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Another form in which popular satisfaction was wont to display itself on important occasions was that of kindling bonfires in all the principal London thoroughfares. It is related by Lord Campbell, in his 'Lives of the Chief Justices,' that a few hours after the trial of William Owen for libel, Sir Dudley Ryder, who, as attorney-general, had been ordered to institute the prosecution against him by a vote of the House of Commons, ventured to return from the Guildhall to his house in Chancery Lane. To his dismay he beheld an enormous bonfire blazing in Fleet Street, surrounded by a turbulent mob, which, before it would permit his coach to pass, compelled him to distribute money among them in order that they might drink to the health of the jury. Failing to recognise in Sir Dudley the counsel for the Crown, they threw to him, in return for his benefaction, a copy of a song supposed to have been sung by the foreman and a chorus of jurymen, but in reality the composition of an Irish porter.

It was on June 12, 1779, that tidings reached the capital from Portsmouth of the honourable acquittal by the courtmartial of Admiral Keppel. The mob became frantic with excitement and compelled every householder' to put up lights.' The principal streets of London and Westminster were illuminated with lamps and candles, the church bells chimed forth merry peals, and guns boomed at intervals. The rabble, who had all along been violent in their denunciations of the admiral's accusers, manifested their exultation by wreaking their vengeance upon Sir Hugh Palliser's residence in Pall Mall, where, after having broken all the windows, they proceeded to burst open the doors, and effecting an entrance, demolished the best part of the furniture, and flung the remainder into the street, where it was given to the flames of a bonfire. Marching to the Admiralty, they continued their work of destruction by taking off the gates from their hinges, and passing through Downing Street, smashed the windows of Lord North's mansion. In the evening the mob carried about effigies of Sir Hugh Palliser suspended by the neck, and finally burnt them upon Tower Hill. Great acclamations attended the presenta'Diary and Letters of Governor Hutchinson, ii. 242-3.

tion of the freedom of the city of London to Admiral Keppel on February 20, but there was less rioting than before.

It must not be supposed that the mob in these particular riots was composed of none but the lower orders of the London population. Hear the remarkable words of Fox's

biographer :

It happened at three in the morning that Charles Fox, Lord Derby, and his brother, Major Stanley, and two or three more young men of quality, having been drinking at Almack's, suddenly thought of making a tour of the streets, and were joined by the Duke of Ancaster, who was very drunk, and what showed it was no premeditated scheme, the latter was a courtier, and had actually been breaking windows. Finding the mob before Palliser's house, some of the young lords said, Why don't you break Lord G. Germaine's windows?' The populace had been so little tutored that they asked who he was, and being encouraged, broke his windows. The mischief pleasing the juvenile leaders, they marched to the Admiralty, forced the gates, and demolished Palliser's and Lord Lisburne's windows.1

6

Lord John Russell, who gives this account of those lawless days, adds in a footnote that it was always said that Thomas Grenville participated in the riot at the Admiralty, and this, when the prevailing amusements of young men of rank in that age are taken into consideration, may very likely have been the

case.

Memorials and Corr. of Fox, ed. by Lord J. Russell, i. 224.

217

CHAPTER XVII.

THE LIFE OF THE PROVINCES.

Isolation of provincial society-Boorish manners of the peasantry-The squire The country parson as he was-The rural Sunday-Furniture of country houses-Domestic manners-Food-Toasting RecreationsThe turf-Sports of the lower orders-State of provincial towns-Archaic customs-Bury Fair-Marriage and funeral ceremonies-Obsolete social condition of their inhabitants-Local punishments-The tumbril, cucking-stool, and 'Drunkard's Cloak'-The brank, or 'Gossip's Bridle ' -The whipping post-- A country clergyman's book of accounts-Defoe's tour through England-Arthur Young's peregrinations.

HITHERTO Our attention has been mainly confined to but one aspect of the social life of England in the eighteenth century, namely, that of the capital. There is, however, another side which awaits a brief consideration-that of provincial society during the same period-and accordingly in this chapter we shall examine that branch of the subject, although necessarily somewhat at random, since to trace all the associations which are connected with it would occupy a volume instead of a single chapter.

