THE difficulties of assessing ‘standards’ may be seen if we examine the history, between 1790 and 1830, of the largest group of workers in any industry – the agricultural labourers.1 It is not altogether true (as the Hammonds implied) that the evidence is ‘scanty’. The difficulty lies more often in its interpretation. There are abundant records as to early nineteenth-century wages and prices, but continuous runs of reliable figures for the same job or the same region are more scarce. Anyone who has examined the dense undergrowth of evidence in Sir John Clapham’s Economic History of Modern Britain, with its diversity in regional and occupational practices, may well feel overwhelmed by its luxuriance. And, indeed, Clapham’s chapters on ‘Agrarian Organization’ and ‘Industrial Organization’ are in themselves an education – but an education, not in the interpretation of evidence so much as in its qualifications.
Throughout this painstaking investigation, the great empiricist eschews all generalizations except for one – the pursuit of the mythical ‘average’. In his discussion of agriculture we encounter the ‘average farm’, the ‘average small-holding’, the ‘average’ ratio of labourers to employers, – notions which often obscure more than they reveal, since they are arrived at by lumping together evidence from Welsh mountains and Norfolk corn-lands which Clapham himself has been at pains to distinguish. We go on to encounter ‘the average cottager in an area affected by enclosure’, the ‘average’ loss to rural earnings from industrial by-employments, the gross earnings of ‘that rather vague figure, the average English (with Welsh) labourer’, and so on. We have already seen that this ‘averaging’ can give us very odd results: the 60% of the labourers who, in 1830, were in low-wage counties which fell below the ‘average’ line.1 ‘In any average,’ Clapham admitted, ‘some 50% of the figures averaged may be expected to fall below the line.’ But if the average itself is based on the conventional wage of a worker in regular employment – that is, if the squire looks through his books and informs the Board of Agriculture that the conventional wage of a ploughman or carter is 12s. – then we may expect all or most of the casual labourers to fall below the line.
But it is in his discussion of supplementary earnings and of the effect of enclosures – as Clapham shuttles us between empirical minutiae (‘love reapings’ in Glamorgan and half-acre gardens in Ludlow) and ‘average’ estimates – that we feel we have parted company with social reality:
If the pig and the cottage garden brought in less to the average British labourer in 1824 than in 1794… very possibly the potato patch would, again on the average, balance the loss. Certainly, lost access to commons in those thirty years had worsened the lot of many men in many places, though it is doubtful whether, averaged over Britain, the loss in well-being due to the enclosures of the commons would amount to very much. It has been exaggerated in popular retrospect; for it had little significance in many parts of England; still less in Wales; and in Scotland, for the pure labourer, none at all.2
Now what is being averaged? The first part of this statement might be of some value if it could be shown that in the same villages where cottage gardens were lost potato patches came in (although we should also examine relative rents). But the second part, which has already passed into comfortable tradition, is not an example of averaging but of statistical dilution. We are being invited to dilute the figures for those parts of Britain where enclosure did take place with those where it did not, divide the sum of this weak solution by the number of counties, and come up with an ‘average’ loss in well-being ‘due to enclosures’. But this is nonsense. One may not take an average of unlike quantities; nor may one divide quantities by counties to arrive at an average of value. This is what Clapham has done.
What he was really doing, of course, was to offer a tentative value judgement as to that elusive quality, ‘well-being’, in the period of maximum enclosure. But to do this, very many more factors – cultural as well as material – should have been brought to bear upon the judgement. Since the judgement springs like an oak out of such a thicket of circumstantial detail – and since it is itself disguised as an ‘average’ – it is easily mistaken as a statement of fact.
Nor are the facts themselves as clear as Clapham implies. Agricultural earnings, through much of the nineteenth century, stubbornly refuse to be reduced to statistical form.1 Not only do we face marked seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labour, but we have at least four different kinds of master-servant relationship. (1) Farm servants, hired by the year or the quarter. (2) A regular labour-force – on the large farm – more or less fully employed the year round. (3) Casual labour, paid by day-rate or piece-rate. (4) More or less skilled specialists, who might contract for the job.
