The name of Reed, the zealous thresher with the flail, serves to remind me of yet another Reed, a woman who died a few years ago aged ninety-four, and whose name should be cherished in one of the downland villages. She was a native of Barford St. Martin on the Nadder, one of two villages, the other being Wishford, on the Wylye river, the inhabitants of which have the right to go into Groveley Wood, an immense forest on the Wilton estate, to obtain wood for burning, each person being entitled to take home as much wood as he or she can carry. The people of Wishford take green wood, but those of Barford only dead, they having bartered their right at a remote period to cut growing trees for a yearly sum of five pounds, which the lord of the manor still pays to the village, and, in addition, the right to take dead wood.
It will be readily understood that this right possessed by the people of two villages, both situated within a mile of the forest, has been a perpetual source of annoyance to the noble owners in modern times, since the strict preservation of game, especially of pheasants, has grown to be almost a religion to the landowners. Now it came to pass that about half a century or longer ago, the Pembroke of that time made the happy discovery, as he imagined, that there was nothing to show that the Barford people had any right to the dead wood. They had been graciously allowed to take it, as was the case all over the country at that time, and that was all. At once he issued an edict prohibiting the taking of dead wood from the forest by the villagers, and great as the loss was to them they acquiesced; not a man of Barford St. Martin dared to disobey the prohibition or raise his voice against it. Grace Reed then determined to oppose the mighty earl, and accompanied by four other women of the village boldly went to the wood and gathered their sticks and brought them home. They were summoned before the magistrates and fined, and on their refusal to pay were sent to prison; but the very next day they were liberated and told that a mistake had been made, that the matter had been inquired into, and it had been found that the people of Barford did really have the right they had exercised so long to take dead wood from the forest.
As a result of the action of these women the right has not been challenged since, and on my last visit to Barford, a few days before writing this chapter, I saw three women coming down from the forest with as much dead wood as they could carry on their heads and backs. But how near they came to losing their right! It was a bold, an unheard-of thing which they did, and if there had not been a poor cottage woman with the spirit to do it at the proper moment the right could never have been revived.
Grace Reed's children's children are living at Barford now; they say that to the very end of her long life she preserved a very clear memory of the people and events of the village in the old days early in the last century. They say, too, that in recalling the far past, the old people and scenes would present themselves so vividly to her mind that she would speak of them as of recent things, and would say to some one fifty years younger than herself, "Can't you remember it? Surely you haven't forgotten it when 'twas the talk of the village!"
It is a common illusion of the very aged, and I had an amusing instance of it in my old Hindon friend when he gave me his first impressions of Bath as he saw it about the year 1835. What astonished him most were the sedan-chairs, for he had never even heard of such a conveyance, but here in this city of wonders you met them in every street. Then he added, "But you've been to Bath and of course you've seen them, and know all about it."
About firewood-gathering by the poor in woods and forests, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop says that the people of the villages adjacent to the Fonthill and Great Ridge Woods were allowed to take as much dead wood as they wanted from those places. She was accustomed to go to the Great Ridge Wood, which was even wilder and more like a natural forest in those days than it is now. It was fully two miles from her village, a longish distance to carry a heavy load, and it was her custom after getting the wood out to bind it firmly in a large barrel-shaped bundle or faggot, as in that way she could roll it down the smooth steep slopes of the down and so get her burden home without so much groaning and sweating. The great wood was then full of hazel-trees, and produced such an abundance of nuts that from mid-July to September people flocked to it for the nutting from all the country round, coming even from Bath and Bristol to load their carts with nuts in sacks for the market. Later, when the wood began to be more strictly preserved for sporting purposes, the rabbits were allowed to increase excessively, and during the hard winters they attacked the hazel-trees, gnawing off the bark, until this most useful and profitable wood the forest produced—the scrubby oaks having little value—was well-nigh extirpated. By and by pheasants as well as rabbits were strictly preserved, and the firewood-gatherers were excluded altogether. At present you find dead wood lying about all over the place, abundantly as in any primitive forest, where trees die of old age or disease, or are blown down or broken off by the winds and are left to rot on the ground, overgrown with ivy and brambles. But of all this dead wood not a stick to boil a kettle may be taken by the neighbouring poor lest the pheasants should be disturbed or a rabbit be picked up.
Some more of the old dame's recollections will be given in the next chapter, showing what the condition of the people was in this district about the year 1830, when the poor farm-labourers were driven by hunger and misery to revolt against their masters—the farmers who were everywhere breaking up the downs with the plough to sow more and still more corn, who were growing very fat and paying higher and higher rents to their fat landlords, while the wretched men that drove the plough had hardly enough to satisfy their hunger.