LITMIR.BIZ

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      In sooth it was a noble treat

      To see that brave commotion.’

      The writer vividly paints the scene, and ends as follows:

      Well, as to the house of Stuart, the less said the better; but as to the Suffolk dames, I agree with the poet, that they are all well worthy of the toast, and it was at a very early period of my existence that I became aware of that fact. But the course of true love never does run smooth, and from none – and they were many – with whom I played on the beach as a boy, or read poetry to at riper years, was it my fate to take one as wife for better or worse. In the crowded city men have little time to fall in love. Besides, they see so many fresh faces that impressions are easily erased. It is otherwise in the quiet retirement of a village where there is little to disturb the mind – perhaps too little. I can well remember a striking illustration of this in the person of an old farmer, who lived about three miles off, and at whose house we – that is, the whole family – passed what seemed to me a very happy day among the haystacks or harvest-fields once or twice a year. The old man was proud of his farm, and of everything connected with it. ‘There, Master James,’ he was wont to say to me after dinner, ‘you can see three barns all at once!’ and sure enough, looking in the direction he pointed, there were three barns plainly visible to the naked eye. Alas! the love of the picturesque had not been developed in my bucolic friend, and a good barn or two – he was an old bachelor, and, I suppose, his heart had never been softened by the love of woman – seemed to him about as beautiful an object as you could expect or desire. One emotion, that of fear, was, however, I found, strongly planted in the village breast. The boys of the village, with whom, now and then, I stole away on a birds’-nesting expedition, would have it that in a little wood about a mile or two off there were no end of flying serpents and dragons to be seen; and I can well remember the awe which fell upon the place when there came a rumour of the doings of those wretches, Burke and Hare, who were said to have made a living by murdering victims – by placing pitch plasters on their mouths – and selling them to the doctors to dissect. At this time a little boy had not come home at the proper time, and the mother came to our house lamenting. The good woman was in tears, and refused to be comforted. There had been a stranger in the village that day; he had seen her boy, he had put a pitch plaster on his mouth, and no doubt his dead body was then on its way to Norwich to be sold to the doctor. Unfortunately, it turned out that the boy was alive and well, and lived to give his poor mother a good deal of trouble. Another thing, of which I have still a vivid recollection, was the mischief wrought by Captain Swing. In Kent there had been an alarming outbreak of the peasantry, ostensibly against the use of agricultural machinery. They assembled in large bodies, and visited the farm buildings of the principal landed proprietors, demolishing the threshing machines then being brought into use. In some instances they set fire to barns and corn-stacks. These outrages spread throughout the county, and fears were entertained that they would be repeated in other agricultural districts. A great meeting of magistrates and landed gentry was held in Canterbury, the High Sheriff in the chair, when a reward was offered of £100 for the discovery of the perpetrators of the senseless mischief, and the Lords of the Treasury offered a further reward of the same amount for their apprehension; but all was in vain to stop the growing evil. The agricultural interest was in a very depressed state, and the number of unemployed labourers so large, that apprehensions were entertained that the combinations for the destruction of machinery might, if not at once checked, take dimensions it would be very difficult for the Government to control. When Parliament opened in 1830, the state of the agricultural districts had been daily growing more alarming. Rioting and incendiarism had spread from Kent to Suffolk, Norfolk, Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire, and Cambridgeshire, and a great deal of very valuable property had been destroyed. A mystery enveloped these proceedings that indicated organization, and it became suspected that they had a political object. Threatening letters were sent to individuals signed ‘Swing,’ and beacon fires communicated from one part of the country to the other. With the object of checking these outrages, night patrols were established, dragoons were kept in readiness to put down tumultuous meetings, and magistrates and clergymen and landed gentry were all at their wits’ ends. Even in our out-of-the-way corner of East Anglia not a little consternation was felt. We were on the highroad nightly traversed by the London and Yarmouth Royal Mail, and thus, more or less, we had communications with the outer world. Just outside of our village was Benacre Hall, the seat of Sir Thomas Gooch, one of the county members, and I well remember the boyish awe with which I heard that a mob had set out from Yarmouth to burn the place down. Whether the mob thought better of it, or gave up the walk of eighteen miles as one to which they were not equal, I am not in a position to say. All I know is, that Benacre Hall, such as it is, remains; but I can never forget the feeling of terror with which, on those dark and dull winter nights, I looked out of my bedroom window to watch the lurid light flaring up into the black clouds around, which told how wicked men were at their mad work, how fiendish passion had triumphed, how some honest farmer was reduced to ruin, as he saw the efforts of a life of industry consumed by the incendiary’s fire. It was long before I ceased to shudder at the name of ‘Swing.’

      The dialect of the village was, I need not add, East Anglian. The people said ‘I woll’ for ‘I will’; ‘you warn’t’ for ‘you were not,’ and so on. A girl was called a ‘mawther,’ a pitcher a ‘gotch,’ a ‘clap on the costard’ was a knock on the head, a lad was a ‘bor.’ Names of places especially were made free with. Wangford was ‘Wangfor,’ Covehithe was ‘Cothhigh,’ Southwold was ‘Soul,’ Lowestoft was ‘Lesteff,’ Halesworth was ‘Holser,’ London was ‘Lunun.’ People who lived in the midland counties were spoken of as living in the shires. The ‘o,’ as in ‘bowls,’ it is specially difficult for an East Anglian to pronounce. A learned man was held to be a ‘man of larnin’,’ a thing of which there was not too much in Suffolk in my young days. A lady in the village sent her son to school, and great was the maternal pride as she called in my father to hear how well her son could read Latin, the reading being reading alone, without the faintest attempt at translation. Sometimes it was hard to get an answer to a question, as when a Dissenting minister I knew was sent for to visit a sick man. ‘My good man,’ said he, ‘what induced you to send for me?’ ‘Hey, what?’ said the invalid. ‘What induced you to send for me?’ Alas! the question was repeated in vain. At length the wife interfered: ‘He wants to know what the deuce you sent for him for.’ And then, and not till then, came an appropriate reply. This story, I believe, has more than once found its way into Punch; but I heard it as a Suffolk boy years and years before Punch had come into existence.

      One of the prayers familiar to my youth was as follows:

      An M.P., who shall be nameless, supplies me with an apt illustration of East Anglian dialect. It was at the anniversary of a National School, with the great M.P. in the chair, surrounded by the benevolent ladies and the select clergy of the district. The subject of examination was Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on an ass’s colt. ‘Why,’ said the M.P. – ‘why did they strew rushes before the Saviour? can any of you children tell me?’ Profound silence. The M.P. repeated the question. A little ragamuffin held up his hand. The M.P. demanded silence as the apt scholar proceeded with his answer. ‘Why were the rushes strewed?’ said the M.P. in a condescending tone. I don’t know,’ replied the boy, ‘unless it was to hull the dickey down.’

      Roars of laughter greeted the reply, as all the East Anglians present knew that ‘hull’ meant ‘throw,’ and ‘dickey’ is Suffolk for ‘donkey,’

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