The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

[10] This was written four years ago. Since then the author has published the first volume of such a work, under the title of “Visits to Remarkable Places, Old Halls, Battle Fields, etc.”

How delightful it is to go through those hereditary abodes of ancient and distinguished families, and to see, in the very construction of them, images of the past times, and their modes of existence. Here you pass through ample courts, amid rambling and extensive offices that once were necessary to the jolly establishment of the age,—for hounds, horses, hawks, and all their attendants and dependences. Here you come into vast kitchens, with fireplaces at which three or four oxen might be roasted at once, with mantelpieces wide as the arch of a bridge, and chimneys as large as the steeple of a country church. Then you advance into great halls, where scores of rude revellers have feasted in returning from battle, or the chase, in the days of feudal running and riding, of foraying and pilgrimages; of hard knocks and hard lying: ere tea and coffee had supplanted beef and ale at breakfast; ere books had charmed away spears and targets, tennis-courts and tourneys, and political squabbles and parliamentary campaigning, the scouring of marches, and firing of neighbours’ castles. Then again, you advance into tapestried chambers, on whose walls mythological or scriptural histories wrought by the fingers of high-born dames, at once impress you with a sense of very still and leisurely and woodland times, when Crockford’s and Almack’s were not; nor the active spirit of civilization had raised up weavers, and spinners, and artificers of all kinds by thousands on thousands, by towns-full and cities-full. And now you come to the very closets and bowers of the ladies themselves—scenes of worn and faded splendour, but shewing enough of their original state to mark their wide difference from the silken boudoirs and luxurious dormitories of the fair dames of this age of swarming and busy artisans; of ample rents and city life; instead of hunting and fighting, of wars in the heart of France, or civil wars at home, to call out the heads of houses, or perhaps drive their families forth with fire and sword in their absence. Then there is the antique chapel, and the library; the one having, in most cases, been deserted by its ancient faith, the other still bearing testimony to the range of reading of our old squires and nobles, since reading became a part of their education, in a few grim folios,—a Bible, a Gwillim’s Heraldry, one or two of our Chroniclers, and a few Latin Classics or Fathers, for the enjoyment of the chaplain.

But the armoury and the great gallery—these are the places in which a flood of historic light pours in upon you, and the spirit of the past is made so palpable, that you forget your real existence in this utilitarian century; you forget reform in all its shapes—ballot, household suffrage, triennial parliaments; you forget the cry of the church and king; and the counter-cry from a million of eager voices, for liberty of hearth and faith; you forget that all around you, from the very walls that surround you to the distant sea, is nothing but fields cultivated like gardens, secured by gates and fences, and tenfold more costly and powerful parchment, to their particular owners; you forget that towns stand by hundreds, and villages by thousands, filled with a busy, an inquisitive, a reading, thinking, aspiring and irresistible population; and that all the institutions, the opinions, the loves and doings of the times when these things before you were matters of familiar life, are gone, or are going, for ever: that,

Another race has been, and other palms are won.

Yes, mighty and impressive as these things are; deeply as they visit your daily thought and nightly dreams; woven as they are with the thread of your existence, and your hopes and belief of the future ages,—yes, potent as they are, they vanish for a time. Here are swords, helmets, coats of mail, and plate-armour standing up in its own massiveness; shells from which the active bodies which moved them, have long ago disappeared. Here are buff-coats, ponderous boots, and huge spurs; broad hats, with sweeping feathers, and chains of gold, crosses and amulets, which make the past for ever in time, the past for ever in spirit, come back again with a vivid and intoxicating effect. You gaze upon arms and relics which figured in all the battles and pilgrimages, the desperate strifes and extravagant pageants of our ancestors; you behold things which link your fancies to all the romantic ages of European history. You forget the present; and exist amid forests, the stern strength of castles and the venerable quiet of convents. You are ready to listen to the distant bell of the abbey; for news of the crusaders; you expect as you ride through the woods, to stumble upon the abode of the hermit. These arms and fragments before you, were in the battles of Cressy and Poictiers; in the wars of the Roses; in the Tourney of the Field of Cloth-of-Gold; that mail, on the back of some stout knight, climbed over the ramparts of Ascalon, or of Jerusalem itself; and those, bringing you down the stream of events, are the equipments of Cavaliers and of Puritan leaders, when the spirit of feudalism and that of progression came so rudely into strife as to shake the kingdom like an earthquake. You step into the gallery, and there are the very men whose iron habiliments you have been contemplating; there are the rude portraitures of the warriors of an earlier day; and there are the Sidneys, the Howards, the Essexes and Leicesters, the Warwicks and Wiltons, of an after one; the men that set up and pulled down kings, that waded through the blood of others, or that poured out their own, for honour and liberty. You have read of some handsome and gallant knight who wrought some chivalric miracle, who perhaps died in its performance—he is there! You have glowed over the accounts of arrogant and fascinating beauties, who turned the heads of kings and nobles—they are there! worthy of all their fame, their very shadows filling you with sighs and dreams of loveliness, which will haunt you in the open sunshine, and amid all the cheerful sounds of present life.

