The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

The nooks of the world which we visited in our last chapter lay in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire; we will now change the scene a little northward. Such secluded and original spots we might indeed readily undertake to discover in almost every county of England; but I can only give a few specimens from the great whole, and leave every one to look about him for the rest. Lancashire is famous for its immense manufactures, and consequent immense population. In ranging over its wild, bleak hills, we are presently made sensible of the vast difference between the character and habits of the working class, and the character and habits of the pastoral and agricultural districts. We have no longer those picturesque villages and cottages, half buried in their garden and orchard trees; no longer those home-crofts, with their old, tall hedges; no longer rows of beehives beneath their little thatched southern sheds; those rich fields and farm-houses, surrounded with wealth of corn-ricks, and herds and flocks. You have no longer that quiet and Arcadian-looking population; hedgers and ditchers, ploughmen and substantial farmers, who seem to keep through life the “peaceful tenor of their way,” in old English fulness and content. There may be indeed, and there are, such people scattered here and there; but they and their abodes are not of the class which gives the predominant character to the scenery. On the contrary, everywhere extend wild naked hills, in many places totally unreclaimed; in others, enclosed, but exhibiting all the signs of a neglected and spiritless husbandry; with stunted fences or stone walls; and fields sodden with wet from want of drainage, and consequently overgrown with rushes. Over these naked and desolate hills are scattered to their very tops, in all directions, the habitations of a swarming population of weavers; the people and their houses equally unparticipant of those features which delight the poet and the painter. The houses are erections of stone or brick, covered with glaring red tiles, as free from any attempt at beauty or ornament as possible. Without, where they have gardens, those gardens are as miserable and neglected as the fields; within, they are squalid and comfortless.

In some of these swarming villages, ay, and in the cottages of the large manufacturing towns too, you can scarcely see a window with whole panes of glass. In one house in the outskirts of Blackburn, and that, too, an alehouse, we counted in a window of sixty panes, eight-and-forty broken ones; and this window was of a pretty uniform character with its fellows, both in that house, and the neighbouring ones. It is not possible to conceive a more violent and melancholy contrast than that which the filth, the poverty, and forlornness of these weavers’ and spinners’ dwellings form to the neatness, comfort, and loveliness of the cottages of the peasantry in many other parts of the kingdom. Any man who had once been through this district, might again recognise the locality if he were taken thither blindfold, by the very smell of oatcake which floats about the villages, and the sound of the shuttles, with their eternal “latitat! latitat!” I ranged wide over the bleak hills in the neighbourhood of Padiham, Belthorne, Guide, and such places, and the numbers and aspect of the population filled me with astonishment. Through the long miserable streets of those villages, children and dogs were thick as motes in the sun. The boys and men with their hair shorn off, as with a pair of wool-shears, close to their heads, till it stood up staring and bristly, and yet left hanging long over their eyes, till it gave them a most villanous and hangman look. What makes those rough heads more conspicuous, is their being so frequently red; the testimony of nature to the ancient prevalence of the Dane on these hills. The men are besides long and bony; the women often of stalwart and masculine figure, and of a hardness of feature which gives them no claims to be ranked amongst the most dangerous of the “Lancashire witches.” Everywhere the rudeness of the rising generation is wonderful. Everywhere the stare of mingled ignorance and insolence meets you; everywhere a troop of lads is at your heels, with the clatter of their wooden clogs, crying—“Fellee, gies a hawpenny!”

In one village, and that too the celebrated Roman station of Ribchester, our chaise was pursued by swarms of these wooden-shod lads like swarms of flies, that were only beaten off for a moment to close in upon you again, and their sisters shewed equally the extravagance of rudeness in which they were suffered to grow up, by running out of the houses as we passed, and poking mops and brushes at the horses’ heads. No one attempted to restrain or rebuke them; and yet, what was odd enough, not one of the adult population offered you the least insult, but if you asked the way, gave you the most ready directions, and if you went into their houses, treated you with perfect civility, and shewed an affection for these wild brats that was honourable to their hearts, and wanted only directing by a better intelligence. The uncouthness of these poor people is not that of evil disposition, but of pressing poverty and continued neglect. As is generally the case, in the poorest houses were the largest families. Ten and eleven children in one small dirty hovel was no uncommon sight, actually covering the very floor till there seemed scarce room to sit down; and amid this crowd, the mother was generally busy washing, or baking oatcakes; and the father making the place resound with the “latitat, latitat” of his shuttle. One did not wonder, seeing this, that the poor creatures are glad to turn out the whole troop of children to play on the hills, the elder girls lugging the babies along with them.

