Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw descending upon them
the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of
the county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely
enough, upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were
now. So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and
persist in everything under the sky.
LI
At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world
was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular
date of the year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor
service during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to
be now carried out. The labourers--or "work-folk", as they used to
call themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from
without--who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to
the new farms.
These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here.
When Tess's mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about
Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the
home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire
for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch. With the younger
families it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an
advantage. The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the
family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became
it turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.
However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village
life did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A
depopulation was also going on. The village had formerly contained,
side by side with the argicultural labourers, an interesting and
better-informed class, ranking distinctly above the former--the class
to which Tess's father and mother had belonged--and including the
carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with
nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people
who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of
their being lifeholders like Tess's father, or copyholders, or
occasionally, small freeholders. But as the long holdings fell
in, they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly
pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer for his hands.
Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land were looked
upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of
others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who had
formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the
depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the
large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as
"the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns", being
really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.