Tales of the Ridings Part 1

Tales of the Ridings.

by F. W. Moorman.

MEMOIR

Frederic Moorman came of a stock which, on both sides, had struck deep roots in the soil of Devon. His father's family, which is believed to have sprung ultimately from "either Cornwall or Scotland"--a sufficiently wide choice, it may be thought--had for many generations been settled in the county.(1) His mother's--her maiden name was Mary Honywill--had for centuries held land at Widdicombe and the neighbourhood, in the heart of Dartmoor. He was born on 8th September 1872, at Ashburton, where his father, the Rev. A. C. Moorman, was Congregational minister; and for the first ten years of his life he was brought up on the skirts of the moor to which his mother's family belonged: drinking in from the very first that love of country sights and sounds which clove to him through life, and laying the foundation of that close knowledge of birds and flowers which was an endless source of delight to him in after years, and which made him so welcome a companion in a country walk with any friend who shared his love of such things but who, ten to one, could make no pretence whatever to his knowledge.

In 1882, his father was appointed to the ministry of the Congregational Church at Stonehouse, in Gloucestershire; and Frederic began his formal schooling at the Wyclif Preparatory School in that place. The country round Stonehouse--a country of barish slopes and richly wooded valleys--is perhaps hardly so beautiful as that which he had left and whose memory he never ceased to cherish. But it has a charm all its own, and the child of Dartmoor had no great reason to lament his removal to the grey uplands and "golden valleys" of the Cotswolds.

His next change must have seemed one greatly for the worse. In 1884 he was sent to the school for the sons of Congregational ministers at Caterham; and the Cotswolds, with their wide outlook over the Severn estuary to May Hill and the wooded heights beyond, were exchanged for the bald sweep and the white chalk-pits of the North Downs. These too have their unique beauty; but I never remember to have heard Moorman say anything which showed that he felt it as those who have known such scenery from boyhood might have expected him to do.

After some five years at Caterham, he began his academical studies at University College, London; but, on the strength of a scholarship, soon removed to University College, Aberystwyth (1890), where the scenery--sea, heron-haunted estuaries, wooded down to the very sh.o.r.e, and hills here and there rising almost into mountains--offered surroundings far more congenial to him than the streets and squares of Bloomsbury.

In these new surroundings, he seems to have been exceptionally happy, throwing himself into all the interests of the place, athletic as well as intellectual, and endearing himself both to his teachers and his fellow-students. His friendship with Professor Herford, then Professor of English at Aberystwyth, was one of the chief pleasures of his student days as well as of his after life. Following his natural bent, he decided to study for Honours in English Language and Literature, and at the end of his course (1893) was placed in the Second Cla.s.s by the examiners for the University of London, to which the Aberystwyth College was at that time affiliated. Those who believe in the virtue of infant prodigies--and, in the country which invented Triposes and Cla.s.s Lists, it is hard to fix any limit to their number--will be distressed to learn that, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge of such matters, he was not at that time reckoned to be of "exceptionally scholarly calibre." Perhaps this was an omen all the better for his future prospects as a scholar.

It is a wholesome practice that, when the cares of examinations are once safely behind him, a student should widen his experience by a taste of foreign travel. Accordingly, in September, 1893, Moorman betook himself to Strasbourg, primarily for the sake of continuing his studies under the skilful guidance of Ten Brinck. The latter, however, was almost at once called to Berlin and succeeded by Brandl, now himself of the University of Berlin, who actually presided over Moorman's studies for the next two years, and who thought, and never ceased to think, very highly both of his abilities and his acquirements. It was only natural that Moorman should make a pretty complete surrender to German ideals and German methods of study. It was equally natural that, in the light of subsequent experience, his enthusiasms in that line should suffer a considerable diminution. He was not of the stuff to accept for ever the somewhat bloodless and barren spirit which has commonly dominated the pursuit of literature in German universities.

Into the social life of his new surroundings he threw himself with all the zest that might have been expected from his essentially sociable nature: making many friendships--that of Brandl was the one he most valued--and joining--in some respects, leading--his fellow-students in their sports and other amus.e.m.e.nts. His first published work, in fact, was a translation of the Rules of a.s.sociation Football into German; and he may fairly be regarded as the G.o.dfather of that game on German soil.

