Chapter Eight

A Parish Record

 

Echoes of Grimm’s visit, or of the beguiling notion of Selborne as a model of the picturesque, returned to Gilbert in the autumn of 1776. One mild day in mid-October he notes that ‘The hanging beech-woods begin to be beautifully tinged, & to afford most lovely scapes, very engaging to the eye, and imagination. They afford sweet lights and shades. Maples are also finely tinged. These scenes are worthy the pencil of a Reubens.’¹ It is, as Naturalist’s Journal entries go, a little arch, and a more typically personal image of autumn crops up four days later: ‘The redbreast’s note is very sweet, & pleasing; did it not carry with it ugly associations of ideas, & put us in mind of the approach of winter.’²

And perhaps of the advance of years. Gilbert had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in July, and Grimm’s departure marked the beginning of a mellower, more domestic phase in his life. Much of the hectic literary activity of the previous few years was now completed. John’s Fauna was faltering. The revised edition of Pennant’s British Zoology, to which he’d given so freely of advice and information, had been published that summer. At last he was free to concentrate on his own work, and though Mulso began to mount a barrage of first disquiet and then dismay about the delay, he was determined to see it though at his own leisurely pace.

There is no sign of middle-aged resignation or regret about this change of gear; on the contrary there is a new warmth in both his writing and his home life. He was travelling less now (just five weeks away from Selborne in 1777) and finding that Selborne was repaying what, in so many ways, he had invested in it. The fruit trees which he had planted more than twenty years ago were now approaching their vintage years. There were new curiosities, too – ‘ferrugineous foxgloves’ and ‘proliferous fiery lilies’. And Selborne continued to be a gathering place for the Whites, especially the younger members of the clan. In the autumn of 1776, another 15-year-old nephew, Benjamin’s son Dick, endeared himself to Gilbert, though he was a very different creature from the studious youngsters who had so far stayed at the Wakes. ‘It is well he is intended for trade,’ Gilbert wrote to a maybe somewhat envious John White, ‘since he loves anything better than [a] book: bodily labour he does not spare; for rolling, wheeling, water-drawing, grass-walk-sweeping are his delight. I have taught him to ride; and perhaps a good seat on an horse may be more useful to him than Virgil, or Horace.’³

The procession of energetic visitors was stretching the limited accommodation of the Wakes to bursting point, and the planned extension was long overdue. But on 6 June 1777 work began at last on the Great Parlour. It was to be a considerable piece of building, 23 feet long, 18 feet wide and 12 feet 3 inches tall, and Gilbert employed a team of local men under the foremanship of George Kemp. Kemp’s wages were 2s a day, his assistant’s 1s 6d, and the carpenters (who were using timber from woods near Winchester) received 1s 8d. The raising of the walls continued, with a few halts in deference to Selborne’s capricious climate, until the end of July. Then the roof was put on. Gilbert slipped into his new role with gusto, and Mulso, who was recovering from the shock of one of his sons becoming a runaway, wondered wistfully if there might be a hidden ‘Purpose’ behind this unaccustomed zeal for improvement:

and to say Truth I did not know but that this expatiating Scheme might depend upon Another, & that You was preparing to exhibit to Us Benedict the married Man. I knew such a Venture was too delicate to be explained even to an old Friend ’till it was quite resolved upon.⁴

Building was very much in the air in the district that summer. Three of Gilbert’s near neighbours were planning extensions or wholesale rebuilding. Even the Wakes’ house-martins seemed inspired to a burst of belated construction, and began a new nest above the garden door on 21 June. Gilbert was impressed by the domestic industry of the local swallows, too. He noted that at this midsummer season they were feeding their young from three in the morning till nine at night. (This suggests some long days on Gilbert’s part, too. Perhaps his gouty hand was causing him to sleep badly.) He was still fascinated by the movements of these summer birds. Between 15 and 21 August he wrote ‘No swifts’ in every single day’s journal entry. ‘The latest swift I ever saw was only once on the 21st Aug … so punctual are they in their migrations or retreat!’ He was increasingly convinced that a few, at least, might stay in the village. On 2 November, a mild, humid day, he saw more than a score of martins

playing about & catching their food over my fields, & along the side of the hanger. It is remarkable that tho’ this species of Hirundines usually withdraws pretty early in Oct: yet a flight has for many years been seen again for one day on or about the 4th of Novr: … These circumstances favour the notion of a torpid state in birds: and are against the migration of swallows in this kingdom.⁵

As usual when writing of house-martins there is not just affection but familiarity in his voice: he takes it for granted that these are Selborne’s martins, the birds ‘that belong to this place’, as he once described the village swifts (though this did not prevent his having the occasional newly arrived martin shot, to examine its condition). It’s an indication of the feelings he had for the ‘parish birds’ that he failed to see the real explanation for these regular re-appearances. The martins concerned were almost certainly not Selborne birds at all, but part of one of the migratory streams of birds that move slowly south across Britain throughout the autumn.

But the detached scientist and the romantic observer were moving closer. On 27 December 1777, a ‘dark & harsh’ day, Gilbert drew a delicious caricature of a wind-ruffled bird: ‘No birds love to fly down the wind, which protrudes them too fast, and hurries them out of their poise.’ He was intrigued by the idea of trying to capture what he called a bird’s ‘air’ (a precursor of our modern idea of ‘jizz’), and, in a letter to Barrington dated 7 August 1778, but probably not sent, he gives thumbnail sketches of the characteristic movements of almost fifty species or families of birds. The result is White at his most dextrous, a rush of evocative images, with each bird caught, almost epigrammatically, by a few exact, unexpected strokes:

Owls move in a buoyant manner, as if lighter than the air… herons seem incumbered with too much sail for their light bodies … the green-finch … exhibits such languishing and faltering gestures as to appear like a wounded and dying bird … fernowls, or goat-suckers, glance in the dusk over the tops of trees like a meteor; starlings as it were swim along.⁶

What is striking is the way Gilbert often arranges his sentence structure to echo the physical style of a bird’s flight. So, ‘The white-throat uses odd jerks and gesticulations over the tops of hedges and bushes’; and ‘woodpeckers fly volatu undosu, opening and closing their wings at every stroke, and so are always rising or falling in curves.’

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Back indoors, the Great Parlour also became a subject of scientific scrutiny. The plasterers had skimped their work by adding wood-ash to the mortar, and Gilbert worried that ‘the alcaline salts of the wood will be very long before they will be dry at all, and will be apt to relax, and then turn moist again when foggy damp weather returns’. Luckily there were good drying winds during February, and the room was soon thoroughly aired. As the days grew longer, he could see how well it was aligned, and notes with satisfaction in February that ‘The sun at setting just shines into the E: corner.’ Its only real drawback was the echo, ‘which, when many people are talking, makes confusion to my dull ears’.

The furnishing and fittings must have helped with this. They were lavish even for such a large and important room. The chimney-piece, ‘23 foot 7 in. of superfishal [sic] white and veined Italian marble’, cost £5.17.11, and a large looking-glass, £9.19s. The wallpaper was ‘flock sattin’ in light brown with a coloured border, and was debited in Gilbert’s accounts at £9.15. The room was finished with a ‘fine stout large Turkey carpet’ at 11 guineas.

That summer the newly-expanded Wakes was full of Gilbert’s friends and relations. Molly White (now a regular visitor) was there, and thought the new parlour ‘one of the pleasantest rooms I ever was in’. So were Anne Barker and Benjamin’s two daughters, Jenny and Becky. Space had even been found for the studious Dr Chandler, although he lived only three miles away. He was a chronic wanderer, and years later Gilbert described him, with only the mildest hint of reproof, as ‘an unsettled man [who] likes this method of procuring an habitation, because it looks so like not settling. Roaming about becomes a habit with th Gentry, as well as mendicants; who, when they have once taken up a strolling life, can never be perswaded to stay at their own parishes.’⁷

But down in Ringmer, the following month, the atmosphere was less relaxed. The hostilities with France which had been smouldering throughout much of the eighteenth century had reached one of their periodic crises, and the south coast was buzzing with rumours of a possible invasion. ‘I hope you can sleep without dreaming of ye French,’ Mulso wrote on Gilbert’s return. Neither man seemed to think much of the bellicose spirit in the air and the upset it produced in their communities. A Selborne man had just come into a £300 share in the bounty from a captured French merchant vessel. ‘This will be some recompence to the poor fellow,’ Gilbert commented to Molly, ‘who was kid-napped in an ale-house at Botley by a press-gang, as he was refreshhing himself in a journey to this place. The young man was bred a carter, and never had any connection with sea-affairs.’⁸ Mulso declared that he would hate to see his hay-crop fed to French or Spanish horses, or to English troopers, for that matter, and quoted the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, ‘Il faut cultiver notre Jardin.’

Not that Gilbert needed any encouragement to look to his own plot. In mid-April the following year (1779) he was busy cutting cucumbers and sending a round-up of the village gossip to Molly.⁹ He was lucky to have the cucumbers. There had been four months of drought, he told her, and the hot-beds were so cold and dry they were hardly working at all. Her father’s present of a rain-measurer had been a kind thought, but a little ironic under the circumstances: ‘There was a time when rain-measurers were very entertaining; and doubtless there will again.’ But then one was always clearing up after the weather down here. The maypole had been blown down in a great storm on New Year’s day, but was now mended and freshly painted. On an overcast night earlier in the month, burglars had broken into Burbey’s shop, just over the street. They had made a mess of the window-frame but had been disturbed before they found the till.

These minor calamities were part of the everyday fabric of village life, and the constant stream of anecdotes that Gilbert was able to send to his relations shows how close he was to the parish grapevine. They are inconsequential stories for the most part, but Selborne’s idiosyncratic landscapes and weather permeate them like a tangy local accent. All the local wells go dry in a bad autumn drought, then overflow during the deluges of the following spring. A great storm blows the tiles off Newton church roof, and hurls them through a farmhouse window, thirty yards away. A mad dog terrorizes the neighbourhood, and seventeen people and a horse – bitten or just nervous – are taken off in a waggon to be dipped in the sea. A bottle of brandy turns purple in Gilbert’s cellar. A cow rolls down the Short Lythe, unscathed. Uncle Will slips on the Hanger and is knocked senseless by a tree stump.

