_Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 23rd September, 1832._
From Bolton, in Lancashire, I came, through Bury and Rochdale, to
Todmorden, on the evening of Tuesday, the 18th September. I have
formerly described the valley of Todmorden as the most curious and
romantic that was ever seen, and where the water and the coal seemed to
be engaged in a struggle for getting foremost in point of utility to
man. On the 19th I staid all day at Todmorden to write and to sleep. On
the 20th I set off for Leeds by the stage coach, through Halifax and
Bradford; and as to _agriculture_, certainly the poorest country that I
have ever set my eyes on, except that miserable _Nova Scotia_, where
there are the townships of Horton and of Wilmot, and whither the
sensible suckling statesman, Lord Howick, is wanting to send English
country girls, lest they should breed if they stay in England! This
country, from Todmorden to Leeds, is, however, covered over with
population, and the two towns of Halifax and Bradford are exceedingly
populous. There appears to be nothing produced by the earth but the
natural grass of the country, which, however, is not bad. The soil is a
sort of yellow-looking, stiffish stuff, lying about a foot thick, upon a
bed of rocky stone, lying upon solid rock beneath. The grass does not
seem to burn here; nor is it bad in quality; and all the grass appears
to be wanted to rear milk for this immense population, that absolutely
covers the whole face of the country. The only grain crops that I saw
were those of very miserable oats; some of which were cut and carried;
some standing in _shock_, the sheaves not being more than about a foot
and a half long; some still standing, and some yet _nearly green_. The
land is very high from Halifax to Bradford, and proportionably cold.
Here are some of those "Yorkshire Hills" that they see from Lancashire
and Cheshire.
I got to Leeds about four o'clock, and went to bed at eight precisely.
At five in the morning of the 21st, I came off by the coach to
Newcastle, through Harrowgate, Ripon, Darlington, and Durham. As I never
was in this part of the country before, and can, therefore, never have
described it upon any former occasion, I shall say rather more about it
now than I otherwise should do. Having heard and read so much about the
"Northern Harvest," about the "Durham ploughs," and the "Northumberland
system of husbandry," what was my surprise at finding, which I verily
believe to be the fact, that there is not as much corn grown in the
North-Riding of Yorkshire, which begins at Ripon, and in the whole
county of Durham, as is grown in the Isle of Wight alone. A very small
part, comparatively speaking, is _arable_ land; and all the outward
appearances show that that which is arable was formerly pasture. Between
Durham and Newcastle there is a pretty general division of the land into
grass fields and corn fields; but, even here, the absence of
_homesteads_, the absence of barns, and of labourers' cottages, clearly
show that agriculture is a sort of novelty; and that nearly all was
pasturage not many years ago, or at any rate only so much of the land
was cultivated as was necessary to furnish straw for the horses kept for
other purposes than those of agriculture, and oats for those horses, and
bread corn sufficient for the graziers and their people. All along the
road from Leeds to Durham I saw hardly any wheat at all, or any wheat
stubble, no barley, the chief crops being oats and beans mixed with
peas. These everywhere appeared to be what we should deem most miserable
crops. The oats, tied up in sheaves, or yet uncut, were scarcely ever
more than two feet and a half long, the beans were about the same
height, and in both cases the land so full of grass as to appear to be
_a pasture_, after the oats and the beans were cut.
The land appears to be divided into very extensive farms. The corn, when
cut, you see put up into little stacks of a circular form, each
containing about _three_ of our southern wagon-loads of sheaves, which
stacks are put up round about the stone house and the buildings of the
farmer. How they thrash them out I do not know, for I could see nothing
resembling a barn or a barn's door. By the corn being put into such
small stacks, I should suppose the thrashing places to be very small,
and capable of holding only one stack at a time. I have many times seen
one single rick containing a greater quantity of sheaves than fifteen or
twenty of these stacks; and I have seen more than twenty stacks, each
containing a number of sheaves equal to, at least, fifteen of these
stacks; I have seen more than twenty of these large stacks, standing at
one and the same time, in one single homestead in Wiltshire. I should
not at all wonder if Tom Baring's farmers at Micheldever had a greater
bulk of wheat-stacks standing now than any one would be able to find of
that grain, especially, in the whole of the North-Riding of Yorkshire,
and in one half of Durham.
But this by no means implies that these are beggarly counties, even
exclusive of their waters, coals, and mines. They are not _agricultural_
counties; they are not counties for the producing of bread, but they are
counties made for the express purpose of producing meat; in which
respect they excel the southern counties, in a degree beyond all
comparison. I have just spoken of the _beds of grass_ that are
everywhere seen after the oats and the beans have been out. Grass is the
natural produce of this land, which seems to have been made on purpose
to produce it; and we are not to call land _poor_ because it will
produce nothing but meat. The size and shape of the fields, the sort of
fences, the absence of all homesteads and labourers' cottages, the
thinness of the country churches, everything shows that this was always
a country purely of pasturage. It is curious, that, belonging to every
farm, there appears to be a large quantity of turnips. They are sowed in
drills, cultivated between, beautifully clean, very large in the bulb,
even now, and apparently having been sowed early in June, if not in May.
