The sharp-visaged, pale-faced nephew grinned as he read his worthy uncle’s epistle, and secretly resolved at once to gratify the mean desire expressed in it, and to amuse himself, at his uncle’s expense, when it was too late for him to make any alteration should he detect it. Of the ungainly figure, and the hideous features of his uncle, he had caricatures without number; and as they were so strongly marked, that the rudest engraver of a wooden block could not fail to copy them faithfully, he determined that the long visage of Daws himself should find a place in his performance.
The fair-day of Cheddar was that one day in the year which was always most trying to Noble. All the other holydays were home festivals, and were kept by the villagers among themselves, being seldom intruded on by strangers; but the annual fair always brought with it a herd of idle vagabonds from Bristol, and other towns within a convenient distance, and seldom terminated without many profligate, disgusting scenes, or an open brawl. The state of public affairs, and the presence of a Puritan force in Somersetshire, had such an effect on the fairs throughout the county this autumn, that they were in general but thinly attended, and little or no business was done among the farmers and dealers, by whom they were commonly frequented.
Nevertheless, fairs were too important in the social economy to the convenience of the people to be wholly suspended. Therefore, on the appointed morning, early in September, a pleasant peal of five bells (not as yet silenced by force or law) gave due notice from the tower of Cheddar church that the day of fairings and gilt gingerbread had arrived; but although a certain quantity of booths had been erected, only one, and that but scantily supplied, was set apart for the profane display of those glittering temptations. Among the farm servants standing for hire, there were no stout young carters with their whips, no hale shepherds with their crooks and green sprigs in their hats; and though there was no lack of maids, yet, as they crowded together, they looked lonesome and sad, and their bonny brown hair was not tied up with ribands. The few children present were held fast by the hand, and led by their parents to see the common purchases made for the household; but even in these matters the traffic was dull. There were, indeed, a few cattle; a few pens of sheep; some piles of Cheddar and other Somersetshire cheese; a store of salted meats; one stall with fair garnishes of pewter for the cupboard; another with wooden bowls, and trenchers, and vessels for the dairy; and one great one, at which groceries, cloths, linens, and articles of hardware, were promiscuously set forth, and where the neighbouring housewives were wont to lay in their store of useful necessaries for the coming year. But now it was so uncertain what a day might bring forth, that not many cared to make their annual outlay.
It might be supposed, that, in such unsettled times, mountebanks, tumblers, and conjurers could hardly reckon on a sufficient harvest of pence to find them in beer and shoe leather; but some of them still ventured their exhibitions, and with a ready wit practised boldly, wherever they came, upon the popular prejudices of the hour, and lent themselves to the crafty suggestions of the designing, who well knew that the vulgar mind may be artfully seduced to join in the ridicule of those very persons and things, which, in its better moments, it has respected.
Now the nephew of Daws had been a most willing and active agent in forwarding the objects of his uncle; for he had not only procured his libellous papers to be printed, but he had provided them each with a caricature engraving on wood; and he had, in like manner, caused certain ribald songs to be headed for distribution at Cheddar fair; so that they who could not read the slanders and calumnies contained in the printed matter might see them pictured to their senses. Nor did he stop here; but he procured a base fellow, the son of a drunken saddler, who was a noted posture master in Bristol, to carry these papers and prints to Cheddar on the fair day, and to commend them to the people. This knave, taking with him a merriman and a fire-eater to assist him in attracting a crowd, repaired thither, and about noon began his operations on a scaffold near the market cross. They had been followed by a rabble of disorderly persons, among whom the report of some fun at Cheddar fair had been already spread by the rogues engaged on the occasion.
Master Daws, who had been advised by his nephew of the preparations that were made for bringing the church and its ministers into contempt before the population of Cheddar, walked to the village at an early hour in company with his nephew, under the pretence of buying a hundred weight of cheese and a salted mutton; and, though the day was fine, he took care to appear in the blue Geneva cloak, which was commonly worn by the Puritan divines. Having engaged an upper room in a public house facing the market place, he had no sooner stalked through the vacant crowd, and made his purchases, than he retired to feast his malignant envy from the window of this chamber.
The sound of the pipe and tabor, and the nasal tones of Master Merriman, soon gathered all the idle folk in the fair round the mountebank’s scaffold. The fool began with their favourite egg-dance; and they stood with gaping mouths to see him hop about on one leg, and then, being blindfolded, dance backwards and forwards between the eggs without touching one of them: their mouths gaped yet wider, as this performer was succeeded by the fire-eater, who, after commencing by the trick of drawing forth from his mouth yard after yard of ribands, as if his stomach had been a riband loom, put a bundle of lighted matches into his mouth, and blew the smoke of the sulphur through his nostrils. Last came the posture-master, whose art consisted in making all sorts of uncouth faces, and exhibiting in a natural but shocking manner every species of deformity and dislocation. Now he showed a huge rising of his left shoulder; now shifted the deformity into the other; now represented a humpback; accompanying these changes of his figure with sundry comical contortions of countenance, to which the crowd responded in roars of laughter. Having thus got them into good humour for his purpose, he went on to imitate the cries and voices of sundry animals and birds; the crow of the cock, the gabble of the geese, the gobble of the turkey, the quaak of the duck, the squeak of the sucking pig, the bleat of the lamb, the grunt of the old sow, and the braying of the ass. The crowd was on the broad grin while he went through these imitations. He now therefore disappeared for a minute, leaving the merriman to amuse them, by way of interlude, with a jocular dance, and returned in robes made of coarse materials to imitate those of a bishop. His figure was stuffed out to Falstaff-like proportions; his hands were crossed with due gravity; he had plumpers in his cheeks; and he forthwith began to intone an anthem with burlesque solemnity. The words were in mockery of the coronation anthem; and the petition for the growth of the King’s beard, and the shaving thereof, was delivered in all those varieties of note which he had before given when mimicking the animals of the farm-yard. He thus excited the mirth of the rabble vastly. He closed this mischievous performance by a comic song about tithes; and, after imitating the squeak of a sucking pig, and the clack of a hen, he produced upon the stage, by sleight of hand, as if from his paunch, a basket filled with curious samples of the small tithe, in which the tenth egg was not forgotten. His place was now taken by the mountebank, who professed to be appointed grand physician to the state, and purifier of the church. The fool stood by his side making all the uncouth faces which he could think of, taken, it must be confessed, most chiefly from the sour kill-joys of the time; and holding a large bundle of printed papers, each headed by a wood-cut, he distributed them down among the people for due consideration of pence and farthings dropped into his cap. These papers, though ridiculous devices were prefixed to them, contained a venom of no laughable matter, and were eagerly bought up.