The war with France and Spain created another kind of unsettled climate, as the rootless and sometimes glamorously alien life of the military clashed with village custom. On the common, a shepherd was attacked and robbed by a sailor. Two besotted local girls ran off with some of the soldiers billeted in Selborne in November 1781, and ‘so that they might cut a figure in their new way of life’ broke into Robert Berriman’s farm and stripped his wife’s wardrobe bare. The twenty-eight kilted Highlanders that were later quartered in the parish and gazed on as curiosities were altogether better behaved, and ‘were never known to steal even a turnip, or a cabbage, though they lived much on vegetables’.

The humans in Gilbert’s writings, their eating and migration habits minutely scrutinized, sometimes seem a little like biological specimens. Yet equally there are creatures who became known so intimately that they were looked on as humans, or at least as honorary parishioners. The most notable of these was Mrs Snooke’s venerable tortoise. Timothy had lived in the walled garden as her much-loved companion for nearly forty years, and when she died on 8 March 1780, aged 86, it was unthinkable that he might pass out of the family’s care.*

Gilbert was in London when he heard the news of his aunt’s death, and travelled down for the funeral and the reading of the will on 12 March. He must have been sad to lose a relative who had been such a good and lively friend, and whose home was probably the favourite of all his retreats. But he was familiar with death and unperturbed by it, and on the journey down to Sussex it was the signs of spring and new life that he noted, crocuses in bloom, rooks building, and chaffinches beginning to sing (‘but in a shorter way than in Hants’). In the will Gilbert had been left a small farm at Iping, near Midhurst, on condition that he paid legacies out of the rents to a number of other members of the family. The net income was little more than £50, and the seven-pound American tortoise must have seemed a much more welcome legacy, though it was not the kind of thing to be spelled out in the will. On 17 March, accordingly, Timothy was dug out of his ‘hybernaculum’ in the flower-border (he ‘resented the Insult by hissing’), packed into a box full of earth and trundled back to Selborne in a post-chaise. He was shaken up enough by the journey to be thoroughly awakened by the time he arrived at the Wakes, and Gilbert described to Molly later that month how he ‘walked twice the whole length of it [the garden] to take a survey of the new premises; but in the evening he retired Punder the mould, and is lost since in the most profound slumbers; and probably may not come forth for these ten days or fortnight.’¹⁰

It must have gratified Gilbert that, despite the trauma of enforced transportation, Timothy was still overwhelmed by the urge to hibernate. And as he slept away the succeeding weeks, drawn into his shell beneath the dark earth of the Wakes’ flower-bed, he was observed with the same slightly distant but single-minded curiosity as he had been at Ringmer, a model of inscrutable instinct. ‘The tortoise keeps under ground all day … The tortoise puts-out his lead in the morning.’ He makes a breathing-hole; marches about the garden; shows a fortunate predilection for the garden’s most prolific crop, cucumbers. When Gilbert gave an account of Timothy’s habits to Barrington in April 1780 he expressed a rare note of doubt about the Creator’s wisdom in bestowing ‘such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-thirds of its existence in joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together’.¹¹

But as the summer advances and Timothy becomes more active, Gilbert’s tone changes. He begins to refer to Timothy by his name, and to show a concern for him as an individual, not just as an unfathomable reptile.

May 27: Sun. Cloudless … Large blue iris blows … Timothy the tortoise possesses a greater share of discernment than I was aware of; & is much too wise to walk into a well, for when he arrives at the haha, he distinguishes the fall of the ground, & retires with caution or marches carefully along the edge: he delights in crawling up the flower-bank, & walking along it’s verge.¹²

He was still subjected to the indignities of some of Gilbert’s knockabout experiments, but no harm was meant him. His pulse was searched for, he was taken to Burbey’s shop to be weighed (much to the amusement of the village children) and was shouted at, to his complete indifference, through a speaking-trumpet. On one occasion he was dunked in a tub of water: ‘he sank gradually, and walked on the bottom of the tub. He seemed quite out of his element and was much dismayed,’ Gilbert says, with apparent surprise, ‘This species seems not at all amphibious.’ The revelation proved a life-saver years later, when Timothy ‘was flooded in his hybernaculum amidst the laurel-hedge; & might have been drowned, had not his friend Thomas [Hoar] come to his assistance, & taken him away.’¹³

During the spring of 1784 Timothy went missing for more than a week, and his imagined adventures formed the substance of the well-known letter from ‘Timothy the Tortoise to Miss Hecky Mulso’.¹⁴ Timothy describes his early life and experiences at length, and how he resolved one May, ‘to elope from my place of confinement; for my fancy had represented to me that probably many agreeable tortoises of both sexes might inhabit the heights of Baker’s Hill or the extensive plains of the neighbouring meadow’. Miss Hecky Mulso wasn’t Mrs Hecky Chapone née Mulso as has sometimes been supposed, but her niece, John Mulso’s second daughter, then 21 years old; and it would be stretching a point to see it – as has also been done – as expressing some wistful, romantic yearnings on Gilbert’s part. In fact it was written as a reply from Timothy to some verses addressed to him by Hecky, after she and her family had been on a visit to Selborne in July 1784. If Gilbert does identify with Timothy at all, it is where he describes ‘what I have never divulged to anyone before – the want of a society of my own kind.’ But the letter is best read as a charming and whimsical indication of just how far Gilbert was now prepared to credit the ‘sorrowful reptile’ with a personality, especially where he mocks his own somewhat insensitive experiments:

These matters displease me; but there is another that much hurts my pride: I mean that contempt shown for my understanding which these Lords of the Creation are very apt to discover, thinking that nobody knows anything but themselves.

By the autumn of 1780 a note of real tenderness had entered Gilbert’s voice, and he described how Timothy, homesick for the New World perhaps, had taken to the border under the fruit wall, and ‘sleeps under a Marvel of Peru’. When he finally went to earth in November, Gilbert put a hen-coop over him to protect him from dogs.

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Familarity with the parish also meant, for someone of Gilbert’s standing, a degree of licence in the use of its natural resources. He tended, for instance, to regard the Hanger as an extension of the Wakes’ grounds, and that autumn, as well as observing the solemn antics of Timothy, he became involved in the construction of a brand-new path up through the hanging woods. The Zig-zag wasn’t being abandoned; indeed it was ‘nicely cleaned-out’ at the same time. But it was a steep climb, and beginning to prove something of a trial for the ageing White family. Gilbert, especially, was finding physical exertion increasingly difficult. His gout was now complicated by gravel, and he had complained in September of ‘shootings in my back and bowel … that pulled me down very much’.¹⁵

So what he christened the Privy Council decided to cut a more gently sloping path up the face of the Hanger, just to the north of the Zig-zag. It was to be known as the Bostal. The money for the project had been put up by Thomas White, and it is quite possible that the original idea came from him too, out of his interest in local history, for ‘bostal’ was an old West Sussex term for the paths that were cut up through the woods on the South Downs. Gilbert’s occasional helper Larby had originally been put to work on the path, but he was proving too slow, and in September Gilbert hired ‘a whole band of myrmidons’ to finish the job. These were chiefly young men from the village, but it is likely that some of the visitors staying at the Wakes that summer also lent a hand, and the excavation was carried out in high spirits.

Those that didn’t work gathered round to watch what the diggers would turn up next. They found moles, living in the middle of the Hanger, large lumps of pyrites – ‘round as balls’ – in the clay and fossil ammonites in the layers of chalk beneath. There was a good deal of friendly banter about the virtues of the new path. Gilbert reported that ‘there is a junto against it called Zigzaggians, of which Mrs. Etty is the head; but Mr. E. and Mr. Yalden would be Bostalians – if they dared.’¹⁶ The squabbling, such as it was, seemed to be largely over the dreadful muddiness of the newly cut track, and, when Gilbert bedded out the worst patches with ferns transplanted from the Hanger, the feuding was settled. (Although the following summer, the doughty Mrs. Yalden, who had no time for these mollycoddled men and their soft options, made a point of waymarking the path between Newton and the tops of the Bostal and Zig-zag with sticks. Afterwards she ‘took a cartful of chalk and a carter, and ordered him to lay lumps of chalk all the way, for direction posts, the whole length of the down, so that Mr. Etty who used to say he would not go over the common by himself in the dark for £50, might now venture for half the money.’)¹⁷ In the end everyone agreed that it was a ‘fine romantic walk, shady and beautiful’, and that it would make the journey to Newton much more pleasant. Molly was particularly delighted by this more decorous way up the hill. There was still no direct coach route to Newton from Selborne, and the previouss summer she had walked all the way to a ball in Richard Yalden’s barn, most probably up the Zig-zag.¹⁸

The two paths were distinguished by more than just their slopes. They had strongly contrasting characters, too. While the Zig-zag was a bracing climb through open scrub and grassland, like an alpine track, the Bostal was a secluded tunnel into the heart of the woods. Cutting this considerable swathe – it was more than 400 yards long and probably two or three yards wide – had meant a great upheaval on the Hanger. It’s very clear from the state and position of the Bostal today that it could not have been made simply by brashing a path through the undergrowth. The soil on the slopes had to be excavated to a depth of four feet in places to create a level surface. And even the most serpentine route could not have avoided the felling of some beech trees and the grubbing out of their roots.

None of this work was out of the ordinary – there was time and labour enough, after all – except for the fact that it was all being carried out, without any apparent by-your-leave, on someone else’s property. Although the Hanger was one of Selborne’s commons, and Gilbert, along with many other villagers, had the right to graze cattle and take firewood, soil and timber (or at least tree roots) were the prerogatives of the Lords of the Manor. Gilbert, not even acting curate of Selborne at this time, had only the most tenuous connections with Magdalen College; yet nowhere in his correspondence or the college records is there any suggestion that he bothered to obtain permission to cut the Bostal, or for that matter build any of his other constructions on the hill. In effect, he gathered a gang of men and flattened an acre of the Lord’s wood. It says a good deal about the remoteness of Magdalen as an absentee landlord, and the freewheeling community that developed in Selborne partly as a result, that he was able to get away with it.

