CHAPTER XVI
OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS
Old memories—Hindon as a borough and as a village—The Lamb Inn and its birds—The "mob" at Hindon—The blind smuggler—Rawlings of Lower Pertwood Farm—Reed, the thresher and deer-stealer—He leaves a fortune—Devotion to work—Old Father Time—Groveley Wood and the people's rights—Grace Reed and the Earl of Pembroke—An illusion of the very aged—Sedan-chairs in Bath—Stick-gathering by the poor—Game-preserving
The incident of the unhappy young man who was transported to Australia or Tasmania, which came out in the shepherd's history of the Ellerby family, put it in my mind to look up some of the very aged people of the downland villages, whose memories could go back to the events of eighty years ago. I found a few, "still lingering here," who were able to recall that miserable and memorable year of 1830 and had witnessed the doings of the "mobs." One was a woman, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop, now aged ninety-four, who was in her teens when the poor labourers, "a thousand strong," some say, armed with cudgels, hammers, and axes, visited her village and broke up the thrashing machines they found there.
Another person who remembered that time was an old but remarkably well-preserved man of eighty-nine at Hindon, a village a couple of miles distant from Fonthill Bishop. Hindon is a delightful little village, so rustic and pretty amidst its green, swelling downs, with great woods crowning the heights beyond, that one can hardly credit the fact that it was formerly an important market and session town and a Parliamentary borough returning two members; also that it boasted among other greatnesses thirteen public-houses. Now it has two, and not flourishing in these tea- and mineral-water drinking days. Naturally it was an exceeedingly corrupt little borough, where free beer for all was the order of the day for a period of four to six weeks before an election, and where every householder with a vote looked to receive twenty guineas from the candidate of his choice. It is still remembered that when a householder in those days was very hard up, owing, perhaps, to his too frequent visits to the thirteen public-houses, he would go to some substantial tradesman in the place and pledge his twenty guineas, due at the next election! In due time, after the Reform Bill, it was deprived of its glory, and later when the South-Western Railway built their line from Salisbury to Yeovil and left Hindon some miles away, making their station at Tisbury, it fell into decay, dwindling to the small village it now is; and its last state, sober and purified, is very much better than the old. For although sober, it is contented and even merry, and exhibits such a sweet friendliness toward the stranger within its gates as to make him remember it with pleasure and gratitude.
What a quiet little place Hindon has become, after its old noisy period, the following little bird story will show. For several weeks during the spring and summer of 1909 my home was at the Lamb Inn, a famous posting-house of the great old days, and we had three pairs of birds—throstle, pied wagtail, and flycatcher—breeding in the ivy covering the wall facing the village street, just over my window. I watched them when building, incubating, feeding their young, and bringing their young off. The villagers, too, were interested in the sight, and sometimes a dozen or more men and boys would gather and stand for half an hour watching the birds flying in and out of their nests when feeding their young. The last to come off were the flycatchers, on 18th June. It was on the morning of the day I left, and one of the little things flitted into the room where I was having my breakfast. I succeeded in capturing it before the cats found out, and put it back on the ivy. There were three young birds; I had watched them from the time they hatched, and when I returned a fortnight later, there were the three, still being fed by their parents in the trees and on the roof, their favourite perching-place being on the swinging sign of the "Lamb." Whenever an old bird darted at and captured a fly the three young would flutter round it like three butterflies to get the fly. This continued until 18th July, after which date I could not detect their feeding the young, although the hunger-call was occasionally heard.
If the flycatcher takes a month to teach its young to catch their own flies, it is not strange that it breeds but once in the year. It is a delicate art the bird practises and takes long to learn, but how different with the martin, which dismisses its young in a few days and begins breeding again, even to the third time!
These three broods over my window were not the only ones in the place; there were at least twenty other pairs in the garden and outhouses of the inn—sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, starlings, and swallows. Yet the inn was in the very centre of the village, and being an inn was the most frequented and noisiest spot.
To return to my old friend of eighty-nine. He was but a small boy, attending the Hindon school, when the rioters appeared on the scene, and he watched their entry from the schoolhouse window. It was market-day, and the market was stopped by the invaders, and the agricultural machines brought for sale and exhibition were broken up. The picture that remains in his mind is of a great excited crowd in which men and cattle and sheep were mixed together in the wide street, which was the market-place, and of shouting and noise of smashing machinery, and finally of the mob pouring forth over the down on its way to the next village, he and other little boys following their march.