In figure this woman is slim, too narrow across the hips, too flat in the chest. And she grows thinner with years. The number of lean, pale women of this type in Hampshire is very remarkable. You see them in every village, women that appear almost fleshless, with a parchment-like skin drawn tight over the bones of the face, pale-blue, washed-out eyes, and thin, dead-looking hair. What is the reason of this leanness? It may be that the women of this blonde type are more subject to poverty of blood than others; for the men, though often thin, are not so excessively thin as the women. Or it may be the effect of that kind of poison which cottage women all over the country are becoming increasingly fond of, and which is having so deleterious an effect on the people in many counties—the tea they drink. Poison it certainly is: two or three cups a day of the black juice which they obtain by boiling and brewing the coarse Indian teas at a shilling a pound which they use, would kill me in less than a week.
Or it may be partly the poison of tea and partly the bad conditions, especially the want of proper food, in the villages. One day on the downs near Winchester I found a shepherd with his flock, a man of about fifty, and as healthy and strong-looking a fellow as I have seen in Hampshire. Why was it, I asked him, that he was the only man of his village I had seen with the colour of red blood in his face? why did they look so unwholesome generally? why were the women so thin, and the children so stunted and colourless? He said he didn't know, but thought that for one thing they did not get enough to eat. "On the farm where I work," he said, "there are twelve of us—nine men, all married, and three boys. My wages are thirteen shillings, with a cottage and garden; I have no children, and I neither drink nor smoke, and have not done so for eighteen years. Yet I find the money is not too much. Of the others, the eight married men all have children—one has got six at home: they all smoke, and all make a practice of spending at least two evenings each week at the public-house." How, after paying for beer and tobacco, they could support their families on the few shillings that remained out of their wages was a puzzle to him.
A mixed race
But this is to digress. The prevalent blonde type I have tried to describe is best seen in the northern half of the county, but is not so accentuated on the east, north, and west borders as in the interior villages. If, as is commonly said, this people is Anglo-Saxon, it must at some early period have mixed its blood with that of a distinctly different race. This may have been the Belgic or Brythonic, but as shape and face are neither Celtic nor Saxon, the Brythons must have already been greatly modified by some older and different race which they, or the Goidels before them, had conquered and absorbed. It will be necessary to return to this point by-and-by.
Side by side with this, in a sense, dim and doubtful people, you find the unmistakable Saxon, the thick-set, heavy-looking, round-headed man with blue eyes and light hair, and heavy drooping mustachios—a sort of terrestrial walrus who goes erect. He is not abundant as in Sussex, but is represented in almost any village, and in these villages he is always like a bull-dog or bull-terrier among hounds, lurchers, and many other varieties, including curs of low degree. Mentally, he is rather a dull dog, at all events deficient in the finer, more attractive qualities. Leaving aside the spiritual part, he is a good all-round man, tough and stubborn, one that the naturalist may have no secret qualms about in treating as an animal. A being of strong animal nature, and too often in this brewer-ridden county a hard drinker. A very large proportion of the men in rural towns and villages with blotchy skins and watery or beery eyes are of this type. Even more offensive than the animality, the mindlessness, is that flicker of conscious superiority which lives in their expression. It is, I fancy, a survival of the old instinctive feeling of a conquering race amid the conquered.
Reversion of type
Nature, we know, is everlastingly harking back, but here in Hampshire I cannot but think that this type, in spite of its very marked characters, is a very much muddied and degenerate form. One is led to this conclusion by occasionally meeting with an individual whose whole appearance is a revelation, and strikes the mind with a kind of astonishment, and one can only exclaim—there is nothing else to say—Here Nature has at length succeeded in reproducing the pure unadulterated form! Such a type I came upon one summer day on the high downs east of the Itchen.
He was a shepherd, a young fellow of twenty, about five feet eight in height, but looking short on account of his extraordinary breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. His arms were like a blacksmith's, and his legs thick, and his big head was round as a Dutch cheese. He could, I imagined, have made a breach in the stone wall near which I found him with his flock, if he had lowered that hard round head and charged like a rhinoceros. His hair was light brown, and his face a uniform rosy brown—in all Hampshire no man nor woman had I seen so beautiful in colour; and his round, keen, piercing eyes were of a wonderful blue—"eyes like the sea." If this poor fellow, washed clean and clothed becomingly in white flannels, had shown himself in some great gathering at the Oval or some such place on some great day, the common people would have parted on either side to make way for him, and would have regarded him with a kind of worship—an impulse to kneel before him. There, on the downs, his appearance was almost grotesque in the dress he wore, made of some fabric intended to last for ever, but now frayed, worn to threads in places, and generally earth-coloured. A small old cap, earth-coloured too, covered a portion of his big, round head, and his ancient, lumpish, cracked and clouted boots were like the hoofs of some extinct large sort of horse which he had found fossilised among the chalk hills. He had but eleven shillings a week, and could not afford to spend much on dress. How he could get enough to eat was a puzzle; he looked as if he could devour half of one of his muttons at a meal, washed down with a bucket of beer, without hurt to his digestion. In appearance he formed a startling contrast to the people around him: they were in comparison a worn-out, weary-looking race, dim-eyed, pale-faced, slow in their movements, as if they had lost all joy and interest in life.
The sight of him taught me something I could not get from the books. The intensity of life in his eyes and whole expression; the rough-hewn face and rude, powerful form—rude but well balanced—the vigour in his every movement, enabled me to realise better than anything that history tells us what those men who came as strangers to these shores in the fifth century were really like, and how they could do what they did. They came, a few at a time, in open row-boats, with nothing but their rude weapons in their hands, and by pure muscular force, and because they were absolutely without fear and without compassion, and were mentally but little above a herd of buffaloes, they succeeded in conquering a great and populous country with centuries of civilisation behind it.