In the first category, declining over this period, there is the most security and the least independence: very low wages, long hours, but board and lodging in the farmer’s household. In the second category will be found some of the best and some of the worst conditions: the ploughman or shepherd kept in security by a prudent farmer, his wife and children given preference in casual work, with milk and grain sold at cheap rates: at the other extreme, teenage farmhands, housed and fed as poorly as any pauper apprentices in the early mills, living in hay-lofts and subject to dismissal at any time: and in between ‘those unhappy men whom necessity has compelled to become the slaves of one man’, living in tied cottages, and ‘bound to work for certain low wages all the year’.1 In the third category there is immense variation: pauper labour: women and children at pauper wages: Irish migratory workers (even textile workers or other urban craftsmen who left their work for the high harvest earnings): and finely graduated piece-rates, such as those for mowing different qualities of hayfield. In the fourth category, we have countless differences of practice, and disguised sub-contracting or family earnings, which play havoc with any statistical table:
|
Mar. 21 |
Samson, waterfurrowing in 29 acres |
8.9 |
|
Robert, 1 day sawing tops pollards |
1.9 | |
|
May 20 |
Strangers, hoeing 5 acres of wheat at 3s. 6d. |
17.6 |
|
July 29 |
Wright, mowing 7 acres of clover |
14.0 |
|
Richardson and Pavely, cleaning farmyard pond |
2.12.6 |
– so runs an Essex farmer’s accounts in 1797.2 ‘I was a hurdle-maker and thatcher, and jobbed at hedging,’ Joseph Carter told Alexander Somerville, referring to the years 1823–30:
The squire shewed as how I got £64 a-year from him for work of that kind for seven years. But then he did not shew that I had most times a man to help me, and two women besides at times. He did not shew that I paid as much as £20 some years for helpers.3
If the figures ‘do not shew that’, it is impossible for them to show a score of other influences: payments in kind or at cheap rates: gardens and potato patches: the effect of enclosure: the effect of taxes, tithes, game laws, and poor-rates: fluctuations in rural industrial employment: above all, the operation of the Poor Laws, before and after 1834. The incidence of different grievances may be felt quite differently at different times and in different parts. In some areas, and on some farms, payment in kind may be additional to wages and indicate an improvement in standards; but more generally (an agricultural historian has warned us) we should see these allowances as ‘the polite euphemism for truck in agriculture’ – a means of holding wages down or in extreme cases dispensing with money-wage altogether.1
In all this very difficult tangle of conflicting evidence – between the effect of the Poor Laws here and new potato patches there, this lost common right and that cottage garden – the ‘average’ labourer proves more than elusive.2 But if averages evade us, we may still sketch certain of the general processes at work in many parts of the country. And first we should remember that the spirit of agricultural improvements in the eighteenth century was impelled less by altruistic desires to banish ugly wastes or – as the tedious phrase goes – to ‘feed a growing population’ than by the desire for fatter rent-rolls and larger profits. As such it turned towards the labourer a face of parsimony:
There is a practice which prevails… of giving them drink both forenoon and afternoon, be the work what it will; which is a ridiculous custom, and ought to be abolished without loss of time. What can be more absurd, than to see a ploughman stopping his horse half an hour, in a cold winter day, to drink ale? 3
The arguments of the enclosure propagandists were commonly phrased in terms of higher rental values and higher yield per acre. In village after village, enclosure destroyed the scratch-as-scratch-can subsistence economy of the poor. The cottager without legal proof of rights was rarely compensated. The cottager who was able to establish his claim was left with a parcel of land inadequate for subsistence and a disproportionate share of the very high enclosure cost.
Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers. Recent scholarship suggests that the rules of the game were kept to more fairly than was suggested by the Hammonds in their great Village Labourer: even very small property-owners received reasonable treatment, many enclosure commissioners acted conscientiously, and so on.1 But, in making these useful qualifications, it is possible to overlook the larger fact that what was at issue was a redefinition of the nature of agrarian property itself. Thus Chambers and Mingay have noted that, in enclosure,
The occupiers of common right cottages… who enjoyed common right by virtue of their tenancy of the cottage, received no compensation because they were not, of course, the owners of the rights. This was a perfectly proper distinction between owner and tenant, and involved no fraud or disregard for cottagers on the part of the commissioners.2
But what was ‘perfectly proper’ in terms of capitalist property-relations involved, none the less, a rupture of the traditional integument of village custom and of right: and the social violence of enclosure consisted precisely in the drastic, total imposition upon the village of capitalist property-definitions. Of course, such definitions had been encroaching within the village for centuries before enclosure: but they had co-existed with those self-governing and customary elements in the structure of the pre-capitalist village community, which – while they were no doubt crumbling under the pressure of increasing population – persisted with remarkable vigour in many places. Copyhold and even vaguer customary family tenancies (which carried common rights) might prove to be invalid at law although they were endorsed by the collective memory of the community. Those petty rights of the villagers, such as gleaning, access to fuel, and the tethering of stock in the lanes or on the stubble, which are irrelevant to the historian of economic growth, might be of critical importance to the subsistence of the poor.
Enclosure, indeed, was the culmination of a long secular process by which men’s customary relations to the agrarian means of production were undermined. It was of profound social consequence because it illuminates, both backwards and forwards, the destruction of the traditional elements in English peasant society. If one looks at English agriculture in the eighteenth century through the pages of Arthur Young’s Annals of Agriculture, or the various county surveys prepared (at the turn of the century) for the Board of Agriculture, it is possible to suppose that customary sanctions had long lost their force. But if one looks at the scene again from the standpoint of the villager, one finds a dense cluster of claims and usages, which stretch from the common to the market-place and which, taken together, made up the economic and cultural universe of the rural poor.