They are generally the white globe turnip, here and there a field of the
Swedish kind. These turnips are not fed off by sheep and followed by
crops of barley and clover, as in the South, but are raised, I suppose,
for the purpose of being carried in and used in the feeding of oxen,
which have come off the grass lands in October and November. These
turnip lands seem to take all the manure of the farm; and, as the reader
will perceive, they are merely an adjunct to the pasturage, serving,
during the winter, instead of hay, wherewith to feed the cattle of
various descriptions.
This, then, is not a country of farmers, but a country of graziers; a
country of pasture, and not a country of the plough; and those who
formerly managed the land here were not husbandmen, but herdsmen.
Fortescue was, I dare say, a native of this country; for he describes
England as a country of shepherds and of herdsmen, not working so very
hard as the people of France did, having more leisure for contemplation,
and, therefore, more likely to form a just estimate of their rights and
duties; and he describes them as having, at all times, in their houses,
plenty of flesh to eat, and plenty of woollen to wear. St. Augustine, in
writing to the Pope an account of the character and conduct of his
converts in England, told him that he found the English an exceedingly
good and generous people; but they had one fault, their fondness for
flesh-meat was so great, and their resolution to have it so determined,
that he could not get them to abstain from it, even on the fast-days;
and that he was greatly afraid that they would return to their state of
horrible heathenism, rather than submit to the discipline of the church
in this respect. The Pope, who had more sense than the greater part of
bishops have ever had, wrote for answer: "Keep them within the pale of
the church, at any rate, even if they slaughter their oxen in the
churchyards: let them make shambles of the churches, rather than suffer
the devil to carry away their souls." The taste of our fathers was by no
means for the potato; for the "nice _mealy_ potato." The Pope himself
would not have been able to induce them to carry "cold potatoes in their
bags" to the plough-field, as was, in evidence before the special
commissions, proved to have been the common practice in Hampshire and
Wiltshire, and which had been before proved by evidence taken by
unfeeling committees of the boroughmonger House of Commons. Faith! these
old papas of ours would have burnt up not only the stacks, but the
ground itself, rather than have lived upon miserable roots, while those
who raised none of the food were eating up all the bread and the meat.
Brougham and Birkbeck, and the rest of the Malthusian crew, are
constantly at work preaching _content to the hungry and naked_. To be
sure, they themselves, however, are not content to be hungry and naked.
Amongst other things, they tell the working-people that the
working-folks, especially in the North, used to have no bread, except
such as was made of oats and of barley. That was better than potatoes,
even the "nice mealy ones;" especially when carried cold to the field in
a bag. But these literary impostors, these deluders, as far as they are
able to delude; these vagabond authors, who thus write and publish for
the purpose of persuading the working-people to be quiet, while they
sack luxuries and riches out of the fruit of their toil; these literary
impostors take care not to tell the people, that these oatcakes and this
barley-bread were always associated with great lumps of flesh-meat; they
forget to tell them this, or rather these half-mad, perverse, and
perverting literary impostors suppress the facts, for reasons far too
manifest to need stating.
The cattle here are the most beautiful by far that I ever saw. The sheep
are very handsome; but the horned cattle are the prettiest creatures
that my eyes ever beheld. My sons will recollect that when they were
little boys I took them to see the "Durham Ox," of which they drew the
picture, I dare say, a hundred times. That was upon a large scale, to be
sure, the model of all these beautiful cattle: short horns, strait back,
a taper neck, very small in proportion where it joins on the small and
handsome head, deep dewlap, small-boned in the legs, hoop-ribbed,
square-hipped, tail slender. A great part of them are white, or
approaching very nearly to white: they all appear to be half fat, cows
and oxen and all; and the meat from them is said to be, and I believe it
is, as fine as that from Lincolnshire, Herefordshire, Romney Marsh, or
Pevensey Level; and I am ready, at any time, to swear, if need be, that
one pound of it fed upon this grass is worth more, to me at least, than
any ten pounds or twenty pounds fed upon oil-cake, or the stinking stuff
of distilleries; aye, or even upon turnips. This is all _grass-land_,
even from Staffordshire to this point. In its very nature it produces
grass that fattens. The little producing-land that there is even in
Lancashire and the West-Riding of Yorkshire, produces grass that would
fatten an ox, though the land be upon the tops of hills. Everywhere,
where there is a sufficiency of grass, it will fatten an ox; and well do
we Southern people know that, except in mere vales and meadows, we have
no land that will do this; we know that we might put an ox up to his
eyes in our grass, and that it would only just keep him from growing
worse: we know that we are obliged to have turnips and meal and cabbages
and parsnips and potatoes, and then, with some of our hungry hay for
them to _pick their teeth with_, we make shift to put fat upon an ox.