But it is not merely these great historic characters. There are family ones that constitute a history amongst themselves, most interesting and touching. There are the founders of those families. There is the great minister, who once rose to the favour of his sovereign, and swayed the destinies of the kingdom; there is the great churchman, that climbed up from plebeian obscurity to the primacy; there is the judge, who, from a younger brother of an ancient line, became the fortunate founder of a new one; there are admirals, generals, and nobles, who have figured in the campaigns of every reign. There are stern forms that were despots in their own sphere, or calm and smiling faces that have such blots and dark passages attached to them as confound all your physiognomical acuteness; and there are beautiful and gentle-looking creatures, that are most strangely tainted with blood; noble matrons, who knew sorrows for which neither their rank and affluence, no, nor the possessions of ten kingdoms could make recompense; and lastly, there are young boys and girls, that look on you with most innocent archness or open good-nature, which perished like blossoms ere fully opened, or lived to make you shudder over their remembrance.

Such are many of our older houses, to say nothing of later and more splendid ones; nothing of all the modern attractions that have been added to their ancient ones; nothing of those sumptuous places which our nobility have raised on their estates, and filled with all the luxurious adornments of modern life, and with the wealth of art. And then those houses stand scattered over all the kingdom, in fine old parks, in gardens of quaint alleys and topiary work; or in the freer beauty of modern lawns and shrubberies; objects of pleasure and pride to thousands beside their own possessors.

Horace Walpole wished that they were all collected in London, and then should we have had such a capital as the world could not boast. Heaven forgive him for the wish! A splendid capital no doubt we should have had, but we should not have had such a country, such a people, such a national strength and character as we have. It is by living scattered through the realm, amid their own people, their own lands and woods, that our gentry have retained such high independence of principle, and such healthy tastes as they have done. It is by this means that agriculture, and horticulture, and rural architecture, have been promoted to the extent they have reached; that the whole kingdom has become a paradise, and that the people have been linked to the interests of their superiors. We have only too many temptations already to a crowding into our capital. A city life to a wealthy aristocracy must become a life of luxury and splendour, a life of dissipation and rivalry. The enjoyments of society, of music, and of public spectacles, at intervals, might refine the taste; but when this species of life becomes almost perpetual, its certain consequence must be to deteriorate and effeminate character; to weaken the domestic attachments; to divert from, or disincline for that sober thought and those studies which lead to greatness, or leave behind solid satisfaction. We have already too much of this, and its effect will daily become more and more conspicuous, as it is of more and more vital importance. Now, while the people are struggling to acquire possession of rights that they long knew not their claim to; now that they are growing informed, and therefore quick to see and to feel—those on whom they look as their natural and powerful rivals, are living at a distance from them; taking no means to conciliate their good-will, or to retain their esteem. Their humble neighbours feel no effect from their estates except the withdrawal of their rents; and they ask themselves what claim these people, who are living in our great Babylon,

Minions of splendour, shrinking from distress,—

have upon their veneration or regard. Is it not in these noble ancestral houses, amid their ancestral woods and lands, that the spirit of our gentry is most likely to acquire a right tone? Here, where they are surrounded by objects and memories of worth, of greatness and renown, that the fire of a generous and glorious emulation is most likely to be kindled; and that all the best feelings of their nature are likely to be touched, and their best affections quickened? Even Horace Walpole himself furnishes an instance in proof. Little as he had of the pensive and poetical in him, his visit to the family place at Houghton called up such thoughts and emotions as, if encouraged instead of avoided, might have made him aware of higher qualities in himself than he was habitually accustomed to display. “Here am I,” says he in one of his letters, “at Houghton! and alone; in this spot where, except two hours last month, I have not been in sixteen years! Think what a crowd of reflections! No!—Gray and forty churchyards could not furnish so many; nay, I know one must feel them with greater indifference than I possess, to have patience to put them into verse. Here I am, probably for the last time in my life, though not for the last time; every clock that strikes tells me that I am one hour nearer to yonder church,—that church into which I have not yet had courage to enter; where lies the mother on whom I doated, and who doated on me! There are the two rival mistresses of Houghton, neither of whom ever wished to enjoy it. There too lies he who founded its greatness; to contribute to whose fall, Europe was embroiled. There he sleeps in quiet and dignity, while his friend and his foe, rather his false ally and real enemy, Newcastle and Bath, are exhausting the dregs of their pitiful lives in squabbles and pamphlets.