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BUT the lad had now reached
his fifteenth year, and must choose a profession for life. Was he to remain
at farm work and become a ploughman ? All his instincts turned from such a
heavy, unintellectual, bucolic future. He was too keen, too active, too
clever, to walk "between the stilts " all his life. He had tried it. He
first accompanied the ploughman as "gaudsman," to "goad" and guide the
horses, and had, in time, held the plough. But the more he essayed it, the
more he felt its utter incompatibility. His intercourse with farm servants
and increased knowledge of the life they led, now extending over nearly five
years, had not been encouraging, either morally or intellectually.
The agricultural population
of all countries, through many causes incidental to their condition, has
always been much behind the rest of the nation in intellectual activity, if
not in moral habit, since long before the time of the Athenians with their
Boeotian neighbours. Even yet, with all the modern ameliorations in
implements, work, and time, the exercise of intelligence evoked by their
life is not very high. At the beginning of the century, with their old-world
appliances, long hours, exhausting if not oppressive toil, and small
domestic comfort, it was in a very backward condition, In truth, John had
even then gathered a poor opinion of their intellectual and moral status,
which, as things then were, was probably not unjust; and subsequent
intercourse with the class, especially in his scientific studies, only
served to strengthen these early impressions, for which we shall find more
than sufficient grounds as we proceed. On the other hand, their strong
physique and high health were matters of which they had reason to be justly
proud, and made them despise the members of other occupations in which these
good elements were lower than with them. This is well illustrated by a
speech made on one occasion, about the time we speak of, by the farmer of
Boggatyhead, which overlooks Dunnottar Castle, when his stooks of corn were
being blown over the cliffs into the sea by a heavy storm. "Rin," says he,
"to Stanehyve, and get as mony men as you can, to help here ; and if ye
canna get men, get weivers or onything!"
One of the commonest of
sounds heard then all over the land, and not less in Stonehaven, was the
merry click-clack of the weaver's shuttle. John had listened to it from his
earliest years. He had often watched the busy weaver, always an attractive
sight to children, and gathered the refuse beneath the looms in kindly
workshops. His father had been a weaver, his mother's people were all
weavers, she herself had assisted them in her younger days, and he had heard
the loom talked of since he could remember anything. Several of our greater
countrymen had also followed the same trade, which at that time held much
higher rank than now; so that its lowliness was no bar to greatness or
study. John, therefore, determinately fixed on following the ancestral
occupation and becoming a weaver.
Nothing could have formed a
greater contrast to the byre and the plough he was leaving than the loom to
which he was going. Of all occupations, there is none that employs the body
more than weaving, while actively exercising the mind. In working, one hand
moves the "lay," the other drives the shuttle; in some classes of work, the
shuttle is deftly thrown through the warp from hand to hand, either of which
moves the "lay" in the short interval between. The feet work the "treddles,"
the fingers tie the thread, while the eye is ever on the alert to see that
all goes well in the countless intricacies of the cords; for a single flaw
would spoil the cloth. In weaving a striped stuff, still greater care is
required. The darker or lighter lines must be inserted by means of
additional shuttles, which are laid aside on the edge of the loom till
required, each in turn shooting to and fro under the ever active hand. The
breadth of each stripe has to be judged by the eye, which the expert workman
learns to do with singular accuracy, assisted, if need be, by a pair of
compasses, which lie ready for use when the requisite breadth is thought to
be reached, a process of minute judgment that necessitates unusual
correctness of observation.
Weavers then formed, as a
whole, a remarkable class of men—intelligent, and observant of the progress
of events at home and abroad ; devoted to politics, strongly or wildly
radical, if not tainted with revolutionary sentiments, after the
intoxication of the first French Revolution; great talkers when they
gathered together in the street or public-house, during the intervals of
work; intensely theological, often religious, well versed in all the
intricacies of Calvinism, severest critics of the minister's discourses, and
keenest of heresy-hunters, scenting it from afar, in phrase or simile,
herein only being strong conservatives—in a word, general guardians of the
Church, reformers of the state, and proud patrons of learning and the
schoolmaster; but, withal, good fathers, good churchmen, good citizens, and
not seldom good men—favourite subjects with all delineators of Scottish
character, "douce Davie Deans" being a mild but picturesque specimen. At the
same time, it should be remembered that John Duncan entered this once
universal and well-remunerated occupation at a transition period in national
progress, when the hand was being rapidly superseded by steam, a fact which
accounts for much of the poverty that pressed him during his latter days.
