Rural Rides

by William Cobbett

I took leave of Mr. Deller this morning, about 7 o’clock. Came back through Avington Park, through the village of Avington, and, crossing the Itchen river, came over to the village of Itchen Abas. Abas means below. It is a French word that came over with Duke Rollo’s progenitors. There needs no better proof of the high descent of the Duke, and of the antiquity of his family. This is that Itchen Abas where that famous Parson-Justice, the Reverend Robert Wright, lives, who refused to hear Mr. Deller’s complaint against the Duke’s servant at his own house, and who afterwards, along with Mr. Poulter, bound Mr. Deller over to the Quarter Sessions for the alleged assault. I have great pleasure in informing the public that Mr. Deller has not had to bear the expenses in this case himself; but that they have been borne by his neighbours, very much to the credit of those neighbours. I hear of an affair between the Duke of Buckingham and a Mr. Bird, who resides in this neighbourhood. If I had had time I should have gone to see Mr. Bird, of whose treatment I have heard a great deal, and an account of which treatment ought to be brought before the public. It is very natural for the Duke of Buckingham to wish to preserve that game which he calls his hobby-horse; it is very natural for him to delight in his hobby; but hobbies, my Lord Duke, ought to be gentle, inoffensive, perfectly harmless little creatures. They ought not to be suffered to kick and fling about them: they ought not to be rough-shod, and, above all things, they ought not to be great things like those which are ridden by the Life-guards: and, like them, be suffered to dance, and caper, and trample poor devils of farmers under foot. Have your hobbies, my Lords of the Soil, but let them be gentle; in short, let them be hobbies in character with the commons and forests, and not the high-fed hobbies from the barracks at Knightsbridge, such as put poor Mr. Sheriff Waithman’s life in jeopardy. That the game should be preserved, every one that knows anything of the country will allow; but every man of any sense must see that it cannot be preserved by sheer force. It must be rather through love than through fear; rather through good-will than through ill-will. If the thing be properly managed, there will be plenty of game without any severity towards any good man. Mr. Deller’s case was so plain: it was so monstrous to think that a man was to be punished for being on his own ground in pursuit of wild animals that he himself had raised: this was so monstrous, that it was only necessary to name it to excite the indignation of the country. And Mr. Deller has, by his spirit and perseverance, by the coolness and the good sense which he has shown throughout the whole of this proceeding, merited the commendation of every man who is not in his heart an oppressor. It occurs to me to ask here, who it is that finally pays for those “counsels’ opinions” which Poulter and Wright said they took in the case of Mr. Deller; because, if these counsels’ opinions are paid for by the county, and if a Justice of the Peace can take as many counsels’ opinions as he chooses, I should like to know what fellow, who chooses to put on a bobtail wig and call himself a lawyer, may not have a good living given to him by any crony Justice at the expense of the county. This never can be legal. It never can be binding on the county to pay for these counsels’ opinions. However, leaving this to be enquired into another time, we have here, in Mr. Deller’s case, an instance of the worth of counsels’ opinions. Mr. Deller went to the two Justices, showed them the Register with the Act of Parliament in it, called upon them to act agreeably to that Act of Parliament; but they chose to take counsels’ opinion first. The two “counsel,” the two “lawyers,” the two “learned friends,” told them that they were right in rejecting the application of Mr. Deller and in binding him over for the assault; and, after all, this Grand Jury threw out the Bill, and in that throwing out showed that they thought the counsels’ opinions not worth a straw.

