mugs and tankards of beer, smoking their short clays and
talking might be numbers of men, mostly agricultural
workers where dull days broke out into life with
interchange of talk, snatches of folk songs, and some show
of fun. Some men would have spoken in what was called
the dubitative or approximating style. The farm labourer
for example, would be feeling for what he had to say
through a maze of tangled expletives, qualifications,
retractions, and corrections. He would have known that he
was unsure of his ground, that he had not said what he had
in his mind and would be afraid of the consequences of
articulate speech, but expected to gain nothing by silence,
however a sense of superiority of one’s own community was
sustained by the repetition of traditional jests and taunts
celebrating the supposed failures of one’s nearest
neighbours.
families where the husband was a teetotaller were both
financially stable and emotionally better off, for drink then
as now, offered excitable temperaments an outlet for
violence. One social commentator said it was a wonder that
Britain was a great empire with men he considered not
men but ‘members of a vast seedy, over-worked, over-
legislated, neuter class, with their drab clothes, their un-
envious, stricken living conditions, old-world apathies and
resentments. No wonder they loose their sensibilities and
rationality through drink.’
Evening News in 1874 illustrates how a good man was
being driven to violence by drink and despair:
hadn’t got a sixpence nor a shilling, and she knew it and
to buy victuals with money, let alone beer. And a man can’t do
very high for it supplied the village with a fund of
narrative, humour and social comment in a language
everybody could understand and a mode in which everyone
could participate. It was simplistic but it had to be.
that’s my share, look ’ee, gone at onst. I know I drinks beer,
and more so than I should. It makes me kinder stupid, as I
thirty year or more, since I wuz big enough to go with the
plough, and I’ve knowed they as worked for nigh handy sixty,
companionship was intensely local with many families
joining together to draw out memories and tell musical
stories – particularly ones involving ghosts and magic.
Yer med as well drink wile ‘ee can. I never meaned to hurt
her, and her knows it; and if it wurn’t for a parcel of women
touch of storytelling brilliance behind it. The well-known
story is that a young monk fell in love with a beautiful
young novice from a nearby nunnery and they would meet
in the nearby woods. After some time they eloped in a black
coach drawn by a pair of horses and driven by another lay
brother. The couple were soon missed and tracked down;
the would-be bridegroom was later lynched and the nun
bricked up alive. A moral tale if there ever was one.
I know I drinks, and what else I be to do? I can’t work allus.”
helped to relieve Charlotte of some of the burdens of care
and caused at least some ambivalent regard to the future.
Only a year previous to George dying, her sister had died
prematurely but it was a little early in her life for the years
of regular obituary and funerals, in any case, true to her
age and upbringing, she would have seen it as her duty to
adapt. There was still time to make plans for the future.