30 NORTHERN COUNTIES-DURHAM. [1760-1783 intercourse, the simplicity of the language has, of late years, been much corrupted." The dialect of Craven has taken its departure with the herds of wild white cattle, whose cows hid their young in the ferns and underwood of the wastes of Craven, and whose bulls were hunted by large assemblages of horsemen and their followers on foot, with something of the grandeur of the chase of the middle ages. The four Northern Counties have many points of interest, especially in the character of their population. Durham was a very neglected agricultural district in the second half of the last century. "Within a comparatively recent period, a large portion of this county was uninclosed and uncultivated, and lay either in wide tracts of desolate moor, or in more sheltered, though equally neglected, 'stinted pastures.'"+ The land under cultivation was universally in want of draining. The farm-yard manures were insufficient, for little stock was kept. The county was indeed famous for a breed of cattle known as the Durham short-horns-animals which were fattened into wonderful size, and were sold at fabulous prices. This breed has been improved into the most esteemed stock of England. Arthur Young is indignant at the wretched breed of sheep that ranged over the Northumberland moors, in flocks as large as forty thousand, which did not pay for their keep more than a shilling or two per head. The millions of acres of improveable moors he holds to be "as waste as when ravaged by the fury of the Scottish borderers." Northumberland contained "large districts, which even within the last eighty years were in a state of nature, * Culley, in Bewick's "Quadrupeds." "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. xvii. p. 93. 1760-1783.] NORTHUMBERLAND-WESTMORLAND. 31 covered with broom, furze, or rushes." * It was long after the Union that the inhabitants of this border land acquired settled and industrious habits. But the fertile vales of the northern parts of the county attracted settlers, who soon introduced better cultivation than that of the small crofts which surrounded the miserable farm hovels. The famous agriculturists known everywhere by the name of Culley settled in the district of Glendale in 1767. Their example, and that of other cultivators and breeders, "gave a stimulus to the surrounding district; and in a few years the inexpert operations and languid system of husbandry which had previously prevailed, gave place to others of extraordinary expedition and efficacy." + When Gray entered Westmorland from Yorkshire, in 1769, he saw a pleasing display of a rural population: "A mile and a half from Brough, on a hill, lay a great army encamped." It was the Brough cattle fair, held on the 29th and 30th of September. "On a nearer approach, appeared myriads of horses and cattle on the road itself; and in all the fields round me, a brisk stream hurrying cross the way;-thousands of clean healthy people in their best parti-coloured apparel, farmers and their families, esquires and their daughters, hastening up from the dales and down the fells on every side, glittering in the sun, and pressing forward to join the throng." The poet travels on into the heart of the beautiful Lake District. At the village of Grange, near Borrodale, he finds a contrast to the bustle of the fair at Brough. He is entertained by a young farmer and his mother with milk and thin oaten cakes, and "butter that Sisera would have jumped at, though not in a lordly dish." The farmer was a noted man of the district. He was "himself the man that last year plundered the eagle's aiery: all the dale are up in arms on such an occasion, for they lose abundance of lambs yearly." The bold dalesman "was let down from the cliff on ropes to the shelf of rock on which the eagle's nest was built, the people above shouting and hollowing to fright the old birds, which flew screaming round, but did not dare to attack him." The eagles are gone, never to return. Every season, says Miss Martineau, there is a rumour of an eagle having visited some point or another; "but, on the whole, we find the preponderance of belief is against there being any eagle's nest amongst the mountains of Westmorland or Cumberland." § Poetry has made the Lake District her home; and amidst the glorious mountains, the lakes, and the tarns, will Poetry ever abide. The gifted writer who has added another celebrated name to the illustrious who have delighted here to dwell, has said of a mountainous district, "it is the only kind of territory in which utility must necessarily be subordinated to beauty . . . . Man may come and live, if he likes, and if he can; but it must be in some humble corner, by permission, as it were, and not through conflict with the genius of the place. Nature and beauty here rule and occupy: man and his desires are subordinate, and scarcely discernible." It was thus, on the slopes of the mountains, or in vales inaccessible, that the Dalesmen, deriving their name from the word deyler, which means to distribute, occupied their .... "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. ii. p. 151. "The Land we Live in," vol. ii. p. 235. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 217. 32 THE LAKE DISTRICT. [1760-1783. little crofts as tenants of their ecclesiastical or military lord. These were the predecessors of the "statesmen," or "estatesmen," who still survive, though in diminished numbers, struggling with their small skill against the march of agricultural science and the extension of farm holdings. Even nature herself cannot resist this progress. The Kentmere Tarn, by whose shallow waters Bernard Gilpin might have meditated three centuries ago, has been drained in our own day. Wherever corn can be made to spring, the reed and the rush no longer flourish. The social condition of the population is as rapidly changing. The shepherd will still go upon the hills, "into the heart of many thousand mists." His dog will still bring down the flock from heights untrodden by man-that faithful servant, of whom it has been said, "without the shepherd's dog, the mountainous land in England would not be worth sixpence." The occasional Pedlar will still carry his pack to the cottage door. But the whole district has been brought into communication with the outer world; and its inner life has undergone a very marked change. "Bookfarming" is no longer held up to ridicule.