At a Cotswold Inn
AT` The Three Magpies' Inn, that living monument to the spirit of rural English democracy, all the news of the surrounding district comes to be discussed of a summer evening ; not the sort of news that gets into' our morning papers, but the homely, intimate news of the county, talk of pigs, cockerels, sweet peas, and the price of leather : of rain, or the lack of it, and of all the little changes and " goings on" of village life. If you would learn of these things, the tap-room of The Three Magpies' or ' The Bear '—priceless architectural' antiques both—is the proper place in which to do so. Conversation, it is often said, is an art which is dying out in the towns, this may be so. But a few evenings spent in the tap-room of any Cotswold inn will prove the falsity of such a generalization.
On the plains, the life of the English peasantry has been changed almost out of recognition within the last hundred years ; in comparatively vast areas it has vanished and will not return. But the hill districts are in many ways, and for obvious reasons, fortresses against the blackening tide of industrial progress. They keep for us an England still a century behind the times. Even the Chilterns, on the very fringes of suburban London, still hold a thousand delicious secrets not to be discovered by motorists or those whose way lies along tarred roads. But it is in the Cotswolds. in many a wooded valley or on the high plateaus dotted with far-spaced, grey-walled farms, that the old strongholds still stand most secure. ' The Three Magpies,' for example—though this is not exactly the inn's name—is situated in a hamlet whose little white, dusty, impossible roads are even yet barred all ways by heavy wooden gates. These roads run, at this time of year, through golden billowy lands of dandelion and cowslip meadow—the loveliest approach imaginable -if you are not awheel, but anathema to motorists, , As the solitary motor-cyclist who mistakenly came this way the other evening said, " These damned gates of yours are out-of-date. Why don't they clear them away ? " The company in The Three Magpies' only smiled its thankfulness that " they " did not. Even the " buzzes," taking the livelihood from carriers, pedlars, and small country traders as they are so rapidly doing everywhere in Britain, have not yet found easy ways among these Cotswold hamlets. And that is saying a good deal ; for one wonders if it is generally realized that the modern, comfortable, all-weather motor- 'bus is a far more significant revolutionary factor in the life of the English countryside than the railways ever were or could be The still recent coming of the " buzzes 7 and what development in this direction is likely to mean to agricultural life is a topic on which Gloucestershire men of the hills will talk and argue for the duration of two or three good pints of ale.
For the rest, however, conversation in The Three Magpies' is much as it must have been before Trafalgar. There is a difference in details. Horses are no longer bought and sold in the inn-parlour. Many of the seasonal country fairs are merged into town market days. The old flourishing Cotswold trades of tile-making, church decorating, and village carpentry are mostly in a melan- choly way. Where a village previously required nine or ten inns to house the travelling bands of craftsmen when they should come, now two inns are more than enough. Blacksmiths find -little to do, though- more perhaps than in most counties. And the little shops suffer from a tyranny of grocery combines which nowadays think nothing of sending their vans into a district a hun- dred miles and more from London. But, on the other hand, there are still uses for the grey Cotswold stone ; hill-quarries -are extensive and numerous. The farmers, hitherto well able to keep up appearances and bring up large families on the profits from their wide cornlands, now find that it pays them-,to concentrate almost entirely on pigs and fowls. Acres and acres show little but flowery grassland given over to White Wyandottes and a few cows for local requirements. So the talk is now greatly of fowls, pedigree boars, and of course, of orchards and gardens, for there is no inhabited dell of this hill- country but has its apple, pear, and plum trees, and no labourer is without his garden walled in low and grey. The love of nature has become articulate in these Glouces- tershire men through long and secure acquaintance. " I never heard so many cuckoos as this year, nor saw so many marigolds down by the water. It makes life worth living," said one, lately in from quarrying the hard grey stone all day.
Anyone with much experience of inn-taproom con- versations will realize that this is by no means a typical remark ; it would not be heard outside the hill-country. For self-consciousness comes with over-education and mass-thinking, two evils of which much of the Cotswold district is yet happily free.
H. M.
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