Title: The village labourer 1760-1832: A study in the government of England before the Reform Bill
Author: Hammond, Barbara, Hammond, J. L.
Language: English
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  THE VILLAGE LABOURER
  1760-1832



  THE VILLAGE LABOURER

  1760-1832

  A Study in the Government of England
  before the Reform Bill

  BY
  J. L. HAMMOND AND BARBARA HAMMOND

 ... The men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of
 those who earn them (because laws should be adapted to those who have
 the heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not
 mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain, and degradation
 and risk to their own lives and to their children’s souls)....

  LORD ACTON.

  SECOND IMPRESSION


  LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
  39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
  NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
  1912



  TO
  GILBERT AND MARY MURRAY



PREFACE


Many histories have been written of the governing class that ruled
England with such absolute power during the last century of the old
régime. Those histories have shown how that class conducted war, how
it governed its colonies, how it behaved to the continental Powers,
how it managed the first critical chapters of our relations with
India, how it treated Ireland, how it developed the Parliamentary
system, how it saved Europe from Napoleon. One history has only been
sketched in outline: it is the history of the way in which this class
governed England. The writers of this book have here attempted to
describe the life of the poor during this period. It is their object
to show what was in fact happening to the working classes under a
government in which they had no share. They found, on searching through
the material for such a study, that the subject was too large for a
single book; they have accordingly confined themselves in this volume
to the treatment of the village poor, leaving the town worker for
separate treatment. It is necessary to mention this, for it helps to
explain certain omissions that may strike the reader. The growth and
direction of economic opinion, for example, are an important part of
any examination of this question, but the writers have been obliged
to reserve the consideration of that subject for their later volume,
to which it seems more appropriate. The writers have also found it
necessary to leave entirely on one side for the present the movement
for Parliamentary Reform which was alive throughout this period, and
very active, of course, during its later stages.

Two subjects are discussed fully in this volume, they believe, 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 lately made 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 are manifest, and
they are acknowledged in the text, but the 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.

 HAMPSTEAD, _August 1911_



CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                                             PAGE

  I. THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER,                                       1

  Comparison between English and French Aristocracy--Control
  of English Aristocracy over (1) Parliament; (2) Local
  Government--The Justices--Family Settlements--Feudal Dues.

  II. THE VILLAGE BEFORE ENCLOSURE,                                   26

  The Common-field System--Classes in the Village--Motives
  for Enclosure--Agricultural Considerations--Moral
  Considerations--Extent of Parliamentary Enclosure.

  III. ENCLOSURE (I),                                                 43

  Procedure in Parliament--Composition of Private Bill
  Committees--Proportion of Consents required--Helplessness
  of Small Men--Indifference of Parliament to Local
  Opinion--Appointment and Powers of Enclosure
  Commissioners--Story of Sedgmoor.

  IV. ENCLOSURE (II),                                                 71

  Standing Orders--General Enclosure Bills--Consolidating Act of
  1801--Popular Feeling against Enclosure--Proposals for Amending
  Procedure--Arthur Young’s Protest--Story of Otmoor.

  V. THE VILLAGE AFTER ENCLOSURE,                                     97

  Effects of Enclosure on (1) Small Farmers; (2) Cottagers;
  (3) Squatters--Expenses--Loss of Common Rights--Village
  Officials--Changed Outlook of Labourer.

  VI. THE LABOURER IN 1795,                                          106

  Loss of Auxiliary Resources--Fuel--Gleaning--Rise in
  Prices--Effect of Settlement Laws--Food Riots of 1795.

  VII. THE REMEDIES OF 1795,                                         123

  The Remedies proposed but not adopted: (1) _Change of
  Diet_--Cheap Cereals--Soup; (2) _Minimum Wage_--Demand from
  Norfolk Labourers--Whitbread’s Bills, 1795 and 1800; (3) _Poor
  Law Reform_--Pitt’s Poor Law Bill---Amendments of Settlement
  Laws; (4) _Allotments_--Success of Experiments--Hostility
  of Farmers--The Remedy adopted: Speenhamland System of
  supplementing Wages from Rates--Account of Speenhamland
  Meeting--Scale of Relief drawn up.

  VIII. AFTER SPEENHAMLAND,                                          166

  Prosperity of Agriculture during French War--Labourers
  not benefited--Heavy Taxation--Agricultural Depression at
  Peace--Labourers’ Rising in 1816--Poor Law Legislation of
  1818, 1819 to relieve Ratepayers, compared with Whitbread’s
  Scheme in 1807--Salaried Overseers--Parish Carts--Drop in
  Scale of Relief for Labourers after Waterloo--New Auxiliary
  Resources--Poaching--Game Laws--Distress and Crime--Criminal
  Justice--Transportation.

  IX. THE ISOLATION OF THE POOR,                                     207

  Attitude of Governing Class towards the Poor--An Ideal Poor
  Woman--Gulf between Farmers and Labourers due to Large
  Farms--Bailiffs--Lawyers and the Poor--The Church and the
  Poor--Gloom of the Village.

  X. THE VILLAGE IN 1830,                                            225

  Poor Law Commission Report of 1834--Effects of Speenhamland
  System: Degradation of Labourer; Demoralisation of Middle
  Classes--Possible Success of Alternative Policies--Minimum
  Wage--Cobbett’s Position.

  XI. THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT (I),                                240

  Rising in Kent--Threshing Machines--Sussex Rising: Brede--Spread
  of Rising Westwards--Description of Outbreak in Hampshire,
  Wiltshire, Berkshire--Alarm of Upper Classes--Melbourne’s
  Circular--Repressive Measures--Archbishop’s Prayer.

  XII. THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT (II),                              272

  Special Commissions--Temper of Judges--Treatment of
  Prisoners--Trials at Winchester, Salisbury, Dorchester,
  Reading, Abingdon, Aylesbury--Cases of Arson--Position of Whig
  Government--Trials of Carlile and Cobbett--Proposals for helping
  Labourers--Lord King--Lord Suffield--Collapse of Proposals.

  XIII. CONCLUSION,                                                  325

  INDEX,                                                             405



CHAPTER I

THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER


‘Là l’aristocratie a pris pour elle les charges publiques les plus
lourdes afin qu’on lui permît de gouverner; ici elle a retenu
jusqu’à la fin l’immunité d’impôt pour se consoler d’avoir perdu le
gouvernement.’

De Tocqueville has set out in this antithesis the main argument that
runs through his analysis of the institutions of ancient France. In
England the aristocracy had power and no privileges: in France the
aristocracy had privileges and no power. The one condition produced,
as he read history, the blending of classes, a strong and vigorous
public spirit, the calm of liberty and order: the other a society
lacking vitality and leadership, classes estranged and isolated, a
concentration of power and responsibility that impoverished private
effort and initiative without creating public energy or public wealth.

De Tocqueville’s description of the actual state of France during
the eighteenth century has, of course, been disputed by later French
writers, and notably by Babeau. Their differences are important, but
for the moment we are concerned to note that in one particular they
are in complete agreement. Neither Babeau, nor any other historian,
has questioned the accuracy of De Tocqueville’s description of the
position of the French nobles, from the day when the great cardinals
crushed their conspiracies to the day when the Revolution destroyed
the monarchy, whose heart and pulse had almost ceased to beat. The
great scheme of unity and discipline in which Richelieu had stitched
together the discords of France left no place for aristocracy. From
that danger, at any rate, the French monarchy was safe. Other dangers
were to overwhelm it, for Richelieu, in giving to it its final form,
had secured it from the aggressions of nobles but not from the follies
of kings. _Tout marche, et le hasard corrige le hasard._ The soliloquy
of Don Carlos in _Hernani_ contains an element of truth and hope for
democracy which is wanting in all systems of personal government, where
the chances of recovery all depend on a single caprice. It was the
single caprice that Versailles represented. It was the single caprice
that destroyed Richelieu’s great creation. When Louis XIV. took to
piety and to Madame de Maintenon, he rescinded in one hour of fatal
zeal the religious settlement that had given her prosperity to France.
Her finance and her resources foundered in his hurricanes of temper and
of arrogance. Louis XV. was known in boyhood as ‘the beloved.’ When
he fell ill in the campaign of 1744 in Flanders, all France wept and
prayed for him. It would have been not less happy for him than it would
have been for Pompey if the intercessions of the world had died on
the breeze and never ascended to the ear of Heaven. When thirty years
later his scarred body passed to the royal peace of St. Denis, amid the
brutal jeers and jests of Paris, the history of the French monarchy
was the richer for a career as sensual and selfish and gross as that
of a Commodus, and the throne which Richelieu had placed absolute and
omnipotent above the tempests of faction and civil war had begun to
rock in the tempests of two sovereigns’ passions.

One half-hearted attempt had indeed been made to change the form and
character of the monarchy. When he became regent in 1715, Orleans
played with the ideas of St. Simon and substituted for the government
of secretaries a series of councils, on which the great nobles sat,
with a supreme Council of Regency. As a departure from the Versailles
system, the experiment at first excited enthusiasm, but it soon
perished of indifference. The bureaucrats, whom Orleans could not
afford to put on one side, quarrelled with the nobles: the nobles
found the business tedious and uninteresting: the public soon tired of
a scheme that left all the abuses untouched: and the regent, at the
best a lukewarm friend to his own innovation, had his mind poisoned
against it by the artful imagination of Dubois. One by one the councils
flickered out; the Council of the Regency itself disappeared in 1728,
and the monarchy fell back into its old ways and habits.

As at Versailles, so in France. If the noble had been reduced to a
trifling but expensive cypher at the Court, the position of seigneur
in the village was not very different. In the sixteenth century he
had been a little king. His relations with the peasants, with whom
his boyhood was often spent in the village school, were close and
not seldom affectionate. But though he was in many cases a gentle
ruler, a ruler he undoubtedly was, and royal ordinances had been found
necessary to curb his power. By the eighteenth century his situation
had been changed. There were survivals of feudal justice and feudal
administration that had escaped the searching eye of Richelieu, but
the seigneur had been pushed from the helm, and the government of the
village had passed into other hands. It was the middle-class intendant
and not the seigneur who was the master. The seigneur who still
resided was become a mere rent receiver, and the people called him the
‘_Hobereau_.’ But the seigneur rarely lived in the village, for the
Court, which had destroyed his local power, had drawn him to Paris to
keep him out of mischief, and when later the Court wished to change its
policy, the seigneur refused to change his habits. The new character of
the French nobility found its expression in its new homes. Just as the
tedious splendour of Versailles, built out of the lives and substance
of an exhausted nation, recorded the decadence and the isolation of the
French monarchy, so in the countryside the new palaces of the nobles
revealed the tastes and the life of a class that was allowed no duties
and forbidden no pleasures. The class that had once found its warlike
energy reflected in the castles of Chinon and Loches was now only at
home in the agreeable indolence of Azay le Rideau or the delicious
extravagance of Chenonceaux. The nobles, unable to feed their pride on
an authority no longer theirs, refused no stimulant to their vanity
and no sop to their avarice. Their powers had passed to the intendant;
their land was passing to the bourgeois or the peasant; but their
privileges increased. Distinctions of rank were sharper edged. It was
harder for a plebeian to become an officer under Louis XVI. than it
had been under Louis XIV., and the exemptions from taxation became a
more considerable and invidious privilege as the general burdens grew
steadily more oppressive. Nature had made the French nobleman less, but
circumstances made him more haughty than the English. Arthur Young,
accustomed to the bearing of English landlords, was struck by the
very distant condescension with which the French seigneur treated the
farmer. The seigneur was thus on the eve of the Revolution a privileged
member of the community, very jealous of his precedence, quarrelsome
about trifles, with none of the responsibilities of a ruler, and with
few of the obligations of a citizen. It was an unenviable and an
uninspiring position. It is not surprising that Fénelon, living in
the frivolous prison of Versailles, should have inspired the young
Duke of Burgundy with his dream of a governing aristocracy, or that
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse should have described the public-spirited
members of this class as caged lions, or that a nobleman of the fierce
energy of the Marquis de Mirabeau should have been driven to divide
his time between the public prosecution of his noisy and interminable
quarrels with his wife and his sons, and the composition of his feeling
treatise on _L’Ami des Hommes_.

For in the France whose king had no thought save for hunting, women
and morbid disease, there was endless energy and intellectual life.
France sparkled with ideas. The enthusiasms of the economists and
philosophers filled the minds of nobles who in England would have been
immersed in the practical duties of administration. The atmosphere of
social sensibility melted the dry language of official reports, and
the intendants themselves dropped a graceful tear over the miseries of
the peasants. Amid the decadence of the monarchy and the uncivilised
and untamed license of Louis XV., there flourished the emancipating
minds of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and Quesnai, as well as
Rousseau, the passion and the spirit of the Revolution. On the one
side is Versailles, abandoned to gross and shameless pleasures, on
the other a society pursuing here a warm light of reason and science
with a noble rage for progress and improvement, bewitched there by the
Nouvelle Héloïse and Clarissa, delighting in those storms of the senses
that were sweeping over France. The memoirs, the art, the literature
of the time are full of these worlds, ruled, one by philosophy and
illumination, the other by the gospel of sensibility and tender
feeling, the two mingling in a single atmosphere in such a salon as
that of Julie de Lespinasse, or in such a mind as that of Diderot.
A kind of public life tries, too, to break out of its prison in the
zealous, if somewhat mistaken exertions of agricultural societies and
benevolent landowners. But amid all this vitality and inspiration and
energy of mind and taste, the government and the fortunes of the race
depend ultimately on Versailles, who lives apart, her voluptuous sleep
undisturbed by the play of thought and hope and eager curiosity, wrapt
and isolated in her scarlet sins.

When Louis XVI. called to office Turgot, fresh from his reforms at
Limoges, it looked as if the intellect of France might be harnessed to
the monarchy. The philosophers believed that their radiant dreams were
about to come gloriously true. Richelieu had planned his system for an
energetic minister and a docile king; Turgot had not less energy than
Richelieu, and Turgot’s master was not more ambitious than Louis XIII.
But the new régime lasted less than two years, for Louis XVI., cowed by
courtiers and ruled by a queen who could not sacrifice her pleasures to
the peace of France, dismissed his minister, the hopes of the reformers
were destroyed, and France settled down to the unrolling of events.
The monarchy was almost dead. It went out in a splendid catastrophe,
but it was already spent and exhausted before the States-General were
summoned. This vast, centralised scheme was run down, exhausted by the
extravagance of the Court, unable to discharge its functions, causing
widespread misery by its portentous failure. The monarchy that the
Revolution destroyed was anarchy. Spenser talks in the _Faerie Queene_
of a little sucking-fish called the remora, which collects on the
bottom of a ship and slowly and invisibly, but surely, arrests its
progress. The last kings were like the remora, fastening themselves on
Richelieu’s creation and steadily and gradually depriving it of power
and life.

It was natural that De Tocqueville, surveying these two centuries of
national life, so full of mischief, misdirection and waste, seeing,
too, in the new régime the survival of many features that he condemned
in the old, should have traced all the calamities of France to the
absence of a ruling aristocracy. It was natural that in such a temper
and with such preoccupations he should have turned wistfully and not
critically to England, for if France was the State in which the nobles
had least power, England was the State in which they had most. The
Revolution of 1688 established Parliamentary Government. The manners
and the blunders of James II. had stripped the Crown of the power that
his predecessor had gained by his seductive and unscrupulous politics,
and when the great families settled with the sovereign of their
choice, their memories of James were too recent and vivid to allow
them to concede more than they could help to William. The Revolution
put the law of the land over the will of the sovereign: it abolished
his suspending and dispensing powers, and it obliged him to summon
Parliament every year. It set up a limited monarchy with Parliament
controlling the Crown. But though the Revolution gave England a
constitutional Parliamentary government, that government had no
homogeneous leadership, and it looked as if its effective force might
be dissipated in the chaos and confusion of ministries. In such a
situation one observer at least turned his eyes to France. There exists
in the British Museum a paper by Daniel Defoe, written apparently for
the guidance of Harley, who was Secretary of State in 1704. In this
paper Defoe dwelt on the evils of divided and dilatory government, and
sketched a scheme by which his patron might contrive to build up for
himself a position like that once enjoyed by Richelieu and Mazarin.
Defoe saw that the experiment meant a breach with English tradition,
but he does not seem to have seen, what was equally true, that success
was forbidden by the conditions of Parliamentary government and the
strength of the aristocracy. The scheme demanded among other things the
destruction of the new Cabinet system. As it happened, this mischievous
condition of heterogeneous administration, in which one minister
counterworked and counteracted another, came to an end in Defoe’s
lifetime, and it came to an end by the consolidation of the system
which he wished to see destroyed.

This was the work of Walpole, whose career, so uninviting to those who
ask for the sublime or the heroic in politics, for it is as unromantic
a story as can be desired of perseverance, and coarse method, and art
without grace, and fruits without flowers, is one of the capital facts
of English history. Walpole took advantage of the fortunate accident
that had placed on the throne a foreigner, who took no interest in
England and did not speak her language, and laid the foundations of
Cabinet government. Walpole saw that if Parliamentary supremacy was to
be a reality, it was essential that ministers should be collectively
responsible, and that they should severally recognise a common aim and
interest; otherwise, by choosing incompatible ministers, the king could
make himself stronger than the Cabinet and stronger than Parliament. It
is true that George III., disdaining the docility of his predecessors,
disputed later the Parliamentary supremacy which Walpole had thus
established, and disputed it by Walpole’s own methods of corruption
and intrigue. But George III., though he assailed the liberal ideas of
his time, and assailed them with an unhappy success, did not threaten
the power of the aristocracy. He wanted ministers to be eclectic and
incoherent, because he wanted them to obey him rather than Parliament,
but his impulse was mere love of authority and not any sense or feeling
for a State released from this monopoly of class. Self-willed without
originality, ambitious without imagination, he wanted to cut the knot
that tethered the Crown to the Cabinet, but he had neither the will
nor the power to put a knife in the system of aristocracy itself. He
wished to set back the clock, but only by half a century, to the days
when kings could play minister against minister, and party against
party, and not to the days of the more resolute and daring dreams of
the Stuart fancy. The large ideas of a sovereign like Henry of Navarre
were still further from his petty and dusty vision. He was so far
successful in his intrigues as to check and defeat the better mind of
his generation, but if he had won outright, England would have been
ruled less wisely indeed, but not less deliberately in the interests of
the governing families. Thus it comes that though his interventions are
an important and demoralising chapter in the history of the century,
they do not disturb or qualify the general progress of aristocratic
power.

In France there was no institution, central or local, in which the
aristocracy held power: in England there was no institution, central
or local, which the aristocracy did not control. This is clear from a
slight survey of Parliament and of local administration.

The extent to which this is true had probably not been generally
grasped before the publication of the studies of Messrs. Redlich and
Hirst, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb, on the history of local government or
the recent works of Dr. Slater and Professor Hasbach on the great
enclosures. Most persons were aware of the enormous power of the
aristocracy, but many did not know that that power was greater at the
end than at the beginning of the century. England was, in fact, less
like a democracy, and more remote from the promise of democracy when
the French Revolution broke out, than it had been when the governing
families and the governing Church, whose cautions and compromises and
restraint Burke solemnly commended to the impatient idealists of 1789,
settled their account with the Crown in the Revolution of 1688.

The corruptions that turned Parliamentary representation into the
web of picturesque paradoxes that fascinated Burke, were not new in
the eighteenth century. As soon as a seat in the House of Commons
came to be considered a prize, which was at least as early as the
beginning of the sixteenth century, the avarice and ambition of
powerful interests began to eat away the democratic simplicity of the
old English franchise. Thus, by the time of James I., England had
travelled far from the days when there was a uniform franchise, when
every householder who did watch and ward could vote at a Parliamentary
election, and when the practice of throwing the provision of the
Members’ wages upon the electorate discouraged the attempt to restrict
the franchise, and thereby increase the burden of the voters. Indeed,
when the Whig families took over the government of England, the case
for Parliamentary Reform was already pressing. It had been admitted by
sovereigns like Elizabeth and James I., and it had been temporarily
and partially achieved by Cromwell. But the monopolies which had been
created and the abuses which had been introduced had nothing to fear
from the great governing families, and the first acts of the Revolution
Parliament, so far from threatening them, tended to give them sanction
and permanence. Down to this time there had been a constant conflict
within the boroughs between those who had been excluded from the
franchise and the minorities, consisting of burgage-holders or corrupt
corporations or freemen, who had appropriated it. These conflicts,
which were carried to Parliament, were extinguished by two Acts, one
of 1696, the other of 1729, which declared that the last determination
in each case was final and irrevocable. No borough whose fate had been
so decided by a Parliamentary committee could ever hope to recover its
stolen franchise, and all these local reform movements settled down to
their undisturbed euthanasia. These Acts were modified by a later Act
of 1784, which allowed a determination to be disputed within twelve
months, but by that time 127 boroughs had already received their final
verdict: in the others, where the franchise was determined after 1784,
there was some revival of local agitation.

The boroughs that were represented in Parliament in the eighteenth
century have been classified by Mr. Porritt, in his learned work, in
four categories. They were (1) Scot and lot and potwalloper boroughs,
(2) Burgage boroughs, (3) Corporation boroughs, and (4) Freemen
boroughs.

The Scot and lot boroughs, of which there were 59, ranged from Gatton,
with 135 inhabitants, to Westminster and Northampton. On paper they
approached most nearly to the old conditions as to the franchise. A
uniform qualification of six months residence was established in 1786.
In other respects the qualifications in these boroughs varied. In some
the franchise depended on the payment of poor rate or church rate: in
others the only condition was that the voter had not been a charge on
the poor rate. The boroughs of the second of these classes were called
potwalloper, because the voter had to prove that he was an inhabitant
in the borough, had a family, and boiled a pot there. This potwalloper
franchise was a survival from the days when freemen took their meals
in public to prove that they did not depend on the table of a lord.
In the eighteenth century the potwalloper sometimes put his table in
the street to show that he had a vote. But these boroughs, in spite of
their wide franchise, fell under the control of the aristocracy almost
as completely as the others, for the reason that when the borough
itself developed, the Parliamentary borough stood still, and in many
cases the inhabitant householders who had the right to vote were the
inhabitants of a small and ancient area of the town. All that was
necessary in such circumstances in order to acquire the representation
of the borough, was to buy the larger part of the property within this
area. This was done, for example, at Aldborough and at Steyning.

The Burgage boroughs were 39. They were Parliamentary boroughs in which
the right to vote attached exclusively to the possession of burgage
properties. The burgage tenants were the owners of land, houses, shops
or gardens in certain ancient boroughs. The holders of these sites
were originally tenants who discharged their feudal obligations by a
money payment, corresponding to the freeholder in the country, who held
by soccage. They thus became the men of the township who met in the
churchyard or town hall. In many cases residence was unnecessary to the
enjoyment of the franchise. The only qualification was the possession
of title-deeds to particular parcels of land, or registration in the
records of a manor. These title-deeds were called ‘snatch papers,’ from
the celerity with which they were transferred at times of election.
The burgage property that enfranchised the elector of Old Sarum was
a ploughed field. Lord Radnor explained that at Downton he held 99
out of the 100 burgage tenures, and that one of the properties was in
the middle of a watercourse. At Richmond, pigeon-lofts and pig-styes
conferred the franchise. In some cases, on the other hand, residence
was required; at Haslemere, for example, Lord Lonsdale settled a colony
of Cumberland miners in order to satisfy this condition. Sometimes the
owner of a burgage property had to show that the house was occupied,
and one proof of this was the existence of a chimney. In all of these
boroughs the aristocracy and other controllers of boroughs worked
hard, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to restrict
the number of properties that carried the right to vote. The holder
of burgage property and the borough patron had a common interest in
these restrictions. The burgage boroughs provided a great many cases
for the decision of Parliamentary committees, and the borough owners
mortgaged their estates under the strain of litigation of this kind.
Parliamentary committees had to determine for example whether the
Widows’ Row at Petersfield really stood on the foundation of the house
which conferred the franchise in the reign of William III. The most
successful borough-monger was the patron who had contrived to exclude
first the non-burgage owners, and then the majority of the burgage
owners, thus reducing his expenses within the narrowest compass.

The Corporation boroughs, or boroughs in which the corporation had
acquired by custom the right to elect, independently of the burgesses,
were 43. In days when Parliamentary elections were frequent, the
inhabitants of many boroughs waived their right of election and
delegated it to the corporations. When seats in the House of Commons
became more valuable, the corporations were tenacious of this customary
monopoly, and frequently sought to have it established by charter.
These claims were contested in the seventeenth century, but without
much success, and the charters bestowed at this time restricted the
franchise to the corporations in order to prevent ‘popular tumult,
and to render the elections and other things and the public business
of the said borough into certainty and constant order.’ It is easy to
trace in these transactions, besides the rapacity of the corporations
themselves, the influence of the landed aristocracy who were already
beginning to finger these boroughs. There was, indeed, an interval
during which the popular attacks met with some success. When Eliot and
Hampden were on the Committee of Privileges, some towns, including
Warwick, Colchester, and Boston, regained their rights. But the
Restoration was fatal to the movement for open boroughs, and though it
was hoped that the Revolution, which had been in part provoked by the
tricks the Stuarts had played with the boroughs, would bring a more
favourable atmosphere, this expectation was defeated. All of these
boroughs fell under the rule of a patron, who bribed the members of
the corporation with money, with livings or clerkships in the state
departments, cadetships in the navy and in India. Croker complained
that he had further to dance with the wives and daughters of the
corporation at ‘tiresome and foolish’ balls. There was no disguise or
mistake about the position. The patron spoke not of ‘my constituents’
but of ‘my corporation.’ The inhabitants outside this little group
had no share at all in Parliamentary representation, and neither the
patron nor his nominee gave them a single thought. The members of the
corporation themselves were often non-resident, and the mayor sometimes
never went near the borough from the first day of his magistracy to the
last. His office was important, not because it made him responsible for
municipal government, but because it made him returning officer. He had
to manage the formalities of an election for his patron.

The Freemen boroughs, of which there were 62, represent in Mr.
Porritt’s opinion the extreme divergence from the old franchise.
In these boroughs restrictions of different kinds had crept in, a
common restriction being that in force at Carlisle, which limited
the franchise to the inhabitants who belonged to the trade guild.
For some time these restrictions, though they destroyed the ancient
significance of ‘freeman’ as a person to be distinguished from the
‘villein,’ did not really destroy the representative character of the
electorate. But these boroughs suffered like the others, and even more
than the others, from the demoralising effects of the appreciation
of the value of seats in Parliament, and as soon as votes commanded
money, the corporations had every inducement to keep down the number of
voters. In many boroughs there set in a further development that was
fatal to the elementary principles of representation: the practice of
selling the freedom of the borough to non-residents. There were three
classes of buyers: men who wanted to become patrons, men who wanted
to become members, and men who wanted to become voters. The making of
honorary freemen became a favourite process for securing the control
of a borough to the corporation or to a patron. Dunwich, which was a
wealthy and famous seaport in the time of Henry II., gradually crumbled
into the German Ocean, and in 1816 it was described by Oldfield
as consisting of forty-two houses and half a church. This little
borough contained in 1670 forty resident freemen, and in that year it
largessed its freedom on four hundred non-residents. The same methods
were applied at Carlisle, King’s Lynn, East Grinstead, Nottingham,
Liverpool, and in many other places. A particularly flagrant case
at Durham in 1762, when 215 freemen were made in order to turn an
election, after the issue of the writ, led to a petition which resulted
in the unseating of the member and the passing of an Act of Parliament
in the following year. This Act excluded from the franchise honorary
freemen who had been admitted within twelve months of the first day
of an election, but it did not touch the rights of ordinary freemen
admitted by the corporation. Consequently, when a Parliamentary
election was impending or proceeding, new freemen used to swarm into
the electorate whenever the corporation or the patron had need of
them. At Bristol in 1812 seventeen hundred and twenty freemen, and at
Maldon in 1826 a thousand freemen, were so admitted and enfranchised.
Generally speaking, corporations seem to have preferred the method of
exclusion to that of flooding the electorate with outside creations.
On the eve of the Reform Bill, there were six electors at Rye and
fourteen at Dunwich. At Launceston, early in the eighteenth century,
the members of the corporation systematically refused freedom to all
but members of their own party, and the same practices were adopted
at East Retford, Ludlow, Plympton, Hastings, and other places. Legal
remedies were generally out of reach of the excluded freemen. There
were some exceptions to the abuses which prevailed in most of these
boroughs, notably the case of the City of London. A special Act of
Parliament (1774) made it a condition of the enjoyment of the freemen’s
franchise there, that the freeman had not received alms, and that he
had been a freeman for twelve calendar months. But in most of these
boroughs, by the end of the eighteenth century, the electorate was
entirely under the influence of the corporations. Nor was the device of
withholding freedom from those qualified by custom, and of bestowing
it on those who were only qualified by subservience, the only resource
at the command of the borough-mongers. Charities were administered
in an electioneering spirit, and recalcitrant voters were sometimes
threatened with impressment.

Of the 513 members representing England and Wales in 1832, 415 sat for
cities and boroughs. Fifty members were returned by 24 cities, 332 by
166 English boroughs, 5 by single-member boroughs, 16 by the Cinque
Ports, and 12 by as many Welsh boroughs. The twelve Welsh counties
returned 12 members, and the forty English counties 82, the remaining 4
members being representatives of the Universities.

The county franchise had a much less chequered history than the
various franchises in boroughs. Before the reign of Henry VI., every
free inhabitant householder, freeholder or non-freeholder, could vote
at elections of Knights of the Shire. The Act of 1430 limited the
franchise to forty-shilling freeholders. Many controversies raged
round this definition, and by the eighteenth century, men were voting
in respect of annuities, rent-charges, the dowries of their wives and
pews in church. Mr. Porritt traces the faggot voter to the early days
of Charles I. Two changes were made in the county franchise between
1430 and 1832. The residential qualification disappears by 1620: in
1702 a tax-paying qualification was introduced under which a property
did not carry a vote unless it had been taxed for a year. In 1781 the
year was cut down to six months. Great difficulties and irregularities
occurred with regard to registration, and a Bill was passed into law in
1784 to establish a public system of registration. The Act, however,
was repealed in the next year, in consequence of the agitation against
the expense. The county franchise had a democratic appearance but
the county constituencies were very largely under territorial sway,
and by the middle of the fifteenth century Jack Cade had complained
of the pressure of the great families on their tenants. Fox declared
that down to 1780 one of the members for Yorkshire had always been
elected in Lord Rockingham’s dining-room, and from that time onwards
the representation of that county seems to have been a battle of bribes
between the Rockinghams, the Fitzwilliams and the Harewoods.

It is easy to see from this sketch of the manner in which the
Parliamentary franchise had been drawn into the hands of patrons and
corporations, that the aristocracy had supreme command of Parliament.
Control by patrons was growing steadily throughout the eighteenth
century. The Society of Friends of the People presented a petition to
the House of Commons in 1793, in which it was stated that 157 members
were sent to Parliament by 84 individuals, and 150 other members
were returned by the recommendation of 70 powerful individuals. The
relations of such members to their patrons were described by Fox in
1797, ‘When Gentlemen represent populous towns and cities, then it is
a disputed point whether they ought to obey their voice or follow the
dictates of their own conscience. But if they represent a noble lord or
a noble duke then it becomes no longer a question of doubt, and he is
not considered a man of honour who does not implicitly obey the orders
of a single constituent.’[1] The petition of the Society of Friends
of the People contained some interesting information as to the number
of electors in certain constituencies: 90 members were returned by 46
places, in none of which the number of voters exceeded 50, 37 ‘by 19
places in none of which the number of voters exceeds 100, and 52 by
26 in none of which the number of voters exceeded 200. Seventy-five
members were returned for 35 places in which it would be to trifle with
the patience of your Honourable House to mention any number of voters
at all,’ the elections at the places alluded to being notoriously a
matter of form.

If the qualifications of voters had changed, so had the qualifications
of members. A power that reposed on this basis would have seemed
reasonably complete, but the aristocracy took further measures to
consolidate its monopoly. In 1710 Parliament passed an Act, to which
it gave the prepossessing title ‘An Act for securing the freedom of
Parliament, by further qualifying the Members to sit in the House of
Commons,’ to exclude all persons who had not a certain estate of land,
worth in the case of knights of the shire, £500, and in the case of
burgesses, £300. This Act was often evaded by various devices, and
the most famous of the statesmen of the eighteenth century sat in
Parliament by means of fictitious qualifications, among others Pitt,
Burke, Fox and Sheridan. But the Act gave a tone to Parliament, and
it was not a dead letter.[2] It had, too, the effect of throwing the
ambitious merchant into the landlord class, and of enveloping him in
the landlord atmosphere. Selection and assimilation, as De Tocqueville
saw, and not exclusion, are the true means of preserving a class
monopoly of power. We might, indeed, sum up the contrast between the
English and French aristocracy by saying that the English aristocracy
understood the advantages of a scientific social frontier, whereas
the French were tenacious of a traditional frontier. More effectual
in practice than this imposition of a property qualification was the
growing practice of throwing on candidates the official expenses of
elections. During the eighteenth century these expenses grew rapidly,
and various Acts of Parliament, in particular that of 1745, fixed these
charges on candidates.

It followed naturally, from a system which made all municipal
government merely one aspect of Parliamentary electioneering, that the
English towns fell absolutely into the hands of corrupt oligarchies
and the patrons on whom they lived. The Tudor kings had conceived
the policy of extinguishing their independent life and energies by
committing their government to select bodies with power to perpetuate
themselves by co-opting new members. The English aristocracy found
in the boroughs--with the mass of inhabitants disinherited and all
government and power vested in a small body--a state of things not
less convenient and accommodating to the new masters of the machine
than it had been to the old. The English towns, which three centuries
earlier had enjoyed a brisk and vigorous public life, were now in a
state of stagnant misgovernment: as the century advanced, they only
sank deeper into the slough, and the Report of the Commission of 1835
showed that the number of inhabitants who were allowed any share in
public life or government was infinitesimal. In Plymouth, for example,
with a population of 75,000, the number of resident freemen was under
300: in Ipswich, with more than 20,000 inhabitants, there were 350
freemen of whom more than 100 were not rated, and some forty were
paupers. Municipal government throughout the century was a system not
of government but of property. It did not matter to the patron whether
Winchester or Colchester had any drains or constables: the patron
had to humour the corporation or the freemen, the corporation or the
freemen had to keep their bargain with the patron. The patron gave
the corporation money and other considerations: the corporation gave
the patron control over a seat in Parliament. Neither had to consider
the interests or the property of the mass of burgesses. Pitt so far
recognised the ownership of Parliamentary boroughs as property, that he
proposed in 1785 to compensate the patrons of the boroughs he wished to
disenfranchise. Every municipal office was regarded in the same spirit.
The endowments and the charities that belonged to the town belonged to
a small oligarchy which acknowledged no responsibility to the citizens
for its proceedings, and conducted its business in secret. The whole
system depended on the patron, who for his part represented the
absolute supremacy of the territorial aristocracy to which he belonged.
Civic life there was none.

If we turn to local government outside the towns there is the same
decay of self-government.

One way of describing the changes that came over English society after
the break-up of feudalism would be to say that as in France everything
drifted into the hands of the intendant, in England everything drifted
into the hands of the Justice of the Peace. This office, created in
the first year of Edward III., had grown during his reign to very
great importance and power. Originally the Justices of the Peace were
appointed by the state to carry out certain of its precepts, and
generally to keep the peace in the counties in which they served.
In their quarterly sittings they had the assistance of a jury, and
exercised a criminal jurisdiction concurrent with that which the king’s
judges exercised when on circuit. But from early days they developed
an administrative power which gradually drew to itself almost all the
functions and properties of government. Its quasi-judicial origin is
seen in the judicial form under which it conducted such business as
the supervision of roads and bridges. Delinquencies and deficiencies
were ‘presented’ to the magistrates in court. It became the habit,
very early in the history of the Justices of the Peace, to entrust to
them duties that were new, or duties to which existing authorities
were conspicuously inadequate. In the social convulsions that followed
the Black Death, it was the Justice of the Peace who was called in to
administer the elaborate legislation by which the capitalist classes
sought to cage the new ambitions of the labourer. Under the Elizabethan
Poor Law, it was the Justice of the Peace who appointed the parish
overseers and approved their poor rate, and it was the Justice of the
Peace who held in his hand the meshes of the law of Settlement. In
other words, the social order that emerged from mediæval feudalism
centred round the Justice of the Peace in England as conspicuously
as it centred round the bureaucracy in France. During the eighteenth
century, the power of the Justice of the Peace reached its zenith,
whilst his government acquired certain attributes that gave it a
special significance.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were still many
small men taking some part in the affairs of the village. The old
manorial civilisation was disappearing, but Mr. and Mrs. Webb have
shown that manor courts of one kind or another were far more numerous
and had far more to do at the beginning of the eighteenth century
than has been commonly supposed. Such records as survive, those,
_e.g._ of Godmanchester and Great Tew, prove that the conduct and
arrangement of the business of the common fields--and England was
still, at the beginning of this period, very largely a country of
common fields--required and received very full and careful attention.
Those courts crumble away as the common fields vanish, and with them
there disappears an institution in which, as Professor Vinogradoff has
shown, the small man counted and had recognised rights. By the time of
the Reform Bill, a manor court was more or less of a local curiosity.
The village vestries again, which represented another successor to the
manorial organisation, democratic in form, were losing their vitality
and functions, and coming more and more under the shadow of the
Justices of the Peace. Parochial government was declining throughout
the century, and though Professor Lowell in his recent book speaks of
village government as still democratic in 1832, few of those who have
examined the history of the vestry believe that much was left of its
democratic character. By the end of the eighteenth century, the entire
administration of county affairs, as well as the ultimate authority in
parish business, was in the hands of the Justice of the Peace, the High
Sheriff, and the Lord-Lieutenant.

The significance of this development was increased by the manner
in which the administration of the justices was conducted. The
transactions of business fell, as the century advanced, into fewer and
fewer hands, and became less and less public in form and method. The
great administrative court, Quarter Sessions, remained open as a court
of justice, but it ceased to conduct its county business in public.
Its procedure, too, was gradually transformed. Originally the court
received ‘presentments’ or complaints from many different sources--the
grand juries, the juries from the Hundreds, the liberties and the
boroughs, and from constable juries. The grand juries presented county
bridges, highways or gaols that needed repair: the Hundred juries
presented delinquencies in their divisions: constable juries presented
such minor anti-social practices as the keeping of pigs. Each of these
juries represented some area of public opinion. The Grand Jury, besides
giving its verdict on all these presentments, was in other ways a very
formidable body, and acted as a kind of consultative committee, and
perhaps as a finance committee. Now all this elaborate machinery was
simplified in the eighteenth century, and it was simplified by the
abandonment of all the quasi-democratic characteristics and methods.
Presentments by individual justices gradually superseded presentments
by juries. By 1835 the Hundred Jury and Jury of Constables had
disappeared: the Grand Jury had almost ceased to concern itself with
local government, and the administrative business of Quarter Sessions
was no longer discussed in open court.

Even more significant in some respects was the delegation of a great
part of county business, including the protection of footpaths, from
Quarter Sessions to Petty Sessions or to single justices out of
sessions. Magistrates could administer in this uncontrolled capacity a
drastic code for the punishment of vagrants and poachers without jury
or publicity. The single justice himself determined all questions of
law and of fact, and could please himself as to the evidence he chose
to hear. In 1822 the Duke of Buckingham tried and convicted a man of
coursing on his estate. The trial took place in the duke’s kitchen: the
witnesses were the duke’s keepers. The defendant was in this case not
a poacher, who was _fera naturæ_, but a farmer, who was in comparison
a person of substance and standing. The office of magistrate possessed
a special importance for the class that preserved game, and readers of
_Rob Roy_ will remember that Mr. Justice Inglewood had to swallow his
prejudices against the Hanoverian succession and take the oaths as a
Justice of the Peace, because the refusal of most of the Northumberland
magistrates, being Jacobites, to serve on the bench, had endangered
the strict administration of the Game Laws. We know from the novels of
Richardson and Fielding and Smollett how this power enveloped village
life. Richardson has no venom against the justices. In _Pamela_ he
merely records the fact that Mr. B. was a magistrate for two counties,
and that therefore it was hopeless for Pamela, whom he wished to
seduce, to elude his pursuit, even if she escaped from her duress in
his country house.

