In the Days of the Guild Part 13

A SONG OF BIRDS AND BEASTS

I gaed awa' to Holyrood and there I built a kirk, And a' the birds of a' the air they helpit me to work.

The whaup wi' her lang bill she dug up the stane, The dove wi' her short bill she brought it hame, The pyet was a wily bird and raised up the wa', The corby was a silly bird and she gar'd it fa', And bye cam' auld Tod Lowrie and skelpit them a'!

I gaed and I gaed and I cam' to London town, And a' the beasts of a' the earth were met to pull it down.

The c.o.c.k wi' his loud voice he raised a fearfu' din, The dragon he was dumb, but he creepit slyly in, The ramping tramping unicorn he clattered at the wa', The bear he growled and grumbled and scrabbled wi' his claw, Till bye cam' auld Tod Lowrie and dang them a'!

The leopard and the wolf they were fechtin' tooth and nail, The bear wad be a lion but he couldna raise a tail, The geese they heard the brattle and yammered loud and lang, The corby flyin' owre them he made his ain sang.

The lion chased the unicorn by holt and by glen, Tod Lowrie met the hounds and he bade them come ben-- But the auld red rascal had twa holes tae his den!

The wolf lap in the fold and made havoc wi' the flock, The corby cleaned the banes in his howf on the rock, The weasel sacked the warren but he couldna grow fat, The cattie met a pullet and they never found that.

They made a wicker boothie and they tethered there a goose, And owre the wee bit lintel they hung a braided noose,-- But auld Tod Lowrie he sat in his ain hoose!

NOTE: There is a pun in the third verse, as "tail" is an old word for a retinue or following. Albert the Bear was margrave of Brandenburg, the leopard was the emblem of Anjou, and the wolf in medieval fables stands for the feudal baron. The unicorn was the legendary beast of Scotland, and the dragon that of Wales. The c.o.c.k stands for France. Henry II. is satirized as the bold and cunning fox, Tod Lowrie. The allusion to the trap in the last three lines is to the offer of the throne of the Holy Roman Empire to the English monarch, during a time of general international hostility and disorder.

XIII

A d.y.k.e IN THE DANELAW

HOW DAVID LE SAUMOND CHANGED THE COURSE OF AN ANCIENT NUISANCE

Farmer Appleby was in what he called a fidget. He did not look nervous, and was not. But the word, along with several others he sometimes used, had come down to him from Scandinavian forefathers. The very name with its ending "by" showed that his farm was a part of the Danelaw.

Along the coast, and in the part of England fronting the North Sea, Danish invaders had imposed their own laws and customs on the country, and were strong enough to hold their own even in the face of a Saxon King. It was only a few years since the Danegeld, the tax collected from all England to ward off the raids of Danish sea-rovers, had been abolished. But Ralph Appleby was as good an Englishman as any.

Little by little the Danelaw was yielding to the common law of England, but that did not worry an Appleby. He did not trouble the law courts, nor did they molest him. The cause of his fidget was a certain law of nature by which water seeks the shortest way down. One side of his farm lay along the river. Like most of the Danish, Norse, Icelandic or Swedish colonists, his long-ago ancestor had settled on a little river in a marsh. First he made camp on an island; then he built a house on the higher bank. Then the channel on the near side of the island filled up, and he planted the rich soil that the river had brought with orchards, and pastured fat cattle in the meadows. Three hundred years later the Applebys owned one of the most prosperous farms in the neighborhood.

Now and then, however, the river remembered that it had a claim on that land. The soil, all bound and matted with tough tree-roots and quitch-gra.s.s, could not be washed away, but the waters took their toll in produce. The year before the orchards had been flooded and two-thirds of the crop floated off. A day or two later, when the flood subsided, the apples were left to fatten Farmer Kettering's hogs, rooting about on the next farm. Hob Kettering's stubborn little Saxon face was all a-grin when he met Barty Appleby and told of it. It speaks well for the friends.h.i.+p of the two boys that there was not a fight on the spot.

That was not all. The stone d.y.k.e between the river and the lowlands had been undermined by the tearing current, and must be rebuilt, and there were no stone-masons in the neighborhood. Each farmer did his own repairing as well as he could. The houses were of timber, plaster, some brick and a little rude masonry. There were not enough good masons in the country to supply the demand, and even in building castles and cathedrals the stone was sometimes brought, ready cut, from France.

In some parts of England the people used stone from old Roman walls, or built on old foundations, but in Roman times this farm had been under water in the marsh. The building of Lincoln Cathedral meant a procession of stone-barges going up the river loaded with stone for the walls, quarried in Portland or in France. When landed it was carried up the steep hill to the site of the building, beyond reach of floods that might sap foundations. It was slow work building cathedrals in marsh lands.

The farmer was out in his boat now, poling up and down along the face of the crumbling wall, trying to figure on the amount of stone that would be needed. He never picked a stone out of his fields that was not thrown on a heap for possible wall-building, but most of them were small. It would take several loads to replace what the river had stolen--and then the whole thing might sink into the mud in a year or two.

