The final weekly entry in this Sunday Series, taken from a Commonplace Book written by Edward Henry Lisle Reeve in 1881, which was given to a member of this Society through contract from an Essex local history blog.
Squire Tufnell of
Langleys, Great Waltham
Squire
Tufnell, of Langleys, is always held up as the type of a perfect country
gentleman.
Squire
Tufnell was a man of large mind – quite above the petty bickerings and
cavillings of the many. He would not
patronize one of the two party newspapers in the town more than the other, but
told the bookseller to send him regularly four copies of each saying that “he
paid no attention to any of their squabbles”.
He
would watch his men on a hot day in summer making the hay in the park in front
of the house. “Don’t they seem to poise
rather?” he would say, pointing to the mechanical efforts made to balance cocks
of hay on the fork by turn instead of giving them the zealous shaking they
required. “I must go and stimulate them”.
And then he would send out some of the home brew’d to inspire new
vigour.
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