Fielding, who saw the servitude of the poor with less patience and
composure, wrote of country life with knowledge and experience.
In _Joseph Andrews_ he describes the young squire who forbids the
villagers to keep dogs, and kills any dog that he finds, and the lawyer
who assures Lady Booby that ‘the laws of the land are not so vulgar to
permit a mean fellow to contend with one of your ladyship’s fortune. We
have one sure card, which is to carry him before Justice Frolic, who
upon hearing your ladyship’s name, will commit him without any further
question.’ Mr. Justice Frolic was as good as his reputation, and at
the moment of their rescue Joseph and Fanny were on the point of being
sent to Bridewell on the charge of taking a twig from a hedge. Fielding
and Richardson wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1831
Denman, the Attorney-General in Grey’s Government, commented on the
difference between the punishments administered by judges at Assize and
those administered by justices at Quarter Sessions, in the defence of
their game preserves, observing that the contrast ‘had a very material
effect in confusing in the minds of the people the notions of right
and wrong.’ This territorial power was in fact absolute. In France the
peasant was in some cases shielded from the caprice of the seigneur by
the Crown, the Parlements and the intendants. Both Henry IV. and Louis
XIII. intervened to protect the communities in the possession of their
goods from the encroachments of seigneurs, while Louis XIV. published
an edict in 1667 restoring to the communities all the property they had
alienated since 1620. In England he was at the landlord’s mercy: he
stood unprotected beneath the canopy of this universal power.

Nor was the actual authority, administrative or judicial, of the
magistrates and their surveillance of the village the full measure of
their influence. They became, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb have shown, the
domestic legislature. The most striking example of their legislation
was the Berkshire Bread Act. In 1795 the Berkshire Court of Quarter
Sessions summoned justices and ‘several discreet persons’ to meet at
Speenhamland for the purpose of rating husbandry wages. This meeting
passed the famous resolution providing for the supplementing of wages
out of the rates, on a certain fixed scale, according to the price
of flour. The example of these seven clergymen and eleven squires
was quickly followed in other counties, and Quarter Sessions used to
have tables drawn up and printed, giving the justices’ scale, to be
issued by the Clerk of the Peace to every acting magistrate and to
the churchwardens and overseers of every parish. It was a handful of
magistrates in the different counties, acting on their own initiative,
without any direction from Parliament, that set loose this social
avalanche in England. Parliament, indeed, had developed the habit of
taking the opinion of the magistrates as conclusive on all social
questions, and whereas a modern elected local authority has to submit
to the control of a department subject to Parliament, in the eighteenth
century a non-elected local authority, not content with its own
unchecked authority, virtually controlled the decisions of Parliament
as well. The opposition of the magistrates to Whitbread’s Bill in 1807,
for example, was accepted as fatal and final.

Now if the Crown had been more powerful or had followed a different
policy, the Justices of the Peace, instead of developing into
autonomous local oligarchies, might have become its representatives.
When feudal rights disappeared with the Wars of the Roses, the
authority of the Justice of the Peace, an officer of the Crown,
superseded that of the local lord. Mr. Jenks[3] is therefore justified
in saying that ‘the governing caste in English country life since the
Reformation has not been a feudal but an official caste.’ But this
official caste is, so to speak, only another aspect of the feudal
caste, for though on paper the representatives of the central power,
the county magistrates were in practice, by the end of the eighteenth
century, simply the local squires putting into force their own ideas
and policy. Down to the Rebellion, the Privy Council expected judges
of assize to choose suitable persons for appointment as magistrates.
Magistrates were made and unmade until the reign of George I.,
according to the political prepossessions of governments. But by the
end of the eighteenth century the Lord Lieutenant’s recommendations
were virtually decisive for appointment, and dismissal from the bench
became unknown. Thus though the system of the magistracy, as Redlich
and Hirst pointed out, enabled the English constitution to rid itself
of feudalism a century earlier than the continent, it ultimately gave
back to the landlords in another form the power that they lost when
feudalism disappeared.

Another distinctive feature of the English magistracy contributed to
this result. The Justice of the Peace was unpaid. The statutes of
Edward III. and Richard II. prescribed wages at the handsome rate of
four shillings a day, but it seems to be clear, though the actual
practice of benches is not very easy to ascertain, that the wages in
the rare instances when they were claimed were spent on hospitality,
and did not go into the pockets of the individual justices. Lord Eldon
gave this as a reason for refusing to strike magistrates off the list
in cases of private misconduct. ‘As the magistrates gave their services
gratis they ought to be protected.’ When it was first proposed in 1785
to establish salaried police commissioners for Middlesex, many Whigs
drew a contrast between the magistrates who were under no particular
obligation to the executive power and the officials proposed to be
appointed who would receive salaries, and might be expected to take
their orders from the Government.

The aristocracy was thus paramount both in local government and in
Parliament. But to understand the full significance of its absolutism
we must notice two important social events--the introduction of family
settlements and the abolition of military tenures.

A class that wishes to preserve its special powers and privileges has
to discover some way of protecting its corporate interests from the
misdemeanours and follies of individual members. The great landlords
found such a device in the system of entail which gave to each
successive generation merely a life interest in the estates, and kept
the estates themselves as the permanent possession of the family. But
the lawyers managed to elude this device of the landowners by the
invention of sham law-suits, an arrangement by which a stranger brought
a claim for the estate against the limited owner in possession, and got
a judgment by his connivance. The stranger was in truth the agent of
the limited owner, who was converted by this procedure into an absolute
owner. The famous case known as Taltarums case in 1472, established
the validity of these lawsuits, and for the next two hundred years
‘Family Law’ no longer controlled the actions of the landowners and the
market for their estates. During this time Courts of Law and Parliament
set their faces against all attempts to reintroduce the system of
entails. As a consequence estates were sometimes melted down, and the
inheritances of ancient families passed into the possession of yeomen
and merchants. The landowners had never accepted their defeat. In
the reign of Elizabeth they tried to devise family settlements that
would answer their purpose as effectually as the old law of entail,
but they were foiled by the great judges, Popham and Coke. After the
Restoration, unhappily, conditions were more propitious. In the first
place, the risks of the Civil War had made it specially important
for rich men to save their estates from forfeiture by means of such
settlements, and in the second place the landowning class was now
all-powerful. Consequently the attempt which Coke had crushed now
succeeded, and rich families were enabled to tie up their wealth.[4]
Family settlements have ever since been a very important part of our
social system. The merchants who became landowners bought up the
estates of yeomen, whereas in eighteenth-century France it was the land
of noblemen that passed to the _nouveaux riches_.

The second point to be noticed in the history of this landlord class
is the abolition of the military tenures in 1660. The form and the
method of this abolition are both significant. The military dues were
the last remaining feudal liability of the landlords to the Crown. They
were money payments that had taken the place of old feudal services.
The landlords, who found them vexatious and capricious, had been trying
to get rid of them ever since the reign of James I. In 1660 they
succeeded, and the Restoration Parliament revived the Act of Cromwell’s
Parliament four years earlier which abolished military tenures. The
bargain which the landlords made with the Crown on this occasion was
ingenious and characteristic; it was something like the Concordat
between Francis I. and Leo X., which abolished the Pragmatic sanction
at the expense of the Gallican Church; for the landowners simply
transferred their liability to the general taxpayer. The Crown forgave
the landlords their dues in consideration of receiving a grant from the
taxation of the food of the nation. An Excise tax was the substitute.

Now the logical corollary of the abolition of the feudal dues that
vexed the large landowners would have been the abolition of the feudal
dues that vexed the small landowners. If the great landlords were no
longer to be subject to their dues in their relation to the Crown, why
should the small copyholder continue to owe feudal dues to the lord?
The injustice of abolishing the one set of liabilities and retaining
the other struck one observer very forcibly, and he was an observer
who knew something, unlike most of the governing class, from intimate
experience of the grievances of the small landowner under this feudal
survival. This was Francis North (1637-1685), the first Lord Guildford,
the famous lawyer and Lord Chancellor. North had begun his career by
acting as the steward of various manors, thinking that he would gain
an insight into human nature which would be of great value to him in
his practice at the bar. His experience in this capacity, as we know
from Roger North’s book _The Lives of the Norths_, disclosed to him an
aspect of feudalism which escaped the large landowners--the hardships
of their dependants. He used to describe the copyhold exactions, and
to say that in many cases that came under his notice small tenements
and pieces of land which had been in a poor family for generations were
swallowed up in the monstrous fines imposed on copyholders. He said he
had often found himself the executioner of the cruelty of the lords
and ladies of manors upon poor men, and he remarked the inconsistency
that left all these oppressions untouched in emancipating the large
landowners. Maine, in discussing this system, pointed out that these
signorial dues were of the kind that provoked the French Revolution.
There were two reasons why a state of things which produced a
revolution in France remained disregarded in England. One was that the
English copyholders were a much smaller class: the other that, as small
proprietors were disappearing in England, the English copyholder was
apt to contrast his position with the status of the landless labourer,
and to congratulate himself on the possession of a property, whereas
in France the copyholder contrasted his position with the status of
the freeholder and complained of his services. The copyholders were
thus not in a condition to raise a violent or dangerous discontent,
and their grievances were left unredressed. It is sometimes said that
England got rid of feudalism a century earlier than the continent. That
is true of the English State, but to understand the agrarian history of
the eighteenth century we must remember that, as it has been well said,
‘whereas the English State is less feudal, the English land law is more
feudal than that of any other country in Europe.’[5]

Lastly, the class that is armed with all these social and political
powers dominates the universities and the public schools. The story of
how the colleges changed from communities of poor men into societies of
rich men, and then gradually swallowed up the university, has been told
in the Reports of University Commissions. By the eighteenth century the
transformation was complete, and both the ancient universities were the
universities of the rich. There is a passage in Macaulay describing the
state and pomp of Oxford at the end of the seventeenth century, ‘when
her Chancellor, the venerable Duke of Ormonde, sat in his embroidered
mantle on his throne under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian
theatre, surrounded by hundreds of graduates robed according to their
rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly presented to
him as candidates for academical honours.’ The university was a power,
not in the sense in which that could be said of a university like the
old university of Paris, whose learning could make popes tremble, but
in the sense that the university was part of the recognised machinery
of aristocracy. What was true of the universities was true of the
public schools. Education was the nursery not of a society, but of an
order; not of a state, but of a race of rulers.

Thus on every side this class is omnipotent. In Parliament with its
ludicrous representation, in the towns with their decayed government,
in the country, sleeping under the absolute rule of the Justice of
the Peace, there is no rival power. The Crown is for all purposes its
accomplice rather than its competitor. It controls the universities,
the Church, the law, and all the springs of life and discussion. Its
own influence is consolidated by the strong social discipline embodied
in the family settlements. Its supremacy is complete and unquestioned.
Whereas in France the fermentation of ideas was an intellectual revolt
against the governing system and all literature spoke treason, in
England the existing régime was accepted, we might say assumed, by
the world of letters and art, by the England that admired Reynolds
and Gibbon, or listened to Johnson and Goldsmith, or laughed with
Sheridan and Sterne. To the reason of France, the government under
which France lived was an expensive paradox: to the reason of England,
any other government than the government under which England lived was
unthinkable. Hence De Tocqueville saw only a homogeneous society, a
society revering its institutions in the spirit of Burke in contrast
with a society that mocked at its institutions in the spirit of
Voltaire.

‘You people of great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes,’
wrote Burke to the Duke of Richmond in 1772, ‘are not like such as I
am, who, whatever we may be by the rapidity of our growth and even
by the fruit we bear, flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the
ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour,
yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our season, and
leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to
be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate
your benefits from generation to generation.’ We propose in this book
to examine the social history of England in the days when the great
oaks were in the fulness of their vigour and strength, and to see what
happened to some of the classes that found shelter in their shade.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] House of Commons, May 26, 1797, on Grey’s motion for Parliamentary
Reform.

[2] The only person who is known to have declined to sit on this
account is Southey.

[3] _Outline of English Local Government_, p. 152.

[4] A clear and concise account of these developments is given by Lord
Hobhouse, _Contemporary Review_, February and March 1886.

[5] Holdsworth’s _History of English Law_.



CHAPTER II

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 twelve
 separate enclosures. These instances have not been chosen on any
 plan. They are taken from different parts of the country, and are of
 various dates; some are enclosures of common fields, some enclosures
 of commons and waste, and some include enclosures of both kinds.


At the time of the great Whig Revolution, England was in the main a
country of commons and of common fields[6]; 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,[7] 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
mediæval 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 arable 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.[8]

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, 120,000 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.[9] 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.[10]

By Sir Richard Sutton’s Act[11] 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.[12]
Before this Act, a universal consent to any change of system was
necessary.[13] 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.[14] 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.[15]
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.[16] 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 cases, 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.[17] 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.’[18]

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.[19] 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.[20] 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.’[21] Arthur Young[22]
compared the open-field system, 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,[23] ‘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.’[24] 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_.[25] ‘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.’[26]

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 Armies, 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.’[27]

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 d’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 æsthetic 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 observers: 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 numbers 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.[28] Mr. Johnson gives the following table for the years
1700-1844, founded on Dr. Slater’s detailed estimate[29]--

  +-----------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
  |           |   Common Field and    |       Waste only.     |
  |           |      some Waste.      |                       |
  |   Years.  +---------+-------------+---------+-------------+
  |           |  Acts.  |  Acreage.   |  Acts.  |   Acreage.  |
  +-----------+---------+-------------+---------+-------------+
  | 1700-1760 |    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.’[30] 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,[31] 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.[32]


FOOTNOTES:

[6] 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.

[7] 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_.

[8] 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, known 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_, 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.

[9] See Webb, _Manor and Borough_, vol. i. p. 66 _seq._

[10] Slater, _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common
Fields_, p. 77.

[11] 13 George III. c. 81.

[12] This was done at Barnes Common; see for whole subject, _Annals of
Agriculture_, vol. xvii. p. 516.

[13] 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).

[14] Slater, p. 119.

[15] Dr. Slater’s conclusion is that ‘in the open field village the
entirely landless labourer was scarcely to be found,’ p. 130.

[16] See _Commons, Forests, and Footpaths_, by Lord Eversley, p. 11.

[17] _Bedfordshire Report_, 1808, p. 223, quoting from Arthur Young.

[18] P. 114.

[19] P. 138.

[20] See on this point, Levy, _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 1.

[21] _Report of Select Committee on Waste Lands_, 1795, p. 15, Appendix
B.

[22] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. i. p. 72.

[23] _An Inquiry into the Connection between the present Price of
Provisions and the Size of Farms_, 1773, p. 81.

[24] _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.’

[25] P. 103.

[26] _Committee on Inclosures_, 1844, p. 135.

[27] _House of Commons Journal_, June 19, 1797.

[28] _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 24.

[29] _Disappearance of Small Landowner_, p. 90; Slater’s _English
Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields_, Appendix B.

[30] _Parliamentary Register_, March 30, 1781.

[31] See Dr. Slater’s detailed estimate.

[32] There were probably many enclosures that had 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 this
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 III

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.[33]
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 providing 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.[34]

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.[35] 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.’[36] 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.’[37] 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:[38] 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[39] 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 survived the scrutiny of a committee on which the Duke of
Leeds’ class was not paramount. Under that Act[40] 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 House 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 House 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)[41] 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[42] 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.[43] 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 at Armley and Ashelworth
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[44] 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.’[45]

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.[46] 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.[47] 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.[48] 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.[49] In the cases of Simpson and Louth, as readers
who consult the Appendix will see, the committees were satisfied with
majorities just above three-fifths in value. At Raunds (see p. 39),
where 4963 acres were ‘interested,’ the owners of 570 are stated to be
against, and of 721 neuter.[50] An interesting illustration of the lax
practice of the committees is provided in the history of an attempted
enclosure at Quainton (1801).[51] 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 of, often induce the inferiors to consent to things which they
think will be to their future disadvantage.’[52] 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,[53] 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[54]
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[55] 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,[56] 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.’[57] 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.[58]

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.’[59]

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,[60] and they
illustrate the play of forces at Westminster. The Bishop of St.
Davids[61] 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[62]
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,[63] 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 fellow-peers, 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.’[64] 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 wrapped 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.’[65] 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.’[66]

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.[67] 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.’[68] 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.’[69] 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.[70] 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,[71]
provided for an appeal to Quarter Sessions. It will be seen that in
five of the cases analysed in the Appendix (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 ten of the cases in the Appendix the award
of the commissioners is stated to be final, and there is no appeal from
it. The 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 unreasonably
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.[72] 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,[73] 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_[74]
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.’[75] 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.[76] 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,[77] 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[78] 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 reflection for the classes that promoted enclosures and
appointed commissioners, but it rings with a very different sound in
other ears. It would clearly 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.’[79] 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.[80] 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.[81]

       *       *       *       *       *

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 illustrations 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.’[82]

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.[83] His account begins with a letter
to Lord Carlisle in November:

 ‘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....’

(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:

 ‘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._’

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.

 ‘... 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....’

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:

 ‘... 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....’

The next letter describes the final catastrophe:

 ‘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[84] 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,[85] 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 parts. 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....’

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 arrested 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 authors 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 numbers 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 legislators, 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 creditors 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.[86]


FOOTNOTES:

[33] _E.g._ Laxton enclosed on petition of 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.

[34] This Standing Order does not seem to have been applied
universally, for Mr. Bragge on December 1, 1800, made a motion that it
should be extended to the counties where it had not hitherto obtained.
See _Senator_, vol. xxvii., December 1, 1800.

[35] See particulars in Appendix.

[36] _A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England_, 1771, vol. i.
p. 122.

[37] Pp. 21 f.

[38] Cf. Otmoor in next chapter.

[39] See Appendix.

[40] See Appendix.

[41] See _House of Commons Journal_.

[42] Eden, _The State of the Poor_, vol. ii. p. 157.

[43] 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.

[44] Report of Select Committee on Most Effectual Means of Facilitating
Enclosure, 1800.

[45] 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 and 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.

[46] _House of Commons Journal_, March 21, 1796.

[47] _House of Commons Journal_, June 10, 1801; cf. also case of
Laleham. See Appendix.

[48] _Ibid._, June 15, 1801.

[49] _Ibid._, May 3, 1809.

[50] _Ibid._, June 29, 1797.

[51] See Appendix A (13).

[52] _A Political Enquiry into the Consequences of enclosing Waste
Lands_, 1785, p. 108.

[53] See Appendix A (12).

[54] House of Commons, May 1, 1845.

[55] Aglionby, House of Commons, June 5, 1844.

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

[57] _Parliamentary Register_, House of Lords, March 30, 1781.

[58] 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.

[59] _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.

[60] See _Parliamentary Register_, House of Lords, March 30, 1781;
April 6, 1781; June 14, 1781.

[61] John Warren (1730-1800).

[62] John Hinchcliffe (1731-1794), at one time Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge.

[63] _Parliamentary Register_, March 30, 1781.

[64] _Senator_, vol. xxvi., July 2, 1800.

[65] For both speeches see _Parliamentary Register_, May 24, 1802.

[66] _Ibid._, June 14, 1781.

[67] See Cheshunt, Louth, Simpson, and Stanwell in Appendix.

[68] _Six Months’ Tour through the North of England_, 1771, vol. i. p.
122.

[69] See _Annual Register_, 1800, Appendix to Chronicle, p. 87.

[70] _Parliamentary Register_, June 14, 1781.

[71] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxvi. p. 111.

[72] February 1, 1793.

[73] See Chapter iv.

[74] Vol. xxvi. p. 70.

[75] 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.

[76] 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.’

[77] _Parliamentary Register_, June 14, 1781.

[78] _General Report on Enclosures_, 1808.

[79] _Six Months’ Tour through the North of England_, vol. i. p. 122.

[80] See Appendix A (6).

[81] _Report on Somerset_, p. 192.

[82] _Parliamentary Register_, January 21, 1772.

[83] _Carlisle MSS._; _Historical MSS. Commission_, pp. 301 ff.

[84] Charles James Fox.

[85] The earlier name of Brooks’s Club.

[86] For the subsequent history of King’s Sedgmoor, see Appendix A
(14).



CHAPTER IV

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 printers and
authors, 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 actors, and because it was the turning
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 Members 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 clerks 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. Flushed 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 Fletcher 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 present 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 already been mentioned in the
previous chapter, but we propose to recapitulate their main provisions
in order to show that the gross unfairness 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.[87] 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.[88] 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_[89] 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 Knights 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,[90] 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 unfortunate 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 1796 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 anæsthesia, 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.[91]
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:[92] and another in the _Annual Register_
for 1799[93] 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.’[94] 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.’[95] Dr. Wilkinson, writing in the _Annals of Agriculture_[96]
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.[97] ‘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
reviewed 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 (1741-1820), 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 enclosing 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.’[98] 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 sizes 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 size 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.[99]

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,’[100] 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.[101] ‘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.[102]
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,[103] 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.[104] 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
analysed in the Appendix. 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,[105]
and he remarks 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 minimum 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 marks 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.[106] 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_,[107] 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.[108]

‘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.’[109]

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 Mackarness, 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 purpose 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.’[110] 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,[111]
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,[112]
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.’[113]

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, whilst 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.’[114]

The results of the Act, framed and administered on these lines, were
described by Dunkin,[115] 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.[116]

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.’[117]
This excess of expenses over profits was adduced by the ‘Otmoor
proprietor,’ to whom we have already referred, as an illustration 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.’[118] 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.[119]

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-hooks, 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.’[120]

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 sticks 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.’[121]

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 four months’ imprisonment.[122]

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 neighbourhood 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.


FOOTNOTES:

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

[88] Sir John Sinclair complained in 1796 that the Board had not even
the privilege of franking its letters.--_Annals of Agriculture_, vol.
xxvi, p. 506.

[89] Vol. xxvi. p. 85.

[90] 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 than
£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.

[91] See Appendix A (5).

[92] _Bedford Report_, 1808, p. 235.

[93] _Annual Register_, 1799, Chron., p. 27.

[94] Eden, 1. Preface, p. xviii.

[95] _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 be 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 of property, and therefore cannot possibly claim any part
thereof.’

[96] Vol. xx. p. 456.

[97] Vol. xxiv. p. 543.

[98] _The Appropriation and Enclosure of Commonable and Intermixed
Lands_, 1801.

[99] ‘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 favourable
terms to industrious families. 3rdly, Restrain the engrossment and
over-enlargement of farms. The propriety of those measures cannot, I
think, be questioned.’--_The Case of Labourers in Husbandry_, p. 103.

[100] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. i. p. 52.

[101] 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.

[102] Slater, pp. 126-7.

[103] _Ibid._, p. 128.

[104] _The Poor Man’s Best Friend, or Land to cultivate for his
own Benefit._ Letter to the Marquis of Salisbury, by the Rev. S.
Demainbray, B.D., 1831.

[105] P. 126.

[106] See for this subject _Cambridge Modern History_, vol. viii. chap.
24, and P. Sagnac, _La Législation Civile de la Révolution Française_.

[107] Vol. i. p. 119 ff.

[108] Jackson’s _Oxford Journal_, September 11, 1830, said that a
single cottager sometimes cleared as much as £20 a year by geese.

[109] _Oxford University and City Herald_, September 25, 1830.

[110] _House of Commons Journal_, February 17, 1815.

[111] 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 interests.

[112] Dunkin’s _Oxfordshire_, vol. i. pp. 122-3.

[113] _Ibid._, p. 123.

[114] Jackson’s _Oxford Journal_, September 18, 1830.

[115] Vol. i. p. 124.

[116] Jackson’s _Oxford Journal_, September 11, 1830.

[117] _Ibid._

[118] _Ibid._, September 18.

[119] 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.

[120] _Oxford University and City Herald_, September 11, 1830.

[121] _Ibid._

[122] Jackson’s _Oxford Journal_, March 5, 1831.



CHAPTER V

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[123]) 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.[124] The expenses were always very
heavy, and in some cases amounted to £5 an acre.[125] 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 cases 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.’[126]
It was a common clause in Enclosure Acts that no sheep were to be
depastured on allotments for seven years.[127] 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 illustrated 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,[128]
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,[129] 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.’[130] 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.’[131]

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,[132]
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?’[133]

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:[134]
‘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!_’[135] The other is from
Sandy:[136] ‘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_.[137]

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

    ‘Estate and house ... and all their sheep,
    A pretty flock, and which for aught I know
    Had clothed the Ewbanks for a thousand years.’

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:--

    ‘Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast
    The little tyrant of his fields withstood.’

       *       *       *       *       *

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 neighbouring 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 vassaux_.
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--.’[138]


FOOTNOTES:

[123] 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 was the result
of a bargain beforehand.

[124] ‘Many small proprietors have been seriously injured by being
obliged in pursuance of ill-framed private bills to enclose lands which
never repaid the expense.’ Marshall, _The Appropriation and Enclosure
of Commonable and Intermixed Lands_, 1801, p. 52.

[125] 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 instances 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 solicitor’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 at House of Commons to swear to them (it once cost from £70 to
 £80 to get consent of principal proprietor);

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

 5. Expense of counsel if there was opposition;

 6. Parliamentary fees, see p. 76.


[126] _Inquiry into the Advantages and Disadvantages resulting from
Bills of Enclosure_, 1780, p. 14.

[127] Cf. Ashelworth, Cheshunt, Knaresborough.

[128] Previous to enclosure there were twenty-five farmers: the land is
now divided among five or six persons only.

[129] 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.

[130] Dunkin’s _Oxfordshire_, pp. 2 and 3.

[131] F. Moore, _Considerations on the Exorbitant Price of
Proprietors_, 1773, p. 22; quoted by Levy, p. 27.

[132] _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.

[133] 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.

[134] P. 235.

[135] 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.

[136] P. 240.

[137] 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.’--_Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xvi. p. 482.

[138] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxxvi. p. 508.



CHAPTER VI

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[139] 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.[140] 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.
At Sidlesham in Surrey, for instance,[141] 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.’[142] 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_,[143] 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_[144] between Capel Lofft,[145] a romantic Suffolk Liberal,
who took the side of the gleaners, and Ruggles,[146] 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 customs 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,[147] 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
necessarily 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.[148]

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.’[149] 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.’[150]

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,[151] 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.[152] 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.[153] 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.[154] 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.’[155] 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. c. 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 he 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.’[156] (1) Bastards, with some exceptions, acquired a
settlement by birth[157]; (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.’[158]

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.’[159] He further says that the parish officers will assist a
poor man in taking a farm in a neighbouring 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.’[160] 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 regulated it in the interest of the employing
class. The answer to Howlett is given by Ruggles in the _Annals of
Agriculture_.[161] 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.[162] 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.’[163] 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.’[164] 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.[165] 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.[166]
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.’[167]

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_[168] 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 neighbouring 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.’[169]

In the Rules for the government of the Poor in the hundreds of Loes and
Wilford in Suffolk[170] 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.’[171] 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
parishioner, 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.’[172] 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.[173]

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,[174] 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.’[175] 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.[176] 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.’[177] 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.’[178] 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.[179] At 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.’[180] 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.[181] 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.[182] 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, whilst 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.[183]

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.


FOOTNOTES:

[139] Davies, _The Case of Labourers in Husbandry_, p. 15.

[140] In some instances it is reckoned as costing only 7s. _Ibid._, see
p. 185.

[141] Davies, p. 181.

[142] Eden, vol. ii. p. 547.

[143] Vol. xxv. p. 488.

[144] See _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. ix. pp. 13, 14, 165-167,
636-646, and vol. x. pp. 218-227.

[145] 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.’

[146] Thomas Ruggles (1737-1813), author of _History of the Poor_,
published in 1793, Deputy-Lieutenant of Essex and Suffolk.

[147] Sir Henry Gould, 1710-1794.

[148] The _Annals 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, wife of Thomas Abree, of the city of New Sarum,
blacksmith, did, during the barley harvest, in the month of September
last, 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 thy 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).

[149] Kent, _Hints_, p. 238.

[150] 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.’

[151] _Notes on the Agriculture of Norfolk_, p. 165.

[152] _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 11.

[153] Young’s _Political Arithmetic_, quoted by Lecky, vol. vii. p. 263
note.

[154] See Appendix B for six of these budgets.

[155] Ruggles, _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xiv. p. 205.

[156] Eden, vol. i. p. 180.

[157] 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.

[158] _Wealth of Nations_, vol. i. p. 194.

[159] Quoted by Eden, vol. i. p. 347.

[160] See _Ibid._, p. 296.

[161] Vol. xiv. pp. 205, 206.

[162] 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
it is capable, naturally encourage a very considerable Extension of
his Works, but that the Experience he has had of the vexatious 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.

[163] Hasbach, pp. 172-3.

[164] Eden, vol. ii. p. 384.

[165] See p. 148.

[166] 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.

[167] Eden, vol. ii. p. 383.

[168] Vol. ix. p. 660.

[169] Eden, vol. ii. p. 288. In considering the accounts of the state
of the commons, it must be remembered that the open parishes thus paid
the penalty of enclosure elsewhere. _Colluvies vicorum._ But these open
fields and commons were becoming rapidly more scarce.

[170] _Ibid._, p. 691.

[171] Eden, vol. iii. p. 743.

[172] _Ibid._

[173] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 591.

[174] _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.’

[175] See _Annual Register_, 1817, p. 298.

[176] Eden, vol. ii. p. 689.

[177] _Reading Mercury_, April 20, 1795; also _Ipswich Journal_, March
28.

[178] _Ipswich Journal_, April 18.

[179] _Ibid._, August 8.

[180] _Ibid._

[181] _Ibid._

[182] _Reading Mercury_, April 27, 1795.

[183] Eden, vol. ii. p. 591.



CHAPTER VII

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.[184]
The rich set an example in the worst days by cutting off pastry and
restricting their servants to a quartern loaf a week each.[185] 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.[186] 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.[187] A Cumberland labourer with a wife and family of five
was shown by Eden[188] 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.[189] 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.’[190] 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.[191]
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.[192] 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.’[193]

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:

    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.

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.’[194] 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 seems to him strange and new.’[195]

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.’[196] 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.’[197]
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.’[198]
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.[199] An
agricultural labourer at Wetherall in Cumberland (five in family)
spends £7, 6s. 9d. on cereals and £2, 13s. 4d. on milk.[200] 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,[201] and
a cooper at Frome, Somerset (seven in family) spending £45, 10s. on
bread, and about 17s. on milk.[202] These figures are typical.[203]

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.’[204] 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.’[205]
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.’[206] Eden[207] 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.[208]

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_[209] 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,[210] 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?[211]... 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.’[212]
We learn from the _Annals of Agriculture_ that at Sedgefield in
Durham[213] many of the poor declared that they had been driven to
drinking tea from not being able to procure milk.[214]

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 seriously.[215] The English poor liked tea
for the same reason 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,[216]
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,’[217] 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.[218] 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.[219]

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’[220]; 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_,[221] ‘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’[222]; 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.[223]

Insufficient firing added to the miseries caused by insufficient
clothes and food. An ingenious writer in the _Annals of
Agriculture_[224] 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,[225] ‘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.’[226] 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.’[227] 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.’[228] There were probably many families like
the two described in Davies[229] who spent nothing on fuel, which
they procured by gathering cow-dung, and breaking their neighbours’
hedges.’[230]

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_,[231] 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.[232]


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[233] 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[234] 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.’[235]

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.’[236]
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.’[237] 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?’[238] 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.’[239] 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 afterwards
developed in a pamphlet published in reply to Pitt’s criticisms of
Whitbread’s Bill.[240] 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 silk-weavers 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_.[241] 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 14l. 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 paper; 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.”[242]

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,[243] and the members for Suffolk.

The object of the Bill[244] 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 Quarter 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, nor
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 ----[245]
years, or to any man who from age or 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.[246] 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.[247] 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:[248] 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[249] 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,[250] 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.’[251] 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 illustration 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.[252] In these parishes,[253] 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[254] 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.[255]

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.[256] 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,[257] not only for the dirt
and disease and the devastating fevers that swept through them,[258]
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:--

    ‘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, far 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.’[259]

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.[260] 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,[261] 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.[262]

This was the state of things that Pitt proposed to reform. His general
ideas on Poor Law reform were put before the House of Commons in the
debate on the second reading of Whitbread’s Bill.[263] 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.’[264] 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.[265] 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 providing 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 provided 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.[266] Howlett attacked the
scheme on the ground of the danger of parish jobbery 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[267] 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[268]
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.[269]

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[270] 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.[271]


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,’[272] and urged that this prohibition,
which had been repealed in 1775,[273] 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.[274] 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.’[275] 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.’[276] 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.[277]
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[278] 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.’[279]

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[280] 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_.[281] 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.’[282] ‘A few roods of land, at a fair rent,’ wrote a
correspondent in the _Annals of Agriculture_ in 1796,[283] ‘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.’[284]
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_,[285] 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!’[286]

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.’[287]

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.’[288] 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.[289] 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.”’[290]

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.”’[291] 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.’[292]
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.[293]

The Select Vestry Act of 1819[294] 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[295] 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 Berkshire J.P.’s and some
discreet persons met at the Pelican Inn at Speenhamland[296] 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.,[297] in his charge to the Grand Jury[298]
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.’[299]

The meeting was duly held on 6th May.[300] 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.’[301] 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.[302] 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 shall 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 1s. 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.[303]

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.’[304] 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.[305] At Maids Morton the roundsman got 6d. from the
employer and 6d. or 9d. from the parish.[306] 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.’[307] 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.’[308]

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:

    ‘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.’[309]

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.


FOOTNOTES:

[184] Eden, vol. i. p. 495.

[185] Resolution of Privy Council, July 6, 1795, and Debate and
Resolution in House of Commons. _Parliamentary Register_, December 11,
1795, and Lord Sheffield in _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. p. 31.

[186] See _Senator_ for March 1, 1796, p. 1147.

[187] See Wilberforce’s speech, _Parliamentary Register_ and _Senator_,
February 18, 1800.

[188] Eden, vol. ii. pp. 104-6.

[189] _Ibid._, p. 15.

[190] _Ibid._, p. 280.

[191] _Ibid._, p. 426.

[192] See _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxiv. pp. 63, 171, 177, 204,
285, 316, etc.

[193] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. p. 678.

[194] Eden, vol. i. p. 533.

[195] 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
liquor 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).

[196] Davies, pp. 31-2.

[197] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. p. 455.

[198] _Parliamentary Register_, November 2, 1795.

[199] Eden, vol. iii. p. 769.

[200] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 97.

[201] _Ibid._, p. 621.

[202] _Ibid._, p. 645.

[203] In many budgets no milk is included.

[204] _Reports on Poor_, vol. iv. p. 151.

[205] Davies, p. 104.

[206] _Reports on Poor_, vol. ii. p. 178.

[207] Vol. ii. p. 587.

[208] _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.’

[209] P. 27.

[210] See _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. pp. 367-8.

[211] Davies, p. 37.

[212] _Ibid._, p. 39.

[213] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxvi. p. 121.

[214] 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.’

[215] Lecky, _History of England in Eighteenth Century_, vol. ii. p.
318.

[216] 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
2-1/2d. or 3d. a lb. to 4-1/2d. 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).

[217] _Reports on Poor_, vol. i. p. 129.

[218] _Ibid._, vol. iii. p. 78.

[219] _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 a food so pre-eminently adapted to
their support’; cf. also Curwen’s _Hints_.

[220] Eden, vol. i. p. 510.

[221] Vol. iii. p. 96.

[222] Eden, vol. iii. p. 694.

[223] 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.’

[224] Vol. iv. p. 496.

[225] Vol. ii. p. 587.

[226] Davies, p. 28.

[227] _Ibid._, p. 118.

[228] Eden, vol. iii. p. 805.

[229] P. 179.

[230] 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.’

[231] Vol. ii. p. 231.

[232] 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.’

[233] 20 George II. c. 19.

[234] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. p. 305 ff.

[235] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. p. 298.

[236] _Parliamentary Register_, December 9, 1795.

[237] _Ibid._, February 12, 1796.

[238] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. p. 345.

[239] _Ibid._, p. 316.

[240] _An Examination of Mr. Pitt’s Speech in the House of Commons,
February 12, 1796._

[241] P. 106 ff.

[242] _Annals of Agriculture_, 1795, vol. xxv. p. 503.

[243] _Parliamentary Debates._

[244] Printed in _Parliamentary Papers_ for 1795-6.

[245] The age was not filled up.

[246] For report of debate see _Parliamentary Register_ for that date.

[247] See _Parliamentary Register_.

[248] See _Parliamentary Register_, February 14, 1800.

[249] _Reports on Poor_, vol. v. p. 23.

[250] See p. 179.

[251] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxvi. p. 178.

[252] 22 George III. c. 83.

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

[254] 9 George I. c. 7.

[255] Eden, vol. i. p. 269.

[256] _E.g._ Oxford and Shrewsbury.

[257] 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.’

[258] At 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.

[259] ‘The Village,’ pp. 16 and 17.

[260] Eden, vol. iii. p. 694 ff.

[261] 36 George III. c. 23.

[262] 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 out 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.

[263] _Parliamentary Register_, February 12, 1796.

[264] _Ibid._, December 22, 1796.

[265] 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.

[266] _House of Commons Journal._

[267] _Parliamentary Register_, February 11, 1800.

[268] 35 George III. c. 101.

[269] For Whitbread’s proposals to amend the Law of Settlement in 1807
see next chapter. An attempt was made in 1819 (59 George III. 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 was found necessary to pass a second Act six years later (1826, 6
George IV. c. 57), and a third Act in 1831 (1 William IV. c. 18).

[270] _Senator_, March 1800.

[271] 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).

[272] Davies, pp. 102-4.

[273] 15 George III. c. 32.

[274] _Reports on Poor_, vol. ii. p. 171.

[275] _Reports on Poor_, vol. ii. p. 136.

[276] _Ibid._, p. 137.

[277] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 66.

[278] Mr. Estcourt mentions that the land ‘would let to a farmer at
about 20s. per acre now.’

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

[280] _Reports on Poor_, vol. iii. p. 329.

[281] 1803, p. 850.

[282] _Reports on Poor_, vol. i. p. 100.

[283] Vol. xxvi. p. 4.

[284] 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 Curwen’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.’

[285] Vol. xxv. p. 349.

[286] _Ibid._, p. 358.

[287] _Reports on Poor_, vol. ii. p. 184.

[288] _Ibid._, p. 134.

[289] Cf. _Poor Law Report_, 1817, Appendix G, p. 4.

[290] Capes, _Rural Life in Hampshire_, p. 282.

[291] _Poor Law Report_, 1834, p. 61; cf. _ibid._, p. 185.

[292] Notes to Kent’s _Norfolk_, p. 178.

[293] See _Poor Law Report_, 1834, p. 181, and _Allotments Committee_,
1843, p. 108.

[294] 59 George III. c. 12.

[295] 1 and 2 William IV. c. 42.

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

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

[298] _Reading Mercury_, April 20, 1795.

[299] _Reading Mercury_, April 20, 1795.

[300] See _Ibid._, May 11, 1795.

[301] Eden, vol. i. p. 578.

[302] 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.

[303] See _Ipswich Journal_, February 7, 1795, and _Reading Mercury_,
July 6, 1795.

[304] Eden, vol. ii. p. 384.

[305] _Ibid._, p. 548.

[306] _Ibid._, p. 27.

[307] Eden, vol. ii. p. 29.

[308] _Ibid._, p. 32.

[309] ‘The Village,’ Book I.



CHAPTER VIII

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
income 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 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 alone 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,[310] 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.[311]

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. The tithe-owners had for centuries appropriated to
their own use a revenue that was designed in part for the poor. Tithes
were originally taxation for four objects: (1) the bishop; (2) the
maintenance of the fabric of the Church; (3) the relief of the poor;
(4) the incumbent. After the endowment of the bishopricks the first of
these objects dropped out. The poor had not a very much longer life.
It is true that the clergy were bidden much later to use tithes, _non
quasi suis sed quasi commendatis_, and Dryden in his character of the
Good Parson had described their historical obligations:

    ‘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.’

