the hampshire people—racial differences in neighbouring counties—a neglected subject—inhabitants of towns—gentry and peasantry—four distinct types—the common blonde type—lean women—deleterious effects of tea-drinking—a shepherd's testimony—a mixed race—the anglo-saxon—case of reversion of type—un-saxon character of the british—dark-eyed hampshire people—racial feeling with regard to eye-colours—the iberian type—its persistence—character of the small dark man—dark and blonde children—a dark village child.
the history of the horn-blower and his old wife, and their still living aged children, serves to remind me that this book, which contains so much about all sorts of creatures and forms of life, from spiders and flies to birds and beasts, and from red alga on gravestones to oaks and yews, has so far had almost nothing to say about our own species—of that variety which inhabits hampshire.
racial differences
if the critical reader asks what is here meant by "variety," what should i answer him? on going directly from any other district in southern england to the central parts of hampshire one is sensible of a difference in the people. one is still in southern england, and the peasantry, like the atmosphere, climate, soil, the quiet but verdurous and varied scenery, are more or less like those of other neighbouring counties—surrey, sussex, kent, berkshire, {221} wilts, and dorset. in general appearance, at all events, the people are much the same; and the dialect, where any survives, and even the quality of the voices, closely resemble those in adjoining counties. nevertheless there is a difference; even the hasty seers who are almost without the faculty of observation are vaguely cognisant of it, though they would not be able to say what it consisted in. probably it would puzzle anyone to say wherein hampshire differed from all the counties named, since each has something individual; therefore it would be better to compare hampshire with some one county near it, or with a group of neighbouring counties in which some family resemblance is traceable. somerset, devon, wilts, and dorset—these answer the description, and i leave out cornwall only because its people are unknown to me. the four named have seemed to me the most interesting counties in southern england; but if i were to make them five by adding hampshire, the verdict of nine persons out of ten, all equally well acquainted with the five, would probably be that it was the least interesting. they would probably say that the people of hampshire were less good-looking, that they had less red colour in their skins, less pure colour in their eyes; that they had less energy, if not less intelligence, or at all events were less lively, and had less humour.
these differences between the inhabitants of neighbouring and of adjoining counties are doubtless in some measure due to local conditions, of soil, climate, {222} food, customs, and so on, acting for long generations on a stay-at-home people: but the main differences are undoubtedly racial; and here we are on a subject in which we poor ordinary folk who want to know are like sheep wandering shepherdless in some wilderness, bleating in vain for guidance in a maze of fleece-tearing brambles. it is true that the ethnologists and anthropologists triumphantly point out that the jute type of man may be recognised in the isle of wight, and in a less degree even in the meon district; for the rest, with a wave of the hand to indicate the northern half of the county, they say that all that is or ought to be more or less anglo-saxon. that's all; since, as they tell us, the affinities of the south hampshire people, of the new forest district especially, have not yet been worked out. not being an anthropologist i can't help them; and am even inclined to think that they have left undone some of the things which they ought to have done. the complaint was made in a former chapter that we had no monograph on fleas to help us; it may be made, too, with regard to the human race in hampshire. the most that one can do in such a case, since man cannot be excluded from the subjects which concern the naturalist, is to record one's own poor little unscientific observations, and let them go for what they are worth.
gentry and peasantry
there is little profit in looking at the townspeople. the big coast towns have a population quite as heterogeneous as that of the metropolis; even in a comparatively small rural inland town, like winchester, {223} one would be puzzled to say what the chief characteristics of the people were. you may feel in a vague way that they are unlike the people of, say, guildford, or canterbury, or reading, or dorchester, but the variety in forms and faces is too great to allow of any definite idea. the only time when the people even in a town can be studied to advantage in places like winchester, andover, etc., is on a market day, or on a saturday afternoon, when the villagers come in to do their marketing. i have said, in writing of somerset and its people, that the gentry, the landowners, and the wealthy residents generally, are always in a sense foreigners. the man may bear a name which has been for many generations in a county, but he is never racially one with the peasant; and, as john bright once said, it is the people who live in cottages that make the nation. his parents and his grandparents and his ancestors for centuries have been mixing their blood with the blood of outsiders. it is well always to bear this in mind, and in the market-place or the high street of the country town to see the carriage people, the gentry, and the important ones generally as though one saw them not, or saw them as shadows, and to fix the attention on those who in face and carriage and dress proclaim themselves true natives and children of the soil.
