Alfred Kingston

“ Of that interesting evolution of the older locomotion, our old town, by the necessity of the route, saw most of the varied phases, for during many years of the century coaches rattled through our streets with kings, queens and princes, duellists and prize-fighters, daring highwaymen and Bow Street runners, romantic lovers off to Gretna Green, and School boys—poor little Nicklebies off to a Squeers' Academy—jostling inside the body of the lumbering coach, or dangling their legs from the roof as outsiders! ”

“ But, if many of the English people, weary of the increasing burdens which fell upon them, had their dreams of a good time coming, they, instead of following the mere glimmer of the will-o'-the-wisp, across the darkness of their lot, responded rather to signs of coming activities. Through the darkness they saw perhaps nothing very striking, but they felt occasionally the thrill of coming activities which were struggling for birth in that pregnant mother-night which seemed to be shrouding the sunset of the century—and they were saved from the immediate horrors of a revolution. ”

“ It is worthy of notice how locomotion in all ages seems to have classified itself into what we now know as passenger and goods train, saloon and steerage. Away back in the 18th century when men were only dreaming of the wonders of the good time coming, when carriages were actually to "travel without horses," the goods train was simply a long line or cavalcade of Pack-horses. This was before the age of "fly waggons," distinguished for carrying goods, and sometimes passengers as well, at the giddy rate of two miles an hour under favourable circumstances! ”

“ Ah, me! who would not be jolly with a good market this week and the prospect of higher prices next?—with the guarantee of the State that the farmer should not have less than 70s. a quarter, and the certainty of higher prices if the war lasted! But these farmers in the leather breeches and top boots—these self-satisfied men are already in the fading glory of the "Good Old Times"—always applying those words, in so far as they have any meaning at all, chiefly to the farming and land-owning classes. ”

“ Men and women forgot their grievances in the contemplation of great names whose owners did not then, like the statesmen of to-day, come down to the level of the common life to be jostled on railway platforms.
It is only when one looks into the details of local life that it is possible to realize the sharp contrast of great men and little happiness for the people, or how terrible must have been the strain for the whole nation to have existed under such conditions without a revolution. ”

“ The marvel is that Parliament with so much talent in its foremost men should have been powerless to deal with the weakness outside, or that the brilliant leaders should have been content to reach such an eminence by so rough and thorny a path; but the great forces which have been liberated within this century had not then set men's energies free, and they were pretty much confined to, and did not see much beyond, the narrow way along which they were toiling. ”

“ Before the century is much older we shall see the same class harrassed, embarrassed, and eaten up by a rotten and immoral poor law system, about to be mended, and their prospect of high prices growing less and less, as sliding scales and all artificial props are removed out of the way of things finding their own level—down, down, down towards the present unsupportable level of prices when the consumer has as complete a monopoly of advantages as had the producer in the old days! ”

“ The old stage wagons succeeding to the pack-horses, which carried goods and occasionally passengers stowed away, were a curiosity. A long-bodied wagon, with loose canvas tilt, wheels of great breadth, so as to be independent of ruts, except the very broadest; with a series of four or five iron tires or hoops round the feloes, and the whole drawn by eight or ten horses, two abreast with a driver riding on a pony with a long whip, which gave him command of the whole team! Average pace about 1 1/2 to 2 miles an hour, including stoppages, as taken from old time tallies, for their journeys! ”

“ With much that is admittedly still lacking in the village life and its hold upon the people, the condition of the youth of an agricultural district presents as great a contrast to-day with that of the youth of eighty years ago, as any other condition of life can show. Then, he trudged from the farm house to his daily round of toil, in his stiff leather breeches, from the field back to the stable, from the stable to the kitchen fire-place, then to bed, and up again to the stable and the field—week in, week out, with, in many cases, not a penny to spend from year's end to year's end ”

“ The French Revolution did not, as a matter of fact, rest with a mere revulsion of moral forces, but as the infection descended from moral heights into the grosser elements of the national life, men soon {3} began to fight for the new life with the old weapons, until France found, and others looking on saw, the beautiful dream of liberty tightening down into that hideous nightmare, and saddest of all tyrannies, the tyranny of the multitude! ”

“ Over the dark night of the 18th and the dull grey morning of the 19th century there was this remarkable feature, that while the local records show how deplorable was the condition of the people, there was at the head of the affairs of the nation a perfect galaxy of great men, such as the public life of this nation had perhaps never known. ”

“ In place of the old bent figures in smock-frocks, there are spruce young fellows in black coats; in place of the old indoor farm service, its hearty living, but liberty to thrash a boy, there is freedom of contract, and, I daresay, sometimes an empty stomach; instead of an absolute indifference to the moral character of the labourer, the farmer is waking up to the fact that a steady sober man is worth more than the frequenter of the ale-house. ”

“ The disappearance of these old village choirs, in which the village blacksmith, the baker, the tailor, and other natives played on the clarionet, bass-viol, bassoon, flute, trombone, and all kinds of instruments, while other grown-up men took their "parts" in those wonderful old fugues that seemed to make the song of praise without end—the absence of all this means a certain loss of that passion for music which has never been thoroughly recovered!
We have many more players and singers now than in the past, but not, perhaps, the same proportion of lovers of music for its own sake. ”

