CHAPTER II. UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
PREFACE
This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery
musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in
_Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters_, and other places, is
intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages,
ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the
villages of fifty or sixty years ago.
One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical
bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist) or
harmonium player; and despite certain advantages in point of control
and accomplishment which were, no doubt, secured by installing the
single artist, the change has tended to stultify the professed aims of
the clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the
interest of parishioners in church doings. Under the old plan, from
half a dozen to ten full-grown players, in addition to the numerous
more or less grown-up singers, were officially occupied with the Sunday
routine, and concerned in trying their best to make it an artistic
outcome of the combined musical taste of the congregation. With a
musical executive limited, as it mostly is limited now, to the parson’s
wife or daughter and the school-children, or to the school-teacher and
the children, an important union of interests has disappeared.
The zest of these bygone instrumentalists must have been keen and
staying to take them, as it did, on foot every Sunday after a toilsome
week, through all weathers, to the church, which often lay at a
distance from their homes. They usually received so little in payment
for their performances that their efforts were really a labour of love.
In the parish I had in my mind when writing the present tale, the
gratuities received yearly by the musicians at Christmas were somewhat
as follows: From the manor-house ten shillings and a supper; from the
vicar ten shillings; from the farmers five shillings each; from each
cottage-household one shilling; amounting altogether to not more than
ten shillings a head annually—just enough, as an old executant told me,
to pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which
they mostly ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in
their own manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their
music-books were home-bound.
It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and ballads
in the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the insertions
being continued from front and back till sacred and secular met
together in the middle, often with bizarre effect, the words of some of
the songs exhibiting that ancient and broad humour which our
grandfathers, and possibly grandmothers, took delight in, and is in
these days unquotable.
The aforesaid fiddle-strings, rosin, and music-paper were supplied by a
pedlar, who travelled exclusively in such wares from parish to parish,
coming to each village about every six months. Tales are told of the
consternation once caused among the church fiddlers when, on the
occasion of their producing a new Christmas anthem, he did not come to
time, owing to being snowed up on the downs, and the straits they were
in through having to make shift with whipcord and twine for strings. He
was generally a musician himself, and sometimes a composer in a small
way, bringing his own new tunes, and tempting each choir to adopt them
for a consideration. Some of these compositions which now lie before
me, with their repetitions of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their
fugues and their intermediate symphonies, are good singing still,
though they would hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are
popular in the churches of fashionable society at the present time.
_August 1896._
_Under the Greenwood Tree_ was first brought out in the summer of 1872
in two volumes. The name of the story was originally intended to be,
more appropriately, _The Mellstock Quire_, and this has been appended
as a sub-title since the early editions, it having been thought
unadvisable to displace for it the title by which the book first became
known.
In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun were
material for another kind of study of this little group of church
musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so lightly, even so
farcically and flippantly at times. But circumstances would have
rendered any aim at a deeper, more essential, more transcendent
handling unadvisable at the date of writing; and the exhibition of the
Mellstock Quire in the following pages must remain the only extant one,
except for the few glimpses of that perished band which I have given in
verse elsewhere.
T. H.
_April_ 1912.
PART THE FIRST—WINTER