Nor was this the end of his activities. During the two years he spent at Strasbourg he acted as Lektor in English to the University, so gaining--and gaining, it is said, with much success--his first experience in what was to be his life's work as a teacher.

On the completion of his course at Strasbourg, where he obtained the degree of Ph.D. in June 1895,(2) he returned to Aberystwyth, now no longer as student but as Lecturer in the English Language and Literature under his friend and former teacher, Professor Herford. There he remained for a little over two years (September, 1895, to January, 1898), gradually increasing his stores of knowledge and strengthening the foundations of the skill which was afterwards to serve him in good stead as a teacher. During that time he also became engaged to the sister of one of his colleagues, Miss Frances Humpidge, whom he had known for some years and whose love was to be the chief joy and support of his after life.

As a matter of prudence, the marriage was postponed until his prospects should be better a.s.sured. The opportunity came sooner than could have been expected. In January, 1898, he was appointed to the lectureship in his subject--a subject, such is our respect for literature, then first handed over to an independent department--in the Yorkshire College at Leeds; and in August of the same year he was married. Four children, three of whom survived and the youngest of whom was twelve at the time of his death, were born during the earlier years of the marriage.

The life of a teacher offers little excitement to the onlooker; and all that can be done here is to give a slight sketch of the various directions in which Moorman's energies went out. The first task that lay before him was to organise the new department which had been put into his hands, to make English studies a reality in the college to which he had been called, to give them the place which they deserve to hold in the life of any inst.i.tution devoted to higher education. Into this task he threw himself with a zeal which can seldom, if ever, have been surpa.s.sed. Within six years he had not only put the teaching of his subject to Pa.s.s Students upon a satisfactory basis; he had also laid the foundations of an Honours School able to compete on equal terms with those of the other colleges which were federated in the then Victoria University of the north. It was a really surprising feat for so young a man--he was little over twenty-five when appointed--to have accomplished in so short a time; the more so as he was working single-handed: in other words, was doing unaided the work, both literary and linguistic, which in other colleges was commonly distributed between two or three.

And I speak with intimate knowledge when I say that the Leeds students who presented themselves for their Honours Degree at the end of that time bore every mark of having been most thoroughly and efficiently prepared.

In 1904, six years after Moorman's appointment to the lectureship, the Yorkshire College was reconst.i.tuted as a separate and independent university, the University of Leeds; and in the rearrangement which followed, an older man was invited to come in as official chief of the department for which Moorman had hitherto been solely responsible. This invitation was not accepted until Moorman had generously made it clear that the proposed appointment would not be personally unwelcome to him.

Nevertheless, it was clearly an invidious position for the new-comer: and a position which, but for the exceptional generosity and loyalty of the former chief of the department, would manifestly have been untenable. In fact, no proof of Moorman's unselfishness could be more conclusive than that, for the nine years during which the two men worked together, the harmony between them remained unbroken, untroubled by even the most pa.s.sing cloud. Near the close of this time, in recognition of his distinction as a scholar and of his great services to the University, a separate post, as Professor of the English Language, was created for him.

During the whole of his time at Leeds, his knowledge of his subject, both on its literary and linguistic side, was constantly deepening and his efficiency, as teacher of it, constantly increasing. With so keen a mind as his, this was only to be expected. It was equally natural that, as his knowledge expanded and his advice came to be more and more sought by those engaged in the study of such matters, he should make the results of his researches known to a wider public. After several smaller enterprises of this kind,(3) he broke entirely fresh ground with two books, which at once established his right to be heard in both the fields for which he was professionally responsible: _Yorkshire Place Names_, published for and by the Th.o.r.esby Society in 1911; and a study of the life and poetry of Robert Herrick, two years later. The former, if here and there perhaps not quite rigorous enough in the tests applied to the slippery evidence available, is in all essentials a most solid piece of work: based on a wide and sound knowledge of the linguistic principles which, though often grossly neglected, form the corner-stone, and something more, of all such inquiries; and lit up with a keen eye for the historical issues--issues reaching far back into national origins which, often in the most unexpected places, they may be made to open out. The latter, to which he turned with the more zest because it led him back to the familiar setting of his native county--to its moors and rills and flowers, and the fairy figures that haunted them--is a delightful study of one of the most unique of English poets(4); a study, however, which could only have been written by one who, among many other things, was a thorough-paced scholar. Many qualities--knowledge, scholarship, love of nature, a discerning eye for poetic beauty--go to the making of such a book. Their union in this _Study_ serves to show that, great as was Moorman's authority in the field of language, it was always to literature, above all to poetry, that his heart went naturally out. The closing years of his life were to set this beyond doubt.