Yet, so much are we like the beasts which, in the fable, came before
Jupiter to ask him to endow them with faculties incompatible with their
divers frames and divers degrees of strength, that we, in this age of
"_waust improvements, Ma'um_," are always hankering after laying fields
down in pasture, in the South, while these fellows in the North, as if
resolved to rival us in "improvement" and perverseness, must needs break
up their pasture-lands, and proclaim defiance to the will of Providence,
and, instead of rich pasture, present to the eye of the traveller
half-green starveling oats and peas, some of them in blossom in the last
week of September. The land itself, the earth, of its own accord, as if
resolved to vindicate the decrees of its Maker, sends up grass under
these miserable crops, as if to punish them for their intrusion; and,
when the crops are off, there comes a pasture, at any rate, in which the
grass, like that of Herefordshire and Lincolnshire, is not (as it is in
our Southern countries) mixed with weeds; but, standing upon the ground
as thick as the earth can bear it, and fattening everything that eats of
it, it forbids the perverse occupier to tear it to pieces. Such is the
land of this country; all to the North of Cheshire, at any rate, leaving
out the East-Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, which are adapted for
corn in some spots and for cattle in others.
These Yorkshire and Durham cows are to be seen in great numbers in and
about London, where they are used for the purpose of giving milk, of
which I suppose they give great quantities; but it is always an
observation that if you have these cows you must _keep them exceedingly
well_: and this is very true; for, upon the food which does very well
for the common cows of Hampshire and Surrey, they would dwindle away
directly and be good for nothing at all; and these sheep, which are as
beautiful as even imagination could make them, so round and so loaded
with flesh, would actually perish upon those downs and in those folds
where our innumerable flocks not only live but fatten so well, and with
such facility are made to produce us such quantities of fine mutton and
such bales of fine wool. There seems to be something in the soil and
climate, and particularly in the soil, to create everywhere a sort of
cattle and of sheep fitted to it; Dorsetshire and Somersetshire have
sheep different from all others, and the nature of which it is to have
their lambs in the fall instead of having them in the spring. I remember
when I was amongst the villages on the Cotswold-hills, in
Gloucestershire, they showed me their sheep in several places, which are
a stout big-boned sheep. They told me that many attempts had been made
to cross them with the small-boned Leicester breed, but that it had
never succeeded, and that the race always got back to the Cotswold breed
immediately.
Before closing these rural remarks, I cannot help calling to the mind of
the reader an observation of LORD JOHN SCOTT ELDON, who, at a time when
there was a great complaint about "agricultural distress" and about the
fearful increase of the poor-rates, said, "that there was no such
distress _in Northumberland_, and no such increase of the poor-rates:"
and so said my dignitary, Dr. Black, at the same time: and this, this
wise lord, and this not less wise dignitary of mine, ascribed to "the
bad practice of the farmers o' the Sooth paying the labourers their
wages out of the poor-rates, which was not the practice in the North." I
thought that they were telling what the children call _stories_; but I
now find that these observations of theirs arose purely from that want
of knowledge of the country which was, and is, common to them both. Why,
Lord John, there are no such persons here as we call farmers, and no
such persons as we call farm-labourers. From Cheshire to Newcastle, I
have never seen _one single labourer's cottage by the side of the road_!
Oh, Lord! if the good people of this country could but see the endless
strings of vine-covered cottages and flower-gardens of the labourers of
Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire; if they could go down the vale of
the Avon in Wiltshire, from Marlborough Forest to the city of Salisbury,
and there see _thirty_ parish churches in a distance of thirty miles; if
they could go up from that city of Salisbury up the valley of Wylly to
Warminster, and there see one-and-thirty churches in the space of
twenty-seven miles; if they could go upon the top of the down, as I did,
not far (I think it was) from St. Mary Cotford, and there have under the
eye, in the valley below, _ten parish churches within the distance of
eight miles_, see the downs covered with innumerable flocks of sheep,
water meadows running down the middle of the valley, while the sides
rising from it were covered with corn, sometimes a hundred acres of
wheat in one single piece, while the stack-yards were still well stored
from the previous harvest; if John Scott Eldon's countrymen could behold
those things, their quick-sightedness would soon discover why poor-rates
should have increased in the South and not in the North; and, though
their liberality would suggest an apology for my dignitary, Dr. Black,
who was freighted to London in a smack, and has ever since been
impounded in the Strand, relieved now and then by an excursion to
Blackheath or Clapham Common; to find an apology for their countryman,
Lord John, would be putting their liberality to an uncommonly severe
test; for he, be it known to them, has chosen his country abode, not in
the Strand like my less-informed dignitary, Dr. Black, nor in his native
regions in the North; but has, in the beautiful county of Dorset, amidst
valleys and downs precisely like those of Wiltshire, got as near to the
sun as he could possibly get, and there, from the top of his mansion he
can see a score of churches, and from his lofty and ever-green downs,
and from his fat valleys beneath, he annually sends his flocks of
long-tailed ewes to Appleshaw fair, thence to be sold to all the
southern parts of the kingdom, having L. E. marked upon their beautiful
wool; and, like the two factions at Maidstone, all tarred with the same
brush. It is curious, too, notwithstanding the old maxim, that we all
try to get as nearly as possible in our old age to the spot whence we
first sprang. Lord John's brother William (who has some title that I
have forgotten) has taken up his quarters on the healthy and I say
beautiful Cotswold of Gloucestershire, where, in going in a postchaise
from Stowe-in-the-Wold to Cirencester, I thought I should never get by
the wall of his park; and I exclaimed to Mr. Dean, who was along with
me, "Curse this Northumbrian ship-broker's son, he has got one half of
the county;" and then all the way to Cirencester I was explaining to Mr.
