Ulverton Read online

  My children.

  Snigger not.

  For this Mr Brazier is the very same Reverend Crispin Brazier of His Majesty’s Church of England that doth stand before ye now, and hath command of this parish, and maintenance of all its souls, and is our Lord’s minister on this base earth. O wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous man he? O what thick and palpable clouds have descended upon this our land, that our anointed guardians of the Faith must rail against the revelations of blockheads and the wisdom of creeping things, yet be mocked!

  O Thou didst walk through the sea with thine horses.

  O Thou didst slay the nations.

  Give them, O Lord. What wilt Thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb. Give them dry breasts.

  Woe.

  List, list.

  To touch the very marrow of the matter now.

  I ask thee: is not that man that runs toward Death willingly more culpable than those poor Gadarene swine, for he does it in full knowledge of his trespass? We are weighed in the balance and are found wanting and if the grapes be not fine the wine-press cannot be trodden into sweetness. The Lord it is who decides when the tender grape shall be gathered, when the reaper shall bow with his hook and the ears of the barley fall. To cut ourselves untimely off is to wither on the vine, to foul the streams of Lebanon, to worm the apple and bring frost to the garden of our souls and the chafe of despair upon our necks, O my children.

  For Mr Kistle did then rise stiffly and took off his coat and gave it to me, saying, ‘Take this. I wish to embrace the Power of my Lord. To come into his presence as naked as the babe and as helpless and as innocent, washed of all my sins. For my soul is one with God and my seed blossoms.’

  My children, he did take off his garments one by one and I was helpless to interject.

  He it was, he alone it was who rended his garments from himself.

  Not as the foulest whisper on the filthy wind hath dropped it amongst you, infecting with its calumnious poison.

  Against thy healing minister.

  Who was so near death or so I felt and not able to stand and my heart hard against him for I saw he was foolish and drunken, but not with wine, that I could not interpose myself betwixt his foolishness and his action.

  Meaning our late curate.

  And he did toss his garments to me, calling them after Isaiah but filthy rags of righteousnesses, and did thereupon halfway out of his worsted stockings fall heavily and nakedly upon the snow. And did not tremble.

  My children, whither his soul went I cannot say, but his breath did not melt the snow at his mouth.

  And on perceiving he was no more, I besought myself to seek succour, but on stumbling out for but a few moments I was so cruelly whipped by the storm that I returned, and laid myself at the mercy of our Lord, huddled in the lee of His compassion whose comfort is ever nigh e’en in the most fearful of times, and that did, thanks be to God, did come with dawn in the bodily guise of a shepherd and his dog, as ye well know.

  And if I had indeed swaddled myself in the garments so venially cast to me, so foolishly cast off, who says I did evil?

  Seeking life.

  As the reasoning soul must.

  Yet the ear of jealousy heareth all things, my children.

  Though he that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith.

  3

  Improvements

  1712

  I HAVE NEAR on sixty acres, most being white land. My great-grandfather enclosed it to sheep some hundred years ago but I till the greater part of it now, with no recourse to the Manor Court. Commoners are the harrow-rest to improved husbandry, is my opinion. I have hedged about my lower fields, and that land is a piece of beauty, in right order. To dung it, I have used all sorts. Pigeons’-dung I have found to be most advantageous on cold land, where the clay makes it spewy underfoot. A neighbour has sown his cold land with hay-dust straight after burning and ploughing. This, he says, kills the acid-juice most effectively, but I have yet to try it. I have for the rest of my land, being white and dry, applied the yield from my hogs-yard. I have found eight pigs to be sufficient for trampling of the garbage and weeds and Cornish muskings to make sixty or so loads of fine manure.

  This last week it was recommended to me by my cousin, who husbands the other side of Ulverdon, towards Effley, that I apply on my white land human ordure, being the product of a suitably-placed house of office, not too near the dwelling – if I were to cast in also, every two days, straw, or suchlike, to clot it. Once broken down, it may be carried to a furthest field and heaped up for putrefaction. He has shown me a crop further advanced and fatter than mine which, he claims, is advantaged by said application of his own manure. I reckon this to be more owing to the said field being well sheltered from the easterly winds by a tall quick-thorn hedge all along one side. My own land is much unsheltered and I propose to enclose my upper fields from the violent winds of cold springs and the scorching winds we sometimes have when the corn is just fattening.

