For I Imagine In Ancient Days
When Books Were Scarce That Was How Men Handed Down The History Of The
Chiefs Of Troy.
An Homeric memory for everything - superstitions,
traditions, anecdotes; the only difficulty was that you could not command
it.
You could not turn to letter A or B and demand information direct
about this or that; you must wait till it came up incidentally in
conversation. In one of the villages there was a young men's club, and,
among other advantages, when they were married they could have a cradle
for nothing. A cottager had a child troubled with a slight infirmity; the
doctor ordered the mother to prepare a stew of mice and give him the
gravy. There happened to be some threshing going on, and one of the men
caught her nine mice, which she skinned and cooked. She did not much like
the task, but she did it, and the child never knew but that it was beef
gravy. It cured him completely. This is the second time I have come
across this curious use of mice. I had heard of it as a traditional
resource among the country people, but in this case it seemed to have
been ordered by a medical practitioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be
something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so
often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been
without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more
use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not.
How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the
mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would
have skinned a hare or rabbit without hesitation, and have cooked and
eaten bacon, though the pig is not a cleanly feeder. It is a country
remark that the pig's foot - often seen on the table - has as many bones as
there are letters of the alphabet. The grapnel kept at every village
draw-well is called the grabhook; the plant called honesty (because both
sides of the flower are alike) is old woman's penny. If you lived in the
country you might be alarmed late in the evening by hearing the tramp of
feet round your house. But it is not burglars; it is young fellows with a
large net and a lantern after the sparrows in the ivy. They have a
prescriptive right to enter every garden in the village. They cry
'sparrow catchers' at the gate, and people sit still, knowing it is all
right. In the jealous suburb of a city the dwellers in the villas would
shrink from this winter custom, the constable would soon have orders to
stop it; in the country people are not so rigidly exclusive. Now it is
curious that the sparrows and blackbirds, yellowhammers and greenfinches,
that roost in the bushes, fly into the net and are easily captured, but
the starlings - thanks to their different ways in daylight - always fly out
at the top of the bush, and so escape.
II.
A black cannon ball lies in a garden, an ornament like a shell or a
fossil, among blue lobelia and green ferns. It is about as big as a
cricket ball - a mere trifle to look at. What a contrast with the immense
projectiles thrown by modern guns! Yet it is very heavy - quite out of
proportion to its size. Imagine iron cricket balls bounding along the
grass and glancing at unexpected angles, smashing human beings instead of
wickets. This cannon ball is not a memorial of the Civil War. It was shot
at a carter with his waggon. Our grandfathers had no idea of taking care
of other people's lives. Every man had to look out for himself; if you
got in the way, that was your fault. A battery was practising, and they
did not trouble themselves about the highway road which skirted the
range; and as the carter was coming home with his waggon one of the balls
ricocheted and rolled along in front of his horses. He picked it up and
brought it home, and there it has lain many a long year, a silent
witness, like the bricks Jack Cade put in the chimney, to the
extraordinary change of ideas which has taken place. We are all expected
nowadays to think not only of ourselves but of others, and if a man fires
a gun without due precautions, and injures or even might have injured
another, he is liable. All our legislation and all the drift of public
opinion goes in this direction. Men were the same then as now; the change
in this respect shows the immense value of ideas. They were then quite
strangers to the very idea of taking any thought for those who might
chance to be in the way. That has been inculcated of recent years. Those
were the days when there was an irresponsible tyrant in every village,
who could not indeed hang men at his castle gate by feudal right of
gallows, but who could as effectually silence them by setting in motion
laws made by the rich for the rich. It is on record how a poor carrier,
whose only fortune was a decrepit horse, dared presumptuously, against
the will of the lord of the manor, to water his horse at a roadside pond.
For this offence he was taken before the justices and fined, his goods
seized, -
And the knackers had his silly old horse,
And so John Harris was bowled out!
Then there was a still more terrible offence - a hungry man picked up a
rabbit. 'How dared John Bartlett for to venture for to go for to grab
it?' But they put him in gaol and cured him of 'that there villanous
habit,' which rhymes, and the tale thereof may be found by the student of
old times in the 'Punch' of the day - a good true honest manly Punch, who
brought his staff down heavily on the head of abuses and injustice.
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