Lady Cathcart, on marrying her fourth husband in 1713, had “If I survive I will have five” engraved upon her wedding ring.
Since my young days the prices of many things have changed very considerably indeed. On the whole the necessities of life have certainly become cheaper, and its minor luxuries have been brought well within the reach of those boasting but a slender purse. When I was a child we used to burn mutton-fat candles in our nursery, and it was only in 1835, as I find from a letter of my dear old governess, that we abandoned this form of illumination for a little lamp trimmed with the best sperm oil. In still older days candles made of deer-fat used, I believe, to be burnt in country houses, where the whole problem of lighting was no easy matter.
The cumbersome oil lamps of pre-electric light days were a great source of trouble and expense, apart from the danger of fire which they sometimes caused owing to careless handling. In large houses men had to be specially told off to attend to the lamps. I remember the uncle of the present Duke of Rutland showing me the lamp-room at Belvoir full of gigantic barrels of oil; at the same time he told me that no less than six men were kept constantly employed at nothing else but looking after the lamps. This Duke of Rutland was very much devoted to hunting and had several very severe falls. My husband and myself used often to go to Belvoir, and I remember that on two occasions, when going to visit there, we turned back at Grantham, it being there reported to us that the Duke, having had a terrible fall, was hovering between life and death; nevertheless he survived both these accidents. The late Duke (Lord John Manners) I always considered one of the most high-bred-looking men I ever saw in my life. I knew him in youth and in old age, and in both he was ever the typical English aristocrat; his polished and courteous address—the heritage of his race still preserved in the present generation—will always linger pleasantly in my memory.
POACHING
There was naturally something much more picturesque about old country life than is the case to-day, when, owing to railways and motor cars, people are kept in constant and close touch with town. The poacher, perhaps, is now the sole anachronism, and even he, I fancy, has discarded his old-world raiding ways in favour of more calculating and scientific methods. Poaching in old days was regarded by the country-folk much as smuggling had been by their forebears—that is, with a certain sneaking feeling of sympathetic toleration.
Many years ago, when I lived in Sussex, stories of the smugglers who formerly abounded along the coast were still told by those who had actually witnessed and, in some cases, taken part in their operations. Smuggling, as a matter of fact, hurting as it did no one but the Revenue, was not regarded with any particular horror, and the long trains of heavily loaded carts escorted by the smugglers were generally interfered with by no one except the Revenue officers and the coastguardsmen. One of the favourite haunts of the “Free Traders” was in Parham Park, and old Baroness de la Zouche used to say that, when she was a little girl, walking one day in the park with her governess, some smugglers had made her open a gate in order to facilitate the passage of a long train of pack-horses loaded with kegs, then on its way to a remote part of the park near the heronry. In Eridge Park, also, caves still exist where smugglers used to store their bales of goods. During the eighteenth century the house was not inhabited, and the surrounding park was practically a wilderness, so that these caves formed a most excellent and secure retreat. There runs beneath the present Eridge Castle a long passage, the entrance to which is far distant from the house, and as its existence has never been accounted for it is not improbable that smugglers may have had something to do with its construction; it is almost certain, at least, that they knew of it and kept it in repair.
SMUGGLING
The officers of the Customs, who were called “riding officers,” though sometimes assisted by dragoons, could do but little against the smugglers, who sometimes indulged in very savage reprisals. The last occasion when life was lost in a smuggling affray was in 1838 at Camber Castle, but it was some time before that date that the last great party of smugglers passed through Petworth—sixty well-armed men, pistols in their belts and cutlasses by their sides. They escorted two carts and a number of horses loaded with tubs of brandy and hollands, whilst a few of them also had bales of silk slung across their backs. This picturesque procession—the funeral cortège, as it were, of smuggling—came into the old town on a Sunday morning, whilst the inhabitants were at church, and made its way through the streets in a very leisurely fashion, some of the smugglers even halting at the inns to have a drink, for it was in the days when licensing reform was as yet a thing of the future. The last of the smugglers were armed chiefly with “bats”—thick ash poles about six feet long. An old smuggler, Smithurst by name, killed in a fight at Bexhill in 1828, was found with his bat almost hacked to pieces but still grasped tightly in his hands.
A particularly ferocious murder committed by smugglers was that of some Custom House officers in 1749, when five men actually robbed the Custom House at Poole. The criminals were eventually caught, hung, and gibbeted in chains, one only escaping this fate through dying of fright whilst being measured for his irons. One of the leg-irons of William Carter, a member of this gang, who was hung in chains near Rake on the Portsmouth Road, came into my possession, and this I still retain.
The last example of hanging in chains took place when I was a child in 1834, in which year a man named Cook, a bookbinder, who had murdered a Mr. Paas at Leicester, was hung and gibbeted in Saffron Lane outside the town. So much disorder and rioting, however, prevailed that the body was very soon removed, and in the same year hanging in chains was finally abolished.