S T. LUKE'S Summer filled the earth with a glory of
golden leaves and luminous skies, and All Saints' brought the rain. The ground must be thoroughly damp to make a good ploughing, or the share will not cut a clean furrow. And on our spur of the Mendips we are near the rock. So the week-long spell of rain was welcome to the farmers, and welcome also to less practical persons for the beauty of its shadowy purple drifts and ghostly silences. But on a lovely clear November morning we got up and started to see the ploughing match.
They begin early in the forenoon, and if yen are betimes en the road, you may meet some of the teams coming from across the hills to compete with our men, who are amongst the most notable ploughers in the country. The great field where the match is held lies on a slope looking towards Blackdown, and there is a certain road on the way thither called the "Kitchen Chimney" because of its narrow and steep descent. A ploughman came up with his team as we crossed the top of it. The early sun was low above the hills at the back of them, and the long dazzling shafts caught the road at an angle and streamed up between the hedges, filling the uphill road with golden light, and the young man with his beasts came up out of it just as the herdsman of King Admetos might have come one day long ago in Thessaly. His shadow, and the shadows of the great horses, stretched ever so far along the road ahead of them as they came up easily with the deliberate gait of ploughers, the great iron. shod feet of the horses glinting backward in the sunlight. " Marnin'," said the youth laconically, and went away whistling in the track of the sunshine, while the horses' heads nodded rhythmically to the regular lifting of their great hoofs.
The lawful approach to the match field led from the road by a wet foot-track across one field to a fathomless bottom of ploughland skirting the next hedge. So since there was nothing to be lost by it, we decided to take a cross-way thither, and made north in a bee-line. On the way we met a figure that looked like a prehistoric survival,—an aged, aged man, whose weight of years appeared incalculable. He was "a-sitting on a gate" like another Immortal, and looked as if he might have begun sitting on it as the Flood was going down, and had watched the progress of events ever since without moving. He did not move as we came up ; so we asked him if this was the way to the field, just to see whether be were quite real. He gazed with a ruminative air at the feminine member of the party. "Happen it be," said he, with the air of one who knew an era when roads were not. "But 'tis main riddly sure-ly," he added; and seeing us undaunted by this intelli- gence, he fixed a beady expressionless eye on us, and in a tone dark with fearful warning, he remarked, "There 'm gateses." We were still unmoved, and the aged one went on to explain that the said gates were of a nature " onfitting for faymales " "But happen," said he, "you'll can find a shard "; and with that he relapsed again into the semblance of an antediluvian survival. So we found a gap in the hedge and scrambled through, while the Ancient went on sitting on his gate and never looked at us again.
There was the field stretched out below us in its wan winter green. There was a tent where the judges were waiting, and a crowd already gathered to look on. There were dogs many and boys many, and carts anchored in the hedges, and horses munching with their noses in bags, and human noses tipped red like the hedge-berries with the nipping November air. Most of the ploughers were there too, looking carefully over their ground and calculating the swell of the earth as it rose and fell eastward, for a special prize is given for setting the line straightest, and the first four furrows are the standard. Each man has a rood to plough ; he sets up a twinkling white osier at its extremity, and then be must depend on the nicety of his eye and the steadiness of his horses for drawing the line that goes like an arrow's flight acroas the field. Thirty teams, good, bad, and indifferent, there were in the field that morning, and a more beautiful sight it would be hard to find, nor one more truly local in its antiquity. Before the Norman Duke sent his men round England to count his manors this village was ploughla.nd amidst a forest. And the names of men long dead who ploughed for a Saxon lord are written in that ancient book. Now, all these centuries after, the Somerset peasants go on ploughing, just as their fathers ploughed when "Alwold held it in the time of King Edward." One may fancy them like the old race in face, for the peasants of this remote part are of a distinct type, and in their narrow indifference to the ways of the mighty and the increase of kingdoms they probably resemble their forefathers too. This manor was given to the Bishop of Coutances at the Conquest, and most likely the "twelve cottagers with their fourteen ploughs" cared as little for the change of an over- lord whom they never saw as their children of to-day care for the spread of Empire and the clash of armed kingdoms, except when their sons, drifting by chance into the whirl of things modern, go away and die in far lands, fighting for an Empire that to their fathers is little more than a name. Except for their pipes and greatcoats, the crowd on this field might have looked on at such a match hundreds of years ago. Many generations bring little change to these distant valleys. The huge shining ploughshares are modern, and so are the splendid horses ; but these are things whose modernity does not clash with the venerable processes of the earth; they are like the ceaseless renewing of Nature, "ever young, yet full of eld," and such modern improvements in the primitive needs of man only link him closer to the past.
The field is getting cut up into innumerable perspectives of vanishing parallels that soothe your eye with their fascinating monotony, and the men go deliberately up and down the field following the ploughs that drive their shining blades through the faint green grass-land, and leave a glowing red track behind them,—for our soil is full of iron ore that makes the bare earth beautiful in various reds. Perfectly regular the cut must be, four inches unvarying in depth, and as the turf rolls over sidelong in a continuous sweep the space between edge and edge must be always eight inches across. The land must not be furrowed too deeply, for then the weather could not crumble the clods, and the surface would become hard again.
