The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

The massy gate of that old hall,

from which Byron declares that,

Mounting his steed he went his way,
And ne’er repassed that hoary threshold more.

But all was silent and lifeless. No person was to be discerned in the court to which it opened; there were no signs of life except in the cooing of some pigeons and the cawing of certain jackdaws. We went round the outbuildings into the churchyard, which is level with the top of the court-wall, and looks directly into it. We leaned over a massy parapet, and looked down into this court; the spell of an invincible silence seemed to cover the whole place. In the gravel walks which ran round the court, there were traces of carriage wheels; but you felt as if no carriage with the bustle and vivacity of active life could ever more enter there. In the centre of the grass-plot, a basin surrounded by a hedge of honeysuckle, and which had doubtless once possessed the life and beauty of a fountain, now shewed only water, black, stagnant, and covered with masses of yellow moss. We were close to the house; its curtained windows gave it an air of habitation; but no sound nor visible indication of the presence of man was about it. We walked along the green and picturesque churchyard: the back of the buildings on this side of the court bounded part of it; they were in the last state of decay; wide gaps in the roof gave us a view into dark and dreary stables. We came to the farm-yard, also joining the churchyard: it had the same aspect of desertion. There was neither cattle nor ricks in it, but the brandreth, or frame on which a rick once stood, littered with decaying straw, and its air of desolation made more striking by a piece of old wooden balustrade cast upon it. There were barn-doors standing wide open; and the litter of the yard even appeared dusty and grey with age. You felt sure no human foot could have disturbed it for years. We descended from the churchyard, and went round the farm-buildings once more towards the old “massy gate.” At the back of these buildings were nailed the trophies of the gamekeeper by hundreds, we might, we think, say thousands; wild cats, dried to blackness, stretched their downward heads and legs from the wall; hawks, magpies, and jays, hung in tattered remnants; but all grey and even green with age; and the heads of birds in plenteous rows, nailed beak upward, were dried and shrivelled by the sun, and winds, and frosts, of many summers and winters, till their distinctive characters were lost. They all seemed to speak the same silent language:—to say, Ay, this was once the abode of a prosperous old family; here were abundance of friends, and dependents going to and fro; horses and hounds going forth in vociferous joy; abroad was the chase and the sound of the gun,—within were spits turning, and good fellowship; but all this is long since over—a blight and a sorrow have fallen here.

We now approached the “massy gateway” by a wide entrance, which a pair of great doors had once closed—one of these had fallen from its hinges, and the other swung in the wind, banging against its post with a hollow sound, whose echoes told of vacancy. Above the gateway, the vane on the cupola turned to and fro in the gusty air, with a dreary queek-quake, queek-quake: all besides was still. We stood and looked at each other with an expression that said,—Did you ever see any thing like this? At this moment an old grey dog came softly out of the court—the first living thing we had seen except the jackdaws and the pigeons; quietly he came, as if he too felt the nature of his abode. It was with no vivacity of action, or noisy bark: he stood and silently wagged his tail; and as we drew near him, as silently retreated into the court. We entered this silent place, and looked around. The house formed its western end; stables and coach-houses formed its north and eastern sides; the south was open to the shrubbery. The ivy hung in huge masses from all the walls. In the eastern end was the “massy gateway” mentioned by Byron, arched over, and surmounted by a clock and cupola. So profoundly lifeless and deserted seemed the place, that though the clock-finger pointed to the true time of the day—exactly half-past twelve o’clock—our imaginations refused for some time to believe that the clock could actually be going: we felt positive astonishment when it proved to us that it really did.

We now resolved to ascertain at the house itself, if it had any living inhabitants; and on approaching the hall-door, we heard a sound in a stable; we went in, and descried, in a dismal room adjoining it, a man sitting by a fire in a corner, and a dog lying on the hearth. The man and the place were alike forlorn. They were dirty, squalid, desolate. We had said, who could have supposed so abandoned a spot so near Nottingham? but who could have imagined so wild and banditti-like a being as that man, within so short a distance of a large town? His dress and person had every character of reckless neglect; his black hair hung about his pale face; he had no handkerchief about his neck; he sate and devoured his dinner, which he appeared to have cooked with his own hands, looking up at us with ruffian stupidity, as he answered our questions with a surly bluntness, without ceasing to help himself, with a large pocket-knife, and no fork, to his meal. He told us we could not see the house—master never let it be seen. When asked, why? he could not tell—but it was so; but we might ask the old woman in the house. Away we went, and a jewel of an old woman we found.