even so there will be variety enough—a little more perhaps than is wanted by the methodic mind anxious to classify these "insect tribes." but after a time—a few months or a few years, let us {224} say—the observer will perceive that the majority of the people are divisible into four fairly distinct types, the minority being composed of intermediate forms and of nondescripts. there is an enormous disproportion in the actual numbers of the people of these distinct types, and it varies greatly in different parts of the county. of the hampshire people it may be said generally, as we say of the whole nation, that there are two types—the blonde and the dark; but in this part of england there are districts where a larger proportion of dark blood than is common in england generally has produced a well-marked intermediate type; and this is one of my four distinct hampshire types. i should place it second in importance, although it comes a very long way after the first type, which is distinctly blonde.
common blonde type
this first most prevalent type, which greatly outnumbers all the others put together, and probably includes more than half of the entire population, is strongest in the north, and extends across the county from sussex to wiltshire. the hampshire people in that district are hardly to be distinguished from those of berkshire. one can see this best by looking at the school-children in a number of north hampshire and berkshire villages. in sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty children in a village school you will seldom find as many as a dozen with dark eyes.
as was said in a former chapter, there is very little beauty or good looks in this people; on the other hand, there is just as little downright ugliness; they are mostly on a rather monotonous level, just {225} passable in form and features, but with an almost entire absence of any brightness, physical or mental. take the best-looking woman of this most common type—the description will fit a dozen in any village. she is of medium height, and has a slightly oval face (which, being anglo-saxon, she ought not to have), with fairly good features; a nose fairly straight, or slightly aquiline, and not small; mouth well moulded, but the lips too thin; chin frequently pointed. her hair is invariably brown, without any red or chestnut colour in it, generally of a dull or dusty hue; and the eyes are a pale greyish-blue, with small pupils, and in very many cases a dark mark round the iris. the deep blue, any pure blue, in fact, from forget-me-not to ultramarine, is as rare in this commonest type as warm or bright hair—chestnut, red, or gold; or as a brilliant skin. the skin is pallid, or dusky, or dirty-looking. even healthy girls in their teens seldom have any colour, and the exquisite roseate and carmine reds of other counties are rare indeed. the best-looking girls at the time of life when they come nearest to being pretty, when they are just growing into womanhood, have an unfinished look which is almost pathetic. one gets the fancy that nature had meant to make them nice-looking, and finally becoming dissatisfied with her work, left them to grow to maturity anyhow. it is pathetic, because there was little more to be done—a rosier blush on the cheek, a touch of scarlet on the lips, a little brightness and elasticity in the hair, a pencil of sunlight to make the eyes sparkle.
{226}
in figure this woman is slim, too narrow across the hips, too flat in the chest. and she grows thinner with years. the number of lean, pale women of this type in hampshire is very remarkable. you see them in every village, women that appear almost fleshless, with a parchment-like skin drawn tight over the bones of the face, pale-blue, washed-out eyes, and thin, dead-looking hair. what is the reason of this leanness? it may be that the women of this blonde type are more subject to poverty of blood than others; for the men, though often thin, are not so excessively thin as the women. or it may be the effect of that kind of poison which cottage women all over the country are becoming increasingly fond of, and which is having so deleterious an effect on the people in many counties—the tea they drink. poison it certainly is: two or three cups a day of the black juice which they obtain by boiling and brewing the coarse indian teas at a shilling a pound which they use, would kill me in less than a week.
or it may be partly the poison of tea and partly the bad conditions, especially the want of proper food, in the villages. one day on the downs near winchester i found a shepherd with his flock, a man of about fifty, and as healthy and strong-looking a fellow as i have seen in hampshire. why was it, i asked him, that he was the only man of his village i had seen with the colour of red blood in his face? why did they look so unwholesome generally? why were the women so thin, and the children so stunted {227} and colourless? he said he didn't know, but thought that for one thing they did not get enough to eat. "on the farm where i work," he said, "there are twelve of us—nine men, all married, and three boys. my wages are thirteen shillings, with a cottage and garden; i have no children, and i neither drink nor smoke, and have not done so for eighteen years. yet i find the money is not too much. of the others, the eight married men all have children—one has got six at home: they all smoke, and all make a practice of spending at least two evenings each week at the public-house." how, after paying for beer and tobacco, they could support their families on the few shillings that remained out of their wages was a puzzle to him.
