A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs Part 7

As to use, there is little or none. A shepherd will sometimes say, when questioned on the subject, that the bells tell him just where the flock is or in which direction they are travelling; but he knows better. The one who is not afraid to confess the simple truth of the matter to a stranger will tell you that he does not need the bells to tell him where the sheep are or in which direction they are grazing. His eyes are good enough for that. The bells are for his solace or pleasure alone. It may be that the sheep like the tinkling too--it is his belief that they do like it. A shepherd said to me a few days ago: "It is lonesome with the flock on the downs; more so in cold, wet weather, when you perhaps don't see a person all day--on some days not even at a distance, much less to speak to. The bells keep us from feeling it too much. We know what we have them for, and the more we have the better we like it. They are company to us."

Even in fair weather he seldom has anyone to speak to. A visit from an idle man who will sit down and have a pipe and talk with him is a day to be long remembered and even to date events from. "'Twas the month--May, June, or October--when the stranger came out to the down and talked to I."

One day, in September, when sauntering over Mere Down, one of the most extensive and loneliest-looking sheep-walks in South Wilts--a vast, elevated plain or table-land, a portion of which is known as White Sheet Hill--I pa.s.sed three flocks of sheep, all with many bells, and noticed that each flock produced a distinctly different sound or effect, owing doubtless to a different number of big and little bells in each; and it struck me that any shepherd on a dark night, or if taken blindfolded over the downs, would be able to identify his own flock by the sound. At the last of the three flocks a curious thing occurred. There was no shepherd with it or anywhere in sight, but a dog was in charge; I found him lying apparently asleep in a hollow, by the side of a stick and an old sack. I called to him, but instead of jumping up and coming to me, as he would have done if his master had been there, he only raised his head, looked at me, then put his nose down on his paws again. I am on duty--in sole charge--and you must not speak to me, was what he said.

After walking a little distance on, I spied the shepherd with a second dog at his heels, coming over the down straight to the flock, and I stayed to watch. When still over a hundred yards from the hollow the dog flew ahead, and the other jumping up ran to meet him, and they stood together, wagging their tails as if conversing. When the shepherd had got up to them he stood and began uttering a curious call, a somewhat musical cry in two notes, and instantly the sheep, now at a considerable distance, stopped feeding and turned, then all together began running towards him, and when within thirty yards stood still, ma.s.sed together, and all gazing at him. He then uttered a different call, and turning walked away, the dogs keeping with him and the sheep closely following.

It was late in the day, and he was going to fold them down at the foot of the slope in some fields half a mile away.

As the scene I had witnessed appeared unusual I related it to the very next shepherd I talked with.

"Oh, there was nothing in that," he said. "Of course the dog was behind the flock."

I said, "No, the peculiar thing was that both dogs were with their master, and the flock followed."

"Well, my sheep would do the same," he returned. "That is, they'll do it if they know there's something good for them--something they like in the fold. They are very knowing." And other shepherds to whom I related the incident said pretty much the same, but they apparently did not quite like to hear that any shepherd could control his sheep with his voice alone; their way of receiving the story confirmed me in the belief that I had witnessed something unusual.

Before concluding this short chapter I will leave the subject of the Wilts.h.i.+re shepherd and his sheep to quote a remarkable pa.s.sage about men singing to their cattle in Cornwall, from a work on that county by Richard Warner of Bath, once a well-known and prolific writer of topographical and other books. They are little known now, I fancy, but he was great in his day, which lasted from about the middle of the eighteenth to about the middle of the nineteenth century--at all events, he died in 1857, aged ninety-four. But he was not great at first, and finding when nearing middle age that he was not prospering, he took to the Church and had several livings, some of them running concurrently, as was the fas.h.i.+on in those dark days. His topographical work included Walks in Wales, in Somerset, in Devon, Walks in many places, usually taken in a stage-coach or on horseback, containing nothing worth remembering except perhaps the one pa.s.sage I have mentioned, which is as follows:--

"We had scarcely entered Cornwall before our attention was agreeably arrested by a practice connected with the agriculture of the people, which to us was entirely novel. The farmers judiciously employ the fine oxen of the country in ploughing, and other processes of husbandry, to which the strength of this useful animal can be employed"--the Rev.

