The Village Labourer
1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill
by J.L. and Barbara Hammond
Originally published 1911
New Edition, 1920.



PREFACE




This edition differs from previous editions of The Village Labourer
in two respects. The original Chapter One has been omitted: this chapter
described the concentration of power in the hands of a small class, which
was the leading feature of our political development in the eighteenth century.
Secondly, the Appendices have been reduced, but the student who wishes to
pursue the subject of enclosure further will find, at the end of this volume,
full details of four important and representative enclosures.




In their preface to the edition published in 1913 the authors discussed
some of the controversies that had arisen on the topic of the enclosures.
It seems worth while to reproduce here the substance of that preface. Two
main criticisms have been passed on the treatment of enclosures in these
pages: the first, that the writers have drawn an unjust picture, because
they deliberately excluded the importance of enclosure in increasing the
food supplies of the nation; the second, that the hardships of the poor have
been exaggerated, and that, though the system of enclosure lent itself to
abuses, there was no evidence that wrong was done in the mass of enclosures.




The writers submit the following considerations: (1) It has been the accepted
view of all modern critics, with the single exception of dr Hasbach, that
the enclosures of this period, or at any rate the enclosures that took place
after 1795, made the soil of England immediately more productive. That this
is the usual view was stated in the text; its correctness was not discussed
or questioned. The subject of this volume is the fate of the Village Labourer,
and so far as he is concerned, the facts which they are accused of neglecting
suggest two reflections: (a) the feeding of Manchester and Leeds did not
make life cheaper to him; and (b) if agriculture suddenly became a great
industry, multiplying as some say England's resources twenty-fold, an equitable
readjustment must have increased the prosperity of all classes engaged in
that industry. The greater the stress laid on the progress of agriculture,
the greater appear the perversity and injustice of the arrangements of a
society under which the labourer became impoverished. If it is argued that
the misery of the labourer was the price the nation had to pay for that advance,
it is worth while to point out that that was not the view of Young, or Davies,
or Eden, or Sinclair, or Cobbett, and that the actual revolution that was
accomplished was not the only alternative to the old unreformed common field
system. (2) The authors desire to point out how little they have relied on
solitary instances for their general statements. Complaint has been made
of the publishing of the story of the attempted enclosure of Sedgmoor, but
those who read that account carefully will see that the passage from Selwyn's
letters are important as disclosing the state of mind of a chairman of an
Enclosure Committee; they will note also that his letters show that it was
a common practice for Members of Parliament to arrange meetings in order
to manipulate Committees in the interest of private persons. Selwyn's view
of the responsibilities of a chairman of one of these Committees has therefore
a special significance. The main question for the historian is this: Were
the poor sacrificed or not in the enclosures as they were carried out? The
writers have given their reasons for thinking that they were sacrificed,
and needlessly sacrificed, and no evidence has come under their notice in
the criticisms published to shake that view. They have set out the actual
methods of procedure that were adopted for converting England from the old
to the new system, and they think it is clear that those methods were such
that the poor were bound to suffer unless Parliament expressly intervened
for their protection. This was apparent, or became apparent, to observers
at the time, and proposals that would have helped the poor were made by Arthur
Young, by Eden, by Davies, by Suffield, and by the Board of Agriculture.
Those proposals were disregarded, not necessarily from wickedness or rapacity,
but because the atmosphere of the ruling class was unfavourable. Young referred
to his own proposal six years later in a passage which is worth quoting:




'I have been reading over my Inquiry into the Propriety of applying Wastes
to the better Maintenance of the Poor. I had almost forgotten it, but of
all the essays and papers I have produced, none I think so pardonable as
this, so convincing by facts, and so satisfactory to any candid reader. Thank
God I wrote it, for though it never had the smallest effect except in exciting
opposition and ridicule, it will, I trust, remain a proof of what ought to
have been done; and had it been executed, would have diffused more comfort
among the poor than any proposition that ever was made' (Autobiography,
July 14, 1806).




One further fact of interest and importance in this connection may be
mentioned. Michael Sadler, the Factory Reformer, was, unhappily for England,
thrown out of Parliament after the passing of the Reform Bill. He was in
the House of Commons for only three years. One of the most important speeches
that he made in his brief career there, was a long speech reviewing the disastrous
change that had come over the agricultural labourers in recent times. The
chief cause he found in the disappearance of the small farmer, the pulling
down of cottages, and the enclosures. He said that the enclosures had inflicted
on the poor as a class 'the most irreparable injuries.' Like Thelwall, with
whom he would have been slow to recognise any affinity, he argued that enclosure
might have benefited the poor, but that in practice it had ruined them. 'Inclosures
might indeed have been so conducted as to have benefited all parties; but
now, coupled with other features of the system, they form a part of what
Blackstone denominates a "fatal rural policy"; one which has completed
the degradation and ruin of your agricultural poor.'




Two subjects are discussed fully in this volume for the first time. One
is the actual method and procedure of Parliamentary Enclosure; the other
the labourers' rising of 1830. More than one important book has been written
on enclosures during the last few years, but nowhere can the student find
a full analysis of the procedure and stages by which the old village was
destroyed. The rising of 1830 has only been mentioned incidentally in general
histories: it has nowhere been treated as a definite demand for better conditions,
and its course, scope, significance and punishment have received little attention.
The writers of this book have treated it fully, using for that purpose the
Home Office Papers accessible to students in the Record Office. They wish
to express their gratitude to Mr Hubert Hall for his help and guidance in
this part of their work.




The obligations of the writers to the important books published in recent
years on eighteenth-century local government in the text, but the are manifest,
and they are acknowledged writers desire to mention specially their great
debt to Mr Hobson's Industrial System, a work that seems to them to throw
a new and most illuminating light on the economic significance of the history
of the early years of the last century.




Mr and Mrs Arthur Ponsonby and Miss M. K. Bradby have done the writers
the great service of reading the entire book and suggesting many important
improvements. Mr and Mrs C. R. Buxton, Mr A. Clutton Brock, Professor L.
T. Hobhouse, and Mr H. W. Massingham have given them valuable help and advice
on various parts of the work.




HEMEL HEMPSTED, April 1920.




CHAPTER ONE




The Village Before Enclosure




To elucidate these chapters, and to supply further information for those
who are interested in the subject, we publish an Appendix containing the
history, and tolerably full particulars, of four separate enclosures at Croydon,
Haute Huntre, Stanwell and Wakefield.




At the time of the great Whig Revolution, England was in the main a country
of commons and of common fields;(1*) at the time of the Reform Bill, England
was in the main a country of individualist agriculture and of large enclosed
farms. There has probably been no change in Europe in the last two centuries
comparable to this in importance of which so little is known to-day, or of
which so little is to be learnt from the general histories of the time. The
accepted view is that this change marks a great national advance, and that
the hardships which incidentally followed could not have been avoided: that
it meant a vast increase in the food resources of England in comparison with
which the sufferings of individuals counted for little: and that the great
estates which then came into existence were rather the gift of economic forces
than the deliberate acquisitions of powerful men. We are not concerned to
corroborate or to dispute the contention that enclosure made England more
productive,(2*) or to discuss the merits of enclosure itself as a public
policy or a means to agricultural progress in the eighteenth century. Our
business is with the changes that the enclosures caused in the social structure
of England, from the manner in which they were in practice carried out. We
propose, therefore, to describe the actual operations by which society passed
through this revolution, the old village vanished, and rural life assumed
its modern form and character.




It is difficult for us, who think of a common as a wild sweep of heather
and beauty and freedom, saved for the enjoyment of the world in the midst
of guarded parks and forbidden meadows, to realise that the commons that
disappeared from so many an English village in the eighteenth century belonged
to a very elaborate, complex, and ancient economy. The antiquity of that
elaborate economy has been the subject of fierce contention, and the controversies
that rage round the nursery of the English village recall the controversies
that raged round the nursery of Homer. The main subject of contention has
been this. Was the manor or the township, or whatever name we like to give
to the primitive unit of agricultural life, an organisation imposed by a
despotic landowner on his dependents, or was it created by the co-operation
of a group of free tribesmen, afterwards dominated by a military overlord?
Did it owe more to Roman tradition or to Teutonic tendencies? Professor Vinogradoff,
the latest historian, inclines to a compromise between these conflicting
theories. He thinks that it is impossible to trace the open-field system
of cultivation to any exclusive right of ownership or to the power of coercion,
and that the communal organisation of the peasantry, a village community
of shareholders who cultivated the land on the open-field system and treated
the other requisites of rural life as appendant to it, is more ancient than
the manorial order. It derives, in his view, from the old English society.
The manor itself, an institution which partakes at once of the character
of an estate and of a unit of local government, was produced by the needs
of government and the development of individualist husbandry, side by side
with this communal village. These conditions lead to the creation of lordships,
and after the Conquest they take form in the manor. The manorial element,
in fact, is superimposed on the communal, and is not the foundation of it:
the medieval village is a free village gradually feudalised. Fortunately
it is not incumbent on us to do more than touch on this fascinating study,
as it is enough for our purposes to note that the greater part of England
in cultivation at the beginning of the eighteenth century was cultivated
on a system which, with certain local variations, belonged to a common type,
representing this common ancestry.




The term 'common' was used of three kinds of land in the eighteenth-century
village, and the three were intimately connected with each other. There were
(1) the gable fields, (2) the common meadowland, and (3) the common or waste.
The arable fields were divided into strips, with different owners, some of
whom owned few strips, and some many. The various strips that belonged to
a particular owner were scattered among the fields. Strips were divided from
each other, sometimes by a grass band called a balk, sometimes by a furrow.
They were cultivated on a uniform system by agreement, and after harvest
they were thrown open to pasturage. The common meadow land was divided up
by lot, pegged out, and distributed among the owners of the strips; after
the hay was carried, these meadows, like the arable fields, were used for
pasture. The common or waste, which was used as a common pasture at all times
of the year, consisted sometimes of woodland, sometimes of roadside strips,
and sometimes of commons in the modern sense.(3*)




Such, roughly, was the map of the old English village. What were the classes
that lived in it, and what were their several rights? In a normal village
there would be (1) a Lord of the Manor, (2) Freeholders, some of whom might
be large proprietors, and many small, both classes going by the general name
of Yeomanry, (3) Copyholders, (4) Tenant Farmers, holding by various sorts
of tenure, from tenants at will to farmers with leases for three lives, (5)
Cottagers, (6) Squatters, and (7) Farm Servants, living in their employers'
houses. The proportions of these classes varied greatly, no doubt, in different
villages, but we have an estimate of the total agricultural population in
the table prepared by Gregory King in 1688, from which it appears that in
addition to the Esquires and Gentlemen, there were 40,000 families of freeholders
of the better sort, 140,000 families of freeholders of the lesser sort, and
150,000 farmers. Adam Smith, it will be remembered, writing nearly a century
later, said that the large number of yeomen was at once the strength and
the distinction of English agriculture.




Let us now describe rather more fully the different people represented
in these different categories, and the different rights that they enjoyed.
We have seen in the first chapter that the manorial courts had lost many
of their powers by this time, and that part of the jurisdiction that the
Lord of the Manor had originally exercised had passed to the Justice of the
Peace. No such change had taken place in his relation to the economic life
of the village. He might or he might not still own a demesne land. So far
as the common arable or common meadow was concerned, he was in the same position
as any other proprietor: he might own many strips or few strips or no strips
at all. His position with regard to the waste was different, the difference
being expressed by Blackstone 'in those waste grounds, which are usually
called commons, the property of the soil is generally in the Lord of the
Manor, as in the common fields it is in the particular tenant.' The feudal
lawyers had developed a doctrine that the soil of the waste was vested in
the Lord of the Manor, and that originally it had all belonged to him. But
feudal law acknowledged certain definite limitations to his rights over the
waste. The Statute of Merton, 1235, allowed him to make enclosures on the
waste, but only on certain terms; he was obliged to leave enough of the waste
for the needs of his tenants. Moreover, his powers were limited, not only
by the concurrent rights of freeholders and copyholders thus recognised by
this ancient law, but also by certain common rights of pasture and turbary
enjoyed by persons who were neither freeholders nor copyholders, namely cottagers.
These rights were explained by the lawyers of the time as being concessions
made by the Lord of the Manor in remote antiquity. The Lord of the Manor
was regarded as the owner of the waste, subject to these common rights: that
is, he was regarded as owning the minerals and the surface rights (sand and
gravel) as well as sporting rights.




Every grade of property and status was represented in the ranks of the
freeholders, the copyholders and the tenant farmers, from the man who employed
others to work for him to the man who was sometimes employed in working for
others. No distinct line, in fact, can be drawn between the small farmer,
whether freeholder, copyholder or tenant, and the cottager, for the cottager
might either own or rent a few strips; the best dividing-line can be drawn
between those who made their living mainly as farmers, and those who made
their living mainly as labourers.




It is important to remember that no farmer, however large his holdings
or property, or however important his social position, was at liberty to
cultivate his strips as he pleased. The system of cultivation would be settled
for him by the Jury of the Manor Court, a court that had different names
in different places. By the eighteenth century the various courts of the
manorial jurisdiction had been merged in a single court, called indifferently
the View of Frankpledge, the Court Leet, the Court Baron, the Great Court
or the Little Court, which transacted so much of the business hitherto confided
to various courts as had not been assigned to the Justices of the Peace.(4*)
Most of the men of the village, freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders, Or
cottagers, attended the court, but the constitution of the Jury or Homage
seems to have varied in different manors. Sometimes the tenants of the manor
were taken haphazard in rotation: sometimes the steward controlled the choice,
sometimes a nominee of the steward or a nominee of the tenants selected the
Jury: sometimes the steward took no part in the selection at all. The chief
part of the business of these courts in the eighteenth century was the management
of the common fields and common pastures, and the appointment of the village
officers. These courts decided which seed should be sown in the different
fields, and the dates at which they were to be opened and closed to common
pasture. Under the most primitive system of rotation the arable land was
divided into three fields, of which one was sown with wheat, another with
spring corn, and the third lay fallow: but by the end of the eighteenth century
there was a great variety of cultivation, and we find a nine years' course
at Great Tew in Oxfordshire, a six years' course in Berkshire, while the
Battersea common fields were sown with one uniform round of grain without
intermission, and consequently without fallowing.(5*)




By Sir Richard Sutton's Act(6*) for the cultivation of common fields,
passed in 1773, a majority of three-fourths in number and value of the occupiers,
with the consent of the owner and titheholder, was empowered to decide on
the course of husbandry, to regulate stinted commons, and, with the consent
of the Lord of the Manor, to let off a twelfth of the common, applying the
rent to draining or improving the rest of it.(7*) Before this Act, a universal
consent to any change of system was necessary.(8*) The cultivation of strips
in the arable fields carried with it rights of common over the waste and
also over the common fields when they were thrown open. These rights were
known as 'common appendant' and they are thus defined by Blackstone: 'Common
appendant is a right belonging to the owners or occupiers of arable land
to put commonable beasts upon the Lord's waste and upon the lands of other
persons within the same manor.'




The classes making their living mainly as labourers were the cottagers,
farm servants, and squatters. The cottagers either owned or occupied cottages
and had rights of common on the waste, and in some cases over the common
fields. These rights were of various kinds: they generally included the right
to pasture certain animals, to cut turf and to get fuel. The cottagers, as
we have already said, often owned or rented land. This is spoken of as a
common practice by Addington, who knew the Midland counties well; Arthur
Young gives instances from Lincolnshire and Oxfordshire, and Eden from Leicestershire
and Surrey. The squatters or borderers were, by origin, a separate class,
though in time they merged into the cottagers. They were settlers who built
themselves huts and cleared a piece of land in the commons or woods, at some
distance from the village. These encroachments were generally sanctioned.
A common rule in one part of the country was that the right was established
if the settler could build his cottage in the night and send out smoke from
his chimney in the morning.(9*) The squatters also often went out as day
labourers. The farm servants were usually the children of the small farmers
or cottagers; they lived in their masters' houses until they had saved enough
money to marry and take a cottage of their own.




Were there any day labourers without either land or common rights in the
old village? It is difficult to suppose that there were many.(10*) Blackstone
said of common appurtenant that it was not a general right 'but can only
be claimed by special grant or by prescription, which the law esteems sufficient
proof of a special grant or agreement for this purpose.' Prescription covers
a multitude of encroachments. Indeed, it was only by the ingenuity of the
feudal lawyers that these rights did not attach to the inhabitants of the
village at large. These lawyers had decided in Gateward's case, 1603, that
'inhabitants' were too vague a body to enjoy a right, and on this ground
they had deprived the inhabitants of the village of Stixswold in Lincolnshire
of their customary right of turning out cattle on the waste.(11*) From that
time a charter of incorporation was necessary to enable the inhabitants at
large to prove a legal claim to common rights. But rights that were enjoyed
by the occupiers of small holdings or of cottages by long prescription, or
by encroachments tacitly sanctioned, must have been very widely scattered.




Such were the classes inhabiting the eighteenth-century village. As the
holdings in the common fields could be sold, the property might change hands,
though it remained subject to common rights and to the general regulations
of the manor court. Consequently the villages exhibited great varieties of
character. In one village it might happen that strip after strip had been
bought up by the Lord of the Manor or some proprietor, until the greater
part of the arable fields had come into the possession of a single owner.
In such eases, however, the land so purchased was still let out as a rule
to a number of small men, for the engrossing of farms as a practice comes
into fashion after enclosure. Sometimes such purchase was a preliminary to
enclosure. The Bedfordshire reporter gives an example in the village of Bolnhurst,
in that county. Three land speculators bought up as much of the land as they
could with a view to enclosing the common fields and then selling at a large
profit. But the land turned out to be much less valuable than they had supposed,
and they could not get it off their hands: all improvements were at a standstill,
for the speculators only let from year to year, hoping still to find a market.(12*)
In other villages, land might have changed hands in just the opposite direction.
The Lord of the Manor might sell his property in the common fields, and sell
it not to some capitalist or merchant, but to a number of small farmers.
We learn from the evidence of the Committee of 1844 on enclosures that sometimes
the Lord of the Manor sold his property in the waste to the commoners. Thus
there were villages with few owners, as there were villages with many owners.
The writer of the Report on Middlesex, which was published in 1798 says,
'I have known thirty landlords in a field of 200 acres, and the property
of each so divided as to lie in ten or twenty places, containing from an
acre or two downwards to fifteen perches; and in a field of 300 acres I have
met with patches of arable land, containing eight perches each. In this instance
the average size of all the pieces in the field was under an acre. In all
cases they lie in long, narrow, winding or worm-like slips.'(13*)




The same writer states that at the time his book was written (1798) 20,000
out of the 23,000 arable acres in Middlesex were cultivated on the common-field
system.(14*) Perhaps the parish of Stanwell, of which we describe the enclosure
in detail elsewhere, may be taken as a fair example of an eighteenth-century
village. In this parish there were, according to the enclosure award, four
large proprietors, twenty-four moderate proprietors, twenty-four small proprietors,
and sixty-six cottagers with common rights.




The most important social fact about this system is that it provided opportunities
for the humblest and poorest labourer to rise in the village. Population
seems to have moved slowly, and thus there was no feverish competition for
land. The farm servant could save up his wages and begin his married life
by hiring a cottage which carried rights of common, and gradually buy or
hire strips of land. Every village, as Hasbach has put it, had its ladder,
and nobody was doomed to stay on the lowest rung. This is the distinguishing
mark of the old village. It would be easy, looking only at this feature,
to idealise the society that we have described, and to paint this age as
an age of gold. But no reader of Fielding or of Richardson would fall into
this mistake, or persuade himself that this community was a society of free
and equal men, in which tyranny was impossible. The old village was under
the shadow of the squire and the parson, and there were many ways in which
these powers controlled and hampered its pleasures and habits: there were
quarrels, too, between farmers and cottagers, and there are many complaints
that the farmers tried to take the lion's share of the commons: but, whatever
the pressure outside and whatever the bickerings within, it remains true
that the common-field system formed a world in which the villagers lived
their own lives and cultivated the soil on a basis of independence.




It was this community that now passed under the unqualified rule of the
oligarchy. Under that rule it was to disappear. Enclosure was no new menace
to the poor. English literature before the eighteenth century echoes the
dismay and lamentations of preachers and prophets who witnessed the havoc
that it spread. Stubbes had written in 1553 his bitter protest against the
enclosures which enabled rich men to eat up poor men, and twenty years later
a writer had given a sombre landscape of the new farming: 'We may see many
of their houses built alone like ravens' nests, no birds building near them.'
The Midlands had been the chief scene of these changes, and there the conversion
of arable land into pasture had swallowed up great tracts of common agriculture,
provoking in some cases an armed resistance. The enclosures of this century
were the second and the greater of two waves.(15*) In one respect enclosure
was in form more difficult now than in earlier periods, for it was generally
understood at this time that an Act of Parliament was necessary. In reality
there was less check on the process. For hitherto the enclosing class had
had to reckon with the occasional panic or ill-temper of the Crown. No English
king, it is true, had intervened in the interests of the poor so dramatically
as did the earlier and unspoilt Louis XIV, who restored to the French village
assemblies the public lands they had alienated within a certain period. But
the Crown had not altogether overlooked the interests of the classes who
were ruined by enclosure, and in different ways it had tried to modify the
worst consequences of this policy. From 1490 to 1601 there were various Acts
and proclamations designed for this purpose. Charles I had actually annulled
the enclosures of two years in certain midland counties, several Commissions
had been issued, and the Star Chamber had instituted proceedings against
enclosures on the ground that depopulation was an offence against the Common
Law. Mr. Firth holds that Cromwell's influence in the eastern counties was
due to his championship of the commoners in the fens. Throughout this time,
however ineffectual the intervention of the Crown, the interests of the classes
to whom enclosures brought wealth and power were not allowed to obliterate
all other considerations.




From the beginning of the eighteenth century the reins are thrown to the
enclosure movement, and the policy of enclosure is emancipated from all these
checks and afterthoughts. One interest is supreme throughout England, supreme
in Parliament, supreme in the country; the Crown follows, the nation obeys.




The agricultural community which was taken to pieces in the eighteenth
century and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs
a free government, was threatened from many points. It was not killed by
avarice alone. Cobbett used to attribute the enclosure movement entirely
to the greed of the landowners, but, if greed was a sufficient motive, greed
was in this case clothed and almost enveloped in public spirit. Let us remember
what this community looked like to men with the mind of the landlord class.
The English landowners have always believed that order would be resolved
into its original chaos, if they ceased to control the lives and destinies
of their neighbours. 'A great responsibility rests on us landlords; if we
go, the whole thing goes.' So says the landlord in Mr. Galsworthy's novel,
and so said the landlords in the eighteenth century. The English aristocracy
always thinking of this class as the pillars of society, as the Atlas that
bears the burden of the world, very naturally concluded that this old peasant
community, with its troublesome rights, was a public encumbrance. This view
received a special impetus from all the circumstances of the age. The landlord
class was constantly being recruited from the ranks of the manufacturers,
and the new landlords, bringing into this charmed circle an energy of their
own, caught at once its taste for power, for direction, for authority, for
imposing its will. Readers of Shirley will remember that when Robert Moore
pictures to himself a future of usefulness and success, he says that he will
obtain an Act for enclosing Nunnely Common, that his brother will be put
on the bench, and that between them they will dominate the parish. The book
ends in this dream of triumph. Signorial position owes its special lustre
for English minds to the association of social distinction with power over
the life and ways of groups of men and women. When Bagehot sneered at the
sudden millionaires of his day, who hoped to disguise their social defects
by buying old places and hiding among aristocratic furniture, he was remarking
on a feature of English life that was very far from being peculiar to his
time. Did not Adam Smith observe that merchants were very commonly ambitious
of becoming country gentlemen? This kind of ambition was the form that public
spirit often took in successful Englishmen, and it was a very powerful menace
to the old village and its traditions of collective life.




Now this passion received at this time a special momentum from the condition
of agriculture. A dictatorship lends itself more readily than any other form
of government to the quick introduction of revolutionary ideas, and new ideas
were in the air. Thus, in addition to the desire for social power, there
was behind the enclosure movement a zeal for economic progress seconding
and almost concealing the direct inspiration of self-interest. Many an enclosing
landlord thought only of the satisfaction of doubling or trebling his rent:
that is unquestionable. If we are to trust so warm a champion of enclosure
as William Marshall, this was the state of mind of the great majority. But
there were many whose eyes glistened as they thought of the prosperity they
were to bring to English agriculture, applying to a wider and wider domain
the lessons that were to be learnt from the processes of scientific farming.
A man who had caught the large ideas of a Coke, or mastered the discoveries
of a Bakewell, chafed under the restraints that the system of common agriculture
placed on improvement and experiment. It was maddening to have to set your
pace by the slow bucolic temperament of small farmers, nursed in a simple
and old-fashioned routine, who looked with suspicion on any proposal that
was strange to them. In this tiresome partnership the swift were put between
the shafts with the slow, and the temptation to think that what was wanted
was to get rid of the partnership altogether, was almost irresistible. From
such a state the mind passed rapidly and naturally to the conclusion that
the wider the sphere brought into the absolute possession of the enlightened
class, the greater would be the public gain. The spirit in which the Board
of Agriculture approached the subject found appropriate expression in Sir
John Sinclair's high-sounding language. 'The idea of having lands in common,
it has been justly remarked, is to be derived from that barbarous state of
society, when men were strangers to any higher occupation than those of hunters
or shepherds, or had only just tasted the advantages to be reaped from the
cultivation of the earth.'(16*) Arthur Young(17*) compared the with its inconveniences
'which the barbarity of their ancestors had neither knowledge to discover
nor government to remedy' to the Tartar policy of the shepherd state.




It is not surprising that men under the influence of these set ideas could
find no virtue at all in the old system, and that they soon began to persuade
themselves that that system was at the bottom of all the evils of society.
It was harmful to the morals and useless to the pockets of the poor. 'The
benefit,' wrote Arbuthnot,(18*) 'which they are supposed to reap from commons,
in their present state, I know to be merely nominal; nay, indeed, what is
worse, I know, that, in many instances, it is an essential injury to them,
by being made a plea for their idleness; for, some few excepted, if you offer
them work, they will tell you, that they must go to look up their sheep,
cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or, perhaps, say they must take
their horse to be shod, that he may carry them to a horse-race or cricket-match.'
Lord Sheffield, in the course of one of the debates in Parliament, described
the commoners as a 'nuisance,' and most people of his class thought of them
as something worse. Mr. John Billingsley, who wrote the Report on Somerset
for the Board of Agriculture in 1795, describes in some detail the enervating
atmosphere of the commoners' life. 'Besides, moral effects of an injurious
tendency accrue to the cottager, from a reliance on the imaginary benefits
of stocking a common. The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few
geese, naturally exalts the peasant, in his own conception, above his brethren
in the same rank of society. It inspires some degree of confidence in a property,
inadequate to his support. In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a
habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly
lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion increases by indulgence;
and at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of
adding intemperance to idleness.'(19*) Mr. Bishton, who wrote the Report
on Shropshire in 1794, gives a still more interesting glimpse into the mind
of the enclosing class: 'The use of common land by labourers operates upon
the mind as a sort of independence.' When the commons are enclosed 'the labourers
will work every day in the year, their children will be put out to labour
early,' and 'that subordination of the lower ranks of society which in the
present times is so much wanted, would be thereby considerably secured.'




A similar view was taken of the moral effects of commons by Middleton,
the writer of the Report on Middlesex.(20*) 'On the other hand, they are,
in many instances, of real injury to the public; by holding out a lure to
the poor man -- I mean of materials wherewith to build his cottage, and ground
to erect it upon: together with firing and the run of his poultry and pigs
for nothing. This is of course temptation sufficient to induce a great number
of poor persons to settle upon the borders of such commons. But the mischief
does not end here: for having gained these trifling advantages, through the
neglect or connivance of the lord of the manor, it unfortunately gives their
minds an improper bias, and inculcates a desire to live, from that time forward,
without labour, or at least with as little as possible.'




One of the witnesses before the Select Committee on Commons Inclosure
in 1844 was Mr. Carus Wilson, who is interesting as the original of the character
of Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. We know how that zealous Christian would
regard the commoners from the speech in which he reproved Miss Temple for
giving the pupils at Lowood a lunch of bread and cheese on one occasion when
their meagre breakfast had been uneatable. 'Oh, madam, when you put bread
and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children's mouths, you
may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their
immortal souls!' We are not surprised to learn that Mr. Carus Wilson found
the commoners 'hardened and unpromising,' and that he was obliged to inform
the committee that. the misconduct which the system encouraged 'hardens the
heart, and causes a good deal of mischief, and at the same time puts the
person in an unfavourable position for the approach of what might be serviceable
to him in a moral and religious point of view.'(21*)




It is interesting, after reading all these confident generalisations about
the influence of this kind of life upon the character of the poor, to learn
what the commoners themselves thought of its moral atmosphere. This we can
do from such a petition as that sent by the small proprietors and persons
entitled to rights of common at Raunds, in Northamptonshire. These unfortunate
people lost their rights by an Enclosure Act in 1797, and during the progress
of the Bill they petitioned Parliament against it, in these terms: 'That
the Petitioners beg Leave to represent to the House that, under Pretence
of improving Lands in the said Parish, the Cottagers and other Persons entitled
to Right of Common on the Lands intended to be inclosed, will be deprived
of an inestimable Privilege, which they now enjoy, of turning a certain Number
of their Cows, Calves, and Sheep, on and over the said Lands; a Privilege
that enables them not only to maintain themselves and their Families in the
depth of Winter, when they cannot, even for their Money, obtain from the
Occupiers of other Lands the smallest Portion of Milk or Whey for such necessary
Purpose, but, in addition to this, they can now supply the Grazier with young
or lean Stock at a reasonable Price, to fatten and bring to Market at a more
moderate Rate for general Consumption, which they conceive to be the most
rational and effectual Way of establishing Public Plenty and Cheapness of
Provision; and they further conceive, that a more ruinous Effect of this
Inclosure will be the almost total depopulation of their Town, now filled
with bold and hardy Husbandmen, from among whom, and the Inhabitants of other
open Parishes, the Nation has hitherto derived its greatest Strength and
Glory, in the Supply of its Fleets and Aries, and driving them, from Necessity
and Want of Employ, in vast Crowds, into manufacturing Towns, where the very
Nature of their Employment, over the Loom or the Forge, soon may waste their
Strength, and consequently debilitate their Posterity, and by imperceptible
degrees obliterate that great Principle of Obedience to the Laws of God and
their Country, which forms the Character of the simple and artless Villagers,
more equally distributed through the Open Countries, and on which so much
depends the good Order and Government of the State: These are some of the
Injuries to themselves as Individuals, and of the ill Consequences to the
Public, which the Petitioners conceive will follow from this, as they have
already done from many Inclosures, but which they did not think they were
entitled to lay before the House (the Constitutional Patron and Protector
of the Poor) until it unhappily came to their own Lot to be exposed to them
through the Bill now pending.'(22*)




When we remember that the enterprise of the age was under the spell of
the most seductive economic teaching of the time, and that the old peasant
society, wearing as it did the look of confusion and weakness, had to fear
not only the simplifying appetites of the landlords, but the simplifying
philosophy, in England of an Adam Smith, in France of the Physiocrats, we
can realise that a ruling class has seldom found so plausible an atmosphere
for the free play of its interests and ideas. Des crimes sont flattés
d'être présidés par une vertu. Bentham himself thought
the spectacle of an enclosure one of the most reassuring of all the evidences
of improvement and happiness. Indeed, all the elements seemed to have conspired
against the peasant, for aesthetic taste, which might at other times have
restrained, in the eighteenth century encouraged the destruction of the commons
and their rough beauty. The rage for order and symmetry and neat cultivation
was universal. It found expression in Burnet, who said of the Alps and Appenines
that they had neither form nor beauty, neither shape nor order, any more
than the clouds of the air: in Johnson, who said of the Highlands that 'the
uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller;'
and in Cobbett, who said of the Cotswolds, 'this is a sort of country having
less to please the eye than any other that I have ever seen, always save
and except the heaths like those of Bagshot and Hindhead.' The enjoyment
of wild nature was a lost sense, to be rediscovered one day by the Romanticists
and the Revolution, but too late to help the English village. In France,
owing to various causes, part economic, part political, on which we shall
touch later, the peasant persisted in his ancient and ridiculous tenure,
and survived to become the envy of English observer: it was only in England
that he lost his footing, and that his ancient patrimony slipped away from
him.




We are not concerned at this juncture to inquire into the truth of the
view that the sweeping policy of enclosure increased the productivity and
resources of the State: we are concerned only to inquire into the Way in
which the aristocracy gave shape and effect to it. This movement, assumed
by the enlightened opinion of the day to be beneficent and progressive, was
none the less a gigantic disturbance; it broke up the old Village life; it
transferred a great body of property; it touched a vast mass of interests
at a hundred points. A governing class that cared for its reputation for
justice would clearly regard it as of sovereign importance that this delicate
network of rights and claims should not be roughly disentangled by the sheer
power of the stronger: a governing class that recognised its responsibility
for the happiness and order of the State would clearly regard it as of sovereign
importance that this ancient community should not be dissolved in such a
manner as to plunge great number of contented men into permanent poverty
and despair. To decide how far the aristocracy that presided over these changes
displayed insight or foresight, sympathy or imagination, and how far it acted
with a controlling sense of integrity and public spirit, we must analyse
the methods and procedure of Parliamentary enclosure.




Before entering on a discussion of the methods by which Parliamentary
enclosure was effected, it is necessary to realise the extent of its operations.
Precise statistics, of course, are not to be had, but there are various estimates
based on careful study of such evidence as we possess. Mr. Levy says that
between 1702 and 1760 there were only 246 Acts, affecting about 400,000 acres,
and that in the next fifty years the Acts had reached a total of 2438, affecting
almost five million acres.(23*) Mr. Johnson gives the following table for
the years 1700-1844, founded on Dr. Slater's detailed estimate(24*) --




 Common Field and Waste only

some waste

Years Acts Acreage Acts Acreage




1750-1760 152 237,845 56 74,518

1761-1801 1,479 2,428,721 521 752,150

1802-1844 1,075 1,610,302 808 939,043




Total 2,706 4,276,868 1,385 1,765,711




This roughly corresponds with the estimate given before the Select Committee
on Enclosures in 1844, that there were some one thousand seven hundred private
Acts before 1800, and some two thousand between 1800 and 1844. The General
Report of the Board of Agriculture on Enclosures gives the acreage enclosed
from the time of Queen Anne down to 1805 as 4,187,056. Mr. Johnson's conclusion
is that nearly 20 per cent of the total acreage of England has been enclosed.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though Mr. Prothero puts
the percentage still higher. But we should miss the significance of these
proportions if we were to look at England at the beginning of the eighteenth
century as a map of which a large block was already shaded, and of which
another block, say a fifth or a sixth part, was to be shaded by the enclosure
of this period. The truth is that the life of the common-field system was
still the normal village life of England, and that the land which was already
enclosed consisted largely of old enclosures or the lord's demesne land lying
side by side with the open fields. This was put quite clearly by the Bishop
of St. Davids in the House of Lords in 1781. 'Parishes of any considerable
extent consisted partly of old inclosures and partly of common fields.'(25*)
If a village living on the common-field system contained old enclosures,
effected some time or other without Act of Parliament, it suffered just as
violent a catastrophe when the common fields or the waste were enclosed,
as if there had been no previous enclosure in the parish. The number of Acts
passed in this period varies of course with the different counties,(26*)
but speaking generally, we may say that the events described in the next
two chapters are not confined to any one part of the country, and that they
mark a national revolution, making sweeping and profound changes in the form
and the character of agricultural society throughout England.(27*)




NOTES:




1. Gregory King and Davenant estimated that the whole of the cultivated
land in England in 1685 did not amount to much more than half the total area,
and of this cultivated portion three-fifths was still farmed on the old common
field system.




2. For a full discussion, in which the ordinary view is vigorously combated
in an interesting analysis, see Hasbach, History of the Agricultural Labourer;
on the other side, Levy, Large and Small Holdings.




3. This was the general structure of the village that was dissolved in
the eighteenth century. It is distinguished from the Keltic type of communal
agriculture, know as run-rig, in two important respects. In the run-rig village
the soil is periodically redivided, and the tenant's holding is compact.
Dr. Slater (Geographical Journal</i>, Jan. 1907) has shown that
in those parts of England where the Keltic type predominated, e.g., in Devon
and Cornwall, enclosure took place early, and he argues with good reason
that it was easier to enclose by voluntary agreement where the holdings were
compact than it was where they were scattered in strips. But gradual enclosure
by voluntary agreement had a different effect from the cataclysm-like enclosure
of the eighteenth century, as is evident from the large number of small farmers
in Devonshire.




4. See Webb, Manor and Borough, vol. i, p. 66 seq.




5. Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields,
p. 77.




6. 13 George III, c. 81.




7. This was done at Barnes Common; see for whole subject, Annals of
Agriculture, vol. xvii. p. 516.




8. For cases where changes in the system of cultivation of common fields
had been made, see Annals of Agriculture, vol. xvi. p. 606; 'To Peterborough,
crossing an open field, but sown by agreement with turnips.' Cf. Report
on Bedfordshire: 'Clover is sown in some of the open clay-fields by common
consent (p. 339), and 'Turnips are sometimes cultivated, both on the sands
and gravels, by mutual consent.' (p. 340).




9. Slater, p. 119.




10. Dr. Slater's conclusion is that 'in the open field village the entirely
landless labourer was scarcely to be found.' p. 130.




11. See Commons, Forests, and Footpaths, by Lord Eversley, p. 11.




12. Bedforshire Report, 1808, p. 223, quoting from Arthur Young.




13. p. 114.




14. p. 138.




15. See on this point, Levy, Large and Small Holdings, p. 1.




16. Report of Select Committee on Waste Lands, 1795, p. 15, Appendix
B.




17. Annals of Agriculture, vol. i. p. 72.




18. An Inquiry into the Connection between the present Price of Provisions
and the Size of Farms, 1773, p. 81.




19. Report on Somerset, reprinted 1797, p. 52; compare Report
on Commons in Brecknock, Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxii, p. 632, where
commons are denounced as 'hurtful to society by holding forth a temptation
to idleness, that fell parent to vice and immorality' also compare Ibid.,
vol. xx, p. 145, where they are said to encourage the commoners to be 'hedge,
breakers, pilferers, nightly trespassers... poultry and rabbit stealers,
or such like.'




20. p. 103.




21. Committee on Inclosures, 1844, p. 135.




22. House of Commons Journal, June 19, 1797.




23. Large and Small Holdings, p. 24.




24. Disappearance of Small Landowner, p. 90; Slater's English
Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, Appendix B.




25. Parliamentary Register, March 30, 1781.




26. See Dr. Slater's detailed estimate.




27. There were probably many enclosures that hand not the authority either
of a special Act or of the Act of 1756, particularly in the more distant
counties. The evidence of Mr Carus Wilson upon the committee of 1844 shows
that the stronger classes interpreted their rights and powers in a liberal
spirit. Mr Carus Wilson had arranged with the other large proprietors to
let out the only common which remained open in the thirteen parishes in which
his father was interested as a large landowner, and to pay the rent into
the poor rates. Some members of the committee asked whether the minority
who dissented from the arrangement could be excluded, and Mr Wilson explained
that he and his confederates believed that the minority were bound by their
action, and that by this simple plan they could shut out all cattle from
the common, except the cattle of their joint tenants. -- Committee on
Inclosures, 1844, p. 127.




Chapter Two




Enclosure (1)




An enclosure, like most Parliamentary operations, began with a petition
from a local person or persons, setting forth the inconveniencies of the
present system and the advantages of such a measure. Parliament, having received
the petition, would give leave for a Bill to be introduced. The Bill would
be read a first and a second time, and would then be referred to a Committee,
which, after considering such petitions against the enclosure as the House
of Commons referred to it, would present its report. The Bill would then
be passed, sent to the Lords, and receive the Royal Assent. Finally, the
Commissioners named in the Bill would descend on the district and distribute
the land. That is, in brief, the history of a successful enclosure agitation.
We will now proceed to explore its different stages in detail.




The original petition was often the act of a big landowner, whose solitary
signature was enough to set an enclosure process in train.(1*) Before 1774
it was not even incumbent on this single individual to let his neighbours
know that he was asking Parliament for leave to redistribute their property.
In that year the House of Commons made a Standing Order prodding that notice
of any such petition should be affixed to the church door in each of the
parishes affected, for three Sundays in the month of August or the month
of September. This provision was laid down, as we learn from the Report of
the Committee that considered the Standing Orders in 1775, because it had
often happened that those whose land was to be enclosed knew nothing whatever
of transactions in which they were rather intimately concerned, until they
were virtually completed.(2*)




But the publicity that was secured by this Standing Order, though it prevented
the process of enclosure from being completed in the dark, did not in practice
give the village any kind of voice in its own destiny. The promoters laid
all their plans before they took their neighbours into the secret. When their
arrangements were mature, they gave notice to the parish in accordance with
the requirements of the Standing Order, or they first took their petition
to the various proprietors for signature, or in some cases they called a
public meeting. The facts set out in the petition against the Enclosure Bill
for Haute Huntre, show that the promoters did not think that they were bound
to accept the opinion of a meeting. In that case 'the great majority' were
hostile, but the promoters proceeded with their petition notwithstanding.(3*)
Whatever the precise method, unless some large proprietor stood out against
the scheme, the promoters were masters of the situation. This we know from
the evidence of witnesses favourable to enclosure. 'The proprietors of large
estates,' said Arthur Young, 'generally agree upon the measure, adjust the
principal points among themselves, and fix upon their attorney before they
appoint any general meeting of the proprietors.'(4*) Addington, in his Inquiry
into the Reasons for and against Inclosing, quoting another writer, says,
'the whole plan is generally settled between the solicitor and two or three
principal proprietors without ever letting the rest of them into the secret
till they are called upon to sign the petition.'(5*) What stand could the
small proprietor hope to make against such forces? The matter was a chose
jugée, and his assent a mere formality. If he tried to resist, he
could be warned that the success of the enclosure petition was certain, and
that those who obstructed it would suffer, as those who assisted it would
gain, in the final award. His only prospect of successful opposition to the
lord of the manor, the magistrate, the impropriator of the tithes, the powers
that enveloped his life, the powers that appointed the commissioner who was
to make the ultimate award, lay in his ability to move a dim and distant
Parliament of great landlords to come to his rescue. It needs no very penetrating
imagination to picture what would have happened in a village in which a landowner
of the type of Richardson's hero in Pamela was bent on an enclosure, and
the inhabitants, being men like Goodman Andrews, knew that enclosure meant
their ruin. What, in point of fact, could the poor do to declare their opposition?
They could tear down the notices from the church doors:(6*) they could break
up a public meeting, if one were held: but the only way in which they could
protest was by violent and disorderly proceedings, which made no impression
at all upon Parliament, and which the forces of law and order could, if necessary,
be summoned to quell.




The scene now shifts to Parliament, the High Court of Justice, the stronghold
of the liberties of Englishmen. Parliament hears the petition, and, almost
as a matter of course, grants it, giving leave for the introduction of a
Bill, and instructing the member who presents the petition to prepare it.
This is not a very long business, for the promoters have generally taken
the trouble to prepare their Bill in advance. The Bill is submitted, read
a first and second time, and then referred to a Committee. Now a modern Parliamentary
Private Bill Committee is regarded as a tribunal whose integrity and impartiality
are beyond question, and justly, for the most elaborate precautions are taken
to secure that it shall deserve this character. The eighteenth-century Parliament
treated its Committee with just as much respect, but took no precautions
at all to obtain a disinterested court. Indeed, the committee that considered
an enclosure was chosen on the very contrary principle. This we know, not
from the evidence of unkind and prejudiced outsiders, but from the Report
of the Committee of the House of Commons, which inquired in 1825 into the
constitution of Committees on Private Bills. 'Under the present system each
Bill is committed to the Member who is charged with its management and such
other Members as he may choose to name in the House, and the Members serving
for a particular County (usually the County immediately connected with the
object of the Bill) and the adjoining Counties, and consequently it has been
practically found that the Members to whom Bills have been committed have
been generally those who have been most interested in the result.'




During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there developed the practice
of opening the committees. This was the system of applying to Private Bills
the procedure followed in the case of Public Bills, and proposing a resolution
in the House of Commons that 'all who attend shall have voices,' i.e., that
any member of the House who cared to attend the committee should be able
to vote. We can see how this arrangement acted. It might happen that some
of the county members were hostile to a particular enclosure scheme; in that
case the promoters could call for an open committee and mass their friends
upon it. It might happen, on the other hand, that the committee was solid
in supporting an enclosure, and that some powerful person in the House considered
that his interests, or the interests of his friend, had not been duly consulted
in the division of the spoil. In such a case he would call for all to 'have
voices' and so compel the promoters to satisfy his claims. This system then
secured some sort of rough justice as between the powerful interests represented
in Parliament, but it left the small proprietors and the cottagers, who were
unrepresented in this mêlée, absolutely at the mercy of these
conflicting forces.




It is difficult, for example, to imagine that a committee in which the
small men were represented would have sanctioned the amazing clause in the
Ashelworth Act(7*) which provided 'that all fields or inclosures containing
the Property of Two or more Persons within one fence, and also all inclosures
containing the property of one Person only, if the same be held by or under
different Tenures or Interests, shall be considered as commonable land and
be divided and allotted accordingly.' This clause, taken with the clause
that follows, simply meant that some big landowner had his eye on some particular
piece of enclosed property, which in the ordinary way would not have gone
into the melting-pot at all. The arrangements of the Wakefield Act would
hardly have saved the scrutiny of a committee on which the Duke of Leeds'
class was not paramount. Under that Act(8*) the duke was to have full power
to work mines and get minerals, and those proprietors whose premises suffered
in consequence were to have reasonable satisfaction, not from the duke who
was enriched by the disturbing cause, but from all the allottees, including
presumably those whose property was damaged. Further, to save himself inconvenience,
the duke could forbid allottees on Westgate Moor to build a house for sixty
years. A different kind of House of Commons would have looked closely at
the Act at Moreton Corbet which gave the Lord of the manor all enclosures
and encroachments more than twenty years old, and also at the not uncommon
provision which exempted the tithe-owner from paying for his own fencing.




The Report of the 1825 Committee describes the system as 'inviting all
the interested parties in the Souse to take part in the business of the committee,
which necessarily terminates in the prevalence of the strongest part, for
they who have no interest of their own to serve will not be prevailed upon
to take part in a struggle in which their unbiassed judgment can have no
effect.' The chairman of the committee was generally the member who had moved
to introduce the Bill. The unreformed Parliament of landowners that passed
the excellent Act of 1782, forbidding Members of Parliament to have an interest
in Government contracts, never thought until the eve of the Reform Bill that
there was anything remarkable in this habit of referring Enclosure Bills
to the judgment of the very landowners who were to profit by them. And in
1825 it was not the EncLosure Bills, in which. the rich took and the poor
suffered, but the Railway Bills, in which rich men were pitted against rich
men, that drew the attention of the House of Commons to the disadvantages
and risks of this procedure.




The committee so composed sets to work on the Bill, and meanwhile, perhaps,
some of the persons affected by the enclosure send petitions against it to
the Souse of Commons. Difficulties of time and space would as a rule deter
all but the rich dissentients, unless the enclosure was near London. These
petitions are differently treated according to their origin. If they emanate
from a lord of the manor, or from a tithe-owner, who for some reason or other
is dissatisfied with the contemplated arrangements, they receive some attention.
In such a case the petitioner probably has some friend in Parliament, and
his point of view is understood. He can, if necessary, get this friend to
attend the committee and introduce amendments. He is therefore a force to
be reckoned with; the Bill is perhaps altered to suit him; the petition is
at any rate referred to the committee. On the other hand, if the petition
comes from cottagers or small proprietors, it is safe, as a rule, to neglect
it.




The enclosure histories set out in the Appendix supply some good examples
of this differential treatment. Lord Strafford sends a petition against the
Bill for enclosing Wakefield with the result that he is allowed to appoint
a commissioner, and also that his dispute with the duke of Leeds is exempted
from the jurisdiction of the Enclosure Commissioners. On the other hand,
the unfortunate persons who petition against the monstrous provision that
forbade them to erect any building for twenty, forty or sixty years, get
no kind of redress. In the case of Croydon, James Trecothick, Esq., who is
dissatisfied with the Bill, is strong enough to demand special consideration.
Accordingly a special provision is made that the commissioners are obliged
to sell Mr. Trecothick, by private contract, part of Addington Hills, if
he so wishes. But when the various freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders
and inhabitant householders of Croydon, who complain that the promoters of
the Bill have named commissioners without consulting the persons interested,
ask leave to nominate a third commissioner, only four members of the House
of Commons support Lord William Russell's proposal to consider this petition,
and fifty-one vote the other way. Another example of the spirit in which
Parliament received petitions from unimportant persons is furnished by the
case of the enclosure of Holy Island. In 1791 (Feb. 23)(9*) a petition was
presented to Parliament for the enclosure of Holy Island, asking for the
division of a stinted pasture, and the extinction of the rights of common
or 'eatage' over certain infield lands. Leave was given, and the Bill was
prepared and read a first time on 28th February. The same day Parliament
received a petition from freeholders and stallingers, who ask to be heard
by themselves or by counsel against the Bill. From Eden(10*) we learn that
there were 26 freeholders and 31 stallingers, and that the latter were in
the strict sense of the term as much freeholders as the former. Whilst, however,
a freeholder had the right to put 30 sheep, 4 black cattle and 3 horses on
the stinted common, a stallinger had a right of common for one horse and
one cow only. The House ordered that this petition should lie on the table
till the second reading, and that the petitioners should then be heard. The
second reading, which had been fixed for 2nd April, was deferred till 20th
April, a change which probably put the petitioners to considerable expense.
On 20th April the Bill was read a second time, and the House was informed
that Counsel attended, and a motion was made that Counsel be now called in.
But the motion was opposed, and on a division was defeated by 47 votes to
12. The Bill passed the House of Commons on 10th May, and received the Royal
Assent on 9th June.(11*) In this case the House of Commons broke faith with
the petitioners, and refused the hearing it had promised. Such experience
was not likely to encourage dissentients to waste their money on an appeal
to Parliament against a Bill that was promoted by powerful politicians. It
will be observed that in many cases the petitioners did not think that it
was worth the trouble and expense to be heard on Second Reading.




The Report of the Committee followed a stereotyped formula: 'That the
Standing Orders had been complied with: and that the Committee had examined
the Allegations of the Bill and found the same to be true; and that the Parties
concerned had given their Consent to the Bill, to the Satisfaction of the
Committee, except...'




Now what did this mean? What consents were necessary to satisfy the committee?
The Parliamentary Committee that reported on the cost of enclosures in 1800(12*)
said that there was no fixed rule, that in some cases the consent of three-fourths
was required, in others the consent of four-fifths. This proportion has a
look of fairness until we discover that we are dealing in terms, not of persons,
but of property, and that the suffrages were not counted but weighed. The
method by which the proportions were reckoned varied, as a glance at the
cases described in the Appendix will show. Value is calculated sometimes
in acres, sometimes in annual value, sometimes in assessment to the land
tax, sometimes in assessment to the poor rate. It is important to remember
that it was the property interested that counted, and that in a case where
there was common or waste to be divided as well as open fields, one large
proprietor, who owned a considerable property in old enclosures, could swamp
the entire community of smaller proprietors and cottagers. If Squire Western
owned an enclosed estate with parks, gardens and farms of 800 acres, and
the rest of the parish consisted of a common or waste of 1000 acres and open
fields of 200 acres, and the village population consisted of 100 cottagers
and small farmers, each with a strip of land in the common fields, and a
right of common on the waste, Squire Western would have a four-fifths majority
in determining whether the open fields and the waste should be enclosed or
not, and the whole matter would be in his hands. This is an extreme example
of the way in which the system worked. The case of Ashelworth shows that
a common might be cut up, on the votes of persons holding enclosed property,
against the wishes of the great majority of the commoners. At Laleham the
petitioners against the Bill claimed that they were 'a great majority of
the real Owners and Proprietors of or Persons interested in, the Lands and
Grounds intended to be enclosed.' At Simpson, where common fields were to
be enclosed, the Major Part of the Owners and Proprietors petitioned against
the Bill, stating that they were 'very well satisfied with the Situation
and Convenience of their respective Lands and Properties in their present
uninclosed State.'(13*)




Even a majority of three-fourths in value was not always required; for
example, the Report of the Committee on the enclosure of Cartmel in Lancashire
in 1796 gave particulars showing that the whole property belonging to persons
interested in the enclosure was assessed at £150, and that the property
of those actually consenting to the enclosure was just under £110.(14*)
Yet the enclosure was recommended and carried. Another illustration is supplied
by the Report of the Committee on the enclosure of Histon and Impington in
1801, where the parties concerned are reported to have consented except the
proprietors of 1020 acres, out of a total acreage of 3680.(15*) In this case
the Bill was recommitted, and on its next appearance the committee gave the
consents in terms of assessment to the Land Tax instead, putting the total
figure at £304, and the assessment of the consenting parties at £188.
This seems to have satisfied the House of Commons.(16*) Further, the particulars
given in the case of the enclosure of Bishopstone in Wilts (enclosed in 1809)
show that the votes of copyholders were heavily discounted. In this case
the copyholders who dissented held 1079 acres, the copyholders who were neuter
81 acres, and the total area to be divided was 2602 acres. But by some ingenious
actuarial calculation of the reversionary interest of the lord of the manor
and the interest of the tithe-owner, the 1079 acres held by copyholders are
written down to 474 acres.(17*) In the cases of Simpson and Louth, as readers
who consult the proceedings will see, the committees were satisfied with
majorities just above three-fifths in value. At Raunds, where 4963 acres
were 'interested,' the owners of 570 are stated to be against, and of 721
neuter.(18*) An interesting illustration of the lax practice of the committees
is provided in the history of an attempted enclosure at Quainton (1801).(19*)
In any case the signatures were a doubtful evidence of consent. 'It is easy,'
wrote an acute observer, 'for the large proprietors to overcome opposition.
Coaxing, bribing, threatening, together with many other acts which superiors
will make use, often induce the inferiors to consent to things which they
think will be to their future disadvantage.(20*) We hear echoes of such proceedings
in the petition from various owners and proprietors at Armley, who 'at the
instance of several other owners of land,' signed a petition for enclosure
and wish to be heard against it, and also in the unavailing petition of some
of the proprietors and freeholders of Winfrith Newburgh in Dorsetshire, in
1768,(21*) who declared that if the Bill passed into law, their 'Estates
must be totally ruined thereby, and that some of the Petitioners by Threats
and Menaces were prevailed upon to sign the Petition for the said Bill: but
upon Recollection, and considering the impending Ruin,' they prayed to 'have
Liberty to retract from their seeming Acquiescence.' From the same case we
learn that it was the practice sometimes to grant copyholds on the condition
that the tenant would undertake not to oppose enclosure. Sometimes, as in
the case of the Sedgmoor Enclosure, which we shall discuss later, actual
fraud was employed. But even if the promoters employed no unfair methods
they had one argument powerful enough to be a deterrent in many minds. For
an opposed Enclosure Bill was much more expensive than an unopposed Bill,
and as the small men felt the burden of the costs much more than the large
proprietors, they would naturally be shy of adding to the very heavy expenses
unless they stood a very good chance of defeating the scheme.




It is of capital importance to remember in this connection that the enumeration
of 'consents' took account only of proprietors. It ignored entirely two large
classes to whom enclosure meant, not a greater or less degree of wealth,
but actual ruin. These were such cottagers as enjoyed their rights of common
in virtue of renting cottages to which such rights were attached, and those
cottagers and squatters who either had no strict legal right, or whose rights
were difficult of proof. Neither of these classes was treated even outwardly
and formally as having any claim to be consulted before an enclosure was
sanctioned.




It is clear, then, that it was only the pressure of the powerful interests
that decided whether a committee should approve or disapprove of an Enclosure
Bill. It was the same pressure that determined the form in which a Bill became
law. For a procedure that enabled rich men to fight out their rival claims
at Westminster left the classes that could not send counsel to Parliament
without a weapon or a voice. And if there was no lawyer there to put his
case, what prospect was there that the obscure cottager, who was to be turned
adrift with his family by an Enclosure Bill promoted by a Member or group
of Members, would ever trouble the conscience of a committee of landowners?
We have seen already how this class was regarded by the landowners and the
champions of enclosure. No cottagers had votes or the means of influencing
a single vote at a single election. To Parliament, if they had any existence
at all, they were merely dim shadows in the very background of the enclosure
scheme. It would require a considerable effort of the imagination to suppose
that the Parliamentary Committee spent very much time or energy on the attempt
to give body and form to this hazy and remote society, and to treat these
shadows as living men and women, about to be tossed by this revolution from
their ancestral homes. As it happens, we need not put ourselves to the trouble
of such speculation, for we have the evidence of a witness who will not be
suspected of injustice to his class. 'This I know,' said Lord Lincoln(22*)
introducing the General Enclosure Bill of 1845, 'that in nineteen cases out
of twenty, Committees of this House sitting on private Bills neglected the
rights of the poor. I do not say that they wilfully neglected those rights
-- far from it: but this I affirm, that they were neglected in consequence
of the Committees being permitted to remain in ignorance of the claims of
the poor man, because by reason of his very poverty he is unable to come
up to London for counsel, to produce witnesses, and to urge his claims before
a Committee of this House.' Another Member(23*) had described a year earlier
the character of this private Bill procedure. 'Inclosure Bills had been introduced
heretofore and passed without discussion, and no one could tell how many
persons had suffered in their interests and rights by the interference of
these Bills. Certainly these Bills had been referred to Committees upstairs,
but everyone knew how these Committees were generally conducted. They were
attended only by honourable Members who were interested in them, being Lords
of Manor, and the rights of the poor, though they might be talked about,
had frequently been taken away under that system.'




These statements were made by politicians who remembered well the system
they were describing. There is another witness whose authority is even greater.
In 1781 Lord Thurlow, then at the beginning of his long life of office as
Lord Chancellor,(24*) spoke for an hour and three quarters in favour of recommitting
the Bill for enclosing Ilmington in Warwickshire. If the speech had been
fully reported it would be a contribution of infinite value to students of
the social history of eighteenth-century England, for we are told that he
proceeded to examine, paragraph by paragraph, every provision of the Bill,
animadverting and pointing out some acts of injustice, partiality, obscurity
or cause of confusion in each.'(25*) Unfortunately this part of his speech
was omitted in the report as being 'irrelative to the debate,' which was
concerned with the question of the propriety of commuting tithes. But the
report, incomplete as it is, contains an illuminating passage on the conduct
of Private Bill Committees. 'His Lordship... next turned his attention to
the mode in which private bills were permitted to make their way through
both Houses, and that in matters in which property was concerned, to the
great injury of many, if not the total ruin of some private families: many
proofs of this evil had come to his knowledge as a member of the other House,
not a few in his professional character, before he had the honour of a seat
in that House, nor had he been a total stranger to such evils since he was
called upon to preside in another place.' Going on to speak of the committees
of the House of Commons and 'the rapidity with which private Bills were hurried
through,' he declared that 'it was not unfrequent to decide upon the merits
of a Bill which would affect the property and interests of persons inhabiting
a district of several miles in extent, in less time than it took him to determine
upon the propriety of issuing an order for a few pounds, by which no man's
property could be injured.' He concluded by telling the House of Lords a
story of how Sir George Savile once noticed a man 'rather meanly habited'
watching the proceedings of a committee with anxious interest. When the committee
had agreed on its report, the agitated spectator was seen to be in great
distress. Sir George Savile asked him what was the matter, and he found that
the man would be ruined by a clause that had been passed by the committee,
and that, having heard that the Bill was to be introduced, he had made his
way to London on foot, too poor to come in any other way or to fee counsel.
Savile then made inquiries and learnt that these statements were correct,
whereupon he secured the amendment of the Bill, 'by which means an innocent,
indigent man and his family were rescued from destruction.' It would not
have been very easy for a 'meanly habited man' to make the journey to London
from Wakefield or Knaresborough or Haute Huntre, even if he knew when a Bill
was coming on, and to stay in London until it went into committee; and if
he did, he would not always be so lucky as to find a Sir George Savile on
the committee -- the public man who was regarded by his contemporaries, to
whatever party they belonged, as the Bayard of politics.(26*)




We get very few glimpses into the underworld of the common and obscure
people, whose homes and fortunes trembled on the chance that a quarrel over
tithes and the conflicting claims of squire and parson might disturb the
unanimity of a score of gentlemen sitting round a table. London was far away,
and the Olympian peace of Parliament was rarely broken by the protests of
its victims. But we get one such glimpse in a passage in the Annual Register
for 1767.




'On Tuesday evening a great number of farmers were observed going along
Pall Mall with cockades in their hats. On enquiring the reason, it appeared
they all lived in or near the parish of Stanwell in the county of Middlesex,
and they were returning to their wives and families to carry them the agreeable
news of a Bill being rejected for inclosing the said common, which if carried
into execution, might have been the ruin of a great number of families.'(27*)




When the Committee on the Enclosure Bill had reported to the House of
Commons, the rest of the proceedings were generally formal. The Bill was
read a third time, engrossed, sent up to the Lords, where petitions might
be presented as in the Commons, and received the Royal Assent.




A study of the pages of Hansard and Debrett tells us little about transactions
that fill the Journals of the Houses of Parliament. Three debates in the
House of Lords are fully reported,(28*) and they illustrate the play of forces
at Westminster. The Bishop of St. Davids(29*) moved to recommit an Enclosure
Bill in 1781 on the ground that, like many other Enclosure Bills, it provided
for the commutation of tithes -- an arrangement which he thought open to
many objections. Here was an issue that was vital, for it concerned the interests
of the classes represented in Parliament. Did the Church stand to gain or
to lose by taking land instead of tithe? Was it a bad thing or a good thing
that the parson should be put into the position of a farmer, that he should
be under the temptation to enter into an arrangement with the landlord which
might prejudice his successor, that he should be relieved from a system which
often caused bad blood between him and his parishioners? Would it 'make him
neglect the sacred functions of his ministry' as the Bishop of St. Davids
feared, or would it improve his usefulness by rescuing him from a situation
in which 'the pastor was totally sunk in the tithe collector' as the Bishop
of Peterborough(30*) hoped, and was a man a better parson on the Sunday for
being a farmer the rest of the week as Lord Coventry believed? The bishops
and the peers had in this discussion a subject that touched very nearly the
lives and interests of themselves and their friends, and there was a considerable
and animated debate,(31*) at the end of which the House of Lords approved
the principle of commuting tithes in Enclosure Bills. This debate was followed
by another on 6th April, when Lord Bathurst (President of the Council) as
a counterblast to his colleague on the Woolsack, moved, but afterwards withdrew,
a series of resolutions on the same subject. In the course of this debate
Thurlow, who thought perhaps that his zeal for the Church had surprised and
irritated his fellowpeers, among whom he was not conspicuous in life as a
practising Christian, explained that though he was zealous for the Church,
'his zeal was not partial or confined to the Church, further than it was
connected with the other great national establishments, of which it formed
a part, and no inconsiderable one.' The Bishop of St. Davids returned to
the subject on the 14th June, moving to recommit the Bill for enclosing Kington
in Worcestershire. He read a string of resolutions which he wished to see
applied to all future Enclosure Bills, in order to defend the interests of
the clergy from 'the oppressions of the Lord of the Manor, landowners, etc.'
Thurlow spoke for him, but he was defeated by 24 votes to 4, his only other
supporters being Lord Galloway and the Bishop of Lincoln.




Thurlow's story of Sir George Savile's 'meanly habited man' did not disturb
the confidence of the House of Lords in the justice of the existing procedure
towards the poor: the enclosure debates revolve solely round the question
of the relative claims of the lord of the manor and the tithe-owner. The
House of Commons was equally free from scruple or misgiving. One petitioner
in 1800 commented on the extraordinary haste with which a New Forest Bill
was pushed through Parliament, and suggested that if it, were passed into
law in this rapid manner at the end of a session, some injustice might unconsciously
be done. The Speaker replied with a grave and dignified rebuke: 'The House
was always competent to give every subject the consideration due to its importance,
and could not therefore be truly said to be incapable at any time of discussing
any question gravely, dispassionately, and with strict regard to justice.'(32*)
He recommended that the petition should be passed over as if it had never
been presented. The member who had presented the petition pleaded that he
had not read it. Such were the plausibilities and decorum in which the House
of Commons mapped up its abuses. We can imagine that some of the members
must have smiled to each other like the Roman augurs, when they exchanged
these solemn hypocrisies.




We have a sidelight on the vigilance of the House of Commons, when an
Enclosure Bill came down from a committee, in a speech of Windham's in defence
of bull-baiting. Windham attacked the politicians who had introduced the
Bill to abolish bull-baiting, for raising such a question at a time of national
crisis when Parliament ought to be thinking of other things. He then went
on to compare the subject to local subjects that 'contained nothing of public
or general interest. To procure the discussion of such subjects it was necessary
to resort to canvass and intrigue. Members whose attendance was induced by
local considerations in most cases of this description, were present: the
discussion, if any took place, was managed by the friends of the measure:
and the decision of the House was ultimately, perhaps, a matter of mere chance.'
From Sheridan's speech in answer, we learn that this is a description of
the passing of Enclosure Bills. 'Another honourable gentleman who had opposed
this Bill with peculiar vehemence, considered it as one of those light and
trivial subjects, which was not worthy to occupy the deliberations of Parliament:
and he compared it to certain other subjects of Bills: that is to say, bills
of a local nature, respecting inclosures and other disposal of property,
which merely passed by chance, as Members could not be got to attend their
progress by dint of canvassing,'(33*) Doubtless most Members of the House
of Commons shared the sentiments of Lord Sandwich, who told the House of
Lords that he was so satisfied 'that the more inclosures the better, that
as far as his poor abilities would enable him, he would support every inclosure
bill that should be brought into the House.'(34*)




For the last act of an enclosure drama the scene shifts back to the parish.
The commissioners arrive, receive and determine claims, and publish an award,
mapping out the new village. The life and business of the village are now
in suspense, and the commissioners are often authorised to prescribe the
course of husbandry during the transition.(35*) The Act which they administer
provides that a certain proportion of the land is to be assigned to the lord
of the manor, in virtue of his rights, and a certain proportion to the owner
of the tithes. An occasional Act provides that some small allotment shall
be made to the poor: otherwise the commissioners have a free hand: their
powers are virtually absolute. This is the impression left by all contemporary
writers. Arthur Young, for example, writes emphatically in this sense. 'Thus
is the property of proprietors, and especially of the poor ones, entirely
at their mercy: every passion of resentment and prejudice may be gratified
without control, for they are vested with a despotic power known in no other
branch of business in this free country.'(36*) Similar testimony is found
in the Report of the Select Committee (1800) on the Expense and Mode of Obtaining
Bills of Enclosure: 'the expediency of despatch, without the additional expense
of multiplied litigation, has suggested the necessity of investing them with
a summary, and in most cases uncontrollable jurisdiction.'(37*) In the General
Report of the Board of Agriculture on Enclosures, published in 1808, though
any more careful procedure is deprecated as likely to cause delay, it is
stated that the adjusting of property worth £50,000 was left to the
arbitration of a majority of five, 'often persons of mean education.' The
author of An Inquiry into the Advantages and disadvantages resulting from
Bills of Inclosure, published in 1781, writes as if it was the practice
to allow an appeal to Quarter Sessions; such an appeal he characterised as
useless to a poor man, and we can well believe that most of the squires who
sat on such a tribunal to punish vagrants or poachers had had a hand in an
enclosure in the past or had their eyes on an enclosure in the future. Thurlow
considered such an appeal quite inadequate, giving the more polite reason
that Quarter Sessions had not the necessary time.(38*) The Act of 1801 is
silent on the subject, but Sinclair's draft of a General Inclosure Bill,
published in the Annals of Agriculture in 1796,(39*) provided for
an appeal to Quarter Sessions. In the case of five enclosures mentioned in
these chapters (Haute Huntre, Simpson, Stanwell, Wakefield and Winfrith Newburgh),
the decision of the commissioners on claims was final, except that at Wakefield
an objector might oblige the commissioners to take the opinion of a counsel
chosen by themselves. In five cases (Ashelworth, Croydon, Cheshunt, Laleham
and Louth), a disappointed claimant might bring a suit on a feigned issue
against a proprietor. At Armley and Knaresborough the final decision was
left to arbitrators, but whereas at Armley the arbitrator was to be chosen
by a neutral authority, the Recorder of Leeds, the arbitrators at Knaresborough
were named in the Act, and were presumably as much the nominees of the promoters
as the commissioners themselves.




The statements of contemporaries already quoted go to show that none of
these arrangements were regarded as seriously fettering the power of the
commissioners, and it is easy to understand that a lawsuit, which might of
course overwhelm him, was not a remedy for the use of a small proprietor
or a cottager, though it might be of some advantage to a large proprietor
who had not been fortunate enough to secure adequate representation of his
interests on the Board of Commissioners. But the decision as to claims was
only part of the business. A man's claim might be allowed, and yet gross
injustice might be done him in the redistribution. He might be given inferior
land, or land in an inconvenient position. In most of the cases cited in
this chapter the award of the commissioners is stated to be final, and there
is no appeal from it. Two exceptions are Knaresborough and Armley. The Knaresborough
Act is silent on the point, and the Armley Act allows an appeal to the Recorder
of Leeds. So far therefore as the claims and allotments of the poor were
concerned, the commissioners were in no danger of being overruled. Their
freedom in other ways was restricted by the Standing Orders of 1774, which
obliged them to give an account of their expenses.




It would seem to be obvious that any society which had an elementary notion
of the meaning and importance of justice would have taken the utmost pains
to see that the men appointed to this extraordinary office had no motive
for showing partiality. This might not reasonably have been expected of the
society about which Pitt declared in the House of Commons, that it was the
boast of the law of England that it afforded equal security and protection
to the high and low, the rich and poor.(40*) How were these commissioners
appointed at the time that Pitt was Prime Minister? They were appointed in
each case before the Bill was presented to Parliament, and generally, as
Young tells us, they were appointed by the promoters of the enclosure before
the petition was submitted for local signatures, so that in fact they were
nominated by the persons of influence who agreed on the measure. In one case
(Moreton Corbet in Shropshire; 1950 acres enclosed in 1797) the Act appointed
one commissioner only, and he was to name his successor. Sometimes, as in
the case of Otmoor,(41*) it might happen that the commissioners were changed
while the Bill was passing through Committee, if some powerful persons were
able to secure better representation of their own interests. In the case
of Wakefield again, the House of Commons Committee placated Lord Strafford
by giving him a commissioner.




Now, who was supposed to have a voice in the appointment of the commissioners?
There is to be found in the Annals of Agriculture(42*) an extremely
interesting paper by Sir John Sinclair, preliminary to a memorandum of the
General Enclosure Bill which he promoted in 1796. Sinclair explains that
he had had eighteen hundred Enclosure Acts (taken indiscriminately) examined
in order to ascertain what was the usual procedure and what stipulations
were made with regard to particular interests; this with the intention of
incorporating the recognised practice in his General Bill. In the course
of these remarks he says, 'the probable result will be the appointment of
one Commissioner by the Lord of the Manor, of another by the tithe-owner,
and of a third by the major part in value of the proprietors.'(43*) It will
be observed that the third commissioner is not appointed by a majority of
the commoners, nor even by the majority of the proprietors, but by the votes
of those who own the greater part of the village. This enables us to assess
the value of what might have seemed a safeguard to the poor -- the provision
that the names of the commissioners should appear in the Bill presented to
Parliament. The lord of the manor, the impropriator of tithes, and the majority
in value of the owners are a small minority of the persons affected by an
enclosure, and all that they have to do is to meet round a table and name
the commissioners who are to represent them.(44*) Thus we find that the powerful
persons who carried an enclosure against the will of the poor nominated the
tribunal before which the poor had to make good their several claims. This
was the way in which the constitution that Pitt was defending afforded equal
security and protection to the rich and to the poor.




It will be noticed further that two interests are chosen out for special
representation. They are the lord of the manor and the impropriator of tithes:
in other words, the very persons who are formally assigned a certain minimum
in the distribution by the Act of Parliament. Every Act after 1774 declares
that the lord of the manor is to have a certain proportion, and the tithe-owner
a certain proportion of the land divided: scarcely any Act stipulates that
any share at all is to go to the cottager or the small proprietor. Yet in
the appointment of commissioners the interests that are protected by the
Act have a preponderating voice, and the interests that are left to the caprice
of the commissioners have no voice at all. Thurlow, speaking in the House
of Lords in 1781,(45*) said that it was grossly unjust to the parson that
his property should be at the disposal of these commissioners, of whom he
only nominated one. 'He thanked God that the property of an Englishman depended
not on so loose a tribunal in any other instance whatever.' What, then, was
the position of the poor and the small farmers who were not represented at
all among the commissioners? In the paper already quoted, Sinclair mentions
that in.some cases the commissioners were peers, gentlemen and clergymen,
residing in the neighbourhood, who acted without fees or emolument. He spoke
of this as undertaking a useful duty, and it does not seem to have occurred
to him that there was any objection to such a practice. 'To lay down the
principle that men are to serve for nothing,' said Cobbett, in criticising
the system of unpaid magistrates, 'puts me in mind of the servant who went
on hire, who being asked what wages he demanded, said he wanted no wages:
for that he always found about the house little things to pick up.'




There is a curious passage in the General Report of the Board of Agriculture(46*)
on the subject of the appointment of commissioners. The writer, after dwelling
on the unexampled powers that the commissioners enjoy, remarks that they
are not likely to be abused, because a commissioner's prospect of future
employment in this profitable capacity depends on his character for integrity
and justice. This is a reassuring reJection for the classes that promoted
enclosures and appointed commissioners, but it rings with a very different
sound in other ears. It would dearly have been much better for the poor if
the commissioners had not had any prospect of future employment at all. We
can obtain some idea of the kind of men whom the landowners considered to
be competent and satisfactory commissioners from the Standing Orders of 1801,
which forbade the employment in this capacity of the bailiff of the lord
of the manor. It would be interesting to know how much of England was appropriated
on the initiative of the lord of the manor, by his bailiff, acting under
the authority given to him by the High Court of Parliament. It is significant,
too, that down to 1801 a commissioner was only debarred from buying land
in a parish in which he had acted in this capacity, until his award was made,
The Act of 1801 debarred him from buying land under such circumstances for
the following five years.




The share of the small man in these transactions from first to last can
be estimated from the language of Arthur Young in 1770. 'The small proprietor
whose property in the township is perhaps his all, has little or no weight
in regulating the clauses of the Act of Parliament, has seldom, if ever,
an opportunity of putting a single one in the Bill favourable to his rights,
and has as little influence in the choice of Commissioners.'(47*) But even
this description does less than justice to his helplessness. There remains
to be considered the procedure before the commissioners themselves. Most
Enclosure Acts specified a date before which all claims had to be presented.
It is obvious that there must have been very many small proprietors who had
neither the courage nor the knowledge necessary to put and defend their case,
and that vast numbers of claims must have been disregarded because they were
not presented, or because they were presented too late, or because they were
irregUlar in form. The Croydon Act, for example, prescribes that claimants
must send in their claims 'in Writing under their Hands, or the Hands of
their Agents, distinguishing in such Claims the Tenure of the Estates in
respect whereof such Claims are made, and stating therein such further Particulars
as shall be necessary to describe such Claims with Precision.' And if this
was a difficult fence for the small proprietor, unaccustomed to legal forms
and documents, or to forms and documents of any kind, what was the plight
of the cottager? Let us imagine the cottager, unable to read or write, enjoying
certain customary rights of common without any idea of their origin or history
or legal basis: knowing only that as long as he can remember he has kept
a cow, driven geese across the waste, pulled his fuel out of the neighbouring
brushwood, and cut turf from the common, and that his father did all these
things before him. The cottager learns that before a certain day he has to
present to his landlord's bailiff, or to the parson, or to one of the magistrates
into whose hands perhaps he has fallen before now over a little matter of
a hare or a partridge, or to some solicitor from the country town, a clear
and correct statement of his rights and his claim to a share in the award.
Let us remember at the same time all that we know from Fielding and Smollett
of the reputation of lawyers for cruelty to the poor. Is a cottager to be
trusted to face the ordeal, or to be in time with his statement, or to have
that statement in proper legal form? The commissioners can reject his claim
on the ground of any technical irregularity, as we learn from a petition
presented to Parliament in 1774 by several persons interested in the enclosure
of Knaresborough Forest, whose claims had been disallowed by the commissioners
because of certain 'mistakes made in the description of such tenements...
notwithstanding the said errors were merely from inadvertency 'and in no
way altered the merits of the petitioners' claims.' A Bill was before Parliament
to amend the previous Act for enclosing Knaresborough Forest, in respect
of the method of payment of expenses, and hence these petitioners had an
opportunity of making their treatment public.(48*) It is easy to guess what
was the fate of many a small proprietor or cottager, who had to describe
his tenement or common right to an unsympathetic tribunal. We are not surprised
that one of the witnesses told the Enclosure Committee of 1844 that the poor
often did not know what their claims were, or how to present them. It is
significant that in the case of Sedgmoor, out of 4063 claims sent in, only
1798 were allowed.(49*)




We have now given an account of the procedure by which Parliamentary enclosures
were carried out. We give elsewhere a detailed analysis, disentangled from
the Journals of Parliament and other sources, of particular enclosures. We
propose to give here two frustrations of the temper of the Parliamentary
Committees. One illustration is provided by a speech made by Sir William
Meredith, one of the Rockingham Whigs, in 1772, a speech that needs no comment.
'Sir William Meredith moved, That it might be a general order, that no Bill,
or clause in a Bill, making any offence capital, should be agreed to but
in a Committee of the whole House. He observed, that at present the facility
of passing such clauses was shameful: that he once passing a Committee-room,
when only one Member was holding a Committee, with a clerk's boy, he happened
to hear something of hanging; he immediately had the curiosity to ask what
was going forward in that small Committee that could merit such a punishment?
He was answered, that it was an Inclosing Bill, in which a great many poor
people were concerned, who opposed the Bill; that they feared those people
would obstruct the execution of the Act, and therefore this clause was to
make it capital felony in anyone who did so. This resolution was unanimously
agreed to.'(50*)




The other illustration is provided by the history of an attempted enclosure
in which we can watch the minds of the chief actors without screen or disguise
of any kind: in this case we have very fortunately a vivid revelation of
the spirit and manner in which Committees conducted their business, from
the pen of the chairman himself. George Selwyn gives us in his letters, published
in the Carlisle Papers, a view of the proceedings from the inside. It is
worth while to set out in some detail the passages from these letters published
in the Carlisle Papers, by way of supplementing and explaining the official
records of the House of Commons.