Being upon the subject of matter connected with the conduct of these Parson-Justices, I will here mention what is now going on in Hampshire respecting the accounts of the Treasurer of the County. At the last Quarter Sessions, or at a Meeting of the Magistrates previous to the opening of the Sessions, there was a discussion relative to this matter. The substance of which appears to have been this; that the Treasurer, Mr. George Hollis, whose accounts had been audited, approved of, and passed every year by the Magistrates, is in arrear to the county to the amount of about four thousand pounds. Sir Thomas Baring appears to have been the great stickler against Mr. Hollis, who was but feebly defended by his friends. The Treasurer of a county is compelled to find securities. These securities have become exempted, in consequence of the annual passing of the accounts by the Magistrates! Nothing can be more just than this exemption. I am security, suppose, for a Treasurer. The Magistrates do not pass his accounts on account of a deficiency. I make good the deficiency. But the Magistrates are not to go on year after year passing his accounts, and then, at the end of several years, come and call upon me to make good the deficiencies. Thus say the securities of Mr. Hollis. The Magistrates, in fact, are to blame. One of the Magistrates, a Reverend Mr. Orde, said that the Magistrates were more to blame than the Treasurer; and really I think so too; for, though Mr. Hollis has been a tool for many many years, of Old George Rose and the rest of that crew, it seems impossible to believe that he could have intended anything dishonest, seeing that the detection arose out of an account published by himself in the newspaper, which account he need not have published until three months later than the time when he did publish it. This is, as he himself states, the best possible proof that he was unconscious of any error or any deficiency. The fact appears to be this; that Mr. Hollis, who has for many years been Under Sheriff as well as Treasurer of the County, who holds several other offices, and who has, besides, had large pecuniary transactions with his bankers, has for years had his accounts so blended that he has not known how this money belonging to the county stood. His own statement shows that it was all a mass of confusion. The errors, he says, have arisen entirely from the negligence of his clerks, and from causes which produced a confusion in his accounts. This is the fact; but he has been in good fat offices too long not to have made a great many persons think that his offices would be better in their hands; and they appear resolved to oust him. I, for my part, am glad of it; for I remember his coming up to me in the Grand Jury Chamber, just after the people at St. Stephen’s had passed Power-of-Imprisonment Bill in 1817; I remember his coming up to me as the Under Sheriff of Willis, the man that we now call Flemming, who has begun to build a house at North Stoneham; I remember his coming up to me, and with all the base sauciness of a thorough-paced Pittite, telling me to disperse or he would take me into custody! I remember this of Mr. Hollis, and I am therefore glad that calamity has befallen him; but I must say that after reading his own account of the matter; after reading the debate of the Magistrates; and after hearing the observations and opinions of well-informed and impartial persons in Hampshire who dislike Mr. Hollis as much as I do; I must say that I think him perfectly clear of all intention to commit anything like fraud, or to make anything worthy of the name of false account; and I am convinced that this affair, which will now prove extremely calamitous to him, might have been laughed at by him at the time when wheat was fifteen shillings a bushel. This change in the affairs of the Government; this penury now experienced by the Pittites at Whitehall, reaches, in its influence, to every part of the country. The Barings are now the great men in Hampshire. They were not such in the days of George Rose while George was able to make the people believe that it was necessary to give their money freely to preserve the “blessed comforts of religion.” George Rose would have thrown his shield over Mr. Hollis; his broad and brazen shield. In Hampshire the Bishop, too, is changed. The present is doubtless as pious as the last, every bit; and has the same Bishop-like views; but it is not the same family; it is not the Garniers and Poulters and Norths and De Grays and Haygarths; it is not precisely the same set who have the power in their hands. Things, therefore, take another turn. The Pittite jolter-heads are all broken-backed; and the Barings come forward with their well-known weight of metal. It was exceedingly unfortunate for Mr. Hollis that Sir Thomas Baring happened to be against him. However, the thing will do good altogether. The county is placed in a pretty situation: its Treasurer has had his accounts regularly passed by the Magistrates; and these Magistrates come at last and discover that they have for a long time been passing accounts that they ought not to pass. These Magistrates have exempted the securities of Mr. Hollis, but not a word do they say about making good the deficiencies. What redress, then, have the people of the county? They have no redress, unless they can obtain it by petitioning the Parliament; and if they do not petition, if they do not state their case, and that boldly too, they deserve everything that can befall them from similar causes. I am astonished at the boldness of the Magistrates. I am astonished that they should think of calling Mr. Hollis to account without being prepared for rendering an account of their own conduct. However, we shall see what they will do in the end. And when we have seen that, we shall see whether the county will rest quietly under the loss which it is likely to sustain.

