Tom Brown at Rugby

Tom Brown at Rugby
Thomas Hughes

Hughes Thomas

Tom Brown at Rugby

PART I

CHAPTER I

THE BROWN FAMILY

"I'm the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir,
With liberal notions under my cap." —

    Ballad.
The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle,[1 - Doyle: an English artist noted for his humorous and satirical designs.] within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating[2 - Matriculating: entering.] at the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen's[3 - Yeomen: small independent farmers. They have generally constituted the best part of the English army.] work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard shaft[4 - Cloth-yard shaft: an arrow a yard in length.] at Cressy and Agincourt[5 - Cressy and Agincourt: English victories over the French in 1346 and 1415.]– with the brown bill[6 - Bill: a combined spear and battle-axe.] and pike under the brave Lord Willoughby – with culverin and demi-culverin[7 - Culverin and demi-culverin: ancient forms of cannon.] against Spaniards and Dutchmen – with hand-grenade[8 - Hand-grenade: a kind of bomb or shell thrown by hand.] and sabre, and musket and bayonet, under Rodney[9 - Rodney, etc.: famous English naval and military commanders.] and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have carried their lives in their hands; getting hard knocks and hard work in plenty, which was, on the whole, what they looked for, and the best thing for them; and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are better without. Talbots[10 - Talbots, etc.: noted family names of the English nobility.] and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and such-like folk have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be somewhat astounded – if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken – to find how small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns.

These latter, indeed, have until the present generation rarely been sung by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their "sacer vates,"[11 - "Sacer vates": inspired bard or poet.] having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding on tight to, whatever good things happened to be going – the foundation of the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way, and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs, seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer, having for many years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and moreover having the honor of being nearly connected with an eminently respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone[12 - Throw his stone, etc.: help to build their cairn or monument.] on to the pile.

THE BROWN CHARACTER

However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have to meet and put up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear at once what sort of folk the Browns are, at least my branch of them; and then if you don't like the sort, why cut the concern at once, and let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other. In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are going, there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcass. And these carcasses for the most part answer very well to the characteristic propensity; they are a square-headed and snake-necked generation, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in the flank, carrying no lumber. Then for clanship,[13 - Clanship: here, the holding together of a class, tribe, or family.] they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing the belief they have in one another. With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third and fourth generation. "Blood is thicker than water," is one of their pet sayings. They can't be happy unless they are always meeting one another. Never was such people for family gatherings, which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together. For during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are wonderfully antagonistic, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till you've been among them some time and understand them, you can't think but that they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it; they love and respect one another ten times the more after a good set family arguing bout,[14 - Bout: contest.] and go back, one to his curacy,[15 - Curacy: parish.] another to his chambers,[16 - Chambers: law offices.] and another to his regiment, freshened for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the height of company.

This family training, too, combined with their turn for combativeness, makes them eminently quixotic.[17 - Quixotic: romantic or visionary] They can't let anything alone which they think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoying all easy-going folk; and spend their time and money in having a tinker at it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile. Most other folk get tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old age. They have always a crotchet[18 - Crotchet: whim, notion, "hobby."] going, till the old man with a scythe[19 - Old man with a scythe: Father Time.] reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are.

And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up, or make them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck's back feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he goes to the treadmill,[20 - Treadmill: a wheel on which prisoners were formerly compelled to work.] and his wife and children to the workhouse, they will be on the look-out for Bill to take his place.

TOM BROWN'S BIRTHPLACE

However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular; so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire's stability, let us at once fix our attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched, and which dwelt in that portion of the Royal County of Berks,[21 - Berks: Berkshire, a county west of London. It is called "Royal" because it is the seat of Windsor Castle. The Vale of the White Horse gets its name from the gigantic image of a horse cut through the turf in the side of a chalk hill. Tradition says it was done over a thousand year ago, to commemorate a great victory over the Danes by Alfred.] which is called the Vale of White Horse.

Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with your eyes open have been aware, soon after leaving the Didcot Station, of a fine range of chalk hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line. The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham Station. If you love English scenery and have a few hours to spare, you can't do better, the next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon road or Shrivenham Station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for the vague old stories that haunt country-sides all about England, will not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours' stay; for, glorious as the view is, the neighborhood is yet more interesting for its relics of by-gone times. I only know two English neighborhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of and going to introduce you to very particularly; for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that don't care for England in detail may skip the chapter.

THE OLD BOY MOURNETH OVER YOUNG ENGLAND

O young England! young England! You who are born into these racing railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground for three pound ten,[22 - Three pound ten (shillings): the English shilling is about twenty five cents, and the pound may be called five dollars.] in a five weeks' holiday, why don't you know more of your own birthplaces? You're all in the ends of the earth it seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar for midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not. Going round Ireland, with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford racing-boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by the last batch of books from Mudie's Library, and half bored to death.

Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high art, and all that; have seen the pictures at Dresden[23 - Dresden: a city of Germany, noted for its treasures of art.] and the Louvre,[24 - The Louvre: an ancient palace in Paris, containing vast collections of sculptures and paintings.] and know the taste of sauer-kraut.[25 - Sauer-kraut: a German dish, prepared from cabbage.] All I say is, you don't know your own lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be chock-full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis,[26 - Bee-orchis (orkis): a wild-flower resembling a bee.] which grows in the next wood or on the down[27 - Down: a barren hill of chalk or sand.] three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old gable-ended farm-houses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the civil wars,[28 - Civil wars: those between Parliament and King Charles I., in the seventeenth century.] where the parish butts[29 - Butts: targets for archery practice. Before the invention of gunpowder they were set up by law in every parish.] stood, where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid[30 - Laid: dispelled by religious ceremonies.] by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.

Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce domum"[31 - Dulce domum: sweet home.] at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday[32 - Black Monday: the end of the holidays.] came round. We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And so we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and stories, by heart; and went over the fields and woods and hills again and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys: and you're young cosmopolites,[33 - Cosmopolites: citizens of the world at large, familiar with all countries.] belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it's all right; I dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish backsword play[34 - Backsword play: the game of single-stick, or fencing with cudgels.] hadn't gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.

VALES IN GENERAL

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large rich pastures, bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber, with here and there a nice little gorse[35 - Gorse: a thick, prickly, evergreen shrub, which grows wild and bears beautiful yellow flowers.] or spinney,[36 - Spinney: a small grove filled with undergrowth.] where abideth poor Charley,[37 - Charley: a fox.] having no other cover[38 - Cover: a retreat, or hiding-place.] to which to betake himself for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the Old Berkshire.[39 - Old Berkshire: an association of hunters.] Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the staunch little pack who dash after him – heads high and sterns low, with a breast-high scent – can consume the ground at such times. There being little plow-land, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built chiefly of good gray-stone and thatched;[40 - Thatched: roofed with straw or reeds.] though I see that within the last year or two the red brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is beginning to manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people; and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in winter, but pleasant jog-trot roads, running through the great pasture lands, dotted here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.

One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth – was it the great Richard Swiveller,[41 - Richard Swiveller: a jolly character who lives by his wits. See Dickens's "Old Curiosity Shop."] or Mr. Stiggins?[42 - Mr. Stiggins: a hypocritical parson. See Dickens's "Pickwick Papers."] says, "We are born in a vale, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These consequences, I for one am ready to encounter. I pity people who wern't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a vale; that is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view, if you choose to turn toward him, that's the essence of a vale. There he is forever in the distance, your friend and companion; you never lose him as you do in hilly districts.

