Indeed The
Labouring People Seem In All Their Ways And Speech To Be Different,
Survivals Perhaps Of A Time When Their Words And Superstitions Were The
Ways Of A Ruder England.
The lanes and the gateways in the fields, as
they say, are 'slubby' enough in November, and those who try to go
through get 'slubbed' up to their knees.
This expresses a soft, plastic,
and adhesive condition of the mud which comes on after it has been
'raining hop-poles' for a week. The labourer has little else to do but to
chop up disused hop-poles into long fagots with a hand-bill - in other
counties a bill-hook. All his class bitterly resent the lowering of wages
which takes place in winter; it is a shame, they say, and they evidently
think that the farmers ought to be forced to pay them more - they are
starvation wages. On the other hand, the farmer, racked in every
direction, and unable to sell his produce, finds the labour bill the most
difficult to meet, because it comes with unfailing regularity every
Saturday. A middle-aged couple of cottagers left their home, and the wife
told us how they had walked and walked day after day, but the farmers
said they were too poor to give them a job. So at last the man, as they
went grumbling on the highway, lost his temper, and hit her a 'clod' in
the head, 'and I never spoke to him for an - hour - afterwards; no, that I
didn't; not for an hour.' A clod is a heavy, lumping blow.
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