Jone. As lung as aw'm wick and weel, owd crayter, aw'st keep comin' again, yo may depend,—like Clegg Ho' Boggart.
Sam. Well neaw, mind tho does do; for aw'd sooner see thee nor two fiddlers, ony time; so good neet to tho, an' good luck to tho, too, Jone; wi' o' my heart!
The night was wearing late, and, as I had yet nearly three miles to go, I rose, and went my way. This road was never so much travelled as some of the highways of the neighbourhood, but, since railways were made, it has been quieter than before, and the grass has begun to creep over it a little in some places. It leads through a district which has always been a kind of weird region to me. And I have wandered among those lonely moorland hills above Birtle, and Ashworth, and Bagslate; up to the crest of old Knowl, and over the wild top of Rooley, from whence the greatest part of South Lancashire—that wonderful region of wealth and energy—lies under the eye, from Blackstone Edge to the Irish Sea; and I have wandered through the green valleys and silent glens, among those hills, communing with the "shapes, and sounds, and shifting elements" of nature, in many a quiet trance of meditative joy; when the serenity of the scene was unmixed with any ruder sounds than the murmurs and gurglings of the mountain stream, careering over its rocky bed through the hollow of the vale; and the music of small birds among the woods which lined the banks; or the gambols of the summer wind among the rustling green, which canopied the lonely stream, so thickly that the flood of sunshine which washed the tree-tops in gold, only stole into the deeps in fitful threads; hardly giving a warmer tinge to the softened light in cool grots down by the water side. Romantic Spoddenlond! Country of wild beauty; of hardy, simple life; of old-world manners, and of ancient tales and legends dim! There was a time when the very air of the district seemed, to my young mind, impregnated with boggart-lore, and all the wild "gramerie" of old Saxon superstition,—when I looked upon it as the last stronghold of the fairies; where they would remain impregnable, haunting wild "thrutches" and sylvan "chapels," in lonely deeps of its cloughs and woods; still holding their mystic festivals there on moonlight nights, and tripping to the music of its waters, till the crack of doom. And, for all the boasted march of intellect, it is, even to this day, a district where the existence of witches, and the power of witch-doctors, wisemen, seers, planet-rulers, and prognosticators, find great credence in the imaginations of a rude and unlettered people. There is a little fold, called "Prickshaw," in this township of Spotland, which fold was the home of a notable country astrologer, in Tim Bobbin's time, called "Prickshaw Witch." Tim tells a humourous story about an adventure he had with this Prickshaw planet-ruler, at the Angel Inn, in Rochdale. Prickshaw keeps up its old oracular fame in that moorland quarter to this day, for it has its planet-ruler still; and, it is not alone in such wild, outlying nooks of the hills that these professors of the art of divination may yet be found; almost every populous town in Lancashire has, in some corner of it, one or more of these gifted star-readers, searching out the hidden things of life, to all inquirers, at about a shilling a-head. These country soothsayers mostly drive a sort of contraband trade in their line, in as noiseless and secret a way as possible, among the most ignorant and credulous part of the population. And it is natural that they should flourish wherever there are minds combining abundance of ignorant faith and imagination with a plentiful lack of knowledge. But they are not all skulkers these diviners of the skies, for now and then a bold prophet stands forth, in distinct proportions, before the public gaze, who has more lofty and learned pretentions; witness the advertisement of Dr. Alphonso Gazelle, of No. 4, Sparth Bottoms, Rochdale, which appears in the Rochdale Sentinel, of the 3rd of December, 1853.[6] Oh, departed Lilly and Agrippa; your shadows are upon us still! But I must continue my story of the lone old road, and its associations; and as I wandered on that cold and silent night, under the blue sky, where night's candles were burning, so clear and calm, I remembered that this was the country of old Adam de Spotland, who, many centuries since, piously bequeathed certain broad acres of land, "for the cure of souls," in the parish of Rochdale. He has, now, many centuries slept with his fathers. And as I walked down the road, in this sombre twilight, with a hushed wind, and under the shade of the woody height on which the homestead of the brave old Saxon stood, my footsteps sounding clear in the quiet air, and the very trees seeming to bend over to one another, and commune in awful murmurs on the approach of an intruder, how could I tell what the tramp of my unceremonious feet might waken there? The road crosses a deep and craggy glen, called "Simpson Clough," which is one of the finest pieces of ravine scenery in the county, little as it is known. The entire length of this wild gorge is nearly three miles, and it is watered by a stream from the hills, called "Nadin Water," which, in seasons of heavy rain, rages and roars with great violence, through its rocky channels. There is many a strange old tale connected with this clough. Half way up a shaley bank, which overhangs the river on the western side of the clough, the mouth of an ancient lead mine may still be seen, partly shrouded by brushwood. Upon the summit of a precipitous steep of wildwood and rock, which bounds the eastern side of the clough, stands Bamford Hall, a handsome, modern building of stone, a few yards from the site of the old hall of the Bamfords of Bamford. The new building is a residence of one branch of the Fenton family, wealthy bankers and cotton spinners, and owners of large tracts of land, here and elsewhere. On an elevated table-land, at the western side of the clough, and nearly opposite to Bamford Hall, stood the ancient mansion of Grizlehurst, the seat of the notable family of Holt, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Holt family were once the most powerful and wealthy landowners in the parish of Rochdale. The principal seats of the family in this parish were Stubley Hall, in the township of Wardleworth, and Castleton Hall, in the township of Castleton. The manor of Spotland was granted by Henry VIII., to Thomas Holt, who was knighted in Scotland, by Edward, Earl of Hertford, in the thirty-sixth year of the reign of that monarch. Part of a neighbouring clough still bears the name of "Tyrone's Bed," from the tradition that Hugh O'Neal, Earl of Tyrone and King of Ulster, took shelter in these woody solitudes, after his defeat in the great Irish Rebellion, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Mr. John Roby, of Rochdale, has woven this legend into an elegant romance, in his "Traditions of Lancashire."