The right of the poor to an allowance from the tithes was declared in
an Act of Richard II. and an Act of Henry IV. After that it disappears
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 commendatis_. 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.”’[312] 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[313] 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, providing 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.’[314] 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 Cæsar 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[315]
                                                     ----------

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.[316]
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 harrow 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;[317] 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:[318] 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.[319] 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.[320]

In 1816 the labourers were suffering both from unemployment and
from high prices. In 1815, as the _Annual Register_[321] 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[322] 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 of 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 naïve 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.’[323] 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.[324]
‘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.’[325]

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.[326] 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.’[327]

       *       *       *       *       *

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.’[328] This decision was
remedied by the 1819 Act[329] 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.’[330] 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.[331] 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_.[332] ‘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.[333] 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[334] 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[335] 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 regime 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
illustrated by a fact mentioned by a clerk to the magistrates in Kent,
in October 1880.[336] 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 eighteenpence.
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.[337] 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[338] 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.[339] 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,[340] 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.[341] 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.[342] 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.[343] 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.’[344] 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.’[345] 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.[346]
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.[347] 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.[348]

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.[349] 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.[350] 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.[351] 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 naturæ_--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.’[352]

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.’[353] 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.’[354] Mr. Orridge, Governor of the
Gaol of Bury St. Edmunds, gave to the Committee on Commitments and
Convictions[355] 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 job-work, 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.’[356]

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:

    ‘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 single sound could know;
    “Loud blow the blasts,” they cried, “and call us as they blow.”’

Such an encounter is put into cold arithmetic in an official return
like this[357]:--

‘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:--

 +---------+--------+---------------------------------------------+------------+
 |         |        |   Capitally convicted and reprieved with--  |            |
 |         |        +--------------+--------------+---------------+            |
 | Above 14|  Above |              |              | Imprisonment  |            |
 |and under|20 years|Transportation|Transportation|   with hard   | Admitted   |
 | 20 years| of age.|   for life.  |    for 14    |labour in House|to Evidence.|
 | of age. |        |              |    years.    | of Correction |            |
 |         |        |              |              |  for 2 years. |            |
 +---------+--------+--------------+--------------+---------------+------------+
 |   11    |    8   |       7      |      9       |       1       |      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.’[358]
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
misdemeanor.[359]

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[360] 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.[361]

‘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 furnishing his friends with presents of game: nobody
would care for a present which everybody could give’![362] 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.’[363] 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.’[364] 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[365] that as men who had been transported were not
brought back at the public expense, they scarcely ever returned,[366]
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.[367] 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.[368]
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.’[369] 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.’[370] 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 complexion 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.

 ‘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!’[371]

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 favourite 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_[372] 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.’[373]

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?

    ‘“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.”’

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.[374] 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.’[375]
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.[376] 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.[377]


FOOTNOTES:

[310] _Poor Law Report_, 1834, p. 60.

[311] The big landlord under this method shared the privilege of paying
the labourer’s wages with the small farmer.

[312] _Tribune_, vol. ii. p. 317.

[313] _Ibid._, p. 339.

[314] Poor Law Commission Report of 1834, p. 126.

[315] See Curtler’s _Short History of Agriculture_, p. 249.

[316] Smart, _Economic Annals_, p. 36.

[317] ‘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.

[318] Curtler, p. 243.

[319] _Agricultural State of the Kingdom_, Board of Agriculture, 1816,
p. 7.

[320] _Ibid._, pp. 250-1.

[321] P. 144.

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

[323] _Annual Register_, 1816, Chron., p. 67.

[324] The disturbances at Brandon ceased immediately on the concession
of the demands of the 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.

[325] _Annual Register_, 1816, Chron., p. 67.

[326] _Cambridge Chronicle_, June 28, 1816.

[327] _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.

[328] _Agricultural State of the Kingdom_, p. 13.

[329] 59 George III. c. 50.

[330] See _Annual Register_, 1819, p. 320.

[331] 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.

[332] _Political Register_, August 29, 1807, p. 329.

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

[334] 58 George III. c. 69.

[335] 59 George III. c. 12.

[336] H. O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial.

[337] Of course the system was only one of the causes of this
difference in wages.

[338] P. 99.

[339] See _Agricultural State of the Kingdom_, Board of Agriculture, p.
231, and Cobbett, _Political Register_, October 5, 1816.

[340] Pp. 21 and 23.

[341] The table is given in the Report of the Committee on the Poor
Laws, 1828.

[342] 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.

[343] _Ibid._, September 9, 1826.

[344] _Rural Rides_, p. 17.

[345] _Ibid._, p. 609.

[346] 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.

[347] See Cobbett; _Letters to Peel_; _Political Register_; and Dr.
Hunt’s evidence before the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and
Convictions, 1827.

[348] 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 threat, 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.’

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

[350] House of Lords, September 19, 1831.

[351] 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 County_, p.
598 note.

[352] _Brougham Speeches_, vol. ii. p. 373.

[353] _Political Register_, March 29, 1823, vol. xxiv. p. 796.

[354] Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions, 1827,
p. 30.

[355] _Ibid._, p. 39.

[356] Quoted in _Times_, December 18, 1830.

[357] 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.

[358] _Hansard_, June 9, 1817.

[359] 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.

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

[361] P. 29 ff.

[362] _Annual Register_, 1827, p. 184.

[363] _Edinburgh Review_, December 1831.

[364] _Parliamentary Register_, February 25, 1782.

[365] P. 42.

[366] ‘Speaking now of country and agricultural parishes, I do not know
above one instance in all my experience.’

[367] Some Enclosure Acts prescribed special penalties for the breaking
of fences. See cases of Haute Huntre and Croydon in Appendix.

[368] See Mr. Estcourt’s evidence before Select Committee on Secondary
Punishments, 1831, p. 41.

[369] _Present State of the Law_, p. 41.

[370] _From Ploughshare 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.

[371] Sydney Smith, _Essays_, p. 487.

[372] Vol. ii. p. 153.

[373] Romilly, _Memoirs_, vol. ii. p. 181.

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

[375] _Correspondence on the Subject of Secondary Punishments_, 1834,
p. 22.

[376] See Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, 1831, and Select
Committee on Transportation, 1838.

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



CHAPTER IX

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.’[378]

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, hard-working, 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 survived 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.’[379] 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 be 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.[380] 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.’[381] 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.[382] 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:

    ‘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.’[383]

Perhaps the most vivid account of the change is given in a letter from
Cobbett in the _Political Register_ for 17th March 1821,[384] addressed
to Mr. Gooch:--

 ‘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_.”’

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_.”’[385] 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.’[386] 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.
Fox-hunting 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!’[387]

       *       *       *       *       *

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.’[388] 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.’[389] 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?[390] If
the settlement was claimed in virtue of apprenticeship,[391] 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.’[392]

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.’[393] 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 jadis les maires du palais
traitèrent les descendants de Clovis pour régner 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 à 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
seat 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,[394] 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 unfortunately 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.’[395] 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.[396]

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.’[397] 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 mediæval 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 France 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.’[398] 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.


FOOTNOTES:

[378] _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (fourth edition), p.
359.

[379] Eden, vol. i. p. 579.

[380] _Reports on Poor_, vol. ii. p. 325.

[381] _Political Register_, vol. lxxviii. p. 710.

[382] Hasbach, p. 131.

[383] ‘Village,’ Book 1.

[384] Vol. xxxviii. p. 750 ff.

[385] Cobbett’s _Political Register_, March 17, 1821, p. 779.

[386] Bamford, _Passages in the Life of a Radical_, p. 38.

[387] _Rural Rides_, p. 460.

[388] _Reflections_, p. 61.

[389] _Poor Law Report_, 1817.

[390] Cf. _Ibid._, 1834, p. 161.

[391] Cf. case of apprentice, _Annual Register_, 1819, p. 195.

[392] _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.

[393] _Wealth of Nations_, vol. iii. p. 234.

[394] _Life in an English Village_, by Maude F. Davies, p. 58.

[395] _Inquiry into the State of the Public Mind among the Lower
Classes_, p. 27.

[396] 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_.

[397] _Life_, vol. iv. p. 277.

[398] _Parliamentary Register_, April 18, 1800.



CHAPTER X

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.’[399] 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?’[400] 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.’[401]

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.’[402] 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.’[403] 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.’[404] 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,’[405] but the labourers did not lick the hand that threw it. All
through 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.[406] 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.’[407] 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.’[408] 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.[409] 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.’[410]

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.’[411] Mr. Drummond, a magistrate
for Hants and Surrey, said to the Committee on Labourers’ 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 ‘labour 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 labourer’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 labourers, 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 labourers,
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 labour, and, in cases where they were
liable to the rate, on the tradesmen who had no employment at which
to set an agricultural labourer. 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.’[412]

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 neighbouring villages or towns; drawing from them, as
allowance, the greater part of their subsistence.’[413] 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 labourers 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.’[414] A clergyman in
Reading[415] 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.[416]

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.’[417] 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,[418] 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.[419]

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 dæmonic 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 fund-holders 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 maxims 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.’[420]

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 on 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.


FOOTNOTES:

[399] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 243.

[400] _Ibid._, p. 84.

[401] _Ibid._, pp. 56-7.

[402] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 244.

[403] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 78-9.

[404] _Ibid._, p. 80.

[405] _Ibid._, p. 291.

[406] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 94.

[407] _Ibid._, p. 172.

[408] _Ibid._, p. 66.

[409] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 98-104.

[410] _Ibid._, p. 100.

[411] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 108.

[412] _Ibid._, p. 210.

[413] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 73.

[414] _Ibid._, p. 157.

[415] _Ibid._, p. 158.

[416] _Ibid._, p. 161.

[417] _Ibid._, p. 130.

[418] Appendix F, No. 3, to 1st Report of Commissioners.

[419] See Webb’s _History of Trade Unionism_, p. 59.

[420] _Tom Jones_, Bk. XII. chap. i.



CHAPTER XI

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 hardly 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 village, their wives and children were starving 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 villages 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.[421] 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-stacks 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.[422] 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.’[423] 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_,[424] 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.’[425]

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.[426]

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[427]:--

 ‘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 1s. 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.’[428]

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 is chiefly famous as Lady Holland’s
first husband. 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 wat we intend to have for a
maried 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 1s. 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
neighbouring 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.[429]

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 House 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.[430]

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’[431] 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 re-establish 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,[432] 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.’[433] 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.’[434] 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.’[435] 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:--

    ‘Men of England, wherefore plough,
    For the lords who lay ye low,’

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 providing 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 Avington 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,[436] 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.[437]

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.’[438] 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,[439] 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,[440] ‘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,[441] 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.’[442]

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.[443] 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.[444] 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.[445] 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,’[446] 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.’[447] 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.[448]

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 alleviation 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.


FOOTNOTES:

[421] See Fawley, p. 279.

[422] _Kent Herald_, September 2, 1830.

[423] _Times_, January 3, 1831.

[424] September 30, 1830.

[425] _Brighton Chronicle_, October 6, quoted in _Times_, October 14.

[426] For Brede see H. O. Papers, Extracts from Poor Law Commissioners’
Report, published 1833, and newspapers.

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

[428] Affidavit in H. O. Papers.

[429] _Times_, November 25.

[430] The petition was as follows: ‘We feel that in justice we ought
not to suffer a moment to pass away without communicating 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 to Wellington when Prime Minister.

[431] H. O. Papers.

[432] _Ibid._

[433] _Ibid._

[434] H. O. Papers.

[435] _Ibid._

[436] Transported for life to New South Wales.

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

[438] H. O. Papers.

[439] 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.

[440] Transported for life to New South Wales.

[441] Transported for life to New South Wales.

[442] H. O. Papers.

[443] _Ibid._

[444] Ten days later, after Lord Melbourne’s circular of December 8,
Dr. Newbolt changed his tone. Writing to the Home Office he deprecated
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.’

[445] See p. 258.

[446] H. O. Papers.

[447] _Ibid._

[448] See _Oxford University and City Herald_, November 20 and 27,
1830.



CHAPTER XII

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 or 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 carrying
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.’[449] 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[450] 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.[451] Mr. Justice
Taunton[452] 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.’[453] In opening the Special
Commission at Winchester Baron Vaughan[454] 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.’[455] 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[456] (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.’[457] By another section of that Act
seven years was fixed as the maximum penalty for breaking a threshing
machine. Mr. Justice Alderson[458] 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.[459]

Mr. Justice Park[460] 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 require 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.’[461]

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.’[462] 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.[463] 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,[464] 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.[465] 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,’[466] 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.’[467] 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.[468] 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.’[469]

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.’[470]
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.[471]

       *       *       *       *       *

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
Wilde, 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. No 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 the conduct of Lady Cavan. She had
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.[472]

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.’[473]

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.[474]
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 neighbouring 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.[475] 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 Stretton. 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 Cheriton, 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
handcuffed 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, being taken
to prison on a charge on which he was subsequently acquitted. 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.[476] 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 Barings
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 Barings 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 proceedings 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.’[477]

       *       *       *       *       *

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 heart-breaking.

 ‘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.’[478]

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, but also because it shows that the judges when inflicting the
maximum penalty of seven years’ transportation for machine-breaking
were well aware 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.[479] ‘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 opened on 11th January.
The rising had been less serious in 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.’[480] 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.[481] 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 paper-making 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,[482] 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.[483] 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.[484] 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.[485] 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 Hampshire 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 1831 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 1810; 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 reviewed 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 subpœna, 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 subpœna’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
manœuvre 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 martial 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 in 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
sensibilities, 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 clocks, 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 marks 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.’[486]


FOOTNOTES:

[449] Russell, _On Crimes and Misdemeanours_, p. 371.

[450] Sir J. B. Bosanquet (1773-1847).

[451] _Times_, December 15, 1830.

[452] Sir W. E. Taunton (1773-1835).

[453] The _Times_ on December 25 quoted part of this charge in a
leading article with some sharp strictures.

[454] Sir John Vaughan (1769-1839).

[455] _Times_, December 21, 1830.

[456] Sir James Parke (1782-1868).

[457] _Times_, January 3, 1831.

[458] Sir E. H. Alderson (1787-1857).

[459] _Times_, January 6, 1831. Cf. letter of Mr. R. Pollen, J.P.,
afterwards one of Winchester Commissioners, to Home Office, November
26: ‘It may be worth considering the law, which exempts all _Threshing
Machines_ from capital punishment, should such 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.’

[460] Sir J. A. Park (1763-1838).

[461] _Times_, January 15, 1831.

[462] _Ibid._, January 12, 1831.

[463] _Ibid._

[464] February 8, 1831.

[465] There are no statistics for Wilts, Hants, Bucks, and Dorsetshire
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.

[466] _Times_, December 24, 1830.

[467] _Ibid._, January 8, 1831.

[468] _Times_, January 7, 1831.

[469] _Ibid._, December 24, 1830. Henry Bunce was transported for life
to New South Wales.

[470] _Ibid._, January 14.

[471] Cobbett, _Political Register_, vol. lxxiii. p. 535, and local
papers.

[472] Fussell’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Boys was sent to
Van Diemen’s Land.

[473] H. O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial. Hants, 1831, March 24.

[474] 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.

[475] 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.

[476] See p. 277.

[477] February 8, 1831.

[478] _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.

[479] The scene is still vividly remembered by an old woman over ninety
years of age with whom Mr. Hudson spoke.

[480] H. O. Papers, Disturbance Entry-Book, Letter of January 3, 1831.

[481] See p. 268.

[482] 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 counties:--

  Berks,       44
  Bucks,       29
  Dorset,      13
  Essex,       23
  Gloucester,  24
  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 been 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 in 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.

[483] See Hudson, _Ibid._

[484] See _Annual Register_ and local papers.

[485] 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.

[486] Correspondence on Secondary Punishment, March 1834, p. 23.



CHAPTER XIII

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 manners
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.[487]

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,[488] 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, but
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
them an 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 Cæsar. 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 Æmilius 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 quæstorship; 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
breaks 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.[489] 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.


FOOTNOTES:

[487] See a remarkable letter from Lord Dudley. ‘He has already been
enough on the Continent for any reasonable end, 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.

[488] See on this subject a very interesting article by Mr. L. March
Phillipps in the _Contemporary Review_, August 1911.

[489] 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.



APPENDIX A (1)

 The information about Parliamentary Proceedings in Appendix A is taken
 from the _Journals_ of the House of Commons or of the House of Lords
 for the dates mentioned. The place where the Award is at present
 enrolled is given, where possible, under the heading ‘Award.’ A
 Return, asked for by Sir John Brunner, was printed February 15, 1904,
 of Inclosure Awards, deposited with Clerks of the Peace or of County
 Councils.


ARMLEY, LEEDS, YORKS.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1793


AREA.--About 175 acres.


NATURE OF GROUND.--Waste Ground, called Armley Moor or Common.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_February 21, 1793._--Petition for
enclosure from ‘several of the Owners of Lands within the Manor and
Township of Armley,’ stating that this parcel of waste ground is,
in its present state, incapable of improvement. Leave given, bill
presented March 15.

_March 28._--Petition against the bill from various owners and
proprietors of Messuages, Cottages, Lands and Tenements who ‘by virtue
thereof, or otherwise, have an indisputable Right of Common upon the
said Moor,’ stating that ‘they conceive that an Inclosure of the said
Moor and Waste Ground would be productive of no Advantage to any
of the Proprietors claiming a Right of Common thereon, but, on the
contrary, would very materially injure and prejudice their respective
Estates in the said Townships, by laying upon the said Township the
Burthen of making, maintaining, and repairing the necessary new Roads,
which must be set out to a considerable Extent over the said Moor and
Waste Ground, and also by increasing the Poors Rate, inasmuch as the
Petitioners conceive that the Inhabitants of the said Town of Armley,
who are very numerous, and principally poor Manufacturers of broad
Woollen Cloth, receive considerable Benefit and Advantage from the
present open State of the said Moor and Waste Ground, particularly in
having Tenters and Frames to stretch and dry their Cloth, Warps, and
Wool, after it has been dyed, put up and fixed upon the said Moor and
Waste Ground, which Privileges and Advantages have hitherto conduced to
alleviate the Distresses and Hardships of the said poor Manufacturers
in the said Township of Armley, and which, if the said Inclosure takes
Place, they will be totally deprived of and reduced to Poverty and
Want.’ The Petition was ordered to be heard on second reading.

_April 9._--Bill read a second time. House informed that Petitioners
declined to be heard on second reading. The Petition was referred to
the Committee.

_April 17._--(1) Petition against the bill from John Taylor, giving
same reasons as last petition. (2) Petition from various master
manufacturers of broad woollen cloth in Armley against the bill,
stating that, as the Moor only contains about 160 Acres, inclosure
which involves division ‘amongst so great a Number of Claimants in
small Allotments,’ and also ‘the heavy and unavoidable Expenses of
obtaining the Act, surveying, dividing, inclosing, and improving’
will confer little or no Benefit on the proprietors, whereas it will
certainly deprive the poor Manufacturers, who are very numerous, of (1)
the Privileges and Advantages of fixing their Tenters, etc., ‘which
they and their Ancestors have hitherto enjoyed’; and (2) ‘of that
Pasturage upon the said Common which they have hitherto much depended
upon.’ Both Petitions to be heard at Report stage; (3) Petition against
the bill from various owners and proprietors who ‘at the Instance of
several other Owners of Lands’ signed a petition for inclosure, ‘under
an Idea, that the Inclosure would meet with the Approbation of, and
be of general Utility to the Inhabitants of the said Town,’ but now
finding that this idea was mistaken, and that Inclosure would be of
general disadvantage, ask that their names should be erased, and that
if the bill is brought in, they should be heard against it. Petition
referred to Committee. Petitioners to be heard, ‘if they think fit’
(‘they’ ambiguous, might be Committee or Petitioners).


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_April 29._--Wilberforce reported
from the Committee; Standing Orders complied with, Committee had
considered the two petitions referred to them (apparently they had not
heard Counsel), and had found that the Allegations of the Bill were
true, and that the parties concerned had given their consent ‘(except
the Owners of Land of the Annual Value of £172, 8s. 2d. who refused to
sign the Bill; and also, except the Owners of Lands of the Annual Value
of £35, 15s. 9d., who declared themselves neuter; and that the Whole of
the Land entitled to Right of Common is of the Annual Value of £901,
12s. 1d.).’ There is nothing to suggest that the petitioners against
the bill were heard at this stage. The Bill passed Commons and Lords.
Royal Assent, June 3, 1793.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 33 George. III. c. 61.)


COMMISSIONERS.--One only. William Whitelock of Brotherton, Yorks,
Gentleman. He is also to act as surveyor. Vacancy to be filled, if
necessary, by ‘the major part in value’ of those interested in the
Common. An arbitrator is to be appointed by the Recorder of Leeds.


PAYMENT TO COMMISSIONER.--£1, 11s. 6d. for each working day. As
surveyor, his remuneration is to be settled by the Recorder of Leeds.

CLAIMS.--The Commissioner is to hear and to determine upon all claims,
but if any one is dissatisfied the matter can be referred to the
Arbitrator, whose decision is final. If the appeal is vexatious, the
Arbitrator can award costs against the appellant. The Arbitrator’s
decision is final except in respect of matters of Title which can still
be tried at law.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Provisions for Lord of the Manor._--(1) The equivalent in value of
one-sixteenth of the whole in lieu of his right in the soil.

(2) His other manorial rights to continue as before, including his
mineral rights, but he is forbidden to ‘enter into or damage any House,
Garden, or Pleasure Ground’ hereafter made on the Common, and if he
damages property he must pay for satisfaction either a yearly rent of
£3 an acre or part of an acre actually used and damaged, or else make
such compensation as shall be awarded by two indifferent persons, one
chosen by the Lord of the Manor, the other by the person who sustains
the damage. If these two cannot agree, they must choose an Umpire whose
decision is to be final.

(3) The Lord of the Manor is to have the use of a spring in the close
belonging to Samuel Blackburn.

_Provisions for Tithe Owners._--None.

_Provisions for the Poor._--(1) Allotment to Cottagers of 8-1/2 acres
in six or more distinct and separate places, as near as possible to the
Cottages on or adjoining the Common ‘which shall for ever hereafter
remain open and uninclosed, and shall be used and enjoyed by the
Occupiers of the several Cottages or Dwelling Houses now or hereafter
to be built within the said Township of Armley, for the setting up and
using of Tenters, Stretchers for Warp, Wool Hedges,’ etc., under the
direction of the Minister, Chapel Wardens, and Overseers. No buildings
are to be erected on this ground, and no rent paid for the use of it;
no roads or paths may be made through it, and no buildings erected
within 20 yards on the South or West.

(2) Allotment to the Poor.--2 acres, to be vested in the Minister,
Chapel Wardens, and Overseers, and used for a Poor House, School House,
and for the benefit of a School master. Until used for these purposes,
the rent and profits are to go towards the Poor Assessment.

_Allotment for Stone_ for roads, etc.--5 acres (for the making and
repairing of highways and private roads).

_Allotment of Residue._--To be divided out amongst the persons having
right of common according to their several rights and interests,
quantity, quality, and situation considered, provided ‘that in case
it shall be determined that the Owners of any Messuages or Cottages,
or Scites of Messuages and Cottages, are entitled to Right of Common
on the said Common or Waste Ground, then that the said Commissioner
... shall award and allot such Parcels of the Common and Waste Ground
to the Owners of such Messuages or Cottages, as have been erected for
Sixty Years and upwards, unless the same shall have been erected upon
the Scite of an ancient Messuage or Cottage, as to him ... shall appear
a fair Compensation for such Right,’ and in making this allotment he
is not to pay any regard to the value of these Messuages and Cottages
one to another, except with reference to the Quantity of land. If any
allottee is dissatisfied with his share, he can appeal for arbitration
to the Recorder of Leeds, whose decision is to be final, except in
cases where the question concerns any Right of Common claimed ‘for
or in respect of any ancient Houses or Scites of Houses, Lands or
Grounds,’ when there may be an appeal at law, if notice is given within
a specified time. Allotments must be accepted within 6 months after
award. Failure to accept excludes allottee from all benefits. (Saving
clause for infants, etc.).


INCROACHMENTS.--(1) Incroachments 60 years old and more to be treated
as old inclosures with right of common, except such Incroachments as
have been made by or for the Curate of Armley for the time being.
(2) Incroachments from 40 to 60 years old to remain with possessors
but not to confer any right of common. (3) Incroachments made within
40 years to be deemed part of the Common to be divided, but to be
allotted to present holders as part of their allotments. But if
they do not lie adjoining the incroacher’s ancient estates then the
Commissioner can allot them to anyone, giving ‘adequate Satisfaction
for any Improvement’ to the incroacher. The above does not apply to two
inclosures made by Stephen Todd, Esqr. and by Joseph Akeroyd which are
to be allotted to them respectively under their present indentures of
lease.


FENCING.--To be done by allottees under the Commissioner’s directions.
_Exception._--The allotment of 2 acres for the poor is to be fenced
and enclosed at the expense of the other proprietors. If allottees
refuse to fence, the Commissioner can do it for them and charge them,
ultimately distraining. To protect the young quickset, no sheep or
lambs are to be depastured in allotments for 7 years, unless special
fences are made, and no cattle, sheep or lambs are to graze in the
roads and ways for 10 years.


EXPENSES.--To be paid by the proprietors in such proportion as the
Commissioner decides. The Commissioner’s accounts are to be entered in
a book, and produced when 5 proprietors require it. To meet expenses,
allotments may be mortgaged in some cases, with consent of the
Commissioner, up to 60s. an acre.


COMPENSATION TO OCCUPIERS.--All leases, as regards right of common and
other rights on the waste ground for 21 years and under to be null
and void, the lessor making such satisfaction to the lessee as the
Commissioner thinks a fit equivalent.


ROADS.--Commissioners have full power to set out and stop up roads and
footpaths.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases where
the Commissioner’s or Arbitrator’s decision is said to be final; or
where some other provision is made, _e.g._ to Recorder of Leeds about
allotments.


AWARD.--Not with Clerk of the Peace or of County Council or in Record
Office.


APPENDIX A (2)

ASHELWORTH, GLOUCESTER.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1797


AREA.--Not given in Act. Commonable Land of every kind stated in
Petition (see below) as 310 Acres in all.


NATURE OF GROUND.--‘Open and Common Fields, Meadows, and Pastures,
Commonable and intermixed Lands, and a Tract of Waste Ground, being
Part and Parcel of a Common called Corse Lawn,[490] and also a Plot,
Piece, or Parcel of Land or Ground, on the Eastern Side of the said
Parish,[491] adjoining to, and lately Part of the Parish of Hasfield
... but now Part of the Parish of Ashelworth’.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_February 21, 1797._--Petition for
enclosure from various owners of lands and estates. March 24, Bill read
first time.

_April 7, 1797._--Petition from various Landowners and Owners of Mease
Places, against the bill, stating ‘That there are only about 310 Acres
of Commonable Land belonging to Land Owners of the said Parish, of
which 148 Acres are Meadow Land, called the _Upper Ham_, lying in the
Manor of _Hasfield_, the Right of Common upon which belongs exclusively
to the Petitioners (and some others) as Owners of Fifty Five Mease
Places within the said Parish, and the Petitioners are the Owners of
Thirty-four of such Mease Places; and that the Remainder of the said
Commonable Land consists of a Common Meadow, called _Lonkergins Ham_,
containing about eight Acres (upon which Six Persons have a Right of
Common) and about 150 Acres of Waste Land, Part of a Tract of Land
called Corse Lawn, upon which Waste Land all the Land Owners of the
said Parish are entitled to a Right of Common; and that the several
Estates within the said Parish, lie very compact and convenient, and
many of such Estates are exempt from the Payment of Great Tithes;
and that of the Remainder of such Estates the Great Tithes (except a
Portion of which the Vicar was endowed) belong to Charles Hayward Esq.,
who is Lord of the Manor of Ashelworth, and Owner of an Estate in the
said Parish; and that there is no one Object in the Bill sufficient,
under the Circumstances of the Case, to justify the enormous Expences
which will attend the obtaining and carrying it into Execution,
but that, on the Contrary, it is fraught with great Evil, and will
be extremely injurious to the Petitioners,’ and asking that the
Petitioners may be permitted to examine Witnesses and to be heard by
their Counsel against the bill.

Petitioners to be heard on Second reading.

_April 10._--Second reading of bill. House informed that Petitioners
did not wish to be heard at that stage. Bill committed. Petitioners to
be heard when Bill reported if they think fit.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_May 3, 1797._--Mr. Lygon reported
from the Committee that the Standing Orders were complied with; that
the allegations were true; and that the Parties concerned had consented
to the satisfaction of the Committee ‘(except the Owners of Property
assessed to the Land Tax at £11, 0s. 5d., and that the whole of the
Property is assessed at £86, 14s. 10d.) and that no Person appeared
before the Committee to oppose the Bill.’ (Nothing about hearing
Petitioners.) Bill passed both Houses with some amendments. In the
House of Lords an amendment was made about referring the quarrel
between the Vicar of Ashelworth and the Rector of Hasfield on the
subject of tithes to arbitration. Royal Assent, June 6, 1797.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 37 George III. c. 108.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Three appointed. Richard Richardson of Bath: Francis
Webb of Salisbury: Thomas Fulljames of Gloucester, Gentlemen. Two to be
a quorum. Surveyor to be appointed by Commissioners. Vacancies, both
Commissioners and Surveyors, to be filled up by remaining Commissioners
from persons not interested. If they fail to fill up, ‘the major part
in value’ of the Proprietors and Persons interested can do so.


PAYMENT TO COMMISSIONERS.--2 guineas each working day. Survey to be
made, unless the existing one seems satisfactory and correct.


SPECIAL CLAUSES.--It is enacted ‘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.’

Also ‘all Homesteads, Gardens, Orchards, old Inclosures, and other
Lands and Grounds,’ shall, with the consent of their proprietors or
Trustees, ‘be deemed and considered to be open and uninclosed Land for
the Purpose of the Division and Allotment hereby intended,’ provided
that Charles Hayward has to get Bishop of Bristol’s consent.


CLAIMS.--All claims to be delivered in writing at first and second
Meeting, and no claim to be received after second Meeting, except for
some special cause allowed by Commissioners. Commissioners to hold
a subsequent meeting and give account in writing of what claims are
admitted and rejected.

Persons whose claims are rejected can bring an action on a feigned
issue against some other Proprietor. Verdict to be final and
conclusive. If Plaintiff wins, Commissioners pay costs; if Defendant
wins, Plaintiff pays. Action must be brought within a specified time (3
months).

_Exceptions._--(1) If the Commissioners disallow the claim of the Dean
and Chapter of Westminster to the Right of Soil in ‘A,’ then the Dean
and Chapter may bring an action within 12 months against the Bishop of
Bristol and Charles Hayward for ascertaining the rights of soil. Costs
to be paid by losers.

(2) If the Commissioners allow the above claim, then the Bishop of
Bristol or Charles Hayward can bring an action _mutatis mutandis_.

Also, If any dispute or difference arises between the Parties
interested in the inclosure ‘touching or concerning the respective
Shares, Rights, and Interests which they or any of them shall claim’
in the land to be inclosed, ‘or touching and concerning the respective
Shares and Proportions’ which they ought to have, the Commissioners
have power to examine and determine the same; their determination to be
‘final, binding and conclusive upon and to all Parties.’ Commissioners
can on request of person who wins his point assess costs on person who
loses it, and ultimately distrain on his goods.

_Exception._--Commissioners to have no jurisdiction about Titles.

Tithe owners are to send in their claims with all particulars.
Commissioners’ determination to be final ‘(if the Parties in Dispute
think proper and agree thereto)’; but not to affect power to try titles
at law.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Lord of the Manor._--(1) The Bishop of Bristol is Lord of the Manor of
Ashelworth (except ‘A’ and ‘B’), and Charles Hayward is his lessee. He
is to have such part as Commissioners judge full compensation, to be
‘not less than 1/15’ of the Waste Land to be inclosed.

(2) Dean and Chapter of Westminster and also the Bishop of Bristol
claim Right of Soil in ‘A,’ whichever establishes his claim to have not
less than 1/15 of ‘A.’

(3) John Parker Esq., is Lord of Manor of ‘B’: to have not less than
1/15 of ‘B’.

_Tithe Owners._--Allotment to be made from land about to be inclosed
for all tithes on all land (including present inclosures), as
follows:--

Not less in value than One Fifth of Arable Land. Not less in value than
One Ninth of Meadow or Pasture Ground, Homesteads, Gardens, Orchards
and Woodlands. Where Tithes only partially due, full equivalent to be
given.

The Vicar of Ashelworth and the Rector of Hasfield can have their
disputed rights to tithes of ‘B’ settled by Arbitration.

Owners of old inclosures who have not large enough allotments to pay
their due proportion of the tithe allotments, are to pay a lump sum of
money instead; _unless_ the Commissioners deem it convenient to allot
part of the old inclosures to the tithe owners instead; in which case
the land so set out is to ‘be deemed Part of the Lands to be divided,
allotted, and inclosed by virtue of this Act.’

Full equivalent to the Vicar for his Glebe Lands and their right of
Common.

_For Stone, Gravel_, etc.--From 2 to 3 acres; ‘to be used and enjoyed
in Common’ by proprietors and inhabitants, ‘for the Purpose only of
getting Stone, Gravel, or other Materials for making and repairing the
Roads and Ways within the said Parish.’ Herbage of above to be allotted
to whomsoever Commissioners direct, or for some general, parochial or
other use.

_To Proprietors of Cottages._--Every proprietor or owner of a cottage
and land of the annual value of £4 or under is to have from 1/2 acre to
2 acres ‘as they the said Commissioners shall think proper.’

_Allotment of Residue._--Amongst the various persons interested
according to their respective rights and interests. Allotments to be as
near homestead or old inclosure as conveniently may be. If two or more
persons with allotments of not more than 2 acres each want to have the
same laid together in order to avoid the expence of inclosing, they are
to give notice to the Commissioners, and the Commissioners are then
to put these allotments together ‘and in and by their Award to direct
how and in what manner such small Allotments shall be cultivated, and
in what Manner and Proportion, and with what Cattle the same shall be
stocked, depastured and fed, during the Time the same shall lie open to
each other,’ and if at any time the Major part of proprietors of the
small Allotments wish it, they are to be inclosed.

Award with full particulars of allotments and of orders and regulations
for putting Act in execution to be drawn up, and to be ‘binding and
conclusive upon and to all Persons, to all Intents and Purposes
whatsoever.’

Allotments to be of same tenure as property in virtue of which they are
given. Allotments must be accepted within 6 months; if allottee fails
to accept, the Commissioners can put in a salaried Bailiff or Receiver
to manage allotment till allottee accepts, when any surplus profits are
to be handed over to allottee. (Saving clause for infants, etc.).


FENCING.--To be done by respective allottees according to
Commissioners’ directions.

_Exceptions._--(1) In the case of allotments to Trustees for parochial
or charitable purposes, the Commissioners are to deduct a portion for
these allottees’ share of fencing and expenses. This deducted land
is to be divided amongst other proprietors. The Commissioners do the
fencing.

(2) Glebe and Tithe Allotments to be fenced by other proprietors, and
the fences to be kept in repair for 7 years at expense of persons named
by the Commissioners.

If an allottee fails to fence, his neighbour can complain to a J. P.
(not interested) and obtain an order to do it and charge expenses on
allottee, or else enter and receive rents.

If any allottee has an unfair share of fencing the Commissioners can
equalise matters. No sheep or lambs to be kept in any inclosure for 7
years, unless special fences are made. No sheep or lambs ever to be
kept in the roads.


EXPENSES.--Part of the Common or Waste Land to be sold to defray
expenses. If the money so raised is not sufficient, ‘the deficiency
shall be paid, borne, and defrayed’ by the various proprietors
(excluding the Tithe owners and the Lords of the Manor for their
respective allotments) in such proportion as the Commissioners direct.

Land may be mortgaged up to 40s. an acre.

Money advanced for Act to have 5 per cent. interest.

Commissioners must keep accounts, which must be open to inspection.


ROADS.--Commissioners to set out roads, ways and footpaths, all others
to be stopped up. But no turnpike road to be interfered with.


COMPENSATION.--Leases at rack-rent to be void; owners paying or
receiving such satisfaction as the Commissioners think right.

Compensation (under Commissioners’ direction) to be paid by new
allottee to former owner for timber, underwood, etc., or else former
owner can enter and cut down, unless Commissioners direct that trees
etc. are not to be cut.


ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN ACT AND AWARD.--Commissioners to have full power
to direct the course of husbandry.


POWER OR APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases ‘where the
Orders, Directions and Determinations of the said Commissioners are
directed to be conclusive, binding and final.’


AWARD.--Date, August 24, 1798. With Clerk of Peace or of County
Council, Gloucester.


APPENDIX A (3)

CHESHUNT.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1799


AREA.--2741 Acres.


NATURE OF GROUND.--Common Fields and common Lammas meadows about 1555
acres; A common called Cheshunt Common about 1186 acres.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_February 23, 1799._--Petition for
enclosure from Sir George William Prescott Bt. (Lord of the Manor), the
Rev. Joseph Martin (Tithe owner), Oliver Cromwell, William Tatnall and
others. Leave given. Bill read twice; committed April 25.

_May 7, 1799._--Petition against the bill from various proprietors of
Lands and Common Rights setting forth ‘That a very great Proportion
of such Open Fields and Commonable Lands are of so bad a Quality, as
to be incapable of any Improvement equivalent to the Expenses of the
Inclosure; and that the said Commons in their present State, are well
fitted for the breeding of Sheep and Support of lean Stock, and that
many of the Inhabitants of the said Parish, who, by reason of their
Residence and Occupation of small Tenements, have Rights of Common,
are enabled, by the lawful Enjoyment of such Common Rights, to support
themselves and their Families; but, as almost all the said Commons lie
at the extreme Edge of the Parish, and are subject to very numerous
and extensive Common Rights, any Allotments of the said Commons to
the lesser Commoners must be too small, and too distant from their
Habitations, to be of any substantial Use to them, which Inconveniences
are now prevented by the Use of general Herdsmen; and that the
Inclosure of the said Open Fields and other Commonable Lands would be,
in many other Respects highly injurious to the Rights and Interests of
the Petitioners.’ Petitioners to be heard before the Committee. All to
have voices.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_May 24._--Mr. Baker reported
from the Committee that they had heard Counsel for the Petitioners;
that the allegations were true; that the Parties concerned had given
their consent to the bill, and also to the changing of one of the
Commissioners named therein ‘(except the Proprietors of 314 Acres
and 19 Perches of Land, who refused to sign the Bill; and also, the
Proprietors of 408 Acres, 3 Roods and 22 Perches who were neuter;
and that the whole Property belonging to Persons interested in the
Inclosure consists of 6930 Acres, or thereabouts).’

Bill passed both Houses. June 13, Royal Assent.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 39 George III. c. 75.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Three appointed.

(1) John Foakes of Gray’s Inn, Gentleman representing the Lord of the
Manor.

(2) Richard Davis of Lewknor, Oxford, Gentleman representing the
Impropriator of the Great Tithes.

(3) Daniel Mumford, of Greville St., Hatton Gardens, Gentleman,
representing the other Proprietors of Estates with Right of Common or a
major part in value. Two to be a quorum. Vacancies to be filled up by
the parties represented from persons not interested in the enclosure.
Surveyor appointed, Henry Craster of Cheshunt.


PAYMENT.--Commissioners, Surveyor, and Clerk or Agent to Commissioners
each to have 2 guineas a day for each working day.


