Under the Greenwood Tree | Page 4

of fifty or sixty years ago.
One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical
bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist) or
harmonium player; and despite certain advantages in point of control
and accomplishment which were, no doubt, secured by installing the
single artist, the change has tended to stultify the professed aims of the
clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the interest of
parishioners in church doings. Under the old plan, from half a dozen to
ten full-grown players, in addition to the numerous more or less
grown-up singers, were officially occupied with the Sunday routine,
and concerned in trying their best to make it an artistic outcome of the
combined musical taste of the congregation. With a musical executive
limited, as it mostly is limited now, to the parson's wife or daughter and
the school- children, or to the school-teacher and the children, an
important union of interests has disappeared.
The zest of these bygone instrumentalists must have been keen and
staying to take them, as it did, on foot every Sunday after a toilsome
week, through all weathers, to the church, which often lay at a distance
from their homes. They usually received so little in payment for their
performances that their efforts were really a labour of love. In the

parish I had in my mind when writing the present tale, the gratuities
received yearly by the musicians at Christmas were somewhat as
follows: From the manor-house ten shillings and a supper; from the
vicar ten shillings; from the farmers five shillings each; from each
cottage-household one shilling; amounting altogether to not more than
ten shillings a head annually--just enough, as an old executant told me,
to pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which
they mostly ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in
their own manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their
music-books were home-bound.
It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and ballads in
the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the insertions being
continued from front and back till sacred and secular met together in
the middle, often with bizarre effect, the words of some of the songs
exhibiting that ancient and broad humour which our grandfathers, and
possibly grandmothers, took delight in, and is in these days unquotable.
The aforesaid fiddle-strings, rosin, and music-paper were supplied by a
pedlar, who travelled exclusively in such wares from parish to parish,
coming to each village about every six months. Tales are told of the
consternation once caused among the church fiddlers when, on the
occasion of their producing a new Christmas anthem, he did not come
to time, owing to being snowed up on the downs, and the straits they
were in through having to make shift with whipcord and twine for
strings. He was generally a musician himself, and sometimes a
composer in a small way, bringing his own new tunes, and tempting
each choir to adopt them for a consideration. Some of these
compositions which now lie before me, with their repetitions of lines,
half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and their intermediate
symphonies, are good singing still, though they would hardly be
admitted into such hymn-books as are popular in the churches of
fashionable society at the present time.
August 1896.
Under the Greenwood Tree was first brought out in the summer of
1872 in two volumes. The name of the story was originally intended to

be, more appropriately, The Mellstock Quire, and this has been
appended as a sub-title since the early editions, it having been thought
unadvisable to displace for it the title by which the book first became
known.
In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun were
material for another kind of study of this little group of church
musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so lightly, even so
farcically and flippantly at times. But circumstances would have
rendered any aim at a deeper, more essential, more transcendent
handling unadvisable at the date of writing; and the exhibition of the
Mellstock Quire in the following pages must remain the only extant
one, except for the few glimpses of that perished band which I have
given in verse elsewhere.
T. H.
April 1912.

PART THE FIRST--WINTER
CHAPTER I
: MELLSTOCK-LANE

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well
as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no
less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself;
the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat
boughs rise and fall. And winter, which