Nor would he have found the dry humour of the Scottish peasant, or the racy wit and wisdom of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. These men’s minds were cast in a heavier mould and moved more slowly. Yet there were occasional gleams of quiet fun. One man who had found Edmund crying because his magpie, let out for her daily exercise, had not returned to her wicker cage, said: “Doo’nt ‘ee take on like that, my man. You goo an’ tell Mrs. Andrews about it [naming the village gossip] an’ you’ll hear where your Maggie’s been seen, if ‘tis as far away as Stratton.”

Their favourite virtue was endurance. Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal. A man would say, “He says, says he, that field o’ oo-ats’s got to come in afore night, for there’s a rain a-comin’. But we didn’t flinch, not we! Got the last loo-ad under cover by midnight. A’moost too fagged-out to walk home; but we didn’t flinch. We done it!” Or, ’Ole bull he comes for me, wi’s head down. But I didn’t flinch. I ripped off a bit o’ loose rail an’ went for he. “Twas him as did th’ flinchin’. He! he!” Or a woman would say, “I set up wi’ my poor old mother six nights runnin’; never had me clothes off. But I didn’t flinch, an’ I pulled her through, for she didn’t flinch neither.” Or a young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, “I didn’t flinch, did I? Oh, I do hope I didn’t flinch.”

The farm was large, extending far beyond the parish boundaries; being, in fact, several farms, formerly in separate occupancy, but now thrown into one and ruled over by the rich old man at the Tudor farmhouse. The meadows around the farmstead sufficed for the carthorses’ grazing and to support the store cattle and a couple of milking cows which supplied the farmer’s family and those of a few of his immediate neighbours with butter and milk. A few fields were sown with grass seed for hay, and sainfoin and rye were grown and cut green for cattle food. The rest was arable land producing corn and root crops, chiefly wheat.

Around the farmhouse were grouped the farm buildings; stables for the great stamping shaggy-fetlocked carthorses; barns with doors so wide and high that a load of hay could be driven through; sheds for the yellow-and-blue painted farm wagons, granaries with outdoor staircases; and sheds for storing oilcake, artificial manures, and agricultural implements. In the brickyard, tall, pointed, elaborately thatched ricks stood on stone straddles; the dairy indoors, though small, was a model one; there was a profusion of all that was necessary or desirable for good farming.