June 12.
The Season, in the Country.
Sheep-Shearing.
Sheep-shearing, one of the great rural labours of this delightful month, if not so full of variety as the hay-harvest, and so creative of matter for those “in search of the picturesque” (though it is scarcely less so), is still more lively, animated, and spirit-stirring; and it besides retains something of the character of a rural holiday, which rural matters need, in this age and in this country, more than ever they did, since it became a civilized and happy one. The sheep-shearings are the only stated periods of the year at which we hear of festivities, and gatherings together of the lovers and practisers of English husbandry; for even the harvest-home itself is fast sinking into disuse, as a scene of mirth and revelry, from the want of being duly encouraged and partaken in by the great ones of the earth; without whose countenance and example it is questionable whether eating, drinking, and sleeping, would not soon become vulgar practices, and be discontinued accordingly! In a state of things like this, the Holkham and Woburn sheep-shearings do more honour to their promoters than all their wealth can purchase and all their titles convey. But we are getting beyond our soundings: honours, titles, and “states of things,” are what we do not pretend to meddle with, especially when the pretty sights and sounds preparatory to and attendant on sheep-shearing, as a mere rural employment, are waiting to be noticed.
Now, then, on the first really summer’s day, the whole flock being collected on the higher bank of the pool formed at the abrupt winding of the nameless mill-stream, at the point, perhaps, where the little wooden bridge runs slantwise across it, and the attendants being stationed waist-deep in the midwater, the sheep are, after a silent but obstinate struggle or two, plunged headlong, one by one, from the precipitous bank; when, after a moment of confused splashing, their heavy fleeces float them along, and their feet, moving by an instinctive art which every creature but man possesses, guide them towards the opposite shallows, that steam and glitter in the sunshine. Midway, however, they are fain to submit to the rude grasp of the relentless washer, which they undergo with as ill a grace as preparatory schoolboys do the same operation. Then, gaining the opposite shore heavily, they stand for a moment till the weight of water leaves them, and, shaking their streaming sides, go bleating away towards their fellows on the adjacent green, wondering within themselves what has happened.
The shearing is no less lively and picturesque, and no less attended by all the idlers of the village as spectators. The shearers, seated in rows beside the crowded pens, with the seemingly inanimate load of fleece in their laps, and bending intently over their work; the occasional whetting and clapping of the shears; the neatly-attired housewives, waiting to receive the fleeces; the smoke from the tar-kettle, ascending through the clear air; the shorn sheep escaping, one by one, from their temporary bondage, and trotting away towards their distant brethren, bleating all the while for their lambs, that do not know them; all this, with its ground of universal green, and finished every-where by its leafy distances, except where the village spire intervenes, forms together a living picture, pleasanter to look upon than words can speak, but still pleasanter to think of, when that is the nearest approach you can make to it.[210]
Chronology.
On this day, in the year 1734, the duke of Berwick, while visiting the trenches at the siege of Philipsburgh, near Spire, in Germany, was killed, standing between his two sons by a cannon-ball. He was the illegitimate son of the duke of York, afterwards James II., whom he accompanied in his flight from England, in 1688. His mother was Arabella Churchill, maid of honour to the duchess of York, and sister to the renowned Marlborough.