* Turnips were first grown as a field-crop in the vale of Bassenthwaite, in 1793. Oats are still half the grain crop; but the food of the people is wondrously altered since the time when a wheaten loaf could not be bought in Carlisle, and "it was only a rich family that used a peck of wheat in the course of a year, and that was used at Christmas." Hemp and flax were grown in small patches for domestic use, the females spinning the flax, and the males plaiting the hemp into cordage, for leather for harness was not used till the end of the last century. "Wonderful Robert Walker," the good curate of Seathwaite, spun the wool out of which the cloth was woven which his wife made up into apparel for themselves and their eight children. But Yorkshire and Lancashire manufactures have banished such thrift. Wordsworth records how the change from hand-labour to machinery intruded itself into Seathwaite: "At a small distance from the parsonage has been erected a mill for spinning yarn. It is a mean and disagreeable object, though not unimportant to the spectator, as calling to mind the momentous changes wrought by such inventions in the frame of society." The spinning wheel went out when drills came in. "About the year 1795, the ancestor of the present Mr. Dixon, of Rucroft or Ruckcroft, in the parish of Ainstable, procured a barrow-drill for sowing his patch of turnips with; and so highly was it esteemed as a saving of labour by himself and his neighbours, that it was lent all round the country, and worked day and night during the season." The one-horse cart gradually drove out the pack-horse, which the farmer employed to carry his grain to the mill or to the market. Looking from Little Langdale, "a horse road is discerned sloping up the brown side of Wrynose, opposite. This track was once the only traffic-road from Kendal to Whitehaven; and it was traversed by pack-horses."§ Not only are the usages of the Lake District changed, but the inhabitants are, in the more beautiful regions, changed from poor cultivators into luxurious gentry; the miserable farm steadings have given "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. xiii. p. 225. 1760-1783.] SCOTLAND-THE LOTHIANS. 33 place to splendid villas. Gray shows us what Grasmere was, ninety years ago: "A white village, with the parish church rising in the midst of it; banging inclosures, corn fields, and meadows green as an emerald, with their trees, hedges, and cattle; fill up the whole space from the edge of the water. . . . . . Not a single red tile, no flaring gentleman's house or garden walls, break in upon the repose of this little unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty, in its neatest and most becoming attire." "We entered Scotland," says Smollett, "by a frightful muir of sixteen miles, which promises very little for the interior parts of the kingdom. . . . That part of Scotland contiguous to Berwick, nature seems to have intended as a barrier between two hostile nations." In a few hours he sees a plain "covered with as fine wheat as ever I saw in the most fertile parts of South Britain." This fertility was exceptional. The agriculture of Scotlandeven in the Lothians, now models of farming excellence-was in the rudest and almost barbarous state, when George III. came to the throne. East Lothian claims the honour of having led the march of improvement. But in the middle of the last century there was not a single mile of continuous hard road in the district. Grain was carried to market on horseback. The whole county of Haddington, long after the middle of that century, was open field. The tenantry frequently resided together in a cluster of mean houses called a town. Green crops were unknown, and the thistles among the corn were carefully gathered to feed the husbandry horses. The implements were of the rudest kind-"better fitted to raise laughter than to raise mould,” according to lord Kaimes, an agricultural improver. The married ploughman was paid, as now, in the produce of the farm; but he received a far less proportion of oats than at the present time, and he had no potatoes in his patch of garden. The only occupation that flourished was that of smuggling.† Such was the agricultural state of the southern shores of the Frith of Forth. The pastoral district of the Lammermuir hills had no improved breeds of sheep till the beginning of the present century. The beautiful country watered by the Tweed and the Teviot was for the greater part uninclosed seventy years ago. Roxburghshire exhibited the dominion of the plough in irregular and detached patches; the intermediate portions being devoted to grazing cattle, which were put under the charge of a herd, to prevent them trespassing upon the scanty divisions set apart for corn. The produce of wheat was only in the proportion of one-twelfth to that of oats and barley. The great novelist has described Liddesdale as exhibiting "no inclosures, no roads, almost no tillage-a land which a patriarch would have chosen to feed his flocks and herds." He has perhaps somewhat exaggerated the abundance of "Charlie's Hope "-the noble cowhouse and its milch-cows, the feeding-house with ten bullocks of the most approved breeds, the stable with two good teams of horses-the appropriate wealth of so worthy a yeoman as "Dandie Dinmont." § Selkirkshire has been rendered familiar to us by "The Ettrick Shepherd," as regards some VOL. VIL * "Humphrey Clinker." "New Statistical Account of Scotland," Haddington, p. 375. D 34 SCOTCH SHEEP FLOCKS. [1760-1783. aspects of its pastoral life. We see his flock, as he was driving them home, suddenly frightened, scampering over the hills, followed by his dog "Sirrah." A dark night is passed in fruitless search, Hogg and his man wandering over the steeps and dells from midnight till the rising sun. At length, at the bottom of a deep ravine, the faithful colley and his charge are found, not a lamb missing. This is the life which knows little change from one century to another; but time yet brings changes. Hogg laments that the black-faced "ewie wi' the crooked horn" had been banished from her native hills. Soberer records inform us that the sheep which once covered the Ettrick wastes produced a crop of wool of the coarsest kind, little adapted for manufacture. The introduction of the Cheviot breed was one of the marks of progress. The management of sheep flocks in Eskdalemuir, the mountain region of Dumfriesshire, attests the innovations of a century. Smollett observes of the sheep which he saw upon the hills, that "their fleeces are much damaged by the tar with which they are smeared, to preserve them from the rot in winter, during which they run wild night and day, and thousands are lost under huge wreaths of snow. 'Tis a pity the farmers cannot contrive some means to shelter this useful animal from the inclemencies of a rigorous climate." When snow storms of any long continuance came, it was the practice of the farmers of Eskdalemuir to fly with their sheep to Annandale. It was the same in the neighbouring mountain districts, when every part of Nithsdale, Annandale, and the lower part of Eskdale, were filled with them. The pastures of the valleys to which the sheep fled are now subdivided and "New Statistical Account," Selkirkshire, p. 76. |