FOOTNOTE

1. See p. 227 above. The county ‘averages’, upon which the national ‘average’ is based, are themselves open to exactly the same criticism. Moreover, they are formed from the evidence of employers, not that of labourers.

2. Loc cit., p. 126.

1. It is significant that when Clapham did commit himself to estimates of percentage variations in wages and cost-of-living, he relied not upon any collocation of his own data, but upon the work of other scholars, notably Silberling, whose cost-of-living series have recently come under severe criticism: see, e.g. T. S. Ashton, in Capitalism and the Historians. For further cautions as to the difficulties of generalization see J. Saville, Rural Depopulation in England and Wales (1957), pp. 15–17.

1. Board of Agriculture, Agricultural State of the Kingdom (1816), p. 162. A reply from Lincolnshire, contrasting the state of tied cottagers on one estate with the labourers on another estate where the landlord rents to each of them an acre for potatoes and four acres for a cow.

2. A. F. J. Brown, English History from Essex Sources (Chelmsford, 1952), p. 39.

3. A. Somerville, The Whistler at the Plough (Manchester, 1852), p. 262.

1. For this and other related points see O. R. McGregor’s valuable introduction to Lord Ernie, English Farming, Past and Present (1961 edn), esp. pp. cxviii–cxxi.

2. The best general accounts are still those in J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer and Lord Ernie, English Farming, Past and Present, and (for houses, clothing and food) G. E. Fussell, The English Rural Labourer (1947).

3. Rennie, Broun and Shirreff, General View of the Agriculture of the West Riding (1794), p. 25.

1.A cogent summary of recent work is in J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (1966), ch. 4: see also W. E. Tate, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (1967), Chapters 8–10, 16. See also my review of the first book in the Times Literary Supplement 16 February 1967, upon which I have drawn in the next few paragraphs (inserted into the Penguin edition), in which I raise certain questions about the social consequences of enclosure which may have been examined too cursorily by these authorities. Among the growing number of studies of particular enclosures, I have found most helpful the series of publications by R. C. Russell, including The Enclosures of Barton-on-Humber and Hibaldstow (Barton, n.d.); The Enclosures of Scartho and Grimsby (Grimsby, 1964); The Enclosures of Bottesford and Yaddlethorpe, Messingham and Ashby (Scunthorpe, n.d.). Each of Mr Russell’s studies follows through the actual procedure in great detail, from initiation to award.

2. Chambers and Mingay, op. cit. p. 97.

1. J. D. Chambers, ‘Enclosure and Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution’, Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd series, V (1952–3), p. 336.

1.27 February 1799, in H.O.42.46.

1. One important study of agrarian disturbance now exists: A. J. Peacock, Bread or Blood. The Agrarian Riots in East Anglia: 1816 (1965).

2. Chambers and Mingay, op. cit., pp. 84–5, estimate that rents on average doubled after enclosure during the peak period of enclosure acts: see also F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), pp. 222–6.

1. For examples of the decline in peasant landowning, see W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant (1957), pp. 265–8.

2. R. Brown, General View of the Agriculture of the West Riding (1799), Appendix, p. 13.

3. Bewick, op. cit., pp. 27 ff.

4. A. Young, General View of the Agriculture of Lincolnshire (1799), pp. 223, 225, 437.

1. Commercial and Agricultural Magazine, July, September, October 1800.

1. Ibid., October 1800.

1.1. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (1930), pp. 57 ff.

2. Rural Rides (Everyman edn), I, p. 174.

1. Agricultural State of the Kingdom (1816), p. 25.

1. First Annual Report of Poor Law Commissioners (1836), pp. 313–14; W. Dodd, The Factory System Illustrated (1842), pp. 246–7. See also A. Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850 (1926), ch. 6.

2. First Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (1836), p. 212. The same joke was ‘well understood’ in Wiltshire in 1845 – but the ‘pit’ had now become the workhouse; A. Somerville, op. cit., p. 385.

1. See A. Redford, op. cit., pp. 58–83; and, for fictitious surpluses, First Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (1836), pp. 229–38; W. T. Thornton, Over-Population (1846), pp. 231–2.

1. Rural Rides (Everyman edn), II, pp. 56–7.

2. W. Belsham, Remarks on the Bill for the Better Support… of the Poor (1795), p. 5; D. Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry (1795), p. 2.

3. Enclosure in Moody to Sidmouth, 13 May 1816, H.O. 42.150.

1.H.O. 42.149/51. For the East Anglian labour-gangs, see W. Hasbach, History of the English Agricultural Labourer (1908), pp. 192–204.

2. Wellington Despatches, second series, viii, p. 388, cit. H. W. C. Davis, op. cit., p. 224.

3. A. Prentice, Historical Sketches of Manchester, p. 372. In the end, nine labourers were hanged, 457 transported, and about 400 imprisoned. See J. L. & B. Hammond, The Village Labourer, chs. X and XI.

1. A. Somerville, op. cit., pp. 262–4.

2. See E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine-Breakers’, Past and Present, 1, February 1952, p. 67.

3. A labourer in Kent was widely reported as saying: ‘We will destroy the cornstacks and thrashing machines this year. Next year we will have a turn with the Parsons, and the third we will make war upon the Statesmen’; see, e.g., handbill in H.O. 40.25.

4. See J. Hughes, ‘Tried Beyond Endurance’, The Landworker, November 1954.

5. In 1833 James Watson appealed to members of the National Union of Working Classes to make especial efforts to build branches among the rural workers. Working Man’s Friend, 3 August 1833. See also Radical Reformer, 19 November 1831.

1. Political Register, 4 December 1830.

1. Richard Hoggart has testified as to the survival of rural memories in working-class Leeds in the 1930s. See Uses of Literacy (1957), pp. 23–5.

2. W. M. Gurney, Trial of James Watson (1817), I, p. 70.