I saw, on my way through the down-countries, hundreds of acres of ploughed land in shelves. What I mean is, the side of a steep hill made into the shape of a stairs, only the rising parts more sloping than those of a stairs, and deeper in proportion. The side of the hill, in its original form, was too steep to be ploughed, or, even, to be worked with a spade. The earth, as soon as moved, would have rolled down the hill; and besides, the rains would have soon washed down all the surface earth, and have left nothing for plants of any sort to grow in. Therefore the sides of hills, where the land was sufficiently good, and where it was wanted for the growing of corn, were thus made into a sort of steps or shelves, and the horizontal parts (representing the parts of the stairs that we put our feet upon) were ploughed and sowed, as they generally are, indeed, to this day. Now no man, not even the hireling Chalmers, will have the impudence to say that these shelves, amounting to thousands and thousands of acres in Wiltshire alone, were not made by the hand of man. It would be as impudent to contend that the churches were formed by the flood, as to contend that these shelves were formed by that cause. Yet thus the Scotch scribes must contend; or they must give up all their assertions about the ancient beggary and want of population in England; for, as in the case of the churches, what were these shelves made for? And could they be made at all without a great abundance of hands? These shelves are everywhere to be seen throughout the down-countries of Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall; and besides this, large tracts of land, amounting to millions of acres, perhaps, which are now downs, heaths, or woodlands, still, if you examine closely, bear the marks of the plough. The fact is, I dare say, that the country has never varied much in the gross amount of its population; but formerly the people were pretty evenly spread over the country, instead of being, as the greater part of them now are, collected together in great masses, where, for the greater part, the idlers live on the labour of the industrious.
In quitting Devizes yesterday morning I saw, just on the outside of the town, a monstrous building, which I took for a barrack; but upon asking what it was, I found it was one of those other marks of the Jubilee Reign; namely, a most magnificent gaol! It seemed to me sufficient to hold one-half of the able-bodied men in the county! And it would do it too, and do it well! Such a system must come to an end, and the end must be dreadful. As I came on the road, for the first three or four miles, I saw great numbers of labourers either digging potatoes for their Sunday’s dinner, or coming home with them, or going out to dig them. The land-owners, or occupiers, let small pieces of land to the labourers, and these they cultivate with the spade for their own use. They pay in all cases a high rent, and in most cases an enormous one. The practice prevails all the way from Warminster to Devizes, and from Devizes to nearly this place (Highworth). The rent is, in some places, a shilling a rod, which is, mind, 160s. or 8l. an acre! Still the poor creatures like to have the land: they work in it at their spare hours; and on Sunday mornings early: and the overseers, sharp as they may be, cannot ascertain precisely how much they get out of their plat of ground. But, good God! what a life to live! What a life to see people live; to see this sight in our own country, and to have the base vanity to boast of that country, and to talk of our “constitution” and our “liberties,” and to affect to pity the Spaniards, whose working people live like gentlemen, compared with our miserable creatures. Again I say, give me the Inquisition and well-healed cheeks and ribs, rather than “civil and religious liberty,” and skin and bone. But the fact is that, where honest and laborious men can be compelled to starve quietly, whether all at once or by inches, with old wheat ricks, and fat cattle under their eye, it is a mockery to talk of their “liberty,” of any sort; for the sum total of their state is this, they have “liberty” to choose between death by starvation (quick or slow) and death by the halter!
