years of bidding a formal farewell to natural history, and within eight of his death. The church register from 1760 to 1785 is written in his clear, beautiful hand, and in the rectory garden there is a large Spanish chestnut-tree planted by him. Although not so fortunate in its surroundings as Selborne, with its Lyth and flowery Bourne and wooded Hanger, Farringdon village, with its noble church and fine old farm-buildings and old cottages, is the better village of the two. At the side of the churchyard there is an old oast-house, now used as a barn, which for quaintness and beauty has hardly its match in England. The churchyard itself is a pretty, peaceful wilderness, deep in grass, with ivy and bramble hanging to the trees, and spreading over tombs and mounds. Long may it be kept sacred from the gardener, with his abhorred pruning-hook, his basket of geranium cuttings—inharmonious flower!—and his brushwood broom to make it all tidy. Finally, there is the wonderful old yew.
Farringdon yew
A great deal has been written first and last about the Selborne yew, which appears to rank as one of the half-dozen biggest yew trees in the country. Its age is doubtless very great, and may greatly exceed the "thousand years" usually given to a very large churchyard yew. The yews planted two hundred years ago by Gilbert White's grandfather in the parsonage garden close by, are but saplings in comparison. A black poplar would grow a bigger trunk in less than ten years. The Selborne yew was indeed one of the antiquities of the village when White described it a century and a quarter ago. It is, moreover, the best-grown, healthiest, and most vigorous-looking yew of its size in Britain. The Farringdon yew, the bigger tree, has a far more aged aspect—the appearance of a tree which has been decaying for an exceedingly long period.
Trees, like men, have their middle period, when their increase slowly lessens until it ceases altogether; their long stationary period, and their long decline: each of these periods may, in the case of the yew, extend to centuries; and we know that behind them all there may have been centuries of slow growth. The Selborne yew has added something to its girth since it was measured by White, and is now twenty-seven feet round in its biggest part, and exceeds by at least three feet the big yew at Priors Dean, and the biggest of the three churchyard yews at Hawkley. The Farringdon yew in its biggest part, about five feet from the ground, measures thirty feet, and to judge by its ruinous condition it must have ceased adding to its bulk more than a century ago. One regrets that White gave no account of its size and appearance in his day. It has, in the usual manner, decayed above and below, the upper branches dying down while the trunk rots away beneath, the tree meanwhile keeping itself alive and renewing its youth, as it were, by means of that power which the yew possesses of saving portions of its trunk from complete decay by covering them inside and out with new bark.
In the churchyard yew at Crowhurst, Surrey, we see that the upper part of the tree has decayed until nothing but the low trunk, crowned with a poor fringe of late branches, has been left; in this case the trunk remains outwardly almost entire—an empty shell or cylinder, large enough to accommodate fourteen persons on the circular bench placed within the cavity. In other cases we see that the trunk has been eaten through and through, and split up into strips; that the strips, covered inside with new bark, have become separate trunks, in some instances united above, as in that of the yew in South Hayling churchyard. The Farringdon tree has decayed below in this way; long strips from the top to the roots have rotted and turned to dust; and the sound portions, covered in and out with bark, form a group of half a dozen flattened boles, placed in a circle, all but one, which springs from the middle, and forms a fantastically twisted column in the centre of the edifice. Between this central strangely shaped bole, now dead, and the surrounding ring there is space for a man to walk round in.
It is a wonderful tree, which White looked at every day for five-and-twenty years, yet never mentioned, and which Loe says nothing about in his Yew Trees of Great Britain and Ireland. The title of this work is misleading: Famous Yew Trees it should have been, since it is nothing but a collection of facts as to size, supposed age, etc., of trees that have often been measured and described, and are accordingly well known. It is well, to my way of thinking, that he attempted nothing more. It is always a depressing thought, when one has discovered a wonderful or a beautiful thing, that a very full and very exact account of it is and must be contained in some musty monograph by some industrious, dreary person. At all events, I can say that the yew trees which have most attracted me, which come up when I think of the yew as a wonderful and a sacred tree, are not in the book. Of my Hampshire favourites I will, for a special reason, speak of but one more—the yew in the churchyard of Hurstbourne Priors, a small village on the upper Test, near Andover.