THE OLD ROMAN CAMP

And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest, bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder, and think it odd you never heard of this before; but, wonder or not as you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a magnificent Roman camp,[43 - Roman camp: the Romans, when they conquered England, about 78 A.D., built a stronghold here.] and no mistake, with gates, and ditch, and mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyrie.[44 - Eyrie: the nest of a bird of prey; here, a gathering-place for Roman soldiers.] The ground falls away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called and here it lies just as the Romans left it, except that cairn,[45 - Cairn: a heap of stones set up to mark a spot.] on the east side, left by her majesty's corps of sappers and miners[46 - Sappers and miners: usually, soldiers employed in working on trenches and fortifications or in undermining those of an enemy; here, engaged in surveying.] the other day, when they and the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys for the Ordnance Map[47 - Ordnance Map: an official or government map.] of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you won't forget – a place to open a man's soul and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great vale spread out as the garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind; and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway" ("the Rudge" as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest back of the hills; such a place as Balak[48 - Balak: see Numbers xxii.] brought Balaam to, and told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.

BATTLE OF ASHDOWN

And now we leave the camp, and descend toward the west, and are on the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen, more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred[49 - Alfred: Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, 871. He defeated the Danes, who had overrun most of England, at Ashdown, and compelled them to make a treaty of peace. He is justly considered one of the noblest and wisest of the English sovereigns; and the thousandth anniversary of his birth was celebrated in 1849, at Wantage, Berks.] won his great battle, the battle of Ashdown "Æscendum" in the chroniclers), which broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are standing – the whole crown of the hill, in fact. "The heathen had beforehand seized the higher ground," as old Asser[50 - Asser: a contemporary of Alfred; he wrote his life.] says, having wasted everything behind them from London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons,[51 - Saxons: a name given to certain German tribes who conquered Britain, in the fifth century. The name England came from the Angles, a people of the same stock, who settled in the east and north of the island. From these Anglo-Saxons the English have in great part descended.] as they did at the Alma.[52 - Alma: a river in the Crimea where a desperate battle was fought between the Russians and the allied English and French in 1854.] "The Christians led up their line from the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen)." Bless the old chronicler![53 - Chronicler: Asser, from whom this is quoted.] does he think nobody ever saw the "single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since; an old single thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At least, if it isn't the same tree, it ought to have been, for it's just in the place where the battle must have been won or lost – "around which, as I was saying, the two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in this place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same place." After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the country-side, carved out on the northern side of the chalk hill under the camp, where it is almost precipitous, the great Saxon white horse, which he who will may see from the railway, and which gives its name to the vale over which it has looked these thousand years and more.

Right down below the White Horse is a curious deep and broad gully called "the Manger," into one side of which the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as the "Giant's Stairs"; they are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and thistle-down gleaming in the sun, and the sheep-paths running along their sides like ruled lines.

The other side of the Manger is formed by the Dragon's Hill, a curious little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward from the range, and utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some deliverer of mankind – St. George[54 - St. George: the patron saint of England.] the country folk used to tell me – killed a dragon. Whether it were St. George, I cannot say; but surely a dragon was killed there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more by token[55 - More by token: as a sign or proof that this is so.] the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hill-side.

Passing along the Ridgeway to the west for about a mile, we come to a little clump of young beech and firs, with a growth of thorn and privet[56 - Privet: a shrub much used for hedges.] underwood. Here you may find nests of the strong down-partridge and pewit, but take care that the keeper[57 - Keeper: the gamekeeper, a man kept on great estates to look after the game.] isn't down upon you; and in the middle of it is an old cromlech,[58 - Cromlech: a rude tomb built by the first inhabitants of Britain.] a huge flat stone raised on seven or eight others, and led up to by a path, with large single stones set up on each side. This is Wayland Smith's cave,[59 - Wayland Smith's Cave: a "supernatural smith" who shod horses on payment of sixpence.] a place of classic fame now; but as Sir Walter[60 - Sir Walter: Sir Walter Scott.] has touched it, I may as well let it alone, and refer you to Kenilworth for the legend.