  I have this day, being a nipping January, carried out to the fields my horse-piss and hogs’-piss, these being frozen and thus facilitating carriage, the motion of the cart being otherwise too great to enable the filling to the brim of the buckets. Piss, I have been told, is most beneficial to white land in wet seasons. It must, like other soils, sit for a suitable time, as the making of vinegar from beer, or else its properties will not be forthcoming, and possibly be injurious to the roots.

  My wife, hitting her head on the door into the cow-stall, this room being dark and the day being so overcast it was almost resembling night, lay in her bed for the afternoon and complained of a headache. The maid cooked my dinner but let the fire out. I myself scoured the pots. I found the buttery to be in a filthy state, with much garbage and even a dead rat tucked into the corners. Today was mild for winter.

  My spring-corn field is in good tillage. I rose early and walked it the length around as the church bell gave out the early service. It is my highest field and faces the village, which affords a view but is injurious to the crop as I am southerly to Ulverdon. I lost my hat when a gust blew, and chased it. It was very raw. I also met a vagrant dressed in nothing more than a shirt and a ragged pair of skin breeches, no doubt his father’s. He was holed up in the lee of the corner oak. I gave him a quarter of the bread I had taken up with me and the milk from my bottle, and sent him on his way. I pray that some of the gentlemen who berate our Chapel might try to live as this vagrant, more like Christ than they. This field had been of rye when I ploughed it with a narrow furrow before the first frost. I perceive that the winter has already shattered the furrows, these being narrow, and mellowed them out finely for the first harrowing. I received great pleasure from this observation of good practice.

  It has been noted that women, if crossed, go pinched and silent, which is the healing-in of their womanly agitations, or they turn shrewish and bellow as if in labour. My wife does neither. She goes ill and lies abed. This causes much distress to our maid, who must redouble her efforts. We cannot afford to pay her more. Today she neglected to scour the pots when my wife had lain already three hours on her bed owing to our rupture at midday.

  This concerned nothing more than the small matter of the dairy’s cleanliness. The first day of February was clear and the thatch smoked from the frost as if on fire.

  Last night she hit me with the stick we keep for this purpose beside the bed. Flesh obeys not the cooling of the mind but pain only. We prayed together afterwards.

  I have begun, being now February, to spread the dung on the field which I grassed last year. The two labourers who joined me in the summer were somewhat put out by this practice, being somewhat earlier than was the practice on their common, and it took some little time to explain to them that with this method the spring rains might wash the goodness of the dung down to the roots of the grass (which is St Foin) before it is dried to dust by the sun and blown off. The
y scratched their heads and maintained it was a queer thing. The smell of the hogs’-dung was lessened by the cold, I noticed.

  This has been a dry February. I am hoping for rain in March, or my method will be put to question.

  A waggon, left out of shelter in the small bennets lea for convenience, has split along the sideboards: Farmer Barr, passing by, informed me that it was the action of the night’s frost on the wet wood. I must shelter the waggon forthwith, although it is an old one, and loose in the hubs.

  A storm last night has put out many of the greater trees and scattered the heaps of dung I took to the upper fields a week ago. A calf came out seeming well but died an hour or so later, whether to the effects of the storm I cannot conjecture. There is undoubtedly some kind of magnetic activity at work when the wind is very strong. The parlour is still full of smoke where it was blown down the chimney, having no opportunity of egress. The door was blown out in the still-room, and several pickle jars were lost – namely, the violets, the cowslips, the flowers of broom. My wife took this sight somewhat poorly.

  A fire, this end of February, reduced two cottages to ashes on the edge of the village. One of my labourers spent the day building another for the poor widow whose wretched abode one of these was. In total the goods lost were two stools, two tables, a candlestick, and three truckle beds. The rest were carried out before the fire properly took hold but amounted to less than half the loss. Our Chapel will provide a proportion. The smell of the burning is sharp even here.

  The habit of folding sheep on the fields to be sown is much taken up in these parts: I have hired fifty ewes (wethers are not so beneficial) and their lambs, whose dung in particular is rich, partaking as it does of the mother’s milk. This has cost me 7d for each night, but I am certain that it will gain me profit from the greater yield this summer. My labourers claim I am making shepherds out of them, although they too have sheep on their commons. They do not fancy the moving of the fences, I fear. This day my wife was found by the maid, with a straw doll hung about her neck.

