Tales of the Ridings | Page 6

Shepherdess, _The Knight of
the Burning Pestle and The Two Noble Kinsmen_ in 1897, and an
elaborately critical edition of Herrick's Poems, in completion of his
Study, in 1915. He also contributed the chapter on "Shakespeare's

Apocrypha" to the Cambridge History of English Literature; and for
many years acted as English editor of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch.
(4) Dean Bourne, the parish to which Herrick was not very willingly
wedded, is within five miles of Ashburton, Moorman's birthplace.
(5) The words in inverted commas are quoted from the records of the
Class, kindly communicated by the secretary, Mr Hind. It is difficult to
imagine anything stronger than the expressions of affectionate respect
which recur again and again in them. I add one more, from the pen
which wrote the second quotation: "So quiet, yet so pervading, was his
love that each felt the individual tie; and our class, so diverse in spirit,
thought and training, has never heard or uttered an angry word. We felt
it would be acting disloyally to hurt anyone whom he loved."
(6) The May King, written in 1913, has been twice acted by school
children, once in the open air, once in the large hall of the University.
Potter Thompson, written in 1911-1912, was acted by students of the
University in 1913 and is at present in rehearsal for acting by pupils of
the Secondary School of Halifax. The Towneley Shepherds' Play was
acted with slight modifications by University students, under
Moorman's guidance, in 1907. His adaptation of it, written in 1919, has
not yet been acted, but was written in the hope that some day it might
be. It may be added that he was largely responsible for a very
successful performance of Fletcher's _Elder Brother_ by the University
students in 1908.
(7) First published serially in The Yorkshire Weekly Post of 1917-1918.

A LAOCOON OF THE ROCKS
The enclosure of the common fields of England by hedge or wall,
whereby the country has been changed from a land of open champaigns
and large vistas to one of parterres and cattle-pens, constitutes a
revolution in the social and economic life of the nation. Though
extending over many years and even centuries, this process of change

reached its height in the latter half of the eighteenth and the early
nineteenth century, and thus comes into line with the industrial
revolution which was taking place in urban England about the same
time. To some, indeed, the enclosure of the open fields may appear as
the outward symbol of that enwalling of the nation's economic freedom
which transformed the artisan from an independent craftsman to a
wage-earner, and made of him a link in the chain of our modern factory
system. To those economists who estimate the wealth of nations solely
by a ledger-standard, the enclosure of the common fields has seemed a
wise procedure; but to those who look deeper, a realisation has come
that it did much to destroy the communal life of the countryside. Be
that as it may, it is beyond question that to the ancient and honoured
order of shepherds, from whose ranks kings, seers and poets have
sprung, it brought misfortune and even ruin.
Among the shepherds of the eastern slopes of the Pennine Hills few
were better known in the early years of the nineteenth century than
Peregrine Ibbotson. A shepherd all his life, as his father and grandfather
had been before him, he nevertheless belonged to a family that had
once owned wide tracts of land in Yorkshire. But the Ibbotsons had
fought on the losing side in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the forfeiture
of their lands had reduced them to the rank of farmers or shepherds.
But the tradition of former greatness was jealously preserved in the
family; it lived on in the baptismal names which they gave to their
children and fostered in them a love of independence together with a
spirit of reserve which was not always appreciated by their neighbours.
But the spirit of the age was at work in them as in so many other
families in the dale villages. Peregrine's six sons had long since left him
alone in his steading on the moors: some had gone down to the
manufacturing towns of the West Riding and had prospered in trade;
others had fought, and more than one had fallen, in the Napoleonic
wars. Peregrine, therefore, although seventy-six years of age and a
widower, had no one to share roof and board with him in his shepherd's
cottage a thousand feet above the sea.
Below, in the dale, lay the villages with their clustered farmsteads and
their square-towered churches of Norman foundation. Round about his

steading, which was screened by sycamores from the westerly gales,
lay the mountain pastures, broken by terraces of limestone rock.