We learn from the Journals of the House of Commons that, on 10th November,
1775, a petition was presented to the House of Commons for the enclosure
of King's Sedgmoor, in the County of Somerset, the petitioners urging that
this land was of very little value in its present state, and that it was
capable of great improvement by enclosure and drainage. Leave was given to
bring in a Bill, to be prepared by Mr. St. John and Mr. Coxe. Mr. St. John
was brother of Lord Bolingbroke. On 13th November, the Bill was presented
and read a first time. Four days later it received a second reading, and
was sent to a Committee of Mr. St. John and others. At this point, those
who objected to the enclosure began to take action. First of all there is
a petition from William Waller, Esq., who says that under a grant of Charles
I he is entitled to the soil of the moor: it is agreed that he shall be heard
by counsel before the Committee. The next day there arrives a petition from
owners and occupiers in thirty-five 'parishes, hamlets and places,' who state
that all these parishes have enjoyed rights of common without discrimination
over the 18,000 acres of pasture on Sedgmoor: that these rights of pasture
and cutting turf and rushes and sedges have existed from time immemorial,
and that no Enclosure Act is wanted for the draining of Sedgmoor, because
an Act of the reign of William III had conferred all the necessary powers
for this purpose on the Justices of the Peace. The petitioners prayed to
be heard by themselves and counsel against the application for enclosure
on Committee and on Report. The House of Commons ordered that the petition
should lie on the Table, and that the petitioners should be heard when the
Report had been received from Committee. Five days later three lords of manors
(Sir Charles Kemys Tynte, Baronet, Copleston Warre Bampfylde, Esq., and William
Hawker, Esq.) petition against the Bill and complain of the haste with which
the promoters are pushing the Bill through Parliament. This petition is taken
more seriously: a motion is made and defeated to defer the Bill for two months,
but the House orders that the petitioners shall be heard before the Committee.
Two of these three lords of manor present a further petition early in December,
stating that they and their tenants are more than a majority in number and
value of the persons interested, and a second petition is also presented
by the thirty-seven parishes and hamlets already mentioned, in which it is
contended that, in spite of the difficulties of collecting signatures in
a scattered district in a very short time, 749 persons interested had already
signed the petition against the Bill, that the effect of the Bill had been
misrepresented to many of the tenants, that the facts as to the different
interests affected had been misrepresented to the Committee, that the number
and rights of the persons supporting the Bill had been exaggerated (only
213 having signed their names as consenting), and that if justice was to
be done to the various parties concerned, it was essential that time should
be given for the hearing of complaints and the circulation of the Bill in
the district. This petition was presented on 11th December, and the House
of Commons ordered that the petitioners should be heard when the Report was
received. Next day Mr. Selwyn, as Chairman of the Committee, presented a
Report in favour of the Bill, mentioning among other things that the number
of tenements concerned was 1269, and that 303 refused to sign; but attention
was drawn to the fact that there were several variations between the Bill
as it was presented to the House, and the Bill as it was presented to the
parties concerned for their consent, and on this ground the Bill was defeated
by 59 to 35 votes.




This is the cold impersonal account of the proceedings given in the official
journals, but the letters of Selwyn take us behind the scenes and supply
a far livelier picture.(51*) His account begins with a letter to Lord Carlisle
in November:




<ex>

'Bully has a scheme of enclosure, which, if it succeeds, I am told will free
him from all his difficulties. It is to come into our House immediately.
If I had this from a better judgment than that of our sanguine counsellors,
I should have more hopes from it. I am ready to allow that he has been very
faulty, but I cannot help wishing to see him once more on his legs....'

</ex>




(Bully, of course, is Bolingbroke, brother of St. John, called the counsellor,
author of the Bill.) We learn from this letter that there are other motives
than a passion to drain Sedgmoor in the promotion of this great improvement
scheme. We learn from the next letter that it is not only Bully's friends
and creditors who have some reason for wishing it well:




<ex>

'Stavordale is returning to Redlinch; I believe that he sets out to-morrow.
He is also deeply engaged in this Sedgmoor Bill, and it is supposed that
he or Lord Ilchester, which you please, will get 2000 l. a year by it. He
will get more, or save more at least, by going away and leaving the Moor
in my hands, for he told me himself the other night that this last trip to
town had cost him 4000 l.'

</ex>




Another letter warns Lord Carlisle that the only way to get his creditors
to pay their debts to him, when they come into their money through the enclosure,
is to press for payment, and goes on to describe the unexpected opposition
the Bill had encountered. Selwyn had been made chairman of the Committee.




<ex>

'... My dear Lord, if your delicacy is such that you will not be pressing
with him about it, you may be assured that you will never receive a farthing.
I have spoke to Hare about it, who [was] kept in it till half an hour after
4; as I was also to-day, and shall be to-morrow. I thought that it was a
matter of form only, but had no sooner begun to read the preamble to the
Bill, but I found myself in a nest of hornets. The room was full, and an
opposition made to it, and disputes upon every word, which kept me in the
Chair, as I have told you. I have gained it seems great reputation, and am
at this minute reputed one of the best Chairmen upon this stand. Bully and
Harry came home and dined with me....'

</ex>




The next letter, written on 9th December, shows that Selwyn is afraid
that Stavordale may not get his money out of his father, and also that he
is becoming still more anxious about the fate of the Enclosure Bill, on which
of course the whole pack of cards depends:




<ex>

'... I have taken the liberty to talk a good deal to Lord Stavordale, partly
for his own sake and partly for Yours, and pressed him much to get out of
town as soon as possible, and not quit Lord I. [Ilchester] any more. His
attention there cannot be of long duration, and his absence may be fatal
to us all. I painted it in very strong colours, and he has promised me to
go, as soon as this Sedgmoor Bill is reported. I moved to have Tuesday fixed
for it. We had a debate and division upon my motion, and this Bill will at
last not go down so glibly as Bully hoped that it would. It will meet with
more opposition in the H. of Lords, and Lord North being adverse to it, does
us no good. Lord Ilchester gets, it is said, £5000 a year by it, and
amongst others Sir C. Tynte something, who, for what reason I cannot yet
comprehend, opposes it....'

</ex>




The next letter describes the final catastrophe:




<ex>

'December 12. Tuesday night... Bully has lost his Bill. I reported it to-day,
and the Question was to withdraw it. There were 59 against us, and we were
35. It was worse managed by the agents, supposing no treachery, than ever
business was. Lord North, Robinson, and Keene divided against. Charles(52*)
said all that could be said on our side. But as the business was managed,
it was the worst Question that I ever voted for. We were a Committee absolutely
of Almack's,(53*) so if the Bill is not resumed, and better conducted and
supported, this phantom of 30,000 l. clear in Bully's pocket to pay off his
annuities vanishes.




'It is surprising what a fatality attends some people's proceedings. I
begged last night as for alms, that they would meet me to settle the Votes.
I have, since I have been in Parliament, been of twenty at least of these
meetings, and always brought numbers down by those means. But my advice was
slighted, and twenty people were walking about the streets who could have
carried this point.




'The cause was not bad, but the Question was totally indigestible. The
most conscientious man in the House in Questions of this nature, Sir F. Drake,
a very old acquaintance of mine, told me that nothing could be so right as
the enclosure. But they sent one Bill into the country for the assent of
the people interested, and brought me another, differing in twenty particulars,
to carry through the Committee, without once mentioning to me that the two
Bills differed. This they thought was cunning, and I believe a happy composition
of Bully's cunning and John's idea of his own par.ts. I had no idea, or could
have, of this difference. The adverse party said nothing of it, comme de
raison, reserving the objection till the Report, and it was insurmountable.
If one of the Clerks only had hinted it to me, inexperienced as I am in these
sort of Bills, I would have stopped it, and by that means have given them
a better chance by a new Bill than they can have now, that people will have
a pretence for not altering their opinion....'

</ex>




These letters compensate for the silence of Hansard, so real and instructive
a picture do they present of the methods and motives of enclosure. 'Bully
has a scheme of enclosure which, if it succeeds, I am told will free him
from all his difficulties.' The journals may talk of the undrained fertility
of Sedgmoor, but we have in this sentence the aspect of the enclosure that
interests Selwyn, the Chairman of the Committee, and from beginning to end
of the proceedings no other aspect ever enters his head. And it interests
a great many other people besides Selwyn, for Bully owes money; so too does
Stavordale, another prospective beneficiary: he owes money to Fox, and Fox
owes money to Carlisle. Now Bully and Stavordale are not the only eighteenth-century
aristocrats who are in difficulties; the waiters at Brooks's and at White's
know that well enough, as Selwyn felt when, on hearing that one of them had
been attested for felony, he exclaimed, 'What an idea of us he will give
in Newgate.' Nor is Bully the only aristocrat in difficulties whose thoughts
turn to enclosure; Selwyn's letters alone, with their reference to previous
successes, would make that clear. It is here that we begin to appreciate
the effect of our system of family settlements in keeping the aristocracy
together. These young men, whose fortunes come and go in the hurricanes of
the faro table, would soon have dissipated their estates if they had been
free to do it; as they were restrained by settlements, they could only mortgage
them. But there is a limit to this process, and after a time their debts
begin to overwhelm them; perhaps also too many of their fellow gamblers are
their creditors to make Brooks's or White's quite as comfortable a place
as it used to be, for we may doubt whether all of these creditors were troubled
with Lord Carlisle's morbid delicacy of feeling. Happily there is an escape
from this painful situation: a scheme of enclosure which will put him 'once
more on his legs.' The other parties concerned are generally poor men, and
there is not much danger of failure. Thus if we trace the adventures of the
gaming table to their bitter end, we begin to understand that these wild
revellers are gambling not with their own estates but with the estates of
their neighbours. This is the only property they can realise. Quidquid delirant
reges plectuntur Achivi.




The particular obstacle on which the scheme split was a fraudulent irregularity
the Bill submitted for signature to the inhabitants differing seriously (in
twenty particulars) from the Bill presented to Parliament. Selwyn clearly
attached no importance at all to the Petitions that were received against
the Bill, or to the evidence of its local unpopularity. It is clear too,
that it was very rare for a scheme like this to miscarry, for, speaking of
his becoming Chairman of the Committee, he adds, 'I thought it was a matter
of form only.' Further with a little care this project would have weathered
the discovery of the fraud of which the author were guilty. 'I begged last
night as for alms that they would meet us to settle the Votes. I have, since
I have been in Parliament, been of twenty at least of these meetings, and
always brought number down by these means. But my advice was slighted, and
twenty people were walking about the streets who could have carried this
point.' In other words, the Bill would have been carried, all its iniquities
notwithstanding, if only Bully's friends had taken Selwyn's advice and put
themselves out to go down to Westminster. So little impression did this piece
of trickery make on the mind of the Chairman of the Committee, that he intended
to the last, by collecting his friends, to carry the Bill, for the fairness
and good order of which he was responsible, through the House of Commons.
This glimpse into the operations of the Committee enables us to picture the
groups of comrades who sauntered down from Almack's of an afternoon to carve
up a manor in Committee of the House of Commons. We can see Bully's friends
meeting round the table in their solemn character of judges and legislator,
to give a score of villages to Bully, and a dozen to Stavordale, much as
Artaxerxes gave Magnesia to Themistocles for his bread, Myus for his meat
and Lampsacus for his wine. And if those friends happened to be Bully's creditor
as well, it would perhaps not be unjust to suppose that their action was
not altogether free from the kind of gratitude that inspired the bounty of
the great king.(54*)




NOTES:




1. E.g., Laxton enclosed on petition on Lord Carbery in 1772. Total area
1200 acres. Enclosure proceedings completed in the Commons in nineteen days.
Also Ashbury, Berks, enclosed on petition of Lord Craven in 1770. There were
contrary petitions. Also Nylands, enclosed in 1790 on petition of the lady
of the manor. Also Tilsworth, Beds, enclosed on petition of Charles Chester,
Esq., 1767, and Westcote, Bucks, on petition of the most noble George, Duke
of Marlborough, January 24, 1765. Sometimes the lord of the manor associated
the vicar with his petition; thus Waltham, Croxton and Braunston, covering
5600 acres, in Leicestershire, were all enclosed in 1766 by the Duke of Rutland
and the local rector or vicar. The relations of Church and State are very
happily illustrated by the language of the petitions, 'A petition of the
most noble John, Duke of Rutland, and the humble petition' of the Rev. -----
Brown or Rastall or Martin.




2. This Standing Order does not seem to have been applied universally,
for Mr Braggs on December 1, 1800, made a motion that it should be extended
to the countries where it had not hitherto obtained. See Senator,
vol. xxvii, December 1, 1800.




3. See particulars in Appendix.




4. A Six Months' Tour through the North of England, 1771, vol.
i, p. 122.




5. Pp. 21 f.




6. Cf. Otmoor in next chapter.




7. See Appendix.




8. See Appendix.




9. See House of Commons Journal.




10. Eden, The State of the Poor, vol. ii, p. 157.




11. Eden, writing a few years later, remarks that since the enclosure
'the property in Holy Island has gotten into fewer hands,' vol. ii, p. 149.




12. Report of Select Committee on Most Effectual Means of Facilitating
Enclosure, 1800.




13. Cf. also Wraisbury in Bucks, House of Commons Journal, June
17, 1799, where the petitioners against the Bill claimed that they spoke
on behalf of 'by much the greatest Part of the Proprietors of the said Lands
of Grounds.' yet in the enumeration of consents the committee state that
the owners of property assessed at £6, 18s. are hostile out of a total
value of £295, 14s.




14. House of Commons Journal, March 21, 1796.




15. House of Commons Journal, June 10, 1801; cf. also case of Laleham.
See Appendix.




16. Ibid., June 15, 1801.




17. Ibid., May 3, 1809.




18. Ibid., June 15, 1801.




19. See Appendix A (13).




20. A Political Enquiry into the Consequences of enclosing Waste Lands,
1785, p. 108.




21. See Appendix A (12).




22. House of Commons, May 1, 1845.




23. Aglionby, House of Commons, June 5, 1844.




24. Thurlow was Chancellor from 1778 to 1783 (when Fox contrived to get
rid of him) and from 1783 to 1792.




25. Parliamentary Register, House of Lords, March 30, 1781.




26. Sir George Savile (1726-1784), M.P. for Yorkshire, 1759-1783; carried
the Catholic Relief Bill, which provoked the Gordon Riots, and presented
the great Yorkshire Petition for Economical Reform.




27. Annual Register, 1867, p. 68. For a detailed history of the
Stanwell Enclosure, see Appendix A (10). Unhappily the farmers were only
reprieved; Stanwell was enclosed at the second attempt.




28. See Parliamentary Register, House of Lords, March 30, 1781;
April 6, 1781; June 14, 1781.




29. John Warren (1730-1800).




30. Hohn Hinchcliffe (1731-1794), at one time Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge.




31. Parliamentary Register, March 30, 1781.




32. Senator, vol. xxvi, July 2, 1800.




33. For both speeches see Parliamentary Register, May 24, 1802.




34. Ibid., June 14, 1781.




35. See Chesnut, Louth, Simpson and Stanwell in Appendix.




36. Six Months' Tour through the North of England, 1771, vol. i,
p. 122.




37. See Annual Register, 1800, Appendix to Chronicle, p.
87.




38. Parliamentary Register, June 14, 1781.




39. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxvi, p. 111.




40. February 1, 1793.




41. See Chapter iv.




42. Vol. xxvi, p. 70.




43. Sinclair's language shows that this was the general arrangement. Of
course there are exceptions. See e.g., Haute Huntre and other cases in Appendix.




44. Cf. Billingsley's Report on Somerset, p. 59, where the arrangements
are described as 'a little system of patronage. The lord of the soil, the
rector, and a few of the principal commoners, monopolize and distribute the
appointments.'




45. Parliamentary Register, June 14, 1781.




46. General Report on Enclosures, 1808.




47. Six Months' Tour through the North of England, vol. i, p. 122.




48. See Appendix A (6).




49. Report on Somerset, p. 192.




50. Parliamentary Register, January 21, 1772.




51. Carlisle MSS.; Historical MSS. Commission, pp. 301ff.




52. Charles James Fox.




53. The earlier name of Brooks's Club.




54. For the subsequent history of King's Sedgmoor, see Appendix A (14).




Chapter 3




Enclosure (2)




In the year 1774, Lord North's Government, which had already received
a bad bruise or two in the course of its quarrels with printer and author,
got very much the worst of it in an encounter that a little prudence would
have sufficed to avert altogether. The affair has become famous on account
of the actor, and because it was the turing point in a very important career.
The cause of the quarrel has passed into the background, but students of
the enclosure movement will find more to interest them in its beginning than
in its circumstances and development.




Mr. De Grey, Member for Norfolk, and Lord of the Manor of Tollington in
that county, had a dispute of long standing with Mr. William Tooke of Purley,
a landowner in Tollington, who had resisted Mr. De Grey's encroachments on
the common. An action on this subject was impending, but Mr. De Grey, who
held, as Sir George Trevelyan puts it, 'that the law's delay was not intended
for Member of Parliament' got another Member of Parliament to introduce a
petition for a Bill for the enclosure of Tollington. As it happened, Mr.
Tooke was a friend of one of the clerks in the House of Commons, and this
friend told him on 6th January that a petition from De Grey was about to
be presented. A fortnight later Mr. Tooke received from this clerk a copy
of Mr. De Grey's petition, in which the Lord Chief Justice, brother of Mr.
De Grey was included. Mr. Tooke hurried to London and prepared a counter
petition, and Sir Edward Astley, the member for the constituency, undertook
to present that petition together with the petition from Mr. De Grey. There
were some further negotiations, with the result that both sides revised their
respective petitions, and it was arranged that they should be presented on
4th February. On that day the Speaker said the House was not full enough,
and the petitions must be presented on the 7th. Accordingly Sir Edward Astley
brought up both petitions on the 7th, but the Speaker said it was very extraordinary
to present two contrary petitions at the same time. 'Bring the first petition
first.' When members began to say 'Hear, hear,' the Speaker remarked, 'It
is only a common petition for a common enclosure,' and the Members fell into
general conversation, paying no heed to the proceedings at the Table. In
the midst of this the petition was read, and the Speaker asked for 'Ayes
and Noes,' and declared that the Ayes had it. The petition asking for the
Bill had thus been surreptitiously carried without the House being made aware
that there was a contrary petition to be presented, the contrary petition
asking for delay. The second petition was then read and ordered to lie on
the Table.




In ordinary circumstances nothing more would have been heard of the opposition
to Mr. De Grey's Bill. Hundreds of petitions may have been so stifled without
the world being any the wiser. But Mr. Tooke, who would never have known
of Mr. De Grey's intention if he had not had a friend among the clerk of
the House of Commons, happened to have another friend who was able to help
him in a very different way in his predicament. This was Horne, who was now
living in a cottage at Purley, reading law, on the desperate chance that
a man, who was a clergyman against his will, would be admitted to the bar.
Rushed rather than spent by his public quarrel with Wilkes, which was just
dying down, Horne saw in Mr. Tooke's wrongs an admirable opportunity for
a champion of freedom, whose earlier exploits had been a little tarnished
by his subsequent feuds with his comrades. Accordingly he responded very
promptly, and published in the Public Advertiser of 11th February, an anonymous
indictment of the Speaker, Sir Retcher Norton, based on his unjust treatment
of these petitions. This letter scandalised the House of Commons and drew
the unwary Government into a quarrel from which Horne emerged triumphant;
for the Government, having been led on to proceed against Horne, was unable
to prove his authorship of the letter. The incident had consequences of great
importance for many persons. It was the making of Horne, for he became Horne
Tooke, with £8000 from his friend and a reputation as an intrepid and
vigilant champion of popular liberty that he retained to the day of his death.
It was also the making of Fox, for it was this youth of twenty-five who had
led the Government into its scrape, and the king could not forgive him. His
temerity on this occasion provoked the famous letter from North. 'Sir, His
Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury to be
made out, in which I do not see your name.' Fox left the court party to lend
his impetuous courage henceforth to very different causes. But for social
students the incident is chiefly interesting because it was the cause of
the introduction of Standing Orders on Enclosure Bills. It had shown what
might happen to rich men under the existing system. Accordingly the House
of Commons set to work to construct a series of Standing Orders to regulate
the proceedings on Enclosure Bills.




Most of these Standing Orders have ready been mentioned in the previous
chapter, but we propose to recapitulate their main provisions in order to
show that the gross fairness of the procedure, described in the last chapter,
as between the rich and the poor, made no impression at all upon Parliament.
The first Standing Orders dealing with Enclosure Bills were passed in 1774,
and they were revised in 1775, 1781, 1799, 1800 and 1801. These Standing
Orders prevented a secret application to Parliament by obliging promoters
to publish a notice on the church door; they introduced some control over
the extortions of commissioners, and laid down that the Bill presented to
Parliament should contain the names of the commissioners and a description
of the compensation to be given to the lord of the manor and the impropriator
of tithes. But they contained no safeguard at all against robbery of the
small proprietors or the commoners. Until 1801 there was no restriction on
the choice of a commissioner, and it was only in that year that Parliament
adopted the Standing Order providing that no lord of the manor, or steward,
or bailiff of any lord or lady or proprietor should be allowed to act as
commissioner in an enclosure in which he was an interested party.(1*) In
one respect Parliament deliberately withdrew a rule introduced to give greater
regUlarity and publicity to the proceedings of committees. Under the Standing
Orders of 1774, the Chairman of a Committee had to report not only whether
the Standing Orders had been complied with, but also what evidence had been
submitted to show that all, the necessary formalities had been observed;
but in the following year the House of Commons struck out this second provision.
A Committee of the House of Commons suggested in 1799 that no petition should
be admitted for a Parliamentary Bill unless a fourth part of the proprietors
in number and value signed the application, but this suggestion was rejected.




The poor then found no kind of shelter in the Standing Orders. The legislation
of this period, from first to last, shows just as great an indifference to
the injustice to which they were exposed. The first public Act of the time
deals not with enclosures for growing corn, but with enclosures for growing
wood. The Act of 1756 states in its preamble that the Acts of Henry VIII,
Charles II and William III for encouraging the growth of timber had been
obstructed by the resistance of the commoners, and Parliament therefore found
it necessary to enact that any owner of waste could enclose for the purpose
of growing timber with the approval of the majority in number and value of
those who had common rights, and any majority of those who had common rights
could enclose with the approval of the owner of the waste. Any person or
persons who thought themselves aggrieved could appeal to Quarter Sessions,
within six months after the agreement had been registered. We hear very little
of this Act, and the enclosures that concern us are enclosures of a different
kind. In the final years of the century there was a succession of General
Enclosure Bills introduced and debated in Parliament, under the stimulus
of the fear of famine. These Bills were promoted by the Board of Agriculture,
established in 1793 with Sir John Sinclair as President, and Arthur Young
as secretary. This Board of Agriculture was not a State department in the
modern sense, but a kind of Royal Society receiving, not too regularly, a
subsidy from Parliament.(2*) As a result of its efforts two Parliamentary
Committees were appointed to report on the enclosure of waste lands, and
the Reports of these Committees, which agreed in recommending a General Enclosure
Bill, were presented in 1795 and 1799. Bills were introduced in 1795, 1796,
1797 and 1800, but it was not until 1801 that any Act was passed.




The first Bills presented to Parliament were General Enclosure Bills,
that is to say, they were Bills for prescribing conditions on which enclosure
could be carried out without application to Parliament. The Board of Agriculture
was set on this policy partly, as we have seen, in the interest of agricultural
expansion, partly as the only way of guaranteeing a supply of food during
the French war. But these were not the only considerations in the mind of
Parliament, and we are able in this case to see what happened to a disinterested
propOsal when it had to pass through the sieve of a Parliament of owners
of land and tithes. For we have in the Annals of Agriculture(3*) the form
of the General Enclosure Bill of 1796 as it was presented to the Government
by that expert body, the Board of Agriculture, and we have among the Parliamentary
Bills in the British Museum (1) the form in which this Bill left a Select
Committee, and (2) the form in which it left a second Select Committee of
Eights of the Shire and Gentlemen of the Long Robe. We are thus able to see
in what spirit the lords of the manor who sat in Parliament regarded, in
a moment of great national urgency, the policy put before it by the Board
of Agriculture. We come at once upon a fact of great importance. In the first
version it is recognised that Parliament has to consider the future as well
as the present, that it is dealing not only with the claims of a certain
number of living cottagers, whose rights and property may be valued by the
commissioners at a five pound note, but with the necessities of generations
still to be born, and that the most liberal recognition of the right to pasture
a cow, in the form of a cash payment to an individual, cannot compensate
for the calamities that a society suffers in the permanent alienation of
all its soil. The Bill as drafted in the Board of Agriculture enacted that
in view of the probable increase of population, a portion of the waste should
be set aside, and vested in a corporate body (composed of the lord of the
manor, the rector, the vicar, the churchwardens and the overseers), for allotments
for ever. Any labourer over twenty-one, with a settlement in the parish,
could claim a portion and hold it for fifty years, rent free, on condition
of building a cottage and fencing it. When the fifty years were over, the
cottages, with their parcels of land, were to be let on leases of twenty-one
years and over at reasonable rents, half the rent to go to the owner of the
soil, and half to the poor rates. The land was never to be alienated from
the cottage. All these far-sighted clauses vanish absolutely under the sifting
statesmanship of the Parliament, of which Burke said in all sincerity, in
his Reflections on the Revolution in France, that 'our representation has
been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which a representation
of the people can be desired or devised.'




There was another respect in which the Board of Agriculture was considered
to be too generous to the poor by the lords of the manor, who made the laws
of England. In version 1 of the Bill, not only those entitled to such right
but, also those who have enjoyed or exercised the right of getting fuel are
to have special and inalienable fuel allotments made to them: in version
2 only those who are entitled to such rights are to have a fuel allotment,
and in version 3, this compensation is restricted to those who have possessed
fuel rights for ten years. Again in version 1, the cost of enclosing and
fencing small allotments, where the owners are unable to pay, is to be borne
by the other owners: in version 2, the small owners are to be allowed to
mortgage their allotments in order to cover the cost. The importance of the
proposal thus rejected by the Parliamentary Committee will appear when we
come to consider the practical effects of Enclosure Acts. The only people
who got their fencing done for them under most Acts were the tithe-owners,
a class neither so poor nor so powerless in Parliament.




However this Bill shared the fate of all other General Enclosure Bills
at this time. There were many obstacles to a General Enclosure Bill. Certain
Members of Parliament resisted them on the ground that if it were made legal
for a majority to coerce a minority into enclosure without coming to Parliament,
such protection as the smaller commoners derived from the possibility of
Parliamentary discussion would disappear. Powis quarrelled with the Bill
of 1796 on this ground, and he was supported by Fox and Grey, but his objections
were overruled. However a more formidable opposition came from other quarters.
Enclosure Acts furnished Parliamentary officials with a harvest of fees,(4*)
and the Church thought it dangerous that enclosure, affecting tithe-owners,
should be carried through without the bishops being given an opportunity
of interfering. These and other forces were powerful enough to destroy this
and all General Enclosure Bills, intended to make application to Parliament
unnecessary.




The Board of Agriculture accordingly changed its plans. In 1800 the Board
abandoned its design of a General Enclosure Bill, and presented instead a
consolidating Bill, which was to cheapen procedure. Hitherto there had been
great diversities of form and every Bill was an expensive little work of
art of its own. The Act of 1801 was designed to save promoters of enclosure
some of this trouble and expense. It took some forty clauses that were commonly
found in Enclosure Bills and provided that they could be incorporated by
reference in private Bills, thus cheapening legal procedure. Further, it
allowed affidavits to be accepted as evidence, thus relieving the promoters
from the obligation of bringing witnesses before the Committee to swear to
every signature. All the recognition that was given to the difficulties and
the claims of the poor was comprised in sections 12 and 13, which allow small
allotments to be laid together and depastured in common, and instruct the
commissioners to have particular regard to the convenience of the owners
or proprietors of the smallest estates. In 1813, the idea of a General Bill
was revived once more, and a Bill passed the House of Commons which gave
a majority of three-fifths in value the right to petition quarter Sessions
for an enclosure. The Bill was rejected in the Lords. In 1836 a General Enclosure
Bill was passed, permitting enclosure when two-thirds in number and value
desired it, and in 1845 Parliament appointed central Commissioners with a
view to preventing local injustice.




It is fortunate that the Parliamentary Reports of the debates on General
Enclosure Bills in the unreformed Parliament are almost as meagre as the
debates on particular Enclosure Bills. We can gather from various indications
that the rights of the clergy received a good deal of notice, and Lord Grenville
made an indignant speech to vindicate his zeal in the cause of the Church,
which had been questioned by opponents. The cause of the poor does not often
ruffle the surface of discussion. This we can collect not only from negative
evidence but also from a statement by Mr. Lechmere, Member for Worcester.
Lechmere, whose loss of his seat in 1790 deprived the poor of one of their
very few champions in Parliament, drew attention more than once during the
discussions on scarcity and the high price of corn to the lamentable consequences
of the disappearances of the small farms, and recommended drastic steps to
arrest the process. Philip Francis gave him some support. The general temper
of Parliament can be divined from his complaint that when these subjects
were under discussion it was very difficult to make a House.




It must not be supposed that the apathy of the aristocracy was part of
a universal blindness or anaesthesia, and that the method and procedure of
enclosure were accepted as just and inevitable, without challenge or protest
from any quarter. The poor were of course bitterly hostile. This appears
not only from the petitions presented to Parliament, but from the echoes
that have reached us of actual violence. It was naturally easier for the
threatened commoners to riot in places where a single enclosure scheme affected
a wide district, and most of the records of popular disturbances that have
come down to us are connected with attempts to enclose moors that were common
to several parishes. An interesting example is afforded by the history of
the enclosure of Haute Huntre Fen in Lincolnshire. This enclosure, which
affected eleven parishes, was sanctioned by Parliament in 1767, but three
years later the Enclosure Commissioners had to come to Parliament to explain
that the posts and rails that they had set up had been destroyed 'by malicious
persons, in order to hinder the execution of the said Act,' and to ask for
permission to make ditches instead of fences.(5*) An example of disturbances
in a single village is given by the Bedfordshire reporter for the Board of
Agriculture, who says that when Maulden was enclosed it was found necessary
to send for troops from Coventry to quell the riots:(6*) and another in the
Annual Register for 1799(7*) describing the resistance of the commoners at
Wilbarston in Northamptonshire, and the employment of two troops of yeomanry
to coerce them. The general hatred of the poor for enclosures is evident
from the language of Eden, and from statements of contributors to the Annals
of Agriculture. Eden had included a question about commons and enclosures
in the questions he put to his correspondents, and he says in his preface
that he had been disappointed that so few of his correspondents had given
an answer to this question. He then proceeds to give this explanation: 'This
question, like most others, that can now be touched upon, has its popular
and its unpopular sides: and where no immediate self-interest, or other partial
leaning, interferes to bias the judgment, a good-natured man cannot but wish
to think with the multitudes; stunned as his ears must daily be, with the
oft-repeated assertion, that, to condemn commons, is to determine on depopulating
the country'(8*) The writer of the Bedfordshire Report in 1808 says that
'it appears that the poor have invariably been inimical to enclosures, as
they certainly remain to the present day.'(9*) Dr. Wilkinson, writing in
the Annals of Agriculture(10*) in favour of a General Enclosure Bill says,
'the grand objection to the inclosure of commons arises from the unpopularity
which gentlemen who are active in the cause expose themselves to in their
own neighbourhood, from the discontent of the poor when any such question
is agitated.' Arthur Young makes a similar statement.(11*) 'A general inclosure
has been long ago proposed to administration, but particular ones have been
so unpopular in some cases that government were afraid of the measure.'




The popular feeling, though quite unrepresented in Parliament, was not
unrepresented in contemporary literature. During the last years of the eighteenth
century there was a sharp war of pamphlets on the merits of enclosure, and
it is noticeable that both supporters and opponents denounced the methods
on which the governing class acted. There is, among others, a very interesting
anonymous pamphlet, published in 1781 under the title of An Inquiry into
the Advantages and disadvantages resulting from Bills of Inclosure, in which
the existing practice is renewed and some excellent suggestions are made
for reform. The writer proposed that the preliminary to a Bill should be
not the fixing of a notice to the church door, but the holding of a public
meeting, that there should be six commissioners, that they should be elected
by the commoners by ballot, that no decision should be valid that was not
unanimous, and that an appeal from that decision should lie not to Quarter
Sessions, but to Judges of Assize. The same writer proposed that no enclosure
should be sanctioned which did not allot one acre to each cottage.




These proposals came from an opponent of enclosure, but the most distinguished
supporters of enclosure were also discontented with the procedure. Who are
the writers on eighteenth-century agriculture whose names and publications
are known and remembered? They are, first of all, Arthur Young (l741-1820),
who, though he failed as a merchant and failed as a farmer, and never ceased
to regret his father's mistake in neglecting to put him into the soft lap
of a living in the Church, made for himself, by the simple process of observing
and recording, a European reputation as an expert adviser in the art which
he had practised with so little success. A scarcely less important authority
was William Marshall (1745-1818), who began by trading in the West Indies,
afterwards farmed in Surrey, and then became agent in Norfolk to Sir Harbord
Harbord. It was Marshall who suggested the creation of a Board of Rural Affairs,
and the preparation of Surveys and Minutes. Though he never held an official
position, it was from his own choice, for he preferred to publish his own
Minutes and Surveys rather than to write them for the Board. He was interested
in philology as well as in agriculture; he published a vocabulary of the
Yorkshire dialect and he was a friend of Johnson, whom he rather scandalised
by condoning Sunday labour in agriculture under special circumstances. Nathaniel
Kent (1737-1810) studied husbandry in the Austrian Netherlands, where he
had been secretary to an ambassador, and on his return to England in 1766
he was employed as an estate agent and land valuer. He wrote a well-known
book Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, and he had considerable influence
in improving the management of various estates.




He was, for a short time, bailiff of George III's farm at Windsor. All
of these writers, though they are very far from taking the view which found
expression in the riots in the Lincolnshire fens, or in the anonymous pamphlet
already mentioned, addressed some very important criticisms and recommendations
to the class that was inclosing the English commons. Both Marshall and Young
complained of the injustice of the method of choosing commissioners. Marshall,
ardent champion of enclosure as he was, and no sentimentalist on the subject
of the commoners, wrote a most bitter account of the motives of the enclosers.
'At this juncture, it is true, the owners of manors and tithes, whether clergy
or laity, men of ministry or men of opposition, are equally on the alert:
not however pressing forward with offerings and sacrifices to relieve the
present distresses of the country, but searching for vantage ground to aid
them in the scramble.'(12*) Holding this view, he was not unnaturally ill-content
with the plan of letting the big landlords nominate the commissioners, and
proposed that the lord of the soil and the owner or owners of tithes should
choose one commissioner each, that the owner or owners of pasturage should
choose two, and that the four should choose a fifth. Arthur Young proposed
that the small proprietors should have a share in the nomination of commissioners
either by a union of votes or otherwise, as might be determined.




The general engrossing of farms was arraigned by Thomas Stone, the author
of an important pamphlet, Suggestions for rendering the inclosure of common
fields and waste lands a source of population and of riches, 1787, who proposed
that in future enclosures farms should be let out in different sites from
£40 to £200 a year. He thought further that Parliament should consider
the advisability of forbidding the alienation of cottagers' property, in
order to stop the frittering away of cottagers' estates which was general
under enclosure. Kent, a passionate enthusiast for enclosing, was not less
critical of the practice of throwing farms together, a practice which had
raised the price of provisions to the labourer, and he appealed to landlords
to aid the distressed poor by reducing the site of their farms, as well as
by raising wages. Arbuthnot, the author of a pamphlet on An Inquiry into
the Connection between the present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms,
by a Farmer, 1773, who had defended the large-farm system against Dr. Price,
wrote, 'My plan is to allot to each cottage three or four acres which should
be annexed to it without power or alienation and without rent while under
the covenant of being kept in grass.'




So much for writers on agriculture. But the eighteenth century produced
two authoritative writers on social conditions. Any student of social history
who wishes to understand this period would first turn to the three great
volumes of Eden's State of the Poor, published in 1797, as a storehouse of
cold facts. Davies, who wrote The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, published
in 1795, is less famous than he deserves to be, if we are to judge from the
fact that the Dictionary of National Biography only knows about him that
he was Rector of Barkham in Berkshire, and a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford,
that he received a D.D. degree in 1800, that he is the author of this book,
and that he died, perhaps, in the year 1809. But Davies' book, which contains
the result of most careful and patient investigation, made a profound impression
on contemporary observers. Howlett called it 'incomparable,' and it is impossible
for the modern reader to resist its atmosphere of reality and truth. This
country parson gives us a simple, faithful and sincere picture of the facts,
seen without illusion or prejudice, and free from all the conventional affectations
of the time: a priceless legacy to those who are impatient of the generalisations
with which the rich dismiss the poor. Now both of these writers warned their
contemporaries of the danger of the uncontrolled tendencies of the age. Eden
proposed that in every enclosure a certain quantity of land should be reserved
for cottagers and labourers, to be vested in the whole district. He spoke
in favour of the crofters in Scotland, and declared that provision of this
kind was made for the labouring classes in the first settled townships of
New England. Davies was still more emphatic in calling upon England to settle
cottagers and to arrest the process of engrossing farms.(13*)




Thus of all the remembered writers of the period who had any practical
knowledge of agriculture or of the poor, there is not one who did not try
to teach the governing class the need for reform, and the dangers of the
state into which they were allowing rural society to drift. Parliament was
assailed on all sides with criticisms and recommendations, and its refusal
to alter its ways was deliberate.




Of the protests of the time the most important and significant came from
Arthur Young. No man had been so impatient of objections to enclosure: no
man had taken so severe and disciplinary a view of the labourer: no man had
dismissed so lightly the appeals for the preservation of the fragmentary
possessions of the poor. He had taught a very simple philosophy, that the
more the landowner pressed the farmer, and the more the farmer pressed the
labourer, the better it was for agriculture. He had believed as implicitly
as Sinclair himself, and with apparently as little effort to master the facts,
that the cottagers were certain to benefit by enclosure. All this gives pathos,
as well as force, to his remarkable paper, published under the title An Inquiry
into the Propriety of applying Wastes to the better Maintenance and Support
of the Poor.




The origin of this document is interesting. It was written in 1801, a
few years after the Speenhamland system had begun to fix itself on the villages.
The growth of the poor rates was troubling the minds of the upper and middle
classes. Arthur Young, in the course of his travels at this time, stumbled
on the discovery that in those parishes where the cottagers had been able
to keep together a tiny patch of property, they had shown a Spartan determination
to refuse the refuge of the Poor Law. When once he had observed this, he
made further investigations which only confirmed his first impressions. This
opened his eyes to the consequences of enclosure as it had been carried out,
and he began to examine the history of these operations in a new spirit.
He then found that enclosure had destroyed with the property of the poor
one of the great incentives to industry and self-respect, and that his view
that the benefit of the commons to the poor was 'perfectly contemptible,'
and 'when it tempts them to become owners of cattle or sheep usually ruinous,'(14*)
was fundamentally wrong. Before the enclosures, the despised commons had
enabled the cottager to keep a cow, and this, so far from bringing ruin,
had meant in very many cases all the difference between independence and
pauperism. His scrutiny of the Acts convinced him that in respect of this
they had been unjust. 'By nineteen out of twenty Inclosure Bills the poor
are injured, and some grossly injured.... Mr. Forster of Norwich, after giving
me an account of twenty inclosures in which he had acted as Commissioner,
stated his opinion on their general effect on the poor, and lamented that
he had been accessory to the injuring of 2000 poor people, at the rate of
twenty families per parish.... The poor in these parishes may say, and with
truth, "Parliament may be tender of property: all I know is that I had
a cow and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me."'




This paper appeared on the eve of the Enclosure Act of 1801, the Act to
facilitate and cheapen procedure, which Young and Sinclair had worked hard
to secure. It was therefore an opportune moment for trying to temper enclosure
to the difficulties of the poor. Arthur Young made a passionate appeal to
the upper classes to remember these difficulties. 'To pass Acts beneficial
to every other class in the State and hurtful to the lowest class only, when
the smallest alteration would prevent it, is a conduct against which reason,
justice and humanity equally plead.' He then proceeded to outline a constructive
scheme. He proposed that twenty millions should be spent in setting up half
a million families with allotments and cottages: the fee-simple of the cottage
and land to be vested in the parish, and possession granted under an Act
of Parliament, on condition that if the father or his family became chargeable
to the rates, the cottage and land should revert to the parish. The parishes
were to carry out the scheme, borrowing the necessary money on the security
of the rates.(15*) 'A man,' he told the landlords, in a passage touched perhaps
with remorse as well as with compassion, 'will love his country the better
even for a pig.' 'At a moment,' so he concludes, 'when a General Inclosure
of Wastes is before Parliament, to allow such a measure to be carried into
execution in conformity with the practice hitherto, without entering one
voice, however feeble, in defence of the interests of the poor, would have
been a wound to the feelings of any man not lost to humanity who had viewed
the scenes which I have visited.'




The appeal broke against a dense mass of class prejudice, and so far as
any effect on the Consolidating Act of 1801 is concerned, Arthur Young might
never have written a line. This is perhaps not surprising, for we know from
Young's autobiography (p. 350) that he did not even carry the Board of Agriculture
with him, and that Lord Carrington, who was then President, only allowed
him to print his appeal on the understanding that it was not published as
an official document, and that the Board was in no way identified with it.
Sinclair, who shared Young's conversion, had ceased to be President in 1798.
The compunction he tried to awaken did affect an Act here and there. A witness
before the Allotments Committee of 1843 described the arrangements he contrived
to introduce into an Enclosure Act. The witness was Mr. Demainbray, an admirable
and most public-spirited parson, Rector of Broad Somerford in Wiltshire.
Mr. Demainbray explained that when the Enclosure Act for his parish was prepared
in 1806, he had been pressed to accept land in lieu of tithes, and that he
took the opportunity to stipulate for some provision for the poor. As a consequence
of his efforts, half an acre was attached to each cottage on the waste, the
land being vested in the rector, churchwardens and overseers for the time
being, and eight acres were reserved for the villagers for allotment and
reallotment every Easter. This arrangement, which had excellent results,
'every man looking forward to becoming a man of property,' was copied in
several of the neighbouring parishes. Dr. Slater has collected some other
examples. One Act, passed in 1824 for Pottern in Wiltshire, vested the ownership
of the enclosed common in the Bishop of Salisbury, who was lord of the manor,
the vicar, and the churchwardens, in trust for the parish. The trustees were
required to lease it in small holdings to poor, honest and industrious persons,
who had not, except in cases of accident or sickness, availed themselves
of Poor Law Relief.(16*) Thomas Stone's proposal for making inalienable allotments
to cottagers was adopted in two or three Acts in the eastern counties, but
the Acts that made some provision for the poor do not amount, in Dr. Slater's
opinion, to more than one per cent of the Enclosure Acts passed before 1845,(17*)
and this view is corroborated by the great stress laid in the Reports of
the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, upon a few cases where
the poor were considered, and by a statement made by Mr. Demainbray in a
pamphlet published in 1831.(18*) In this pamphlet Mr. Demainbray quotes what
Davies had said nearly forty years earlier about the effect of enclosures
in robbing the poor, and then adds: 'Since that time many hundred enclosures
have taken place, but in how few of them has any reserve been made for the
privileges which the poor man and his ancestors had for centuries enjoyed?'




Some interesting provisions are contained in certain of the Acts of the
period. At Stanwell the commissioners were to set aside such parcel as they
thought proper not exceeding thirty acres, to be let out and the rents and
profits were to be given for the benefit of such occupiers and inhabitants
as did not receive parochial relief or occupy lands and tenements of more
than £5 a year, and had not received any allotment under the Act. Middleton,
the writer of the Report on Middlesex, says that the land produced £30
a year,(19*) and he remark that this is a much better way of helping the
poor than leaving them land for their use. We may doubt whether the arrangement
seemed equally attractive to the poor. It could not have been much compensation
to John Carter, who owned a cottage, to receive three roods, twenty-six perches
in lieu of his rights of common, which is his allotment in the award, for
three-quarters of an acre is obviously insufficient for the pasture of a
cow, but it was perhaps still less satisfactory for James Carter to know
that one acre and seven perches were allotted to the 'lawful owner or owners'
of the cottage and land which he occupied, and that his own compensation
for the loss of his cow or sheep or geese was the cold hope that if he kept
off the rates, Sir William Gibbons, the vicar, and the parish officers might
give him a dole. The Laleham Commissioners were evidently men of a rather
grim humour, for, in setting aside thirteen acres for the poor, they authorised
the churchwardens and overseers to encourage the poor, if they were so minded,
by letting this plot for sixty years and using the money so received to build
a workhouse. A much more liberal provision was made at Cheshunt, where the
poor were allowed 100 acres. At Knaresborough and Louth, the poor got nothing
at all.




Before we proceed to describe the results of enclosure on village life,
we may remark one curious fact. In 1795 and 1796 there was some discussion
in the House of Commons of the condition of the agricultural labourers, arising
out of the proposal of Whitbread's to enable the magistrates to fix a minium
wage. Pitt made a long speech in reply, and promised to introduce a scheme
of his own for correcting evils that were too conspiCuous to be ignored.
This promise he kept next year in the ill-fated Poor Law Bill, which died,
almost at its birth, of general hostility. That Bill will be considered elsewhere.
All that we are concerned to notice here is that neither speech nor Bill,
though they cover a wide range of topics, and though Pitt said that they
represented the results of long and careful inquiry, hint at this cause of
social disturbance, or at the importance of safe-guarding the interests of
the poor in future enclosure schemes: this in spite of the fact that, as
we have seen, there was scarcely any contemporary writer or observer who
had not pointed out that the way in which the governing class was conducting
these revolutions was not only unjust to the poor but perilous to the State.




It is interesting, in the light of the failure to grasp and retrieve an
error in national policy which mark the progress of these transactions, to
glance at the contemporary history of France. The Legislative Assembly, under
the influence of the ideas of the economists, decreed the division of the
land of the communes in 1792. The following year this decree was modified.
Certain provincial assemblies had asked for division, but many of the villages
were inexorably hostile. The new decree of June 1793 tried to do justice
to these conflicting wishes by making division optional. At the same time
it insisted on an equitable division in cases where partition took place.
But this policy of division was found to have done such damage to the interests
of the poor that there was strenuous opposition, with the result that in
1796 the process was suspended, and in the following year it was forbidden.(20*)
Can any one suppose that if the English legislature had had as swift and
ready a sense for things going wrong, the policy of enclosure would have
been pursued after 1801 with the same reckless disregard for its social consequences?




We have given in the last chapter the history of an enclosure project
for the light it throws on the play of motive in the enclosing class. We
propose now to give in some detail the history of an enclosure project that
succeeded for the light it throws on the attention which Parliament paid
to local opinion and on the generally received views as to the rights of
the small commoners. Our readers will observe that this enclosure took place
after the criticisms and appeals which we have described had all been published.




Otmoor is described in Dunkin's History of Oxfordshire,(21*) as a 'dreary
and extensive common.' Tradition said that the tract of land was the gift
of some mysterious lady 'who gave as much ground as she could ride round
while an oat-sheaf was burning, to the inhabitants of its vicinity for a
public common,' and hence came its name of Oatmoor, corrupted into Otmoor.
Whatever the real origin of the name, which more prosaic persons connected
with 'Oc,' a Celtic word for 'water,' this tract of land had been used as
a 'public common without stint... from remote antiquity.' Lord Abingdon,
indeed, as Lord of the Manor of Beckley, claimed and exercised the right
of appointing a moor-driver, who at certain seasons drove all the cattle
into Beckley, where those which were unidentified became Lord Abingdon's
property. Lord Abingdon also claimed rights of soil and of sport: these,
like his other claim, were founded on prescription only, as there was no
trace of any grant from the Crown.




The use to which Otmoor, in its original state, was put, is thus described
by Dunkin. 'Whilst this extensive piece of land remained unenclosed, the
farmers of the several adjoining townships estimated the profits of a summer's
pasturage at 20s. per head, subject to the occasional loss of a beast by
a peculiar distemper called the moor-evil. But the greatest benefit was reaped
by the cottagers, many of whom turned out large numbers of geese, to which
the coarse aquatic sward was well suited, and thereby brought up their families
in comparative plenty.(22*)




'Of late years, however, this dreary waste was surveyed with longing eyes
by the surrounding landowners, most of whom wished to annex a portion of
it to their estates, and in consequence spared no pains to recommend the
enclosure as a measure beneficial to the country.'




The promoters of the enclosure credited themselves with far loftier motives:
prominent among them being a desire to improve the morals of the poor. An
advocate of the enclosure afterwards described the pitiable state of the
poor in pre-enclosure days in these words: 'In looking after a brood of goslings,
a few rotten sheep, a skeleton of a cow or a mangy horse, they lost more
than they might have gained by their day's work, and acquired habits of idleness
and dissipation and a dislike to honest labour, which has rendered them the
riotous and lawless set of men which they have now shown themselves to be.'
A pious wish to second the intention of Providence was also a strong incentive:
'God did not create the earth to lie waste for feeding a few geese, but to
be cultivated by man, in the sweat of his brow.'(23*)




The first proposal for enclosure came to Parliament from George, Duke
of Marlborough, and others on 11th March, 1801. The duke petitioned for the
drainage and the allotment of the 4000 acres of Otmoor among the parishes
concerned, namely Beckley (with Horton and Studley), Noke, Oddington, and
Charlton (with Fencott and Moorcott). This petition was referred to a Committee,
to consider amongst other things, whether the Standing Orders with reference
to drainage Bills had been duly complied with. The Committee reported in
favour of allowing the introduction of the Bill, but made this remarkable
admission, that though the Standing Orders with respect to the affixing of
notices on church doors had been complied with on Sunday, 3rd August, 'it
appeared to the Committee that on the following Sunday, the 10th of August,
the Person employed to affix the like Notices was prevented from so doing
at Beckley, Oddington and Charlton, by a Mob at each Place, but that he read
the Notices to the Persons assembled, and afterwards threw them amongst them
into the Church Yards of those Parishes.' Notice was duly affixed that Sunday
at Noke. The next Sunday matters were even worse, for no notices were allowed
to be fixed in any parish.




The Bill that was introduced in spite of this local protest, was shipwrecked
during its Committee stage by a petition from Alexander Croke, LL.D., Lord
of the Manor of Studley with Whitecross Green, and from John Mackaness, Esq.,
who stated that as proprietors in the parish of Beckley, their interests
had not been sufficiently considered.




The next application to Parliament was not made till 1814. In the interval
various plans were propounded, and Arthur Young, in his Survey of Oxfordshire
for the Board of Agriculture, published in 1809 (a work which Dunkin describes
as supported by the farmers and their landlords and as having caught their
strain), lamented the wretched state of the land. 'I made various inquiries
into the present value of it by rights of commonage; but could ascertain
no more than the general fact, of its being to a very beggarly amount....
Upon the whole, the present produce must be quite contemptible, when compared
with the benefit which would result from enclosing it. And I cannot but remark,
that such a tract of waste land in summer, and covered the winter through
with water, to remain in such a state, within five miles of Oxford and the
Thames, in a kingdom that regularly imports to the amount of a million sterling
in corn, and is almost periodically visited with apprehensions of want --
is a scandal to the national policy.... If drained and enclosed, it is said
that no difficulty would occur in letting it at 30s. per acre, and some assert
even 40s.' (p. 228).




When the new application was made in November 1814, it was again referred
to a Committee, who again had to report turbulent behaviour in the district
concerned. Notices had been fixed on all the church doors on 7th August,
and on three doors on 14th August, 'but it was found impracticable to affix
the Notices on the Church doors of the other two Parishes on that day, owing
to large Mobs, armed with every description of offensive weapons, having
assembled for the prose of obstructing the persons who went to affix the
Notices, and who were prevented by violence, and threats of immediate death,
from approaching the Churches.'(24*) From the same cause no notices could
be affixed on these two church doors on 21st or 28th August.




These local disturbances were not allowed to check the career of the Bill.
It was read a first time on 21st February, and a second time on 7th March.
But meanwhile some serious flaws had been discovered. The Duke of Marlborough
and the Earl of Abingdon both petitioned against it. The Committee, however,
were able to introduce amendments that satisfied both these powerful personages,
and on 1st May Mr. Fane reported from the Committee that no persons had appeared
for the said petitions, and that the parties concerned had consented to the
satisfaction of the Committee, and had also consented 'to the changing the
Commissioners therein named.' Before the Report had been passed, however,
a petition was received on behalf of Alexander Croke,(25*) Esq., who was
now in Nova Scotia, which made further amendments necessary, and the Committee
was empowered to send for persons, papers and records. Meanwhile the humbler
individuals whose future was imperilled were also bestirring themselves.
They applied to the Keeper of the Records in the Augmentation Office for
a report on the history of Otmoor. This Report, which is published at length
by Dunkin,(26*) states that in spite of laborious research no mention of
Otmoor could be found in any single record from the time of William the Conqueror
to the present day. Even Doomsday Book contained no reference to it. Nowhere
did it appear in what manor Otmoor was comprehended, nor was there any record
that any of the lords of neighbouring manors had ever been made capable of
enjoying any rights of common upon it. The custom of usage without stint,
in fact, pointed to some grant before the memory of man, and made it unlikely
that any lord of the manor had ever had absolute right of soil. Armed, no
doubt, with this learned report, some 'Freeholders, Landholders, Cottagers
and Persons' residing in four parishes sent up a petition asking to be heard
against the Bill. But they were too late: their petition was ordered to lie
on the Table, and the Bill passed the Commons the same day (26th June) and
received the Royal Assent on 12th July.




The Act directed that one-sixteenth of the whole (which was stated to
be over 4000 acres) should be given to the Lord of the Manor of Beckley,
Lord Abingdon, in compensation of his rights of soil, and one-eighth as composition
for all tithes. Thus Lord Abingdon received, to start with, about 750 acres.
The residue was to be allotted among the various parishes, townships and
hamlets, each allotment to be held as a common pasture for the township.
So far, beyond the fact that Lord Abingdon had taken off more than a sixth
part of their common pasture, and that the pasture was now divided up into
different parts, it did not seem that the ordinary inhabitants were much
affected. The sting lay in the arrangements for the future of these divided
common pastures. 'And if at any future time the major part in value of the
several persons interested in such plot or parcels of land, should require
a separate division of the said land, he (the commissioner) is directed to
divide and allot the same among the several proprietors, in proportion to
their individual rights and interests therein.'(27*)




We have, fortunately, a very clear statement of the way in which the 'rights
and interests' of the poorer inhabitants of the Otmoor towns were regarded
in the enclosure. These inhabitants, it must be remembered, had enjoyed rights
of common without any stint from time immemorial, simply by virtue of living
in the district. In a letter from 'An Otmoor Proprietor' to the Oxford papers
in 1830, the writer (Sir Alexander Croke himself?), who was evidently a man
of some local importance, explains that by the general rule of law a commoner
is not entitled to turn on to the common more cattle than are sufficient
to manure and stock the land to which the right of common is annexed. Accordingly,
houses without land attached to them cannot, strictly speaking, claim a right
of common. How then explain the state of affairs at Otmoor, where all the
inhabitants, landed or landless, enjoyed the same rights? By prescription,
he answers, mere houses do in point of fact sometimes acquire a right of
common, but this right, though it may be said to be without stint, is in
reality always liable to be stinted by law. Hence, when a common like Otmoor
is enclosed, the allotments are made as elsewhere in proportion to the amount
of land possessed by each commoner, whist a 'proportionable share' is thrown
in to those who own mere houses. But even this share, he points out, does
not necessarily belong to the person who has been exercising the right of
common, unless he happens to own his own house. It belongs to his landlord,
who alone is entitled to compensation. A superficial observer might perhaps
think this a hardship, but in point of fact it is quite just. The tenants,
occupying the houses, must have been paying a higher rent in consideration
of the right attached to the houses, and they have always been liable to
be turned out by the landlord at will. 'They had no permanent interest, and
it has been decided by the law that no man can have any right in any common,
as belonging to a house, wherein he has no interest but only habitation:
so that the poor, as such, had no right to the common whatever.'(28*)




The results of the Act, framed and administered on these lines, were described
by Dunkin,(29*) writing in 1823, as follows: 'It now only remains to notice
the effect of the operation of this act. On the division of the land allotted
to the respective townships, a certain portion was assigned to each cottager
in lieu of his accustomed commonage, but the delivery of the allotment did
not take place, unless the party to whom it was assigned paid his share of
the expenses incurred in draining and dividing the waste: and he was also
further directed to enclose the same with a fence. The poverty of the cottager
in general prevented his compliance with these conditions, and he was necessitated
to sell his share for any paltry sum that was offered. In the spring of 1819,
several persons at Charlton and elsewhere made profitable speculations by
purchasing these commons for £5 each, and afterwards prevailing on the
commissioners to throw them into one lot; thus forming a valuable estate.
In this way was Otmoor lost to the poor man, and awarded to the rich, under
the specious idea of benefitting the public.' The expenses of the Act, it
may be mentioned, came to something between £20,000 and £30,000,
or more than the fee-simple of the soil.(30*)




'Enclosed Otmoor did not fulfil Arthur Young's hopes:... instead of the
expected improvement in the quality of the soil, it has been rendered almost
totally worthless; a great proportion being at this moment over-rated at
5s. an acre yearly rent, few crops yielding any more than barely sufficient
to pay for labour and seed.'(31*) This excess of expenses over profits was
adduced by the 'Otmoor proprietor,' to whom we have already referred, as
an frustration of the public-spirited self-sacrifice of the enclosers, who
were paying out of their own pockets for a national benefit, and by making
some, at any rate, of the land capable of cultivation, were enabling the
poor to have 'an honest employment, instead of losing their time in idleness
and waste.'(32*) But fifteen years of this 'honest employment' failed to
reconcile the poor to their new position, and in 1830 they were able to express
their feelings in a striking manner.(33*)




In the course of his drainage operations, the commissioner had made a
new channel for the river Ray, at a higher level, with the disastrous result
that the Ray overflowed into a valuable tract of low land above Otmoor. For
two years the farmers of this tract suffered severe losses (one farmer was
said to have lost £400 in that time), then they took the law into their
own hands, and in June 1829 cut the embankments, so that the waters of the
Ray again flowed over Otmoor and left their valuable land unharmed. Twenty-two
farmers were indicted for felony for this act, but they were acquitted at
the Assizes, under the direction of Mr. Justice Parke, on the grounds that
the farmers had a right to abate the nuisance, and that the commissioner
had exceeded his powers in making this new channel and embankment.




This judgment produced a profound impression on the Otmoor farmers and
cottagers. They misread it to mean that all proceedings under the Enclosure
Act were illegal and therefore null and void, and they determined to regain
their lost privileges. Disturbances began at the end of August (28th August).
For about a week, straggling parties of enthusiasts paraded the moor, cutting
down fences here and there. A son of Sir Alexander Croke came out to one
of these parties and ordered them to desist. He had a loaded pistol with
him, and the moor-men, thinking, rightly or wrongly, that he was going to
fire, wrested it from him and gave him a severe thrashing. Matters began
to look serious: local sympathy with the rioters was so strong that special
constables refused to be sworn in; the High Sheriff accordingly summoned
the Oxfordshire Militia, and Lord Churchill's troop of Yeomanry Cavalry was
sent to Islip. But the inhabitants were not overawed. They determined to
perambulate the bounds of Otmoor in full force, in accordance with the old
custom. On Monday, 6th September, five hundred men, women and children assembled
from the Otmoor towns, and they were joined by five hundred more from elsewhere.
Armed with reap-hook, hatchets, bill-hooks and duckets, they marched in order
round the seven-mile-long boundary of Otmoor, destroying all the fences on
their way. By noon their work of destruction was finished. 'A farmer in the
neighbourhood who witnessed the scene gives a ludicrous description of the
zeal and perseverance of the women and children as well as the men, and the
ease and composure with which they waded through depths of mud and water
and overcame every obstacle in their march. He adds that he did not hear
any threatening expressions against any person or his property, and he does
not believe any individuals present entertained any feeling or wish beyond
the assertion of what they conceived (whether correctly or erroneously) to
be their prescriptive and inalienable right, and of which they speak precisely
as the freemen of Oxford would describe their right to Port Meadow.'(34*)




By the time the destruction of fences was complete, Lord Churchill's troop
of yeomanry came up to the destroying band: the Riot Act was read, but the
moormen refused to disperse. Sixty or seventy of them were thereupon seized
and examined, with the result that forty-four were sent off to Oxford Gaol
in wagons, under an escort of yeomanry. Now it happened to be the day of
St. Giles' Fair, and the street of St. Giles, along which the yeomanry brought
their prisoners, was crowded with countryfolk and townsfolk, most of whom
held strong views on the Otmoor question. The men in the wagons raised the
cry 'Otmoor for ever,' the crowd took it up, and attacked the yeomen with
great violence, hurling brickbats, stones and stick at them from every side.
The yeomen managed to get their prisoners as far as the turning down Beaumont
Street, but there they were overpowered, and all forty-four prisoners escaped.
At Otmoor itself peace now reigned. Through the broken fences cattle were
turned in to graze on all the enclosures, and the villagers even appointed
a herdsman to look after them. The inhabitants of the seven Otmoor towns
formed an association called 'the Otmoor Association,' which boldly declared
that 'the Right of Common on Otmoor was always in the inhabitants, and that
a non-resident proprietor had no Right of Common thereon,' and determined
to raise subscriptions for legal expenses in defence of their right, calling
upon 'the pecuniary aid of a liberal and benevolent public... to assist them
in attempting to restore Otmoor once more to its original state.'(35*)




Meanwhile the authorities who had lost their prisoners once, sent down
a stronger force to take them next time, and although at the Oxford City
Sessions a bill of indictment against William Price and others for riot in
St. Giles and rescue of the prisoners was thrown out, at the County Sessions
the Grand Jury found a true Bill against the same William Price and others
for the same offence, and also against Cooper and others for riot at Otmoor.
The prisoners were tried at the Oxford Assizes next month, before Mr. Justice
Bosanquet and Sir John Patteson. The jury returned a verdict which shows
the strength of public opinion. 'We find the defendants guilty of having
been present at an unlawful assembly on the 6th September at Otmoor, but
it is the unanimous wish of the Jury to recommend all the parties to the
merciful consideration of the Court.' The judges responded to this appeal
and the longest sentence inflicted was for months' imprisonment.(36*)




The original enclosure was now fifteen years old, but Otmoor was still
in rebellion, and the Home Office Papers of the next two years contain frequent
applications for troops from Lord Macclesfield, Lord-Lieutenant, Sir Alexander
Croke and other magistrates. Whenever there was a full moon, the patriots
of the moor turned out and pulled down the fences. How strong was the local
resentment of the overriding of all the rights and traditions of the commoners
may be seen not only from the language of one magistrate writing to Lord
Melbourne in January 1832: 'all the towns in the neighborhood of Otmoor are
more or less infected with the feelings of the most violent, and cannot at
all be depended on:' but also from a resolution passed by the magistrates
at Oxford in February of that year, declaring that no constabulary force
that the magistrates could raise would be equal to suppressing the Otmoor
outrages, and asking for soldiers. The appeal ended with this significant
warning: 'Any force which Government may send down should not remain for
a length of time together, but that to avoid the possibility of an undue
connexion between the people and the Military, a succession of troops should
be observed.' So long and so bitter was the civil war roused by an enclosure
which Parliament had sanctioned in absolute disregard of the opinions or
the traditions or the circumstances of the mass of the people it affected.




NOTES:




1. Most private Enclosure Acts provided that if a commissioner died his
successor was to be somebody not interested in the property.




2. Sir John Sinclair complained in 1796, that the Board had not even the
privilege of franking its letters. -- Annals of Agriculture, vol.
xxvi, pp. 506.




3. Vol. xxvi, p. 85.




4. From the Select Committee on the Means of Facilitating Enclosures in
1800, reprinted in Annual Register, 1800, Appendix to Chronicle, p.
85 ff., we learn that the fees received alone in the House of Commons (Bill
fees, small fees, committee fees, housekeepers' and messengers' fees, and
engrossing fees) for 707 Bills during the fourteen years from 1786 to 1799
inclusive amounted to no less that £59,867, 6s. 4d. As the scale of
fees in the House of Lords was about the same (Bill fees, yeoman, usher,
door-keepers' fees, order of committee, and committee fees) during these
years about £120,000 must have gone into the pockets of Parliamentary
officials.




5. See Appendix A (5).




6. Bedford Report, 1808, p. 235.




7. Annual Register, 1799, Chron. p. 27.




8. Eden, I, Preface, p. xviii.




9. Bedford Report, p. 249. Cf. writer in Appendix of Report
on Middlesex, pp. 507-15, 'a gentleman of the least sensibility would
rather suffer his residence to continue surrounded by marshes and bogs, than
take the lead in what may be deemed an obnoxious measure.' This same writer
urges, that the unpopularity of enclosures would be overcome were care taken
'to place the inferior orders of mankind -- the cottager and industrious
poor -- in such a situation, with regard to inclosures, that they should
certainly have some share secured to them, and he treated with a gentle hand.
Keep all in temper -- let no rights be now disputed... It is far more easy
to prevent a clamour than to stop it when once it is raised. Those who are
acquainted with the business of inclosure must know that there are more than
four-fifths of the inhabitants in most neighbourhoods who are generally left
out of the bill for want for property, and therefore cannot possibly claim
any part thereof.'




10. Vol. xx, p. 456.




11. Vol. xxiv, p. 543.




12. The Appropriation and Enclosure of Commonable and Intermixed Lands,
1801.




13. 'Allow to the cottager a little land about his dwelling for keeping
a cow, for planting potatoes, for raising flax or hemp. 2ndly. Convert the
waste lands of the kingdom into small arable farms, a certain quantity every
year, to be let on favourble terms to industrious families. 3rdly, Restrain
the engrossment and over-enlargement of farms. The propriety of those measures
cannot, I think, he questioned.' -- The Case of Labourers in Husbandry,
p. 103.




14. Annals of Agriculture, vol. i, p. 52.




15. This scheme marks a great advance on an earlier scheme which Young
published in the first volume of the Annals of Agriculture. He then
proposed that public money should be spent in settling cottagers or soldiers
on the waste, giving them their holding free of rent and tithes for three
lives, at the end of which time the land they had redeemed was to revert
to its original owners.




16. Slater, pp. 126-7.




17. Ibid., p. 128.




18. The Poor Man's Best Friend, or Land to cultivate for his own Benefit.
Letter to the Marquis of Salisbury, by the Rev. S. Demainbary, B.D., 1831.




19. p. 126.




20. See for this subject Cambridge Modern History, vol. viii, chap.
24, and P. Sagnac, La Législation Civils de la Révolution
Française.




21. Vol. i, p. 119 ff.




22. Jackson's Oxford Journal, September 11, 1830, said that a single
cottager sometimes cleared as much as £20 a year by geese.




23. Oxford University and City Herald, September 25, 1830.




24. House of Commons Journal, February 17, 1815.




25. Alexander Croke (1758-1842), knighted in 1816, was from 1801-1815
judge in the Vice-Admiralty Court, Nova Scotia. As a lawyer, he could defend
his own interest.




26. Dunkin's Oxfordshire, vol. i, pp. 122-3.




27. Ibid., p. 123.




28. Jackson's Oxford Journal, September 18, 1830.




29. Vol. i, p. 124.




30. Jackson's Oxford Journal, September 11, 1830.




31. Ibid.,




32. Ibid., September 18.




33. See Jackson's Oxford Journal, and Oxford University and
City Herald, for September 11, 1830, and also Annual Register,
1830, Chron. p. 142, and Home Office Papers, for what follows.




34. Oxford University and City Herald, September 11, 1830.




35. Ibid.




36. Jackson's Oxford Journal, March 5, 1831.




Chapter Four




The Village After Enclosure




The governing class continued its policy of extinguishing the old village
life and all the relationships and interests attached to it, with unsparing
and unhesitating hand; and as its policy progressed there were displayed
all the consequences predicted by its critics. Agriculture was revolutionised:
rents leapt up: England seemed to be triumphing over the difficulties of
a war with half the world. But it had one great permanent result which the
rulers of England ignored. The anchorage of the poor was gone.




For enclosure was fatal to three classes: the small farmer, the cottager,
and the squatter. To all of these classes their common rights were worth
more than anything they received in return. Their position was just the opposite
of that of the lord of the manor. The lord of the manor was given a certain
quantity of land (the conventional proportion was one-sixteenth(1*)) in lieu
of his surface rights, and that compact allotment was infinitely more valuable
than the rights so compensated. Similarly the tithe-owner stood to gain with
the increased rent. The large farmer's interests were also in enclosure,
which gave him a wider field for his capital and enterprise. The other classes
stood to lose.




For even if the small farmer received strict justice in the division of
the common fields, his share in the legal costs and the additional expense
of fencing his own allotments often overwhelmed him, and he was obliged to
sell his property.(2*) The expenses were always very heavy, and in some cases
amounted to £5 an acre.(3*) The lord of the manor and the tithe-owner
could afford to bear their share, because they were enriched by enclosure:
the classes that were impoverished by enclosure were ruined when they had
to pay for the very proceeding that had made them the poorer. The promoter
of the General Enclosure Bill of 1796, it will be remembered, had proposed
to exempt the poor from the expense of fencing, but the Select Committee
disapproved, and the only persons exempted in the eases we have examined
were the lords of the manor or tithe-owners.




If these expenses still left the small farmer on his feet, he found himself
deprived of the use of the fallow and stubble pasture, which had been almost
as indispensable to him as the land he cultivated. 'Strip the small farms
of the benefit of the commons,' said one observer, 'and they are all at one
stroke levelled to the ground.'(4*) It was a common clause in Enclosure Acts
that no sheep were to be depastured on allotments for seven years.(5*) The
small farmer either emigrated to America or to an industrial town, or became
a day labourer. His fate in the last resort may perhaps be frustrated by
the account given by the historian of Oxfordshire of the enclosure of Merton.
'About the middle of last century a very considerable alteration was produced
in the relative situation of different classes in the village. The Act of
Parliament for the inclosure of the fields having annulled all leases, and
the inclosure itself facilitated the plan of throwing several small farms
into a few large bargains,(6*) the holders of the farms who had heretofore
lived in comparative plenty, became suddenly reduced to the situation of
labourers, and in a few years were necessitated to throw themselves and their
families upon the parish. The overgrown farmers who had fattened upon this
alteration, feeling the pressure of the new burden, determined if possible
to free themselves: they accordingly decided upon reducing the allowance
of these poor to the lowest ratio,(7*) and resolved to have no more servants
so that their parishioners might experience no further increase from that
source. In a few years the numbers of the poor rapidly declined: the more
aged sank into their graves, and the youth, warned by their parents' sufferings,
sought a settlement elsewhere. The farmers, rejoicing in the success of their
scheme, procured the demolition of the cottages, and thus endeavoured to
secure themselves and their successors from the future expenses of supporting
an increased population, so that in 1821 the parish numbered only thirty
houses inhabited by thirty-four families.'(8*) Another writer gave an account
of the results of a Norfolk enclosure. 'In passing through a village near
Swaffham, in the County of Norfolk a few years ago, to my great mortification
I beheld the houses tumbling into ruins, and the common fields all enclosed;
upon enquiring into the cause of this melancholy alteration, I was informed
that a gentleman of Lynn had bought that township and the next adjoining
to it: that he had thrown the one into three, and the other into four farms;
which before the enclosure were in about twenty farms: and upon my further
enquiring what was becoming of the farmers who were turned out, the answer
was that some of them were dead and the rest were become labourers.'(9*)




The effect on the cottager can best be described by saying that before
enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land, after enclosure he was a
labourer without land. The economic basis of his independence was destroyed.
in the first place, he lost a great many rights for which he received no
compensation. There were, for instance, the cases mentioned by Mr. Henry
Homer (1719-1791), Rector of Birdingbury and Chaplain to Lord Leigh, in the
pamphlet he published in 1769,(10*) where the cottagers lost the privileges
of cutting furze and turf on the common land, the proprietor contending that
they had no right to these privileges, but only enjoyed them by his indulgence.
In every other case, Mr. Homer urged, uninterrupted, immemorial usage gives
a legal sanction even to encroachments. 'Why should the poor, as poor, be
excluded from the benefit of this general indulgence; or why should any set
of proprietors avail themselves of the inability of the poor to contend with
them, to get possession of more than they enjoyed?'(11*)




Another right that was often lost was the prescriptive right of keeping
a cow. The General Report on Enclosures (p. 12) records the results
of a careful inquiry made in a journey of 1600 miles, which showed that before
enclosure cottagers often kept cows without a legal right, and that nothing
was given them for the practice. Other cottagers kept cows by right of hiring
their cottages and common rights, and on enclosure the land was thrown into
a farm, and the cottager had to sell his cow. Two examples taken from the
Bedfordshire Report illustrate the consequences of enclosure to the
small man. One is from Maulden:(12*) 'The common was very extensive. I conversed
with a farmer, and several cottagers. One of them said, enclosing would ruin
England; it was worse than ten wars. Why, my friend, what have you lost by
it? I kept four cows before the parish was enclosed, and now I don't keep
so much as a goose; and you ask me what I lose by it!'(13*) The other is
from Sandy;(14*) 'This parish was very peculiarly circumstanced; it abounds
with gardeners, many cultivating their little freeholds, so that on the enclosure,
there were found to be sixty-three proprietors, though nine-tenths, perhaps,
of the whole belonged to Sir P. Monoux and Mr. Pym. These men kept cows on
the boggy common, and cut fern for litter on the warren, by which means they
were enabled to raise manure for their gardens, besides fuel in plenty; the
small allotment of an acre and a half, however good the land, has been no
compensation for what they were deprived of. They complain heavily, and know
not how they will now manage to raise manure. This was no reason to preserve
the deserts in their old state, but an ample one for giving a full compensation.'




Lord Winchilsea stated in his letter to the Board of Agriculture in 1796:
'Whoever travels through the Midland Counties and will take the trouble of
inquiring, will generally receive for answer that formerly there were a great
many cottagers who kept cows, but that the land is now thrown to the farmers,
and if he inquires still further, he will find that in those parishes the
Poor Rates have increased in an amazing degree more than according to the
average rise throughout England.'




These cottagers often received nothing at all for the right they had lost,
the compensation going to the owner of the cottage only. But even those cottagers
who owned their cottage received in return.for their common right something
infinitely less valuable. For a tiny allotment was worth much less than a
common right, especially if the allotment was at a distance from their cottage,
and though the Haute Huntre Act binds the commissioners to give Lord FitzWilliam
an allotment near his gardens, there was nothing in any Act that we have
seen to oblige the commissioners to give the cottager an allotment at his
door. And the cottagers had to fence their allotments or forfeit them. Anybody
who glances at an award will understand what this meant. it is easy, for
example, to imagine what happened under this provision to the following cottagers
at Stanwell: Edmund Jordan (1 1/2 acres) J. and F. Ride (each 1 1/4 acres)
T. L. Rogers (1 1/4 acres) Brooker Derby (1 1/4) Mary Gulliver (1 1/4 acres)
Anne Higgs (1 1/4) H. Isherwood (1 1/4) William Kent (1 1/4) Elizabeth Carr
(1 acre) Thomas Nash (1 acre) R. Ride (just under 1 acre) William Robinson
(just under 1 acre) William Cox (3/4 acre) John Carter (3/4 acre) William
Porter (3/4 acre) Thomas King (1/2 acre) John Hetherington (under 1/2 an
acre) J. Trout (1/4 acre and 4 perches) and Charles Burkhead (12 perches).
It would be interesting to know how many of these small parcels of land found
their way into the hands of Sir william Gibbons and Mr. Edmund Hill.