Hurstbourne Priors yew
This tree, which is doubtless very aged, has not grown an enormous trunk, nor is it high for an old yew, but its appearance is nevertheless strangely impressive, owing to the length of its lower horizontal branches, which extend to a distance of thirty to thirty-five feet from the trunk, and would lie on the ground if not kept up by props. Another thing which make one wonder is the number of graves that are crowded together beneath these vast sheltering arms. One may count over thirty stones, some very old; many more have probably perished, and there are besides many green mounds. I have watched in a churchyard in the Midlands a grave being dug under a yew, at about three yards' distance from the trunk: a barrowful of roots was taken out during the process. It seemed to me that a very serious injury was being inflicted on the tree, and it is probable that many of our very old churchyard yews have been dwarfed in their growth by such cutting of the roots. But what shall we say of the Hurstbourne Priors yew, from which not one but thirty or forty barrow-loads of living roots must have been taken at various times to make room for so many coffins! And what is the secret of the custom in this, and probably other villages, of putting the dead so close to or under the shelter of the tree?
Compare this Hurstbourne Priors yew, and many other ancient churchyard yews in Hampshire, with that of Selborne, which albeit probably no older is double their size: is it not probable that the Selborne tree is the largest, best grown, and most vigorous of the old yews because it has not been mutilated at its roots as the others have been?
There is but one grave beneath or near this tree; not the grave of any important person, but a nameless green mound of some obscure peasant. I had often looked with a feeling almost of astonishment at that solitary conspicuous mound in such a place, midway between the trunk of the tree and the church door, wondering who it was whose poor remains had been so honoured, and why it was. Then by chance I found out the whole story; but it came to me in scraps, at different times and places, and that is how I will give it to the reader, in fragments, in the course of the following chapter.
CHAPTER X
Wolmer Forest—Charm of contrast and novelty in scenery—Aspect of Wolmer—Heath and pine—Colour of water and soil—An old woman's recollections—Story of the "Selborne mob"—Past and present times compared—Hollywater Clump—Age of trees—Bird life in the forest—Teal in their breeding haunts—Boys in the forest—Story of the horn-blower.
The first part of the story of that Selborne mound in a strange place was heard at Wolmer Forest, over five years ago, during my first prolonged visit to that spot. I have often been there since, and have stayed many days, but a first impression of a place, as of a face, is always the best, the brightest, the truest, and I wish to describe Wolmer as I saw it then.
It struck me on that visit that the pleasure we have in visible nature depends in a measure on contrast and novelty. Never is moist verdure so refreshing and delightful to the eye as when we come to it from brown heaths and grey barren downs and uplands. So, too, the greenness of the green earth sharpens our pleasure in all stony and waste places; trim flower gardens show us the beauty of thorns and briars, and make us in love with desolation. As in light and shade, wet and dry, tempest and calm, so the peculiar attractions of each scene and aspect of nature are best "illustrated by their contraries."
I had, accordingly, the best preparation for a visit to Wolmer by a few days' ramble in Alice Holt Forest, with its endless oaks, and in the luxuriant meadows and cool shady woods at Waverley Abbey. It was a great change to Wolmer Forest. Although its soil is a "hungry, bare sand," it has long been transformed from the naked heath of Gilbert White's time to a vast unbroken plantation. Looked upon from some eminence it has a rough, dark aspect. There are no smooth summits and open pleasant places; all is covered by the shaggy mantle of the pines. But it is nowhere gloomy, as pine woods are apt to be: the trees are not big enough, on account of that hungry sand in which they are rooted, or because they are not yet very old. The pines not being too high and shady to keep the sun and air out, the old aboriginal vegetation has not been killed: in most places the ling forms a thick undergrowth, and looks green, while outside of the forest, in the full glare of the sun, it has a harsh, dry, dead appearance.
On account of this abundance of ling a strange and lovely appearance is produced in some favourable years, when the flowers are in great profusion and all the plants blossom at one time. That most beautiful sight of the early spring, when the bloom of the wild hyacinth forms a sheet of azure colour under the woodland trees, is here repeated in July, but with a difference of hue both in the trees above and in the bloom beneath.