CLAIMS.--All claims with particulars of tenure, etc., to be handed in
at specified times; claimants must give such particulars ‘as shall be
necessary to describe such Claims with as much Precision as they can.’
No claim to be received afterwards, unless for some special cause.
Commissioners’ determination on claims to be final and conclusive, if
no objection is made. If objection is made, the objector can (1) try
the matter at law on a feigned issue; or (2) submit the question to 2
arbitrators, the claimant naming one arbitrator, the objector naming
the other. If the arbitrators disagree, they can name an umpire, whose
decision is final and conclusive. Commissioners can award costs.
Commissioners to have no jurisdiction over matters of title which can
be tried at law.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_To Lords of the Manor._--(7 of them.)

(1) Sir G. W. Prescott of Cheshunt.

(2) Rev. J. Martin of the Manors of the Rectory of Cheshunt.

(3) Anne Shaw, widow, of the Manors of Andrews and Le Mott.

(4) Francis Morland of the Manors of Theobalds, Tongs, Clays, Clarks,
Dareys, Cross-Brookes, and Cullens.

(5) Robert William Sax, and

(6) Mary Jane Sax, and

(7) Joseph Jackson, of the Manors of Beaumont and Perriers.

So much ‘as shall in the Judgment of the said Commissioners be an
adequate Compensation and Satisfaction’ for their Rights and Interests.

_Tithe Owners._--One-fifth of arable or tillage, and one-ninth of the
other land to be divided which is subject to tithes.

Above to be divided between Impropriator of Great Tithes and Vicar.

For Glebe Lands, a full equivalent. If any owner of old inclosed land
who has no land in the common fields, but possesses a Right of Common
over Cheshunt Common, wishes it, part of his allotment can (with the
tithe owner’s consent) be set aside and given to the tithe owners, and
his Land will be free of tithes for ever.

_For Stone and Gravel_, etc.--2 Acres, to be used in common by
proprietors and tenants, for their own use and also for the roads.

_For Cottagers._--An allotment of 100 Acres, exclusive of Roads, to
be vested in the Lord of the Manor, the Vicar, Churchwardens, and
Overseers, ‘for the Use of the Occupiers of Houses or Cottages within
the said Parish already having Right of Common, without more than
One Rood of Land belonging to and used with the same as a Garden or
Orchard, the Yearly Rent of which, at the Time of passing this Act,
shall not exceed Six Pounds, without paying any thing for such Use.’

The number of the Houses with their rents and the number of cattle are
to be described in the Award. No one else is to send cattle on to the
100 acres.

These cottagers are also to have the herbage of the 2-acre allotment
for stone and gravel.

_Allotment of Residue._--Amongst the various persons interested in
proportion to their various rights and interests, Quantity, Quality,
and Situation considered.

Small allotments may, on application of allottees, if Commissioners
think proper, be laid together, and enjoyed in common under
Commissioners’ direction.

Each Copyholder of all the Manors is to have a separate and distinct
allotment. If any allottee is dissatisfied with his allotment, he can
send in a complaint to the Commissioners, who are to hear and determine
the matter; their determination is to be final and conclusive.

The Award is to be final and conclusive. If any allottee fails to
accept his allotment, or molests another in accepting, he is to be
‘divested of all Right, Estate, and Interest whatsoever’ in the Lands
to be divided.

The tenure of the allotment to be that of the estate in virtue of which
it is given.


INCROACHMENTS.--Not mentioned.


FENCING.--Not specifically mentioned, but from clauses _re_ tithe
owners, etc., must be done at allottee’s expense.

Beasts, cattle, etc., not to be depastured on the new allotments for 7
years unless special fences made, or a proper person sent to look after
cattle.

Tithe owners’ allotments to be fenced, and fencing kept in repair for 7
years by the other proprietors.

The 100-acre allotment for cottagers to be fenced at the expense of the
owners of the residue of the common. Mortgage up to £2 an acre allowed
for expense of fencing.


EXPENSES.--To be borne by all owners and proprietors (except the Rector
and the Vicar, in regard to their Glebe and Tythe Allotments) in
proportion to their shares, at an equal pound rate to be fixed by the
Commissioners. If allottees fail to pay, Commissioners can distrain or
enter and receive rents, etc.

Commissioners must keep accounts which must be open to inspection. If
they receive more money than is needed, the surplus is to go to the
Poor Rates.


COMPENSATION.--All rack-rent leases to be void, the owners giving the
tenants ‘reasonable Satisfaction’; but where it seems more equitable to
the Commissioners, the allotment can be held by the tenant during his
lease at a rent to the owner fixed by the Commissioners.

Satisfaction for crops and for ploughing, manuring and tilling to be
given by new allottee.


ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN ACT AND AWARD.--Commissioners to have full power
to direct the course of husbandry.


ROADS.--Commissioners to have full power to set out and to stop up
roads and footpaths (except that they are not to make them over
‘Gardens, Orchards, Plantations, and other Private Grounds’), and if
ancient footways or paths are stopped up, the owners of old inclosed
land, for whose accommodation it is done, are to pay something towards
the general expenses of the act.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not when Commissioners’
or others’ determination is said to be final and conclusive.


AWARD.--Enrolled at Westminster, February 27, 1806. Record Office.


MAIN FEATURES OF AWARD:--

  Whole area divided out including roads, some old
  inclosures and homesteads given up to be             _a._ _r._ _p._
  allotted,                                           2,667  2  33
                                                      ------------
  Tithe owners in various allotments including 106
  acres for exonerating old inclosures, and 1-3/4      _a._ _r._ _p._
  acre for Vicar’s Glebe and Right of Common,           474  1  13

  The Lord of the Manor (Sir G. B. Prescott) and
  the trustees of the late Lord of the Manor,
  including 38-3/4 acres or 1/18 for manorial rights,   438  0  24

  Mrs. Anne Shaw,                                       376  2   7
  Oliver Cromwell, Esq.,                                107  3  29
  Occupiers of Cottages,                                100  0   0
  Gravel Pits,                                            1  3  13

The remainder (excluding roads) is allotted amongst 213 allottees:--

  From 50-100 acres 4 }
  From 30-50 acres  3 } Above 10 acres    23
  From 10-30 acres 16 }

                         From 1-10 acres  141

  From 1/2-1 acre 37  }
  From 1/4-1/2 acre 8 } Below 1 acre      49
  Below 1/4 acre 4     }
                                          ---
                                          213
                                          ---

The Award shows that there must have been 86 owners of the 1555 acres
of Open Fields and Lammas Meadows as 86 allottees receive allotments in
lieu of land. Of these 86, 63 receive allotments of under 10 acres in
lieu of their land. (13 from 5-10 acres, 37 from 1-5 acres, 13 below 1
acre.)


AMENDING ACT _re_ the 100 Acres Allotment, 1813.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_November 6, 1813._--Petition from the Lord
of the Manor, the Vicar, Churchwardens and Overseers for amending Act.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_November 20, 1813._--Reported
that the parties concerned had consented except 9 Persons with right of
common who refused, and 3 who were neuter; the total number of persons
having right of common being 183.


MAIN FEATURES OF AMENDING ACT.--(Local and Personal, 54 George III. c.
2.)


NEW ARRANGEMENTS RESPECTING 100-ACRE ALLOTMENT.--The Commissioners had
set out the 100 Acres for the use of certain occupiers, who were to
be entitled to turn out on May 12 till February 2 either 1 Horse or 2
Cows or other Neat Cattle, or 7 Sheep; ‘And whereas, partly owing to
the great Extent of the said Parish of Cheshunt, and to the Distance
at which the greater Part of the Cottages or Houses, mentioned in
the Schedule to the said Award, are situated from the said Plot or
Allotment of One hundred Acres, and partly to the Inability of most
of the Occupiers of such Cottages or Houses to maintain or keep any
Horses, Cows, or other Neat Cattle or Sheep, the Persons for whose
Benefit and Advantage such Plot or Allotment of Land was intended,
derive little if any Advantage therefrom; but the Herbage of such Plot
or Allotment of Land is consumed by the Cattle of Persons having no
Right to depasture the same’; it is enacted that the Trustees are to
have power to let out the 100 Acres to one or more tenants for not more
than 21 years, ‘at the best and most improved yearly Rent or Rents
that can at the Time be reasonably had and obtained for the same. The
proceeds of the rents (when expenses are paid, see below) are to be
divided among the occupiers of the houses and cottages mentioned in the
Schedule.


EXPENSES.--The Allotment is to be mortgaged up to £500 for the expenses.

To repay the mortgage £50 is to be set aside from the rents yearly.

Interest at 5% on the sum borrowed is to be paid from the rents.


APPENDIX A (4)

CROYDON, SURREY.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1797


AREA.--2950 acres.


NATURE OF GROUND.--Open and Common Fields, about 750 acres, Commons,
Marshes, Heaths, Wastes and Commonable Woods, Lands, and Grounds about
2200 acres.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_November 7, 1796._--Petition for enclosure
from Hon. Richard Walpole, John Cator, Esq., Richard Carew, Esq., John
Brickwood, Esq., and others. Leave given; bill presented May 8, 1797;
read twice and committed.

_May 18, 1797._--(1) Petition against the bill from Richard Davis and
others, as prejudicial to their rights and interests; (2) Petition
against it from James Trecothick, Esq. Both petitions to be heard
before Committee. May 26, Petition against the bill from Richard Davis
and others stating ‘that the said Bill goes to deprive the Inhabitants
of the said Parish and the Poor thereof in particular, of certain
ancient Rights and Immunities granted to them (as they have been
informed) by some, or one, of the Predecessors of His present Majesty,
and that the said Bill seems calculated to answer the Ends of certain
Individuals.’

Petitioners to be heard when the Bill was reported.

_June 7._--Petition of various inhabitants of Croydon against the bill;
similar to last petition. To be heard when Bill reported.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_June 19._--Lord William Russell
reported from the Committee, standing orders complied with, that the
Petitions had been considered, allegations true; parties concerned had
given their consent to the satisfaction of the Committee, ‘(except the
Owners of 230 Acres 2 Roods and 25 Perches of Inclosed Land, and 67
Acres 1 Rood and 31 Perches of Common Field Land, who refused to sign
the Bill; and also the Owners of 225 Acres 1 Rood and 34 Perches of
Inclosed Land, and 7 Acres 3 Roods and 5 Perches of Common Field Land,
who, on being applied to, returned no Answer; and that the Whole of the
Land consists of 6316 Acres and 37 Perches of Inclosed Land, and 733
Acres 1 Rood and 39 Perches of Common Field Land, or thereabouts)....’

The same day (June 19) petition from various Freeholders, Copyholders,
Leaseholders and Inhabitant Householders of Croydon stating that the
promoters of the bill have named Commissioners without consulting the
persons interested ‘at an open and public meeting,’ and that since
the Archbishop of Canterbury as Lord of the Soil of the Wastes has
named one Commissioner (James Iles of Steyning, Gentleman) the other
two Commissioners ought, ‘in common Justice and Impartiality’ to be
nominated by the proprietors of lands and the Parish at large; and as
they understand that the Tithe owners and other Proprietors wish John
Foakes, named in the bill, to remain a Commissioner, asking leave
to nominate as the third Thomas Penfold of Croydon, Gentleman. Lord
William Russell proposed to recommit the bill in order to consider this
petition, but obtained only 5 votes for his motion against 51.

The Bill passed Commons.

In the Lords a Petition was read July 4, 1797, against the Bill from
the Freeholders, Copyholders, Leaseholders and Inhabitant-Freeholders
of Croydon, praying their Lordships, ‘To take their Case into their
most serious Consideration.’ Petition referred to Committee.

_July 10, 1797._--Bill passed Lords in a House of 4 Peers. (Bishop of
Bristol, Lords Walsingham, Kenyon, and Stewart of Garlies.)

[3 of these had been members of the Committee of 6 to whom the Bill was
committed.]

Royal Assent, July 19.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 37 George III. c. 144.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Three appointed. (1) James Iles of Steyning, Sussex;
(2) John Foakes of Gray’s Inn; (3) Thomas Crawter of Cobham, Gentlemen.

The first represents the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord of the Manor
of Croydon, the other two represent the proprietors of estates with
right of common (the Archbishop excluded) ‘or the major part in value’
(such value to be collected from the rentals in land tax assessments).
Vacancies to be filled up by the parties represented. New Commissioners
not to be interested in the inclosure. Two Surveyors appointed by name:
vacancies to be filled up by Commissioners.


PAYMENT TO COMMISSIONERS.--2 guineas a day. Surveyors to be paid what
the Commissioners think ‘just and reasonable.’


CLAIMS.--To be delivered in at the meeting or meetings advertised for
the purpose. None to be received after, except for some special cause.
Claimants must send in 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.’ The Commissioners are to hold a meeting to hear and
determine about claims, and if no objections are raised, then their
determination is final and conclusive. If objections are raised, then
any one person whose claim is disallowed, or any three persons who
object to the allowance of some one else’s claim, can proceed to trial
at the Assizes on a feigned issue. The verdict of the trial is to be
final. Due notice of trial must be given and the allotment suspended.
The Commissioners cannot determine on questions of title which may
still be tried at law.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Provisions for Lord of the Manor._--The Archbishop of Canterbury is
Lord of the Manor of Croydon and also of Waddon, and there are six
other Lords whose manors lie either wholly or partly within the parish,
_i.e._ (1) Robert Harris, Esq., of Bermondsey; (2) Richard Carew,
Esq., of Norbury; (3) John Cator, Esq., of Bensham; (4) William Parker
Hamond, Esq., of Haling; (5) James Trecothick, Esq., of Addington,
otherwise Temple, who also claims for Bardolph and Bures. (6) The
Warden and Poor of the Hospital of Holy Trinity (Whitgift Foundation)
of Croham. Each of these 7 Lords is to have one-eighteenth of the
Commons and Wastes lying within his Manor. But whereas James Trecothick
claims some quit-rents in the Manor of Croydon, if he makes good his
claim to the Commissioners, then the Archbishop’s eighteenth is to be
divided between James Trecothick and the Archbishop, and this is to
be taken by James Trecothick as his whole share as Lord of a Manor.
The Archbishop can also have part of Norwood Common in lieu of his due
share of Norwood woodlands.

Manorial rights, save Right of Soil, continue as before.

Compensation for the timber in Norwood Woodlands is to be fixed by the
Commissioners and paid by the allottees to the Archbishop.

_Provision for Tithe Owners._--For Rectorial Tithes, such parcel or
parcels as Commissioners judge to be full equivalent.

Whereas the Archbishop claims that Norwood Woodlands (295 acres)
are exempt from all tithes, this claim is to be determined by the
Commissioners or at law, and if not found good, another parcel to be
set out as full equivalent.

But the tithe allotments in all are not to equal in value more than
one-ninths of the Commons, marshes etc.

For Vicar’s tithes over Norwood Common, an equivalent parcel of land.

_Provisions for the Poor._--If the inhabitants of Croydon prove their
claim to Rights of Common on Norwood Common, and in Norwood Commonable
Woods to the satisfaction of the Commissioners, or before a Court (if
it is tried at law) then the Commissioners are to set out from the
Commons, Wastes, etc., as much land as they judge to be equivalent to
such right, ‘having particular Regard to the Accommodation of Houses
and Cottages contiguous to the said Commons, etc.,’ and this land is
to remain common, for the use of the inhabitants of Croydon, subject
to the right of getting gravel from it. Suppose, however, that the
inhabitants’ claim is not allowed, or if allowed does not equal 215
acres of common in value: even then the Commissioners are to set out
215 acres for the above purpose. These 215 acres are to be vested in
the Vicar, Churchwardens, Overseers, and 6 Inhabitants chosen at a
Vestry meeting. These trustees can inclose as much as a seventh part
and let it on lease for 21 years. They are to manage the common with
regard to stint, etc., and to dispose of rents.

_Allotment of Residue._--The open common fields, commons, marshes,
etc., to be divided amongst the several persons ‘according to their
respective Rights and Interests,’ due regard being paid to Quality,
Quantity, and Situation, and the allotments being placed as near the
Homesteads, etc., as is consistent with general convenience.

All houses erected 20 years and more before the Act, and the Sites of
all such houses to be considered as ancient messuages entitled to right
of common, with the exception of houses built on encroachments, the
owners of which are to have whatever allotment the Commissioners think
fair and reasonable.

The Commissioners are to give notice of a place where a schedule
of allotments can be inspected and of a meeting where objections
can be heard. The Commissioners are to hear complaints, but their
determination is to be binding and conclusive on all parties.

When the award is drawn up ‘the said Allotments, Partitions, Divisions,
and Exchanges, and all Orders, and Directions, Penalties, Impositions,
Regulations and Determinations so to be made as aforesaid, in and by
such Award or Instrument, shall be, and are hereby declared to be
final, binding and conclusive unto and upon all Persons interested in
the said Division and Inclosure.’ Persons who refuse to accept within
an appointed time, or who molest others who accept, are ‘divested of
all Right of Possession, Right of Pasturage and Common, and all other
Right, Estate and Interest whatsoever in the allotments.’ Allotments
are to be of the same tenure as the estates in right of which they are
given. Copyhold allotments in the Manors of Croydon and Waddon can be
enfranchised by the Commissioners at the request of the allottees, a
part of such allotments being deducted and given to the Archbishop for
compensation. Allotments may be laid together if the different owners
wish it.


INCROACHMENTS.--Those made within 6 months not to count. Those of 20
years old and over to remain with present possessor, but not to confer
right to an allotment.

Encroachments under 20 years old, (1) if the encroacher has a right to
an allotment, then it shall be given to him as whole or part of that
allotment (not reckoning the value of buildings and improvements);
(2) if the allotment to which he has a right is unequal in value to
the encroachment, or if he has no right to an allotment, he can pay
the surplus or the whole price at the rate of £10 an acre; (3) if the
encroacher cannot or will not purchase, the Commissioners are to allot
him his encroachment for which he is to pay rent at the rate of 12s.
an acre a year for ever, such rent being apportioned to whomever the
Commissioners direct as part of their allotment.

Provisions are also made for giving encroachers allotments elsewhere
instead, in certain cases.


FENCING.--To be done by allottees. If the proportion of fencing to
be done by any allottee is unfair, the Commissioners have power to
equalise it. _Exception._--(1) The allotment to Rector for Tithes which
is to be fenced at the expense of or by the person or persons whom the
Commissioners appoint; (2) The allotments belonging to certain estates
leased out at reserved rents by the Archbishop and by Trinity Hospital
for 21 years, are to be fenced by the lessees; to compensate lessees
new leases are to be allowed; (3) Allotments to Charity Estates (except
Trinity Hospital) are to have a part deducted from them and be fenced
by the Commissioners. If any proprietor refuses to fence, his neighbour
can, on complaint to a J.P., obtain an order or an authorisation to
enter, do the fencing, and take the rents till it is paid for.

Guard fences to protect the quickset are allowed.

_Penalty for damaging fences_ from 40s. to £10. The owner of the
damaged fence may give evidence. Half the penalty goes to the informer
and half to the owner. But if the owner informs, the whole penalty goes
to the Overseer.

Estates may be mortgaged up to 40s. an acre to meet expenses of
fencing. Roads are not to be depastured for 10 years.


EXPENSES.--To meet all expenses (including the lawsuits on feigned
issues) part of the Commons, Wastes, etc., are to be sold by public
auction. Private sales are also authorised, but no one person may buy
privately more than 2 acres; except that if James Trecothick, Esq., so
wishes, the Commissioners are to sell him by private contract part of
Addington Hills at what they judge a fair and reasonable price.

Any surplus is to be paid to the Highways or Poor Rates within 6 months
after award. Commissioners are to keep Accounts, which must be open to
Inspection.

Common Rights and Interests may be sold before the execution of the
award by allottees except the Archbishop, the Vicar, Trinity Hospital,
and Trustees for Charitable purposes.


COMPENSATION TO OCCUPIERS.--In the case of leases at rack-rent the
Commissioners are to set out the allotment to the owner, but the owner
is to pay fair compensation to the tenant for loss of right of common,
either by lowering his rent or by paying him a gross sum of money as
the Commissioners direct. _Exception._--If the Commissioners think it a
more equitable course they may allot the allotment to the tenant during
his lease, and settle what extra rent he shall pay in respect of the
owner’s expense in fencing, etc.

Satisfaction for crops, ploughing, tilling, manuring, etc. is to be
given in cases where the ground is allotted to a new possessor.


ROADS.--Commissioners have power to set out and shut up roads (turnpike
roads excluded), footpaths, etc., but if they shut up a footpath
through old inclosed land, the person for whose benefit it is shut is
to pay such compensation as the Commissioners decide, the money going
towards the Expenses of the Act.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases, _e.g._
claims and allotment, where the Commissioners’ decisions are final and
conclusive or a provision for trial at law is made.


ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN ACT AND AWARD.--As soon as the Act is passed the
Commissioners are to have sole direction of the course of husbandry.
Exception.--They are not to interfere with Thomas Wood and Peter Wood,
Gentlemen, in their cultivation of such parts of the common fields of
Waddon as are leased to them by the Archbishop. (Four years of the
lease are still to run.)


AWARD.--Date, March 2, 1801. Clerk of Peace or of County Council,
Surrey.


AMENDING ACT, 1803.--(Private, 43 George III. c. 53.)

Passed in response to a petition (February 16, 1803) from the Vicar,
Churchwardens, Overseers, and other inhabitants of Croydon, stating
that whereas the Commissioners have set out 237 acres 2 roods for the
inhabitants of Croydon, instead of 215 acres, doubts have arisen as to
whether this land is vested in trustees as was directed to be done with
the 215 acres.


MAIN FEATURES.--The 237 acres 2 roods to be treated as the 215 acres.
Land up to 5 acres to be sold to defray cost of this new Act; any
surplus to go to Use and Benefit of Poor, any deficit to be made up by
rents or sale of gravel.


NOTE ON RESULTS.--Third Report of Select Committee on Emigration,
1826-7, p. 369. Dr. Benjamin Wills stated that as the result of the
loss of common rights suffered under the Bill, he had seen some 900
persons summoned for the Poor Rate. ‘By the destruction of the common
rights, and giving no remuneration to the poor man, a gentleman has
taken an immense tract of it and converted it into a park: a person in
the middling walk of life has bought an acre or two; and though this
common in its original state was not so valuable as it has been made,
yet the poor man should have been consulted in it; and the good that it
was originally to him was of such a nature that, destroying that, has
had an immense effect.’


APPENDIX A (5)

HAUTE HUNTRE, LINCS.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1767


AREA.--22,000 Acres ‘more or less.’


NATURE OF GROUND.--Haute Huntre, Eight Hundred or Holland Fen and other
commonable places adjacent.

Owners and Proprietors of Houses and Toftsteads in the following 11
Parishes or Townships have Right of Common:--Boston West, Skirbeck
Quarter, Wyberton, Frampton, Kirton, Algarkirke, Fosdyke, Sutterton,
Wigtoft, Swineshead, and Brothertoft; and also in a place called Dog
Dyke in the Parish of Billinghay.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_December 4, 1766._--Petition for enclosure
from various owners and proprietors with right of common, asking that
the fen shall be divided up into specific allotments for each Town.
Leave given. Bill read first time, December 9.

_March 4, 1767._--Long petition against the bill from (1) the Master,
Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College, Cambridge, which College
is Impropriator of the Great Tythes, and Patron of the Vicarage of
Swineshead, (2) the Rev. John Shaw, Patron and Rector of Wyberton, (3)
Zachary Chambers, Esq., Lord of the Manor of Swineshead, and others.
The petition gave a history of the movement for enclosure. On August
26, 1766, a meeting of several gentlemen and others was held at the
Angel Inn, Sleaford, at which a resolution was passed that a Plan or
Survey of the fen with a return of the Houses etc., with Right of
Common should be made before a bill was brought in. On October 16,
1766, a public meeting of several proprietors was held at Sleaford at
which some of those present proposed to read a bill for dividing and
inclosing the fen; the great majority however of those present objected
to this course, and requested and insisted that as no Survey had been
produced, nothing further should be done till the following spring,
‘but notwithstanding the said Request, some few of the said Proprietors
then present proposed that a Petition for the said Bill might then be
signed; which Proposition being rejected by a considerable Majority,
the said few Proprietors declared their Resolution to sign such a
Petition, as soon as their then Meeting was broke up, without any
Resolutions being concluded upon, or the Sentiments of the Majority of
the Proprietors either entered down or paid any Regard to, and without
making any Adjournment of the said Meeting; and that, soon after the
said Meeting broke up, some of the Proprietors present at the said
Meeting signed the Petition, in consequence of which the said Bill hath
been brought in.’ The petitioners also pointed out that the petition
for enclosure was signed by very few proprietors except those in Boston
West, and requested that no further measures should be taken till next
session, and that meanwhile the Survey in question should be made, and
suggested that the present bill was in many respects exceptionable, and
asked to be heard by Counsel against the bill as it now stood. Petition
to lie on table till second reading.

_March 6, 1767._--Bill read second time and committed. Petition
referred to Committee.

_March 21._--Petition against the bill from Sir Charles Frederick,
Knight of the Bath, sole owner of Brothertoft, where there are 51
Cottages or Toftsteads with right of common. Referred to Committee.

_March 27._--Petition against the bill from Sir Gilbert Heathcote,
Bart. and others; bill injurious to interests. Referred to Committee.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_April 29, 1767._--Lord Brownlow
Bertie reported from the Committee; Committee had heard Counsel in
favour of the first petition and considered the other two; that the
Allegations of the Bill were true; and that the Parties concerned had
given their consent to the Bill to the satisfaction of the Committee
‘(except 94 Persons with Right of Common and Property of the Annual
Value of £3177, 2s. 6d. who refused, and except 53 Persons with Right
of Common and Property of the Annual Value of £694, 10s. who could not
be found, and except 40 Persons with Right of Common and Property of
the Annual Value of £1310, 0s. 6d. who declared they were indifferent,
and that the whole Number of Persons with Right of Common is 614, and
the whole Property of the Annual Value of £23,347, 8s.).’ Several
amendments were made in the Bill and it was sent up to the Lords.
In the Lords, petitions against it were received from Sir Gilbert
Heathcote (May 7) and Samuel Reynardson, Esq. (May 14), both of which
were referred to the Committee. Several amendments were made, including
the insertion of a clause giving the Proprietors or Occupiers the same
right of common over the Parish allotment as they already had over the
whole. Royal Assent, June 29, 1767.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 7 George III. c. 112.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Five are to be appointed; they are to be chosen by
eleven persons, each representing one of the eleven townships. These
eleven persons are to be elected in each township by the owners and
proprietors of Houses, Toftsteads, and Lands which formerly paid
Dyke-reeve assessments; except in the case of Brothertoft, where Sir
Charles Frederick, as sole owner and proprietor, nominates the person.
No person interested in the inclosure is to be chosen as Commissioner,
and in addition to the usual oath of acting ‘without favour or
affection’ the Commissioners are required to take the following oath:--

‘I, A. B., do swear, that I am neither Proprietor nor Occupier of,
nor, to the best of my Knowledge, am I concerned as Guardian, Steward
or Agent for any Proprietor of any Houses, Toftsteads, or Lands within
any of the Parishes of’ (names given) ‘or for any Person to whom any
Allotment is to be made by virtue of the said Act.’

Three Commissioners are a quorum. Vacancies are to be filled by the
11 persons elected as before. If they fail to do so, the remaining
Commissioners can nominate. Survey to be made by persons appointed
by the Commissioners, and number of present Houses and Toftsteads to
be recorded except in Boston West and Brothertoft. Edward Draper of
Boston, Gentleman, to be Clerk.


PAYMENT.--Commissioners each to have £210 and no more. Two guineas to
be deducted for each day’s absence.


CLAIMS.--Nothing is said about sending in claims, as the survey giving
the Houses, etc., does instead. If any difference or dispute arise
between parties interested in the division with respect to shares,
rights, interests, and proportions, the Commissioners are to hear them,
and their determination is to be binding and conclusive.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_To Lords of the Manor._--Zachary Chambers, Esq., is Lord of the Manor
of Swineshead; Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is Lord of the Manor of
Frampton. These two are intitled jointly to the soil of the fen, and
Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is also intitled ‘to the Brovage or
Agistment’ of 480 head of cattle on the fen every year.

(1) Zachary Chambers, Esq., is to have 120 Acres in one piece in a part
called Brand End in lieu of his rights of soil and of all mines and
quarries of what nature whatsoever.

(2) Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is to have 120 Acres in one piece,
near Great Beets, for his rights of soil and of mines and quarries.[492]

Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is also to have in lieu of his right of
Brovage a parcel of the same number of acres that were given by an Act
of 9 James I. to the Lords of the Manor of Swineshead for Brovage.

_Tithe Owners._--Not mentioned.

_Allotment of Residue._--After part has been sold for expenses (see
below) and after allotment to the Lords of the Manor, the residue is
to be divided amongst the eleven townships and Dog Dyke in proportion
and according to the number of Houses and Toftsteads in each parish.
For Brothertoft and Dog Dyke there are special arrangements; in
the ten remaining townships or parishes, the following method is
to be pursued:--For each House or Tenement there must be 4 acres,
and for each Toftstead 2 acres allowed; when this proportion has
been set out, the remainder is to be shared out in proportion to
the Dyke-reeve assessments before the passing of a recent drainage
Act. Quantity, Quality, and Situation are to be considered. _Special
provision._--Boston West is to have the same proportion of fen as
Frampton.

The share that each of the above ten townships receives is to be the
common fen belonging to the township or parish, subject to the same
common rights as the present fen, and is to be contiguous to the
township.

_Brothertoft and Dog Dyke allotments._--The allotment for Brothertoft
is to be half as many acres as are allotted to Boston West, and is to
go to Sir Charles Frederick, sole owner and proprietor, and to be near
Brothertoft.

The Allotment to Dog Dyke is to be calculated in reference to the share
that Brothertoft receives. Each House or Toftstead in Dog Dyke is to
have 2/3 of the proportion that each House or Toftstead in Brothertoft
is assigned. The Dog Dyke Allotment is to go to Earl Fitzwilliam, the
sole owner, and is to be near the Earl’s gardens.

If any half-year lands, and other inclosed lands, directed to be sold
(see Expenses) remain unsold, these are to be sold and the leases are
to be allotted to the parishes in such proportions as the Commissioners
direct.

An award is to be drawn up and its provisions are binding and
conclusive.


FENCING.--Each township’s share is to be divided by an 8-feet wide
ditch and a quick hedge, and guarded with a fence and rail 4-1/2 feet
high, with double bars of fir or deal and with oak posts; the fence
and the rail are to be nailed or mortified together. The Commissioners
do this fencing out of the money raised for defraying the expenses of
the Act, but each township is to keep up its fences according to the
Commissioners’ directions. The fences, etc., are to be made within 18
months.

_Penalty_ for wilfully and maliciously cutting, breaking down, burning,
demolishing, or destroying any division fence:

 1st offence (before 2 J.P.’s), fine of £5 to £20, or from 1 to 3
 months in House of Correction.

 2nd offence (before 2 J.P.’s), fine of £10 to £40, or from 6 to 12
 months in House of Correction.

 3rd offence (before Quarter Sessions), transportation for 7 years as a
 felon.


EXPENSES.--To defray all expenses the Commissioners can--

(1) sell the Right of Acreage or Common upon certain specified
half-year lands,[493] _e.g._ The Frith, Great Beets, Little Beets, the
Mown Rakes, etc., to the owners and proprietors of these lands. If the
owners refuse to buy or do not pay enough to cover the expenses of the
Act, the Commissioners can--

(2) sell part of the Fen. In this case the first land to be sold is
Coppin Sykes Plot, Ferry Corner Plot, Pepper Gowt Plot, and Brand End
Plot; the next land, Gibbet Hills.

As Coppin Sykes Plot, etc., belong to the Commissioners of two Drainage
Acts, the drainage Commissioners can as compensation charge rates on
the respective townships instead, and if any township refuses to pay,
they can inclose a portion of its allotment, but not for tillage.

_Penalty for taking turf or sod_ after Act.

Culprit can be tried before one J.P., and fined from 40s. to £10,
or, if he or she fails to pay, be given hard labour in the House of
Correction for 1 to 3 months, or till the penalty is paid. Notice of
this penalty is to be fixed on Church and Chapel Doors and published in
newspapers.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases where the
Commissioners’ decisions are said to be final and conclusive.


AWARD.--Date, May 19, 1769. With Clerk of Peace or County Council,
Lincoln.

From _Annual Register_, 1769, p. 116 (Chronicle for July 16):

‘Holland Fen, in Lincolnshire, being to be inclosed by act of
parliament, some desperate persons have been so incensed at what they
called their right being taken from them, that in the dead of night
they shot into the windows of several gentlemen whom they thought
active in procuring the act for inclosure; but happily no person has
been killed.’


AMENDING ACT, 1770.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_January 25, 1770._--Petition for an
amending Act from the Commissioners who carried out the previous one;
stating that ‘the Posts and Rails for many Miles in the Division
Fences, which have been erected pursuant to the Directions of the said
Act, have been pulled down, and the greatest Part thereof destroyed,
together with great Part of the Materials for completing the said
Fencing,’ and asking for leave to take down the Fencing and to make
wide ditches instead.

Leave given. Bill passed both Houses and received Royal Assent.


MAIN FEATURES OF AMENDING ACT.--(Private, 10 George III. c. 40.)

The Commissioners are empowered to take down the posts and rails, and
to make ditches 10 feet wide and 5 feet deep as boundaries instead.

The Posts and Rails are to be sold, and the proceeds are to defray
the expenses of this Act and the costs of the Commissioners. The
Commissioners are to have a sum of £31, 10s. each as payment, with 2
guineas deducted for each day’s absence.

Edward Draper, Clerk to the Commissioners, is to be repaid up to £1000,
his costs in prosecuting fence-destroyers.

If any proprietor has already made ditches wide enough, he is to be
repaid his proportion.

Any surplus is to be handed over to Drainage Commissioners.


NOTES:--

                                                    Act.    Award.
  Boston West division was enclosed in              1771     1772
  Algarkirke cum Fosdyke         „                  1771
  Frampton     „       „         „                  1784
  Kirton       „       „         „                  1772     1773
  Skirbeck     „       „         „                  1771     1772
  Swineshead   „       „         „                  1773     1774
  Sutterton    „       „         „                  1772     1773
  Wigtoft      „       „         „                  1772     1773
  Wyberton     „       „         „                  1789


APPENDIX A (6)

KNARESBOROUGH FOREST.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1770


AREA.--About 20,000 acres.


NATURE OF GROUND.--Open, Commonable or Waste Lands.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_February 8, 1770._--Petition for enclosure
from several freehold and copyhold tenants within the Forest; stating
that the said tracts are of little advantage now, whereas it would
be of public utility to have them divided into just allotments and
enclosed. Leave given, bill presented, read twice, March 19; committed
March 28. Petition against the bill from ‘a very great Number of the
Freeholders, and Customary or Copyhold Tenants having Right of Common,’
stating that the bill contains provisions very injurious to the
petitioners and others. Referred to the Committee.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_May 7, 1770._--Lord Strange
reported from the Committee that the allegations of the bill were true,
that no person had appeared before the Committee to oppose the bill,
and that ‘the Parties concerned had given their Consent’ ‘(except the
Proprietors of Land in the Seven Lower Constableries, assessed to
the Land Tax at £47, 2s. 3d. per Annum, and the Proprietors of Land
in the Four Higher Constableries assessed to the Land Tax at £118,
3s. 6-3/4d., and that the whole of the Assessment in the Seven Lower
Constableries, and for Estates of several Persons adjoining, being
within the District called the Forest, in virtue whereof Right of
Common is enjoyed, amounts to £497, 1s. 4-1/2d., and in the Four High
Hamlets to £183, 9s. 8d.).’

The bill passed both Houses and received the Royal Assent on May 19.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 10 George III. c. 94.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Five appointed. William Hill of Tadcaster, Gentleman;
Joseph Butter of Bowthorp, Surveyor; William Chippendale of Ripley,
Surveyor; John Flintoff of Boroughbridge, Surveyor; Thomas Furness of
Otley, Gentleman. Vacancies to be filled up by remaining Commissioners.
Three are a quorum.


ARBITRATORS.--Nine appointed by name. Two can act. Vacancies to be
filled up by Commissioners from barristers.


SURVEYORS.--Three named, two of them are also Commissioners. Vacancies
to be filled up by Commissioners.


PAYMENT TO COMMISSIONERS, ARBITRATORS AND SURVEYORS.--Nothing stated.


CLAIMS.--All claims to be delivered in at the first, second or third
meeting; claims must be in writing and must specify and contain ‘an
Account and Description of the Messuage or Messuages, antient Building
or Buildings, and Lands’ in respect of which the claim is made, and
also the name or names of the person or persons in actual possession.
For a month after the third meeting all claims are to be open to the
inspection of other claimants. Failure to deliver in ‘such Writing and
Account as aforesaid’ at the first three meetings debars the would-be
claimant from all right to allotment, ‘Infancy, Coverture, Lunacy, or
any other general legal Impediment whatsoever of or in any such Person
in anywise notwithstanding.’

If claims are duly made and no objection raised to them by any
person, they are to be allowed finally and conclusively at the
fourth meeting; and no right so allowed can be disputed afterwards.
Supposing objections are made by any two other claimants or by any
Commissioner present, then the matter is to be referred to two or more
of the arbitrators whose decision is to be final and conclusive. If
unreasonable, unjust, frivolous or vexatious claims or objections are
made, the Arbitrators can assess the costs on the maker.

In deciding on claims, 40 years’ enjoyment of commonage is to be
considered to confer a right, when it is enjoyed in respect of owning
ancient messuages, etc., whether situated within or without the limits
of the Forest (save and except in respect of Commonage by Vicinage).

The quantity and the value of the lands in virtue of which claims are
made, are to be adjudged by the Commissioners, and such judgment is to
be final and conclusive, but no ancient Messuage or Building or Scite
thereof is to be allowed at greater value than any other.

Disputes between landlords and tenants are to be referred to the
Arbitrators, and their award is to be final and conclusive.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Provisions for the Lord of the Manor_ (the King).--(1) One-tenth part
of the whole, after allotments for Stone Quarries, watering places
and roads have been deducted; ‘the said Tenth Part to consist of a
proportionable Share of the best and worst kind of Land as near as may
be.’

(2) All incroachments made within 40 years, and held by persons not
entitled to right of common; but see Incroachments.

(3) The King’s rights to Mines, Minerals, and Quarries (except Stone
Quarries) are not to be prejudiced, but he or his lessee is to pay
reasonable satisfaction for any damage done, such satisfaction to
be determined by 2 or more J.P.’s, or, if the parties are still
dissatisfied, by a Jury of 12.

_Provisions for Tithe Owners._--Such portions as the Commissioners
shall adjudge to be ‘full Recompence and Satisfaction.’

_For Stone Quarries, Watering Places, and Roads._--Such allotment as
the Commissioners think requisite.

_For Harrogate Stray._--‘Whereas there are within the constableries
of Bilton with Harrowgate and Beckwith with Rosset, or One of them,
certain Wells or Springs of medicinal Waters, commonly called
Harrowgate Spaws, to which during the Summer Season great Numbers of
Persons constantly resort to receive the Benefit of the said Waters
to the great Advantage and Emolument of Tradesmen, Farmers, and other
Persons in that Neighbourhood, and the Persons resorting to the said
Waters now have the Benefit of taking the Air upon the open Part of
the said Constableries,’ it is enacted that 200 acres of land near the
said springs shall be set apart and left free and open for ever. The
Freeholders and Copyholders within the said Constableries are to have
right of pasture on these 200 acres, the stint being regulated by the
Commissioners, and such right of common being taken as part of their
respective allotments.

_For the Poor._--None.

_Allotment of Residue._--To be allotted to the Persons entitled to
commonage ‘in Proportion to the real Value of their several and
respective Messuages, Lands, and Tenements’ in respect of which they
are entitled. Quality and situation to be considered in settling the
Quantum. Allotments must be accepted within six months after award (see
also Fencing).

Award to be drawn up with all particulars, but nothing is specifically
said about its being final. It is to be Evidence in Courts of Law.

