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Page 31
She had still, however, an eye for the servants:
No servant at table use sauc'ly to talk,
Lest tongue set at large out of measure do walk;
No lurching, no snatching, no striving at all,
Lest one go without, and another have all.
And then a final word:
Declare after supper--take heed thereunto--
What work in the morning each servant shall do.
And then--bed!
There were feast days, of course: Christmas to Epiphany was one long
feast; then Plow Monday, Shrovetide, Sheep-shearing, Wake-Day, Harvest
Home, Seed-Cake--these as the times came round. But there was a weekly
regale too, which was known as Twice-a-Week-Roast. On Sundays and
Thursdays a hot joint was the custom at supper. Tusser is clear about
the value and sanction at once:
Thus doing and keeping such custom and guise,
They call thee good huswife--they love thee likewise.
Those days are past and done, with much to regret and much to be
thankful for. You trained good servants that way--but did you make
good men and women? Some think so, and I among them; but such training
is two-edged, and while I feel sure that the girls and lads were
the better for the discipline, I cannot believe that the masters and
mistresses were. They nursed arrogance; out of them came the tyrants
and gang-drivers of the eighteenth century, Act of Settlement, the
Enclosure Acts, Speenhamland, rick-burning, machine-breaking, and the
Bloody Assize of 1831. Well, now the reckoning has come, and Hodge
will have Farmer Blackacre at his discretion.
One or two variations from modern practice may be noted. The
Elizabethan husbandman grew, I have said, his own flax and hemp; he
grew his vines too, and Tusser bids him prune them in February. I, who
grow mine, call that full early. He does not tell us when he gathered
his grapes or (what I very much want to know) how he made his
wine--whether with pure fermented grape-juice, which is the French
way, or by adding water and sugar to the must, which is our present
English fashion. Again, he used sheep's milk both for draught and for
butter-making. I wish we had sheep's milk butter. No one who has had
it in Greece would be without it at home if he could help it. You
weaned the lambs at Philip and Jacob, he says, if you wanted any milk
from the ewe. Lastly, he grew saffron, which he pared between the two
St. Mary's days. To pare is to strip the soil with a breast-plow.
The two St. Mary's days were July 22 and August 15, which would be a
pretty good time to plant saffron.
We also, in my country, date our operations by holy days, long after
the holy men have ceased to be commemorated. Who knows St. Gregory's
Day? It is March 12. Marrowfat peas go into the drill:
Sow runcivals timely, and all that is grey;
But sow not the white till St. Gregory's Day.
I will undertake that half a dozen old hands round about my house
follow out this rule in its entirety.
FLOWER OF THE FIELD
A county inquiry took me, one day last summer, deeply into the Plain,
up and over a rutty track which my driver will have cause to remember.
An uncommonly large hawk soaring over his prey, and so near the ground
that I could see the light through his ragged plumes, a hare limping
through the bents, further off a crawling flock bustling after
shepherd and dog, were all the living things I saw. The ground was
iron, the colour of what had once been herbage a glaring brown. Of the
flowers none but the hardiest had outlived the visitation of the sun.
I saw rest-harrow which has a root like whipcord, and the flat thistle
which thrives in dust. The harebells floated no more, the discs of the
scabious were shrivelled husks; ladies' bedstraw was straw indeed, but
not for ladies' uses. Three miles away from anywhere we came upon a
clump of dusty sycamores whose leaves were spotted and beginning to
fall; beyond them was a squat row of flint and brick bungalows, the
goal of our quest. There were three tenements, of which two were
empty. In the third lives the shepherd who had called me up to
consider his circumstances.
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