a mixed race
but this is to digress. the prevalent blonde type i have tried to describe is best seen in the northern half of the county, but is not so accentuated on the east, north, and west borders as in the interior villages. if, as is commonly said, this people is anglo-saxon, it must at some early period have mixed its blood with that of a distinctly different race. this may have been the belgic or brythonic, but as shape and face are neither celtic nor saxon, the brythons must have already been greatly modified by some older and different race which they, or the goidels before them, had conquered and absorbed. it will be necessary to return to this point by-and-by.
side by side with this, in a sense, dim and doubtful people, you find the unmistakable saxon, the thick-set, {228} heavy-looking, round-headed man with blue eyes and light hair, and heavy drooping mustachios—a sort of terrestrial walrus who goes erect. he is not abundant as in sussex, but is represented in almost any village, and in these villages he is always like a bull-dog or bull-terrier among hounds, lurchers, and many other varieties, including curs of low degree. mentally, he is rather a dull dog, at all events deficient in the finer, more attractive qualities. leaving aside the spiritual part, he is a good all-round man, tough and stubborn, one that the naturalist may have no secret qualms about in treating as an animal. a being of strong animal nature, and too often in this brewer-ridden county a hard drinker. a very large proportion of the men in rural towns and villages with blotchy skins and watery or beery eyes are of this type. even more offensive than the animality, the mindlessness, is that flicker of conscious superiority which lives in their expression. it is, i fancy, a survival of the old instinctive feeling of a conquering race amid the conquered.
reversion of type
nature, we know, is everlastingly harking back, but here in hampshire i cannot but think that this type, in spite of its very marked characters, is a very much muddied and degenerate form. one is led to this conclusion by occasionally meeting with an individual whose whole appearance is a revelation, and strikes the mind with a kind of astonishment, and one can only exclaim—there is nothing else to say—here nature has at length succeeded in reproducing the pure unadulterated form! such a {229} type i came upon one summer day on the high downs east of the itchen.
he was a shepherd, a young fellow of twenty, about five feet eight in height, but looking short on account of his extraordinary breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. his arms were like a blacksmith's, and his legs thick, and his big head was round as a dutch cheese. he could, i imagined, have made a breach in the stone wall near which i found him with his flock, if he had lowered that hard round head and charged like a rhinoceros. his hair was light brown, and his face a uniform rosy brown—in all hampshire no man nor woman had i seen so beautiful in colour; and his round, keen, piercing eyes were of a wonderful blue—"eyes like the sea." if this poor fellow, washed clean and clothed becomingly in white flannels, had shown himself in some great gathering at the oval or some such place on some great day, the common people would have parted on either side to make way for him, and would have regarded him with a kind of worship—an impulse to kneel before him. there, on the downs, his appearance was almost grotesque in the dress he wore, made of some fabric intended to last for ever, but now frayed, worn to threads in places, and generally earth-coloured. a small old cap, earth-coloured too, covered a portion of his big, round head, and his ancient, lumpish, cracked and clouted boots were like the hoofs of some extinct large sort of horse which he had found fossilised among the chalk hills. he had but eleven shillings {230} a week, and could not afford to spend much on dress. how he could get enough to eat was a puzzle; he looked as if he could devour half of one of his muttons at a meal, washed down with a bucket of beer, without hurt to his digestion. in appearance he formed a startling contrast to the people around him: they were in comparison a worn-out, weary-looking race, dim-eyed, pale-faced, slow in their movements, as if they had lost all joy and interest in life.
the sight of him taught me something i could not get from the books. the intensity of life in his eyes and whole expression; the rough-hewn face and rude, powerful form—rude but well balanced—the vigour in his every movement, enabled me to realise better than anything that history tells us what those men who came as strangers to these shores in the fifth century were really like, and how they could do what they did. they came, a few at a time, in open row-boats, with nothing but their rude weapons in their hands, and by pure muscular force, and because they were absolutely without fear and without compassion, and were mentally but little above a herd of buffaloes, they succeeded in conquering a great and populous country with centuries of civilisation behind it.
