No one can read the book without perceiving that all the conversations are fictitious. Mr. Cobbold was no Shakespeare, and he makes all his characters talk in the same style as (if report be true) he conversed himself. The whole of the Barry incidents may be fictitious; for if the details given were true, everybody in Suffolk must have known who Margaret’s husband was. The father of Edmund and John “Barry” was the discoverer of crag shells as manure and was a farmer and miller at Levington Hill, the next parish to Nacton. But even then the author may have used pardonable license. Still the last letter of Margaret’s which the author declares he received from his mother cannot be genuine. It is signed Margaret “Barry,” and it says expressly that she was married to the man who had loved her fruitlessly when the family lived at Nacton. In point of fact Margaret never married. Had the book been a document written many centuries ago, there would be suggested grave doubts whether such a woman ever existed; as it is, the Cobbold family have lived in Ipswich in unbroken succession during the past century; and documents, like the original gaol-delivery in 1797 and the exemption of Mr. Cobbold from any parish offices for arresting the culprit, prove beyond doubt the existence of Margaret Catchpole. As, however, the subject of these lectures is ‘English social life,’ I shall now give some extracts from the book before me, and from Crabbe’s biography to shew how the peasantry lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.[15] Even to this day if you enter a harvest field in Suffolk at reaping time you will hear the old Norman French demand for “_Largess_” and you will be expected to give it. Mr. Cobbold gives in his book a description of a harvest home, many features of which are still remembered. The farmer lodged all the single men in his house, but the married men (known as hinds) lived in the neighbouring cottages. When the last sheaf of corn was conveyed to the stack-yard, the barn was covered with green leaves and the sheaf brought in with shouting and blowing of the harvest horn. The farmer then gave an ample supper to the labourers, and he, his wife, and daughters waited on their guests. The head man of the harvest field acted as “lord of the feast.” The chief song was called “Hallo Largess,” and was in honour of the division of the Largess obtained in harvest time among the reapers. Here is a verse of the song quoted by our author: “Now the ripening corn In the sheaves is borne, And the loaded wain Bring home the grain. The merry, merry reapers sing And jocund shouts the happy harvest hind Hallo Large, Hallo Large, Hallo Largess.”