remains of a medieval painting of the Doom, the Archangel Michael holding the balance, and some souls going to Heaven on one side of him, others to Hell on the other side. In other parts of the church, too, the pale brick-red lines of the painting which once covered the church may be faintly discernible in sunlight. Mostly the walls will be whitewashed, and in bold black and red, with cherubs as decorative devices, will be painted admonitory texts against idolatry. The Elizabethan texts will be in black letters; the later and less admonitory Georgian ones will be in the spacious Roman style which we see on the gravestones in the churchyard. In the Sanctuary on either side of the altar are the Lord’s Prayer and the Commandments painted in gold letters on black boards, and perhaps Moses and Aaron flank these, also painted on boards by a local inn-sign painter. An oil painting of the Crucifixion or The Deposition of our Lord or some other scriptural subject may adorn the space above the altar table. Far more people could read than is generally supposed; literacy was nearly as rife as it is today. There was not the need to teach by pictures in the parish church that there had been in the middle ages.
The lighting of the church is wholly by candles. In the centre of the nave a branched brass candelabrum is suspended by two interlocking rods painted blue, the two serpent heads which curl round and interlock them being gilded. In other parts of the church, in distant box-pews or up the choir gallery, light is from single candles in brass sconces fixed to the woodwork. If the chancel is dark, there may be two fine silver candlesticks on the altar for the purpose of illumination. But candles are not often needed, for services are generally in the hours of daylight, and the usual time for a country evensong is three o’clock in the afternoon, not six or half-past six as is now the custom.
Outside the church on a sunny Sunday morning the congregation gathers. The poorer sort are lolling against the tombstones, while the richer families, also in their best clothes, move towards the porch where the churchwardens stand with staves ready to conduct them to their private pews. The farmworkers do not wear smocks for church, but knee breeches and a long coat and shoes. Women wear wooden shoes, called pattens, when it is wet, and take them off in the porch. All the men wear hats, and they hang them on pegs on the walls when they enter the church.
How still the morning of the hallowed day!
Mute is the voice of rural labour, hushed
The ploughboy’s whistle, and the milkmaid’s song.
The scythe lies glittering in the dewy wreath
Of tedded grass, mingled with fading flowers,
That yester morn bloomed waving in the breeze.
Sounds the most faint attract the ear, – the hum
Of early bee, the trickling of the dew,
The distant bleating, midway up the hill.
With dove-like wings, Peace o’er yon village broods:
The dizzying mill-wheel rests; the anvil’s din
Hath ceased; all, all around is quietness.
Less fearful on this day, the limping hare
Stops, and looks back, and stops, and looks on man
Her deadliest foe. The toilworn horse, set free,
Unheedful of the pasture, roams at large;
And as his stiff unwieldly bulk rolls on,
His iron-armed hoofs gleam in the morning ray.
So the Scottish poet James Graham begins his poem The Sabbath (1804). All this island over, there was a hush of feudal quiet in the country on a Sunday. We must sink into this quiet to understand and tolerate, with our democratic minds, the graded village hierarchy, graded by birth and occupation, by clothes and by seating in the church. It is an agricultural world as yet little touched by the machines which were starting in the mills of the midlands and the north. The Sabbath as a day of rest and worship touched all classes. Our feeblest poets rose from bathos to sing its praises. I doubt if Felicia Hemens ever wrote better than this, in her last poem (1835), composed less than a week before she died.
How many blessed groups this hour are bending,
Through England’s primrose meadow paths, their way
Towards spire and tower, midst shadowy elms ascending,
Whence the sweet chimes proclaim the hallowed day:
The halls from old heroic ages grey
Pour their fair children forth; and hamlets low,
With whose thick orchard blooms the soft winds play,
Send out their inmates in a happy flow,
Like a freed rural stream.
I may not tread
With them those pathways, – to the feverish bed
Of sickness bound, – yet, O my God, I bless
Thy mercy, that with Sabbath peace hath filled
My chastened heart, and all its throbbings stilled
To one deep calm of lowliest thankfulness.
One is inclined, seeing the pale whites and ochres and greys, relieved here and there with the warm brown red of local bricks, which we associate today with Georgian England, to forget how highly coloured were the clothes of the people. Thomas Hood’s early poem The Two Peacocks at Bedfont (1827) describes with the colours of an aquatint the worshippers entering that then countrified Middlesex church:
So speaking, they pursue the pebbly walk
That leads to the white porch the Sunday throng,
Hand-coupled urchins in restrained talk,
And anxious pedagogue that chasten wrong,
And posied churchwarden with solemn stalk,
And gold-bedizened beadle flames along,
And gentle peasant clad in buff and green,
Like a meek cowslip in the spring serene;
And blushing maiden – modestly array’d
In spotless white – still conscious of the glass;
And she, the lonely widow that hath made
A sable covenant with grief, – alas!
She veils her tears under the deep, deep shade,
While the poor kindly-hearted, as they pass,
Bend to unclouded childhood, and caress
Her boy, – so rosy! – and so fatherless!
Thus as good Christians ought, they all draw near
The fair white temple, to the timely call
Of pleasant bells that tremble in the ear, –
Now