Professor Chambers has well written:
The appropriation to their own exclusive use of practically the whole of the common waste by the legal owners meant that the curtain which separated the growing army of labourers from utter proletarianization was torn down. It was, no doubt, a thin and squalid curtain… but it was real, and to deprive them of it without providing a substitute implied the exclusion of the labourers from the benefits which their intensified labour alone made possible.1
The loss of the commons entailed, for the poor, a radical sense of displacement. One encounters an exceptional note of vehemence in some of the protests against enclosure which crop up from time to time in the Home Office papers: as witness an anonymous letter of 1799 addressed to Oliver Cromwell, Esquire, of Cheshunt Park:
Whe right these lines to you who are the Combin’d of the Parish of Cheshunt in the Defence of our Parrish rights which you unlawfully are about to disinherit us of…
Resolutions is maid by the aforesaid Combind that if you intend of inclosing Our Commond Commond fields Lammas Meads Marshes &c Whe Resolve before… that bloudy and unlawful act [it] is finished to have your hearts bloud if you proceede in the aforesaid bloudy act Whe like horse leaches will cry give, give until whe have spilt the bloud of every one that wishes to rob the Inosent unborn. It shall not be in your power to say I am safe from the hands of my Enemy for Whe like birds of pray will prively lie in wait to spil the bloud of the aforesaid Charicters whose names and places of abode are as prutrified sores in our Nostrils. Whe declair that thou shall not say I am safe when thou goest to thy bed for beware that thou liftest not thine eyes up in the most mist of flames…1
The ‘Combin’d’ of Cheshunt were unusually articulate and determined: they succeeded in raising a counter-petition to parliament, and as a result of their pressure common rights were taken into account in the enclosure award. But the tone of such a letter as this reminds one that enclosure must be seen within the total situation of power and deference in the countryside. Men in the social and cultural station of the authors of such letters could only in the most exceptional circumstances – and with the advice of some men of education and substance – have had recourse to the costly and procrastinating procedures of an alien culture and an alien power. The fatalism of the cottager in the face of this ever-present power, and the uneven, piecemeal incidence of enclosure (when the enclosure of neighbouring villages might be separated by the passage of several decades), go some way towards explaining the seeming passivity of the victims.
Even so, this passivity may be overstated; there has been little research into the actual responses of the poor to enclosure, and such research presents peculiar difficulties, being concerned with the illiterate and the inarticulate enduring distinct experiences in hundreds of different villages over many decades.1 Enclosure-riots, the breaking of fences, threatening letters, arson, were more common than some agrarian historians suppose. But a reason for the very patchy character of resistance by the poor may be found in the divisions within the poor themselves. We might find a clue in a later passage of the letter of the ‘Combin’d’ of Cheshunt:
Whe cannot but say that there is plenty of room for Alterations for Whe cannot see why that Ruskins and a few more of them should run our Common over while there is no room for another to put anything on [If] thou hadst made an Alteration in the rights of Commoning thou instead of being contempabel whould thy Name been as Oderriferous Ointment pour’d fourth to us The voice of us and the maguor part of the parrish is for a regulation of commons rights…
There is evidence at the end of the eighteenth century of increasing pressure on the commons and of an over-stocking, not only by squatters and cottagers but also by large graziers like ‘that Ruskins’. In such a context, the dividing lines between the interests of the very small proprietor and the poor cottager became of critical importance. The small proprietor was interested in the strictest stinting and regulation of common rights: it was in the interest of the cottager or squatter that a more lax definition of custom should prevail. The eyes of the small proprietor (like those of any peasant in any age and country) might glitter at the short-term prospect of outright proprietorship – even the four or five acres which enclosure might bring: but the cottager without any proprietary rights by enclosure lost all. In the long run the gains of the small proprietors might prove to be illusory: but the illusion was sustained during the high price years of the French Wars.
Indeed, both of the major objects of the operation (more food and higher rents) were attained throughout the Wars. Rents rose very markedly in areas of recent enclosure,2 and they were sustained both by higher prices and higher yields per acre. When prices fell, in 1815–16 and in 1821, rents remained high – or came down as they always do, tardily – thereby spelling the ruin of many smallholders who had clung on to their few acre holdings gained from enclosure.1 High rents sustained extraordinary luxury and ostentatious expenditure among the landowners, while high prices nourished higher social pretensions – so much lamented by Cobbett – among the farmers and their wives. This was the meridian for those ‘country patriots’ whom Byron scorched in his Age of Bronze.
But greed alone cannot account for the position into which the labourer was driven in these years. How was it possible, when the wealth of the landowners and farmers was rising, for the labourer to be held at brute subsistence level? We must look for an answer in the general counter-revolutionary tone of the whole period. It is probable that the real wages of labourers had been rising in the decades before 1790, especially in areas contiguous to manufacturing or mining districts. ‘There wants a war to reduce wages,’ was the cry of some northern gentry in the 1790s.2 And the reflexes, of panic and class antagonism, inflamed in the aristocracy by the French Revolution were such as to remove inhibitions and to aggravate the exploitive relationship between masters and servants. The Wars saw not only the suppression of the urban reformers but also the eclipse of the humane gentry of whom Wyvill is representative. To the argument of greed a new argument was added for general enclosure – that of social discipline. The commons, ‘the poor man’s heritage for ages past’, on which Thomas Bewick could recall independent labourers still dwelling, who had built their cottages with their own hands,3 were now seen as a dangerous centre of indiscipline. Arthur Young saw them as a breeding-ground for ‘barbarians’, ‘nursing up a mischievous race of people’; of the Lincolnshire Fens, ‘so wild a country nurses up a race of people as wild as the fen’.4
Ideology was added to self-interest. It became a matter of public-spirited policy for the gentleman to remove cottagers from the commons, reduce his labourers to dependence, pare away at supplementary earnings, drive out the smallholder. At a time when Wordsworth was extolling the virtues of old Michael and his wife, in their struggle to maintain their ‘patrimonial fields’, the very much more influential Commercial and Agricultural Magazine regarded the ‘yeoman’ in a different light:
A wicked, cross-grained, petty farmer is like the sow in his yard, almost an insulated individual, who has no communication with, and therefore, no reverence for the opinion of the world.