Stone Quarries are to be vested in the landholders. Allotments to
be of the same tenure as the property in virtue of which they are
given. Timber is to belong to copyholders as if they were freeholders.
Disputes arising in the execution of the Act, which do not affect the
persons in general interested in the Inclosure, can, if all the Parties
concerned in the particular dispute wish it, be referred to some other
Arbitrator or Arbitrators not mentioned in the Act, and his or their
decision is to be final.


INCROACHMENTS.--(1) Incroachments 40 years old and upwards, with all
buildings thereon, to be absolute property of persons in possession;
but Copyhold.

(2) Incroachments made within 40 years.

(_a_) If incroachers are also owners who have a right of common, then
the incroachments are to be given as their respective allotments
(reckoning the value of the land only). If any particular incroachment
is bigger than the allotment to which the incroacher is entitled, the
surplus ground is to be treated as ordinary distributable ground.

(_b_) If incroachers are not entitled to right of common, then their
incroachments, together with all the buildings on them, are to go
to the King as Lord of the Manor; But whereas these incroachments
‘consist chiefly of Buildings and Inclosures which have been erected
and inclosed, or are held and enjoyed by poor Persons who have, by
their own Industry and Labour, built and improved the same, or by
Persons who have been at considerable Charges therein,’ His Majesty
is graciously pleased to grant Leases for 40 years in possession, ‘to
the End no Person whatsoever may be removed from or deprived of his,
her, or their present Possessions.’ These leases are to hold good even
though not amounting to one-third of the improved annual value of the
incroachments. After 40 years, full rents must be taken. _Exception_ to
(2 _b_).--Small incroachments made for Workhouses, for cottages of Poor
chargeable to the Parish, or for Free Schools, are to be assigned to
Trustees for benefit of the users.

In spite of above provisions any Incroachments which the Commissioners
think fit can be set out for roads, ditches, or fences, etc.


FENCING.--In the paragraph about selling land for expenses it says
that the Ring fences to be made by Commissioners, but elsewhere it
says fencing to be done by allottees under Commissioners’ directions.
_Exception._--Tithe allotments which are to be fenced by other
proprietors, and certain other cases. If allottees do not fence,
Commissioners do it for them and charge. If any persons think their
allotments not worth fencing, then two or more of them whose allotments
are contiguous can agree to leave them unenclosed, provided that within
12 months they set up a good stone wall or other substantial Fence
between their allotments and those of others. They must keep this wall
or fence in repair always.

No sheep or goats to be kept for 7 years in any Inclosure adjoining a
boundary fence, unless a special wall or Pale-fence is provided.


EXPENSES.--To be defrayed by sale at auction of parcels of land.
Any surplus to be distributed amongst allottees in proportion to
allotments. But if a Majority in Value of the persons interested do
not wish any land sold, they can signify the same in writing, and can
deposit a sufficient sum of money for the purposes of the Act with the
Commissioners, and then the provisions for sale cease. Mortgages, in
certain cases up to 50s. an acre, to meet expenses are allowed.


ROADS.--In Award, Commissioners are to give orders for laying out
roads, etc.


COMPENSATION TO OCCUPIERS.--None.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases where
decisions are said to be final and conclusive.


AWARD.--June 25, 1775. Duchy of Lancaster.


AMENDING ACT, 1774.--(Private, 14 George III. c. 54.)


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_February 21, 1774._--Petition from Sir
Bellingham Graham, Bart., Walter Masterman, Esq., and others stating
that the land to defray expenses is not yet sold, and asking for
an amending Act to enable the Petitioners and others to pay their
respective shares instead of the land being sold. Leave given and
bill brought in. March 23, 1774, Petition from Mary Denison of Leeds,
widow, and her heirs, who had ‘neglected to deliver her Claim of Common
Right within the Time limited by the said Act, of which Neglect the
Petitioners were not acquainted till after the Third Meeting of the
Commissioners; soon after which the Petitioners caused a Claim to be
made and delivered, but the said Commissioners refused to accept the
same,’ asking for relief. Petition referred to the Committee, with
instructions that they have power to make provision in the bill.

_March 25._--Petition from several persons asking relief on same
grounds as Ellen Oxley (see April 15 below).

Petition from various persons asking that their allotments may be near
within their townships.

_April 14._--Petition from Daniel Lascelles, Esq., Sir Savile Slingsby,
Oliver Coghill, Esq., and the Rev. William Roundell stating that
they sent in claims as owners of rights of common; that these claims
were referred to the Arbitrators; and that ‘it was discovered that
Mistakes were made in the Description of such Tenements, or some Parts
therof; and that, notwithstanding the said Errors arose merely from
Inadvertency, and in no respect altered the Merits of the Petitioners’
Claims, the Arbitrators did not think fit to permit the Petitioners to
rectify the same,’ but disallowed the claims. The Petitioners ask for
reconsideration.

_April 15._--Petitions from Rev. Thomas Collins who through
‘Inadvertency’ had neglected to deliver in his claim of common right in
respect of two Copyhold Messuages within the specified time, and from
Francis Bedford, ditto, _re_ copyhold close.

_April 15._--Petition from Ellen Oxley and John Clarke, stating that
they preferred claims of common rights to the Commissioners; that
these claims were objected to and referred to the Arbitrators, who
heard divers claims, several of which they disallowed; that as Ellen
Oxley and John Clarke could not produce such evidence as was required
by the Arbitrators in support of their claims, they withdrew them;
that subsequently a Verdict was produced and read in evidence to the
Arbitrators, by means of which similar claims were allowed.

Bill passed both Houses. Royal Assent.


MAIN FEATURES OF AMENDING ACT.--(Private, 14 George III. c. 54.)

New Commissioner added, Richard Richardson (who was one of the
Surveyors under the former Act).


EXPENSES.--Commissioners can set out allotments without abatement for
sale to 48 persons named, and other allottees who give notice. In the
case of these allottees, the Commissioners are to settle their quota of
charges and assess them accordingly.

The Commissioners in rendering their account may charge one guinea
a day for loss of time, and 10s. a day for expenses. The surveyors’
charges must be ‘reasonable and moderate.’ The Commissioners must give
an account before they call for payment, and the account is to be open
to inspection at the charge of 6d.


CLAIMS.--The claims of 32 persons named, which have been disallowed
or withdrawn (1) for want of evidence; (2) for misnomers; (3) for
failure to deliver in time, are to be reconsidered. Such claims must
be delivered in at the first meeting, and must not be greater than
they were before. They can be referred on appeal to the Arbitrators as
before, but the appellant must now give security for costs in case the
appeal fails.


INCROACHMENTS.--As some encroachments of over 40 years standing are
found to have no right of common (and so cannot contribute their share
to the Tithe Allotment), tithes can be charged on these in the form of
rent charges.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions in respect of the Commissioners’
accounts, if any person interested thinks any item unreasonable, and no
satisfactory explanation is forthcoming.


AWARD (for 2 Acts).--June 25, 1775. Duchy of Lancaster.

From the Award we learn as follows:--

Over 2751 Acres were sold to meet the expenses of the Act.

The King received 2344 acres.

The tithe owners received 4694 acres odd.

The remainder was divided amongst over 700 different persons and
bodies. The allottees’ shares varied from as much as 1386 acres
(Devisees of Sir John Ingelby, Bart.) down to a few perches.

The amount that went to trustees for the use of the poor, including the
various small incroachments (for schools, workhouses, etc.), which were
allowed to stand was about 32 acres.


NOTES ON AFTER-HISTORY.--_Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxvii. p.
292.--In 1793 Arthur Young bought an estate in Knaresborough Forest
of about 4400 acres; 4000 acres of this was waste land, let out at a
rental of 6d. an acre; 2751 acres of the estate were copyhold, and had
been sold to pay the expenses of inclosure. The rest had formed part of
the King’s allotment, and was hired on a long lease. On the 400 acres
of cultivated land there were 3 farmhouses. The game of the waste was
let for £30 a year; peats dug from it produced £6 to £8 a year, and
Arthur Young calculated that one Scotch wether could be supported per
acre.


APPENDIX A (7)

LALEHAM.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1774


AREA.--(From Award), 918 Acres.


NATURE OF GROUND.--‘Several large and open Fields,’ ‘and likewise
certain Wastes and Commons.’


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--


FIRST ATTEMPT, JANUARY 31, 1767.--Petition from Sir James Lowther, Lord
of the Manor, and from ‘divers owners’ for enclosure of the open fields
and commons, and also of ‘a large Pasture called Laleham Burway.’ Leave
given, but bill dropped after first reading.

_Second attempt, December 7, 1767._--Petition for enclosure from Sir
James Lowther alone, on behalf of himself and others. Leave given; bill
prepared by Mr. Anthony Bacon and Mr. Fuller, read twice and committed
(December 14) to Mr. Bacon, Mr. Jenkinson, Sir James Lowther, and
others.

_December 21, 1767._--Petition against the bill from various persons,
being Owners, Proprietors and Occupiers entitled to Rights of Common,
and also Owners of Cow Gates on Laleham Burway, setting forth ‘that
the Inclosure sought by the said Bill is contrary to the general Sense
and Opinion of the Petitioners and others, who compose a Majority in
Number of the Owners or Proprietors of, or Persons interested’ in the
Inclosure, and also stating that the meadow of Laleham Burway is not
within the Manor of Laleham, but has been proved by a trial at law to
be part of the Manor of Chertsey Beaumont. Petitioners to be heard on
Report.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_December 21, 1767_ (same
day).--Mr. Anthony Bacon reported from the Committee that the
Allegations of the Bill were true, and ‘that the Parties concerned had
given their Consent to the Bill, to the Satisfaction of the Committee
(except the Proprietors of Estates, who are entitled to Right of Common
in the said Manor, who are rated to the Poors Rate to the Amount of
£8, 2s. 0d. per Annum; and also the Proprietors of Estates, who are
intitled to Right of Common in the said Manor, who are rated to the
Poors Rate to the Amount of 15s. per Annum, who, being applied to,
refused to sign the Bill, but declared they would not oppose the same;
and that the whole of the Estates, in the said Manor, are rated to
the Poors Rate to the Amount of £27, 6s. 6d. or thereabouts; and that
the Proprietors of Eighty-six Cow Pastures or Farines, had refused to
give their Consent to the said Bill; and that the whole Number of Cow
Pastures, or Farines, are 292-1/2); and that no Person appeared before
the Committee to oppose the said Bill.’

The consideration of the Report was put off several times; February
25, 1768, a debate on the subject, resumed on February 29, with the
result that the Bill was defeated.

_Third Attempt, February 28, 1774._--Petition from various owners and
occupiers for enclosure of Laleham and of Laleham Burway. Leave given.
Bill read first time March 18.

_March 22._--Petition against the bill from various owners and
proprietors of certain Messuages, Cottages, Farmsteads, Lands and
Rights of Common, and also owners of Cattle gates on Laleham Burway,
setting forth that the ‘Bill is contrary to the general Sense and
Opinion of the Petitioners and others, who compose a great Majority
of the real Owners and Proprietors of, or Persons interested in, the
Lands and Grounds intended to be inclosed: and that the Petitioners
conceive that the said Bill, if passed into a Law, will in general be
injurious to all the Petitioners, and in particular highly burthensome
and oppressive to such of them who enjoy small and inconsiderable
Rights and Interests therein.’ The Petition again pointed out that
Laleham Burway was not in the Manor of Laleham, and that apart from
that fact, ‘Inclosure would render the Enjoyment thereof’ inconvenient
if not impracticable. To be heard by Counsel on second reading. On
April 15 came another Petition from William Barwell, Esq., and other
proprietors in and near Chertsey, opposing the enclosure of Laleham
Burway as detrimental to the proprietors thereof and to the inhabitants
in general of Chertsey, and suggesting that it is ‘calculated only for
the private Emolument of some One or few’ of the proprietors. Petition
to lie on table.

_May 20._--Bill read a second time. Both above Petitions read and
Counsel against the Bill heard and several witnesses examined. Bill
committed.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_June 7, 1774._--Mr. Norton
reported from the Committee, that the allegations were true and that
the parties concerned had consented ‘(except the Owners of 13 Houses
intitled to Right of Common and the Proprietors of Lands rated to the
Land Tax of £35, 4s. 6d. per Annum who refused to sign the Bill, and
also except the Proprietors of Lands rated to the Land Tax at 9s. per
Annum who could not be found; and that the whole Number of Houses
having Right of Common is 80, and the whole of the said Lands are rated
to the Land Tax at £168, 2s. 6d. per Annum).’

A Clause was offered to be added to the Bill, for giving an Appeal
to Quarter Sessions,[494] and this was agreed to. Other clauses to
restrain the Commissioners from setting out a road over Laleham South
Field and for saving the rights of tithe owners were also added.

The Bill passed both Houses and received the Royal Assent, June 22,
1774.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 14 George III. c. 114.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Three appointed:--Ralph Gowland, Esq., of Laleham;
Thomas Jackman of Guildford; Henry Brumbridge of Thorpe.

Two a quorum. Vacancies to be filled by remaining Commissioners from
persons not interested in allotments or division.

Surveyor or surveyors to be appointed by Commissioners.


PAYMENT.--Nothing stated.

A special clause enacting that they are to make the division and
allotment on or before December 24, 1774, ‘or as soon after as
conveniently may be done.’[495]


CLAIMS.--All claims to be delivered in writing with particulars of
right or title in respect of which claim is made at 1st or 2nd meeting.
If any claim is objected to at 1st, 2nd, or 3rd meeting by another
claimant then the Commissioners can hear and determine, and their
determination is final and binding. _Exception._--If a claimant refuses
to refer the matter to the Commissioners, then he or she can bring
an action at law against the objector on an issue to be settled if
necessary by the officer of the Court. But if the claimant whose claim
is objected to fails to bring the action, and still refuses to refer
the question to the Commissioners, then (after 3 months) he loses all
his rights.

There is also a clause ‘for the better settling the Rights and Claims
of all the said parties so interested and concerned as aforesaid’ by
which it is enacted that in case any difference touching rights and
claims arises between any of the parties so interested and concerned,
the Commissioners have power to hear and finally determine the same,
‘which Determination shall be binding and conclusive to all Parties.’


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Lord of the Manor_ (Sir James Lowther).--No special provision
mentioned, but see Award.

Clause to say that the Lord of the Manor’s rights are not to be
prejudiced by the Act ‘(except such Common of Pasture, or other Rights
of Common, as can or may be claimed by or belonging to him).’

_Tithe Owners._--Nothing in the Act to affect any right or title to
tithes.

_Provision for the Poor._--Nothing mentioned, but see Award.

_Allotment._--The Commissioners are to make the allotments amongst the
several persons ‘intitled to any Lands, Grounds, Right of Common or
other Property,’ in proportion to ‘the real value of their several and
respective Shares and Interests and Right of Common or other Property
through and over the said Common Fields, or other the Premises to be
allotted and divided.’ Quantity, Quality and Convenience are to be
considered. The Commissioners are to draw up an Award as soon as is
convenient after allotment, and ‘the several Allotments, Partitions
and Divisions so made’ in and by the Award ‘shall be and are hereby
declared to be binding and conclusive unto and upon all and every the
several Parties interested in the said open and common Fields, common
Pastures, and commonable Lands.’ Allotments must be accepted within 12
months after award. (Saving clause for infants, etc.) Failure to accept
excludes allottee from all benefits in lands and estates allotted to
any other person, and the Commissioners can appoint a Bailiff or rent
receiver with full power to manage the allotment in question, any
surplus of profits to go to the original allottee who has refused to
accept--until he changes his mind and accepts it.

Allotments are to be of the same tenure as the estates for which they
are claimed. The Herbage of the Lanes and Public Roads to be allotted
to such person or persons as the Commissioners direct.

A special clause to exempt Laleham Burway from division.


INCROACHMENTS.--Not mentioned.


FENCING.--No instructions given; except that when an allotment abuts on
the highway, the fences are to be kept up by the owner.


EXPENSES.--To be paid by the ‘Owners and Proprietors and Persons
interested of and in the said Lands and Grounds’ in such proportion as
the Commissioners decide. If persons refuse to pay, Commissioners can
distrain or else enter on allotment and take rents. Allotments may be
mortgaged up to 40s. an acre.


COMPENSATION TO OCCUPIERS AND OTHERS.--Leases at rack-rent ‘shall cease
and be totally extinguished’ if Commissioners give notice; the owner
giving such compensation to the tenant as the Commissioners direct.

Underwoods, hedges, shrubs, etc., are not to be grubbed up or destroyed
before allotment without special permission from the Commissioners, but
are to remain for the benefit of the allottee, the allottee paying the
former owner such compensation as the Commissioners direct.

Also, If any land with woods, underwoods, hedges, shrubs, etc., is
allotted to someone who does not already hold it, then the first
owner may enter and fell, grub up and cut down the underwood, hedges,
etc., and take them away, unless the same have been allotted by the
Commissioners to the new owner.


POWER OF APPEAL.--Only with respect to roads, and then to Quarter
Sessions only.


ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN ACT AND AWARD.--Not mentioned.


AWARD.--Date, 1803. Record Office. During the 29 years between the Act
and the Award 10 Commissioners were concerned, (A) Ralph Gowland, (B)
Thomas Jackman, (C) Henry Brumbridge, (D) George Wheatley, (E) John
Baynes Garforth, (F) Sir Philip Jennings Clarke, (G) Richard Penn,
(H) Sir William Gibbons (see Stanwell), (I) Thomas Chapman, (J) George
Kinderley, as follows:--

C refused to act straight away. A then appointed D. B refused to sit
in 1781. A and D appointed E. A died 1787. D and E appointed F. F died
1788. D and E appointed G. D died 1802. E and G were desirous of being
discharged from acting further. H was ‘duly appointed.’ E and G refused
to act. H appointed I and J. H, I and J gave the award.

_Distribution of Land._--918 acres odd, exclusive of roads, were
divided out as follows:--

                                                                    Acres.

  _Lord Lowther_[496] (including 18-1/2 for his rights of soil),    626-1/2
  _Six other owners_ (in shares varying from 68-1/4 to John
      Coggan, Martha his wife, to 16-1/4 to the Vicar,              223-1/4
  _Twenty-three owners_ (in shares varying from 7-1/2 acres, Messrs.
      Blackwell and Elson, to 16 perches John Goodwin,               51-1/4
  Churchwardens and Overseers for the Poor (see below),              13
  Gravel Pit,                                                         4
                                                                    -------
                                                                    918

The destiny of the 13 acres vested in the Churchwardens and Overseers
is described thus: they are ‘for the use of the poor of Laleham, as a
compensation for their loss of Common, the said 13 acres in lieu of the
herbage of the roads the use of which by the poor was thought might
be injurious to the young quick by the grazing of their cattle on the
roads, and as the Majority of the Proprietors have agreed’ to give up
this 13 acres as an equivalent for the Herbage, the Herbage is given to
the proprietors instead.

The Churchwardens and Overseers may do one of two things with the 13
acres plot, they may (1) lease it out for 21 years at ‘the best and
greatest rent’ to a parishioner: (the plan shows the 13 acres to have
been wedged in between Lord Lowther’s fields), or (2) ‘if they should
think it more advantageous to the parish to raise a certain sum of
money upon it for the Purpose of erecting a Workhouse’ they may let it
out for 60 years.


APPENDIX A (8)

LOUTH, LINCOLNSHIRE.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1801


  AREA.--In Petition for Enclosure, about 1770 Acres.
         In Act           „           „   1854   „
         In Award         „           „   1701   „


NATURE OF GROUND.--‘Open Common Fields, Meadows, Pastures, and other
Commonable Lands and Waste Grounds.’

Description from Eden, vol. ii. p. 395 (June 1795).--‘Most of the
land belonging to this town lies in 2 large common fields, which are
fallowed and cropped alternately: in several parts of these common
fields there are large tracts of waste land, upon which a great number
of poor people summer each a cow, which in winter go at large in these
fields. The Poor complain heavily of the farmers, saying, “That they
encroach on their property”; and the farmers say, “That the Poor take
the opportunity of eating their corn with their cattle.” Tithes are
here taken in kind.’


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_March 11, 1801._--Petition for enclosure
from various persons, owners, or interested in estates in Louth. Leave
given. Bill read twice, and committed on June 5. Same day, Petition
of various Freeholders and Proprietors of old inclosed land against
the bill; setting forth that there are ‘now more than 750 acres of old
inclosed Meadows and Pasture Lands very contiguous to the Town; and
that the Soil of these Open Fields is best adapted for Wheat and Beans,
of which it produces excellent Crops alternately, and is in a very high
State of Cultivation; and that there is no Waste Land, as the Commons
are a very rich Pasture, which keep a large Quantity of Cattle, the
Property of a great many industrious People, who have Common Rights,
and are enabled by their Common Rights to maintain their Families,
and increase the Population and Prosperity of the Town of Louth’; and
asking the House either to reject the Bill ‘or not to suffer that Part
thereof to pass into a Law, which would compel the Petitioners to
relinquish Part of their Old Inclosed Land against their Consent, but
permit them to remain subject to the Tythes they have hitherto paid.’
Petition referred to the Committee. All to have Voices.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_June 17, 1801._--Mr. Annesley
reported from the Committee that the Standing Orders had been complied
with; that the allegations were true; and that the parties concerned
had consented ‘(except the Proprietors of Messuages, Cottages and
Toftsteads, having Right of Common of the Annual Value of £465, 10s.
who refused to sign the Bill, and also except the Proprietors of
Messuages, Cottages and Toftsteads having Right of Common of the Annual
Value of £177, 15s. who were neuter; and that the Whole of the Property
interested in the Inclosure is of the Annual Value of £1670, 12s.).’
The Bill passed both Houses. Royal Assent, June 24, 1801.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Local and Personal, 41 George III. c. 124.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Three appointed. (1) John Renshaw of Owthorpe, Notts,
gentleman, on behalf of Tithe owners;

(2) Isaac Leatham of Barton-le-Street, Yorks, gentleman, on behalf of
the majority in value of the proprietors of common fields, meadows and
commonable Lands and Waste Grounds (tithe owners excluded);

(3) John Parkinson of Asgarby, Lincs, gentleman, on behalf of the
majority in value of the proprietors of ancient inclosures and of
Common Right Houses and Toftsteads (tithe owners excluded).

Two to be a quorum. Vacancies to be filled by the party represented
from persons ‘not interested in the inclosure.’

Surveyor appointed by name. Vacancy to be filled by majority in value
of all those interested.


PAYMENT TO COMMISSIONERS.--2 guineas each a day. Surveyor to be paid
what Commissioners think fit.


CLAIMS.--All claims to be delivered in with full particulars at
meetings held for the purpose; no claims to be received afterwards
except for some special cause. Full notice of a meeting to examine
claims to be given. Commissioners can determine on claims, but if any
claimant is dissatisfied with their determination he or she can try
the matter at law by bringing an action on a feigned issue against any
person interested in the Lands. Jury’s Verdict to be final. Defendant’s
costs to be borne by all or some of the persons interested, as the
Commissioners determine. If no notice of such action is given, then the
determination of the Commissioners on claims is final and conclusive.
But the Commissioners are not to determine on questions of title which
can be tried at law. Such suits are not to impede inclosure, and the
allotment is to be set out to the person in possession. Claimants in
respect of Messuages, Cottages, Tofts, or Toftsteads need not prove
usage of Right of Common.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_The Lord of the Manor_ (_i.e._ The Warden and Six Assistants of the
Town of Louth and Free School of King Edward the Sixth) to have one
twentieth in value of the Waste Lands and other Lands which are not the
separate Property of any Person or Persons; in particular a piece of
Common called _Julian Bower_ with the Trees on it is to be included as
part of the Allotment.

_Tithe Owners._--(1) The Worshipful Roger Kedington, M.A., Prebendary
of the Prebendal of Louth in Lincoln, impropriator of the Rectory of
Louth, and patron of Vicarage; (2) William Hutton, Esq., lessee of
above for 3 Lives; (3) Rev. Wolley Jolland, Vicar of Louth, entitled to
Vicarage House and Garden and also to a Right of Common, and to small
Tythes.

(1) Allotments which Commissioners consider equal in value and a full
Compensation for present unenclosed Glebe Lands and Rights of Common.

(2) Such pieces of the Lands and Grounds to be enclosed (of every
kind) as shall equal in value 1/5 part of all the open, arable and
tillage land ‘(although the same may be occasionally used in Meadow or
Pasture)’ ‘and which are not Waste Lands.’

(3) Such pieces of the Lands and Grounds to be enclosed as shall, in
Commissioners’ judgment, equal in value all the Great and Small Tythes
and other Ecclesiastical Dues on ancient Inclosed Arable and Tillage
Lands.

(4) Such pieces of the Lands and Grounds to be enclosed as shall equal
in value 1/8 part of all the ancient enclosed Meadow and Pasture Lands,
Grounds and Homesteads ‘(not being Glebe Lands, consecrated Burying
Grounds, or Orchards or Gardens),’ and of the Near East Field, Far East
Field, Great Roarings, Butter Closes, and all other open and commonable
Meadow or Pasture Lands, Commons and Grounds to be inclosed which are
subject to tithes and ecclesiastical dues.

_Arrangements for Owners of Old Inclosures._--(See Petition on March
11, 1801). Owners of old Inclosures who have not sufficient allotments
in the land to be inclosed, to contribute from them their proportion
of the above Tithe allotments, can _either_ have part of their old
inclosures allotted instead (with their consent) _or_ pay such gross
sum of money towards the expenses of the Act as the Commissioners
direct, whilst a portion of the land to be inclosed is given to the
tithe owner.

After this Act the only Tithes which remain are those for Gardens and
Orchards, and Tithes of Mills, Pigs, Poultry, Bees and Honey; also
Surplice Fees, Easter Offering and Mortuaries are untouched.

_For Repair of Roads._--Sufficient pieces or parcels to be vested in
the Surveyor of Highways.

_For Fairs._--A piece of ground called ‘The Quarry’ is to be allotted
to the Lords of the Manor for the holding of Fairs.

_Provision for the Poor._--None.

_Allotment of Residue._--Amongst the various persons interested with
due regard to Quantity, Quality and Situation. No undue Preference
to be shown. The open fields to be allotted to their present owners,
unless the owners ask for allotment elsewhere.

If an allottee is dissatisfied with his allotment, the Commissioners
must hear his complaints, but their determination is final till the
Award is made.

The Award is to be drawn up and read over to the Proprietors and all
the orders and directions, penalties, impositions, regulations and
determinations of the Award are to be final, binding and conclusive on
all parties.

If an allottee refuses to accept or molests anyone else who accepts, he
or she must pay the penalties decided on by the Commissioners.

The tenure of allotments is to be the same as that of the estate in
virtue of which they are claimed.

The grass on the road allotment is to be allotted to such person or
persons as the Commissioners direct, or else be applied for some
general, Parochial, or other use.

No person is to graze cattle, dig, cultivate or plant in any road or
way under penalty of a fine of £3.


INCROACHMENTS.--Incroachments 20 years old and over are to stand.
Incroachments made within 20 years are to be treated as part of the
Commons to be divided, but, if the Commissioners think it fit and
convenient they can be allotted to the person in possession, without
considering the value of erections or improvements (1) as the whole
or part of his allotment; (2) as his allotment, the allottee paying
such extra sum of money as the Commissioners think fit (this is
supposing the allotment he is entitled to is less in value than the
incroachment); (3) for such sum of money as the Commissioners think fit
(this is supposing he is not entitled to any allotment).

_But_ if the Commissioners do not think it fit and convenient to allot
an incroachment to the person in possession, they may (1) sell it at
public auction and apply the money to the purposes of the Act; (2)
allot it to someone else, in which case a ‘reasonable’ sum of money
is to be given to the dispossessed owner, the new allottee paying the
whole or part of it.


FENCING.--To be done by the several proprietors as the Commissioners
direct.

_Exception._--(1) The Tithe Owners’ allotments are to be fenced by the
other proprietors.

(2) In the case of allotments to Churchwardens, Overseers or Colleges,
Chantries, Charities, etc., the Commissioners are to fence, deducting
such portion of the allotments as is equal to the expenses of fencing
and to these allottees’ share of the expenses of the Act.

The portion deducted is to be divided amongst the other Proprietors who
have to pay the expenses.

If any allottee refuses to fence, the Commissioners can do it and
charge the expenses on the allotment, appointing a Bailiff to receive
rents and money.


EXPENSES.--The expenses of the Act are to be defrayed by all the
Proprietors benefited in proportion to the value of their allotments,
_except_ the Lords of the Manor and the Tithe owners in respect of
their special allotments, and except the holders in trust for public
bodies. (These last have had a portion deducted. See Fencing.)

The cost of the survey of the land to be inclosed is to be borne
by those interested in it, and the cost of the survey of the old
inclosures by the proprietors of old inclosures.

Mortgages are allowed under certain conditions (except to Tithe owners)
up to £4 an acre.

Commissioners are to keep accounts which must be open to inspection. A
penalty is specified for failure to keep them. Money amounting to £50
is to be paid in to a Banker.

Proprietors (tithe owners excepted) can sell their Common Rights or
allotments before the Award.


COMPENSATION.--(1) Leases at Rack Rent of any land to be inclosed,
either alone or together with any Messuages, Cottages, Toftsteads,
etc., to be void; the proprietor paying the lessee such satisfaction
as the Commissioners direct. _Exception._--No lease of any Messuage,
Cottage, Toftstead, Lands, Hereditaments or ancient Estate in respect
of which allotment is made for Right of Common is to be void; but the
allotments made to these are to belong to the proprietors who must pay
to the lessees such satisfaction as the Commissioners direct.

(2) Satisfaction (adjudged by the Commissioners) is to be given for
standing crops by the new allottee, unless the owner of the crops likes
to come and reap them.

Satisfaction is also to be given to the occupier for ploughing,
tilling and manuring, but no Swarth 6 years old is to be ploughed till
allotments are entered on.

(3) If any trees, shrubs, etc., go with the ground to a new proprietor,
the old proprietor is to be paid their valuation (as judged by the
Commissioners).


ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN ACT AND AWARD.--The Commissioners are to have
absolute power to determine the course of husbandry.


ROADS.--Commissioners to have power to set out and stop up roads and
footpaths (turnpike roads excepted), but are to give notice in a local
newspaper _re_ public carriage roads, and any person who thinks himself
or herself aggrieved can appeal to Quarter Sessions whose decision is
final.

If an ancient road or path is shut up, the person for whose
accommodation it is shut up may be required by the Commissioners to pay
compensation either (1) to person or persons injured or (2) for general
expenses of the Act.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not where
Commissioners’ determinations are said to be final.


AWARD.--Date, 1806. Record Office.


MAIN FEATURES OF AWARD:--


                                                  _a._  _r._ _p._
  Whole Area divided out,                       1701  3  21
                                                -----------
  Tithe Owners (various allotments), in all,     584  3   6[497]
  One of the tithe holders also receives,         24  3   4
  The Lords of the Manor,                        109  2   4[498]
  Lords of the Manor, as Guardians of the
      Free School,                                69  3  19
  Allotments for repairing roads,                  2  0   3
  For Fairs,                                       4  1  12
                                                -----------
                                                 795  1   8
                                                -----------

  The remainder is divided out amongst 130 allottees:--

  From 50-100 acres  4 }
  From 30-50 acres   7 }
  From 10-30 acres  10 }           Above 10 acres 21
                    -- }
                    21 }
                    --            From 1-10 acres 42

  From 1/2 acre-1 acre    22      }
  From 1/4 acre-1/2 acre  10      }
  Below 1/4 acre          35[499] } Below 1 acre  67
                          --      }              ---
                          67      }              130
                          --                     ---

The smallest allotments are, Ann Metcalf, Spinster, 14 perches, which
she must fence on the N. and W. sides; Ann Hubbard, Widow, 15 perches,
which she must fence on the S. and W. sides.

These, like the other small allotments, are in lieu of Right of Common
and all other Interest.


APPENDIX A (9)

SIMPSON, BUCKS.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1770


AREA.--Not specified anywhere. The annual value unenclosed is stated to
be £773, so the acreage was probably over 1500.


NATURE OF GROUND.--Open and Common Fields, Lammas Grounds and Pastures.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--

_First Attempt, December 13, 1762._--Petition from Walden Hanmer,
Esq., Lord of the Manor, William Edge, Gentleman, and other owners
and proprietors, stating that the holdings are at present intermixed
and dispersed, that the land in its present state is in great measure
incapable of Improvement, and that if it were divided and inclosed
great Benefit would accrue, and asking for leave to bring in a Bill to
enclose. Leave was given, and the Bill passed its second reading and
was sent to Committee. On March 16, 1763, came a petition against it
from John Goodman and Nicholas Lucas, Gentlemen, and other owners and
proprietors against the bill, ‘alleging that the Petitioners are Owners
and Proprietors of Four Fifth Parts, and upwards, of the said Fields,
Grounds, and Pastures, so intended to be inclosed, and of several
Rights and Privileges incident thereto,’ stating that the bill would
be greatly detrimental to all of them and ‘tend to the Ruin of many of
them,’ and asking to be heard by Counsel against the bill. Petition to
be heard when the bill was reported.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_March 25, 1763._--Mr. Lowndes
reported from the Committee, that the allegations were true and that
‘the Parties concerned had given their Consent to the Bill, to the
Satisfaction of the Committee (except Michael Woodward, Nicholas Lucas,
senior, Lewis Goodman, who, being asked to sign a Bill testifying their
Consent, and whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds amounts to
£31 a Year, or thereabouts, but the Witness could not ascertain the
Interest of the said Lewis Goodman and Thomas Goodman, said that they
had no Objection to the Inclosure, but did not care to sign, and also
except Luke Goodman and Edward Chad, whose Interest in the said Lands
and Grounds is £16 a Year; Edward Chad said he was by no means for
it, and Luke Goodman said, he would neither meddle nor make; and also
except Joseph Etheridge, a Minor, whose Interest in the said Lands and
Grounds is £38 a Year; and Mary Etheridge, his Guardian whose Interest
in the said Lands and Grounds is £16 a Year, said, she never was for
it, as being a Woman, and having nobody to look after her Fencing; and
also except ---- Loughton, John Goodman, and Son, whose Interest in
the said Lands and Grounds is £24 a Year; John Goodman said, he would
lose his Life before he would lose his Land; his Son said, he did not
care to meddle; and also except John Goodman, who, being asked to
sign a Bill, testifying his Consent, and whose Interest in the said
Lands and Grounds is £55 a year, said he would not sign it; and except
Sear Newman, whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds amounts to
£30 a Year, who said he had no Objection to it, but did not care to
meddle or make, upon Account of his Father being so much against it;
and it appeared to your Committee, by Articles of Agreement, dated
the 31st Day of December, 1761, that the said John Goodman and Sear
Newman did thereby consent and agree to an Inclosure of all the Open
and Commonable Fields, Lands, Cow Pasture, and Fields, within the
said Parish of Simpson, and to pay their respective Proportions of
the Expence of an Act of Parliament; and other the necessary Expences
attending the same; and also except John Newman, whose Interest in the
said Lands and Grounds is £30 a Year, who said he would not sign it;
and also except Nicholas Lucas the younger, whose Interest in the said
Fields is £36 a Year, who said he had no Objection to sign, if the
Cow Pasture had been left open; and also except Daniel Lucas, whose
Interest in the said Lands and Grounds is £25 a Year, who refused
signing; and also except George Wilkes, whose Interest in the said
Lands and Grounds is £1, 10s. a Year, who said he had no Occasion
to sign, because he had agreed with Mr. Hanmer for the Purchase of
his Commons; and also except Richard Goodman, Edward Ashwell, for a
Minor, Edward Cooke and John Fox, whose Interest in the said Lands
and Grounds together amounts to £5, 10s. a Year, who were not applied
to; and also except Sarah Hawes, Widow, who is lately dead; and also
except George Stone, whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds is
£3 a Year, who was not applied to, because he had sold his Interest to
Mr. Hanmer, who has consented to the Bill; and also except Six out of
Eight of the Feoffees of Lands belonging to the Poor of Simpson, which
Lands are of the yearly Value of £24: and also except the Feoffees of
certain Charity Lands and Grounds, of the yearly Value of £16; William
Cooper, one of the Feoffees, being asked to sign a Bill testifying his
Consent, said he was against it; and that the yearly Value of the said
Lands and Grounds, in the said Fields, Cow Pasture, Common Meadows,
Lammas Grounds, and Waste Grounds, amounts to Seven Hundred Ninety-nine
Pounds, Fifteen Shillings, or thereabouts;)....’

After the Report was read, Counsel was heard for the Petitioners
against the Bill, but the Bill was read a third time and sent up to the
Lords. March 29, it was read a second time, and a Petition against it
from John Goodman, John Newman, Nicholas Lucas and others was received.
April 14, Lord St. John of Bletsoe reported it without amendments from
the Committee, but it was defeated on its third reading.

_Second Attempt, January 15, 1765._--Walden Hanmer, Esquire, the
Rector, and others again petitioned for enclosure. Leave was given to
bring in a bill, but nothing came of it.

_Third Attempt, February 6, 1770._--Walden Hanmer, Esquire, and others
again petitioned for enclosure. Leave was given, and a bill read twice
and sent to Committee.

_March 6, 1770._--‘A Petition of the Major Part of the Owners and
Proprietors’ against the Bill, stating ‘that the Petitioners are very
well satisfied with the Situation and Convenience of their respective
Lands and Properties in their present uninclosed State,’ and that the
Bill will do them great Injury.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_March 6, 1770_ (same day).--Mr.
Kynaston reported that the allegations were true, and that the Parties
concerned had consented to the Bill ‘to the Satisfaction of the
Committee,’ with the following exceptions--Five Persons with property
of the annual value of £192, 10s.; Sear Numan, with property of annual
value of £20, 15s., ‘who said he must do as his Father would have
him’; John Lucas the younger, with property of the annual value of
15s.; George Cross, ‘who would not say any Thing,’ with property of
the annual value of £5; Elizabeth Mead, ‘who said she should sell when
inclosed,’ with property of the annual value of £2, 10s.; and Five
Persons, who said they would not oppose the Bill, with property of the
annual value of £77, 10s. The annual value of ‘the whole of the Estates
in the said Fields intended to be inclosed’ was given as £773. The
Bill passed the Commons and the Lords, where a petition against it was
considered. It received the Royal Assent on March 29, 1770.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 10 George III. c. 42.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Three appointed. (1) The Rev. John Lord of Drayton
Parslow, Clerk; (2) Thomas Harrison of Stoney Stratford, Gentleman; (3)
Francis Burton of Aynho, Northamptonshire, Gentleman. Two a quorum.
Vacancies to be filled up by remaining Commissioner or Commissioners
from persons ‘not interested in the Division and Inclosure.’ No
particulars of payment.

A survey to be made by a surveyor nominated by Commissioners.


CLAIMS.--The Commissioners are ‘to hear and finally determine’ any
differences about Interests and Rights.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Provisions for Lord of the Manor._--None (as there seems to have been
no common or waste ground concerned).

His manorial rights, right of common excepted, to go on as before.

_Provisions for Tithe Owners._--The Rector to have (1) such parcels of
Land as shall be a full equivalent of his glebe lands and common Right;
(2) 1/7 part of all the rest, ‘Quantity as well as Quality considered,’
as full compensation for all Tithes.

In the case of old inclosures which have allotments, the Commissioners
can give him either part of these or part of the owner’s allotment in
place of tithes, and in case of old inclosures, etc., which have no
allotment, they remain subject to Tithes.

The Rector is exonerated from keeping a Bull and a Boar.

_Provision for Gravel_, _Sand_, _etc._--See Allotment of Residue.

_Provision for Poor._--None.

_Allotment of Residue._--As soon as is convenient after the survey is
made, the Commissioners are to set out and allot the land in proportion
to the respective interests and right of common of the claimants,
‘having a due Regard to the Situation and Convenience, as well as to
the Quantity and Quality of the Lands and Grounds.’ The award, which
contains their decision, is to be final and conclusive.

Allotments must be accepted within 12 calendar months. Failure to
accept excludes the allottee from all Benefits under the Act. (Saving
clause for infants, etc.)