The thick deep wood which you see in the hollow, about a mile off, surrounds Ashdown Park, built by Inigo Jones.[61 - Inigo Jones: a celebrated architect of the 17th century.] Four broad alleys are cut through the wood, from circumference to centre, and each leads to one face of the house. The mystery of the downs hangs about house and wood, as they stand there alone, so unlike all around, with the green slopes, studded with great stones just about this part, stretching away on all sides. It was a wise Lord Craven,[62 - Lord Craven: the owner of the estate on which the "White Horse" is located.] I think, who pitched his tent there.

THE "SEVEN BARROWS" FARM

Passing along the Ridgeway to the east, we soon come to cultivated land. The downs, strictly so called, are no more; Lincolnshire farmers have been imported, and the long fresh slopes are sheep-walks[63 - Sheep-walks: sheep pastures, for which the "downs" are much used.] no more, but grow famous turnips and barley. One of these improvers lives over there at the "Seven Barrows"[64 - Barrows: ancient burial mounds.] farm, another mystery of the great downs. There are the barrows still, solemn and silent, like ships in the calm sea, the sepulchres of some sons of men. But of whom? It is three miles from the White Horse, too far for the slain of Ashdown to be buried there – who shall say what heroes are waiting there? But we must get down into the Vale again, and so away by the Great Western Railway to town, for time and the printer's devil press; and it is a terrible long and slippery descent, and a shocking bad road. At the bottom, however, there is a pleasant public,[65 - Public: a public house.] whereat we must really take a modest quencher, for the down air is provocative of thirst. So we pull up under an old oak which stands before the door.

THE BLOWING STONE

"What is the name of your hill, landlord?"

"Blawing Stwun Hill, sir, to be sure."

[Reader. "Sturm?"

Author. "Stone, stupid; The Blowing Stone."]

"And of your house? I can't make out the sign."

"Blawing Stwun, sir," says the landlord, pouring out his old ale from a Toby Philpot jug,[66 - Toby Philpot jug: a large brown pitcher, shaped like a jolly old gentleman of the olden time.] with a melodious crash, into the long-necked glass.

"What queer names!" say we, sighing at the end of our draught, and holding out the glass to be replenished.

"Bean't queer at all, as I can see, sir," says mine host, handing back our glass, "seeing that this here is the Blawing Stwun itself"; putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian[67 - Antediluvian: before the deluge.] rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale, wondering what will come next. "Like to hear un,[68 - Un: it; also him or her.] sir?" says mine host, setting down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the "Stwun." We are ready for anything; and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his mouth to one of the rat-holes. Something must come of it, if he doesn't burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here it comes, sure enough, a grewsome[69 - Grewsome: frightful.] sound between a moan and a roar, and spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hill-side, and into the woods at the back of the house, a ghost-like awful voice. "Um[70 - Um: they.] do say, sir," says mine host, rising, purple-faced, while the moan is still coming out of the Stwun, "as they used in old times to warn the country-side, by blawing the Stwun when the enemy was a comin' – and as how folks could make un heered then for seven mile round; leastways, so I've heerd lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about them old times." We can hardly swallow lawyer Smith's seven miles, but could the blowing of the stone have been a summons, a sort of sending the fiery cross[71 - Fiery cross: a cross, the ends of which had been fired and then extinguished in blood. It was sent round by the chiefs of clans in time of war, to summon their followers.] round the neighborhood in the old times? What old times? Who knows? We pay for our beer, and are thankful.

"And what's the name of the village just below, landlord?"

"Kingstone Lisle, sir."

"Fine plantations[72 - Plantations: groves of trees set out in regular order.] you've got here."

"Yes, sir, the Squire's[73 - Squire: a country gentleman.] 'mazin' fond of trees and such like."

"No wonder. He's got some real beauties to be fond of. Good-day, landlord."

"Good-day, sir, and a pleasant ride to 'e."[74 - 'E: thee or you.]

FARRINGDON AND PUSEY