Richard Warner is tedious, but let us be patient and see what follows--"to which the strength of this useful animal can be employed; and while the hinds are thus driving their patient slaves along the furrows, they continually cheer them with conversation, denoting approbation and pleasure. This encouragement is conveyed to them in a sort of chaunt, of very agreeable modulation, which, floating through the air from different distances, produces a striking effect both on the ear and imagination. The notes are few and simple, and when delivered by a clear, melodious voice, have something expressive of that tenderness and affection which man naturally entertains for the companions of his labours, in a _pastoral state_ of society, when, feeling more forcibly his dependence upon domesticated animals for support, he gladly reciprocates with them kindness and protection for comfort and subsistence. This wild melody was to me, I confess, peculiarly affecting. It seemed to draw more closely the link of friends.h.i.+p between man and the humbler tribes of _fellow mortals_. It solaced my heart with the appearance of humanity, in a world of violence and in times of universal hostile rage; and it gladdened my fancy with the contemplation of those days of heavenly harmony, promised in the predictions of eternal truth, when man, freed at length from prejudice and pa.s.sion, shall seek his happiness in cultivating the mild, the benevolent, and the merciful sensibilities of his nature; and when the animal world, catching the virtues of its lord and master, shall soften into gentleness and love; when the wolf"....

And so on, clause after clause, with others to be added, until the whole sentence becomes as long as a fis.h.i.+ng-rod. But apart from the fiddlededee, is the thing he states believable? It is a charming picture, and one would like to know more about that "chaunt," that "wild melody." The pa.s.sage aroused my curiosity when in Cornwall, as it had appeared to me that in no part of England are the domestic animals so little considered by their masters. The R.S.P.C.A. is practically unknown there, and when watching the doings of shepherds or drovers with their sheep the question has occurred to me, What would my Wilts.h.i.+re shepherd friends say of such a scene if they had witnessed it? There is nothing in print which I can find to confirm Warner's observations, and if you inquire of very old men who have been all their lives on the soil they will tell you that there has never been such a custom in their time, nor have they ever heard of it as existing formerly. Warner's Tour through Cornwall is dated 1808.

I take it that he described a scene he actually witnessed, and that he jumped to the conclusion that it was a common custom for the ploughman to sing to his oxen. It is not unusual to find a man anywhere singing to his oxen, or horses, or sheep, if he has a voice and is fond of exercising it. I remember that in a former book--"Nature in Downland"--I described the sweet singing of a cow-boy when tending his cows on a heath near Trotton, in West Suss.e.x; and here in Wilts.h.i.+re it amused me to listen, at a vast distance, to the robust singing of a shepherd while following his flock on the great lonely downs above Chitterne. He was a sort of Tamagno of the downs, with a tremendous voice audible a mile away.

CHAPTER XII

THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE

Dan'l Burdon, the treasure-seeker--The shepherd's feeling for the Bible--Effect of the pastoral life--The shepherd's story of Isaac's boyhood--The village on the Wylye

One of the shepherd's early memories was of Dan'l Burdon, a labourer on the farm where Isaac Bawcombe was head-shepherd. He retained a vivid recollection of this person, who had a profound gravity and was the most silent man in the parish. He was always thinking about hidden treasure, and all his spare time was spent in seeking for it. On a Sunday morning, or in the evening after working hours, he would take a spade or pick and go away over the hills on his endless search after "something he could not find." He opened some of the largest barrows, making trenches six to ten feet deep through them, but found nothing to reward him. One day he took Caleb with him, and they went to a part of the down where there were certain depressions in the turf of a circular form and six to seven feet in circ.u.mference. Burdon had observed these basin-like depressions and had thought it possible they marked the place where things of value had been buried in long-past ages. To begin he cut the turf all round and carefully removed it, then dug and found a thick layer of flints.

