Old Country Life

One in ten;
For why should a blockhead have one in ten,
For prating so long, like a book-learned sot,
Till pudding and dumpling burn to pot?
Burn to pot."

There can be little question that the parson did get cheated over and over again, and bore it without a murmur.

An amusing ballad is sung to this day in the west of England relative to the way in which parsons were treated by their parishioners —

"There wor a man in our town,
I knowed him well, 'twor Passon Brown,
A man of credit and renown,
For – he wor our Passon.

Passon he had got a sheep,
Merry Christmas he would keep;
Decent Passon he – and cheap,
Well-spoke – and not a cross 'un.

Us had gotten nort to eat,
So us stole the Passon's sheep —
Merry Christmas us would keep;
We ate 'n for our dinner.

Us enjoyed our Christmas day;
Passon preached, and said, 'Let's pray,
But I'm a fasting saint; aye, aye!
You'm each a wicked sinner.'

Cruel vex'd wor Passon Brown,
Sick to death he laid him down
Passonless was soon our town,
For why? – we'd starved our Passon.

Tell'y – did'y ever hear
Such a story, true but queer,
How 'twixt Christmas and New Year
The flock had ate their Passon?"

There was non-residence undoubtedly previous to the Act against holding more than one living at a time, unless near together. Men of birth and influence obtained a good deal of preferment, but never in post-Reformation times to the extent that this abuse existed before. To take but one instance. Thomas Cantilupe, who died in 1282, was Precentor and Canon of York, Archdeacon of Stafford and Canon of Lichfield, Canon of London, Canon of Hereford, and held the livings of Doderholt, Hampton, Aston, Wintringham, Deighton, Rippel, Sunterfield, and apparently also Prestbury. Pretty well! It was never so bad in the maligned Hanoverian period.

I had a living in Essex which was held formerly by a certain Bramston Staynes, who was a squarson in Essex, and held simultaneously three other livings; there was one curate to serve the three churches. The rector is said to have visited one of his livings twice only in the twenty years of his incumbency – once to read himself in, the other time to settle some dispute relative to the payment of his tithes.

I can recall several instances of the old scholar-parson, a man chap-ful of quotations. One, a very able classic, and a great naturalist, was rather fond of the bottle. "Mr. West," said a neighbour one day, "I hear you have a wonderfully beautiful spring of water in your glebe." "Beautiful! surpassing! fons Blandusiæ, splendidior vitro!– water so good that I never touch it – afraid of drinking too much of it."

Some twenty-five years ago I knew another, a fine scholar, an old bachelor, living in a very large rectory. He was a man of good presence, courteous, old-world manners, and something of old-world infirmities. His sense of his religious responsibilities in the parish was different in quality to that affected now-a-days.

He was very old when I knew him, and was often laid up with gout. One day, hearing that he was thus crippled, I paid him a visit, and encountered a party of women descending the staircase from his room. When I entered he said to me, "I suppose you met little Mary So-and-so and Janie What's-her-name going out? I've been churching them up here in my bed-room, as I can't go to church."

When a labourer desired to have his child privately baptized, he provided a bottle of rum, a pack of cards, a lemon, and a basin of pure water, then sent for the parson and the farmer for whom he worked. The religious rite over, the basin was removed, the table cleared, cards and rum produced, and sat down to. On such occasions the rector did not return home till late, and the housekeeper left the library window unhasped for the master, but locked the house doors. Under the library window was a violet bed, and it was commonly reported that the rector had on more than one occasion slept in that bed after a christening. Unable to heave up his big body to the sill of the window, he had fallen back among the violets, and there slept off the exertion.

I never had the opportunity of hearing the old fellow preach. His conversation – whether addressing a gentleman, a lady, or one of the lower classes – was garnished with quotations from the classic authors, Greek and Latin, with which his surprising memory was richly stored; and I cannot think that he could resist the temptation of introducing them into his discourse from the pulpit, yet I heard no hint of this in the only sermon of his which was repeated to me by one of his congregation. The occasion of its delivery was this.