talking with him, i was not surprised to find him a discontented man. he did not want to live in a town—he seemed not to know just what he wanted, or having but few words he did not know how to say it; but his mind was in a state of turmoil and revolt, and he could only curse the head shepherd, {231} the bailiff, the farmer, and, to finish up, the lord of the manor. probably he soon cast away his crook, and went off in search of some distant place, where he would be permitted to discharge the energy that seethed and bubbled in him—perhaps to bite the dust on the african veldt.
this, then, is one of the main facts to be noted in the blonde hampshire peasant—the great contrast between the small minority of persons of the anglo-saxon and of the prevalent type. it was long ago shown by huxley that the english people generally are not saxons in the shape of the head, and in all saxon england the divergence has perhaps been greatest in this southern county. the oval-faced type, as i have said, is less pronounced as we approach the borders of berkshire, and although the difference is not very great, it is quite perceptible; the berkshire people are rather nearer to the common modified saxon type of oxfordshire and the midlands generally.
dark hampshire people
in the southern half of hampshire the dark-eyed, black-haired people are almost as common as the blonde, and in some localities they are actually in a majority. visitors to the new forest district often express astonishment at the darkness and "foreign" appearance of the people, and they sometimes form the mistaken idea that it is due to a strong element of gipsy blood. the darkest hampshire peasant is always in shape of head and face the farthest removed from the gipsy type.
among the dark people there are two distinct {232} types, as there are two in the blonde, and it will be understood that i only mean two that are, in a measure, fixed and easily recognised types; for it must always be borne in mind that, outside of these distinctive forms, there is a heterogeneous crowd of persons of all shades and shapes of face and of great variety in features. these two dark types are: first, the small, narrow-headed person of brown skin, crow-black hair, and black eyes; of this rarest and most interesting type i shall speak last. second, the person of average height, slightly oval face, and dark eyes and hair. the accompanying portrait of a young woman in a village on the test is a good specimen of this type. now we find that this dark-haired, dark-eyed, and often dark-skinned people are in stature, figure, shape of head, and features exactly like the oval-faced blonde people already {233} described. they are, light and dark, an intermediate type, and we can only say that they are one and the same people, the outcome of a long-mixed race which has crystallised in this form unlike any of its originals; that the difference in colour is due to the fact that blue and black in the iris and black and brown in the hair very seldom mix, these colours being, as has been said, "mutually exclusive." they persist when everything else, down to the bony framework, has been modified and the original racial characters obliterated. nevertheless, we see that these mutually exclusive colours do mix in some individuals both in the eyes and hair. in the grey-blue iris it appears as a very slight pigmentation, in most cases round the pupil, but in the hair it is more marked. many, perhaps a majority, of the dark-eyed people we are now considering have some warm brown colour in their black hair; in members of the same family you will often find raven-black hair and brownish-black hair; and sometimes in three brothers or sisters you will find the two original colours, black and brown, and the intermediate very dark or brownish-black hair.
a hampshire girl
a hampshire girl
the brunette of this oval-faced type is also, as we have seen, deficient in colour, but, as a rule, she is more attractive than her light-eyed sister. this may be due to the appearance of a greater intensity of life in the dark eye; but it is also probable that there is almost always some difference in disposition, that black or dark pigment is correlated with a warmer, quicker, more sympathetic nature. the anthropologists tell us that very slight differences in intensity {234} of pigmentation may correspond to relatively very great constitutional differences. one fact in reference to dark- and light-coloured people which i came upon in hampshire, struck me as exceedingly curious, and has suggested the question: is there in us, or in some of us, very deep down, and buried out of sight, but still occasionally coming to life and to the surface, an ancient feeling of repulsion or racial antipathy between black and blonde? are there mental characteristics, too, that are "mutually exclusive"? dark and light are mixed in very many of us, but, as huxley has said, the constituents do not always rightly mix: as a rule, one side is strongest. with the dark side strongest in me, i search myself, and the only evidence i find of such a feeling is an ineradicable dislike of the shallow frosty blue eye: it makes me shiver, and seems to indicate a cold, petty, spiteful, and false nature. this may be merely a fancy or association, the colour resembling that of the frosty sky in winter. in many others the feeling appears to be more definite. i know blue-eyed persons of culture, liberal-minded, religious, charitable, lovers of all men, who declare that they cannot regard dark-eyed persons as being on the same level, morally, with the blue-eyed, and that they cannot dissociate black eyes from wickedness. this, too, may be fancy or association. but here in hampshire i have been startled at some things i have heard spoken by dark-eyed people about blondes. not of the mitigated hampshire blonde, with that dimness in the colour of his skin, and eyes, and hair, but of the more vivid {235} type with brighter blue eyes, and brighter or more fiery hair, and the light skin to match. what i have heard was to this effect:
"perhaps it will be all right in the end—we hope it will: he says he will marry her and give her a home. but you never know where you are with a man of that colour—i'll believe it when i see it."