Nor did the villagers seem the least bit put out, though strictly speaking their common rights had probably been infringed through the destruction of a small source of wood and mast. They no doubt welcomed the work which constructing the track had provided, and the general benefit the finished route gave to the whole parish. But with land rights being increasingly threatened by enclosure and agricultural modernization, it may be a measure of the affection felt locally for Gilbert that his actions were judged by the spirit behind them, not by their technical legality.

That spring (1780) the parish had given an indication of how it felt about its history and traditional identity. Throughout the previous decade, the third baronet Sir Simeon Stuart, who had succeeded his father as Member of Parliament for Hampshire in 1761, and who was Lord of the Manor of the neighbouring parish of Hartley, had been rationalizing his extensive landholdings in the district. He had stopped off rights of way, and grubbed out hedges, not just around his tenancies in Selborne, but along the ancient boundaries between the two parishes. More seriously, he had encroached on the common at Dorton. He was up-braided repeatedly at the annual Manorial Court, but to no avail.¹⁹ He died in 1779, and there is no record as to whether the lost part of Dorton was ever regained by the village. But during the ceremony of beating the bounds held from 3 to 5 May the following year, the villagers made a point of reaffirming the old field and parish boundaries. It was the first perambulation for nine years and the largest turnout since 1703. Fifteen local farmers and tradesmen did the walk, including John Hales, John Burbey, Thomas Carpenter and Robert Berriman, as well as a dozen boys, and on the way they drove in stakes of yew – that classic Selbornian timber – along the lines of the vanished hedges.²⁰

There was, throughout the last half of the eighteenth century, a discernible attitude in Selborne that the parish land, and most of what grew or lived on it, was a communal asset. Free of the brooding and often censorious influence of a Big House, and – except within the bounds of Woolmer Forest – from the increasingly vindictive action being taken against trespassers and poachers under the cloak of the Black Acts, and the 1770 Night Poaching Act,²¹ Selborne villagers simply helped themselves. It was a sign of a comparatively free community, though the consequences frequently seem shocking to modern sensibilities. Village women dug up stinking hellebores in the Hanger to grow on as herbs (they ‘give the leaves powdered to children troubled with worms’); Gilbert transplanted them too, as ornaments for his shrubberies, along with mulleins, foxgloves and spurge laurel; blackbirds were shot by the dozen when they raided the gooseberries; a boy robbed a nightingale’s nest from one of Gilbert’s own hedges; adders were slaughtered on sight.

Sometimes the quarry was altogether rarer. In the middle of June 1781, a boy climbed to the top of a tall beech tree on the Hanger, and took the one and only egg of a pair of honey-buzzards – more widespread then than now but still a scarce bird. A few days later the female bird was shot. Both trophies found their way into Gilbert’s hands for examination. So did one of the flock of black-winged stilts, which, making the mistake of stopping off at Frensham Pond, eight miles away, received the kind of welcome customarily given to any conspicuous rarities. ‘The pond-keeper says there were three brace in the flock; but that, after he had satisfied his curiosity, he suffered the sixth to remain unmolested,’²² Gilbert wrote to Barrington, without any apparent trace of irony. It was only the third recorded visit to Britain by the species. Gilbert was even able to see the funny side of these unfortunate birds, and his account went on to say:

I… found the length of the legs to be so extraordinary, that, at first sight, one might have supposed the shanks had been fastened on to impose on the credulity of the beholder: they were legs in caricatura; and had we seen such proportions on a Chinese or Japan screen we should have made large allowances for the fancy of the draughtsman.²³

But the swallow tribe at least were regarded with affection round the village, and their messy nesting colonies were tolerated in cottage, church and farmhouse alike. Perhaps they were still regarded as bringers of good luck to the households they chose as hosts. In 1780 there were forty martins’ nests under the eaves of the Priory Farmhouse alone, and in June Gilbert marvelled at the numbers of young raised on this one building. The first brood, gathering to sun themselves on the tiles, covered one whole side of the roof. There were probably some of this colony among the large numbers that were feeding over the Hanger in mid-October. This has always been one of the great Selborne spectacles in late summer and early autumn, as families of martins, often joined by swallows skimming over the adjacent meadows, play in the thermals. Gilbert loved to watch these great acrobatic assemblies from his ‘field alcove’, a roughly built hideaway that he had put up in the fields between the Wakes and the Hanger. In the autumn of 1780 he resolved to watch them intently (probably with the help of his telescope) to try and settle once and for all the question of whether any went into hibernation. The notes he took during several consecutive days in the middle of October were worked up into an essay for the Natural History (though not sent to Barrington). Its conclusions would today be regarded as false, but it remains one of the finest insights into White’s method of observation and feelings for house-martins, and is worth quoting from at length:

Having taken notice, in October 1780, that the last flight [of martins] was numerous, amounting perhaps to one hundred and fifty; and that the season was soft and still; I was resolved to pay uncommon attention to these late birds; to find, if possible, where they roosted, and to determine the precise time of their retreat. The mode of life of these latter hirundines is very favourable to such a design; for they spend the whole day in the sheltered district, between me and the Hanger, sailing about in a placed, easy manner, and feasting on those insects which love to haunt a spot so secure from ruffling winds. As my principal object was to discover the place of their roosting, I took care to wait on them before they retired to rest, and was much pleased to find that, for several evenings together, just at a quarter past five in the afternoon, they all scudded away in great haste towards the south-east, and darted down among the low shrubs above the cottages at the end of the hill. This spot in many respects seems to be well calculated for their winter residence: for in many parts it is as steep as the roof of any house, and therefore secure from the annoyances of water; and it is moreover clothed with beechen shrubs, which, being stunted and bitten by sheep, make the thickest covert imaginable; and are so entangled as to be impervious to the smallest spaniel… I watched them on to the thirteenth and fourteenth of October, and found their evening retreat was exact and uniform; but after this they made no regular appearance. Now and then a straggler was seen; and on the twenty-second of October, I observed two in the morning over the village, and with them my remarks for the season ended …

I have only to add that were the bushes, which cover some acres, are not my own property, to be grubbed and carefully examined, probably those late broods, and perhaps the whole aggregate body of the house-martins of this district, might be found there, in different secret dormitories; and that so far from withdrawing into warmer climes, it would appear that they never depart three hundred yards from the village.²⁴

The following spring, just about the time when the martins might be presumed to be coming out of hibernation, he put at least some of his proprietorial scruples aside, and hired a gang of young men to search the beech shrubs and root-cavities where the martins had apparently vanished six months before. But there was nothing – except that, a few days later (the search went on until at least 11 April), a lone house martin ‘came down the street & flew into a nest under Benham’s eaves’. This was an early date for the species, and Gilbert wondered if the bird might have been disturbed by the search-party on the Hanger.

The domestic affairs of the parish swifts were investigated with the same curiosity and determination. In the middle of August 1781 Gilbert noticed that there was still one swift, and perhaps a pair, flying regularly in and out of the church eaves. He debated whether ‘a backward brood, delayed by some accident’ had prevented them leaving with the rest. And on 24 August he was able to glimpse that they were indeed attending on two nearly fledged nestlings ‘which show their white chins at the mouth of the crevice’. Gilbert was astonished. In forty years of close observation he had never encountered swifts with young this late in the year. It simply did not fit with their habit of punctuality that had so impressed him in 1777. He kept watch on the young for the next few days, and remarked how they began to look ‘very brisk’. On 28 August, though, they had vanished, and on the last day of the month Gilbert and a helper climbed up to the eaves to see if they could unravel what had happened. It was soon explained. They found no live or hibernating birds, but ‘in a nest two callow dead swifts, on which had been formed a second nest’.²⁵

*

This story was quickly worked up into a short essay for the Natural History. It was included as a letter to Barrington, dated 9 September l781, but was almost certainly never sent. Indeed the Naturalist’s Journal, whose main entries had for some time been straying way beyond their allotted columns, was now acting as a work-book as well as a diary, a place where Gilbert could, in both senses, collect his thoughts. Occasionally he reports on matters of interest beyond Selborne, on, for instance, what sounds like a national epidemic of Russian ’flu in June 1782, and later that month on the large scallop shells his brother Thomas had nailed up under his eaves in South Lambeth to attract house-martins. (These prototype nest-boxes ‘had not been fixed half an hour, before several pairs settled upon them; &, expressing great complacency, began to build immediately.’²⁶ But chiefly the journal records, with an extraordinary clarity and concentration, the daily pulse of natural life in the parish. Many of these entries are like secular collects or miniature parables. A house-martin drowns in a water-tub. A lesser whitethroat – a ‘pettichaps’ – ‘runs up the stem of the crown-imperials, & putting its head into the bells of those flowers, sips the liquor’. And at night, ‘when the servants have been gone to bed some time, & the kitchen left dark’ the hearth begins to swarm with young crickets, the size of ants. In just a few phrases, stripped of adjectival excess or elaboration, and often working by the simple contrast of two apparently incongruous images, he can catch the essence of a moment, or of a whole season. These are a few of the entries through which he mapped the progress of a heat wave in June 1782:

June 14: Ephemera, mayflies, appear, playing over the streams: their motions are very peculiar, up & down for many yards, almost in a perpendicular line. June 15. Hung out my pendent meat safe … A pair of partridges haunt Baker’s hill, & dust themselves along the verge of the brick-walk. June 16. This hot weather makes the tortoise so alert that he traverses all the garden by six o’clock in the morning. When the sun grows very powerful he retires under a garden-mat, or the shelter of some cabbage … June 20. The smoke from the lime kilns hangs along the forest in level tracks for miles.