Wolmer Forest
In May, Wolmer is comparatively flowerless, and there is no bright colour, except that of the earth itself in some naked spot. The water of the sluggish boggy streamlets in the forest, tributaries of the well-named Dead Water, takes a deep red or orange hue from the colour of the soil. The sand abounds with ironstone, which in the mass is deep rust-red- and purple-coloured. When crushed and pulverised by traffic and weather on the roads, it turns to a vivid chrome yellow. In the hot noonday sun the straight road that runs through the forest appeared like a yellow band or ribbon. That was a curious and novel picture, which I often had before me during the excessively dry and windy weather in May—the vast whity-blue, hot sky, without speck or stain of cloud above, and the dark forest covering the earth, cut through by that yellow zone, extending straight away until it was lost in the hazy distance. Even stranger was the appearance when the wind blew strongest and raised clouds of dust from the road, which flew like fiery yellow vapours athwart the black pines.
The "Selborne mob"
In a small house by the roadside in the middle of the forest I found a temporary home. My aged landlady proved a great talker, and treated me to a good deal of Hampshire dialect. Her mind was well stored with ancient memories. At first I let her ramble on without paying too much attention; but at length, while speaking of the many little ups and downs of her not uneventful life, she asked me if I knew Selborne, and then informed me that she was a native of that village, and that her family had lived there for generations. Her mother had reached the age of eighty-six years; she had married her third husband when over seventy. By her first she had had two and by her second thirteen children, and my informant, who is now aged seventy-six, was the last born. This wonderful mother of hers, who had survived three husbands, and whose memory went back several years into the eighteenth century, had remembered the Rev. Gilbert White very well: she was aged about twelve when he died. It was wonderful, she said, how many interesting things she used to tell about him; for Gilbert White, whose name was known to the great world outside of his parish, was often in her mind when she recalled her early years. Unfortunately, these interesting things had now all slipped out of my landlady's memory. Whenever I brought her to the point she would stand with eyes cast down, the fingers of her right hand on her forehead, trying—trying to recall something to tell me: a simple creature, who was without imagination, and could invent nothing. Then little by little she would drift off into something else—to recollections of people and events not so remote in time, scenes she had witnessed herself, and which had made a deeper impression on her mind. One was how her father, her mother's second husband, had acted as horn-blower to the "Selborne mob," when the poor villagers were starving; and how, blowing on his horn, he had assembled his fellow-revolutionists, and led them to an attack on the poorhouse, where they broke down the doors and made a bonfire of the furniture; then on to the neighbouring village of Headley to get recruits for their little army. Then the soldiery arrived on the scene, and took them prisoners and sent them to Winchester, where they were tried by some little unremembered Judge Jeffreys, who sentenced many or most of them to transportation; but not the horn-blower, who had escaped, and was in hiding among the beeches of the famous Selborne Hanger. Only at midnight he would steal down into the village to get a bite of food and hear the news from his vigorous and vigilant wife. At length, during one of these midnight descents, he was seen, and captured, and sent to Winchester. But by this time the authorities had grown sick—possibly ashamed—of dealing so harshly with a few poor peasants, whose sufferings had made them mad, and the horn-blower was pardoned, and died in bed at home when his time came.
I did not cease questioning the poor woman, because she would not admit that all she had heard about Gilbert White was gone past recall. Often and often had she thought of what her mother had told her. Up to within two or three years ago she remembered it all so well. What was it now? Once more, standing dejected in the middle of the room, she would cudgel her old brains. So much had happened since she was a girl. She had been brought up to farm-work. Here would follow the names of various farms in the parishes of Selborne, Newton Valence, and Oakhanger, where she had worked, mostly in the fields; and of the farmers, long dead and gone most of them, who had employed her. All her life she had worked hard, struggling to live. When people complained of hard times now, of the little that was paid them for their work, she and her husband remembered what it was thirty and forty and fifty years ago, and they wondered what people really wanted. Cheap food, cheap clothing, cheap education for the children—everything was cheap now, and the pay more. And she had had so many children to bring up—ten; and seven of them were married, and were now having so many children of their own that she could hardly keep count of them.
It was idle to listen; and at last, in desperation, I would jump up and rush out, for the wind was calling in the pines, and the birds were calling, and what they had to tell was just then of more interest than any human story.
Not far from my cottage there was a hill, from the summit of which the whole area of the forest was visible, and the country all round for many leagues beyond it. I did not like this hill, and refused to pay it a second visit. The extent of country it revealed made the forest appear too small; it spoilt the illusion of a practically endless wilderness, where I could stroll about all day and see no cultivated spot, and no house, and perhaps no human form. It was, moreover, positively disagreeable to be stared at across the ocean of pines by a big, brand-new, red-brick mansion, standing conspicuous, unashamed, affronting nature, on some wide heath or lonely hillside.
