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Professor Thorold Rogers, writing of the twelfth century, gives the following picture of the poorer classes: "The houses of these villagers were mean and dirty. Brickmaking was a lost art, stone was found only in a few places. The wood fire was on a hob of clay.
Brickmaking has now become such an important industry at the school that last season our students manufactured twelve hundred thousand of first-class bricks, of a quality stable to be sold in any market. Aside from this, scores of young men have mastered the brickmaking trade both the making of bricks by hand and by machinery and are now engaged in this industry in many parts of the South.
The name of the place, or rather neighborhood, for I don't know where the place actually is there are three places, and they are all four or five miles off Mill Village, and Pemunk, and Sandon; the name of the neighborhood, Brickfield Farms, comes from there having been brickmaking done here at one time; but it was given up.
"All is vanity and clay." At the end of his brickmaking, our adventurer found himself with a tolerable suit of clothes somewhat darned on his back, several blood-blisters in his palms, and some verdigris coppers in his pocket. Forthwith, to seek his fortune, he proceeded on foot to the capital, entering, like the king, from Windsor, from the Surrey side.
This proud disdain must mark his goddess of stone in the Arabian hills, this majesty and power; but there must be youth and fire in the place of this ancient calm. A porter that stood beside him, emboldened by barley beer and the growing disapproval among the on-lookers, cried: "Ha! by the rags of my fathers, she outshines her masters, the brickmaking hag!"
When he was trying most, sometimes, they wouldn't believe in him; and then there would come idle days, and he would meet old companions, and get led off, and then there would be weeks of misery. Now he is coming away from it all. There is a little cottage ready, with a garden; the little wife is so happy! He can't get it here; and he will have work at his trade, and will learn brickmaking.
I had always sympathized with the "Children of Israel," in their task of "making bricks without straw," but ours was the task of making bricks with no money and no experience. In the first place, the work was hard and dirty, and it was difficult to get the students to help. When it came to brickmaking, their distaste for manual labour in connection with book education became especially manifest.
And on the brink of this canal there had sprung up a colony of brickmakers, the nature of the earth in those parts combining with the canal to make brickmaking a suitable trade. The workmen there assembled were not, for the most part, native-born Hogglestockians, or folk descended from Hogglestockian parents.
"And I footed it there, and that's sixteen. And I paid one-and-sixpence for beer and grub; s'help me I did." "Dan!" said a voice from the bed, rebuking him for the impropriety of his language. "Well; I beg pardon, but I did. And they guv' me two bob; just two plain shillings, by " "Dan!" "And I'd 've arned three-and-six here at brickmaking easy; that's what I wuld.
I had always supposed that brickmaking was very simple, but I soon found out by bitter experience that it required special skill and knowledge, particularly in the burning of the bricks. After a good deal of effort we moulded about twenty-five thousand bricks, and put them into a kiln to be burned. This kiln turned out to be a failure, because it was not properly constructed or properly burned.
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