I must now go back to Itchen Abas, where, in the farm-yard of a farmer, Courtenay, I saw another wheat-rick. From Itchen Abas I came up the valley to Itchen Stoke. Soon after that I crossed the Itchen river, came out into the Alresford turnpike road, and came on towards Alresford, having the valley now upon my left. If the hay be down all the way to Southampton in the same manner that it is along here, there are thousands of acres of hay rotting on the sides of this Itchen river. Most of the meadows are watered artificially. The crops of grass are heavy, and they appear to have been cut precisely in the right time to be spoiled. Coming on towards Alresford, I saw a gentleman (about a quarter of a mile beyond Alresford) coming out of his gate with his hat off, looking towards the south-west, as if to see what sort of weather it was likely to be. This was no other than Mr. Rolleston or Rawlinson, who, it appears, has a box and some land here. This gentleman was, when I lived in Hampshire, one of those worthy men, who, in the several counties of England, executed “without any sort of remuneration” such a large portion of that justice which is the envy of surrounding nations and admiration of the world. We are often told, especially in Parliament, of the disinterestedness of these persons; of their worthiness, their piety, their loyalty, their excellent qualities of all sorts, but particularly of their disinterestedness, in taking upon them the office of Justice of the Peace; spending so much time, taking so much trouble, and all for nothing at all, but for the pure love of their King and country. And the worst of it is, that our Ministers impose upon this disinterestedness and generosity; and, as in the case of Mr. Rawlinson, at the end of, perhaps, a dozen years of services voluntarily rendered to “King and country,” they force him, sorely against his will, no doubt, to become a Police Magistrate in London! To be sure there are five or six hundred pounds a-year of public money attached to this; but what are these paltry pounds to a “country gentleman,” who so disinterestedly rendered us services for so many years? Hampshire is fertile in persons of this disinterested stamp. There is a ’Squire Greme, who lives across the country, not many miles from the spot where I saw “Mr. Justice” Rawlinson. This ’Squire also has served the country for nothing during a great many years; and of late years, the ’Squire Junior, eager, apparently to emulate his sire, has become a distributor of stamps for this famous county of Hants! What sons ’Squire Rawlinson may have is more than I know at present, though I will endeavour to know it, and to find out whether they also be serving us. A great deal has been said about the debt of gratitude due from the people to the Justices of the Peace. An account, containing the names and places of abode of the Justices, and of the public money, or titles, received by them and by their relations; such an account would be a very useful thing. We should then know the real amount of this debt of gratitude. We shall see such an account by-and-by; and we should have seen it long ago if there had been, in a certain place, only one single man disposed to do his duty.

I came through Alresford about eight o’clock, having loitered a good deal in coming up the valley. After quitting Alresford you come (on the road towards Alton) to the village of Bishop’s Sutton; and then to a place called Ropley Dean, where there is a house or two. Just before you come to Ropley Dean, you see the beginning of the Valley of Itchen. The Itchen river falls into the salt water at Southampton. It rises, or rather has its first rise, just by the road side at Ropley Dean, which is at the foot of that very high land which lies between Alresford and Alton. All along by the Itchen river, up to its very source, there are meadows; and this vale of meadows, which is about twenty-five miles in length, and is in some places a mile wide, is, at the point of which I am now speaking, only about twice as wide as my horse is long! This vale of Itchen is worthy of particular attention. There are few spots in England more fertile or more pleasant; and none, I believe, more healthy. Following the bed of the river, or, rather, the middle of the vale, it is about five-and-twenty miles in length, from Ropley Dean to the village of South Stoneham, which is just above Southampton. The average width of the meadows is, I should think, a hundred rods at the least; and if I am right in this conjecture, the vale contains about five thousand acres of meadows, large part of which is regularly watered. The sides of the vale are, until you come down to within about six or eight miles of Southampton, hills or rising grounds of chalk, covered more or less thickly with loam. Where the hills rise up very steeply from the valley the fertility of the corn-lands is not so great; but for a considerable part of the way the corn-lands are excellent, and the farmhouses, to which those lands belong, are, for the far greater part, under covert of the hills on the edge of the valley. Soon after the rising of the stream, it forms itself into some capital ponds at Alresford. These, doubtless, were augmented by art, in order to supply Winchester with fish. The fertility of this vale, and of the surrounding country, is best proved by the fact that, besides the town of Alresford and that of Southampton, there are seventeen villages, each having its parish church, upon its borders. When we consider these things we are not surprised that a spot situated about half way down this vale should have been chosen for the building of a city, or that that city should have been for a great number of years a place of residence for the Kings of England.

Winchester, which is at present a mere nothing to what it once was, stands across the vale at a place where the vale is made very narrow by the jutting forward of two immense hills. From the point where the river passes through the city, you go, whether eastward or westward, a full mile up a very steep hill all the way. The city is, of course, in one of the deepest holes that can be imagined. It never could have been thought of as a place to be defended since the discovery of gunpowder; and, indeed, one would think that very considerable annoyance might be given to the inhabitants even by the flinging of the flint-stones from the hills down into the city.