At first sight, it might seem
a mistake to exchange an occupation so much connected with nature and
natural phenomena for one so sedentary and confined. But the advantages of
an agricultural life for natural study are more seeming than real, and were
much more so at that time than now. It is not the shoemaker's children that
are the best shod; nor are our field workers the best field students. Many
things account for this, patent to the most casual observer, but chiefly
then the long laborious and depressing hours. But in his new employment, the
passion for nature, already generated in the lad by his early life, could
still be gratified in leisure hours, outside the weaver's shop, as it would
have required to have been in the other case, beyond the farmer's fields.
Then, in autumn when work was slack, he could return again to the harvest
rig, with what advantages it offered; and in after years, having time
greatly in his own hands, as a home weaver and not a worker at a
strict-timed factory, he could use his leisure as he pleased for outdoor
pursuits. Under the most adverse circumstances, enthusiasm would make its
own opportunities. In every way, therefore, there can be no doubt that to
John Duncan the weaver's treddles were better than the ploughman's stilts.
At length, in 1809, about the time Thom, the Inverurie poet, began the same
occupation in Aberdeen, when Duncan had entered on his sixteenth year,
arrangements were completed for his being apprenticed as a weaver in the
birthplace of his parents, a weaving colony, where they also had sat at the
loom.
Drumlithie, to which he now
went, is a small inland, rural village, or "toonie," as John called it,
seven miles from Stonehaven, and eight from Laurencekirk. It is pleasantly
situated amidst some embowering ash trees, in an undulating hollow,
cultivated to the summits of its enclosing heights, at the northern
extremity of the far-stretching Howe of Strathmore. The centre of a wide
agricultural district, it has now a railway station of its own on the busy
line between Perth and Aberdeen. Like most quiet country villages, it
possesses a comfortable inn, a school-house, and, in this case, several
churches; for, in addition to the Established Church and the representatives
of Scotch dissent, it boasts an Episcopal chapel, half of the population
having stuck to prelacy from the old days, even in the neighbourhood of
Dunnottar and its Covenanting dungeons. Architecturally, though an ancient
site, it contains nothing peculiar, except a curious solid, circular, stone
tower crowned with a belfry, built in 1777, its top having been recently
renewed, whence a bell tolls at special times of public assembly.
When the thin, shy,
uncouth-looking, friendless hero of our story entered the village early one
morning at the beginning of the century, it presented a very different
aspect from the silent, sleepy, retrograding hamlet it is now. The houses
were mostly thatched, and stood amidst neat well-tended gardens, and the
whole place had an air of vital activity about it that betokened prosperous
trade; while the clatter of the loom resounded from every dwelling. As he
passed along the narrow street to the upper end of the village, where he was
to spend five important years of his life, he could observe through his
sheepish eyes, under their projecting brows—which saw deeper and farther,
however, than the casual observer might suspect—that numerous groups of
weavers eyed him from the corners of the streets, where they stood without
coat or hat, adorned with the inevitable apron, the badge of their trade,
which he was soon to don. His lank, ill-filled figure, his awkward stoop
that bespoke bashfulness and toil, his simple, retiring look, his meagre,
worn apparel, his small but well-tied bundle that bore all his possessions,
did not escape their critical gaze; and the question went quickly round who
this "queer kind o' creatur" could be, that was inquiring for the sharpest
and most domineering man in the whole village, the notorious Charlie Pirie
—another suggestive example of the wolf and the lamb.