The Louth award is still more interesting from this point of view. J.
Trout and Charles Burkhead passing rich, the one on 1/4 acre and 4 perches,
the other on 12 perches, had only to pay their share of the expenses of the
enclosure, and for their own fencing. Sir William Gibbons was too magnanimous
a man to ask them to fence his 500 acres as well. But at Louth the tithe-owners,
who took more than a third of the whole, were excused their share of the
costs, and also had their fencing done for them by the other proprietors.
The prebendary and the vicar charged the expenses of fencing their 600 acres
on persons like Elizabeth Bryan who went off with 39 perches, Ann dunn (35
perches), Naomi Hodgson, widow (35 perches), John Betts (34 perches), Elizabeth
Atkins (32 perches), Will Boswell (31 perches), Elizabeth Eycon (28 perches),
Ann Hubbard, widow (15 perches), and Ann Metcalf, whose share of the spoil
was 14 perches. The award shows that there were 67 persons who received an
acre or less. Cottagers who received such allotments and had to fence them
had no alternative but to sell, and little to do with the money but to drink
it. This is the testimony of the General Report on Enclosures.(15*)




The squatters, though they are often spoken of as cottagers, must be distinguished
from the cottager in regard to their legal and historical position. They
were in a sense outside the original village economy. The cottager was, so
to speak, an aboriginal poor man: the squatter a poor alien. He settled on
a waste, built a cottage, and got together a few geese or sheep, perhaps
even a horse or a cow, and proceeded to cultivate the ground.




The treatment of encroachments seems to have varied very greatly, as the
cases analysed in the Appendix show, and there was no settled rule. Squatters
of less than twenty years' standing seldom received any consideration beyond
the privilege of buying their encroachment. Squatters of more than twenty
or forty years' standing, as the case might be, were often allowed to keep
their encroachments, and in some cases were treated like cottagers, with
a claim to an allotment. But, of course, like the cottagers, they lost their
common rights.




Lastly, enclosure swept away the bureaucracy of the old village: the viewers
of fields and letters of the cattle, who had general supervision of the arrangements
for pasturing sheep or cows in the common meadow, the common shepherd, the
chimney peepers who saw that the chimneys were kept properly, the hayward,
or pinder, who looked after the pound. Most of these little officials of
the village court had been paid either in land or by fees. When it was proposed
to abolish Parliamentary Enclosure, and to substitute a General Enclosure
Bill, the Parliamentary officials, who made large sums out of fees from Enclosure
Bills, were to receive compensation; but there was no talk of compensation
for the stolen livelihood of a pinder or a chimney peeper, as there had been
for the lost pickings of the officials of Parliament, or as there was whenever
an unhappy aristocrat was made to surrender one of his sinecures. George
Selwyn, who had been Paymaster of the Works for twenty-seven years at the
time that Burke's Act of 1782 deprived him of that profitable title, was
not allowed to languish very long on the two sinecures that were left to
him. In 1784 Pitt consoled him with the lucrative name of Surveyor-General
of Crown Lands. The pinder and the viewer received a different kind of justice.
For the rich there is compensation, as the weaver said in Disraeli's Sybil,
but 'sympathy is the solace of the poor.' In this case, if the truth be told,
even this solace was not administered with too liberal a hand.




All these classes and interests were scattered by enclosure, but it was
not one generation alone that was struck down by the blow. For the commons
were the patrimony of the poor. The commoner's child, however needy, was
born with a spoon in his mouth. He came into a world in which he had a share
and a place. The civilisation which was now submerged had spelt a sort of
independence for the obscure lineage of the village. It had represented,
too, the importance of the interest of the community in its soil, and in
this aspect also the robbery of the present was less important than the robbery
of the future. For one act of confiscation blotted out a principle of permanent
value to the State.




The immediate consequences of this policy were only partially visible
to the governing or the cultivated classes. The rulers of England took it
for granted that the losses of individuals were the gains of the State, and
that the distresses of the poor were the condition of permanent advance.
Modern apologists have adopted the same view; and the popular resistance
to enclosure is often compared to the wild and passionate fury that broke
against the spinning and weaving machines, the symbols and engines of the
Industrial Revolution. History has drawn a curtain over those days of exile
and suffering, when cottages were pulled down as if by an invader's hand,
and families that had lived for centuries in their dales or on their small
farms and commons were driven before the torrent, losing




<poem>

'Estate and house and all their sheep,

A pretty flock, and which for aught I know

Had clothed the Ewbanks for a thousand years.'

</poem>




Ancient possessions and ancient families disappeared. But the first consequence
was not the worst consequence: so far from compensating for this misery,
the ultimate result was still more disastrous. The governing class killed
by this policy the spirit of a race. The petitions that are buried with their
brief and unavailing pathos in the Journals of the House of Commons
are the last voice of village independence, and the unnamed commoners who
braved the dangers of resistance to send their doomed protests to the House
of Commons that obeyed their lords, were the last of the English peasants.
These were the men, it is not unreasonable to believe, whom Gray had in mind
when he wrote: --




<poem>

'Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood,'

</poem>




As we read the descriptions of the state of France before the Revolution,
there is one fact that comforts the imagination and braces the heart. We
read of the intolerable services of the peasant, of his forced labour, his
confiscated harvests, his crushing burdens, his painful and humiliating tasks,
including in some cases even the duty of protecting the sleep of the seigneur
from the croaking of the neighboring marshes. The mind of Arthur Young was
filled with this impression of unsupportable servitude. But a more discerning
eye might have perceived a truth that escaped the English traveller. It is
contained in an entry that often greets us in the official reports on the
state of the provinces: ce seigneur litige avec ses vaissaux. Those few words
flash like a gleam of the dawn across this sombre and melancholy page. The
peasant may be overwhelmed by the dîme, the taille, the corvée,
the hundred and one services that knit his tenure to the caprice of a lord:
he may be wretched, brutal, ignorant, ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ill-housed:
but he has not lost his status: he is not a casual figure in a drifting proletariat:
he belongs to a community that can withstand the seigneur, dispute his claims
at law, resume its rights, recover its possessions, and establish, one day,
its independence.




In England the aristocracy destroyed the promise of such a development
when it broke the back of the peasant community. The enclosures created a
new organisation of classes. The peasant with rights and a status, with a
share in the fortunes and government of his village, standing in rags, but
standing on his feet, makes way for the labourer with no corporate rights
to defend, no corporate power to invoke, no property to cherish, no ambition
to pursue, bent beneath the fear of his masters, and the weight of a future
without hope. No class in the world has so beaten and crouching a history,
and if the blazing ricks in 1830 once threatened his rulers with the anguish
of his despair, in no chapter of that history could it have been written,
'This parish is at law with its squire.' For the parish was no longer the
community that offered the labourer friendship and sheltered his freedom:
it was merely the shadow of his poverty, his helplessness, and his shame.
'Go to an ale-house kitchen of an old enclosed country, and there you will
see the origin of poverty and Poor-rates. For whom are they to be sober?
For whom are they to save? For the parish? If I am diligent, shall I have
leave to build a cottage? If I am sober, shall I have land for a cow? If
I am frugal, shall I have half an acre of potatoes? You offer no motives;
you have nothing but a parish officer and a workhouse! -- Bring me another
pot --.'(16*)




NOTES:




1. See the Evidence of Witnesses before the Committee on Commons Inclosure
of 1844. (Baily, land-agent): 'General custom to give the Lord of Manor 1/16th
as compensation for his rights exclusive of the value of minerals and of
his rights as a common right owner.' Another witness (Coulson, a solicitor)
defined the surface rights as 'game and stockage,' and said that the proportion
determined upon the result of a bargain beforehand.




2. 'Many small proprietors have been seriously injured by being obliged
in pursuance of ill-framed private bills to enclosure lands which newer repaid
the expense.' Marshall, The Appropriation and Enclosures of Commonable
and Intermixed Lands, 1801, p. 52.




3. Cost of Enclosure -- The expenses of particular Acts varied very much.
Billingsley in his Report on Somerset (p. 57) gives £3 an acre
as the cost of enclosing a lowland parish, £2, 10s. for an upland parish.
The enclosure of the 12,000 acre King's Sedgmoor (Ibid., p. 196) came (with
the subdivisions) to no less than £59,624, 4s. 8d., or nearly £5
an acre. Stanwell Enclosure, on the other hand, came to about 23s. an acre,
and various instance given in the Report for Bedfordshire work out
at about the same figure. When the allotments to the tithe-owners and the
lord of the manor were exempted, the sum per acre would of course fall more
heavily on the other allottees, e.g., of Louth, where more than a third of
the 1701 acres enclosed were exempt. In many cases, of course, land was sold
to cover expenses. The cost of fencing allotments would also vary in different
localities. In Somerset, from 7s. 7d. to 8s. 7d. for 20 feet of quickset
hedge was calculated, in Bedfordshire, 10s. 6d. per pole. See also for expense
Hasbach, pp. 64, 65, and General Report on Enclosures, Appendix, xvii.
Main Items: --

1. Country solictor's fees for drawing up Bill and attending in town;

2. Attendance of witnesses at House of Commons and House of Lords to prove
that Standing Orders had been complied with;

3. Expenses of persons to get signatures of consents and afterwards to attend
to get consent of principal proprietors);

4. Expense of Parliamentary solicitor, 20 gs., but more if opposition;

5. Expense of counsel if there was opposition;

6. Parliament fees, see p. 76.




4. Inquiry into the Advantages and Disadvantages resulting from Bills
of Enclosure, 1789, p. 14.




5. Cf. Ashelworth, Cheshunt, Knaresborough.




6. Previous to enclosure there were twenty-five farmers; the land is now
divided among five or six persons only.




7. It was then confidently said that several poor persons actually perished
from want, and so great was the outcry that some of the farmers were hissed
in the public market at Bicester.




8. Dunkin's Oxfordshire, pp. 2 and 3.




9. F. Moore, Considerations on the Exorbitant Price of Proprietors,
1773, p. 22; quoted by Levy, p. 27.




10. Essay on the Nature and Method of ascertaining the specific Share
of Proprietors upon the Inclosure of Common fields, with observations on
the inconveniences of common fields, etc., p. 22.




11. The Kirton, Sutterton and Wigtoft (Lincs) Acts prescribed a penalty
for taking turf or sod after the passing of the Act, of £10, and in
default of payment imprisonment in the House of Correction with hard labour
for three months.




12. p. 235.




13. The only provision for the poor in the Maulden Act, (36 Geo. III,
c. 65) was a fuel allotment as a compensation for the ancient usage of cutting
peat or moor turf. The trustees (rector, churchwarden and overseers) were
to distribute the turf to poor families, and were to pay any surplus from
the rent of the herbage to the poor rates.




14. p. 240.




15. At St. Neots a gentleman complained to Arthur Young in 1791 that in
the enclosure which took place sixteen years before, 'the poor were ill-treated
by having about half a rood given them in lieu of a cow keep, the inclosure
of which land costing more than they could afford, they sold the lots at
£5, the money was drank out at the ale-house, and the men, spoiled by
the habit, came, with their families to the parish.' -- Annuals of Agriculture,
vol xvi. p. 482.




16. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxxvi. p. 508.




Chapter Five




The Labourer in 1795




In an unenclosed village, as we have seen, the normal labourer did not
depend on his wages alone. His livelihood was made up from various sources.
His firing he took from the waste, he had a cow or a pig wandering on the
common pasture, perhaps he raised a little crop on a strip in the common
fields. He was not merely a wage earner, receiving so much money a week or
a day for his labour, and buying all the necessaries of life at a shop: he
received wages as a labourer, but in part he maintained himself as a producer.
Further, the actual money revenue of the family was not limited to the labourer's
earnings, for the domestic industries that flourished in the village gave
employment to his wife and children.




In an enclosed village at the end of the eighteenth century the position
of the agricultural labourer was very different. All his auxiliary resources
had been taken from him, and he was now a wage earner and nothing more. Enclosure
had robbed him of the strip that he tilled, of the cow that he kept on the
village pasture, of the fuel that he picked up in the woods, and of the turf
that he tore from the common. And while a social revolution had swept away
his possessions, an industrial revolution had swept away his family's earnings.
To families living on the scale of the village poor, each of these losses
was a crippling blow, and the total effect of the changes was to destroy
their economic independence.




Some of these auxiliary resources were not valued very highly by the upper
classes, and many champions of enclosure proved to their own satisfaction
that the advantage, for example, of the right of cutting fuel was quite illusory.
Such writers had a very superficial knowledge of the lot of the cottagers.
They argued that it would be more economical for the labourer to spend on
his ordinary employment the time he devoted to cutting fuel and turf, and
to buy firing out of his wages: an argument from the theory of the division
of labour that assumed that employment was constant. Fortunately we have,
thanks to Davies, a very careful calculation that enables us to form rather
a closer judgment. He estimates(1*) that a man could cut nearly enough in
a week to serve his family all the year, and as the farmers will give the
carriage of it in return for the ashes, he puts the total cost at 10s. a
year, or a little more than a week's wages.(2*) If we compare this with his
accounts of the cost of fuel elsewhere, we soon see how essential common
fuel rights were to a labourer's economy. As Sidlesham in Surrey, for instance,(3*)
in the expenses of five families of labourers, the fuel varies from £1,
15s. 0d. up to £4, 3s. 0d., with an average of £2, 8s. 0d. per
family. It must be remembered, too, that the sum of 10s. for fuel from the
common is calculated on the assumption that the man would otherwise be working;
whereas, in reality, he could cut his turf in slack times and in odd hours,
when there was no money to be made by working for some one else.




There was another respect in which the resources of a labouring family
were diminished towards the end of the century, and this too was a loss that
the rich thought trifling. From time immemorial the labourer had sent his
wife and children into the fields to glean or leaze after the harvest. The
profits of gleaning, under the old, unimproved system of agriculture, were
very considerable. Eden says of Rode in Northamptonshire, where agriculture
was in a 'wretched state, from the land being in common-fields,' that 'several
families will gather as much wheat as will serve them for bread the whole
year, and as many beans as will keep a pig.'(4*) From this point of view
enclosure, with its improved methods of agriculture, meant a sensible loss
to the poor of the parish, but even when there was less to be gleaned the
privilege was by no means unimportant. A correspondent in the Annals of
Agriculture,(5*) writing evidently of land under improved cultivation
in Shropshire, estimates that a wife can glean three or four bushels. The
consumption of wheat, exclusive of other food, by a labourer's family he
puts at half a bushel a week at least; the price of wheat at 13s. 6d. a bushel;
the labourer's wages at 7s. or 8s. To such a family gleaning rights represented
the equivalent of some six or seven weeks' wages.




With the introduction of large farming these customary rights were in
danger. It was a nuisance for the farmer to have his fenced fields suddenly
invaded by bands of women and children. The ears to be picked up were now
few and far between, and there was a risk that the labourers, husbands and
fathers of the gleaners, might wink at small thefts from the sheaves. Thus
it was that customary rights, which had never been questioned before, and
seemed to go back to the Bible itself, came to be the subject of dispute.
On the whole question of gleaning there is an animated controversy in the
Annals of Agriculture(6*) between Capel Lofft,(7*) a romantic Suffolk
Liberal, who took the side of the gleaners, and Ruggles,(8*) the historian,
who argued against them. Capel Lofft was a humane and chivalrous magistrate
who, unfortunately for the Suffolk poor, was struck off the Commission of
the Peace a few years later, apparently at the instance of the Duke of Portland,
for persuading the Deputy-Sheriff to postpone the execution of a girl sentenced
to death for stealing, until he had presented a memorial to the Crown praying
for clemency. The chief arguments on the side of the gleaners were (1) that
immemorial custom gave legal right, according to the maxim, consuetudo angliae
lex est angliae communis; (2) that Blackstone had recognised the right in
his Commentaries, basing his opinion upon Hale and Gilbert, 'Also it hath
been said, that by the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed
to enter and glean on another's ground after harvest without being guilty
of trespass, which humane provision seems borrowed from the Mosaic law, (iii.
212, 1st edition); (3) that in Ireland the right was recognised by statutes
of Henry VIII's reign, which modified it; (4) that it was a custom that helped
to keep the poor free from degrading dependence on poor relief. It was argued,
on the other hand, by those who denied the right to glean, that though the
custom had existed from time immemorial, it did not rest on any basis of
actual right, and that no legal sanction to it had ever been explicitly given,
Blackstone and the authorities on whom he relied being too vague to be considered
final. Further, the custom was demoralising to the poor; it led to idleness,
'how many days during the harvest are lost by the mother of a family and
all her children, in wandering about from field to field, to glean what does
not repay them the wear of their cloathes in seeking;' it led to pilfering
from the temptation to take handfuls from the swarth or shock; and it was
deplorable that on a good-humoured permission should be grafted 'a legal
claim, in its use and exercise so nearly approaching to licentiousness.'




Whilst this controversy was going on, the legal question was decided against
the poor by a majority of judges in the Court of Common Pleas in 1788. One
judge, Sir Henry Gould,(9*) dissented in a learned judgment; the majority
based their decision partly on the mischievous consequences of the practice
to the poor. The poor never lost a right without being congratulated by the
rich on gaining something better. It did not, of course, follow from this
decision that the practice necessary ceased altogether, but from that time
it was a privilege given by the farmer at his own discretion, and he could
warn off obnoxious or 'saucy' persons from his fields. Moreover, the dearer
the corn, and the more important the privilege for the poor, the more the
farmer was disinclined to largess the precious ears. Capel Lofft had pleaded
that with improved agriculture the gleaners could pick up so little that
that little should not be grudged, but the farmer found that under famine
prices this little was worth more to him than the careless scatterings of
earlier times.(10*)




The loss of his cow and his produce and his common and traditional rights
was rendered particularly serious to the labourer by the general growth of
prices. For enclosure which had produced the agrarian proletariat, had raised
the cost of living for him. The accepted opinion that under enclosure England
became immensely more productive tends to obscure the truth that the agricultural
labourer suffered in his character of consumer, as well as in his character
of producer, when the small farms and the commons disappeared. Not only had
he to buy the food that formerly he had produced himself, but he had to buy
it in a rising market. Adam Smith admitted that the rise of price of poultry
and pork had been accelerated by enclosure, and Nathaniel Kent laid stress
on the diminution in the supply of these and other small provisions. Kent
has described the change in the position of the labourers in this respect:
'Formerly they could buy milk, butter, and many other small articles in every
parish, in whatever quantity they are wanted. But since small farms have
decreased in number, no such articles are to be had; for the great farmers
have no idea of retailing such small commodities, and those who do retail
them carry them all to town. A farmer is even unwilling to sell the labourer
who works for him a bushel of wheat, which he might get ground for three
or four pence a bushel. For want of this advantage he is driven to the mealman
or baker, who, in the ordinary course of their profit, get at least ten per
cent. of them, upon this principal article of their consumption.'(11*) Davies,
the author of The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, thus describes the
new method of distribution. 'The great farmer deals in a wholesale way with
the miller: the miller with the mealman: the mealman with the shopkeeper,
of which last the poor man buys his flour by the bushel. For neither the
miller nor the mealman will sell the labourer a less quantity than a sack
of flour, under the retail price of shops, and the poor man's pocket will
seldom allow of his buying a whole sack at once.'(12*)




It is clear from these facts that it would have needed a very large increase
of wages to compensate the labourer for his losses under enclosure. But real
wages, instead of rising, had fallen, and fallen far. The writer of the Bedfordshire
Report (p. 67), comparing the period of 1730-50 with that of 1802-6 in respect
of prices of wheat and labour, points out that to enable him to purchase
equal quantities of bread in the second period and in the first, the pay
of the day labourer in the second period should have been 2s. a day, whereas
it was 1s. 6d. Nathaniel Kent, writing in 1796,(13*) says that in the last
forty or fifty years the price of provisions had gone up by 60 per cent,
and wages by 25 per cent, 'but this is not all, for the sources of the market
which used to feed him are in a great measure cut off since the system of
large farms has been so much encouraged.' Professor Levy estimates that wages
rose between 1760 and 1813 by 60 per cent, and the price of wheat by 130
per cent.(14*) Thus the labourer who now lived on wages alone earned wages
of a lower purchasing power than the wages which he had formerly supplemented
by his own produce. Whereas his condition earlier in the century had been
contrasted with that of Continental peasants greatly to his advantage in
respect of quantity and variety of food, he was suddenly brought down to
the barest necessities of life. Arthur Young had said a generation earlier
that in France bread formed nineteen parts in twenty of the food of the people,
but that in England all ranks consumed an immense quantity of meat, butter
and cheese.(15*) We know something of the manner of life of the poor in 1789
and 1795 from the family budgets collected by Eden and Davies from different
parts of the country.(16*) These budgets show that the labourers were rapidly
sinking in this respect to the condition that Young had described as the
condition of the poor in France. 'Bacon and other kinds of meat form a very
small part of their diet, and cheese becomes a luxury.' But even on the meagre
food that now became the ordinary fare of the cottage, the labourers could
not make ends meet. All the budgets tell the same tale of impoverished diet
accompanied by an overwhelming strain and an actual deficit. The normal labourer,
even with constant employment, was no longer solvent.




If we wish to understand fully the predicament of the labourer, we must
remember that he was not free to roam over England, and try his luck in some
strange village or town when his circumstances became desperate at home.
He lived under the capricious tyranny of the old law of settlement, and enclosure
had made that net a much more serious fact for the poor. The destruction
of the commons had deprived him of any career within his own village; the
Settlement Laws barred his escape out of it. It is worth while to consider
what the Settlement Laws were, and how they acted, and as the subject is
not uncontroversial it will be necessary to discuss it in some detail.




Theoretically every person had one parish, and one only, in which he or
she had a settlement and a right to parish relief. In practice it was often
difficult to decide which parish had the duty of relief, and disputes gave
rise to endless litigation. From this point of view eighteenth-century England
was like a chessboard of parishes, on which the poor were moved about like
pawns. The foundation of the various laws on the subject was an Act passed
in Charles II's reign (13 and 14 Charles II. c. 12) in 1662. Before this
Act each parish had, it is true, the duty of relieving its own impotent poor
and of policing its own vagrants, and the infirm and aged were enjoined by
law to betake themselves to their place of settlement, which might be their
birthplace, or the place where they had lived for three years, but, as a
rule, 'a poor family might, without the fear of being sent back by the parish
officers, go where they choose, for better wages, or more certain employment.'(17*)
This Act of 1662 abridged their liberty, and, in place of the old vagueness,
established a new and elaborate system. The Act was declared to be necessary
in the preamble, because 'by reason of some defects in the law, poor people
are not restrained from going from one parish to another, and therefore do
endeavour to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best
stock, the largest commons or wastes to build cottages, and the most woods
for them to burn and destroy; and when they have consumed it, then to another
parish; and at last become rogues and vagabonds; to the great discouragement
of parishes to provide stock, when it is liable to be devoured by strangers.'
By the Act any new-comer, within forty days of arrival, could be ejected
from a parish by an order from the magistrates, upon complaint from the parish
officers, and removed to the parish where he or she was last legally settled.
If, however, the new-comer settled in a tenement of the yearly value of £10,
or could give security for the discharge of the parish to the magistrates'
satisfaction, he was exempt from this provision.




As this Act carried with it the consequence that forty days' residence
without complaint from the parish officers gained the new-comer a settlement,
it was an inevitable temptation to Parish A to smuggle its poor into Parish
B, where forty days' residence without the knowledge of the parish officers
would gain them a settlement. Fierce quarrels broke out between the parishes
in consequence. To compose these it was enacted (1 James II. c. 17) that
the forty days' residence were to be reckoned only after a written notice
had been given to a parish officer. Even this was not enough to protect Parish
B, and by 3 William and Mary, c. 11 (1691) it was provided that this notice
must be read in church, immediately after divine service, and then registered
in the book kept for poor's accounts. Such a condition made it practically
impossible for any poor man to gain a settlement by forty days' residence,
unless his tenement were of the value of £10 a year, but the Act allowed
an immigrant to obtain a settlement in any one of four ways; (1) by paying
the parish taxes; (2) by executing a public annual office in the parish;
(3) by serving an apprenticeship in the parish; (4) by being hired for a
year's service in the parish. (This, however, only applied to the unmarried.)
In 1697 (8 and 9 William III. e. 30) a further important modification of
the settlement laws was made. To prevent the arbitrary ejection of new-comers
by parish officers, who feared that the fresh arrival or his children might
somehow or other gain a settlement, it was enacted that if the new-comer
brought with him to Parish B a certificate from the parish officers of Parish
A taking responsibility for him, then he could not be removed till be became
actually chargeable. It was further decided by this and subsequent Acts and
by legal decisions, that the granting of a certificate was to be left to
the discretion of the parish officers and magistrates, that the cost of removal
fell on the certificating parish, and that a certificate holder could only
gain a settlement in a new parish by renting a tenement of £10 annual
value, or by executing a parish office, and that his apprentice or hired
servant could not gain a settlement.




In addition to these methods of gaining a settlement there were four other
ways, 'through which,' according to Eden, 'it is probable that by far the
greater part of the labouring Poor... are actually settled.'(18*) (1) Bastards,
with some exceptions, acquired a settlement by birth;(19*) (2) legitimate
children also acquired a settlement by birth if their father's, or failing
that, their mother's legal settlement was not known; (3) women gained a settlement
by marriage; (4) persons with an estate of their own were irremovable, if
residing on it, however small it might be.




Very few important modifications had been made in the laws of Settlement
during the century after 1697. In 1722 (9 George I. c. 7) it was provided
that no person was to obtain a settlement in any parish by the purchase of
any estate or interest of less value than £30, to be 'bona fide paid,'
a provision which suggests that parishes had connived at gifts of money for
the purchase of estates in order to discard their paupers: by the same Act
the payment of the scavenger or highway rate was declared not to confer a
settlement. In 1784 (24 George III. c. 6) soldiers, sailors and their families
were allowed to exercise trades where they liked, and were not to be removable
till they became actually chargeable; and in 1793 (33 George III. c. 54)
this latter concession was extended to members of Friendly Societies. None
of these concessions affected the normal labourer, and down to 1795 a labourer
could only make his way to a new village if his own village would give him
a certificate, or if the other village invited him. His liberty was entirely
controlled by the parish officers.




How far did the Settlement Acts operate? How far did this body of law
really affect the comfort and liberty of the poor? The fiercest criticism
comes from Adam Smith, whose fundamental instincts rebelled against so crude
and brutal an interference with human freedom. 'To remove a man who has committed
no misdemeanour, from a parish where he chuses to reside, is an evident violation
of natural liberty and justice. The common people of England, however, so
jealous of their liberty, but, like the common people of most other countries,
never rightly understanding wherein it consists, have now, for more than
a century together, suffered themselves to be exposed to this oppression
without a remedy. Though men of reflexion, too, have sometimes complained
of the law of settlements as a public grievance; yet it has never been the
object of any general popular clamour, such as that against general warrants,
an abusive practice undoubtedly, but such a one as was not likely to occasion
any general oppression. There is scarce a poor man in England, of forty years
of age, I will venture to say, who has not, in some part of his life, felt
himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements.'(20*)




Adam Smith's view is supported by two contemporary writers on the Poor
Law, Dr. Burn and Mr. Hay. Dr. Burn, who published a history of the Poor
Law in 1764, gives this picture of the overseer: 'The office of an Overseer
of the Poor seems to be understood to be this, to keep an extraordinary look-out
to prevent persons coming to inhabit without certificates, and to fly to
the Justices to remove them: and if a man brings a certificate, then to caution
the inhabitants not to let him a farm of £10 a year, and to take care
to keep him out of all parish offices.'(21*) He further says that the parish
officers will assist a poor man in taking a farm in a neighboring parish,
and give him £10 for the rent. Mr. Hay, M.P., protested in his remarks
on the Poor Laws against the hardships inflicted on the poor by the Laws
of Settlement. 'It leaves it in the breast of the parish officers whether
they will grant a poor person a certificate or no.'(22*) Eden, on the other
hand, thought Adam Smith's picture overdrawn, and he contended that though
there were no doubt cases of vexatious removal, the Laws of Settlement were
not administered in this way everywhere. Howlett also considered the operation
of the Laws of Settlement to be 'trifling,' and instanced the growth of Sheffield,
Birmingham, and Manchester as proof that there was little interference with
the mobility of labour.




A careful study of the evidence seems to lead to the conclusion that the
Laws of Settlement were in practice, as they were on paper, a violation of
natural liberty; that they did not stop the flow of labour, but that they
related it in the interest of the employing class. The answer to Howlett
is given by Ruggles in the Annals of Agriculture.(23*) He begins by
saying that the Law of Settlement has made a poor family 'of necessity stationary;
and obliged them to rest satisfied with those wages they can obtain where
their legal settlement happens to be; a restraint on them which ought to
insure to them wages in the parish where they must remain, more adequate
to their necessities, because it precludes them in a manner from bringing
their labour, the only marketable produce they possess, to the best market;
it is this restraint which has, in all manufacturing towns, been one cause
of reducing the poor to such a state of miserable poverty; for, among the
manufacturers, they have too frequently found masters who have taken, and
continue to take every advantage, which strict law will give; of consequence,
the prices of labour have been, in manufacturing towns, in an inverse ratio
of the number of poor settled in the place; and the same cause has increased
that number, by inviting foreigners, in times when large orders required
many workmen; the masters themselves being the overseers, whose duty as parish
officers has been opposed by their interest in supplying the demand.' In
other words, when it suited an employer to let fresh workers in, he would,
qua overseer, encourage them to come with or without certificates; but when
they were once in and 'settled' he would refuse them certificates to enable
them to go and try their fortunes elsewhere, in parishes where a certificate
was demanded with each poor new-comer.(24*) Thus it is not surprising to
find, from Eden's Reports, that certificates are never granted at
Leeds and Skipton; seldom granted at Sheffield; not willingly granted at
Nottingham, and that at Halifax certificates are not granted at present,
and only three have been granted in the last eighteen years.




It has been argued that the figures about removals in different parishes
given by Eden in his second and third volumes show that the Law of Settlement
was 'not so black as it has been painted.'(25*) But in considering the small
number of removals, we must also consider the large number of places where
there is this entry, 'certificates are never granted.' It needed considerable
courage to go to a new parish without a certificate and run the risk of an
ignominious expulsion, and though all overseers were not so strict as the
one described by Dr. Burn, yet the fame of one vexatious removal would have
a far-reaching effect in checking migration. It is clear that the law must
have operated in this way in districts where enclosures took away employment
within the parish. Suppose Hodge to have lived at Kibworth-Beauchamp in Leicestershire.
About 1780, 3600 acres were enclosed and turned from arable to pasture; before
enclosure the fields 'were solely applied to the production of corn,' and
'the Poor had then plenty of employment in weeding, reaping, threshing, etc.,
and could also collect a great deal of corn by gleaning.'(26*) After the
change, as Eden admits, a third or perhaps a fourth of the number of hands
would be sufficient to do all the farming work required. Let us say that
Hodge was one of the superfluous two-thirds, and that the parish authorities
refused him a certificate. What did he do? He applied to the overseer, who
sent him out as a roundsman.(27*) He would prefer to bear the ills he knew
rather than face the unknown in the shape of a new parish officer, who might
demand a certificate, and send him back with ignominy if he failed to produce
one. If he took his wife and family with him there was even less chance of
the demand for a certificate being waived.(28*) So at Kibworth-Beauchamp
Hodge and his companions remained, in a state of chronic discontent. 'The
Poor complain of hard treatment from the overseers, and the overseers accuse
the Poor of being saucy.'(29*)




Now, at first sight, it seems obvious that it would be to the interest
of a parish to give a poor man a certificate, if there were no market for
his labour at home, in order to enable him to go elsewhere and make an independent
living. This seems the reasonable view, but it is incorrect. In the same
way, it would seem obvious that a parish would give slight relief to a person
whose claim was in doubt rather than spend ten times the amount in contesting
that claim at law. In point of fact, in neither case do we find what seems
the reasonable course adopted. Parishes spent fortunes in lawsuits. And to
the parish authorities it would seem that they risked more in giving Hodge
a certificate than in obliging him to stay at home, even if he could not
make a living in his native place; for he might, with his certificate, wander
a long way off, and then fall into difficulties, and have to be fetched back
at great expense, and the cost of removing him would fall on the certificating
parish. There is a significant passage in the Annals of Agriculture(30*)
about the wool trade in 1788. 'We have lately had some hand-bills scattered
about Bocking, I am told, promising full employ to combers and weavers, that
would migrate to Nottingham. Even if they chose to try this offer; as probably
a parish certificate for such a distance would be refused; it cannot be attempted.'
Where parishes saw an immediate prospect of getting rid of their superfluous
poor into a neighboring parish with open fields or a common, they were indeed
not chary of granting certificates. At Hothfield in Kent, for example, 'full
half of the labouring poor are certificated persons from other parishes:
the above-mentioned common, which affords them the means of keeping a cow,
or poultry, is supposed to draw many Poor into the parish; certificated persons
are allowed to dig peat.'(31*)




In the Rules for the government of the Poor in the hundreds of Loes and
Wilford in Suffolk(32*) very explicit directions are given about the granting
of certificates. In the first place, before any certificate is granted the
applicant must produce an examination taken before a Justice of the Peace,
showing that he belongs to one of the parishes within the hundred. Granted
that he has complied with this condition, then, (1) if he be a labourer or
husbandman no certificate will be granted him out of the hundreds unless
he belongs to the parish of Kenton, and even in that case it is 'not to exceed
the distance of three miles;' (2) if he be a tradesman, artificer, or manufacturer
a certificate may be granted to him out of the hundreds, but in no case is
it to exceed the distance of twenty miles from the parish to which he belongs.
The extent of the hundreds was roughly fourteen miles by five and a half.




Eden, describing the neighbourhood of Coventry, says: 'In a country parish
on one side the city, chiefly consisting of cottages inhabited by ribbon-weavers,
the Rates are as high as in Coventry; whilst, in another parish, on the opposite
side, they do not exceed one-third of the City Rate: this is ascribed to
the care that is taken to prevent manufacturers from settling in the parish.'(33*)
In the neighbourhood of Mollington (Warwickshire and Oxon) the poor rates
varied from 2s. to 4s. in the pound. 'The difference in the several parishes,
it is said, arises, in a great measure, from the facility or difficulty of
obtaining settlements: in several parishes, a fine is imposed on a parishoner,
who settles a newcomer by hiring, or otherwise, so that a servant is very
seldom hired for a year. Those parishes which have for a long time been in
the habit of using these precautions, are now very lightly burthened with
Poor. This is often the case, where farms are large, and of course in few
hands; while other parishes, not politic enough to observe these rules, are
generally burthened with an influx of poor neighbours.'(34*) Another example
of this is Deddington (Oxon) which like other parishes that possessed common
fields suffered from an influx of small farmers who had been turned out elsewhere,
whereas neighbouring parishes, possessed by a few individuals, were cautious
in permitting newcomers to gain settlements.(35*) This practice of hiring
servants for fifty-one weeks only was common: Eden thought it fraudulent
and an evasion of the law that would not be upheld in a court of justice,(36*)
but he was wrong, for the 1817 Report on the Poor Law mentions among 'the
measures, justifiable undoubtedly in point of law, which are adopted very
generally in many parts of the kingdom, to defeat the obtaining a settlement,
that of hiring labourers for a less period than a year; from whence it naturally
and necessarily follows, that a labourer may spend the season of his health
and industry in one parish, and be transferred in the decline of life to
a distant Part of the kingdom.'(37*) We hear little about the feelings of
the unhappy labourers who were brought home by the overseers when they fell
into want in a parish which had taken them in with their certificate, but
it is not difficult to imagine the scene. It is significant that the Act
of 1795 (to which we shall refer later), contained a provision that orders
of removal were to be suspended in cases where the pauper was dangerously
ill.




From the Rules for the Government of the Poor in the Hundreds of Loes
and Wilford, already alluded to, we learn some particulars of the allowance
made for the removal of paupers. Twenty miles was to be considered a day's
journey; 2d. was to be allowed for one horse, and so on in proportion per
mile: but if the distance were over twenty miles, or the overseer were obliged
to be out all night, then 2s. was to be allowed for him, 1s. for his horse,
and 6d. for each pauper.(38*) It is improbable that such a scale of payment
would induce the overseer to look kindly on the causes of his trouble: much
less would a pauper be a persona grata if litigation over his settlement
had already cost the parish large sums.




It has been necessary to give these particulars of the Law of Settlement
for two reasons. In the first place, the probability of expulsion, 'exile
by administrative order,' as it has been called, threw a shadow over the
lives of the poor. In the second place, the old Law of Settlement became
an immensely more important social impediment when enclosure and the great
industrial inventions began to redistribute population. When the normal labourer
had common rights and a strip and a cow, he would not wish to change his
home on account of temporary distress: after enclosure he was reduced to
a position in which his distress, if he stayed on in his own village, was
likely to be permanent.




The want and suffering revealed in Davies' and Eden's budgets came to
a crisis in 1795, the year of what may be called the revolt of the housewives.
That year, when exceptional scarcity sharpened the edge of the misery caused
by the changes we have summarised, was marked by a series of food riots all
over England, in which a conspicuous part was taken by women. These disturbances
are particularly interesting from the discipline and good order which characterise
the conduct of the rioters. The rioters when they found themselves masters
of the situation did not use their strength to plunder the shops: they organised
distribution, selling the food they seized at what they considered fair rates,
and handing over the proceeds to the owners. They did not rob: they fixed
prices, and when the owner of provisions was making for a dearer market they
stopped his carts and made him sell on the spot. At Aylesbury in March 'a
numerous mob, consisting chiefly of women, seized on all the wheat that came
to market, and compelled the farmers to whom it belonged to accept of such
prices as they thought proper to name.'(39*) In Devonshire the rioters scoured
the country round Chudleigh, destroying two mills: 'from the great number
of petticoats, it is generally supposed that several men were dressed in
female attire.'(40*) At Carlisle a band of women accompanied by boys paraded
the streets, and in spite of the remonstrances of a magistrate, entered various
houses and shops, seized all the grain, deposited it in the public hall,
and then formed a committee to regulate the price at which it should be sold.(41*)
As Ipswich there was a riot over the price of butter, and at Fordingbridge,
a certain Sarah Rogers, in company with other women started a cheap butter
campaign. Sarah took some butter from Hannah Dawson 'with a determination
of keeping it at a reduced price,' an escapade for which she was afterwards
sentenced to three months' hard labour at the Winchester Assizes.' Nothing
but the age of the prisoner (being very young) prevented the Court from passing
a more severe sentence.(42*) At Bath the women actually boarded a vessel,
laden with wheat and flour. which was lying in the river and refused to let
her go. When the Riot Act was read they retorted that they were not rioting,
but were resisting the sending of corn abroad, and sang God save the King.
Although the owner took an oath that the corn was destined for Bristol, they
were not satisfied, and ultimately soldiers were called in, and the corn
was relanded and put into a warehouse.(43*) In some places the soldiers helped
the populace in their work of fixing prices: at Seaford, for example, they
seized and sold meat and flour in the churchyard, and at Guildford they were
the ringleaders in a movement to lower the price of meat to 4d. a pound,
and were sent out of the town by the magistrates in consequence.(44*) These
spontaneous leagues of consumers sprang up in many different parts, for in
addition to the places already mentioned there were disturbances of sufficient
importance to be chronicled in the newspapers, in Wiltshire, Suffolk, and
Norfolk, whist Eden states that at Deddington the populace seized on a boat
laden with flour, but restored it on the miller's promising to sell it at
a reduced price.(45*)




These riots are interesting from many points of view. They are a rising
of the poor against an increasing pressure of want, and the forces that were
driving down their standard of life. They did not amount to a social rebellion,
but they mark a stage in the history of the poor. To the rich they were a
signal of danger. Davies declared that if the ruling classes learnt from
his researches what was the condition of the poor, they would intervene to
rescue the labourers from 'the abject state into which they are sunk.' Certainly
the misery of which his budgets paint the plain surface could not be disregarded.
If compassion was not a strong enough force to make the ruling classes attend
to the danger that the poor might starve, fear would certainly have made
them think of the danger that the poor might rebel. Some of them at any rate
knew their Virgil well enough to remember that in the description of the
threshold of Orcus, while 'senectus' is 'tristis' and 'egestas' is 'turpis,'
'fames' is linked with the more ominous epithet 'malesuada.' If a proletariat
were left to starve despair might teach bad habits, and this impoverished
race might begin to look with ravenous eyes on the lot of those who lived
on the spoils and sinecures of the State. Thus fear and pity united to sharpen
the wits of the rich, and to turn their minds to the distresses of the poor.




NOTES:




1. Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, p. 15.




2. In some instance it is reckoned as costing only 7s. Ibid., see p. 185.




3. Davies, p. 181.




4. Eden, vol. ii, p. 547.




5. Vol. xxv, p. 488.




6. See Annuals of Agriculture, vol. ix, pp. 13, 14, 165-167, 636-646,
and vol. x, pp. 218-227.




7. Capel Lofft (1751-1824); follower of Fox; writer of poems and translations
from Virgil and Petrarch; patron of Robert Bloomfield, author of Farmer's
Boy. Called by Boswell 'This little David of popular spirit.'




8. Thomas Ruggles (1737-1813), author of History of the Poor, published
in 1793, Deputy-Lieutenant of Essex and Suffolk.




9. Sir Henry Gould, 1710-1794.




10. The Annuals of Agriculture (vol. xvii, p. 293) contains a curious
apology by a gleaner in 1791 to the owner of some fields, who had begun legal
proceedings against her and her husband. 'Whereas I, Margaret Abree, with
of Thomas Abree, of the city of New Sarum, blacksmith, did, during the barley
harvest, in the mouth of September las, many times wilfully and maliciously
go into the fields of, and belonging to, Mr Edward Perry, at Clarendon Park,
and take with me my children, and did there leaze, collect, and carry away
a quantity of barley... Now we do hereby declare, that we are fully convinced
of the illegality of such proceedings, and that no person has a right to
leaze any sort of grain, or to come on any field whatsoever, without the
consent of the owner; and are also truly sensible of the obligation we are
under to the said Edward Perry for his lenity towards us, inasmuch as the
damages given, together with the heavy cost incurred, would have been much
greater than we could possibly have discharged, and must have amounted to
perpetual imprisonment, as even those who have least disapproved of our conduct,
would certainly not have contributed so large a sum to deliver us from the
legal consequences of it. And we do hereby faithfully promise never to be
guilty of the same, or any like offence in future. Thomas Abree, Margaret
Abree. Her + Mark.' It is interesting to compare with this judge-made law
of England the Mosaic precept: 'And when ye reap the harvest of your land,
thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of they field when thou
reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt
leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger.' (Leviticus xxiii,
22).




11. Kent, Hints. p. 238.




12. p. 34; cf. Marshall on the Southern Department, p. 9, 'Yorkshire bacon,
generally of the worst sort, is retailed to the poor from little chandlers'
shops at an advanced price, bread in the same way.'




13. Notes on the Agriculture of Norfolk, p. 165.




14. Large and Small Holdings, p. 11.




15. Young's Political Arithmetic, quoted by Lecky, vol. vii, p.
263 note.




16. See Appendix B for six of these budgets.




17. Ruggles, Annals of Agriculture, vol. xiv, p. 205.




18. Eden, vol. i, p. 180.




19. The parish might have the satisfaction of punishing the mother by
a year's hard labour (7 James I, c. 4, altered in 1810), but could not get
rid of the child.




20. Wealth of Nations, vol. i, p. 194.




21. Quoted by Eden, vol. i, p. 347.




22. See Ibid., p. 296.




23. Vol. xiv, pp. 205, 206.




24. An example of a parish where the interests of the employer and of
the parish officers differed is given in the House of Commons Journal for
February 4, 1788, when a petition was presented from Mr John Wilkinson, a
master iron founder at Bradley, near Bilston, in the parish of Wolverhampton.
The petitioner states 'that the present Demand for the Iron of his Manufacture
and the Improvement of which is capable, naturally encourage a very considerable
Extension of his Works, but that the Experience he has had of the vexation
Effect, as well as of the constantly increasing Amount of Poor Rates to which
he is subject, has filled him with Apprehensions of final Ruin to his Establishment;
and that the Parish Officers... are constantly alarming his Workmen with
Threats of Removal to the various Parishes from which the Necessity of employing
skilful Manufacturers has obliged him to collect them.' He goes on to ask
that his district shall be made extra-parochial to the poor rates.




25. Hasbach, pp. 172-3.




26. Eden, vol. ii, p. 384.




27. See p. 148.




28. The unborn were the special objects of parish officers' dread. At
Derby the persons sent out under orders of removal are chiefly pregnant girls.
(Eden vol. ii, p. 126). Bastards (see above) with some exceptions gained
a settlement in their birthplace, and Hodge's legitimate children might gain
one too if there was any doubt about the place of their parents' settlements.




29. Eden, vol. ii, p. 383.




30. vol. ix, p. 660.




31. Eden, vol. ii, p. 288. 'In considering the accounts of the state of
the commons, it must be remember that the open parishes thus paid the penalty
of enclosure elsewhere. Colluvies vicorum. But these open fields and commons
were becoming rapidly more scarce.




32. Ibid., p. 691.




33. Eden, vol. ii, p. 743.




34. Ibid.




35. Ibid., vol. ii, p. 591.




36. Ibid., p. 654, re Litchfield. 'In two or three small parishes in this
neighbourhood, which consist of large farms, there are very few poor: the
farmers, in order to prevent the introduction of poor from other parishes,
hire their servants for fifty-one weeks only. I conceive, however, that this
practice would be considered, by a court of justice, as fraudulent, and a
mere evasion in the master; and that a servant thus hired, if he remained
the fifty-second week with his master, on a fresh contract, would acquire
a settlement in the parish.'




37. See Annual Register, 1817, p. 298.




38. Eden, vol. ii, p. 689.




39. Reading Mercury, April 20, 1795; also Ipswich Journal,
March 28.




40. Ipswich Journal, April 18.




41. Ibid., August 8.




42. Ibid.




43. Ibid.




44. Reading Mercury, April 27, 1795.




45. Eden, vol. ii, p. 591.




Chapter Six




The Remedies of 1795




The collapse of the economic position of the labourer was the result of
many causes, and in examining the various remedies that were proposed we
shall see that they touch in turn on the several deficiencies that produced
this failure. The governing fact of the situation was that the labourer's
wages no longer sufficed to provide even a bare and comfortless existence.
It was necessary then that his wages should be raised, or that the effects
of the rise in prices should be counteracted by changes of diet and manner
of life, or that the economic resources which formerly supplemented his earnings
should in some way be restored, unless he was to be thrown headlong on to
the Poor Law. We shall see what advice was given and what advice was taken
in these momentous years.




DIET REFORM




A disparity between income and expenditure may be corrected by increasing
income or by reducing expenditure. Many of the upper classes thought that
the second method might be tried in this emergency, and that a judicious
change of diet would enable the labourer to face the fall of wages with equanimity.
The solution seemed to lie in the simple life. Enthusiasts soon began to
feel about this proposal the sort of excitement that Robinson Crusoe enjoyed
when discovering new resources on his island: an infinite vista of kitchen
reform beckoned to their ingenious imaginations: and many of them began to
persuade themselves that the miseries of the poor arose less from the scantiness
of their incomes than from their own improvidence and unthriftiness.(1*)
The rich set an example in the worst days by cutting off pastry and restricting
their servants to a quartern loaf a week each.(2*) It was surely not too
much in these circumstances to ask the poor to adapt their appetites to the
changed conditions of their lives, and to shake off what Pitt called 'groundless
prejudices' to mixed bread of barley, rye, and wheat.(3*) Again oatmeal was
a common food in the north, why should it not be taken in the south? If no
horses except post horses and perhaps cavalry horses were allowed oats, there
would be plenty for the poor.(4*) A Cumberland labourer with a wife and family
of five was shown by Eden(5*) to have spent £7, 9s. 2d. a year on oatmeal
and barley, whereas a Berkshire labourer with a wife and four children at
home spent £36, 8s. a year on wheaten bread alone.(6*) Clearly the starving
south was to be saved by the introduction of cheap cereals.




Other proposals of this time were to break against the opposition of the
rich. This broke against the opposition of the poor. All attempts to popularise
substitutes failed, and the poorer the labourer grew the more stubbornly
did he insist on wheaten bread. 'Even household bread is scarcely ever used:
they buy the finest wheaten bread, and declare (what I much doubt), that
brown bread disorders their bowels. Bakers do not now make, as they formerly
did, bread of unsifted flour: at some farmers' houses, however, it is still
made of flour, as it comes from the mill; but this practice is going much
into disuse. 20 years ago scarcely any other than brown bread was used.'(7*)
At Ealing, when the charitable rich raised a subscription to provide the
distressed poor with brown bread at a reduced price, many of the labourers
thought it so coarse and unpalatable that they returned the tickets though
wheaten bread was at 1s. 3d. the quartern loaf.(8*) Correspondent after correspondent
to the Annals of Agriculture notes and generally deplores the fact that the
poor, as one of them phrases it, are too fine-mouthed to eat any but the
finest bread.(9*) Lord Sheffield, judging from his address to Quarter Sessions
at the end of 1795, would have had little mercy on such grumblers. After
explaining that in his parish relief was now given partly in potatoes, partly
in wheaten flour, and partly in oaten or barley flour, he declared: 'If any
wretches should be found so lost to all decency, and so blind as to revolt
against the dispensations of providence, and to refuse the food proposed
for their relief, the parish officers will be justified in refusing other
succour, and may be assured of support from the magistracy of the county.'(10*)




To the rich, the reluctance of the labourer to change his food came as
a painful surprise. They had thought of him as a roughly built and hardy
animal, comparatively insensible to his surroundings, like the figure Lucretius
drew of the primeval labourer:




<poem>

Et majoribus et solidis magis ossibus intus

Fundatum, et validis aptum per viscera nervis;

Nec facile ex aestu, nec frigore quod caperetur,

Nec novitate cibi, nec labi corporis ulla.

<poem>




They did not know that a romantic and adventurous appetite is one of the
blessings of an easy life, and that the more miserable a man's condition,
and the fewer his comforts, the more does he shrink from experiments of diet.
They were therefore surprised and displeased to find that labourers rejected
soup, even soup served at a rich man's table, exclaiming, 'This is washy
stuff, that affords no nourishment: we will not be fed on meal, and chopped
potatoes like hogs.'(11*) The dislike of change of food was remarked by the
Poor Law Commissioners in 1834, who observed that the labourer had acquired
or retained 'with the moral helplessness some of the other peculiarities
of a child. He is often disgusted to a degree which other classes scarcely
conceive possible, by slight differences in diet; and is annoyed by anything
that seeks to him strange and new.'(12*)




Apart from the constitutional conservatism of the poor there were good
reasons for the obstinacy of the labourers. Davies put one aspect of the
case very well. 'If the working people of other countries are content with
bread made of rye, barley, or oats, have they not milk, cheese, butter, fruits,
or fish, to eat with that coarser bread? And was not this the case of our
own people formerly, when these grains were the common productions of our
land, and when scarcely wheat enough was grown for the use of the nobility
and principal gentry? Flesh-meat, butter, and cheese, were then at such moderate
prices, compared with the present prices, that poor people could afford to
use them in common. And with a competent quantity of these articles, a coarser
kind of bread might very well satisfy the common people of any country.'(13*)
He also states that where land had not been so highly improved as to produce
much wheat, barley, oatmeal, or maslin bread were still in common use. Arthur
Young himself realised that the labourer's attachment to wheaten bread was
not a mere superstition of the palate. 'In the East of England I have been
very generally assured, by the labourers who work the hardest, that they
prefer the finest bread, not because most pleasant, but most contrary to
a lax habit of body, which at once prevents all strong labour. The quality
of the bread that is eaten by those who have meat, and perhaps porter and
port, is of very little consequence indeed; but to the hardworking man, who
nearly lives on it, the case is abundantly different.'(14*) Fox put this
point in a speech in the House of Commons in the debate on the high price
of corn in November 1795. He urged gentlemen, who were talking of mixed bread
for the people, 'not to judge from any experiment made with respect to themselves.
I have myself tasted bread of different sorts, I have found it highly pleasant,
and I have no doubt it is exceedingly wholesome. But it ought to be recollected
how very small a part the article of bread forms of the provisions consumed
by the more opulent classes of the community. To the poor it constitutes,
the chief, if not the sole article of subsistence.'(15*) The truth is that
the labourer living on bread and tea had too delicate a digestion to assimilate
the coarser cereals, and that there was, apart from climate and tradition,
a very important difference between the labourer in the north and the labourer
in the south, which the rich entirely overlooked. That difference comes out
in an analysis of the budgets of the Cumberland labourer and the Berkshire
labourer. The Cumberland labourer who spent only £7, 9s. on his cereals,
spent £2, 13s. 7d. a year on milk. The Berkshire labourer who spent
£36, 8s. on wheaten bread spent 8s. 8d. a year on milk. The Cumberland
family consumed about 1300 quarts in the year, the Berkshire family about
two quarts a week. The same contrast appears in all budget comparisons between
north and south. A weaver at Kendal (eight in the family) spends £12,
9s. on oatmeal and wheat, and £5, 4s. on milk.(16*) An agricultural
labourer at Wetherall in Cumberland (five in family) spends £7, 6s.
9d. on cereals and £2, 13s. 4d. on milk.(17*) On the other side we have
a labourer in Shropshire (four in family) spending £10, 8s. on bread
(of wheat rye), and only 8s. 8d. on milk,(18*) and a cooper at Frome, Somerset
(seven in family) spending £45, 10s. on bread, and about 17s. on milk.(19*)
These figures are typical.(20*)




Now oatmeal eaten with milk is a very different food from oatmeal taken
alone, and it is clear from a study of the budgets that if oatmeal was to
be acclimatised in the south, it was essential to increase the consumption
of milk. But the great difference in consumption represented not a difference
of demand, but a difference of supply. The southern labourer went without
milk not from choice but from necessity. In the days when he kept cows he
drank milk, for there was plenty of milk in the village. After enclosure,
milk was not to be had. It may be that more cows were kept under the new
system of farming, though this is unlikely, seeing that at this time every
patch of arable was a gold-mine, but it is certainly true that milk became
scarce in the villages. The new type of farmer did not trouble to sell milk
at home. 'Farmers are averse to selling milk; while poor persons who have
only one cow generally dispose of all they can spare.'(21*) The new farmer
produced for a larger market: his produce was carried away, as Cobbett said,
to be devoured by 'the idlers, the thieves, the prostitutes who are all taxeaters
in the wens of Bath and London.' Davies argued, when pleading for the creation
of small farms, 'The occupiers of these small farms, as well as the occupiers
of Mr. Kent's larger cottages, would not think much of retailing to their
poorer neighbours a little corn or a little milk, as they might want, which
the poor can now seldom have at all, and never but as a great favour from
the rich farmers.'(22*) Sir Thomas Bernard mentioned among the advantages
of the Winchilsea system the 'no inconsiderable convenience to the inhabitants
of that neighbourhood, that these cottagers are enabled to supply them, at
a very moderate price, with milk, cream, butter, poultry, pig-meat, and veal:
articles which, in general, are not worth the farmer's attention, and which,
therefore, are supplied by speculators, who greatly enhance the price on
the public.'(23*) Eden(24*) records that in Oxfordshire the labourers bitterly
complain that the farmers, instead of selling their milk to the poor, give
it to their pigs, and a writer in the Reports of the Society for Bettering
the Condition of the Poor says that this was a practice not unusual in many
parts of England.(25*)




The scarcity of milk must be considered a contributory cause of the growth
of tea-drinking, a habit that the philanthropists and Cobbett agreed in condemning.
Cobbett declared in his Advice to Young Men(26*) that 'if the slops
were in fashion amongst ploughmen and carters, we must all be starved; for
the food could never be raised. The mechanics are half ruined by them.' In
the Report on the Poor presented to the Hants Quarter Sessions in 1795,(27*)
the use of tea is described as 'a vain present attempt to supply to the spirits
of the mind what is wanting to the strength of the body; but in its lasting
effects impairing the nerves, and therein equally injuring both the body
and the mind.' Davies retorted on the rich who found fault with the extravagance
of the poor in tea-drinking, by pointing out that it was their 'last resource.'
'The topic on which the declaimers against the extravagance of the poor display
their eloquence with most success, is tea-drinking. Why should such people,
it is asked, indulge in a luxury which is only proper for their betters;
and not rather content themselves with milk, which is in every form wholesome
and nourishing? Were it true that poor people could every where procure so
excellent an article as milk, there would be then just reason to reproach
them for giving the preference to the miserable infusion of which they are
so fond. But it is not so. Wherever the poor can get milk, do they not gladly
use it? And where they cannot get it, would they not gladly exchange their
tea for it?(28*)... Still you exclaim, Tea is a luxury. If you mean fine
hyson tea, sweetened with refined, sugar, and softened with cream, I readily
admit it to be so. But this is not the tea of the poor. Spring water, just
coloured with a few leaves of the lowest-priced tea, and sweetened with the
brownest sugar, is the luxury for which you reproach them. To this they have
recourse from mere necessity: and were they now to be deprived of this, they
would immediately be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not the
cause, but the consequence, of the distresses of the poor.'(29*) We learn
from the Annals of Agriculture that at Sedgefield in Durham(30*) many
of the poor declared that they had been driven to drinking tea from not being
able to procure milk.(31*) 




No doubt the scarcity of milk helped to encourage a taste that was very
quickly acquired by all classes in England, and not in England only, for,
before the middle of the eighteenth century, the rapid growth of tea-drinking
among the poor in the Lowlands of Scotland was affecting the revenue very.
The English poor liked tea for the same reason seriously(32*) that Dr. Johnson
liked it, as a stimulant, and the fact that their food was monotonous and
insipid made it particularly attractive. Eden shows that by the end of the
eighteenth century it was in general use among poor families, taking the
place both of beer and of milk, and excluding the substitutes that Eden wished
to make popular. It seems perhaps less surprising to us than it did to him,
that when the rich, who could eat or drink what they liked, enjoyed tea,
the poor thought bread and tea a more interesting diet than bread and barley
water.




A few isolated attempts were made to remedy the scarcity of milk,(33*)
which had been caused by enclosure and the consolidation of farms. Lord Winchilsea's
projects have already been described. In the Reports of the Society for bettering
the Condition of the Poor, there are two accounts of plans for supplying
milk cheap, one in Staffordshire, where a respectable tradesman undertook
to keep a certain number of cows for the purpose in a parish where 'the principal
number of the poorer inhabitants were destitute of all means of procuring
milk for their families,'(34*) another at Stockton in Durham, where the bishop
made it a condition of the lease of a certain farm, that the tenant should
keep fifteen cows whose milk was to be sold at 1/2d. a pint to the poor.(35*)
Mr. Curwen again, the Whig M.P. for Carlisle, had a plan for feeding cows
in the winter with a view to providing the poor with milk.(36*)




There was another way in which the enclosures had created an insuperable
obstacle to the popularising of 'cheap and agreeable substitutes' for expensive
wheaten bread. The Cumberland housewife could bake her own barley bread in
her oven 'heated with heath, furze or brush-wood, the expence of which is
inconsiderable;'(37*) she had stretches of waste land at her door where the
children could be sent to fetch fuel. 'There is no comparison to the community,'
wrote a contributor to the Annals of Agriculture,(38*) 'whether good
wheat, rye, turnips, etc., are not better than brakes, goss, furz, broom,
and heath,' but as acre after acre in the midlands and south was enclosed,
the fuel of the poor grew ever scantier. When the common where he had gleaned
his firing was fenced off, the poor man could only trust for his fuel to
pilferings from the hedgerows. To the spectator, furze from the common might
seem 'gathered with more loss of time than it appears to be worth;'(39*)
to the labourer whose scanty earnings left little margin over the expense
of bread alone, the loss of firing was not balanced by the economy of time.(40*)




Insufficient firing added to the miseries caused by insufficient clothes
and food. An ingenious writer in the Annals of Agriculture(41*) suggested
that the poor should resort to the stables for warmth, as was the practice
in the duchy of Milan. Fewer would suffer death from want of fire in winter,
he argued, and also it would be a cheap way of helping them, as it cost no
fuel, for cattle were so obliging as to dispense warmth from their persons
for nothing. But even this plan (which was not adopted) would not have solved
the problem of cooking. The labourer might be blamed for his diet of fine
wheaten bread and for having his meat (when he had any) roasted instead of
made into soup, but how could cooking be done at home without fuel? 'No doubt,
a labourer,' says Eden,(42*) 'whose income was only £20 a year, would,
in general, act wisely in substituting hasty-pudding, barley bread, boiled
milk, and potatoes, for bread and beer; but in most parts of this county,
he is debarred not more by prejudice, than by local difficulties, from using
a diet that requires cooking at home. The extreme dearness of fuel in Oxfordshire,
compels him to purchase his dinner at the baker's; and, from his unavoidable
consumption of bread, he has little left for cloaths, in a country where
warm cloathing is most essentially wanted.' In Davies' more racy and direct
language, 'it is but little that in the present state of things the belly
can spare for the back.'(43*) Davies also pointed out the connection between
dear fuel and the baker. 'Where fuel is scarce and dear, poor people find
it cheaper to buy their bread of the baker than to bake for themselves....
But where fuel abounds, and costs only the trouble of cutting and carrying
home, there they may save something by baking their own bread.'(44*) Complaints
of the pilfering of hedgerows were very common. 'Falstaff says " his
soldiers found linen on every hedge;" and I fear it is but too often
the case, that labourers' children procure fuel from the same quarter.'(45*)
There were probably many families like the two described in Davies(46*) who
spent nothing on fuel, which they procured 'by gathering cow-dung, and breaking
their neighbours' hedges.'(47*)




In some few cases, the benevolent rich did not content themselves with
attempting to enforce the eighth commandment, but went to the root of the
matter, helping to provide a substitute for their hedgerows. An interesting
account of such an experiment is given in the Reports on the Poor(48*)
by Scrope Bernard. 'There having been several prosecutions at the Aylesbury
Quarter Sessions, for stealing fuel last winter, I was led to make particular
inquiries, respecting the means which the poor at Lower Winchendon had of
providing fuel. I found that there was no fuel then to be sold within several
miles of the place; and that, amid the distress occasioned by the long frost,
a party of cottagers had joined in hiring a person, to fetch a load of pit-coal
from Oxford, for their supply. In order to encourage this disposition to
acquire fuel in an honest manner,' a present was made to all this party of
as much coal again as they had already purchased carriage free. Next year
the vestry determined to help, and with the aid of private donations coal
was distributed at 1s. 4d. the cwt. (its cost at the Oxford wharf), and kindling
faggots at 1d. each. 'It had been said that the poor would not find money
to purchase them, when they were brought: instead of which out of 35 poor
families belonging to the parish, 29 came with ready money, husbanded out
of their scanty means, to profit with eagerness of this attention to their
wants; and among them a person who had been lately imprisoned by his master
for stealing wood from his hedges.' Mr. Bernard concludes his account with
some apt remarks on the difficulties of combining honesty with grinding poverty.(49*)




MINIMUM WAGE




The attempts to reduce cottage expenditure were thus a failure. We must
now describe the attempts to increase the cottage income. There were two
ways in which the wages of the labourers might have been raised. One way,
the way of combination, was forbidden by law. The other way was the fixing
of a legal minimum wage in relation to the price of food. This was no new
idea, for the regulation of wages by law was a venerable English institution,
as old as the Statute of Edward III. The most recent laws on the subject
were the famous Act of Elizabeth, an Act of James I, and an Act of George
II (1747). The Act of Elizabeth provided that the Justices of the Peace should
meet annually and assess the wages of labourers in husbandry and of certain
other workmen. Penalties were imposed on all who gave or took a wage in excess
of this assessment. The Act of James I was passed to remove certain ambiguities
that were believed to have embarrassed the operation of the Act of Elizabeth,
and among other provisions imposed a penalty on all who gave a wage below
the wage fixed by the magistrates. The Act of 1747(50*) was passed because
the existing laws were 'insufficient and defective,' and it provided that
disputes between masters and men could be referred to the magistrates, 'although
no rate or assessment of wages has been made that year by the Justices of
the shire, where such complaint shall be made.'




Two questions arise on the subject of this legislation, Was it operative?
In whose interests was it administered, the interests of the employers or
the interests of the employed? As to the first question there is a good deal
of negative evidence to show that during the eighteenth century these laws
were rarely applied. An example of an assessment (an assessment declaring
a maximum) made by the Lancashire magistrates in 1725, was published in the
Annals of Agriculture in 1795(51*) as an interesting curiosity, and the writer
remarks: 'It appears from Mr. Ruggles' excellent History of the Poor that
such orders must in general be searched for in earlier periods, and a friend
of ours was much surprised to hear that any magistrates in the present century
would venture on so bold a measure.'(52*)




As to the second question, at the time we are discussing it was certainly
taken for granted that this legislation was designed to keep wages down.
So implicitly was this believed that the Act of James I which provided penalties
in cases where wages were given below the fixed rate was generally ignored,
and speakers and writers mentioned only the Act of Elizabeth, treating it
as an Act for fixing a maximum. Whitbread, for example, when introducing
a Bill in 1795 to fix a minimum wage, with which we deal later, argued that
the Elizabethan Act ought to be repealed because it fixed a maximum. This
view of the earlier legislation was taken by Fox, who supported Whitbread's
Bill, and by Pitt who opposed it. Fox said of the Act of Elizabeth that 'it
secured the master from a risk which could but seldom occur, of being charged
exorbitantly for the quantity of service; but it did not authorise the magistrate
to protect the poor from the injustice of a grinding and avaricious master,
who might be disposed to take advantage of their necessities, and undervalue
the rate of their services.'(53*) Pitt said that Whitbread 'imagined that
he had on his side of the question the support of experience in this country,
and appealed to certain laws upon the statute-book in confirmation of his
proposition. He did not find himself called upon to defend the principle
of these statutes, but they were certainly introduced for purposes widely
different from the object of the present bill. They were enacted to guard
the industry of the country from being checked by a general combination among
labourers; and the bill now under consideration was introduced solely for
the purpose of remedying the inconveniences which labourers sustain from
the disproportion existing between the price of labour and the price of living.'(54*)
Only one speaker in the debates, Vansittart, afterwards Chancellor of the
Exchequer, took the view that legislation was not needed because the Act
of James I gave the magistrates the powers with which Whitbread sought to
arm them.




It was natural that many minds searching after a way of escape from the
growing distress of the labourers, at a time when wages had not kept pace
with prices, should have turned to the device of assessing wages by law in
accordance with the price of provisions. If prices could not be assimilated
to wages, could not wages be assimilated to prices? Nathaniel Kent, no wild
visionary, had urged employers to raise wages in proportion to the increase
of their profits, but his appeal had been without effect. But the policy
of regulating wages according to the price of food was recommended in several
quarters, and it provoked a great deal of discussion. Burke, whose days were
closing in, was tempted to take part in it, and he put an advertisement into
the papers announcing that he was about to publish a series of letters on
the subject. The letters never appeared, but Arthur Young has described the
visit he paid to Beaconsfield at this time and Burke's rambling thunder about
'the absurdity of regulating labour and the mischief of our poor laws,' and
Burke's published works include a paper Thoughts and details on Scarcity,
presented to Pitt in November 1795. In this paper Burke argued that the farmer
was the true guardian of the labourer's interest, in that it would never
be profitable to him to underpay the labourer: an uncompromising application
of the theory of the economic man, which was not less superficial than the
Jacobins' application of the theory of the natural man.




In October 1795 Arthur Young sent out to the various correspondents of
the Board of Agriculture a circular letter containing this question among
others: 'It having been recommended by various quarter-sessions, that the
price of labour should be regulated by that of bread corn, have the goodness
to state what you conceive to be the advantages or disadvantages of such
a system?'(55*) Arthur Young was himself in favour of the proposal, and the
Suffolk magistrates, at a meeting which he attended on the 12th of October,
ordered: 'That the Members for this county be requested by the chairman to
bring a bill into parliament, so to regulate the price of labour, that it
may fluctuate with the average price of bread corn.'(56*) Most of the replies
were adverse, but the proposal found a warm friend in Mr. Howlett, the Vicar
of Dunmow, who put into his answer some of the arguments which he in reply
to afterwards developed in a pamphlet published. Pitt's criticisms of Whitbread's
Bill.(57*) Howlett argued that Parliament had legislated with success to
prevent combinations of workmen, and as an example he quoted the Acts of
8 George III, which had made the wages of tailors and silkweavers subject
to the regulations of the magistrates. It was just as necessary and just
as practicable to prevent a combination of a different kind, that of masters.
'Not a combination indeed formally drawn up in writing and sanctioned under
hand and seal, a combination, however, as certain (the result of contingencies
or providential events) and as fatally efficacious as if in writing it had
filled five hundred skins of parchment: a combination which has operated
for many years with a force rapidly increasing, a combination which has kept
back the hire of our labourers who have reaped down our fields, and has at
length torn the clothes from their backs, snatched the food from their mouths,
and ground the flesh from their bones.' Howlett, it will be seen, took the
same view as Thelwall, that the position of the labourers was deteriorating
absolutely and relatively. He estimated from a survey taken at Dunmow that
the average family should be taken as five; if wages had been regulated on
this basis, and the labourer had been given per head no more than the cost
of a pauper's keep in the workhouse sixty years ago, he would have been very
much better off in 1795. He would himself take a higher standard. In reply
to the argument that the policy of the minimum wage would deprive the labourers
of all spur and incentive he pointed to the case of the London tailors; they
at any rate displayed plenty of life and ingenuity, and nobody could say
that the London fashions did not change fast enough. Employers would no more
raise wages without compulsion than they would make good roads without the
aid of turnpikes or the prescription of statutes enforced by the magistrates.
His most original contribution to the discussion was the argument that the
legal regulation should not be left to the unassisted judgment of the magistrates:
'it should be the result of the clearest, fullest, and most accurate information,
and at length be judiciously adapted to each county, hundred, or district
in every quarter of the kingdom.' Howlett differed from some of the supporters
of a minimum wage, in thinking that wages should be regulated by the prices
of the necessaries of life, not merely by that of bread corn.




The same policy was advocated by Davies in The Case of Labourers in
Husbandry.(58*) Davies argued that if the minimum only were fixed, emulation
would not be discouraged, for better workmen would both be more sure of employment
and also obtain higher wages. He suggested that the minimum wage should be
fixed by calculating the sum necessary to maintain a family of five, or by
settling the scale of day wages by the price of bread alone, treating the
other expenses as tolerably steady. He did not propose to regulate the wages
of any but day labourers, nor did he propose to deal with piecework, although
piecework had been included in the Act of Elizabeth. He further suggested
that the regulation should be in force only for half the year, from November
to May, when the labourers' difficulties pressed hardest upon them. Unfortunately
he coupled with his minimum wage policy a proposal to give help from the
rates to families with more than five members, if the children were unable
to earn.




But the most interesting of all the declarations in favour of a minimum
wage was a declaration from labourers. A correspondent sent the following
advertisement to the Annals of Agriculture: --




'The following is an advertisement which I cut out of a Norwich newspaper:
--




"DAY LABOURERS"




At a numerous meeting of the day labourers of the little parishes of Heacham,
Snettisham, and Sedgford, this day, 5th November, in the parish church of
Heacham, in the county of Norfolk, in order to take into consideration the
best and most peaceable mode of obtaining a redress of all the severe and
peculiar hardships under which they have for many years so patiently suffered,
the following resolutions were unanimously agreed to: -- 1st, That -- The
labourer is worthy of his hire, and that the mode of lessening his distresses,
as hath been lately the fashion, by selling him flour under the market price,
and thereby rendering him an object of a parish rate, is not only an indecent
insult on his lowly and humble situation (in itself sufficiently mortifying
from his degrading dependence on the caprice of his employer) but a fallacious
mode of relief, and every way inadequate to a radical redress of the manifold
distresses of his calamitous state. 2nd, That the price of labour should,
at all times, be proportioned to the price of wheat, which should invariably
be regulated by the average price of that necessary article of life; and
that the price of labour, as specified in the annexed plan, is not only well
calculated to make the labourer happy without being injurious to the farmer,
but it appears to us the only rational means of securing the permanent happiness
of this valuable and useful class of men, and, if adopted in its full extent,
will have an immediate and powerful effect in reducing, if it does not entirely
annihilate, that disgraceful and enormous tax on the public -- the POOR RATE.




"Plan of the Price of Labour proportionate to the Price of Wheat

per last. per day.

When wheat shall be 14 l. the price of labour shall be 1s. 2d.

"" 16""" 1s. 4d.

"" 18""" 1s. 6d.

"" 20""" 1s. 8d.

"" 22""" 1s. 10d.

"" 24""" 2s. 0d.

"" 26""" 2s. 2d.

"" 28""" 2s. 4d.

"" 30""" 2s. 6d.

"" 32""" 2s. 8d.

"" 34""" 2s. 10d.

"" 36""" 3s. 0d.




And so on, according to this proportion.




"3rd, That a petition to parliament to regulate the price of labour,
conformable to the above plan, be immediately adopted; and that the day labourers
throughout the county be invited to associate and co-operate in this necessary
application to parliament, as a peaceable, legal, and probable mode of obtaining
relief; and, in doing this, no time should be lost, as the petition must
be presented before the 29th January 1796.




"4th, That one shilling shall be paid into the hands of the treasurer
by every labourer, in order to defray the expences of advertising, attending
on meetings, and paying counsel to support their petition in parliament.




"5th, That as soon as the sense of the day labourers of this county,
or a majority of them, shall be made known to the clerk of the meeting, a
general meeting shall be appointed, in some central town, in order to agree
upon the best and easiest mode of getting the petition signed: when it will
be requested that one labourer, properly instructed, may be deputed to represent
two or three contiguous parishes, and to attend the above intended meeting
with a list of all the labourers in the parishes he shall represent, and
pay their respective subscriptions; and that the labourer, so deputed, shall
be allowed two shillings and six pence a day for his time, and two shillings
and six pence a day for his expences.




"6th, That Adam Moore, clerk of the meeting, be directed to have
the above resolutions, with the names of the farmers and labourers who have
subscribed to and approved them, advertised in one Norwich and one London
Raper; when it is hoped that the above plan of a petition to parliament will
not only be approved and immediately adopted by the day labourers of this
county, but by the day labourers of every county in the kingdom.




"7th, That all letters, post paid, addressed to Adam Moore, labourer,
at Heacham, near Lynn, Norfolk, will be duly noticed."(59*)




This is one of the most interesting and instructive documents of the time.
It shows that the labourers, whose steady decline during the next thirty
years we are about to trace, were animated by a sense of dignity and independence.
Something of the old spirit of the commoners still survived. But there is
no sequel to this incident. This great scheme of a labourers' organisation
vanishes: it passes like a flash of summer lightning. What is the explanation?
The answer is to be found, we suspect, in the Treason and Sedition Acts that
Pitt was carrying through Parliament in this very month. Under those Acts
no language of criticism was safe, and fifty persons could not meet except
in the presence of a magistrate, who had power to extinguish the meeting
and arrest the speaker. Those measures inflicted even wider injury upon the
nation than Fox and Sheridan and Erskine themselves believed.




The policy of a minimum wage was brought before Parliament in the winter
of 1795, in a Bill introduced by Samuel Whitbread, one of the small band
of brave Liberals who had stood by Fox through the revolutionary panic. Whitbread
is a politician to whom history has done less than justice, and he is generally
known only as an implacable opponent of the Peninsular War. That opposition
he contrived to conduct, as we know from the Creevey Papers, in such a way
as to win and keep the respect of Wellington. Whitbread's disapproval of
that war, of which Liberals like Holland and Lord John Russell, who took
Fox's view of the difference of fighting revolutions by the aid of kings
and fighting Napoleon by the aid of peoples, were strong supporters, sprang
from his compassion for the miseries of the English poor. His most notable
quality was his vivid and energetic sympathy; he spent his life in hopeless
battles, and he died by his own hand of public despair. The Bill he now introduced
was the first of a series of proposals designed for the rescue of the agricultural
labourers. It was backed by Sheridan and Grey,(60*) and the members for Suffolk.




The object of the Bill(61*) was to explain and amend the Act of Elizabeth,
which empowered Justices of the Peace at or within six weeks of every General
Quarter Sessions held at Easter to regUlate the wages of labourers in husbandry.
The provisions of the Bill were briefly as follows. At any Quartet Sessions
the justices could agree, if they thought fit, to hold a General Sessions
for carrying into execution the powers given them by the Act. If they thought
good to hold such a General Sessions, the majority of them could 'rate and
appoint the wages and fix and declare the hours of working of all labourers
in husbandry, by the day, week, month or year, and with beer or cyder or
without, respect being had to the value of money and the plenty or scarcity
of the time.' This rate was to be printed and posted on the church doors,
and was to hold good till superseded by another made in the same way. The
rate was not to apply to any tradesman or artificer, nor to any labourer
whose diet was wholly provided by his employer, not to any labourer bona
fide employed on piecework, nor to any labourer employed by the parish. The
young, the old, and the infirm were also exempted from the provisions of
the Act. It was to be lawful 'to contract with and pay to any male person,
under the age of ---- (62*) years, or to any man who from age ot infirmity
or any other incapacity shall be unable to do the ordinary work of a labouring
man, so much as he shall reasonably deserve for the work which he shall be
able to do and shall do.' In case of complaint the decision as to the ability
of the labourer rested with the justices.




With the above exceptions no labourer was to be hired under the appointed
rates, and any contract for lower wages was void. If convicted of breaking
the law, an employer was to be fined; if he refused to pay the fine, his
goods were to be distrained on, and if this failed to produce enough to pay
the expenses, he could be committed to the common gaol or House of Correction.
A labourer with whom an illegal contract was made was to be a competent witness.