If material is needed for the roads, the surveyors may, under an
order from two J. P.’s not interested in the inclosure, enter on any
allotment and take it, except where the allotment is a garden, park,
orchard, paddock, wood, or ground planted with an avenue of trees for
the ornament of any House.


INCROACHMENTS.--Not mentioned; as no common.


FENCING.--To be done ‘at the proper Costs and Charges’ of the
respective allottees, as directed by the Commissioners, except in the
case of the Rector, whose allotment is to be fenced for him by the
other proprietors, and whose fences, if they abut on a highway, are
to be kept up by the other proprietors for 7 years. The fencing of all
allotments must be carried out within 12 months after the Award, and
if any person refuse to fence, the Commissioners, on complaint of a
neighbour, can do the fencing and charge it to the recalcitrant owner,
distraining on his goods, if necessary. If any one proprietor has more
than his fair share of fencing to do, then the Commissioners can make
the other proprietors pay something towards it. If any allotment abuts
on a common field, fencing is not compulsory.


EXPENSES.--These are to be paid by the Owners and Proprietors ‘by an
equal Pound Rate according to the Value of the Lands and Grounds each
Person shall have allotted to him.’ Proprietors are allowed to mortgage
their allotments up to 40s. an acre in order to meet expenses.


COMPENSATION TO OCCUPIERS.--All rack-rent leases are to be null and
void, the owners making such satisfaction to the tenants as the
Commissioners think reasonable.


ROADS.--Commissioners to have full power to set out and shut up roads,
footpaths, etc.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only; and not in cases where
the Commissioners’ decisions are final and conclusive, as, _e.g._, on
claims and allotments.


ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN ACT AND AWARD.--Directly the Act is passed, till
the allotments are made, the Commissioners are to have ‘the sole,
intire and absolute Management, Order and Direction’ of all the land
with regard to cultivation, flocks, etc., any usage to the contrary
notwithstanding.


AWARD.--Bucks, with Clerk of the Peace or Clerk of the Council. Date,
April 26, 1771.


APPENDIX A (10)

STANWELL.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1789


AREA.--According to Act ‘by Estimation about 3000 Acres,’ but Award
gives 2126 Acres only.


NATURE OF GROUND.--‘Large open fields, Arable and Meadow Grounds, and
Lammas Lands, about 1621 acres, and also several Commons, Moors and
Waste Lands,’ about 505 acres (unstinted).


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--

_First Attempt, December 12, 1766._--Petition for Enclosure from the
Lord of the Manor, the Impropriator of the Great Tythes, the Vicar, and
the most considerable Proprietors. Leave given. Bill read first time,
January 27, 1767.

_February 18, 1767._--Petition against the bill from various ‘Owners
or Occupiers of Cottages or Tenements in the parish of Stanwell,’
setting forth ‘that the Petitioners in Right of their said Cottages and
Tenements are severally intitled to Common of Pasture for their Cattle
and Sheep upon all the said Commons, Moors, and Waste Lands, at all
Times of the Year, except for Sheep, without any Stint whatsoever, as
also a Right of intercommoning their Cattle and Sheep, with those of
the Tenants of divers other Manors, at all Times in the Year, upon the
large Common called _Hounslow Heath_: and the Petitioners in the Rights
aforesaid, are also intitled to and do enjoy Common of Turbary on the
said Commons and Heath, and that the Lord of the Manor of Stanwell
lately caused part of the said Moors within the said Parish, to be
fenced in, and inclosed with Pales for his own sole and separate Use,
without the Consent of the Petitioners and other Persons intitled to a
Right of Common therein, which said Pales have been since pulled down
by several of the Petitioners and others, against whom several Actions
have been commenced by the Lord of the said Manor, in order to try the
Petitioners’ said Right of Common therein, all which Actions are now
depending; and that the Petitioners apprehend, and believe, in case
the said Bill should pass into a Law, the Legality of the Petitioners’
said Rights will be left to the Determination of Commissioners
unqualified to judge of the same: and that in case the Petitioners’
said Rights should be allowed by such Commissioners, that no adequate
Compensation in Land will or can be awarded to the Petitioners for the
same: and that the dividing and inclosing the said Commons, Moors, and
Waste Lands within the said Parish, will greatly injure and distress
many....’ Another petition was presented on the same day from George
Richard Carter, Esq., Samuel Clark, Esq., Jervoise Clark, Esq., John
Bullock, Esq., and several others, being owners and proprietors of
Farms and Lands in the parish of Stanwell, setting forth that the
Petitioners, as also the Owners of near 100 Cottages or Tenements
within the said Parish, and their respective Tenants are entitled to
right of pasture as in the petition given above, and stating that
inclosing will be attended with great inconvenience.

On February 26 came yet another petition from owners and occupiers in
the parishes of Harmondsworth, Harlington, Cranford, Heston, Isleworth,
Twickenham, Teddington, Hampton, Hanworth, Feltham, and East Bedfont in
Middlesex, setting forth that the Commons and Waste Lands in the parish
of Stanwell were part of Hounslow Heath, over which the petitioners had
right of pasture, and stating that if the part of the Heath in Stanwell
parish were inclosed it would be very injurious to all the owners and
occupiers in the parish of Stanwell, except to the Lord of the Manor,
and would also be prejudicial to the petitioners.

All these petitions were ordered to lie on the table till the second
reading, which took place on February 26. Counsel was heard for and
against the Bill; the motion that the Bill should be committed was
defeated by 34 to 17 votes, and thus the farmers were able to parade
along Pall Mall with cockades in their hats.[500]

_Second Attempt, February 20, 1789._--Petition from the Lord of the
Manor (Sir William Gibbons), the Vicar and others for enclosure. Leave
given. Bill read twice.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_March 30, 1789._--Sir William
Lemon reported from the Committee that the Standing Orders had been
complied with; that the allegations were true, and that the parties
concerned had given their consent ‘(except the Proprietors of Estates
of the Annual Value of £164, 14s. or thereabouts who refused to sign
the Bill, and also except the Proprietors of £220, 5s. 8d. per Annum or
thereabouts who did not chuse to sign the Bill, but made no Objection
to the Inclosure, and also except some small Proprietors of about £76
per Annum who could not be found, and that the whole Property belonging
to Persons interested in the Inclosure amounts to £2,929, 5s. 4d. per
annum or thereabouts).’ Bill passed both Houses. Royal Assent, May 19,
1789.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 29 George III. c. 15.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Edward Hare of Castor, Northampton, Gentleman;
William Young of Chancery Lane, Gentleman; Richard Davis of Lewknor,
Oxford, Gentleman. Two a quorum. Vacancies to be filled by remaining
Commissioners from persons not interested in the Inclosure.


SURVEYOR.--One named. Vacancy to be filled by Commissioners.


PAYMENT TO COMMISSIONERS.--£2, 2s. for each working day. Nothing about
Surveyor’s pay.

Special clause that certain Surveys already made may be used.


CLAIMS.--All claims about Right of Common ‘and all Differences and
Disputes which shall arise between the Parties interested, or claiming
to be interested in the said intended Division and Inclosure, or any of
them concerning their respective Rights, Shares, and Interests in the
said open Fields, arable and meadow Grounds, and Lammas Lands, Commons,
Moors, and Waste Grounds, or their respective Allotments, Shares and
Proportions which they, or any of them ought to have’ in the division,
are to be heard and determined by the Commissioners. This determination
is to be binding and conclusive on all parties; except with regard to
matters of Title which can be tried at law.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

(1) _Lords of the Manor_ (Sir William Gibbons, Thomas Somers Cocks,
Esq., and Thomas Graham, Esq.).--One sixteenth part of the residue of
the Moors and Waste Lands, when roads and allotment for gravel have
been deducted.

(2) _Tithe Owners._--Not to be prejudiced by the Act. Land still to be
liable to tithes as before.

(3) _Gravel Pits._--For roads and for use of inhabitants; not more than
3 acres.

(4) _Provision for Poor._--Such parcel as the Commissioners think
proper (‘not exceeding in the whole 30 Acres’). To be vested in the
Lords of the Manor, the Vicar, Churchwardens, and Overseers, and to be
let out, and the rents and profits thereof to be given for the benefit
of such occupiers and inhabitants as do not receive parish relief,
or occupy lands and tenements of more than £5 a year, or receive any
allotment under the Act.

_Allotment of Residue._--The land to be divided among the various
persons interested ‘in proportion and according (Quantity, Quality and
Situation considered) to their several and respective Shares, Rights,
and Interests therein.’ If the Commissioners think that any of the
allotments in the common fields are too small to be worth enclosing
they may lay such proprietors’ allotments together.

_Certain principles to be followed._--Owners of cottage commons who
are also proprietors of lands in the open fields are to have their
allotment in virtue of their Right of Common added to the other
allotment to which they are entitled.

Owners of cottage commons who do not possess land in the open fields as
well, are to have their allotments put all together for a cow common,
with such stint as the Commissioners decide. But if they wish for
separate allotments they may have them.

Allotments must be accepted within six months after award. Failure to
accept excludes allottee from all ‘Benefit Advantage’ by this Act, and
also from all estate right or interest in any other allotment. (Saving
clause for infants, etc.)

The award is to be drawn up; ‘and the Award, and all Orders,
Directions, Regulations, and Determinations therein contained, and
thereby declared, shall be binding and conclusive to and upon all
Persons whomsoever.’ Tenure of allotments to be that of estates
in virtue of which they are granted. Copyhold allotments can be
enfranchised if wished, the Commissioners deducting a certain amount as
compensation for Lord of the Manor. Allottees lose all Right of Common
on any common in adjoining parishes.


INCROACHMENTS.--Not mentioned in Act.


EXCHANGES.--Allowed (as always). Also former exchanges can be confirmed
by the Commissioners ‘notwithstanding any legal or natural Incapacity
of any Proprietor or Owner having made any such Exchanges.’


FENCING.--To be done by allottees. If any person has an undue
proportion Commissioners have power to equalise.

_Exceptions._--(1) Fences of cow common allotment for those who have
Cottage Common only (see above), which are to be made and kept in
repair by the other proprietors; but if these allottees choose to have
separate allotments they must fence them themselves.

(2) Allotment for the Poor (30 acres).--To be fenced by other
proprietors.

(3) Allotments to charities, ditto.

If any allottee refuses to fence or keep fences in repair his neighbour
can complain to a J.P. ‘not interested’ in the inclosure, and the J.P.
can either make an order, or else empower the complainant to enter and
carry the work out at the charge of the owner.


EXPENSES.--Part of the Commons and Wastes to be sold by auction to
cover expenses. Any surplus to be laid out by Commissioners on some
lasting improvements; any deficit to be made up by proprietors as
Commissioners direct.

Commissioners are to keep accounts which must be open to inspection.

To meet expenses allotments may be mortgaged up to 40s. an acre.


COMPENSATION TO OCCUPIERS.--Leases at rack or extended rents of any of
the land to be inclosed by this Act to be void, owners paying tenants
such compensation as Commissioners direct. Satisfaction is also to be
given for standing crops, for ploughing, manuring, and tilling.


ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN THE ACT AND AWARD.--The Commissioners are to
direct the course of husbandry ‘as well with respect to the Stocking as
to the Plowing, Tilling, Cropping, Sowing, and Laying down the same.’


ROADS.--Full power to set out roads and footpaths and to shut up
others. Turnpike roads excluded.


POWER OF APPEAL.--None.


AWARD.--Record Office.

From the Award we learn as follows:--

14 parcels of land, containing in all over 123 acres were sold to cover
expenses for £2512.

31-1/2 acres are allotted to the Lords of the Manor (Sir William
Gibbons, Thomas Somers Cocks, and Thomas Graham) in lieu of their
rights as Lords of the Soil.

490 acres to Sir William Gibbons in trust for himself and the other
Lords of the Manor in lieu of all other claims (freehold lands, rights
of common, etc.).

69 acres to the mortgagees of the late Sir J. Gibbons.

6 acres to the Trustees of the late Sir J. Gibbons.

400 acres to Edmund Hill, Esq. (who also bought 117 acres of the land
sold to defray costs).

100 acres to Henry Bullock, Esq.

72 acres to Thomas Hankey, Esq.

45 acres to Jervoise Clark Jervoise, Esq.

Allotments of from 20 to 40 acres to eleven other allottees.

Allotments of from 10 to 20 acres to twelve allottees.

Allotments of from 12 perches to 9 acres to seventy-nine allottees.

Twenty-four of these smaller allotments (including six of less than
2 acres) are given in lieu of open field property; the remaining
fifty-five are given in compensation for common rights of some sort or
other.

Sixty-six cottages appear as entitling their owners to
compensation.[501] Of these 66, 16 belong to Henry Bullock and 8 to
Sir William Gibbons, and the remaining 42 to 38 different owners. The
allotments to cottages vary from a quarter of an acre (John Merrick) to
over an acre (Anne Higgs). The owners of cottage commons only had their
allotments separately and not in common.


APPENDIX A (11)

WAKEFIELD, YORKS.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1793


AREA.--2300 acres ‘or thereabouts.’


NATURE OF GROUND.--Open Common Fields, Ings, Commons, Waste Grounds,
within the townships of Wakefield, Stanley, Wrenthorpe, Alverthorpe,
and Thornes.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_January 23, 1793._--Petition from several
owners and proprietors for enclosure. Leave given to prepare bill.
January 28, Wilberforce presented it; February 18, it was committed to
Wilberforce, Duncombe and others.

_February 28._--Petition against the bill from the Earl of Strafford,
stating that the bill will greatly affect and prejudice his property.
Petition referred to Committee.

Same day, Petition against the bill from several Persons, being Owners
of Estates and Occupiers of Houses in the Town and Parish of Wakefield.
‘Setting forth, That, if the said Bill should pass into a Law, as it
now stands, the same will greatly affect and prejudice the Estates
and Property of the Petitioners, (viz.), their being deprived of the
Benefit they now receive from the Pasturage of the Ings, from the
12th of August to the 5th of April, and for which they cannot receive
any Compensation adequate thereto, as well as the Restrictions which
exclude the Inhabitants from erecting Buildings on Land that may be
allotted to them for Twenty, Forty, and Sixty Years, on different Parts
of Westgate Common, as specified in the said Bill.’ This petition also
was referred to the Committee.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_March 12._--Wilberforce reported
from the Committee that the Standing Orders had been complied with,
that they had considered the first Petition (Lord Strafford’s), (no
one had appeared to be heard on behalf of the second Petition),
that they found the allegations of the Bill true, that ‘the Parties
concerned’ had given their consent to the Bill, and also to adding
one Commissioner to the three named in the Bill ‘(except the Owners
of Estates whose Property in the Lands and Grounds to be divided and
inclosed is assessed to the Land Tax at £5 per Annum or thereabouts,
who refused to sign the Bill; and also, except the Owners of Estates
whose Property in the said Lands and Grounds is assessed to the Land
Tax at about £51 per Annum, who have either declared themselves
perfectly indifferent about the Inclosure, or not given any Answer to
the Application made to them respecting it; and that the whole Property
belonging to Persons interested in the Inclosure is assessed to the
Land Tax at £432 per Annum, or thereabouts ...).’

Bill passed Commons and Lords. March 28, Royal Assent.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 33 George III. c. 11.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Four appointed. (1) Richard Clark of Rothwell Haigh,
Gentleman; (2) John Renshaw of Owthorp, Notts, Gentleman; (3) John
Sharp of Gildersome, Yorks, Gentleman; (4) William Whitelock of
Brotherton, Yorks, Gentleman; the first representing the Duke of Leeds,
the second the Earl of Strafford (no doubt this was the Commissioner
added in Committee), and the other two representing the Majority in
Value of the Persons interested. Any vacancy to be filled up by the
party represented, and new Commissioners to be ‘not interested in the
said Inclosure.’ Three to be a quorum. In case of dispute and equal
division of opinion amongst the Commissioners, an Umpire is appointed
(Isaac Leatham of Barton, Gentleman); the decision of Commissioners and
Umpire to be final and conclusive.


PAYMENT TO COMMISSIONERS.--2 guineas each for each working day. The
Surveyors (2 appointed) to be paid as Commissioners think fit.


CLAIMS.--All claims with full particulars of the nature and tenure of
the property on behalf of which the claim is made are to be handed
in at the 1st or 2nd meeting of the Commissioners; no claim is to be
received later except for some special cause; and the determination of
the Commissioners as to the various claims is to be binding and final.
There are, however, three exceptions to the above, (1) Persons claiming
in virtue of Messuages and Tofts need not prove usage of common; (2)
Any Person who is dissatisfied with regard to his own or some one
else’s claim, may give notice in writing, and the Commissioners are
then to take Counsel’s opinion on the matter. The Commissioners are
to choose the Counsel, who is to be ‘not interested in the Premises.’
The Commissioners may also on their own responsibility take Counsel’s
opinion at any time they think proper; Counsel’s opinion is to be
final. The costs are to be paid by the party against whom the dispute
is determined, or otherwise as the Commissioners decide; (3) The Earl
of Strafford is exempted from specifying particulars of Tenure in
making his claim, for there are disputes on this subject between the
Duke and the Earl, ‘which Matters in Difference the said Duke and Earl
have not agreed to submit to the Consideration or Determination of the
said Commissioners.’ The Commissioners need not specify the tenure of
the Earl’s share in making their award, and if the Duke and Earl go to
law about their dispute and the matter is settled in a Court of Equity,
then the Commissioners are to make a second special Award for them.


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Provisions for the Lord of the Manor_--‘the Most Noble Francis, Duke
of Leeds.’--

(1) Such part of the Commons and Waste Grounds as is ‘equal in Value
to One full Sixteenth Part thereof in lieu of and as a sufficient
Recompence for his Right to the Soil of the said Commons and Waste
Grounds, and for his Consent to the Division and Inclosure thereof;

(2) An allotment of the Commons and Waste Grounds to be (in the
judgment of the Commissioners) a fair compensation for his Coney
Warrens which are to be destroyed;

(3) An allotment equal in value (in the judgment of the Commissioners)
to £40 a year as compensation for the reserved Rents he has been
receiving from persons who have made incroachments during the last 20
years;

(4) An allotment or allotments of not more than 5 acres in the whole,
to be awarded in such place as the Duke or his Agents appoint, close
to one of his stone quarries, as compensation for the right given by
the Act to other allottees of the Common of getting stone on their
allotments;

(5) The value of all the timber on allotments from the common is to be
assessed by the Commissioners, and paid by the respective allottees to
the Duke. If they refuse to pay, the Duke may come and cut down the
timber ‘without making any Allowance or Satisfaction whatsoever to the
Person or Persons to whom any such Allotment shall belong, for any
Injury to be done thereby’;

(6) The Duke’s power to work Mines and to get all Minerals is not to be
interfered with by anything in this Act but the ‘Owners or Proprietors
of the Ground wherein such Pits or Soughs shall be made, driven, or
worked, or such Engines, Machines or Buildings erected, or such Coals
or Rubbish laid, or such Ways, Roads or Passages made and used,’ are
to have a ‘reasonable Satisfaction for Damages.’ The payment of the
reasonable Satisfaction however is not to fall on the Duke, but on all
the allottees of the Commons and Waste Grounds who are to meet together
in the Moot Hall and appoint a salaried officer to settle the damages
and collect the money by a rate raised according to the Poor Rate
of the previous year. If the claimant and the officer fail to agree,
arbitrators, and ultimately an umpire, can be appointed.

_Provisions for Tithe Owners._--A fair allotment is to be given to
the Vicar in compensation for his small Tythes. In cases where the
allottees have not enough land to contribute their due share to the
tithe allotment, they have to pay a yearly sum instead.

_For Stone and Gravel_, _etc._--Suitable allotments for stone and
gravel, etc., to be made ‘for the Use and Benefit’ of all allottees
‘for the Purpose of getting Stone, Sand, Gravel, or other Materials
for making and repairing of the public Roads and Drains’; but these
allotments are not to include any of the Duke’s or of his tenants’
stone quarries.

_Provision for the Poor._--None.

_Allotment of Residue._--(1) The open fields are to be divided out
amongst the present proprietors in proportion to their present value
and with regard to convenience; unless any owner of open-field land
specially asks for an allotment elsewhere; (2) The owners of Ings are
to have Ings allotted to them, unless they wish for land elsewhere; (3)
The Commons and Waste grounds are first to have the various allotments
to the Lord of the Manor and the Vicar specified above, and also the
allotment for Stone and Gravel for roads deducted from them, and then
the residue is to be allotted ‘among the several Persons (considering
the said Duke of Leeds as one) having Right of Common in or upon the
said Commons and Waste Grounds’ in the following fashion; one half is
to be divided among the Owners or Proprietors of Messuages, Cottages
or Tofts with Right of Common, according to their several Rights and
Interests; the other half, together with the rest and residue of Land
to be divided, is to be allotted among the Owners or Proprietors of
open common fields, Ings, and old inclosed Lands according to their
several rights and interests ‘without any undue Preference whatsoever.’
The Commissioners are also directed to pay due regard to situation
and to putting the different allotments of the same person together.
Allotments are to be of the same tenure, _i.e._ freehold or copyhold,
as the holdings in respect of which they are claimed, but no fines are
to be taken on account of the allotment.

With respect to the allottees of allotments on Westgate Moor, a special
clause (see petition on January 23) is inserted. They are forbidden to
put up any House, Building or Erection of any kind on one part for 20,
on another for 40, on another for 60, years, unless the Duke consents,
the object being ‘thereby the more advantageously to enable the said
Duke, his Heirs and Assigns, to work his Colliery in and upon the same
Moor.’

The award, with full particulars of allotments, etc., is to be drawn
up and is to be ‘final, binding, and conclusive upon all Parties and
Persons interested therein.’

If any person (being Guardian, etc., tenant in tail or for life of
lessee, etc.) fails to accept and fence, then Commissioners can do
it for him and charge; if he still refuses, Commissioners can lease
allotment out and take rent till Expenses are paid.


INCROACHMENTS.--Incroachments 20 years old are to stand; those made
within 20 years are to be treated as part of the Commons to be divided,
but they are, if the Commissioners think it fit and convenient, to be
allotted to the person in possession without considering the value of
erections and improvements. Three contingencies for allotment to the
person in possession are provided for;--(1) if he is entitled to an
allotment, his incroachment is to be treated as part or the whole of
his allotment;

(2) If his incroachment is of greater value than the allotment he
is entitled to, then he is to pay whatever extra sum of money the
Commissioners judge right;

(3) If he is not entitled to any allotment at all, then he has to pay
the price set on his incroachment by the Commissioners.

If the Commissioners do not allot an incroachment to the person in
possession, they may sell it at public auction and apply the money
to the purposes of the Act, or they may allot it to someone not in
possession, in which case a ‘reasonable’ sum of money is to be given to
the dispossessed owner, the new allottee paying the whole or part of it.

The above provisions apply to the ordinary incroachers; the Duke has
special arrangements. If he has made any new incroachments during
the last 20 years in addition to any older incroachments, these new
incroachments are to be valued by the Commissioners, and the Duke is
to have them either as part of his allotment or for a money payment,
as he chooses; also ‘whereas the Tenants of the said Duke of Leeds of
the Collieries on the said Commons and Waste Lands ... have from Time
to Time erected Fire Engines, Messuages, Dwelling Houses, Cottages and
other Buildings upon the said Commons and Waste Lands, and made several
other Conveniences thereon for the Use and Accommodation of the said
Collieries, and the Persons managing and working the same, a great Part
of which have been erected and made within the last Twenty Years, these
are not to be treated like other incroachments, but are to ‘be and
continue the absolute Property of the said Duke of Leeds, his Heirs and
Assigns, in as full and ample Manner’ as if the erections had been made
more than 20 years before.


FENCING.--All allotments are to be fenced at the expense of their
several proprietors ‘in such Manner, Shares and Proportions as the said
Commissioners shall ... direct’ with the following exceptions--(1)
the Vicar’s allotment for small Tithes is to be fenced by the other
proprietors; (2) the allotments to Hospitals, Schools, and other public
Charities are to have a certain proportion deducted from them to cover
the cost of fencing. Allottees who refuse to fence can be summoned
before a J.P. by their neighbours, and the J.P. (who is not to be
interested in the Enclosure) can make an order compelling them to fence.

To protect the new hedges, it is ordered that no sheep or lambs are to
be turned out in any allotment for 7 years, unless the allottee makes
special provision to protect his neighbour’s young quickset, and no
beasts, cattle or horses are to be turned into any roads or lanes where
there is a new-growing fence.


EXPENSES.--Part of the Commons and Waste Grounds is to be sold to
cover the expences; if the proceeds do not cover the costs the residue
is to be paid by the allottees in proportion to their shares, and
any surplus is to be divided among them, But Hospitals, Schools, and
Public Charities are exempted from this payment, a portion of their
allotments, in fact, having been already deducted in order to pay
their share of Expenses. The Commissioners are to keep an account of
Expenses, which is to be open to inspection. The owners of Ings are to
pay a sum of money in return for the extinction of the right of Eatage
(referred to by the Petitioners) on their land from August 12 to April
5; and this money is to be applied for the purposes of the Act.

If allottees find the expenses of the Act and of fencing more than they
can meet, they are allowed (with the consent of the Commissioners)
to mortgage their allotments up to 40s. an acre. If they dislike
this prospect, they are empowered by the Act, at any time before the
execution of the Award, to sell their rights to allotment in respect of
any common right.


COMPENSATION TO OCCUPIERS.--Occupiers are to pay a higher rent in
return for the loss of the use of common rights. The clause runs
as follows:--‘That the several Persons who hold any Lands or other
Estates, to which a Right of Common upon the said Commons and Waste
Grounds is appurtenant or belonging, or any Part of the said Open
Common Fields or Inclosures, by virtue of any Lease, of which a longer
Term than One Year is unexpired, shall and are hereby required to
pay to their respective Landlords such Increase of Rent towards the
Expences such Landlords will be respectively put to in Consequence of
this Act, as the said Commissioners shall judge reasonable, and shall
by Writing under their Hands direct or appoint, having Regard to the
Duration of such respective Leases, and to the probable Benefit which
will accrue to such respective Lessees by Reason of the said Inclosure.’


ROADS.--Commissioners to have full power to set out and shut up roads
and footpaths (turnpike roads excepted).


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not in any cases where
the Commissioners’ decisions are final, binding, or conclusive, as
they are, _e.g._ on claims (except the Earl of Strafford’s) and on
allotments.


AWARD.--Not with Clerks of Peace or of County Council, or in Record
Office.


APPENDIX A (12)

WINFRITH NEWBURGH, DORSET.--ENCLOSURE ACT, 1768


AREA.--2254 Acres or thereabouts.


NATURE OF GROUND.--Common Fields, Meadow Grounds, Sheep Downs, Commons,
Common Heaths, and other Waste Grounds.

(In Report, Common Arable Fields and Common Meadows = 1218 acres.)


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_December 1, 1767._--Petition for enclosure
from Edward Weld, Esq., George Clavell, Esq., Benjamin Thornton, Clerk,
William Weston, Clerk, John Felton, Gentleman, and others. Leave
given; bill read twice and committed on December 11 to a Committee of
42 members in addition to the members for Dorset, Somerset, Devon and
Cornwall. All to have Voices. January 25, 1768, Petition from persons
being Freeholders, Proprietors of Estates or otherwise interested,
against the bill stating ‘that if the said Bill should pass into a
Law the Estates of the Petitioners and others in the said Parish
will be greatly injured, and several of them 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 shall be subject
to by the Inclosure, beg Leave now to have Liberty to retract from
their seeming Acquiescence in the said Petition,’ and ask to be heard
by Counsel against the Bill. Petition referred to the Committee.

_January 29, 1768._--Mr. Bond reported from the Committee that there
was an erasure in the prayer of the said Petition and asked for
instructions. A fresh Committee of 36 members (many of whom were also
members of the other Committee) was appointed to examine into the
question of how the erasure was made, and whether it was previous or
subsequent to the signing. This Committee was ordered to report to the
House, but there is no record of its report.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_February 2, 1768._--Mr. Bond
reported from the Committee that the allegations were true, and that
the ‘Parties concerned’ had given their consent ‘(except Four Persons
who could not be found whose Property in the Common Meadows to be
inclosed amounts to Five Acres, Three Roods, Twenty Three Perches
and a half; and also except Four other Persons who, when applied to
for their Consent to the Bill, refused to sign, though they declared
they had no Objection, and whose Property in the Common Meadows to be
inclosed amounts to Four Acres, One Rood, Thirty Eight Perches; and
also except Six Persons whose Property in the Common Arable Fields
and Common Meadows to be inclosed mounts to One hundred and twenty
two Acres, Thirty Three Perches, who refused to sign the Bill; and
also, except Three Persons, whose Property in the Common Arable Fields
and Common Meadows, to be inclosed, amounts to One hundred and seven
Acres, Twenty Three Perches, who hold under Copies of Court Roll,
granted on Condition that they would join in any Act or Deed for the
dividing and inclosing the said Common Fields, and Meadows, and other
Commonable Lands within the said Manor, when thereto requested by the
Lord of the said Manor; and that the whole Number of Acres in the said
Common Arable Fields and Common Meadows is One thousand, Two hundred
and eighteen, Twenty Eight Perches and a half, and that the Rector of
Winfrith Newburgh and Vicar of Campden, who are intitled to all the
Great and Small Tithes arising out of the said Common Arable Fields and
Common Meadows have consented thereto).’

_February 2, 1768_ (same day).--Another Petition against the bill from
Freeholders, Proprietors and Persons otherwise interested stating
that the Inclosure is ‘contrary to the general Sense of the Persons
interested therein,’ and will be ‘injurious to the Property of the
Petitioners and others, the smaller Landholders within the said Parish,
some of whom must, in the Petitioners’ Judgment, be totally ruined
thereby.’ Petitioners to be heard when Report considered.

_February 3, 1768._--Report considered. House informed that no Counsel
attended. Report read. Clause added settling the expenses to be paid
by Copyholders and Lessees for Lives. Bill sent to Lords. February
9, Committed. Same day, Petition against it from various persons as
‘contrary to the general Sense of the Persons interested therein.’
Referred to Committee. February 12, Lord Delamer reported from the
Committee without amendment. February 24, Royal Assent.


MAIN FEATURES OF ACT.--(Private, 8 George III. c. 18.)


COMMISSIONERS.--Seven appointed. (1) John Bond, Esq., of Grange; (2)
David Robert Mitchell, Esq., of Dewlish; (3) Nathaniel Bond, Esq., of
West Lulworth; (4) Thomas Williams, Esq., of Herringstone; (5) William
Churchill, Esq., of Dorchester; (6) George Lillington of Burngate,
Gentleman; (7) Joseph Garland of Chaldon, Gentleman; all of Dorset.

Sometimes 3, sometimes 4 a quorum. Vacancies to be filled up by
remaining Commissioners from persons not interested in the land to be
inclosed.

Survey to be made if Commissioners ‘shall think the same necessary.’


PAYMENT.--Nothing stated.


CLAIMS.--Commissioners to examine into and determine on all claims;
and ‘in case any Difference or Dispute shall arise between all or
any of the Parties interested in the said Division and Inclosure,
with respect to the Premises, or any Matter or Thing herein contained
or consequent thereon, or in relation thereunto, the same shall be
adjusted and finally determined between the said Parties, and every
of them, by the said Commissioners, or any Three or more of them.’
Commissioners can examine witnesses on oath, ‘and the Determinations of
the said Commissioners, or any Three or more of them therein, shall be
binding and conclusive to all and every the said Parties....’


SYSTEM OF DIVISION--SPECIAL PROVISIONS:

_Lords of the Manor_ (Edward Weld, Esq., of Winfrith Newburgh; George
Clavell, Esq., of Langcotts and East Fossell).--No special provision
for allotment. Their Manorial Rights are not to be prejudiced by Act
except as regards ‘the Mines, Delves, and Quarries lying within and
under such Parts, Shares, and Proportions of the said Common Fields,
Meadow Grounds, Sheep Downs, Commons, Common Heaths and other Waste
Grounds, as shall or may be allotted and assigned to the several other
Freeholders and Owners of Lands’ within these Manors ‘or to any Person
or Persons not having any Lands within the said In-Parish or Manors,
or within the Precincts thereof as aforesaid, in Lieu of or as an
Equivalent for such Right or Claim as aforesaid; and other than and
except such Common of Pasture and other Common Rights as can or may be
claimed by or belonging to the Lord or Lords of the said Manors in and
upon the Premises so intended to be divided and inclosed as aforesaid.’

_Tithe Owners._--Tithe owners to have the same rights to Tithes over
the land about to be inclosed as they have over the lands already
inclosed.

If arable land is converted to pasture on inclosure (for Dairy Cows or
Black Cattle) then allottees shall pay an annual 3s. an acre to tithe
owners as compensation for corn tithes. Allotments given in virtue of
estates which are Cistertian Lands, are to be deemed Cistertian Lands
too, _i.e._ to have same exemption from tithes, but any Cistertian
Lands which are allotted are to be under the same obligations for
tithes as the estates in virtue of which they are allotted.

_Provision for the Poor._--None.

_Provision for Fuel Allotment._--Commissioners are to ascertain and
determine all Rights of Common over the land to be enclosed, and are
then to set out such part or parts ‘as shall appear to them to be
sufficient, and to be conveniently situate for the preserving and
raising Furze, Turf, or other Fuel, for the Use of the several Persons’
who shall appear to the Commissioners to be intitled to a Right of
Common.

_Allotment of Residue._--Amongst all persons who appear to the
Commissioners to be intitled to a Right of Common, or to have or be
intitled to any other Property in the said Common Fields, etc., in such
proportions as the Commissioners judge right ‘without giving any undue
Preference,’ and with due regard to Quality, Quantity, and Situation.

But the following Rules are to be observed with regard to proportions:--

(1) Common Fields and Sheep Downs are to be divided ‘by and according
to the Parts and Proportions of the Arable Lands lying in the said
Common Fields, where the said Parties respectively now are, or, at the
Time of such Allotments so as aforesaid to be made shall be intitled
to.’

(2) Meadow Grounds, Commons, Common Heaths, and other Waste Grounds
to be divided ‘according to the Sum or Sums of money which the said
Parties and each of them now stand charged with towards the Relief of
the Poor of the said Parish’ in respect of their lands which have right
of common.

_Special Clause._--In case it appears to the Commissioners that any
persons who have no land, nevertheless have a right of common, then
the Commissioners can allot such person such part of the land to be
inclosed as they think an equivalent for such right of common. In order
to prevent all Differences and Disputes, the Commissioners are to draw
up an Award, and this Award shall be binding and conclusive to all and
every Person and Persons interested. Failure to accept within 6 months
excludes allottee from all benefit and advantage of this Act, and
also ‘from any Estate, Interest or Right of Common, or other Property
whatsoever’ in any other allotment. (Saving clause for infants, etc.)


INCROACHMENTS.--Not mentioned.


FENCING, etc.--To be done by allottees in such proportions as
Commissioners direct. Such directions to be put in award, and to be
final and binding. Fences to be made within 12 months, or some other
convenient space of time.

If an allottee fails to fence, his neighbour can complain to a J.P.
(not interested in the inclosure), who can authorise complainant to do
it, and either charge defaulter or to enter on premises and receive
rents till expenses paid. _Exception._--Allotment of Copyholders and
leaseholders for one or more lives are to be fenced partly by the Lord
of the Manor and partly by the allottees in such proportion as the
Commissioners (or 4 of them) direct.


EXPENSES.--(1) Expenses of obtaining and passing the Act to be borne by
the Lords of the Manor.

(2) Expenses of carrying out the Act (survey, allotment, Commissioners’
charges, etc.) to be borne by the several allottees in proportion to
the Quantity of Land allotted to them, or otherwise as Commissioners
direct. _Exception._--Tithe owners’ share to be borne by the Lords of
the Manor. Commissioners can distrain for payment.

Trustees, Tenants in Tail or for Life may mortgage up to 40s. an acre.


COMPENSATION.--Leases and agreements at Rack Rent to be void, owners
making such compensation to Lessees as Commissioners judge right.


ROADS.--Commissioners have power to set out and shut up roads and
footpaths.


POWER OF APPEAL.--To Quarter Sessions only, and not when Commissioners’
determination said to be final.


AWARD.--August 17, 1771. With Dorset Clerk of Peace or of County
Council.


APPENDIX A (13)

QUAINTON.--ATTEMPTED ENCLOSURE, 1801


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_March 20, 1801._--Petition for enclosures
from ‘several persons.’ Leave given. Earl Temple, Sir William Young,
and Mr. Praed to prepare bill.

_April 2._--Bill read first time.

_April 13._--Petition from various proprietors of Lands, Common Rights,
and other Hereditaments against the bill, stating that enclosure ‘would
be attended with an Expence to the Proprietors far exceeding any
Improvement to be derived therefrom.’ Ordered to be heard on second
reading.

_April 15._--Bill read second time. Petitioners declined to be heard.
Bill committed to Mr. Praed, Earl Temple, etc.

_April 21._--Petition against the bill from various proprietors stating
‘that the Proprietors of the said Commonable Lands are very numerous,
and the Shares or Properties belonging to most of them are so small
that the proposed Division and Inclosure would be attended with an
Expence far exceeding any Improvement to be derived therefrom; and
that a great Majority in Number of the said Proprietors dissent to the
said Bill, and the Proprietors of more than One-third, and very nearly
One-half Part in Value, of the Lands to be inclosed, also dissent
thereto; and that many of the Clauses and Provisions in the said Bill
are also highly injurious’ to the petitioners.

Referred to the Committee. All to have voices.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_June 12._--Mr. Praed reported
from the Committee that the Standing Orders had been complied with,
that the allegations were true, and that the Parties concerned had
given their consent (except the owners of Estates assessed to the Land
Tax at £39, 12s. 6-1/4d. who refused to sign the bill, and the owners
of Estates assessed at £3, 10s. 0d. who were neuter; and that the whole
of the Estates ‘interested’ were assessed at £246, 8s. 6d.).

Same day.--Petition against the bill from Richard Wood on behalf of
himself and other proprietors who were parties to the former petition,
Richard Wood being the only one left in London, setting forth ‘that
the said Bill proposes to inclose only a Part of the said Parish of
Quainton, consisting of 3 open Arable Fields, and about 280 Acres of
Commonable Land, lying dispersedly in, or adjoining to the said Open
Fields, the rest of the said Parish being Old inclosed Lands’; that the
agent for the bill had given the Committee a statement (1) of the names
of the persons interested; (2) of the amount at which these persons
were assessed to the Land Tax for their property throughout the parish,
according to which statement it appeared, first, that of the 34 persons
interested, ‘not being Cottagers,’ 8 assented, 4 were neuter, and 22
dissented; but that, second, as stated in terms of Land Tax Assessment,
£203, 5s. 11-3/4d. assented, and £39, 12s. 6-1/4d. dissented; that
this statement was wrong inasmuch as the proprietors of old inclosed
lands had in respect of old inclosures no rights over the commonable
lands, and that therefore no old inclosed land could rank as property
‘interested’ in the inclosure. The petitioners gave the following
enumeration of Consents as the correct one; whole quantity of land in
the Open Fields, ‘in respect of which only a Right of Common could be
claimed,’ 42-1/4 yard lands:--

  Land belonging to those who assented,    21-3/4 yard lands
        „            „        dissented,   19-1/2    „
        „            „        were neutral, 1     yard land

or in terms of annual value--

  Assenting,      £406 10  0
  Dissenting,      370  0  0
  Neutral,          37  0  0

The petitioners further stated that their Counsel had offered to call
witnesses before the Committee to prove the above facts; that the agent
for the bill had retorted that old inclosed lands had a right in the
Commons, although he did not pretend that such right had ever been
enjoyed, or produce any witness to show that it had ever been claimed,
but supported his claim by quoting a clause in the bill by which it
was proposed that the Rector’s Tithes for the old inclosures as well
as the new should be commuted for an allotment of land; and that the
Committee refused to hear the evidence tendered by the petitioners’
Counsel. This Petition was referred to the Committee to whom the bill
was recommitted, and the bill was dropped.