Hollywater Clump
A second hill, not far from the first, was preferable when I wished for a wide horizon, or to drink the wind and the music of the wind. Round and dome-like, it stood alone; and although not so high as its neighbour, it was more conspicuous, and seen from a distance appeared to be vastly higher. The reason of this was that it was crowned with a grove of Scotch firs with boles that rose straight and smooth and mast-like to a height of about eighty feet; thus, seen from afar, the hill looked about a hundred feet higher than it actually was, the tree-tops themselves forming a thick, round dome, conspicuous above the surrounding forest, and Wolmer's most prominent feature. I have often said of Hampshire—very many persons have said the same—that it lacks one thing—sublimity, or, let us say, grandeur. I have been over all its high, open down country, and upon all its highest hills, which, although rising to a thousand feet above the sea at one point, yet do not impress one so much as the South Downs; and I have been in all its forest lands, which have wildness and a thousand beauties, and one asks for nothing better. But the Hollywater Clump in Wolmer Forest as soon as I come in sight of it wakes in me another sense and feeling; and I have found in conversation with others on this subject that they are affected in the same way. I doubt if anyone can fail to experience such a feeling when looking on that great hill-top grove, a stupendous pillared temple, with its dome-like black roof against the sky, standing high above and dominating the sombre pine and heath country for miles around.
Bird life in the forest
Gilbert White described Wolmer as a naked heath with very few trees growing on it. The Hollywater Clump must, one cannot but think, have been planted before or during his time. One old native of Wolmer, whose memory over five years ago went back about sixty years, assured me that the trees looked just as big when he was a little boy as they do now. Undoubtedly they are very old, and many, we see, are decaying, and some are dead, and for many years past they have been dying and falling.
The green woodpecker had discovered the unsoundness of many of them; in some of the trunks, in their higher part, the birds had made several holes. These were in line, one above the other, like stops in a flute. Most of these far-up houses or flats were tenanted by starlings. This was only too apparent for the starling, although neat and glossy in his dress is an untidy tenant, and smears the trunk beneath the entrance to his nest with numberless droppings. You might fancy that he had set himself to whitewash his tenement, and had carelessly capsized his little bucket of lime on the threshold.
It was pleasant in the late afternoon to sit at the feet of these stately red columns—this brave company of trees, that are warred against by all the winds of heaven—and look upon the black legions of the forest covering the earth beneath them for miles. High up in the swaying, singing tops a kind of musical talk was audible—the starlings' medley of clinking, chattering, wood-sawing, knife-grinding, whistling, and bell-like sounds. Higher still, above the tree-tops, the jackdaws were at their aerial gambols, calling to one another, exulting in the wind. They were not breeding there, but were attracted to the spot by the height of the hill, with its crown of soaring trees. Some strong-flying birds—buzzards, kites, vultures, gulls, and many others—love to take their exercise far from earth, making a playground of the vast void heaven. The wind-loving jackdaw, even in his freest, gladdest moments, never wholly breaks away from the earth, and for a playground prefers some high, steep place—a hill, cliff, spire, or tower—where he can perch at intervals, and from which he can launch himself, as the impulse takes him, either to soar and float above, or to cast himself down into the airy gulf below.
Stray herons, too, come to the trees to roost. The great bird could be seen far off, battling with the wind, rising and falling, blown to this side and that, now displaying his pale under-surface, and now the slaty blue of his broad, slow-flapping wings.
As the sun sank nearer to the horizon, the tall trunks would catch the level beams and shine like fiery pillars, and the roof thus upheld would look darker and gloomier by contrast. With the passing of that red light, the lively bird-notes would cease, the trees would give forth a more solemn, sea-like sound, and the day would end.
My days, during all the time I spent at Wolmer, when I had given up asking questions, and my poor old woman had ceased cudgelling her brains for lost memories, were spent with the birds. The yaffle, nightjar, and turtle-dove were the most characteristic species. Wolmer is indeed the metropolis of the turtle-doves, even as Savernake is (or was) that of the jays and jackdaws. All day long the woods were full of the low, pleasing sound of their cooing: as one walked among the pines they constantly rose up in small flocks from the ground with noisy wines and as they flew out into some open space to vanish again in the dark foliage, their wings in the strong sunlight often looked white as silver. But the only native species I wish to speak of is the teal as I found it a little over five years ago. In Wolmer these pretty entertaining little ducks have bred uninterruptedly for centuries, but I greatly fear that the changes now in progress—the increase of the population, building, the large number of troops kept close by, and perhaps, too, the slow drying up of the marshy pools—will cause them to forsake their ancient haunts.