The first discussions of the Bill were friendly in tone. On 25th November
Whitbread asked for leave to bring it in. Sir William Young, Lechmere, Charles
Dundas, and Sir John Rous all spoke with sympathy and approval. The first
reading debate took place on 9th december, and though Whitbread had on that
occasion the powerful support of Fox, who, while not concealing his misgivings
about the Bill, thought the alternative of leaving the great body of the
people to depend on the charity of the rich intolerable, an ominous note
was struck by Pitt and Henry Dundas on the other side. The Bill came up for
second reading on 12th February 1796.(63*) Whitbread's opening speech showed
that he was well aware that he would have to face a formidable opposition.
Pitt rose at once after the motion had been formally seconded by one of the
Suffolk members, and assailed the Bill in a speech that made an immediate
and overwhelming impression. He challenged Whitbread's argument that wages
had not kept pace with prices; he admitted the hardships of the poor, but
he thought the picture overdrawn, for their hardships had been relieved by
'a display of beneficence never surpassed at any period,' and he argued that
it was a false remedy to use legislative interference, and to give the justices
the power to regUlate the price of labour, and to endeavour 'to establish
by authority what would be much better accomplished by the unassisted operation
of principles.' This led naturally to an attack on the restrictions on labour
imposed by the Law of Settlement, and a discussion of the operation of the
Poor Laws, and the speech ended, after a glance at the great possibilities
of child employment, with the promise of measures which should restore the
original purity of the Poor Laws, and make them a blessing instead of the
curse they had become. The speech seems to have dazzled the House of Commons,
and few stood up against the general opinion that Whitbread's proposal was
dangerous, and that the whole question had better be left to Pitt. Lechmere,
a Worcestershire member, was one of them, and he made an admirable little
speech in which he tried to destroy the general illusion that the poor could
not be unhappy in a country where the rich were so kind. Whitbread himself
defended his Bill with spirit and ability, showing that Pitt had not really
found any substantial argument against it, and that Pitt's own remedies were
all hypothetical and distant. Fox reaffirmed his dislike of compulsion, but
restated at the same time his opinion that Whitbread's Bill, though not an
ideal solution, was the best solution available of evils which pressed very
hardly on the poor and demanded attention. General Smith pointed out that
one of Pitt's remedies was the employment of children, and warned him that
he had himself seen some of the consequences of the unregulated labour of
children 'whose wan and pale complexions bespoke that their constitutions
were already undermined, and afforded but little promise of a robust manhood,
or of future usefulness to the community.' But the general sense of the House
was reflected in the speeches of Buxton, Coxhead and Burdon, whose main argument
was that the poor were not in so desperate a plight as Whitbread supposed,
and that whatever their condition might be, Pitt was the most likely person
to find such remedies as were practicable and effective. The motion for second
reading was negatived without a division. The verdict of the House was a
verdict of confidence in Pitt.




Four years later (11th February 1800) Whitbread repeated his attempt.(64*)
He asked for leave to bring in a Bill to explain and amend the Act of Elizabeth,
and said that he had waited for Pitt to carry out his promises. He was aware
of the danger of overpaying the poor, but artificers and labourers should
be so paid as to be able to keep themselves and their families in comfort.
He saw no way of securing this result in a time of distress except the way
he had suggested. Pitt rose at once to reply. He had in the interval brought
in and abandoned his scheme of Poor Law Reform. He had spent his only idea,
and he was now confessedly without any policy at all. All that he could contribute
was a general criticism of legislative interference, and another discourse
on the importance of letting labour find its own level. He admitted the fact
of scarcity, but he believed the labouring class seldom felt fewer privations.
History scarcely provides a more striking spectacle of a statesman paying
himself with soothing phrases in the midst of a social cyclone. The House
was more than ever on his side. All the interests and instincts of class
were disguised under the gold dust of Adam Smith's philosophy. Sir William
Young, Buxton, Wilberforce, Ellison, and Perceval attacked the Bill. Whitbread
replied that charity as a substitute for adequate wages had mischievous effects,
for it took away the independence of the poor, 'a consideration as valuable
to the labourer as to the man of high rank,' and as for the argument that
labour should be left to find its own level, the truth surely was that labour
found its level by combinations, and that this had been found to be so great
an evil that Acts of Parliament had been passed against it.




The date of the second reading of the Bill was hotly disputed:(65*) the
friends of the measure wanted it to be fixed for 28th April, so that Quarter
Sessions might have time to deliberate on the proposals; the opponents of
the measure suggested 25th February, on the grounds that it was dangerous
to keep the Bill in suspense so long: 'the eyes of all the labouring poor,'
said Mr. Ellison, 'must in that interval be turned upon it.' The opponents
won their point, and when the Bill came up for second reading its fate was
a foregone conclusion. Whitbread made one last appeal, pleading the cause
of the labourers bound to practical serfdom in parishes where the landowner
was an absentee, employed at starvation wages by farmers, living in cottages
let to them by farmers. But his appeal was unheeded: Lord Belgrave retorted
with the argument that legislative interference with agriculture could not
be needed, seeing that five hundred Enclosure Bills had passed the House
during a period of war, and the Bill was rejected.




So died the policy of the minimum wage. Even later it had its adherents,
for, in 1805, Sir Thomas Bernard criticised it(66*) as the 'favourite idea
of some very intelligent and benevolent men.' He mentioned as a reductio
ad absurdum of the scheme, that had the rate of wages been fixed by the standard
of 1780 when the quartern loaf was 6d. and the labourer's pay 9s. a week,
the result in 1800 when the quartern loaf cost 1s. 9d. would have been a
wage of £1, 11s. 6d.




When Whitbread introduced his large and comprehensive Poor Law Bill in
1807,(67*) the proposal for a minimum wage was not included.




From an examination of the speeches of the time and of the answers to
Arthur Young's circular printed in the Annals of Agriculture, it is
evident that there was a genuine fear among the opponents of the measure
that if once wages were raised to meet the rise in prices it would not be
easy to reduce them when the famine was over. This was put candidly by one
of Arthur Young's correspondents: 'it is here judged more prudent to indulge
the poor with bread corn at a reduced price than to raise the price of wages.'(68*)




The policy of a minimum wage was revived later by a society called 'The
General Association established for the Purpose of bettering the Condition
of the Agricultural and Manufacturing Labourers.' Three representatives of
this society gave evidence before the Select Committee on Emigration in 1827,
and one of them pointed out as an frustration of the injustice with which
the labourers were treated, that in 1825 the wages of agricultural labourers
were generally 9s. a week, and the price of wheat 9s. a bushel, whereas in
1732 the wages of agricultural labour were fixed by the magistrates at 6s.
a week, and the price of wheat was 2s. 9d. the bushel. In support of this
comparison he produced a table from The Gentleman's Magazine of 1732:
--




Wheat in February 1732, 23s. to 25s. per quarter.

Wheat in March 1732, 20s. to 22s. per quarter.




Yearly wages appointed by the Justices to be taken by the servants in
the county of Kent, not exceeding the following sums:




Head ploughman waggoner or seedsman.. £8 0 0

His mate........ 4 0 0

Best woman....... 3 0 0

Second sort of woman..... 2 0 0

Second ploughman...... 6 0 0

His mate........ 3 0 0

Labourers by day in summer.... 1 2

In winter........ 1 0




JUSTICES OF GLOUCESTER




Head servant in husbandry.... 5 0 0

Second servant in husbandry.... 4 0 0

Driving boy under fourteen.... 1 0 0

Head maid servant or dairy servant... 2 10 0

Mower in harvest without drink per day.. 1 2

With drink....... 1 0

Other day labourers with drink.... 1 0

From corn to hay harvest with drink... 0 8

Mowers and reapers in corn harvest with drink. 1 0

Labourers with diet...... 0 4

Without diet or drink..... 0 10

Carpenter wheelwright or mason without drink. 1 2

With drink....... 1 0




One of the witnesses pointed out that there were five millions of labourers
making with their families eight millions, and that if the effect of raising
their wages was to increase their expenditure by a penny a day, there would
be an increase of consumption amounting to twelve millions a year. These
arguments made little impression on the Committee, and the representations
of the society were dismissed with contempt: 'It is from an entire ignorance
of the universal operation of the principle of Supply and demand regUlating
the rate of wages that all these extravagant propositions are advanced, and
recommendations spread over the country which are so calculated to excite
false hopes, and consequently discontent, in the minds of the labouring classes.
Among the most extravagant are those brought forward by the Society established
for the purpose of bettering the condition of the manufacturing and agricultural
labourers.'




 POOR LAW REFORM




Pitt, having secured the rejection of Whitbread's Minimum Wage Bill in
1796, produced his own alternative: Poor Law Reform. It is necessary to state
briefly what were the Poor Law arrangements at the time of his proposals.




The Poor Law system reposed on the great Act of Elizabeth (1601), by which
the State had acknowledged and organised the duty to the poor which it had
taken over from the Church. The parish was constituted the unit, and overseers,
unsalaried and nominated by the J.P.'s, were appointed for administering
relief, the necessary funds being obtained by a poor rate. Before 1722 a
candidate for relief could apply either to the overseers or to the magistrate.
By an Act passed in that year, designed to make the administration stricter,
application was to be made first to the overseer. If the overseer rejected
the application the claimant could submit his case to a magistrate, and the
magistrate, after hearing the overseer's objection, could order that relief
should be given. There were, however, a number of parishes in which applications
for relief were made to salaried guardians. These were the parishes that
had adopted an Act known as Gilbert's Act, passed in 1782.(69*) In these
parishes,(70*) joined in incorporations, the parish overseers were not abolished,
for they still had the duty of collecting and accounting for the rates, but
the distribution was in the hands of paid guardians, one for each parish,
appointed by the justices out of a list of names submitted by the parishioners.
In each set of incorporated parishes there was a 'Visitor' appointed by the
justices, who had practically absolute power over the guardians. If the guardians
refused relief, the claimant could still appeal, as in the case of the overseers,
to the justices.




Such was the parish machinery. The method of giving relief varied greatly,
but the main distinction to be drawn is between (1) out relief, or a weekly
pension of a shilling or two at home; and (2) indoor relief, or relief in
a workhouse, or poorhouse, or house of industry. Out relief was the earlier
institution, and it held its own throughout the century, being the only form
of relief in many parishes. Down to 1722 parishes that wished to build a
workhouse had to get a special Act of Parliament. In that year a great impetus
was given to the workhouse movement by an Act(71*) which authorised overseers,
with the consent of the vestry, to start workhouses, or to farm out the poor,
and also authorised parishes to join together for this purpose. If applicants
for relief refused to go into the workhouse, they forfeited their title to
any relief at all. A great many workhouses were built in consequence of this
Act: in 1732 there were stated to be sixty in the country, and about fifty
in the metropolis.(72*)




Even if the applicant for relief lived in a parish which had built or
shared in a workhouse, it did not follow that he was forced into it. He lost
his title to receive relief outside, but his fate would depend on the parish
officers. In the parishes which had adopted Gilbert's Act the workhouse was
reserved for the aged, for the infirm, and for young children. In most parishes
there was out relief as well as indoor relief: in some parishes outdoor relief
being allowed to applicants of a certain age or in special circumstances.
In some parishes all outdoor relief had stopped by 1795.(73*) There is no
doubt that in most parishes the workhouse accommodation would have been quite
inadequate for the needs of the parish in times of distress. It was quite
common to put four persons into a single bed.




The workhouses were dreaded by the poor,(74*) not only for the dirt and
disease and the devastating fevers that swept through them,(75*) but for
reasons that are intelligible enough to any one who has read Eden's descriptions.
Those descriptions show that Crabbe's picture is no exaggeration: --




<poem>

'Theirs is yon House that holds the Parish-Poor,

Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door.

There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,

And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;

There Children dwell who know no Parents' care;

Parents, who know no Children's love, dwell there!

Heart-broken Matrons on their joyless bed,

Forsaken Wives and Mothers never wed;

Dejected Widows with unheeded tears,

And crippled Age with more than childhood fears;

The Lame, the Blind, and, £ar the happiest they!

The moping idiot and the Madman gay.

Here too the Sick their final doom receive,

Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,

Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,

Mixt with the clamours of the crowd below;

Here sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,

And the cold charities of man to man:

Whose laws indeed for ruin'd Age provide,

And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;

But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,

And pride embitters what it can't deny.'(76*)

<poem>




A good example of this mixture of young and old, virtuous and vicious,
whole and sick, sane and mad, is given in Eden's catalogue of the inmates
of Epsom Workhouse in January 1796.(77*) There were eleven men, sixteen women,
and twenty-three children. We read of J. H., aged forty-three, 'always...
somewhat of an idiot, he is now become quite a driveller;' of E. E., aged
sixty-two, 'of a sluggish, stupid character;' of A. M., aged twenty-six,
'afflicted with a leprosy;' of R. M., aged seventy-seven, 'worn out and paralytic;'
of J. R., aged seventeen, who has contracted so many disorderly habits that
decent people will not employ him. It is interesting to notice that it was
not till 1790 that the Justices of the Peace were given any power of inspecting
workhouses.




In 1796, before Pitt's scheme was brought in, the Act of 1722, which had
been introduced to stiffen the administration of the Poor Laws, was relaxed.
An Act,(78*) of which Sir William Young was the author, abolished the restriction
of right to relief to persons willing to enter the workhouse, and provided
that claimants could apply for relief directly to a magistrate. The Act declares
that the restrictions had been found 'inconvenient and oppressive.' It is
evidence, of course, of the increasing pressure of poverty.




But to understand the arrangements in force at this time, and also the
later developments, we must glance at another feature of the Poor Law system.
The Poor Laws were a system of employment as well as a system of relief.
The Acts before 1722 are all called Acts for the Relief of the Poor: the
Act of 1722 speaks of 'the Settlement, Employment and Relief.' That Act empowered
parishes to farm out the poor to an employer. Gilbert's Act of 1782 provided
that in the parishes incorporated under that Act the guardians were not to
send able-bodied poor to the poorhouse, but to find work for them or maintain
them until work was found: the guardian was to take the wage and provide
the labourer with a maintenance. Thus there grew up a variety of systems
of public employment: direct employment of paupers on parish work: the labour
rate system, or the sharing out of the paupers among the ratepayers: the
roundsman system by which pauper labour was sold to the farmers.(79*)




This was the state of things that Pitt proposed to reform. His general
ideas on the subject were put before the House of Commons in the debate on
the second reading of Whitbread's Bill.(80*) He thought that persons with
large families should be treated as entitled to relief, that persons without
a settlement, falling into want, should not be liable to removal at the caprice
of the parish officer, that Friendly Societies should be encouraged, and
that Schools of Industry should be established. 'If any one would take the
trouble to compute the amount of all the earnings of the children who are
already educated in this manner, he would be surprised, when he came to consider
the weight which their support by their own labours took off the country,
and the addition which, by the fruits of their toil, and the habits to which
they were formed, was made to its internal opulence.' On 22nd december of
that year, in a new Parliament, he asked for leave to bring in a Bill for
the better Support and Maintenance of the Poor. He said the subject was too
extensive to be discussed at that stage, that he only proposed that the Bill
should be read a first and second time and sent to a committee where the
blanks could be filled up, and the Bill printed before the holidays, 'in
order that during the interval of Parliament it might be circulated in the
country and undergo the most serious investigation.'(81*) Sheridan hinted
that it was unfortunate for the poor that Pitt had taken the question out
of Whitbread's hands, to which Pitt replied that any delay in bringing forward
his Bill was due to the time spent on taking advice. On 28th February of
the next year (1797), while strangers were excluded from the Gallery, there
occurred what the Parliamentary Register calls 'a conversation upon the farther
consideration of the report of the Poor's Bill,' in which nobody but Pitt
defended the Bill, and Sheridan and Joliffe attacked it. With this its Parliamentary
history ends.




The main features of the Bill were these.(82*) Schools of Industry were
to be established in every parish or group of parishes. These schools were
to serve two purposes. First, the young were to be trained there (this idea
came, of course, from Locke). Every poor man with more than two children
who were not self-supporting, and every widow with more than one such child,
was to be entitled to a weekly allowance in respect of each extra child.
Every allowance child who was five years or over was to be sent to the School
of Industry, unless his parent could instruct and employ him, and the proceeds
of his work was to go towards the upkeep of the school. Secondly, grown-up
people were to be employed there. The authorities were to provide 'a proper
stock of hemp, flax, silk, cotton, wool, iron, leather or other materials,
and also proper tools and implements for the employment of the poor,' and
they were empowered to carry on all trades under this Act, 'any law or custom
to the contrary notwithstanding.' Any person lawfully settled in a parish
was entitled to be employed in the school; any person residing in a parish,
able and willing to be employed at the usual rates, was entitled to be employed
there when out of work. Poor persons refusing to be employed there were not
to be entitled to relief. The authorities might either pay wages at a rate
fixed by the magistrates, or they might let the employed sell their products
and merely repay the school for the material, or they might contract to feed
them and take a proportion of their receipts. If the wages paid in the school
were insufficient, they were to be supplemented out of the rates.




The proposals for outside relief were briefly and chiefly these. A person
unable to earn the full rate of wages usually given might contract with his
employer to work at an inferior rate, and have the balance between his earnings
and an adequate maintenance made up by the parish. Money might be advanced
under certain circumstances for the purchase of a cow or other animal, if
it seemed likely that such a course would enable the recipient to maintain
himself without the help of the parish. The possession of property up to
thirty pounds was not to disqualify a person for relief. A parochial insurance
fund was to be created, partly from private subscriptions and partly from
the rates. No person was to be removed from a parish on account of relief
for temporary disability or sickness.




The most celebrated and deadly criticism came from Bentham, who is often
supposed to have killed the Bill. Some of his objections are captious and
eristical, and he is a good deal less than just to the good elements of the
scheme. Pitt deserves credit for one statesmanlike discovery, the discovery
that it is bad policy to refuse to help a man until he is ruined. His cow-money
proposal was also conceived in the right spirit if its form was impracticable.
But the scheme as a whole was confused and incoherent, and it deserved the
treatment it received. It was in truth a huge patchwork, on which the ideas
of living and dead reformers were thrown together without order or plan.
As a consequence, its various parts did not agree. It is surprising that
the politician who had attacked Whitbread's Bill as an interference with
wages could have included in his scheme the proposal to pay wages in part
out of rates. The whole scheme, though it would have involved a great expenditure,
would have produced very much the same result as the Speenhamland system,
by virtue of this clause. Pitt showed no more judgment or foresight than
the least enlightened of County Justices in introducing into a scheme for
prodding relief, and dealing with unemployment, a proposal that could only
have the effect of reducing wages. The organisation of Schools of Industry
as a means of dealing with unemployment has sometimes been represented as
quite a new proposal, but it was probably based on the suggestion made by
Fielding in 1753 in his paper, 'A proposal for making an effectual provision
for the poor, for amending their morals, and for rendering them useful members
of society.' Fielding proposed the erection of a county workhouse, which
was to include a house of correction. He drew up a sharp and drastic code
which would have authorised the committal to his County House, not only of
vagrants, but of persons of low degree found harbouring in an ale-house after
ten o'clock at night. But the workhouse was not merely to be used as a penal
settlement, it was to find work for the unemployed. Any person who was unable
to find employment in his parish could apply to the minister or churchwardens
for a pass, and this pass was to give him the right to claim admission to
the County House where he was to be employed. The County House was also to
be prodded with instructors who could teach native and foreign manufactures
to the inmates. Howlett, one of Pitt's critics, was probably right in thinking
that Pitt was reviving this scheme.




The Bill excited general opposition. Bentham's analysis is the most famous
of the criticisms that have survived, but in some senses his opposition was
less serious than the dismay of magistrates and ratepayers. Hostile petitions
poured into the House of Commons from London and from all parts of the country;
among others there were petitions from Shrewsbury, Oswestry, Worcester, Bristol,
Lincoln, Carmarthen, Bedford, Chester and Godalming.(83*) Howlett attacked
the scheme on the ground of the danger of parish robbery and corruption.
Pitt apparently made no attempt to defend his plan, and he surrendered it
without a murmur. We are thus left in the curious and disappointing position
of having before us a Bill on the most important subject of the day, introduced
and abandoned by the Prime Minister without a word or syllable in its defence.
Whitbread observed(84*) four years later that the Bill was brought in and
printed, but never brought under the discussion of the House. Pitt's excuse
is significant: 'He was, as formerly, convinced of its propriety; but many
objections had been started to it by those whose opinion he was bound to
respect. Inexperienced himself in country affairs, and in the condition of
the poor, he was diffident of his own opinion, and would not press the measure
upon the attention of the House.'




Poor Law Reform was thus abandoned, but two attempts were made, at the
instance of Pitt, one of them with success, to soften the brutalities of
the Law of Settlement. Neither proposal made it any easier to gain a settlement,
and Pitt very properly declared that they did not go nearly far enough. Pitt
had all Adam Smith's just hatred of these restrictions, and in opposing Whitbread's
Bill for a minimum wage he pointed to 'a radical amendment' of the Law of
Settlement as the true remedy. He was not the formal author of the Act of
1795, but it may safely be assumed that he was the chief power behind it.
This Act(85*) provided that nobody was to be removeable until he or she became
actually chargeable to the parish. The preamble throws light on the working
of the Settlement laws. It declares that 'Many industrious poor persons,
chargeable to the parish, township, or place where they live, merely from
want of work there, would in any other place where sufficient employment
is to be had, maintain themselves and families without being burthensome
to any parish, township, or place; and such poor persons are for the most
part compelled to live in their own parishes, townships, or places, and are
not permitted to inhabit elsewhere, under pretence that they are likely to
become chargeable to the parish, township, or place into which they go for
the purpose of getting employment, although the labour of such poor persons
might, in many instances, be very beneficial to such parish, township, or
place.' The granting of certificates is thus admitted to have been ineffectual.
The same Act provided that orders of removal were to be suspended in cases
where the pauper was dangerously ill, a provision that throws some light
on the manner in which these orders had been executed, and that no person
should gain a settlement by paying levies or taxes, in respect of any tenement
of a yearly value of less than ten pounds.(86*)




From this time certificates were unnecessary, and if a labourer moved
from Parish A to Parish B he was no longer liable to be sent back at the
caprice of Parish B's officers until he became actually chargeable, but,
of course, if from any cause he fell into temporary distress, for example,
if he were out of work for a few weeks, unless he could get private aid from
'the opulent,' he had to return to his old parish. An attempt was made to
remedy this state of things by Mr. Baker who, in March 1800, introduced a
Bill(87*) to enable overseers to assist the deserving but unsettled poor
in cases of temporary distress. He explained that the provisions of the Bill
would apply only to men who could usually keep themselves, but from the high
cost of provisions had to depend on parochial aid. He found a powerful supporter
in Pitt, who argued that if people had enriched a parish with their industry,
it was unfair that owing to temporary pressure they should be removed to
a place where they were not wanted, and that it was better for a parish to
suffer temporary inconvenience than for numbers of industrious men to be
rendered unhappy and useless. But in spite of Pitt's unanswerable case, the
Bill, which was denounced by Mr. Buxton as oppressive to the landed interest,
by Lord Sheffield as 'subversive of the whole economy of the country,' by
Mr. Ellison as submerging the middle ranks, and by Sir William Pulteney as
being a 'premium for idleness and extravagance,' was rejected by thirty votes
to twenty-three.(88*)




ALLOTMENTS.




Another policy that was pressed upon the governing class was the policy
of restoring to the labourer some of the resources he had lost with enclosure,
of putting him in such a position that he was not obliged to depend entirely
on the purchasing power of his wages at the shop. This was the aim of the
allotment movement. The propaganda failed, but it did not fail for the want
of vigorous and authoritative support. We have seen in a previous chapter
that Arthur Young awoke in 1801 to the social mischief of depriving the poor
of their land and their cows, and that he wanted future Enclosure Acts to
be juster and more humane. Cobbett suggested a large scheme of agrarian settlement
to Windham in 1806. These proposals had been anticipated by Davies, whose
knowledge of the actual life of the poor made him understand the important
difference between a total and a partial dependence on wages. 'Hope is a
cordial, of which the poor man has especially much need, to cheer his heart
in the toilsome journey through life. And the fatal consequence of that policy,
which deprives labouring people of the expectation of possessing any property
in the soil, must be the extinction of every generous principle in their
minds.... No gentleman should be permitted to pull down a cottage, until
he had first erected another, upon one of Mr. Kent's plans, either on some
convenient part of the waste, or on his own estate, with a certain quantity
of land annexed.' He praised the Act of Elizabeth which forbade the erection
of cottages with less than four acres of land around them, 'that poor people
might secure for themselves a maintenance, and not be obliged on the loss
of a few days labour to come to the parish,'(89*) and urged that this prohibition,
which had been repealed in 1775,(90*) should be set up again.




The general policy of providing allotments was never tried, but we know
something of individual experiments from the Reports of the Society for Bettering
the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor. This society took
up the cause of allotments very zealously, and most of the examples of private
benevolence seem to have found their way into the pages of its reports.




These experiments were not very numerous. Indeed, the name of Lord Winchilsea
recurs so inevitably in every allusion to the subject as to create a suspicion
that the movement and his estates were coextensive. This is not the truth,
but it is not very wide of the truth, for though Lord Winchilsea had imitators,
those imitators were few. The fullest account of his estate in Rutlandshire
is given by Sir Thomas Bernard.(91*) The estate embraced four parishes Hambledon,
Egleton, Greetham, and Burley on the Hill. The tenants included eighty cottagers
possessing one hundred and seventy-four cows. 'About a third part have all
their land in severalty; the rest of them have the use of a cow-pasture in
common with others; most of them possessing a small homestead, adjoining
to their cottage; every one of them having a good garden, and keeping one
pig at least, if not more.... Of all the rents of the estate, none are more
punctually paid than those for the cottagers' land.' In this happy district
if a man seemed likely to become a burden on the parish his landlord and
neighbours saved the man's self-respect and their own pockets as ratepayers,
by setting him up with land and a cow instead. So far from neglecting their
work as labourers, these proprietors of cows are described as 'most steady
and trusty.' We have a picture of this little community leading a hard but
energetic and independent life, the men going out to daily work, but busy
in their spare hours with their cows, sheep, pigs, and gardens; the women
and children looking after the live stock, spinning, or working in the gardens:
a very different picture from that of the landless and ill-fed labourers
elsewhere.




Other landlords, who, acting on their own initiative, or at the instance
of their agents, helped their cottagers by letting them land on which to
keep cows were Lord Carrington and Lord Scarborough in Lincolnshire, and
Lord Egremont on his Yorkshire estates (Kent was his agent). Some who were
friendly to the allotments movement thought it a mistake to give allotments
of arable land in districts where pasture land was not available. Mr. Thompson,
who writes the account of Lord Carrington's cottagers with cows, thought
that 'where cottagers occupy arable land, it is very rarely of advantage
to them, and generally a prejudice to the estate.'(92*) He seems, however,
to have been thinking more of small holdings than of allotments. 'The late
Abel Smith, Esq., from motives of kindness to several cottagers on his estates
in Nottinghamshire, let to each of them a small piece of arable land. I have
rode over that estate with Lord Carrington several times since it descended
to him, and I have invariably observed that the tenants upon it, who occupy
only eight or ten acres of arable land, are poor, and their land in bad condition.
They would thrive more and enjoy greater comfort with the means of keeping
two or three cows each than with three times their present quantity of arable
land; but it would be a greater mortification to them to be deprived of it
than their landlord is disposed to inflict.'(93*) On the other hand, a striking
instance of successful arable allotments is described by a Mr. Estcourt in
the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor.(94*)
The scene was the parish of Long Newnton in Wilts, which contained one hundred
and forty poor persons, chiefly agricultural labourers, distributed in thirty-two
families, and the year was 1800. The price of provisions was very high, and
'though all had a very liberal allowance from the poor rate, the whole village
was plunged in debt and misery. From this hopeless plight the parish was
rescued by an allotment scheme that Mr. Estcourt established and described.
Each cottager who applied was allowed to rent a small quantity of land at
the rate of £1, 12s. an acre(95*) on a fourteen years' lease: the quantity
of land let to an applicant depended on the number in his family, with a
maximum of one and a half acres: the tenant was to forfeit his holding if
he received poor relief other than medical relief. The offer was greedily
accepted, two widows with large families and four very old and infirm persons
being the only persons who did not apply for a lease. A loan of £44
was divided among the tenants to free them from their debts and give them
a fresh start. They were allowed a third of their plot on Lady Day 1801,
a second third on Lady Day 1802, and the remainder on Lady Day 1803. The
results as recorded in 1805 were astonishing. None of the tenants had received
any poor relief: all the conditions had been observed: the loan of £44
had long been repaid and the poor rate had fallen from £212, 16s. to
£12, 6s. 'They are so much beforehand with the world that it is supposed
that it must be some calamity still more severe than any they have ever been
afflicted with that could put them under the necessity of ever applying for
relief to the parish again.... The farmers of this parish allow that they
never had their work better done, their servants more able, willing, civil,
and sober, and that their property was never so free from depredation as
at present.'(96*)




Some philanthropists, full of the advantages to the poor of possessing
live-stock, argued that it was a good thing for cottagers to keep cows even
in arable districts. Sir Henry Vavasour wrote an account in 1801(97*) of
one of his cottagers who managed to keep two cows and two pigs and make a
profit of £30 a year on three acres three perches of arable with a summer's
gait for one of his cows. The man, his wife, and his daughter of twelve worked
on the land in their spare hours. The Board of Agriculture offered gold medals
in 1801 for the best report of how to keep one or two cows on arable land,
and Sir John Sinclair wrote an essay on the subject, reproduced in the account
of 'Useful Projects' in the Annual Register.(98*) Sir John Sinclair
urged that if the system was generally adopted it would remove the popular
objections to enclosure.




Other advocates of the policy of giving the labourers land pleaded only
for gardens in arable districts; 'a garden,' wrote Lord Winchilsea, 'may
be allotted to them in almost every situation, and will be found of infinite
use to them. In countries, where it has never been the custom for labourers
to keep cows, it may be difficult to introduce it; but where no gardens have
been annexed to the cottages, it is sufficient to give the ground, and the
labourer is sure to know what to do with it, and will reap an immediate benefit
from it. Of this I have had experience in several places, particularly in
two parishes near Newport Pagnell, Bucks, where there never have been any
gardens annexed to the labourers' houses, and where, upon land being allotted
to them, they all, without a single exception, have cultivated their gardens
extremely well, and profess receiving the greatest benefits from them.'(99*)
'A few roods of land, at a fair rent,' wrote a correspondent in the Annals
of Agriculture in 1796,(100*) 'would do a labourer as much good as wages
almost doubled: there would not, then, be an idle hand in his family, and
the man himself would often go to work in his root yard instead of going
to the ale house.'(101*) The interesting report on the 'Inquiry into the
General State of the Poor' presented at the Epiphany General Quarter Sessions
for Hampshire and published in the Annals of Agriculture,(102*) a
document which does not display too much indulgence to the shortcomings of
labourers, recommends the multiplication of cottages with small pieces of
ground annexed, so that labourers might live nearer their work, and spend
the time often wasted in going to and from their work, in cultivating their
plot of ground at home. 'As it is chiefly this practice which renders even
the state of slavery in the West Indies tolerable, what an advantage would
it be to the state of free service here!'(103*)




The experiments in the provision of allotments of any kind were few, and
they are chiefly interesting for the light they reflect on the character
of the labourer of the period. They show of what those men and women were
capable whose degradation in the morass of the Speenhamland system is the
last and blackest page in the history of the eighteenth century. Their rulers
put a stone round their necks, and it was not their character but their circumstances
that dragged them into the mire. In villages where allotments were tried
the agricultural labourer is an upright and self-respecting figure. The immediate
moral effects were visible enough at the time. Sir Thomas Bernard's account
of the cottagers on Lord Winchilsea's estate contains the following reflections:
'I do not mean to assert that the English cottager, narrowed as he now is
in the means and habits of life, may be immediately capable of taking that
active and useful station in society, that is filled by those who are the
subject of this paper. To produce so great an improvement in character and
circumstances of life, will require time and attention. The cottager, however,
of this part of the county of Rutland, is not of a different species from
other English cottagers; and if he had not been protected and encouraged
by his landlord, he would have been the same hopeless and comfortless creature
that we see in some other parts of England. The farmer (with the assistance
of the steward) would have taken his land; the creditor, his cow and pig;
and the workhouse, his family.'(104*)




We have seen, in discussing enclosures, that the policy of securing allotments
to the labourers in enclosure Acts was defeated by the class interests of
the landlords. Why, it may be asked, were schemes such as those of Lord Winchilsea's
adopted so rarely in villages already enclosed? These arrangements benefited
all parties. There was no doubt about the demand; 'in the greatest part of
this kingdom,' wrote one correspondent, 'the cottager would rejoice at being
permitted to pay the utmost value given by the farmers, for as much land
as would keep a cow, if he could obtain it at that price.'(105*) The steadiness
and industry of the labourers, stimulated by this incentive, were an advantage
both to the landlords and to the farmers. Further. it was well known that
in the villages where the labourers had land, poor rates were light.(106*)
Why was it that a policy with so many recommendations never took root? Perhaps
the best answer is given in the following story. Cobbett proposed to the
vestry of Bishops Walthams that they should 'ask the Bishop of Winchester
to grant an acre of waste land to every married labourer. All, however, but
the village schoolmaster voted against it, on the ground... that it would
make the men "too saucy," that they would "breed more children"
and "want higher wages."'(107*)




The truth is that enclosures and the new system of farming had set up
two classes in antagonism to allotments, the large farmer, who disliked saucy
labourers, and the shopkeeper, who knew that the more food the labourer raised
on his little estate the less would he buy at the village store. It had been
to the interest of a small farmer in the old common-field village to have
a number of semi-labourers, semi-owners who could help at the harvest: the
large farmer wanted a permanent supply of labour which was absolutely at
his command. Moreover, the roundsman system maintained his labourers for
him when he did not want them. The strength of the hostility of the farmers
to allotments is seen in the language of those few landlords who were interested
in this policy. Lord Winchilsea and his friends were always urging philanthropists
to proceed with caution, and to try to reason the farmers out of their prejudices.
The Report of the Poor Law Commission in 1834 showed that these prejudices
were as strong as ever. 'We can do little or nothing to prevent pauperism;
the farmers will have it: they prefer that the labourers should be slaves;
they object to their having gardens, saying 'The more they work for themselves,
the less they work for us.'(108*) This was the view of Boys, the writer in
agricultural subjects, who, criticising Kent's declaration in favour of allotments,
remarks: 'If farmers in general were to accommodate their labourers with
two acres of land, a cow and two or three pigs, they would probably have
more difficulty in getting their hard work done -- as the cow, land, etc.,
would enable them to live with less earnings.'(109*) Arthur Young and Nathaniel
Kent made a great appeal to landlords and to landlords' wives to interest
themselves in their estates and the people who lived on them, but landlords'
bailiffs did not like the trouble of collecting a number of small rents,
and most landlords preferred to leave their labourers to the mercy of the
farmers. There was, however, one form of allotment that the farmers themselves
liked: they would let strips of potato ground to labourers, sometimes at
four times the rent they paid themselves, getting the land manured and dug
into the bargain.(110*)




The Select Vestry Act of 1819(111*) empowered parishes to buy or lease
twenty acres of land, and to set the indigent poor to work on it, or to lease
it out to any poor and industrious inhabitant. A later Act of 1831(112*)
raised the limit from twenty to fifty acres, and empowered parishes to enclose
fifty acres of waste (with the consent of those who had rights on it ) and
to lease it out for the same purposes. Little use was made of these Acts,
and perhaps the clearest light is thrown on the extent of the allotment movement
by a significant sentence that occurs in the Report of the Select Committee
on Allotments in 1843. 'It was not until 1830, when discontent had been so
painfully exhibited amongst the peasantry of the southern counties that this
method of alleviating their situation was much resorted to.' In other words,
little was done till labourers desperate with hunger had set the farmers'
ricks blazing.




THE REMEDY ADOPTED. SPEENHAMLAND




The history has now been given of the several proposals made at this time
that for one reason or another fell to the ground. A minimum wage was not
fixed, allotments were only sprinkled with a sparing hand on an estate here
and there, there was no revolution in diet, the problems of local supply
and distribution were left untouched, the reconstruction of the Poor Law
was abandoned. What means then did the governing class take to tranquillise
a population made dangerous by hunger? The answer is, of course, the Speenhamland
Act. The Bcrkshire J.P.'s and some discreet persons met at the Pelican Inn
at Speenhamland(113*) on 6th May 1795, and there resolved on a momentous
policy which was gradually adopted in almost every part of England.




There is a strange irony in the story of this meeting which gave such
a fatal impetus to the reduction of wages. It was summoned in order to raise
wages, and so make the labourer independent of parish relief. At the General
Quarter Sessions for Berkshire held at Newbury on the 14th April, Charles
Dundas, M.P.,(114*) in his charge to the Grand Jury(115*) dwelt on the miserable
state of the labourers and the necessity of increasing their wages to subsistence
level, instead of leaving them to resort to the parish officers for support
for their families, as was the case when they worked for a shilling a day.
He quoted the Acts of Elizabeth and James with reference to the fixing of
wages. The Court, impressed by his speech, decided to convene a meeting for
the rating of wages. The advertisement of the meeting shows that this was
the only object in view. 'At the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace for
this county held at Newbury, on Tuesday, the 14th instant, the Court, having
taken into consideration the great Inequality of Labourers' Wages, and the
insufficiency of the same for the necessary support of an industrious man
and his family; and it being the opinion of the Gentlemen assembled on the
Grand Jury, that many parishes have not advanced their labourers' weekly
pay in proportion to the high price of corn and provisions, do (in pursuance
of the Acts of Parliament, enabling and requiring them so to do, either at
the Easter Sessions, yearly, or within six weeks next after) earnestly request
the attendance of the Sheriff, and all the Magistrates of this County, at
a Meeting intended to be held at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland, on Wednesday,
the sixth day of May next, at ten o'clock in the forenoon, for the purpose
of consulting together with such discreet persons as they shall think meet,
and they will then, having respect to the plenty and scarcity of the time,
and other circumstances (if approved of) proceed to limit, direct, and appoint
the wages of day labourers.'(116*)




The meeting was duly held on 6th May.(117*) Mr. Charles Dundas was in
the chair, and there were seventeen other magistrates and discreet persons
present, of whom seven were clergymen. It was resolved unanimously 'that
the present state of the poor does require further assistance than has been
generally given them.' Of the details of the discussion no records have come
down to us, nor do we know by what majority the second and fatal resolution
rejecting the rating of wages and substituting an allowance policy was adopted.
According to Eden, the arguments in favour of adopting the rating of wages
were 'that by enforcing a payment for labour, from the employers, in proportion
to the price of bread, some encouragement would have been held out to the
labourer, as what he would have received, would have been payment for labour.
He would have considered it as his right, and not as charity.'(118*) But
these arguments were rejected, and a pious recommendation to employers to
raise wages, coupled with detailed directions for supplementing those wages
from parish funds, adopted instead.(119*) The text of the second resolution
runs thus: 'Resolved, that it is not expedient for the Magistrates to grant
that assistance by regulating the wages of day Labourers according to the
directions of the Statutes of the 5th Elizabeth and 1st James: But the Magistrates
very earnestly recommend to the Farmers and others throughout the county
to increase the Pay of their Labourers in proportion to the present Price
of Provisions; and agreeable thereto the Magistrates now present have unanimously
Resolved, That they will in their several divisions, make the following calculations
and allowances for the relief of all poor and industrious men and their families,
who, to the satisfaction of the Justices of their parish, shall endeavour
(as far as they can), for their own support and maintenance, that is to say,
when the gallon loaf of second flour, weighing 8 lbs. 11 oz. shall cost one
shilling, then every poor and industrious man shill have for his own support
3s. weekly, either produced by his own or his family's labour or an allowance
from the poor rates, and for the support of his wife and every other of his
family 1s. 6d. When the gallon loaf shall cost ls. 4d., then every poor and
industrious man shall have 4s. weekly for his own, and 1s. 10d: for the support
of every other of his family.




'And so in proportion as the price of bread rises or falls (that is to
say), 3d. to the man and 1d. to every other of the family, on every penny
which the loaf rises above a shilling.'




In other words, it was estimated that the man must have three gallon loaves
a week, and his wife and each child one and a half.




It is interesting to notice that at this same famous Speenhamland meeting
the justices 'wishing, as much as possible, to alleviate the distresses of
the Poor with as little burthen on the occupiers of the Land as possible'
recommended overseers to cultivate land for potatoes and to give the workers
a quarter of the crop, selling the rest at one shilling a bushel; overseers
were also recommended to purchase fuel and to retail it at a loss.




The Speenhamland policy was not a full-blown invention of that unhappy
May morning in the Pelican Inn. The principle had already been adopted elsewhere.
At the Oxford quarter Sessions on 13th January 1795, the justices had resolved
that the following incomes were 'absolutely necessary for the support of
the poor, industrious labourer, and that when the utmost industry of a family
cannot produce the undermentioned sums, it must be made up by the overseer,
exclusive of rent, viz.: --




'A single Man according to his labour.




'A Man and his Wife not less than 6s. a week.




'A Man and his Wife with one or two Small Children, not less than 7s.
a week.




'And for every additional Child not less than 1s. a week.' This regulation
was to be sent to all overseers within the county.(120*)




But the Speenhamland magistrates had drawn up a table which became a convenient
standard, and other magistrates found it the simplest course to accept the
table as it stood. The tables passed rapidly from county to county. The allowance
system spread like a fever, for while it is true to say that the northern
counties took it much later and in a milder form, there were only two counties
still free from it in 1834 -- Northumberland and Durham.




To complete our picture of the new system we must remember the results
of Gilbert's Act. It had been the practice in those parishes that adopted
the Act to reserve the workhouse for the infirm and to find work outside
for the unemployed, the parish receiving the wages of such employment and
providing maintenance. This outside employment had spread to other parishes,
and the way in which it had been worked may be illustrated by cases mentioned
by Eden, writing in the summer and autumn of 1795. At Kibworth-Beauchamp
in Leicestershire, 'in the winter, and at other times, when a man is out
of work, he applies to the overseer, who sends him from house to house to
get employ: the housekeeper, who employs him, is obliged to give him victuals,
and 6d.; a day and the parish adds 4d.; (total 10d. a day;) for the support
of his family: persons working in this manner are called rounds-men, from
their going round the village or township for employ.'(121*) At Yardley Goben,
in Northamptonshire, every person who paid more than £20 rent was bound
in his turn to employ a man for a day and to pay him a shilling.(122*) At
Maids Morton the roundsman got 6d. from the employer and 6d. or 9d. from
the parish.(123*) At Winslow in Bucks the system was more fully developed.
'There seems to be here a great want of employment: most labourers are (as
it is termed,) on the Rounds; that is, they go to work from one house to
another round the parish. In winter, sometimes 40 persons are on the rounds.
They are wholly paid by the parish, unless the householders choose to employ
them; and from these circumstances, labourers often become very lazy, and
imperious. Children, about ten years old, are put on the rounds, and receive
from the parish from 1s. 6d. to 3s. a week.'(124*) The Speenhamland systematised
scale was easily grafted on to these arrangements. 'During the late dear
season, the Poor of the parish went in a body to the Justices, to complain
of their want of bread. The Magistrates sent orders to the parish officers
to raise the earnings of labourers, to certain weekly sums, according to
the number of their children; a circumstance that should invariably be attended
to in apportioning parochial relief. These sums were from 7s. to 19s.; and
were to be reduced, proportionably with the price of bread.'(125*)




The Speenhamland system did not then spring Athene-like out of the heads
of the justices and other discreet persons whose place of meeting has given
the system its name. Neither was the unemployment policy thereafter adopted
a sudden inspiration of the Parliament of 1796. The importance of these years
is that though the governing classes did not then introduce a new principle,
they applied to the normal case methods of relief and treatment that had
hitherto been reserved for the exceptions. The Poor Law which had once been
the hospital became now the prison of the poor. Designed to relieve his necessities,
it was now his bondage. If a labourer was in private employment, the difference
between the wage his master chose to give him and the recognised minimum
was made up by the parish. Those labourers who could not find private employment
were either shared out among the ratepayers, or else their labour was sold
by the parish to employers, at a low rate, the parish contributing what was
needed to bring the labourers' receipts up to scale. Crabbe has described
the roundsman system:




</poem>

'Alternate Masters now their Slave command,

Urge the weak efforts of his feeble hand,

And when his age attempts its task in vain,

With ruthless taunts, of lazy poor complain.'(126*)

</poem>




The meshes of the Poor Law were spread over the entire labour system.
The labourers, stripped of their ancient rights and their ancient possessions,
refused a minimum wage and allotments, were given instead a universal system
of pauperism. This was the basis on which the governing class rebuilt the
English village. Many critics, Arthur Young and Malthus among them, assailed
it, but it endured for forty years, and it was not disestablished until Parliament
itself had passed through a revolution.




NOTES:




1. Eden, vol. i, p. 495.




2. Resolution of Privy Council, July 6, 1795, and Debate and Resolution
in House of Commons. Parliamentary Register, December 11, 1795, and
Lord Sheffield in Annuals of Agriculture, vol. xxv, p. 31.




3. See Senator for March 1, 1796, p. 1147.




4. See Wilberforce's speech, Parliamentary Register and Senator,
February 18, 1800.




5. Eden, vol. ii, pp. 104-6.




6. Ibid., p. 15.




7. Ibid., p. 280.




8. Ibid., p. 426.




9. See Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxiv, pp. 63, 171, 177, 204,
285, 316, etc.




10. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxv, p. 678.




11. Eden, vol. i, p. 533.




12. Perhaps the unpopularity of soup is partly explained by a letter published
in the Annals of Agriculture in December 1795, vol. xxvi, p. 215.
The writer says it is the custom for most families in the country 'to give
their poor neighbours the pot liquor, that is, the liquour in which any meat
has been boiled, and to which they sometimes add the broken bread from the
parlour and kitchen tables: this,' he adds, 'makes but an indifferent mess.'
The publications of the time contain numerous recipes for cheap soups; 'the
power of giving an increased effect to Christian benevolence by these soups'
(Reports on Poor, vol i, p. 167) was eagerly welcomed. Cf. Mrs Shore's
account of stewed ox's head for the poor, according to which, at the cost
of 2s. 6d. with the leavings of the family, a savoury mess for fifty-two
persons could be prepared (Ibid., p. 60).




13. Davies, pp. 31-2.




14. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxv, p. 455.




15. Parliamentary Register, November 2, 1795.




16. Eden, vol. iii, p. 769.




17. Ibid, vol. ii, p. 97.




18. Ibid, p. 621.




19. Ibid., p. 645.




20. In many budgets no milk is included.




21. Reports on Poor, vol. iv, p. 151.




22. Davies, p. 104.




23. Reports on Poor, vol. ii, p. 178.




24. Vol. ii, p. 587.




25. Reports on Poor, vol. i, p. 134; another reason for the dearth
of milk was the growing consumption of veal in the towns. Davies says (p.
19). 'Suckling is here so profitable (to furnish veal for London) that the
poor can seldom either buy or beg milk.'




26. p. 27.




27. See Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxv, pp. 367-8.




28. Davies, p. 37.




29. Ibid., p. 39.




30. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxvi, p. 121.




31. The dearness of malt was another fact which helped the introduction
of tea. Cf. Davies, p. 38: 'Time was when small beer was reckoned one of
the necessaries of life, even in poor families.'




32. Lecky, History of England in Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p.
318.




33. In connection with the dearth of milk it is important to notice the
rise in the price of cheese. 'Poor people,' says Davies (p. 19), 'reckon
cheese the dearest article they can use' (cf. also p. 143), and in his comparison
of prices in the middle of the eighteenth century with those of 1787-94 he
gives the price of 112 lbs. of cheese at Reading Fair as from 17s. to 21s.
in the first period, and 40s. to 46s. in the second. Retail cheese of an
inferior sort had risen from 2 1/2 d. or 3d. a lb. to 4 1/2 d. or 5d. (p.
65); cf. also correspondent in Annals of Agriculture, vol. ii, p.
442. 'Every inhabitant of Bath must be sensible that butter and cheese have
risen in price one-third, or more, within these twenty years.' (Written in
1784).




34. Reports on Poor, vol. i, p. 129.




35. Ibid., vol. iii, p. 78.




36. Annual Register, 1806, p. 974; 'My local situation afforded
me ample means of knowing how greatly the lower orders suffered from being
unable to procure a supply of milk; and I am fully persuaded of the correctness
of the statement that the labouring poor lose a number of their children
from the want of food so pre-eminently adapted to the their support;' cf.
also Curwen's Hints.




37. Eden, vol. i, p. 510.




38. Vol. iii, p. 96.




39. Eden, vol. iii, p. 694.




40. Cf., Reports on Poor, vol. i, p. 43; 'Where there are commons,
the ideal advantage of cutting flags, peat, or whins, often causes a poor
man to spend more time in procuring such fuel, than, if he reckoned his labour,
would purchase for him double the quantity of good firing.'




41. Vol. iv, p. 496.




42. Vol. ii, p. 587.




43. Davies, p. 28.




44. Ibid., p. 118.




45. Eden, vol. iii, p. 805.




46. p. 179.




47. Cf. also Eden's description of a labourer's expenses, vol. iii, p.
797, where he says that whilst hedging and ditching, they are allowed to
take home a faggot every evening, whilst the work lasts, 'but this is by
no means sufficient for his consumption; his children, therefore, are sent
into the fields, to collect wood where they can; and neither hedges nor trees
are spared by the young marauders, who are thus, in some degree, educated
in the art of thieving.'




48. Vol. ii, p. 231.




49. Cf. also for the difficulties of the poor in getting fuel, the account
by the Rev. Dr. Glasse; Reports on Poor, vol. i, p. 58. 'Having long
observed, that there is scarcely any article of life, in respect to which
the poor are under greater difficulties, or for the supply of which they
have stronger temptations to dishonest practices, than that of fuel,' he
laid up in summer a store of coals in Greenford (Middlesex), and Wanstead,
and sold them rather under original cost price, carriage free, in winter.
'The benefit arising from the relief afforded them in this article of coals,
is obvious: they are habituated to pay for what they have; whereas at the
shop they ran in debt. When their credit was at an end, they contrived to
do without coals, by having recourse to wood-stealing; than which I know
no practise which tends more effectually to introduce into young minds a
habit of dishonesty; it is also very injurious to the farmer, and excites
a degree of resentment in his breast, which, in many instances, renders him
averse to affording relief to the poor, even when real necessity calls loudly
for it.'




50. 20 George, II, c. 19.




51. Annuals of Agriculture, vol. xxv, p. 305 ff.




52. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxv. p. 298.




53. Parliamentary Register, December 9, 1795.




54. Ibid., February 12, 1796.




55. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxv. p. 345.




56. Ibid., p. 316.




57. An Examination of Mr Pitt's Speech in the House of Commons,
February 12, 1796.




58. p. 106 ff.




59. Annuals of Agriculture, 1795, vol. xxv., p. 503.




60. Parliamentary Debates.




61. Printed in Parliamentary Papers for 1795-6.




62. The age was not filled up.




63. For report of debate see Parliamentary Register for that date.




64. See Parliamentary Register.




65. See Parliamentary Register, February 14, 1800.




66. Reports on Poor, vol. v. p. 23.




67. See p. 179.




68. Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxvi, p. 178.




69. 22 George III, c. 83.




70. In 1834 there were 924 comprised in 67 incorporations (Nicholls, vol.
ii, p. 91).




71. 9 George I, c. 7.




72. Eden, vol. i, p. 269.




73. E.g., Oxford and Shrewsbury.




74. There is a significant entry in the Abstracts of Returns to
the 1775 Poor Relief Committee in reference to the building of that death-trap,
the Bulcamp House of Industry. 'In the Expences for Building is included
£500 for building a Part which was pulled down by a Mob.'




75. An Heckingham in Norfolk a putrid fever, in 1774, killed 126 out of
220 inmates (Eden, vol. ii, p. 473, quoting Howlett); cf. also Ruggles, History
of the Poor, vol. ii, p. 266.




76. 'The Village,' pp. 16 and 17.




77. Eden, vol. iii, p. 694 ff.




78. 36 George III, c. 23.




79. The last of these systems had been included in a Bill introduced by
Sir William Young in 1788. 'In order to relieve agricultural labourers, who
are often, during the winter, out of employment, the vestry in every parish
is empowered, by notice affixed to the church door, to settle a rate of wages
to be paid to labourers not of employ, from the 30th Nov to the 28th of Feb.;
and to distribute and send them round in rotation to the parishioners, proportionally
as they pay to the Rates; to be paid by the person employing them two-thirds
of the wages so settled, and one-third by the parish-officers out of the
Rates.' -- Eden, vol. i, p. 397.




80. Parliamentary Register, February 12, 1796.




81. Ibid., December 22, 1796.




82. The Bill is printed in House of Commons Papers, 1796. The 'Heads
of the Bill' as circulated appear in the Annals of Agriculture, vol.
xxvi, pp. 260 ff. and 359 ff. Eden gives in the form of Appendices (1) the
Heads of the Bill, (2) the Amendments introduced in Committee.




83. House of Commons Journal.




84. Parliamentary Register, February 11, 1800.




85. 35 George III, c. 101.




86. For Whitbread's proposals to amend the Law of Settlement in 1807 see
next chapter. An attempt was made in 1819 (59 George II, c. 50) to define
and simplify the conditions under which the hiring of a tenement of £10
annual value conferred the right to a settlement. The term of residence was
extended to a year, the nature of the tenement was defined, and it was laid
down that the rent must be £10 and paid for a whole year. But so unsuccessful
was this piece of legislation that it as found necessary to pass a second
Act six years later (1826, 6 George IV, c. 57), and a third Act in 1831 (I
William IV, c. 18).




87. Senator, March 1800.




88. See Debates in Senator, March 31 and April 3, 1800, and Parliamentary
Register. Cf. for removals for temporary distress, Sir Thomas Bernard's Charge
to Overseers in the Hundred of Stoke. Bucks. Reports on Poor, vol.
i, p. 260. 'With regard to the removal of labourers belonging to other parishes,
consider thoroughly what you may lose, and what the individual may suffer,
by the removal, before you apply to us on the subject. Where you have had,
for a long time, the benefit of their labour, and where all they want is
a little temporary relief, reflect whether, after so many years spent in
your service, this is the moment and the cause, for removing them from the
scene of their daily labour to a distant parish, etc.' (1798).




89. Davies, pp. 102-4.




90. 15 George III c. 32.




91. Reports on Poor, vol. ii, p. 171.




92. Reports on Poor, vol. ii, p. 136.




93. Ibid., p. 137.




94. Ibid, vol. v, p. 66.




95. Mr Estcourt mentions that the land 'would let to a farmer at about
20s. per acre now.'




96. It is interesting to find that these allotments were still let out
successfully in 1868. See p. 4145 of the Report on the Employment of Children,
Young Persons and Women in Agriculture, 1868.




97. Reports on Poor, vol. iii, p. 329.




98. 1803, p. 850.




99. Reports on Poor, vol. i, p. 100.




100. Vol. xxvi, p. 4.




101. The most distinguished advocate of this policy was William Marshall,
the agricultural writer who published a strong appeal for the labourers in
his book On the Management of Landed Estates, 1806, p. 155; cf. also
Curween's Hints, p. 239; 'A farther attention to the cottager's comfort
is attended with little cost; I mean giving him a small garden, and planting
that as well as the walls of his house with fruit trees.'




102. Vol. xxv. p. 349.




103. Ibid., p. 358.




104. Reports on Poor, vol. ii, p. 184.




105. Ibid., p. 134.




106. Cf. Poor Law Report, 1817, Appendix G. p. 4.




107. Capes, Rural Life in Hampshire, p. 282.




108. Poor Law Reports, 1834, p. 61; cf. ibid., p. 185.




109. Notes to Kent's Norfolk, p. 178.




110. See Poor Law Report, 1834, p. 181, and Allotments Committee,
1843, p. 108.




111. 59 George III, c. 12.




112. 1 and 2 William IV, c. 42.




113. Speenhamland is now part of Newbury. The Pelican Inn has disappeared,
but the Pelican Posting House survives.




114. Charles Dundas, afterwards Lord Amesbury, 1751-1832; Liberal, M.P.
for Berkshire 1794-1832, nominated by Sheridan for the Speakersip in 1802
but withdrew.




115. Reading Mercury, April 20, 1795.




116. Reading Mercury, April 20, 1795.




117. See Ibid., May 11, 1795.




118. Eden, vol. i, p. 578.




119. On the same day a 'respectable meeting' at Basingstoke, with the
Mayor in the chair, was advocating the fixing of labourers' wages in accordance
with the price of wheat without any reference to parish relief. -- Reading
Mercury, May 11, 1795.




120. See Ipswich Journal, February 7, 1795, and Reading Mercury,
July 6, 1795.




121. Eden, vol. ii, p. 384.




122. Ibid., p. 548.




123. Ibid., p. 27.




124. Eden, vol. ii, p. 29.




125. Ibid., p. 32. 




126. 'The Village,' Book I.




Chapter Seven




After Speenhamland




The Speenhamland system is often spoken of as a piece of pardonable but
disastrous sentimentalism on the part of the upper classes. This view overlooks
the predicament in which these classes found themselves at the end of the
eighteenth century. We will try to reconstruct the situation and to reproduce
their state of mind. Agriculture, which had hitherto provided most people
with a livelihood, but few people with vast fortunes, had become by the end
of the century a great capitalist and specialised industry. During the French
War its profits were fabulous, and they were due partly to enclosures, partly
to the introduction of scientific methods, partly to the huge prices caused
by the War. It was producing thus a vast surplus over and above the product
necessary for maintenance and for wear and tear. Consequently, as students
of Mr. Hobson's Industrial System will perceive, there arose an important
social problem of distribution, and the Poor Law was closely involved with
it.




This industry maintained, or helped to maintain, four principal interests:
the landlords, the tithe-owners, the farmers, and the labourers. Of these
interests the first two were represented in the governing class, and in considering
the mind of that class we may merge them into one. The sympathies of the
farmers were rather with the landlords than with the labourers, but their
interests were not identical. The labourers were unrepresented either in
the Government or in the voting power of the nation. If the forces had been
more equally matched, or if Parliament had represented all classes, the surplus
in come of agriculture would have gone to increase rents, tithes, profits,
and wages. It might, besides turning the landlords into great magnates like
the cotton lords of Lancashire, and throwing up a race of farmers with scarlet
coats and jack boots, have raised permanently the standard and character
of the labouring class, have given them a decent wage and decent 142 cottages.
The village population whose condition, as Whitbread said, was compared by
supporters of the slave trade with that of the negroes in the West Indies,
to its disadvantage, might have been rehoused on its share of this tremendous
revenue. In fact, the revenue went solely to increase rent, tithes, and to
some extent profits. The labourers al one had made no advance when the halcyon
days of the industry clouded over and prices fell. The rent receiver received
more rent than was needed to induce him to let his land, the farmer made
larger profits than were necessary to induce him to apply his capital and
ability to farming, but the labourer received less than was necessary to
maintain him, the balance being made up out of the rates. Thus not only did
the labourer receive no share of this surplus; he did not even get his subsistence
directly from the product of his labour. Now let us suppose that instead
of having his wages made up out of the rates he had been paid a maintenance
wage by the farmer. The extra cost would have come out of rent to the same
extent as did the subsidy from the rates. The landlord therefore made no
sacrifice in introducing the Speenhamland system, for though the farmers
thought that they could obtain a reduction of rent more easily if they could
plead high rates than if they pleaded the high price of labour,(1*) it is
obvious that the same conditions which produced a reduction of rents in the
one case must ultimately have produced a reduction in the other. As it was,
none of this surplus went to labour, and the proportion in which it was divided
between landlord and farmer was not affected by the fact that the labourer
was kept alive partly from the rates and not wholly from wages.(2*) 




Now the governing class which was confronted with the situation that we
have described in a previous chapter consisted of two classes who had both
contrived to slip off their obligations to the State. They were both essentially
privileged classes. The landlords were not in the eye of history absolute
owners; they had held their land on several conditions, one of which was
the liability to provide military services for the Crown, and this obligation
they had commuted into a tax on the nation. Neither were the tithe-owners
absolute owners in the eye of history. In early days all Church property
was regarded as the patrimony of the poor, and the clergy were bidden to
use it non quasi suis sed quasi commendatis, Dryden, in drawing the character
of the Good Parson, had described their obligations:




<poem>

'True priests, he said, and preachers of the Word

Were only stewards of their sovereign Lord:

Nothing was theirs but all the public store,

Intrusted riches to relieve the poor,'

</poem>




It was recognised, as late as the reign of Henry IV, that tithes were
designed among other objects for the relief of the poor. An Act of that reign
confirmed an earlier Act of Richard II. (15 Rich. II. c. 6), which laid down
that on the appropriation of any parish church, money was to be paid yearly
of the fruits and profits of the said church to the poor parishioners. After
this time the claims of the poor fade from view. Of course, great masses
of tithe property had passed, by the time we are considering, into secular
hands. The monasteries appropriated about a third of the livings of England,
and the tithes in these parishes passed at the Reformation to the Crown,
whence they passed in grants to private persons. No responsibility for the
poor troubled either the lay or spiritual owners of tithes, and though they
used the name of God freely in defending their claims, they were stewards
of God in much the same sense as George IV was the defender of the faith.
The landowners and tithe-owners had their differences when it came to an
Enclosure Bill, but these classes had the same interests in the disposal
of the surplus profits of agriculture; and both alike were in a vulnerable
position if the origin and history of their property came under too fierce
a discussion.




There was a special reason why the classes that had suddenly become very
much richer should dread too searching a discontent at this moment. They
had seen tithes, and all seignorial dues abolished almost at a single stroke
across the Channel, and they were at this time associating constantly with
the emigrant nobility of France, whose prospect of recovering their estates
seemed to fade into a more doubtful distance with every battle that was fought
between the France who had given the poor peasant such a position as the
peasant enjoyed nowhere else, and her powerful neighbour who had made her
landlords the richest and proudest class in Europe. The French Convention
had passed a decree (November 1792), declaring that 'wherever French armies
shall come, all taxes, tithes, and privileges of rank are to be abolished,
all existing authorities cancelled, and provisional administrations elected
by universal suffrage. The property of the fallen Government, of the privileged
classes and their adherents to be placed under French protection.' This last
sentence had an unpleasant ring about it; it sounded like a terse paraphrase
of non quasi suis sed quasi comemndatis. In point of fact there was not yet
any violent criticism of the basis of the social position of the privileged
classes in England. Even Paine, when he suggested a scheme of Old Age Pensions
for all over fifty, and a dowry for every one on reaching the age of twenty-one,
had proposed to finance it by death duties. Thelwall, who wrote with a not
unnatural bitterness about the great growth of ostentatious wealth at a time
when the poor were becoming steadily poorer, told a story which illustrated
very well the significance of the philanthropy of the rich. 'I remember I
was once talking to a friend of the charity and benevolence exhibited in
this country, when stopping me with a sarcastic sneer, "Yes," says
he, "we steal the goose, and we give back the giblets." "No,"
said a third person who was standing by, "giblets are much too dainty
for the common herd, we give them only the pen feathers."'(3*) But the
literature of Radicalism was not inflammatory, and the demands of the dispossessed
were for something a good deal less than their strict due. The richer classes,
however, were naturally anxious to soothe and pacify the poor before discontent
spread any further, and the Speenhamland system turned out, from their point
of view, a very admirable means to that end, for it provided a maintenance
for the poor by a method which sapped their spirit and disarmed their independence.
They were anxious that the labourers should not get into the way of expecting
a larger share in the profits of agriculture, and at the same time they wanted
to make them contented. Thelwall(4*) stated that when he was in the Isle
of Wight, the farmers came to a resolution to raise the price of labour,
and that they were dissuaded by one of the greatest proprietors in the island,
who called a meeting and warned the farmers that they would make the common
people insolent and would never be able to reduce their wages again.




An account of the introduction of the system into Warwickshire and Worcestershire
illustrates very well the state of mind in which this policy had its origin.
'In Warwickshire, the year 1797 was mentioned as the date of its commencement
in that county, and the scales of relief giving it authority were published
in each of these counties previously to the year 1800. It was apprehended
by many at that time, that either the wages of labour would rise to a height
from which it would be difficult to reduce them when the cause for it had
ceased, or that during the high prices the labourers might have had to endure
privations to which it would be unsafe to expose them. To meet the emergency
of the time, various schemes are said to have been adopted, such as weekly
distributions of flour, prodding families with clothes, or maintaining entirely
a portion of their families, until at length the practice became general,
and a right distinctly admitted by the magistrates was claimed by the labourer
to parish relief, on the ground of inadequate wages and number in family.
I was informed that the consequences of the system were not wholly unforeseen
at the time, as affording a probable inducement to early marriages and large
families; but at this period there was but little apprehension on that ground.
A prevalent opinion, supported by high authority, that population was in
itself a source of wealth, precluded all alarm. The demands for the public
service were thought to endure a sufficient draught for any surplus people;
and it was deemed wise by many persons at this time to present the Poor Laws
to the lower classes, as an institution for their advantage, peculiar to
this country; and to encourage an opinion among them, that by this means
their own share in the property of the kingdom was recognised.'(5*) To the
landlords the Speenhamland system was a safety-valve in two ways. The farmers
got cheap labour, and the labourers got a maintenance, and it was hoped thus
to reconcile both classes to high rents and the great social splendour of
their rulers. There was no encroachment on the surplus profits of agriculture,
and landlords and tithe-owners basked in the sunshine of prosperity. It would
be a mistake to represent the landlords as deliberately treating the farmers
and the labourers on the principle which Caesar boasted that he had applied
with such success, when he borrowed money from his officers to give it to
his soldiers, and thus contrived to attach both classes to his interest;
but that was in effect the result and the significance of the Speenhamland
system.




This wrong application of those surplus profits was one element in the
violent oscillations of trade during the generation after the war. A long
war adding enormously to the expenditure of Government must disorganise industry
seriously in any case, and in this case the demoralisation was increased
by a bad currency system. The governing class, which was continually meditating
on the subject of agricultural distress, holding inquiries, and appointing
committees, never conceived the problem as one of distribution. The Select
Committee of 1833 on Agriculture, for example, expressly disclaims any interest
in the question of rents and wages, treating these as determined by a law
of Nature, and assuming that the only question for a Government was the question
of steadying prices by protection. What they did not realise was that a bad
distribution of profits was itself a cause of disturbance. The most instructive
speech on the course of agriculture during the French war was that in which
Brougham showed in the House of Commons, on 9th April 1816, how the country
had suffered from over-production during the wild elation of high prices,
and how a tremendous system of speculative farming had been built up, entangling
a variety of interests in this gamble. If those days had been employed to
raise the standard of life among the labourers and to increase their powers
of consumption, the subsequent fall would have been broken. The economists
of the time looked on the millions of labourers as an item of cost, to be
regarded like the price of raw material, whereas it is clear that they ought
to have been regarded also as affording the best and most stable of markets.
The landlord or the banker who put his surplus profits into the improvement
and cultivation of land, only productive under conditions that could not
last and could not return, was increasing unemployment in the future, whereas
if the same profits had been distributed in wages among the labourers, they
would have permanently increased consumption and steadied the vicissitudes
of trade. Further, employment would have been more regular in another respect,
for the landowner spent his surplus on luxuries, and the labourer spent his
wages on necessaries.




Now labour might have received its share of these profits either in an
increase of wages, or in the expenditure of part of the revenue in a way
that was specially beneficial to it. Wages did not rise, and it was a felony
to use any pressure to raise them. What was the case of the poor in regard
to taxation and expenditure? Taxation was overwhelming. A Herefordshire farmer
stated that in 1815 the rates and taxes on a farm of three hundred acres
in that county were: --




£ s. d.




Property tax, landlord and tenant... 95 16 10

Great tithes....... 64 17 6

Lesser tithes....... 29 15 0

Land tax........ 14 0 0

Window lights..... 24 1 6

Poor rates, landlord...... 10 0 0

Poor rates, tenant...., 40 0 0

Cart-horse duty, landlord, 3 horses.,. 2 11 0

Two saddle horses, landlord.... 9 0 0

Gig........ 6 6 0

Cart-horse duty, tenant..... 7 2 0

One saddle horse, tenant..... 2 13 6

Landlord's malt duty on 60 bushels of barley. 21 0 0

Tenant's duty for making 120 bushels of barley into malt....... 42 0 0

New rate for building shire hall, paid by landlord........ 9 0 0

New rate for building shire hall, paid by tenant. 3 0 0

Surcharge....... 2 8 0




 £383 11 4(6*)




The Agricultural and Industrial Magazine, a periodical published
by a philanthropical society in 1833, gave the following analysis of the
taxation of a labourer earning £22, 10s.




a year: --




 £ s. d.

1. Malt...... 4 11 3

2. Sugar...... 0 17 4

3. Tea and Coffee..... 1 4 0

4. Soap...... 0 13 0

5. Housing...... 0 12 0

6. Food..... 3 0 0

7. Clothes.,.,.. 0 10 0

£11 7 7




But in the expenditure from this taxation was there a single item in which
the poor had a special interest? The great mass of the expenditure was war
expenditure, and that was not expenditure in which the poor were more interested
than the rest. Indeed, much of it was expenditure which could not be associated
directly or indirectly with their interests, such as the huge subsidies to
the courts of Europe. Nearly fifty millions went in these subventions, and
if some of them were strategical others were purely political. Did the English
labourer receive any profit from the two and a half millions that Pitt threw
to the King of Prussia, a subsidy that was employed for crushing Kosciusko
and Poland, or from the millions that he gave to Austria, in return for which
Austria ceded Venice to Napoleon? Did he receive any benefit from the million
spent every year on the german legion, which helped to keep him in order
in his own country? Did he receive any benefit from the million and a half
which, on the confession of the Finance Committee of the House of Commons
in 1810, went every year in absolute sinecures? Did he receive any benefit
from the interest on the loans to the great bankers and contractors, who
made huge profits out of the war and were patriotic enough to lend money
to the Government to keep it going? Did he receive any benefit from the expenditure
on crimping boys or pressing seamen, or transporting and imprisoning poachers
and throwing their families by thousands on the rates? Pitt's brilliant idea
of buying up a cheap debt out of money raised by a dear one cost the nation
twenty millions, and though Pitt considered the Sinking Fund his best title
to honour, nobody will pretend that the poor of England gained anything from
this display of his originality.(7*) In these years government was raising
by taxation or loans over a hundred millions, but not a single penny went
to the education of the labourer's children, or to any purpose that made
the perils and difficulties of his life more easy to be borne. If the sinecures
had been reduced by a half, or if the great money-lenders had been treated
as if their claims to the last penny were not sacrosanct, and had been made
to take their share of the losses of the time, it would have been possible
to set up the English cottager with allotments on the modest plan proposed
by Young or Cobbett, side by side with the great estates with which that
expenditure endowed the bankers and the dealers in scrip.




Now, so long as prices kept up, the condition of the labourer was masked
by the general prosperity of the times. The governing class had found a method
which checked the demand for higher wages and the danger that the labourer
might claim a share in the bounding wealth of the time. The wolf was at the
door, it is true, but he was chained, and the chain was the Speenhamland
system. Consequently, though we hear complaints from the labourers, who contended
that they were receiving in a patronising and degrading form what they were
entitled to have as their direct wages, the note of rebellion was smothered
for the moment. At this time it was a profitable proceeding to grow corn
on almost any soil, and it is still possible to trace on the unharvested
downs of Dartmoor the print of the plough that turned even that wild moorland
into gold, in the days when Napoleon was massing his armies for invasion.
During these years parishes did not mind giving aid from the rates on the
Speenhamland scale, and, though under this mischievous system population
was advancing wildly, there was such a demand for labour that this abundance
did not seem, as it seemed later, a plague of locusts, but a source of strength
and wealth. The opinion of the day was all in favour of a heavy birth rate,
and it was generally agreed, as we have seen, that Pitt's escapades in the
West Indies and elsewhere would draw off the surplus population fast enough
to remove all difficulties. But although the large farmers prayed incessantly
to heaven to preserve Pitt and to keep up religion and prices, the day came
when it did not pay to plough the downs or the sands, and tumbling prices
brought ruin to the farmers whose rents and whole manner of living were fixed
on the assumption that there was no serious danger of peace, and that England
was to live in a perpetual heyday of famine prices.




With the fall in prices, the facts of the labourer's condition were disclosed.
Doctors tell us that in some cases of heart disease there is a state described
as compensation, which may postpone failure for many years. With the fall
in 1814 compensation ceased, and the disease which it obscured declared itself.
For it was now no longer possible to absorb the redundant population in the
wasteful roundsman system, and the maintenance standard tended to fall with
the growing pressure on the resources from which the labourer was kept. By
this time all labour had been swamped in the system. The ordinary village
did not contain a mass of decently paid labourers and a surplus of labourers,
from time to time redundant, for whom the parish had to provide as best it
could. It contained a mass of labourers, all of them underpaid, whom the
parish had to keep alive in the way most convenient to the farmers. Bishop
Berkeley once said that it was doubtful whether the prosperity that preceded,
or the calamities that succeeded, the South Sea Bubble had been the more
disastrous to Great Britain: that saying would very well apply to the position
of the agricultural labourer in regard to the rise and the fall of prices.
With the rise of prices the last patch of common agriculture had been seized
by the landlords, and the labourer had been robbed even of his garden;(8*)
with the fall, the great mass of labourers were thrown into destitution and
misery. We may add that if that prosperity had been briefer, the superstition
that an artificial encouragement of population was needed -- the superstition
of the rich for which the poor paid the penalty would have had a shorter
life. As it was, at the end of the great prosperity the landlords were enormously
rich; rents had in some cases increased five-fold between 1790 and 1812;(9*)
the large farmers had in many cases climbed into a style of life which meant
a crash as soon as prices fell; the financiers had made great and sudden
fortunes; the only class for whom a rise in the standard of existence was
essential to the nation, had merely become more dependent on the pleasure
of other classes and the accidents of the markets. The purchasing power of
the labourer's wages had gone down.




The first sign of the strain is the rioting of 1816. In that year the
spirit which the governing class had tried to send to sleep by the Speenhamland
system, burst out in the first of two peasants' revolts. Let us remember
what their position was. They were not the only people overwhelmed by the
fall in prices. Some landlords, who had been so reckless and extravagant
as to live up to the enormous revenue they were receiving, had to surrender
their estates to the new class of bankers and money-lenders that had been
made powerful by the war. Many farmers, who had taken to keeping liveried
servants and to copying the pomp of their landlords, and who had staked everything
on the permanence of prices, were now submerged. Small farmers too, as the
answers sent to the questions issued this year by the Board of Agriculture
show, became paupers. The labourer was not the only sufferer. But he differed
from the other victims of distress in that he had not benefited, but, as
we have seen, had lost, by the prosperity of the days when the plough turned
a golden furrow. His housing had not been improved; his dependence had not
been made less abject or less absolute; his wages had not risen; and in many
cases his garden had disappeared. When the storm broke over agriculture his
condition became desperate. In February 1816 the Board of Agriculture sent
out a series of questions, one of which asked for an account of the state
of the poor, and out of 273 replies 237 reported want of employment and distress,
and 25 reported that there was not unemployment or distress.(10*) One of
the correspondents explained that in his district the overseer called a meeting
every Saturday, when he put up each labourer by name to auction, and they
were let generally at from 1s. 6d. to 2s. per week and their provisions,
their families being supported by the parish.(11*)




In 1816 the labourers were suffering both from unemployment and from high
prices. In 1815, as the Annual Register(12*) puts it, 'much distress
was undergone in the latter part of the year by the trading portion of the
community. This source of private calamity was unfortunately coincident with
an extraordinary decline in agricultural prosperity, immediately proceeding
from the greatly reduced price of corn and other products, which bore no
adequate proportion to the exorbitant rents and other heavy burdens pressing
upon the farmer.' At the beginning of 1816 there were gloomy anticipations
of a fall in prices, and Western(13*) moved a series of resolutions designed
to prevent the importation of corn. But as the year advanced it became evident
that the danger that threatened England was not the danger of abundance but
the danger of scarcity. A bitterly cold summer was followed by so meagre
a harvest that the price of corn rose rapidly beyond the point at which the
ports were open for importation. But high prices which brought bidders at
once for farms that had been unlet made bread and meat dear to the agricultural
labourer, Without bringing him more employment or an advance of wages, and
the riots of 1816 were the result of the misery due to this combination of
misfortunes.




