LINGERING CUSTOMS.  
Many precious rites
And customs of our rural ancestry
Are gone, or stealing from us.
Wordsworth.
 
How rapidly is the fashion of the ancient rural life of England disappearing! Every one who lived in the country in his youth, and looks back to that period now, feels how much is lost! How many of the beautiful old customs, the hearty old customs, the poetical old customs, are gone! Modern ambition, modern wealth, modern notions of social proprieties, modern education, are all hewing at the root of the poetical and picturesque, the simple and cordial in rural life; and what are they substituting in their stead? We will endeavour, anon, to shew what they are doing, and what they are leaving undone; just now let us try to seize on the fluttering apparition of primitive custom, and bid it a hearty good-bye, before it is gone for ever. I have, in another place, shewn how all the more fanciful and refined of our village festal habits have vanished. The May-day dances, and gathering of May-branches—the scattering of flowers on holiday occasions in village streets, and about our houses. Even the planting of flowers about the graves in our village churchyards, once so common in England, is now rarely to be seen. Camden in his Britannia, and John Evelyn mention that it was the custom of their times in Surrey, but who in Surrey sees anything of the[583] kind now?[32] You may meet with a solitary shrub, or with graves bound down with withes and briars; but nothing of that general planting of flowering shrubs which you see in Wales. It is the fate of champaign countries, to have their rustic customs sooner obliterated than those of mountain regions. The Scotch still retain their penny-weddings and Halloweens, the Welsh their singular wedding customs, and funeral customs as singular; but how wonderfully have the simple customs on these occasions of our English hamlets dwindled in our days! Washington Irving, in an interesting paper in the Sketch-Book, speaks of a practice in some villages of hanging up in the churches at the funeral of a maiden, gloves and garlands cut in paper. In what church is that done now-a-days? And yet, though I never saw a funeral in which so beautiful and appropriate a practice was retained, I well recollect seeing those gloves and garlands hanging in the church of my native village in Derbyshire; and I have heard my mother say, that in her younger days she has helped to cut and prepare them for the funeral of young women of the place. The garlands were originally of actual flowers—lilies and roses—and the gloves of white kid. For these had become substituted simple white paper. There was a garland then, of imitative roses and lilies wreathed round a bow of peeled willow—a pair of gloves cut in paper, and a white handkerchief of the same material on which was written some texts of Scripture, or some stanzas of poetry applicable to the occasion, and to the hope of immortality in the deceased; and these were not unfrequently chosen for the purpose by the dying maiden herself. These emblems of purity and evanescent youth were laid on the coffin during the funeral procession, as the sword and cap of the soldier on his, and were then suspended in the body of the church; and there hung, till they fell through time, or till all who had an interest in the deceased were dead or departed. In all the village churches into which I have been in various parts of the kingdom, I do not recollect seeing any of those maiden trophies, except in this one; and they, on the coming of a new incumbent, were removed in a general church-cleaning many years ago.
[32] In John Evelyn’s own churchyard at Wootten, there is now not the least trace of this beautiful custom.
[584]
And yet, where is it that our old customs, and the impress of past times and generations, linger so strongly as about our village churches in England! Entering one of them in some retired district on a Sunday, you seem to step back into a past age. The quaint old place—its rude and ancient pillars and arches—its oaken pews and pulpit, grown almost black with years; the massy font, the grim, grotesque human heads for corbels, every one differing from the other, where the mason seems to have indulged his humorous fancy without regard to the sacred character of the house in which they were to figure—the contrasting, though often faded splendour of the squire’s pew; the heavy tombs, with procumbent effigies of knight and dame—the mural tablets to the memory of departed rectors; the hatchment in sign of some once important personage gone to his long home—and the half-worn stones on which you tread,
Where many a holy text around is strewn,
To teach the rustic moralist to die.
And then, the simple congregation! All in their best attire, in cut and texture guiltless of modern fashion: the clergyman, who with the air of a gentleman, has probably caught somewhat of the Doric air of the region; and the old clerk with his long coat, and long hair combed over his shoulders, doling out his responses with a peculiar twang, to which an ancient parish clerk can only attain. Then the little music-loft, with its musicians, consisting of a bass-viol, a bassoon, and hautboy, and the whole congregation singing with all their heart and soul. These are remnants of antiquity that are nowhere else to be found. There is a paper in Blackwood’s Magazine for April 1838, called “Church Music and other Parochials,” which gives you a picture of things which everybody who has gone to a thoroughly old-fashioned country church has seen over and over. The old clerk, the writer says, always reads Cheberims and Sepherims, and most unequivocally—“I am a Lion to my mother’s children,” and truly he sometimes looks not unlike one: and when told by the clergyman that he must take him to task to teach him to read and give the responses differently, he replies—“Why, sir, if I must read just like you there wouldn’t be a bit of difference between us.”
