Ulverton (17 page)

saith: he does not answer the Charge for it will not stand

& we went riding. The rides here are thro’ beech. Beech and more beech, and then downland – nay more more & more downland. The whole world might be composed of turf & nibbling sheep, were one to be as these peasants, and not venture forth enough miles to break the downland spell – and see happy clay, and our sweet Thames. There is a dreadful Rollingness to these wretched minds, that need a right-angle sorely to shake them up. I am not a bad rider over gates and hedgerows, tho’ I have never taken horse out of London before. I stumbled only once – in an infernal patch of briar and mud that nearly had me threwn headlong. How does Matlock, sweetest Emily? The Special Commission arrives in a fortnight: I must have all the Briefs ready. We hear report that Field Marshal the Duke of W. himself will sit with the Judges, as if their scarlet will not terrify these wretches enough without that great Nose. They shall be dealt with in batches of twenty, or the assize will last till Doomsday – or certainly over Christmas. Alas – still a hundred remain. I must haste them on – they persevere in telling one every
twist
and turn, as if they are embarked on a yarn of the sea – of marvellous Adventure, such as I would hear from my father as a boy. One has to cut these yards of fustian cloth, as a tailor for a dwarf. A few, I am grateful to report (these the hardest & most guilty) say nothing, and set their jaws (tho’ their hands tremble). Sometimes I am in a fog of accent, that is made blinder by the majority of the labourers having severe catarrh, arising (or so I am informed by the Doctor, a bristly young fellow) from the draughts in their dwellings, or the wet straw they reportedly sleep on – but whatever the origin of the Complaint, it causes their accents to sound as tho’ slinking past – sunk into themselves, as it were – a quality that makes interpretation a deal more difficult. I have a man beside me, a local fellow of some education (he writes verse) – who lights my way by Translation. So the days pass without you, sweetest Emily.

I do not know who carried the shillings

My regards to your Uncle, & Mrs Hawkes.

Lancelot Heddin of Ulverton labourer aged 27 who was apprehended at Ulverton House on the morning of the 22nd of November and has been discharged on his own recognizance to appear and answer at the Sessions – stated on his Examination on the 5th of December as follows

not a carpet or rug in the place: all is beeswaxed floors and the whole resounds like a perpetual thunderstorm when persons are moving about. The distance the Examinants must cross to stand before my table is a decent one, and I must wait until the echoes of their approach have taken leave of the room (by dint of not finding another wooden surface to bounce off) before I open
my
mouth at all. It is a very old house, with a groaning flight of stairs too dark – and grim diamond-paned windows – and more beam than is good for the constitution of one’s pate. There is a smell of stabies throughout. I will soon be munching oats. Please to send more water-colourings – to see the brush of your fair hand in a blue wash of sky is to see Heaven through a sunlit cloud

forced the unwilling. We passed the Gore and into Gumbledons Bush

Horse – who be truly very large – is now complete, barring the eye, which is to be made of smashed glass (Norcoat’s servants have been breaking drained Port and Brandy bottles against the walls all morning, an infernal clatter that has set my teeth on edge) – I find the idea vulgar, but appropriately reflective of the progenitor’s thirst as much as soul. I had to Examine a beggar this morning, who used foul language against the Squire in his capacity as justice of the Peace, upon which insult our good fellow clapped the bad fellow (who stinks unmercifully) in the Cage, or Blind House – this being a place as small and low as those confined there, off the aforementioned Square – dating from the halcyon days when this settlement was sufficiently swaggering to have its own penal dwelling. The poor fellow being almost blind, I could not draw a word of sense out of him, but only a kind of self-pitying jabber. If he had not been released – he would not now be up for robbery and extortion: he was unlocked by the Rioters. That is an anecdote for your uncle’s supper-table, a perfect Exemplum to puff his melancholy. How does his illness fare? If my readings of judicial oratory (I know Lord Erskine almost by heart) has served any purpose, it would be to move your uncle to spill his doubloons out of his codicil as your beauty evidently has not. ‘I say by G—d that man is a ruffian who shall, after this, presume to build upon such honest artless conduct as an evidence of guilt.’ I have been practising my Lord Erskine in the mirror. I will solicit with the eye and the hand & the voice and woo him from your father.
‘Such,
my lords, is the case.’ I am not very good at tones of thunder, however: my frame buckles frigh