"yes, he seems all right, and speaks well, and promises to pay the money. but look at the colour of his eyes! no, i can't trust him."
"he's a very nice person, i have no doubt, but his eyes and hair are enough for me," etc., etc.
even this may be merely the effect of that enmity or suspicion with which the stranger, or "foreigner," as he is called, is often regarded in rural districts. the person from another county, or from a distance, unrelated to anyone in the community, is always a foreigner, and the foreign taint may descend to the children: may it not be that in hampshire anyone with bright colour in eyes, hair, and skin is also by association regarded as a foreigner?
it remains to speak of the last of the four distinct types, the least common and most interesting of all—the small, narrow-headed man with very black hair, black eyes, and brown skin.
we are deeply indebted to the anthropologists who have, so to speak, torn up the books of history, and are re-telling the story of man on earth: we admire them for their patient industry, and because they have gone bravely on with their self-appointed task, one peculiarly difficult in this land of many {236} mixed races, heedless of the scoffs of the learned or of those who derive their learning from books alone, and mock at men whose documents are "bones and skins." but we sometimes see that they (the anthropologists) have not yet wholly emancipated themselves from the old written falsehoods when they tell us, as they frequently do, that the iberian in this country survives only in the west and the north. they refer to the small, swarthy welshman; to the so-called "black celt" in ireland, west of the shannon; to the small black yorkshireman of the dales, and to the small black highlander; and the explanation is that in these localities remnants of the dark men of the iberian race who inhabited britain in the neolithic period, were never absorbed by the conquerors; that, in fact, like the small existing herds of indigenous white cattle, they have preserved their peculiar physical character down to the present time by remaining unmixed with the surrounding blue-eyed people. but this type is not confined to these isolated spots in the west and north; it is found here, there, and everywhere, especially in the southern counties of england: you cannot go about among the peasants of hampshire, wiltshire, and dorset without meeting examples of it, and here at all events, it cannot be said that the ancient british people were not absorbed. they, the remnant that escaped extermination, were absorbed by the blue-eyed, broad-headed, tall men, the goidels we suppose, who occupied the country at the beginning of the bronze age; and the absorbers were in their {237} turn absorbed by another blue-eyed race; and these by still another or by others. the only explanation appears to be that this type is persistent beyond all others, and that a very little black blood, after being mixed and re-mixed with blonde for centuries, even for hundreds of generations, may, whenever the right conditions occur, reproduce the vanished type in its original form.
time brings about its revenges in many strange ways: we see that there is a continuous and an increasing migration from wales and the highlands into all the big towns in england, and this large and growing celtic element will undoubtedly have a great effect on the population in time, making it less saxon and more celtic than it has been these thousand years past and upwards. but in all the people, celtic, anglo-saxon, dane, or what not, there is that older constituent—infinitely older and perhaps infinitely more persistent; and this too, albeit in a subtler way, may be working in us to recover its long-lost world. that it has gone far in this direction in spain, where the blue eye is threatened with extinction, and in the greater portion, if not all, of france, there appears to be some evidence to show. here, where the neolithic people were more nearly exterminated and the remnant more completely absorbed, the return may be very much slower. but when we find, as we do in hampshire and many other counties, that this constituent in the blood of the people, after mixture for untold ages with so many other bloods of so many {238} conquering races, has not only been potent to modify the entire population, but is able to reproduce the old type in its pristine purity; and when we almost invariably find that these ancients born again are better men than those in whom other racial characters predominate—more intelligent, versatile, adaptive, temperate, and usually tougher and longer lived, it becomes possible to believe that in the remote future—there are thousands of years for this little black leaven to work—these islands will once more be inhabited by a race of men of the neolithic type.
