THE CORNFIELD. After Constable.
The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for his growls, poor fellow, is careful to explain his cornfields away. When asked why, if it does not pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he says he grows it for the straw. At any rate, times are changed from those when agricultural England was merry with high prices; those picturesque days when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed, as every traveller was hailed, at harvest-time by the reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo, largesse," the largesse going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the village inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the reaping-hook, and with it and many other things has gone the Lord of the Harvest, elected from among his fellow-reapers to preside over their labours and their harvest-supper in the great fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen. The line of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning with their sickles in the fierce sun upon the diminishing fields of standing wheat, with halts for levenses and bever, and so home by the light of the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines do the work instead. It was astonishing, and, in the haymaking fields, still is, what long and continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say the eleven o'clock forenoon meal, and bever, the four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose name came through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin "bibere," to drink, reduced the contents of the barrels placed in the shady hedgerows, but quarts imbibed under such conditions were harmless. Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life, the names of "bever" and "levenses" remain yet in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk as those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and carter.
Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent moments, of coaching and posting days here, when, near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green, and in a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes, leading from Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond, "Laddenford Stables" stood at the cross roads that went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed to part here and went their several ways, but how they fared, or what was their social status, the story does not tell.
Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing by Capel station, and so by Copdock, whose church tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape of King David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at the foot of its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and Washbrook in the hollow, together with the broad and still marshy valley of the little Wash Brook, tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days when Saxons and Danes contended on this coast, a navigable creek, an arm of the Orwell. The road, in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley, together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of bygone geographical conditions, leading as it does down to the place where a bridge now spans the stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of old, first fordable. Having thus crossed, the road went, and still goes, in a right-angle turn uphill, towards Ipswich.
It was by no means necessary for travellers journeying between London and Norwich to touch Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises commonly went from Washbrook, through Sproughton and Bramford, and joined the coach route again at Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook who can still tell of the coaches that halted at "Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a toll-gate (the house still existing) stretched across the way at the foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks" who posted the long stage between "Stonham Pie" and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the "Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely up at the hill-top, but now a private residence with its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and can show the places, in what are now meadows, where many houses and cottages stood in those wayfaring days, when the high-lying road to Ipswich, across the uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.
XXXI
There can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings having thoroughly captured the heart of grumbling old Cobbett.
"From the town itself," he says, "you can see nothing; but you can, in no direction, go from it a quarter of a mile without finding views that a painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable, for we do not generally attribute an artistic perception of scenic beauties to this practical farmer. Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom and his pictures he probably had never heard, although Constable had already for years been painting these very scenes.