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Updated: April 30, 2025
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen.
Bodo goes whistling off in the cold with his oxen and his little boy; and it is no use to follow him farther, because he ploughs all day and eats his meal under a tree with the other ploughmen, and it is very monotonous. Let us go back and see what Bodo's wife, Ermentrude, is doing. She is busy too; it is the day on which the chicken-rent is due a fat pullet and five eggs in all.
The pyracanthus bushes in the hedge yield their clusters of bright yellow berries, mingled with more glowing hues of red from haws and glossy hips. On the pale grey earthen slopes men and women are plying the long Sabellian hoes of their forefathers, and ploughmen are driving furrows down steep hills.
And not so bad, not so bad, I call it! with their right left; right left. Ha! ha! You've seen better. No need to tell me that. But, in England, we look to the meaning of things. We're a practical people. What's more, we're volunteers. Volunteers in everything. We can't make a regiment of ploughmen march like clock-work in a minute; and we don't want to.
At first they see only a rude representation of mountains and forests, gardens, fallow fields, standing crops, cows, milk-maids, mills and millers, ploughs, ploughmen, oxen, cities, soldiers, horses, carriages, mines and miners, convents, monks, hermits, &c., all in a state of quiescence. The pulling of a few strings, however, gives a totally novel aspect to the face of affairs.
In William Benson's edition of the Georgics "with notes critical and rustick," it is stated that "the husbandry of England in general is Virgilian, which is shown by paring and burning the surface: by raftering and cross-ploughing, and that in those parts of England where the Romans principally inhabited all along the Southern coast Latin words remain to this hour among shepherds and ploughmen in their rustick affairs: and what will seem more strange at first sight to affirm though in fact really true, there is more of Virgil's husbandry put in practice in England at this instant than in Italy itself."
Then the manly voice of the young paterfamilias would strike up the solemn, melancholy tune which the ancient tradition of the province transmits, not to all ploughmen without distinction, but to those most expert in the art of arousing and sustaining the spirit of working-cattle.
Where the ploughs go, and the ploughmen; where the cattle are driven afield; where the farmyards tell how they are housed and kept; where the women sit with their milking pails or make journeys to the spring; where flowers trim the house-fronts, or where the little yard-gate says that everything, like itself, hangs by one hinge.
The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen a good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when I asked someone how all these came to be hanged, I was told it was because they could not scrape together enough crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms."
And then I walked along the streets, and peeped into the shops and what do you think I saw? Tommy. What? Harry. Why, I saw great hulking fellows, as big as our ploughmen and carters, with their heads all frizzled and curled like one of our sheep's tails, that did nothing but finger ribbons and caps for the women! This diverted me so, that I could not help laughing ready to split my sides.
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