At Ropley Dean, before I mounted the hill to come on towards Rotherham Park, I baited my horse. Here the ground is precisely like that at Ashmansworth on the borders of Berkshire, which, indeed, I could see from the ground of which I am now speaking. In coming up the hill, I had the house and farm of Mr. Duthy to my right. Seeing some very fine Swedish turnips, I naturally expected that they belonged to this gentleman, who is Secretary to the Agricultural Society of Hampshire; but I found that they belonged to a farmer Mayhew. The soil is, along upon this high land, a deep loam, bordering on a clay, red in colour, and pretty full of large, rough, yellow-looking stones, very much like some of the land in Huntingdonshire; but here is a bed of chalk under this. Everything is backward here. The wheat is perfectly green in most places; but it is everywhere pretty good. I have observed, all the way along, that the wheat is good upon the stiff, strong land. It is so here; but it is very backward. The greater part of it is full three weeks behind the wheat under Portsdown Hill. But few farmhouses come within my sight along here; but in one of them there was a wheat-rick, which is the third I have seen since I quitted the Wen. In descending from this high ground, in order to reach the village of East Tisted, which lies on the turnpike road from the Wen to Gosport through Alton, I had to cross Rotherham Park. On the right of the park, on a bank of land facing the north-east, I saw a very pretty farmhouse, having everything in excellent order, with fine corn-fields about it, and with a wheat-rick standing in the yard. This farm, as I afterwards found, belongs to the owner of Rotherham Park, who is also the owner of East Tisted, who has recently built a new house in the park, who has quite metamorphosed the village of Tisted within these eight years, who has, indeed, really and truly improved the whole country just round about here, whose name is Scot, well known as a brickmaker at North End, Fulham, and who has, in Hampshire, supplanted a Norman of the name of Powlet. The process by which this transfer has taken place is visible enough, to all eyes but the eyes of the jolterheads. Had there been no Debt created to crush liberty in France and to keep down reformers in England, Mr. Scot would not have had bricks to burn to build houses for the Jews and jobbers and other eaters of taxes; and the Norman Powlet would not have had to pay in taxes, through his own hands and those of his tenants and labourers, the amount of the estate at Tisted, first to be given to the Jews, jobbers, and tax-eaters, and then by them to be given to “’Squire Scot” for his bricks. However, it is not ’Squire Scot who has assisted to pass laws to make people pay double toll on a Sunday. ’Squire Scot had nothing to do with passing the New Game-laws and Old Ellenborough’s Act; ’Squire Scot never invented the New Trespass law, in virtue of which John Cockbain of Whitehaven in the county of Cumberland was, by two clergymen and three other magistrates of that county, sentenced to pay one half-penny for damages and seven shillings costs, for going upon a field, the property of William, Earl of Lonsdale. In the passing of this Act, which was one of the first passed in the present reign, ’Squire Scot, the brickmaker, had nothing to do. Go on, good ’Squire, thrust out some more of the Normans: with the fruits of the augmentations which you make to the Wen, go, and take from them their mansions, parks, and villages!

