Our ‘Packmans,’ ‘Paxmans,’ and perhaps ‘Packers,’ were, as a rule, the village commissioners.[296] What a simple and homely state of life do their names suggest. No half-hourly omnibus, or still more frequent train, whisked off the bustling housewife to the big town—now some sleepy old place with grass-grown streets, and half a century behind the times, where ‘news much older than the ale goes round’—but then the thrifty emporium of cheese and butter and such like stores, and great in the eyes of country bumpkins. No; if you visited the town in those days you must make a day of it. And the mistress knew better than do this. Leave her dairy, forsooth—what would become of the cream if she left Malkin to forget her work, and talk with Giles the cowboy behind the stable door all morning? She leave, indeed! Of course she could not, so there was the pack-horseman, who for a trifling commission went to and from the market for her and her neighbours. As he returned in the cool of the evening, when the sun was low and work over, you might see him pausing awhile at the door of the farmsteads, long after he has given the mistress her store, and, more slily, Malkin her ribbon. He is in no hurry now, for he is telling the country folk all the news; how the great world is wagging, and how there has been a great battle with the Frenchers some six or eight weeks ago (news, good or bad, did not travel fast in those days). The Frenchmen are looked upon by the simple rustics as the very impersonification of iniquity, they being under a sort of impression that a Frenchman is a being who defies God and man alike, and would think no bones of eating you up. At once the packman is plied for a full, true, and particular account of the battle, and he, there being none to gainsay his description, and with an eye probably to the good wife’s best ale, which, as he well knows from experience, will be brought forth with a freedom of hospitality proportionate to the horror of the details, fills up a bloody tale with sundry touches of a most tragic character, while the country folk gape in wide-mouthed terror, and the old grandmother cries ‘Lord, ha’ mercy on us!’ His face is lost to sight once more in the ale jug, and then he passes on to other steads, where a similar scene and a similar reward await his thirsty soul. Another name in evident use for the packman was that of ‘Sumpter,’ ‘Martin le Someter’ or ‘William le Sumeter’ being common entries at this time. We are still familiar with the term as applied to the mule or horse that carried the baggage, but in a personal sense it has long been extinct,[297] saving in our directories, where as ‘Sumpter’ and ‘Sumter’ it is by no means seldom met with. How large a load these animals were required to bear we may picture to ourselves from a verse found in ‘Percy’s Reliques’—