She was the very beau ideal of an old servant; all simplicity and fidelity, full of the history of the family; wrapped up in its fortunes and its honours—a part and parcel of the race and place, for she had been in the family above sixty years,—being taken, as she said, when she was ten years old, by Mary Chaworth’s grandfather, and put to school, and taught to read and write, to mark and to flower; for she would, he said, be a nice sharp girl to wait on him. “Oh! he was a pretty man—a very pretty, well-behaved gentleman,” said she with a sigh. Old Nanny Marsland, for such was her name, seemed a pure and unsophisticated creature; the regular influx of visiters had not spoiled her; the curious and the pert, and the idle, the insolent and the foolish, had not troubled the clear sincere current of her thoughts; had not made her heart and spirit turn inward, in self-defence, and converted her into the subtle and parrot shew-woman.

She never dreamt of any thing being blameable that had been done by any of the family. She delighted to talk of the Hall and its people; and feeling her solitude,—for she was the sole regular occupant,—some one to talk to was a luxury. Could we have hoped for a creature more to our hearts’ desire? Under her guidance we progressed through this most interesting old place; thoughts and feelings, never to be forgotten, springing up at every step.

The house is not large; and desertion had stamped within, the same characters as on all without. Damp had disfigured the walls; a fire of cheerful pine-logs blazed in the hall and in the kitchen; but everywhere else was the chill and gloom of the old neglected mansion. All the more modern furniture, and most of the paintings, had been removed, and thereby the keeping of the abode was but the better preserved. We know not how to describe the feelings with which we traversed these rooms. It was as if the hall of one of our old English families had been hidden beneath a magic cloud for ages, and suddenly revealed to our eyes, now, at a time when every thing belonging to this country is so much changed;—houses, men, manners, and opinions. When we entered the old-fashioned family hall, standing as it stood ages ago, furnished as it was ages ago, with its antique stove, its antique sofas, if so they can be called, made of wood carved, and curiously painted, and cushioned with scarlet, standing on each side of the fire; the antique French timepiece on its bracket; its various old cabinets and tables standing by walls; and its floor of large and small squares of alternating black marble and white stone—the domestic sanctuary of a race whom we regard as our progenitors, but widely different to ourselves, seemed suddenly revealed to us, and we could almost have expected to see the rough, boisterous squire, or the stately baron, issue from one of the side-doors; or to hear the rustling of the silken robe of some long-waisted dame, who could occasionally leap a five-barred gate as readily as she could dance at the Christmas festival; or one of high and solemn beauty, in whom devotion, deep, uninquiring and undoubting, was the great principle and passion of life; to whom the domestic chapel was a holy place; the chaplain her daily counsellor; and the distribution of alms her daily occupation. We saw before us the hearthstone of a race that lived in the full enjoyment of aristocratic ascendancy, when rank was old and undisputed; when neither mercantile wealth had pressed on their nobility on the one hand, nor popular knowledge and rights on the other; when the gentry lived only to be reverenced and obeyed, every one in the midst of his own forests and domains as a king, and led forth his tenants and serfs to the wars of his country, or to the chase of his own wide wilds; when field sports and jovial feastings, and love-making, were the life-employment of men and women, who took rank and power as an unquestioned heritage, and never troubled their brain with gathering knowledge: and all below them were supposed to be happy, because they were ignorant and submissive.

This hall, which occupies the centre of the building, is nearly sixty feet long by thirty wide, supported by two elliptic arches and Ionic pillars. The middle of the room is now occupied by a billiard-table, which formerly stood in an upper room, called the terrace-room, of which we shall speak presently. The great door, entering from the porch, was secured by a massy bar of wood which had been rudely let into the walls at each end, at the time of the riots of the Reform Bill, when Nottingham Castle was burnt, and when the mob were expected here, who owed the proprietor a piece of retribution, and actually attempted to burn his house at Colwick; whence his wife, Mary Chaworth, only escaped by being carried from her bed, where illness had long confined her, and hidden for some hours in the shrubbery during excessive rain, and afterwards conveyed across the Trent in a boat. At the lower end of this hall an easy flight of steps leads to the upper apartments. Near the fire, at the upper end, a few steps lead into a beautiful little breakfast-room, which looks out into the garden, and forms one of the projections of the building, the staircase at the lower end forming the other: the three large, old-fashioned windows which light the hall, lying on this side, and looking out into a little parterre, fenced off with a trellis-fence, even with the two projections we have spoken of—such a parterre as one often meets with, belonging to old houses—a little favoured sanctuary of garden-ground, where choice flowers were trained, and which was the especial care of page and gardener, before ladies took to gardening themselves. This, which is now a perfect wilderness, almost overrun with shrubs and the tall tree-like laurels which encumber wall and window, and almost exclude daylight from the hall, to the great annoyance of our good old woman, was once, as was fitting, the favourite flower-garden of Mary Chaworth.