Between Warminster and Westbury I saw thirty or more men digging a great field of I dare say twelve acres. I thought, “surely that ‘humane,’ half-mad fellow, Owen, is not got at work here; that Owen who, the feelosofers tell us, went to the Continent to find out how to prevent the increase of the labourers’ children.” No: it was not Owen: it was the overseer of the parish, who had set these men to dig up this field previously to its being sown with wheat. In short, it was a digging instead of a ploughing. The men, I found upon inquiry, got 9d. a day for their work. Plain digging in the market gardens near London is, I believe, 3d. or 4d. a rod. If these poor men, who were chiefly weavers or spinners from Westbury, or had come home to their parish from Bradford or Trowbridge; if they digged six rods each in a day, and fairly did it, they must work well. This would be 1½d. a rod, or 20s. an acre; and that is as cheap as ploughing, and four times as good. But how much better to give the men higher wages, and let them do more work? If married, how are their miserable families to live on 4s. 6d. a week? And, if single, they must and will have more, either by poaching, or by taking without leave. At any rate, this is better than the road work: I mean better for those who pay the rates; for here is something which they get for the money that they give to the poor; whereas, in the case of the road-work, the money given in relief is generally wholly so much lost to the rate-payer. What a curious spectacle this is: the manufactories throwing the people back again upon the land! It is not above eighteen months ago that the Scotch FEELOSOFERS, and especially Dr. Black, were calling upon the farm labourers to become manufacturers! I remonstrated with the Doctor at the time; but he still insisted that such a transfer of hands was the only remedy for the distress in the farming districts. However (and I thank God for it), the feelosofers have enough to do at home now; for the poor are crying for food in dear, cleanly, warm, fruitful Scotland herself, in spite of a’ the Hamiltons and a’ the Wallaces and a’ the Maxwells and a’ the Hope Johnstones and a’ the Dundases and a’ the Edinbro’ Reviewers and a’ the Broughams and Birckbecks. In spite of all these, the poor of Scotland are now helping themselves, or about to do it, for want of the means of purchasing food.
From Devizes I came to the vile rotten borough of Calne leaving the park and house of Lord Lansdown to my left. This man’s name is Petty, and, doubtless, his ancestors “came in with the Conqueror;” for Petty is, unquestionably, a corruption of the French word Petit; and in this case there appears to have been not the least degeneracy; a thing rather rare in these days. There is a man whose name was Grimstone (that is, to a certainty, Grindstone), who is now called Lord Verulam, and who, according to his pedigree in the Peerage, is descended from a “standard-bearer of the Conqueror!” Now, the devil a bit is there the word Grindstone, or Grimstone, in the Norman language. Well, let them have all that their French descent can give them, since they will insist upon it, that they are not of this country. So help me God, I would, if I could, give them Normandy to live in, and, if the people would let them, to possess.
This Petty family began, or, at least, made its first grand push, in poor, unfortunate Ireland! The history of that push would amuse the people of Wiltshire! Talking of Normans and high-blood, puts me in mind of Beckford and his “Abbey”! The public knows that the tower of this thing fell down some time ago. It was built of Scotch-fir and cased with stone! In it there was a place which the owner had named, “The Gallery of Edward III., the frieze of which (says the account) contains the achievements of seventy-eight Knights of the Garter, from whom the owner is lineally descended”! Was there ever vanity and impudence equal to these! the negro-driver brag of his high blood! I dare say that the old powder-man, Farquhar, had as good pretension; and I really should like to know whether he took out Beckford’s name and put in his own, as the lineal descendant of the seventy-eight Knights of the Garter.
I could not come through that villanous hole, Calne, without cursing Corruption at every step; and when I was coming by an ill-looking, broken-winded place, called the town-hall, I suppose, I poured out a double dose of execration upon it. “Out of the frying-pan into the fire;” for in about ten miles more I came to another rotten-hole, called Wotton-Basset! This also is a mean, vile place, though the country all round it is very fine. On this side of Wotton-Basset I went out of my way to see the church at Great Lyddiard, which in the parliamentary return is called Lyddiard Tregoose. In my old map it is called Tregose; and to a certainty the word was Tregrosse; that is to say, très grosse, or very big. Here is a good old mansion-house and large walled-in garden and a park belonging, they told me, to Lord Bolingbroke. I went quite down to the house, close to which stands the large and fine church. It appears to have been a noble place; the land is some of the finest in the whole country; the trees show that the land is excellent; but all, except the church, is in a state of irrepair and apparent neglect, if not abandonment. The parish is large, the living is a rich one, it is a Rectory; but though the incumbent has the great and small tithes, he, in his return, tells the Parliament that the parsonage-house is “worn out and incapable of repair!” And observe that Parliament lets him continue to sack the produce of the tithes and the glebe, while they know the parsonage-house to be crumbling-down, and while he has the impudence to tell them that he does not reside in it, though the law says that he shall! And while this is suffered to be, a poor man may be transported for being in pursuit of a hare! What coals, how hot, how red, is this flagitious system preparing for the backs of its supporters!