‘Why beest thee here, John? What beest thee about?’ He answered that it was because they were starving, and that I knew the state of the Poor, who had not enough maintenance to keep a wife and children, and that I must support them and break my machine, that was taking the bread from their mouths, and raise my wages to 2s a day, and half a crown after Ladyday, & they wd have £4 from me. Then Moses Perry came forward & said he was the treasurer, for he was always so for the collection at Whitsun. He had a basket. I took them to the Barn and shewed them as I had already broke my machine, but if the Rector did not lower his tithes, I could not be giving them 2s a

the Eye is in. From afar, it looks quite horrid – it has struck the children here quite dumb with fear. Indeed – this is a quiet place. I am, I must confess, treated without civility: a kind of contemptuous pall of neglect towards betters hangs over the cotters – who seem alarmingly swarthy, as tho’ rubbed in charcoal – O for thy fair curls, thy angel’s countenance, my Emily! I ope your Locket with abandon. Here is too grim, for so many men have been taken into custody that there is an effect as after war, when the women folk slouch about in shawls and turn their heads as one passes. I do not know how they will deal with the Rioters, my heart. Lord Melbourne at the Home Office was appointed in the middle of all this Trouble, and is more resolute than Peel. I think we shall have some Examples made. But surely not 2,000, which is the full number. Melbourne has made Norcoat furious, for Squire Norcoat cannot sit on the bench – local magistrates are perceived too soft for this, tho’ some are harder than flint, & clamour for the rope – for all breakers – without reprieve. I do not feel hard, but I had a stone cast at me last week, & I have had a letter, in a very poor orthography, informing me that my name ‘is drawn amongst the Black Harts in the Black Booke’, that I am ‘a blaggard Enmy of the Peeple’, and I must make my Will. Do not
fear
a moment, my sweet child: these fellows are thoroughly cowed, and this is but the twitch of the dying

bee a hard task, Tom.’

Your father has been written to.

& staid the evening

then to exercise my hand, grown crabbed from the pen and these desultory tales, I walk briskly up the road swinging my arms

said ‘That’s a good little lot there, Mr Stiff.’ He answered that they would be having no less, or there wd be more agitation. He threw it upon the stone of the Court yard. The said John Oadam gathered it up and holloed: he wore a crown of bedwine, that was in beard

uire looks through his telescope at the infernal Horse, tho’ he has no need: it struts over us big as a clou

He had some wild Clymatis wound about his head that resembled a Savage’s cap of feathers, I believe this was to denote his captainship. I heard one of the Mob refer to him as ‘Captain Swing’. He called out we are all one,

capons boiled in their bladders, roasted venison with a marinade of veal, fried ducklings, a complete little cygnet from the Lake, Westphalia ham and a calf’s head hashed with larded liver, with ice cream and blancmange as an afterthought. I was the lowliest fellow there, but acted royally. Lady Chalmers referred to me throughout as the Bench: she has a grip like sugar-tongs.

John Oadam saith: that he has nothing to say to these Charges.

but took a coach to Bath. I had to wrest myself from there on the Sunday evening but I staid one night & sipped and ate and Conversed with the civilised. I noted, to my horror, halfway to a theatre, that my waistcoat sported a splash of Chalk upon the breast. It will not remove itself with water. The stagecoach dropped me very late at the turnpike crossing & I walked back without a moon: white to my knees, my cloathes ruined. Infernal country!

I saw the said shepherd Bunce kneel and fire the straw beneath the said iron Plough.

opening ceremony was conducted with appalling seriousness, and All who Matter in the neighbourhood stood about this muddy turf silently cursing its blanched steed, that is taking the field at full stretch – tho’ on the grassy lip of its haunches one recognises nothing but a deal of white chalk and the fact one is chilled to the bone. It is attempting to outflank, as it were, the ancient at Uffingdon, to which attaches much superstition: indeed – I have heard it stated that its eye is hollowed by generations of barren females coupling with the moon. I doubt our Squire Norcoat’s equestrian challenge to be efficacious in this respect, or to attach to its bony fetlocks and glistening retina
anything
more than amused indifference. But the fellow is exceedingly puffed up with his creation. I will retain the sight of him bellowing through his Speaking-Trumpet on that far hill for the rest of my years, and shall (I warn you now) regale it to my grandchildren long after all memory of the Law has departed my brain.