Dean _how the man had got his money_, at which Dean, who is a Roman
Catholic, seemed to me to be ready to cross himself several times.
No, there is no apology for Lord John's observations on the difference
between the poor-rates of the South and the North. To go from London to
his country-houses he must go across Surrey and Hampshire, along one of
the vales of Wiltshire, and one of the vales of Dorsetshire, in which
latter county he has many a time seen in one single large field _a
hundred wind-rows_ (stacks made in the field in order that the corn may
get quite dry before it be put into great stacks); he has many a time
seen, on one farm, two or three hundred of these, each of which was very
nearly as big as the stacks which you see in the stack-yards of the
North Riding of Yorkshire and of Durham, where a large farm seldom
produces more than ten or a dozen of these stacks, and where the
farmer's property consists of his cattle and sheep, and where little,
very little, agricultural labour is wanted. Lord John ought to have
known the cause of the great difference, and not to have suffered such
nonsense to come out of a head covered with so very large a wig.
I looked with particular care on the sides of the road all the way
through Yorkshire and Durham. The distance, altogether, from Oldham in
Lancashire, to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is about a hundred and fifty miles;
and, leaving out the _great_ towns, I did not see so many churches as
are to be seen in any twenty miles of any of the valleys of Wiltshire.
All these things prove that these are by nature counties of pasturage,
and that they were formerly used solely for that purpose. It is curious
that there are none of those lands here which we call "meadows." The
rivers run in _deep beds_, and have generally very steep sides; no
little rivulets and occasional overflowings that make the meadows in the
South, which are so very beautiful, but the grass in which is not of the
rich nature that the grass is in these counties in the North: it will
produce milk enough, but it will not produce beef. It is hard to say
which part of the country is the most valuable gift of God; but every
one must see how perverse and injurious it is to endeavour to produce in
the one that which nature has intended to confine to the other. After
all the unnatural efforts that have been made here to ape the farming of
Norfolk and Suffolk, it is only _playing at farming_, as stupid and
"loyal" parents used to set their children _to play at soldiers during
the last war_.
If any of these sensible men of Newcastle were to see the farming in the
South Downs, and to see, as I saw in the month of July last, four teams
of large oxen, six in a team, all ploughing in one field in preparation
for wheat, and several pairs of horses, in the same field, dragging,
harrowing, and rolling, and had seen on the other side of the road from
five to six quarters of wheat standing upon the acre, and from nine to
ten quarters of oats standing alongside of it, each of the two fields
from fifty to a hundred statute acres; if any of these sensible men of
Newcastle could see these things, they would laugh at the childish work
that they see going on here under the name of farming; the very sight
would make them feel how imperious is the duty on the law-giver to
prevent distress from visiting the fields, and to take care that those
whose labour produced all the food and all the raiment, shall not be fed
upon potatoes and covered with rags; contemplating the important effects
of their labour, each man of them could say as I said when this mean and
savage faction had me at my trial, "I would see all these labourers
hanged, and be hanged along with them, rather than see them live upon
potatoes."
_Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 24th September, 1832._
Since writing the above I have had an opportunity of receiving
information from a very intelligent gentleman of this county, who tells
me, that in Northumberland there are some lands which bear very heavy
crops of wheat; that the agriculture in this county is a great deal
better than it is farther south; that, however, it was a most lamentable
thing that the paper-money price of corn tempted so many men to break up
these fine pastures; that the turf thus destroyed cannot be restored
probably in a whole century; that the land does not now, with present
prices, yield a clear profit, anything like what it would have yielded
in the pasture; and that thus was destroyed the _goose with the golden
eggs_. Just so was it with regard to the _downs_ in the south and the
west of England, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres, where
the turf was the finest in the world, broken up for the sake of the
paper-money prices, but now left to be _downs again_; and which will not
be _downs_ for more than a century to come. Thus did this accursed
paper-money cause even the fruitful qualities of the earth to be
anticipated, and thus was the soil made _worth less_ than it was before
the accursed invention appeared! This gentleman told me that this
breaking up of the pasture-land in this country had made the land,
though covered again with artificial grasses, unhealthy for sheep; and
he gave as an instance the facts, that three farmers purchased a hundred
and fifty sheep each, out of the same flock; that two of them, who put
their sheep upon these recently broken-up lands, lost their whole flocks
by the rot, with the exception of four in the one case and four in the
other, out of the three hundred: and that the third farmer, who put his
sheep upon the old pastures, and kept them there, lost not a single
sheep out of the hundred and fifty! These, ever accursed paper-money,
are amongst thy destructive effects!
I shall now, laying aside for the present these rural affairs, turn to
the politics of this fine, opulent, solid, beautiful, and important
town; but as this would compel me to speak of particular transactions
and particular persons, and as this _Register_ will come back to
Newcastle before I am likely to quit it, the reader will see reasons
quite sufficient for my refraining to go into matters of this sort,
until the next _Register_, which will in all probability be dated from
Edinburgh.
While at Manchester, I received an invitation to lodge while here at the
house of a friend, of whom I shall have to speak more fully hereafter;
but every demonstration of respect and kindness met me at the door of
the coach in which I came from Leeds, on Friday, the 21st September. In
the early part of Saturday, the 22nd, a deputation waited upon me with
_an address_. Let the readers, in my native county and parish, remember
that I am now at the end of thirty years of calumnies poured out
incessantly upon me from the poisonous mouths and pens of three hundred
mercenary villains, called newspaper editors and reporters; that I have
written and published more than a hundred volumes in those thirty years;
and that more than a thousand volumes (chiefly paid for out of the
taxes) have been written and published for the sole purpose of impeding
the progress of those truths that dropped from my pen; that my whole
life has been a life of sobriety and labour; that I have invariably
shown that I loved and honoured my country, and that I preferred its
greatness and happiness far beyond my own; that, at four distinct
periods, I might have rolled in wealth derived from the public money,
which I always refused on any account to touch; that, for having
thwarted this Government in its wastefulness of the public resources,
and particularly for my endeavours to produce that Reform of the
Parliament which the Government itself has at last been compelled to
resort to; that, for having acted this zealous and virtuous part, I have
been twice stripped of all my earnings by the acts of this Government;
once lodged in a felon's jail for two years, and once driven into exile
for two years and a half; and that, after all, here I am on a spot
within a hundred miles of which I never was before in my life; and here
I am receiving the unsolicited applause of men amongst the most
intelligent in the whole kingdom, and the names of some of whom have
been pronounced accompanied with admiration, even to the southernmost
edge of the kingdom.
_Hexham, 1st Oct., 1832._
I left Morpeth this morning pretty early, to come to this town, which
lies on the banks of the Tyne, at thirty-four miles distant from
Morpeth, and at twenty distant from Newcastle. Morpeth is a great
market-town, for cattle especially. It is a solid old town; but it has
the disgrace of seeing an enormous new jail rising up in it. From
cathedrals and monasteries we are come to be proud of our jails, which
are built in the grandest style, and seemingly as if to imitate the
Gothic architecture.
From Morpeth to within about four miles of Hexham, the land is but very
indifferent; the farms of an enormous extent. I saw in one place more
than a hundred corn-stacks in one yard, each having from six to seven
Surrey wagon-loads of sheaves in a stack; and not another house to be
seen within a mile or two of the farmhouse. There appeared to be no such
thing as barns, but merely a place to take in a stack at a time, and
thrash it out by a machine. The country seems to be almost wholly
destitute of people. Immense tracks of corn-land, but neither cottages
nor churches. There is here and there a spot of good land, just as in
the deep valleys that I crossed; but, generally speaking, the country
is poor; and its bleakness is proved by the almost total absence of the
oak tree, of which we see scarcely one all the way from Morpeth to
Hexham. Very few trees of any sort, except in the bottom of the warm
valleys; what there are, are chiefly the _ash_, which is a very hardy
tree, and will live and thrive where the _oak_ will not grow at all,
which is very curious, seeing that it comes out into leaf so late in the
spring, and sheds its foliage so early in the fall. The trees which
stand next in point of hardiness are the _sycamore_, the _beech_, and
the _birch_, which are all seen here; but none of them fine. The _ash_
is the most common tree, and even it flinches upon the hills, which it
never does in the South. It has generally become yellow in the leaf
already; and many of the trees are now bare of leaf before any frost has
made its appearance.
