Chapter I: Front Matter

Mary Webb has also written

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G O N E T O E A R T H
S E V E N F O R A S E C R E T
T H E G O L D E N A R R O W
P O E M S
T H E H O U S E I N D O R M E R F O R E S T
A R M O U R W H E R E I N H E T R U S T E D

PRECIOUS BANE

M A R Y W E B B

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P R E C I O U S B A N E

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
THE RIGHT HON. STANLEY BALDWIN

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY, INC.

P R E C I O U S B A N E , F I R S T P U B L I S H E D , 1 9 2 6 B Y E . P . D U T T O N & C O . , I N C . :: :: A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D :: P R I N T E D I N U . S . A .

_First Printing_ _April, 1926_
_Second Printing_ _May, 1926_
_Third Printing_ _June, 1926_
_Fourth Printing_ _Aug., 1926_
_Fifth Printing_ _Sept., 1926_
_Sixth Printing_ _Aug., 1928_
_Reissued with introduction_
_by Stanley Baldwin_
_February, 1929_

To my dear
H. B. L. W.

Introduction

MARY MERIDITH, the author of _Precious Bane_, was born in the little village of Leighton, near Cressage, under the Wrekin, on March 25th, 1881, and died at St. Leonards, October 8th, 1927, and was buried at Shrewsbury. She was the daughter of George Edward Meredith, a schoolmaster of Welsh descent, by his marriage with Sarah Alice Scott, daughter of an Edinburgh doctor of the clan of Sir Walter Scott. She was the eldest of six children and spent her early girlhood at The Grange, a small country house near Much Wenlock; from 12 to 21 she lived at Stanton-on-Hine-Heath, six miles north-east of Shrewsbury, and for the next ten years at The Old Mill, Meole Brace, a mile from Shrewsbury. In 1912 Mary Meredith married Mr. Henry Bertram Law Webb, a Cambridge graduate and a native of Shropshire. After two years at Weston-super-Mare, where Mr. Webb had a post in a school, Mr. and Mrs. Webb returned to Shropshire, living at Pontesbury and Lyth Hill, working as market gardeners and selling the produce at their own stall in Shrewsbury market. Mrs. Webb had written stories and poems from childhood, but it was at this period that she seriously turned her mind to writing novels. A volume of essays on nature, _The Spring of Joy_, and three novels, _The Golden Arrow_, _Gone to Earth_, and _The House in Dormer Forest_, had been published before she came to live in London in 1921. _Seven for a Secret_ followed in 1922 and _Precious Bane_ in 1924. It was awarded the “Femina Vie Heureuse” Prize for 1924-5 given annually for the best work of imagination in prose or verse descriptive of English life by an author who had not attained sufficient recognition.

I am indebted for these biographical particulars to Mr. Webb to whom _Precious Bane_ is inscribed. I never met Mary Webb and knew nothing of her work until I read _Precious Bane_ at Christmas, 1926. I am glad to think that I was in time to send her a few words of appreciation.

The stupid urban view of the countryside as dull receives a fresh and crushing answer in the books of Mary Webb. All the novels except _Precious Bane_ are set in the hill country of south-west Shropshire, between the Clee Hills and the Breiddens, and between Shrewsbury and Ludlow. The scene of _Precious Bane_ is the country of north Shropshire meres—the Ellesmere district, but the dialect is that of south Shropshire. It is the country of the Severn lowlands and of isolated upland ridges where Celt and Saxon have met and mingled for centuries. For the passing traveller it is inhabited by an uncommunicative population dwelling among places with names like Stedment and Squilver and Stiperstone, Nipstone and Nind. There are of course the old castles and timbered black and white houses for the motoring visitors. But to the imaginative child brought up among the ploughlands and pools and dragon-flies there is “a richness on the world, so it looked what our parson used to call sumptuous.” It is this richness which Mary Webb saw and felt as a girl and remembered with lyrical intensity as a woman.

