THE SHEEP-SHEARING.
KING JOHN, taking a journey North to admonish the King of Scots, found (says Holinshed's " Chronicle ") that by reason of the great number of enclosures owned by the great, poor men were in many places driven off the laud. Whereupon the King "aware," says the Chronicler, " with an oath, that he would not suffer wild beasts to feed upon the fat of his soil and see the people perish for want of ability to procure and buy them food that should defend the realm."
Some Elizabethan prejudice doubtless coloured Harrison's views about that very ill-reported Monarch, for Somerset records prove that King John, like his predecessors, "afforested land to the no small detriment of the tenants," and W--- lies within the ancient forest of Mendip, where a hunting-lodge of King John's still stands. But the Church held more lands hereabouts than the Barons, and even though Abbots at times "did unlawfully enclose" common and waste lands, yet Somerset men, judging by the old records, were not backward in demanding redress for wrongs done to tenements held "since the first crossing" of William the Norman.
There were many sheep fed on the Somerset commons in the old days, and the wool was spun in the homes of the poor and woven for their garments by the village loom. John the Webbe of W— was a prosperous man in the days of Edward II. ; he paid a lay subsidy of two shillings when the next King came! Wood, corn, and coal were the wealth of mediaeval England, and all abounded near W—. For after all, food and clothing and shelter are the first necessities of bodily life; and the poor men who could till their holdings, and graze their few sheep, and build their houses of the wood or stone at hand were self-dependent in the same degree that the W— men are now, and probably just about as wealthy in the world's goods, for none of them are rich to-day and none very poor.
Many changes have taken place since the days when " the Webbe, the Dyer, and the Tapicer " were a necessary part of village economy. Trade has come and gone in Somerset, but the W— men have not, in all probability, been greatly changed by its fluctuations. No large flocks of sheep are kept in W—, no one has enough land. But many men have a few sheep, some very few. The annual sheep-shearing com- petitions, however, are supported by most of the able-bodied men of the village, and there is keen competition for the championship, although shearing, like ploughing, generally goes in families, and one name predominates in the list of prize-winners. It is a beautiful sight, the sheep-shearing, in many ways. For these big, strong Somerset men at work in the fields with their big beasts or their heavy tools have a stolid and reliable air, self-contained and friendly, like a good plough-horse. But at these matches there is animation and energy, and certain qualities lying deeper than the surface come up to view.
The shearers gather in a big tent, men in the middle surrounded by pens full of sheep, outside which the lookers- on throng and pass and stand to watch. The competitors were packed into the smallest possible limit of elbow-room, and all wore white overalls and shirt-sleeves rolled very high, so that the deeply tanned arms and necks showed conspicuous in every movement. Farmer Ben Pearce, whose family props the W— reputation for sheep-shearing, wore a blue shift which.distinguished him among the crowd. There were three distinct shades of red in the splendid tan of his skin, because his Sunday collar had left a paler line just below his sun-burnt ears and face, and the stain of the red soil showed distinct above the tan in the wrinkles of his industrious elbows. It was very hot in that big tent on June 1st. Fortunately, for three days of sunshine had just come in time to dry the sheep after their dipping. " A lepping May," says the local proverb, " brings a good mow of bay." But it spoilt practice for the shearing and made the prize-men anxious, because Pan himself could not shear a wet sheep. There they were, however, forty pens full of them, and all dry, in a barricade round the shearers, and outside them a surging multitude of onlookers watching, talking, criticising the work. Three hours' work and four fat sheep to shear. They were all at it for dear life, and no time to exchange a word with friends at the barrier, or pause for anything but to buy a hot face in the great mugs of cider brought round at intervals by the biggest bandsman. A full- grown sheep is no light weight, and the men's figures were a splendid study as they heaved the great creatures, and stooped and stretched about them, arms and legs and sinewy backs bent all at once to the task of holding and turning and snipping the helpless heavy mass under the shears. Somerset peasants are a fine race, well-knit and powerful, and when they are working in their earth-stained clothes have a splendid natural grace and vigour with which the weekly dis- guise of Sunday clothes and idleness presents a deplorable contrast. But though the men appear to advantage during a shearing match, the sheep done not. The situation is a trying one for the pretty mountain-bred sheep of the Northumberland moors, but for the compound of wool and mutton that