Adam Thorpe - Ulverton

I do not know who carried the shillings

My regards to your Uncle, & Mrs Hawkes.

Lancelot Heddin of Ulverton labourer aged 27 who was apprehended at Ulverton House on the morning of the 22nd of November and has been discharged on his own recognizance to appear and answer at the Sessions — stated on his Examination on the 5th of December as follows

not a carpet or rug in the place: all is beeswaxed floors and the whole resounds like a perpetual thunderstorm when persons are moving about. The distance the Examinants must cross to stand before my table is a decent one, and I must wait until the echoes of their approach have taken leave of the room (by dint of not finding another wooden surface to bounce off) before I open my mouth at all. It is a very old house, with a groaning flight of stairs too dark — and grim diamond-paned windows — and more beam than is good for the constitution of one’s pate. There is a smell of stabies throughout. I will soon be munching oats. Please to send more water-colourings — to see the brush of your fair hand in a blue wash of sky is to see Heaven through a sunlit cloud

forced the unwilling. We passed the Gore and into Gumbledons Bush

Horse — who be truly very large — is now complete, barring the eye, which is to be made of smashed glass (Norcoat’s servants have been breaking drained Port and Brandy bottles against the walls all morning, an infernal clatter that has set my teeth on edge) — I find the idea vulgar, but appropriately reflective of the progenitor’s thirst as much as soul. I had to Examine a beggar this morning, who used foul language against the Squire in his capacity as justice of the Peace, upon which insult our good fellow clapped the bad fellow (who stinks unmercifully) in the Cage, or Blind House — this being a place as small and low as those confined there, off the aforementioned Square — dating from the halcyon days when this settlement was sufficiently swaggering to have its own penal dwelling. The poor fellow being almost blind, I could not draw a word of sense out of him, but only a kind of self-pitying jabber. If he had not been released — he would not now be up for robbery and extortion: he was unlocked by the Rioters. That is an anecdote for your uncle’s supper-table, a perfect Exemplum to puff his melancholy. How does his illness fare? If my readings of judicial oratory (I know Lord Erskine almost by heart) has served any purpose, it would be to move your uncle to spill his doubloons out of his codicil as your beauty evidently has not. ‘I say by G — d that man is a ruffian who shall, after this, presume to build upon such honest artless conduct as an evidence of guilt.’ I have been practising my Lord Erskine in the mirror. I will solicit with the eye and the hand & the voice and woo him from your father. ‘Such, my lords, is the case.’ I am not very good at tones of thunder, however: my frame buckles frigh

‘Why beest thee here, John? What beest thee about?’ He answered that it was because they were starving, and that I knew the state of the Poor, who had not enough maintenance to keep a wife and children, and that I must support them and break my machine, that was taking the bread from their mouths, and raise my wages to 2s a day, and half a crown after Ladyday, & they wd have £4 from me. Then Moses Perry came forward & said he was the treasurer, for he was always so for the collection at Whitsun. He had a basket. I took them to the Barn and shewed them as I had already broke my machine, but if the Rector did not lower his tithes, I could not be giving them 2s a

the Eye is in. From afar, it looks quite horrid — it has struck the children here quite dumb with fear. Indeed — this is a quiet place. I am, I must confess, treated without civility: a kind of contemptuous pall of neglect towards betters hangs over the cotters — who seem alarmingly swarthy, as tho’ rubbed in charcoal — O for thy fair curls, thy angel’s countenance, my Emily! I ope your Locket with abandon. Here is too grim, for so many men have been taken into custody that there is an effect as after war, when the women folk slouch about in shawls and turn their heads as one passes. I do not know how they will deal with the Rioters, my heart. Lord Melbourne at the Home Office was appointed in the middle of all this Trouble, and is more resolute than Peel. I think we shall have some Examples made. But surely not 2,000, which is the full number. Melbourne has made Norcoat furious, for Squire Norcoat cannot sit on the bench — local magistrates are perceived too soft for this, tho’ some are harder than flint, & clamour for the rope — for all breakers — without reprieve. I do not feel hard, but I had a stone cast at me last week, & I have had a letter, in a very poor orthography, informing me that my name ‘is drawn amongst the Black Harts in the Black Booke’, that I am ‘a blaggard Enmy of the Peeple’, and I must make my Will. Do not fear a moment, my sweet child: these fellows are thoroughly cowed, and this is but the twitch of the dying

bee a hard task, Tom.’

Your father has been written to.

& staid the evening

then to exercise my hand, grown crabbed from the pen and these desultory tales, I walk briskly up the road swinging my arms

said ‘That’s a good little lot there, Mr Stiff.’ He answered that they would be having no less, or there wd be more agitation. He threw it upon the stone of the Court yard. The said John Oadam gathered it up and holloed: he wore a crown of bedwine, that was in beard

uire looks through his telescope at the infernal Horse, tho’ he has no need: it struts over us big as a clou

He had some wild Clymatis wound about his head that resembled a Savage’s cap of feathers, I believe this was to denote his captainship. I heard one of the Mob refer to him as ‘Captain Swing’. He called out we are all one,

capons boiled in their bladders, roasted venison with a marinade of veal, fried ducklings, a complete little cygnet from the Lake, Westphalia ham and a calf’s head hashed with larded liver, with ice cream and blancmange as an afterthought. I was the lowliest fellow there, but acted royally. Lady Chalmers referred to me throughout as the Bench: she has a grip like sugar-tongs.

John Oadam saith: that he has nothing to say to these Charges.

but took a coach to Bath. I had to wrest myself from there on the Sunday evening but I staid one night & sipped and ate and Conversed with the civilised. I noted, to my horror, halfway to a theatre, that my waistcoat sported a splash of Chalk upon the breast. It will not remove itself with water. The stagecoach dropped me very late at the turnpike crossing & I walked back without a moon: white to my knees, my cloathes ruined. Infernal country!

I saw the said shepherd Bunce kneel and fire the straw beneath the said iron Plough.

opening ceremony was conducted with appalling seriousness, and All who Matter in the neighbourhood stood about this muddy turf silently cursing its blanched steed, that is taking the field at full stretch — tho’ on the grassy lip of its haunches one recognises nothing but a deal of white chalk and the fact one is chilled to the bone. It is attempting to outflank, as it were, the ancient at Uffingdon, to which attaches much superstition: indeed — I have heard it stated that its eye is hollowed by generations of barren females coupling with the moon. I doubt our Squire Norcoat’s equestrian challenge to be efficacious in this respect, or to attach to its bony fetlocks and glistening retina anything more than amused indifference. But the fellow is exceedingly puffed up with his creation. I will retain the sight of him bellowing through his Speaking-Trumpet on that far hill for the rest of my years, and shall (I warn you now) regale it to my grandchildren long after all memory of the Law has departed my brain.