doused the candles in the stable. A man with a basket stood against the Door & the carters came out with straw. Some others heaped straw beneath the iron Plough. It was not light enough to see their Faces, tho’ I heard one say

round and about again, the identical histories – or histories I must hope are identical, else the mis-match might prolong the Prosecution to a tedious extent. I nudge here and there – for one will have a lanthorn where there has been always a candle – and another a candle where there has been always a tinderbox. Dearest Emily, I have numbed you with my Legal gossip: how does your breathing now, out of the city? And what of Uncle after your father’s visit? Does he still smile on us from his ebbing bed? Have you broached the Subject again? A simple stroke of the pen would do it, but can he see? Did your father meddle in his drawer? I am exceeding vexed. My coat is almost out at elbow. Your father cannot have all. How long it takes to weave the cobweb (which is the Will) and how quick to tear it down (which is the Codicil). How, if we are to hang upon your father alas – am I to shift his judgement of me? My letter to him has not been answered. My head swims with all this – round and about – like a whirl-

desperate fellows in the main. They are well-known abouts and are unmarried. They had blackened their faces with soot,

chalked right across the door: ‘We have Not yet Dun.’ Squire in a heat: thunder on the stairs, & in the pantry. In the Riots, he was conciliatory – says Wellington is a ruffian, for Wellington made suggestion that the magistrates hunt them down for sport with horsewhips and fowling pieces. If Squire were to have his way, there wd be Prison only for these fellows. His own farm has lost three ploughmen and a pig-man, two of whom might hang and all are certain to be transported – if the Briefs do their work. I say to him the Law, in this case, must act as the Example to some, and be merciful to others (we cannot have 2,000 guilty – our prisons are already stuffed with them, and there will be more agitation). He says, that is not our way: he blames all on the machines – and certain ‘Radical scoundrels’ – & France – and mutters darkly against the tithes – and wd against our local Lord, if he was not enamoured of the dark wine up there, that is served in crystal. Most tedious supper yesterday, at the Doctor’s – much of the party & their daughters of the mind that we shd bring the price of Bread lower, & feed these fellows. I said we cannot have robbery, Arson, extortion & machine-breaking without shewing how Diabolical these acts are, or tomorrow our transport ships wd be lower still in the water with the consequence of imaginary grievances – that we must nip in the bud, to save the flower – that Lord C. is for swinging the Mob
in toto
– that these Horrid acts must spread like a Contagion without hard medicine – and other such ruminations, that impressed the Assembled no end, as all visitors from the Town must, tho’ they be cork-brained as the wine. The company included the Archdeacon of Salisbury, a plump fellow by the name of Fisher, & his friend Mr Constable the painter, who then broke out of gloom to strike a somewhat stained fist upon the table, spluttered against various types of dregs – was all for sluicing out the rabble forthwith – that the agitators of Reform were sent by the Devil – that Mechanicks must be kept solitary or their evil dispositions wd be fanned into flame – thus buttressing my argument, but with a degree of passion that almost undid the whole. He is sketching the Cathedral in Salisbury for a great work which shall shew a rainbow over the edifice – this the Ecclesiastical Government according to the Archdeacon, whereupon Mr Constable broke into an exceedingly admirable discourse on opticks, and the lustre of wet grass, and the calm white edges of moving clouds being his
soul
– or the wet grass was – or both at once – leastways he ended by stating that Paradise was a slimy post in a ditch, or some such, which provoked all present into peals of mirth. Upon returning to the subject of our troubled times, one daughter, of a fierier disposition, stated – looking at me as the chief organ of this illumination – that ’twas hard to call it Extortion, for the like shillings-round was done at Whitsun for the feast, & was an ancient practice in all the villages, & that the labourers were dressed as for this Procession – in ribands & suchlike, & blew horns as on that day. Thereupon there fell a hush, and a clearing of throats – & I kept, as Lord Erskine wd have done, an auspicious silence – that cowed the company quite – until I spoke but these words with a serious demeanour: ‘I see no blossom on the trees, madam. Pray excuse me, I did not know it was Whitsun here, & Extortion in London.’ This made enough break into laughter, as to patch the threadbare situation. So I hone my rhetoric even at the table. I keep to the road and take a servant with a lanthorn, for I will not be bludgeoned to death in this wretched hole. I am almost finished – the wigs will be huffing and puffing in the Courthouse next Thursday. The tightness in my chest is gone – I am better with the medicine – tho’ this cough hangs