The little straggling town faded away into country on one side close
to the entrance-lodge of a great park, where lived my Lord and Lady
Cumnor: "the earl" and "the countess," as they were always called by
the inhabitants of the town; where a very pretty amount of feudal
feeling still lingered, and showed itself in a number of simple ways,
droll enough to look back upon, but serious matters of importance
at the time. It was before the passing of the Reform Bill, but a
good deal of liberal talk took place occasionally between two or
three of the more enlightened freeholders living in Hollingford;
and there was a great Tory family in the county who, from time to
time, came forward and contested the election with the rival Whig
family of Cumnor. One would have thought that the above-mentioned
liberal-talking inhabitants would have, at least, admitted the
possibility of their voting for the Hely-Harrison, and thus trying to
vindicate their independence. But no such thing. "The earl" was lord
of the manor, and owner of much of the land on which Hollingford was
built; he and his household were fed, and doctored, and, to a certain
measure, clothed by the good people of the town; their fathers'
grandfathers had always voted for the eldest son of Cumnor Towers,
and following in the ancestral track, every man-jack in the place
gave his vote to the liege lord, totally irrespective of such
chimeras as political opinion.
This was no unusual instance of the influence of the great
land-owners over humbler neighbours in those days before railways,
and it was well for a place where the powerful family, who thus
overshadowed it, were of so respectable a character as the Cumnors.
They expected to be submitted to, and obeyed; the simple worship of
the townspeople was accepted by the earl and countess as a right; and
they would have stood still in amazement, and with a horrid memory
of the French sansculottes who were the bugbears of their youth, had
any inhabitant of Hollingford ventured to set his will or opinions
in opposition to those of the earl. But, yielded all that obeisance,
they did a good deal for the town, and were generally condescending,
and often thoughtful and kind in their treatment of their vassals.
Lord Cumnor was a forbearing landlord; putting his steward a little
on one side sometimes, and taking the reins into his own hands now
and then, much to the annoyance of the agent, who was, in fact, too
rich and independent to care greatly for preserving a post where his
decisions might any day be overturned by my lord's taking a fancy
to go "pottering" (as the agent irreverently expressed it in the
sanctuary of his own home), which, being interpreted, meant that
occasionally the earl asked his own questions of his own tenants,
and used his own eyes and ears in the management of the smaller
details of his property. But his tenants liked my lord all the better
for this habit of his. Lord Cumnor had certainly a little time for
gossip, which he contrived to combine with the failing of personal
intervention between the old land-steward and the tenantry. But,
then, the countess made up by her unapproachable dignity for this
weakness of the earl's. Once a year she was condescending. She and
the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after
the manner of schools now-a-days, where far better intellectual
teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and work-people
than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly estate; but
a school of the kind we should call "industrial," where girls are
taught to sew beautifully, to be capital housemaids, and pretty fair
cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a kind of charity uniform
devised by the ladies of Cumnor Towers;--white caps, white tippets,
check aprons, blue gowns, and ready curtseys, and "please, ma'ams,"
being _de rigueur_.