was not more than eight hundred acres or so. But his family had been in
possession of it long before the Earls of Cumnor had been heard of;
before the Hely-Harrisons had bought Coldstone Park; no one in
Hollingford knew the time when the Hamleys had not lived at Hamley.
'Ever since the Heptarchy,' said the vicar. 'Nay,' said Miss Browning,
'I have heard that there were Hamleys of Hamley before the Romans.' The
vicar was preparing a polite assent, when Mrs. Goodenough came in with
a still more startling assertion. 'I have always heerd,' said she, with
all the slow authority of an oldest inhabitant, 'that there was Hamleys
of Hamley afore the time of the pagans.' Mr. Ashton could only bow, and
say, 'Possibly, very possibly, madam.' But he said it in so courteous a
manner that Mrs. Goodenough looked round in a gratified manner, as much
as to say, 'The Church confirms my words; who now will dare dispute
them?' At any rate, the Hamleys were a very old family, if not
aborigines. They had not increased their estate for centuries; they had
held their own, if even with an effort, and had not sold a rood of it
for the last hundred years or so. But they were not an adventurous
race. They never traded, or speculated, or tried agricultural
improvements of any kind. They had no capital in any bank; nor what
perhaps would have been more in character, hoards of gold in any
stocking. Their mode of life was simple, and more like that of yeomen
than squires. Indeed Squire Hamley, by continuing the primitive manners
and customs of his forefathers, the squires of the eighteenth century,
did live more as a yeoman, when such a class existed, than as a squire
of this generation. There was a dignity in this quiet conservatism that
gained him an immense amount of respect both from high and low; and he
might have visited at every house in the county had he so chosen. But
he was very indifferent to the charms of society; and perhaps this was
owing to the fact that the squire, Roger Hamley, who at present lived
and reigned at Hamley, had not received so good an education as he