Ch. 16: Old Wiltshire Days

Old memories--Hindon as a borough and as a village--The Lamb Inn and its
birds--The "mob" at Hindon--The blind smuggler--Rawlings of Lower
Pertwood Farm--Reed, the thresher and deer-stealer--He leaves a
fortune--Devotion to work--Old Father Time--Groveley Wood and the
people's rights--Grace Reed and the Earl of Pembroke--An illusion of the
very aged--Sedan-chairs in Bath--Stick-gathering by the
poor--Game-preserving

The incident of the unhappy young man who was transported to Australia
or Tasmania, which came out in the shepherd's history of the Ellerby
family, put it in my mind to look up some of the very aged people of the
downland villages, whose memories could go back to the events of eighty
years ago. I found a few, "still lingering here," who were able to
recall that miserable and memorable year of 1830 and had witnessed the
doings of the "mobs." One was a woman, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop,
now aged ninety-four, who was in her teens when the poor labourers, "a
thousand strong," some say, armed with cudgels, hammers, and axes,
visited her village and broke up the thrashing machines they found
there.

Another person who remembered that time was an old but remarkably
well-preserved man of eighty-nine at Hindon, a village a couple of miles
distant from Fonthill Bishop. Hindon is a delightful little village, so
rustic and pretty amidst its green, swelling downs, with great woods
crowning the heights beyond, that one can hardly credit the fact that it
was formerly an important market and session town and a Parliamentary
borough returning two members; also that it boasted among other
greatnesses thirteen public-houses. Now it has two, and not flourishing
in these tea- and mineral-water drinking days. Naturally it was an
exceeedingly corrupt little borough, where free beer for all was the
order of the day for a period of four to six weeks before an election,
and where every householder with a vote looked to receive twenty guineas
from the candidate of his choice. It is still remembered that when a
householder in those days was very hard up, owing, perhaps, to his too
frequent visits to the thirteen public-houses, he would go to some
substantial tradesman in the place and pledge his twenty guineas, due at
the next election! In due time, after the Reform Bill, it was deprived
of its glory, and later when the South-Western Railway built their line
from Salisbury to Yeovil and left Hindon some miles away, making their
station at Tisbury, it fell into decay, dwindling to the small village
it now is; and its last state, sober and purified, is very much better
than the old. For although sober, it is contented and even merry, and
exhibits such a sweet friendliness