A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs

by W. H. Hudson

An old Wiltshire woman's memories—Her home—Work on a farm—A little bird-scarer—Housekeeping—The agricultural labourers' rising—Villagers out of work—Relief work—A game of ball with barley bannocks—Sheep-stealing—A poor man hanged—Temptations to steal—A sheep-stealing shepherd—A sheep-stealing farmer—Story of Ebenezer Garlick—A sheep-stealer at Chitterne—The law and the judges—A "human devil" in a black cap—How the revolting labourers were punished—A last scene at Salisbury Court House—Inquest on a murdered man—Policy of the farmers

The story of her early life told by my old friend Joan, aged ninety-four, will serve to give some idea of the extreme poverty and hard suffering life of the agricultural labourers during the thirties of last century, at a time when farmers were exceedingly prosperous and landlords drawing high rents.

She was three years old when her mother died, after the birth of a boy, the last of eleven children. There was a dame's school in their little village of Fonthill Abbey, but the poverty of the family would have made it impossible for Joan to attend had it not been for an unselfish person residing there, a Mr. King, who was anxious that every child should be taught its letters. He paid for little Joan's schooling from the age of four to eight; and now, in the evening of her life, when she sits by the fire with her book, she blesses the memory of the man, dead these seventy or eighty years, who made this solace possible for her.

After the age of eight there could be no more school, for now all the older children had gone out into the world to make their own poor living, the boys to work on distant farms, the girls to service or to be wives, and Joan was wanted at home to keep house for her father, to do the washing, mending, cleaning, cooking, and to be mother to her little brother as well.

Her father was a ploughman, at seven shillings a week; but when Joan was ten he met with a dreadful accident when ploughing with a couple of young or intractable oxen; in trying to stop them he got entangled in the ropes and one of his legs badly broken by the plough. As a result it was six months before he could leave his cottage. The overseer of the parish, a prosperous farmer who had a large farm a couple of miles away, came to inquire into the matter and see what was to be done. His decision was that the man would receive three shillings a week until able to start work again, and as that would just serve to keep him, the children must go out to work. Meanwhile, one of the married daughters had come to look after her father in the cottage, and that set the little ones free.

The overseer said he would give them work on his farm and pay them a few pence apiece and give them their meals; so to his farm they went, returning each evening home. That was her first place, and from that time on she was a toiler, indoors and out, but mainly in the fields, till she was past eighty-five;—seventy-five years of hard work—then less and less as her wonderful strength diminished, and her sons and daughters were getting grey, until now at the age of ninety-four she does very little—practically nothing.

In that first place she had a very hard master in the farmer and overseer. He was known in all the neighbourhood as "Devil Turner," and even at that time, when farmers had their men under their heel as it were, he was noted for his savage tyrannical disposition; also for a curious sardonic humour, which displayed itself in the forms of punishment he inflicted on the workmen who had the ill-luck to offend him. The man had to take the punishment, however painful or disgraceful, without a murmur, or go and starve. Every morning thereafter Joan and her little brother, aged seven, had to be up in time to get to the farm at five o'clock in the morning, and if it was raining or snowing or bitterly cold, so much the worse for them, but they had to be there, for Devil Turner's bad temper was harder to bear than bad weather. Joan was a girl of all work, in and out of doors, and, in severe weather, when there was nothing else for her to do, she would be sent into the fields to gather flints, the coldest of all tasks for her little hands.

"But what could your little brother, a child of seven, do in such a place?" I asked.

She laughed when she told me of her little brother's very first day at the farm. The farmer was, for a devil, considerate, and gave him something very light for a beginning, which was to scare the birds from the ricks. "And if they will come back you must catch them," he said, and left the little fellow to obey the difficult command as he could. The birds that worried him most were the fowls, for however often he hunted them away they would come back again. Eventually, he found some string, with which he made some little loops fastened to sticks, and these he arranged on a spot of ground he had cleared, scattering a few grains of corn on it to attract the "birds." By this means he succeeded in capturing three of the robbers, and when the farmer came round at noon to see how he was getting on, the little fellow showed him his captures. "These are not birds," said the farmer, "they are fowls, and don't you trouble yourself any more about them, but keep your eye on the sparrows and little birds and rooks and jackdaws that come to pull the straws out."

That was how he started; then from the ricks to bird-scaring in the fields and to other tasks suited to one of his age, not without much suffering and many tears. The worst experience was the punishment of standing motionless for long hours at a time on a chair placed out in the yard, full in sight of the windows of the house, so that he could be seen by the inmates; the hardest, the cruellest task that could be imposed on him would come as a relief after this. Joan suffered no punishment of that kind; she was very anxious to please her master and worked hard; but she was an intelligent and spirited child, and as the sole result of her best efforts was that more and more work was put on her, she revolted against such injustice, and eventually, tried beyond endurance, she ran away home and refused to go back to the farm any more. She found some work in the village; for now her sister had to go back to her husband, and Joan had to take her place and look after her father and the house as well as earn something to supplement the three shillings a week they had to live on.