"Hech, master!" said a voice overhead. "Are ye wantin' a stone-mason just now?"

Ralph Appleby looked up. On the little bridge, peering down, was a freckled, high-cheek-boned man with eyes as blue as his own, and with a staff in one big, hard-muscled hand. He wore a rough, shabby cloak of ancient fas.h.i.+on and had a bundle on his shoulder.

"I should say I be," said the surprised farmer. "Be you wanting the job?"

The stranger was evidently a Scot, from his speech, and Scots were not popular in England then. Still, if he could build a wall he was worth day's wages. "What's yer name?" Appleby added.

"Just David," was the answer. "I'm frae Dunedin. There's muckle stone work there."

"I make my guess they've better stuff for building than that pile o'

pebbles," muttered the farmer, leaping ash.o.r.e and kicking with his foot the heap of stone on the bank. "I've built that wall over again three times, now."

The newcomer grinned, not doubtfully but confidently, as if he knew exactly what the trouble was. "We'll mend all that," he said, striding down to peer along the water-course. The wriggling stream looked harmless enough now.

"You've been in England some time?" queried Appleby.

"Aye," said David. "I learned my trade overseas and then I came to the Minster, but I didna stay long. Me and the master mason couldna make our ideas fit."

Barty, sorting over the stones, gazed awestruck at the stranger. Such independence was unheard-of.

"What seemed to be the hitch?" asked the farmer coolly.

"He was too fond o' making rubble serve for buildin' stone," said David.

"Then he'd face it with Portland ashlars to deceive the pa.s.ser-by."

"Ye'll have no cause to worry over that here," said Ralph Appleby dryly.

"I'm not using ashlars or whatever ye call them, in my orchard wall.

Good masonry will do."

"Ashlar means a building stone cut and dressed," explained David. "I went along that wall of yours before you came. If you make a culvert up stream with a stone-arched bridge in place of the ford yonder, ye'll divert the course of the waters from your land."

"If I put a bridge over the Wash, I could make a weir to catch salmon,"

said the startled farmer. "I've no cut stone for arches."

"We'll use good mortar and plenty of it, that's all," said David. "I'll show ye."

The things that David accomplished with rubble, or miscellaneous sc.r.a.p-stone, seemed like magic to Barty. He trotted about at the heels of the mason, got very tired and delightfully dirty, asked numberless questions, which were always answered, and considered David the most interesting man he had ever met. David solved the building-stone problem by concocting mortar after a recipe of his own and using plenty of it between selected stones. Sometimes there seemed to be almost as much mortar as there was stone, but the wedge-shaped pieces were so fitted that the greater the pressure on the arch the firmer it would be.

Laborers were set to work digging a channel to let the stream through this gully under the arches, and it seemed glad to go.

"When I'm a man, David," announced Barty, lying over the bridge-rail on his stomach and looking down at the waters that tore through the new channel, "I shall be a mason just like you. The river can't get our apples now, can it?"

David grinned. "Water never runs up hill," he said. "And it will run down hill if it takes a thousand years. You learn that first, if you want to be a mason, lad."

"But everybody knows that," Barty protested.

"Two and two mak' four, but if you and me had twa aipples each, and I ate one o' mine, and pit the ither with yours to mak' fower and you didna find it out it wad be a sign ye didna know numbers," retorted David, growing more and more Scotch as he explained. "And when I see a mason lay twa-three stones to twa-three mair and fill in the core wi'

rubble I ken he doesna reckon on the water seeping in."

"But you've put rubble in those arches, David," said Barty, using his eyes to help his argument.

"Spandrel, spandrel, ye loon," grunted David. "Ye'll no learn to be a mason if ye canna mind the names o' things. The s.p.a.ce between the arch and the beam's filled wi' rubble and good mortar, but the weight doesna rest on that--it's mostly on the arches where we used the best of our stanes. And there's no great travel ower the brig forbye. It's different with a cathedral like yon. Ye canna build siccan a mighty wall wi'

mortar alone. The water's aye searchin' for a place to enter. When the rocks freeze under the foundations they crumble where the water turns to ice i' the seams. When the rains come the water'll creep in if we dinna make a place for it to rin awa' doon the wa'. That's why we carve the little drip-channels longways of the arches, ye see. A wall's no better than the weakest stane in it, lad, and when you've built her you guard her day and night, summer and winter, frost, fire and flood, if you want her to last. And a Minster like York or Lincoln--the sound o' the hammer about her walls winna cease till Judgment Day."

Barty looked rather solemnly at the little, solid, stone-arched bridge, and the stone-walled culvert. While it was a-building David had explained that if the stream overflowed here it would be over the reedy meadows near the river, which would be none the worse for a soaking. The orchards and farm lands were safe. The work that they had done seemed to link itself in the boy's mind to cathedral towers and fortress-castles and the d.y.k.es of Flanders of which David had told.

The loose stone from the ruined wall was used to finish a wall in a new place, across the corner of the land by which the river still flowed.