“ The rejoicings were unbounded and images of "Boney" were carried about in almost every village on donkeys or men's shoulders, and afterwards burned on the village green. No one dreamed that Waterloo was still in store, but alas it soon appeared as if all this patriotic eloquence, and peace rejoicing, would have to be unsaid, for in a short time there came the alarming news that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and was returning to France! ”

“ Parliamentary Reform, for which more enlightened men here and there had for fifty years been asking, was the first setting of the tide which was to penetrate and revolutionize all our local life. Early in the present century when the then Lord Dacre contested Cambridgeshire, and had the audacity to advocate Parliamentary Reform and Civil and Religious Liberty, he was called the Fire-Brand, and he had few supporters when, in 1810, he moved for an inquiry into the state of Parliamentary representation. ”

“ All the ancient bundle of precedents, and the swaddling bands of restraints and customs in which men had been content to remain confined for thousands of years, were henceforth to be dissolved in that grandiose dream of a society in which each individual, left to follow his unrestrained will, was to be trusted to contribute to the happiness of all without that security from wrong which, often rude in its operation, had been the fundamental basis of social order for ages! ”

“ But just as the heavy material roadway along which the old locomotion was shifting a hundred years ago, from horses' backs on to wheels, has become firmer, broader, lighter, and freer by the cutting down of hedge rows and hindrances which shut out the sweetening influence of light and air; so along the highways of men's thoughts and actions there has been an analogous process of cutting down boundaries and removing hindrances which divided men in the past, until we see one another face to face. ”

“ Generally about two guineas was the price, and students would club together their five shillings each for a "subject." In the face of such facts it would be idle to suggest that the tradition of that mysterious cart, moving silently through the darkness of night on muffled wheels towards our village churchyards, was merely a creature of the imagination. The tradition of that phantom cart which lingered for years had a substantial origin as certain as the memory of many persons still living can make it! ”

“ Coaches and coach horses are not the only things which have disappeared from our high roads. One of the things to be met with on the roads in 1800-20 was the velocipede. It was not unlike in form the "Safety" bicycle which is so universally met with on our roads to-day, with a trifling difference which made long and rapid journeys out of the question. The fact is the mechanical genius of Englishmen, which has made such enormous strides during the century, had not then found out that it was possible to use the solid earth as a fulcrum and at the same time to leave the feet and legs free. ”

“ The old tales of "barley bread as black as your hat," which many persons living have heard their grandfathers speak of, were no mere tradition, but a stern hard fact, and whenever, in that terribly anxious spring time of 1801, the poor could get a scrap of bacon, a dish of tops of slinging nettles was by no means an uncommon resort to eke out the means of a precarious existence. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the harvest of 1801 was looked forward to with as great a degree of anxiety as ever the children of Israel looked for a sight of the Promised Land! ”

“ From the old Royston Book Club debates of last century it will be remembered that I quoted the result of a vote upon—which of the three professions, of divinity, law and physic, was most beneficial to mankind, and that the doctors could only get one vote, against a respectable number for law and divinity. ”

“ The current of business and bargain-making slackens; plump portly farmers in top boots, millers in grey suits almost flour-proof, maltsters carrying riding whips—all the busy assembly of men of shrewd common sense and well filled nankeen purses suddenly puts up its sample bags, drops its business air, and, like boys out of school, melts away in three different directions according to individual preferences. For behind that well understood signal of the bells is the typical institution then in its palmiest days—the "Market Ordinary." ”

“ Before the people of England at the end of the 18th century, on the horizon which shut out the future, lay a great black bank of cloud, and our great grandfathers who gazed upon it, almost despairing whether it would ever lift, were really in the long shadows of great coming events. ”

“ These picturesque features of our rural country life have now disappeared almost as entirely as the parish stocks. Perhaps the most perfect specimen in existence, and one which could have hardly been rivalled for picturesqueness even in the old days, is that which still points the modern wayfarer to the "Fox and Hounds," in the village of Barley, near Royston, where the visitor may see Reynard making his way across the beam overhead, from one side of the street to the other, into the "cover" of a sort of kennel in the thatch roof, with hounds and huntsmen in full cry behind him! ”

“ It may be a hard thing to say perhaps, but the evidence seems irresistible that though there may be notable instances to the contrary, in too many cases where the old clay-bat and thatched habitations have escaped the devouring element of fire, the housing of the labouring man's family is much worse than it was sixty years ago. Is it surprising that a spirited youth or girl, with all the stimulus of immensely improved conditions of life around them, should be drawn away from the old moorings? ”

“ However much we may be inclined to smile at this grandiloquent prophecy of the fruits of an evening school, in the light of present difficulties of instilling four standards into the bulk of the childhood of the nation, it is impossible to move a step among the footprints of the common people of sixty years ago without finding how enormously the progress of education has transformed the face of society, though not quite on the classic lines of the old writer just quoted. ”