Teal
By chance I very soon discovered their choicest breeding-place, not far from that dome-shaped, fir-crowned hill which was my principal landmark. This was a boggy place, thirty or forty acres in extent surrounded by trees and overgrown with marsh weeds and grasses, and in places with rushes. Cotton grass grew in the drier parts, and the tufts nodding in the wind looked at a distance like silvery white flowers. At one end of the marsh there were clumps of willow and alder, where the reed-bunting was breeding and the grasshopper warbler uttered his continuous whirring sound, which seemed to accord with the singing of the wind in the pines. At the other end there was open water with patches of rushes growing in it; and here at the water's edge, shaded by a small fir, I composed myself on a bed of heather to watch the birds.
The inquisitive moor-hens were the first to appear, uttering from time to time their sharp, loud protest. Their suspicion lessened by degrees, but was never wholly laid aside; and one bird, slyly leaving the water, made a wide circuit and approached me through the trees in order to get a better view of me. A sudden movement on my part, when he was only three yards from me, gave him a terrible fright. Mallards showed themselves at intervals, swimming into the open water, or rising a few yards above the rushes, then dropping out of sight again. Where the rushes grew thin and scattered, ducklings appeared, swimming one behind the other, busily engaged in snatching insects from the surface. By-and-by a pair of teal rose up, flew straight towards me, and dropped into the open water within eighteen yards of where I sat. They were greatly excited, and no sooner touched the water than they began calling loudly; then, from various points, others rose and hurried to join them, and in a few moments there were eleven, all disporting themselves on the water at that short distance. Teal are always tamer than ducks of other kinds, but the tameness of these Wolmer birds was astonishing and very delightful. For a few moments I imagined they were excited at my presence, but it very soon appeared that they were entirely absorbed in their own affairs and cared nothing about me. What a wonderfully lively, passionate, variable, and even ridiculous little creature the teal is! Compared with his great relations—swans, geese, and the bigger ducks—he is like a monkey or squirrel among stately bovine animals. Now the teal have a world-wide range, being found in all climates, and are of many species; they are, moreover, variable in plumage, some species having an exceedingly rich and beautiful colouring; but wherever found, and however different in colour, they are much the same in disposition—they are loquacious, excitable, violent in their affections beyond other ducks, and, albeit highly intelligent, more fearless than other birds habitually persecuted by man. A sedate teal is as rare as a sober-coloured humming-bird. The teal is also of so social a temper that even in the height of the breeding season he is accustomed to meet his fellows at little gatherings. A curious thing is that at these meetings they do not, like most social birds, fall into one mind, and comport themselves in an orderly, disciplined manner, all being moved by one contagious impulse. On the contrary, each bird appears to have an impulse of his own, and to follow it without regard to what his fellows may be doing. One must have his bath, another his frolic; one falls to courting, another to quarrelling, or even fighting, and so on, and the result is a lively splashing, confused performance, which is amusing to see. It was an exhibition of this kind which I was so fortunate as to witness at the Wolmer pond. The body-jerking antics and rich, varied plumage of the drakes gave them a singular as well as a beautiful appearance; and as they dashed and splashed about, sometimes not more than fourteen yards from me, their motions were accompanied by all the cries and calls they have—their loud call, which is a bright and lively sound; chatterings and little, sharp, exclamatory notes; a long trill, somewhat metallic or bell-like; and a sharp, nasal cry, rapidly reiterated several times, like a laugh.
After they had worked off their excitement and finished their fun they broke up into pairs and threes, and went off in various directions, and I saw no more of them.
It was not until the sun had set that a snipe appeared. First one rose from the marsh and began to play over it in the usual manner, then another rose to keep him company, and finally a third. Most of the time they hovered with their breasts towards me, and seen through my glass against the pale luminous sky, their round, stout bodies, long bills, and short, rapidly vibrating wings, gave them the appearance of gigantic insects rather than birds.