These removed, he came upon a deposit of ashes and charred wood. And that was all. Burdon without a word set to work to put it all back in its place again--ashes and wood, and earth and flints--and having trod it firmly down he carefully replaced the turf, then leaning on his spade gazed silently at the spot for a s.p.a.ce of several minutes. At last he spoke. "Maybe, Caleb, you've beared tell about what the Bible says of burnt sacrifice. Well now, I be of opinion that it were here. They people the Bible says about, they come up here to sacrifice on White Bustard Down, and these be the places where they made their fires."

Then he shouldered his spade and started home, the boy following.

Caleb's comment was: "I didn't say nothing to un because I were only a leetel boy and he were a old man; but I knowed better than that all the time, because them people in the Bible they was never in England at all, so how could they sacrifice on White Bustard Down in Wiltsheer?"

It was no idle boast on his part. Caleb and his brothers had been taught their letters when small, and the Bible was their one book, which they read not only in the evenings at home but out on the downs during the day when they were with the flock. His extreme familiarity with the whole Scripture narrative was a marvel to me; it was also strange, considering how intelligent a man he was, that his lifelong reading of that one book had made no change in his rude "Wiltsheer" speech.

Apart from the feeling which old, religious country people, who know nothing about the Higher Criticism, have for the Bible, taken literally as the Word of G.o.d, there is that in the old Scriptures which appeals in a special way to the solitary man who feeds his flock on the downs. I remember well in the days of my boyhood and youth, when living in a purely pastoral country among a semi-civilized and very simple people, how understandable and eloquent many of the ancient stories were to me.

The life, the outlook, the rude customs, and the vivid faith in the Unseen, were much the same in that different race in a far-distant age, in a remote region of the earth, and in the people I mixed with in my own home. That country has been changed now; it has been improved and civilized and brought up to the European standard; I remember it when it was as it had existed for upwards of two centuries before it had caught the contagion. The people I knew were the descendants of the Spanish colonists of the seventeenth century, who had taken kindly to the life of the plains, and had easily shed the traditions and ways of thought of Europe and of towns. Their philosophy of life, their ideals, their morality, were the result of the conditions they existed in, and wholly unlike ours; and the conditions were like those of the ancient people of which the Bible tells us. Their very phraseology was strongly reminiscent of that of the sacred writings, and their character in the best specimens was like that of the men of the far past who lived nearer to G.o.d, as we say, and certainly nearer to nature than it is possible for us in this artificial state. Among these sometimes grand old men who were large landowners, rich in flocks and herds, these fine old, dignified "natives," the substantial and leading men of the district who could not spell their own names, there were those who reminded you of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brethren, and even of David the pa.s.sionate psalmist, with perhaps a guitar for a harp.

No doubt the Scripture lessons read in the thousand churches on every Sunday of the year are practically meaningless to the hearers. These old men, with their sheep and goats and wives, and their talk about G.o.d, are altogether out of our ways of thought, in fact as far from us--as incredible or unimaginable, we may say--as the neolithic men or the inhabitants of another planet. They are of the order of mythical heroes and the giants of antiquity. To read about them is an ancient custom, but we do not listen.

Even to myself the memories of my young days came to be regarded as very little more than mere imaginations, and I almost ceased to believe in them until, after years of mixing with modern men, mostly in towns, I fell in with the downland shepherds, and discovered that even here, in densely populated and ultra-civilized England, something of the ancient spirit had survived. In Caleb, and a dozen old men more or less like him, I seemed to find myself among the people of the past, and sometimes they were so much like some of the remembered, old, sober, and slow-minded herders of the plains that I could not help saying to myself, Why, how this man reminds me of Tio Isidoro, or of Don Pascual of the "Three Poplar Trees," or of Marcos who would always have three black sheep in a flock. And just as they reminded me of these men I had actually known, so did they bring back the older men of the Bible history--Abraham and Jacob and the rest.