  How to avoid the spalting of dry land when it is ploughed took up the bulk of my conversation with Mr Lisle, Esquire, whom I encountered on the Ulverdon road, past the ash-copse, early this morning. He was on his way to inspect a spongy ground he had pared off and burnt the summer last, and sown with hay-dust. Mr Lisle reckoned on ploughing lightly therefore, or not at all, because the bad ground that is turned up beneath the good makes the effort worthless. Mr Lisle’s horse was made jittery by a crow that swooped very close, but he was in no danger. This led us swiftly to a second observation: Pliny’s remark that good soil can be told by the flocking of crows and other birds to its turning-up, stirring the air about the ploughman like gulls about a ship. This is due to the abundance of certain types of insects who are particular about the soil they choose to abide in. Mr Lisle is a great expert on these matters and an hour spent in his company furnishes a good crop of information. He has much land hereabouts but I believe he comes from Crux Easton, to the South. He reckons on there being another month of dry weather, the last year being so moist. He has the Queen’s ear, it is said, but that is only from the fusty-minded of Ulverdon to whom any man that hails from afar and bears the title of Esq. is worthy of awe. My wife has not eaten for two days. Yesterday I placed before her some white meat with bread but she scarcely looked. Our maid swept and stoked the fire all the while talking of her sick father who aids in the smithy but is no decent church man, and not making allowance for my wife’s situation. I am resolved to be rid of her. She wears her bodice loose and will not tie up her hair as is seemly. She beats the coverlets like a mad woman, or a soldier his drum. It scares the poultry across the yard. There was no butter churned this week, as I was busy with the ploughing of the fallow, which I have resolved to turn to wheat and not let it lie idle, my wife was abed, and the maid was in the herb garden (it being a new moon this Tuesday), and planting chervil and coriander on my wife’s instructions. I saw the market from the top field and reflected that this was the first day we had not sent to it with butter. I prayed then and there in the field and, being on my knees, noticed the brashiness of the new-turned-up soil more keenly than heretofore. The stones are very light, but enough to rest the harrow, I fear. My knees have remained cold, which is curious. They have retained the winter in them as the soil does. I heated some water and washed before the fire this day.

  This morning early I smelt spring.

  Of the inestimable advantages of enclosing land: despite the clovering of the fallow that is taken up by many neighbouring villages, the fusty gents of Ulverdon, hid in this valley from the outer world as they are, have decreed that fallow remain naked for fear of wearying of the soil. Some men I know, seeing my and others’ clover and St Foin, and the health of the winter cattle, and the goodness of the soil so pastured, chafe at this regulation, and would fence their-strips if it were affordable. They might, at ploughing, remove the fences and thereby gain still the common advantages of the shared plough and oxen. However, to such degree are the stones of tradition buried deep that no man might lift them alone, or stub up the shrubs of complacency. The bare widenesses of the commons around Ulverdon, that are not to sheep, suffer considerably, in places, from the winds, and I have seen a score of strips with the meagre corn quite flattened each summer.

  I have spent this day constructing a dry hedge for the protection of my young trees that I am to plant about my top field. I hired a lad to help me, as my servants were dunging. The lad was amused by this artificial thing, but I explained to him that the winds up here would nip the tender trees and he nodded sagely. If we are to Improve effectively, the young must be instructed forthwith in the new ways.

  I was paused in my tawing of the harness by a shriek from the upper window of the house. My wife had taken it into her head to batter the poor maid with a pan for tearing a hole in the linen for the flock-bed. The hole was but a finger’s width where already the linen was worn almost out. The maid was somewhat bruised about the face but otherwise unharmed. I gave her a jug of beer for which she was exceeding grateful. My wife lay abed. I myself bathed the afflicted places with a tincture of camomile, and was reminded of Our Lord’s feet.

  On tawing of harness: it is to be recommended that, if cracks in bending from over-dryness are to be avoided, a proper dressing of allum and salt must be applied to halters, cruppers, belly-bands etc., and especially where the leather is horny, or has a seam of black running through.