Ploughing is not such a sociable business as the hedging contest that is going on hard by. The men work a rood apart from each other, and, besides, it is not prudent to look away right or left from the nose of your plough, and the care- ful feet of the horses that step so heedfully along the furrow, one great foot behind the other, so that the clean edge of the last-cut ridge shall not be marred. They are beautiful creatures, these horses, that look so wise and patient as they go down the long perspective of furrows, and turning, come slowly back mounting the hollow slope of the field. They steam white in the white mist that the early sun draws up from the cold damp surface of the earth, and above the splendid red of the soil the watery November sunshine trans- figures the mists into a pale luminous wonder of diffused light and opalescent shadow. There is a Welshman ploughing to-day, and our people do not like him. We keep the old fashion of feud between village and village, and a man from across the Border is little better than an outlaw to us. We are jealous of our neighbours and hate strangers, as our fathers did here long ages ago. Farmer Ben Reider, one of a family that spreads in endless ramifications through the village of W—, is looking askance at " Walshman." " Couldn't he hey' bid to whum to Cardiff," says he, "and not come across channel fur to best we ? " "Walsh man" is doing too well to please our folk, who scan his trail of furrows jealously as he turns back along the slope. What a sight it is when the horses reach the furrow's end and swing round to the next one, with a straining, and stamping, and rattling of chains, and a scattering of the crowd of boys and beasts standing imprudently within the radius of the great ploughshare's sweep. The ploughman weighs down the heel of the shining blade, swinging it round with his weight, as the good horses trample round labouring sideways against the huge pull, the great muscles rising and crossing on their wet flanks, and their heads tossing against the pull, all in a vaporous white cloud of steam and sunlight; and the master shouts encourage- ment in the queer nasalised " a's" that Chaucer's ploughman may have used calling up his team. " Coom a-a-ann," says he, and stops an instant to pick up a stone in the line of the plough, and off they go again down the long red slope.
Job Oakburn is champion again, the experts say, and they grudge the Welshman his second, though he well deserves it. The Oakburn family have the ploughing instinct in their blood. They are all first-class men in the matches. Job stood up to a plough's tail when he wore a pinafore, and got a prize when he was fourteen at the match ; a solemn, laborious small figure going steadily up and down furrow, while his father walked by to give advice, but never touched the handles. Old and young, all are sons of the plough. Farmer Reider's father is here in a cart, a hale old man of eighty, who has ploughed his own land for nearly sixty years of that. The old man leans out to speak to his son. "How be, Ben?" says he. "Didst thou see old Tummas a-settin.' on Weaver's barton over to Kitchen Chimney earner?" His son nods. "Ay, truly," he says; "poor old chap, he don't niver come no nigher than that to match nowadays. How come it he . were Muted so sore? Harses weren't sa'cy nowise, was them ?" "Nay," says his father, " 'twere Tummas's own doin' on account of his stubbornness, look'm. For he went a-plonghin' to Bishopton Match one marnin' after he'd a bin rough wr the ammonia o' the lungs six weeks afore and were 'still nesh. And he were leery after he'd a-walked eight mile to Bishopton, but 'a wouldn't take no more but a drink o' cider in a tiddly-wink. And cider be heady stuff to plough on. So 'a did plough straight sure enough, but there come a girt stone anigh the end of the plot, and Tummas did stoop for to halve 'tin away, for though he were aged, 'a could wang about a tidy weight so peart as a youngster. I reckon 'twere the fault o' that cider, for Tummas hadn't no call to stumble, but simly 'a did feel a duzziness, for 'a did totter so's the chain catched 'cm a knock on the jaw that did make harses start forrard again, and that did send 'tin hard down wi's head against the blade. And when us did pull 'un out, he were a-bloodin' like a peg, and have been queer in the head ever since, and won't go nigh a plough. 'Twere a bitter ploughin' for he, poor old chap, for 'a used to be martal smart at the matches, but now the sperrit's out of 'un, and 'a can't abide for even to see the field." Poor old man, bereft of his inheritance, and mourning it dumbly like a worn-out horse.
They are truly sons of the soil, this primitive West Country peasantry, a labouring rase, for their holdings are for the most part small, and in W—, which is an agricultural parish seven miles long, there is not a farm of more than a lundred and fifty acres. It is the very smallness of these holdings that binds them so closely to the soil. When you have wide lands, and traffic largely in the fruits of them, then you are a vital part of the nerve-system of a vast Imperial commerce, a mart of nations whose harvests are "by great waters," and those distant harvests concern you seriously. But our small farmers sell their hay and stock and dairy- stuff in a neighbouring city, and their horizon is bounded by that decaying Western metropolis. A very few have sons in Canada, and are proud to tell neighbours of the • high wages that the lads get. But for that, these slow- - moving, jealous Somerset peasants are very much as their fathers must have been hundreds .of years ago, who tilled their lands and harvested their crops in this ,remote corner, caring little that their alien lord was King of France and a mighty. Power on the distant Continent. They go on still gathering in their crops without troubling muCh about foreign markets. Their needs and thoughts are almost as simple as those Of their primal ancestry to whom the ancient promise was given : "While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest shall hot cease."
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