The nephew of old Daws had been at little pains to rack his invention for the subject of these curious cuts. On one, he had engraven the figure of a fox, vested in canonicals, with a crosier in his hand and a mitre on his head, hanging upon a tree, with a flock of geese and other fowl beneath chattering at him; on another, he had represented a fox in chains, with his right paw on a bag of money, and a monkey at prayers by his side, trying to steal it away. On the next was given the figure of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, bearing a close resemblance to his own uncle, puffing a large fire with a pair of bellows, on which was inscribed “Groans and sighs;” while above was depicted an owl, with a wolf and a lamb joining in prayers. By a self-deception not uncommon, Master Daws had not the slightest suspicion that the said wolf bore any likeness to himself, and, to the secret diversion of his nephew, he gave a most ghastly smile of approval as he looked over the rude caricatures, three of which we have described. The time was now come for directing the wayward crowd to a stronger expression of their contempt for the church than laughter. Accordingly, the nephew of Daws descended among them, and proposed that they should burn a bishop’s effigy before the parson’s house. While the effigy was preparing, the people stood in groups reading the papers; and sundry charitable suggestions were made by the baser among them. “Let’s get into his cellar,” said one, “and drink a little of the sacrament wine.”—“Let’s lay hold of the church plate,” said another:—“Or give the parson a ride on old Bruin here,” was the cruel proposal of a third, pointing to a huge bear in a string, led by a wandering showman. All things were soon ready; and, led by the posture master in front, and guided behind by the mischievous nephew of Master Daws, off the rabble moved, noisy and half drunk, and ready for all evil. They had no sooner reached the yew-tree in the churchyard, and were advancing towards the wicket, than out rushed an old beggar, stumping on his wooden leg, followed by plain Peter and two more old labourers, and immediately behind them, as if in pursuit, a fine young bull. The old beggar, who was no other than the worn-out veteran before mentioned, shouted, “Mad bull!” at the top of his voice, with an earnestness and passion that made him at once believed; and the crowd fled, tumbling over each other, as they ran, in inextricable confusion: nor were they allowed time to detect the deception practised on them; for the old soldier and plain Peter slipping behind the frightened beast, and goading him forward, he performed his friendly office as well as the maddest of all bulls, and very effectually dispersed the mob, and defeated their base and cruel intentions for that day. Master Daws, who had from his post of observation at the window witnessed the scenes in the market-place with the most malignant satisfaction, as soon as the crowd marched off towards the vicarage with the effigy, and he saw the coast clear, could not repress his curiosity, and, stealing down, followed afar off to watch their operations. In the luckless moment of their panic and flight, he was so terrified and puzzled, that he could not regain the house, but ran with the crowd, and was thrown down by a pig; nor was this the worst, for it so happened that a man, leading a monkey, fell at the same moment, and jocko flew upon Daws and bit his right ear, till he screamed for agony: beyond this, however, and the tearing of his clothes, he sustained no injury. A worse fate waited the posture-master, the bear being infuriated at the hubbub, and having broken away from his master, seized him fiercely, and embraced him in a hug so fatal, that it produced contortions of countenance and a dislocation of bones very different from those he had so lately been exhibiting, and left him a cripple for life. The warning of his master’s danger had been communicated to plain Peter, that very morning, by the grateful old soldier, who had come to that fair with no other intention than rendering this service, he having heard a whisper of the intended doings in a tap at Bristol. It so chanced that old Noble was confined to the house by a sprain of the ankle, and his mistress was not well; so Peter kept from them all mention of these fears. The stratagem he adopted for putting the mob to flight was suggested by the old soldier, and cheerfully aided by a neighbouring farmer and two of his servants. Thus was the worthy parson protected in peace, and kept safe from the strife of tongues and the violence of a base rabble, throughout a day that was very threatening: unconscious himself how Daws had been undermining him, he had passed it in a frame of mind more than usually composed.
Daws and his nephew continued their retreat without staying to pay their reckoning at the public-house. The greater part of the crowd, finding themselves on the road to Axbridge, proceeded there, to make up for their disappointment at Cheddar by a riot at that place instead. So few, indeed, returned, after they had got beyond the reach of danger, to find out the truth of it, and they squabbled so much among themselves, that Master Blount and the villagers were able to prevent further disturbance at that time. Before evening all the strange rabble departed; and the sun set on Cheddar as tranquilly as in happier times.