  Today I caught the maid at her offices. She was pissing within the dairy and not, as instructed, upon the dung-heap which is hidden from general view. Being midway through her passing of urine she made no effort to hide herself and I was afflicted with a view of her private place, which, unlike my wife’s, is crow-black. Her skirts were too far up about her waist to shield any particular from me and I remonstrated with her, but am recognisant of the fact that my prayers have gone unanswered. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

  My wife beat me, on my instructions, again this night. I am much disturbed, at present, by appearances in my sleep of our youngest, who has not been gone from this world more than a year now. I woke deeply troubled by this. I was about the yard early overseeing the oxen and a coulter was badly nipped, I noticed. If the Lord has not granted me a son, and only sickly daughters who do not live, my cousin must take hold of this land when I am gone, and the thought weakens my resolve. This morning was deadly cold, and the foddering barton was stone-hard in white heaps. Despite the decent feed, the cows are milking thinly at present. Their racks are halfway full and little is trodden that is not straw. My servant says it is the inclemency of the weather. Some of the udders are, indeed, cracked. Everything steams.

  The advantages of the turnwrest cannot be over-estimated. When combined with a draught of horses it is incomparable. My own draught remains of oxen but Mr King’s I have seen in action and his horses are easy of manoeuvre and appear faster, particularly at the headland turn, which in my lower fields is altogether
too narrow for my heavy beasts. We replaced three shares in one morning, the soil being so brashy. The coulter cut deep, it being a dry month of March so far, and a drier February, this year 1712, but the crows and rooks and gulls followed close on our heels, which bodes well for the soil, which I have meliorated with much dung since the wheat harvest. The land’s chockiness was never so obvious as this morning, when the share was bone-white after the first furrow. I pray for a dripping summer which always spreads its juices easily in our dry chalk land. In dry summers the barley ears tend to blight and a shrivelled look.

  My uncle having made me of a bookish mind, despite it being viliorated with matters such as dung and mouldiness, I have on my shelves several volumes, of which the most-thumbed is Bunyan’s. His is the pilgrim who names the world a ‘wilderness’, and visits the valley of Humiliation. Perched before the fireside, reading by the glow (as we are low with candles, and my wife had settled early, not wishing to worsen her headache with drawing-up of old holes in old stockings), and still aching from the stilts of the turnwrest which I held for more than an hour while my ploughman rested, and the share too blunt already, and the tilth deep, I noted that, far from being a source of contentment, the pilgrim’s woes matched mine too greatly, and I likened my life to the handling of an oxen team on a chocky, declivous field, with the rooks so loud about me that I could not hear my own breath, or the ploughman shouting from the hedge that the coulter was loose, and but shallow cutting.

  Today I went to market and on my return, upon the scarp above Five Elms Farm, that was once old Anne Cobbold’s the witch, I noted one elm to be down, most likely in the January storm, and it being old, and wondered about the name, and that my own farm, being simply Plumm’s, which is my own family title, might lose that title when I pass on, which upset me greatly.

  Today we ploughed the last acre. There is much debate at present, among my neighbouring farmers who have come by, over the number of earths that is desirable after naked fallow. I have one field that has lain still for two summers, with only camomile and redweed upon it, being fallowed before I tried the clover and St Foin, and being a field much reduced in richness by my forefathers, who rested it not. It is a loose, spongy ground, and Farmer Barr was of the mind that, were I to plough it up and sow it to one earth, as I had considered, I would have much trouble with the redweed, or poppy. If the land is settled and fast, as it may be after three summers or more, the redweed seed is choked where it is turned under. I told him that I thought it better, then, to wait for rain, which might impact the soil, and render it suitable for one or two earths. Farmer Barr is cursed himself by redweed and is sore on the subject. I left the ploughman to clean and oil this dusk and went inside to ask after my wife, who is again poorly, and to relate to her the advice of Farmer Barr, only to encounter my maid sobbing in the still-room. When asked for the reason of her distress I was met with no answer. Hearing the noise of the bed above I knew my wife was not deceased, which had passed through my mind, and sat down. Her hands were as ice. I took to rubbing them and, seeing her face lighten its load, asked her again. She being a very young girl, and a simple one at that, laid her head in my lap, which was redolent still of the field, and thus we remained for at least a half-hour. What happened following this attempt of comfort I will relate as best my troubled hand can put it down. She arose, closed the door to the kitchen, which rendered it very dark in the still-room, so that I was afraid for the bottles, whereupon I heard a rustling, like the prickles of barley in a wind, and felt a body that was unclothed from the waist down upon my lap, and my breeches unlaced with a dexterous hand before I could render a note of complaint or astonishment. I saw in my mind only the turn of the furrow, the coulter slicing, and the crows with their baleful cries. The Lord forgive me. We broke five bottles: of sallets, of gillyflowers, and three of white lilies.