makes a Southdown nothing could be more undignified. He is planted miserably on end, and spreads into queer, shapeless expansions like a half-filled meal- sack, four helpless hoofs meeting in a bunch in front, and a bewildered foolish face doubled backwards out of harm's way between the shearer's knees while he makes the first cut along the animal's chest, and turns back the fleece to avoid smother- ing him when he is laid on his side for the next move. At this point the sheep recovers himself enough to kick, under the impression that he is about to be slain. The little sharp hoofs can give a stinging blow if you meet them, and there is a great art in holding your sheep with discretion, for unless he keeps quiet he may get snipped, and then the prize is lost. When the sheep has resigned himself it is good to watch the skill with which the fleece is snipped and turned back bit by bit, until at last it lies out entire in the gleaming whiteness of the inside wool, and is rolled up with care (for this, too, counts in the prize), while the original owner is bundled back without ceremony into the pen in an abashed and tight-fitting condition, and received with horror by his yet unshorn companions. The sheep had the best of it then, for the shearers got dreadfully hot towards the end of the three hours. But Farmer Ben, in his blue shirt, took very little notice of the great-cider mugs ; he snipped away with a steady delibera- tion, and his good brown face looked very little hotter than it had looked when he began. But he glanced now and then towards the end of the tent, where boys of varying shapes and sizes were busy each with a pen holding two sheep, and a father or adviser of some sort kneeling beside them to give directions and help to hold the sheep. Farmer Ben's eldest boy was shearing beside him, qualifying for a prize too, and his second boy was in the younger class who received help. Frank's pen was the best shorn in the whole tent, said the judges, not excepting the champion's. But the most attractive figure of • all was a little counterpart of Benjamin, clad in a small blue shirt, and wearing the same deliberate and responsible air on his solemn round face. The youth was nine years old and small for his age, and his short legs could get no grip on the sheep, which appeared several sizes larger than the shearer. But he lay prone on its body like a resolute small frog, digging in his knees and snipping away at the woolly monster with little brown arms that had hardly outgrown dimples. When the sheep kicked it heaved him bodily into the air, but the big hands beside him held it down again and directed his small shears. It was hard work, but Reggie meant to get his prize, and there were two to be shorn. "Don't thee look up, boy," said Blue Shirt Senior warningly, " thou It miss thy time"; and Blue Shirt Junior obediently turned away his eyes from the crowd at the barrier and went on steadily snipping. It is a fine thing to be a prize-man at nine years old, and finer still to carry on traditions of ability. Among the " able-men " of W— 'before the Armada there was a William Peres, .pikeman, enrolled among those who were to defend the realm, and there is no reason to suppose that the Peres who wore corselet and burgonet and carried an eighteen-foot pike more
than three hundred years ago was not an ancestor of the small sheep-shearer in the blue shirt. Many local names are unchanged since then. John the Webbe was doubtless the progenitor of the W— Webbes of Henry VIII.'s time, clothiers, apprentices of Bristol merchants and prosperous men, one of whom left to a certain Eliza Clark the notable legacy of "two pairs of sheets, not the best pair, nor the worst, but mediocre?' From the earliest days shearing and spinning and weaving have employed and supported the Somerset peasantry, because "sheep," as an old authority says, "is the most profitablest cattle a man can have." And the English " Webbes " were trained and taught by foreign craftsmen since shortly after the Conquest, though Somerset men have never liked strangers, as the Protector's Flemings found in Edward VI.'s days. "John the Frenchman" lived in W— when Edward II. was King. History does not say what became of him, but more than one local patriot expressly stipulated that his chantry priest must not be a Frenchman. And there is a quaint local illustration of the early law for protecting aliens in a thirteenth-century record of a neighbouring village :—" Wolwarcl the Tucker found drowned near L-. . No-one is suspected. Judgment, misadventure. No Englishiy. Therefore murder." But when the domestic industry had become international trade, then came the time of great fortunes and great poverty. The great lords enclosed and the great capitalists suppressed, and the land became poor in the poverty of them that should defend the realm. Splendid churches were raised by the wealthy capitalists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but national defence failed with the decay of the poor tenants, who could not farm their holdings because of the enclosures. The weakness of English naval defence was an international gibe in the time of Henry VI. : " Where be our ships, where be our swords become ? Our enemies bid for a ship set a sheep." Trades must fluctuate, and the lesser men must suffer ; and when they are deprived of occupation and driven off the land, the age that sees " Trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land and dispossess the swain"