The riots broke out in May of that year, and the counties affected were
Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire. Nightly assemblies were
held, threatening letters were sent, and houses, barns and ricks were set
on fire. These fires were a prelude to a more determined agitation, which
had such an effect on the authorities that the Sheriff Suffolk and Mr. Willet,
a banker of Brandon near Bury, hastened to London to inform the Home Secretary
and to ask for the help of the government in restoring tranquillity. Mr.
Willet's special interest in the proceedings is explained in a naive sentence
in the Annual Register: 'A reduction in the price of bread and meat
was the avowed object of the rioters. They had fixed a maximum for the price
of both. They insisted that the lowest price of wheat must be half a crown
a bushel, and that of prime joints of beef fourpence per pound. Mr. Willet,
a butcher at Brandon, was a marked object of their ill-will, in which Mr.
Willet, the banker, was, from the similarity of his name, in danger of sharing.
This circumstance, and a laudable anxiety to preserve the public peace, induced
him to take an active part and exert all his influence for that purpose.'(14*)
The rioters numbered some fifteen hundred, and they broke up into separate
parties, scattering into different towns and villages. In the course of their
depredations the house of the right Mr. Willet was levelled to the ground,
after which the wrong Mr. Willet, it is to be hoped, was less restless.(15*)
'They were armed with long, heavy sticks, the ends of which, to the extent
of several inches, were studded with short iron spikes, sharp at the sides
and point. Their flag was. inscribed "Bread or Blood!" and they
threatened to march to London.'(16*)




During the next few days there were encounters between insurgent mobs
in Norwich and Bury and the yeomanry, the dragoons, and the West Norfolk
Militia. No lives seem to have been lost, but a good deal of property was
destroyed, and a number of rioters were taken into custody. The Times of
25th May says, in an article on these riots, that wages had been reduced
to a rate lower than the magistrates thought reasonable, for the magistrates,
after suppressing a riot near Downham, acquiesced in the propriety of raising
wages, and released the offenders who had been arrested with a suitable remonstrance.
There was a much more serious battle at Littleport in the Isle of Ely, when
the old fighting spirit of the fens seems to have inspired the rioters. They
began by driving from his house a clergyman magistrate of the name of Vachel,
after which they attacked several houses and extorted money. They then made
for Ely, where they carried out the same programme. This state of anarchy,
after two or three days, ended in a battle in Littleport in which two rioters
were killed, and seventy-five taken prisoners. The prisoners were tried next
month by a Special Commission: twenty-four were capitally convicted; of these
five were hung, five were transported for life, one was transported for fourteen
years, three for seven years, and ten were imprisoned for twelve months in
Ely gaol.(17*) The spirit in which one of the judges, Mr. Christian, the
Chief Justice of the Isle of Ely, conducted the proceedings may be gathered
from his closing speech, in which he said that the rioters were receiving
'great wages' and that 'any change in the price of provisions could only
lessen that superfluity, which, I fear, they too frequently wasted in drunkenness.'(18*)




The pressure of the changed conditions of the nation on this system of
maintenance out of the rates is seen, not only in the behaviour of the labourers,
but also in the growing anxiety of the upper classes to control the system,
and in the tenacity with which the parishes contested settlement claims.
This is the great period of Poor Law litigation. Parish authorities kept
a stricter watch than ever on immigrants. In 1816, for example, the Board
of Agriculture reported that according to a correspondent 'a late legal decision,
determining that keeping a cow gained a settlement, has deprived many cottagers
of that comfort, as it is properly called.'(19*) This decision was remedied
by the 1819 Act(20*) to amend the Settlement Laws as regards renting tenements,
and the Report on the Poor Law in 1819 states that in consequence there 'will
no longer be an obstacle to the accommodation which may be afforded in some
instances to a poor family, by renting the pasturage of a cow, or some other
temporary profit from the occupation of land.'(21*) Lawsuits between parishes
were incessant, and in 1815 the money spent on litigation and the removal
of paupers reached the gigantic figure of £287,000.




In Parliament, too, the question of Poor Law Reform was seen to be urgent,
but the problem assumed a particular and very limited shape. The significance
of this development can be illustrated by comparing the character and the
fate of a measure Whitbread had introduced in 1807 with the character and
the fate of the legislation after Waterloo.




Whitbread's scheme had aimed at (1) improving and humanising the Law of
Settlement; (2) reforming the administration of the Poor Law as such in such
a way as to give greater encouragement to economy and a fairer distribution
of burdens; (3) stimulating thrift and penalising idleness in the labourers;
(4) reforming unemployment policy.




The proposals under the first head provided that settlement might be gained
by five years' residence as a householder, if the householder had not become
chargeable or been convicted of crime, or been absent for more than six weeks
in a year. Two Justices of the Peace were to have power on complaint of the
parish authorities to adjudicate on the settlement of any person likely to
become chargeable, subject to an appeal to quarter Sessions.




The proposals under the second head aimed partly at vestry reform and
partly at rating reform. In those parishes where there was an open vestry,
all ratepayers were still equal as voters, but Whitbread proposed to give
extra voting power at vestry meetings in proportion to assessment.(22*) He
wished to reform rating, by making stock in trade and personal property (except
farming stock), which produced profit liable to assessment, by authorising
the vestry to exempt such occupiers of cottages as they should think fit,
and by giving power to the Justices of the Peace to strike out of the rate
any person occupying a cottage not exceeding five pounds in yearly value,
who should make application to them, such exemptions not to be considered
parochial relief. He also proposed that the county rate should be charged
in every parish in proportion to the assessed property in the parish, and
that any parish whose poor rate was for three years more than double the
average of the parish rate in the county, should have power to apply to Quarter
Sessions for relief out of county stock.




Whitbread's proposals for stimulating thrift and penalising idleness were
a strange medley of enlightenment and childishness. He proposed to give the
parish officers power to build cottages which were to be let at the best
rents that were to be obtained: but the parish officers might with the consent
of the vestry allow persons who could not pay rent to occupy them rent free,
or at a reduced rent. He proposed also to create a National Bank, something
of the nature of a Post Office Savings Bank, to be employed both as a savings
bank and an insurance system for the poor. With these two excellent schemes
he combined a ridiculous system of prizes and punishments for the thrifty
and the irresponsible. Magistrates were to be empowered to give rewards (up
to a maximum of £20) with a badge of good conduct, to labourers who
had brought up large families without parish help, and to punish any man
who appeared to have become chargeable from idleness or misconduct, and to
brand him with the words, 'criminal Poor.'




In his unemployment policy Whitbread committed the fatal mistake, common
to almost all the proposals of the time, of mixing up poor relief with wages
in a way to depress and demoralise the labour market. The able-bodied unemployed,
men, youths, or single women, were to be hired out by parish officers at
the best price to be obtained. The wages were to be paid to the worker. If
the worker was a single man or woman, or a widower with no children dependent
on him, his or her earnings were to be made up by the parish to a sum necessary
to his or her subsistence. If he or she had children, they were to be made
up to three-quarters, or four-fifths, or the full average rate, according
to the number of children. No single man or woman was to be hired out for
more than a year, and no man or woman with dependent children for more than
a month.




The proposals were attacked vigorously by two critics who were not often
found in company, Cobbett and Malthus. Cobbett criticised the introduction
of plural voting at vestry meetings in an excellent passage in the Political
Register.(23*) 'Many of those who pay rates are but a step Or two from
pauperism themselves; and they are the most likely persons to consider duly
the important duty of doing, in case of relief, what they would be done unto.
"But," Mr. Whitbread will say, "is it right for these persons
to give away the money of others." It is not the money of others, any
more than the amount of tithes is the farmer's money. The maintenance of
the poor is a charge upon the land, a charge duly considered in every purchase
and in every lease. Besides, as the law now stands, though every parishioner
has a vote in vestry, must it not be evident, to every man who reflects,
that a man of large property and superior understanding will have weight
in proportion? That he will, in fact, have many votes? If he play the tyrant,
even little men will rise against him, and it is right they should have the
power of so doing; but, while he conducts himself with moderation and humanity,
while he behaves as he ought to do to those who are beneath him in point
of property, there is no fear but he will have a sufficiency of weight at
every vestry. The votes of the inferior persons in the parish are, in reality,
dormant, unless in cases where some innovation, or some act of tyranny, is
attempted. They are, like the sting of the bee, weapons merely of defence.'




Malthus' criticisms were of a very different nature.(24*) He objected
particularly to the public building of cottages, and the assessment of personal
property to the rates. He argued that the scarcity of houses was the chief
reason 'why the Poor Laws had not been so extensive and prejudicial in their
effects as might have been expected.' If a stimulus was given to the building
of cottages there would be no check on the increase of population. A similar
tendency he ascribed to the rating of personal property. The employers of
labour had an interest in the increase of population, and therefore in the
building of cottages. This instinct was at present held in check by consideration
of the burden of the rates. If, however, they could distribute that burden
more widely, this consideration would have much less weight. Population would
increase and wages would consequently go down. 'It has been observed by Dr.
Adam Smith that no efforts of the legislature had been able to raise the
salary of curates to that price which seemed necessary for their decent maintenance:
and the reason which he justly assigns is that the bounties held out to the
profession by the scholarships and fellowships of the universities always
occasioned a redundant supply. In the same manner, if a more than usual supply
of labour were encouraged by the premiums of small tenements, nothing could
prevent a great and general fall in its price.'




The Bill was introduced in 1807, before the fall of the Whig Ministry,
and it went to a Committee. But the Tory Parliament elected that year to
support Portland and his anti-Catholic Government was unfriendly, and the
county magistrates to whom the draft of the Bill was sent for criticisms
were also hostile. Whitbread accordingly proceeded no further. At this time
the Speenhamland system seemed to be working without serious inconvenience,
and there was therefore no driving power behind such proposals. But after
1815 the conditions had changed, and the apathy of 1807 had melted away.
The ruling class was no longer passive and indifferent about the growth of
the Speenhamland system: both Houses of Parliament set inquiries on foot,
schemes of emigration were invited and discussed, and measures of Vestry
Reform were carried. But the problem was no longer the problem that Whitbread
had set out to solve. Whitbread had proposed to increase the share of property
in the control of the poor rates, but he had also brought forward a constructive
scheme of social improvement. The Vestry Reformers of this period were merely
interested in reducing the rates: the rest of Whitbread's programme was forgotten.




In 1818 an Act(25*) was passed which established plural voting in vestries,
every ratepayer whose rateable value was £50 and over being allowed
a vote for every £25 of rateable property. In the following year an
Act(26*) was passed which allowed parishes to set up a select vestry, and
ordained that in these parishes the overseers should give such relief as
was ordered by the Select Vestry, and further allowed the appointment of
salaried assistant overseers. These changes affected the administration of
the Speenhamland system very considerably; and the salaried overseers made
themselves hated in many parishes by the Draconian régime which they
introduced. The parish cart, or the cart to which in some parishes men and
women who asked for relief were harnessed, was one of the innovations of
this period. The administrative methods that were adopted in these parishes
are frustrated by a fact mentioned by a clerk to the magistrates in Kent,
in October 1830.(27*) The writer says that there was a severe overseer at
Ash, who had among other applicants for relief an unemployed shepherd, with
a wife and five children living at Margate, thirteen miles away. The shepherd
was given 9s. a week, but the overseer made him walk to Ash every day except
Sunday for his eighteen pence. The shepherd walked his twenty-six miles a
day on such food as he could obtain out of his share of the 9s. for nine
weeks, and then his strength could hold out no longer. The writer remarked
that the shepherd was an industrious and honest man, out of work through
no fault of his own. It was by such methods that the salaried overseers tried
to break the poor of the habit of asking for relief, and it is not surprising
that such methods rankled in the memories of the labourers. In this neighbourhood
the writer attributed the fires of 1830 more to this cause than to any other.




These attempts to relieve the ratepayer did nothing to relieve the labourer
from the incubus of the system. His plight grew steadily worse. A Committee
on Agricultural Wages, of which Lord John Russell was chairman, reported
in 1824 that whereas in certain northern counties, where the Speenhamland
system had not yet taken root, wages were 12s. to 15s., in the south they
varied from 8s. or 9s. a week to 3s. for a single man and 4s. 6d. for a married
man.(28*) In one part of Kent the lowest wages in one parish were 6d. a day,
and in the majority of parishes 1s. a day. The wages of an unmarried man
in Buckinghamshire in 1828, according to a clergyman who gave evidence before
the Committee of that year on the Poor Laws, were 3s. a week, and the wages
of a married man were 6s. a week. In one parish in his neighbourhood the
farmers had lately reduced the wages of able-bodied married men to 4s. a
week. Thus the Speenhamland system had been effective enough in keeping wages
low, but as a means of preserving a minimum livelihood it was breaking down
by this time on all sides. We have seen from the history of Merton in Oxfordshire(29*)
what happened in one parish long before the adversities of agriculture had
become acute. It is easy from this case to imagine what happened when the
decline in employment and agriculture threw a steadily increasing burden
on the system of maintenance from the rates. In some places, as the Commissioners
of 1834 reported, the labourers were able by intimidation to keep the system
in force, but though parishes did not as a rule dare to abandon or reform
the system, they steadily reduced their scale.




The most direct and graphic demonstration of this fact, which has not
apparently ever been noticed in any of the voluminous discussions of the
old Poor Law system, is to be seen in the comparison of the standards of
life adopted at the time the system was introduced with the standards that
were adopted later. In 1795, as we have seen, the magistrates at Speenhamland
recommended an allowance of three gallon loaves for each labourer, and a
gallon loaf and a half for his wife and for each additional member of his
family. This scale, it must be remembered, was not peculiar to Berkshire.
It was the authoritative standard in many counties. We are able to compare
this with some later scales, and the comparison yields some startling results.
In Northamptonshire in 1816 the magistrates fixed a single man's allowance
at 5s., and the allowance for a man and his wife at 6s., the price of wheat
the quartern loaf being 11 1/2d.(30*) On this scale a man is supposed to
need a little over two and a half gallon loaves, and a man and his wife a
little more than three gallon loaves, or barely more than a single man was
supposed to need in 1795. This is a grave reduction, but the maintenance
standard fell very much lower before 1832. For though we have scales for
Cambridgeshire and Essex for 1821 published in the Report of the Poor Law
Commission of 1834,(31*) which agree roughly with the Northamptonshire scale
(two gallon loaves for a man, and one and a half for a woman), in Wiltshire,
according to the complicated scale adopted at Hindon in 1817, a man was allowed
one and three-fifths gallon loaves, and a woman one and one-tenth.(32*) A
Hampshire scale, drawn up in 1822 by eight magistrates, of whom five were
parsons, allowed only one gallon loaf a head, with 4d. a week per head in
addition to a family of four persons, the extra allowance being reduced by
a penny in cases where there were six in the family, and by twopence in cases
where there were more than six.(33*) The Dorsetshire magistrates in 1826
allowed a man the equivalent of one and a half gallon loaves and a penny
over, and a woman or child over fourteen one and one-sixth.(34*) We have
a general statement as to the scales in force towards the end of our period
in a passage in M'Culloch's Political Economy quoted in the Edinburgh
Review for January 1831 (p. 353): 'The allowance scales now issued from
time to time by the magistrates are usually framed on the principle that
every labourer should have a gallon loaf of standard wheaten bread weekly
for every member of his family and one over: that is four loaves for three
persons, five for four, six for five, and so on.' That is, a family of four
persons would have had seven and a half gallon loaves in 1795, and only five
gallon loaves in 1831.




Now the Speenhamland scale did not represent some easy and luxurious standard
of living; it represented the minimum on which it was supposed that a man
employed in agriculture could support life. In thirty-five years the standard
had dropped, according to M'Culloch's statement, as much as a third, and
this not because of war or famine, for in 1826 England had had eleven years
of peace, but in the ordinary course of the life of the nation. Is such a
decline in the standard of life recorded anywhere else in history?




How did the labourers live at all under these conditions? Their life was,
of course, wretched and squalid in the extreme. Cobbett describes a group
of women labourers whom he met by the roadside in Hampshire as 'such an assemblage
of rags as I never saw before even amongst the hoppers at Farnham.' Of the
labourers near Cricklade he said: 'Their dwellings are little better than
pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to
that of a pig. These wretched hovels are stuck upon little beds of ground
on the roadside where the space has been wider than the road demanded. In
many places they have not two rods to a hovel. It seems as if they had been
swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under
the banks on the roadside. Yesterday morning was a sharp frost, and this
had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plots of potatoes.
In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this; no, not even
amongst the free negroes in America who, on an average, do not work one day
out of four.'(35*) The labourers' cottages in Leicestershire he found were
'hovels made of mud and straw, bits of glass or of old cast-off windows,
without frames or hinges frequently, and merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter
them and look at the bits of chairs or stools, the wretched boards tacked
together to serve for a table, the floor of pebble broken or of the bare
ground; look at the thing called a bed, and survey the rags on the backs
of the inhabitants.'(36*) A Dorsetshire clergyman, a witness before the Committee
on Wages in 1824, said that the labourers lived almost entirely on tea and
potatoes; a Bedfordshire labourer said that he and his family lived mainly
on bread and cheese and water, and that sometimes for a month together he
never tasted meat; a Suffolk magistrate described how a labourer out of work,
convicted of stealing wood, begged to be sent at once to a House of Correction,
where he hoped to find food and employment. if Davies had written an account
of the labouring classes in 1820 or 1830, the picture he drew in 1795 would
have seemed bright in comparison. But even this kind of life could not be
supported on such provision as was made by the parish. How, then, did the
labourers maintain any kind of existence when society ceased to piece together
a minimum livelihood out of rates and wages?




For the answer to this question we must turn to the history of crime and
punishment; to the Reports of the Parliamentary Committees on Labourers'
Wages (1824), on the Game Laws (1823 and 1828), on Emigration (1826 and 1827),
on Criminal Commitments and Convictions and Secondary Punishments (1827,
1828, 1831, and 1832), and the evidence of those who were in touch with this
side of village life. From these sources we learn that, rate aid not being
sufficient to bring wages to the maintenance level, poaching, smuggling,
and ultimately thieving were called in to rehabilitate the labourer's economic
position.(37*) He was driven to the wages of crime. The history of the agricultural
labourer in this generation is written in the code of the Game Laws, the
growing brutality of the Criminal Law, and the preoccupation of the rich
with the efficacy of punishment.




We know from Fielding with what sort of justice the magistrates treated
persons accused of poaching in the reign of George III's grandfather, but
when he wrote his account of Squire Western, and when Blackstone wrote that
the Game Laws had raised up a little Nimrod in every manor, the blood of
men and boys had not yet been spilt for the pleasures of the rich. it is
only after Fielding and Blackstone were both in their graves that this page
of history became crimson, and that the gentlemen of England took to guarding
their special amusements by methods of which a Member of Parliament declared
that the nobles of France had not ventured on their like in the days of their
most splendid arrogance. The little Nimrods who made and applied. their code
were a small and select class. They were the persons qualified under the
law of Charles II to shoot game, i.e., persons who possessed a freehold estate
of at least £100 a year, or a leasehold estate of at least £150
a year, or the son or heir-apparent of an esquire or person of higher degree.
The legislation that occupies so much of English history during a period
of misery and famine is devoted to the protection of the monopoly of this
class, comprising less than one in ten thousand of the people of England.
A Member of Parliament named Warburton said in the House of Commons that
the only parallel to this monopoly was to be found in Mariner's account of
the Tonga Islands, where rats were preserved as game. Anybody might eat rats
there, but nobody was allowed to kill them except persons descended from
gods or kings.




With the general growth of upper-class riches and luxury there came over
shooting a change corresponding with the change that turned hunting into
a magnificent and extravagant spectacle. The habit set in of preserving game
in great masses, of organising the battue, of maintaining armies of keepers.
In many parts of the country, pheasants were now introduCed for the first
time. Whereas game had hitherto kept something of the wildness, and vagrancy,
and careless freedom of Nature, the woods were now packed with tame and docile
birds, whose gay feathers sparkled among the trees, before the eyes of the
half-starved labourers breaking stones on the road at half a crown a week.
The change is described by witnesses such as Sir James Graham and Sir Thomas
Baring, magistrates respectively in Cumberland and Hampshire, before the
Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions in 1827. England
was, in fact, passing through a process precisely opposite to that which
had taken place in France: the sport of the rich was becoming more and more
of an elaborate system, and more of a vested interest. This development was
marked by the growth of an offensive combination among game preservers; in
some parts of the country game associations were formed, for the express
purpose of paying the costs of prosecutions, so that the poacher had against
him not merely a bench of game preservers, but a ring of squires, a sort
of Holy Alliance for the punishment of social rebels, which drew its meshes
not round a parish but round a county. Simultaneously, as we have seen, a
general change was coming over the circumstances and position of the poor.
The mass of the people were losing their rights and independence; they were
being forced into an absolute dependence on wages, and were living on the
brink of famine. These two developments must be kept in mind in watching
the building up of the game code in the last phase of the ancient régime.




The Acts for protecting game passed after the accession of George III
are in a crescendo of fierceness. The first important Act was passed in 1770.
Under this Act any one who killed game of any kind between sunsetting and
sunrising, or used any gun, or dog, snare, net, or other engine for destroying
game at night, was, on conviction by one witness before one Justice of the
Peace, to be punished with imprisonment for not less than three months or
more than six. For a subsequent offence he was to be imprisoned for not more
than twelve months or less than six, and to be whipped publicly between the
hours of twelve and one o'clock. This was light punishment compared with
the measures that were to follow. In the year 1800, the year of Marengo,
when all England was braced up for its great duel with the common enemy of
freedom and order, and the labourers were told every day that they would
be the first to suffer if Napoleon landed in England, the English Parliament
found time to pass another Act to punish poachers, and to teach justice to
mend her slow pace. By this Act when two or more persons were found in any
forest, chase, park, wood, plantation, paddock, field, meadow, or other open
or enclosed ground, having any gun, net, engine, or other instrument, with
the intent to destroy, take, or kill game, they were to be seized by keepers
or servants, and on conviction before a J.P., they were to be treated as
rogues and vagabonds under the Act of 1744, i.e., they were to be punished
by imprisonment with hard labour; an incorrigible rogue, i.e., a second offender,
was to be imprisoned for two years with whipping. Further, if the offender
was over twelve years of age, the magistrates might sentence him to serve
in the army or navy. If an incorrigible rogue escaped from the House of Correction
he was to be liable to transportation for seven years.




Two consequences followed from this Act. Now that punishment was made
so severe, the poacher had a strong reason for violence: surrender meant
service in a condemned regiment, and he therefore took the risks of resistance.
The second consequence was the practice of poaching in large groups. The
organisation of poaching gangs was not a natural development of the industry;
it was adopted in self-defence.(38*) This Act led inevitably to those battles
between gamekeepers and labourers that became so conspicuous a feature of
English life at this time, and in 1803 Lord Ellenborough passed an Act which
provided that any persons who presented a gun or tried, to stab or cut 'with
intent to obstruct, resist, or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer
of the person or persons so stabbing or cutting, or the lawful apprehension
or detainer of any of his, her, or their accomplices for any offences for
which he, she, or they may respectively be liable by law to be apprehended,
imprisoned, or detained,' should suffer death as a felon. In 1816, when peace
and the fall of prices were bringing new problems in their train, there went
through Parliament, without a syllable of debate, a Bill of which Romilly
said that no parallel to it could be found in the laws of any country in
the world. By that Act a person who was found at night unarmed, but with
a net for poaching, in any forest, chase, or park was to be punished by transportation
for seven years. This Act Romilly induced Parliament to repeal in the following
year, but the Act that took its place only softened the law to the extent
of withdrawing this punishment from persons found with nets, but without
guns or bludgeons: it enacted that any person so found, armed with gun, crossbow,
firearms, bludgeon, or any other offensive weapon, was to be tried at Quarter
Sessions, and if convicted, to be sentenced to transportation for seven years:
if such offender were to return to Great Britain before his time was over,
he was to be transported for the rest of his life.(39*)




This savage Act, though by no means a dead letter, as Parliamentary Returns
show, seems to have defeated its own end, for in 1828 it was repealed, because,
as Lord Wharncliffe told the House of Lords, there was a certain reluctance
on the part of juries to convict a prisoner, when they knew that conviction
would be followed by transportation. The new Act of 1828, which allowed a
person to be convicted before two magistrates, reserved transportation for
the third offence, punishing the first offence by three months', and the
second by six months' imprisonment. But the convicted person had to find
sureties after his release, or else go back to hard labour for another six
months if it was a first offence, or another twelve months if it was his
second. Further, if three men were found in a wood and one of them carried
a gun or bludgeon, all three were liable to be transported for fourteen years.(40*)
Althorp's Bill of 1831 which abolished the qualifications of the Act of Charles
II, gave the right to shoot to every landowner who took out a certificate,
and made the sale of game legal, proposed in its original form to alter these
punishments, making that for the first and second offences rather more severe
(four and eight months), and that for the third, two years' imprisonment.
In Committee in the House of Commons the two years were reduced to one year
on the proposal of Orator Hunt. The House of Lords, however, restored the
punishments of the Act of 1828.




These were the main Acts for punishing poachers that were passed during
the last phase of the ancient régime. How large a part they played
in English life may be imagined from a fact mentioned by the duke of Richmond
in 1831.(41*) In the three years between 1827 and 1830 one in seven of all
the criminal convictions in the country were convictions under the Game Code.
The number of persons so convicted was 8502, many of them being under eighteen.
Some of them had been transported for life, and some for seven or fourteen
years. In some years the proportion was still higher.(42*) We must remember,
too, what kind of judges had tried many of these men and boys. 'There is
not a worse-constituted tribunal on the face of the earth,' said Brougham
in 1828, 'not even that of the Turkish Cadi, than that at which summary convictions
on the Game Laws constantly take place; I mean a bench or a brace of sporting
justices. I am far from saying that, on such subjects, they are actuated
by corrupt motives; but they are undoubtedly instigated by their abhorrence
of that caput lupinum, that hostis humani generis, as an Honourable Friend
of mine once called him in his place, that fera naturae -- a poacher. From
their decisions on those points, where their passions are the most likely
to mislead them, no appeal in reality lies to a more calm and unprejudiced
tribunal; for, unless they set out any matter illegal on the face of the
conviction, you remove the record in vain.'(43*)




The close relation of this great increase of crime to the general distress
was universally recognised. Cobbett tells us that a gentleman in Surrey asked
a young man, who was cracking stones on the roadside, how he could live upon
half a crown a week. 'I don't live upon it,' said he. 'How do you live then?'
'Why,' said he, 'I poach: it is better to be hanged than to be starved to
death.'(44*) This story receives illustration after illustration in the evidence
taken by Parliamentary Committees. The visiting Justices of the Prisons in
Bedfordshire reported in 1827 that the great increase in commitments, and
particularly the number of commitments for offences against the Game Laws,
called for an inquiry. More than a third of the commitments during the last
quarter had been for such offences. The Report continues:--




'In many parishes in this county the wages given to young unmarried agricultural
labourers, in the full strength and vigour of life, seldom exceed 3s. or
3s. 6d. a week, paid to them, generally, under the description of roundsmen,
by the overseers out of the poor rates; and often in the immediate vicinity
of the dwellings of such half-starved labourers there are abundantly-stocked
preserves of game, in which, during a single night, these dissatisfied young
men can obtain a rich booty by snaring hares and taking or killing pheasants...
offences which they cannot be brought to acknowledge to be any violation
of private property. Detection generally leads to their imprisonment, and
imprisonment introduces these youths to familiarity with criminals of other
descriptions, and thus they become rapidly abandoned to unlawful pursuits
and a life of crime.'(45*) Mr. Orridge, Governor of the Gaol of Bury St.
Edmunds, gave to the Committee on Commitments and Convictions(46*) the following
figures of prisoners committed to the House of Correction for certain years:
--




 1805, 221 1815, 387 1824, 457

1806, 192 1816, 476 1825, 439

1807, 173 1817, 430 1826, 573.




He stated that the great increase in the number of commitments began in
the year 1815 with the depression of agriculture and the great dearth of
employment: that men were employed on the roads at very low rates: that the
commitments under the Game Laws which in 1810 were five, in 1811 four, and
in 1812 two, were seventy-five in 1822, a year of great agricultural distress,
sixty in 1823, sixty-one in 1824, and seventy-one in 1825. Some men were
poachers from the love of sport, but the majority from distress. Mr. Pym,
a magistrate in Cambridgeshire, and Sir Thomas Baring, a magistrate for Hampshire,
gave similar evidence as to the cause of the increase of crime, and particularly
of poaching, in these counties. Mr. Bishop, a Bow Street officer, whose business
it was to mix with the poachers in public-houses and learn their secrets,
told the Committee on the Game Laws in 1823 that there had not been employment
for the labouring poor in most of the places he had visited. Perhaps the
most graphic picture of the relation of distress to crime is given in a pamphlet,
Thoughts and Suggestions on the Present Condition of the Country,
published in 1830 by Mr. Potter Macqueen, late M.P. for Bedford.




'In January 1829, there were ninety-six prisoners for trial in Bedford
Gaol, of whom seventy-six were able-bodied men, in the prime of life, and,
chiefly, of general good character, who were driven to crime by sheer want,
and who would have been valuable subjects had they been placed in a situation,
where, by the exercise of their health and strength, they could have earned
a subsistence. There were in this number eighteen poachers, awaiting trial
for the capital offence of using arms in self-defence when attacked by game-keepers;
of these eighteen men, one only was not a parish pauper, and he was the agent
of the London poulterers, who, passing under the apparent vocation of a rat-catcher,
paid these poor creatures more in one night than they could obtain from the
overseer for a week's labour. I conversed with each of these men singly,
and made minutes of their mode of life. The two first I will mention are
the two brothers, the Lilleys, in custody under a charge of firing on and
wounding a keeper, who endeavoured to apprehend them whilst poaching. They
were two remarkably fine young men, and very respectably connected. The elder,
twenty-eight years of age, married, with two small children. When I inquired
how he could lend himself to such a wretched course of life, the poor fellow
replied: 'Sir, I had a pregnant wife, with one infant at her knee, and another
at her breast; I was anxious to obtain work, I offered myself in all directions,
but without success; if I went to a distance, I was told to go back to my
parish, and when I did so, I was allowed.... What? Why, for myself, my babes,
and my wife, in a condition requiring more than common support, and unable
to labour, I was allowed 7s. a week for all; for which I was expected to
work on the roads from light to dark, and to pay three guineas a year for
the hovel which sheltered us.' The other brother, aged twenty-two, unmarried,
received 6d. a day. These men were hanged at the spring assizes. Of the others,
ten were single men, their ages varying from seventeen to twenty-seven. Many
had never been in gaol before, and were considered of good character. Six
of them were on the roads at 6d. per day. Two could not obtain even this
pittance. One had been refused relief on the ground that he had shortly previous
obtained a profitable piece of jobwork, and one had existed on 1s. 6d. during
the fortnight before he joined the gang in question. Of five married men,
two with wife and two children received 7s., two with wife and one child
6s., and one with wife and four small children 11s.'(47*)




If we wish to obtain a complete picture of the social life of the time,
it is not enough to study the construction of this vindictive code. We must
remember that a sort of civil war was going on between the labourers and
the gamekeepers. The woods in which Tom Jones fought his great fight with
Thwackum and Blifil to cover the flight of Molly Seagrim now echoed on a
still and moonless night with the din of a different sort of battle: the
noise of gunshots and blows from bludgeons, and broken curses from men who
knew that, if they were taken, they would never see the English dawn rise
over their homes again: a battle which ended perhaps in the death or wounding
of a keeper or poacher, and the hanging or transportation of some of the
favourite Don Quixotes of the village. A witness before the Committee on
the Game Laws said that the poachers preferred a quiet night. Crabbe, in
the poacher poem (Book XXI of Tales of the Hall) which he wrote at
the suggestion of Romilly, takes what would seem to be the more probable
view that poachers liked a noisy night:




<poem>

'It was a night such bold desires to move

Strong winds and wintry torrents filled the grove;

The crackling boughs that in the forest fell,

The cawing rooks, the cur's affrighted yell;

The scenes above the wood, the floods below,

Were mix'd, and none the singie sound could know.

"Loud blow the blasts," they cried, "and call us as they blow."'

</poem>




Such an encounter is put into cold arithmetic in an official return like
this:(48*) --




'An account of the nineteen persons committed to Warwick Gaol for trial
at the Lent Assizes 1829 for shooting and wounding John Slinn at Combe Fields
in the County of Warwick whilst endeavouring to apprehend them for destroying
game in the night with the result thereof: --




Above 14 and under 20 years of age 11

Above 20 years of age 8

Capitally convicted and repreived with --

Transportation for life 7

Transportation for 14 years 9

Imprisonment with hard labour

in House of Correction for 2 years 1

Admitted to Evidence 2




Seven peasants exiled for life, nine exiled for fourteen years, and two
condemned to the worst exile of all. In that village at any rate there were
many homes that had reason to remember the day when the pleasures of the
rich became the most sacred thing in England.




But the warfare was not conducted only by these methods. For the gentlemen
of England, as for the genius who fought Michael and Gabriel in the great
battle in the sixth book of Paradise Lost, science did not spread
her light in vain. There was a certain joy of adventure in a night skirmish,
and a man who saw his wife and children slowly starving, to whom one of those
golden birds that was sleeping on its perch the other side of the hedge,
night after night, till the day when it should please the squire to send
a shot through its purple head, meant comfort and even riches for a week,
was not very much afraid of trusting his life and his freedom to his quick
ear, his light foot, or at the worst his powerful arm. So the game preservers
invented a cold and terrible demon: they strewed their woods with spring
guns, that dealt death without warning, death without the excitement of battle,
death that could catch the nimblest as he slipped and scrambled through the
hiding bracken. The man who fell in an affray fell fighting, his comrades
by his side; it was a grim and uncomforted fate to go out slowly and alone,
lying desolate in the stained bushes, beneath the unheeding sky. It is not
clear when these diabolical engines, as Lord Holland called them, were first
introduced, but they were evidently common by 1817, when Curwen made a passionate
protest in the House of Commons, and declared, 'Better the whole race of
game was extinct than that it should owe its preservation to such cruel expedients.'(49*)
Fortunately for England the spring guns, though they scattered murder and
wounds.freely enough (Peel spoke in 1827 of 'daily accidents and misfortunes'),
did not choose their victims with so nice an eye as a Justice of the Peace,
and it was often a gamekeeper or a farm servant who was suddenly tripped
up by this lurking death. By 1827 this state of things had become such a
scandal that Parliament intervened and passed an Act, introduced in the Lords
by Lord Suffield, who had made a previous attempt in 1825, to make the setting
of spring guns a misdemeanour.(50*)




The Bill did not pass without considerable opposition. Tennyson, who introduced
it in the Commons, declared that the feudal nobility in ancient France had
never possessed a privilege comparable with this right of killing and maiming,
and he said that the fact that Coke of Norfolk(51*) and Lord Suffield, both
large game preservers, refused to employ them showed that they were not necessary.
Members of both Houses of Parliament complained bitterly of the 'morbid sensibility'
that inspired the proposal, and some of them defended spring guns as a labour-saving
machine, speaking of them with the enthusiasm that a manufacturer might bestow
on the invention of an Arkwright or a Crompton. One member of the House of
Commons, a Colonel French, opposed the Bill with the argument that the honest
English country gentleman formed 'the very subject and essence of the English
character,' while Lord Ellenborough opposed it in the other House on the
ground that it was contrary to the principles of the English law, which gave
a man protection for his property in proportion to the difficulty with which
it could be defended by ordinary means.




The crime for which men were maimed or killed by these engines or torn
from their homes by summary and heartless justice was, it must be remembered,
no crime at all in the eyes of the great majority of their countrymen. At
this time the sale of game was prohibited under stern penalties, and yet
every rich man in London, from the Lord Mayor downwards, entertained his
guests with game that he had bought from a poulterer. How had the poulterer
bought it? There was no secret about the business. It was explained to two
Select Committees, the first of the House of Commons in 1823, and the second
of the House of Lords in 1828, by poulterers who lived by these transactions,
and by police officers who did nothing to interfere with them. Daniel Bishop,
for example, one of the chief Bow Street officers, described the arrangements
to the Committee in 1823.(52*)




'Can you state to the Committee, how the Game is brought from the poachers
up to London, or other market?... The poachers generally meet the coachman
or guards of the mails or vans, and deliver it to them after they are out
of a town, they do not deliver it in a town; then it is brought up to London,
sometimes to their agents; but the coachmen and guards mostly have their
friends in London where they know how to dispose of it, and they have their
contracts made at so much a brace.... There is no intermediate person between
the poacher and the coachman or guard that conveys it to. town?... Very seldom;
generally the head of the gang pays the rest of the men, and he sends off
the Game.... When the game arrives in London, how is it disposed of?... They
have their agents, the bookkeepers at most of the inns, the porters who go
out with the carts; any persons they know may go and get what quantity they
like, by sending an order a day or two before; there are great quantities
come up to Leadenhall and Newgate markets.' Nobody in London thought the
worse of a poulterer for buying poached game; and nobody in the country thought
any the worse of the poacher who supplied it. A witness before the Committee
in 1823 said that in one village the whole of the village were poachers,
'the constable of the village, the shoemaker and other inhabitants of the
village.' Another witness before the Lords in 1828 said that occupiers and
unqualified proprietors agreed with the labourers in thinking that poaching
was an innocent practice.




Those who wished to reform the Game Laws argued that if the sale of game
were legalised, and if the anomalous qualifications were abolished, the poacher's
prize would become much less valuable, and the temptation would be correspondingly
diminished.. This view was corroborated by the evidence given to the Select
Committees. But all such proposals were bitterly attacked by the great majority
of game preservers. Lord Londonderry urged against this reform in 1827 'that
it would deprive the sportsman of his highest gratification... the pleasure
of fishing his friends with presents of game: nobody would care for a present
which everybody could give!'(53*) Other game preservers argued that it was
sport that made the English gentlemen such good officers, on which the Edinburgh
Review remarked: 'The hunting which Xenophon and Cicero praise as the best
discipline for forming great generals from its being war in miniature must
have been very unlike pheasant shooting.'(54*) Lord Deerhurst declared, when
the proposal was made fourteen years earlier, that this was not the time
to disgust resident gentlemen. The English aristocracy, like the French,
would only consent to live in the country on their own terms. When the squires
threatened to turn émigrés if anybody else was allowed to kill
a rabbit, or if a poacher was not put to risk of life and limb, Sydney Smith
gave an answer that would have scandalised the House of Commons, 'If gentlemen
cannot breathe fresh air without injustice, let them putrefy in Cranbourne
Court.'




But what about the justice of the laws against poachers? To most members
of Parliament there would have been an element of paradox in such a question.
From the discussions on the subject of the Game Laws a modern reader might
suppose that poachers were not men of flesh and blood, but some kind of vermin.
There were a few exceptions. In 1782, when Coke of Norfolk, acting at the
instance of the magistrates of that county, proposed to make the Game Laws
more stringent, Turner, the member for York, made a spirited reply; he 'exclaimed
against those laws as cruel and oppressive on the poor: he said it was a
shame that the House should always be enacting laws for the safety of gentlemen;
he wished they would make a few for the good of the poor.... For his own
part, he was convinced, that if he had been a common man, he would have been
a poacher, in spite of all the laws; and he was equally sure that the too
great severity of the laws was the cause that the number of poachers had
increased so much.'(55*) Fox (29th April 1796) protested with vigour against
the morality that condemned poachers without mercy, and condoned all the
vices of the rich, but he, with Sheridan, Curwen, Romilly, and a few others
were an infinitesimal minority.




The aristocracy had set up a code, under which a man or boy who had offended
against the laws, but had done nothing for which any of his fellows imputed
discredit to him, was snatched from his home, thrown into gaol with thieves
and criminals, and perhaps flung to the other side of the world, leaving
his family either to go upon the rates or to pick up a living by such dishonesties
as they could contrive. This last penalty probably meant final separation.
Mr. T. G. B. Estcourt, M.P., stated in evidence before the Select Committee
on Secondary Punishments in 1831(56*) that as men who had been transported
were not brought back at the public expense, they scarcely ever returned,(57*)
that agricultural labourers specially dreaded transportation, because it
meant 'entire separation' from 'former associates, relations, and friends,'
and that since he and his brother magistrates in Wiltshire had taken to transporting
more freely, committals had decreased. The special misery that transportation
inflicted on men of this class is illustrated in Marcus Clarke's famous novel,
For the Term of His Natural Life. In the passage describing the barracoon
on the transport ship, Clarke throws on the screen all the different types
of character -- forgers, housebreakers, cracksmen, footpads -- penned up
in that poisonous prison. 'The poacher grimly thinking of his sick wife and
children would start as the night-house ruffian clapped him on the shoulder
and bade him with a curse to take good heart and be a man.' Readers of Mr.
Hudson's character sketches of the modern Wiltshire labourer can imagine
the scene. To the lad who had never been outside his own village such a society
must have been unspeakably alien and terrible: a ring of callous and mocking
faces, hardened, by crime and wrong and base punishment, to make bitter ridicule
of all the memories of home and boyhood and innocence that were surging and
breaking round his simple heart.




The growing brutality of the Game Laws, if it is the chief, is not the
only illustration of the extent to which the pressure of poverty was driving
the labourers to press upon law and order, and the kind of measures that
the ruling class took to protect its property. Another illustration is the
Malicious Trespass Act.




In 1820 Parliament passed an Act which provided that any person convicted
before a single J.P. within four months of the act of doing any malicious
injury to any building, hedge, fence, tree, wood, or underwood was to pay
damage not exceeding £5, and if he was unable to pay these damages he
was to be sent to hard labour in a common gaol or House of Correction for
three months. The law before the passing of this Act was as it is to-day,
i.e., the remedy lay in an action at law against the trespasser, and the
trespasser under the Act of William and Mary had to pay damages. The Act
of 1820 was passed without any debate that is reported in Hansard, but it
is not unreasonable to assume that it was demanded for the protection of
enclosures and game preserves.(58*) This Act exempted one set of persons
entirely, 'persons engaged in hunting, and qualified persons in pursuit of
game.' These privileged gentlemen could do as much injury as they pleased.




One clause provided that every male offender under sixteen who did not
pay damages, and all costs and charges and expenses forthwith, might be sent
by the magistrate to hard labour in the House of Correction for six weeks.
Thus a child who broke a bough from a tree by the roadside might be sent
by the magistrate, who would in many cases be the owner of the tree, to the
House of Correction, there to learn the ways of criminals at an age when
the magistrate's own children were about half-way through their luxurious
education. This was no brutum fulmen. Children were sent to prison in great
numbers.(59*) Brougham said in 1828: 'There was a Bill introduced by the
Rt. Hon. Gentleman opposite for extending the payment of expenses of witnesses
and prosecutors out of the county rates. It is not to be doubted that it
has greatly increased the number of Commitments, and has been the cause of
many persons being brought to trial, who ought to have been discharged by
the Magistrates. The habit of committing, from this and other causes, has
grievously increased everywhere of late, and especially of boys. Eighteen
hundred and odd, many of them mere children, have been committed in the Warwick
district during the last seven years.'(60*) The Governor of the House of
Correction in Coldbath Fields, giving evidence before the Committee on Secondary
Punishments in 1831, said that he had under his charge a boy of ten years
old who had been in prison eight times. Capper, the Superintendent of the
Convict Establishment, told the same Committee that some of the boy convicts
were so young that they could scarcely put on their clothes, and that they
had to be dressed. Richard Potter's diary for 1813 contains this. entry.
'Oct. 13. -- I was attending to give evidence against a man. Afterwards,
two boys, John and Thomas Clough, aged 12 and 10 years, were tried and found
guilty of stealing some Irish linen out of Joseph Thorley's warehouse during
the dinner hour. The Chairman sentenced them to seven years' transportation.
On its being pronounced, the Mother of those unfortunate boys came to the
Bar to her children, and with them was in great agony, imploring mercy of
the Bench. With difficulty the children were removed. The scene was so horrifying
I could remain no longer in court.'(61*) Parliament put these tremendous
weapons into the hands of men who believed in using them, who administered
the law on the principle by which Sir William Dyott regulated his conduct
as a magistrate, that 'nothing but the terror of human suffering can avail
to prevent crime.'




The class that had, in Goldsmith's words, hung round 'our paltriest possessions
with gibbetts' never doubted its power to do full justice to the helpless
creatures who tumbled into the net of the law. Until 1836 a man accused of
a felony was not allowed to employ counsel to make his defence in the Court.
His counsel (if he could afford to have one) could examine and cross-examine
witnesses, and that was all; the prisoner, whatever his condition of mind,
or his condition of body, had to answer the speech of the prosecuting counsel
himself. In nine cases out of ten he was quite an unlearned man; he was swept
into the glare of the Court blinking from long months of imprisonment in
dark cells; the case against him was woven into a complete and perfect story
by the skilled fingers of a lawyer, and it was left to this rude and illiterate
man, by the aid of his own memory and his own imagination, his life on the
razor's edge, his mind bewildered by his strange and terrible surroundings,
to pick that story to pieces, to expose what was mere and doubtful inference,
to put a different completion on a long and tangled set of events, to show
how a turn here or a turn there in the narrative would change black into
white and apparent guilt into manifest innocence. Sydney Smith, whose opinions
on the importance of giving the poor a fair trial were as enlightened as
his opinions on their proper treatment in prison were backward, has described
the scene.




<ex>

'It is a most affecting moment in a Court of Justice, when the evidence has
all been heard, and the Judge asks the prisoner what he has to say in his
defence. The prisoner who has (by great exertions, perhaps of his friends)
saved up money enough to procure Counsel, says to the Judge "that he
leaves his defence to his Counsel." We have often blushed for English
humanity to hear the reply. "Your Counsel cannot speak for you, you
must speak for yourself;" and this is the reply given to a poor girl
of eighteen -- to a foreigner -- to a deaf man -- to a stammerer -- to the
sick to the feeble -- to the old -- to the most abject and ignorant of human
beings!... How often have we seen a poor wretch, struggling against the agonies
of his spirit, and the rudeness of his conceptions, and his awe of better-dressed
men and better-taught men, and the shame which the accusation has brought
upon his head, and the sight of his parents and children gazing at him in
the Court, for the last time perhaps, and after a long absence!'(62*)

</ex>




Brougham said in the House of Commons that there was no man who visited
the Criminal Courts who did not see the fearful odds against the prisoner.
This anomaly was peculiar to England, and in England it was peculiar to cases
of felony. Men tried for misdemeanours, or for treason, or before the House
of Lords could answer by the mouth of counsel. It was only in those cases
where the prisoners were almost always poor and uneducated men and women,
as Lord Althorp pointed out in an admirable speech in the House of Commons,
that the accused was left to shift for himself. Twice, in 1824 and in 1826,
the House of Commons refused leave to bring in a Bill to redress this flagrant
injustice, encouraged in that refusal not only by Canning, but, what is much
more surprising, by Peel.




The favorite argument against this reform, taking precedence of the arguments
that to allow persons the aid of counsel in putting their statement of fact
would make justice slower, more expensive, and more theatrical, was the contention
that the judge did, in point of fact, represent the interest of the prisoner:
a confused plea which it did not require any very highly developed gift of
penetration to dissect. But how far, in point of fact, were the judges able
to enter into the poor prisoner's mind? They had the power of sentencing
to death for hundreds of trivial offences. It was the custom to pass the
brutal sentence which the law allowed to be inflicted for felonies. and then
to commute it in all except a few cases. By what considerations did judges
decide when to be severe? Lord Ellenborough told Lauderdale that he had left
a man to be hanged at the Worcester Assizes because he lolled out his tongue
and pretended to be an idiot, on which Lauderdale asked the Chief Justice
what law there was to punish that particular offence with death. We learn
from Romilly's Memoirs(63*) that one judge left three men to be hanged for
thefts at the Maidstone Assizes because none of them could bring a witness
to his character.




The same disposition to trust to the discretion of the judge, which Camden
described as the law of tyrants, explains the vitality of the system of prescribing
death as the punishment for hundreds of paltry offences. During the last
fifty years the energy of Parliament in passing Enclosure Acts had been only
rivalled by its energy in creating capital offences. The result was a penal
code which had been condemned by almost every Englishman of repute of the
most various opinions, from Blackstone, Johnson, and Goldsmith to Burke and
Bentham. This system made the poor man the prey of his rich neighbours. The
most furious punishments were held in terrorem over the heads of prisoners,
and the wretched man who was caught in the net was exposed to all the animosities
that he might have provoked in his ordinary life. Dr. Parr put this point
writing to Romilly in 1811.




'There is, indeed, one consideration in the case of bad men which ought
to have a greater weight than it usually has in the minds of the Judges,
dislike from party, quarrels with servants or neighbours, offence justly
or unjustly taken in a quarrel, jealousy about game, and twenty other matters
of the same sort, frequently induce men to wish to get rid of a convicted
person: and well does it behove every Judge to be sure that the person who
recommends the execution of the sentence is a man of veracity, of sense,
of impartiality and kindness of nature in the habitual character of his mind.
I remember hearing from Sergeant Whitaker that, while he was trying a man
for a capital offence at Norwich, a person brought him a message from the
late Lord Suffield, "that the prisoner was a good-for-nothing fellow,
and he hoped the Judge would look to him;" and the Sergeant kindled
with indignation, and exclaimed, in the hearing of the Court, "Zounds!
would Sir Harbord Harbord have me condemn the man before I have tried. him?"
What Sir Harbord did during the trial, many squires and justices of the peace,
upon other occasions, do after it; and were I a Judge, I should listen with
great caution to all unfavourable representations. The rich, the proud, the
irascible, and the vindictive are very unfit to estimate the value of life
to their inferiors.'(64*)




We can see how the squires and the justices would close in round a man
of whom they wanted, with the best intentions in the world, to rid their
parish, woods, and warrens, when the punishment he was to receive turned
on his reputation as it was estimated by the gentlemen of his neighbourhood.
Was Sir Harbord Harbord very far removed from the state of mind described
in the Sixth Satire of Juvenal?




<poem>

'"Pone crucem servo." "Meruit quo crimine servus.

Supplicium? quis testis adest? quis detulit? Audi:

Nulla unquam de morte hominis cunctatio longa est."

"O demens, ita servus homo est? nil fecerit, esto:

Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas,"'

</poem>




And Sir Harbord Harbord had in hundreds of cases what he had not in this
case, the power to wreak his anger on 'a good-for-nothing fellow.'




When Romilly entered on his noble crusade and tried very cautiously to
persuade Parliament to repeal the death penalty in cases in which it was
rarely carried out, he found the chief obstacle in his way was the fear that
became common among the governing class at this time, the fear that existing
methods of punishment were ceasing to be deterrent. In 1810 he carried his
Bill, for abolishing this penalty for the crime of stealing privately to
the amount of five shillings in a shop, through the House of Commons, and
the Bill was introduced in the House of Lords by Lord Holland. There it was
rejected by twenty-one to eleven, the majority including the Archbishop of
Canterbury and six other bishops.(65*) The chief speeches against the Bill
were made by Eldon and Ellenborough. Ellenborough argued that transportation
was regarded, and justly regarded, by those who violated the law as 'a summer
airing by an easy migration to a milder climate.'




The nightmare that punishment was growing gentle and attractive to the
poor came to haunt the mind of the governing class. It was founded on the
belief that as human wretchedness was increasing, there was a sort of law
of Malthus, by which human endurance tended to outgrow the resources of repression.
The agricultural labourers were sinking into such a deplorable plight that
some of them found it a relief to be committed to the House of Correction,
where, at least, they obtained food and employment, and the magistrates began
to fear in consequence that ordinary punishments could no longer be regarded
as deterrent, and to reason that some condition had yet to be discovered
which would be more miserable than the general existence of the poor. The
justices who punished Wiltshire poachers found such an El Dorado of unhappiness
in transportation. But disturbing rumours came to the ears of the authorities
that transportation was not thought a very terrible punishment after all,
and the Government sent out to Sir George Arthur, the Governor of Van Diemen's
Land, certain complaints of this kind. The answer which the Governor returned
is published with the Report of the Committee on Secondary Punishments, and
the complete correspondence forms a very remarkable set of Parliamentary
Papers. The Governor pointed out that these complaints, which made such an
impression on Lord Melbourne, came from employers in Australia, who wanted
to have greater control over their servants. Arthur was no sentimentalist;
his sympathies had been drilled in two hard schools, the army and the government
of prisoners; his account of his own methods shows that in describing the
life of a convict he was in no danger of falling into the exaggerations or
the rhetoric of pity. In these letters he made it very clear that nobody
who knew what transportation meant could ever make the mistake of thinking
it a light punishment. The ordinary convict was assigned to a settler. 'Deprived
of liberty, exposed to all the caprice of the family to whose service he
may happen to be assigned, and subject to the most summary laws, the condition
of a convict in no respect differs from that of a slave, except that his
master cannot apply corporal punishment by his own hands or those of his
overseer, and has a property in him for a limited period only.' Further,
'idleness and insolence of expression, or even of looks, anything betraying
the insurgent spirit, subjects him to the chain-gang, or the triangle, or
to hard labour on the roads.'(66*) We can imagine what the life of an ordinary
convict might become. In earlier days every convict who went out began as
an assigned servant, and it was only for misconduct in the colony or on the
way thither that he was sent to a Penal Settlement, but the growing alarm
of the ruling class on the subject of punishment led to a demand for more
drastic sentences, and shortly after the close of our period Lord Melbourne
introduced a new system, under which convicts might be sentenced from home
to the Penal Settlement, and any judge who thought badly of a prisoner might
add this hideous punishment to transportation.




The life of these Settlements has been described in one of the most vivid
and terrible books ever written. Nobody can read Marcus Clarke's great novel
without feeling that the methods of barbarism had done their worst and most
devilish in Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur. The lot of the prisoners in
Resurrection is by comparison a paradise. Not a single feature that
can revolt and stupefy the imagination is wanting to the picture. Children
of ten committing suicide, men murdering each other by compact aS an escape
from a hell they could no longer bear, prisoners receiving a death sentence
with ecstasies of delight, punishments inflicted that are indistinguishable
from torture, men stealing into the parched bush in groups, in the horrible
hope that one or two of them might make their way to freedom by devouring
their comrades -- an atmosphere in which the last faint glimmer of self-respect
and human feeling was extinguished by incessant and degrading cruelty. Few
books have been written in any language more terrible to read. Yet not a
single incident or feature is imaginary: the whole picture is drawn from
the cold facts of the official reports.(67*) And this system was not the
invention of some Nero or Caligula; it was the system imposed by men of gentle
and refined manners, who talked to each other in Virgil and Lucan of liberty
and justice, who would have died without a murmur to save a French princess
from an hour's pain or shame, who put down the abominations of the Slave
Trade, and allowed Clive and Warren Hastings to be indicted at the bar of
public opinion as monsters of inhumanity; and it was imposed by them from
the belief that as the poor were becoming poorer, only a system of punishment
that was becoming more brutal could deter them from crime.




If we want to understand how completely all their natural feelings were
lost in this absorbing fear, we must turn to the picture given by an observer
who was outside their world; an observer who could enter into the misery
of the punished, and could describe what transportation meant to boys of
nine and ten, exposed to the most brutal appetites of savage men; to chained
convicts, packed for the night in boxes so narrow that they could only lie
on one side; to crushed and broken men, whose only prayer it was to die.
From him we learn how these scenes and surroundings impressed a mind that
could look upon a convict settlement as a society of living men and boys,
and not merely as the Cloaca Maxima of property and order.(68*)




NOTES:




1. Poor Law Report, 1834, p. 60.




2. The big landlord under this method shared the privilege of paying the
labourer's wages with the small farmers.




3. Tribune, vol. ii, p. 317.




4. Ibid., p. 339.




5. Poor Law Commission Report, of 1834, p. 126.




6. See Curtler's Short History of Agriculture, p. 249.




7. Smart, Economic Annals, p. 36.




8. 'It was during the war that the cottagers of England were chiefly deprived
of the little pieces of land and garden, and made solely dependent for subsistence
on the wages of their daily labour, or the poor rates. Land, and the produce
of it, had become so valuable, that the labourer was envied the occupation
of the smallest piece of ground which he possessed: and even "the bare-worn
common" was denied.' Kentish Chronicle, December 14, 1830.




9. Curtler, p. 243.




10. Agricultural State of the Kingdom, Board of Agriculture, 1816,
p. 7.




11. Ibid., pp. 250-1.




12. p. 144.




13. C.C. Western (1767-1844); whig M.P., 1790-1832; chief representative
of agricultural interests; made peer in 1833.




14. Annual Register, 1816, Chron. p. 67.




15. The disturbances at Brandon ceased immediately on the concession of
the demands of rioters; flour was reduced to 2s. 6d. a stone, and wages were
raised for two weeks to 2s. a head. The rioters were contented, and peace
was restored. -- Times, May 23, 1816.




16. Annual Register, 1816, Chron., p. 67.




17. Cambridge Chronicle, June 28, 1816.




18. Times, June 26. A curious irony has placed side by side with
the account in the Annual Register of the execution of the five men
who were hung for their share in this spasm of starvation and despair, the
report of a meeting, with the inevitable Wilberforce in the chair, for raising
a subscription for rebuilding the Protestant Church at Copenhagen, which
had been destroyed by the British Fleet at the bombardment of Copenhagen
in 1807.




19. Agricultural State of the Kingdom, p. 13.




20. 59 George III, c. 50.




21. See Annual Register, 1819, p. 320.




22. Those assessed at £100 were to have two votes, those at £150
three votes, and those at £400 four votes. Whitbread did not propose
to copy the provision of Gilbert's Act, which withdrew all voting power in
vestries in parishes that adopted that Act from persons assessed at less
than £5.




23. Political Register, August 29, 1807, p. 329.




24. Letter to Samuel Whitbread, M. P., on his proposed Bill for the Amendment
of the Poor Laws, 1807.




25. 58 George III, c. 69.




26. 59 George III, c. 12.




27. H.O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial.




28. Of course the system was only one of the causes of this difference
in wages.




29. p. 99.




30. See Agricultural State of the Kingdom, Board of Agriculture,
p. 231, and Cobbett, Political Register, October 5, 1816.




31. pp. 21 and 23.




32. The table is given in the Report of the Committee on the Poor Laws,
1828.




33. Cobbett, Political Register, September 21, 1822. Cobbett wrote
one of his liveliest articles on this scale, setting out the number of livings
held by the five parsons, and various circumstances connected with their
families.




34. Ibid., September 9, 1826.




35. Rural Rides, p. 17.




36. Ibid., p. 609.




37. The farmers were usually sympathetic to poaching as a habit, but it
was not so much from a perception of its economic tendencies, as from a general
resentment against the Game Laws.




38. See Cobbett; Letters to Peel; Political Register; and
Dr Hunt's evidence before the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and
Convictions, 1827.




39. A manifesto was published in a Bath paper in reply to this Act; it
is quoted by Sydney Smith, Essays, p. 263: 'Take Notice. -- We have
lately heard and seen that there is an act passed, and whatever poacher is
caught destroying the game is to be transported for seven years -- This is
English Liberty!




'Now we do swear to each other that the first of our company that this
law is inflicted on, that there shall not be one gentleman's seat in our
country escape the rage of fire. The first that impeaches shall be shot.
We have sworn not to impeach. You may think it a treat, but they will find
it a reality. The Game Laws were too severe before. The Lord of all men sent
these animals for the peasants as well as for the prince. God will not let
his people be oppressed. He will assist us in our undertaking, and we will
execute it with caution.'




40. The Archbishop of Canterbury prosecuted a man under this Act in January
1831, for rescuing a poacher from a gameskeeper without violence, on the
ground that he thought it his duty to enforce the provisions of the Act.




41. House of Lords, September 19, 1831.




42. A magistrate wrote to Sir R. Peel in 1827 to say that many magistrates
sent in very imperfect returns of convictions, and that the true number far
exceeded the records. -- Webb, Parish and Country, p. 598 note.




43. Brougham Speeches, vol. ii, p. 373.




44. Political Register, March 29, 1823, vol. xxiv., p. 796.




45. Select Committee on Criminal Committee and Convictions, 1827, p. 30.




46. Ibid., p. 39.




47. Quoted in Times, September 18, 1830.




48. Return of Convictions under the Game Laws from 1827 to 1830. Ordered
by the House of Commons to be printed, February 14, 1831, p. 4.




49. Hansard, June 9, 1817.




50. Scotland was exempted from the operation of this statute, for whilst
the Bill was going through Parliament, a case raised in a Scottish Court
ended in a unanimous decision by the six Judges of the High Court of Justiciary
that killing by a spring gun was murder. Hence the milder provisions of this
Act were not required. See Annual Register, 1827, p. 185, and Chron.
p. 116.




51. That Coke of Norfolk did not err on the side of mercy towards poachers
is clear from this record. His biographer (Mrs Stirling) states that one
of his first efforts in Parliament was to introduce a Bill to punish night
poaching.




52. p. 29 ff.




53. Annual Register, 1827, p. 184.




54. Edinburgh Review, December 1831.




55. Parliamentary Register, February 25, 1782.




56. p. 42.




57. 'Speaking now of country and agricultural parishes, I do not know
above one instance in all my experience.'




58. Some Enclosure Acts prescribe special penalties for the breaking of
fences. See cases of Haute Huntre and Croydon in Appendix.




59. See Mr Estcourt's evidence before Select Committee on Secondary Punishments,
1831, p. 41.




60. Present State of the Law, p. 41.




61. From Ploughshares to Parliament, p. 186; the Annual Register
for 1791 records the execution of two boys at Newport for stealing, one aged
fourteen and the other fifteen.




62. Sydney Smith, Essays, p. 487.




63. Vol. ii, p. 153.




64. Romilly, Memoirs, vol. ii, p. 181.




65. It was again rejected in 1813 by twenty to fifteen, the majority including
five bishops.




66. Correspondence on the Subject of Secondary Punishments, 1834,
p. 22.




67. See Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, 1831, and Select Committee
on Transportation, 1838.




68. See evidence of Dr. Ullathorne, Roman Catholic Vicar-General of New
Holland and Van Diemen's Land, before the 1838 Committee on Transportation.




Chapter Eight




The Isolation of the Poor




The upper classes, to whom the fact that the labourers were more wretched
in 1830 than they had, been in 1795 was a reason for making punishment more
severe, were not deliberately callous and cruel in their neglect of all this
growing misery and hunger. Most of those who thought seriously about it had
learnt a reasoned insensibility from the stern Sibyl of the political economy
in fashion, that strange and partial interpretation of Adam Smith, Malthus
and Ricardo which was then in full power. This political economy had robbed
poverty of its sting for the rich by representing it as Nature's medicine,
bitter indeed, but less bitter than any medicine that man could prescribe.
If poverty was sharper at one time than another, this only meant that society
was more than ever in need of this medicine. But the governing class as a
whole did not think out any such scheme or order of society, or master the
new science of misery and vice. They thought of the poor not in relation
to the mysterious forces of Nature, but in relation to the privileges of
their own class in which they saw no mystery at all. Their state of mind
is presented in a passage in Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King.
'As men are apt to make themselves the measure of all being, so they make
themselves the final cause of all creation. Thus the reputed orthodox philosophers
in all ages have taught that the world was made for man, the earth for him
to inhabit, and all the luminous bodies in the immense expanse around us
for him to gaze at. Kings do no more, nay not so much, when they imagine
themselves the final cause for which societies were formed and governments
instituted.' If we read 'the aristocracy' for 'kings' we shall have a complete
analysis of the social philosophy of the ruling class. It was from this centre
that they looked out upon the world. When the misery of the poor reacted
on their own comfort, as in the case of poaching or crime or the pressure
on the rates, they were aware of it and took measures to protect their property,
but of any social problem outside these relations they were entirely unconscious.
Their philosophy and their religion taught them that it was the duty of the
rich to be benevolent, and of the poor to be patient and industrious. The
rich were ready to do their part, and all they asked of the poor was that
they should learn to bear their lot with resignation. Burke had laid down
the true and full philosophy of social life once and for all. 'Good order
is the foundation of all good things. To be enabled to acquire, the people,
without being servile, must be tractable and obedient. The magistrate must
have his reverence, the laws their authority. The body of the people must
not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their
minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They
must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find,
as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must
be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice.'(1*)




The upper classes, looking upon the world in this way, considered that
it was the duty of the poor man to adapt himself, his tastes, his habits,
and his ambitions, to the arrangements of a society which it had pleased
Providence to organise on this interesting plan. We have in the pages of
Eden the portrait of the ideal poor woman, whose life showed what could be
done if poverty were faced in the proper spirit. 'Anne Hurst was born at
Witley in Surrey: there she lived the whole period of a long life, and there
she died. As soon as she was thought able to work, she went to service: there,
before she was twenty, she married James Strudwick, who, like her own father,
was a day labourer. With this husband she lived, a prolific, hardworking,
contented wife, somewhat more than fifty years. He worked more than threescore
years on one farm, and his wages, summer and winter, were regularly a shilling
a day. He never asked more nor was never offered less. They had between them
seven children:. and lived to see six daughters married and three the mothers
of sixteen children: all of whom were brought up, or are bringing up, to
be day labourers. Strudwick continued to work till within seven weeks of
the day of his death, and at the age of four score, in 1787, he closed, in
peace, a not inglorious life; for, to the day of his death, he never received
a farthing in the way of parochial aid. His wife saved him about seven years,
and though bent with age and infirmities, and little able to work, excepting
as a weeder in a gentleman's garden, she also was too proud to ask or receive
any relief from the parish. For six or seven of the last years of her life,
she received twenty shillings a year from the person who favoured me with
this account, which he drew up from her own mouth. With all her virtue, and
all her merit, she yet was not much liked in her neighbourhood; people in
affluence thought her haughty, and the Paupers of the parish, seeing, as
they could not help seeing, that her life was a reproach to theirs, aggravated
all her little failings. Yet, the worst thing they had to say of her was,
that she was proud; which, they said, was manifested by the way in which
she buried her husband. Resolute, as she owned she was, to have the funeral,
and everything that related to it, what she called decent, nothing could
dissuade her from having handles to his coffin and a plate on it, mentioning
his age. She was also charged with having behaved herself crossly and peevishly
towards one of her sons-in-law, who was a mason and went regularly every
Saturday evening to the ale house as he said just to drink a pot of beer.
James Strudwick in all his life, as she often told this ungracious son-in-law,
never spent five shillings in any idleness: luckily (as she was sure to add)
he had it not to spend. A more serious charge against her was that, living
to a great age, and but little able to work, she grew to be seriously afraid,
that, at last, she might become chargeable to the parish (the heaviest, in
her estimation, of all human calamities), and that thus alarmed she did suffer
herself more than once, during the exacerbations of a fit of distempered
despondency, peevishly (and perhaps petulantly) to exclaim that God Almighty,
by suffering her to remain so long upon earth, seemed actually to have forgotten
her.' 'Such,' concludes Eden, 'are the simple annals of Dame Strudwick: and
her historian, partial to his subject, closes it with lamenting that such
village memoirs have not oftener been sought for and recorded.'(2*) This
was the ideal character for the cottage. How Eden or anybody else would have
hated this poor woman in whom every kindly feeling had been starved to death
if she had been in his own class! We know from Creevey what his friends thought
of 'the stingy kip' Lambton when they found themselves under his roof, where
'a round of beef at a side table was run at with as much keenness as a banker's
shop before a stoppage.' A little peevishness or even petulance with God
Almighty would not have seemed the most serious charge that could be brought
against such a neighbour. But if every villager had had Dame Strudwick's
hard and narrow virtues, and had crushed all other tastes and interests in
the passion for living on a shilling a day in a cold and bitter independence,
the problem of preserving the monopolies of the few without disorder or trouble
would have been greatly simplified. There would have been little danger,
as Burke would have said, that the fruits of successful industry and the
accumulations of fortune would be exposed to 'the plunder of the negligent,
the disappointed, and the unprosperous.'




The way in which the ruling class regarded the poor is illustrated in
the tone of the discussions when the problem of poverty had become acute
at the end of the eighteenth century. When Pitt, who had been pestered by
Eden to read his book, handed a volume to Canning, then his secretary, that
brilliant young politician spent his time writing a parody on the grotesque
names to he found in the Appendix, and it will be recollected that Pitt excused
himself for abandoning his scheme for reforming the Poor Law, on the ground
that he was inexperienced in the condition of the poor. It was no shame to
a politician to be ignorant of such subjects. The poor were happy or unhappy
in the view of the ruling class according to the sympathy the rich bestowed
on them. If there were occasional misgivings they were easily dispelled.
Thus one philosopher pointed out that though the position of the poor man
might seem wanting in dignity or independence, it should be remembered by
way of consolation that he could play the tyrant over his wife and children
as much as he liked.(3*) Another train of soothing reflections was started
by such papers as that published in the Annals of Agriculture in 1797,
under the title 'On the Comforts enjoyed by the Cottagers compared to those
of the ancient Barons.' In such a society a sentiment like that expressed
by Fox when supporting Whitbread's Bill in 1795, that 'it was not fitting
in a free country that the great body of the people should depend on the
charity of the rich,' seemed a challenging paradox. Eden thought this an
extraordinary way of looking at the problem, and retorted that it was gratifying
to see how ready the rich were to bestow their benevolent attentions. This
was the point of view of Pitt and of almost all the speakers in the debate
that followed Fox's outburst, Buxton going so far as to say that owing to
those attentions the condition of the poor had never been 'so eligible.'
Just as the boisterous captain in Evelina thought it was an honour to a wretched
Frenchwoman to be rolled in British mud, so the English House of Commons
thought that poverty was turned into a positive blessing by the kindness
of the rich.




Writing towards the end of the ancient régime, Cobbett maintained
that in his own lifetime the tone and language of society about the poor
had changed very greatly for the worse, that the old name of 'the commons
of England' had given way to such names as 'the lower orders,' 'the peasantry,'
and 'the population,' and that when the poor met together to demand their
rights they were invariably spoken of by such contumelious terms as 'the
populace' or 'the mob.' 'In short, by degrees beginning about fifty years
ago the industrious Part of the community, particularly those who create
every useful thing by their labour, have been spoken of by everyone possessing
the power to oppress them in any degree in just the same manner in which
we speak of the animals which compose the stock upon a farm. This is not
the manner in which the forefathers of us, the common people, were treated.'(4*)
Such language, Cobbett said, was to be heard not only from ' tax-devourers,
bankers, brewers, monopolists of every sort, but also from their clerks,
from the very shopkeepers and waiters, and from the fribbles stuck up behind
the counter to do the business that ought to be done by a girl.' This is
perhaps only another way of saying that the isolation of the poor was becoming
a more and more conspicuous feature of English society.




Many causes combined to destroy the companionship of classes, and most
of all the break-up of the old village which followed on the enclosures and
the consolidation of farms. In the old village, labourers and cottagers and
small farmers were neighbours. They knew each other and lived much the same
kind of life. The small farmer was a farmer one day of the week and a labourer
another; he married, according to Cobbett, the domestic servant of the gentry,
a fact that explains the remark of Sophia Western's maid to the landlady
of the inn, 'and let me have the bacon cut very nice and thin, for I can't
endure anything that's gross. Prythee try if you can't do a little tolerably
for once; and don't think you have a farmer's wife or some of those creatures
in the house.' The new farmer lived in a different latitude. He married a
young lady from the boarding school. He often occupied the old manor house.(5*)
He was divided from the labourer by his tastes, his interests, his ambitions,
his display and whole manner of life. The change that came over the English
village in consequence was apparent to all observers with social insight.
When Goldsmith wanted to describe a happy village he was careful to choose
a village of the old kind, with the farmers 'strangers alike to opulence
and to poverty,' and Crabbe, to whose sincere and realist pen we owe much
of our knowledge of the social life of the time, gives a particularly poignant
impression of the cold and friendless atmosphere that surrounded the poor:




<poem>

'Where Plenty smiles, alas! she smiles for few,

And those who taste not, yet behold her store,

Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,

The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.'(6*)

</poem>




Perhaps the most vivid account of the change is given in a letter from
Cobbett in the <ex>Political Register</ex> for 17th March 1821,(7*)
addressed to Mr. Gooch: --




<ex>

'I hold a return to small farms to be absOlutely necessary to a restoration
to anything like an English community; and I am quite sure, that the ruin
of the present race of farmers, generally, is a necessary preliminary to
this.... The life of the husbandman cannot be that of a gentleman without
injury to society at large. When farmers become gentlemen their labourers
become slaves. A Virginian farmer, as he is called, very much resembles a
great farmer in England; but then, the Virginian's work is done by slaves.
It is in those States of America, where the farmer is only the first labourer
that all the domestic virtues are to be found, and all that public-spirit
and that valour, which are the safeguards of American independence, freedom,
and happiness. You, Sir, with others, complain of the increase of the poor-rates.
But, you seem to forget, that, in the destruction of the small farms, as
separate farms, small-farmers have become mere hired labourers.... Take England
throughout three farms have been turned into one within fifty years, and
the far greater part of the change has taken place within the last thirty
years; that is to say, since the commencement of the deadly system of Pitt.
Instead of families of small farmers with all their exertions, all their
decency of dress and of manners, and all their scrupulousness as to character,
we have families of paupers, with all the improvidence and wrecklessness
belonging to an irrevocable sentence of poverty for life. Mr. Curwen in his
Hints on Agriculture, observes that he saw some where in Norfolk, I believe
it was, two hundred farmers worth from five to ten thousand pounds each;
and exclaims "What a glorious sight!" In commenting on this passage
in the Register, in the year 1810, I observed " Mr. Curwen only saw
the outside of the sepulchre; if he had seen the two or three thousand half-starved
labourers of these two hundred farmers, and the five or six thousand ragged
wives and children of those labourers; if the farmers had brought those with
them, the sight would not have been so glorious."'

</ex>




A practice referred to in the same letter of Cobbett's that tended to
widen the gulf between the farmer and the labourer was the introduction of
bailiffs: 'Along with enormous prices for corn came in the employment of
Bailiffs by farmers, a natural consequence of large farms; and to what a
degree of insolent folly the system was leading, may be guessed from an observation
of Mr. Arthur Young, who recommended, that the Bailiff should have a good
horse to ride, and a bottle of port wine every day at his dinner: while in
the same work, Mr. Young gives great numbers of rules for saving labour upon
a farm. A pretty sort of farm where the bailiff was to have a bottle of port
wine at his dinner! The custom was, too, to bring bailiffs from some distant
part, in order to prevent them from having any feeling of compassion for
the labourers. Scotch bailiffs above all, were preferred, as being thought
harder than any others that could be obtained; and thus (with shame I write
the words!) the farms of England, like those of Jamaica, were supplied with
drivers from Scotland!... Never was a truer saying, than that of the common
people, that a Scotchman makes a "good sole, but a d----d bad upper
leather."'(8*) Bamford, speaking of 1745, says: 'Gentlemen then lived
as they ought to live: as real gentlemen will ever be found living: in kindliness
with their neighbours; in openhanded charity towards the poor, and in hospitality
towards all friendly comers. There were no grinding bailiffs and land stewards
in those days to stand betwixt the gentleman and his labourer or his tenant:
to screw up rents and screw down livings, and to invent and transact all
little meannesses for so much per annum.'(9*) Cobbett's prejudice against
Scotsmen, the race of 'feelosofers,' blinded him to virtues which were notoriously
theirs, as in his round declaration that all the hard work of agriculture
was done by Englishmen and Irishmen, and that the Scotsmen chose such tasks
as 'peeping into melon frames.' But that his remarks upon the subject of
the introduction of Scottish bailiffs reflected a general feeling may be
seen from a passage in Miss Austen's Emma, 'Mr. Graham intends to have a
Scotch bailiff for his new estate. Will it answer? Will not the old prejudice
be too strong?'




The change in the status of the farmer came at a time of a general growth
of luxury. All classes above the poor adopted a more extravagant and ostentatious
style and scale of living. This was true, for example, of sporting England.
Fox-hunting dates from this century. Before the eighteenth century the amusement
of the aristocracy was hunting the stag, and that of the country squire was
hunting the hare. It was because Walpole kept beagles at Richmond and used
to hunt once a week that the House of Commons has always made Saturday a
holiday. In the Peninsular War, Wellington kept a pack of hounds at headquarters,
but they were fox-hounds. In its early days fox-hunting had continued the
simpler traditions of hare-hunting, and each small squire kept a few couple
of hounds and brought them to the meet. Gray has described his uncle's establishment
at Burnham, where every chair in the house was taken up by a dog. But as
the century advanced the sport was organised on a grander scale: the old
buck-hounds and slow horses were superseded by more expensive breeds, and
far greater distances were covered. Foxhunting became the amusement both
of the aristocracy and of the squires, and it resembled rather the pomp and
state of stag-hunting than the modest pleasures of Walpole and his friends.
In all other directions there was a general increase of magnificence in life.
The eighteenth century was the century of great mansions, and some of the
most splendid palaces of the aristocracy were built during the distress and
famine of the French war. The ambitions of the aristocracy became the ambitions
of the classes that admired them, as we know from Smollett, and Sir William
Scott in 1802, speaking in favour of the non-residence of the clergy, 'expressly
said that they and their families ought to appear at watering-places, and
that this was amongst the means of making them respected by their flocks!'(10*)




The rich and the poor were thus growing further and further apart, and
there was nobody in the English village to interpret these two worlds to
each other. M. Babeau has pointed out that in France, under the ancient régime,
the lawyers represented and defended in some degree the rights of the peasants.
This was one consequence of the constant litigation between peasants and
seigneurs over communal property. The lawyers who took the side of the peasants
lived at their expense it is true, but they rendered public services, they
presented the peasants' case before public opinion, and they understood their
ideas and difficulties. This explains a striking feature of the French Revolution,
the large number of local lawyers who became prominent as champions of revolutionary
ideas. One of Burke's chief complaints of the Constituent Assembly was that
it contained so many country attorneys and notaries, 'the fomenters and conductors
of the petty war of village vexation.'(11*) In England the lawyers never
occupied this position, and it is impossible to imagine such a development
taking place there. The lawyers who interested themselves in the poor were
enlisted not in the defence of the rights of the commoners but in the defence
of the purses of the parishes. For them the all-important question was not
what rights the peasant had against his lord, but on which parish he had
a claim for maintenance.