It would be absurd to close this sketch of Moorman's professional activities without a reference, however slight, to what was, after all, one of the most significant things about them. No man can, in the full sense, be a teacher unless, in some way or other, he throws himself into the life and interests of his students. And it was among the secrets--perhaps the chief secret--of Moorman's influence as a teacher that, so far from being mere names in a register, his students were to him always young people of flesh and blood, in whose interests he could share, whose companion he delighted to be, and who felt that they could turn to him for advice and sympathy as often as they were in need. No doubt his own youthfulness of temper, the almost boyish spirits which seldom or never flagged in him, helped greatly to this result; but the true fountain of it all lay in his ingrained unselfishness. The same power was to make itself felt among the cla.s.ses for older students which he held in the last years of his life.

To fulfil all these academical duties in the liberal spirit, which was the only spirit possible to Moorman, might well have been expected to exhaust the energies of any man. Yet, amidst them all, he found time to take part, both as lecturer and as trusted adviser, in the activities of the Workers' Educational a.s.sociation, attending summer meetings and, during the last five or six winters of his life, delivering weekly lectures and taking part in the ensuing discussions, at Crossgates, one of the outlying suburbs of Leeds. To the students who there, year by year, gathered round him he greatly endeared himself by his power of understanding their difficulties and of presenting great poetry in a way that came home to their experience and imagination. His growing sympathy with the life of homestead and cottage made this a work increasingly congenial to him; and, as a lecturer, he was perhaps never so happy, in all senses of the word, as when, released from the "idols of the lecture-room," he was seeking to awake, or keep alive, in others that love of imaginative beauty which counted for so much in his own life and in his discharge of the daily tasks that fell upon him: speaking freely and from his heart to men and women more or less of his own age and his own aspirations; "mingling leadership and _camaraderie_ in the happy union so characteristic of him," and "drawing out the best endeavours of his pupils by his modest, quietly effective methods of teaching and, above all, by his great, quiet, human love for each and all."(5)

It is clear that such work, however delightful to him, meant a considerable call upon his time and strength: the more so as it went hand in hand with constant labours on behalf of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, for which he was the most indefatigable of travellers--cycling his way into dale after dale in search of "records"--and of which, on the death of his friend, Mr Philip Unwin, he eventually became president. Nor was this all. During the last seven years or so of his life the creative impulse, the need of embodying his own life and the lives of those around him in imaginative form was constantly growing upon him, and a wholly new horizon was opening before him.

At first he may have thought of nothing more than to produce plays suitable for performance either by the students of the University or by young people in those Yorkshire dales with which his affections were becoming year by year increasingly bound up. But, whatever the occasion, it soon proved to be no more than an occasion. He swiftly found that imaginative expression not only came naturally to him, but was a deep necessity of his nature; that it gave a needed outlet to powers and promptings which had hitherto lain dormant and whose very existence was unsuspected by his friends, perhaps even by himself. _The May King_, _Potter Thompson_, the adaptation of the _Second Shepherds' Play_ from the fifteenth-century _Towneley Mysteries_ followed each other in swift succession; and the two first have, or will shortly have, been performed either by University students or by school children of "the Ridings."(6) This is not the place to attempt any critical account of them. But there are few readers who will not have been struck by the simplicity with which the themes--now pathetic, now humorous, now romantic--are handled, and by the easy unconsciousness with which the Professor wears his "singing robes."