[585]
Such is the peculiar elocution of the true old parish clerk, that even a dog is sensible of it. I wandered into a rustic church where I accidentally saw the congregation collecting, having at my heels a little favourite spaniel. The church stood in the middle of a field at some distance from the hamlet, and I did not see where to secure the dog during the service; I therefore trusted to his general good behaviour, and made him lie down under the seat. Here he slept very quietly for some time; but at the very first sound of the clerk’s voice, which was of the genuine traditional tone, up he jumped and began to bark most vociferously. I kicked him with my heel; menaced him with look and hand; set my foot on him; held his mouth—but all was in vain. While the clergyman, who, I must confess, shewed great forbearance, perceiving that I was a stranger, and who moreover betrayed by a suppressed smile that he also perceived the true cause of the dog’s irritation, was reading the lessons, the dog was perfectly still; again the clerk said, “amen,” and again up started Fido and barked as loud as ever. The case was hopeless—nothing remained but to retire.
In some of these rustic temples you sometimes see things that would electrify a city audience with surprise. I once saw a venerable clergyman on the edge of Yorkshire perpetrate a pun in the midst of the service with all gravity. As he was reading the morning lessons, a fellow who had probably been a little elated over-night, or not improbably the same morning, suddenly cried out—“Arise and shine!”—The rector paused and said, “Who was that?” “It was Joseph Twigg, sir,” responded some one. “Then twig him out!” rejoined the rector, as glibly and yet as gravely as possible. A smile, and indeed a general display of open mouths and grinning teeth appeared in his congregation—but Joseph Twigg was twigged out, and the rector went on.
Around these old buildings cling all the ancient superstitions. They are as much haunted as ever. They are as prolific of stories of ghosts and apparitions as ever. There are yet young people who go and watch in those old porches on St. Mark’s-eve to see whom they shall marry, and will sow hempseed backward at midnight round the whole church for the same purpose. In many parts of the country none will be buried on the north side of the church; and accordingly that side of the churchyard is commonly one unbroken[586] level of greensward, although all the rest be crowded to excess with graves. The north side of the church, by immemorial custom, is the allotted portion of the suicide and the outcast. Accordingly, in many churchyards, that part is purposely very small. It is in many so little visited, that it is a wilderness, grown in summer breast-high with mallows, nettles, chervil, elder bushes,
Hemlocks and darnels dank.
The writer of the article in Blackwood’s Magazine just mentioned, says, “I have often tried to make out the exact ideas the poor people have of angels—for they talk a great deal about them. The best that I can make of it is, that they are children, or children’s heads and shoulders winged, as represented in church paintings, and in plaster-of-Paris on ceilings. We have a goodly row of them all the length of one ceiling, and it cost the parish, or rather the then minister, I believe, who indulged them, no trifle to have the eyes blacked, and nostrils, and a touch of light red in the cheeks. It is notorious and scriptural, they think, that the body dies, but nothing being said about the head and shoulders, they have a sort of belief that they are preserved to angels—which are no other than dead young children.” There is no doubt that nearly all the idea which many country people possess of cherubims and angels is derived from these plaster heads, or from those cherubims with full-blown cheeks and gilded wings, and those gilded angels with long trumpets depicted on gravestones. Ministers preach about angels and spirits as things which everybody comprehends, but which they have no actual conception of, only as they see them represented by the chisels and gold-leaf of country masons; and the story of the country fellow who had shot an owl, and was thus accosted by his wife—“Don’t thee know what thee hast done? Why, thee hast killed one of ar parson’s cherabums!” is not so outré as it might appear to many.
But we must leave these superstitions to the winter fireside of the hamlet. More of the old customs connected with funerals than with any other events, remain in primitive districts. In Derbyshire, when the body is laid out, the nurse who attended the deceased, and has performed this last office, goes round to “bid to the berrin” (funeral). The names of the parties to be invited are[587] given to her, and away she trudges from house to house, over hill and dale, sometimes to a considerable distance. She delivers her message, and names the day and hour. Refreshments are forthwith set before her. However she may protest that she wants nothing—can eat nothing—out come, at least, the sweet loaf, and currant or ginger wine. The family gathers round as she sits, to hear all particulars of the illness; how it came on; what doctor was employed; all the progress of the complaint; which leads probably to whole histories of similar illnesses which they have known,—all the sayings of the deceased; the end he made, which is generally described by saying, “he died like a lamb!”—“What sort of a corpse is it?” which generally is answered by the information, that “he looks just like himself for all the world—with a most heavenly smile on ............