If it were possible for the reader to retrace his footsteps into the dark backward and abysm of time,' and to find himself in some one or other of the provincial towns or villages of the last century, few things would strike him more forcibly than their complete isolation from what is commonly called the outer world. For such a state of complete isolation it is not difficult to account. Some ten or a dozen miles of miry and well nigh impassable road, or a river over which nobody had deemed it worth while to throw even a wooden bridge, would then have sufficed, as it often did, to impose almost as much restriction upon frequent intercourse as the Atlantic Ocean does between us

and our American brethren at the present time. There were many districts which rarely or never received visitants from the outer world at all, and in which the sudden appearance of a traveller aroused as much curiosity among the natives as that of an Englishman nowadays excites among the rude uncultivated peasantry who inhabit the north-west coast of Ireland. Indeed it too often happened that Hodge's prejudices against intruders assumed a most unpleasantly active form. William Hutton, an eminent Birmingham bookseller of the last century, has left on record a short narrative of a visit which he paid in company with a friend to the village of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, some time during the year 1770, in order to view the scene of the memorable battle which had been fought in its vicinity more than two centuries and a half before. In that narrative he states that the villagers set their dogs at them in the streets, merely because they were strangers. Nor were they surprised at such treatment. 'Surrounded with impassable roads,' he wrote, 'no intercourse with man to humanise the mind, nor commerce to smooth their rugged manners, they continue the boors of nature.' The testimony of John Wesley, who, in his time, must have penetrated almost every district of the kingdom, is upon this point equally apposite. In describing his journey from Manchester to Huddersfield, he observes-‘The people ran and shouted after the carriage, and I believe they are the wildest folk in England.' Further proof of the brutality which still reigned among the lower orders in provincial districts is supplied in the fact that so late as the closing years of the eighteenth century, there existed, at Bolton in Lancashire, a savage custom of maltreating strangers called 'trotting,' in which they were subjected to downright brutal usage. In their more serious quarrels it was not uncommon to bite off ears and noses; and in some instances to kick each other to death with the force of their clogs. When John Wesley visited Cornwall in 1776, he found 'wrecking' a practice which had been made a capital offence by Henry Pelham, as rife then as it had ever been.

2

Nine-tenths of the provincial denizens, to the close of the
History of Bosworth Field.

2 Gardiner, Music and Friends, i. 586.

eighteenth century, possessed knowledge of scarcely anybody or anything outside their own very limited sphere. Now and then, perhaps, some London pedlar or packman hawking his wares in a sequestered neighbourhood would favour his customers with a few items of information respecting men and what they were doing amidst the varied scenes, the bustle and the stir of the great Babel which he had left behind him; or it would not unfrequently happen that a stained and tattered number of a London or country newspaper found its way from the house of some neighbouring gentleman into the kitchen of the village inn, where its slender contents were read and re-read by someone possessed of a good pair of lungs to a crowd of gaping clodhoppers whom it furnished with food for reflection, like the Shunamite widow's barrel of meal and cruse of oil, for the space of half a year. But beyond this the rustic population in the last century seldom or never advanced.

In considering the main factors in provincial society at that time, we pause first to notice the character of the small squire. Nothing can be more erroneous than the supposition that the squires of eighteenth-century England bore any resemblance to their modern counterparts, that they were in effect the prototypes of Sir Roger de Coverley with whom Addison has made us so familiar, or of Sir William Thornton whom the reader of Goldsmith can never forget. Divest that immortal creation of Fielding's brain, Squire Western, of the grosser features in his character, and the portrait will stand very well for a representative of this large and influential class for, at least, the first sixty years of the eighteenth century.

Adopting the language of a writer in the 'Connoisseur,' it may be said without any exaggeration that the majority of the squires were as mere vegetables which grew up and rotted on the same spot of ground; except a few, perhaps, that were transplanted into Parliament. Their whole life was hurried away in scampering after foxes, leaping five-bar gates, trampling upon the farmers' corn, and swilling October. The career of one was the career of a hundred. First he dawdled away a couple of years at one of the universities, which he generally left without taking a degree, and with but little addition to his previous

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