The same qualities, perhaps in a yet higher degree, appear in the dialect poems, written during the last three years of his life: _Songs of the Ridings_. The inspiration of these was less literary; they sprang straight from the soil and from his own heart. It was, no doubt, a scholarly instinct which first turned his mind in this direction: the desire of one who had studied the principles of the language and knew every winding of its historical origins to trace their working in the daily speech of the present. He has told us so himself, and we may readily believe it. But, if he first came to the dales as learner and scholar, he soon found his way back as welcome visitor and friend. The more he saw of the dalesmen, the more his heart went out to them: the more readily, as if by an inborn instinct, did he enter into their manner of life, their mood and temper, their way of meeting the joys and sorrows brought by each day as it pa.s.sed. And so it was that the scholar's curiosity, which had first carried him thither, rapidly gave way to a feeling far deeper and more human. His interest in forms of speech and fine shades of vowelling fell into the background; a simple craving for friendly intercourse, inspired by a deep sense of human brotherhood, took its place. And _Songs of the Ridings_(7) is the spontaneous outgrowth of the fresh experience and the ever-widening sympathies which had come to him as a man. The same is true of _Tales of the Ridings_, published for the first time in the following pages.

The last five years of his life (1914-1919) had, to him as to others, been years of unusual stress. Disqualified for active service, he had readily undertaken the extra work entailed by the departure of his younger colleagues for the war. He had also discharged the semi-military duties, such as acting on guard against enemy aircraft, which fell within his powers; and, both on the outskirts of Leeds and round his Lytton Dale cottage, he had devoted all the time he could spare to allotment work, so as to take his share--it was, in truth, much more than his share--in increasing the yield of the soil. All this, with a host of miscellaneous duties which he voluntarily shouldered, had put an undue strain upon his strength. Yet, with his usual buoyancy, he had seemed to stand it all without flagging; and even when warned by the army medical authorities that his heart showed some weakness, he had paid little heed to the warning, had certainly in no way allowed it either to interfere with his various undertakings or to prey upon his spirits.

The Armistice naturally brought some relief. Among other things, it opened the prospect of the return of his colleagues and a considerable lightening both of his professional and of his manifold civic duties. He was, moreover, much encouraged--as a man of his modest, almost diffident, nature was bound to be--by the recognition which _Songs of the Ridings_ had brought from every side: not least from the dalesmen, for whom and under whose inspiration they were written. And all his friends rejoiced to think that a new and brighter horizon seemed opening before him. Those who saw him during these last months thought that he had never been so buoyant. They felt that a new hope and a new confidence had entered into his life.

These hopes were suddenly cut off. He had pa.s.sed most of August and the first week of September (1919) at his cottage in Lytton Dale, keeping the morning of his birthday (8th September), as he always delighted to do, with his wife and children. In the afternoon he went down to bathe in the river, being himself an excellent swimmer, and wishing to teach his two younger children an art in which he had always found health and keen enjoyment. He swam across the pool and called on his daughter to follow him. Noticing that she was in some difficulty, he jumped in again to help her, but suddenly sank to the bottom, and was never seen alive again. An angler ran up to help from a lower reach of the stream, and brought the girl safely to land. Then, for the first time learning that her father had sunk, he dived and dived again in the hope of finding him before it was too late. But the intense cold of the water baffled all his efforts, and the body was not recovered until some hours later. It is probable that the chill of the pool had caused a sudden failure of Moorman's heart--a heart already weakened by the excessive strain of the last few years--and it is little likely that, after he had once sunk, he could ever have been saved.

The death of Moorman called forth expressions of grief and of grateful affection, so strong and so manifestly sincere as to bring something of surprise even to his closest friends. Much more surprising would they have been to himself. They came from every side, from lettered and unlettered, from loom and dale, from school and university. Nothing could prove more clearly how strong was the hold he had won upon all who knew him, how large the place he filled in the heart of his colleagues and the county of his adoption. It was a fitting tribute to a literary achievement of very distinctive originality. It was also, and above all, a tribute, heartfelt and irrepressible, to the charm of a singularly bright and winning spirit: to a life which had spent itself, without stint and without one thought of self, in the service of others.