The causes of litigation were endless: if a man rented a tenement of the
annual value of £10 he acquired a settlement. But his rental might not
have represented the annual value, and so the further question would come
up, Was the annual value actually £10? 'If it may be really not far
from that sum, and the family of the pauper be numerous, the interests of
the contending parishes, supported by the conflicting opinions of their respective
surveyors, leads to the utmost expense and extremity of litigation.'(12*)
If the annual value were not in dispute there might be nice and intricate
questions about the kind of tenement and the nature of the tenure: if the
settlement was claimed in virtue of a contract of hiring, was the contract
'general, special, customary, retrospective, conditional, personal' or what
not?(13*) If the settlement was claimed in virtue of apprenticeship,(14*)
what was the nature of the indentures and so on. If claimed for an estate
of £30, was the estate really worth £30, and how was it acquired?
These are a few of the questions in dispute, and to add to the confusion
'on no branch of the law have the judgments of the superior court been so
contradictory.'(15*)




Thus the principal occupation of those lawyers whose business brought
them into the world of the poor was of a nature to draw their sympathies
and interests to the side of the possessing classes, and whereas peasants'
ideas were acclimatised outside their own class in France as a consequence
of the character of rural litigation and of rural lawyers, the English villager
came before the lawyer, not as a client, but as a danger; not as a person
whose rights and interests had to be explored and studied, but as a person
whose claims on the parish had to be parried or evaded. It is not surprising,
therefore, to find that both Fielding and Smollett lay great stress on the
reputation of lawyers for harshness and extortion in their treatment of the
poor, regarding them, like Carlyle, as 'attorneys and law beagles who hunt
ravenous on the earth.' Readers of the adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
will remember Tom Clarke 'whose goodness of heart even the exercise of his
profession had not been able to corrupt. Before strangers he never owned
himself an attorney without blushing, though he had no reason to blush for
his own practice, for he constantly refused to engage in the cause of any
client whose character was equivocal, and was never known to act with such
industry as when concerned for the widow and orphan or any other object that
sued in forma pauperis.' Fielding speaks in a foot-note to Tom Jones of the
oppression of the poor by attorneys, as a scandal to the law, the nation,
Christianity, and even human nature itself.




There was another class that might, under different circumstances, have
helped to soothe and soften the isolation of the poor, but the position and
the sympathies of the English Church made this impossible. This was seen
very clearly by Adam Smith, who was troubled by the fear that 'enthusiasm,'
the religious force so dreaded by the men of science and reason, would spread
among the poor, because the clergy who should have controlled and counteracted
it were so little in touch with the mass of the people. Under the government
of the Anglican Church, as set up by the Reformation, he pointed out, 'the
clergy naturally endeavour to recommend themselves to the sovereign, to the
court, and to the nobility and gentry of the country, by whose influence
they chiefly expect to obtain preferment.'(16*) He added that such a clergy
are very apt to neglect altogether the means of maintaining their influence
and authority with the lower ranks of life. The association of the Anglican
Church with the governing class has never been more intimate and binding
than it was during the eighteenth century. This was true alike of bishops
and of clergy. The English bishop was not a gay Voltairean like the French,
but he was just as zealous a member of the privileged orders, and the system
over which he presided and which he defended was a faint copy of the gloriously
coloured scandals of the French Church. The prelates who lived upon those
scandals were described by Robespierre, with a humour that he did not often
indulge, as treating the deity in the same way as the mayor of the palace
used to treat the French kings. 'Ils l'ont traité comme iadis les
maires du palais traitèrent les descendants de Clovis pour, regner
sous son nom et se mettre à sa place. Ils l'ont relégué
dans le ciel comme dans un palais, et ne l'ont appelé sur la terre
que pour demander a leur profit des dîmes, des richesses, des honneurs,
des plaisirs et de la puissance.' When Archbishop Dillon declared against
the civil constitution he said that he and his colleagues acted as gentlemen
and not as theologians. The Archbishop of Aix spoke of tithes as a voluntary
offering from the piety of the faithful. 'As to that,' said the Duke de la
Rochefoucault, 'there are now forty thousand cases in the Courts.' Both these
archbishops would have found themselves quite at home among the spiritual
peers in the House of Lords, where the same decorous hypocrisies mingled
with the same class atmosphere. For the English bishops, though they were
not libertines like the French, never learnt so to be Christians as to forget
to be aristocrats, and their religious duties were never allowed to interfere
with the demands of scholarship or of pleasure. Perhaps the most distinguished
product of this régime was Bishop Watson of Llandaff, who invented
an improved gunpowder and defended Christianity against Paine and Gibbon.
These were his diversions; his main business was carried on at his magnificent
country scat on the banks of Windermere. He was bishop for thirty-four years,
and during the whole of that time he never lived within his diocese, preferring
to play the part of the grand seigneur planting trees in Westmorland. He
has left a sympathetic and charming account of what he modestly calls his
retirement from public life, an event not to be confused with abdication
of his see, and of how he built the palace where he spent the emoluments
of Llandaff and the long autumn of his life.




It was natural to men who lived in this atmosphere to see politics through
the spectacles of the aristocracy. To understand how strongly the view that
the Church existed to serve the aristocracy, and the rest of the State through
the aristocracy, was fixed in the minds of the higher clergy, we have only
to look at the case of a reformer like Bishop Horsley. The bishop is chiefly
known as a preacher, a controversialist, and the author of the celebrated
dictum that the poor had nothing to do with the laws except to obey them.
His battle with Priestley has been compared to the encounter of Bentley and
Collins, a comparison that may not give Horsley more, but certainly gives
Priestley less than his due. When he preached before the House of Lords on
the death of Louis XVI his audience rose and stood in silent reverence during
his peroration. The cynical may feel that it was not difficult to inspire
emotion and awe in such a congregation on such a subject at such a time,
but we know from De Quincey that Horsley's reputation as a preacher stood
remarkably high. He was one of the leaders of the Church in politics; for
our purposes it is more important to note that he was one of the reforming
bishops. Among other scandals he attacked the scandal of non-residence, and
he may be taken as setting in this regard the strictest standard of his time;
yet he did not scruple to go and live in Oxford for some years as tutor to
Lord Guernsey, during the time that he was Rector of Newington, as plain
a confession as we could want that in the estimation of the most public-spirited
of the clergy the nobility had the first claims on the Church. These social
sympathies were confirmed by common political interests. The privileges of
the aristocracy and of the bishops were in fact bound up together, and both
bishops and aristocracy had good reason to shrink from breaking a thread
anywhere. Perhaps the malicious would find the most complete and piquant
illustration of the relations of the Church and the governing class in the
letter written by Dr. Goodenough to Addington, who had just made him dean
of Rochester, when the clerkship of the Pells, worth £3000 a year, was
about to become vacant. 'I understand that Colonel Barré is in a very
precarious state. I hope you will have the fortitude to nominate Harry to
be his successor.' Harry, Addington's son, was a boy at Winchester. The father's
fortitude rose to the emergency: the dean blossomed a little later into a
bishop.




But if the French and the English bishops both belonged to the aristocracy
in feelings and in habits, a great difference distinguishes the rank and
file of the clergy in the two countries. The French priest belonged by circumstances
and by sympathy to the peasant class. The bishop regarded the country curé
as un vilain sentant le fumier, and treated him with about as much consideration
as the seigneur showed to his dependants. The priest's quarrel with the bishop
was like the peasant's quarrel with the seigneur: for both priest and peasant
smarted under the arrogant airs of their respective superiors, and the bishop
swallowed up the tithes as the seigneur swallowed up the feudal dues. Sometimes
the curé put himself at the head of a local rebellion. In the reign
of Louis XV the priests round Saint-Germain led out their flocks to destroy
the game which devoured their crops, the campaign being announced and sanctified
from the pulpit. In the Revolution the common clergy were largely on the
side of the peasants. Such a development was inconceivable in England. As.the
curé's windows looked to the village, the parson's windows looked
to the hall. When the parson's circumstances enabled him to live like the
squire, he rode to hounds, for though, as Blackstone tells us, Roman Canon
Law, under the influence of the tradition that St. Jerome had once observed
that the saints had eschewed such diversions, had interdicted venationes
et sylvaticas vagationes cum canibus et accipitribus to all clergymen, this
early severity of life had vanished long before the eighteenth century. He
treated the calls of his profession as trifling accidents interrupting his
normal life of vigorous pleasure. On becoming Bishop of Chester, Dr. Blomfield
astonished the diocese by refusing to license a curate until he had promised
to abstain from hunting, and by the pain and surprise with which he saw one
of his clergy carried away drunk from a visitation dinner. One rector, whom
he rebuked for drunkenness, replied with an injured manner that he was never
drunk on duty.




There were, it is true, clergymen of great public spirit and devoted lives,
and such men figure in these pages, but the Church, as a whole, was an easy-going
society, careful of its pleasures and comforts, living with the moral ideas
and as far as possible in the manner of the rich. The rivalry of the Methodist
movement had given a certain stimulus to zeal, and the Vicar of Corsley in
Wilts,(17*) for example, added a second service to the duties of the Sunday,
though guarding himself expressly against the admission of any obligation
to make it permanent. But it was found impossible to eradicate from the system
certain of the vices that belong to a society which is primarily a class.
Some of the bishops set themselves to reduce the practice of non-residence.
Porteus, Bishop of London, devoted a great part of his charge to his clergy
in 1790 to this subject, and though he pleaded passionately for reform he
cannot be said to have shut his eyes to the difficulties of the clergy. 'There
are, indeed, two impediments to constant residence which cannot easily be
surmounted; the first is (what fortunately prevails in some parts of this
diocese) unwholesomeness of situation; the other is the possession of a second
benefice. Yet even these will not justify a total and perpetual absence from
your cures. The unhealthiness of many places is of late years by various
improvements greatly abated, and there are now few so circumstanced as not
to admit of residence there in some part of the year without any danger to
the constitution.' Thus even Bishop Porteus, who in this very charge reminded
the clergy that they were called by the titles of stewards, watchmen, shepherds,
and labourers, never went the length of thinking that the Church was to be
expected to minister to the poor in all weathers and in all climates.




The exertions of the reforming bishops did not achieve a conspicuous success,
for the second of the difficulties touched on by Porteus was insurmountable.
In his Legacy to Parsons, Cobbett, quoting from the Clerical Guide, showed
that 332 parsons shared the revenues of 1496 parishes, and 500 more shared
those of 1524. Among the pluralists were Lord Walsingham, who besides enjoying
a pension of £700 a year, was Archdeacon of Surrey, Prebendary of Winchester,
Rector of Calbourne, Rector of Fawley, perpetual Curate of Exbury, and Rector
of Merton; the Earl of Guildford, Rector of Old Alresford, Rector of New
Alresford, perpetual Curate of Medsted, Rector of St. Mary, Southampton,
including the great parish of South Stoneham, Master of St. Cross Hospital,
with the revenue of the parish of St. Faith along with it. There were three
Pretymans dividing fifteen benefices, and Wellington's brother was Prebendary
of Durham, Rector of Bishopwearmouth, Rector of Chelsea, and Rector of Therfield.
This method of treating the parson's profession as a comfortable career was
so closely entangled in the system of aristocracy, that no Government which
represented those interests would ever dream of touching it. Parliament intervened
indeed, but intervened to protect those who lived on these abuses. For before
1801 there were Acts of Parliament on the Statute Book (21 Henry VIII. c.
13, and 13 Elizabeth c. 20), which provided certain penalties for non-residence.
In 1799 a certain Mr. Williams laid informations against hundreds of the
clergy for offences against these Acts. Parliament replied by passing a series
of Acts to stay proceedings, and finally in 1803 Sir William Scott, member
for the University of Oxford, passed an Act which allowed the bishops to
authorise parsons to reside out of their parishes. It is not surprising to
find that in 1812, out of ten thousand incumbents, nearly six thousand were
non-resident.




In the parishes where the incumbent was non-resident, if there was a clergyman
at all in the place, it was generally a curate on a miserable pittance. Bishop
Porteus, in the charge already mentioned, gives some interesting information
about the salaries of curates: 'It is also highly to the honour of this diocese
that in general the stipends allowed to the curates are more liberal than
in many other parts of the kingdom. In several instances I find that the
stipend for one church only is £50 a year; for two £60 and the
use of a parsonage; and in the unwholesome parts of the diocese £70
and even £80 (that is £40 for each church), with the same indulgence
of a house to reside in.' Many of the parishes did not see much of the curate
assigned to them. 'A man must have travelled very little in the kingdom,'
said Arthur Young in 1798, 'who does not know that country towns abound with
curates who never see the parishes they serve, but when they are absolutely
forced to it by duty.'(18*) But the ill-paid curate, even when he was resident
and conscientious, as he often was, moved like the pluralist rector in the
orbit of the rich. He was in that world though not of it. All his hopes hung
on the squire. To have taken the side of the poor against him would have
meant ruin, and the English Church was not a nursery of this kind of heroism.
It is significant that almost every eighteenth-century novelist puts at least
one sycophantic parson in his or her gallery of portraits.(19*)




In addition to the social ties that drew the clergy to the aristocracy,
there was a powerful economic hindrance to their friendship with the poor.
De Tocqueville thought that the tithe system brought the French priest into
interesting and touching relations with the peasant: a view that has seemed
fanciful to later historians, who are more impressed by the quarrels that
resulted. But de Tocqueville himself could scarcely argue that the tithe
system helped to warm the heart of the labourer to the Church of England
in cases such as those recorded in the Parliamentary Paper issued in 1833,
in which parson magistrates sent working men to prison for refusing to pay
tithes to their rector. Day labouring men had originally been exempted from
liability to pay tithes, but just as the French Church brought more and more
of the property and industry of the State within her confiscating grasp,
so the English Parliament, from the reign of William III, had been drawing
the parson's net more closely round the labourer. Moreover, as we shall see
in a later chapter, the question of tithes was in the very centre of the
social agitations that ended in the rising of 1830 and its terrible punishment.
In this particular quarrel the farmers and labourers were on the same side,
and the parsons as a body stood out for their own property with as much determination
as the landlords.




In one respect the Church took an active part in oppressing the village
poor, for Wilberforce and his friends started, just before the French Revolution,
a Society for the Reformation of Manners, which aimed at enforcing the observance
of Sunday, forbidding any kind of social dissipation, and repressing freedom
of speech and of thought whenever they refused to conform to the superstitions
of the morose religion that was then in fashion. This campaign was directed
against the license of the poor alone. There were no stocks for the Sabbath-breakers
of Brooks's: a Gibbon might take what liberties he pleased with religion:
the wildest Methodist never tried to shackle the loose tongues or the loose
lives of the gay rich. The attitude of the Church to the excesses of this
class is well depicted in Fielding's account of Parson Supple, who never
remonstrated with Squire Western for swearing, but preached so vigorously
in the pulpit against the habit that the authorities put the laws very severely
in execution against others, 'and the magistrate was the only person in the
parish who could swear with impunity.' This description might seem to border
on burlesque, but there is an entry in Wilberforce's diary that reveals a
state of mind which even Fielding would have found it impossible to caricature.
Wilberforce was staying at Brighton, and this is his description of an evening
he spent at the Pavilion with the first gentleman of Europe: 'The Prince
and Duke of Clarence too very civil. Prince showed he had read Cobbett. Spoke
strongly of the blasphemy of his late papers and most justly.'(20*) We can
only hope that Sheridan was there to enjoy the scene, and that the Prince
was able for once to do justice to his strong feelings in language that would
not shock Wilberforce's ears.




Men like Wilberforce and the magistrates whom he inspired did not punish
the rich for their dissolute behaviour; they only found in that behaviour
another argument for coercing the poor. As they watched the dishevelled lives
of men like George Selwyn their one idea of action was to punish a village
labourer, for neglecting church on Sunday morning. We have seen how the cottagers
paid in Enclosure Bills for their lords' adventures at play. They paid also
for their lords' dissipations in the loss of innocent pleasures that might
have brought some colour into their grey lives. The more boisterous the fun
at Almack's, the deeper the gloom thrown over the village. The Select Committee
on Allotments that reported in 1843 found one of the chief causes of crime
in the lack of recreations. Sheridan at one time and Cobbett at another tried
to revive village sports, but social circumstances were too strong for them.
In this respect the French peasant had the advantage. Babeau's picture of
his gay and sociable Sunday may be overdrawn, but a comparison of Crabbe's
description of the English Sunday with contemporary descriptions of Sunday
as it was spent in a French village, shows that the spirit of common gaiety,
killed in England by Puritanism and by the destruction of the natural and
easy-going relations of the village community, survived in France through
all the tribulations of poverty and famine. The eighteenth-century French
village still bore a resemblance in fact to the medieval English village,
and Goldsmith has recorded in The Traveller his impressions of 'mirth
and social ease.' Babeau gives an account of a great variety of village games,
from the violent contests in Brittany for the 'choule,' in one of which fourteen
players were drowned, to the gentler dances and the children's romps that
were general in other parts of France, and Arthur Young was very much struck
by the agility and the grace that the heavy peasants displayed in dancing
on the village green. Windham, speaking in a bad cause, the defence of bull-baiting
in 1800, laid stress on the contrast: 'In the south of Fiance and in Spain,
at the end of the day's labour, and in the cool of the evening's shade, the
poor dance in mirthful festivity on the green, to the sound of the guitar.
But in this country no such source of amusement presents itself. If they
dance, it must be often in a marsh, or in the rain, for the pleasure of catching
cold. But there is a substitute in this country well known by the name of
Hops. We all know the alarm which the very word inspires, and the sound of
the fiddle calls forth the magistrate to dissolve the meeting. Men bred in
ignorance of the world, and having no opportunity of mixing in its scenes
or observing its manners, may be much worse employed than in learning something
of its customs from theatrical representations; but if a company of strolling
players make their appearance in a village, they are hunted immediately from
it as a nuisance, except, perhaps, there be a few people of greater wealth
in the neighbourhood, whose wives and daughters patronize them.'(21*) Thus
all the influences of the time conspired to isolate the poor, and the changes,
destructive of their freedom and happiness, that were taking place in their
social and economic surroundings, were aggravated by a revival of Puritanism
which helped to rob village life of all its natural melody and colour.




NOTES:




1. Reflections on the Revolution in France (fourth edition), p.
359.




2. Eden, vol. i, p. 579.




3. Reports on Poor, vol. ii, p. 325.




4. Political Register, vol. lxxviii, p. 710.




5. Hasbach, p. 131.




6. 'Village,' Book i.




7. Vol. xxxviii, p. 750 ff.




8. Cobbet's Political Register, March 17, 1821, p. 779.




9. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, p. 38.




10. Rural Rides, p. 460.




11. Reflections, p. 61.




12. Poor Law Report, 1817.




13. Cf. Ibid., 1834, p. 161.




14. Cf. case of apprentice, Annual Register, 1819, p. 195.




15. Poor Law Report, 1817; in some cases there were amicable arrangements
to keep down legal expenses; e.g., at Halifax (Eden), the overseer formed
a society of the officers of adjoining parishes. Cases were referred to them,
and the decision of the majority was accepted.




16. Wealth of Nations, vol. iii, p. 234.




17. Life in an English Village, by Maude F. Davies, p. 58.




18. Inquiry into the State of the Public Mind among the Lower Classes,
p. 27.




19. The parsons under Squire Allworthy's roof, the parson to whom Pamela
appealed in vain, and, most striking of all, Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice.




20. Life, vol. iv, p. 277.




21. Parliamentary Register, April 18, 1800.




Chapter Nine




The Village in 1830




We have described the growing misery of the labourer, the increasing rigours
of the criminal law, and the insensibility of the upper classes, due to the
isolation of the poor. What kind of a community was created by the Speenhamland
system after it had been in force for a generation? We have, fortunately,
a very full picture given in a Parliamentary Report that is generally regarded
as one of the landmarks of English history. We cannot do better than set
out the main features of the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834,
and the several effects they traced to this system.




The first effect is one that everybody could have anticipated: the destruction
of all motives for effort and ambition. Under this system 'the most worthless
were sure of something, while the prudent, the industrious, and the sober,
with all their care and pains, obtained only something; and even that scanty
pittance was doled out to them by the overseer.'(1*) All labourers were condemned
to live on the brink of starvation, for no effort of will or character could
improve their position. The effect on the imagination was well summed up
in a rhetorical question from a labourer who gave evidence to a Commissioner.
'When a man has his spirit broken what is he good for?'(2*) The Poor Law
Commissioners looked at it from a different point of view: 'The labourer
feels that the existing system, though it generally gives him low wages,
always gives him work. It gives him also, strange as it may appear, what
he values more, a sort of independence. He need not bestir himself to seek
work; he need not study to please his master; he need not put any restraint
upon his temper; he need not ask relief as a favour. He has all a slave's
security for subsistence, without his liability to punishment.... All the
other classes of society are exposed to the vicissitudes of hope and fear;
he alone has nothing to lose or to gain.'(3*)




But it is understating the result of the system on individual enterprise
to say that it destroyed incentives to ambition; for in some parishes it
actually proscribed independence and punished the labourer who owned some
small property. Wages under these conditions were so low that a man with
a little property or a few savings could not keep himself alive without help
from the parish, but if a man was convicted of possessing anything he was
refused parish help. It was dangerous even to look tidy or neat, 'ragged
clothes are kept by the poor, for the express purpose of coming to the vestry
in them.'(4*) The Report of the Commissioners on this subject recalls Rousseau's
description of the French peasant with whom he stayed in the course of his
travels, who, when his suspicions had been soothed, and his hospitable instincts
had been warmed by friendly conversation, produced stores of food from the
secret place where they had been hidden to escape the eye of the tax-collector.
A man who had saved anything was ruined. A Mr. Hickson, a Northampton manufacturer
and landowner in Kent, gave an illustration of this.




'The case of a man who has worked for me will show the effect of the parish
system in preventing frugal habits. This is a hard-working, industrious man,
named William Williams. He is married, and had saved some money, to the amount
of about £70, and had two cows; he had also a sow and ten pigs. He had
got a cottage well furnished; he was a member of a benefit club at Meopham,
from which he received 8s. a week when he was ill. He was beginning to learn
to read and write, and sent his children to the Sunday School. He had a legacy
of about £46, but he got his other money together by saving from his
fair wages as a waggoner. Some circumstances occurred which obliged me to
part with him. The consequence of this labouring man having been frugal and
saved money, and got the cows, was that no one would employ him, although
his superior character as a workman was well known in the parish. He told
me at the time I was obliged to part with him: "Whilst I have these
things I shall get no work; I must part with them all; I must be reduced
to a state of beggary before any one will employ me." I was compelled
to part with him at Michaelmas; he has not yet got work, and he has no chance
of getting any until he has become a pauper; for until then the paupers will
be preferred to him. He cannot get work in his own parish, and he will not
be allowed to get any in other parishes. Another instance of the same kind
occurred amongst my workmen. Thomas Hardy, the brother-in-law of the same
man, was an excellent workman, discharged under similar circumstances; he
has a very industrious wife. They have got two cows, a well-furnished cottage,
and a pig and fowls. Now he cannot get work, because he has property. The
pauper will be preferred to him, and he can qualify himself for it only by
becoming a pauper. If he attempts to get work elsewhere, he is told that
they do not want to fix him on the parish. Both these are fine young men,
and as excellent labourers as I could wish to have. The latter labouring
man mentioned another instance of a labouring man in another parish (Henstead),
who had once had more property than he, but was obliged to consume it all,
and is now working on the roads.'(5*) This effect of the Speenhamland arrangements
was dwelt on in the evidence before the Committee on Agricultural Labourers'
Wages in 1824. Labourers had to give up their cottages in a Dorsetshire village
because they could not become pensioners if they possessed a cottage, and
farmers would only give employment to village pensioners. Thus these cottagers
who had not been evicted by enclosure were evicted by the Speenhamland system.




It is not surprising that in the case of another man of independent nature
in Cambridgeshire, who had saved money and so could get no work, we are told
that the young men pointed at him, and called him a fool for not spending
his money at the public-house, 'adding that then he would get work.'(6*)
The statesmen who condemned the labourer to this fate had rejected the proposal
for a minimum wage, on the ground that it would destroy emulation.




There was one slight alleviation of this vicious system, which the Poor
Law Commissioners considered in the very different light of an aggravation.
If society was to be reorganised on such a basis as this, it was at any rate
better that the men who were made to live on public money should not be grateful
to the ratepayers. The Commissioners were pained by the insolence of the
paupers. 'The parish money' said a Sussex labourer, 'is now chucked to us
like as to a dog,'(7*) but the labourers did not lick the hand that thew
it. All though the Report we read complaints of the 'insolent, discontented,
surly pauper,' who talks of 'right' and 'income,' and who will soon fight
for these supposed rights and income 'unless some step is taken to arrest
his progress to open violence.' The poor emphasised this view by the terms
they applied to their rate subsidies, which they sometimes called 'their
reglars,' sometimes 'the county allowance,' and sometimes 'The Act of Parliament
allowance.' Old dusty rentbooks of receipts and old dirty indentures of apprenticeship
were handed down from father to son with as much care as if they had been
deeds of freehold property, as documentary evidence to their right to a share
in the rates of a particular parish.(8*) Of course there was not a uniform
administration, and the Commissioners reported that whilst in some districts
men were disqualified for relief if they had any wages, in others there was
no inquiry into circumstances, and non-necessitous persons dipped like the
rest into the till. In many cases only the wages received during the last
week or fortnight were taken into account, and thus the allowance would be
paid to some persons who at particular periods received wages in excess of
the scale. This accounts for the fact stated by Thorold Rogers from his own
experience that there were labourers who actually saved considerable sums
out of the system.




The most obvious and immediate effect was the effect which had been foreseen
without misgiving in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The married man was
employed in preference to the bachelor, and his income rose with the birth
of each child. But there was one thing better than to marry and have a family,
and that was to marry a mother of bastards, for bastards were more profitable
than legitimate children, since the parish guaranteed the contribution for
which the putative father was legally liable. It was easier to manage with
a family than with a single child. As one young woman of twenty-four with
four bastard children put it, 'If she had one more she should be very comfortable.'(9*)
Women with bastard children were thus very eligible wives. The effect of
the whole system on village morals was striking and widespread, and a witness
from a parish which was overwhelmed with this sudden deluge of population
said to the Commission, 'the eighteen-penny children will eat up this parish
in ten years more, unless some relief be afforded us.'(10*) Before this period,
if we are to believe Cobbett, it had been rare for a woman to be with child
at the time of her marriage; in these days of demoralisation and distress
it became the habit.




The effects produced by this system on the recipients of relief were all
of them such as might have been anticipated, and in this respect the Report
of the Commissioners contained no surprises. It merely illustrated the generalisations
that had been made by all Poor Law Reformers during the last fifteen years.
But the discovery of the extent of the corruption which the system had bred
in local government and administration was probably a revelation to most
people. It demoralised not only those who received but those who gave. A
network of tangled interests spread over local life, and employers and tradesmen
were faced with innumerable temptations and opportunities for fraud. To take
the case of the overseer first. Suppose him to be a tradesman: he was liable
to suffer in his custom if he refused to relieve the friends, or it might
be the workmen of his customers. It would require a man of almost superhuman
rigidity of principle to be willing not only to lose time and money in serving
a troublesome and unprofitable office, but to lose custom as well.(11*) From
the resolve not to lose custom he might gradually slip down to the determination
to reimburse himself for 'the vexatious demands' on his time, till a state
of affairs like that in Slaugham came about.




'Population, 740. Expenditure, £1706. The above large sum of money
is expended principally in orders on the village shops for flour, clothes,
butter, cheese, etc.: the tradesmen serve the office of overseer by turns;
the two last could neither read nor write.'(12*)




If the overseer were a farmer there were temptations to pay part of the
wages of his own and his friends' labourers out of parish money, or to supply
the workhouse with his own produce. The same temptations beset the members
of vestries, whether they were open or select. 'Each vestryman, so far as
he is an immediate employer of labour, is interested in keeping down the
rate of wages, and in throwing part of their payment on others, and, above
all, on the principal object of parochial fraud, the tithe-owner: if he is
the owner of cottages, he endeavours to get their rent paid by the parish;
if he keeps a shop, he struggles to get allowance for his customers or debtors;
if he deals in articles used in the workhouse, he tries to increase the workhouse
consumption; if he is in humble circumstances, his own relations or friends
may be among the applicants.'(13*) Mr. Drummond, a magistrate for Hants and
Surrey, said to the Committee on Laborers' Wages in 1824, that part of the
poor-rate expenditure was returned to farmers and landowners in exorbitant
cottage rents, and that the farmers always opposed a poor man who wished
to build himself a cottage on the waste.




In the case of what was known as the 'labor rate' system, the members
of one class combined together to impose the burden of maintaining the poor
on the shoulders of the other classes. By this system, instead of the laborer's
wages being made up to a fixed amount by the parish, each ratepayer was bound
to employ, and to pay at a certain rate, a certain number of laborers, whether
he wanted them or not. The number depended sometimes on his assessment to
the poor rate, sometimes on the amount of acres he occupied (of the use to
which the land was put no notice was taken, a sheep-walk counting for as
much as arable fields): when the occupiers of land had employed a fixed number
of laborers, the surplus labourers were divided amongst all the ratepayers
according to their rental. This plan was superficially fair, but as a matter
of fact it worked out to the advantage of the big farmers with much arable
land, and pressed hard on the small ones who cultivated their holdings by
their own and their children's labor, and, in cases where they were liable
to the rate, on the tradesmen who had no employment at which to set an agricultural
laborer. After 1832 (2 and 3 William IV. c. 96) the agreement of three-fourths
of the ratepayers to such a system was binding on all, and the large farmers
often banded together to impose it on their fellow ratepayers by intimidation
or other equally unscrupulous means: thus at Kelvedon in Essex we read: 'There
was no occasion in this parish, nor would it have been done but for a junto
of powerful landholders, putting down opposition by exempting a sufficient
number, to give themselves the means of a majority.'(14*)




Landlords in some cases resorted to Machiavellian tactics in order to
escape their burdens.




'Several instances have been mentioned to us, of parishes nearly depopulated,
in which almost all the labour is performed by persons settled in the neighboring
villages or towns; drawing from them, as allowance, the greater part of their
subsistence.'(15*) This method is described more at length in the following
passage: --




' When a parish is in the hands of only one proprietor, or of proprietors
so few in number as to be able to act, and to compel their tenants to act,
in unison, and adjoins to parishes in which property is much divided, they
may pull down every cottage as it becomes vacant, and prevent the building
of new ones. By a small immediate outlay they may enable and induce a considerable
portion of those who have settlements in their parish to obtain settlements
in the adjoining parishes: by hiring their laborers for periods less than
a year, they may prevent the acquisition of new settlements in their own.
They may thus depopulate their own estates, and cultivate them by means of
the surplus population of the surrounding district.'(16*) A clergyman in
Reading(17*) said that he had between ten and twenty families living in his
parish and working for the farmers in their original parish, whose cottages
had been pulled down over their heads. Occasionally a big proprietor of parish
A, in order to lessen the poor rates, would, with unscrupulous ingenuity,
take a farm in parish B, and there hire for the year a batch of labourers
from A: these at the end of their term he would turn off on to the mercies
of parish B which was now responsible for them, whilst he sent for a fresh
consignment from parish A.(18*)




The Report of the Commission is a remarkable and searching picture of
the general demoralisation produced by the Speenhamland system, and from
that point of view it is most graphic and instructive. But nobody who has
followed the history of the agricultural labourer can fail to be struck by
its capital omission. The Commissioners, in their simple analysis of that
system, could not take their eyes off the Speenhamland goblin, and instead
of dealing with that system as a wrong and disastrous answer to certain difficult
questions, they treated the system itself as the one and original source
of all evils. They sighed for the days when 'the paupers were a small disreputable
minority, whose resentment was not to be feared, and whose favour was of
no value,' and 'all other classes were anxious to diminish the number of
applicants, and to reduce the expenses of their maintenance.'(19*) They did
not realise that the governing class had not created a Frankenstein monster
for the mere pleasure of its creation; that they had not set out to draw
up an ideal constitution, as Rousseau had done for the Poles. In 1795 there
was a fear of revolution, and the upper classes threw the Speenhamland system
over the villages as a wet blanket over sparks. The Commissioners merely
isolated the consequences of Speenhamland and treated them as if they were
the entire problem, and consequently, though their report served to extinguish
that system, it did nothing to rehabilitate the position of the labourer,
or to restore the rights and status he had lost. The new Poor Law was the
only gift of the Reformed Parliament to the agricultural labourer; it was
an improvement on the old, but only in the sense that the east wind is better
than the sirocco.




What would have happened if either of the other two remedies had been
adopted for the problem to which the Speenhamland system was applied, it
is impossible to say. But it is easy to see that the position of the agricultural
labourer, which could not have been worse, might have been very much better,
and that the nation, as apart from the landlords and money-lords, would have
come out of this whirlpool much stronger and much richer. This was clear
to one correspondent of the Poor Law Commission, whose memorandum, printed
in an Appendix,(20*) is more interesting and profound than any contribution
to the subject made by the Commissioners themselves. M. Chateauvieux set
out an alternative policy to Speenhamland, which, if the governing class
of 1795 or the governing class of 1834 had been enlightened enough to follow
it, would have set up a very different labouring class in the villages from
the helpless proletariat that was created by the enclosures.




'Mais si au lieu d'opérer le partage des biens communaux, l'administration
de la commune s'était bornée à louer pour quelques années
des parcelles des terres qu'elle possède en vaine pâture, et
cela à très bas prix, aux journaliers domiciliés sur
son territoire, il en serait resulté:




'(1) Que le capital de ces terres n'aurait point été aliéné
et absorbé dans la propriété particulière.




'(2) Que ce capital aurait été néanmoins utilisé
pour la reproduction.




'(3) Qu'il aurait servi à l'amélioration du sort des pauvres
qui l'auraient défriché, de toute la différence entre
le prix du loyer qu'ils en auraient payé, et le montant du revenu
qu'ils auraient obtenu de sa recolte.




'(4) Que la commune aurait encaissé le montant de ses loyers, et
aurait augmenté d'autant les moyens dont elle dispose pour le soulagement
de ces pauvres.'




M. Chateauvieux understood better than any of the Commissioners, dominated
as they were by the extreme individualist economy of the time, the meaning
of Bolingbroke's maxim that a wise minister considers his administration
as a single day in the great year of Government; but as a day that is affected
by those which went before and must affect those which are to come after.
A Government of enclosing landowners was perhaps not to be expected to understand
all that the State was in danger of losing in the reckless alienation of
common property.




What of the prospects of the other remedy that was proposed? At first
sight it seems natural to argue that had Whitbread's Minimum Wage Bill become
an Act of Parliament it would have remained a dead letter. The administration
depended on the magistrates and the magistrates represented the rent-receiving
and employing classes. A closer scrutiny warrants a different conclusion.
At the time that the Speenhamland plan was adopted there were many magistrates
in favour of setting a minimum scale. The Suffolk magistrates, for example,
put pressure on the county members to vote for Whitbread's Bill, and those
members, together with Grey and Sheridan, were its backers. The Parliamentary
support for the Bill was enough to show that it was not only in Suffolk that
it would have been adopted; there were men like Lechmere and Whitbread scattered
about the country, and though they were men of far more enlightened views
than the average J. P., they were not without influence in their own neighbourhoods.
It is pretty certain, therefore, that if the Bill had been carried, it would
have been administered in some parts of the country. The public opinion in
support of the Act would have been powerfully reinforced by the pressure
of the labourers, and this would have meant a more considerable stimulus
than might at first be supposed, for the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners
shows that the pressure of the labourers was a very important factor in the
retention of the allowance system in parishes where the overseers wished
to abandon it, and if the labourers could coerce the local authorities into
continuing the Speenhamland system, they could have coerced the magistrates
into making an assessment of wages. The labourers were able by a show of
violence to raise wages and to reduce prices temporarily, as is clear from
the history of 1816 and 1830. It is not too much to suppose that they could
have exercised enough influence in 1795 to induce magistrates in many places
to carry out a law that was on the Statute Book. Further, it is not unreasonable
to suppose that agricultural labourers' unions to enforce the execution of
the law would have escaped the monstrous Combination Law of 1799 and 1800,
for even in 1808 the Glasgow and Lancashire cotton-weavers were permitted
openly to combine for the purpose of seeking a legal fixing of wages.(21*)




If assessment had once become the practice, the real struggle would have
arisen when the great prosperity of agriculture began to decline; at the
time, that is, when the Speenhamland system began to show those symptoms
of strain that we have described. Would the customary wage, established under
the more favourable conditions of 1795, have stood against that pressure?
Would the labourers have been able to keep up wages, as critics of the Whitbread
Bill had feared that they would? In considering the answers to that question,
we have to reckon with a force that the debaters of 1795 could not have foreseen.
In 1795 Cobbett was engaged in the politics and polemics of America, and
if any member of the House of Commons knew his name, he knew it as the name
of a fierce champion of English institutions, and a fierce enemy of revolutionary
ideas; a hero of the Anti-Jacobin itself. In 1810 Cobbett was rapidly
making himself the most powerful tribune that the English poor have ever
known. Cobbett's faults are plain enough, for they are all on the surface.
His egotism sometimes seduced his judgment; he had a strongly perverse element
in his nature; his opinion of any proposals not his own was apt to be petulant
and peevish, and it might perhaps be said of him that he generally had a
wasp in his bonnet. These qualities earned for him his title of the Contentious
Man. They would have been seriously disabling in a Cabinet Minister, but
they did not affect his power of collecting and mobilising and leading the
spasmodic forces of the poor.




Let us recall his career in order to understand what his influence would
have been if the labourers had won their customary wage in 1795, and had
been fighting to maintain it fifteen or twenty years later. His adventures
began early. When he was thirteen his imagination was fired by stories the
gardener at Farnham told him of the glories of Kew. He ran away from home,
and made so good an impression on the Kew gardener that he was given work
there. His last coppers on that journey were spent in buying Swift's Tale
of a Tub. He returned home, but his restless dreams drove him again into
the world. He tried to become a sailor, and ultimately became a soldier.
He left the army, where he had made his mark and received rapid promotion,
in order to expose a financial scandal in his regiment, but on discovering
that the interests involved in the countenance of military abuses were far
more powerful than he had supposed, he abandoned his attempt and fled to
France. A few months later he crossed to America, and settled down to earn
a living by teaching English to French refugees. This peaceful occupation
he relinquished for the congenial excitements of polemical journalism, and
he was soon the fiercest pamphleteer on the side of the Federals, who took
the part of England, in their controversies with the democrats, who took
the part of the Revolution. So far as the warfare of pamphlets went, Cobbett
turned the scale. The democrats could not match his wit, his sarcasm, his
graphic and pointed invectives, his power of clever and sparkling analysis
and ridicule. This warfare occupied him for nearly ten years, and he returned
to England in time to have his windows broken for refusing to illuminate
his house in celebration of the Peace of Amiens. In 1802 he started the Political
Register. At that time he was still a Tory, but a closer study of English
life changed his opinions, and four years later he threw himself into the
Radical movement. The effect of his descent on English politics can only
be compared to the shock that was given to the mind of Italy by the French
methods of warfare, when Charles VIII led his armies into her plains to fight
pitched battles without any of the etiquette or polite conventions that had
graced the combats of the condottieri. He gave to the Reform agitation an
uncompromising reality and daring, and a movement which had become the dying
echo of a smothered struggle broke into storm and thunder. Hazlitt scarcely
exaggerated his daemonic powers when he said of him that he formed a fourth
estate of himself.




Now Cobbett may be said to have spent twenty years of his life in the
effort to save the labourers from degradation and ruin. He was the only man
of his generation who regarded politics from this standpoint. This motive
is the key to his career. He saw in 1816 that the nation had to choose between
its sinecures, its extravagant army, its rulers' mad scheme of borrowing
at a higher rate to extinguish debt, for which it was paying interest at
a low rate, its huge Civil List and privileged establishments, the interests
of the fundholders and contractors on the one hand, and its labourers on
the other. In that conflict of forces the labourer could not hold his own.
Later, Cobbett saw that there were other interests, the interests of landowners
and of tithe-holders, which the State would have to subordinate to national
claims if the labourer was to be saved. In that conflict, too, the labourer
was beaten. He was unrepresented in Parliament, whereas the opposing interests
were massed there. Cobbett wanted Parliamentary Reform, not like the traditional
Radicals as a philosophy of rights, but as an avalanche of social power.
Parliamentary Reform was never an end to him, nor the means to anything short
of the emancipation of the labourer. In this, his main mission, Cobbett failed.
The upper classes winced under his ruthless manners, and they trembled before
his Berserker rage, but it is the sad truth of English history that they
beat him. Now if, instead of throwing himself against this world of privilege
and vested interests in the hopes of wringing a pittance of justice for a
sinking class, it had been his task to maintain a position already held,
he would have fought under very different conditions. If, when prices began
to fall, there had been a customary wage in most English villages, the question
would not have been whether the ruling class was to maintain its privileges
and surplus profits by letting the labourer sink deeper into the morass,
but whether it was to maintain these privileges and profits by taking something
openly from him. It is easier to prevent a dog from stealing a bone than
to take the bone out of his mouth. Cobbett was not strong enough to break
the power of the governing class, but he might have been strong enough to
defend the customary rights of the labouring class. As it was, the governing
class was on the defensive at every point. The rent receivers, the tithe
owners, the mortgagers, the lenders to the Government and the contractors
all clung to their gains, and the food allowance of the labourer slowly and
steadily declined.




There was this great difference between the Speenhamland system and a
fixed standard of wages. The Speenhamland system after 1812 was not applied
so as to maintain an equilibrium between the income and expenditure of the
labourer: it was applied to maintain an equilibrium between social forces.
The scale fell not with the fall of prices to the labourer, but with the
fall of profits to the possessing classes. The minimum was not the minimum
on which the labourer could live, but the minimum below which rebellion was
certain. This was the way in which wages found their own level. They gravitated
lower and lower with the growing weakness of the wage-earner. If Cobbett
had been at the head of a movement for preserving to the labourer a right
bestowed on him by Act of Parliament, either he would have succeeded, or
the disease would have come to a crisis in 1816, instead of taking the form
of a lingering and wasting illness. Either, that is, other classes would
have had to make the economies necessary to keep the labourers' wages at
the customary point, or the labourers would have made their last throw before
they had been desolated and weakened by another fifteen years of famine.




There is another respect in which the minimum wage policy would have profoundly
altered the character of village society. It would have given the village
labourers a bond of union before they had lost the memories and the habits
of their more independent life; it would have made them an organised force,
something like the organised forces that have built up a standard of life
for industrial workmen. An important passage in Fielding's Tom Jones
shows that there was material for such combination in the commoners of the
old village. Fielding is talking of his borrowings from the classics and
he defends himself with this analogy; 'The ancients may be considered as
a rich common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus
hath a free right to batten his muse: or, to place it in a clearer light,
we moderns are to the ancients what the poor are to the rich. By the poor
here I mean that large and venerable body which in English we call the mob.
Now whoever hath had the honour to be admitted to any degree of intimacy
with this mob must well know, that it is one of their established maims to
plunder and pillage their rich neighbours without any reluctance: and that
this is held to be neither sin nor crime among them. And so constantly do
they abide and act by this maxim, that in every parish almost in the kingdom
there is a kind of confederacy ever carrying on against a certain person
of opulence called the squire whose property is considered as free booty
by all his poor neighbours; who, as they conclude that there is no manner
of guilt in such depredations, look upon it as a point of honour and moral
obligation to conceal and to preserve each other from punishment on all such
occasions. In like manner are the ancients such as Homer, Virgil, Horace,
Cicero and the rest to be esteemed among us writers as so many wealthy squires
from whom we, the poor of Parnassus, claim an immemorial custom of taking
whatever we can come at.'(22*)




It would not have been possible to create a great labourers' union before
the Combination Laws were repealed in 1824, but if the labourers had been
organised to defend their standard wage, they would have established a tradition
of permanent association in each village. The want of this was their fatal
weakness. All the circumstances make the spirit of combination falter in
the country. In towns men are face to face with the brutal realities of their
lives, unsoftened by any of the assuaging influences of brook and glade and
valley. Men and women who work in the fields breathe something of the resignation
and peace of Nature; they bear trouble and wrong with a dangerous patience.
Discontent moves, but it moves slowly, and whereas storms blow up in the
towns, they beat up in the country. That is one reason why the history of
the anguish of the English agricultural labourer so rarely breaks into violence.
Castlereagh's Select Committee in 1817 rejoiced in the discovery that 'notwithstanding
the alarming progress which has been made in extending disaffection, its
success has been confined to the principal manufacturing districts, and that
scarcely any of the agricultural population have lent themselves to these
violent projects.' There is a Russian saying that the peasant must 'be boiled
in the factory pot' before a revolution can succeed. And if it is difficult
in the nature of things to make rural labourers as formidable to their masters
as industrial workers, there is another reason why the English labourer rebelled
so reluctantly and so tardily against what Sir Spencer Walpole called, in
the true spirit of a classical politician, 'his inevitable and hereditary
lot.' Village society was constantly losing its best and bravest blood. Bamford's
description of the poacher who nearly killed a gamekeeper's understrapper
in a quarrel in a public-house, and then hearing from Dr. Healey that his
man was only stunned, promised the doctor that if there was but one single
hare on Lord Suffield's estates, that hare should be in the doctor's stew-pot
next Sunday, reminds us of the loss a village suffered when its poachers
were snapped up by a game-preserving bench, and tossed to the other side
of the world. During the years between Waterloo and the Reform Bill the governing
class was decimating the village populations on the principle of the Greek
tyrant who flicked off the heads of the tallest blades in his field; the
Game Laws, summary jurisdiction, special commissions, drove men of spirit
and enterprise, the natural leaders of their fellows, from the villages where
they might have troubled the peace of their masters. The village Hampdens
of that generation sleep by the shores of Botany Bay. Those who blame the
supine character of the English labourer forget that his race, before it
had quite lost the memories and the habits of the days of its independence
and its share in the commons, was passed through this sieve. The scenes we
shall describe in the next chapter show that the labourers were capable of
great mutual fidelity when once they were driven into rebellion. If they
had had a right to defend and a comradeship to foster from the first, Cobbett,
who spent his superb strength in a magnificent onslaught on the governing
class, might have made of the race whose wrongs he pitied as his own, an
army no less resolute and disciplined than the army O'Connell made of the
broken peasants of the West.




NOTES:




1. Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 243.




2. Ibid., p. 84.




3. Ibid., pp. 56-7.




4. Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 244.




5. Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 78-9.




6. Ibid., p. 80.




7. Ibid., p. 291.




8. Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 94.




9. Ibid., p. 172.




10. Ibid., p. 66.




11. Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 98-104.




12. Ibid., p. 100.




13. Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 108.




14. Ibid., p. 210.




15. Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 73.




16. Ibid., p. 157.




17. Ibid., p. 158.




18. Ibid., p. 161.




19. Ibid., p. 130.




20. Appendix F, No. 3, to 1st Report of commissioners.




21. See Webb's History of Trade Unionism, p. 59.




22. Tom Jones, Bk., XII, chap. i.




Chapter Ten




The Last Labourers' Revolt




Where not otherwise stated the authorities for the two following chapters
are the Home Office Papers for the time (Municipal and Provincial, Criminal,
disturbances, domestic, etc.), the Times and local papers.




I




A traveller who wished to compare the condition of the English and the
French rural populations in 1830 would have had little else to do than to
invert all that had been written on the subject by travellers a century earlier.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century England had the prosperous and
France the miserable peasantry. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century
the French peasant had been set free from the impoverishing and degrading
services which had made his lot so intolerable in the eyes of foreign observers;
he cultivated his own land, and lived a life, spare, arduous, and exacting
but independent. The work of the Revolution had been done so thoroughly in
this respect that the Bourbons, when Wellington and the allies lifted them
back on to their throne, could not undo it. It is true that the future of
the French peasants was a subject of some anxiety to English observers, and
that M'Culloch committed himself to the prediction that in half a century,
owing to her mass of small owners, France would be the greatest pauper-warren
in Europe. If any French peasant was disturbed by this nightmare of the political
economy of the time, he had the grim satisfaction of knowing that his position
could hardy become worse than the position that the English labourer already
occupied. He would have based his conclusion, not on the wild language of
revolutionaries, but on the considered statement of those who were so far
from meditating revolution that they shrank even from a moderate reform of
Parliament. Lord Carnarvon said in one House of Parliament that the English
labourer had been reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in
Europe; English landlords reproduced in the other that very parallel between
the English labourer and the West Indian negro which had figured so conspicuously
in Thelwall's lectures. Thelwall, as Canning reminded him in a savage parody
on the Benedicite, got pelted for his pains. Since the days of those lectures
all Europe had been overrun by war, and England alone had escaped what Pitt
had called the liquid fire of Jacobinism. There had followed for England
fifteen years of healing peace. Yet at the end of all this time the conquerors
of Napoleon found themselves in a position which they would have done well
to exchange with the position of his victims. The German peasant had been
rescued from serfdom; Spain and italy had at least known a brief spell of
less unequal government. The English labourer alone was the poorer; poorer
in money, poorer in happiness, poorer in sympathy, and infinitely poorer
in horizon and in hope. The riches that he had been promised by the champions
of enclosure had faded into something less than a maintenance. The wages
he received without land had a lower purchasing power than the wages he had
received in the days when his wages were supplemented by common rights. The
standard of living which was prescribed for him by the governing class was
now much lower than it had been in 1795.




This was not part of a general decline. Other classes for whom the rulers
of England prescribed the standard had advanced during the years in which
the labourers had lost ground. The King's Civil List had been revised when
provisions rose. The salaries of the judges had been raised by three several
Acts of Parliament (1799, 1809, and 1825), a similar course had been taken
in the case of officials. Those who have a taste for the finished and unconscious
cynicism of this age will note -- recollecting that the upper classes refused
to raise wages in 1795 to meet the extra cost of living, on the ground that
it would be difficult afterwards to reduce them -- that all the upper-class
officials, whose salaries were increased because living was more expensive,
were left to the permanent enjoyment of that increase. The lives of the judges,
the landlords, the parsons, and the rest of the governing class were not
become more meagre but more spacious in the last fifty years. During that
period many of the great palaces of the English nobility had been built,
noble libraries had been collected, and famous galleries had grown up, wing
upon wing. The agricultural labourers whose fathers had eaten meat, bacon,
cheese, and vegetables were living on bread and potatoes. They had lost their
gardens, they had ceased to brew their beer in their cottages. In their work
they had no sense of ownership or interest. They no longer 'sauntered after
cattle' on the open common, and at twilight they no longer 'played down the
setting sun;' the games had almost disappeared from the English tillage,
their wives and children were starting before their eyes, their homes were
more squalid, and the philosophy of the hour taught the upper classes that
to mend a window or to put in a brick to shield the cottage from damp or
wind was to increase the ultimate miseries of the poor. The sense of sympathy
and comradeship, which had been mixed with rude and unskilful government,
in the old village had been destroyed in the bitter days of want and distress.
Degrading and repulsive work was invented for those whom the farmer would
not or could not employ. De Quincey, wishing to illustrate the manners of
eighteenth-century France, used to quote M. Simond's story of how he had
seen, not very long before the Revolution, a peasant ploughing with a team
consisting of a donkey and a woman. The English poor could have told him
that half a century later there were English tillages in which it was the
practice of the overseer to harness men and women to the parish cart, and
that the sight of an idiot woman between the shafts was not unknown within
a hundred miles of London.(1*) Men and women were living on roots and sorrel;
in the summer of the year 1830 four harvest labourers were found under a
hedge dead of starvation, and Lord Winchilsea, who mentioned the fact in
the House of Lords, said that this was not an exceptional case. The labourer
was worse fed and worse housed than the prisoner, and he would not have been
able to keep body and soul together if he had not found in poaching or in
thieving or in smuggling the means of eking out his doles and wages.




The feelings of this sinking class, the anger, dismay, and despair with
which it watched the going out of all the warm comfort and light of life,
scarcely stir the surface of history. The upper classes have told us what
the poor ought to have thought of these vicissitudes; religion, philosophy,
and political economy were ready with alleviations and explanations which
seemed singularly helpful and convincing to the rich. The voice of the poor
themselves does not come to our ears. This great population seems to resemble
nature, and to bear all the storms that beat upon it with a strange silence
and resignation. But just as nature has her power of protest in some sudden
upheaval, so this world of men and women -- an underground world as we trace
the distance that its voices have to travel to reach us -- has a volcanic
character of its own, and it is only by some volcanic surprise that it can
speak the language of remonstrance or menace or prayer, or place on record
its consciousness of wrong. This world has no member of Parliament, no press,
it does not make literature or write history; no diary or memoirs have kept
alive for us the thoughts and cares of the passing day. It is for this reason
that the events of the winter of 1830 have so profound an interest, for in
the scenes now to be described we have the mind of this class hidden from
us through all this period of pain, bursting the silence by the only power
at its command. The demands presented to the farmer, the parson, and the
squire this winter tell us as much about the South of England labourer in
1830 as the cahiers tell us of the French peasants in 1789.




We have seen that in 1795 and in 1816 there had been serious disturbances
in different parts of England. These had been suppressed with a firm hand,
but during hard winters sporadic violence and blazing hay-stack showed from
time to time that the fire was still alive under the ashes. The rising of
1830 was far more general and more serious; several counties in the south
of England were in state bordering on insurrection; London was in a panic,
and to some at least of those who had tried to forget the price that had
been paid for the splendour of the rich, the message of red skies and broken
mills and mob diplomacy and villages in arms sounded like the summons that
came to Hernani. The terror of the landowners during those weeks is reflected
in such language as that of the Duke of Buckingham, who talked of the country
being in the hands of the rebels, or of one of the Barings, who said in the
House of Commons that if the disorders went on for three or four days longer
they would be beyond the reach of almost any power to control them. This
chapter of social history has been overshadowed by the riots that followed
the rejection of the Reform Bill. Every one knows about the destruction of
the Mansion House at Bristol, and the burning of Nottingham Castle; few know
of the destruction of the hated workhouses at Selborne and Headley. The riots
at Nottingham and Bristol were a prelude to victory; they were the wild shout
of power. If the rising of 1830 had succeeded, and won back for the labourer
his lost livelihood, the day when the Headley workhouse was thrown down would
be remembered by the poor as the day of the taking of the Bastille. But this
rebellion failed, and the men who led that last struggle for the labourer
passed into the forgetfulness of death and exile.




Kent was the scene of the first disturbances. There had been some alarming
fires in the west of the county during the summer, at Orpington and near
Sevenoaks. In one case the victim had made himself unpopular by pulling down
a cottage built on a common adjoining his property, and turning out the occupants.
How far these fires were connected with later events it is impossible to
say: the authors were never discovered. The first riot occurred at Hardres
on Sunday the 29th of August, when four hundred labourers destroyed some
threshing machines.(2*) Next day two magistrates with a hundred special constables
and some soldiers went to Hardres Court, and no more was heard of the rioters.
The Spectator early next year announced that it had found as a result
of inquiries that the riots began with a dispute between farmers over a threshing
machine, in the course of which a magistrate had expressed strong views against
the introduction of these machines. The labourers proceeded to destroy the
machine, whereupon, to their surprise, the magistrate turned on them and
punished them; in revenge they fired his ricks.' A farmer in another village,
talking of the distress of the labourers, said, "Ah, I should be well
pleased if a plague were to break out among them, and then I should have
their carcases as manure, and right good stuff it would make for my hops."
This speech, which was perhaps only intended as a brutal jest, was reported;
it excited rage instead of mirth, and the stacks of the jester were soon
in a blaze. This act of incendiarism was open and deliberate. The incendiary
is known, and not only has he not been tried, he has not even been charged.'(3*)
Cobbett, on the other hand, maintained that the occasion of the first riots
was the importation of Irish labourers, a practice now some years old, that
might well inflame resentment, at a time when the governing class was continually
contending that the sole cause of distress was excessive population, and
that the true solution was the removal of surplus labourers to the colonies.




Whatever the actual origin of the first outbreak may have been, the destruction
of machinery was to be a prominent feature of this social war. This was not
merely an instinct of violence, there was method and reason in it. Threshing
was one of the few kinds of work left that provided the labourer with a means
of existence above starvation level. A landowner and occupier near Canterbury
wrote to the Kent Herald,(4*) that in his parish, where no machines
had been introduced, there were twenty-three barns. He calculated that in
these barns fifteen men at least would find employment threshing corn up
till May. If we suppose that each man had a wife and three children, this
employment would affect seventy-five persons. 'An industrious man who has
a barn never requires poor relief; he can earn from 15s. to 20s. per week;
he considers it almost as his little freehold, and that in effect it certainly
is.' It is easy to imagine what the sight of one of these hated engines meant
to such a parish; the fifteen men, their wives and families would have found
cold comfort, when they had become submerged in the morass of parish relief,
in the reflection that the new machine extracted for their master's and the
public benefit ten per cent. more corn than they could hammer out by their
free arms. The destruction of threshing machines by bands of men in the district
round Canterbury continued through September practically unchecked. By the
end of the month three of the most active rioters were in custody, and the
magistrates were under the pleasant illusion that there would be voluntary
surrenders. In this they were disappointed, and the disturbances spread over
a wider area, which embraced the dover district. Early in October there was
a riot at Lyminge, at which Sir Edward Knatchbull and the Rev. Mr. Price
succeeded in arresting the ringleaders, and bound over about fifty other
persons. Sir Edward Knatchbull, in writing to the Home Office, stated that
the labourers said 'they would rather do anything than encounter such a winter
as the last.' Mr. Price had to pay the penalty for his active part in this
affair, and his ricks were fired.




Large rewards were promised from the first to informers, these rewards
including a wise offer of establishment elsewhere, but the prize was refused,
and rick-burning spread steadily through a second month. Threatening letters
signed 'Swing,' a mysterious name that for the next few weeks spread terror
over England, were received by many farmers and landowners. The machine-breakers
were reported not to take money or plunder, and to refuse it if offered.
Their programme was extensive and formidable. When the High Sheriff attended
one of their meetings to remonstrate with them, they listened to his homily
with attention, but before dispersing one of them said, 'We will destroy
the cornstacks and threshing machines this year, next year we will have a
turn with the parsons, and the third we will make war upon the statesmen.'(5*)




On 24th October seven prisoners were tried at the East Kent Quarter Sessions,
for machine-breaking. They pleaded guilty, and were let off with a lenient
sentence of three days' imprisonment and an harangue from Sir Edward Knatchbull,
Hitherto all attempts to discover the incendiaries had been baffled, but
on 21st October a zealous magistrate wrote to the Home Office to say that
he had found a clue. He had apprehended a man called Charles Blow, and since
the evidence was not sufficient to warrant committal for arson, he had sent
him to Lewes Jail as a vagrant for three months. 'In company with Blow was
a girl of about ten years of age (of the name of Mary Ann Johnson), but of
intelligence and cunning far beyond her age. It having been stated to me
that she had let fall some expressions which went to show that she could
if she pleased communicate important information, I committed her also for
the same period as Blow.' Now the fires in question had taken place in Kent,
and the vagrants were apprehended in Sussex, consequently the officials of
both counties meddled with the matter and between them spoilt the whole plan,
for Mary Ann and her companion were questioned by so many different persons
that they were put on their guard, and failed to give the information that
was expected. Thus at any rate, Lord Camden, the Lord-Lieutenant, explained
their silence, but he did not despair, 'if the Parties cannot even be convicted
I am apt to think their Committal now will do good, though they may be to
be liberated afterwards, but nothing is so likely to produce alarm and produce
evidence as a Committal for a Capital Crime.' However, as no more is heard
of Mary Ann, it may be assumed that when she had served her three months
she left Lewes Jail a sadder and a wiser child.




Towards the end of October, after something of a lull in the middle of
the month, the situation became more serious. Dissatisfaction, or, as some
called it, 'frightful anarchy,' spread to the Maidstone and Sittingbourne
districts. Sir Robert Peel was anxious to take strong measures. 'I beg to
repeat to you that I will adopt any measure-will incur any expense at the
public charge-that can promote the suppression of the outrages in Kent and
the detection of the offenders.' A troop of cavalry was sent to Sittingbourne.
In the last days of October, mobs scoured the country round Maidstone, demanding
half a crown a day wages and constant employment, forcing all labourers to
join them, and levying money, beer, and provisions. At Stockbury, between
Maidstone and Sittingbourne, one of these mobs paraded a tricolour and a
black flag. On 30th October the Maidstone magistrates went out with a body
of thirty-four soldiers to meet a mob of four hundred people, about four
miles from Maidstone, and laid hold of the three ringleaders. The arrests
were made without difficulty or resistance, from which it looks as if these
bands of men were not very formidable, but the officer in command of the
soldiers laid stress in his confidential report on the dangers of the situation
and the necessity for fieldpieces, and Peel promptly ordered two pieces of
artillery to be dispatched.




At the beginning of November disturbances broke out in Sussex, and the
movement developed into an organised demand for a living wage. By the middle
of the month the labourers were masters over almost all the triangle on the
map, of which Maidstone is the apex and Hythe and Brighton are the bases.
The movement, which was more systematic, thorough, and successful in this
part of the country than anywhere else, is thus described by the special
correspondent of the Times, 17th November: 'Divested of its objectionable
character, as a dangerous precedent, the conduct of the peasantry has been
admirable. There is no ground for concluding that there has been any extensive
concert amongst them. Each parish, generally speaking, has risen per se;
in many places their proceedings have been managed with astonishing coolness
and regularity; there has been little of the ordinary effervescence displayed
on similar occasions. The farmers have notice to meet the men: a deputation
of two or more of the latter produce a written statement, well drawn up,
which the farmers are required to sign; the spokesman, sometimes a dissenting
or Methodist teacher, fulfils his office with great propriety and temper.
Where disorder has occurred, it has arisen from dislike to some obnoxious
clergyman, or tithe man, or assistant overseer, who has been trundled out
of the parish in a wheelbarrow, or drawn in triumph in a load of ballast
by a dozen old women. The farmers universally agreed to the demands they
made: that is, they were not mad enough to refuse requests which they could
not demonstrate to be unreasonable in themselves, and which were urged by
three hundred or four hundred men after a barn or two had been fired, and
each farmer had an incendiary letter addressed to him in his pocket.'




There was another development of the movement which is not noted in this
account by the correspondent of the Times. It often happened that the farmers
would agree to pay the wages demanded by the labourers, but would add that
they could not continue to pay those wages unless rents and tithes were reduced.
The labourers generally took the hint and turned their attention to tithes
and rents, particularly to tithes. Their usual procedure was to go in a body
to the rector, often accompanied by the farmers, and demand an abatement
of tithes, or else to attend the tithe audit and put some not unwelcome pressure
upon the farmers to prevent them from paying.




It must not be supposed that the agitation for a living wage was confined
to the triangular district named above, though there it took a more systematic
shape. Among the Home Office Papers is a very interesting letter from Mr.
D. Bishop, a London police officer, written from deal on 11th November, describing
the state of things in that neighbourhood: ' I have gone to the different
Pot Houses in the Villages, disguised among the Labourers, of an evening
and all their talk is about the wages, some give 1s. 8d. per day some 2s.
some 2s. 3d.... all they say they want is 2s. 6d. per day and then they say
they shall be comfortable. I have every reason to believe the Farmers will
give the 2s. 6d. per day after a bit... they are going to have a meeting
and I think it will stop all outrages.'




The disturbances in Sussex began with a fire on 3rd November at an overseer's
in Battle. The explanation suggested by the authorities was that the paupers
had been 'excited by a lecture lately given here publicly by a person named
Cobbett.' Next night there was another fire at Battle; but it was at Brede,
a village near Rye, that open hostilities began. As the rising at Brede set
the fashion for the district, it is perhaps worth while to describe it in
some detail.(6*)




For a long time the poor of Brede had smarted under the insults of Mr.
Abel, the assistant overseer, who, among other innovations, had introduced
one of the hated parish carts, and the labourers were determined to have
a reckoning with him. After some preliminary discussions on the previous
day, the labourers held a meeting on 5th November, and deputed four men to
negotiate with the farmers. At the conference which resulted, the following
resolutions, drawn up by the labourers, were signed by both parties:(7*)
--




'Nov. 5, 1830. At a meeting held this day at the Red Lion, of the farmers,
to meet the poor labourers who delegated david Noakes Senior, Thomas Henley,
Joseph Bryant and Th. Noakes, to meet the gentlemen this day to discuss the
present distress of the poor.... Resolution 1. The gentlemen agree to give
to every able-bodied labourer with wife and two children 2s. 3d. per day,
from this day to the 1st of March next, and from the 1st of March to the
1st of Oct. 2s. 6d. per day, and to have ls. 6d. per week with three children,
and so on according to their family. Resolution 2. The poor are determined
to take the present overseer, Mr. Abell, out of the parish to any adjoining
parish and to use him with civility.'




The meeting over, the labourers went to Mr. Abel's house with their wives
and children and some of the farmers, and placed the parish cart at his door.
After some hammering at the gates, Mr. Abel was persuaded to come out and
get into the cart. He was then solemnly drawn along by women and children,
accompanied by a crowd of five hundred, to the place of his choice, Vine
Hall, near Robertsbridge, on the turnpike road, where he was deposited with
all due solemnity. Mr. Abel made his way to the nearest magistrate to lodge
his complaint, while the people of the parish returned home and were regaled
with beer by the farmers: 'and Mr. Coleman... he gave every one of us half
a pint of Beer, women and men, and Mr. Reed of Brede High gave us a Barrel
because we had done such a great thing in the Parish as to carry that man
away, and Mr. Coleman said he never was better pleased in his life than with
the day's work which had been done.'(8*)




The parish rid of Mr. Abel, the next reform in the new era was to be the
reduction of tithes, and here the farmers needed the help of the labourers.
What happened is best told in the words of one of the chief actors. He describes
how, a little before the tithe audit, his employer came to him when he was
working in the fields and suggested that the labourers should see if they
could 'get a little of the tithe off;' they were only to show themselves
and not to take any violent action. Other farmers made the same suggestions
to their labourers. 'We went to the tithe audit and Mr. Hele came out and
spoke to us a good while and I and david Noakes and Thomas Noakes and Thomas
Henley answered him begging as well as we could for him to throw something
off for us and our poor Children and to set up a School for them and Mr.
Hele said he would see what he could do.




'Mr. Coleman afterwards came out and said Mr. Hele had satisfied them
all well and then Mr. Hele came out and we made our obedience to him and
he to us, and we gave him three cheers and went and set the Bells ringing
and were all as pleased as could be at what we had done.'




The success of the Brede rising had an immediate effect on the neighbourhood,
and every parish round prepared to deport its obnoxious overseer and start
a new life on better wages. Burwash, Ticehurst, Mayfield, Heathfield, Warbleton
and Ninfield were among the parishes that adopted the Brede programme. Sometimes
the assistant overseer thought it wise to decamp before the cart was at his
door. Sometimes the mob was aggressive in its manners. 'A very considerable
Mob,' wrote Sir Godfrey Webster from Battle Abbey on 9th November, 'to the
amount of nearly 500, having their Parish Officer in custody drawn in a dung
Cart, attempted to enter this town at eleven o'clock this Morning.' The attempt
was unsuccessful, and twenty of the rioters were arrested. The writer of
this letter took an active part throughout the disturbances. In this emergency
he seems to have displayed great zeal and energy. A second letter of his
on 12th November gives a good description of the state of affairs round Mayfield.
'The Collector of Lord Carrington's Tithes had been driven out of the Parish
and the same Proceeding was intended to be adopted towards the Parish Officer
who fled the place, it had been intended by the Rioters to have taken by
Force this Morning as many Waggons as possible (forcibly) carried off the
Tithe Corn and distributed it amongst themselves in case of interruption
they were resolved to burn it. One of the most violent and dangerous papers
I have yet seen (a copy of which I enclose) was carried round the 3 adjoining
Parishes and unfortunately was assented to by too many Occupiers of Land.
I arrived in Time to prevent its circulation at Mayfield a small Town tho'
populous parish 3000. By apprehending the Bearer of the Paper who acted as
Chief of the Party and instantly in presence of a large Mob committing him
for Trial I succeeded in repressing the tumultuous action then going on,
and by subsequently calling together the Occupiers of Land, and afterwards
the Mob (composed wholly of Agricultural Labourers) I had the satisfaction
of mediating an arrangement between them perfectly to the content of each
party, and on my leaving Mayfield this afternoon tranquillity was perfectly
restored at that Place.' The violent and dangerous paper enclosed ran thus:
'Now gentlemen this is what we intend to have for a married man to have 2s.
and 3d. per day and all over two children 1s. 6d. per head a week and if
a Man has got any boys or girls over age for to have employ that they may
live by there Labour and likewise all single men to have 1s. 9d. a day per
head and we intend to have the rents lowered likewise and this is what we
intend to have before we leave the place and if ther is no alteration we
shall proceed further about it. For we are all at one and we will keep to
each other.'




At Ringmer in Sussex the proceedings were marked by moderation and order.
Lord Gage, the principal landowner of the neighbourhood, knowing that disturbances
were imminent, met the labourers by appointment on the village green. There
were about one hundred and fifty persons present. By this time magistrates
in many places had taken to arresting arbitrarily the ringleaders of the
men, and hence when Lord Gage, who probably had no such intention, asked
for the leader or captain nobody came forward, but a letter was thrown into
the ring with a general shout. The letter which Lord Gage picked up and took
to the Vestry for consideration read as follows: 'We the labourers of Ringmer
and surrounding villages, having for a long period suffered the greatest
privations and endured the most debasing treatment with the greatest resignation
and forbearance, in the hope that time and circumstances would bring about
an amelioration of our condition, till, worn out by hope deferred and disappointed
in our fond expectations, we have taken this method of assembling ourselves
in one general body, for the purpose of making known our grievances, and
in a peaceable, quiet, and orderly manner, to ask redress; and we would rather
appeal to the good sense of the magistracy, instead of inflaming the passions
of our fellow labourers, and ask those gentlemen who have done us the favour
of meeting us this day whether 7d. a day is sufficient for a working man,
hale and hearty, to keep up the strength necessary to the execution of the
labour he has to do? We ask also, is 9s. a week sufficient for a married
man with a family, to provide the common necessaries of life? Have we no
reason to complain that we have been obliged for so long a period to go to
our daily toil with only potatoes in our satchels, and the only beverage
to assuage our thirst the cold spring; and on retiring to our cottages to
be welcomed by the meagre and half-famished offspring of our toilworn bodies?
All we ask, then, is that our wages may be advanced to such a degree as will
enable us to provide for ourselves and families without being driven to the
overseer, who, by the bye, is a stranger amongst us, and as in most instances
where permanent overseers are appointed, are men callous to the ties of nature,
lost to every feeling of humanity, and deaf to the voice of reason. We say
we want wages sufficient to support us, without being driven to the overseer
to experience his petty tyranny and dictation. We therefore ask for married
men 2s. 3d. per day to the first of March, and from that period to the first
of October 2s. 6d. a day: for single men ls. 9d. a day to the first of March,
and 2s. from that time to the first of October. We also request that the
permanent overseers of the neighbouring parishes may be directly discharged,
particularly Finch, the governor of Ringmer poorhouse and overseer of the
parish, that in case we are obliged, through misfortune or affliction, to
seek parochial relief, we may apply to one of our neighboring farmers or
tradesmen, who would naturally feel some sympathy for our situation, and
who would be much better acquainted with our characters and claims. This
is what we ask at your hands -- this is what we expect, and we sincerely
trust this is what we shall not be under the painful necessity of demanding.'




While the Vestry deliberated the labourers remained quietly in the yard
of the poorhouse. One of them, a veteran from the Peninsular War who had
lost a limb, contrasted his situation on 9d. a day with that of the Duke
of Wellington whose 'skin was whole' and whose pension was £60,000 a
year. After they had waited some time, they were informed that their demands
were granted, and they dispersed to their homes with huzzas and tears of
joy, and as a sign of the new and auspicious era they broke up the parish
grindstone, a memory of the evil past.(9*)




An important feature of the proceedings in Kent and Sussex was the sympathy
of other classes with the demands of the labourers. The success of the movement
in Kent and Sussex, and especially of the rising that began at Brede, was
due partly, no doubt, to the fact that smuggling was still a common practice
in those counties, and that the agricultural labourers thus found their natural
leaders among men who had learnt audacity, resourcefulness, and a habit of
common action in that school of danger. But the movement could not have made
such headway without any serious attempt to suppress it if the other classes
had been hostile. There was a general sense that the risings were due to
the neglect of the Government. Mr. Hodges, one of the Members for Kent, declared
in the Souse of Commons on 10th December that if the duke of Wellington had
attended to a petition received from the entire Grand Jury of Kent there
would have been no disturbances.(10*)




The same spirit is displayed in a letter written by a magistrate at Battle,
named Collingwood. 'I have seen three or four of our parochial insurrections,
and been with the People for hours alone and discussing their matters with
them which they do with a temper and respectful behaviour and an intelligence
which must interest everyone in their favor. The poor in the Parishes in
the South of England, and in Sussex and Kent greatly, have been ground to
the dust in many instances by the Poor Laws. Instead of happy peasants they
are made miserable and sour tempered paupers. Every Parish has its own peculiar
system, directed more strictly, and executed with more or less severity or
harshness. A principal tradesman in Salehurst (Sussex) in one part of which,
Robertsbridge, we had our row the other night, said to me these words "
You attended our meeting the other day and voted with me against the two
principal Rate payers in this parish, two Millers, paying the people in two
gallons of bad flour instead of money. You heard how saucy they were to their
betters, can you wonder if they are more violent to their inferiors? They
never call a man Tom, Dick etc. but you d----d rascal etc., at every word,
and force them to take their flour. Should you wonder that they are dissatisfied?
"These words he used to me a week before our Robertsbridge Row. Each
of these Parochial Rows differs in character as the man whom they select
as leader differs in impudence or courage or audacity or whatever you may
call it. If they are opposed at the moment, their resistance shows itself
in more or less violent outrages; personally I witnessed but one, that of
Robertsbridge putting Mr. Johnson into the cart, and that was half an accident.
I was a stranger to them, went among them and was told by hundreds after
that most unjustifiable assault that I was safe among them as in my bed,
and I never thought otherwise. One or two desperate characters, and such
there are, may at any moment make the contest of Parish A differ from that
of Parish B, but their spirit, as far as regards loyalty and love for the
King and Laws, is, I believe, on my conscience, sound. I feel convinced that
all the cavalry in the world, if sent into Sussex, and all the spirited acts
of Sir Godfrey Webster, who, however, is invaluable here will (not?) stop
this spirit from running through Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somersetshire, where
Mr. Hobhouse, your predecessor, told me the other day that they have got
the wages for single men down to 6s. per week (on which they cannot live)
through many other counties. In a week you will have Demands for cavalry
from Hampshire under the same feeling of alarm as I and all here entertained:
the next week from Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and all the counties in which
the poor Rates have been raised for the payment of the poor up to Essex and
the very neighbourhood of London, where Mr. Geo. Palmer, a magistrate, told
me lately that the poor single man is got down to 6s. I shall be over to-morrow
probably at Benenden where they are resolved not to let either Mr. Hodges's
taxes, the tithes or the King's taxes be paid. So I hear, and so I dare say
two or three carter boys may have said. I shall go to-morrow and if I see
occasion will arrest some man, and break his head with my staff. But do you
suppose that that (though a show of vigor is not without avail) will prevent
Somersetshire men from crying out, when the train has got to them, we will
not live on 6s. per week, for living it is not, but a long starving, and
we will have tithes and taxes, and I know not what else done away with. The
only way to stop them is to run before the evil. Let the Hampshire Magistrates
and Vestries raise the wages before the Row gets to their County, and you
will stop the thing from spreading, otherwise you will not, I am satisfied.
In saying all this, I know that I differ with many able and excellent Magistrates,
and my opinion may be wrong, but I state it to you.'




It is not surprising that magistrates holding these opinions acted rather
less vigorously than the central Government wished, and that Lord Camden's
appeals to them not to let their political feelings and 'fanciful Crotchets'(11*)
interfere with their activity were unsuccessful. But even had all the magistrates
been united and eager to crush the risings they could not act without support
from classes that were reluctant to give it. The first thought of the big
landed proprietors was to reestablish the yeomanry, but they found an unexpected
obstacle in the temper of the farmers. The High Sheriff, after consultation
with the Home Secretary, convened a meeting for this purpose at Canterbury
on 1st November, but proceedings took an unexpected turn, the farmers recommending
as a preferable alternative that public salaries should be reduced, and the
meeting adjourned without result. There were similar surprises at other meetings
summoned with this object, and landlords who expected to find the farmers
rallying to their support were met with awkward resolutions calling for reductions
in rent and tithes. The Kent Herald went so far as to say that only
the dependents of great landowners will join the yeomanry, 'this most unpopular
corps.' The magistrates found it equally difficult to enlist special constables,
the farmers and tradesmen definitely refusing to act in this capacity at
Maidstone, at Cranbrook, at Tonbridge, and at Tonbridge Wells,(12*) as well
as in the smaller villages. The chairman of the Battle magistrates wrote
to the Home Office to say that he intended to reduce his rents in the hope
that the farmers would then consent to serve.




Even the Coast Blockade Service was not considered trustworthy. 'It is
the last force,' wrote one magistrate, 'I should resort to, on account of
the feeling which exists between them and the people hereabouts.'(13*) In
the absence of local help, the magistrates had to rely on military aid to
quell a mob, or to execute a warrant. Demands for troops from different quarters
were incessant, and sometimes querulous. 'If you cannot send a military force,'
wrote one indignant country gentleman from Heathfield on 14th November, 'for
God's sake, say so, without delay, in order that we may remove our families
to a place of safety from a district which want of support renders us totally
unable longer to defend.'(14*) Troops were despatched to Cranbrook, but when
the Battle magistrates sent thither for help they were told to their great
annoyance that no soldiers could be spared. The Government indeed found it
impossible to supply enough troops. 'My dear Lord Liverpool,' wrote Sir Robert
Peel on 15th November, 'since I last saw you I have made arrangements for
sending every disposable cavalry soldier into Kent and the east part of Sussex.
General Dalbiac will take the command. He will be at Battel to-day to confer
with the Magistracy and to attempt to establish some effectual plan of operations
against the rioters.'