As for the rights of the cottager in enclosure, ‘it may seem needless to notice his claims’:
But the interest of the other claimants is ultimately concerned in permitting the labouring man to acquire a certain portion of land… for by this indulgence the poor-rates must be speedily diminished; since a quarter of an acre of garden-ground will go a great way towards rendering the peasant independent of any assistance. However, in this beneficent intention moderation must be observed, or we may chance to transform the labourer into a petty farmer; from the most beneficial to the most useless of all the applications of industry. When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings… the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work, and the hay-making and harvest… must suffer to a degree which… would sometimes prove a national inconvenience.
As for the village poor they are ‘designing rogues, who, under various pretences, attempt to cheat the parish’, and ‘their whole abilities are exerted in the execution of deceit, which may procure from the parish officers an allowance of money for idle and profligate purposes’.1
There are, of course, exceptions. But this is the way the grain runs between 1790 and 1810. It was a matter of policy to increase the dependence of cheap reserves of labour – ‘applications of industry’ for the convenience of the farmer at haymaking and harvest, and for the road-making, fencing and draining incident on enclosure. What Cobbett called ‘Scotch feelosofy’ and the Hammonds the ‘spirit of the age’ was endorsed as heartily by landowners as by manufacturers. But whereas it fitted the conditions of the Industrial Revolution like a glove, in agriculture it contested (at best) with older paternalist traditions (the squire’s duty to his labourers) and with the tradition of earnings based on need (the older customs of differentials according to age, marital status, children, etc., which were perpetuated under the Speenhamland system of poor relief); while (at worst) it was reinforced by the feudal arrogance of the aristocracy towards the inferior labouring race. The doctrine that labour discovers its own ‘natural’ price, according to the laws of supply and demand, had long been ousting the notion of the ‘just’ wage. During the Wars it was propagated by every means. ‘The demand for labour must necessarily regulate wages,’ wrote a country magistrate in 1800. And he went on to argue that the poor-rates, by maintaining a surplus population and encouraging marriages – thereby ensuring a supply of labour in excess of demand – brought down the total wages bill. Indeed, he showed himself a pioneer in the science of ‘averages’:
Let us suppose the annual poor-rates, and the amount of wages throughout England added together in one total; I think this total would be less than the sole amount of the wages, if the poor-rates had not existed.1
The motives which led to the introduction of the various systems of poor-relief which related relief to the price of bread and to the number of children were no doubt various. The Speenhamland decision of 1795 was impelled by both humanity and necessity. But the perpetuation of Speenhamland and ‘roundsman’ systems, in all their variety, was ensured by the demand of the larger farmers – in an industry which has exceptional requirements for occasional or casual labour – for a permanent cheap labour reserve.
After the Wars there is a new emphasis: farmers are very much more willing to listen to the warnings of Malthus against ‘a bounty on population’. Poor-rates had risen from under two million pounds per annum in the 1780s, to more than four millions in 1803, and over six millions after 1812. A bounty on population now appeared, as the Poor Law Commission was to describe it in 1834, as ‘a bounty on indolence and vice’. Landowners and farmers began to regret the lost commons – the cow, the geese, the turfs – which had enabled the poor to subsist without coming to the parish overseer. Some cows came back: here and there potato patches made some headway: the Board of Agriculture lent its strenuous support to the allotment propaganda. But it was too late to reverse a general process: no common was ever brought back (though many more were enclosed) and few landowners would risk renting land (perhaps four acres for a cow at a minimum of £6 per annum) to a labourer. Farmers who had made a doctrine of parsimony during the years of war prosperity were not inclined to be less parsimonious when wheat prices fell. Moreover, the population of the villages was added to by returned soldiers; the labourers were joined by bankrupt smallholders; the work incidental to enclosure fell off; and the concentration of the textile industries in the north and the Midlands further weakened the position of the labourer in East Anglia, the West Country, and the south. New or expanding rural industries (straw-plaiting or lace) might afford temporary relief in certain counties; but the overall decline (most notably in spinning) is beyond dispute. And as domestic employments failed, so the cheap labour of women as field labourers grew.1
High rents or falling prices: war debt and currency crises: taxes on malt, on windows, on horses: Game Laws, with their paraphernalia of gamekeepers, spring-guns, mantraps and (after 1816) sentences of transportation: all served, directly or indirectly, to tighten the screw upon the labourer. ‘The Jacobins did not do these things,’ exclaimed Cobbett:
And will the Government pretend that ‘Providence’ did it?… Poh! These things are the price of efforts to crush freedom in France, lest the example of France should produce a reform in England. These things are the price of that undertaking…2
Nor could the labourer expect to find a protector in the ‘average’ parson – who, to Cobbett, was an absentee pluralist, entertaining his family at Bath while an underpaid curate attended services.
For nearly four decades, there is a sense of the erosion of traditional sanctions and of a countryside governed with counter-revolutionary licence. ‘In regard to the poor-rates,’ one Bedfordshire ‘feelosofer’ (Dr Macqueen) wrote to the Board of Agriculture in 1816, ‘I always view these as coupled with the idleness and depravity of the working class’:
The morals as well as the manners of the lower orders of the community have been degenerating since the earliest ages of the French Revolution. The doctrine of equality and the rights of man is not yet forgotten, but fondly cherished and reluctantly abandoned. They consider their respective parishes as their right and inheritance, in which they are entitled to resort…1
One recalls with difficulty that England belonged to the labourers as well.