Endnotes (were footnotes):

(1) To this family is believed to have belonged John Moreman, Canon and eventually Dean of Exeter (though he died, October, 1554, "before he was presented to the Deanery"), of whom an account will be found in Prince's _Worthies of Devon_ (ed. 1701, pp. 452-453), as well as in Wood's _Athenoe_ and _Fasti Oxonienses_ and Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_. He was "the first in those days to teach his parishioners to say the Lord's Prayer, the Belief and the Commandments in the English tongue" (whether the contrast is with Latin or Cornish, for he was then Vicar of Menynhed, in East Cornwall, does not appear). He was imprisoned, as a determined Catholic, in Edward VI.'s reign, but "enlarged under Queen Mary, with whom he grew into very great favour," and was chosen to defend the doctrine of Transubstantiation before the Convocation of 1553.

(2) His thesis for this degree, on _The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry from Beowulf to Shakespeare_, was published in 1905.

(3) He published editions of _The Faithful Shepherdess_, _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ and _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_ in 1897, and an elaborately critical edition of Herrick's _Poems_, in completion of his _Study_, in 1915. He also contributed the chapter on "Shakespeare's Apocrypha" to the _Cambridge History of English Literature_; and for many years acted as English editor of the _Shakespeare Jahrbuch_.

(4) Dean Bourne, the parish to which Herrick was not very willingly wedded, is within five miles of Ashburton, Moorman's birthplace.

(5) The words in inverted commas are quoted from the records of the Cla.s.s, kindly communicated by the secretary, Mr Hind. It is difficult to imagine anything stronger than the expressions of affectionate respect which recur again and again in them. I add one more, from the pen which wrote the second quotation: "So quiet, yet so pervading, was his love that each felt the individual tie; and our cla.s.s, so diverse in spirit, thought and training, has never heard or uttered an angry word. We felt it would be acting disloyally to hurt anyone whom he loved."

(6) _The May King_, written in 1913, has been twice acted by school children, once in the open air, once in the large hall of the University. _Potter Thompson_, written in 1911-1912, was acted by students of the University in 1913 and is at present in rehearsal for acting by pupils of the Secondary School of Halifax. The Towneley _Shepherds' Play_ was acted with slight modifications by University students, under Moorman's guidance, in 1907. His adaptation of it, written in 1919, has not yet been acted, but was written in the hope that some day it might be. It may be added that he was largely responsible for a very successful performance of Fletcher's _Elder Brother_ by the University students in 1908.

(7) First published serially in _The Yorkshire Weekly Post_ of 1917-1918.

A LAOc.o.o.n OF THE ROCKS

The enclosure of the common fields of England by hedge or wall, whereby the country has been changed from a land of open champaigns and large vistas to one of parterres and cattle-pens, const.i.tutes a revolution in the social and economic life of the nation. Though extending over many years and even centuries, this process of change reached its height in the latter half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, and thus comes into line with the industrial revolution which was taking place in urban England about the same time. To some, indeed, the enclosure of the open fields may appear as the outward symbol of that enwalling of the nation's economic freedom which transformed the artisan from an independent craftsman to a wage-earner, and made of him a link in the chain of our modern factory system. To those economists who estimate the wealth of nations solely by a ledger-standard, the enclosure of the common fields has seemed a wise procedure; but to those who look deeper, a realisation has come that it did much to destroy the communal life of the countryside. Be that as it may, it is beyond question that to the ancient and honoured order of shepherds, from whose ranks kings, seers and poets have sprung, it brought misfortune and even ruin.

Among the shepherds of the eastern slopes of the Pennine Hills few were better known in the early years of the nineteenth century than Peregrine Ibbotson. A shepherd all his life, as his father and grandfather had been before him, he nevertheless belonged to a family that had once owned wide tracts of land in Yorkshire. But the Ibbotsons had fought on the losing side in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the forfeiture of their lands had reduced them to the rank of farmers or shepherds. But the tradition of former greatness was jealously preserved in the family; it lived on in the baptismal names which they gave to their children and fostered in them a love of independence together with a spirit of reserve which was not always appreciated by their neighbours. But the spirit of the age was at work in them as in so many other families in the dale villages. Peregrine's six sons had long since left him alone in his steading on the moors: some had gone down to the manufacturing towns of the West Riding and had prospered in trade; others had fought, and more than one had fallen, in the Napoleonic wars. Peregrine, therefore, although seventy-six years of age and a widower, had no one to share roof and board with him in his shepherd's cottage a thousand feet above the sea.

