Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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When for thirty shillings men were hung,
And the thirst for blood grew stronger,
Men's lives were valued then at a sheep's--
Thank God that lasts no longer.

So strong is custom and tradition, and the habit of thought it weaves
about us, that I have heard ancient and grave farmers, when the fact was
mentioned with horror, hum, and ah! and handle their beards, and mutter
that 'they didn't know as 'twas altogether such a bad thing as they was
hung for sheep-stealing.' There were parsons then, as now, in every rural
parish preaching and teaching something they called the Gospel. Why did
they not rise as one man and denounce this ghastly iniquity, and demand
its abolition? They did nothing of the sort; they enjoyed their pipes and
grog very comfortably.

The gallows at the cross-roads is gone, but the workhouse stands, and
custom, cruel custom, that tyrant of the mind, has inured us (to use an
old word) to its existence in our midst. Apart from any physical
suffering, let us only consider the slow agony of the poor old reaper
when he feels his lusty arm wither, and of the grey bowed wife as they
feel themselves drifting like a ship ashore to that stony waiting-room.
For it is a waiting-room till the grave receives them. Economically, too,
the workhouse is a heavy loss and drag.

Could we, then, see the tithe barn filled again with golden wheat for
this purpose of help to humanity, it might be a great and wonderful good.
With this tenth to feed the starving and clothe the naked; with the tenth
to give the little children a midday meal at the school--that would be
natural and true. In the course of time, as the land laws lessen their
grip, and the people take possession of the earth on which they stand, it
is more than probable that something of this kind will really come about.
It would be only simple justice after so many centuries--it takes so many
hundreds of years to get even that.

'Workhouse, indeed!' I have heard the same ancient well-to-do greybeards
ejaculate, 'workhouse! they ought to be very thankful they have got such
a place to go to!'

All the village has been to the wheat-field with reaping-hooks, and
waggons and horses, the whole strength of man has been employed upon it;
little brown hands and large brown hands, blue eyes and dark eyes have
been there searching about; all the intelligence of human beings has been
brought to bear, and yet the stubble is not empty. Down there come again
the ever-increasing clouds of sparrows; as a cloud rises here another
cloud descends beyond it, a very mist and vapour as it were of wings. It
makes one wonder to think where all the nests could have been; there
could hardly have been enough caves and barns for all these to have been
bred in. Every one of the multitude has a keen pair of eyes and a hungry
beak, and every single individual finds something to eat in the stubble.
Something that was not provided for them, crumbs that have escaped from
this broad table, and there they are every day for weeks together, still
finding food. If you will consider the incredible number of little
mouths, and the busy rate at which they ply them hour by hour, you may
imagine what an immense number of grains of wheat must have escaped man's
hand, for you must remember that every time they peck they take a whole
grain. Down, too, come the grey-blue wood-pigeons and the wild
turtle-doves. The singing linnets come in parties, the happy
greenfinches, the streaked yellow-hammers, as if any one had delicately
painted them in separate streaks, and not with a wash of colour, the
brown buntings, chaffinches--out they come from the hazel copses, where
the nuts are dropping, and the hedge berries turning red, and every one
finds something to his liking. There are the seeds of the charlock and
the thistle, and a hundred other little seeds, insects, and minute
atom-like foods it needs a bird's eye to know. They are never still, they
sweep up into the hedges and line the boughs, calling and talking, and
away again to another rood of stubble without any order or plan of
search, just sowing themselves about like wind-blown seeds. Up and down
the day through with a zest never failing. It is beautiful to listen to
them and watch them, if any one will stay under an oak by the nut-tree
boughs, here the dragon-flies shoot to and fro in the shade as if the
direct rays of the sun would burn their delicate wings; they hunt chiefly
in the shade. The linnets will suddenly sweep up into the boughs and
converse sweetly over your head. The sunshine lingers and grows sweeter
as the autumn gives tokens of its coming in the buff bryony leaf, and the
acorn filling its cup. They are so happy, the birds, yet there are few to
listen to them. I have often looked round and wondered that no one else
was about hearkening to them. Altogether, perhaps, they lead safer lives
in England than anywhere else. We do not shoot them; the fowlers do
mischief, still they make but little impression; there are few birds of
prey, and there is not that fearful bloodthirstiness that makes a
tropical forest so terrible in fact, under its outward show of glowing
colour. There, with cruel hawks and owls, and serpents, and beasts of
prey, a bird's life is one long terror. They are ever on the watch here,
but they are not so fearfully harassed, and are not certain as it were
beforehand to be torn to pieces. The land is well cultivated, and the
more the culture the more the food for them. Frost and snow are their
greatest enemies, but even these do not often last a great while. It is a
land of woods, and above all of hedges, which are much more favourable to
birds than forests, so that they are better off in England than in other
countries. From the sowing to the reaping, the wheat-field gives a
constant dole like the monasteries of old, only here it is no crust, but
a free and bountiful largess. Then the stubble must be broken up by the
plough, and again there is a fresh helping for them. Brown partridge, and
black rook, and yellowhammer, all hues and degrees, come to the
wheat-field.

