There was a curious custom at one time in the Dales of holding market at the church. Meat and all kinds of things were displayed at the church doors, and it often happened that people would make their bargains first and hang their goods over the backs of their seats. Though such practices have long been discontinued, there are still people living who have heard the clerk give out in the churchyard the advertisements of the several sales which were to be held in the neighbourhood. One good custom there was, however, which might be often practised now with advantage in small towns and villages, namely, that of the churchwardens going round the village during divine service and driving all the loungers into church.
The Dalesfolk had their sports too, the chief of which was the one for which Cumberland and Westmoreland have ever been famous, namely wrestling. They were also keen hunters; and until quite a recent period a few couples of hounds were kept in every dale, and when the presence of a fox was betrayed by a missing lamb or a decimated hen-roost, all the dogs and nearly all the men in the parish entered in pursuit of the depredator, and were seldom balked by their victim.
Some songs that were in vogue in the Dales a hundred years ago are still sung, chiefly at fairs by itinerant ballad-mongers. Some of the tunes are very antique, as for instance, _St Dunstan’s Hunt’s Up_, mentioned by Sir Walter Scott as lost and forgotten, but which is still played on the fiddle every Christmas-eve. The festivals held from time to time in the Dales were such as were very common in all parts of ‘Merrie England’ when our forefathers worked hard, and money was much scarcer than it is now. That they worked harder on the whole is a thing which admits of two opinions; but one thing is certain, namely, that their work was of a steady, careful, easy-going kind, whilst now it is all bustle and drive, in the endeavour to cram into a few fleeting hours as much as they could do in a whole week. Such as we find the world, however, we must put up with it, content, like them, to keep pegging away, and meeting the storms and buffetings of life with the same courageous spirit which enabled them to add their mite towards the honour, glory, and welfare of our common country.