sees the walls of empire shaken. And when the Most Christian King turned the Church out of doors, then the poor suffered again, because the hungry courtiers who got the Church lands had no regard for tenants' rights. Leland describes this part of Somerset as full of enclosures, and though many of these were doubtless tilled, yet he mentions a certain Duke. in the neighbourhood who took "much fair ground very fruitful of corn" and enlarged his park "to the compass of six miles, not without many curses of the poor tenants." And yet at that time certain villages bordering W—, sleepy now and silent, were busy centres of life, " standing much by clothing," and the inhabitants were beginning to build themselves the "fair houses of stone" that are standing to-day. But by the Restoration the " brokers and factors " had spoiled the trade for the West Country villages and caused infinite distress. The great company of Merchant Adventurers, which made Bristol the second town in the kingdom, was decaying, and the old com- plaint that home-spun cloth was put aside for the finer foreign webs came back again. Earl Simon the Righteous had tried to remedy that by bidding the patriotic "not to seek over- precious raiment," but wear native manufactures, though unbecoming !
But the day of capital and factory work was approach- ing, and now the W— sheep-shearers have nothing to do with the fleece when once it is off the sheep's back, unlike the Northern farmers, who send it to the mill and get it back in rough homespun : one fleece clothes a man ! The craft has left us, and though a vast family of Dyers peoples one end of the village and Weavers the other, the original use of the names is out of mind. Thanks to the old redding works, and the ancient quarries, out of which some of the noblest towers in the kingdom were built centuries ago, W— men have not been at the mercy of a shifting trade as were some of their neighbours, and it is pleasant to imagine that they now stand on much the same footing as they did when their forefathers were enrolled in the county musters as pikemen, archers, and billmen. The labourer's condition has improved vastly in the last hundred years, and men who lead a decent, laborious, and cheerful existence on a pound a week, and bring up " long vam'leys" besides, play no inconsiderable part in the welfare of kingdoms. The wage is hard to earn and the ways are narrow, but the most prosperous have not always the most grit. Neither have certain of the younger generation, who enjoy more privileges than the elder, always the more enterprising character. The farmers say that a prolonged education makes the modern boy "too proud to work," and " book larnen ain't no martal use to plant tarmuts." Indeed, the cleverest man in the village left school at ten, and was accustomed, in his own business intervals, to clean the house and get the dinner and fight an elder brother for the privilege of blacking the grate, while his mother was away on a sixteen-mile tramp with the letters. And many of the small farmers lead a life no less laborious and thrifty than their humbler neighbours, working their small holdings alone with wife and sons, thinking no hard- ship of their toilsome, frugal, and cheerful lives, and would probably rather die than go and live in the town. These villages are full of such men, who love the soil that breeds them with a devotion no less strong because they will not speak of it to strangers, sentiment being no part of their workaday life ; but the red lanes and the spring pastures and ploughing fields are an intimate part of their nature. The industrious shearer of nine is a worthy descendant of the pikeman who "defended the realm," and doubtless sheared sheep too, twelve generations ago. Their poverty is an independent poverty, and goes to make character. Some people have disabilities that seem to be in favour of success, like the men who fought at Minden. Advanced education does not always take effect upon their brains, fortunately. Another champion shearer, the descendant of prize-men, although naturally averse from literary pursuits, was laid up for weeks with pleurisy, and during that time actually read through " Treasure Island," sent from the Rectory among a heap of illustrated papers. " Passon " remarked to his mother that Charlie was turning a scholar. " No, sure," said she reassuringly ; "it don't stop in's head long enough to hurt 'en."
Too much traffic in borrowed ideas is not the best training for such men. There is a certain wisdom that comes from the soil, and makes a character not moulded in Board-schools. There need be no lack of such as "should defend the realm" while these men are able to remain on the land and continue to live by it in the state of sturdy independence that has moulded their race and made it endure, since- " Self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the billows and the sky.
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