The point here is that these old Bible stories have a reality and significance for the shepherd of the down country which they have lost for modern minds; that they recognize their own spiritual lineaments in these antique portraits, and that all these strange events might have happened a few years ago and not far away.

One day I said to Caleb Bawcombe that his knowledge of the Bible, especially of the old part, was greater than that of the other shepherds I knew on the downs, and I would like to hear why it was so. This led to the telling of a fresh story about his father's boyhood, which he had heard in later years from his mother. Isaac was an only child and not the son of a shepherd; his father was a rather worthless if not a wholly bad man; he was idle and dissolute, and being remarkably dexterous with his fists he was persuaded by certain sporting persons to make a business of fighting--quite a common thing in those days. He wanted nothing better, and spent the greater part of the time in wandering about the country; the money he made was spent away from home, mostly in drink, while his wife was left to keep herself and child in the best way she could at home or in the fields. By and by a poor stranger came to the village in search of work and was engaged for very little pay by a small farmer, for the stranger confessed that he was without experience of farm work of any description. The cheapest lodging he could find was in the poor woman's cottage, and then Isaac's mother, who pitied him because he was so poor and a stranger alone in the world, a very silent, melancholy man, formed the opinion that he had belonged to another rank in life. His speech and hands and personal habits betrayed it.

Undoubtedly he was a gentleman; and then from something in his manner, his voice, and his words whenever he addressed her, and his attention to religion, she further concluded that he had been in the Church; that, owing to some trouble or disaster, he had abandoned his place in the world to live away from all who had known him, as a labourer.

One day he spoke to her about Isaac; he said he had been observing him and thought it a great pity that such a fine, intelligent boy should be allowed to grow up without learning his letters. She agreed that it was, but what could she do? The village school was kept by an old woman, and though she taught the children very little it had to be paid for, and she could not afford it. He then offered to teach Isaac himself and she gladly consented, and from that day he taught Isaac for a couple of hours every evening until the boy was able to read very well, after which they read the Bible through together, the poor man explaining everything, especially the historical parts, so clearly and beautifully, with such an intimate knowledge of the countries and peoples and customs of the remote East, that it was all more interesting than a fairy tale.

Finally he gave his copy of the Bible to Isaac, and told him to carry it in his pocket every day when he went out on the downs, and when he sat down to take it out and read in it. For by this time Isaac, who was now ten years old, had been engaged as a shepherd-boy to his great happiness, for to be a shepherd was his ambition.

Then one day the stranger rolled up his few belongings in a bundle and put them on a stick which he placed on his shoulder, said good-bye, and went away, never to return, taking his sad secret with him.

Isaac followed the stranger's counsel, and when he had sons of his own made them do as he had done from early boyhood. Caleb had never gone with his flock on the down without the book, and had never pa.s.sed a day without reading a portion.

The incidents and observations gathered in many talks with the old shepherd, which I have woven into the foregoing chapters, relate mainly to the earlier part of his life, up to the time when, a married man and father of three small children, he migrated to Warminster. There he was in, to him, a strange land, far away from friends and home and the old familiar surroundings, amid new scenes and new people, But the few years he spent at that place had furnished him with many interesting memories, some of which will be narrated in the following chapters.

I have told in the account of Winterbourne Bishop how I first went to that village just to see his native place, and later I visited Doveton for no other reason than that he had lived there, to find it one of the most charming of the numerous pretty villages in the vale. I looked for the cottage in which he had lived and thought it as perfect a home as a quiet, contemplative man who loved nature could have had: a small, thatched cottage, very old looking, perhaps inconvenient to live in, but situated in the prettiest spot, away from other houses, near and within sight of the old church with old elms and beech-trees growing close to it, and the land about it green meadow. The clear river, fringed with a luxuriant growth of sedges, flag, and reeds, was less than a stone's-throw away.