The cattle all along here are of a coarse kind; the cows swag-backed and
badly shaped; Kiloe oxen, except in the dips of good land by the sides
of the bourns which I crossed. Nevertheless, even here, the fields of
turnips, of both sorts, are very fine. Great pains seem to be taken in
raising the crops of these turnips: they are all cultivated in rows, are
kept exceedingly clean, and they are carried in as winter food for all
the animals of a farm, the horses excepted.
As I approached Hexham, which, as the reader knows, was formerly the
seat of a famous abbey, and the scene of a not less famous battle, and
was, indeed, at one time the _see_ of a bishop, and which has now
churches of great antiquity and cathedral-like architecture; as I
approached this town, along a valley down which runs a small river that
soon after empties itself into the Tyne, the land became good, the ash
trees more lofty, and green as in June; the other trees proportionably
large and fine; and when I got down into the vale of Hexham itself,
there I found the _oak_ tree, certain proof of a milder atmosphere; for
the _oak_, though amongst the hardest _woods_, is amongst the tenderest
of plants known as natives of our country. Here everything assumes a
different appearance. The Tyne, the southern and northern branches of
which meet a few miles above Hexham, runs close by this ancient and
celebrated town, all round which the ground rises gradually away towards
the hills, crowned here and there with the remains of those castles
which were formerly found necessary for the defence of this rich and
valuable valley, which, from tip of hill to tip of hill, varies,
perhaps, from four to seven miles wide, and which contains as fine
corn-fields as those of Wiltshire, and fields of turnips, of both kinds,
the largest, finest, and best cultivated, that my eyes ever beheld. As a
proof of the goodness of the land and the mildness of the climate here,
there is, in the grounds of the gentleman who had the kindness to
receive and to entertain me (and that in a manner which will prevent me
from ever forgetting either him or his most amiable wife); there is,
standing in his ground, _about an acre of my corn_, which will ripen
perfectly well; and in the same grounds, which, together with the
kitchen-garden and all the appurtenances belonging to a house, and the
house itself, are laid out, arranged, and contrived, in a manner so
judicious, and to me so original, as to render them objects of great
interest, though, in general, I set very little value on the things
which appertain merely to the enjoyments of the rich. In these same
grounds (to come back again to the climate), I perceived that the rather
tender evergreens not only lived but throve perfectly well, and (a
criterion infallible) the _biennial stocks_ stand the winter without any
covering or any pains taken to shelter them; which, as every one knows,
is by no means always the case, even at Kensington and Fulham.
At night I gave a lecture at an inn, at Hexham, in the midst of the
domains of that impudent and stupid man, Mr. Beaumont, who, not many
days before, in what he called a speech, I suppose, made at Newcastle,
thought proper, as was reported in the newspapers, to utter the
following words with regard to me, never having, in his life, received
the slightest provocation for so doing. "The liberty of the press had
nothing to fear from the Government. It was the duty of the
administration to be upon their guard to prevent extremes. There was a
crouching servility on the one hand, and an excitement to
disorganization and to licentiousness on the other, which ought to be
discountenanced. The company, he believed, as much disapproved of that
political traveller who was now going through the country--he meant
Cobbett--as they detested the servile effusions of the Tories."
Beaumont, in addition to his native stupidity and imbecility, might have
been drunk when he said this, but the servile wretch who published it
was not drunk; and, at any rate, Beaumont was my mark, it not being my
custom to snap at the stick, but at the cowardly hand that wields it.
Such a fellow cannot be an object of what is properly called _vengeance_
with any man who is worth a straw; but, I say, with SWIFT, "If a _flea_
or a _bug_ bite me, I will kill it if I can;" and, acting upon that
principle, I, being at Hexham, put my foot upon this contemptible
creeping thing, who is offering himself as a candidate for the southern
division of the county, being so eminently fitted to be a maker of the
laws!
The newspapers have told the whole country that Mr. John Ridley, who is
a tradesman at Hexham, and occupies some land close by, has made a stand
against the demand for tithes; and that the tithe-owner recently broke
open, in the night, the gate of his field, and carried away what he
deemed to be the tithe; that Mr. Ridley applied to the magistrates, who
could only refer him to a court of law to recover damages for the
trespass. When I arrived at Hexham, I found this to be the case. I
further found that Beaumont, that impudent, silly and slanderous
Beaumont, is the _lay-owner_ of the tithes in and round about Hexham; he
being, in a right line, doubtless, the heir or successor of the abbot
and monks of the Abbey of Hexham; or, the heir of the donor, Egfrid,
_king of Northumberland_. I found that Beaumont had leased out his
tithes to _middle men_, as is the laudable custom with the pious bishops
and clergy of the law-church in Ireland.