It is the sense of selection in these entries that is so striking and which makes the Naturalist’s Journal much more than a merely passive or casual record. They have a form and a rightness that makes them appear like answers to half-formed questions, or details coloured in an already partially outlined picture. Something is plainly on Gilbert’s mind before he makes them. Earlier in the summer of 1782 he had been told of a strange congregation of swallows on a willow overhanging one of James Knight’s ponds. It is almost certain that he never witnessed this himself, but he questioned his neighbour closely, and afterwards wrote a wonderfully evocative picture of the scene:

His attention was first drawn by the twittering of these birds, which sate motionless in a row on the bough, with their heads all one way, & by their weight pressing down the twig so that it nearly touched the water.²⁷

It is as simply and touchingly done as a Japanese print, and it isn’t hard to understand the dense rush of associations that this scene must have aroused in Gilbert. Later he interprets it as suggestive evidence that swallows might hibernate near water. But the way he has composed his affecting description gives away much more tender feelings towards these favourite birds, huddled together for company and perched precariously over the water as they were. Gilbert openly admitted and described emotions of this kind in only about half a dozen entries over forty years. Yet in the later journals they are never far from the surface, and are arguably the stronger for being implicit. Gilbert may not always have been aware of just how much of his feelings he was revealing by his choice of details and of the language in which to capture them; but today they are all but impossible to read without an awareness of their symbolism and association and meaning.

The best journal entries are the sharpest and most evocative of all White’s writing, and miniature prose-poems in their own right. Verse, as we have seen, he used either as a way of more honestly confronting and confessing his emotions, albeit in formal and sometimes devious ways, or as an intellectual diversion, a kind of literary circuit-training. In 1774 he had advised his nephew Sam that ‘A little turn for English poetry is no doubt a pretty accomplishment for a young Gent: and will not only enable him the better to read and relish our best poets; but will, like dancing to the body, have an happy influence even upon his prose compositions.’²⁸ For real writing, for honest accounts of the hard physical world around him in Selborne, he needed the spare immediacy of journal prose. In this he had the tacit support of both Jo Warton and the polymathic Dr John Aikin (a friend of Pennant’s and a future editor of the Natural History). They had attacked both the stale images and the derivative phraseology of contemporary descriptive writing, as well as the poets who wrote naturalistic poetry ‘without ever looking into the face of nature’. Ironically, as John Arthos has pointed out, it was above all else the influence of natural history and science that nurtured the ‘stock diction’ so characteristic of eighteenth-century writers:

They knew something of the working of the universe, the harmonious balance of its elements … the principles of vegetation, and their increasing knowledge pleased them for the proof it gave of a well ordered world. The sure constancy of things was the charm of nature; it was part of the pleasure of poetry to re-create that charm.²⁹

In the journals of his mature years Gilbert White was one of the first writers to show that it was possible to write of the natural world with a fresh and intensely personal vision without in any way sacrificing precision. And, as his responses to a number of dramatic events in the parish were soon to demonstrate, he had begun to form a bridge between two different views of nature: the old superstitious view which none the less included humans as part of the natural scheme of things; and the more rational but also more alienated view of contemporary science.

*

At this time Gilbert was living rather comfortably at Selborne. After the death of his brother in November 1780, he had invited John’s widow, Barbara, to come and live at the Wakes, and she was helping to keep house there. He was rarely short of company as he had sometimes been in his forties, and the house was often full of his friends and his growing clutch of nephews and nieces. In the summer of 1782 his guests included the Reverend Ralph Churton (a Fellow of Brasenose College, whom he had met through Dr Chandler), his brother Thomas White and his three children, his sister Anne Barker from Rutland and her two young daughters, and occasionally Gibraltar Jack who had settled at Salisbury as a surgeon, and who was now, in keeping with his age and position, always referred to as John. Gilbert especially enjoyed listening to Mary and Elizabeth Barker play the harpsichord.

But this was a pleasure for which he now had to pay a price. He had begun to suffer from a common annoyance of older people, known to psychologists as ‘obsessional rumination’ and after listening to his relations’ recitals he found himself

haunted with passages therefrom night and day, and especially at first waking, which by their importunity give me more pain than pleasure: airs and jigs rush upon my imagination, and recur irresistibly to my memory at seasons, and even when I am desirous of thinking of other matters.³⁰

Though it was unconnected with the music in his head, he was also suffering from bouts of deafness and increasingly frequent attacks of gout. He had begun to show slight evidence of absent-mindedness, repeating himself in his correspondence, and on one occasion he signed off a note to Mulso with the words ‘Your most humble servant G.W.’. These inconveniences were perhaps no more than a man of 62 should expect, but added to Gilbert’s natural procrastination they must have slowed up his work on the Natural History, which at this stage included the writing up of a good deal of new material based on journal entries.

But Mulso, who in any case prided himself on his vastly more prostrating illnesses, would hear none of this. He was still convinced that it was the ‘Rubbish of the Antiquities of your Native Place’ that was holding matters up. Since he first heard about this extension of the book, he had become, first, anxious, and then quite furiously exasperated about it. ‘A Farrago of Antiquities,’ he railed, ‘routed out of the Rusts and Crusts & Fusts of Time!’ Later, ‘Another Winter is pass’d without your Essays. I have no more to say than that You are a timorous, provoking Man: You defraud Yourself of a great Credit in the World … Your Porch will be bigger than your House; and You will clap a Gothic Front upon a Plan of Palladio, I mean this, if You labour too much at it.’³¹

I suspect that Mulso, with his intuitive understanding of Gilbert’s ways, was warning him more generally of the dangers of losing touch with the vitality of his subject. Three years before he had advised Gilbert to make the book ‘very clear, but very short. The Novelty, & Elegance, the Tenderness, & ye Piety of the Natural Part will be the Fort of ye Performance.’³² And it was not only the tenacity with which Gilbert held on to his meagre curacy at Farringdon that Mulso had in mind when he wrote in June 1782: ‘perhaps You are like an old Prisoner of ye Bastille, & would fear to catch Cold in your Leg if it had not a Chain on.’³³ Perhaps Gilbert had also sensed that he had to re-engage with his subject with the urgency that he had achieved when writing of the martins and swallows, ten years before. The stimulus he needed was not long in coming.

June 1783 had begun in a familiar style with spells of rain and cool winds. Then on the 23rd, Gilbert noted in the Journal, there was a vast fall of honeydew, and a ‘Hot and hazy’ mist. Over the following days (until 20 July, in fact) the air grew progressively more sultry and oppressive, and a blue fog hung about, persistently, day and night. ‘Sun looks all day like the moon, & sheds a rusty red light’ Gilbert wrote on the 26th. Soon there was an ominously premature leaf-fall from the trees, and as Gilbert’s brother Henry recorded in his Fyfield diary, ‘ye superstirious in town and country have abounded with ye most direful presages and prognostication.’³⁴ Gilbert eventually wrote up this phenomenon – ‘a most extraordinary appearance unlike anything known within the memory of man’ – as one of the set pieces that close the Natural History. His description, with its sense of insidious, creeping disaster, can still send shivers down the spine:

The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butcher’s meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people began to look with a superstitious awe at the red, louring aspect of the sun; and indeed there was reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive; for, all the while, Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily were torn and convulsed with earthquakes; and about that juncture a volcano sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway.³⁵

It’s now known that all these phenomena were due to the eruption of the volcano Skaptár-jökull in Iceland, noticed right across Europe. The sultriness broke up in a succession of violent thunderstorms over southern Britain. Mulso thought them the worst he had ever seen and had ‘five fireballs fall within sight’.

The 1783 summer – if such it can be called – was followed by a winter just as testing and protracted. The first snow fell on Christmas Day, and there was barely a day clear of snow until early April, 1784. When Gilbert was riding back from a visit to his brother in South Lambeth on 2 April, he had trouble getting through the drifts, and when he first glimpsed the village from the Alton path ‘poor old Selborne afforded a very Siberian View … I hardly knew my native spot.’ A few days before, on the twenty-eighth day of continuous frost, he had confessed to Molly: ‘I long for the weather described on the other side of the paper.’³⁶ On the reverse of the letter was a copy of a poem entitled ‘On the Dark, Still, Dry Warm Weather occasionally happening in the Winter Months’ that Gilbert had penned in one of Selborne’s brief respites from its pounding by the elements. The title (condensed and evocative enough to remind one of a journal entry) is the best thing about this poem, which for once reveals no more about his feelings than that he was distressed enough by the weather to write something in verse.³⁷

The whole parish was still suffering from the combined effects of the summer tempests and the long freeze. Food was scarce, the price of mutton had risen to five pence a pound, and Gilbert’s letters to London are full of pleas for salt-fish. Because the ground was so hard, there was little work to be had on the farms, and the poor-tax almost doubled. Illness was rife. Gilbert had a severe and protracted cold, and in the middle of it had to bury his friend Mr Etty, the vicar of Selborne, who died early in April of a serious infection.

Yet again, the summer migrants arrived in the midst of snow. A nightingale was reported singing at Bramshott, five miles from Selborne, on 2 April, and a farmer told Richard Yalden that he had seen two swallows at Hawkley on the unprecedentedly early date of the 7th of that month. This led to a bizarre exchange between Gilbert and Yalden. Gilbert asked the Newton Valence vicar whether he thought the farmer a likely man to know swallows, to which he replied – or so Gilbert reported – ‘O, yes – for he was a married man.’ It is as likely that Gilbert’s hearing was playing him up as that Yalden saw natural wisdom as a reward for a conventionally moral life; but Gilbert had the last word nevertheless, and answered: ‘Though a very unworthy batchelor, I presumed I knew swallows as well as most married men in England.’³⁸ Bats appeared on a ‘sweet afternoon’ on the 9th, and a pair of swifts were back in the village on May Day.

But not all the auguries were so promising. At eleven o’clock on the morning of 17 June, Gilbert met Mrs Etty on the Plestor. Rather surprisingly, the vicar’s wife had a reputation locally as something of a sensitive, and she told Gilbert that ‘by certain feelings she was sure storms were at hand.’³⁹ A couple of hours later ‘a blue mist, smelling strongly of sulphur’ began to gather around the Hanger. The storm broke over Hartley at a quarter to two, and soon reached Selborne. It began with large drops of rain, which were rapidly followed by huge hailstones, up to three inches in girth and ‘somewhat in the shape of cockles, with a white nucleus in each’. Gilbert was sitting down to lunch at the time, and was alerted by ‘the clattering of tiles and jingling of glass’.