At Tisted I crossed the turnpike road before mentioned, and entered a lane which, at the end of about four miles, brought me to this village of Selborne. My readers will recollect that I mentioned this Selborne when I was giving an account of Hawkley Hanger, last fall. I was desirous of seeing this village, about which I have read in the book of Mr. White, and which a reader has been so good as to send me. From Tisted I came generally up hill till I got within half a mile of this village, when, all of a sudden, I came to the edge of a hill, looked down over all the larger vale of which the little vale of this village makes a part. Here Hindhead and Black-down Hill came full in my view. When I was crossing the forest in Sussex, going from Worth to Horsham, these two great hills lay to my west and north-west. To-day I am got just on the opposite side of them, and see them, of course, towards the east and the south-east, while Leith Hill lies away towards the north-east. This hill, from which you descend down into Selborne, is very lofty; but, indeed, we are here amongst some of the highest hills in the island, and amongst the sources of rivers. The hill over which I have come this morning sends the Itchen river forth from one side of it, and the river Wey, which rises near Alton, from the opposite side of it. Hindhead which lies before me, sends, as I observed upon a former occasion, the Arun forth towards the south and a stream forth towards the north, which meets the river Wey, somewhere above Godalming. I am told that the springs of these two streams rise in the Hill of Hindhead, or, rather, on one side of the hill, at not many yards from each other. The village of Selborne is precisely what it is described by Mr. White. A straggling irregular street, bearing all the marks of great antiquity, and showing, from its lanes and its vicinage generally, that it was once a very considerable place. I went to look at the spot where Mr. White supposes the convent formerly stood. It is very beautiful. Nothing can surpass in beauty these dells and hillocks and hangers, which last are so steep that it is impossible to ascend them, except by means of a serpentine path. I found here deep hollow ways, with beds and sides of solid white stone; but not quite so white and so solid, I think, as the stone which I found in the roads at Hawkley. The churchyard of Selborne is most beautifully situated. The land is good, all about it. The trees are luxuriant and prone to be lofty and large. I measured the yew-tree in the churchyard, and found the trunk to be, according to my measurement, twenty-three feet, eight inches, in circumference. The trunk is very short, as is generally the case with yew-trees; but the head spreads to a very great extent, and the whole tree, though probably several centuries old, appears to be in perfect health. Here are several hop-plantations in and about this village; but for this once the prayers of the over-production men will be granted, and the devil of any hops there will be. The bines are scarcely got up the poles; the bines and the leaves are black, nearly, as soot; full as black as a sooty bag or dingy coal-sack, and covered with lice. It is a pity that these hop-planters could not have a parcel of Spaniards and Portuguese to louse their hops for them. Pretty devils to have liberty, when a favourite recreation of the Donna is to crack the lice in the head of the Don! I really shrug up my shoulders thinking of the beasts. Very different from such is my landlady here at Selborne, who, while I am writing my notes, is getting me a rasher of bacon, and has already covered the table with a nice clean cloth. I have never seen such quantities of grapes upon any vines as I see upon the vines in this village, badly pruned as all the vines have been. To be sure, this is a year for grapes, such, I believe, as has been seldom known in England, and the cause is the perfect ripening of the wood by the last beautiful summer. I am afraid, however, that the grapes come in vain; for this summer has been so cold, and is now so wet, that we can hardly expect grapes which are not under glass to ripen. As I was coming into this village, I observed to a farmer who was standing at his gateway, that people ought to be happy here, for that God had done everything for them. His answer was, that he did not believe there was a more unhappy place in England: for that there were always quarrels of some sort or other going on. This made me call to mind the King’s proclamation, relative to a reward for discovering the person who had recently shot at the parson of this village. This parson’s name is Cobbold, and it really appears that there was a shot fired through his window. He has had law-suits with the people; and I imagine that it was these to which the farmer alluded. The hops are of considerable importance to the village, and their failure must necessarily be attended with consequences very inconvenient to the whole of a population so small as this. Upon inquiry, I find that the hops are equally bad at Alton, Froyle, Crondall, and even at Farnham. I saw them bad in Sussex; I hear that they are bad in Kent; so that hop-planters, at any rate, will be, for once, free from the dreadful evils of abundance. A correspondent asks me what is meant by the statements which he sees in the Register, relative to the hop-duty? He sees it, he says, continually falling in amount; and he wonders what this means. The thing has not, indeed, been properly explained. It is a gamble; and it is hardly right for me to state, in a publication like the Register, anything relative to a gamble. However, the case is this: a taxing system is necessarily a system of gambling; a system of betting; stock-jobbing is no more than a system of betting, and the wretched dogs that carry on the traffic are little more, except that they are more criminal, than the waiters at an E O Table, or the markers at billiards. The hop duty is so much per pound. The duty was imposed at two separate times. One part of it, therefore, is called the Old Duty, and the other part the New Duty. The old duty was a penny to the pound of hops. The amount of this duty, which can always be ascertained at the Treasury as soon as the hopping season is over, is the surest possible guide in ascertaining the total amount of the growth of hops for the year. If, for instance, the duty were to amount to no more than eight shillings and fourpence, you would be certain that only a hundred pounds of hops had been grown during the year. Hence a system of gambling precisely like the gambling in the funds. I bet you that the duty will not exceed so much. The duty has sometimes exceeded two hundred thousand pounds. This year it is supposed that it will not exceed twenty, thirty, or forty thousand. The gambling fellows are betting all this time; and it is, in fact, an account of the betting which is inserted in the Register.

This vile paper-money and funding-system; this system of Dutch descent, begotten by Bishop Burnet, and born in hell; this system has turned everything into a gamble. There are hundreds of men who live by being the agents to carry on gambling. They reside here in the Wen; many of the gamblers live in the country; they write up to their gambling agent, whom they call their stockbroker; he gambles according to their order; and they receive the profit or stand to the loss. Is it possible to conceive a viler calling than that of an agent for the carrying on of gambling? And yet the vagabonds call themselves gentlemen; or, at least, look upon themselves as the superiors of those who sweep the kennels. In like manner is the hop-gamble carried on. The gambling agents in the Wen make the bets for the gamblers in the country; and, perhaps, millions are betted during the year, upon the amount of a duty, which, at the most, scarcely exceeds a quarter of a million. In such a state of things how are you to expect young men to enter on a course of patient industry? How are you to expect that they will seek to acquire fortune and fame by study or by application of any kind?

Looking back over the road that I have come to-day, and perceiving the direction of the road going from this village in another direction, I perceive that this is a very direct road from Winchester to Farnham. The road, too, appears to have been, from ancient times, sufficiently wide; and when the Bishop of Winchester selected this beautiful spot whereon to erect a monastery, I dare say the roads along here were some of the best in the country.

Thursley (Surrey),
Thursday, 7th August.