_North Shields, 2nd Oct., 1832._
These sides of the Tyne are very fine: corn-fields, woods, pastures,
villages; a church every four miles, or thereabouts; cows and sheep
beautiful; oak trees, though none very large; and, in short, a fertile
and beautiful country, wanting only the gardens and the vine-covered
cottages that so beautify the counties in the South and the West. All
the buildings are of stone. Here are coal-works and railways every now
and then. The working people seem to be very well off; their dwellings
solid and clean, and their furniture good; but the little gardens and
orchards are wanting. The farms are all large; and the people who work
on them either live in the farmhouse, or in buildings appertaining to
the farmhouse; and they are all well fed, and have no temptation to acts
like those which sprang up out of the ill-treatment of the labourers in
the South. Besides, the mere country people are so few in number, the
state of society is altogether so different, that a man who has lived
here all his life-time, can form no judgment at all with regard to the
situation, the wants, and the treatment of the working people in the
counties of the South.
They have begun to make a railway from Carlisle to Newcastle; and I saw
them at work at it as I came along. There are great _lead mines_ not far
from Hexham; and I saw a great number of little one-horse carts bringing
down the _pigs of lead_ to the point where the Tyne becomes navigable to
Newcastle; and sometimes I saw loads of these _pigs_ lying by the
road-side, as you see parcels of timber lying in Kent and Sussex, and
other timber counties. No fear of their being stolen: their weight is
their security, together with their value compared with that of the
labour of carrying. Hearing that Beaumont was, somehow or other,
connected with this lead-work, I had got it into my head that he was a
pig of lead himself, and half expected to meet with him amongst these
groups of his fellow-creatures; but, upon inquiry, I found that some of
the lead-mines belonged to him; descending, probably, in that same right
line in _which the tithes descended to him_; and as the Bishop of Durham
is said to be the owner of great lead-mines, Beaumont and the bishop may
possibly be in the _same boat_ with regard to the subterranean estate as
well as that upon the surface; and if this should be the case, it will,
I verily believe, require all the piety of the bishop, and all the
wisdom of Beaumont, to keep the boat above water for another five years.
_North Shields, 3rd Oct., 1832._
I lectured at South Shields last evening, and here this evening. I came
over the river from South Shields about eleven o'clock last night, and
made a very firm bargain with myself never to do the like again. This
evening, after my lecture was over, some gentlemen presented an address
to me upon the stage, before the audience, accompanied with the valuable
and honourable present of the late Mr. Eneas Mackenzie's _History of the
County of Northumberland_; a very interesting work, worthy of every
library in the kingdom.
From Newcastle to Morpeth; from Morpeth to Hexham; and then all the way
down the Tyne; though everywhere such abundance of fine turnips, and in
some cases of mangel-wurzel, you see scarcely any _potatoes_: a certain
sign that the working people do not live like hogs. This root is raised
in Northumberland and Durham, to be used merely as garden stuff; and,
used in that way, it is very good; the contrary of which I never
thought, much less did I ever say it. It is the using of it as a
_substitute_ for bread and for meat, that I have deprecated it; and when
the Irish poet, Dr. Drennen, called it "the lazy root, and the root of
misery," he gave it its true character. Sir Charles Wolseley, who has
travelled a great deal in France, Germany and Italy, and who, though
Scott-Eldon scratched him out of the commission of the peace, and though
the sincere patriot Brougham will not put him in again, is a very great
and accurate observer as to these interesting matters, has assured me
that, in whatever proportion the cultivation of potatoes prevails in
those countries, in that same proportion the working-people are
wretched.
From this degrading curse; from sitting round a dirty board, with
potatoes trundled out upon it, as the Irish do: from going to the field
with cold potatoes in their bags, as the working-people of Hampshire and
Wiltshire _did_, but which they have not done since the appearance of
certain _coruscations_, which, to spare the feelings of the "Lambs, the
Broughams, the Greys, and the Russells," and their dirty
bill-of-indictment-drawer Denman, I will not describe, much less will I
eulogize; from this degrading curse the county of Northumberland is yet
happily free!
_Sunderland, 4th Oct., 1832._
This morning I left North Shields in a post-chaise, in order to come
hither through Newcastle and Gateshead, this affording me the only
opportunity that I was likely to have of seeing a plantation of Mr.
Annorer Donkin, close in the neighbourhood of Newcastle; which
plantation had been made according to the method prescribed in my book,
called the "Woodlands;" and to see which plantation I previously
communicated a request to Mr. Donkin. That gentleman received me in a
manner which will want no describing to those who have had the good luck
to visit Newcastle. The plantation is most advantageously circumstanced
to furnish proof of the excellence of my instructions as to planting.
The predecessor of Mr. Donkin also made plantations upon the same spot,
and consisting precisely of the same sort of trees. The two plantations
are separated from each other merely by a road going through them. Those
of the predecessor have been made _six-and-twenty years_; those of Mr.