The parish was devastated by the storm. Some men who could not get back from the field were injured, and John Burbey was badly cut in the hand while trying to cover up his hot-beds. Vast numbers of windows were broken, orchard crops destroyed, and over an area about two miles square the torrential rains flooded fields and washed the topsoil away. Gilbert was out surveying the damage and gathering evidence and anecdotes from his neighbours as soon as it had passed. Later he wrote in his journal the full story of the gathering and breaking of the storm, and its effects on the parish:

The hollow lane by Norton was so torn & disordered as not to be passable ’till mended; rocks being removed that weighed 200 weight. The flood at Gracious street ran over the goose-hatch, & mounted above the fourth bar of Grange-yard gate. Those that saw the effect that the great hail had on ponds & pools say, that the dashing of the water made an extraordinary appearance, the froth & spray standing-up in the air three feet above the surface! … The rushing & roaring of the hail as it approached was truely tremendous.⁴⁰

*

What is remarkable about Gilbert’s records of the prodigious weather conditions in 1783–4 is the way he infuses an acute, detailed, objective account with a sense of wonder – of awe, almost – at the natural dramas with which humans were still inextricably involved, a feeling which might have come straight out of the medieval period. He shows the same feeling, though with a different emphasis, when he comes to describe the flight of Blanchard’s balloon across the village.

Balloons were a source of great public excitement in the 1780s. De Rozier had made the first manned ascent in October 1783, and when Lunardi made his celebrated flight from Chelsea on 15 September 1784 (accompanied by a cat, a dog and a pigeon) it was in front of an immense assembly, including the Prince of Wales. The enterprising Whites had, by this date, already made some ballooning experiments of their own. Gilbert’s nephew Edmund White and a friend had constructed a small hot-air device out of thin paper. The ‘bag’ was two and a half feet long, and twenty inches across, and ‘the buoyant air was supplyed at bottom by a cotton plug of wooll wetted with spirits of wine; & set on fire by a candle.’⁴¹ The air was cool and moist on the open part of the Hanger chosen for the flight, and the device refused to perform properly. But when it was tried out in the stairway in Newton Valence Vicarage it rose up to the ceiling and remained there until the fuel ran out.

But in many areas of the countryside there was still some suspicion about these new-fangled devices. When Lunardi’s trip had come to an abrupt halt in North Hertfordshire the local farmworkers refused to come to his assistance, and it took the example of a young woman, who grabbed one of the mooring cords, to bring them round.

Later that autumn Gilbert heard that there was to be another flight from Chelsea, this time by the Frenchman, Jean Blanchard. (In good weather London newspapers arrived in Selborne no more than a day after publication.) On 15 October, the day before the proposed ascent, the weather was fine and the wind steady from the north-east, and Gilbert became ‘possessed with a notion’ that Blanchard would pass over the village the next day:

The next day proving also bright and the wind continuing as before, I became more sanguine than ever; and issuing forth, exhorted all those who had any curiosity to look sharp from about one to three o’clock, as they would stand a good chance of being entertained with a very extraordinary sight.⁴²

Gilbert was determined to introduce this scientific marvel to his parishioners. He toured the fields like an evangelist, urging the workers to keep a watch towards the north-east, and sent off an urgent note to Farringdon, in case the balloon passed further north than he expected. By two o’clock, a large crowd had gathered on top of the Hanger, and expectations were rising as a long cloud of London smoke blew in from the north-eastern quarter. Gilbert tried hard to contain himself. He made a last patrol of the Pound-field below the Hanger, then went home for dinner, laying ‘his hat and surtout ready in a chair, in case of an alarm’. The call came at twenty to three, and Gilbert ran into his orchard, where twenty or thirty of his neighbours had gathered. He watched the balloon’s transit in a state of near rapture, and the descriptions he put down in letters, the Journal and later an article for a newspaper, come closer to catching the breadth of his complicated personality than anything else he wrote. He saw the balloon appear as a small dot and gradually materialize into a burnished yellow orb, flashing in the afternoon sun; and as this vision of the scientific future passes overhead its passage is mapped and measured by the ancient and familiar geography of the village:

From the green bank at the S.W. end of my house saw a dark blue speck at a most prodigious height, dropping as it were from the sky, and hanging amidst the regions of the upper air, between the weather-cock of the tower and the top of the may-pole. At first, coming towards us, it did not seem to make any way; but we soon discovered that its velocity was very considerable. For in a few minutes it was over the maypole; and then over the Fox on my great parlor chimney; and in ten minutes behind my great wallnut tree. The machine looked mostly of a dark blue colour; but some times reflected the rays of the sun, and appeared of a bright yellow. With a telescope I could discern the boat, and the ropes that supported it. To my eye this vast balloon appeared no bigger than a large tea-urn.⁴³

If this is reminiscent of anything, it is of Brueghel’s painting of Icarus, where the ‘winged boy’s’ fall from the sky is figured against a farming landscape peopled with labourers who have not the slightest interest or concern about what is happening above them. Here the feeling is reversed, and the contrast becomes a celebration, inside a fond and familiar setting, of what can be achieved by human initiative. (As Richard Jefferies was to dream, a hundred years later: ‘My sympathies and hopes are with the light of the future, only I should like it to come from nature. The clock should be read by the sunshine, not the sun timed by the clock.’⁴⁴) For Gilbert, the mixed emotions this scene aroused recalled those he had experienced when Joseph Banks set off on his momentous voyage in 1768, and those he felt about departing migrants every autumn:

I was wonderfully struck at first with the phaenomenon; and, like Milton’s ‘belated peasant’, felt my heart rebound with fear and joy at the same time. After a while I surveyed the machine with more composure, without that awe and concern for two of my fellow-creatures, lost, in appearance, in the boundless depths of the atmosphere! for we supposed then that two were embarked on this astonishing voyage. At last, seeing with what steady composure they moved, I began to consider them as secure as a group of Storks or Cranes intent on the business of emigration.⁴⁵

*

Gilbert spent the final years of work on the Natural History continuing to guide, and be guided by, the villagers of Selborne. The vicar who had replaced Mr Etty, the Reverend C. Taylor, proved to have little desire to reside in Selborne, and from October 1784 Gilbert became curate-in-charge, a position he held until his death. His duties were not very strenuous – twenty to twenty-five baptisms a year, four or five marriages and about twenty deaths.⁴⁶ But he had under his pastoral care a battleworn community, physically and economically depleted by the continuing assaults of the weather. Work and food were still in short, supply. There had been a number of thefts of corn from local mills and barns, and firewood was being cut at a damaging rate on Selborne common. By the spring of 1786 even hay had become scarce. ‘My rick is now almost as slender as the waste of a virgin,’ Gilbert joked to Sam Barker, ‘and it would have been much for the reputation of the two last brides that I have married, had their wastes been as slender.’⁴⁷

One of the few things that was in the power of the village to attend to was the state of the local roads, many of which had been ravaged by the repeated alternations of frost and flood. Over the autumn of 1784 special attention was paid to the lane that ran south-west from the village up to Newton Valence. On 23 November Gilbert was able to record in his journal that his brother Thomas and family had come into the village by coach along this road and that this was ‘the first carriage that ever came this way!’ (Local people were paid by the job or day for work on the parish highways, and for repairing bridges, hedges and gates. Women helped by picking stones to fill ruts and holes. The work was paid for out of a rent levied on the copyholders of the parish, usually between two and five shillings a year.⁴⁸)

But no sooner had this work been completed than Selborne was hit by another brutal winter. On the night of 7 December 1784 there was a massive blizzard across southern England, the worst since 1776. Snow continued falling with scarcely a break for the next forty-eight hours. At eleven on the night of the 10th, one of Gilbert’s thermometers registered one degree below zero Fahrenheit and the mercury in another had vanished into the bulb. All the bread, cheese, meat, potatoes and apples that weren’t in underground cellars were frozen solid. In Gracious Street the ice was four inches thick, and over in Fyfield Henry White found that iron stuck fast to his hand when he picked it up.⁴⁹ Gangs of men were regularly called to shovel snow out of the hollow lanes (the parish spent seven shillings on beer for them on one day that winter) until a brief thaw in the middle of January.

Yet there were compensations. A deceptively bright day on 1 February brought about a curious appearance, and one of Gilbert’s most perfect journal entries: ‘On this cold day about noon a bat was flying round Gracious street pond, & dipping down & sipping the water, like swallows, as it flew: all the while the wind was very sharp, & the boys were standing on the ice!’⁵⁰

The church bells, which had been recast amid great festivities in 1781, were rung as usual to commemorate what were known locally as ‘Crownation’ and ‘Powder-plot’ days. Cricket matches were held on the common on top of the Hanger, and sound as if they were lively affairs: in just a single match two men were carried off, wounded by the ball, one with a dislocated knee and the other a badly wounded face and leg. Elsewhere on the Hanger one of Gilbert’s female helpers (perhaps Goody Hampton) scattered beech mast among the scrub, partly to compensate for the heavy toll that firewood cutting, and heavy timber-felling by Magdalen, were having on the more wooded stretches to the north-west.

Gilbert has sometimes been criticized for not paying more open attention to the villagers in the pages of the Natural History. Richard Jefferies, for instance, made this complaint, at the end of an otherwise very affectionate introduction to an 1887 edition:

He knew the farmers and the squires; he had access everywhere, and he had the quickest of eyes. It must ever be regretted that he did not leave a natural history of the people of his day. We should then have had a picture of England just before the beginning of our present era, and a wonderful difference it would have shown.⁵¹

It is not really sufficient to answer that the Natural History was simply not this kind of book, for there is a good deal about human behaviour and social custom in it, particularly in the closing sections. The problem is that those humans who are included are portrayed less as real people than as other kinds of biological specimen. They are curiosities, like the moose and the tortoise: lepers, a toad-witch, gypsies, an idiot boy who had lived in Selborne during the 1750s and 1760s, and who from early childhood had shown an extraordinary obsession with bees:

He was a very merops apiaster, or bee-bird; and very injurious to men that kept bees; for he would slide into their bee-gardens, and, sitting down before the stools, would rap with his finger on the hives, and so take the bees as they came out… As he ran about he used to make a humming noise with his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees. … ⁵²

The full account is extraordinarily exact and detailed, like a clinical case history, but there is little sign of sympathy or understanding. The boy is not even given a name, which at least the tortoise was. Gilbert’s chief regret seems to be that had the boy had more intelligence (‘but directed to the same object’) he might have been able to contribute to a greater scientific understanding of the life of bees!