So much did I like the vale of the Wylye when I grew to know it well that I wish to describe it fully in the chapter that follows.

CHAPTER XIII

VALE OF THE WYLYE

Warminster--Vale of the Wylye--Counting the villages--A lost church--Character of the villages--Tytherington church--Story of the dog--Lord Lovell--Monuments in churches--Manor-houses--Knook--The cottages--Yellow stonecrop--Cottage gardens--Marigolds--Golden-rod--Wild flowers of the water-side--Seeking for the characteristic expression

The prettily-named Wylye is a little river not above twenty miles in length from its rise to Salisbury, where, after mixing with the Nadder at Wilton, it joins the Avon. At or near its source stands Warminster, a small, unimportant town with a n.o.bler-sounding name than any other in Wilts.h.i.+re. Trowbridge, Devizes, Marlborough, Salisbury, do not stir the mind in the same degree; and as for Chippenham, Melksham, Mere, Calne, and Corsham, these all are of no more account than so many villages in comparison. Yet Warminster has no a.s.sociations--no place in our mental geography; at all events one remembers nothing about it. Its name, which after all may mean nothing more than the monastery on the Were--one of the three streamlets which flow into the Wylye at its source--is its only glory. It is not surprising that Caleb Bawcombe invariably speaks of his migration to, and of the time he pa.s.sed at Warminster, when, as a fact, he was not there at all, but at Doveton, a little village on the Wylye a few miles below the town with the great name.

It is a green valley--the greenness strikes one sharply on account of the pale colour of the smooth, high downs on either side--half a mile to a mile in width, its crystal current showing like a bright serpent for a brief s.p.a.ce in the green, flat meadows, then vanis.h.i.+ng again among the trees. So many are the great shade trees, beeches and ashes and elms, that from some points the valley has the appearance of a continuous wood--a contiguity of shade. And the wood hides the villages, at some points so effectually that looking down from the hills you may not catch a glimpse of one and imagine it to be a valley where no man dwells. As a rule you do see something of human occupancy--the red or yellow roofs of two or three cottages, a half-hidden grey church tower, or column of blue smoke, but to see the villages you must go down and look closely, and even so you will find it difficult to count them all. I have tried, going up and down the valley several times, walking or cycling, and have never succeeded in getting the same number on two occasions. There are certainly more then twenty, without counting the hamlets, and the right number is probably something between twenty-five and thirty, but I do not want to find out by studying books and maps. I prefer to let the matter remain unsettled so as to have the pleasure of counting or trying to count them again at some future time. But I doubt that I shall ever succeed. On one occasion I caught sight of a quaint, pretty little church standing by itself in the middle of a green meadow, where it looked very solitary with no houses in sight and not even a cow grazing near it. The river was between me and the church, so I went up-stream, a mile and a half, to cross by the bridge, then doubled back to look for the church, and couldn't find it! Yet it was no illusory church; I have seen it again on two occasions, but again from the other side of the river, and I must certainly go back some day in search of that lost church, where there may be effigies, bra.s.ses, sad, eloquent inscriptions, and other memorials of ancient tragedies and great families now extinct in the land.

This is perhaps one of the princ.i.p.al charms of the Wylye--the sense of beautiful human things hidden from sight among the ma.s.ses of foliage.

Yet another lies in the character of the villages. Twenty-five or twenty-eight of them in a s.p.a.ce of twenty miles; yet the impression, left on the mind is that these small centres of population are really few and far between. For not only are they small, but of the old, quiet, now almost obsolete type of village, so un.o.btrusive as to affect the mind soothingly, like the sight of trees and flowery banks and grazing cattle. The churches, too, as is fit, are mostly small and ancient and beautiful, half-hidden in their tree-shaded churchyards, rich in a.s.sociations which go back to a time when history fades into myth and legend. Not all, however, are of this description; a few are naked, dreary little buildings, and of these I will mention one which, albeit ancient, has no monuments and no burial-ground. This is the church of Tytherington, a small, rustic village, which has for neighbours Codford St. Peter one one side and Sutton Veny and Norton Bavant on the other.