He was highly incensed at a long engagement being broken off between some young people in his parish, so next Sunday he preached on "Let love be without dissimulation;" and the sermon, which on this occasion was extempore, was reported by those who heard it to consist of little more than this – "You see, my dearly beloved brethren, what the Apostle says – Let love be without dissimulation. Now I'll tell y' what I think dissimulation is. When a young chap goes out a walking with a girl, – as nice a lass as ever you saw, with an uncommon fresh pair o' cheeks and pretty black eyes too, and not a word against her character, very respectably brought up, – when, I say, my dearly beloved brethren, a young chap goes out walking with such a young woman, after church of a summer evening, seen of every one, and offers her his arm, and they look friendly like at each other, and at times he buys her a present at the fair, a ribbon, or a bit of jewellery – I cannot say I have heard, and I don't say that I have seen, – when, I say, dearly beloved brethren, a young chap like this goes on for more than a year, and lets everybody fancy they are going to be married, – I don't mean to say that at times a young chap may see a nice lass and admire her, and talk to her a bit, and then go away and forget her – there's no dissimulation in that; – but when it goes on a long time, and he makes her to think he's very sweet upon her, and that he can't live without her, and he gives her ribbons and jewellery that I can't particularize, because I haven't seen them – when a young chap, dearly beloved brethren – " and so on and so on, becoming more and more involved. The parties preached about were in the church, and the young man was just under the pulpit, with the eyes of the whole congregation turned on him. The sermon had its effect – he reverted to his love, and without any dissimulation, we trust, married her.

The Christmas and the Easter decorations in this old fellow's church were very wonderful. There was a Christmas text, and that did service also for Easter. The decorating of the church was intrusted to the schoolmaster, a lame man, and his wife, and consisted in a holly or laurel crutch set up on one side of the chancel, and a "jaws of death" on the other. This appalling symbol was constructed like a set of teeth in a dentist's shop-window – the fangs were made of snipped or indented white drawing paper, and the gums of overlapping laurel leaves stitched down one on the other.

A very good story was told of this old parson, which is, I believe, quite true. He was invited to spend a couple of days with a great squire some miles off. He went, stayed his allotted time, and disappeared. Two days later the lady of the house, happening to go into the servants'-hall in the evening, found, to her amazement, her late guest – there. After he had finished his visit up-stairs, at the invitation of the butler he spent the same time below. "Like Persephone, madam," he said, – "half my time above, half in the nether world."

In the matter of personal neatness he left much to be desired. His walled garden was famous for its jargonelle pears. Lady X – , one day coming over, said to him, "Will you come back in my carriage with me, and dine at the Park? You can stay the night, and be driven home to-morrow."

"Thank you, my lady, delighted. I will bring with me some jargonelles. I'll go and fetch them."

Presently he returned with a little open basket and some fine pears in it. Lady X – looked at him, with a troubled expression in her sweet face. The rector was hardly in dining suit; moreover, there was apparent no equipment for the night.

"Dear Mr. M – , will you not really want something further? You will dine with us, and sleep the night."

A vacant expression stole over his countenance, as he retired into himself in thought. Presently a flash of intelligence returned, and he said with briskness, "Ah! to be sure; I'll go and fetch two or three more jargonelles."

A kind, good-hearted man the scholar-parson was, always ready to put his hand into his pocket at a tale of distress, but quite incapable of understanding that his parishioners might have spiritual as well as material requirements. I remember a case of a very similar man – a fellow of his college, and professor at Cambridge – to whom a young student ventured to open some difficulties and doubts that tortured him. "Difficulties! doubts!" echoed the old gentleman. "Take a couple of glasses of port. If that don't dispel them, take two more, and continue the dose till you have found ease of mind."

But to return to our country parson, who had the jargonelles. His church was always well attended. Quite as large a congregation was to be found in it as in other parish churches, where all the modern appliances of music, popular preaching, parish visitations, clubs and bible-classes were in force. Perhaps the reason was that he was not too spiritually exacting. Many of our enthusiastic modern parsons attempt to screw up their people into a condition of spiritual exaltation which they are quite unable to maintain permanently, and then they become discouraged at the inevitable, invariable relapse.