The 7th Dragoon Guards at Canterbury were to provide for East Kent; the
2nd Dragoon Guards at Maidstone were to provide for Mid-kent; and the 5th
Dragoon Guards at Tunbridge Wells for the whole of East Sussex. Sir Robert
Peel meanwhile thought that the magistrates should themselves play a more
active part, and he continually expressed the hope that they would 'meet
and concert some effectual mode of resisting the illegal demands.'(15*) He
deprecated strongly the action of certain magistrates in yielding to the
mobs. Mr. Collingwood, who has been mentioned already, received a severe
reproof for his behaviour at Goudhurst, where he had adopted a conciliatory
policy and let off the rioters on their own recognisances. 'We did not think
the case a very strong one,' he wrote on 18th November, 'or see any very
urgent necessity for the apprehension of Eaves, nor after Captain King's
statement that he had not felt a blow, could we consider the assault of a
magistrate proved. The whole parish unanimously begged them off, and said
that their being discharged on their own recognisances would probably contribute
to the peace of the parish.'




The same weakness, or sympathy, was displayed by magistrates in the western
part of Sussex, where the rising spread after the middle of November. In
the Arundel district the magistrates anticipated disturbances by holding
a meeting of the inhabitants to fix the scale of wages. The wages agreed
on were '2s. a day wet and dry and 1s. 6d. a week for every child (above
2 ) under 4,' during the winter: from Lady day to Michaelmas 14s. a week,
wet and dry, with the same allowance for children. A scale was also drawn
up for lads and young men. The mobs were demanding 14s. a week all the year
round, but they seem to have acquiesced in the Arundel scale, and to have
given no further trouble. At Horsham, the labourers adopted more violent
measures and met with almost universal sympathy. There was a strong Radical
party in that town, and one magistrate described it later as 'a hot Bed of
Sedition.' Attempts were made, without success, to show that the Radicals
were at the bottom of the disturbances. The district round Horsham was in
an agitated state. Among others who received threatening letters was Sir
Timothy Shelley of Field Place. The letter was couched in the general spirit
of Shelley's song to the men of England: --




<poem>

'Men of England, wherefore plough,

For the lords who lay ye low,'

</poem>




which his father may, or may not, have read. The writer urged him, 'if
you wish to escape the impending danger in this world and in that which is
to come,' to go round to the miserable beings from whom he exacted tithes,
'and enquire and hear from there own lips what disstres there in.' Like many
of these letters, it contained at the end a rough picture of a knife, with
'Beware of the fatel daggar' inscribed on it.




In Horsham itself the mob, composed of from seven hundred to a thousand
persons, summoned a vestry meeting in the church. Mr. Sanctuary, the High
Sheriff for Sussex, described the episode in a letter to the Home Office
on the same day (18th November). The labourers, he said, demanded 2s. 6d.
a day, and the lowering of rents and tithes: 'all these complaints were attended
to -- thought reasonable and complied with,' and the meeting dispersed quietly.
Anticipating, it may be, some censure, he added, 'I should have found it
quite impossible to have prevailed upon any person to serve as special constable
-- most of the tradespeople and many of the farmers considering the demands
of the people but just (and) equitable -- indeed many of them advocated (them)
a doctor spoke about the taxes -- but no one backed him -- that was not the
object of the meeting.' A lady living at Horsham wrote a more vivid account
of the day's work. She described how the mob made everybody come to the church.
Mr. Simpson, the vicar, went without more ado, but Mr. Hurst, senior, owner
of the great tithes, held out till the mob seized a chariot from the King's
Arms and dragged it to his door. Whilst the chariot was being brought he
slipped out, and entered the church with his two sons. All the gentlemen
stood up at the altar, while the farmers encouraged the labourers in the
body of the church. 'Mr. Hurst held out so long that it was feared blood
would be shed, the doors were shut till the demands were granted, no lights
were allowed, the Iron railing that surrounds the Monuments torn up, and
the sacred boundary between the chancel and Altar overleapt before he would
yield.' Mr. Hurst himself wrote to the Home Office to say that it was only
the promise to reduce rents and tithes that had prevented serious riots,
but he met with little sympathy at headquarters. 'I cannot concur,' wrote
Sir Robert Peel, 'in the opinion of Mr. Hurst that it was expedient or necessary
for the Vestry to yield to the demands of the Mob. In every case that I have
seen, in which the mob has been firmly and temperately resisted, they have
given way without resorting to personal violence.' A neighbouring magistrate,
who shared Sir Robert Peel's opinion about the affair, went to Horsham a
day or two later to swear in special constables. He found that out of sixty-three
'respectable householders' four only would take the oath. Meanwhile the difficulties
of prodding troops increased with the area of disturbances. 'I have requested
that every effort may be made to reinforce the troops in the western part
of Sussex,' wrote Sir Robert Peel to a Horsham magistrate on 18th November,
'and you may judge of the difficulty of doing so, when I mention to you that
the most expeditious mode of effecting this is to bring from Dorchester the
only cavalry force that is in the West of England. This, however, shall be
done, and 100 men (infantry) shall be brought from the Garrison of Portsmouth.'




Until the middle of November the rising was confined to Kent, Sussex and
parts of Surrey, with occasional fires and threatening letters in neighbouring
counties. After that time the disturbances became more serious, spreading
not only to the West of Sussex, but to Berkshire, Hampshire, and Wiltshire.
On 22nd November the Duke of Buckingham wrote from Adington in Hampshire
to the duke of Wellington: 'Nothing can be worse than the state of this neighbourhood.
I may say that this part of the country is wholly in the hands of the rebels...
1500 rioters are to assemble to-morrow morning, and will attack any farmhouses
where there are threshing machines. They go about levying contributions on
every gentleman's house. There are very few magistrates; and what there are
are completely cowed. In short, something decisive must instantly be done.'
The risings in these counties differed in some respects from the rising in
Kent and Sussex. The disturbances were not so much like the firing of a train
of discontent, they were rather a sudden and spontaneous explosion. They
lasted only about a week, and were well described in a report of Colonel
Brotherton, one of the two military experts sent by Lord Melbourne to Wiltshire
to advise the magistrates. He wrote on 28th November: 'The insurrectionary
movement seems to be directed by no plan or system, but merely actuated by
the spontaneous feeling of the peasantry and quite at random.' The labourers
went about in larger numbers, combining with the destruction of threshing
machines and the demand for higher wages a claim for 'satisfaction' as they
called it in the form of ready money. It was their practice to charge £2
for breaking a threshing machine, but in some cases the mobs were satisfied
with a few coppers. The demand for ready money was not a new feature, for
many correspondents of the Home Office note in their letters that the mobs
levied money in Kent and Sussex, but hitherto this 'sturdy begging,' as Cobbett
called it, had been regarded by the magistrates as unimportant. The wages
demanded in these counties were 2s. a day, whereas the demands in Kent and
usually in Sussex had been for 2s. 6d. or 2s. 3d. Wages had fallen to a lower
level in Hampshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. The current rate in Wiltshire
was 7s., and Colonel Mair, the second officer sent down by the Home Office,
reported that wages were sometimes as low as 6s. It is therefore not surprising
to learn that in two parishes the labourers instead of asking for 2s. a day,
asked only for 8s. or 9s. a week. In Berkshire wages varied from 7s. to 9s.,
and in Hampshire the usual rate seems to have been 8s.




The rising in Hampshire was marked by a considerable destruction of property.
At Fordingbridge, the mob under the leadership of a man called Cooper, broke
up the machinery both at a sacking manufactory and at a manufactory of threshing
machines. Cooper was soon clothed in innumerable legends: he was a gipsy,
a mysterious gentleman, possibly the renowned 'Swing' himself. At the Fordingbridge
riots he rode on horseback and assumed the title of Captain Hunt. His followers
addressed him bareheaded. In point of fact he was an agricultural labourer
of good character, a native of East Grimstead in Wilts, who had served in
the artillery in the French War. Some two months before the riots his wife
had robbed him, and then eloped with a paramour. This unhinged his self-control;
he gave himself up to drink and despair, and tried to forget his misery in
reckless rioting. Near Andover again a foundry was destroyed by a mob, after
the ringleader, Gilmore, had entered the justices' room at Andover, where
the justices were sitting, and treated with them on behalf of the mob. Gilmore
also was a labourer; he was twenty-five years old and had been a soldier.




The most interesting event in the Hampshire rising was the destruction
of the workhouses at Selborne and Headley. Little is reported of the demolition
of the poorhouse at Selborne. The indictment of the persons accused of taking
part in it fell through on technical grounds, and as the defendants were
also the persons charged with destroying the Headley workhouse, the prosecution
in the Selborne case was abandoned. The mob first went to Mr. Cobbold, Vicar
of Selborne, and demanded that he should reduce his tithes, telling him with
some bluntness 'we must have a touch of your tithes: we think £300 a
year quite enough for you... £4 a week is quite enough.' Mr. Cobbold
was thoroughly alarmed, and consented to sign a paper promising to reduce
his tithes, which amounted to something over £600, by half that sum.
The mob were accompanied by a good many farmers who had agreed to raise wages
if the labourers would undertake to obtain a reduction of tithes, and these
farmers signed the paper also. After Mr. Cobbold's surrender the mob went
on to the workhouse at Headley, which served the parishes of Bramshott, Headley
and Kingsley. Their leader was a certain Robert Holdaway, a wheelwright,
who had been for a short time a publican. He was a widower, with eight small
children, described by the witnesses at his trial as a man of excellent character,
quiet, industrious, and inoffensive. The master of the workhouse greeted
Holdaway with 'What, Holdy, are you here?' 'Yes, but I mean you no harm nor
your wife nor your goods: so get them out as soon as you can, for the house
must come down.' The master warned him that there were old people and sick
children in the house. Holdaway promised that they should be protected, asked
where they were, and said the window would be marked. What followed is described
in the evidence given by the master of the workhouse: 'There was not a room
left entire, except that in which the sick children were. These were removed
into the yard on two beds, and covered over, and kept from harm all the time.
This was done by the mob. They were left there because there was no room
for them in the sick ward. The sick ward was full of infirm old paupers.
It was not touched, but of all the rest of the place not a room was left
entire.' The farmers looked on whilst the destruction proceeded, and one
at least of the labourers in the mob declared afterwards that his master
had forced him to join.




In Wiltshire also the destruction of property was not confined to threshing
machines. At Wilton, the mob, under the leadership of a certain John Jennings,
aged eighteen,(16*) who declared that he 'was going to break the machinery
to make more work for the poor people,' did £500 worth of damage in
a woollen mill. Another cloth factory at Quidhampton was also injured; in
this affair an active part was taken by a boy even younger than Jennings,
John Ford, who was only seventeen years old.(17*)




The riot which attracted most attention of all the disturbances in Wiltshire
took place at Pyt House, the seat of Mr. John Benett, M.P. for the county.
Mr. Benett was a well-known local figure, and had given evidence before several
Committees on Poor Laws. The depth of his sympathy with the labourers may
be gauged by the threat that he uttered before the Committee of 1817 to pull
down his cottages if Parliament should make length of residence a legal method
of gaining a settlement. Some member of the Committee suggested that if there
were no cottages there would be no labourers, but Mr. Benett replied cheerfully
enough that it did not matter to a labourer how far he walked to his work:
'I have many labourers coming three miles to my farm every morning during
the winter, (the hours were six to six) 'and they are the most punctual persons
we have.' At the time he gave this evidence, he stated that about three-quarters
of the labouring population in his parish of Tisbury received relief from
the poor rates in aid of wages, and he declared that it was useless to let
them small parcels of land. The condition of the poor had not improved in
Mr. Benett's parish between 1817 and 1830, and Lord Arundel, who lived in
it, described it as 'a Parish in which the Poor have been more oppressed
and are in greater misery as a whole than any Parish in the Kingdom.'(18*)
It is not surprising that when the news of what had been achieved in Kent
and Sussex spread west to Wiltshire, the labourers of Tisbury rose to demand
2s. a day, and to destroy the threshing machines. A mob of five hundred persons
collected, and their first act was to destroy a threshing machine, with the
sanction of the owner, Mr. Turner, who sat by on horseback, watching them.
They afterwards proceeded to the Pyt House estate. Mr. Benett met them, parleyed
and rode with them for some way; they behaved politely but firmly, telling
him their intentions. One incident throws a light on the minds of the actors
in these scenes. 'I then,' said Mr. Benett afterwards, 'pointed out to them
that they could not trust each other, for any man, I said, by informing against
ten of you will obtain at once £500.' It was an adroit speech, but as
it happened the Wiltshire labourers, half starved, degraded and brutalised,
as they might be, had a different standard of honour from that imagined by
this magistrate and member of Parliament, and the devilish temptation he
set before them was rejected. The mob destroyed various threshing machines
on Mr. Benett's farms, and refused to disperse; at last, after a good deal
of sharp language from Mr. Benett, they threw stones at him. At the same
time a troop of yeomanry from Hindon came up and received orders to fire
blank cartridges above the heads of the mob. This only produced laughter;
the yeomanry then began to charge; the mob took shelter in the plantations
round Pyt House and stoned the yeomanry, who replied by a fierce onslaught,
shooting one man dead on the spot,(19*) wounding six by cutting off fingers
and opening skulls, and taking a great number of prisoners. At the inquest
at Tisbury on the man John Harding, who was killed, the jury returned a verdict
of justifiable homicide, and the coroner refused to grant a warrant for burial,
saying that the man's action was equivalent to felo de se. Hunt stated in
the House of Commons that the foreman of the jury was the father of one of
the yeomen.




We have seen that in these counties the magistrates took a very grave
view of the crime of levying money from householders. This was often done
by casual bands of men and boys, who had little connection with the organised
rising. An examination of the cases described before the Special Commissions
gives the impression that in point of fact there was very little danger to
person or property. A farmer's wife at Aston Tirrold in Berkshire described
her own experience to the Abingdon Special Commission. A mob came to her
house and demanded beer. Her husband was out and she went to the door. 'Bennett
was spokesman. He said "Now a little of your beer if you please."
I answered "Not a drop." He asked "Why?" and I said "I
cannot give beer to encourage riot." Bennett said "Why you don't
call this rioting do you?" I said "I don't know what you call it,
but it is a number of people assembled together to alarm others: but don't
think I'm afraid or daunted at it." Bennett said " Suppose your
premises should be set on fire?" I said "Then I certainly should
be alarmed but I don't suppose either of you intends doing that." Bennett
said "No, we do not intend any such thing, I don't wish to alarm you
and we are not come with the intention of mischief."' The result of
the dialogue was that Bennett and his party went home without beer and without
giving trouble.




It was natural that when mob-begging of this kind became fashionable,
unpopular individuals should be singled out for rough and threatening visits.
Sometimes the assistant overseers were the objects of special hatred, sometimes
the parson. It is worth while to give the facts of a case at St. Mary Bourne
in Hampshire, because stress was laid upon it in the subsequent prosecutions
as an instance of extraordinary violence. The clergyman, Mr. Easton, was
not a favourite in his parish, and he preached what the poor regarded as
a harsh and a hostile sermon. When the parish rose, a mob of two hundred
forced their way into the vicarage and demanded money, some of them repeating,
'Money or blood.' Mrs. Easton, who was rather an invalid, Miss Lucy Easton,
and Master Easton were downstairs, and Mrs. Easton was so much alarmed that
she sent Lucy upstairs to fetch 10s. Meanwhile Mr. Easton had come down,
and was listening to some extremely unsympathetic criticisms of his performances
in the pulpit. 'Damn you,' said Daniel Simms,(20*) 'where will your text
be next Sunday?' William Simms was equally blunt and uncompromising. Meanwhile
Lucy had brought down the half-sovereign, and Mrs. Easton gave it to William
Simms,(21*) who thereupon cried 'All out,' and the mob left the Eastons at
peace.




One representative of the Church was distinguished from most of the country
gentlemen and clergymen of the time by his treatment of one of these wandering
mobs. Cobbett's letter to the Hampshire parsons, published in the Political
Register, 15th January 1831, contains an account of the conduct of Bishop
Sumner, the Bishop of Winchester. 'I have, at last, found a Bishop of the
Law Church to praise. The facts are these: the Bishop, in coming from Winchester
to his palace at Farnham, was met about a mile before he got to the latter
place, by a band of sturdy beggars, whom some call robbers. They stopped
his carriage, and asked for some money, which he gave them. But he did not
prosecute them: he had not a man of them called to account for his conduct,
but, the next day, set twenty-four labourers to constant work, opened his
Castle to the distressed of all ages, and supplied all with food and other
necessaries who stood in need of them. This was becoming a Christian teacher.'
Perhaps the bishop remembered the lines from Dryden's Tales from Chaucer,
describing the spirit in which the good parson regarded the poor:




'Who, should they steal for want of his relief,

He judged himself accomplice with the thief.'




There was an exhibition of free speaking at Hungerford, where the magistrates
sat in the Town Hall to receive deputations from various mobs, in connection
with the demand for higher wages. The magistrates had made their peace with
the Hungerford mob, when a deputation from the Kintbury mob arrived, led
by William Oakley, a young carpenter of twenty-five. Oakley addressed the
magistrates in language which they had never heard before in their lives
and were never likely to hear again. 'You have not such d d flats to deal
with now, as you had before; we will have 2s. a day till Lady day, and 2s.
6d. afterwards for labourers and 3s. 6d. for tradesmen. And as we are here
we will have £5 before we leave the place or we will smash it.... You
gentlemen have been living long enough on the good things, now is our time
and we will have them. You gentlemen would not speak to us now, only you
are afraid and intimidated.' The magistrates acceded to the demands of the
Kintbury mob and also gave them the £5, after which they gave the Hungerford
mob £5, because they had behaved well, and it would be unjust to treat
them worse than their Kintbury neighbours. Mr. Page, Deputy-Lieutenant for
Berks, sent Lord Melbourne some tales about this same Kintbury mob, which
was described by Mr. Pearse, M.P., as a set of 'desperate savages.' 'I beg
to add some anecdotes of the mob yesterday to illustrate the nature of its
component parts. They took £2 from Mr. Cherry a magistrate and broke
his Machine. Afterwards another party came and demanded One Pound when the
two parties had again formed into one, they passed by Mr. Cherry's door and
said they had taken one pound too much, which they offered to return to him
which it is said he refused-they had before understood that Mrs. Cherry was
unwell and therefore came only in small parties. A poor woman passed them
selling rabbitts, some few of the mob took some by force, the ringleader
ordered them to be restored. At a farmer's where they had been regaled with
bread cheese and beer one of them stole an umbrella: the ringleader hearing
of it, as they were passing the canal threw him into it and gave him a good
ducking.'(22*)




In the early days of the rising in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire,
there was a good deal of sympathy with the labourers. The farmers in many
cases made no objection to the destruction of their threshing machines. One
gentleman of Market Lavington went so far as to say that 'nearly all the
Wiltshire Farmers were willing to destroy or set aside their machines.' 'My
Lord,' wrote Mr. Williams, J.P., from Marlborough, 'you will perhaps be surprised
to hear that the greatest number of the threshing machines destroyed have
been put out for the Purpose by the Owners themselves.' The duke of Buckingham
complained that in the district round Avington 'the farmers have not the
Spirit and in some instances not the Wish to put down' disturbances.(23*)
At a meeting in Winchester, convened by the Mayor to preserve the peace (reported
in the Hampshire Chronicle of 22nd November), Dr. Newbolt, a clergyman and
magistrate, described his own dealings with one of the mobs. The mob said
they wanted 12s. a week wages: this he said was a reasonable demand. He acted
as mediator between the labourers and farmers, and as a result of his efforts
the farmers agreed to these terms, and the labourers returned to work, abandoning
their project of a descent on Winchester. The Mayor of Winchester also declared
that the wages demanded were not unreasonable, and he laid stress on the
fact that the object of the meeting was not to appoint special constables
to come into conflict with the people, but merely to preserve the peace.
Next week Dr. Newbolt put an advertisement into the Hampshire Chronicle,
acknowledging the vote of thanks that had been passed to him, and reaffirming
his belief that conciliation was the right policy.(24*) At Overton, in Hampshire,
Henry Hunt acted as mediator between the farmers and a hungry and menacing
mob. Such was the fear of the farmers that they gave him unlimited power
to make promises on their behalf: he promised the labourers that their wages
should be raised from 9s. to 12s., with house rent in addition, and they
dispersed in delight.




Fortune had so far smiled upon the rising, and there was some hope of
success. If the spirit that animated the farmers, and in Kent many of the
landowners, had lasted, the winter of 1830 might have ended in an improvement
of wages and a reduction of rents and tithes throughout the south of England.
In places where the decline of the labourer had been watched for years without
pity or dismay, magistrates were now calling meetings to consider his circumstances,
and the Home Office Papers show that some, at any rate, of the country gentlemen
were aware of the desperate condition of the poor. Unhappily the day of conciliatory
measures was a brief one. Two facts frightened the upper classes into brutality:
one was the spread of the rising, the other the scarcity of troops.(25*)
As the movement spread, the alarm of the authorities inspired a different
policy, and even those landowners who recognised that the labourers were
miserable, thought that they were in the presence of a rising that would
sweep them away unless they could suppress it at once by drastic means. They
pictured the labourers as Huns and the mysterious Swing as a second Attila,
and this panic they contrived to communicate to the other classes of society.




Conciliatory methods consequently ceased; the upper classes substituted
action for diplomacy, and the movement rapidly collapsed. Little resistance
was offered, and the terrible hosts of armed and desperate men melted down
into groups of weak and ill-fed labourers, armed with sticks and stones.
On 26th November the Times could report that seventy persons had been
apprehended near Newbury, and that 'about 60 of the most forward half-starved
fellows, had been taken into custody some two miles from Southampton. Already
the housing of the Berkshire prisoners was becoming a problem, the gaols
at Reading and Abingdon being overcrowded: by the end of the month the Newbury
Mansion House and Workhouse had been converted into prisons. This energy
had been stimulated by a circular letter issued on 24th November, in which
Lord Melbourne urged the lord-lieutenants and the magistrates to use firmness
and vigour in quelling disturbances, and virtually promised them immunity
for illegal acts done in discharge of their duty. A village here and there
continued to give the magistrates some uneasiness, for example, Broughton
in Hants, 'an open village in an open country... where there is no Gentleman
to overawe them,'(26*) but these were exceptions. The day of risings was
over, and from this time forward, arson was the only weapon of discontent.
At Charlton in Wilts, where 'the magistrates had talked of 12s. and the farmers
had given 10s.,' a certain Mr. Polhill, who had lowered the wages one Saturday
to 9s., found his premises in flame. 'The poor,' remarked a neighbouring
magistrate, 'naturally consider that they will be beaten down again to 7s.'(27*)
By 4th December the Times correspondent in Wiltshire and Hampshire could
report that quiet was restored, that the peasantry were cowed, and that men
who had been prominent in the mobs were being picked out and arrested every
day. He gave an amusing account of the trials of a special correspondent,
and of the difficulties of obtaining information. 'The circular of Lord Melbourne
which encourages the magistrates to seize suspected persons, and promises
them impunity if the motives are good (such is the construction of the circular
in these parts), and which the magistrates are determined to act upon, renders
inquiries unsafe, and I have received a few good natured hints on this head.
Gentlemen in gigs and post chaises are peculiar objects of jealousy. A cigar,
which is no slight comfort in this humid atmosphere, is regarded on the road
as a species of pyrotechnical tube; and even an eye glass is in danger of
being metamorphosed into a newly invented air gun, with which these gentlemen
ignite stacks and barns as they pass. An innocent enquiry of whose house
or farm is that? is, under existing circumstances, an overt act of incendiarism.'




In such a state of feeling, it was not surprising that labourers were
bundled into prison for sour looks or discontented conversation. A zealous
magistrate wrote to the Home Office on 13th December after a fire near Maidenhead,
to say that he had committed a certain Greenaway to prison on the following
evidence: 'Dr. Vansittart, Rector of Shottesbrook, gave a sermon a short
time before the fire took place, recommending a quiet conduct to his Parishioners.
Greenaway said openly in the churchyard, we have been quiet too long. His
temper is bad, always discontented and churlish, frequently changing his
Master from finding great difficulty in maintaining a large family from the
Wages of labour.'




Meanwhile the rising had spread westward to Dorset and Gloucestershire,
and northward to Bucks. In Dorsetshire and Gloucestershire, the disturbances
were much like those in Wiltshire. In Bucks, in addition to the usual agricultural
rising, with the breaking of threshing machines and the demand for higher
wages, there were riots in High Wycombe, and considerable destruction of
paper-making machinery by the unemployed. Where special grievances existed
in a village, the labourers took advantage of the rising to seek redress
for them. Thus at Walden in Bucks, in addition to demanding 2s. a day wages
with 6d. for each child and a reduction of tithes, they made a special point
of the improper distribution of parish gifts. 'Another person said that buns
used to be thrown from the church steeple and beer given away in the churchyard,
and a sermon preached on the bun day. Witness (the parson) told them that
the custom had ceased before he came to the parish, but that he always preached
a sermon on St. George's day, and two on Sundays, one of which was a volunteer.
He told them that he had consulted the Archdeacon on the claim set up for
the distribution of buns, and that the Archdeacon was of opinion that no
such claim could be maintained.'




At Benson or Bensington, in Oxfordshire, the labourers, after destroying
some threshing machines, made a demonstration against a proposal for enclosure.
Mr. Newton, a large proprietor, had just made one of many unsuccessful attempts
to obtain an Enclosure Act for the parish. Some thousand persons assembled
in the churchyard expecting that Mr. Newton would try to fix the notice on
the church door, but as he did not venture to appear, they proceeded to his
house, and made him promise never again to attempt to obtain an Enclosure
Act.(28*)




The movement for obtaining higher wages by this rude collective bargaining
was extinguished in the counties already mentioned by the beginning of December,
but disturbances now developed over a larger area. A 'daring riot' took place
at Stotfold in Bedfordshire. The labourers met together to demand exemption
from taxes, dismissal of the assistant overseer, and the raising of wages
to 2s. a day. The last demand was refused, on which the labourers set some
straw alight in a field to alarm the farmers. Mr. Whitbread, J.P., brought
a hundred special constables, and arrested ten ringleaders, after which the
riot ceased. There were disturbances in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex; and
in many other counties the propertied classes were terrified from time to
time by the news of fires. In Cambridgeshire there were meetings of labourers
to demand higher wages, in some places with immediate success, and one magistrate
was alarmed by rumours of a design to march upon Cambridge itself on market
day. In devonshire Lord Ebrington reported an agitation for higher wages
with encouragement from the farmers. He was himself impressed by the low
wages in force, and had raised them in places still quiet; a mistake for
which he apologised. Even Hereford, 'this hitherto submissive and peaceful
county,' was not unaffected. In Northamptonshire there were several fires,
and also risings round Peterborough, Oundle and Wellingborough, and a general
outbreak in the Midlands was thought to be imminent. Hayricks began to blaze
as far north as Carlisle. Swing letters were delivered in Yorkshire, and
in Lincolnshire the labourer was said to be awakening to his own importance.
There were in fact few counties quite free from infection, and a leading
article appeared in the Times on 6th December, in which it was stated
that never had such a dangerous state of things existed to such an extent
in England, in the period of well-authenticated records. 'Let the rich be
taught that Providence will not suffer them to oppress their fellow creatures
with impunity. Here are tens of thousands of Englishmen, industrious, kind-hearted,
but broken-hearted beings, exasperated into madness by insufficient food
and clothing, by utter want of necessaries for themselves and their unfortunate
families.'




Unfortunately Providence, to whom the Times attributed these revolutionary
sentiments, was not so close to the scene as Lord Melbourne, whose sentiments
on the subject were very different. On 8th December he issued a circular,
which gave a death-blow to the hope that the magistrates would act as mediators
on behalf of the labourers. After blaming those magistrates who, under intimidation,
had advised the establishment of a uniform rate of wages, the Home Secretary
went on, 'Reason and experience concur in proving that a compliance with
demands so unreasonable in themselves, and urged in such a manner, can only
lead, and probably within a very short period of time, to the most disastrous
results.' He added that the justices had 'no general legal authority to settle
the amount of the wages of labour.' The circular contained a promise on the
part of the Government that they would adopt 'every practicable and reasonable
measure' for the allegation of the labourers' privations.




From this time the magistrates were everywhere on the alert for the first
signs of life and movement among the labourers, and they forbade meetings
of any kind. In Suffolk and Essex the labourers who took up the cry for higher
wages were promptly thrown into prison, and arbitrary arrests became the
custom. The movement was crushed, and the time for retribution had come.
The gaols were full to overflowing, and the Government appointed Special
Commissions to try the rioters in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Berks, and
Bucks. Brougham, who was now enjoying the office in whose pompous manner
he must have lisped in his cradle, told the House of Lords on 2nd December,
'Within a few days from the time I am addressing your Lordships, the sword
of justice shall be unsheathed to smite, if it be necessary, with a firm
and vigorous hand, the rebel against the law.'




The disturbances were over, but the panic had been such that the upper
classes could not persuade themselves that England was yet tranquil. As late
as Christmas Eve the Privy Council gave orders to the archbishop to prepare
'a form of prayer to Almighty God, on account of the troubled state of certain
parts of the United Kingdom.' The archbishop's composition, which was published
after scores of men and boys had been sentenced to transportation for life,
must have been recited with genuine feeling by those clergymen who had either
broken, or were about to break, their agreement to surrender part of their
tithes. One passage ran as follows: 'Restore, O Lord, to Thy people the quiet
enjoyment of the many and great blessings which we have received from Thy
bounty: defeat and frustrate the malice of wicked and turbulent men, and
turn their hearts: have pity, O Lord, on the simple and ignorant, who have
been led astray, and recall them to a sense of their duty; and to persons
of all ranks and conditions in this country vouchsafe such a measure of Thy
grace, that our hearts being filled with true faith and devotion, and cleansed
from all evil affections, we may serve Thee with one accord, in duty and
loyalty to the King, in obedience to the laws of the land, and in brotherly
love towards each other....'




We shall see in the next chapter what happened to 'the simple and ignorant'
who had fallen into the hands of the English judges.




NOTES:




1. See Fawley, p. 279.




2. Kent Herald, September 2, 1830.




3. Times, January 3, 1831.




4. September 30, 1830.




5. Brighton Chronicle, October 6, quoted in Times, October
14.




6. For Brede see H.O. Papers, Extracts from Poor Law Commissioners'
Report, published 1833, and newspapers.




7. They were signed by G.S. Hill, minister, by eight farmers and the four
labourer delegates.




8. Affidavit in H.O. Papers.




9. Times, November 25.




10. The petition was as follows: 'We feel that in justice we ought not
to suffer a moment to pass away without communicated to your Grace the great
and unprecedented distress which we are enabled from our own personal experience
to state prevails among all the peasantry to a degree not only dreadful to
individuals, but also to an extent which, if not checked, must be attended
with serious consequences to the national prosperity.' Mr Hodges does not
mention the date, merely stating that it was sent Wellington when Prime Minister.




11. H.O. Papers.




12. Ibid.




13. Ibid.




14. H.O. Papers.




15. Ibid.




16. Transported for life to New South Wales.




17. Ford was capitally convicted and sentenced to transportation for life,
but his sentence was commuted to imprisonment.




18. H.O. Papers.




19. According to local tradition he was killed not by the yeomanry but
by a farmer, before the troop came up. See Hudson, A Shepherd's Life,
p. 248.




20. Transported for life to New South Wales.




21. Transported for life to New South Wales.




22. H.O. Papers.




23. Ibid.




24. Ten days later, after Lord Melbourne's circular of December 8, Dr
Newbolt changed his tone. Writing to the Home Office he depreciated the censure
implied in that circular, and stated that his conduct was due to personal
infirmities and threats of violence: indeed he had subsequently heard from
a certain Mr Wickham that 'I left his place just in time to save my own life,
as some of the Mob had it in contemplation to drag me out of the carriage,
and to destroy me upon the spot, and it was entirely owing to the interference
of some of the better disposed of the Peasantry that my life was preserved.'




25. See p. 258.




26. H.O. Papers.




27. Ibid.




28. See Oxford University and City Herald, November 20 and 27,
1830.




Chapter Eleven




The Last Labourers' Revolt




II




The bands of men and boys who had given their rulers one moment of excitement
and lively interest in the condition of the poor had made themselves liable
to ferocious penalties. For the privileged classes had set up a code under
which no labourer could take a single step for the improvement of the lot
of his class without putting his life and liberties in a noose. It is true
that the savage laws which had been passed against combination in 1799 and
1800 had been repealed in 1824, and that even under the less liberal Act
of the following year, which rescinded the Act of 1824, it was no longer
a penal offence to form a Trades Union. But it is easy to see that the labourers
who tried to raise their wages were in fact on a shelving and most perilous
slope. If they used threats or intimidation or molested or obstructed, either
to get a labourer to join with them or to get an employer to make concessions,
they were guilty of a misdemeanour punishable with three months' imprisonment.
They were lucky if they ran no graver risk than this. Few of the prosecutions
at the Special Commissions were under the Act of 1825. A body of men holding
a meeting in a village where famine and unemployment were chronic, and where
hardly any one had been taught to read and write, might very soon find themselves
becoming what the Act of 1714 called a riotous assembly, and if a magistrate
took alarm and read the Riot Act, and they did not disperse within one hour,
every one of them might be punished as a felon. The hour's interval did not
mean an hour's grace, for, as Mr. Justice Alderson told the court at Dorchester,
within that hour 'all persons, even private individuals, may do anything,
using force even to the last extremity to prevent the commission of a felony.'




There were at least three ways in which labourers meeting together to
demonstrate for higher wages ran a risk of losing their lives, if any of
their fellows got out of hand from temper, or from drink, or from hunger
and despair. Most of the prosecutions before the Special Commissions were
prosecutions under three Acts of 1827 and 1828, consolidating the law on
the subject of offences against property and offences against the person.
Under the eighth section of one Act (7 and 8 George IV. c. 30), any persons
riotously or tumultuously assembled together who destroyed any house, stable,
coach-house, outhouse, barn, granary, or any building or erection or machinery
used in caring on any trade or manufacture were to suffer death as felons.
In this Act there is no definition of riot, and therefore 'the common law
definition of a riot is resorted to, and in such a case if any one of His
Majesty's subjects was terrified there was a sufficient terror and alarm
to substantiate that part of the charge.'(1*) Under the sixth section of
another Act, any person who robbed any other person of any chattel, money,
or valuable security was to suffer death as a felon. Now if a mob presented
itself before a householder with a demand for money, and the householder
in fear gave even a few coppers, any person who was in that mob, whether
he had anything to do with this particular transaction or not, whether he
was aware or ignorant of it, was guilty of robbery, and liable to the capital
penalty. Under section 12 of the Act of the following year, generally known
as Lansdowne's Act, which amended Ellenborough's Act of 1803, it was a capital
offence to attempt to shoot at a person, or to stab, cut, or wound him, with
intent to murder, rob, or maim. Under this Act, as it was interpreted, if
an altercation arose and any violence was offered by a single individual
in the mob, the lives of the whole band were forfeit. This was put very clearly
by Baron Vaughan: 'There seems to be some impression that unless the attack
on an individual is made with some deadly weapons, those concerned are not
liable to capital punishment; but it should be made known to all persons
that if the same injury were inflicted by a blow of a stone, all and every
person forming part of a riotous assembly is equally guilty as he whose hand
may have thrown it, and all alike are liable to death.' Under section 4 of
one Act of 1827 the penalty for destroying a threshing machine was transportation
for seven years, and under section 17 the penalty for firing a rick was death.
These were the terrors hanging over the village labourers of whom several
hundreds were now awaiting their trial.




The temper of the judges was revealed in their charges to the Grand Juries.
In opening the Maidstone Assizes on 14th December, Mr. Justice Bosanquet(2*)
declared that though there might be some distress it was much exaggerated,
and that he was sure that those whom he had the honour to address would find
it not only their duty but their pleasure to lend an ear to the wants of
the poor.(3*) Mr. Justice Taunton(4*) was even more reassuring on this subject
at the Lewes Assizes: the distress was less than it had been twelve months
before. 'I regret to say,' he went on, 'there are persons who exaggerate
the distress and raise up barriers between different classes -- who use the
most inflammatory language -- who represent the rich as oppressors of the
poor. It would be impertinent in me to say anything to you as to your treatment
of labourers or servants. That man must know little of the gentry of England,
whether connected with the town or country, who represents them as tyrants
to the poor, as not sympathising in their distress, and as not anxious to
relieve their burdens and to promote their welfare and happiness.'(5*) In
opening the Special Commission at Winchester Baron Vaughan(6*) alluded to
the theory that the tumults had arisen from distress and admitted that it
might be partly true, but, he continued, 'every man possessed of the feelings
common to our nature must deeply lament it, and endeavour to alleviate it
(as you gentlemen no doubt have done and will continue to do), by every means
which Providence has put within his power.' If individuals were aggrieved
by privations and injuries, they must apply to the Legislature, which alone
could afford them relief, 'but it can never be tolerated in any country which
professes to acknowledge the obligations of municipal law, that any man or
body of men should be permitted to sit in judgment upon their own wrongs,
or to arrogate to themselves the power of redressing them. To suffer it would
be to relapse into the barbarism of savage life and to dissolve the very
elements by which society is held together.'(7*) The opinions of the Bench
on the sections of the Act (7 and 8 George IV. c. 30) under which men could
be hung for assembling riotously and breaking machinery were clearly expressed
by Mr. Justice Parke(8*) (afterwards Lord Wensleydale) at Salisbury: 'If
that law ceases to be administered with due firmness, and men look to it
in vain for the security of their rights, our wealth and power will soon
be at an end, and our capital and industry would be transferred to some more
peaceful country 'whose laws are more respected or better enforced.'(9*)
By another section of that Act seven years was fixed as the maximum penalty
for breaking a threshing machine. Mr. Justice Alderson(10*) chafed under
this restriction, and he told two men, Case and Morgan, who were found guilty
at the Salisbury Special Commission of going into a neighbouring parish and
breaking a threshing machine, that had the Legislature foreseen such crimes
as theirs, it would have enabled the court to give them a severer sentence.(11*)




Mr. Justice Park(12*) was equally stern and uncompromising in defending
the property of the followers of the carpenter of Nazareth against the unreasoning
misery of the hour. Summing up in a case at Aylesbury, in which one of the
charges was that of attempting to procure a reduction of tithes, he remarked
with warmth: 'It was highly insolent in such men to requite of gentlemen,
who had by an expensive education qualified themselves to discharge the sacred
duties of a Minister of the Gospel, to descend from that station and reduce
themselves to the situation of common labourers.'(13*)




Few judges could resist the temptation to introduce into their charges
a homily on the economic benefits of machinery. Mr. Justice Park was an exception,
for he observed at Aylesbury that the question of the advantages of machinery
was outside the province of the judges, 'and much mischief often resulted
from persons stepping out of their line of duty.'(14*) Mr. Justice Alderson
took a different view, and the very next day he was expounding the truths
of political economy at Dorchester, starting with what he termed the 'beautiful
and simple illustration' of the printing press.(15*) The illustration must
have seemed singularly intimate and convincing to the labourers in the dock
who had never been taught their letters.




Such was the temper of the judges. Who and what were the prisoners before
them? After the suppression of the riots, the magistrates could pick out
culprits at their leisure, and when a riot had involved the whole of the
village the temptation to get rid by this method of persons who for one reason
or another were obnoxious to the authorities was irresistible. Hunt, speaking
in the House of Commons,(16*) quoted the case of Hindon; seven men had been
apprehended for rioting and they were all poachers. Many of the prisoners
had already spent a month in an overcrowded prison; almost all of them were
poor men; the majority could not read or write.(17*) Few could afford counsel,
and it must be remembered that counsel could not address the court on behalf
of prisoners who were being tried for breaking machines, or for belonging
to a mob that asked for money or destroyed property. By the rules of the
gaol, the prisoners at Salisbury were not allowed to see their attorney except
in the presence of the gaoler or his servant. The labourers' ignorance of
the law was complete and inevitable. Many of them thought that the King or
the Government or the magistrates had given orders that machines were to
be broken. Most of them supposed that if a person from whom they demanded
money threw it down or gave it without the application of physical force,
there was no question of robbery. We have an illustration of this illusion
in a trial at Winchester when Isaac Hill, junior, who was charged with breaking
a threshing machine near Micheldever, for which the maximum penalty was seven
years, pleaded in his defence that he had not broken the machine and that
all that he did 'was to ask the prosecutor civilly for the money, which the
mob took from him, and the prosecutor gave it to him, and that he thanked
him very kindly for it,'(18*) an admission which made him liable to a death
penalty. A prisoner at Salisbury, when he was asked what he had to say in
his defence to the jury, replied: 'Now, my Lord, I'se got nothing to say
to 'em, I doant knaow any on 'em.'(19*) The prisoners were at this further
disadvantage that all the witnesses whom they could call as to their share
in the conduct of a mob had themselves been in the mob, and were thus liable
to prosecution. Thus when James Lush (who was afterwards selected for execution)
and James Toomer appealed to a man named Lane, who had just been acquitted
on a previous charge, to give evidence that they had not struck Mr. Pinniger
in a scuffle, Mr. Justice Alderson cautioned Lane that if he acknowledged
that he had been in the mob he would be committed. Lane chose the safer part
of silence.(20*) In another case a witness had the courage to incriminate
himself. When the brothers Simms were being tried for extorting money from
Parson Easton's wife, a case which we have already described, Henry Bunce,
called as a witness for the defence, voluntarily declared, in spite of a
caution from the judge (Alderson), that he had been present himself and that
William Simms did not use the expression 'blood or money.' He was at once
ordered into custody. 'The prisoner immediately sprung over the bar into
the dock with his former comrades, seemingly unaffected by the decision of
the learned judge.'(21*)




Perhaps the darkest side of the business was the temptation held out to
prisoners awaiting trial to betray their comrades. Immunity or a lighter
sentence was freely offered to those who would give evidence. Stokes, who
was found guilty at Dorchester of breaking a threshing machine, was sentenced
by Mr. Justice Alderson to a year's imprisonment, with the explanation that
he was not transported because 'after you were taken into custody, you gave
very valuable information which tended greatly to further the ends of justice.'(22*)
These transactions, were not often dragged into the daylight, but some negotiations
of this character were made public in the trial of Mr. Deacle next year.
Mr. Deacle, a well-to-do gentleman farmer, was tried at the Lent Assizes
at Winchester for being concerned in the riots. One of the witnesses against
him, named Collins, admitted in cross-examination that he believed he should
have been prosecuted himself, if he had not promised to give evidence against
Mr. Deacle; another witness, named Barnes, a carpenter, stated in cross-examination
that during the trials at the Special Commission, 'he being in the dock,
and about to be put on his trial, the gaoler Beckett called him out, and
took him into a room where there were Walter Long, a magistrate, and another
person, whom he believed to be Bingham Baring, who told him that he should
not be put upon his trial if he would come and swear against Deacle.' When
the next witness was about to be cross-examined, the counsel for the prosecution
abruptly abandoned the case.(23*)




The first Special Commission was opened at Winchester with suitable pomp
on 18th December. Not only the prison but the whole town was crowded, and
the inhabitants of Winchester determined to make the best of the windfall.
The jurymen and the Times special correspondent complained bitterly
of the abnormal cost of living, the latter mentioning that in addition to
extraordinary charges for beds, 5s. a day was exacted for firing and tallow
candles, bedroom fire not included. The three judges sent down as commissioners
were Baron Vaughan, Mr. Justice Parke, and Mr. Justice Alderson. With them
were associated two other commissioners, Mr. Sturges Bourne, of assistant
overseer fame, and Mr. Richard Pollen. The Duke of Wellington, as Lord-Lieutenant,
sat on the Bench. The Attorney-General, Mr. Sergeant Wild, and others appeared
to prosecute for the Crown. The County took up every charge, the Government
only the more serious ones.




There were three hundred prisoners, most of them charged with extorting
money by threats or with breaking machinery. What chance had they of a fair
trial? They started with the disabilities already described. They were thrown
by batches into the dock; the pitiless law was explained to the jury; extenuating
circumstances were ruled out as irrelevant. 'We do not come here,' said Mr.
Justice Alderson, 'to inquire into grievances. We come here to decide law.'
But though evidence about wages or distress was not admitted, the judges
did not scruple to give their own views of the social conditions which had
produced these disturbances. Perhaps the most flagrant example was provided
by a trial which happily was for a misdemeanour only. Seven men were indicted
for conspiring together and riotously assembling for the purpose of raising
wages and for compelling others to join them. The labourers of the parish
of Fawley had combined together for two objects, the first to raise their
wages, which stood at 9s. a week, the second to get rid of the assistant
overseer, who had introduced a parish cart, to which he had harnessed women
and boys, amongst others an idiot woman, named Jane Stevens. The labourers
determined to break up the cart, but they desisted on the promise of a farmer
that a horse should be bought for it. Lord Cavan was the large landowner
of the parish. He paid his men as a rule 9s. a week, but two of them received
10s. The mob came up to his house to demand an increase of wages: Lord Cavan
was out, quelling rioters elsewhere. Lady Cavan came down to see them. 'Seeing
you are my neighbours and armed,' said she, 'yet, as I am an unprotected
woman, I am sure you will do no harm.' The labourers protested that they
meant no harm, and they did no harm. 'I asked them,' said Lady Cavan afterwards,
in evidence, 'why they rose then, there was no apparent distress round Eaglehurst,
and the wages were the same as they had been for several years. I have been
in several of their cottages and never saw any appearance of distress. They
said they had been oppressed long and would bear it no longer.' One man told
her that he had 9s. a week wages and 3s. from the parish, he had heard that
the 3s. was to be discontinued. With the common-sense characteristic of her
class Lady Cavan assured him that he was not improving his position by idling.
The labourers impressed the Cavan men, and went on their peaceful way round
the parish. The farmers who gave evidence for the prosecution were allowed
to assert that there was no distress, but when it came to evidence for the
defence a stricter standard of relevancy was exacted. One witness for the
prisoners said of the labourers: 'The men were in very great distress; many
of the men had only a few potatoes in their bag when they came to work.'
'The learned judges objected to this course of examination being continued:
it might happen that through drinking a man might suffer distress.' The Attorney-General,
in his closing speech, asserted again that the prisoners did not seem to
have been in distress. Baron Vaughan, in summing up, said that men were not
to assemble and conspire together for the purpose of determining what their
wages should be. 'That which at first might be in itself a lawful act, might
in the event become illegal.... A respectful statement or representation
of their grievances was legal, and to which no one would object, but the
evidence, if they believed it, showed that the conduct of this assembly was
far from being respectful. N o one could feel more for the distresses of
the people than he did, but he would never endure that persons should by
physical strength compel wages to be raised. There was no country where charity
fell in a purer stream than in this. Let the man make his appeal in a proper
and respectful manner, and he might be assured that appeal would never be
heard in vain... His Lordship spoke very highly of conduct of Lady Cavan.
She visited the cottages of all those who lived in the neighbourhood, she
knew they were not distressed, and she also felt confident from her kindness
to them that they would not offer her any violence.' All seven were found
guilty; four were sentenced to six months hard labour, and three to three
months.




Very few, however, of the cases at Winchester were simple misdemeanours,
for in most instances, in addition to asking for higher wages, the labourers
had made themselves liable to a prosecution for felony, either by breaking
a threshing machine or by asking for money. Those prisoners who had taken
part in the Fordingbridge riots, or in the destruction of machinery near
Andover, or in the demolition of the Headley Workhouse, were sentenced to
death or to transportation for life. Case after case was tried in which prisoners
from different villages were indicted for assault and robbery. The features
varied little, and the spectators began to find the proceedings monotonous.
Most of the agricultural population of Hampshire had made itself liable to
the death penalty, if the authorities cared to draw the noose. The three
hundred who actually appeared in Court were like the men on whom the tower
of Siloam fell.




A case to which the prosecution attached special importance arose out
of an affair at the house of Mr. Eyre Coote. A mob of forty persons, some
of whom had iron bars, presented themselves before Mr. Coote's door at two
o'clock in the morning. Two bands of men had already visited Mr. Coote that
evening, and he had given them beer: this third band was a party of stragglers.
Mr. Coote stationed his ten servants in the portico, and when the mob arrived
he asked them, 'What do you want, my lads?' 'Money,' was the answer. 'Money,'
said Mr. Coote, 'you shan't have.' One of the band seemed to Mr. Coote about
to strike him. Mr. Coote seized him, nine of the mob were knocked down and
taken, and the rest fled. Six of the men were prosecuted for feloniously
demanding money. Baron Vaughan remarked that outrages like this made one
wonder whether one was in a civilised country, and he proceeded to raise
its moral tone by sentencing all the prisoners to transportation for life,
except one, Henry Eldridge, who was reserved for execution. He had been already
capitally convicted of complicity in the Fordingbridge riots, and this attempt
to 'enter the sanctuary of Mr. Eyre Coote's home' following upon that crime,
rendered him a suitable 'sacrifice to be made on the altar of the offended
justice' of his country.




In many of the so-called robberies punished by the Special Commissions
the sums taken were trifling. George Steel, aged eighteen, was sentenced
to transportation for life for obtaining a shilling, when he was in liquor,
from Jane Neale: William Sutton, another boy of eighteen, was found guilty
of taking 4d. in a drunken frolic: Sutton, who was a carter boy receiving
1s. 6d. a week and his food, was given an excellent character by his master,
who declared that he had never had a better servant. The jury recommended
him to mercy, and the judges responded by sentencing him to death and banishing
him for life. George Clerk, aged twenty, and E. C. Nutbean, aged eighteen,
paid the same price for 3d. down and the promise of beer at the Greyhound.
Such cases were not exceptional, as any one who turns to the reports of the
trials will see.




The evidence on which prisoners were convicted was often of the most shadowy
kind. Eight young agricultural labourers, of ages varying from eighteen to
twenty-five, were found guilty of riotously assembling in the parish of St.
Lawrence Wootten and feloniously stealing £2 from William Lutely Sclater
of Tangier Park. 'We want to get a little satisfaction from you' was the
phrase they used. Two days later another man, named William Farmer, was charged
with the same offence. Mr. Sclater thought that Farmer was like the man in
the mob who blew a trumpet or horn, but could not swear to his identity.
Other witnesses swore that he was with the mob elsewhere, and said, 'Money
wa want and money wa will hae.' On this evidence he was found guilty, and
though Mr. Justice Alderson announced that he felt warranted in recommending
that he should not lose his life, 'yet, it was his duty,' he continued, 'to
state that he should for this violent and disgraceful outrage be sent out
of the country, and separated for life from those friends and connections
which were dear to him here: that he should have to employ the rest of his
days in labour, at the will and for the profit of another, to show the people
of the class to which the prisoner belonged that they cannot with impunity
lend their aid to such outrages against the peace and security of person
and property.'




We have seen that at the time of the riots it was freely stated that the
farmers incited the labourers to make disturbances. Hunt went so far as to
say in the House of Commons that in nineteen cases out of twenty the farmers
encouraged the labourers to break the threshing machines. The county authorities
evidently thought it unwise to prosecute the farmers, although it was proved
in evidence that there were several farmers present at the destruction of
the Headley Workhouse, and at the demonstration at Mr. Cobbold's house. Occasionally
a farmer, in testifying to a prisoner's character, would admit that he had
been in a mob himself. In such cases the judge administered rebukes, but
the prosecution took no action. There was, however, one exception. A small
farmer, John Boys, of the parish of Owslebury, had thrown himself heartily
into the labourers' cause. A number of small farmers met and decided that
the labourers' wages ought to be raised. Boys agreed to take a paper round
for signature. The paper ran as follows: 'We the undersigned are willing
to give 2s. per day for able-bodied married men, and 9s. per week for single
men, on consideration of our rents and tithes being abated in proportion.'
In similar cases, as a rule, the farmers left it to the labourers to collect
signatures, and Boys, by undertaking the work himself, made himself a marked
man. He had been in a mob which extorted money from Lord Northesk's steward
at Owslebury, and for this he was indicted for felony. But the jury, to the
chagrin of the prosecution, acquitted him. What followed is best described
in the report of Sergeant Wilde's speech in the House of Commons (21st July
1831). 'Boyce was tried and acquitted: but he (Mr. Wilde) being unable to
account for the acquittal, considering the evidence to have been clear against
him, and feeling that although the jury were most respectable men, they might
possibly entertain some sympathy for him in consequence of his situation
in life, thought it his duty to send a communication to the Attorney-General,
stating that Boyce was deeply responsible for the acts which had taken place:
that he thought he should not be allowed to escape, and recommending that
he be tried before a different jury in the other Court. The Attorney-General
sent to him (Mr. Wilde) to come into the other Court, and the result was
that Boyce was then tried and convicted.' In the other more complaisant Court,
Farmer Boys and James Fussell, described as a genteel young man of about
twenty, living with his mother, were found guilty of heading a riotous mob
for reducing rents and tithes and sentenced to seven years' transportation.(24*)





This was not the only case in which the sympathies of the jury created
a difficulty. The Home Office Papers contain a letter from Dr. Quarrier,
a Hampshire magistrate, who had been particularly vigorous in suppressing
riots, stating that Sir James Parke discharged a jury at the Special Commission
'under the impression that they were reluctant to convict the Prisoners which
was more strongly impressed upon the mind of the Judge, by its being reported
to his Lordship that "some of the Gosport Jurors had said, while travelling
in the stage coach to Winchester, that they would not convict in cases where
the Labourers had been driven to excess by Poverty and low Wages!" It
was ascertained that some of those empannelled upon the acquitting Jury were
from Gosport, which confirmed the learned Judge in the determination to discharge
them.'(25*)




An interesting feature of the trials at Winchester was the number of men
just above the condition of agricultural labourers who threw in their lot
with the poor: the village mechanics, the wheelwrights, carpenters, joiners,
smiths, and the bricklayers, shoemakers, shepherds and small holders were
often prominent in the disturbances. To the judges this fact was a riddle.
The threshing machines had done these men no injury; they had not known the
sting of hunger; till the time of the riots their characters had been as
a rule irreproachable. Nemo repente turpissimus fuit, and yet apparently
these persons had suddenly, without warning, turned into the 'wicked and
turbulent men' of the archbishop's prayer. Such culprits deserved, in the
opinions of the bench, severer punishment than the labourers, whom their
example should have kept in the paths of obedience and peace.(26*) Where
the law permitted, they were sentenced to transportation for life. One heinous
offender of this type, Gregory, a carpenter, was actually earning 18s. a
week in the service of Lord Winchester. But the most interesting instances
were two brothers, Joseph and Robert Mason, who lived at Bullington. They
rented three or four acres, kept a cow, and worked for the neighboring farmers
as well. Joseph, who was thirty-two, had a wife and one child; Robert, who
was twenty-four, was unmarried. Between them they supported a widowed mother.
Their characters were exemplary, and the most eager malice could detect no
blot upon their past. But their opinions were dangerous: they regularly took
in Cobbett's Register and read it aloud to twenty or thirty of the
villagers. Further, Joseph had carried on foot a petition for reform to the
king at Brighton from a hundred and seventy-seven 'persons, belonging to
the working and labouring classes' of Wonston, Barton Stacey and Bullington,
and was reported to have given some trouble to the king's porter by an importunate
demand for an audience. The recital of these facts gave rise to much merriment
at his trial, and was not considered irrelevant by judges who ruled out all
allusions to distress.(27*) An interesting light is thrown on the history
of this petition by a fragment of a letter, written by Robert Mason to a
friend, which somehow fell into the hands of a Captain Thompson of Longparish,
and was forwarded by him to the Home Office as a valuable piece of evidence.




'P.S. -- Since I wrote the above I have saw and talked with two persons
who say " Bullington Barton and Sutton has sent a petition and why not
Longparish Hursborne and Wherwell send another." I think as much, to
be sure if we had all signed one, one journey and expense would have served
but what is expence? Why I would engage to carry a Petition and deliver it
at St. James for 30 shillings, and to a place like Longparish what is that?
If you do send one pray do not let Church property escape your notice. There
is the Church which cost Longparish I should think nearly £1500 yearly:
yes and there is an old established Chaple which I will be bound does not
cost £25 annually. For God sake...' (illegible).




The first charge brought against the Masons was that of robbing Sir Thomas
Baring's steward of £10 at East Stratton. The money had been taken by
one of the mobs; the Masons were acquitted. They were next put on their trial
together with William Winkworth, a cobbler and a fellow reader of Cobbett,
and ten others, for a similar offence. This time they were accused of demanding
£2 or £5 from Mr. W. Dowden of Micheldever. The Attorney-General,
in opening the case, drew attention to the circumstances of the Masons and
Winkworth, saying that the offence with which they were charged was of a
deeper dye, because they were men of superior education and intelligence.
A humane clergyman, Mr. Cockerton, curate of Stoke Charity, gave evidence
to the effect that if the men had been met in a conciliatory temper in the
morning they would have dispersed. Joseph Mason and William Winkworth were
found guilty, and sentenced, in the words of the judge, to 'be cut off from
all communion with society' for the rest of their lives. Robert Mason was
still unconvicted, but he was not allowed to escape. The next charge against
him was that of going with a mob which extorted five shillings from the Rev.
J. Joliffe at Barton Stacey. He admitted that he had accompanied the mob,
partly because the labourers had urged him to do so, partly because he hoped
that Mr. Joliffe, being accustomed to public speaking, would be able to Persuade
the labourers to disperse before any harm was done. There was no evidence
to show that he had anything to do with the demand for money. He was found
guilty and sentenced to transportation for life. When asked what he had to
say for himself, he replied, 'If the learned Counsel, who has so painted
my conduct to you, was present at that place and wore a smock frock instead
of a gown, and a straw hat instead of a wig, he would now be standing in
this dock instead of being seated where he is.'




Six men were reserved for execution, and told that they must expect no
mercy on this side of the grave: Cooper, the leader in the Fordingbridge
riots; Holdaway, who had headed the attack on Headley Workhouse; Gilmore,
who had entered the justices' room in Andover 'in rather a violent manner'
and parleyed with the justices, and afterwards, in spite of their remonstrances,
been a ringleader in the destruction of a foundry in the parish of Upper
Clatford; Eldridge, who had taken part in the Fordingbridge riot and also
'invaded the sanctuary' of Mr. Eyre Coote's home; James Aunalls, a lad of
nineteen, who had extorted money at night with threats of a fire, from a
person whom he bade look over the hills, where a fire was subsequently seen,
and Henry Cook. Cook was a ploughboy of nineteen, who could neither read
nor write. For most of his life, since the age of ten, he had been a farm
hand. For six months before the riots he had been employed at sawing, at
10s. a week, but at the time of the rising he was out of work. After the
riots he got work as a ploughboy at about 5s. a week till his arrest. Like
the other lads of the neighbourhood he had gone round with a mob, and he
was found guilty, with Joseph Mason, of extorting money from William dowden.
For this he might have got off with transportation for life, but another
charge was preferred against him. Mr. William Bingham Baring, J.P., tried,
with the help of some of his servants, to quell a riot at Northingdon down
Farm. Silcock, who seemed the leader of the rioters, declared that they would
break every machine. Bingham Baring made Silcock repeat these words several
times and then seized him. Cook then aimed a blow at Bingham Baring with
a sledge-hammer and struck his hat. So far there was no dispute as to what
had happened. One servant of the Barings gave evidence to the effect that
he had saved his master's life by preventing Cook from striking again; another
afterwards put in a sworn deposition to the effect that Cook never attempted
to strike a second blow. All witnesses agreed that Bingham Baring's hat had
suffered severely; some of them said that he himself had been felled to the
ground. Whatever his injuries may have been, he was seen out a few hours
later, apparently in perfect health; next day he was walking the streets
of Winchester; two days later he was presented at Court, and within a week
he was strong enough to administer a sharp blow himself with his stick to
a handcuffcd and unconvicted prisoner, a display of zeal for which he had
to pay £50. Cook did not put up any defence. He was sentenced to death.




Perhaps it was felt that this victim to justice was in some respects ill
chosen, for reasons for severity were soon invented. He was a heavy, stolid,
unattractive boy, and his appearance was taken to indicate a brutal and vicious
disposition. Stories of his cruelties to animals were spread abroad. 'The
fate of Henry Cook,' said the Times correspondent (3rd January 1831),
'excites no commiseration. From everything I have heard of him, justice has
seldom met with a more appropriate sacrifice. He shed some tears shortly
after hearing his doom, but has since relapsed into a brutal insensibility
to his fate.' His age was raised to thirty, his wages to 30s. a week. Denman
described him in the House of Commons, after his execution, as a carpenter
earning 30s. a week, who had struck down one of the family of his benefactor,
and had only been prevented from killing his victim by the interposition
of a more faithful individual. This is the epitaph written on this obscure
ploughboy of nineteen by the upper classes. His own fellows, who probably
knew him at least as well as a Denman or a Baring, regarded his punishment
as murder. Cobbett tells us that the labourers of Micheldever subscribed
their pennies to get Denman's misstatements about Cook taken out of the newspapers.
When his body was brought home after execution, the whole parish went out
to meet it, and he was buried in Micheldever churchyard in solemn silence.




Bingham Baring himself, as has been mentioned, happened to offend against
the law by an act of violence at this time. He was not like Cook, a starving
boy, but the son of a man who was reputed to have made seven millions of
money, and was called by Erskine the first merchant in Europe. He did not
strike his victim in a riot, but in cold blood. His victim could not defend
himself, for he was handcuffed. The man struck was a Mr. Deacle, a small
farmer who had had his own threshing machine broken, and was afterwards arrested
with his wife, by Bingham Baring and a posse of magistrates, on suspicion
of encouraging the rioters. deacle's story was that Baring and the other
magistrates concerned in the arrest treated his wife with great insolence
in the cart in which they drove the Deacles to prison, and that Bingham Baring
further struck him with a stick. For this deacle got £50 damages in
an action he brought against Baring. 'This verdict,' said the Morning
Herald, 'seemed to excite the greatest astonishment; for most of the
Bar and almost every one in Court said, if on the jury, they would have given
at least £5000 for so gross and wanton an insult and unfeeling conduct
towards those who had not offered the least resistance; the defendants not
addressing the slightest evidence in palliation or attempting to justify
it.' The judge, in summing up, 'could not help remarking that the handcuffing
was, to say the least of it, a very harsh proceeding towards a lady and gentleman
who had been perfectly civil and quiet.' Meanwhile the case of the magistrates
against the Deacles had collapsed in the most inglorious manner. Though they
had handcuffed these two unresisting people, they had thought it wiser not
to proceed against them. Deacle, however, insisted on being tried, and by
threatening the magistrates with an action, he obliged them to prosecute.
He was tried at the Assizes, and, as we have seen, the trial came to an abrupt
conclusion under circumstances that threw the gravest suspicion on the methods
of the authorities. Meanwhile the treatment these two persons had received
(and we can imagine from their story how innocent poor people, without friends
or position, were handled) had excited great indignation, and the newspapers
were full of it. There were petitions sent up to Parliament for a Committee
of Inquiry. Now the class to which Cook was unlucky enough to belong had
never sent a single member to Parliament, but the Baring family had five
Members in the House of Commons at this very moment, one of whom had taken
part with Bingham Baring in the violent arrest of the Deacles. The five,
moreover, were very happily distributed, one of them being Junior Lord of
the Treasury in Grey's Government and husband of Grey's niece, and another
an important member of the Opposition and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer
under Peel. The Baring therefore were in less danger of misrepresentation
or misunderstanding; the motion for a Committee was rejected by a great majority
on the advice of Althorp and Peel; the leader of the House of Commons came
forward to testify that the Baring were friends of his, and the discussion
ended in a chorus of praise for the family that had been judged so harshly
outside the walls of Parliament.




When the Special Commission had finished its labours at Winchester, 101
prisoners had been capitally convicted; of these 6 were left for execution.
The remaining 95 were, with few exceptions, transported for life. Of the
other prisoners tried, 36 were sentenced to transportation for various periods,
65 were imprisoned with hard labour, and 67 were acquitted. Not a single
life had been taken by the rioters, not a single person wounded. Yet the
riots in this county alone were punished by more than a hundred capital convictions,
or almost double the number that followed the devilish doings of Lord George
Gordon's mob. The spirit in which Denman regarded the proceeding is illustrated
by his speech in the House of Commons on the amnesty debate: 'No fewer than
a hundred persons were capitally convicted at Winchester, of offences for
every one of which their lives might have been justly taken, and ought to
have been taken, if examples to such an extent had been necessary.(28*)




These sentences came like a thunderclap on the people of Winchester, and
all classes, except the magistrates, joined in petitions to the Government
for mercy. The Times correspondent wrote as follows: --




'Winchester, Friday Morning, 7th Jan.




'The scenes of distress in and about the jail are most terrible. The number
of men who are to be torn from their homes and connexions is so great that
there is scarcely a hamlet in the county into which anguish and tribulation
have not entered. Wives, sisters, mothers, children, beset the gates daily,
and the governor of the jail informs me that the scenes he is obliged to
witness at the time of locking up the prison are truly heartbreaking.




'You will have heard before this of the petitions which have been presented
to the Home Office from Gosport, Portsmouth, Romsey, Whitchurch, and Basingstoke,
praying for an extension of mercy to all the men who now lie under sentence
of death. A similar petition has been got up in this city. It is signed by
the clergy of the Low Church, some of the bankers, and every tradesman in
the town without exception. Application was made to the clergy of the Cathedral
for their signatures, but they refused to give them, except conditionally,
upon reasons which I cannot comprehend. They told the petitioners, as I am
informed, that they would not sign any such petition unless the grand jury
and the magistracy of the county previously affixed their names to it. Now
such an answer, as it appears to me, is an admission on their part that no
mischief would ensue from not carrying into effect the dreadful sentence
of the law; for I cannot conceive that if they were of opinion that mischief
would ensue from it, they would sign the petition, even though it were recommended
by all the talent and respectability of the Court of quarter Sessions. I
can understand the principles on which that man acts, who asserts and laments
the necessity of vindicating the majesty of the law by the sacrifice of human
life; but I cannot understand the reasons of those who, admitting that there
is no necessity for the sword of justice to strike the offender, decline
to call upon the executive government to stay its arm, and make their application
for its mercy dependent on the judgment, or it may be the caprice, of an
influential aristocracy. Surely, of all classes of society, the clergy is
that which ought not to be backward in the remission of offences. They are
daily preaching mercy to their flocks, and it wears but an ill grace when
they are seen refusing their consent to a practical application of their
own doctrines. Whatever my own opinion may be, as a faithful recorder of
the opinions of those around me, I am bound to inform you, that, except among
the magistracy of the county, there is a general, I had almost said a universal,
opinion among all ranks of society, that no good will be effected by sacrificing
human life.'(29*)




This outburst of public opinion saved the lives of four of the six men
who had been left for execution. The two who were hung were Cooper and Cook.
But the Government and the judges were determined that the lessons of civilisation
should not be wanting in impressiveness or in dignity. They compelled all
the prisoners who had been condemned by the Commission to witness the last
agonies of the two men whom public opinion had been unable to rescue. The
account given in the Times of 17th January shows that this piece of
refined and spectacular discipline was not thrown away, and that the wretched
comrades of the men who were hanged suffered as acutely as Denman or Alderson
themselves could have desired. 'At this moment I cast my eyes down into the
felons' yard, and saw many of the convicts weeping bitterly, some burying
their faces in their smock frocks, others wringing their hands convulsively,
and others leaning for support against the wall of the yard and unable to
cast their eyes upwards.' This was the last vision of English justice that
each labourer carried to his distant and dreaded servitude, a scene that
would never fade from his mind. There was much that England had not taught
him. She had not taught him that the rich owed a duty to the poor, that society
owed any shelter to the freedom or the property of the weak, that the mere
labourer had a share in the State, or a right to be considered in its laws,
or that it mattered to his rulers in what wretchedness he lived or in what
wretchedness he died. But one lesson she had taught him with such savage
power that his simple memory would not forget it, and if ever in an exile's
gilding dreams he thought with longing of his boyhood's famine-shadowed home,
that inexorable dawn would break again before his shrinking eyes and he would
thank God for the wide wastes of the illimitable sea.




The Special Commission for Wiltshire opened at Salisbury on 2nd January
1831. The judges were the same as those at Winchester; the other commissioners
were Lord Radnor, the friend of Cobbett, and Mr. T. G. B. Estcourt. Lord
Lansdowne, the Lord-Lieutenant, sat on the bench. The foreman of the Grand
Jury was Mr. John Benett, who has already figured in these pages as the proprietor
whose property was destroyed and the magistrate who committed the culprits.
There were three hundred prisoners awaiting trial.




The method in which the prosecutions were conducted in Wiltshire, though
it did not differ from the procedure followed in Hampshire and elsewhere,
provoked some criticism from the lawyers. The prosecutions were all managed
by the county authorities. The clerks of the committing magistrates in the
different districts first took the depositions, and then got up all the prosecutions
in their capacity of solicitors to the same magistrates prosecuting as county
authorities, to the exclusion of the solicitors of the individual prosecutors.
Further, all the prosecutions were managed for the county by a single barrister,
who assisted the Attorney-General and left no opening for other members of
the Bar. The counsel for one of the prisoners objected to this method, not
only on the ground of its unfairness to the legal profession, but on the
wider ground of the interests of justice. For it was inconsistent with the
impartiality required from magistrates who committed prisoners, that they
should go on to mix themselves up with the management of the prosecution;
in many cases these magistrates served again as grand jurors in the proceedings
against the prisoners. Such procedure, he argued 'was calculated to throw
at least a strong suspicion on the fair administration of justice.' These
protests, however, were silenced by the judges, and though the Attorney-General
announced that he was willing that the counsel for the magistrates should
retire, no change was made in the arrangements.




The Salisbury prisoners were under a further disadvantage peculiar, it
is to be hoped, to that gaol. They were forbidden to see their attorney except
in the presence of the gaoler or his servants. This rule seems to have been
construed by the authorities in a manner that simplified considerably the
task of the prosecution. The facts of the case of James Lush, condemned to
death on two charges of extorting money in a mob, were made public by Hunt
in a letter to the Times, 22nd January 1831. Lush was a very poor man, but
when first committed he sent for an attorney and made a full confession.
'This confession, so confidentially made to his attorney (by an extraordinary
rule of the gaol) the legal adviser was compelled to submit to the inspection
of the gaoler, which paper he kept in his hands for several days and in all
human probability, this document, or a copy of it, was either submitted to
the inspection of the judge, or placed in the hands of the prosecutor, the
Crown Solicitor, or the Attorney-General: when this man was called up for
trial, such was his extreme poverty, that he could not raise a guinea to
fee counsel, and he was left destitute, without legal advice or assistance.'
The Attorney-General could only answer this charge in the House of Commons
by declaring that he had no recollection of any such circumstance himself,
and that no gentleman of the Bar would avail himself of information obtained
in such a manner. Lush could not distinguish these niceties of honour, or
understand why his confession should be examined and kept by the gaoler unless
it was to be used against him, and it is not surprising that he thought himself
betrayed. It is only fair to Lord Melbourne to add that when Hunt drew his
attention to this iniquitous rule in Salisbury Gaol he had it abolished.




The cases tried were very similar to those at Winchester; batch after
batch of boys and men in the prime of life were brought up to the dock for
a brief trial and sentence of exile. Such was the haste that in one case
at least the prisoners appeared with the handcuffs still on their wrists,
a circumstance which elicited a rebuke from the judge, and an excuse of overwork
from the gaoler. Amongst the first cases eight prisoners, varying in age
from seventeen to thirty, were sentenced to transportation for life for doing
£500 worth of damage at Brasher's cloth mill at Wilton. Thirteen men
were transported for seven years and one for fourteen years for breaking
threshing machines on the day of the Pyt House affray. Mr. John Benett was
satisfied with this tale of victims in addition to the man killed by the
yeomanry, and refrained from prosecuting for the stones thrown at him. For
this he took great credit in the House of Commons, and no doubt it was open
to him to imitate Bingham Baring's friends, and to talk of that kind of outrage
as 'murder.'




At Salisbury, as at Winchester, evidence about distress and wages was
ruled out by the judges whenever possible; thus when twelve men, nine of
whom were afterwards transported for seven years, were being tried for breaking
a threshing machine on the farm of a man named Ambrose Patience, the cross-examination
of Patience, which aimed at eliciting facts about wages and distress, was
stopped by the court on the ground that in a case of this sort such evidence
was scarcely regular; it was intimated, however, that the court would hear
representations of this kind later. But some light was thrown incidentally
in the course of the trials on the circumstances of the prisoners. Thus one
of the Pyt House prisoners urged in his defence: 'My Lord, I found work very
bad in my own parish for the last three years, and having a wife and three
children to support I was glad to get work wherever I could get it. I had
some work at a place four miles from my house.' He then described how on
his way to work he was met by the mob and forced to join them. 'It is a hard
case with me, my Lord; I was glad to get work though I could earn only seven
shillings per week, and it cost me a shilling a week for iron, so that I
had only six shillings a week to support five persons.' Another prisoner,
Mould of Hatch, was stated by Lord Arundel to be very poor: he had a wife
and six children, of whom one or two had died of typhus since his committal.
They had nothing to live on but what they got at Lord Arundel's house. The
benevolent Lord Arundel, or the parish, must have supported the survivors
indefinitely, for Mould was exiled for seven years. Barett again, another
of these prisoners, was supporting himself, a wife, and a child on 5s. a
week. The usual rate of wages in Wiltshire was 7s. a week.




Evidence about the instigation of the labourers by those in good circumstances
was also ruled out, and much that would be interesting in the history of
the riots has thus perished. When six men were being prosecuted for breaking
a threshing machine on the farm of Mr. Judd at Newton Toney, counsel for
the defence started a cross-examination of the prosecutor designed to show
that certain landowners in the parish had instigated the labourers to the
outrages, but he was stopped by Mr. Justice Alderson, who declared that such
an inquiry was not material to the issue, which was the guilt or innocence
of the prisoners. If the prisoners were found guilty these circumstances
would be laid before the court in mitigation of punishment. However strong
the mitigating circumstances in this case were, the punishment was certainly
not mitigated, for all six men were sentenced to the maximum penalty of seven
years' transportation. In a similar case in Whiteparish it came out in the
evidence that Squire Bristowe had sent down buckets of strong beer, and that
Squire Wynne, who was staying with Squire Bristowe, was present at the breaking
of the machine. In the affair at Ambrose Patience's farm already mentioned,
the defence of the prisoners was that Farmer Parham had offered them half
a hogshead of cider if they would come and break his machine, whilst in another
case three men were acquitted because one of the witnesses for the prosecution,
a young brother of the farmer whose property had been destroyed, unexpectedly
disclosed the fact that his brother had said to the mob: 'Act like men, go
and break the machine, but don't go up to the house.'




The proportion of charges of extorting money was smaller at Salisbury
than at Winchester: most of the indictments were for breaking machines only.
In some instances the prosecution dropped the charge of robbery, thinking
transportation for seven years a sufficient punishment for the offence. Three
brothers were sentenced to death for taking half a crown: nobody received
this sentence for a few coppers. In this case the three brothers, William,
Thomas, and John Legg, aged twenty-eight, twenty-one, and eighteen, had gone
at midnight to the kitchen door of the house of Mrs. Montgomery, wife of
a J.P., and asked the manservant for money or beer. The man gave them half
a crown, and they thanked him civilly and went away. A curious light is thrown
on the relations between robbers and the robbed in the trial of six men for
machine-breaking at West Grimstead: the mob of fifty persons asked the farmer
for a sovereign, he promised to pay it next day, whereupon one of the mob,
a man named Light who was his tenant, offered to pay the sovereign himself
and to deduct it from the rent.




At Salisbury, as at Winchester, the fate of the victims depended largely
on the character given to the prisoners by the local gentry. This was especially
the case towards the end when justice began to tire, and a good many charges
were dropped. Thus Charles Bourton was only imprisoned for three months for
breaking a threshing machine, whilst John Perry was transported for seven
years for the same offence. But then John Perry had been convicted seven
or eight times for poaching.




In Wiltshire, as in Hampshire, the judges were particularly severe to
those prisoners who were not agricultural labourers. A striking instance
is worth quoting, not only as illustrating this special severity, hut also
because it shows that the judges when inflicting the maximum penalty of seven
years' transportation for machine-breaking were well award that it was tantamount
to exile for life. Thomas Porter, aged eighteen, a shepherd, Henry Dicketts,
aged nineteen, a bricklayer's labourer, Aaron Shepherd, aged forty (occupation
not stated), James Stevens, aged twenty-five, an agricultural labourer, and
George Burbage, aged twenty-four, also an agricultural labourer, were found
guilty of machine-breaking at Mr. Blake's at Idmiston. Stevens and Burbage
escaped with two years' and one year's imprisonment with hard labour, respectively,
and the following homily from Mr. Justice Alderson to think over in prison:
'You are both thrashers and you might in the perversion of your understanding
think that these machines are detrimental to you. Be assured that your labour
cannot ultimately be hurt by the employment of these machines. If they are
profitable to the farmer, they will also be profitable ultimately to the
labourer, though they may for a time injure him. If they are not profitable
to the farmer he will soon cease to employ them.' The shepherd boy of eighteen,
the bricklayer's labourer of nineteen, and their companion of forty were
reserved for a heavier penalty: 'As to you, Aaron Shepherd, I can give you
no hope of remaining in this country. You Thomas Porter, are a shepherd,
and you Henry Dicketts, are a bricklayer's labourer. You have nothing to
do with threshing machines. They do not interfere with your labour, and you
could not, even in the darkness of your ignorance, suppose that their destruction
would do you any good.... I hope that your fate will be a warning to others.
You will leave the country, all of you: you will see your friends and relations
no more: for though you will be transported for seven years only, it is not
likely that at the expiration of that term you will find yourselves in a
situation to return. You will be in a distant land at the expiration of your
sentence. The land which you have disgraced will see you no more: the friends
with whom you are connected will be parted from you for ever in this world.'