In coming from Wotton-Basset to Highworth, I left Swindon a few miles away to my left, and came by the village of Blunsdon. All along here I saw great quantities of hops in the hedges, and very fine hops, and I saw at a village called Stratton, I think it was, the finest campanula that I ever saw in my life. The main stalk was more than four feet high, and there were four stalks, none of which were less than three feet high. All through the country, poor, as well as rich, are very neat in their gardens, and very careful to raise a great variety of flowers. At Blunsdon I saw a clump, or, rather, a sort of orchard, of as fine walnut-trees as I ever beheld, and loaded with walnuts. Indeed I have seen great crops of walnuts all the way from London. From Blunsdon to this place is but a short distance, and I got here about two or three o’clock. This is a cheese country; some corn, but, generally speaking, it is a country of dairies. The sheep here are of the large kind; a sort of Leicester sheep, and the cattle chiefly for milking. The ground is a stiff loam at top, and a yellowish stone under. The houses are almost all built of stone. It is a tolerably rich, but by no means a gay and pretty country. Highworth has a situation corresponding with its name. On every side you go up-hill to it, and from it you see to a great distance all round and into many counties.
Highworth, Wednesday, 6th Sept.
The great object of my visit to the Northern border of Wiltshire will be mentioned when I get to Malmsbury, whither I intend to go to-morrow, or next day, and thence through Gloucestershire, in my way to Herefordshire. But an additional inducement was to have a good long political gossip with some excellent friends, who detest the borough-ruffians as cordially as I do, and who, I hope, wish as anxiously to see their fall effected, and no matter by what means. There was, however, arising incidentally a third object, which, had I known of its existence, would of itself have brought me from the south-west to the north-east corner of this county. One of the parishes adjoining to Highworth is that of Coleshill, which is in Berkshire, and which is the property of Lord Radnor, or Lord Folkestone, and is the seat of the latter. I was at Coleshill twenty-two or three years ago, and twice at later periods. In 1824 Lord Folkestone bought some Locust trees of me; and he has several times told me that they were growing very finely; but I did not know that they had been planted at Coleshill; and, indeed, I always thought that they had been planted somewhere in the south of Wiltshire. I now found, however, that they were growing at Coleshill, and yesterday I went to see them, and was, for many reasons, more delighted with the sight than with any that I have beheld for a long while. These trees stand in clumps of 200 trees in each, and the trees being four feet apart each way. These clumps make part of a plantation of 30 or forty acres, perhaps 50 acres. The rest of the ground; that is to say, the ground where the clumps of Locusts do not stand, was, at the same time that the Locust clumps were, planted with chestnuts, elms, ashes, oaks, beeches, and other trees. These trees were stouter and taller than the Locust trees were, when the plantation was made. Yet, if you were now to place yourself at a mile’s distance from the plantation, you would not think that there was any plantation at all except the clumps. The fact is that the other trees have, as they generally do, made as yet but very little progress; are not, I should think, upon an average, more than 4½ feet, or 5 feet, high; while the clumps of Locusts are from 12 to 20 feet high; and I think that I may safely say that the average height is sixteen feet. They are the most beautiful clumps of trees that I ever saw in my life. They were indeed planted by a clever and most trusty servant, who, to say all that can be said in his praise, is, that he is worthy of such a master as he has.
The trees are, indeed, in good land, and have been taken good care of; but the other trees are in the same land; and, while they have been taken the same care of since they were planted, they had not, I am sure, worse treatment before planting than these Locust trees had. At the time when I sold them to my Lord Folkestone, they were in a field at Worth, near Crawley, in Sussex. The history of their transport is this. A Wiltshire wagon came to Worth for the trees on the 14th of March 1824. The wagon had been stopped on the way by the snow; and though the snow was gone off before the trees were put upon the wagon, it was very cold, and there were sharp frosts and harsh winds. I had the trees taken up, and tied up in hundreds by withes, like so many fagots. They were then put in and upon the wagon, we doing our best to keep the roots inwards in the loading, so as to prevent them from being exposed but as little as possible to the wind, sun, and frost. We put some fern on the top, and, where we could, on the sides; and we tied on the load with ropes, just as we should have done with a load of fagots. In this way they were several days upon the road; and I do not know how long it was before they got safe into the ground again. All this shows how hardy these trees are, and it ought to admonish gentlemen to make pretty strict enquiries, when they have gardeners, or bailiffs, or stewards, under whose hands Locust trees die, or do not thrive.