Boys in the forest
At length, tired of watching them, I stretched myself out in the ling, but continued listening, and while thus occupied an amusing incident occurred. A flock of eighteen mallards rose up with a startled cry from the marsh at a distance, and after flying once or twice round, dropped down again. Then the sound of crackling branches and of voices talking became audible advancing round the marsh towards me. It was the first human sound I had heard that day at that spot. Then the sounds ceased, and after a couple of minutes of silence I glanced round in the direction they had proceeded from, and beheld a curious sight. Three boys, one about twelve years old, the others smaller, were grouped together on the edge of the pool, gazing fixedly across the water at me. They had taken me for a corpse, or an escaped criminal, or some such dreadful object, lying there in the depth of the forest. The biggest boy had dropped on to one knee among the rough heather, while the others, standing on either side, were resting their hands on his shoulders. Seen thus, in their loose, threadbare, grey clothes and caps, struck motionless, their white, scared faces, parted lips, and wildly staring eyes turned to me, they were like a group cut in stone. I laughed and waved my hand to them, whereupon their faces relaxed, and they immediately dropped into natural attitudes. Very soon they moved away among the trees, but after eight or ten minutes they reappeared near me, and finally, from motives of curiosity, came uninvited to my side. They proved to be very good specimens of the boy naturalist; thorough little outlaws, with keen senses, and the passion for wildness strong in them. They told me that when they went bird-nesting they made a day of it, taking bread and cheese in their pockets, and not returning till the evening. For an hour we talked in the fading light of day on the wild creatures in the forest, until we could no longer endure the cloud of gnats that had gathered round us.
About three years after the visit to Wolmer I made the acquaintance of a native of Selborne, whose father had taken part as a lad in the famous "Selborne mob," and who confirmed the story I had heard about the horn-blower, whose name was Newland. He had been a soldier in his early manhood before he returned to his native village and married the widow who bore him so many children. It was quite true that he had died at home, in bed, and what was more, he added, he was buried just between the church porch and the yew, where he was all by himself. How he came to be buried there he did not know.
Lately, in October 1902, I heard the finish of the story. I found an old woman, a widow named Garnett, an elder sister of the woman at Wolmer Forest. She is eighty years old, but was not born until a year or two after the "Selborne mob" events, which fixes the date of that outbreak about the year 1820. She has a brother, now in a workhouse, about two years older than herself, who was a babe in arms at that time. When Newland was at last captured and sent to Winchester, his poor wife, with her baby in her arms, set out on foot to visit him in gaol. It was a long tramp for her thus burdened, and it was also in the depth of one of the coldest winters ever known. She started early, but did not get to her destination until the following morning, and not without suffering a fresh misfortune by the way. Before dawn, when the cold was most intense, while walking over Winchester Hill, her baby's nose was frozen; and though everything proper was done when she arrived at the houses, it never got quite right. His injured nose, which turns to a dark-blue colour and causes him great suffering in cold weather, has been a trouble and misery to him all his life long.
Story of the horn-blower
Newland, we know, was forgiven and returned to spend the rest of his life in his village, where he died at last of sheer old age, passing very quietly away after receiving the sacrament from the vicar, and in the presence of his faithful old wife and his children and grandchildren.
After he was dead, two of his children—my informant, and that brother who as a babe had travelled to Winchester in his mother's arms in cold weather—talked together about him and his life, and of all he had suffered and of his goodness, and in both their minds there was one idea, an anxious wish that his descendants should not allow him to go out of memory. And there was no way known to them to keep him in mind except by burying him in some spot by himself, where his mound would be alone and apart. Finally, brother and sister, plucking up courage, went to the vicar, the well-remembered Mr. Parsons, who built the new vicarage and the church school, and begged him to let them bury their father by the yew tree near the porch, and he good-naturedly consented.
That was how Newland came to be buried at that spot; but before many days the vicar went to them in a great state of mind, and said that he had made a terrible mistake, that he had done wrong in consenting to the grave being made there, and that their father must be taken up and placed at some other spot in the churchyard. They were grieved at this, but could say nothing. But for some reason the removal never took place, and in time the son and daughter themselves began to regret that they had buried their father there where they could never keep the mound green and fresh. People going in or coming out of church on dark evenings stumbled or kicked their boots against it, or when they stood there talking to each other they would rest a foot on it, and romping children sat on it, so that it always had a ragged, unkept appearance, do what they would.
It is certainly an unsightly mound. It would be better to do away with it, and to substitute a small memorial stone with a suitable inscription placed level with the turf.