II.

Every day something new is introduced into farming, and yet the old
things are not driven out. Every one knows that steam is now used on the
farm for ploughing and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead,
and one would have thought that by this time it would have superseded all
other motive powers. Yet this very day I counted twenty great cart-horses
at work in one ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to
harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nineteen were
dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of limb, standing high up above
the level surface of the open field, great towers of strength, almost
prehistoric in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great cannon
up into a battery on the heights. The day before, passing the same
farm--it was Sunday--a great bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in
a corner of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, and the sun
shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had been brushed, the long
black mane hung over the arching neck, the large dark eyes looked at us
so quietly--a real English picture. The black funnel of the steam-engine
has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the fields. They have
been there for centuries, and there they stay; the notched, broad wheel
of the steam-plough has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth.
New things come, but the old do not go away. One life is but a summer's
day compared with the long cycle of years of agriculture, and yet it
seems that a whole storm, as it were, of innovations has burst upon the
fields ever since I can recollect, and, as years go, I am still in the
green leaf. The labouring men used to tell me how they went reaping, for
although you may see what is called reaping still going on at
harvest-time, it is not reaping. True reaping is done with a hook alone
and the hand; all the present reaping is 'vagging,' with a hook in one
hand and a bent stick in the other, and instead of drawing the hook
towards him and cutting it, the reaper chops at the straw as he might at
an enemy. Then came the reaping machines, that simply cut the wheat, and
left it lying flat on the ground, which were constantly altered and
improved. Now there are the wire and string binders, that not only cut
the corn, but gather it together and bind it in sheaves--a vast saving in
labour. Still the reaping-hook endures and is used on all small farms,
and to some extent on large ones, to round off the work of the machine;
the new things come, but the old still remains. In itself the
reaping-hook is an enlarged sickle, and the sickle was in use in Roman
times, and no man knows how long before that. With it the reaper cut off
the ears of the wheat only, leaving the tall straw standing, much as if
it had been a pruning-knife. It is the oldest of old implements--very
likely it was made of a chip of flint at first, and then of bronze, and
then of steel, and now at Sheffield or Birmingham in its enlarged form of
the 'vagging' hook. In the hand of Ceres it was the very symbol of
agriculture, and that was a goodly time ago. At this hour they say the
sickle is still used in several parts of England where the object is more
to get the straw than the ear.

On the broad page of some ancient illuminated manuscript, centuries old,
you may see the churl, or farmer's man, knocking away with his flail at
the grain on the threshing-floor. The knock knocking of the flail went on
through the reigns of how many kings and queens I do not know, they are
all forgotten, God wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old
days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets
printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and
when the corn laws starved half England--those were the times of the
flail. Every barn--and there were then barns on every farm, think of the
number--had its threshing-floor opposite the great open doors, and all
the dread winter through the flail resounded. Men looked upon it as their
most cherished privilege to get that employment in the bitter dark hours
of the hungry months. It was life itself to them: to stand there swinging
that heavy bit of wood all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and
drink, for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as a civil
list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn
villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.

The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed with leather. They
had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in
the wars of old times, _i.e._ Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on
the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are
gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam
threshes our ricks--in a few days doing what used to take months, and you
would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever.
Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms--which it is now
the cry to multiply--for knocking out little quantities of grain for
feeding purposes. The gleaners used to use them to thresh out their
collections. There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody
had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if the force of modern
ideas should succeed in dividing the land among small occupiers, the
flail will become as common as ever.

There was an old waggon shown at the Royal Agricultural Show in London
said to be two hundred years old; probably it had had so many new wheels,
and shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its
constitution--still there were waggons in those days, and there are
waggons now. Express trains go by in a great hurry--the slow waggons
gather up the warm hay and the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of
years since. The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient goad draw the
old wooden plough over the slopes of the Downs, though the telegraph
wires are in sight. You may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a
thousand years ago on the broad English acres. Yet the light iron plough,
and the heavy drill with its four horses, the steam-plough, winnowing
machines, root-pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields,
and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases.

If I were a painter I should like to paint all this; I should like to
paint a great steam-ploughing engine and its vast wheels, with its sweep
of smoke, sometimes drifting low over the fallow, sometimes rising into
the air in regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii's
volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air; sweet white violets
in a corner by the hedge still there in all their beauty. For I think
that the immense realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more
lovely; the more they try to drive out Nature with a fork the more she
returns, and the soul clings the stronger to the wild flowers. I should
like to paint the lessening square of the wheat-field, the reaping
machine continually cutting the square smaller, as if it traversed the
Greek fret. People of the easel would not find it easy to depict the
half-green, half-made hay floating in the air behind a haymaking machine.
Sunlight falls on the modern implements just the same as on the old
wooden plough and the oxen. To be true, pictures of our fields should
have them both, instead of which all the present things are usually
omitted, and we are presented with landscapes that might date from the
first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal,
poetical, and classical. His 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' which displays a
modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour
rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give
him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense
of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs
no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature.
Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham.