APPENDIX A (14)


SUBSEQUENT HISTORY OF KING’S SEDGMOOR

In 1775, Mr. Allen, Member of Parliament for Bridgwater, tried to
get an enclosure bill passed. ‘Sanguine of success, and highly
impressed with the idea of its importance, he purchased a large
number of rights, and having obtained a signature of consents, went to
Parliament; but not having interest enough in the House to stem the
torrent of opposition, all his delusive prospects of profit vanished,
and he found himself left in a small but respectable minority.’[502]
No further attempt was made till 1788, when a meeting to consider
the propriety of draining and dividing the moor, was held at Wells.
‘At this meeting Sir Philip Hales presided; and after much abuse and
opposition from the lower order of commoners, who openly threatened
destruction to those who supported such a measure, the meeting was
dissolved without coming to any final determination.

‘The leading idea was, however, afterwards pursued, with great
assiduity, by Sir Philip, and his agent Mr. Symes of Stowey; and by
their persevering industry, and good management,’[503] application was
again made to Parliament in 1791.


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS.--_February 18, 1791._--Petition from several
Owners and Proprietors for a bill to drain and divide the tract of
waste ground of about 18,000 acres called King’s Sedgmoor. Petitioners
point out that the moor is liable to be overflowed, ‘and thereby the
same is not only less serviceable and useful to the Commoners, but
also, by reason of the Vapours and Exhalations which arise from thence,
the Air of the circumjacent Country is rendered less salubrious’; also
that it would be ‘beneficial, as well to the wholesomeness of the
neighbouring Country as also to the Profitableness of the Pasturage of
the said Moor’ if it were drained and divided into Parochial or other
large allotments. The House was also informed that the expense of the
undertaking was not proposed to be levied by Tolls or Duties upon the
Parties interested.

Leave given. Mr. Philips and Sir John Trevelyan to prepare. February
28. Bill committed to Mr. Philips, Mr. Templar, etc.


REPORT AND ENUMERATION OF CONSENTS.--_March 7._--Mr. Philips reported
that the Standing Orders had been complied with, that the allegations
were true, and that the parties concerned had consented ‘(except the
Owners of 107 Rights on the said Moor, who declared themselves neuter
in respect to the Bill; and also except the Owners of 84 Rights, who
declared themselves against the Bill; and that the whole of the Rights
on the said Moor consist of 1740, or thereabouts; and that no Person
appeared before the Committee to oppose the Bill).’

The Bill passed Commons, March 9; Lords, April 15. Royal Assent, May 13.

Billingsley, after describing the attempts to enclose Sedgmoor, remarks
(p. 192): ‘I have been thus particular in stating the progress of this
business merely to show the impropriety of calling public meetings with
a view of gaining signatures of consent or taking the sense of the
proprietors in that way. At all publick meetings of this nature which I
ever attended noise and clamour have silenced sound sense and argument.
A party generally attends with a professed desire to oppose, and truth
and propriety have a host of foes to combat. Whoever therefore has
an object of this kind in view let him acquire consent by _private
application_; for I have frequently seen the good effects thereof
manifested by the irresistible influence of truth when coolly and
quietly administered; and it has frequently happened that men hostile
to your scheme have by dispassionate argument not only changed their
sentiment but become warm partisans in that cause which at first they
meant to oppose.’

The task of Sir Philip and Mr. Symes in acquiring consents by the
cool and quiet administration of truth must have been considerably
lightened by the fact that Parliament anticipated the Commissioners
with extraordinary accuracy in disregarding 55% of the claims. The
Commissioners, says Billingsley, investigated 4063 claims, of which
only 1798 were allowed. The Parliamentary Committee had asserted that
there were 1740 rights, ‘or thereabouts.’

The Act for draining and dividing King’s Sedgmoor is not, so far as we
have been able to discover, amongst the printed Statutes.

Particulars of the expenses are given by Billingsley (p. 196), who
estimates the area at 12,000 acres:--

                                                            £   _s._ _d._
  To act of parliament and all other incidental expenses,  1,628 15  0
  Interest of money borrowed,                              3,239  4 11
  Commissioners,                                           4,314  7  8
  Clerk,                                                   1,215 19  0
  Surveyor,                                                  908 12  6
  Printers,                                                  362  6  3
  Petty expenses,                                            575 11  1
  Land purchased,                                          2,801  4 11
  Drains, sluices, bridges and roads,                     15,418  2  8
  Awards and incidentals,                                  1,160  0  8
                                                          ------------
                                                         £31,624  4  8
                                                         -------------

About 700 acres were sold to discharge the expenses.

The drainage and division into parochial allotments was a preliminary
to enclosure of the different parochial shares, which was of course
made easier by the fact that 55% of the claims had already been
disallowed. In the years 1796, ’97, and ’98, fourteen Enclosure Acts
for the different parishes were passed.

(Butleigh and Woollavington, 1796. Aller, Ashcott, Compton Dundon,
Higham, Othery, Moorlinch, Somerton, Street, and Weston Zoyland, 1797.
Bridgwater, Chedjoy, and Midellzoy, 1798.)

Billingsley estimated that the total cost of subdividing parochial
allotments would be £28,000.

He also estimated that the value of the land rose from 10s. to 35s. an
acre.


FOOTNOTES:

[490] Referred to below as ‘A’.

[491] Referred to below as ‘B’.

[492] Note that the compensation to the Lords of the Manor added
together comes to less than one ninety-first part of the soil.

[493] _I.e._ lands over which there is right of common for half the
year between Michaelmas and Lady Day or Lammas and Lady Day.

[494] This referred to roads only, see Act.

[495] It took twenty-nine years.

[496] Sir James Lowther, afterwards Lord Lowther, who had originally
petitioned for enclosure, had died in 1802. He was succeeded by his
cousin, Wordsworth’s patron.

[497] These allotments were fenced by the other proprietors and did not
bear any of the expenses of the Act.

[498] Including 8 acres 1 rood 5 perches for rights of soil.

[499] Nine of them women.

[500] See p. 55.

[501] See Petition, p. 379, where nearly a hundred are said to do so.

[502] Billingsley’s _Somerset_, p. 191.

[503] _Ibid._, pp. 191-2.



APPENDIX B

BEDFORDSHIRE.--CLOPSHILL, 1795.[504]


FAMILY OF SIX PERSONS.

  _Expences by the Week_--                  £ _s._  _d._
      Bread, flour, or oatmeal,             0  7  6
      Yeast and salt,                       0  0  3
      Thread and worsted,                   0  0  2
      Bacon or other meat,                  0  1  6
      Tea, sugar, and butter,               0  0 10-1/2
      Soap,                                 0  0  5
      Candles,                              0  0  5
      Beer,                                 0  0  7
                                           ------------
          Total of the Week,               £0 11  8-1/2
                                           ------------
      Amount per Annum,                   £30  8 10
      Rent,                                 1 10  0
      Wood,                                 1 12  6
      Cloaths,                              2  2  0
      Sickness,                             0  5  0
                                          ---------
          Total Expences per Annum,       £35 18  4
                                          ---------
  _Earning per Week_--
      The man,                             £0  7  6
      The woman,                            0  1  6
      The children,                         0  4  0
                                          ---------
          Total of the Week,               £0 13  0
                                          ---------
          Total Earnings per Annum,       £33 16  0
                                          ---------
  _N.B._--‘The Harvest earnings not included: they go a great
  way towards making up the deficiency.’


DORSET.--SHERBORNE, 1789.[505]


FAMILY OF FIVE PERSONS.

  _Expences per Week_--                     £  _s._ _d._
      Bread,                                0  3  0
      Salt,                                 0  0  1-1/2
      Meat,                                 0  0  8
      Tea, etc.,                            0  0  2[506]
      Cheese,                               0  0  7
      Milk,                                 0  0  4
      Soap,                                 0  0  2-1/2
      Candles,                              0  0  6
      Thread, etc.,                         0  0  1
                                          ---------
          Total,                           £0  5  8
                                          =========
      Amount per Annum,                   £14 14  8
      Rent,                                 2  0  0
      Fuel,                                 3 18  0
      Clothes, etc.,                        1  0  0
                                          ---------
          Total Expences per Annum,       £21 12  8
                                          =========
  _Earnings per Week_--
      The man,                             £0  6  0
      The woman,                            0  2  6
                                          ---------
          Total,                           £0  8  6
                                          =========
          Total Earnings per Annum,       £22  2  0
                                          =========


HAMPSHIRE.--LONG PARISH, 1789.[507]

FAMILY OF SIX PERSONS.

  _Expences per Week_--                     £  _s._ _d._
      Bread or Flour,                       0  5  0
      Yeast and Salt,                       0  0  3
      Bacon or other Meat,                  0  1  0
      Tea, Sugar, and Butter,               0  0  6
      Cheese,                               0  0  5
      Soap, Starch, and Blue,               0  0  2
      Candles,                              0  0  2
      Thread, Thrum, and Worsted,           0  0  3
                                          ---------
          Total,                           £0  7  9
                                          =========
      Amount per Annum,                   £20  3  0

      Rent, Fuel (‘both very high and
        scarce’), Clothes,
        Lying-in, etc.,                     7  0  0
                                          ---------
          Total Expences per Annum,       £27  3  0
                                          =========
  _Earnings per Week_--
      The man,                             £0  8  0
      The woman,                            0  1  0
                                          ---------
          Total,                           £0  9  0
                                          =========
          Total Earnings per Annum,       £23  8  0
                                          =========


HERTS.--HINKSWORTH, 1795.[508]

FAMILY OF SIX PERSONS.

  _Expences by the Week_--             £ _s._  _d._
      Bread, flour, or oatmeal,        0 10  5
      Heating the oven,                0  0  4
      Yeast and salt,                  0  0  4
      Bacon or pork,                   0  3  4
      Tea, sugar, and butter,          0  1  9-1/2
      Soap,                            0  0  5
      Cheese,                          0  0  7-1/2
      Candles,                         0  0  4
      Small beer,                      0  0  6-3/4
      Milk,                            0  0  4
      Potatoes,                        0  1  3
      Thread and worsted,              0  0  4
                                      ------------
          Total of the Week,          £1  0  0-1/2
                                      ============
      Amount per Annum,              £52  2  2
      Rent,                            2  0  0
      Cloaths,                         6  5 10
      Fuel, coal, wood, etc.,          3 15  3
      Births and burials,              1  3  6
                                     ---------
          Total Expences per Annum,  £65  6  9
                                     =========
  _Earnings per Week_--
      The man,                        £0  9  2-3/4
      The woman,                       0  1  6
      The children,                    0  4  8
                                      ------------
          Total of the Week,          £0 15  4-3/4
                                      ============
          Total Earnings per Annum,  £40  0  7

                                     ============


NORTHAMPTONSHIRE.--CASTOR, 1794.[509]

FAMILY OF SIX PERSONS.

  _Expences per Week_--                £   _s._ _d._
      Bread and Flour,                 0  4  3
      Salt,                            0  0  1
      Meat,                            0  1  6
      Tea, Sugar, and Butter,          0  1  1
      Cheese (sometimes),              0  0  5
      Soap 1/4 lb., Starch, etc.,      0  0  2-1/2
      Candles 1/2 lb., Thread, etc.,   0  0  6
                                      ------------
                              Total,  £0  8  0-1/2
                                      ============

      Amount per Annum,               20 18  2
      Rent,                            1 15  0
      Fuel and coals,                  1 10  0
      Clothing,                        2 15  0
      Lying-in, loss of time, etc.,    1 10  0
                                     ---------
          Total Expenses per Annum,  £28  8  2
                                     =========
  _Earnings per Week_--
      The man,                        £0  7  6
      The woman,                       0  0 10
      The children,                    0  0  4
                                     ---------
          Total,                      £0  8  8
                                     =========
          Total Earnings per Annum,  £22 10  8
                                     =========

  _N.B._--To the earnings may be added what is got by gleaning.


NORFOLK.--DISS, 1793.[510]

FAMILY OF SIX PERSONS.

  _Expences by the Week_--             £  _s._ _d._
      Bread, flour or oatmeal,         0  4  7-1/2
      Yeast and salt,                  0  0  2
      Bacon or other meat,             0  0  3
      Tea, sugar, and butter,          0  0  9-1/4
      Soap,                            0  0  2-1/4
      Candles,                         0  0  3
      Cheese,                          0  0  5-1/2
      Milk,                            0  0  6
      Potatoes,                        0  0  6
      Thread and worsted,              0  0  2
                                      ------------
          Total per Week,             £0  7 10-1/2
                                      ============
      Total per Annum,               £20  9  6
      Rent,                            3  3  0
      Fuel,                            1  4  0
      Cloaths,                         2  3  0
      Births, burials, sickness,       0 10  0
                                      ---------
          Total Expenses per Annum,   £27  9  6
                                      =========
  _Earnings per Week_--
      The Man,                         £0  9  0
      The Woman,                        0  1  0
      The Children,                     0  1  6
                                      ---------
          Total,                       £0 11  6
                                      =========
          Total Earnings per Annum,   £29 18  0
                                      =========

  _N.B._--In 1795 the earnings of this family were the same but
  their expenses had risen to £36, 11s. 4d. On bread they spent
  8s. a week instead of 4s. 7-1/2d.


FOOTNOTES:

[504] Eden, vol. iii. p. cccxxxix.

[505] Davies, p. 152.

[506] Davies puts 1-1/2d., but this is probably a slip.

[507] Davies, p. 166.

[508] Eden, vol. iii. p. cccxlii.

[509] Davies, p. 176.

[510] Eden, vol. iii. p. cccxlvi.



CHIEF AUTHORITIES


 _Journals of House of Commons_ for period.

 _Journals of House of Lords_ for period.

 Reports of Parliamentary Debates for period in _Parliamentary
 Register_, _Parliamentary History_, _Senator_ and _Parliamentary
 Debates_.

 _Statutes, Public and Private_ for period.

 _Enclosure Awards_ in Record Office or Duchy of Lancaster.

 _Home Office Papers_ in Record Office.

 _Parliamentary Papers_ for period; specially--

 FOR ENCLOSURES--

Report from Select Committee on Standing Orders relating to Private
Bills, 1775.

Report from Select Committee on Waste Lands. Ordered to be printed
December 23, 1795.

Report from Select Committee on Waste Lands, 1797.

Report from Select Committee on Means of Facilitating Inclosure, 1800.
(Deals specially with Expense).

Report from Select Committee on Constitution of Select Committees on
Private Bills, 1825.

Report from Select Committee on Commons Inclosure, 1844.

 FOR POOR LAWS--

Report from Select Committee on Poor Laws, 1817.

Report from Lords Committee on Poor Laws, 1818.

Report from Select Committee on Poor Laws, 1819.

Report from Select Committee on Relief of Able-Bodied from the Poor
Rate, 1828.

Report from Lords on Poor Law, 1828.

Documents in possession of Poor Law Commissioners, 1833.

Report of Poor Laws Commissioners, 1834

 FOR GAME LAWS, CRIME, AND PUNISHMENT--

Report from Select Committee on Game Laws, 1823.

Report from Lords Committee on Game Laws, 1828.

Report from Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions,
1827.

Report from Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions,
1828.

Return of Convictions under the Game Laws from 1827-30.

Report from Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, 1831.

Report from Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, 1832.

Report from Select Committee on Transportation, 1838.

 FOR OTHER SOCIAL QUESTIONS--

Report from Select Committee on Agricultural Distress, 1821.

Report from Select Committee on Labourers’ Wages, 1824.

Reports from Select Committee on Emigration, 1826-7.

Report from Select Committee on Agriculture, 1833.

Report from Select Committee on Allotment System, 1843.

Publications of Board of Agriculture.

_General Report on Enclosures_, 1808.

_Report on the Agricultural State of the Kingdom_, 1816.

_Agricultural Surveys_ of different Counties, by various writers,
alluded to in text as _Bedford Report_, _Middlesex Report_, etc.


_Annual Register_ for period.

_Annals of Agriculture_, 1784-1815 (46 vols.).

Cobbett’s _Political Register_, 1802-35.

_The Tribune_ (mainly Thelwall’s lectures), 1795-6.

Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Improving the
Comforts of the Poor, (5 vols.), 1795-1808.

Ruggles, Thomas, _History of the Poor_, 1793 (published first in
_Annals of Agriculture_).

Davies, David, _The Case of Labourers in Husbandry stated and
considered_, 1795.

Eden, Sir Frederic Morton, _The State of the Poor or An History of the
Labouring Classes in England_, 1797.

The Works of Arthur Young, William Marshall, and other contemporary
writers on agriculture and enclosures; see list in Hasbach, _History of
the English Agricultural Labourer_.

Cobbett’s _Works_.

Dunkin’s _History of Oxfordshire_.

_Carlisle Papers, Historical MSS. Commission._

_Memoir of Lord Suffield_, by R. M. Bacon, 1838.

_Life of Sir Samuel Romilly_, 1842.


MODERN AUTHORITIES

 Babeau, A., _Le Village sous l’ancien Régime_.

 Curtler, W. H. R., _A Short History of English Agriculture_.

 Eversley, Lord, _Commons, Forests, and Footpaths_.

 Hasbach, Wilhelm, _History of the English Agricultural Labourer_.

 Hirst, F. W., and Redlich, J., _Local Government in England_.

 Hobson, J. A., _The Industrial System_.

 Hudson, W. H., _A Shepherd’s Life_.

 Jenks, E., _Outlines of Local Government_.

 Johnson, A. H., _The Disappearance of the Small Landowner_.

 Kovalewsky, M., _La France Économique et Sociale à la Veille de la
 Révolution_.

 Levy, H., _Large and Small Holdings_.

 Mantoux, P., _La Révolution Industrielle_.

 Porritt, E., _The Unreformed House of Commons_.

 Scrutton, T. E., _Commons and Common Fields_.

 Slater, G., _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields_.

 Smart, W., _Economic Annals of the Nineteenth Century_.

 De Tocqueville, _L’ancien Régime_.

 Vinogradoff, P., _The Growth of the Manor_.

 Webb, S. and B., _English Local Government_.--_The Parish and the
 County._

 ---- _English Local Government_.--_The Manor and the Borough._



INDEX


  Abel, Mr., 248. f.

  Abingdon, 267;
    Special Commission at, 305 f.

  Abingdon, Lord, and Otmoor, 88, 91;
    on Special Commission, 302.

  Abree, Margaret and Thomas, 109 _n._

  Adam, the brothers, 327.

  Addington, H. _See_ Sidmouth.

  ---- Stephen, 31, 44.

  Addington Hills, 48.

  Addison, 325.

  Aglionby, Mr., M.P., 53.

  Agriculture, and enclosure, 36;
    during French war, 166 ff.;
    Brougham on, 171.

  Aix, Archbishop of, 217.

  Albemarle, Lord, 321.

  Aldborough, 9.

  Alderson, Justice, on Special Commissions, 272, 275, 277, 278, 281,
        290, 293, 295, 298, 300;
    and Looker case, 295 f.

  Allotments, and enclosure, 84 ff.;
    experiments, 154 ff.;
    hostility of farmers to, 159 f.;
    M. Chateauvieux on, 232 f.;
    Suffield’s scheme in 1830, 322 ff.

  Almack’s, 68, 70.

  Althorp, Lord, 190, 202, 288;
    Cobbett on, 313.

  America, farmers in, 212;
    Cobbett in, 235.

  Amnesty Debate, 314.

  Andover, 260, 280, 285.

  Appeal, against enclosure award, 59 f.

  Arbuthnot, J., 37, 81.

  Aristocracy, contrast between English and French, 1 ff.;
    control over all English institutions, 7 ff.;
    Burke on, 24 f.;
    characteristics, Chapter xiii.

  Armley (enclosure), 51, 59, 60, and Appendix A (1).

  Arson, in 1830, 243 ff., 268 f.;
    penalties for, 273;
    trials for, 309 f.

  Artaxerxes, 70.

  Arthur, Sir George (Governor of Van Diemen’s Land), 205, 324.

  Arundel, 256.

  Arundel, Lord, 261, 293.

  Ash, 183.

  Ashbury (enclosure), 43 _n._

  Ashelworth (enclosure), 46, 50, 59, 98, and Appendix A (2).

  Astley, Sir E., 71.

  Aston, Tirrold, 263.

  Atkins, Elizabeth, 102.

  Attorney-General. _See_ Denman.

  Aunalls, James, 285.

  Austen, Jane, 214.

  Avington, 258, 265.

  Award, enclosure, 60.

  Aylesbury, 132;
    riots in 1795, 121;
    Special Commission, 275, 306 f.

  Azay le Rideau, 3.


  Babeau, M., 1, 215, 223.

  Bacon, R. M., 321.

  Bagehot, W., 36.

  Bagshot Heath, 40.

  Bailiffs, 160, 213.

  Baily, Mr., 97 _n._

  Baker, Mr., M.P., and Settlement, 153.

  Bakewell, 36.

  Bamford, S., 213, 238.

  Bampfylde, Copleston Warre, 65.

  Barett, 293.

  Baring, Bingham, 292, 304;
    and Cook 286;
    and Deacle case, 278, 287.

  ---- Sir Thomas, 187, 192, 284.

  Barings, the, 243, 288, 302, 317.

  Barkham, 82.

  Barnes, 277.

  ---- Common, 31.

  Barré, Colonel, 219.

  Barton Stacey, 284, 285.

  Basingstoke, 162 _n._, 289.

  Baskerville, Mr., J.P., 297.

  Bath, 121, 127, 130 _n._, 190 _n._

  Bathurst, Lord, 56.

  Batten, Matthew, 303.

  Battersea, 30.

  Battle, 248, 250, 253, 255, 256.

  Beaconsfield, 135.

  Beckett (the gaoler), 277.

  Beckley, 88 f., 91.

  Bedford, 152.

  ---- Gaol, account of prisoners in, 193.

  Belgrave, Lord, 143.

  Benett, John, M. P., and 1830 rising, 261, 291, 292, 315;
    at Cobbett’s trial, 317.

  Bennett, 263.

  ---- Cornelius, 303 f.

  Benson or Bensington, 268.

  Bentham, 203, 312;
    on enclosure, 40;
    on Pitt’s Bill, 150.

  Bentley, 218.

  Berkeley, Bishop, 175.

  Berkshire, 30;
    1830 rising in, 258 ff.;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  ---- Bread Act. _See_ Speenhamland.

  Bernard, Scrope, 132.

  ---- Sir Thomas, on Lord Winchilsea’s allotments, 128, 155, 158 f.;
    on minimum wage, 143;
    on removals, 154 _n._

  Betts, John, 102.

  Bicester, 99 _n._

  Billingsley, J., 37, 61 _n._, 98 _n._

  Birdingbury, 100.

  Birmingham, 115.

  Bishop, Daniel, on poaching, 192, 196;
    on 1830 rising, 248.

  Bishop, 310 f.

  Bishops, the, comparison of French and English, 217;
    reforming, 218, 219.

  Bishopstone (Wilts), (enclosure), 51.

  Bishops Walthams, 159.

  Bishton, Mr., 38.

  Blackstone, 187, 203, 219;
    on common rights, 29, 31;
    on gleaning, 108.

  Blake, Mr., of Idmiston, 295.

  ---- William, 326.

  Blean, 310.

  Blizzard, Thomas, 307.

  Blomfield, Bishop, 219.

  Blow, Charles, 246.

  Board of Agriculture, and enclosures, 74 ff., 84;
    questions to correspondents, 135, 176.

  Bocking, 118.

  Bolingbroke, Lord (author of _Patriot King_), 207.

  ---- ---- and Sedgmoor, 65.

  Bolland, Mr. Justice, 302.

  Bolnhurst (enclosure), 32.

  Bologna, 326.

  Booby, Lady, 18.

  Borderers. _See_ Squatters.

  Boroughs, disputes about franchise, 8;
    Scot and lot, 8;
    potwalloper, 9;
    burgage, 9;
    corporation, 10;
    freemen, 11.

  Bosanquet, Mr. Justice, 95, 274.

  Boston, 10.

  Boswell, Will, 102.

  Botany Bay, 239.

  Bourton, Charles, 294.

  Boys, John (agriculturist), 160.

  ---- ---- (farmer, in 1830 rising), 282 f.

  Bradley, 116 _n._

  Bragge, Mr., M.P., 44 _n._

  Bramshott, 260.

  Brandon, 177.

  Braunston (enclosure), 43 _n._

  Bread, wheaten and mixed, 124, 126.
    _See also_ Diet.

  Brede, parish rising at, 248 ff.

  Brighton, 223, 247, 284.

  Brimpton, 304.

  Bristol, 12, 121, 152, 243.

  Bristowe, Squire, 293.

  Brittany, 224.

  Broad Somerford, 85.

  Brocklehurst, Mr., 38.

  Brooks’s, 68 _n._, 69, 222, 332.

  Brotherton, Colonel, 259.

  Brougham, Henry, 302, 322;
    on agriculture, 171;
    on J.P.’s, 191;
    on increase of commitments, 200;
    on criminal courts, 202;
    on 1830 rising, 270;
    Cobbett on, 313;
    at Cobbett’s trial, 317 f.

  Broughton, 267.

  Brown, Rev. Mr., 43 _n._

  ---- Thomas, 310.

  Bryan, Elizabeth, 102.

  Bryant, Joseph, 249.

  Buckingham, 183;
    and 1830 rising, 268;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  ---- Duke of, 18;
    and rising of 1830, 243, 258, 265, 306.

  Buckland Newton, 301.

  Budgets, 111, 120, Appendix B.

  Bulcamp, House of Industry, 147 _n._

  Bull-baiting, 57.

  Bullen, Robert, 301.

  Bullington, 284.

  Bully. _See_ Bolingbroke.

  Bunce, Henry, 277.

  Buns, parish, 268.

  Burbage, George, 295.

  Burdett, Sir F., 313.

  Burdon, Mr., M.P., 142.

  Burgage boroughs, 9.

  Burgundy, Duke of, 4.

  Burke, 7, 14, 103, 203, 329, 330;
    on the aristocracy, 24;
    on Parliamentary representation, 75;
    on regulating wages, 135;
    philosophy of social life, 208, 210;
    on French Assembly, 215.

  Burkhead, Charles, 102.

  Burley on the Hill, 155.

  Burn, Dr., 115, 117.

  Burnet, 40.

  Burnham, 214.

  Burwash, 250.

  Bury St. Edmunds, 177, 192.

  Buxton, Mr., M.P., 142, 143, 153, 210.

  Byron, 313.


  Cabinet System established, 6.

  Cade, Jack, 13.

  Cæsar, 170, 330.

  Cambridge, 269.

  _Cambridge Modern History_, 87 _n._

  Cambridgeshire, 177, 184, 269.

  Camden, 202.

  Camden, Lord, 246, 255, 309.

  Canning, 202, 210, 241, 331, 332.

  Canterbury, 244, 255, 256.

  Canterbury, Archbishop of, 190 _n._, 204;
    prayer in 1830, 270.

  Capes, W. W., 159 _n._

  Capital offences, and Private Bill Committees, 64.

  Carbery, Lord, 43 _n._

  Carlile, Richard, prosecution in 1831, 315.

  Carlisle, 11, 121, 269.

  Carlisle, Lord, and Sedgmoor, 66 ff.

  Carlyle, 216.

  Carmarthen, 152.

  Carnarvon, Lord, 240.

  Carr, Elizabeth, 102.

  Carrington, Lord, 84, 155, 156, 250.

  Carter, James, 86.

  ---- John, 86, 102.

  Cartmel (enclosure), 50.

  Carus Wilson, Mr., 38, 42 _n._

  Case, 275.

  Castlereagh, 238, 299, 314, 332.

  Cavan, Lord and Lady, 279 f.

  Certificates (under Settlement Laws), 113, 115 ff., 158.

  Chancellor, Lord. _See_ Brougham.

  Charles I., and enclosures, 34.

  ---- V., 319.

  ---- VIII., 235.

  ---- X., 311.

  Charlton (Otmoor), 89, 93.

  ---- (Wilts), 287.

  Chateauvieux, M., 233 f.

  Chatham, Lord, 329, 330.

  Cheese, dearness of, 129 _n._

  Chenonceaux, 3.

  Cherry, Mr., J.P., 265.

  Cheshunt (enclosure), 58 _n._, 59, 86, 98 _n._, and Appendix A (3).

  Chester, 152.

  Chester, Charles, 43 _n._

  Children, employment of, 141 f.;
    punishment of, 200 f.

  Chinon, 3.

  Chippendale, 327.

  Christian, Mr., 178.

  Chudleigh, 121.

  Church, the (_see also_ Clergy), 326;
    and enclosure, 56, 76 f., 168;
    and tithes, 167 f.;
    and the poor, 216 ff.

  Churchill, Lord, 94 f.

  Cicero, 238, 331.

  Cinque Ports, 12.

  Claims, presentation of, under enclosure Acts, 63.

  Clare, Lord, 321.

  ---- John, 331, 332 _n._

  Clarke, Marcus, 199, 205.

  ---- Tom, 216.

  Clergy, non-residence of the, 214, 220;
    and the poor, 216 ff.;
    association with governing class, 219;
    salaries of curates, 221;
    and tithes, 222.

  Clerk, George, 281.

  Clive, 206.

  Clough, John and Thomas, 200.

  Cobbett, William, 40, 127, 184 _n._, 189 _n._, 191, 228, 278 _n._,
        284, 285, 291, 309;
    on enclosures, 35;
    on unpaid magistrates, 62;
    on tea, 128;
    on allotments, 154, 159, 173;
    on Whitbread’s 1807 scheme, 180 f.;
    description of labourers, 185;
    on relations of rich to poor, 211;
    on change in farming, 212 f.;
    on parsons, 220;
    George IV. on, 223;
    and village sports, 223;
    description of, 234 f.;
    and 1830 rising, 244, 248, 259, 264, 287;
    on Whig ministers, 313;
    trial in 1831, 315 ff.

  Cobbold, Rev. Mr., 260, 282.

  Cockerton, Rev. Mr., 285.

  Codrington, O. C., 297.

  Coke, Lord, 21.

  ---- of Norfolk, 36;
    and spring guns, 196;
    and Game Laws, 196 _n._, 198.

  Colchester, 10, 15.

  Coleman, Mr., 249 f.

  Collingwood, Mr., J.P., 253, 256.

  Collins, A., 218.

  ---- (in Deacle case), 277.

  Combination Laws, 234, 238, 272.

  Commissioners, Enclosure, 43;
    power of, 58 f.;
    appointment of, 60 ff., 73.

  Commissioners. _See_ Poor Law Commission.

  Commoners, character of, 37 ff.;
    at Otmoor, 88 f.;
    theory of rights of, 92.

  Common fields, extent of, in 1688, 26;
    system of cultivation, 28;
    managed by manor courts, 30;
    varieties in system, 30, 31 _n._;
    Sir R. Sutton’s Act, 31;
    ownership of, 32;
    subdivision of property in, 33;
    position of labourers under system, 33 f., 159;
    disadvantages of, 36 f.;
    relation to old enclosures, 42.

  Common land, three uses of term, 28.

  Commons, relation to village economy, 27, 103;
    alleged deleterious effects of, on commoners, 37 f.;
    commoners’ own views on subject, 39;
    aesthetic objections to, 40.

  Common rights, 29, 31, 32;
    legal decision about inhabitants, 32;
    claims for, on enclosure, 63;
    at Otmoor, 92.

  Consents, proportion required for enclosure, 49 ff.;
    how assessed, 50 ff.;
    how obtained, 51 f.;
    _see also_ King’s Sedgmoor, 66 ff.

  Cook, Henry, 286 f., 290, 317, 319.

  Cooper, 259, 285, 290.

  ---- and others, 95.

  Coote, Eyre, 280, 285.

  Copenhagen, 178 _n._

  Copyholders, position of, 22, 23, 28 f., 51.

  Corn Laws, 321.

  Cornwall, 28 _n._

  Corporation boroughs, 10.

  Corsley (Wilts), 220.

  Cottagers, 28 ff.;
    position before enclosure, 31;
    and enclosure, 52 f.;
    presentment of claims by, 63;
    results of enclosure on, 97, 100 ff.;
    and allotments, 155 ff.

  Cotswolds, 40.

  Coulson, Mr., 97 _n._

  Councils, French, under Regency, 2.

  Cove, Rev. Mr., J. P., 304.

  Coventry, 78, 119.

  Coventry, Lord, 56.

  Cows, loss of, on enclosure, 100 f., 127;
    Raunds commoners on benefit of, 39;
    and allotments, 155 ff.;
    and settlement, 178 f.

  Cox, William, 102.

  Coxe, Mr., M.P., 65.

  Coxhead, Mr., M.P., 142.

  Crabbe, 223;
    on workhouse, 147;
    on roundsmen, 165;
    on poachers, 194;
    on poor, 212.

  Cranbrook, 255 f.

  Craven, Lord, 43 _n._

  Creevey, 139, 209.

  Cricklade, 185.

  Croke, Sir Alex., 89 f., 92, 94, 96.

  Croker, 10.

  Cromwell, Oliver, 22;
    and enclosures, 35.

  Crook, John, 306.

  Croxton, 43 _n._

  Croydon (enclosure), 48, 59, 63, 199 _n._, and Appendix A (4).

  Curtler, W. H. R., 172, 175 _n._

  Curwen, Mr., M.P., 130, 158 _n._, 195, 198, 213.


  Dalbiac, General, 256.

  Darling, Alfred, 305.

  Davenant, 26 _n._

  Davies, Rev. David, his book, 82, 85;
    on fuel, 107, 131 f.;
    on rise in prices, 110;
    his budgets, 111, 120, 122, and Appendix B;
    on mixed bread, 126;
    on milk, 127;
    on tea, 128 f.;
    on minimum wage, 136 f.;
    on land for labourers, 82, 154.

  ---- Miss M. F., 220 _n._

  Dawson, Hannah, 121.

  Deacle, Mr., and the Deacle case, 277 f., 287 f.

  Deal, 248.

  Debates in Parliament, on Private Enclosure Bills, 55 f.;
    on General Enclosure Bills, 77;
    on Whitbread’s Bill, 140 ff.;
    on Pitt’s Poor Law Bill, 149;
    on Settlement, 153;
    on rising of 1830, 314 f., 320.

  Deddington, 119, 122.

  Deerhurst, Lord, 197.

  Defoe, Daniel, 6.

  De Grey, Mr., 71 f.

  Demainbray, Rev. S., 85.

  Denman, Lord, on J.P.’s, 19;
    and 1830 rising, 278, 282, 288, 290, 291, 302;
    and Cook, 287, 319;
    and Lush, 292;
    and amnesty debate, 315;
    and Cobbett’s trial, 317 ff.

  De Quincey, 218, 242, 332.

  Derby, 117 _n._

  Derby, Brooker, 102.

  _Deserted Village, The_, 331.

  D’Este, Isabella, 326.

  De Tocqueville, 1, 5, 14, 24, 222.

  Devon, 28 _n._, 269.

  Dicketts, Henry, 295.

  Diderot, 4.

  Diet, of labourer, 111, 123 ff.;
    attempt to introduce cheap cereals, 124;
    soup, 125;
    tea, 128 f.

  Dillon, Archbishop, 217.

  Disraeli, 103.

  Domestic industries, 107.

  _Doomsday Book_, 91.

  Dorchester, Special Commission at, 275, 300 f.

  Dorset, 185;
    1830 rising, 268;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Dover, 245.

  Dowden, W., 285 f.

  Downton, 9.

  Drake, Sir F., 68.

  Drummond, Mr., 230.

  Dryden, 169, 264.

  Dubois, 2.

  Dudley, Lord, 327 _n._

  Dundas, Charles, 141;
    and Speenhamland, 161 f.;
    on Special Commission, 302.

  ---- Henry, 141, 299, 329.

  Dunkin, on Otmoor, 88 ff.;
    on Merton, 99.

  Dunmow, 135 f.

  Dunn, Ann, 102.

  Dunwich, 11 f.

  Durham, 11.

  Durham, Lord, 209, 313, 317, 318.

  Dyott, Sir W., 201.


  Ealing, 124.

  East Grimstead, 260.

  ---- Grinstead, 11.

  ---- Retford, 12.

  ---- Stretton, 284.

  Easton, Rev. Mr., and family, 263, 277.

  Eaves, 256.

  Ebrington, Lord, 269.

  Eden, Sir F. M., 31;
    and enclosure, 49, 78, 82, 117;
    his book, 82, 210;
    and gleaning, 107;
    budgets, 111 and Appendix B;
    on Settlement Laws, 113 f., 116, 118 _n._ ff.;
    and food riots, 122;
    on diet, 123-132 _passim_;
    on workhouses, 147;
    on roundsmen, 148 _n._ and 164;
    on Speenhamland meeting, 162;
    his ideal poor woman, 208 f.;
    on rich and poor, 210.

  _Edinburgh Review_, 185, 197.

  Egleton, 155.

  Egremont, Lord, 155.

  Eldon, Lord, 20, 204, 309.

  _Eleanor_, the, 308 _n._

  Eliot, 10.

  _Eliza_, the, 324.

  Elizabeth, Queen, 8, 21.

  Ellenborough, Lord, 189, 196, 202, 204, 273.

  Ellison, Mr., M.P., 143, 153.

  Ely, 178.

  Enclosures, and productivity, 26, 40;
    by voluntary agreement, 28 _n._;
    extent of, before eighteenth century, 34;
    motives for, 35;
    extent of Parliamentary enclosure, 41 f.;
    Parliamentary procedure, 43 ff.;
    consents required, 49 ff.;
    Lord Thurlow on Parliamentary procedure, 53 f.;
    local procedure, 58 ff.;
    General Enclosure Bills, 74 ff.;
    Act of 1801, 77, 84;
    hostility of poor to, 78 f.;
    criticism of methods, 81 ff.;
    provision for poor, 85 f.;
    results on village, Chap. v.;
    effects on relationship of classes, 211.

  Encroachments, by squatters, 31;
    treatment of, under enclosure, 103.

  Engrossing of farms, 32, 81, 211.

  Entail. _See_ Family Settlements.

  Epsom, 147.

  Erskine, 139.

  Essex, 184, 269;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Estcourt, Thomas, 156.

  ---- T. G. B., 198, 200 _n._, 291.

  _Evelina_, 211.

  Eversley, Lord, 32 _n._

  Ewbanks, 104.

  Expenses of enclosure, 97 f.
    _See also_ Fees.

  Eycon, Elizabeth, 102.


  Falkland, 312.

  Fane, Mr., M.P., 90.

  Farmers implicated in 1830 rising, 248 f., 265, 282.

  ---- large, gained by enclosure, 97;
    and milk, 127;
    and allotments, 159;
    divided from labourers, 212;
    Cobbett on, 212 f.

  ---- small, ruined by enclosure, 97 ff.;
    and milk, 127 f.;
    and other classes, 211;
    Cobbett on, 212 f.

  Farmer, William, 281.

  Farm servants, 28, 31.

  Farnham, 185, 235, 264.

  Fawley, 242 _n._, 278 ff.

  Fees for Enclosure Bills, 76.

  Felony, counsel in cases of, 201.

  Fencing, cost of, 97, 98 _n._, 101;
    penalties for breaking, 199 _n._

  Fencott, 89.

  Fénelon, 3.

  Fielding, 187, 327;
    on village life, 18 f., 33;
    on lawyers, 63, 216;
    his scheme for the poor, 151;
    on solidarity of poor, 237.

  Finch, Mr., 252.

  Firth, Mr., 35.

  Fitzwilliam, Lord, 101, 330.

  Fitzwilliams, 13.

  Flackwell Heath, 307.

  Flanders, 2.

  Ford, John, 261.

  Fordingbridge, 121, 259, 280, 285.

  Forster, Mr., of Norwich, 83.

  Fox, C. J., 53 _n._, 139, 140, 311, 314, 328, 329;
    on M.P.’s and patrons, 13 f.;
    and Sedgmoor, 68 f.;
    and Horne Tooke, 72 f.;
    on mixed bread, 126;
    on minimum wage, 134, 141 f.;
    on charity, 210;
    despair of Parliamentary government, 330.

  Fox-hunting, change in, 214.