She has interlaced with this natural beauty the tragic drama of a youth whose whole being is bent on toil and thrift and worldly success only to find himself defeated on the morrow of the harvest by the firing of the cornricks by the father of his lover. The dour figure of Gideon Sarn is set against that of his gentle sister, Prudence, who tells the tale. She is a woman flawed with a hare-shotten lip and cursed in the eyes of the neighbours until her soul’s loveliness is discerned by Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. And so there comes to her at the end of the story the love which is “the peace to which all hearts do strive.”

The strength of the book is not in its insight into human character, though that is not lacking. Nor does it lie in the inevitability with which the drama is unfolded and the sin of an all-absorbing and selfish ambition punished. It lies in the fusion of the elements of nature and man, as observed in this remote countryside by a woman even more alive to the changing moods of nature than of man. Almost any page at random will furnish an illustration of the blending of human passion with the fields and skies.

“So they rode away, and the sound of the people died till it was
less than the hum of a midge, and there was nothing but a scent
of rosemary, and warm sun, and the horse lengthening its stride
towards the mountains, whence came the air of morning.” (p.
117).

One reviewer compared _Precious Bane_ to a sampler stitched through long summer evenings in the bay window of a remote farmhouse. And sometimes writers of Welsh and Border origin, like William Morris, have had their work compared to old tapestries. But while these comparisons suggest something of the harmonies of colour they fail to convey the emotional force which glows in these pages. Nature to Mary Webb was not a pattern on a screen. Her sensibility is so acute and her power over words so sure and swift that one who reads some passages in Whitehall has almost the physical sense of being in Shropshire corn-fields.

_Precious Bane_ is a revelation not of unearthly but of earthly beauty in one bit of the England of Waterloo, the Western edge, haunted with the shadows of superstition, the legendary lore and phantasy of neighbours on the Border, differing in blood and tongue. This mingling of peoples and traditions and turns of speech and proverbial wisdom is what Mary Webb saw with the eye of the mind as she stood at her stall in Shrewsbury market, fastened in her memory, and fashioned for us in the little parcel of novels which is her legacy to literature.

STANLEY BALDWIN 10 Downing Street, S.W.1. October, 1928

Foreword

TO conjure, even for a moment, the wistfulness which is the past is like trying to gather in one’s arms the hyacinthine colour of the distance. But if it is once achieved, what sweetness!—like the gentle, fugitive fragrance of spring flowers, dried with bergamot and bay. How the tears will spring in the reading of some old parchment—“to my dear child, my tablets and my ring”—or of yellow letters, with the love still fresh and fair in them though the ink is faded—“and so good night, my dearest heart, and God send you happy.” That vivid present of theirs, how faint it grows! The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are to-morrow’s past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks—a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go. The whirr of the spinning-wheels has ceased in our parlours, and we hear no more the treadles of the loom, the swift, silken noise of the flung shuttle, the intermittent thud of the batten. But the imagination hears them, and theirs is the melody of romance.

When antique things are also country things, they are easier to write about, for there is a permanence, a continuity in country life which makes the lapse of centuries seem of little moment.

Shropshire is a county where the dignity and beauty of ancient things lingers long, and I have been fortunate not only in being born and brought up in its magical atmosphere, and in having many friends in farm and cottage who, by pleasant talk and reminiscence have fired the imagination, but also in having the companionship of such a mind as was my father’s—a mind stored with old tales and legends that did not come from books, and rich with an abiding love for the beauty of forest and harvest field, all the more intense, perhaps, because it found little opportunity for expression.

In treating of the old subject of sin-eating I am aware that William Sharpe has forestalled me and has written with consummate art. But sin-eaters were as well known on the Welsh border as in Scotland, and John Aubrey tells of one who lived “in a cottage on Rosse highway,” and was a “lamentable poore raskell.”

My thanks are due to the authors of _Shropshire Folk Lore_ for the rhymes of “Green Gravel” and “Barley Bridge,” and for the verification of various customs which I had otherwise only known by hearsay, and to the Somerset weavers, who recently let me see both hand looms and spinning-wheels in use.

MARY WEBB
March, 1926.

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