All the old things remain on the farm, but the village is driven out--the
village that used to come as one man to the reaping. Machinery has not
altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and
as work decreases, so men decrease. Some go the cities, some emigrate;
the young men drift away, and there is none of that home life that there
used to be. They are going to try to re-settle our land by altering the
laws. Most certainly the laws ought to be altered, and must be altered,
still it is evident to any one of dispassionate thought, while such
immense quantities of gold are sent away from us, profit cannot be made
in farming either small or great. The crop is the same in either case,
and if there is no sale for the produce, it matters very little whether
you farm four acres or four hundred.

New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A stout old farmer sat at
the side of his barn door on the hatch leaning against the post. His body
was as rotund as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great
checks were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed me, a
stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust and suspicion in every
line of his face. Out of the hunting season a stranger might perhaps have
been seen there once in six months, and this was that once. The British
bull-dog growled in his countenance--very likely pleasantness itself to
those he knew, grimness itself to others. The sunlight fell full into the
barn, the great doors wide open; there were sacks on the other side of
the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, and two men turning the
winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his
great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he
would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and
the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap
tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together,--farmers, and
bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers--and their clothes are
different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that
you may see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic wood
engravings of early printed books, in the etchings of last century, the
same lines and expression. The earth has marked them all. In a modern
country sketch or picture you would _not_ find them, they would be
smoothed away--drawing-room faces, made transparent, in attitudes like
easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned These are not country people.
Country people are the same now in appearance as when the old artists
honestly drew them; sturdy and square, bulky and slow, no attitudes, no
drawing-room grace, no Christmas card glossiness; somewhat stiff of limb,
with a distinct flavour of hay and straw about them, and no enamel. In
the villages cottagers have no ideas of tastefully disposing their
mantles about their shoulders, or of dressing for the occasion. I do not
know how to describe the form of a middle-aged cottage woman on a stormy
day with a large, greenish umbrella, a round bonnet, huge and enclosing
all the head, back, and sides, like the vast helm of the knights, a sort
of circular cloak, stout ankles well visible, and sometimes pattens; the
wearer inside all this decidedly bulky, and the whole apparatus coming
along through mud and rain with great deliberation. Inside the round
bonnet a ruddy, apple-checked face, just such a one as used to go to mass
in Sir John the priest's time, before the images were knocked out of the
rood-loft at the church there. The boys and girls play in the ditches
till they go to school, and they play in the hedges and ditches every
hour they can get out of school, and the moment their time is up they go
to work among the hedges and ditches, and though they may have had to
read standard authors at school, no sooner do they get among the furrows
than they talk hedge and ditch language. They do not talk Pope, or
Milton, or Addison; they 'knaaws,' 'they be a-gwoin thur,' it's a 'geat,'
and a 'vield,' and a 'vurrow.' These are the old faces you see, the same
old powers are at work to fashion them. Heavy, blind blows of the Wind,
the Rain, Frost, and Heat, have beaten up their faces in rude _repousse_
work. They have nails in their boots, but new hats on their heads; he who
paints them aright should paint the old nailed boots, but also the new
hats and the Waltham watches. Why do they not read? All have been taught,
and curious as the inconsistency may seem, they all value the privilege
of being _able_ to read and write, and yet they do not exercise it,
except in a casual, random way. I for one, when the public schools began
all through the rural districts, thought that at last the printing-press
was going to reach the country people. In a measure it has done so, but
in a flickering, uncertain manner; they read odd bits which come drifting
to their homes in irregular ways, just as people on the coast light their
fires with fragments of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides
on the beach. So the fire of the mind in country places is fed with chips
and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not fit together, and no one
sits down to read. I think I see two reasons why country people do not
read, the first of which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the
second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who make books come to
see what is wanted.

