From Avening I came on through Nailsworth, Woodchester, and Rodborough, to this place. These villages lie on the sides of a narrow and deep valley, with a narrow stream of water running down the middle of it, and this stream turns the wheels of a great many mills and sets of machinery for the making of woollen-cloth. The factories begin at Avening, and are scattered all the way down the valley. There are steam-engines as well as water powers. The work and the trade is so flat that in, I should think, much more than a hundred acres of ground which I have seen to-day covered with rails or racks for the drying of cloth, I do not think that I have seen one single acre where the racks had cloth upon them. The workmen do not get half wages; great numbers are thrown on the parish; but overseers and magistrates in this part of England do not presume that they are to leave anybody to starve to death; there is law here; this is in England, and not in “the North,” where those who ought to see that the poor do not suffer talk of their dying with hunger as Irish ’Squires do; aye, and applaud them for their patient resignation!
The Gloucestershire people have no notion of dying with hunger; and it is with great pleasure that I remark that I have seen no woe-worn creature this day. The sub-soil here is a yellowish ugly stone. The houses are all built with this; and, it being ugly, the stone is made white by a wash of some sort or other. The land on both sides of the valley, and all down the bottom of it, has plenty of trees on it; it is chiefly pasture land, so that the green and the white colours, and the form and great variety of the ground, and the water and altogether make this a very pretty ride. Here are a series of spots, every one of which a lover of landscapes would like to have painted. Even the buildings of the factories are not ugly. The people seem to have been constantly well off. A pig in almost every cottage sty; and that is the infallible mark of a happy people. At present, indeed, this valley suffers; and though cloth will always be wanted, there will yet be much suffering even here, while at Uly and other places they say that the suffering is great indeed.
Huntley,
Between Gloucester and Ross.
From Stroud I came up to Pitchcomb, leaving Painswick on my right. From the lofty hill at Pitchcomb I looked down into that great flat and almost circular vale, of which the city of Gloucester is in the centre. To the left I saw the Severn, become a sort of arm of the sea; and before me I saw the hills that divide this county from Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The hill is a mile down. When down, you are amongst dairy-farms and orchards all the way to Gloucester, and this year the orchards, particularly those of pears, are greatly productive. I intended to sleep at Gloucester, as I had, when there, already come twenty-five miles, and as the fourteen, which remained for me to go in order to reach Bollitree, in Herefordshire, would make about nine more than either I or my horse had a taste for. But when I came to Gloucester I found that I should run a risk of having no bed if I did not bow very low and pay very high; for what should there be here but one of those scandalous and beastly fruits of the system called a “Music-Meeting!” Those who founded the Cathedrals never dreamed, I dare say, that they would have been put to such uses as this! They are, upon these occasions, made use of as Opera-Houses; and I am told that the money which is collected goes, in some shape or another, to the Clergy of the Church, or their widows, or children, or something. These assemblages of player-folks, half-rogues and half-fools, began with the small paper-money; and with it they will go. They are amongst the profligate pranks which idleness plays when fed by the sweat of a starving people. From this scene of prostitution and of pocket-picking I moved off with all convenient speed, but not before the ostler made me pay 9d. for merely letting my horse stand about ten minutes, and not before he had begun to abuse me for declining, though in a very polite manner, to make him a present in addition to the 9d. How he ended I do not know; for I soon set the noise of the shoes of my horse to answer him. I got to this village, about eight miles from Gloucester, by five o’clock: it is now half past seven, and I am going to bed with an intention of getting to Bollitree (six miles only) early enough in the morning to catch my sons in bed if they play the sluggard.
Bollitree,
Wednesday, 13th Sept.
This morning was most beautiful. There has been rain here now, and the grass begins (but only begins) to grow. When I got within two hundred yards of Mr. Palmer’s I had the happiness to meet my son Richard, who said that he had been up an hour. As I came along I saw one of the prettiest sights in the flower way that I ever saw in my life. It was a little orchard; the grass in it had just taken a start, and was beautifully fresh; and very thickly growing amongst the grass was the purple flowered Colchicum in full bloom. They say that the leaves of this plant, which come out in the spring and die away in the summer, are poisonous to cattle if they eat much of them in the spring. The flower, if standing by itself, would be no great beauty; but contrasted thus with the fresh grass, which was a little shorter than itself, it was very beautiful.
Bollitree,
Saturday, 23rd Sept.
Upon my arrival here, which, as the reader has seen, was ten days ago, I had a parcel of letters to open, amongst which were a large lot from Correspondents, who had been good enough to set me right with regard to that conceited and impudent plagiarist, or literary thief, “Sir James Graham, Baronet of Netherby.” One correspondent says that I have reversed the rule of the Decalogue by visiting the sins of the son upon the father. Another tells me anecdotes about the “Magnus Apollo.” I hereby do the father justice by saying that, from what I have now heard of him, I am induced to believe that he would have been ashamed to commit flagrant acts of plagiarism, which the son has been guilty of. The whole of this plagiarist’s pamphlet is bad enough. Every part of it is contemptible; but the passage in which he says that there was “no man of any authority who did not under-rate the distress that would arise out of Peel’s Bill;” this passage merits a broom-stick at the hands of any Englishman that chooses to lay it on, and particularly from me.
As to crops in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, they have been very bad. Even the wheat here has been only a two-third part crop. The barley and oats really next to nothing. Fed off by cattle and sheep in many places, partly for want of grass and partly from their worthlessness. The cattle have been nearly starved in many places; and we hear the same from Worcestershire. In some places one of these beautiful calves (last spring calves) will be given for the wintering of another. Hay at Stroud was six pounds a ton: last year it was 3l. a ton: and yet meat and cheese are lower in price than they were last year. Mutton (I mean alive) was last year at this time 7½d.; it is now 6d. There has been in North Wilts and in Gloucestershire half the quantity of cheese made this year, and yet the price is lower than it was last year. Wool is half the last year’s price. There has, within these three weeks or a month, been a prodigious increase in the quantity of cattle food; the grass looks like the grass late in May; and the late and stubble-turnips (of which immense quantities have been sown) have grown very much, and promise large crops generally; yet lean sheep have, at the recent fairs, fallen in price; they have been lessening in price, while the facility of keeping them has been augmenting! Aye; but the paper-money has not been augmenting, notwithstanding the Branch-Bank at Gloucester! This bank is quite ready, they say, to take deposits; that is to say, to keep people’s spare money for them; but to lend them none, without such security as would get money, even from the claws of a miser. This trick is, then, what the French call a coup-manqué; or a missing of the mark. In spite of everything, as to the season, calculated to cause lean sheep to rise in price, they fell, I hear, at Wilton fair (near Salisbury) on the 12th instant, from 2s. to 3s. a head. And yesterday, 22nd Sept., at Newent fair, there was a fall since the last fair in this neighbourhood. Mr. Palmer sold, at this fair, sheep for 23s. a head, rather better than some which he sold at the same fair last year for 34s. a head: so that here is a falling off of a third! Think of the dreadful ruin, then, which must fall upon the renting farmers, whether they rent the land, or rent the money which enables them to call the land their own! The recent Order in Council has ruined many. I was, a few days after that Order reached us, in Wiltshire, in a rick yard, looking at the ricks, amongst which were two of beans. I asked the farmer how much the Order would take out of his pocket; and he said it had already taken out more than a hundred pounds! This is a pretty state of things for a man to live in! The winds are less uncertain than this calling of a farmer is now become, though it is a calling the affairs of which have always been deemed as little liable to accident as anything human.