These good people worked much harder than their descendants of the present day. Their hours of labour were much longer, and much of what they did by hand is now done by machinery. Though ignorant and unrefined, they were honest and hospitable, and possessed a great deal of sound shrewd common-sense. In those days many of them followed several handicrafts, for the division of labour was not such as it is now; and a remarkable instance of this diversified ability is to be found in the life of the man who was the parish priest of Wordsworth’s poem, The Excursion. This worthy man—whose history we have slightly alluded to in an article in this Journal on the Lake Country—was the son of a poor statesman, and was the youngest of twelve. At the age of seventeen he became a village schoolmaster, and a little later both minister and schoolmaster. Before and after school-hours he laboured at manual occupation, rising between three and four in the summer, and working in the fields with the scythe or sickle. He ploughed, he planted, tended sheep, or clipped and salved, all for hire; wrote his own sermons, and did his duty at chapel twice on Sundays. In all these labours he excelled. In winter-time he occupied himself in reading, writing his own sermons, spinning, and making his own clothes and those of his family, knitting and mending his own stockings, and making his own shoes, the leather of which was of his own tanning. In his walks he never neglected to gather and bring home the wool from the hedges. He was also the physician and lawyer of his parishioners; drew up their wills, conveyances, bonds, &c., wrote all their letters, and settled their accounts, and often went to market with sheep or wool for the farmers.
He married a respectable maid-servant, who brought him forty pounds; and shortly afterwards he became curate of Seathwaite, where he lived and officiated for sixty-seven years. We are told that when his family wanted cloth, he often took the spinning-wheel into the school-room, where he also kept a cradle—of course of his own making. Not unfrequently the wheel, the cradle, and the scholars all claiming his attention at the same moment, taxed the ingenuity of this wonderful man to keep them all going. To all these attainments Mr Walker—or ‘Wonderful Walker,’ as he was called—also added a knowledge of fossils and plants, and a ‘habit’ of observing the stars and winds. In summer he also collected various insects, and by his entertaining descriptions of them amused and instructed his children. After a long and extremely useful, nay we might say heroic life, which extended over nearly the whole of the last century (he having been born in 1709), this remarkable Dalesman died on the 25th of June 1802, in the ninety-third year of his age. In the course of his life he had, besides bringing up and settling in life a family of twelve children, amassed the sum of two thousand pounds, the result of marvellous industry and self-denial.
The chapel where this celebrated man entered upon his sacred duties was the smallest in the Dales, the poet Wordsworth, Mr Walker’s biographer, describing it as scarcely larger than many of the fragments of rock lying near it. Most of these small chapelries were presided over by ‘readers,’ men who generally exercised the trades of clogger, tailor, and butter-print maker, in order to eke out their small stipend. The livings were not worth more than two or three pounds a year, and the ministers were dependent upon the voluntary contributions of their parishioners. Their stipends, beside the small money-payment mentioned above, comprised ‘clothes yearly and whittlegate.’ The former meant one suit of clothes, two pairs of shoes, and one pair of clogs; and the latter, two or three weeks’ victuals at each house according to the ability of the inhabitants, which was settled among themselves; so that the minister could ‘go his course’ as regularly as the sun, and complete it annually. Few houses having more than one or two knives, he was obliged to carry his own knife or ‘whittle.’ He marched from house to house, and as master of the flock, had the elbow-chair at the table-head. Some remarkable scenes were often the result of this droll arrangement, and many good stories are current with reference to it. A story is told in Whythburn of a minister who had but two sermons, which he preached in turn. The walls of the chapel were at that time unplastered, and the sermons were usually placed in a hole in the wall behind the pulpit. On Sunday, before the service began, some wag pushed the sermons so far into the hole that they could not be got out with the hand. When the time for the sermon had arrived, the minister tried in vain to get them out. He then turned to the congregation and said that he could touch them with his forefinger, but couldn’t get his thumb in to grasp them. ‘But however,’ said he, ‘I will read you a chapter of Job instead, and that’s worth both of them put together!’
There was a curious custom at one time in the Dales of holding market at the church. Meat and all kinds of things were displayed at the church doors, and it often happened that people would make their bargains first and hang their goods over the backs of their seats. Though such practices have long been discontinued, there are still people living who have heard the clerk give out in the churchyard the advertisements of the several sales which were to be held in the neighbourhood. One good custom there was, however, which might be often practised now with advantage in small towns and villages, namely, that of the churchwardens going round the village during divine service and driving all the loungers into church.
The Dalesfolk had their sports too, the chief of which was the one for which Cumberland and Westmoreland have ever been famous, namely wrestling. They were also keen hunters; and until quite a recent period a few couples of hounds were kept in every dale, and when the presence of a fox was betrayed by a missing lamb or a decimated hen-roost, all the dogs and nearly all the men in the parish entered in pursuit of the depredator, and were seldom balked by their victim.
Some songs that were in vogue in the Dales a hundred years ago are still sung, chiefly at fairs by itinerant ballad-mongers. Some of the tunes are very antique, as for instance, St Dunstan’s Hunt’s Up, mentioned by Sir Walter Scott as lost and forgotten, but which is still played on the fiddle every Christmas-eve. The festivals held from time to time in the Dales were such as were very common in all parts of ‘Merrie England’ when our forefathers worked hard, and money was much scarcer than it is now. That they worked harder on the whole is a thing which admits of two opinions; but one thing is certain, namely, that their work was of a steady, careful, easy-going kind, whilst now it is all bustle and drive, in the endeavour to cram into a few fleeting hours as much as they could do in a whole week. Such as we find the world, however, we must put up with it, content, like them, to keep pegging away, and meeting the storms and buffetings of life with the same courageous spirit which enabled them to add their mite towards the honour, glory, and welfare of our common country.
A SPRING MORNING.
When sparrows in the brightening sun
Chirped blithe of summer half-begun