in speaking of the character, physical and mental, of the men of distinctly iberian type, i must confess that i write only from my own observation, and that i am hardly justified in founding general statements on an acquaintance with a very limited number of persons. my experience is that the men of this type have, generally speaking, more character than their neighbours, and are certainly very much more interesting. in recalling individuals of the peasant class who have most attracted me, with whom i have become intimate and in some instances formed lasting friendships, i find that of twenty-five to thirty no fewer than nine are of this type. of this number four are natives of hampshire, while the other five, oddly enough, belong to five different counties. but i do not judge only from these few individuals: a rambler about the country who seldom stays many days in one village or spot cannot become intimately acquainted with the cottagers. i judge partly from the few i know well, and partly from a {239} very much larger number of individuals i have met casually or have known slightly. what i am certain of is that the men of this type, as a rule, differ mentally as widely as they do physically from persons of other commoner types. the iberian, as i know him in southern and south-western england, is, as i have said, more intelligent, or at all events, quicker; his brains are nimbler although perhaps not so retentive or so practical as the slower saxon's. apart from that point, he has more imagination, detachment, sympathy—the qualities which attract and make you glad to know a man and to form a friendship with him in whatever class he may be. why is it, one is sometimes asked, that one can often know and talk with a spaniard or frenchman without any feeling of class distinction, any consciousness of a barrier, although the man may be nothing but a workman, while with english peasants this freedom and ease between man and man is impossible? it is possible in the case of the man we are considering, simply because of those qualities i have named, which he shares with those of his own race on the continent.
i have found that when one member of a family of mixed light and dark blood is of the distinctly iberian type, this one will almost invariably take a peculiar and in some ways a superior position in the circle. the woman especially exhibits a liveliness, humour, and variety rare indeed among persons born in the peasant class. she entertains the visitor, or takes the leading part, and her slow-witted sisters {240} regard her with a kind of puzzled admiration. they are sisters, yet unrelated: their very blood differs in specific gravity, and their bodily differences correspond to a mental and spiritual unlikeness. in my intercourse with people in the southern counties i have sometimes been reminded of huxley and his account of his parents contained in a private letter to havelock ellis. his father, he said, was a fresh-coloured, grey-eyed warwickshire man. "my mother came of wiltshire people. except for being somewhat taller than the average type, she was a typical example of the iberian variety—dark, thin, rapid in all her ways, and with the most piercing black eyes i have seen in anybody's head. mentally and physically (except in the matter of the beautiful eyes) i am a piece of my mother, and except for my stature ... i should do very well for a 'black celt'—supposed to be the worst variety of that type."
the contrast between persons of this type and saxon or blonde has often seemed to me greatest in childhood, since the blonde at that period, even in hampshire, is apt to be a delicate pink and white whereas the individual of strongly-marked iberian character is very dark from birth. i will, to conclude this perhaps imprudent chapter, give an instance in point.
a dark village child
walking one day through the small rustic village of martyr worthy, near winchester, i saw a little girl of nine or ten sitting on the grass at the side of the wide green roadway in the middle of the village engaged in binding flowers round her hat. she was {241} slim, and had a thin oval face, dark in colour as any dark spanish child, or any french child in the "black provinces"; and she had, too, the soft melancholy black eye which is the chief beauty of the spanish, and her loose hair was intensely black. even here where dark eyes and dark hair are so common, her darkness was wonderful by contrast with a second little girl of round, chubby, rosy face, pale-yellowish hair, and wide-open blue surprised eyes, who stood by her side watching her at her task. the flowers were lying in a heap at her side; she had wound a long slender spray of traveller's joy round her brown straw hat, and was now weaving in lychnis and veronica, with other small red and blue blossoms, to improve her garland. i found to my surprise on questioning her that she knew the names of the flowers she had collected. an english village child, but in that spanish darkness and beauty, and in her grace and her pretty occupation, how very un-english she seemed!