Below, in the dale, lay the villages with their cl.u.s.tered farmsteads and their square-towered churches of Norman foundation. Round about his steading, which was screened by sycamores from the westerly gales, lay the mountain pastures, broken by terraces of limestone rock. Above, where the limestone yields place to the millstone, were the high moors and fells, where grouse, curlews and merlins nested among the heather, and hardy, blue-faced sheep browsed on the mountain herbage.

It was Peregrine's duty to shepherd on these unenclosed moors the sheep and lambs which belonged to the farmers in the dale below. Each farmer was allowed by immemorial custom to pasture so many sheep on the moors the number being determined by the acreage of his farm. During the lambing season, in April and May, all the sheep were below in the crofts behind the farmsteads, where the herbage was rich and the weakly ewes could receive special attention; but by the twentieth of May the flocks were ready for the mountain gra.s.s, and then it was that Peregrine's year would properly begin. The farmers, with their dogs in attendance, would drive their sheep and lambs up the steep, zigzagging path that led to Peregrine's steading, and there the old shepherd would receive his charges. Dressed in his white linen smock, his crook in his hand, and his white beard lifted by the wind, he would take his place at the mouth of the rocky defile below his house. At a distance he might easily have been mistaken for a bishop standing at the altar of his cathedral church and giving his benediction to the kneeling mult.i.tudes. There was dignity in every movement and gesture, and the act of receiving the farmers'

flocks was invested by him with ritual solemnity. He gave to each farmer in turn a formal greeting, and then proceeded to count the sheep and lambs that the dogs had been trained to drive slowly past him in single file. He knew every farmer's "stint" or allowance, and stern were his words to the man who tried to exceed his proper number.

"Thou's gotten ower mony yowes to thy stint, Thomas Moon," he would say to a farmer who was trying to get the better of his neighbours.

"Nay, Peregrine, I reckon I've n.o.bbut eighty, and they're lile 'uns at that."

"Eighty's thy stint, but thou's gotten eighty-twee; thou can tak heam wi' thee twee o' yon three-yeer-owds, an' mind thou counts straight next yeer."

Further argument was useless; Peregrine had the reputation of never making a mistake in his reckoning, and, amid the jeers of his fellows, Thomas Moon would drive his two rejected ewes with their lambs back to his farm.

When all the sheep had been counted and driven into the pens which they were to occupy for the night the shepherd would invite the farmers to his house and entertain them with oatcakes, Wensleydale cheese and home-brewed beer; meanwhile, the conversation turned upon the past lambing season and the prospects for the next hay harvest. When the farmers had taken their leave Peregrine would pay a visit to the pens to see that all the sheep were properly marked and in a fit condition for a moorland life. Next morning he opened the pens and took the ewes and lambs on to the moors.

For the next ten months they were under his sole charge, except during the short periods of time when they had to be brought down to the farms.

The first occasion was "clipping-time," at the end of June, before the hay harvest began. Then, on the first of September, they returned to the dale in order that the ram lambs might be taken from the flocks and sold at the September fairs. Once again, before winter set in, the farmers demanded their sheep of Peregrine in order to anoint them with a salve of tar, b.u.t.ter and grease, which would keep out the wet. For the rest the flocks remained with Peregrine on the moors, and it was his duty to drive them from one part to another when change of herbage required it.

The moors seemed woven into the fabric of Peregrine's life, and he belonged to them as exclusively as the grouse or mountain linnet. He knew every rock upon their crests and every runnel of water that fretted its channel through the peat; he could mark down the merlin's nest among the heather and the falcon's eyrie in the cleft of the scar. If he started a brooding grouse and the young birds scattered themselves in all directions, he could gather them all around him by imitating the mother's call-note. The moor had for him few secrets and no terrors. He could find his way through driving mist or snowstorm, knowing exactly where the sheep would take shelter from the blast, and rescuing them from the danger of falling over rocks or becoming buried in snowdrifts.

The sun by day and the stars by night were for him both clock and compa.s.s, and if these failed him he directed his homeward course by observing how the cotton-gra.s.s or withered sedge swayed in the wind.