Nor is the precise account of the making of rushlights – that ‘simple piece of domestic economy’ – which forms Letter XXVI to Daines Barrington, entirely free of similar moralizing. ‘The careful wife of an industrious Hampshire labourer’, who used this cheap and long-lasting source of light, was commendably thrifty; but it’s extremely doubtful if Gilbert had used this poor man’s candle since his penny-pinching days at Oxford, and it seems unfair of him to rebuke the very poor for preferring tallow candles, as he did himself.

In Gilbert’s defence it must be said that he was a strong believer in cottage independence and self-help, and had no time for measures that kept labourers in a state of subservience. There is a letter from Molly (now nicknamed ‘the young Antiquary’ by Gilbert for the help she was giving him on the book) which contains an abstract from an Act of Parliament relating to rushlights. It specified the conditions under which small rushlights for home use could be exempt from tax: ‘and so as such as be only once dipped in, or once drawn through grease or kitchen-stuff, & not at all through any tallow melted or refined, shall not be chargeable … once through the grease!!!’ Molly comments acidly, ‘Pray Observe the tender mercies of the Excise toward the Poor!’⁵³

Yet none of this implies that Gilbert was aloof or remote from the community. I am sure that one reason why he did not feel it necessary to spend more time explicitly discussing ordinary village life was that the villagers were already part of the fibre of the book, as collaborators and, in a sense, co-authors. Gilbert, as we have seen repeatedly, relied on his neighbours for evidence, information and anecdotes. Occasionally he would go out and quite specifically interview them, perhaps about the nests in which cuckoos had been found, or the effects of a storm; but mostly the information must have been gleaned in the course of ordinary conversation. In one of the very few personal recollections of Gilbert that are trustworthy, his brother Benjamin’s granddaughter, Georgiana, quotes Gilbert’s neighbour John Neal, who remembered his animated conversations with villagers, ‘standing in the middle of the road, flourishing his stick’, and talking with ‘his peculiar way of shrugging his shoulders’.⁵⁴

It was in his study of birds and their movements that he found the greatest benefit from having such a wide and sympathetic network of collaborators. The villagers became adept at spotting and reporting early migrants, bringing to Gilbert any curious specimens they had shot or found. The journals are full of more specific instances of help. Thomas Benham, the smallholder who lived down the street from the Wakes, helped in the search for hibernating house-martins. Tim Turner, Gilbert’s next-door neighbour, also assisted in the house-martin study. He showed Gilbert two nests built like long tunnels to fit into the shape of his eaves, confirming the statement Gilbert had made that the birds’ nests were not always hemispheric. Dan Wheeler’s son reported finding a young cuckoo in a hedge-sparrow’s nest, and underneath it, one of the hedge-sparrow’s eggs that had been thrown out. Richard Butler, a thatcher, took Gilbert to see a flycatcher’s nest built behind the head of an old rake lying on a shelf. John Burbey watched a hawfinch breaking open plumstones with its massive beak and consuming the kernels.

Not all these birds got away with their lives. Many – silent witnesses by then – were taken to the Wakes along with the reports on their behaviour. Indeed it is likely that Gilbert’s well-known inquisitiveness actually provoked the ‘procurement’ of some of the rarer species. Some of the villagers acquired the habit of examining the crops of dead birds, and this may at least have put paid to a few damaging myths and superstitions. (John Burbey’s hawfinch was subsequently shot on the suspicion – shared by Gilbert – that it was destroying the buds of fruit trees; but all its crop contained were the plum kernels he had watched it eating.) Gilbert’s prize for initiative, though, would have gone to this farmer’s wife: ‘One of my neighbours shot a ring-dove on an evening, just as it was returning from feed, & going to roost. When his wife had picked & drawn it, she found its craw stuffed with the most nice & tender tops of turnips. These she washed & boiled, & so sate down to a choice & delicate plate of greens, culled & provided in this extraordinary manner.’⁵⁵

George Sturt has pointed out how some of the more generalized descriptions of Selborne in the Natural History, particularly of the character of the soils, come out of not one individual’s impressions, but the long collective experience of the villagers.⁵⁶ So does the language in which they are expressed. Gardens in the north-east of the village have ‘a warm, forward, crumbling mould, called black malm’; over on the sandy soils of Woolmer Forest oaks grow ‘shakey, and so brittle as often to fall to pieces on sawing’. Farming and gardening jargon, vernacular names and dialect words abound throughout Gilbert’s writings, sometimes in the same sentences as scientific Latin. But they are almost always words which have an evocative, often onomatopoeic, effect, regardless of whether their meaning is known. Skies can be ‘muddled’; clouds ‘flisky’; the ground ‘chops’ in dry weather; ‘slidders’ were the shallow trenches down which beech trees were dragged when they were felled on the Hanger.

*

In the autumn of 1787 this legacy of communal knowledge, married to Gilbert’s uniquely personal vision, began its journey into posterity. The first instalments of The Natural History of Selborne had at last been delivered to the printers. Mulso, who had given up harassing Gilbert about its protracted birth, was overjoyed, and promptly put in an order for a set of first editions. Two major decisions about the final shape of the book had already been taken. First, that ‘the epistolary style’ would be maintained throughout, and that even the notes and essays not sent to Pennant and Barrington would be presented as imagined letters to them. Second, some of these contrived letters should be shaped into an introduction and a conclusion to the book. The first nine ‘letters’ build up a picture of the setting of the book, the parish itself, its geology, scenery and history. The last six widen its scope and show the tiny village in the grip of the elements, whose influence had no geographical limits.

To some extent Gilbert’s plan may have been influenced by Sir John Cullum’s The History and Antiquities of Hawsted, which had been published in 1784 and adopted a similar structure. But the way Gilbert arranges his material makes a vastly greater impact than this rather mundane survey of an East Anglian parish. His opening and closing sections give form and scale and even a semblance of narrative structure to what would otherwise have been a shapeless anthology. The Natural History has, as a result, an epic feel, a sense of being an exploration of a whole world, not just a single parish. ‘No novelist could have opened better,’ wrote Virginia Woolf:

Selborne is set solidly in the foreground. But something is lacking; and so before the scene fills with birds, mice, voles, crickets and the Duke of Richmond’s moose … we have Queen Anne lying on the bank to watch the deer driven past. It was an anecdote, he casually remarks, that he had from an old keeper, Adams, whose great-grandfather, father and self were all keepers in the forest. And thus the single straggling street is allied with history, and shaded by tradition.⁵⁷

The working manuscript that Gilbert was slowly assembing for the printers is still extant, and by comparing its text with that of the surviving original letters to Pennant and Barrington it’s possible to get an idea of the extent of his editing and additional writing. It’s clear, for instance, that it not just the opening and closing ‘letters’ that are literary devices; as many as forty of the sixty-six ‘Letters to Daines Barrington’, and fifteen of those to Pennant (amounting to almost half the total text) were probably never sent through the post. It is difficult to be more exact than this because of the extent of the editing. A few letters bear dates even though they were never sent. More have had their original dates changed, sometimes, bafflingly, by just a few days, though on one occasion by a whole year. Parts of other letters are deleted, chopped up, amalgamated, redistributed. A long communication to Pennant dated 8 February 1772 is split into three shorter ones dated, respectively, 8 February, 9 March and 12 April 1772. A note on soft-billed birds sent as part of a letter to Barrington on 15 January 1770, is presented in the Natural History as Letter XLI to Pennant. The letters written on 8 July 1773 went through an even more complicated transformation. From surviving transcripts it appears as if Gilbert wrote identical drafts to Doth Pennant and Barrington that day; but in the Natural History the first half of this communal text (discussing the whitethroat and other small birds) appears at the end of the otherwise ‘false’ letter XL to Pennant, dated 2 September 1774. The remainder forms Letter XV to Barrington, under its correct date.

Although some of these changes and reshufflings seem to be almost gratuitous and beyond any obvious explanation, most of them were sensible measures – for example, to remove personal messages and bring together material on related topics. There was also a good deal of new material to be written, much of it based on Journal entries. These amendments and additions, along with the copies of the original letters, had to be transcribed, and the final manuscript is in at least four hands: Gilbert’s, Gibraltar Jack’s, what looks like Sam Barker’s script, and other, so far unidentified, autographs. Yet despite all this help, and the years he had spent on the book, these last stages of work still faced Gilbert – as they do most authors – with a hectic rush for the line. Molly White, who had been such a sterling source of help and advice for the past ten years, now began to have an even more active involvement in the book. In 1785, at the age of 26, she had married her cousin, Benjamin White’s eldest son (also Ben), who had taken over the management of his father’s publishing house in Fleet Street. Molly saw herself as part of the family business, and she soon took on the role of Gilbert’s sub-editor. From the middle of 1787 Gilbert was sending his concluding essays (probably beginning with Letter LVI to Barrington) direct to her for checking and marking-up. Gilbert, understandably, fussed and fretted about his offspring – ‘Pray let this letter stand the last, before the letters to Mr Barrington describing the weather of Selborne, in number, I think, four’ – but he had no real cause to worry.⁵⁸ Back from Molly came clean sheets of proofs ‘so well corrected, that I have not met with one error!’