In the southern and eastern parishes the long war of attrition centred on the right of poor-relief. After the commons were lost, it was the last – the only – right the labourer had. The young and the single – or the village craftsmen – might venture to the towns, follow the canals (later the railways), or emigrate. But the mature labourer with a family was afraid of losing the security of his ‘settlement’; this, as much as his attachment to his own community and rural customs, prevented him from competing wholesale with the Irish poor (who, unluckier even than him, had no settlement to lose) in the industrial labour market. Even in times of labour ‘shortage’ in the manufacturing districts, his migration was not encouraged. When, after 1834, the Poor Law Commissioners sought to stimulate such migration, principally to the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, – perhaps, as a counter-blow at the trade unions – preference was given to ‘widows with large families of children, or handicraftsmen… with large families. Adult men could not acquire the requisite skill for the superior processes of the factories.’ Labour markets were set up in Manchester and Leeds where mill-owners could scan the details of families – age of children – character as a workman – moral character – remarks (‘exceeding healthy’, ‘fine of their age’, ‘willing to take on themselves the part of parents to three orphans’) – like stock for sale. ‘We have numbers of small families,’ one hopeful Suffolk guardian appended, ‘such as man and wife, willing, if you could engage them together, say man at 8s., woman at 4s.’1
The poor-rates, then, were the labourer’s last ‘inheritance’. From 1815 to 1834 the contest continued. On the side of the gentry and overseers, economies, settlement litigation, stone-breaking and punitive tasks, cheap labour-gangs, the humiliations of labour-auctions, even of men harnessed in carts. On the side of the poor, threats to the overseers, sporadic sabotage, a ‘servile and cunning’ or ‘sullen and discontented’ spirit, an evident demoralization documented in page after page of the Poor Law Commissioners’ Reports. ‘It would be better for us to be slaves at once than to work under such a system… when a man has his spirit broken, what is he good for?’ In the Speenhamland counties of the south the labourers had their own bitter jest – the farmers ‘keep us here [on the poor-rates] like potatoes in a pit, and only take us out for use when they can no longer do without us’.2
It is an apt description. Cobbett, in his invectives against wholesale rural depopulation, was right in his description of causes but wrong in his conclusions. It seems probable that the enclosures – especially of arable land in the south and the east during the Wars – did not result in general depopulation. While labourers were migrating – in ripples, from village to town, and from county to county – the general population rise more than compensated for the loss. After the Wars, when prices fell and the farmers could no longer ‘get vent for our young men in the army or navy’ (a useful disciplinary power, in the hands of a country magistrate), the outcry was about ‘surplus population’. But, after the new Poor Law was put into operation in 1834, this ‘surplus’ in some villages proved fictitious. In these villages the greater part of the labour bill was being met through the poor-rates; labourers were employed for odd days or half-days and then turned back on the parish. ‘If there comes a frost they discharge them,’ said one overseer: ‘when the season opens they come to me, and take ’em back again. The farmers make my house what we call in our trade a house of call.’ Wet weather created a ‘surplus’: harvest a ‘shortage’. Employers, jealous at subsidizing the labour of their neighbours through the poor-rates, would discharge their own men and apply for their labour from the overseer: ‘So-and-so has turned off two of his men; if I am to pay to their wages, he shall pay to yours; you must go.’ It is a system open to endless permutations of muddle, waste, and extortion – and to a few tricks on the labourer’s side as well. But – cunning and sheer mulishness apart – it had a single tendency: to destroy the last vestige of control by the labourer over his own wage or working life.1
‘A system’ – the cant phrase of the political economy of the time runs, when brought to bear on Speenhamland – ‘which has broken the bond of mutual dependence between the master and his servant.’ In fact, the southern labourer had been reduced to total dependence on the masters as a class. But slave labour is ‘uneconomic’, especially when it is exacted from men who nourish grievances at lost rights and the inchoate resistances of ‘free-born Englishmen’. It is ‘uneconomic’ to supervise labourers in gangs (although this was done for many years in the eastern counties) – through most of the year labourers must work in twos and threes, with the stock, in the fields, at hedging, by their own initiative. During these years the exploitive relationship was intensified to the point where it simply ceased to ‘pay’ – this kind of pauper labour turned out to be turnip-pilferers, alehouse scroungers, poachers and layabouts. It was easier to emigrate than to resist; for reinforcing the exploitive relationship was that of political repression. Illiteracy, exhaustion, the emigration from the village of the ambitious, the sharp-witted and the young, the shadow of the squire and parson, the savage punishmentof enclosure or bread rioters and of poachers – all combined to induce fatalism and to inhibit the articulation of grievances. Cobbett, the greatest tribune of the labourers, had many supporters among the farmers and in the small market towns. It is doubtful whether before 1830 many labourers knew his name or understood what he was about. As Cobbett rode past the ‘Accursed Hill’ of Old Sarum, he met a labourer returning from work:
