CRAGWELL END

There's nothing I know of to make you spend

A day of your life at Cragwell End.

It's a village quiet and grey and old,

A little village tucked into a fold

( A sort of valley, not over wide )

Of the hills that flank it on either side.

There's a large grey church with a square stone tower,

And a clock to mark you the passing hour

In a chime that shivers the village calm

With a few odd bits of the th psalm.

A red-brick Vicarage stands thereby,

Breathing comfort and lapped in ease,

With a row of elms thick-trunked and high,

And a bevy of rooks to caw in these.

‘ Tis there that the Revd. Salvyn Bent

( No tie could be neater or whiter than his tie )

Maintains the struggle against dissent,

An Oxford scholar ex Aede Christi;

And there in his twenty-minute sermons

He makes mince-meat of the modern Germans,

Defying their apparatus criticus

Like a brave old Vicar,

A famous sticker

To Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus.

He enjoys himself like a hearty boy

Who finds his life for his needs the aptest;

But the poisoned drop in his cup of joy

Is the Revd. Joshua Fall, the Baptist,

An earnest man with a tongue that stings —

The Vicar calls him a child of schism —

Who has dared to utter some dreadful things

On the vices of sacerdotalism,

And the ruination

Of education

By the Church of England Catechism.

Set in a circle of oak and beech,

North of the village lies Cragwell Hall;

And stretching far as the eye can reach,

Over the slopes and beyond the fall

Of the hills so keeping their guard about it

That the north wind never may chill or flout it,

Through forests as dense as that of Arden,

With orchard and park and trim-kept garden,

And farms for pasture and farms for tillage,

The Hall maintains its rule of the village.

And in the Hall

Lived the lord of all,

Girt round with all that our hearts desire

Of leisure and wealth, the ancient Squire.

He was the purplest-faced old man

Since ever the Darville race began,

Pompous and purple-faced and proud;

With a portly girth and a voice so loud

You might have heard it a mile away

When he cheered the hounds on a hunting day.

He was hard on dissenters and such encroachers,

He was hard on sinners and hard on poachers;

He talked of his rights as one who knew

That the pick of the earth to him was due:

The right to this and the right to that,

To the humble look and the lifted hat;

The right to scold or evict a peasant,

The right to partridge and hare and pheasant;

The right to encourage discontent

By raising a hard-worked farmer's rent;

The manifest right to ride to hounds

Through his own or anyone else's grounds;

The right to eat of the best by day

And to snore the whole of the night away;

For his motto, as often he explained,

Was “A Darville holds what a Darville gained.”

He tried to be just, but that may be

Small merit in one who has most things free;

And his neighbours averred,

When they heard the word,

“Old Darville's a just man, is he? Bust his

Gills, we could do without his justice!”