These stories, which were kept strictly to the fields and never repeated elsewhere, formed a kind of rustic Decameron, which seemed to have been in existence for centuries and increased like a snowball as it rolled down the generations. The tales were supposed to be extremely indecent, and elderly men would say after such a sitting, “I got up an’ went over to th’ osses, for I couldn’t stand no more on’t. The brimstone fair come out o’ their mouths as they put their rascally heads together.” What they were really like only the men knew; but probably they were coarse rather than filthy. Judging by a few stray specimens which leaked through the channel of eavesdropping juniors, they consisted chiefly of “he said” and “she said,” together with a lavish enumeration of those parts of the human body then known as “the unmentionables.”

Songs and snatches on the same lines were bawled at the plough-tail and under hedges and never heard elsewhere. Some of these ribald rhymes were so neatly turned that those who have studied the subject have attributed their authorship to some graceless son of the Rectory or Hall. It may be that some of these young scamps had a hand in them, but it is just as likely that they sprung direct from the soil, for, in those days of general churchgoing, the men’s minds were well stored with hymns and psalms and some of them were very good at parodying them.

There was “The Parish Clerk’s Daughter,” for instance. This damsel was sent one Christmas morning to the church to inform her father that the Christmas present of beef had arrived after he left home. When she reached the church the service had begun and the congregation, led by her father, was half-way through the psalms. Nothing daunted, she sidled up to her father and intoned:

“Feyther, the me-a-at’s come, an’ what’s me mother to d-o-o-o w’it?”

And the answer came pat: “Tell her to roast the thick an’ boil th’ thin, an’ me-ak a pudden o’ th’ su-u-u-u-et.” But such simple entertainment did not suit the man already mentioned. He would drag out the filthiest of the stock rhymes, then go on to improvise, dragging in the names of honest lovers and making a mock of fathers of first children. Though nine out of ten of his listeners disapproved and felt thoroughly uncomfortable, they did nothing to check him beyond a mild “Look out, or them boo-oys’ll hear ‘ee!” or “Careful! some ‘ooman may be comin’ along th’ roo-ad.”

But the lewd scandalizer did not always have everything his own way. There came a day when a young ex-soldier, home from his five years’ service in India, sat next to him. He sat through one or two such extemporized songs, then, eyeing the singer, said shortly, “You’d better go and wash out your dirty mouth.”