I asked how he got on. He said, very badly. I asked him what was the cause of it. He said the hard times. ‘What times,’ said I; ‘was there ever a finer summer, a finer harvest…?’ ‘Ah!’ said he, ’they make it bad for poor people, for all that.’ ‘They?’ said I, ‘who is they?’ He was silent. ‘Oh, no, no! my friend,’ said I, ‘it is not they; it is that Accursed Hill that has robbed you…’1
Throughout the Wars the ‘grand fabric of society’ was supported upon this ‘distressful… rustic base’. ‘It is the wives of these men,’ wrote David Davies, ‘who rear those hardy broods of children who, besides supplying the country with the hands it wants, fill up the voids which death is continually making in camps and cities.’2 After the Wars, with soaring prices and the return of soldiers to their villages, there was some stirring of revolt. ‘The Burthen that is now laid on us we are Determin’d to bear no longer,’ ran a letter from the Yeovil district, signed with a bleeding heart: ‘Blood and Blood and Blood, A General Revolution their mus be…’3 But the very violence of such threats points to a sense of impotence. Only in 1816 in East Anglia, where the labourers were frequently employed in large gangs, did serious disturbances break out. The demand for a minimum wage (2s. a day) was united with the demand for price maximums; there were food riots, forced levies for money from the gentry, and the destruction of threshing-machines. But disorder was brutally repressed, and thrust back into the underground of the poaching war, the anonymous letter, the flaming corn rick.1
Revolt, when it came, in 1830, with its curiously indecisive and unbloodthirsty mobs (‘the turbulence of demoralized freemen’) was met with the same sense of outrage as a rising of the ‘blacks’. ‘I induced the magistrates to put themselves on horseback,’ recorded the victor of Waterloo,
each at the head of his own servants and retainers, grooms, huntsmen, game-keepers, armed with horsewhips, pistols, fowling pieces and what they could get, and to attack in concert… these mobs, disperse them, destroy them, and take and put in confinement those who could not escape.2
It was not the Duke, however, but the new Whig Ministry (which was to pass the Reform Bill) which sent Special Commissions down to terrorize the insurgents. And it was the organ of middle-class Radicalism, The Times, which led the outcry for examples of severity. The advice was followed:
On the 9th of January [1831], judgment of death was recorded against twenty-three prisoners, for the destruction of a paper machine in Buckingham; in Dorset, on the 11th, against three, for extorting money, and two for robbery; at Norwich, fifty-five prisoners were convicted of machine-breaking and rioting; at Ipswich, three, for extorting money; at Petworth, twenty-six for machine-breaking and rioting; at Gloucester, upwards of thirty; at Oxford, twenty-nine; and at Winchester, out of upwards of forty convicted, six were left for execution…. At Salisbury, forty-four prisoners were convicted…3
And it was a Whig Ministry again which sanctioned, three years later, the transportation of the labourers of Tolpuddle in Dorsetshire, who had had the insolence to form a trade union.
This revolt of the field labourers extended more widely into East Anglia and the Midlands, as well as the southern counties, and lasted longer than is apparent from the Hammonds’ account. Few first-hand accounts from the labourers’ side have survived. In 1845 Somerville took down the story of Joseph Carter, a Hampshire labourer from the village of Sutton Scotney (one of the places where the revolt commenced), who was sentenced to transportation for his part, and who had spent two years in the Portsmouth hulks. ‘Everybody was forced like to go,’ said Carter: ‘There was no denying’:
I wor at the meeting across the street there, in that corner house, the night as Joe Mason read the letter to us all, that came from Overton. There was no name to the letter. But Joe said he knowed who it came from. Joe was a good scholard. The letter, I know, came from old D—s; he be dead; and it came out of Newton; never came from Overton. It said we was all to leave off work; and the Sutton men was to go out and stop the ploughs. They was to send home the horses for the farmers to look after them themselves, and was to take the men with them. And they was to go and turn the men out of the barns. And they was all to go and break the sheens as the farmers had got to do the thrashing….
Well; about the letter. Joe Mason read it. We did not then know who it came from. But we knows, all on us now in this here place, that old D—s had a hand in’t. He was a great friend of Mr Cobbett. He used to write to Mr Cobbett. He never got into no trouble about it. He was too good a manager to get other people into trouble to get in himself. No; I do not blame this on Mr Cobbett. I mean old D—s, the shoemaker…
The labourers then collected or extorted money from gentry and farmers, and Joseph Carter was made treasurer:
They said I wor honest, and they gave it to me to carry. I had £40 at one time – £40 every shilling. Some people ha’ told me since that I should ha’ gone off with it. I did think of doing that once. The coach came by when we was up on the London Road, and it did come into my head to get on the coach, and get away from the whole business, with the £40. But I thought about leaving my wife behind, and about what a vagabond they would all call me, and the coach was soon past….