First, nature has given them so much to read out of doors, such a vast
and ever-changing picture-book, that white paper stained with black type
indoors seems dry and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his
family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red
comb, his silvery scaled legs, his reddened feathers, and his fiery
attitudes, his jolly crow, and all his ways--there's an illustrated
pamphlet, there's a picture-block book for you in one creature only!
Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled eggs, the
feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present terror of the red
wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox)--here's a Chronicon Nurembergense
with a thousand woodcuts; a whole history. This seems a very simple
matter, and yet it is true that people become intensely absorbed in
watching and living with such things. Add to these the veined elms, whose
innumerable branches divide like the veins or the nerves of a
physiological diagram, or like sprays of delicate seaweed slow turning
from their winter outline to the soft green shading of summer; add to
these the upspringing of the wheat and its slow coming to that maturity
of gold which marks the fulness of the year; consider, then, the
incomparable beauty of the mowing grass. Now remember that they live
among these things, and by daily iteration the dullest mind becomes
wrapped up in and welded to them. Black type on white paper is but a flat
surface after these. Secondly, the books and papers themselves, made and
printed in such enormous quantities, do not touch a country mind. They
have such a cityfied air. Very correct, very scientific, and extremely
well edited, but thin in the matter. Something so stagey--you may see it,
for instance, in the books for children introducing fairies, which
fairies have short skirts, and caper about exactly like a pantomime among
stage frogs and stage mushrooms, and it is quite clear that the artist
who drew them, and the author who wrote of them, actually drew their
inspiration from the boards of a theatre. They have never dreamed among
the cowslips of the real fields, they have never watched the ways of the
birds from under an oak. Children instinctively see that these toy-books
are not natural, and do not care for them; they may be illustrated in
gold and colours, sumptuously got up, and yet they are failures. Children
do not take these to bed with them. I have seen this myself; I bought so
many books to please children, but could never do it till by chance some
one sent a little American toy-book, 'The History of the Owl and his
Little One, and the Manoeuvres of the Fox.' This had a little of the
spirit of the woods in it, and was read and re-read for a year. Only the
other day a lady was telling me much the same thing, how she had bought
book after book but could never hit on anything to please her little boy,
till at last she found an American publication, roughly illustrated,
which he always had by him. It is very strange that the art of the
old-fashioned book for children has gone over to New York, which seems to
us the land of newness.

For grown-up people the modern books which are sent out in such numbers,
often very cheap, have likewise an artificial cityfied air so obviously
got up and theatrical, such a mark of machinery on them, all stamped and
chucked out by the thousand, that they have no attraction for a people
who live with nature, and even in old age retain a certain childlike
faith in honesty and genuine work. The reprints of good old authors, too,
which may be had for a few pennies now, are so edited away that all the
golden ring of the metal is clipped out of them. Overlaid with notes, and
analyses, and critical exegesis, the original throb of the author's heart
has disappeared from these polished bones. Just to suggest the book that
would please the country reader, look for a moment at those works which
came into existence at the very first dawn of printing--those volumes
with strongly drawn and Durer-like illustrations, very rough, and without
perspective, but whose meaning is at once understood, and which somehow
convey what I may call a genuine impression. Any countryman would tell
you at once that the illustrations of half the books of the present day
are mere vamped-up shallowness, drawn from a city man's mind in a city
room by gaslight. You must consider that the countryman who lives out of
doors, and always with nature, is, as regards his reading, very much in
the same mental position as the people who lived four hundred years
ago--in the days when costly and rare manuscripts, few and far between,
chained to the desk, were just being superseded by printed books at a
fifth the price, which could be actually bought and carried home. Till
quite lately so few books have circulated in country places that they may
be said to have been like these old manuscripts. The early printed books
were simply the manuscripts printed, and that is why they remain to this
day the finest specimens of typography, quite incomparable and not to be
approached by present-day printers. The art of the scribe, elaborated
through centuries, had reached a marvellous perfection; the first printer
copied them--the magic Fust actually sold his first books as manuscripts.
Since printers have only copied printers, books have steadily declined in
excellence. I have been obliged to use the outside to suggest the
inside--country readers want that which is genuine, honest, and, in a
word, really good; you cannot please them with vamped-up book-making. Two
books occur to me at this moment which would be greatly appreciated in
every country home, from that of the peasant who has just begun to read
to the houses of well-educated and well-to-do people, if they only knew
of their existence and their contents--of course provided they were cheap
enough, for country people have to be careful of their money nowadays. I
allude to Darwin's 'Climbing Plants' and to his 'Earthworms;' these are
astonishing works of singular patience and careful observation. The first
gives most fascinating facts about such a common plant, for example, as
the hedge bryony and the circular motion of its tendrils. Any farmer, for
instance, will tell you that the hop-bine will insist upon going round
the pole in one direction, and you cannot persuade it to go the other.
These circular movements seem almost to resemble those of the planets
about their centre, all things down to the ether seem to have a rotatory
motion; and some foreign plants which he grew send their far-extended
tendrils round and round with so patent a movement that you can see it
hour by hour like the hand of a clock. Perhaps the little book on
earthworms is a yet more wonderful achievement of this great genius, who
had not only untiring patience to observe and verify, but also possessed
imagination, and could thereby see the motive idea at work behind the
facts. At first it has a repellent sound, but we quickly learn how clumsy
and prejudiced have been our views of the despised worm thrown up by
every ploughshare.

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