To get into this church, where there was nothing but naked walls to look at, I had to procure the key from the clerk, a nearly blind old man of eighty. He told me that he was shoemaker but could no longer see to make or mend shoes; that as a boy he was a weak, sickly creature, and his father, a farm bailiff, made him learn shoemaking because he was unfit to work out of doors. "I remember this church," he said, "when there was only one service each quarter," but, strange to say, he forgot to tell me the story of the dog! "What, didn't he tell you about the dog?"

exclaimed everybody. There was really nothing else to tell.

It happened about a hundred years ago that once, after the quarterly service had been held, a dog was missed, a small terrier owned by the young wife of a farmer of Tytherington named Case. She was fond of her dog, and lamented its loss for a little while, then forgot all about it.

But after three months, when the key was once more put into the rusty lock and the door thrown open, there was the dog, a living "skelington"

it was said, dazed by the light of day, but still able to walk! It was supposed that he had kept himself alive by "licking the moisture from the walls." The walls, they said, were dripping with wet and covered with a thick growth of mould. I went back to interrogate the ancient clerk, and he said that the dog died shortly after its deliverance; Mrs.

Case herself told him all about it. She was an old woman then, but was always willing to relate the sad story of her pet.

That picture of the starving dog coming out, a living skeleton, from the wet, mouldy church, reminds us sharply of the changed times we live in and of the days when the Church was still sleeping very peacefully, not yet turning uneasily in its bed before opening its eyes; and when a comfortable rector of Codford thought it quite enough that the people of Tytherington, a mile away, should have one service every three months.

As a fact, the Tytherington dog interested me as much as the story of the last Lord Lovell's self-incarceration in his own house in the neighbouring little village of Upton Lovell. He took refuge there from his enemies who were seeking his life, and concealed himself so effectually that he was never seen again. Centuries later, when excavations were made on the site of the ruined mansion, a secret chamber was discovered, containing a human skeleton seated in a chair at a table, on which were books and papers crumbling into dust.

A volume might be filled with such strange and romantic happenings in the little villages of the Wylye, and for the natural man they have a lasting fascination; but they invariably relate to great people of their day--warriors and statesmen and landowners of old and n.o.ble lineage, the smallest and meanest you will find being clothiers, or merchants, who ama.s.sed large fortunes and built mansions for themselves and almshouses for the aged poor, and, when dead, had memorials placed to them in the churches. But of the humble cottagers, the true people of the vale who were rooted in the soil, and nourished and died like trees in the same place--of these no memory exists. We only know that they lived and laboured; that when they died, three or four a year, three or four hundred in a century, they were buried in the little shady churchyard, each with a green mound over him to mark the spot. But in time these "mouldering heaps" subsided, the bodies turned to dust, and another and yet other generations were laid in the same place among the forgotten dead, to be themselves in turn forgotten. Yet I would rather know the histories of these humble, unremembered lives than of the great ones of the vale who have left us a memory.

It may be for this reason that I was little interested in the manor-houses of the vale. They are plentiful enough, some gone to decay or put to various uses; others still the homes of luxury, beauty, culture: stately rooms, rich fabrics; pictures, books, and ma.n.u.scripts, gold and silver ware, china and gla.s.s, expensive curios, suits of armour, ivory and antlers, tiger-skins, stuffed goshawks and peac.o.c.ks'

feathers. Houses, in some cases built centuries ago, standing half-hidden in beautiful wooded grounds, isolated from the village; and even as they thus stand apart, sacred from intrusion, so the life that is in them does not mix with or form part of the true native life. They are to the cottagers of to-day what the Roman villas were to the native population of some eighteen centuries ago. This will seem incredible to some: to me, an untrammelled person, familiar in both hall and cottage, the distance between them appears immense.