I reached home about ten o'clock, and, thinking over the incidents of my walk, I was a little impressed by one fact, suggested by the conversation at the roadside public-house, with "Jone o'Jeffrey's," and the old couple; namely, that there is a great outlying mass of dumb folk in this country, who—by low social condition, but more by lack of common education among them—are shut out from the chance of hearing much, and still more from the chance of understanding what little they do hear, respecting the political questions of the time; and, also, with respect to many other matters which are of essential importance to their welfare. Whether this ignorance which yet pervades a great proportion of the poor of England, is chargeable upon that multitude itself, or upon that part of the people whom more favourable circumstances have endowed with light and power, and who yet withhold these elements from their less fortunate fellows, or, whether it is chargeable upon neither, let casuists decide. The fact that this ignorance does exist among the poor of England, lies so plainly upon the surface of society, that it can only be denied by those who are incurious as to the condition of the humbler classes of this kingdom; or, by those who move in such exclusive circles of life, that they habitually ignore the conditions of human existence which lie outside of their own limits of society and sympathy; or, by such as wink their eyes to the truth of this matter, in order to work out some small purpose of their own. Wherever there is ignorance at all there is too much of it; and it cannot be too soon removed, especially by those who are wise enough to see the crippling malignities of its nature. That portion of our population which hears next to nothing, and understands less, of politics and the laws—any laws whatever—is nevertheless compelled to obey the laws, right or wrong, and whatever strange mutations they may be subject to; and is thus continually drifted to and fro by conflicting currents of legislation which it cannot see; currents of legislation which sometimes rise from sources where there exists, unfortunately, more love for ruling than for enlightening. Many changes come over the social condition of this blind multitude, they know not whence, nor how, nor why. The old song says—
Remember, when the judgment's weak,
The prejudice is strong.
And, certainly, that part of the popular voice which is raised upon questions respecting which it has little or no sound information, must be considerably swayed by prejudice, and by that erratic play of unenlightened feeling, which has no safer government than the ephemeral circumstances which chase each other off the field of time. Shrewd demagogues know well how prostrate is the position of this uneducated "mass," as it is called; and they have a stock of old-fashioned tricks, by which they can move it to their own ends "as easy as lying." He who knows the touches of this passive instrument, can make it discourse the music he desires; and, unhappily, that is not always airs from heaven.
'Tis the time's plague,
When madmen lead the blind.
Now, the educated classes have all the wide field of ancient learning open to them—they can pasture where they will; and, the stream of present knowledge rushing by, they can drink as they list. Whatever is doing in politics, too, they hear of, whilst these things are yet matters of public dispute; and, in some degree, they understand and see the drift of them, and, therefore, can throw such influence as in them lies into one or the other scale of the matter. This boasted out-door parliament—this free expression of public opinion in England, however, as I have said before, goes no farther down among the people than education goes. Below that point lies a land of fretful slaves, dungeoned off by ignorance from the avenues which lead to freedom; and they drag out their lives in unwilling subservience to a legislation which is beyond their influence. Their ignorance keeps them dumb; and, therefore, their condition and wants are neither so well known, nor so often nor so well expressed as those of the educated classes. They seldom complain, however, until the state of affairs drives them to great extremity, and then their principal exponents are mobs, and uproars of desperation. It is plain that where there is society there must be law, and obedience to that law must be enforced, even among those who know nothing of the law, as well as those who defy it; but my principal quarrel is with that ignorant condition of theirs which shuts them out from any reasonable hope of exercising their rights as men and citizens. And so long as that ignorance is unnecessarily continued, the very enforcement of laws among them, the nature of which they have no chance of knowing, looks, to me, like injustice. I see a remarkable difference, however, between the majority of popular movements which have agitated the people for some time past, and that successful one—the repeal of the corn-laws. The agitation of that question, I believe, awakened and enlisted a greater breadth of the understanding sympathy of the nation, among all classes, than was ever brought together upon any one popular question which has been agitated within the memory of man. But it did more than this—and herein lies one of the foundationstones which shall hold it firm awhile, I think; since it has passed into law, its effects have most efficiently convinced that uneducated multitude of the labouring poor, who could not very well understand, and did not care much for the mere disputation of the question. Everybody has a stomach of some sort—and it frequently happens that when the brain is not very active the stomach is particularly so—so that, where it could not penetrate the understanding, it has by this time triumphantly reached the stomach, and now sits there, smiling defiance to any kind of sophistry that would coax it thenceforth again. The loaves of free trade followed the tracts of the League, and the hopes of protectionist philosophers are likely to be "adjourned sine die," for this generation at least—perhaps for ever; for the fog is clearing up a little, and I think I see, in the distance, a better education getting ready for the next generation.
O for the coming of that glorious time
When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth
And best protection, this imperial realm,
While she exacts allegiance, shall admit
An obligation on her part, to teach
Them who are born to serve her and obey
Binding herself by statute to secure
For all her children whom her soil maintains,
The rudiments of letters.