The Wakes was a hive of cottage industry during the early months of 1788. While Molly was checking proofs in town, her new son Benjamin was being looked after in the Selborne crèche. ‘In return for your care about my brat’, Gilbert wrote on 13 March, ‘I have pleasure to inform you that your boy is perfectly well, and brisk: and that his nurse is better.’⁵⁹ Gilbert himself was compiling his index, ‘an occupation full as entertaining as that of darning stockings, though by no means so advantageous to society’. Ralph Churton was staying at the Wakes as well, and was also working on an index, to Dr Townson’s Discourse on the Gospels, ‘so that my old parlor is become quite an Index manufactory.⁶⁰ Despite all this activity Gilbert still found time for his journal. He records shearing his mongrel Rover, and using the white hair in plaster for the ceiling; and notes the sad death of John Burbey’s brown owl, ‘a great washer’, which was drowned in a water-butt. And on still nights at the beginning of March he had heard, in a respite from his deafness, the urgent flight-calls of migrating stone curlews returning to breed on the sheep-walks:

On March 1st after it was dark some were passing over the village, as might be perceived by their quick, short note, which they use in their nocturnal excursions by way of watch-word, that they may not stray, & lose their companions.⁶¹

There were a few last-minute changes to the proofs (‘procurers’ in XXIV to Pennant is tactfully changed to ‘neighbours’); and some final queries and requests to Benjamin junior. Should the Antiquities, also composed as a series of letters, be addressed to somebody? Shouldn’t quotations be printed in italics? And would he, please, not be ‘offended at the vague spellings of the names of men, and places, but to take them as you find them in their places, because centuries ago men had no criteria to go by, but spelt just as it happened.’⁶² Then, some time during the spring, it was all done, and after nearly twenty years of daily work Gilbert had no more to do than wait for the finished copies. It is no wonder that, on the point of being launched into the public eye at the age of 68, he found himself in an unaccustomed state of jitters. He felt, he wrote to Churton in August, ‘like a school boy who has done some mischief, and does not know whether he is to be flogged for it or not’.⁶³ He passed the time as best he could, sowing winter vegetables and recording the progress of the hop harvest. In November he watched, without any obvious enthusiasm, the King’s stag-hounds’ unsuccessful search for a stag in Hartley Wood, and seemed more moved by the ‘Swarms of sporting gnats come streaming out from the tops of the hedges, just as at Midsumr’.⁶⁴ In the end, he decided, as he had often done before, to ‘purge off’ his anxiety in verse. The result, a little self-mocking piece entitled ‘To Myself Commencing Author,’ was posted off to friends and relatives in London:

Go, view that House, amid the garden’s bound,

Where tattered volumes strew the learned ground,

Where Novels, – Sermons in confusion lie,

Law, ethics, physics, school-divinity;

Yet did each author, with a parent’s joy,

Survey the growing beauties of his boy,

Upon his new-born babe did fondly look,

And deem Eternity should claim his book.

Taste ever shifts; in half a score of years

A changeful public may alarm thy fears;

Who now reads Cowley? – The sad doom await,

Since such as these are now may be thy fate.⁶⁵

Copies of the Natural History began to be delivered well in time for Christmas. Mulso was honoured with an advance copy, and though he had read most of the text before, he was generous with his praise, even of the section on antiquities which he had reviled for so long. But the most touching tribute in Mulso’s letter of thanks was the inclusion, for the first time in more than thirty years of correspondence, of an astute and nicely crafted natural history vignette. It is so well done one wishes Mulso had tried his hand before:

A Circumstance struck me the other day in your way, it seem’d a novelty to me, but it may be usual & constant, for ought I know. We have great Numbers of Jackdaws, which get under our Tilings. Out of my Study window I have the long Roof of the Deanery before me, and it was new to me that during this whole Month of Decr, as far as it is pass’d, the Jackdaws keep in Pairs. I observed on the Ridge Tiles that tho’ a Number were there at a time, yet for the most part they left little spaces, & the Pairs were discernable & separated from the rest; they were likewise in different Pairs on the Declivity of the Roof. It wants much of Valentine’s day, but the world is in a Hurry to secure it’s rights.⁶⁶

Henry White had received his copies on 3 December, and his journal for the day reads:

Hamper from London containing stock of Books, etc etc, & Natural History of Selborne, pres, by ye Author; a very elegant 4to with splendid engravings. Red-breast comes into the Parsonage.⁶⁷

Sadly Harry did not live long enough to see how the world at large received his brother’s book. On 27 December he filled in his diary for the day, noted ‘the wind rather rough and fierce’ and the poor yields from his coppice woods, and then quite suddenly died, aged only 55. Gilbert wrote to Sam Barker that the ‘unexpected event … has plunged a numerous family in the deepest sorrow and trouble’; and it cast a shadow over what would otherwise have been a happy time for Gilbert. His book was being complimented everywhere. His old friend Jo Warton was delighted with it. Thomas White gave it a long, appreciative but – coming as it did from a brother – properly restrained review in the Gentleman’s Magazine. More important was a perceptive unsigned notice in the Topographer for the Year 1789:

a more delightful, or more original work that Mr. White’s History of Selborne has seldom been published … Natural History has evidently been the author’s principal study, and, of that, ornithology is evidently the favourite. The book is not a compilation from former publications, but the result of many years’ attentive observations to nature itself, which are told not only with the precision of a philosopher, but with that happy selection of circumstances, which mark the poet. Throughout therefore not only the understanding is informed, but the imagination is touched.⁶⁸

But the evidence of his own advancing years and the toll of another desperate winter were hard to avoid during the dark days at the start of 1789. The frost had been joined by northeast winds so piercing that labourers were finding it hard to stand up in the fields. The local ponds were either frozen solid or bone-dry from the previous summer’s drought, and farmers were having to drive their cattle long distances to the local springs for water. When the thaw came Gilbert looked down into a freshly dug grave and saw that ‘the frost … appeared to have ent’red the ground about 12 inches’.

*

The few short years that Gilbert had left were inevitably clouded by the deaths of friends and relatives. Mulso’s wife passed away in December 1790, and the following September Mulso himself succumbed to a long illness. At no other time does one become more acutely aware of the importance and value of Mulso’s letters than when, quite abruptly, he is no longer there to record Gilbert’s reactions to the death of his oldest friend.

But there is no sense of anticlimax about Gilbert’s life after Selborne. He kept up his journal without any perceptible decline in energy or imagination, and continued to be an active gardener and genial host at the Wakes. A journal entry for 16 May 1790 shows a benign satisfaction at the fecundity of both charges: ‘Mrs Edmund White brought to bed of a boy, who has encreased the number of my nephews & nieces to 56. One polyanth-stalk produced 47 pips or blossoms.’

This great army of nephews and nieces, whose regular increase is proudly logged in the journal, were frequent visitors to the Wakes, and Gilbert’s natural history interests plainly rubbed off on at least some of them. In September he wrote to Molly about her second son’s (3 years old and number 52 on Gilbert’s list) fastidious attention to the hirundines. ‘Tom talks much of mum’s martin’s nest; but complains that the young poop on the pavement.’⁶⁹

One of the consequences of publication was the emergence of new correspondents. One of these was George Montagu, the Gloucestershire sportsman-naturalist who went on to compile the first dictionary of birds. Montagu was an energetic and efficient worker, and differentiated many British birds for the first time (including the harrier that bears his name). But his interests did not spread much beyond identification and classification, and his letters to Gilbert are little more than a shopping-list for specimens to add to his collection:

You are surprised at my requesting of you the Goat-sucker [nightjar]: ’tis true many parts of this county produce them, but they are not to be commanded, and one bird in the spring or before August is worth twenty after that time, as most birds are then out of feather, and the young ones are seldom in full, or proper plumage till the winter, and many till the ensuing spring.⁷⁰

Gilbert no longer had the stomach to treat birds as so many bundles of collectable plumage, and though he replied politely to Montagu’s first letter in the summer of 1789, the correspondence soon petered out.

Much more to his taste was a letter of congratulation that arrived the following July from Norfolk. It came from Robert Marsham, of Stratton near Norwich, a traveller and lover of trees who proved to have kept a natural history journal for more than forty years. He was 82, twelve years older than Gilbert, yet it was obvious from their very first exchange that the two men had much in common. Marsham’s first letter is a lively, inquisitive, serpentine ramble around a vast array of topics, from the mating of frogs to winter-leafing hawthorns, that is reminiscent of Gilbert’s early communications with Pennant, and Gilbert replied in kind. They kept up an affectionate and scholarly correspondence that was cut short only by Gilbert’s death. Trees, their planting, care, size and uses, were always the chief topic of discussion, but the two men also found common ground in their growing distaste for the needless exploitation and killing of wild creatures, and in a shared fascination with the mysteries of migration. Marsham admitted early on that he was especially perplexed by what happened to young swallows during the winter:

I have had 4 pair attending my house as many years as i can remember. If these produce two broods of 5 young, you see, Sir, one pair only, will in 7 years produce above half a million, 559870 birds: yet the number every Spring appears the same.⁷¹

Gilbert had a perfectly reasonable solution to this puzzle, but was curiously diffident with it, as if he found it hard to accept that his beloved summer migrants were subject to exactly the same perils as resident birds (like, say, the tits), whose stable populations he never questioned:

With regard to the annual encrease of swallows, & that those that return bear no manner of proportion to those that depart; it is a subject so strange, that it will be best for me to say little. I suppose that nature, ever provident, intends the vast encrease as a balance to some great devastations to which they may be liable either in their emigrations or winter retreats.⁷²

The mass death of such attractive and loyal birds was sad to contemplate. Even the loss of one was a cause for sorrow. When Marsham, discussing the possibility of torpidity in his reply, mentions that he had found a dead swallow under his window on 10 November the previous year, Gilbert admonishes him almost by return of post: ‘It does not appear from yr letter that you endeavoured to revive the Swallow which fell down before yr parlor-window.’⁷³ (Marsham was innocent: ‘the Swallow was dead, & a wing torn off.’)

Gilbert’s fondness for the swallow family was obvious in everything he wrote about them, and as he continued to debate their winter movements with Marsham, it begins to look as if there might be a very simple reason for his stubborn refusal – against an increasing volume of evidence – to come down off the fence on this issue: in an unscientific corner of his heart he did not want them to go. The possibility that a few of the birds whose presence so enlivened the parish during the summer might be sleeping away the cold months on the Hanger must, I am sure, have made the bleak Selborne winters a little more tolerable.