We suppose that one main cause of dissent is the deadness and dulness of the Church service before the revival of late days; and we attribute this deadness and dulness to the indifference of these bêtes noirs, the clergy of last century. I doubt it.

At the time of the Commonwealth our churches had been gutted of everything ornamental and beautiful, and the services reduced to the most dreary performance of sermon and extempore prayer. At the Restoration, a very large number indeed of the Presbyterian ministers conformed, were ordained, and retained the benefices. Naturally they conducted the Common Prayer as nearly as they could on the lines of the service they were accustomed to. They had no tradition of what the Anglican liturgy was; they did not understand it, and they served it up cold or lukewarm, as unpalatable as possible. They did not like it themselves, and they did not want their congregations to become partial to it. The old clergy who were restored were obliged to content themselves with the merest essentials of Divine worship; their congregations had grown up without acquaintance with the liturgy – at all events for some nineteen years they had not heard it, and they did not want to shock their weak consciences by too sudden a transformation.

When Pepys went to church on November 4, 1660, he entered in his Diary, "Mr. Mills did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer, by saying Glory be to the Father, &c., after he had read the two psalms; but the people had been so little used to it, that they could not tell what to answer." The same afternoon he went to Westminster Abbey, "where the first time that ever I heard the organs in a cathedral."

Evelyn enters, on March 22, 1678, "now was our Communion-table placed altar-wise," that is to say, not till eighteen years after the Restoration! so slowly were alterations made in the churches to bring them back to their former conditions of decency and order. Whatever has been done since has been done cautiously and with hesitation, lest offence should be given.

It was not practicable in our village churches to have the hearty congregational singing that now prevails, for only a very few could read, and only such could join in the psalmody.

I have in my possession a diary kept by a kinswoman in 1813. She makes in that year an entry, "Walked over this Sunday to South Mimms church to hear a barrel-organ that has just been there erected. It made very beautiful and appropriate music, and admirably sustained the voices of the quire, but I do not myself admire these innovations in the conduct of Divine worship." What would she have said to the innovations that have taken place since then, had she lived to see them! And they have been, for the most part, in a right direction; but we must be thankful, not only for them, but for the evidence they give that the clergy are somewhat emerging from that condition in which they were, as Crabbe describes them, when "Fear was their ruling passion" —

"All things new
Were deemed superfluous, useless, or untrue.
Habit with him was all the test of truth;
It must be right; I've done it from my youth.
Questions he answer'd in as brief a way; —
It must be wrong – it was of yesterday."

CHAPTER VI

THE HUNTING PARSON

WHY not? why should not the parson mount his cob and go after the hounds? A more fresh, invigorating pursuit is not to be found, not one in which he is brought more in contact with his fellow-men. There was a breezy goodness about many a hunting parson of the old times that was in itself a sermon, and was one on the topic that healthy amusement and Christianity go excellently well together. I had rather any day see a parson ride along with the pink, than sport the blue ribbon. The last of our genuine West Country hunting parsons was Jack Russell, whose life has already been written, but to whom I can bear testimony that he was a good specimen of the race. I was one day on top of a coach along with two farmers, one from the parish of Jack Russell, another from that of another hunting parson, whom we will call Jack Hannaford. They were discussing their relative parsons. Then he who was under Hannaford told a scurvy tale of him, whereat his companion said, "Tell'ee what, all the world knows what your pa'sson be; but as for old Jack Russell, up and down his backbone, he's as good a Christian, as worthy a pastor, and as true a gentleman as I ever seed."

In a parish on the Cornish side of the estuary of the Tamar, some little while ago, the newly appointed rector, turning over the register of baptisms in the vestry, was much astonished at seeing entries of the christening of boys only. "Why, Richard!" said he to the clerk, "however comes this about – are there only boys born in this place?"