I needn’t ha’ been tried at all. They came to me time and times after I was in Winchester gaol, to get me to speak against the two Masons. They offered to let me clear, if I would only tell what I knowed agin them. Had I told what I knowed, they’d ha’ been hung, as sure as Borrowman, and Cooke, and Cooper, was hung. I was took out with the other prisoners to see they hung. They tried to frighten us by it to tell all we knowed on one another. But I wouldn’t split. So the Masons was only transported, and they transported me, too. Ees the mob took me agin my will; but then that was not enough to make me split, ’cause you see, I stayed with them…. It wor the young fellows did it…1
The labourers’ revolt was a true outburst of machine-breaking, with little indication of ulterior political motive. While corn ricks and other property were destroyed (as well as some industrial machinery in country districts) the main assault was on the threshing-machine, which (despite futurist homilies) patently was displacing the already starving labourers. Hence the destruction of the machines did in fact effect some immediate relief.2 But among the ‘young fellows’ it is possible that political ideas of further significance were abroad.3 A ‘scholard’ like Joe Mason may foreshadow George Loveless. Radical cobblers like D———s were to be found in most small market towns. In Norfolk it is tempting to suggest that the agitations of Jacobins and Radicals had left some traces in the villages. The most strenuous efforts were made in Lincolshire in 1830 and 1831 to intimidate labourers who had been reading Cobbett’s Register.4 But if there was a stirring political consciousness, it did not reach the point at which the urban and rural workers could form common organizations or make common cause, until several years after the labourers’ revolt had been repressed.5
The revolt of 1830 was not wholly without effect. It led to the temporary raising of wages in the southern counties. And, indirectly, it gave a final push to Old Corruption. Many farmers, and a few of the gentry, had been ashamed of the business, had negotiated with the mobs, or given them passive support. The revolt both sapped the confidence of the gentry, and helped to arouse the Reform agitation of 1831-2. ‘The important feature in the affair,’ wrote Cobbett, ‘is, that the middle class, who always, heretofore, were arrayed, generally speaking, against the working class, are now with them in heart and mind, thought not always in act…. Among the tradesmen, even of the metropolis, ninety-nine out of a hundred are on the side of the labourers.’1 The aristocracy lost ‘face’: the necessity and urgency of Reform was made plainer. And it is from this time forward that articulate political development can be seen among the rural labourers: pockets of trade unionism in the 1830s: Joseph Arch’s father (‘steady as Old Time, a plodding man’) victimized in 1835 for refusing to sign a petition in favour of the Corn Laws: a scatter of Chartist branches in East Anglia and the south.
But the grievances of the labourers had, as it were, a vicarious existence, twisted in with the other strands which made up the consciousness of the urban working class. Although – unlike France or Ireland – it never gave rise to a coherent national agitation, the ground-swell of rural grievance came back always to access to the land. ‘Times used to be better before Bledlow was enclosed…. We should rejoice to occupy a rood of land, and pay full rent for it’ (Buckinghamshire Labourers’ Petition, 1834). ‘… small allotments of land to labourers to be cultivated with a spade…’ (Essex Labourers’ Petition, 1837). ‘He wished every labouring man to have three or four acres of land at the same rent as the farmers gave. They would pay this, and gladly. (Loud cheers….)’ (speech of Wiltshire labourer, 1845). When the labourer or his children moved into the town it was this aspiration which remained. And when the tithes, the Game Laws, and the threshing machines had been forgotten, the sense of lost rights lingered – or, as Clapham has it, was ‘exaggerated’ in ‘popular retrospect’. We shall see how Cobbett and Hunt, farmers both, helped to shape the new urban radicalism; but rural memories were fed into the urban working-class culture through innumerable personal experiences.1 Throughout the nineteenth century the urban worker made articulate the hatred for the ‘landed aristocrat’ which perhaps his grandfather had nourished in secret: he liked to see the squire cast in villainous melodramas, and he preferred even a Board of Guardians to the charity of a Lady Bountiful: he felt that the landowner had no ‘right’ to his wealth whereas, if only by foul means, the mill-owner had ‘earned’ his. The response of urban trade unionists to the transportation of the Tolpuddle labourers was immediate and overwhelming; and to the later struggles of Arch’s union scarcely less so. And the yearning for land arises again and again, twisted in with the outworker’s desire for an ‘independence’, from the days of Spence to the Chartist Land Plan and beyond. Perhaps its vestiges are still with us today, in allotments and garden-plots. Land always carries associations – of status, security, rights – more profound than the value of its crop.
We see the influence of this as early as the 1790s, in the Jacobin hatred of the landed aristocracy. This was an enduring characteristic of the radicalism of the artisans, nourished by Paine’s Agrarian Justice and Spence’s propaganda for land nationalization. In the severe post-war depression, Dr Watson and other orators won great support from the unemployed, and the discharged sailors and soldiers who attended the meetings at Spa Fields:
… trade and commerce have been annihilated, but still the earth was by nature designed for the support of mankind. The earth is at all times sufficient to place man above distress… if he had but a spade and a hoe… 2
In the next decade, as Owenism changed its form among its plebeian followers, the dream of a cooperative community upon the land acquired extraordinary force.
And so, to the political myth of English freedom before the ‘Norman bastard and his armed banditti’ there was added the social myth of the golden age of the village community before enclosure and before the Wars:
Here’s that we may live to see the restoration of old English times, old English fare, old English holidays, and old English justice, and every man live by the sweat of his brow… when the weaver worked at his own loom, and stretched his limbs in his own field, when the laws recognized the poor man’s right to an abundance of everything…
– This is Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist leader, who gave to the myth gargantuan dimensions: but Cobbett, Hunt, Oastler and a score of Radical leaders contributed to it. The savage penal code, the privations, the bridewells, of old England were forgotten; but the myth of the lost paternalist community became a force in its own right – perhaps as powerful a force as the utopian projections of Owen and the Socialists. To say it was ‘myth’ is not to say it was all false; rather, it is a montage of memories, an ‘average’ in which every loss and every abuse is drawn into one total. In his youth, ‘Old Robin’ tells the mill-owner (in a pamphlet of O’Connor’s) ‘all those new streets behind Mr Twist’s and Mr Grab’s and Mr Screw’s… were all open fields, and children used to be there at eight, nine, ten, eleven, aye, and twelve years of age, idling their time at play, at cricket, at trap, and marbles, and ball… and leap-frog…’ Then came the time ‘when rich folk frightened poor folk out of their sense with “He’s a cooming” and “They’re a cooming”.’ ‘Who are “they”, Robin?’
