COUNTRY LIFE
Country Customs When I wrote, a fortnight ago, of " the category of vanishing country festivals " it did not occur to me that I could fill this page, and another, with even brief descriptions of the feast and festival days, now obsolete, which must have been commonly kept in the childhood of our grandparents. Since then I have been able to gather some notes on about thirty customs. Unfortunately not alt are complete enough to be included here, and some, such as Pancake Day and Oak Apple Day, need no description by me. But what of Clipping Posies, Duck under the Water, Largess, Lowbelling, Valentining, Possessioning, Booting, Dyzemas Day, Mop, Riding and Stattis ? These read like the quips of an Elizabethan clown, and to most of us will mean about as much. Yet in the last century they must have been a fixed and cherished part of country life. And many of them, if they are completely dead at all, must have died out quite recently. The distribution of largess is commonly remembered. Possessioning survives under its better-known name, Beating the Bounds. Of the rest Valentining and Mop are certainly observed ; Valentining in the Eastern counties, where children still beg for coppers on Valentine's Day, with a bong :
"Holly and ivy and tickle my toe, Give me red apple and let me go."
And Mop, or Mop Fair, certainly survives, particularly at Boston, in Lincolnshire, and is still a great day there. Mop is roughly synonymous with Stattis, a corruption of Statute, in turn an abbreviation of Statute Sessions, established by Edward III in 1351. Both Stattis and Mop Caine eventually to mean an annual fair or gathering for the hiring out of ser- vants to new masters, the difference being that Stattis comes before Michaelmas and Mop after. Every Hundred in England originally- had a Stattis, with attendance of magistrates, to solve the servant problems. Later the attendance of magis- trates ceased and the fair grew up, an occasion of rejoicing and a chance to buy a new rig-out. My own grandfather regularly attended a great Stattis at Kimbolton, in Huntingdonshire. Today, at Boston, servants are still said to buy new clothes on Mop Fair day. But what no longer survives, and what must have once coloured the whole Stattis scene delightfully, is the wearing of emblems of service, the shepherd carrying his lock of wool, the cow-man his tuft of cow-hair, the carter his whip. And whether the rest of these odd customs survive at all or not, they go to prove at least one thing : that country life in the past was not quite so dull as this age is apt to think 'it. Nor quite so circumspect. Take the ceremony known as Riding. The wife who wore the trousers got no change out of Riding, in which two men, one dressed as a woman, rode in a cart to the house where the husband was henpecked and went through a satirical mimicry of female persecution, the woman walloping the man with a basting ladle. And discontented married couples could hardly have been sweetened by the custom known as Lowbelling, where a crowd of neigh- bours turned out, rattled ironical tin cans for their benefit, and gave them the contemporary equivalent of the raspberry.
The Village Hall
Village life, indeed, can hardly ever have been so stereo- typed and in that sense so dull as it is today. Of the three great pillars of pre-War village life, two—the church and the big house—have been badly shaken. The pub. alone, thanks as much to the townsman as anyone, keeps its place. It is a place that must, however, have been challenged, if only a little, by the post-War rise of the 'village hall, an erection which; incidentally, has often outdone the corrugated iron chapel in its depressing ugliness. That there is no need for this unimaginative village jerry-building—which has, I suspect, too often been the result of the notion that village folk '• wouldn't appreciate anything better even if it were put up "- was emphatically proved by an admirable article by Mr. J. W. Robertson Scott in the Kerr: Chronicle recently, in ;which he described an almost Utopian village hall just com- pleted in the Cotswolds, a fine building in local style and atone, with bath-rooms, sports changing-rooms, concert hall and so on. Now comes the news that the National Council of Social Service is prepared to grant financial assistance to
villages which desire to build halls. The scheme embodies a free grant of one-sixth of the total cost of erection, with a maximum of £350, together with a loan of not more than one-third of the total cost, with a maximum of £500. This means that if both loan and grant are approved the village itself must raise, in cash, one-half the total cost of erection ; if the grant only is made, the village must raise the whole of the balance. Loans are made free of interest, and special loans, also free of interest, are available for the improvement of existing village halls. This is the mere outline of a scheme which ought to give a great many villages something to think about, and full details can be obtained from the National Council of Social Service, 26 Bedford Square, W.C. 1.
Preserving the Coast In their love of country the English are occasionally respon- sible for some crazy paradoxes. Thus, for centuries much has been sung, written and otherwise declaimed in praise of the English coast and sea, from the patriotic lyricism of poets down to the bombast of politicians. Yet, according to a qualified authority, only a fraction of the coast-line of these islands is owned by the National Trust and preserved for the nation in its natural beauty, and the very part of the country which ought to be a national heritage and pride is in fact at the mercy of the speculating jerry-builder. Already parts of the Sussex coast and the unique coast-line of Romney Marsh from Hythe to Winchelsea have long been ruined by atrocious vandalism. Parts of the Essex coast arc a disgrace to a civilisation whose language contains the words " preservation " and " beauty." Neither the Essex nor the marsh coast is remarkable for cliff scenery and magnificence of views, and it is the cliff coast and its preservation which has been interesting Dr. Vaughan Cornish, whose excellent paper The Cliff Scenery of England and the Preservation of its Amenities has just been issued in pamphlet form. On the assumption that out of a total coastline of 1,800 miles about 500 miles is cliff Of not less than 100 feet, Dr. Cornish estimates that the total cost of preserving the English cliff coastline for the nation, on a basis of £100 an acre, would be only £2,000,000, a moderate enough sum, and even more moderate in comparison with the proposed L.C.C. expenditure of /35,000,000 on slum clear- ance. And what, one may well ask, has the preservation of cliff scenery to do with slum clearance ? To which Dr. Cornish replies : " The project for slum clearance and that for national parks ought to be envisaged together as complementary parts of one great movement for saving England from what is mildly termed undue urbanization, a condition that is to say in which the towns are not fit to live in and the country- side not fit to look at." I do not need, I think, to comment on this spirited passage, except to repeat that the English are, sometimes, masters of the art of destroying what they most profess to love.
The Virtues of Walnut
There is a shortage of walnut ; and since the wood is excellent for gun-stocks, Mussolini, apparently, is responsible. It is hardly likely that the Duce will see these notes, but it is interesting, nevertheless, to reflect that the tree has some other and not inappropriate virtues. According to Culpepper : " if they (the leaves) be taken with onions, salt and honey, they help the biting of a mad dog, or infectious poison of any beast." And according to a nineteenth-century herbalist : "The green rind in decoction is administered with great advantage to patients who labour under imbecility." But neither these virtues nor Mussolini himself have any place in the sober little pamphlet of half-a-dozen pages just issued by East Mailing. This is an account of the result of walnut research there, and it reveals the depressing fact that out of a large collection of nuts from widely different English sources less than 1 per cent. were of a satisfactory standard of quality. This is largely due to the prevalent planting of seedling rather than named varieties, and all varieties in this country are apparently hopelessly mixed. But no doubt Italian trees, having a nobler destiny, are
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