The wildness into which some of these children in the more solitary parts of the country grow, is, I imagine, not to be surpassed in any of the back settlements of America. On the 5th of July, 1836, the day of that remarkable thunder-storm, which visited a great part of the kingdom with such fury, being driven into a cottage at the foot of Pendle by the coming on of this storm, and while standing at the door watching its progress, I observed the head of some human creature carefully protruded from the doorway of an adjoining shed, and as suddenly withdrawn on being observed. To ascertain what sort of person it belonged to, I went into the shed, but at first found it too dark to allow me to discover any thing. Presently, however, as objects became visible, I saw a little creature, apparently a girl of ten years old, reared very erectly against the opposite wall. On accosting her in a kind tone, and telling her to come forward, and not to be afraid, she advanced from the wall, and behold! there stood another little creature about the head shorter, whom she had been concealing. I asked the elder child whether this younger one was a girl. She answered—“Ne-a.” “Was it a boy?” “Ne-a.” “What! neither boy nor girl! was she herself a girl?” “Ne-a.” “What was it a boy that I was speaking to?” “Ne-a.” “What in the name of wonder were they then?” “We are childer.” “Childer! and was the woman in the house their mother?” “Ne-a.” “Who was she then?” “Ar Mam.” “O! your mam! and do you keep cows in this shed?” “Ne-a.” “What then?” “Bee-as.” In short, common English was quite unintelligible to these little creatures, and their appearance was as wild as their speech. They were two fine young creatures, nevertheless, especially the elder, whose form and face were full of that symmetry and free grace that are sometimes the growth of unrestrained nature, and would have delighted the sculptor or the painter. Their only clothing was a sort of little bodice with skirts, made of a reddish stuff, and rendered more picturesque by sundry patches of scarlet cloth, no doubt from their mother’s old cloak. Their heads, bosoms, and legs to the knees, were bare to all the influences of earth and heaven; and on giving them each a penny, they bounded away with the fleetness and elasticity of young roes. No doubt, the hills and the heaths, the wild flowers of summer and the swift waters of the glens, were the only live-long day companions of these children, who came home only to their oatmeal dinner, and a bed as simple as their garments. Imagine the violent change of life, by the sudden capture and confinement of these little English savages, in the night-and-day noise, labour, and foul atmosphere of the cotton purgatories!