Sep 7. [1791] Cut 125 cucumbers. Young martins, several hundreds, congregate on the church, & yew-tree. Hence I conclude that most of the second broods are flown. Such an assemblage is very beautiful, & amusing, did it not bring with it an association of ideas tending to make us reflect that winter is approaching; & that these little birds are consulting how they may avoid it.⁷⁴

A journal note on the state of the martin flocks a week later (subsequently worked into a letter to Marsham) shows an even more intense mixture of exultation and poignancy:

during this lovely weather the congregating flocks of house martins on the Church & tower were very beautiful & amusing! When they flew off all together from the roof, on any alarm, they quite swarmed in the air. But they soon settled again in heaps on the shingles; where preening their feathers to admit the rays of the sun, they seemed highly to enjoy the warm situation. Thus did they spend the heat of the day, preparing for their Migration, & as it were consulting when & where they are to go!⁷⁵

Marsham shared his sentiments. ‘I love the Swallows and H. Martins so well,’ he replied, ‘that i lament the want of their company in Autumn as heartily & as much as i do the warm weather.’⁷⁶ Although the two men were never to meet they were becoming firm friends. Gilbert confided that he was beginning to ‘look upon You as a Selborne man’; Marsham returned the compliment by naming a favourite beech ‘Mr White’s Beech’. It was ‘about 50 years old, & runs clear about 25 feet, then, about as much in handsome head’. ‘O, that I had known you forty years ago’ remarked Gilbert in that winter of 1791. It is tempting to speculate how Gilbert’s writing activities might have been affected if he had met Marsham at the same time as Pennant and Barrington. The correspondence would certainly have been more intimate and affectionate, but perhaps a little too much so to make for compelling reading. My own suspicion is that the various kinds of frustration Gilbert felt with Pennant and Barrington were important incentives in sharpening his style.

*

It was a sign of just how little Gilbert’s energy and enthusiasm had declined that he was actively preparing another monograph for the Royal Society, this time on the nightjar, or fern-owl. He had always been fascinated by this mysterious bird, even before the occasion when one shook the Hermitage with its churring song (page 117). He called it a ‘nocturnal swallow’, and thought it every bit as evocative of hot summer nights as swifts and swallows were of summer days. In 1789 he began looking at it more closely, in the hope that he might be able to defend it against the superstitious charges that it sucked the teats of goats, and infected calves with the parasitic disease known as ‘puck-eridge’. He complained to Marsham:

The least attention & observation would convince men that these poor birds neither injure the goat-herd nor the grazier; but that they are perfectly harmless, & subsist alone on night-moths & beetles; … nor does it any wise appear, how they can, weak & unarmed as they are, inflict any malady on kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, & can affect them by fluttering over them.⁷⁷

But more ominous stories were in the air. On 14 July 1789, the day that a woman who lived at the foot of the Hanger brought Gilbert two nightjar’s eggs and a clutch of first-hand anecdotes about the bird’s breeding habits, the Parisian workers stormed the Bastille. News of the French Revolution took some while to reach Selborne, but from the autumn of that year Gilbert’s letters begin to contain anxious and bewildered notes about ‘these strange commotions’. Gilbert did his best to understand what was happening, and read Arthur Young’s Travels through France,⁷⁸ He couldn’t feel comfortable with Young’s reformist politics, but he was impressed by his sharp eye, and by his strictures on the French clergy’s weakness for hunting and carousing. Knowing that Young lived in East Anglia, he enquired of Marsham whether they were acquainted. Marsham replied with a rare outburst of biimpishness. He decried the corrupting influence of the Revolution on English workers (thirteen of his own ungrateful villagers had joined a ‘Jacobin’ club!), passed on a string of libellous gossip about Young, and concluded that the man was ‘an abominable coxcomb’. Gilbert, in his replies, seemed anxious to make it clear that, despite his respect for Young’s warnings, he was very far from being a radical:

To try to build up a fairer picture of the nightjar’s life, he began offering sixpence to his ‘intelligent young neighbours’ for every story they could bring him about the bird.

You cannot abhor the dangerous doctrines of levellers & republicans more than I do! I was born & bred a Gentleman, & hope I shall be allowed to die such. The reason you having so many bad neighbours is your nearness to a great factious manufacturing town. Our common people are more simple-minded & know nothing of Jacobin clubs.⁷⁹

It would be wrong to read too much into this statement. Gilbert, by his own admission, had no first-hand experience of English sympathy for the French cause, and was probably exaggerating his feelings in order to avoid a disagreement with a valued acquaintance. If he was no radical, he was also no uncritical defender of property interests. In Selborne politics he remained a resolute supporter of the rights of the ‘common people’. He had personally helped to bring about an informal agreement between Selborne’s commoners to make the cutting of firewood on the Hanger less intense and more equitable.⁸⁰ In 1789 he made a public stand on behalf of a local right of way, and wrote in the Parish Register an affirmation that one of the ancient trackways to the north of the village ‘had been from time immemorial an undisputed bridle road’, until Sir Simeon Stuart and his tenant had stopped it up some twenty years previously, ‘and so deprived the neighbourhood of the advantage of that way’.⁸¹ And even in the last year of his life he was prepared, if the need should arise, to help scupper a far more serious threat to local common rights. News of the danger came from his nephew James (one of Benjamin’s sons). Early in 1793 James had met an attorney known to Gilbert, a Mr Fisher, ‘a Man of a meddling disposition’. Fisher was a canny, speculative racketeer, and had been working through central southern England, drawing up enclosure schemes for different manors, and endeavouring to sell them to the landowners. He had his eye on Selborne, but had apparently been put off by Gilbert’s assertion that the woods and commons in Selborne belonged to the tenants, not the Lord of the Manor, and that this had been confirmed by the 1719 Decree in Chancery. But James thought there was a chance that Fisher might come to Selborne to check the wording of the Decree; and recommended that if Gilbert thought there was any ambiguity in it (and there certainly was; see page 29) he might keep it judiciously hidden:

I trust you will excuse my giving you a hint. If you will take the trouble to look into the Decree, and if it is what Mr. Fisher from conversation with you, supposes it to be, there can be no objection to shew it him when he asks to see it, but if there should be any thing in it which is different from his present ideas, or would induce him to revive this business, I think that you would wish to evade shewing him any thing which may, in the event, occasion much trouble and expence both to yourself and all the other copyholders of Selborne.⁸²

Fisher never came, but the threat he briefly posed was a portent of changes that were soon to affect the independence and diversity of rural communities throughout southern England.

*

Gilbert’s last few years passed comparatively peacefully. He was troubled by coughs in the winter, and by occasional attacks of gravel and gout, but not so much as to interfere with what was still an active outdoor life, and what seemed to be an increasingly rapturous view of the natural world. On 20 March 1792, he was in the middle of a letter to Marsham, describing how the first passage migrant, the chiffchaff, usually arrived on 20th March, ‘when behold! as I was writing this very page, my servant looked in at the parlour door, and said that a neighbour had heard the Chif-chaf this morning!! These are incidents that must make the most indifferent look on the works of the Creation with wonder!’⁸³ That summer the village seemed especially blessed with birds. Two pairs of flycatchers nested at the Wakes, one in the Virginia creeper over the garden door and the other in the vine over the parlour window. There were eleven house-martins’ nests under John Burbey’s eaves, and three singing nightjars close to the track from Selborne through the High Wood, which Gilbert took when he was visiting his nephew Edmund at Newton vicarage. On the evening of 27 August 1792, one of these birds came down to the Wakes garden, and put on a spectacular show by ‘hawking round, & round the circumference of my great spreading oak for twenty times following, keeping mostly close to the grass; but occasionally glancing up amidst the boughs of the tree’, showing ‘a command of wing superior, I think, to the swallow itself’.⁸⁴

The winter of 1792–3 was mild by Selborne standards, and the house was full of visitors. Ralph Churton and Benjamin junior and Molly White came for Christmas, and various other nieces and nephews (now sixty-two in number) throughout January. Snowdrops bloomed before the end of the month. In March Gilbert went for what was to prove his last trip away from Selborne, to visit his brother Benjamin’s new house at Mareland, between Alton and Farnham. The two brothers walked up to Bentley church, a long, steep climb, and from the top were able to see the crest of the South Downs. Gilbert watched Ben’s lambs gambolling, listened to the Farnham bells ringing ‘up the vale of a still evening’, and filled his journal with nostalgic quotations. Back in Selborne in April, Gilbert and Chandler made one last unsuccessful search for hibernating swallows in the ragged thatch of a deserted cottage. But the mild winter had been followed by a harsh, backward spring. There were repeated snow-storms throughout April, and Gilbert’s illnesses had begun to return, all together. On 2 May he wrote an almost desperately poignant note in his journal: ‘Sad, blowing, wintry weather. I think I saw a house martin.’

On 28 May he noted that the hirundines had still not begun to build. But he was able to find some pleasure in the great showers of apple-blossom: ‘My weeding-woman swept-up on the grass-plot a bushel-basket of blossoms from the white apple-tree: & yet that tree seems still covered with bloom.’⁸⁵ On 10 June he cut five cucumbers and read the funeral service over ‘Mary Burbey, aged 16’. The next day ‘A man brought me a large plate of strawberries, which were crude, & not near ripe. The ground all as hard as iron: we can sow nothing nor plant out.’

On the 15th he made his last short journal entry and wrote what was to be his last letter, to Marsham. It was a lively, inquisitive communication which pondered yet again the question of hirundine migration, and Gilbert’s intellect seemed not to have been dulled one bit by the illness ominously outlined in the letter: ‘I have been annoyed this spring with a bad nervous cough, & a wandering gout, that have pulled me down very much, & rendered me very languid & indolent… The season with us is unhealthy.’⁸⁶ But his condition deteriorated suddenly. On 17 June Dr Webb of Alton was sent for, and from this date visited his patient every day. Gilbert was apparently in some pain, for Webb administered a number of ‘anodyne draughts’, presumably of laudanum.⁸⁷ Meanwhile Gilbert’s bed had been moved into the old parlour at the back of the house, where he could look out over the garden to the Hanger, now in full, belated leaf. And it was here, perhaps watching the swallows skimming over the Park Meadows, that he died on 26 June 1793.

 

* An eventual post-mortem examination of Timothy revealed that ‘he’ was a female. To avoid confusion I have kept the masculine pronouns in references to the tortoise.