Mr. Justice Alderson's methods received a good deal of attention in one
of the Salisbury trials, known as the Looker case. Isaac Looker, a well-to-do
farmer, was indicted for sending a threatening letter to John Rowland: 'Mr.
Rowland, Haxford Farm, Hif you goes to sware against or a man in prisson,
you have here farm burnt down to ground, and thy bluddy head chopt off.'
Some evidence was produced to show that Isaac Looker had asserted in conversation
that it was the magistrates and the soldiers, and not the mobs, who were
the real breakers of the peace. But this did not amount to absolute proof
that he had written the letter: to establish this conclusion the prosecution
relied on the evidence of four witnesses; the first had quarrelled with Looker,
and had not seen his writing for four or five years; the second denied that
there had been any quarrel, but had not been in the habit of speaking to
the prisoner for five or six years, or seen his writing during that time;
the third had not had 'much of a quarrel' with him, but had not seen his
writing since 1824; the fourth was the special constable who found in Looker's
bureau, which was unlocked and stood in the kitchen where the family sat,
a blank piece of paper that fitted on to the piece on which the letter was
written. More witnesses were called for the defence than for the prosecution,
and they included the vestry clerk of Wimborne, an ex-schoolmaster; all of
these witnesses had known Looker's writing recently, and all of them swore
that the threatening letter was not in his writing. Mr. Justice Alderson
summed up against the prisoner, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and
sentence of transportation for life was passed upon Looker in spite of his
vehement protestations of innocence. 'I cannot attend to these asseverations,'
said Mr. Justice Alderson, 'for we all know that a man who can be guilty
of such an offence as that of which you have been convicted, will not hesitate
to deny it as you now do. I would rather trust to such evidence as has been
given in your case, than to the most solemn declarations even on the scaffold.'




The learned judge and the jury then retired for refreshment, when a curious
development took place. Edward, son of Isaac Looker, aged eighteen years,
came forward and declared that he had written the letter in question and
other letters as well. He wrote a copy from memory, and the handwriting was
precisely similar. He explained that he had written the letters without his
father's knowledge and without a thought of the consequences, in order to
help two cousins who were in gaol for machine-breaking. He had heard people
say that 'it would get my cousins off if threatening letters were written.'
He had let his father know in prison that he had written the letters, and
had also told his father's solicitor. Edward Looker was subsequently tried
and sentenced to seven years' transportation: Isaac's case was submitted
to the Home Secretary for pardon.




Although, as we have said, the Government, or its representatives, grew
rather more lenient towards the end of the proceedings at Salisbury, it was
evidently thought essential to produce some crime deserving actual death.
The culprit in this case was Peter Withers, a young man of twenty-three,
married and with five children. His character till the time of the riots
was exemplary. He was committed on a charge of riot, and briefed a lawyer
to defend him for this misdemeanour. Just before the trial came on the charge
was changed, apparently by the Attorney-General, to the capital charge of
assaulting Oliver Calley Codrington with a hammer. His counsel was of course
unprepared to defend him on this charge, and, as he explained afterwards,
'it was only by the humane kindness of the Attorney-General who allowed him
to look at his brief that he was aware of all the facts to be alleged against
his client.' Withers himself seemed equally unprepared; when asked for his
defence he said that he would leave it to his counsel, as of course he had
arranged to do when the charge was one of misdemeanour only.




The incident occurred in an affray at Rockley near Marlborough. Mr. Baskerville,
J.P., rode up with some special constables to a mob of forty or fifty men,
Withers amongst them, and bade them go home. They refused, declaring that
they did not care a damn for the magistrates. Mr. Baskerville ordered Mr.
Codrington, who was a special constable, to arrest Withers. A general mêlée
ensued, blows were given and received, and Codrington was hit by a hammer
thrown by Withers. Withers' own version of the affair was that Codrington
attacked him without provocation in a ferocious manner with a hunting whip,
loaded with iron at the end. Baskerville also struck him. He aimed his hammer
at Codrington and it missed. Codrington's horse then crushed him against
the wall, and he threw his hammer a second time with better aim. There was
nothing in the evidence of the prosecution to discredit this version, and
both Baskerville and Codrington admitted that they might have struck him.
Codrington's injuries were apparently more serious than Bingham Baring's;
it was stated that he had been confined to bed for two or three days, and
to the house from Tuesday to Saturday, and that he had a scar of one and
a half inches on the right side of his nose. No surgeon, however, appeared
as a witness, and the hammer WaS not produced in court. Withers was found
guilty and reserved, together with Lush, for execution.




The special correspondent of the Times who had been present at
Winchester made an interesting comparison between the Hampshire and the Wiltshire
labourers on trial (8th January 1831). The Wiltshire labourers he described
as more athletic in appearance and more hardy in manner. 'The prisoners here
turn to the witnesses against them with a bold and confident air: cross-examine
them, and contradict their answers, with a confidence and a want of common
courtesy, in terms of which comparatively few instances occurred in the neighbouring
county.' In this behaviour the correspondent detected the signs of a very
low state of moral intelligence.




When the time came for the last scene in court there was no trace of the
bold demeanour which had impressed the Times correspondent during
the conduct of the trials. For the people of Wiltshire, like the people of
Hampshire, were stunned by the crash and ruin of this catastrophic vengeance.
The two men sentenced to death were reprieved, but one hundred and fifty-four
men and boys were sentenced to transportation, thirty-three of them for life,
the rest for seven or fourteen years, with no prospect of ever returning
to their homes. And Alderson and his brother judges in so punishing this
wild fling of folly, or hope, or despair, were not passing sentence only
on the men and boys before them: they were pronouncing a doom not less terrible
on wives and mothers and children and babes in arms in every village on the
Wiltshire Downs. One man begged to be allowed to take his child, eight months
old, into exile, for its mother had died in childbirth, and it would be left
without kith or kin. He was told by the judge that he should have remembered
this earlier. The sentence of final separation on all these families and
homes was received with a frenzy of consternation and grief, and the judges
themselves were affected by the spectacle of these broken creatures in the
dock and round the court, abandoned to the unchecked paroxysms of despair.(30*)
'Such a total prostration of the mental faculties by fear,' wrote the Times
correspondent, 'and such a terrible exhibition of anguish and despair, I
never before witnessed in a Court of Justice.' 'Immediately on the conclusion
of this sentence a number of women, who were seated in court behind the prisoners,
set up a dreadful shriek of lamentation. Some of them rushed forward to shake
hands with the prisoners, and more than one voice was heard to exclaim, "Farewell,
I shall never see you more."'




'The whole proceedings of this day in court were of the most afflicting
and distressing nature. But the laceration of the feelings did not end with
the proceedings in court. The car for the removal of the prisoners was at
the back entrance to the court-house and was surrounded by a crowd of mothers,
wives, sisters and children, anxiously waiting for a glance of their condemned
relatives. The weeping and wailing of the different parties, as they pressed
the hands of the convicts as they stepped into the car, was truly heartrending.
We never saw so distressing a spectacle before, and trust that the restored
tranquillity of the country will prevent us from ever seeing anything like
it again.'




The historian may regret that these men do not pass out before him in
a cold and splendid defiance. Their blind blow had been struck and it had
been answered; they had dreamt that their lot might be made less intolerable,
and the governing class had crushed that daring fancy for ever with banishment
and the breaking of their homes; it only remained for them to accept their
fate with a look of stone upon their faces and a curse of fire in their hearts.
So had Muir and Palmer and many a political prisoner, victims of the tyrannies
of Pitt and Dundas, of Castlereagh and Sidmouth, gone to their barbarous
doom. So had the Lantenacs and the Gauvains alike gone to the guillotine.
History likes to match such calm and unshaken bearing against the distempered
justice of power. Here she is cheated of her spectacle. Outwardly it might
seem a worse fate for men of education to be flung to the hulks with the
coarsest of felons: for men whose lives had been comfortable to be thrust
into the dirt and disorder of prisons. But political prisoners are martyrs,
and martyrs are not the stuff for pity. However bitter their sufferings,
they do not suffer alone: they are sustained by a Herculean comradeship of
hopes and of ideas. The darkest cage is lighted by a ray from Paradise to
men or women who believe that the night of their sufferings will bring a
dawn less cold and sombre to mankind than the cold and sombre dawn of yesterday.
But what ideas befriended the ploughboy or the shepherd torn from his rude
home? What vision had he of a nobler future for humanity? To what dawn did
he leave his wife or his mother, his child, his home, his friends, or his
trampled race? What robe of dream and hope and fancy was thrown over his
exile or their hunger, his poignant hour of separation, or their ceaseless
ache of poverty and cold




 'to comfort the human want.

From the bosom of magical skies'?




The three judges who had restored respect for law and order in Wiltshire
and Hampshire next proceeded to Dorchester, where a Special Commission to
try the Dorsetshire rioters was. The rising had been less serious in opened
on 11th January Dorset than in the two other counties, and there were only
some fifty prisoners awaiting trial on charges of machine-breaking, extorting
money and riot. The Government took no part in the prosecutions; for, as
it was explained in a letter to Denman, 'the state of things is quite altered;
great effect has been produced: the law has been clearly explained, and prosecutions
go on without the least difficulty.'(31*) Baron Vaughan and Mr. Justice Parke
had given the charges at Winchester and Salisbury: it was now the turn of
Mr. Justice Alderson, and in his opening survey of the social conditions
of the time he covered a wide field. To the usual dissertation on the economics
of machinery he added a special homily on the duties incumbent on the gentry,
who were bidden to discourage and discountenance, and if necessary to prosecute,
the dangerous publications that were doing such harm in rural districts.
But their duties did not end here, and they were urged to go home and to
educate their poorer neighbours and to improve their conditions. The improvement
to be aimed at, however, was not material but moral. 'Poverty,' said Mr.
Justice Alderson,' is indeed, I fear, inseparable from the state of the human
race, but poverty itself and the misery attendant on it, would no doubt be
greatly mitigated if a spirit of prudence were more generally diffused among
the people, and if they understood more fully and practised better their
civil, moral and religious duties.'




The Dorsetshire labourers had unfortunately arrived at the precipitate
conclusion that a spirit of prudence would not transform 7s. a week into
a reasonable livelihood. They used no violence beyond breaking up the threshing
machines. 'We don't intend to hurt the farmer,' they told the owner of one
machine, 'but we are determined that the land shall come down, and the tithes,
and we will have more wages.' When money was taken it seems to have been
demanded and received in an amicable spirit. The sums asked for were often
very small. Sentence of death was pronounced on two men, Joseph Sheppard
and George Legg, for taking 2s. from Farmer Christopher Morey at Buckland
Newton. The mob asked for money, and the farmer offered them 1s.: they replied
that they wanted 1s. 6d., and the farmer gave them 2s. Sheppard's character
was very good, and it came out that he and the prosecutor had had a dispute
about money some years before. He was transported, but not for life. Legg
was declared by the prosecutor to have been 'saucy and impudent,' and to
have 'talked rough and bobbish.' His character, however, was stated by many
witnesses, including the clergyman, to be exemplary. He had five children
whom he supported without parish help on 7s. a week: a cottage was given
him but no fuel. Baron Vaughan was so much impressed by this evidence that
he declared that he had never heard better testimony to character, and that
he would recommend a less severe penalty than transportation. But Legg showed
a lamentable want of discretion, for he interrupted the judge with these
words: 'I would rather that your Lordship would put twenty-one years' transportation
upon me than be placed in the condition of the prosecutor. I never said a
word to him, that I declare.' Baron Vaughan sardonically remarked that he
had not benefited himself by this observation.




The tendency to give less severe punishment, noticed in the closing trials
at Salisbury, was more marked at Dorchester. Nine men were let off on recognisances
and ten were not proceeded against: in the case of six of these ten the prosecutor,
one Robert Bullen, who had been robbed of 4s. and 2s. 6d., refused to come
forward. But enough sharp sentences were given to keep the labourers in submission
for the future. One man was transported for life and eleven for seven years:
fifteen were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment; seven were acquitted.
It was not surprising that the special correspondent of the Times complained
that such meagre results scarcely justified the pomp and expense of a Special
Commission. In the neighbouring county of Gloucester, where the country gentlemen
carried out the work of retribution without help from headquarters, seven
men were transported for fourteen years, twenty for seven years, and twenty-five
were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from six months to three
years. All of these sentences were for breaking threshing machines.




The disturbances in Berks and Bucks had been considered serious enough
to demand a Special Commission, and Sir James Alan Park, Sir William Bolland
and Sir John Patteson were the judges appointed. The first of the two Berkshire
Commissions opened at Reading on 27th December. The Earl of Abingdon, Lord-Lieutenant
of the County, and Mr. Charles Dundas were the two local commissioners. Mr.
Dundas has figured already in these pages as chairman of the meeting at Speenhamland.
One hundred and thirty-eight prisoners were awaiting trial at Reading: they
were most of them young, only eighteen being forty or over. The rest, with
few exceptions, varied from seventeen to thirty-five in age, and must have
lived all their lives under the Speenhamland system.




It is impossible to compare the accounts of the Special Commissions in
Berks and Bucks with those in Hampshire and Wiltshire without noticing a
difference in the treatment of the rioters. The risings had been almost simultaneous,
the offences were of the same character, and the Commissions sat at the same
time. The difference was apparent from the first, and on 1st January the
Times published a leading article pleading for uniformity, and pointing
out that the Berkshire Commission was 'a merciful contrast' to that at Winchester.
The cause is probably to be found in the dispositions and characters of the
authorities responsible in the two cases. The country gentlemen of Berkshire,
represented by a man like Mr. Dundas, were more humane than the country gentlemen
of Hampshire, represented by men like the duke of Wellington and the Barings;
Mr. Gurney, the public prosecutor at Reading, was more lenient than Sir Thomas
Denman, and the Reading judges were more kindly and considerate than the
judges at Winchester. Further, there had been in Berkshire little of the
wild panic that swept over the country houses in Hampshire and Wiltshire.
The judges at Reading occasionally interjected questions on the prisoners,
behalf, and in many cases they did not conceal their satisfaction at an acquittal.
Further, they had a more delicate sense for the proprieties. Contrary to
custom, they asked neither the Grand Jury nor the magistrates to dinner on
the first day, being anxious, we are told, to free the administration of
justice 'from the slightest appearance of partiality in the eyes of the lower
classes.' The Lord Chancellor and Lord Melbourne had been consulted and had
approved.




It must not be supposed that Mr. Justice Park's theories of life and social
relationships differed from those of his brothers at Winchester. In his address
to the Grand Jury he repudiated with indignation the 'impudent and base slander...
that the upper ranks of society care little for the wants and privations
of the poor. I deny this positively, upon a very extensive means of knowledge
upon subjects of this nature. But every man can deny it who looks about him
and sees the vast institutions in every part of the kingdom for the relief
of the young and the old, the deaf and the lame, the blind, the widow, the
orphan -- and every child of wretchedness and woe. There is not a calamity
or distress incident to humanity, either of body or of mind, that is not
humbly endeavoured to be mitigated or relieved, by the powerful and the affluent,
either of high or middling rank, in this our happy land, which for its benevolence,
charity, and boundless humanity, has been the admiration of the world.' The
theory that the rich kept the poor in a state of starvation and that this
was the cause of the disturbances, he declared later to be entirely disproved
by the conduct of one of the mobs in destroying a threshing machine belonging
to William Mount, Esq., at Wasing, 'Mr. Mount having given away £100
no longer ago than last winter to assist the lower orders during that inclement
season.'




A feature of the Reading Commission was the difficulty of finding jurymen.
All farmers were challenged on behalf of the prisoners, and matters were
at a deadlock until the judges ordered the bystanders to be impannelled.




The earlier cases were connected with the riots in Hungerford. Property
in an iron foundry had been destroyed, and fifteen men were found guilty
on this capital charge. One of the fifteen was William Oakley, who now paid
the penalty for his £5 and strong language. But when the first cases
were over, Mr. Gurney began to drop the capital charge, and to content himself,
as a rule, with convictions for breaking threshing machines. One case revealed
serious perjury on one side or the other. Thomas Goodfellow and Cornelius
Bennett were charged with breaking a threshing machine at Matthew Batten's
farm. The prisoners produced four witnesses, two labourers, a woman whose
husband was in prison for the riots, and John Gaiter, who described himself
as 'not quite a master bricklayer,' to prove that Matthew Batten had encouraged
the riots. The first three witnesses declared that Batten had asked the rioters
to come and break his machine in order to serve out his landlord and Mr.
Ward, and had promised them victuals and £1. Batten and his son, on
the other hand, swore that these statements were false. The prisoners were
found guilty, with a recommendation to mercy which was disregarded. Goodfellow,
who was found guilty of breaking other machines as well, was sentenced to
fourteen, and Cornelius Bennett to seven years' transportation, The judge
spoke of their scandalous attempt to blacken the character of a respectable
farmer: 'it pleased God however that the atrocious attempt had failed.' It
would be interesting to know what were the relations between Matthew Batten
and his landlord.




On the last day of the trials Mr. Gurney announced that there would be
no more prosecutions for felony, as enough had been done in the way of making
examples. Some interesting cases of riot were tried. The most important riot
had taken place as early as 19th November, and the hero of the proceedings
was the Rev. Edward Cove, the venerable Vicar of Brimpton, one of the many
parson magistrates. A mob had assembled in order to demand an increase of
wages, and it was met by Mr. Cove and his posse of special constables. On
occasions like this, Mr. Gurney remarked, we become sensible of the great
advantages of our social order. Mr. Cove without more ado read the Riot Act;
the mob refused to disperse; his special constables thereupon attacked them,
and a general mêlée followed in which hard blows were given
and taken. No one attempted to strike Mr. Cove himself, but one of his companions
received from a rioter, whom he identified, a blow rivalling that given to
Mr. Bingham Baring, which beat the crown of his hat in and drove the rim
over his eyes: it was followed by other and more serious blows on his head
and body. The counsel for the defence tried to show that it was distress
that had caused the rioters to assemble, and he quoted a remark of the Chairman
of Quarter Sessions that the poor were starved almost into insurrection;
but all evidence about wages was rUled out. The court were deeply impressed
by this riot, and Mr. Justice Park announced that it had alarmed him and
his fellow judges more 'than anything that had hitherto transpired in these
proceedings.' 'Had one life been lost,' he continued, 'the lives of every
individual of the mob would have been forfeited, and the law must have been
carried into effect against those convicted.' As it was, nobody was condemned
to death for his share in the affray, though the more violent, such as George
Williams, alias 'Staffordshire Jack,' a 'desperate character,' received heavier
penalties for machine-breaking in consequence.




Three men were reserved for execution: William Oakley, who was told that
as a carpenter he had no business to mix himself up in these transactions;
Alfred Darling, a blacksmith by trade, who had been found guilty on several
charges of demanding money; and Winterbourne, who had taken part in the Hungerford
affair in the magistrates' room, and had also acted as leader in some cases
when a mob asked for money. In one instance the mob had been content with
£1 instead of the £2 for which it had asked for breaking a threshing
machine, Winterbourne remarking, 'we will take half price because he has
stood like a man.'




Public opinion in Berkshire was horrified at the prospect of taking life.
Petitions for mercy poured in from Reading, including one from ladies to
the queen, from Newbury, from Hungerford, from Henley, and from other places.
Two country gentlemen, Mr. J. B. Monck and Mr. Wheble, made every exertion
to save the condemned men. They waited with petitions on Lord Melbourne,
who heard them patiently for an hour. They obtained a reprieve for Oakley
and for Darling, who were transported for life; Winterbourne they could not
save: he was hung on 11th January, praying to the last that his wife, who
was dangerously ill of typhus, might die before she knew of his fate.




Fifty-six men were sentenced to transportation from Reading -- twenty-three
for life, sixteen for fourteen years, seventeen for seven years thirty-six
were sent to prison for various terms.




The same commissioners went on to Abingdon where proceedings opened on
6th January. Here there were only forty-seven prisoners, all but two of whom
were agricultural labourers, most of them very young. The cases resembled
those tried at Reading, but it is clear that the evidence of Mrs. Charlotte
Slade, whose conduct we have already described, and her method of dealing
with the rioters, made a great impression on Mr. Justice Park and his colleagues,
and opened their eyes to the true perspective of the rhetorical language
that had assumed such terrifying importance to other judges. One young labourer,
Richard Kempster by name, who was found guilty of breaking a threshing machine,
had carried a black-and-red flag in the mob, and when arrested had exclaimed,
'be damned if I don't wish it was a revolution, and that all was a fire together:'
it is easy to imagine the grave homily on the necessity of cutting such a
man off for ever from his kind that these words would have provoked from
the judges at Winchester. Mr. Justice Park and his colleagues sentenced Kempster
to twelve months' imprisonment. At Abingdon only one man was sentenced to
be transported; Thomas Mackrell, an agricultural labourer of forty-three.
Another, Henry Woolridge, had sentence of death commuted to eighteen months'
imprisonment. Thirty-five others were sent to prison for various terms.




The same three judges proceeded to Aylesbury to try the Buckinghamshire
rioters. The chief event in this county had been the destruction of paper-making
machinery at Wycombe. The Commission opened on 11th January: the duke of
Buckingham and Mr. Maurice Swabey were the local commissioners. There were
one hundred and thirty-six prisoners to be tried, almost all young and illiterate:
only eighteen were forty years of age or over. Forty-four men and boys were
found guilty of the capital charge of destroying paper machinery. Most of
the other prisoners who were charged with breaking threshing machines were
allowed to plead guilty and let off on their own recognisances, or else the
charge was not pressed. An exception was made in a case in which some members
of a mob had been armed with guns. Three men who had carried guns were sent
to transportation for seven years, and thirteen others involved were sent
to prison for two years or eighteen months. Several men were tried for rioting,
and those who had combined a demand for increased wages with a request for
the restoration of parish buns were sent to prison for six weeks. One more
trial is worth notice, because it suggests that even in Buckinghamshire,
where the general temper was more lenient, individuals who had made themselves
obnoxious were Singled out for special treatment. John Crook, a miller, was
indicted with four others for riotously assembling and breaking a winnowing
machine at Mr. Fryer's at Long Crendon. As Crook was charged with a misdemeanour
his counsel could address the jury, and we learn from his speech that Crook
had been kept in prison since 2nd December, though £2000 had been offered
in bail and many other prisoners had been allowed out. The explanation, it
was argued, was to be found in the fact that Crook had come into some property
which qualified him to hold a gun licence and to kill game. He was sentenced
to three months' imprisonment without hard labour, and to pay a fine of £10.




Thirty-two men in all were sent to prison for the agricultural disturbances
in addition to the three sentenced to transportation. Forty-two of those
concerned in the breaking of papermaking machinery received sentence of death,
but their punishment was commuted to life transportation for one, seven years'
transportation for twenty-two, and imprisonment for various terms for the
rest. Two men were reserved for execution. One, Thomas Blizzard, was thirty
years old, with a wife and three children. His character was excellent. At
the time of the riots he was a roundsman, receiving 1s. a day from the overseer's
and 1s. 6d. a week from a farmer. He told his employer at Little Marlow that
he would take a holiday to go machine-breaking, for he would endure imprisonment,
or even transportation, rather than see his wife and children cry for bread.
John Sarney, the other, was fifty-six years old and had a wife and six children:
he kept a small beer-shop and his character was irreproachable. Petitions
on behalf of the two men were signed extensively, and the sentence was commuted
to transportation for life. The Aylesbury sentences seem lenient in comparison
with those given at Salisbury and Winchester, but they did not seem lenient
to the people in the district. 'Pen cannot describe,' wrote a Times
correspondent, 'the heart-rending scene of despair, misery and want, prevailing
at Flackwell-Heath, the residence of the families of the major part of the
misguided men now incarcerated at Aylesbury.' The same correspondent tells
of a benevolent Quaker, who had become rich as a maker of paper, helping
these families by stealth.




The work of the Special Commissions was now over. Melbourne had explained
in Parliament that they had been set up 'to expound the law' and to bring
home to the ignorant the gravity of their crimes against social order. In
spite of the daily imposition of ferocious punishments on poachers and thieves,
the poor apparently did not know in what letters of blood the code against
rioting and discontent was composed. These three weeks had brought a lurid
enlightenment into their dark homes. In the riots, as we have seen, the only
man who had been killed was a rioter, killed according to the reports of
the time by a yeomanry soldier, according to local tradition by a farmer,
and for that offence he had been refused Christian burial. On the other side,
not a single person had been killed or seriously wounded. For these riots,
apart from the cases of arson, for which six men or boys were hung, aristocratic
justice exacted three lives, and the transportation of four hundred and fifty-seven
men and boys,(32*) in addition to the imprisonment of about four hundred
at home. The shadow of this vengeance still darkens the minds of old men
and women in the villages of Wiltshire, and eighty years have been too short
a time to blot out its train of desolating memories.(33*) Nobody who does
not realise what Mr. Hudson has described with his intimate touch, the effect
on the imagination and the character of 'a life of simple unchanging action
and of habits that are like instincts, of hard labour in sun and rain and
wind from day to day,' can ever understand what the breaking of all the ties
of life and home and memory meant to the exiles and to those from whose companionship
they were then torn for ever.




We have said that one feature of the rising was the firing of stacks and
ricks and barns. This practice was widespread, and fires broke out even in
counties where the organised rising made little progress. Associations for
the detection of incendiaries were formed at an early stage, and immense
rewards were offered. Yet not a single case of arson was tried before the
Special Commissions, and the labourers kept their secret well. Many of the
governing class in the early days persuaded themselves that the labourers
had no secret to keep, and that the fires were due to any one except the
labourers, and to any cause except distress. Perhaps the wish was father
to the thought, for as the Times observed, persons responsible for
grinding the faces of their labourers preferred to think the outrages the
work of strangers. Sometimes it was smugglers, suffering from the depression
in their trade: sometimes it was foreigners: sometimes it was mysterious
gentlemen in gigs, driving furiously about the country, led by Captain Swing,
scattering fireballs and devastation. These were the fashionable theories
in the House of Lords, although Richmond reminded his brother peers that
there had been a flood of petitions representing the sufferings of the labourers
from the very beginning of the year, and that the House of Lords had not
thought it necessary to give them the slightest attention. Lord Camden ascribed
the outrages to the French spirit, and argued that the country was enjoying
'what was undeniably a genial autumn.' The Duke of Wellington took the same
view, denying that the troubles were due to distress: the most influential
cause of disturbances was the example, 'and I will unhesitatingly say the
bad and the mischievous example, afforded by the neighbouring States.' Eldon
remarked that many of the prisoners taken in the riots were foreigners, a
point on which Melbourne undeceived him. The speakers who regarded the disturbances
in the south of England as the overflow of the Paris Revolution had no positive
evidence to produce, but they had a piece of negative evidence which they
thought conclusive. For if the labourers knew who were the incendiaries,
they would surely have given information. In some cases a reward of £1000
with a free pardon for all except the actual author was waiting to be claimed,
'and yet not one of the miserable beings have availed themselves of the prospect
of becoming rich.'




Some eleven cases of arson were tried at the Assizes in Essex, Kent, Sussex,
and Surrey: all the prisoners were agricultural labourers and most of them
were boys. Eight were convicted, often on very defective evidence, and six
were executed. One of the eight, Thomas Goodman, a boy of eighteen, saved
his life by declaring in prison that the idea had been put into his head
by a lecture of Cobbett's. Two brothers of the name of Pakeman, nineteen
and twenty years old, were convicted on the evidence of Bishop, another lad
of eighteen, who had prompted them to set fire to a barn, and later turned
king's evidence 'after a gentleman in the gaol had told him of the big reward.'
This fire seems to have been a piece of bravado, as no doubt many others
were, for Bishop remarked, as the three were sitting under a hedge after
lighting the barn, 'who says we can't have a fire too, as well as them at
Blean?' The two boys, who had never been taught to read or write, scandalised
the public by displaying a painful indifference to the ministrations of the
chaplain, and dying without receiving the sacrament.(34*) A half-witted boy
of fourteen, Richard Pennells, was tried at Lewes for setting fire to his
master's haystack for a promise of sixpence from a man who was not discovered.
His master, who prosecuted, remarked that he was 'dull of apprehension, but
not so much as not to know right from wrong.' The boy, who had no counsel,
offered no defence, and stood sobbing in the dock. The jury found him guilty,
with a recommendation to mercy on account of his youth and imperfect understanding.
Sentence of death was recorded, but he was told that his life would be spared.




These same Lewes Assizes, conducted by Mr. Justice Taunton, afforded a
striking example of the comparative treatment of different crimes. Thomas
Brown, a lad of seventeen, was charged with writing the following letter
to Lord Sheffield, 'Please, my Lord, I dont wise to hurt you. This is the
case al the world over. If you dont get rid of your foreign steward and farmer
and bailiff in a few days time -- less than a month -- we will burn him up,
and you along with him. My writing is bad, but my firing is good my Lord.'
Lord Sheffield gave evidence as to the receipt of the letter: the prisoner,
who had no counsel, was asked by the judge if he would like to put any questions,
and he only replied that he hoped that his lordship would forgive him. The
judge answered that his lordship had not the power, and sentenced Brown to
transportation for life.(35*) Later on in the same Assizes, Captain Winter,
a man of sixty, captain of a coasting vessel, was tried for the murder of
his wife, who had been killed in a most brutal manner. He had been hacking
and wounding her for four hours at night, and she was last seen alive at
half past two in the morning, naked and begging for mercy. Her body was covered
with wounds. The man's defence was that he came home drunk, that he found
his wife drunk, and that he had no knowledge of what followed. To the general
surprise Captain Winter escaped with a verdict of manslaughter. 'The prisoner,'
wrote the Times correspondent, 'is indebted for his life to the very
merciful way in which Mr. Justice Taunton appeared to view the case, and
the hint which he threw out to the jury, that the parties might have had
a quarrel, in which case her death by the prisoner would amount to manslaughter
only.'




When the disturbances began, the duke of Wellington was Prime Minister,
and Sir Robert Peel Home Secretary. But in November 1830 Wellington, who
had made a last effort to rally the old Tories, sulking over his surrender
on Catholic Emancipation, by some sudden thunder against Reform, had been
beaten on the Civil List and resigned. Reform was inevitable, and with Reform
the Whigs. Thus, towards the close of the year of the Revolution that drove
Charles X from France, Lord Grey became Prime Minister, to carry the measure
which as Charles Grey, lieutenant of Charles Fox, he had proposed in the
House of Commons in 1793, a few months after Louis XVI had lost his head
in the Revolution which had maddened and terrified the English aristocracy.
Fortune had been sparing in her favours to this cold, proud, honourable and
courageous man. She had shut him out from power for twenty-three years, waiting
to make him Prime Minister until he was verging on seventy, and all the dash
and ardour of youth had been chilled by disappointment and delay. But she
had reserved her extreme of malice to the end, for it was her chief unkindness
that having waited so long she did not wait a little longer. Grey, who had
been forty-four years in public life, and forty-three in opposition, took
office at the moment that the rising passed into Sampshire and Wiltshire,
and thus his first act as Prime Minister was to summon his colleagues to
a Cabinet meeting to discuss, not their plans for Parliamentary Reform, but
the measures to be taken in this alarming emergency. After a lifetime of
noble protest against war, intolerance, and repression, he found himself
in the toils and snares of the consequences of a policy in which war, intolerance,
and repression had been constant and conspicuous features. And those consequences
were especially to be dreaded by such a man at such a time.




Grey became Prime Minister to carry Reform, and Reform was still enveloped
to many minds in the wild fancies and terrors of a Jacobin past. To those
who knew, conscious as they were of their own modest purposes and limited
aim, that their accession to power boded to many violence, confusion, and
the breaking up of the old ways and life of the State, it was maddening that
these undiscerning peasants should choose this moment of all others for noise
and riot. The struggle for Reform was certain to lead to strife, and it was
hard that before they entered upon it England should already be in tumult
from other causes. Moreover, Grey had to reckon with William IV. So long
as he could remember, the Court had been the refuge of all that was base
in English politics, and it was a question whether Liberal ideas had suffered
more from the narrow and darkened mind of George III or the mean and incorrigible
perfidy of George IV. In comparison with his father, the new king had the
wisdom of a Bentham or an Adam Smith; in comparison with his brother, he
had the generous and loyal heart of a Philip Sidney or a Falkland. But seen
in any less flattering mirror, he was a very ordinary mortal, and Grey had
known this jolly, drinking, sailor prince too long and too well to trust
either his intellect or his character, under too fierce or too continuous
a strain. These riots tried him severely. No sooner was William on his throne
than the labourers came out of their dens, looking like those sansculottes
whose shadows were never far from the imagination of the English upper classes.
The king's support of Reform was no violent enthusiasm, and the slightest
threat of disorder might disturb the uneasy equilibrium of his likes and
fears. In the long run it depended on the will of this genial mediocrity-so
strangely had Providence mixed caprice and design in this world of politics
-- whether or not Reform should be carried, and carried without bloodshed.
Throughout these months then, the king, always at Melbourne's elbow, trying
to tempt and push the Government into more drastic measures, was a very formidable
enemy to the cause of moderation and of justice.




These influences were strong, and there was little to counteract them.
For there was nobody in the world which Grey and Melbourne alike inhabited
who could enter into the minds of the labourers. This is readily seen, if
we glance at two men who were regarded as extreme Radicals in the House of
Commons, Hobhouse and Burdett. Each of these men had served the cause of
Reform in prison as well as in Parliament, and each with rather ridiculous
associations; Hobhouse's imprisonment being connected with the ballad inspired
by the malicious and disloyal wit of his friend and hero, Byron, and Burdett's
with the ludicrous scene of his arrest, with his boy spelling out Magna Charta
on his knee. It is difficult for those who have read Hobhouse's diaries to
divine what play of reason and feeling ever made him a Radical, but a Radical
he was, an indefatigable critic of the old régime, and in particular
of such abuses as flogging in the army. Burdett was a leader in the same
causes. To these men, if to any, the conduct of the labourers might have
seemed to call for sympathy rather than for violence. But if we turn to Hobhouse's
diary we see that he was never betrayed into a solitary expression of pity
or concern for the scenes we have described, and as for Burdett, he was all
for dragooning the discontented counties and placing them under martial law.
And even Radnor, who as a friend of Cobbett was much less academic in his
Radicalism, sat on the Wiltshire Commission without making any protest that
has reached posterity.




All the circumstances then made it easy for Grey and his colleagues to
slip into a policy of violence and repression. They breathed an atmosphere
of panic, and they dreaded the recoil of that panic on their own schemes.
Yet when all allowance is made for this insidious climate, when we remember
that no man is so dangerous as the kind man haunted by the fear of seeming
weak, at a moment when he thinks his power of doing good depends on his character
for strength; when we remember, too, the tone of Society caught between scare
and excitement, the bad inspiration of the Court, the malevolent influence
of an alarmed Opposition, the absorbing interest of making a ministry, the
game apart from the business of politics, it is still difficult to understand
how men like Grey and Holland and Durham could ever have lent themselves
to the cruelties of this savage retribution. When first there were rumours
of the intention of the Government to put down the riots with severe measures,
Cobbett wrote a passage in which he reviewed the characters of the chief
ministers, Grey with his 'humane disposition,' Holland 'who never gave his
consent to an act of cruelty,' Althorp 'who has never dipped his hand in
blood,' Brougham 'who with all his half Scotch crotchets has at any rate
no blood about him,' to show that the new ministers, unlike many of their
Tory predecessors, might be trusted to be lenient and merciful. Two of these
men, Grey and Holland, had made a noble stand against all the persecutions
of which Tory Governments had been guilty, defending with passion men whose
opinions they regarded with horror; if any record could justify confidence
it was theirs. Unfortunately the politician who was made Home Secretary did
not share in this past. The common talk at the time of Melbourne's appointment
was that he was too lazy for his office; the real criticism should have been
that he had taken the side of Castlereagh and Sidmouth in 1817. As Home Secretary
he stopped short of the infamous measures he had then approved; he refused
to employ spies, and the Habeas Corpus was not suspended. But nobody can
follow the history of this rising, and the history of the class that made
it, without recognising that the punishment which exiled these four hundred
and fifty labourers is a stain, and an indelible stain, on the reputation
of the Government that lives in history on the fame of the Reform Bill. It
is difficult to believe that either Fox or Sheridan could have been parties
to it. The chief shame attaches to Melbourne, who let the judges do their
worst, and to Lansdowne, who sat beside the judges on the Salisbury bench,
but the fact that the Prime Minister was immersed in the preparation of a
reform, believed by his contemporaries to be a revolution, does not relieve
him of his share of the odium, which is the due of Governments that are cruel
to the weak, and careless of justice to the poor.




One effort was made, apart from the intercession of public opinion, to
induce the Government to relax its rigours. When the panic had abated and
the last echo of the riots had been stilled by this summary retribution,
a motion was proposed in the House of Commons for a general amnesty. Unhappily
the cause of the labourers was in the hands of Henry Hunt, a man whose wisdom
was not equal to his courage, and whose egregious vanity demoralised and
spoilt his natural eloquence. If those who were in close sympathy with his
general aims could not tolerate his manners, it is not surprising that his
advocacy was a doubtful recommendation in the unsympathetic atmosphere of
the House of Commons. He was a man of passionate sincerity, and had already
been twice in prison for his opinions, but the ruling class thinking itself
on the brink of a social catastrophe, while very conscious of Hunt's defects,
was in no mood to take a detached view of this virtue. The debate, which
took place on the 8th of February 1831, reflects little credit on the House
of Commons, and the division still less, for Hume was Hunt's only supporter.
The chief speakers against the motion were Benett of Wiltshire, George Lamb,
brother of Melbourne and Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and Denman,
the Attorney-General. Lamb amused himself and the House with jests on the
illiterate letter for writing which the boy Looker was then on the high seas,
and Denman threw out a suggestion that Looker's father had had a share in
the boy's guilt. Denman closed his speech by pouring scorn on those who talked
sentimentality, and declaring that he would ever look back with pride on
his part in the scenes of this memorable winter.




So far the Government had had it all their own way. But in their anxiety
to show a resolute front and to reassure those who had suspected that a reform
Government would encourage social disorder by weakness, Lord Grey and his
colleagues were drawn into a scrape in which they burnt their fingers rather
badly. They decided to prosecute two writers for inciting the labourers to
rebel. The two writers were Richard Carlile and William Cobbett. Carlile
was the natural prey for a Government in search of a victim. He had already
spent six or seven years of his lion-hearted life in prison for publishing
the writings of Paine and Hone: his wife, his sister, and his shopman had
all paid a similar penalty for their association, voluntary or involuntary,
with his public-spirited adventures. The document for which he stood in the
dock at the Old Bailey early in January l831 was an address to the agricultural
labourers, praising them for what they had done, and reviewing their misfortunes
in this sentence: 'The more tame you have grown, the more you have been oppressed
and despised, the more you have been trampled on.' Carlile defended himself
in a speech that lasted four hours and a half. The jury disagreed, but after
several hours they united on a verdict of acquittal on the charge of bringing
the Crown into contempt, and of guilty on the charge of addressing inflammatory
language to the labouring classes. He was sentenced to imprisonment for two
years, to pay a fine, and to find sureties.




Cobbett's trial was a more important event, for whereas Carlile was the
Don Quixote of liberty of mind, Cobbett was a great political force, and
his acquittal would give a very serious shock to the prestige of the Government
that attacked him. The attention of the authorities had been called to Cobbett's
speeches very early in the history of the riots, and the Home Office Papers
show that appeals to the Government to prosecute Cobbett were the most common
of all the recommendations and requests that poured into Whitehall from the
country. Some of these letters were addressed to Sir Robert Peel, and one
of them is endorsed with the draft of a reply: 'My dear Sir, -- If you can
give me the name of the person who heard Cobbett make use of the expression
to which you refer you would probably enable me to render no small public
service by the prosecution of Cobbett for sedition. -- Very faithfully Yours,
Robert Peel.'




In an evil moment for themselves, Peel's successors decided to take action,
not indeed on his speeches, but on his articles in the Political Register.
The character of those articles might perhaps be described as militant and
uncompromising truth. They were inflammatory, because the truth was inflammatory.
Nobody who knew the condition of the labourers could have found in them a
single misstatement or exaggeration. The only question was whether it was
in the public interest to publish them in a time of disturbance. From this
point of view the position of the Government was seriously weakened by the
fact that the Times had used language on this very subject which was
not one whit less calculated to excite indignation against the rich, and
the Times, though it was the organ of wealthy men, was in point of
fact considerably cheaper to buy than the Register, the price of which
Cobbett had raised to a shilling in the autumn of 1830. But this was not
the only reason why the Government was in danger of exposing itself to a
charge of malice in choosing Cobbett for a prosecution. The unrest in the
southern counties had been due to a special set of economic causes, but there
was unrest due to other causes in other parts of England. It was not the
misery of ploughboys and labourers in Hampshire and Kent that had made Wellington
and Peel decide that it was unsafe for the King to dine at the Guildhall
in the winter of 1830: the Political Unions, which struck such terror into
the Court and the politicians, were not bred in the villages. There was a
general and acute discontent with extravagant government, with swollen lists
and the burden of sinecures, with the whole system of the control of the
boroughs and its mockery of representation. Now in such a state of opinion
every paper on the side of reform might be charged with spreading unrest.
Statistics of sinecures, and pensions, and the fat revenues of bishopricks,
were scattered all over England, and the facts published in every such sheet
were like sparks thrown about near a powder magazine. The private citizens
who wrote to the Home Office in the winter of 1830 mentioned these papers
almost as often as they mentioned Cobbett's lectures. Many of these papers
were based on a pamphlet written by Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty
in the very Government that prosecuted Cobbett. One of the Barings complained
in the House of Commons in December 1830, that the official papers on offices
and sinecures which the Reform Government had itself presented to Parliament
to satisfy public opinion of its sincerity in the cause of retrenchment were
the cause of mischief and danger. At such a time no writer, who wished to
help the cause of reform, could measure the effects of every sentence so
nicely as to escape the charge of exciting passion, and the Government was
guilty of an extraordinary piece of folly in attacking Cobbett for conduct
of which their own chief supporters were guilty every time they put a pen
to paper.




The trial took place in July 1831 at the Guildhall. It was the great triumph
of Cobbett's life, as his earlier trial had been his great humiliation. There
was very little of the lion in the Cobbett who faltered before Vicary Gibbs
in l810; there was very little of the lamb in the Cobbett who towered before
Denman in 1831. And the court that witnessed his triumph presented a strange
scene. The trial had excited intense interest, and Cobbett said that every
county in England was represented in the company that broke, from time to
time, into storms of cheering. The judge was Tenterden, the Chief Justice,
who, as a bitter enemy of reform, hated alike accusers and accused. Six members
of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister himself and the Lord Chancellor, Melbourne
and Durham, Palmerston and Goderich listened, from no choice of their own,
to the scathing speech in which Cobbett renewed their conduct. Benett of
Pyt House was there, a spectre of vengeance from one Commission, and the
father of the boy Cook of Micheldever, a shadow of death from another. All
the memories of those terrible weeks seemed to gather together in the suspense
of that eager crowd watching this momentous encounter.




Denman, who prosecuted, employed a very different tone towards Cobbett
from the tone that Perceval had used at the first of Cobbett's trials. Perceval,
when prosecuting Cobbett for some articles on Ireland in the Register in
1803, asked the jury with the patrician insolence of a class that held all
the prizes of life, 'Gentlemen, who is Mr. Cobbett? Is he a man writing purely
from motives of patriotism? Quis homo hic est? Quo patre natus?' No counsel
prosecuting Cobbett could open with this kind of rhetoric in 1831: Denman
preferred to describe him as 'one of the greatest masters of the English
language.' Denman's speech was brief, and it was confined mainly to a paraphrase
of certain of Cobbett's articles and to comments upon their effect. It was
no difficult task to pick out passages which set the riots in a very favourable
light, and emphasised the undoubted fact that they had brought some improvement
in the social conditions, and that nothing else had moved the heart or the
fears of the ruling class. But the speech was not long over before it became
evident that Cobbett, like another great political defendant, though beginning
as the accused, was to end as the accuser. His reply to the charge of exciting
the labourers to violence was immediate and annihilating. In December 1830,
after the publication of the article for which he was now being tried, Brougham,
as President of the Society for the diffusion of Useful Knowledge, had asked
and obtained Cobbett's leave to reprint his earlier 'Letter to the Luddites,'
as the most likely means of turning the labourers from rioting and the breaking
of machines. There stood the Lord Chancellor in the witness-box, in answer
to Cobbett's subpoena, to admit that crushing fact. This was a thunderclap
to Denman, who was quite ignorant of what Brougham had done, and, as we learn
from Greville, he knew at once that his case was hopeless. Cobbett passed
rapidly from defence to attack. Grey, Melbourne, Palmerston, Durham, and
Goderich had all been subpoena'd in order to answer some very awkward questions
as to the circumstances under which Thomas Goodman had been pardoned. The
Lord Chief Justice refused to allow the questions to be put, but at least
these great Ministers had to listen as Cobbett told the story of those strange
transactions, including a visit from a parson and magistrates to a 'man with
a rope round his neck,' which resulted in Goodman's unexplained pardon and
the publication of a statement purporting to come from him ascribing his
conduct to the incitement at Cobbett's 'lacture.' Cobbett destroyed any effect
that Goodman's charge might have had by producing a declaration signed by
one hundred and three persons present at the lecture -- farmers. tradesmen,
labourers, carpenters, and shoemakers -- denying that Cobbett had made the
statement ascribed to him in Goodman's confession, one of the signatories
being the farmer whose barn Goodman had burnt. He then proceeded to contrast
the treatment Goodman had received with the treatment received by others
convicted of incendiarism, and piecing together all the evidence of the machinations
of the magistrates, constructed a very formidable indictment to which Denman
could only reply that he knew nothing of the matter, and that Cobbett was
capable of entertaining the most absurd suspicions. On another question Denman
found himself thrown on the defensive, for he was now confronted with his
own misstatements in Parliament about Cook, and the affidavits of Cook's
father present in court. Denman could only answer that till that day no one
had contradicted him, though he could scarcely have been unaware that the
House of Commons was not the place in which a Minister's statement about
the age, occupation, pay, and conduct of an obscure boy was most likely to
be challenged. Denman made a chastened reply, and the jury, after spending
the night at the Guildhall, disagreed, six voting each way. Cobbett was a
free man, for the Whigs, overwhelmed by the invective they had foolishly
provoked, remembered, when too late, the wise saying of Maurice of Saxony
about Charles V: 'I have no cage big enough for such a bird,' and resisted
all the King's invitations to repeat their rash adventure. To those who have
made their melancholy way through the trials at Winchester and Salisbury,
at which rude boys from the Hampshire villages and the Wiltshire downs, about
to be tossed across the sea, stood shelterless in the unpitying storm of
question and insinuation and abuse, there is a certain grim satisfaction
in reading this last chapter and watching Denman face to face, not with the
broken excuses and appeals of ignorant and helpless peasants, but with a
volleyed thunder that swept into space all his lawyer's artifice and skill.
Justice plays strange tricks upon mankind, but who will say that she has
not her inspirations?




One more incident has to be recorded in the tale of suppression. The riots
were over, but the fires continued. In the autumn of 1831 Melbourne, in a
shameful moment, proposed a remedy borrowed from the evil practices which
a Tory Parliament had consented at last to forbid. The setting of spring
guns and man-traps, the common device of game preservers, had been made a
misdemeanour in 1826 by an Act of which Suffield was the author. Melbourne
now proposed to allow persons who obtained a license from two magistrates
to protect their property by these means. The Bill passed the House of Lords,
and the Journals record that it was introduced in the House of Commons,
but there, let us hope from very horror at the thought of this moral relapse,
silently it disappears.




When Grey met Parliament as Prime Minister he said that the Government
recognised two duties: the duty of finding a remedy for the distress of the
labourers, and the duty of repressing the riots with severity and firmness.
We have seen how the riots were suppressed; we have now to see what was done
towards providing a remedy. This side of the picture is scarcely less melancholy
than the other; for when we turn to the debates in Parliament we see clearly
how hopeless it was to expect any solution of an economic problem from the
legislators of the time. Now, if ever, circumstances had forced the problem
on the mind of Parliament, and in such an emergency as this men might be
trusted to say seriously and sincerely what they had to suggest. Yet the
debates are a mêlée of futile generalisations, overshadowed
by the doctrine which Grey himself laid down that 'all matters respecting
the amount of rent and the extent of farms would be much better regulated
by the individuals who were immediately interested than by any Committee
of their Lordships.' One peer got into trouble for blurting out the truth
that the riots had raised wages; another would curse machinery as vigorously
as any labourer; many blamed the past inattention of the House of Lords to
the labourers' misery; and one considered the first necessity of the moment
was the impeachment of Wellington. Two men had actual and serious proposals
to make. They were Lord King and Lord Suffield.




Both of these men are striking figures. King (1776-1833) was an economist
who had startled the Government in 1811 by calling for the payments of his
rents in the lawful coin of the realm. This dramatic manoeuvre for discrediting
paper money had been thwarted by Lord Stanhope, who, though in agreement
with King on many subjects, strongly approved of paper money in England as
he had approved of assignats in France. Lord Holland tells a story of how
he twitted Stanhope with wanting to see history repeat itself, and how Stanhope
answered with a chuckle: 'And if they take property from the drones and give
it to the bees, where, my dear Citoyen, is the great harm of that?' King
was always in a small minority and his signature was given, together with
those of Albemarle, Thanet, and Holland, to the protest against establishing
marital law in Ireland in 1801, which was written with such wounding directness
that it was afterwards blackened out of the records of the House of Lords,
on the motion of the infamous Lord Clare. But he was never in a smaller minority
than he was on this occasion when he told his fellow landlords that the only
remedy for the public distress was the abolition of the Corn Laws. Such a
proposal stood no chance in the House of Lords or n the House of Commons.
Grey declared that the abolition of the Corn Laws would lead to the destruction
of the country, and though there were Free Traders among the Whigs, even
nine years after this Melbourne described such a policy as 'the wildest and
maddest scheme that has ever entered into the imagination of man to conceive.'
Suffield (1781-1835), the only other politician with a remedy, is an interesting
and attractive character. Originally a Tory, and the son of Sir Harbord Harbord,
who was not a man of very tender sensbilities, Suffield gradually felt his
way towards Liberalism. He was too large-minded a man to be happy and at
ease in an atmosphere where the ruling class flew instinctively in every
crisis to measures of tyranny and repression. Peterloo completed his conversion.
From that time he became a champion of the poor, a fierce critic of the Game
Laws, and a strong advocate of prison reform. He is revealed in his diary
and all the traditions of his life as a man of independence and great sincerity.
Suffield's policy in this crisis was the policy of home colonisation, and
its fate can best be described by means of extracts from a memoir prepared
by R. M. Bacon, a Norwich journalist and publicist of importance, and printed
privately in 1838, three years after Suffield had been killed by a fall from
his horse. They give a far more intimate and graphic picture of the mind
of the Government than the best reported debates in the records of Parliament.




We have seen in a previous chapter that there had been at this time a
revival of the movement for restoring the land to the labourers. One of the
chief supporters of this policy was R. M. Bacon, who, as editor of the Norwich
Mercury, was in close touch with Suffield. Bacon set out an elaborate
scheme of home colonisation, resembling in its main ideas the plan sketched
by Arthur Young thirty years earlier, and this scheme Suffield took up with
great enthusiasm. Its chief recommendation in his eyes was that it applied
public money to establishing labourers with a property of their own, so that
whereas, under the existing system, public money was used, in the form of
subsidies from the rates, to depress wages, public money would be used under
this scheme to raise them. For it was the object of the plan to make the
labourers independent of the farmers, and to substitute the competition of
employers for the competition of employed. No other scheme, Suffield used
to maintain, promised any real relief. If rents and taxes were reduced the
farmer would be able, but would not be compelled, to give better wages: if
taxes on the labourers' necessaries were reduced, the labourers would be
able to live on a smaller wage, and as long as they were scrambling for employment
they were certain to be ground down to the minimum of subsistence. The only
way to rescue them from this plight was to place them again in such a position
that they were not absolutely dependent on the farmers. This the government
could do by purchasing land, at present waste, and compelling parishes, with
the help of a public loan, to set up labourers upon it, and to build cottages
with a fixed allotment of land.




Suffield's efforts to persuade the government to take up this constructive
policy began as soon as Grey came into office. His first letters to Bacon
on the subject are written in November. The opposition, he says, is very
strong, and Sturges Bourne and Lansdowne are both hostile. On 17th November
he writes that a peer had told him that he had sat on an earlier committee
on this subject with Sturges Bourne, as chairman, and that 'those who understood
the subject best agreed with Malthus that vice and misery alone could cure
the evil.' On 19th November he writes that he has had a conference with Brougham,
with about the same success as his conference with Lansdowne and Sturges
Bourne. On the 23rd he writes that he has been promised an interview at the
Home Office; on the 25th 'no invitation from Lord Melbourne -- the truth
is he cannot find one moment of leisure. The Home Office is distracted by
the numerous representations of imminent danger to property, if not to life,
and applications for protection.' Later in the same day he writes that he
has seen both Grey and Melbourne: 'I at once attacked Grey. I found him disposed
to give every possible consideration to the matter. He himself has in Northumberland
seen upon his own property the beneficent effects of my plan, namely of apportioning
land to cottagers, but he foresaw innumerable difficulties.' A House of Lords
Committee had been appointed on the Poor Laws at the instance of Lord Salisbury,
and Suffield hoped to persuade this committee to report in favour of his
scheme. He therefore pressed Grey to make a public statement of sympathy.
Grey said 'he would intimate that Government would be disposed to carry into
effect any measure of relief recommended by the Committee; very pressed but
would call Cabinet together to-morrow.' The interview with Melbourne was
very different. 'Next I saw Lord Melbourne. "Oppressed as you are,"
said I, "I am willing to relieve you from a conference, but you must
say something on Monday next and I fear you have not devoted much attention
to the subject." "I understand it perfectly," he replied,
"and that is the reason for my saying nothing about it." "How
is this to be explained?" "Because I consider it hopeless."
"Oh, you think with Malthus that vice and misery are the only cure?"
"No," said Lord Melbourne, "but the evil is in numbers and
the sort of competition that ensues." "Well then I have measures
to propose which may meet this difficulty." "Of these," said
Lord Melbourne, "I know nothing," and he turned away from me to
a friend to enquire respecting outrages.' Suffield concludes on a melancholy
note: 'The fact is, with the exception of a few individuals, the subject
is deemed by the world a bore: every one who touches on it is a bore, and
nothing but the strongest conviction of its importance to the country would
induce me to subject myself to the indifference that I daily experience when
I venture to intrude the matter on the attention of legislators.'




A fortnight later Suffield was very sanguine: 'Most satisfactory interview
with Melbourne: thinks Lord Grey will do the job in the recess.' But the
sky soon darkens again, and on the 27th Suffield writes strongly to Melbourne
on the necessity of action, and he adds: 'Tranquillity being now restored,
all the farmers are of course reducing their wages to that miserable rate
that led to the recent disturbances.' Unhappily the last sentence had a significance
which perhaps escaped Suffield. Believing as he did in his scheme, he thought
that its necessity was proved by the relapse of wages on the restoration
of tranquillity, but vice and misery-ridden politicians might regard the
restoration of tranquillity as an argument for dropping the scheme. After
this the first hopes fade away. There is strong opposition on the Select
Committee to Suffield's views, and he is disappointed of the prompt report
in favour of action which he had expected from it. The Government are indisposed
to take action, and Suffield, growing sick and impatient of their slow clock,
warns Melbourne in June that he cannot defend them. Melbourne replies that
such a measure could not be maturely considered or passed during the agitation
over the Reform Bill. Later in the month there was a meeting between Suffield
and Melbourne, of which unfortunately no record is preserved in the Memoir,
with the result that Suffield declared in Parliament that the Government
had a plan. In the autumn of 1831 an Act was placed on the Statute Book which
was the merest mockery of all Suffield's hopes, empowering churchwardens
or overseers to hire or lease, and under certain conditions to enclose, land
up to a limit of fifty acres, for the employment of the poor. It is difficult
to resist the belief that if the riots had lasted longer they might have
forced the Government to accept the scheme, in the efficacy of which it had
no faith, as the price of peace, and that the change in temperature recorded
in Suffield's Diary after the middle of December mark the restoration
of confidence at Whitehall.




So perished the last hope of reform and reparation for the poor. The labourers'
revolt was ended; and four hundred and fifty men had spent their freedom
in vain. Of these exiles we have one final glimpse; it is in a letter from
the Governor of Van Diemen's Land to Lord Goderich: 'If, my Lord, the evidence,
or conduct, of particular individuals, can be relied on as proof of the efficiency
or non-efficiency of transportation, I am sure that a strong case indeed
could, be made out in its favour. I might instance the rioters who arrived
by the Eliza, several of whom died almost immediately from disease,
induced apparently by despair. A great many of them went about dejected and
stupefied with care and grief, and their situation after assignment was not
for a long time much less unhappy.'(36*)




NOTES:




1. Russell, On Crimes and Misdemeanours, p. 371.




2. Sir J.B. Bosanquet (1773-1847).




3. Times, December 15, 1830.




4. Sir W.E. Taunton (1773-1835).




5. The Times on December 25 quoted part of this charge is a leading
article with some sharp strictures.




6. Sir John Vaughan (1769-1839).




7. Times, December 21, 1830.




8. Sir James Parke (1782-1868).




9. Times, January 3, 1831.




10. Sir E.H. Alderson (1787-1857).




11. Times, January 6, 1831. Cf. letter of Mr R. Pollen, J.P., afterwards
on of Winchester Commissioners, to Home Office, November 26: 'It may be worth
considering the law, which exempts all Threshing Machines from capital punishment,
should much scenes as these occur again amongst the agricultural classes.
I confess I view with great regret that they have found the mode of combining,
which I had hoped was confined to the manufacturing classes.'




12. Sir J.A. Park (1763-1838)




13. Times, January 15, 1831.




14. Ibid., January 12, 1831.




15. Ibid.




16. February 8, 1831.




17. There are no statistics for Wilts, Hants, Bucks, and Dorshetshire
prisoners. At Reading out of 138 prisoners 37 could read, and 25 of the 37
could also write. At Abingdon, out of 47, 17 could read, and 6 of them could
also write. In Wilts and Hants the proportion was probably smaller, as the
people were more neglected.




18. Times, December 24, 1830.




19. Ibid., January 8, 1831.




20. Times, January 7, 1831.




21. Ibid., December 24, 1930. Henry Bunce was transported for life to
New South Wales.




22. Ibid., January 14.




23. Cobbett, Political Register, vol. lxxiii, p. 535, and local
papers.




24. Fusell's sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Boys was sent to Van
Diemen's Land.




25. H.O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial. Hants. 1831, March 24.




26. As early as November 26, Mr Richard Pollen, Chairman of Quarter Sessions
and afterwards a commissioner at Winchester, had written to the Home Office.
'I have directed the Magistrates' attention very much to the class of People
found in the Mobs many miles from their own homes, Taylors, Shoemakers etc.,
who have been found always very eloquent, they are universally politicians:
they should be, I think, selected.' -- H.O. Papers.




27. For a full account of the incident, including the text of the petition
and list of signatures, see Cobbett's Two-penny Trash, July 1, 1832.




28. February 8, 1831.




29. Times, January 8, 1831. The Times of the same day contains
an interesting petition from the Birmingham Political Union on behalf of
all the prisoners tried before the Special Commissions.




30. The scene is still vividly remembered by an old woman over ninety
years of age with whom Mr Hudson spoke.




31. H.O. Papers, Disturbance Entry-Book, Letter of January 3, 1831.




32. Three boats carried the convicts, the Eliza and the Proteus to Van
Diemen's Land, the Eleanor to New South Wales. The list of the prisoners
on board shows that they came from the following countries: --

Berks, 44

Bucks, 29

Dorset, 13

Essex, 23

Gloucester, 23

Hampshire, 100

Hunts, 5

Kent, 22

Norfolk, 11

Oxford, 11

Suffolk, 7

Sussex, 17

Wilts, 151




 Total 457




If this represents the total, some sentences of transportation must have
ben commuted for imprisonment; possibly some rioters were sent later, for
Mr Potter MacQueen, in giving evidence before the Committee on Secondary
Punishments, spoke of the six hundred able-bodied men who had been transported
to consequence of being concerned in the Swing offences. -- Report of
Committee, p. 95. Four years later Lord John Russell, as Home Secretary,
pardoned 264 of the convicts, in 1836 he pardoned 86 more, and in 1837 the
survivors, mostly men sentenced for life or for fourteen years, were given
pardons conditional on their 'continuing to reside in Australia for the remainder
of their sentences.' No free passages back were granted, and Mr Hudson states
that very few, not more than one in five or six, ever returned. -- A Shepherd's
Life, p. 247.




33. See Hudson, Ibid.




34. See Annual Register and local Papers.




35. He was sent to Van Diemen's Land. It is only fair to Lord Sheffield
to say that he applied in vain to Lord Melbourne for a mitigation of the
life sentence. See Criminal Entry-Book, H.O. Papers.




36. Correspondence on Secondary Punishment, March, 1834, p. 25.




Chapter XII




Conclusion




A row of eighteenth-century houses, or a room of normal eighteenth-century
furniture, or a characteristic piece of eighteenth-century literature, conveys
at once a sense of satisfaction and completeness. The secret of this charm
is not to be found in any special beauty or nobility of design or expression,
but simply in an exquisite fitness. The eighteenth-century mind was a unity,
an order; it was finished, and it was simple. All literature and art that
really belong to the eighteenth century are the language of a little society
of men and women who moved within one set of ideas; who understood each other;
who were not tormented by any anxious or bewildering problems; who lived
in comfort, and, above all things, in composure. The classics were their
freemasonry. There was a standard for the mind, for the emotions, for the
taste: there were no incongruities. When you have a society like this, you
have what we roughly call a civilisation, and it leaves its character and
canons in all its surroundings and its literature. Its definite ideas lend
themselves readily to expression. A larger society seems an anarchy in contrast;
just because of its escape into a greater world it seems powerless to stamp
itself on wood or stone; it is condemned as an age of chaos and mutiny, with
nothing to declare. In comparison with the dishevelled century that follows,
the eighteenth century was neat, well dressed and nicely appointed. It had
a religion, the religion of quiet common sense and contentment with a world
that it found agreeable and encouraging; it had a style, the style of the
elegant and polished English of Addison or Gibbon. Men who were not conscious
of any strain or great emotion asked of their writers and their painters
that they should observe in their art the equanimity and moderation that
were desirable in life. They did not torture their minds with eager questions;
there was no piercing curiosity or passionate love or hatred in their souls;
they all breathed the same air of distinguished satisfaction and dignified
self-control. English institutions suited them admirably; a monarchy so reasonable
nobody could mind; Parliament was a convenient instrument for their wishes,
and the English Church was the very thing to keep religion in its place.
What this atmosphere could produce at its best was seen in Gibbon or in Reynolds;
and neither Gibbon nor Reynolds could lose themselves in a transport of the
imagination. To pass from the eighteenth century to the Revolt, from Pope
to Blake, or from Sheridan to Shelley, is to burst from this little hothouse
of sheltered and nurtured elegance into an infinite wild garden of romance
and mystery. For the eighteenth century such escape was impossible, and if
any one fell into the fatal crime of enthusiasm, his frenzy took the form
of Methodism, which was a more limited world than the world he had quitted.




The small class that enjoyed the monopoly of political power and social
luxuries, round whose interests and pleasures the State revolved, consisted,
down to the French war, of persons accustomed to travel, to find amusement
and instruction in foreign galleries and French salons, and to study the
fashions and changes of thought, and letters and religion, outside England;
of persons who liked to surround themselves with the refinements and the
decorations of life, and to display their good taste in collecting old masters,
or fine fragments of sculpture, or the scattered treasures of an ancient
library. Perhaps at no time since the days when Isabella d'Este consoled
herself for the calamities of her friends and relatives with the thought
of the little Greek statues that were brought by these calamities into the
market, has there been a class so keenly interested in the acquisition of
beautiful workmanship, for the sake of the acquisition rather than for the
sake of the renown of acquiring it. The eighteenth-century collectors bought
with discernment as well as with liberality: they were not the slaves of
a single rage or passion, and consequently they enriched the mansions of
England with the achievements of various schools. Of course the eighteenth
century had its own fashion in art, and no admiration is more unintelligible
to modern taste than the admiration for Guercino and Guido Reni and the other
seventeenth-century painters of Bologna. But the pictures that came across
the Channel in such great numbers were not the products of one school, or
indeed the products of one country. Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian, they
all streamed into England, and the nation suddenly found itself, or rather
its rulers, very rich in masterpieces. The importance of such a school of
manner as this, with its knowledge of other worlds and other societies, its
interest in literature and art, its cosmopolitan atmosphere, can only be
truly estimated by those who remember the boorish habits of the country gentlemen
of the earlier eighteenth century described by Fielding. With the French
war this cosmopolitan atmosphere disappeared. Thenceforth the aristocracy
were as insular in their prejudices as any of their countrymen, and Lord
Holland, who preserved the larger traditions of his class, provoked suspicion
and resentment by travelling in Spain during the Peninsular War.(1*)




But if the art and literature of the eighteenth century show the predominance
of a class that cultivated its taste outside England, and that regarded art
and literature as mere ministers to the pleasure of a few,(2*) they show
also that that class had political power as well as social privileges. There
is no art of the time that can be called national either in England or in
France, but the art of eighteenth-century England bears a less distant relation
to the English people than the art of eighteenth-century France to the people
of France, just in proportion as the great English houses touched the English
people more closely than Versailles touched the French. English art is less
of mere decoration and less of mere imitation, for, though it is true that
Chippendale, Sheraton, and the Adam brothers were all in one sense copying
the furniture of other countries -- Holland, China, France -- they all preserved
a certain English strain, and it was the flavour of the vernacular, so to
speak, that saved their designs from the worst foreign extravagance. They
were designing, indeed, for a class and not for a nation, but it was for
a class that had never broken quite away from the life of the society that
it controlled. The English aristocracy remained a race of country gentlemen.
They never became mere loungers or triflers, kicking their heels about a
Court and amusing themselves with tedious gallantries and intrigues. They
threw themselves into country life and government, and they were happiest
away from London. The great swarms of guests that settled on such country
seats as Holkham were like gay and boisterous schoolboys compared with the
French nobles who had forgotten how to live in the country, and were tired
of living at Versailles. If anything could exceed Grey's reluctance to leave
his great house in Northumberland for the excitements of Parliament, it was
Fox's reluctance to leave his little house in Surrey. The taste for country
pleasures and for country sports was never lost, and its persistence explains
the physical vitality of the aristocracy. This was a social fact of great
importance, for it is health after all that wins half the battles of classes.
No quantity of Burgundy and Port could kill off a race that was continually
restoring its health by life in the open air; it did not matter that Squire
Western generally spent the night under the table if he generally spent the
day in the saddle. This inheritance of an open-air life is probably the reason
that in England, in contrast to France and Italy, good looks are more often
to be found in the aristocracy than in other classes of society.




It was due to this physical vigour that the aristocracy, corrupt and selfish
though it was, never fell into the supreme vice of moral decadence. The other
European aristocracies crumbled at once before Napoleon: the English aristocracy,
amidst all its blunders and errors, kept its character for endurance and
fortitude. Throughout that long struggle, when Napoleon was strewing Europe
with his triumphs and, as Sheridan said, making kings the sentinels of his
power, England alone never broke a treaty or made a surrender at his bidding.
For ten years Pitt seems the one fixed point among the rulers of Europe.
It is not, of course, to be argued that the ruling class showed more valour
and determination than any other class of Englishmen would have shown: the
empire-builders of the century, men of daring and enterprise on distant frontiers,
were not usually of the ruling class, and Dr. Johnson once wrote an essay
to explain why it was that the English common soldier was the bravest of
the common soldiers of the world. The comparison is between the English aristocracy
and the other champions of law and order in the great ordeal of this war,
and in that comparison the English aristocracy stands out in conspicuous
eminence in a Europe of shifting and melting governments.




The politics of a small class of privileged persons enjoying an undisputed
power might easily have degenerated into a mere business of money-making
and nothing else. There is plenty of this atmosphere in the eighteenth-century
system: a study merely of the society memoirs of the age is enough to dissipate
the fine old illusion that men of blood and breeding have a nice and fastidious
Sense about money. Just the opposite is the truth. Aristocracies have had
their virtues, hut the virtue of a magnificent disdain for money is not to
be expected in a class which has for generations taken it as a matter of
course that it should be maintained by the State. At no time in English history
have sordid motives been so conspicuous in politics as during the days when
power was most a monopoly of the aristocracy. No politicians have sacrificed
so much of their time, ability, and principles to the pursuit of gain as
the politicians of the age when poor men could only squeeze into politics
by twos or threes in a generation, when the aristocracy put whole families
into the House of Commons as a matter of course, and Burke boasted that the
House of Lords was wholly, and the House of Commons was mainly, composed
for the defence of hereditary property.




But the politics of the eighteenth century are not a mere scramble for
place and power. An age which produced the two Pitts could not be called
an age of mere avarice. An age which produced Burke and Fox and Grey could
not be called an age of mere ambition. The politics of this little class
are illuminated by the great and generous behaviour of individuals. If England
was the only country where the ruling class made a stand against Napoleon,
England was the only country where members of the ruling class were found
to make a stand for the ideas of the Revolution. Perhaps the proudest boast
that the English oligarchy can make is the boast that some of its members,
nursed as they had been in a soft and feathered world of luxury and privilege,
could look without dismay on what Burke called the strange, wild, nameless,
enthusiastic thing established in the centre of Europe. The spectacle of
Fox and Sheridan and Grey leading out their handful of Liberals night after
night against the Treason and Sedition Bills, at a time when an avalanche
of terror had overwhelmed the mind of England, when Pitt, Burke, and Dundas
thought no malice too poisoned, Gillray and Rowlandson no deforming touch
of the brush too brutal, when the upper classes thought they were going to
lose their property, and the middle classes thought they were going to lose
their religion, is one of the sublime spectacles of history. This quality
of fearlessness in the defence of great causes is displayed in a fine succession
of characters and incidents; Chatham, whose courage in facing his country's
dangers was not greater than his courage in blaming his country's crimes;
Burke, with his elaborate rage playing round the dazzling renown of a Rodney;
Fox, whose voice sounds like thunder coming over the mountains, hurled at
the whole race of conquerors; Holland, pleading almost alone for the abolition
of capital punishment for stealing before a bench of bishops; a man so little
given to revolutionary sympathies as Fitzwilliam, leaving his lord-lieutenancy
rather than condone the massacre of Peterloo. If moral courage is the power
of combating and defying an enveloping atmosphere of prejudice, passion,
and panic, a generation which was poor in most of the public virtues was,
at least, conspicuously rich in one. Foreign policy, the treatment of Ireland,
of India, of slaves, are beyond the scope of this book, but in glancing at
the class whose treatment of the English poor has been the subject of our
study, it is only just to record that in other regions of thought and conduct
they bequeathed a great inheritance of moral and liberal ideas: a passion
for justice between peoples, a sense for national freedom, a great body of
principle by which to check, refine, and discipline the gross appetites of
national ambition. Those ideas were the ideas of a minority, but they were
expressed and defended with an eloquence and a power that have made the man
important and a glorious part of English history. In all this development
of liberal doctrine it is not fanciful to see the ennobling influence of
the Greek writers on whom every eighteenth-century politician was bred and
nourished.




Fox thought in the bad days of the war with the Revolution that his own
age resembled the age of Cicero, and that Parliamentary government in England,
undermined by the power of the Court, would disappear like liberty in republican
Rome. There is a strange letter in which, condoling with Grey on his father's
becoming a peer, he remarks that it matters the less because the House of
Commons will soon cease to be of any importance. This prediction was falsified,
and England never produced a Caesar. There is, however, a real analogy in
the social history of the two periods. The English ruling class corresponds
to the Roman senatorial order, both classes claiming office on the same ground
of family title, a Cavendish being as inevitable as a Claudius, and an AEmilius
as a Gower. The equites were the second rank of the Roman social aristocracy,
as the manufacturers or bankers were of the English. A Roman eques could
pass into the senatorial order by holding the quaestorship; an English manufacturer
could pass into the governing class by buying an estate. The English aristocracy,
like the Roman, looked a little doubtfully on new-comers, and even a Cicero
or a Canning might complain of the. freezing welcome of the old nobles; but
it preferred to use rather than to exclude them.




In both societies the aristocracy regarded the poor in much the same spirit,
as a problem of discipline and order, and passed on to posterity the same
vague suggestion of squalor and turbulence. Thus it comes that most people
who think of the poor in the Roman Republic think only of the great corn
largesses; and most people who think of the poor in eighteenth-century England
think only of the great system of relief from the rates. Mr. Warde Fowler
has shown how hard it is to find in the Roman writers any records of the
poor. So it is with the records of eighteenth-century England. In both societies
the obscurity which surrounded the poor in life has settled on their wrongs
in history. For one person who knows anything about so immense an event as
the disappearance of the old English village society, there are a hundred
who know everything about the fashionable scenes of high politics and high
play, that formed the exciting world of the upper classes. The silence that
shrouds these village revolutions was not quite unbroken, but the cry that
disturbed it is like a noise that break for a moment on the night, and then
dies away, only serving to make the stillness deeper and more solemn. The
Deserted Village is known wherever the English language is spoken,
but Goldsmith's critics have been apt to treat it, as Dr. Johnson treated
it, as a beautiful piece of irrelevant pathos, and his picture of what was
happening in England has been admired as a picture of what was happening
in his discolouring dreams. Macaulay connected that picture with reality
in his ingenious theory, that England provided the village of the happy and
smiling opening, and Ireland the village of the sombre and tragical end.
One enclosure has been described in literature, and described by a victim,
John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant, who drifted into a madhouse through
a life of want and trouble. Those who recall the discussions of the time,
and the assumption of the upper classes that the only question that concerned
the poor was the question whether enclosure increased employment, will be
struck by the genuine emotion with which Clare dwells on the natural beauties
of the village of his childhood, and his attachment to his home and its memories.
But Clare's day was brief and he has few readers.(3*) In art the most undistinguished
features of the most undistinguished members of the aristocracy dwell in
the glowing colours of a Reynolds; the poor have no heirlooms, and there
was no Millet to preserve the sorrow and despair of the homeless and dispossessed.
So comfortably have the rich soothed to sleep the sensibilities of history.
These debonair lords who smile at us from the family galleries do not grudge
us our knowledge of the escapades at Brooks's or at White's in which they
sowed their wild oats, but we fancy they are grateful for the poppy seeds
of oblivion that have been scattered over the secrets of their estates. Happy
the race that can so engage the world with its follies that it can secure
repose for its crimes.




De Quincey has compared the blotting out of a colony of Alexander's in
the remote and unknown confines of civilisation, to the disappearance of
one of those starry bodies which, fixed in longitude and latitude for generations,
are one night observed to be missing by some wandering telescope. 'The agonies
of a perishing world have been going on, but all is bright and silent in
the heavenly host.' So is it with the agonies of the poor. Wilberforce, in
the midst of the scenes described in this volume, could declare, 'What blessings
do we enjoy in this happy country; I am reading ancient history, and the
pictures it exhibits of the vices and the miseries of men fill me with mixed
emotions of indignation, horror and gratitude.' Amid the great distress that
followed Waterloo and peace, it was a commonplace of statesmen like Castlereagh
and Canning that England was the only happy country in the world, and that
so long as the monopoly of their little class was left untouched, her happiness
would survive. That class has left bright and ample records of its life in
literature, in art, in political traditions, in the display of great orations
and debates, in memories of brilliant conversation and sparkling wit; it
has left dim and meagre records of the disinherited peasants that are the
shadow of its wealth; of the exiled labourers that are the shadow of its
pleasures; of the villages sinking in poverty and crime and shame that are
the shadow of its power and its pride.




NOTES:




1. See a remarkable letter from Lord Dudley. 'He has already been enough
on the Continent for any reasonable and either of curiosity or instruction,
and his availing himself so immediately of this opportunity to go to a foreign
country again looks a little too much like distaste for his own.' -- Letters
to Ivy from the first Earl of Dudley, October 1808.




2. See on this subject a very interesting article by Mr L. March Phillippe
in the Contemporary Review, August 1911.




3. Helpstone was enclosed by an Act of 1809. Clare was then sixteen years
old. His association with the old village life had been intimate, for he
had tended geese and sheep on the common, and he had learnt the old country
songs from the last village cowherd. His poem on Helpstone was published
in 1820.