In the immediate neighbourhood of towns, many of the swelling ranges of hills present a much more cultivated aspect, and delight the eye with their smooth, green, and flowing outlines; and the valleys almost everywhere, are woody, watered with clear rapid streams, and, in short, are beautiful. But along these rise up the tall chimneys of vast and innumerable factories, and even while looking on the palaces of the master manufacturers, with their woods and gardens, and shrubbery lawns around them, one cannot help thinking of all the horrors detailed before the Committees of the House of Commons respecting the Factory System; of the parentless and friendless little wretches, sent by wagon-loads from distant workhouses to these prisons of labour and despair; of the young frames crushed to the dust by incessant labour; of the beds into which one set of children got, as another set got out, so that they were said never to be cold the whole year round, till contagious fevers burst out and swept away by hundreds these little victims of Mammon’s ever-urging, never-ceasing wheel. Beautiful as are many of those wild glens and recesses where, before the introduction of steam, the dashing rivulet invited the cotton-spinners to erect their mills; and curious as the remains of those simple original factories are, with their one great water-wheel, which turned their spindles while there was water, but during the drought of summer quite as often stood still; yet one is haunted even there, amongst the shadows of fine old trees that throw their arms athwart streams dashing down their beds of solid rock, by the memory of little tender children who never knew pity or kindness, but laboured on and on, through noon and through midnight, till they slept and yet mechanically worked, and were often awaked only by the horrid machinery rending off their little limbs. In places like these, where now the old factories, and the large houses of the proprietors stand deserted, or are inhabited by troops of poor creatures, whose poverty makes them only appear the more desolate, we are told by such men as Mr. Fielden of Oldham, once a factory child himself, and now a great manufacturer, who dares to reveal the secrets of the prison-house, that little creatures have even committed suicide to escape from a life worse than ten deaths. And what a mighty system is this now become! What a perpetual and vast supply of human life and energy it requires, with all the facilities of improved machinery, with all the developed power of steam, and with all the growing thirst of wealth to urge it on! We are told that the state of the factories, and the children employed in them, is greatly improved; and I trust they are; but if there be any truth in the evidence given before the parliamentary committees, there is need of great amelioration yet; and it is when we recollect these things, how completely the labouring class has, in these districts, been regarded as mere machinery for the accumulation of enormous capitals, that we cease to wonder at their uncouth and degraded aspect, and at the neglect in which they are suffered to swarm over these hills,—like the very weeds of humanity, cast out into disregarded places, and left to spread and increase in rank and deleterious luxuriance. The numbers of drunken men that you meet in these districts in an evening, and the numbers of women that you see seated with their ale-pots and pipes round the alehouse fires, a sight hardly elsewhere to be witnessed, form a striking contrast to the state of things in the agricultural districts, such as Craven, where you may pass through half-a-dozen villages, and not find one pot-house.

It was necessary to take a glimpse at these Lancashire hills in reviewing the rural life of England; let us now pass into a tract of the country which borders immediately upon them, and yet is so totally unlike in its aspect and population. We shall now penetrate into perhaps the most perfect nook of the world that England holds. The Yorkshire dales are known to most by name, but to comparatively few by actual visitation. They lie amongst that wild tract of hills which stretches along the West Riding of Yorkshire, from Lancashire to Westmoreland, and forms part, in fact, of the great mountainous chain which runs from Derbyshire through these counties and Cumberland into Scotland. Some of these hills are of great bulk and considerable altitude. The old rhymes are well known of—

Ingleborough, Pendle, and Pennegent
Are the highest hills betwixt Scotland and Trent;

and

Pendle, Pennegent, and Ingleborough
Are the highest hills all England thorough.

The Yorkshire dales stretch from the foot of Ingleborough north-east and west, over a considerable space of country. It is a wild, and, in many parts, a dreary region. Long ridges of hills covered with black heath, or bare stone,—with stony wastes at their feet of the grimmest and most time-worn character. All round Ingleborough the whole country seems to have been so tossed, shaken, and undermined by the violence which at some period broke it up into its present character, that its whole subterranean space seems to be filled with caves and passages for winds and waters that possess a remarkable connexion one with another, and present a multitude of singular phenomena. On the Craven side lie those celebrated spots Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, well known to tourists; the one, a splendid range of precipice with a river issuing from its base; the other, Gordale Scar, one of the most solemnly impressive of nature’s works. It is the course of a river which has torn its way from the top of a mountain, through a rugged descent in the solid rock, and falls into a sort of cove surrounded by lofty precipices, which make such a gloom, that on looking up, the stars are said sometimes to be seen at noon. Amongst all the magnificent scenes which the mountainous parts of these kingdoms present, I never visited one which impressed me with so much awe and wonder as this. You approach it by no regular road; you have even to ask permission to pass through the yard of a farm-house, to get at it; and your way is then up a valley, along which come two or three streams, running on with a wild beauty and abundance that occupy and delight your attention. Suddenly, you pass round a rock, and find yourself in this solemn cove, the high grey cliffs towering above you on all sides, the water dropping from their summits in a silver rain, and before you a river descending from a cleft in the mountain, and falling, as it were, over a screen, and spreading in white foam over it in a solemn and yet riotous beauty. This screen is formed of the calcareous deposit of the water; and crossing the stream by the stones which lie in it, you may mount from the greensward which carpets the bottom of the cove, climb up this screen, and ascend along the side of the falling torrent, up one of the most wild and desolate ravines, till you issue on the mountain top, where the mountain cistus and the crimson geranium wave their lovely flowers in the breeze.