Why, Boney and the French, to be sure. Well, that time when rich folk frightened poor folk and stole all the land. This was all common, then, Mr Smith… All reet and left, up away to bastile and barracks was all common. And all folk in Devil’s Dust would have a cow, or donkey, or horse on common, and they’d play cricket, and have running matches, and wrestling….
… They built barrack at one end and church at ’tother… and, at last, almost all folk had to sell cow, to pay Lawyer Grind, and Lawyer Squeeze… and now the son of one of ’em is mayor, and t’other… is manager of bank. Aye, dearee me, many’s the honest man was hung and transported over ould common.1
It is an historical irony that it was not the rural labourers but the urban workers who mounted the greatest coherent national agitation for the return of the land. Some of them were sons and grandsons of labourers, their wits sharpened by the political life of the towns, freed from the shadows of the squire. Some – the supporters of the Land Plan – were weavers and artisans of rural descent: ‘faither, and grandfaither and all folk belonging to I worked on land and it didn’t kill them, and why should it kill me?’1 Faced with hard times and unemployment in the brick wastes of the growing towns, the memories of lost rights rose up with a new bitterness of deprivation.
We have strayed far from averages. And that was our intention. For we cannot make an average of well-being. We have seen something of the other side of the world of Jane Austen’s novels; and for those who lived on that side the period felt catastrophic enough. ‘When farmers became gentlemen,’ Cobbett wrote, ‘their labourers became slaves.’ If it is possible to argue that there was gain at the end of the process, we must remember that the gain came to other people. In comparing a Suffolk labourer with his grand-daughter in a cotton-mill we are comparing – not two standards – but two ways of life.
There are, however, two relevant points which may be made about these averages. The first is that it is possible, given the same figures, to show both a relative decline and an absolute increase in poverty. Agriculture is an inelastic industry in its demand for labour: if ten labourers were required for a given farm in 1790, there might be ten – or, with improved ploughs and threshing machines – eight in 1830. We might show that the labourer or carter in regular employment increased his real wages over this period; while the increase in population in the village – casual labour and unemployed – led to an absolute increase in the number of the poor. And while this might be most evident in agriculture, the same hypothesis must be borne in mind when discussing the overall national picture. If, for the sake of argument, we take the hypothesis that 40% of the population (10.5 millions) was living below a given poverty-line’ in 1790, but only 30% of the population (18.1 millions) in 1841, nevertheless the absolute number of the poor will have increased from about four millions to well over five millions. More poverty will be ‘felt’ and, moreover, there will in fact be more poor people.
This is not juggling with figures. It is possible that something of this sort took place. But at the same time no such assessment of averages can tell us about ‘average’ human relationships. To judge these, we are forced to pick our way as we can through conflicting subjective evidence. And a judgement on this period must surely take in some impression of the ‘average’ English gentleman. We need not accept Cobbett’s invective – ‘the most cruel, the most unfeeling, the most brutally insolent’ of all God’s creatures. But we surely need not fall back into some of the queerer notions which have recently made a re-appearance: ‘The English country gentlemen were indeed perhaps the most remarkable class of men that any society has ever produced anywhere in the world.’1 In the place of this we may offer a Norfolk labourer’s opinion, in an anonymous letter to ‘the Gentlemen of Ashill’ – ‘You have by this time brought us under the heaviest burden & into the hardest Yoke we ever knowed’:
It is too hard for us to bear, you have often times blinded us saying that the fault was all in the Place-men of Parliament, but… they have nothing to do with the regulation of this parish.
You do as you like, you rob the poor of their Commons right, plough the grass up that God send to grow, that a poor man may feed a Cow, Pig, Horse, nor Ass; lay muck and stones on the road to prevent the grass growing…. There is 5 or 6 of you have gotten all the whole of the Land in this parish in your own hands & you would wish to be rich and starve all the other part of the poor…
‘We have counted up that we have gotten about 60 of us to 1 of you: therefore should you govern, so many to 1?’ 2
But it was for the tithe-consuming clergy that the especial hatred of the rural community was reserved. ‘Prepare your wicked Soul for Death,’ an Essex vicar was threatened in 1830, in a letter which enclosed two matches: ‘You & your whole Crew are biggest Paupers in the parish…’ The Rector of Freshwater (Isle of Wight) received an even more explicit intimation from one of his parishioners, in the form of some mild arson, with an accompanying letter. ‘For the last 20 years wee have been in a Starving Condition to maintain your Dam Pride’:
What we have done now is Soar against our Will but your harts is so hard as the hart of Pharo… So now as for this fire you must not take it as a front [an affront], for if you hadent been Deserving it wee should not have dont [done it]. As for you my Ould frend you dident hapen to be hear, if that you had been rosted I fear, and if it had been so how the farmers would lagh to see the old Pasen [Parson] rosted at last…
‘As for this litel fire,’ the writer concluded, with equable ill-humour, ‘Don’t be alarmed it will be a damd deal wors when we Burn down your barn…’1