CHAPTER XI
The Hampshire people—Racial differences in neighbouring counties—A neglected subject—Inhabitants of towns—Gentry and peasantry—Four distinct types—The common blonde type—Lean women—Deleterious effects of tea-drinking—A shepherd's testimony—A mixed race—The Anglo-Saxon—Case of reversion of type—Un-Saxon character of the British—Dark-eyed Hampshire people—Racial feeling with regard to eye-colours—The Iberian type—Its persistence—Character of the small dark man—Dark and blonde children—A dark village child.
The history of the horn-blower and his old wife, and their still living aged children, serves to remind me that this book, which contains so much about all sorts of creatures and forms of life, from spiders and flies to birds and beasts, and from red alga on gravestones to oaks and yews, has so far had almost nothing to say about our own species—of that variety which inhabits Hampshire.
Racial differences
If the critical reader asks what is here meant by "variety," what should I answer him? On going directly from any other district in southern England to the central parts of Hampshire one is sensible of a difference in the people. One is still in southern England, and the peasantry, like the atmosphere, climate, soil, the quiet but verdurous and varied scenery, are more or less like those of other neighbouring counties—Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire, Wilts, and Dorset. In general appearance, at all events, the people are much the same; and the dialect, where any survives, and even the quality of the voices, closely resemble those in adjoining counties. Nevertheless there is a difference; even the hasty seers who are almost without the faculty of observation are vaguely cognisant of it, though they would not be able to say what it consisted in. Probably it would puzzle anyone to say wherein Hampshire differed from all the counties named, since each has something individual; therefore it would be better to compare Hampshire with some one county near it, or with a group of neighbouring counties in which some family resemblance is traceable. Somerset, Devon, Wilts, and Dorset—these answer the description, and I leave out Cornwall only because its people are unknown to me. The four named have seemed to me the most interesting counties in southern England; but if I were to make them five by adding Hampshire, the verdict of nine persons out of ten, all equally well acquainted with the five, would probably be that it was the least interesting. They would probably say that the people of Hampshire were less good-looking, that they had less red colour in their skins, less pure colour in their eyes; that they had less energy, if not less intelligence, or at all events were less lively, and had less humour.
These differences between the inhabitants of neighbouring and of adjoining counties are doubtless in some measure due to local conditions, of soil, climate, food, customs, and so on, acting for long generations on a stay-at-home people: but the main differences are undoubtedly racial; and here we are on a subject in which we poor ordinary folk who want to know are like sheep wandering shepherdless in some wilderness, bleating in vain for guidance in a maze of fleece-tearing brambles. It is true that the ethnologists and anthropologists triumphantly point out that the Jute type of man may be recognised in the Isle of Wight, and in a less degree even in the Meon district; for the rest, with a wave of the hand to indicate the northern half of the county, they say that all that is or ought to be more or less Anglo-Saxon. That's all; since, as they tell us, the affinities of the South Hampshire people, of the New Forest district especially, have not yet been worked out. Not being an anthropologist I can't help them; and am even inclined to think that they have left undone some of the things which they ought to have done. The complaint was made in a former chapter that we had no monograph on fleas to help us; it may be made, too, with regard to the human race in Hampshire. The most that one can do in such a case, since man cannot be excluded from the subjects which concern the naturalist, is to record one's own poor little unscientific observations, and let them go for what they are worth.
Gentry and peasantry
There is little profit in looking at the townspeople. The big coast towns have a population quite as heterogeneous as that of the metropolis; even in a comparatively small rural inland town, like Winchester, one would be puzzled to say what the chief characteristics of the people were. You may feel in a vague way that they are unlike the people of, say, Guildford, or Canterbury, or Reading, or Dorchester, but the variety in forms and faces is too great to allow of any definite idea. The only time when the people even in a town can be studied to advantage in places like Winchester, Andover, etc., is on a market day, or on a Saturday afternoon, when the villagers come in to do their marketing. I have said, in writing of Somerset and its people, that the gentry, the landowners, and the wealthy residents generally, are always in a sense foreigners. The man may bear a name which has been for many generations in a county, but he is never racially one with the peasant; and, as John Bright once said, it is the people who live in cottages that make the nation. His parents and his grandparents and his ancestors for centuries have been mixing their blood with the blood of outsiders. It is well always to bear this in mind, and in the market-place or the High Street of the country town to see the carriage people, the gentry, and the important ones generally as though one saw them not, or saw them as shadows, and to fix the attention on those who in face and carriage and dress proclaim themselves true natives and children of the soil.