  France, position of aristocracy in, 1 ff.;
    monarchy in, 2 ff.;
    division of common land in, 87;
    peasants compared with English labourers, 105, 111, 168, 240.

  Franchise, Parliamentary, 7 ff.;
    in boroughs, 8 ff.;
    county, 13.

  Francis I., 22.

  ---- Philip, 78.

  Freeholders, 28 f.

  Freemen boroughs, 11 f.

  French, Colonel, M.P., 196.

  French Convention, 168.

  ---- war, agriculture during, 171.

  Friends of the People, 13 f.

  Frome, 127.

  Fryer, Mr., 306.

  Fuel rights, 31, 100, 106;
    allotments, 76;
    cost of, to labourer, 107;
    scarcity after enclosure, 130 ff.;
    taken from hedges, 131.

  Fussell, J., 283.


  Gage, Lord, 251.

  Gaiter, John, 303.

  Galloway, Lord, 57.

  Galsworthy, J., 35.

  Game Laws, 187 ff., 321;
    convictions under, 191 f.;
    supply of game to London, 196 f.

  Gardens for labourers, 157, 175.

  Gateward’s case, 32.

  Gatton, 8.

  Geese on Otmoor, 88.

  George III., 6, 80, 312.

  ---- IV., 168, 312;
    on Cobbett, 223.

  German legion, 173.

  Gibbon, 24, 217, 222, 325, 326.

  Gibbons, Sir W., 86, 102.

  Gibbs, Sir Vicary, 317.

  Gilbert, 108.

  Gilbert’s Act, 146, 148, 164, 179 _n._

  Gillray, 329.

  Gilmore, 260, 285.

  Glasse, Rev. Dr., 132 _n._

  Gleaning, 107 ff., 117;
    controversy on, 108 f.

  Gloucester, 144;
    trials at, 301.

  Gloucestershire, 1830 rising, 268;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Godalming, 152.

  Goderich, Lord, 317 f., 324.

  Godmanchester, 17.

  Goldsmith, Oliver, 24, 201, 203, 212, 223, 331.

  Gooch, Mr., 212.

  Goodenough, Dr., 218.

  Goodfellow, Thomas, 303 f.

  Goodman, Thomas, 309, 318.

  Gordon riots, 288.

  Gosport, 289;
    jurors, 283.

  Goudhurst, 256.

  Gould, Sir Henry, 109.

  Graham, Sir James, 187, 317.

  Gray, Thomas, 104, 214.

  Great Tew, 17, 30.

  Greenaway, 268.

  Greenford, 132 _n._

  Greetham, 155.

  Gregory, 284.

  Grenville, Lord, 77.

  Grey, Lord, 14 _n._, 19, 76, 140, 233, 314, 328, 329, 330;
    Prime Minister, 311 ff., 320;
    Cobbett on, 313;
    at Cobbett’s trial, 317 f.;
    on Corn Laws, 321;
    and Suffield, 322 ff.

  Guercino, 326.

  Guernsey, Lord, 218.

  Guildford, 121.

  Guildford, Lord, 220.
    _See also_ North, Francis.

  Gulliver, Mary, 102.

  Gurney, J., in 1830 trials, 302 ff.


  Hale, 108.

  Halifax, 116, 216 _n._

  Hambledon, 155.

  Hampden, 10.

  Hampshire, 128, 184;
    1830 rising in, 258 ff.;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  ---- and Wiltshire labourers compared, 298.

  Harbord Harbord, Sir, 80, 203 f., 321.

  Harding, John, 262.

  Hardres, 244.

  Hardy, J., 227.

  Harewoods, the, 13.

  Hasbach, Professor, 7, 26 _n._, 33.

  Haslemere, 9.

  Hastings, Warren, 206.

  Hastings, 12.

  Hatch, 293.

  Haute Huntre (enclosure), 44, 55, 59, 61 _n._, 78, 101, 199 _n._,
        and Appendix A (5).

  Hawker, W., 65.

  Hay, Mr., M.P., 115.

  Hazlitt, William, 235.

  Heacham, 137, 139.

  Headley Workhouse, 243 f., 260, 280, 282, 285.

  Healey, Dr., 238.

  Heathfield, 250, 255.

  Heckingham, 147 _n._

  Hele, Rev. Mr., 250.

  Helpstone, 332 _n._

  Henley, 305.

  Henley, Thomas, 249 f.

  Henry IV. (of France), 7, 19.

  Henstead, 227.

  Hereford, 269.

  Hetherington, 102.

  Hickson, Mr., 226.

  Higgs, Ann, 102.

  Highlands, the, 40.

  Hill, Edmund, 102.

  ---- G. S., 249 _n._

  ---- Isaac, 276.

  Hinchcliffe, J. _See_ Bishop of Peterborough.

  Hindhead, 40.

  Hindon, 184, 276.

  Hirst. _See_ Redlich.

  Histon and Impington (enclosure), 51.

  Hobhouse, H., 254.

  ---- John Cam, 312 f.

  ---- Lord, 22 _n._

  Hobson, J. A., 166.

  Hodges, Mr., M.P., 253 f.

  Hodgson, Naomi, 102.

  Holdaway, Robert, 260, 285.

  Holdsworth, W., 23 _n._

  Holkham, 328.

  Holland, Lady, 250.

  ---- Lord, 140, 314, 320, 321, 327;
    on spring guns, 195;
    on penal code, 204, 330.

  Holy Island (enclosure), 48 f.

  Homage. _See_ Juries.

  Homer, 238.

  ---- Rev. H., 100.

  Hone, 315.

  Horace, 238.

  Horsham, 257 f.

  Horsley, Bishop, 218.

  Horton, 89.

  Hothfield, 118.

  Howlett, Rev. J., 115, 147 _n._, 151;
    on minimum wage, 135 f.

  Hubbard, Ann, 102.

  Hudson, W. H., 199, 262 _n._, 298 _n._, 308.

  Hume, J., 315.

  Hungerford riots, 264, 303, 305.

  Hunt, Henry, 190, 262, 266, 276, 282;
    and Lush, 291;
    and amnesty debate, 314 f.

  ---- Rev. Dr., 189 _n._

  Huntingdon, 177;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Hurst, Ann. _See_ Strudwick.

  ---- Mr., 257 f.

  Hurstbourne, 284.

  Hythe, 247.


  Idmiston, 295.

  Ilchester, Lord, 67.

  Ilmington, 53.

  Ipswich, 15, 121.

  _Ipswich Journal_, 121 _n._, 164 _n._

  Isherwood, H., 102.

  Isle of Wight, 169.

  Islip, 94.


  James I., 8.

  ---- II., 5.

  Jenks, E., 20.

  Jennings, John, 261.

  Jerome, St., 219.

  Johnson, A. H., 41, 42.

  ---- Mary Ann, 246.

  ---- (overseer), 254.

  ---- Samuel, 24, 40, 80, 129, 203, 328, 331.

  Joliffe, Mr., M.P., 149.

  ---- Rev. J., 285.

  _Jones, Tom_, 194.

  Jordan, Edmund, 102.

  Judd, Mr., 293.

  Judges, discretion in sentences, 202 f.;
    salaries advanced, 241;
    addresses at Special Commissions, 274, 275, 300, 303.

  Juries, presentments by, 17;
    of Manor Courts, 30.

  Justices of the Peace, growth of power, 16 ff.;
    autocratic character, 18 ff.;
    unpaid, 20;
    and regulation of wages, 140, 144;
    and workhouses, 148;
    Brougham on, 191.

  Juvenal, 204.


  Keene, Mr., 68.

  Kelvedon, 230.

  Kempster, Richard, 305.

  Kemys Tynte, Sir C., 65, 68.

  Kendal, 127.

  Kent, 144, 183;
    1830 rising in, 244 ff.;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Kent, Nathaniel, 80, 81, 110, 111, 127, 135, 154, 155, 160.

  ---- William, 102.

  Kenton, 118.

  Kew, 235.

  Kibworth-Beauchamp, 117, 164.

  King, Gregory, 26 _n._, 28.

  ---- Captain, 256.

  ---- Lord, 320.

  ---- Thomas, 102.

  Kingsley, 260.

  King’s Lynn, 11.

  ---- Sedgmoor (enclosure), 52, 64 ff., 98 _n._, Appendix A (14).

  Kington, 56.

  Kintbury mob, 264;
    anecdotes of, 265.

  Kirton, 100 _n._

  Knaresborough (enclosure), 55, 59 f., 64, 86, 98 _n._, Appendix A (6).

  Knatchbull, Sir Edward, 245 f.

  Kosciusko, 173.


  ‘Labour Rate’ system, 230.

  Laleham (enclosure), 50, 51 _n._, 59, 86, Appendix A (7).

  Lamb, George, 315.

  Lambton. _See_ Durham, Lord.

  Lampsacus, 70.

  Lancashire, 133.

  Lane, 277.

  Lansdowne, Lord, 273, 291, 314, 322.

  Lauderdale, Lord, 202.

  Launceston, 12.

  Lawyers, French and English, compared, 215 f.

  Laxton, 43 _n._

  Lechmere, Mr., M.P., 77, 141, 233.

  Lecky, W. E. H., 111 _n._, 129 _n._

  Leeds, 59, 60, 116.

  Leeds, Duke of, 47 f.

  Legg, the brothers, 294.

  ---- George, 301.

  Leicestershire, 186.

  Leigh, Lord, 100.

  Leo X., 22.

  Lespinasse, Mlle. de, 4.

  Levy, Professor, 26 _n._, 41, 100 _n._, 111.

  Lewes Assizes, 274;
    Gaol, 246.

  Light, 294.

  Lilley, the brothers, 193.

  Limoges, 4.

  Lincoln, 152.

  Lincoln, Bishop of, 57.

  ---- Lord, 53.

  Lincolnshire, 155, 269.

  Litchfield, 119 _n._

  Little Marlow, 307.

  Littleport, 178.

  Liverpool, 11.

  Liverpool, Lord, 256.

  Llandaff, Bishop of. _See_ Watson.

  Loches, 3.

  Locke, 150.

  Loes and Wilford, 118, 120.

  Lofft, Capel, 108.

  London, City of, 12.

  Londonderry, Lord, 197.

  Long, Walter, J.P., 278.

  Long Crendon, 306.

  ---- Newnton, 156.

  Longparish, 284.

  Lonsdale, Lord, 9.

  Looker case, the, 295, 296, 315.

  Lord of the Manor, position under common-field system, 28 f., 32 f.;
    position on enclosure, 58, 61, 73, 97.

  Louis XIII., 5, 19.

  ---- XIV., 2, 3, 19, 34.

  ---- XV., 2, 4, 219.

  ---- XVI., 3, 4, 5, 218, 311.

  Louth (enclosure), 51, 58 _n._, 59, 86, 98 _n._, 102, Appendix A (8).

  Lowell, Professor, 17.

  Lower Winchendon, 132.

  Lucan, 206.

  Lucretius, 125.

  Ludlow, 12.

  Lush, James, 277, 291, 292, 298.

  Lyminge, 245.

  Lynn, 139.


  Macaulay, 23;
    on _Deserted Village_, 331.

  Macclesfield, Lord, 96.

  Machinery, judges on benefits of, 275;
    destruction of, in 1830, 259 ff., 268, 303, 306;
    penalties for destruction, 273.
    _See also_ Threshing Machines.

  Mackarness, John, 89.

  Mackrell, Thomas, 306.

  Macquarie Harbour, 206.

  Magnesia, 70.

  Maidenhead, 268.

  Maids Morton, 164.

  Maidstone, 246 f., 255 f.;
    Assizes, 274.

  Maine, 23.

  Mair, Colonel, 259.

  Maldon, 12.

  Malicious Trespass Act, 199 f.

  Malthus, 165, 204, 207, 322, 323;
    on Whitbread’s scheme, 180 ff.

  Manchester, 115.

  Manor, the, connection with common field system, 27.

  ---- Courts, 16 f.;
    and common field system, 30.

  ---- Lord of the. _See_ Lord.

  March Phillipps, L., 327 _n._

  Marengo, 188.

  Margate, 183.

  Mariner, 187.

  Market Lavington, 265.

  Marlborough, 265, 297.

  Marlborough, Duke of, 43 _n._, 89.

  Marshall, William, 36, 80, 97 _n._, 110 _n._, 158 _n._;
    on methods of enclosure, 81.

  Martin, Rev. Mr., 43 _n._

  Mason, Joseph and Robert, 284 f.

  Maulden (enclosure), 78, 100, 101 _n._

  Maurice of Saxony, 319.

  Mayfield, 250 f.

  Mazarin, 6.

  M‘Culloch, 185, 240.

  Melbourne, Lord, 96, 302, 310 _n._;
    and transportation, 205;
    and 1830 rising, 259, 264, 309, 312, 314;
    circular of Nov. 24, 267;
    of Dec. 8, 266 _n._, 270;
    and Special Commissions, 307;
    at Cobbett’s trial, 317 f.;
    and spring guns, 319;
    on Corn Laws, 321;
    and Suffield’s proposals, 322 f.

  Meredith, Sir William, 64.

  Merton, 99, 183.

  Metcalf, Ann, 102.

  Methodist movement, 220, 326.

  Micheldever, 276, 287.

  Middleton, Mr., 38, 86.

  Middlesex, 21.

  Midlands, 34, 101.

  Milan, 131.

  Millet, 332.

  Military tenures, abolition of, 22.

  Milk, and enclosure, 39, 110, 127 ff.;
    attempts to provide, 129 f.

  Minimum wage, 133 ff.;
    Whitbread’s proposals, 86, 139 ff.;
    probable effects of, 233 f.

  Mirabeau, Marquis de, 4.

  Mollington, 119.

  Monck, J. B., 305.

  Monoux, Sir P., 101.

  Montesquieu, 4.

  Montgomery, Mrs., 294.

  Moorcott, 89.

  Moore, Adam, 139.

  ---- F., 100 _n._

  ---- Robert (in _Shirley_), 35.

  Moreton Corbet (enclosure), 47, 60.

  Morey, Farmer C., 301.

  Morgan, 275.

  Mould of Hatch, 293.

  Mount, W., 303.

  Muir, Thomas, 299.

  Municipal government, 15.

  Myus, 70.


  Napoleon, 140, 173, 188, 241, 328, 329.

  Nash, Thomas, 102.

  Neale, Jane, 281.

  Newbolt, Rev. Dr., 265 f.

  Newbury, 161, 267, 305.

  New England, 82.

  ---- Forest, 57.

  Newington, 218.

  Newport, 201 _n._

  ---- Pagnell, 157.

  New Sarum, 109 _n._

  ---- South Wales, 261 _n._, 263 _n._, 277 _n._, 308 _n._

  Newton, Mr., 268.

  Newton Toney, 293.

  Nicholls, Sir George, 146 _n._

  Ninfield, 250.

  Noakes, David and Thomas, 249 f.

  Noke, 89.

  Norfolk, 122, 177, 269;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  North, Francis, 22.

  ---- Lord, 68, 71, 73.

  ---- Roger, 23.

  Northampton, 8.

  Northamptonshire, 184, 269.

  Northesk, Lord, 282.

  Norton, Sir Fletcher, 72.

  Norwich, 177.

  _Norwich Mercury_, 321.

  Nottingham, 11, 116, 118;
    castle, 243.

  Nottinghamshire, 156.

  Nutbean, E. C., 281.

  Nylands, 43 _n._


  Oakley, William, 264, 303, 305.

  O’Connell, 239.

  Oddington, 89.

  Officials, salaries raised, 241.
    _See also_ Parliamentary _and_ Village.

  Old Age Pensions, 169.

  Oldfield, 11.

  Old Sarum, 9.

  Orleans, Duke of, 2.

  Ormonde, Duke of, 23.

  Orpington, 244.

  Orridge, Mr., 192.

  Oswestry, 152.

  Otmoor (enclosure), 45 _n._, 60, 88 ff.

  Oundle, 269.

  Overseers, and relief, 145 f.;
    salaried, 182;
    hostility to, in 1830 rising, 247, 249, 250, 252, 254, 278.

  Overton, 266.

  Owslebury, 282.

  Oxford, 23, 95, 132, 147 _n._, 163, 218.

  _Oxford Journal_, Jackson’s, 88 _n._, 92 _n._, 93 _n._, 96 _n._

  _Oxford University and City Herald_, 89 _n._, 93 _n._, 95 _n._,
        269 _n._

  Oxfordshire, 128, 131, 268;
    prisoners, 308 _n._


  Page, Mr., 264.

  Paine, Thomas, 169, 217, 315.

  Pakeman, the brothers, 309 f.

  Palmer, G., 254.

  ---- T. F., 299.

  Palmerston, Lord, 317, 318.

  Parham, Farmer, 294.

  Parish carts, 182, 242, 278 f.

  Park, Mr. Justice, on Special Commissions, 275, 302, 304 ff.

  Parke, Mr. Justice, and Otmoor, 94;
    on Special Commissions, 275, 278, 283, 300.

  Parliament, qualifications for members, 14.

  Parliamentary Committees, on Private Enclosure Bills, 45 ff.;
    how constituted, 46.

  ---- government, established, 5.

  ---- officials and enclosure, 76, 103.

  ---- Reform, 8;
    Cobbett and, 236;
    Grey’s Government and, 311 f.

  ---- representation, analysis of, 12, 13, 14.
    _See also_ Franchise.

  Parr, Dr. 203.

  Patience, Ambrose, 292, 294.

  Patrons, control of boroughs by, 10 f., 15;
    relations to M.P.’s, 13.

  Patteson, Sir John, 95, 302.

  Pearse, Mr., M.P., 265.

  Peel, Sir Robert, 191 _n._, 195, 202, 288;
    and 1830 rising, 246, 247, 256, 258, 311;
    and prosecution of Cobbett, 316.

  Penal Code, 203.

  ---- Settlements, 205, 206.

  Peninsular War, 139, 327.

  Pennells, Richard, 310.

  Perceval, Spencer, 143, 317.

  Perry, E., 109 _n._

  ---- John, 294.

  Peterborough, 31 _n._, 269.

  Peterborough, Bishop of, 56.

  Peterloo, 330.

  Petersfield, 10.

  Petitions, for enclosure, 43 f.;
    against enclosure, 47;
    how treated, 48;
    about New Forest, 57;
    about Tollington, 71 f.

  Pinniger, Mr., 277.

  Pitt, William, the younger, 14, 15, 60, 103, 139, 174, 212, 241, 299;
    on mixed bread, 124;
    on minimum wage, 134 f., 141 f.;
    his Poor Law Bill, 86, 145, 149 ff., 210;
    and settlement, 152 f.;
    and Sinking Fund, 173;
    and French War, 328 f.

  Plymouth, 15.

  Plympton, 12.

  Poachers, in Bedford Gaol, 193;
    loss to village, 238.
    _See also_ Game Laws.

  Polhill, Mr., 267.

  Political economy, in fashion, 207;
    judges on, 275.

  ---- Unions, 290, 316.

  Pollen, R., J.P., 275 _n._, 278, 283 _n._

  Pompey, 2.

  Poor Law, system of relief, 145 ff.;
    of employment, 148;
    Pitt’s Bill of 1796, 149 ff.;
    Whitbread’s Bill of 1807, 143, 179 ff.;
    litigation, 178.
    _See also_ Settlement _and_ Speenhamland system.

  ---- ---- Commission of 1834, 125, 160, 167 _n._, 170, 184, 225 ff.

  Pope, 326.

  Popham, 21.

  Population and Speenhamland system, 170, 174 f., 228.

  Porritt, E., 8 ff., 11, 13.

  Port Arthur, 206.

  Porter, Thomas, 295.

  ---- William, 102.

  Porteus, Bishop, charge to clergy, 220 f.

  Portland, Duke of, 108.

  Portsmouth, 289.

  Potato ground, 160.

  Potter, Richard, 200.

  ---- Macqueen, 192, 308 _n._

  Pottern, 85.

  Potwalloper boroughs, 9.

  Powis, Mr., M.P., 76.

  Pretymans, the, 220.

  Price, William, and others, 95.

  ---- Rev. Mr., 245.

  Prices, growth of, 109.

  Priestley, Dr., 218.

  Privileges, Committee of, 10.

  _Proteus_, the, 308 _n._

  Prothero, R. E., 42.

  Public schools, 23.

  Pulteney, Sir William, 153.

  Punishment, discretion of judges, 202;
    penal code, 203;
    fears of its mildness, 204.
    _See also_ Transportation.

  Purley, 71.

  Pym, Mr., 101.

  ---- Mr., J.P., 192.

  Pyt House affray, 261 f., 292 f.


  Quainton (enclosure), 51, Appendix A (13).

  Quarrier, Dr., 283.

  Quarter Sessions, change in procedure, 17 f.

  Quesnai, 4.

  Quidhampton, 261.


  Radicals, the, 169, 236, 312.

  Radnor, Lord, 9, 291, 313.

  Rastall, Rev. Mr., 43 _n._

  Raunds (enclosure), 39, 51.

  Ray, river, 93 f.

  Reading, 231, 267;
    Special Commission at, 302 ff.

  _Reading Mercury_, 121 _n._ f., 161 _n._ ff.

  Redlich and Hirst, 7, 20.

  Redlinch, 67.

  Reed, Mr., 249.

  Reform Bill, riots, 243;
    agitation for, 324.
    _See also_ Parliamentary Reform.

  ---- Government, and 1830 rising, 311 ff.;
    prosecution of Carlile and Cobbett, 315 ff.;
    incapacity for social legislation, 324.

  Reni, Guido, 326.

  Revolution of 1688, 5, 26.

  Reynolds, Sir J., 24, 326, 332.

  Ricardo, 207.

  Richardson, Samuel, 18, 19, 33, 45.

  Richelieu, 1 ff., 5 f.

  Richmond, 9, 214.

  Richmond, Duke of, 24, 191, 309.

  Rick-burning. _See_ Arson.

  Ride, J. and F., and R., 102.

  Ringmer, 251.

  Riots, enclosure, 78 (_see also_ Otmoor);
    food riots of 1795, 120 ff.;
    of 1816, 175, 177 ff.;
    law about riot, 272 f.;
    in 1830, Chaps. xi. and xii. _passim_.

  Rising in 1830, 240 ff.;
    origin in Kent, 244;
    spread to Sussex, 247;
    to Berks, Hants, and Wilts, 258;
    alarm of authorities, 266 ff.;
    spread West and North, 268;
    wholesale arrests, 267, 270;
    trials, 272 ff.

  Robertsbridge, 249, 253 f.

  Robespierre, 217.

  Robinson, Mr., M.P., 68.

  ---- William, 102.

  Rochefoucault, Duc de la, 217.

  Rockingham, Lord, 13.

  Rockley, 297.

  Rode, 107.

  Rogers, Sarah, 121.

  ---- T. L., 102.

  Rome, comparison between English and Roman social history, 330 f.

  Romilly, S., 202 ff.;
    on Game Laws, 189, 198.

  Romsey, 289.

  Roundsman system, 148, 159, 164 f.

  Rous, Sir John, 141.

  Rousseau, 4, 226, 232.

  Rowland, John, 295.

  Rowlandson, 329.

  Ruggles, Thomas, 108, 112 _n._, 115, 133, 147 _n._

  Run-rig system, 28 _n._

  Russell, Lord John, 140, 183, 308 _n._

  ---- Lord William, 48.

  ---- 273 _n._

  Rutland, 155, 159.

  Rutland, Duke of, 43 _n._

  Rye, 12.


  Sagnac, P., 87 _n._

  St. Davids, Bishop of, 42, 55 f.

  St. Denis, 2.

  St. Germain, 219.

  St. John, H., and Sedgmoor, 65 ff.

  St. Lawrence Wootten, 281.

  St. Mary Bourne, 263.

  St. Neots, 102 _n._

  Salehurst, 253.

  Salisbury, Special Commission at, 275, 290 ff.;
    gaol rules at, 276, 291 f.;
    scene in court, 298 f.

  Salisbury, Bishop of, 85.

  ---- Lord, 85 _n._, 323.

  Sanctuary, Mr., 257.

  Sandwich, Lord, 58.

  Sandy (enclosure), 101.

  Sarney, John, 307.

  Savile, Sir George, 54 f., 57.

  Scarborough, Lord, 155.

  Schools of Industry, 149 f.

  Sclater, W. L., 281.

  Scot and lot boroughs, 8.

  Scotland, 129, 195 _n._

  Scotsmen, Cobbett on, 213.

  Scott, Sir William, 214, 221.

  Seaford, 121.

  Sedgefield, 129.

  Sedgford, 137.

  Sedgmoor. _See_ King’s Sedgmoor.

  Selborne Workhouse, 243, 260.

  Select Committees. _See_ List of Authorities.

  ---- Vestry. _See_ Vestry Reform.

  Selwyn, George, 103, 223;
    and Sedgmoor, 65 ff., 103.

  Settlement, Laws of, 112 ff., 141, 178 f., 261;
    effect of, 114 ff.;
    reforms made and proposed, 152 f.;
    Whitbread’s proposals in 1807, 179;
    litigation, 215.

  Settlements, family, 21 f.

  Sevenoaks, 244.

  Sheffield, 115 f.

  Sheffield, Lord, 37, 123 _n._, 124, 153, 310.

  Shelley, Sir Timothy, 257.

  ---- P. B., 257, 326.

  Shepherd, Aaron, 295.

  Sheppard, Joseph, 301.

  Sheraton, 327.

  Sheridan, 14, 24, 139, 161 _n._, 223, 314, 326, 328, 329;
    on enclosure Bills, 57;
    and minimum wage, 140, 233;
    and Pitt’s Poor Law Bill, 149;
    and Game Laws, 198.

  Shooting, change in character, 187.

  Shopkeepers and allotments, 159.

  Shore, Mrs., 125 _n._

  Shottesbrook, 268.

  Shrewsbury, 147 _n._, 152.

  Sidlesham, 107.

  Sidmouth, Lord, 218, 299, 314.

  Sidney, Sir Philip, 312.

  Silcock, 286.

  Simms, the brothers, 263, 277.

  Simond, M., 242.

  Simpson (enclosure), 50, 51, 58 _n._, 59, Appendix A (9).

  Simpson, Rev. Mr., 257.

  Sinclair, Sir John, 74;
    on common-field system, 36;
    and enclosure, 59 ff., 83 ff., 157.

  Sinecures, 173.

  Sinking Fund, 173.

  Sittingbourne, 246 f.

  Skipton, 116.

  Slade, Mrs. Charlotte, 263, 305.

  Slater, Dr., 7, 28 _n._, 30 _n._, 32 _n._, 41, 42 _n._, 85.

  Slaugham, 229.

  Slinn, John, 194.

  Smart, Professor, 173 _n._

  Smith, Abel, 156.

  ---- Adam, 29, 36, 40, 110, 143, 152, 181, 207, 312;
    on settlement, 114 f.;
    on clergy, 216 f.

  ---- General, 142.

  ---- Sydney, 190 _n._, 198, 201.

  Smollett, 18, 63, 214, 216.

  Snettisham, 137.

  Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, 85.

  ---- for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 318.

  ---- for the Reformation of Manners, 222.

  Soldiers and food riots, 121 f.

  Somerset, 98 _n._

  Soup for the poor, 125 and _n._

  Southampton, 267.

  Southey, 14 _n._

  South Sea Bubble, 175.

  Special Commissions, in 1816, 172;
    in 1830, 272 ff.;
    at Winchester, 278 ff.;
    Salisbury, 290 ff.;
    Dorchester, 300 ff.;
    Reading, 302 ff.;
    Abingdon, 305 ff.;
    Aylesbury, 306 f.;
    conduct of prosecutions, 291.

  Speenhamland, 19, 161 ff.

  ---- system, 19, 83, 302, 331;
    introduction of, 161 ff.;
    scale, 163;
    effects of, Chaps. viii. and x. _passim_;
    introduction into Warwickshire, 170;
    reduction in scale, 184 ff.

  Spenser, 5.

  Spring guns, 195 f.;
    Melbourne’s suggested reintroduction, 319.

  Squatters, 28;
    described, 31;
    ignored in enclosure consents, 52;
    results of enclosure on, 97, 102 f.

  Standing Orders, about enclosures, 43 f., 60, 62;
    origin of, 73 f.

  Stanhope, Lord, 320.

  Stanwell (enclosure), 33, 55, 58 _n._, 59, 86, 102, Appendix A (10).

  Star Chamber and enclosures, 34.

  States-General, 5.

  Stavordale, Lord, and Sedgmoor, 67 ff.

  Steel, George, 281.

  Sterne, 24.

  Stevens, James, 295.

  ---- Jane, 279.

  Steyning, 9.

  Stirling, Mrs., 196 _n._

  Stixswold, 32.

  Stockbury, 247.

  Stockton, 130.

  Stoke, 154 _n._

  ---- Cheriton, 285.

  Stokes, 277.

  Stone, Thomas, 81, 85.

  Stotfold, 269.

  Strafford, Lord, 48, 60.

  Strudwick, Dame, 208 ff.

  Stubbes, 34.

  Studley, 89.

  Sturges Bourne, 278, 322.

  Suffield, Lord, 238;
    and spring guns, 195 f., 319;
    scheme in 1830, 320 ff.;
    interviews with ministers, 322 ff.
    _See also_ Harbord Harbord.

  Suffolk, 122, 135, 177, 269;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Sumner, Bishop, 159, 264.

  Surplus profits, 167 ff.

  Surrey, 258.

  Sussex, 1830 rising in, 247;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Sutterton (enclosure), 100 _n._

  Sutton, Sir Richard, 30.

  ---- William, 281.

  Swabey, Maurice, 306.

  Swaffham, 99.

  Swift, 235.

  Swing, Captain, 245.


  Taltarum’s Case, 21.

  Taunton, Mr. Justice, 274, 310 f.

  Taxation, 171 ff.

  Tea-drinking, 128 f.

  Tenant farmers, 28 f.

  Tennyson, Mr., M.P., 196.

  Tenterden, Chief Justice, 317.

  Thanet, Lord, 321.

  Thelwall, 136, 169, 241.

  Themistocles, 70.

  Thompson, Mr., 156.

  ---- Captain, 284.

  Threshing machines, destruction of, Chap. xi. _passim_;
    reason of hostility to, 245;
    penalty for destruction, 273, 275.

  Thurlow, Lord, on enclosure procedure, 53, 56 f., 61.

  Ticehurst, 250.

  Tilsworth, 43 _n._

  _Times_, the, 177 _n._, 178 _n._, 193 _n._, and Chapters xi. and
        xii. _passim_, including articles quoted, 269, 274, 302,
        and Special Correspondent, 269, 274, 302.

  Tisbury, 261 f.

  Tithes, 217 f., 222;
    origin, 167 f.;
    demand for abatement in 1830, Chap. xi. _passim_.

  Tithe-owners, and enclosure, 56, 61 f., 97, 168.

  Tollington, 71.

  Tonbridge, 255.

  Tonga Islands, 187.

  Tooke, J. Horne, 72.

  ---- William, 71 f.

  Toomer, James, 277.

  Transportation, dreaded by labourers, 198 f.;
    described, 205 f.;
    effect on village life, 239.

  Treason and Sedition Acts, 139, 329.

  Trecothick, James, 48.

  Trevelyan, Sir George, 71.

  Trout, J., 102.

  Tunbridge Wells, 255 f.

  Turgot, 4 f.

  Turner, Mr., M.P., 198.

  ---- Mr. (Pyt House affray), 262.


  Ullathorne, Dr., 206 _n._

  Universities, the, 23.

  Upper Clatford, 285.


  Vachel, Rev. Mr., 178.

  Van Diemen’s Land, 205, 283 _n._, 308 _n._, 310 _n._, 324.

  Vansittart, 134.

  ---- Rev. Dr., 268.

  Vaughan, Baron, on Special Commissions, 273 f., 278 ff., 300 f.

  Vavasour, Sir Henry, 157.

  Venice, 173.

  Versailles, 2, 4, 327, 328.

  Vestry Reform, Whitbread’s proposals, 179 ff.;
    Acts of 1818 and 1819, 182 f.

  Village officials, 103.

  Vine Hall, 249.

  Vinogradoff, Professor, 17, 27.

  Virgil, 122, 206, 238.

  Voltaire, 4, 24.


  Wages, and prices, 111;
    regulation of, 133 ff.;
    assessment in 1725, 133;
    in 1732, 144 f.;
    proposals to assess at Speenhamland, 162;
    wages in 1824, 183;
    demand for living wage in 1830, Chaps. xi. and xii. _passim_;
    wages in Berks, Hants, and Wilts, 259.

  Wakefield (enclosure), 47 f., 55, 59 f., Appendix A (11).

  Walden, 268.

  Waller, William, 65.

  Walpole, 6, 214.

  ---- Sir Spencer, 238.

  Walsingham, Lord, 220.

  Waltham (enclosure), 43 _n._

  Wanstead, 132 _n._

  Warbleton, 250.

  Warburton, Mr., M.P., 187

  Ward, Mr., 304.

  Warde Fowler, Mr., 331.

  Warren, John. _See_ St. Davids, Bishop of.

  Warwick, 10.

  Warwickshire, 169, 194.

  Wasing, 303.

  Waterloo, 332.

  Watson, Bishop, 217.

  Webb, Mr. and Mrs., 7, 16, 19, 30 _n._, 191 _n._, 234 _n._

  Webster, Sir Godfrey, 250, 254.

  Wellingborough, 269.

  Wellington, Duke of, 140, 214, 221, 240, 252, 320;
    as Prime Minister, 253, 311, 316;
    and 1830 rising, 258, 278, 302, 309.

  Wensleydale, Lord. _See_ Mr. Justice Parke.

  Westcote (enclosure), 43 _n._

  Western, C. C., 176.

  ---- Squire, 50, 187, 222, 328.

  ---- Sophia, 211.

  West Grimstead, 294.

  Westminster, 8.

  Wetherall, 127.

  Wharncliffe, Lord, 190.

  Wheble, Mr., 305.

  Wherwell, 284.

  Whitaker, Sergeant, 203.

  Whitbread, Samuel, and minimum wage proposals, 86, 134, 139 ff.,
        149, 210, 233;
    scheme of 1807, 20, 179 ff.

  ---- Mr., J.P., 269.

  Whitchurch, 289.

  Whitecross Green, 89.

  Whiteparish, 293.

  White’s, 69, 332.

  Wickham, Mr., 266 _n._

  Wigtoft (enclosure), 100 _n._

  Wilbarston (enclosure), 78.

  Wilberforce, William, 124 _n._;
    and minimum wage, 143;
    and Protestant Church in Copenhagen, 178 _n._;
    and the reform of manners, 222;
    and Prince of Wales on Cobbett, 223;
    on blessings of England, 332.

  Wilde, Mr. Serjeant, 278, 282.

  Wilford, 118, 120.

  Wilkes, 72.

  Wilkinson, Dr., 79.

  Wilkinson, Mr. John, 116 _n._

  Willet, Mr., the banker, 177.

  ---- ---- the butcher, 177.

  William III., 5.

  ---- IV., 312.

  Williams, Mr., 221.

  ---- Mr., J. P., 265.

  ---- George, 305.

  ---- William, 226.

  Wilton, 261, 292.

  Wiltshire, 122;
    1830 rising in, 258 ff.;
    labourers compared with Hampshire, 298;
    prisoners, 308 _n._

  Winchester, 15, 121, 219;
    and 1830 rising, 265;
    Special Commission at, 274, 276, 278 ff.;
    scenes outside gaol, 289.

  Winchester, Bishop of. _See_ Sumner.

  ---- Lord, 284.

  ---- Mayor of, 265.

  Winchilsea, Lord, 101, 130, 242;
    his allotments, 155, 157 ff., 160.

  Windermere, 217.

  Windham, W., 57, 224.

  Windsor, 80.

  Winfrith Newburgh, (enclosure), 51, 59, Appendix A (12).

  Winkworth, William, 285.

  Winslow, 164.

  Winter, Captain, 310.

  Winterbourne, 305.

  Withers, Peter, 297.

  Witley, 208.

  Wonston, 284.

  Woolridge, Henry, 306.

  Worcester, 152.

  Worcestershire, 169.

  Workhouses, 147;
    destroyed in 1830, 260.

  Wraisbury, 50 _n._

  Wycombe, 306.

  Wynne, Squire, 293.


  Xenophon, 197.


  Yardley Goben, 164.

  Yorkshire, 13, 155, 269.

  Young, Arthur, 31, 33 _n._, 74, 80, 102 _n._, 160;
    on France and England, 3, 105, 111, 224;
    on common-field system, 37;
    on enclosure and its methods, 44, 58, 60, 62, 79, 81;
    protest against methods, 82 ff., 154;
    scheme for allotments, 84, 173, 321;
    and Otmoor, 89, 93;
    on wheaten bread, 126;
    and minimum wage, 135, 143;
    and Speenhamland system, 165;
    and bailiffs, 213;
    and curates, 221.

  ---- Sir William, 141, 143, 148.


  Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
  at the Edinburgh University Press



Transcriber's Note


The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. 3 "Gobereau" changed to "Hobereau"

p. 22 "eighteeenth-century" changed to "eighteenth-century"

p. 31 (note) "consent (p. 339)" changed to "consent’ (p. 339)"

p. 51 "of 721 neuter.’" changed to "of 721 neuter."

p. 58 "of canvassing,’" changed to "of canvassing.’"

p. 62 "his award was made," changed to "his award was made."

p. 69 "irregularity the Bill" changed to "irregularity: the Bill"

p. 76 "no less that" changed to "no less than"

p. 78 "ask for permisson" changed to "ask for permission"

p. 79 "inariably" changed to "invariably"

p. 105 "ses vaissaux" changed to "ses vassaux"

p. 107 "As Sidlesham in Surrey" changed to "At Sidlesham in Surrey"

p. 113 "till be became" changed to "till he became"

p. 119 "a parishoner" changed to "a parishioner"

p. 121 "As Ipswich" changed to "At Ipswich"

p. 121 "severe sentence." changed to "severe sentence.’"

p. 146 (note) "p. 91." changed to "p. 91.)"

p. 148 (note) "vol. i. p. 397" changed to "vol. i. p. 397."

p. 160 "saying ‘The more" changed to "saying "The more"

p. 160 "for us.’" changed to "for us."’"

p. 217 "demander a leur" changed to "demander à leur"

p. 228 "p. 66" changed to "p. 66."

p. 274 (note) "Vaughan (1769-1839" changed to "Vaughan (1769-1839)."

p. 278 "Sergeant Wild" changed to "Sergeant Wilde"

p. 304 "years’ transportation," changed to "years’ transportation."

p. 342 "(Lord of the Manor)" changed to "(Lord of the Manor),"

p. 343 "Clarks, Darey’s" changed to "Clarks, Dareys"

p. 357 "asking for leave." changed to "asking for leave"

p. 365 "‘A Clause was offered" changed to "A Clause was offered"

p. 380 "Cocks, Esq" changed to "Cocks, Esq."

p. 395 "p, 191." changed to "p. 191."

p. 397 "oatmeal" changed to "oatmeal,"

p. 398 "scarce’) Clothes," changed to "scarce’), Clothes,"

p. 402 "_History of the English Agricultural Labourer_" changed to
"_History of the English Agricultural Labourer_."

p. 405 "Aldeborough" changed to "Aldborough"

p. 405 "43 _n_" changed to "43 _n._"

p. 405 "50 59" changed to "50, 59"

p. 405 "1795, 121" changed to "1795, 121;"

p. 405 "J.P, 297" changed to "J.P., 297."

p. 409 "Charles, 141," changed to "Charles, 141;"

p. 409 "148 _n_" changed to "148 _n._"

p. 411 "Isle of Wight, 169" changed to "Isle of Wight, 169."

p. 411 "Holdsworth, W., 23 _n._" was printed out of order

p. 414 "Prothero, R. E" changed to "Prothero, R. E."

p. 414 "against enclosure 47" changed to "against enclosure, 47"

p. 417 "Mr. Serjeant" changed to "Mr. Sergeant"


Inconsistent or archaic spelling and punctuation have otherwise been
kept as printed.



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