John had entered a town of
rural weavers. Every householder had his workshop attached to his house. He
rented, moreover, a large garden and a considerable croft of land, of from
two to four acres, and kept a cow. At early morn every day, as certainly as
the sun rose, the blast of the horn of the common village cowherd resounded
over the vale; when from every gate a cow joined the general herd, which was
led by him to the wide common in the hollow, below the town to the north,
now under cultivation. The same merry sound was heard in the evening, when
he returned with his lowing charge, and every animal went of her own accord
to her own byre, bearing rich treasures for the pail. The public cowherd,
generally an elderly weather-beaten man, was known throughout Scotland by
the title of "Tootie," from his tooting or winding his horn—a name still
attached to places such as "Tootie's Nook," a street corner where he used to
assemble his cattle in an ancient town in Angus, where the writer was born.
His name and functions recall a bygone picturesque state of life once
prevalent in the country, but now seldom seen; the upland rural village of
Lauder, south of Edinburgh, being one of the very few spots, if not the only
place, in Scotland where this remnant of past rural comfort still lingers.
In Drumlithie, the staple
trade at this period was that of "green" or unbleached linen, though a
little woollen was made in the shape of wincey. Some time after John Duncan
left it, when bleaching was better developed through increased knowledge of
practical chemistry, "white weaving," or bleached linen, was introduced, and
added to the local population and prosperity. In John's time there, flax was
extensively cultivated in the neighbourhood, but it has been abandoned for
more than thirty years, and there, as elsewhere over the country, the
remains of the pits where it was steeped may still be found. The whole of
each family engaged in the trade—the father and sons wove, and the mother
and daughters spun the yarn. Even the farmers near made it a condition, in
hiring female servants, that they should be good "spinsters;" and they got
then two shillings a spindle for the produce of their wheels and lissom
fingers. The household varied their sedentary Iife by tending their gardens,
rearing homely but pretty flowers—for not a few were creditable
florists—cultivating their crofts, then under a four years' rotation,
shearing the daily grass for the cow, looking after their poultry and
cattle, and cutting, drying, and fetching home their peats from the moss,
which then stretched beyond the public common—for coal was then little used
in inland districts.
A hebdomadal silence and
sanctimony fell upon the noisy hamlet, when walking was a crime, when the
voluble population spoke in subdued tones, and the churches were crowded,
Sabbatarian Leagues being then unknown and unneeded. A cheerful, active,
social and intellectual life, however, burst forth on Monday morning, and
pervaded the week till midnight on Saturday, when the most pressing business
at once religiously ceased. The usual social, political and ecclesiastical
questions were ardently discussed in Drumlithie, with all the accustomed
,keenness of professional reformers, and the affairs of the Church and the
nation, and the conduct of the Napoleonic wars, then raging, authoritatively
and conclusively settled—for Drumlithie at least. At that time, newspapers
were costly and rare, and could only be afforded by the rich or by clubs of
the villagers—some twenty joining for one paper ; but the two or three that
weekly arrived were greedily devoured and thoroughly digested with a
keenness now unknown, till they became the merest rags, and were precious
even then. Some of the weavers possessed not a few books, such as John's
master, and these were not allowed to gather dust on their shelves ; but a
taste for general reading was not common even amongst weavers. The parish
school then stood, as now, at the upper south end of the village, and was
taught at that time by Mr. Charles, a worthy, old-fashioned man, who, in
1820, six years after Duncan left, became minister of Garvock, above
Laurencekirk, and died in his hundredth year, tended to the last by his old
housekeeper, of about the same age, that had been with him in Drumlithie;
and the elements of education were, as a whole, fairly prized by the
community.
The above picture, which is a
simple statement of facts gathered from eye-witnesses and participants,
reveals a state of rural society creditable to the country and the age,
self-supporting, well-conditioned, hardworking and comfortable, with
valuable social elements that have greatly passed away with the decay of
village communities and the overgrowth of city centres. To some of these
elements it may be well and wise for us, as a nation, once more to return.
One thing, at least, the most sceptical will allow—tastes and habits then
were much simpler, and in many ways healthier, than they are now. As put by
one of my aged informants, who was a boy in the village when the century
began, "Fowk didna need a' the pleasures then that they need noo." But
whether, as he maintained, "no half the mischief was dune then that is noo,"
and whether our fathers were better men than their children, are other
questions open to both positive and negative replies. |