Even so there will be variety enough—a little more perhaps than is wanted by the methodic mind anxious to classify these "insect tribes." But after a time—a few months or a few years, let us say—the observer will perceive that the majority of the people are divisible into four fairly distinct types, the minority being composed of intermediate forms and of nondescripts. There is an enormous disproportion in the actual numbers of the people of these distinct types, and it varies greatly in different parts of the county. Of the Hampshire people it may be said generally, as we say of the whole nation, that there are two types—the blonde and the dark; but in this part of England there are districts where a larger proportion of dark blood than is common in England generally has produced a well-marked intermediate type; and this is one of my four distinct Hampshire types. I should place it second in importance, although it comes a very long way after the first type, which is distinctly blonde.
Common blonde type
This first most prevalent type, which greatly outnumbers all the others put together, and probably includes more than half of the entire population, is strongest in the north, and extends across the county from Sussex to Wiltshire. The Hampshire people in that district are hardly to be distinguished from those of Berkshire. One can see this best by looking at the school-children in a number of North Hampshire and Berkshire villages. In sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty children in a village school you will seldom find as many as a dozen with dark eyes.
As was said in a former chapter, there is very little beauty or good looks in this people; on the other hand, there is just as little downright ugliness; they are mostly on a rather monotonous level, just passable in form and features, but with an almost entire absence of any brightness, physical or mental. Take the best-looking woman of this most common type—the description will fit a dozen in any village. She is of medium height, and has a slightly oval face (which, being Anglo-Saxon, she ought not to have), with fairly good features; a nose fairly straight, or slightly aquiline, and not small; mouth well moulded, but the lips too thin; chin frequently pointed. Her hair is invariably brown, without any red or chestnut colour in it, generally of a dull or dusty hue; and the eyes are a pale greyish-blue, with small pupils, and in very many cases a dark mark round the iris. The deep blue, any pure blue, in fact, from forget-me-not to ultramarine, is as rare in this commonest type as warm or bright hair—chestnut, red, or gold; or as a brilliant skin. The skin is pallid, or dusky, or dirty-looking. Even healthy girls in their teens seldom have any colour, and the exquisite roseate and carmine reds of other counties are rare indeed. The best-looking girls at the time of life when they come nearest to being pretty, when they are just growing into womanhood, have an unfinished look which is almost pathetic. One gets the fancy that Nature had meant to make them nice-looking, and finally becoming dissatisfied with her work, left them to grow to maturity anyhow. It is pathetic, because there was little more to be done—a rosier blush on the cheek, a touch of scarlet on the lips, a little brightness and elasticity in the hair, a pencil of sunlight to make the eyes sparkle.
In figure this woman is slim, too narrow across the hips, too flat in the chest. And she grows thinner with years. The number of lean, pale women of this type in Hampshire is very remarkable. You see them in every village, women that appear almost fleshless, with a parchment-like skin drawn tight over the bones of the face, pale-blue, washed-out eyes, and thin, dead-looking hair. What is the reason of this leanness? It may be that the women of this blonde type are more subject to poverty of blood than others; for the men, though often thin, are not so excessively thin as the women. Or it may be the effect of that kind of poison which cottage women all over the country are becoming increasingly fond of, and which is having so deleterious an effect on the people in many counties—the tea they drink. Poison it certainly is: two or three cups a day of the black juice which they obtain by boiling and brewing the coarse Indian teas at a shilling a pound which they use, would kill me in less than a week.
Or it may be partly the poison of tea and partly the bad conditions, especially the want of proper food, in the villages. One day on the downs near Winchester I found a shepherd with his flock, a man of about fifty, and as healthy and strong-looking a fellow as I have seen in Hampshire. Why was it, I asked him, that he was the only man of his village I had seen with the colour of red blood in his face? why did they look so unwholesome generally? why were the women so thin, and the children so stunted and colourless? He said he didn't know, but thought that for one thing they did not get enough to eat. "On the farm where I work," he said, "there are twelve of us—nine men, all married, and three boys. My wages are thirteen shillings, with a cottage and garden; I have no children, and I neither drink nor smoke, and have not done so for eighteen years. Yet I find the money is not too much. Of the others, the eight married men all have children—one has got six at home: they all smoke, and all make a practice of spending at least two evenings each week at the public-house." How, after paying for beer and tobacco, they could support their families on the few shillings that remained out of their wages was a puzzle to him.