Читать книгу History of Madeley including Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale, and Coalport онлайн

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The fashions and manners here represented have passed away, and these relics of antiquity look like fossils of old formations, or like dismantled wrecks cast up by the ever-moving current of time. They contrast strangely enough—these trophies of times gone by—with the visible emblems of man’s altered genius around. Modes of life have changed; every age has turned some new page as it passed. Instead of monasteries and moated manor-houses, with country waste and wood, thistled and isolated, whose wild possessors neglected even to till the surface, we have men of active mould, who do daily battle with the stubborn elements of the earth, while flashing fires flicker round their stolid effigies, telling of wealth-producing agencies that make millions happy. Ideas begotten of time, not then dreamt of, have leaped over moat and rampart, re-constituted society, converted parks into pit-mounds, and around the habitations of knighted warriors reared forges and constructed railways.

We are tempted to dwell a little longer here in connection with the Old Court, because considerable interest attaches to features, memorials, and traditions of such places. Viewed from the position we now occupy, a position the culminating result of past efforts and past struggles, they remind us of less favourable phases of society, and picture to the mind ideas, manners, and institutions—the cradle of our present privileges. Manor houses, many of which were destroyed during the Civil War, were held by the Church, and by distinguished personages, lay or clerical, who granted or leased land they did not themselves require. Hence the rise of copyholds—estates held by copy of the roll of the Court of the Manor. Courts were held within these manors and jurisdiction was had of misdemeanours and disputes. On forest borders, on grassy plains, amid fat meadow lands, by rivers, on rocky spurs and projections, these mansions or castelled structures stood, whilst their occupiers, with little industrial or political activity to escape the ennui of their position, were often driven upon the high road of adventure. One can scarcely conceive the privileged owners of such mansions to do otherwise than despise the dependent population—boors, serfs, and villeins, who cultivated their domains. Salient and strongly marked were the two classes—knowledge and power paramount with the one, ignorance and incapacity characterising the other: a proud supremacy and subserviency—claimed and admitted. Priors, bishops, and lay proprietors moved from manor to manor, taking their seats in these feudal courts, receiving homage and inflicting penalties. Woe to the bondsmen of the estate—doomed from the cradle to the grave to slavery—found guilty of an attempt to “steal himself,” as the old Roman law had it, from his lawful owner. Even tenants under these proud holders were subject to great exactions,—the cattle of the manor, boar or bull, by the condition of the tenure being free to roam at night through standing corn or grass: a provision as just as that with which in this the nineteenth century the lord of the manor has power, after purchase, to mine under and throw down the house one has built, in this same manor of Madeley, without one farthing compensation. Sturdy radicals, troublesome fellows, then as now held up at times the glass by means of political squibs to perpetrators of such injustice. One quaint old Shropshire satirist in the 14th century lashes severely the vices of the times. Another in a political song colours his picture deeply. The church at times interfered to mitigate the condition of the people, but the spiritual overseers of the poor, as a rule, thought more of the sports of the field than of their flocks except, indeed, at shearing time. Chaucer in estimating their qualifications was of opinion that “in hunting and riding they were more skilled than in divinity.”