Donkin _six years_; and, incredible as it may appear, the trees in the
latter are full as lofty as those in the former; and, besides the equal
loftiness, are vastly superior in point of shape, and, which is very
curious, retain all their freshness at this season of the year, while
the old plantations are brownish and many of the leaves falling off the
trees, though the sort of trees is precisely the same. As a sort of
reward for having thus contributed to this very rational source of his
pleasure, Mr. Donkin was good enough to give me an elegant copy of the
fables of the celebrated Bewick, who was once a native of Newcastle and
an honour to the town, and whose books I had had from the time that my
children began to look at books, until taken from me by that sort of
rapine which I had to experience at the time of my memorable flight
across the Atlantic, in order to secure the use of that long arm which I
caused to reach them from Long Island to London.
In Mr. Donkin's kitchen-garden (my eyes being never closed in such a
scene) I saw what I had never seen before in any kitchen-garden, and
which it may be very useful to some of my readers to have described to
them. _Wall-fruit_ is, when destroyed in the spring, never destroyed by
_dry-cold_; but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, by wet-frosts, which
descend always perpendicularly, and which are generally fatal if they
come between the expansion of the blossom and the setting of the fruit;
that is to say, if they come after the bloom is quite open, and before
it has disentangled itself from the fruit. The great thing, therefore,
in getting _wall-fruit_, is to keep off these frosts. The French make
use of boards, in the neighbourhood of Paris, projecting from the tops
of the walls and supported by poles; and some persons contrive to have
curtains to come over the whole tree at night and to be drawn up in the
morning. Mr. Donkin's walls have a top of stone; and this top, or cap,
projects about eight inches beyond the face of the wall, which is quite
sufficient to guard against the wet-frosts which always fall
perpendicularly. This is a country of stone to be sure; but those who
can afford to build walls for the purpose of having wall-fruit, can
afford to cap them in this manner: to rear the wall, plant the trees,
and then to save the expense of the cap, is really like the old
proverbial absurdity, "of losing the ship for the sake of saving a
pennyworth of tar."
At Mr. Donkin's I saw a portrait of Bewick, which is said to be a great
likeness, and which, though imagination goes a great way in such a case,
really bespeaks that simplicity, accompanied with that genius, which
distinguished the man. Mr. Wm. Armstrong was kind enough to make me a
present of a copy of the last performance of this so justly celebrated
man. It is entitled "_Waits for Death_," exhibiting a poor old horse
just about to die, and preceded by an explanatory writing, which does as
much honour to the heart of Bewick as the whole of his designs put
together do to his genius. The sight of the picture, the reading of the
preface to it, and the fact that it was the last effort of the man;
altogether make it difficult to prevent tears from starting from the
eyes of any one not uncommonly steeled with insensibility.
You see nothing here that is pretty; but everything seems to be abundant
in value; and one great thing is, the working people live well. Theirs
is not a life of ease to be sure, but it is not a life of hunger. The
pitmen have twenty-four shillings a week; they live rent-free, their
fuel costs them nothing, and their doctor cost them nothing. Their work
is terrible, to be sure; and, perhaps, they do not have what they ought
to have; but, at any rate, they live well, their houses are good and
their furniture good; and though they live not in a beautiful scene,
they are in the scene where they were born, and their lives seem to be
as good as that of the working part of mankind can reasonably expect.
Almost the whole of the country hereabouts is owned by that curious
thing called the _Dean and Chapter_ of Durham. Almost the whole of South
Shields is theirs, granted upon leases with fines at stated periods.
This Dean and Chapter are the _lords of the Lords_. Londonderry, with
all his huffing and strutting, is but a tenant of the Dean and Chapter
of Durham, who souse him so often with their _fines_ that it is said
that he has had to pay them more than a hundred thousand pounds within
the last ten or twelve years. What will Londonderry bet that, he is not
the _tenant of the public_ before this day five years? There would be no
difficulty in these cases, but on the contrary a very great convenience;
because all these tenants of the Dean and Chapter might then purchase
out-and-out, and make that property freehold, which they now hold by a
tenure so uncertain and so capricious.
_Alnwick, 7th Oct., 1832._
From Sunderland I came, early in the morning of the 5th of October, once
more (and I hope not for the last time) to Newcastle, there to lecture
on the paper-money, which I did, in the evening. But before I proceed
further, I must record something that I heard at Sunderland respecting
that babbling fellow Trevor! My readers will recollect the part which
this fellow acted with regard to the "liberal Whig prosecution;" they
will recollect that it was he who first mentioned the thing in the House
of Commons, and suggested to the wise Ministers the propriety of
prosecuting me; that Lord Althorp and Denman _hummed_ and _ha'd_ about
it; that the latter had _not read it_, and that the former would offer
no opinion upon it; that Trevor came on again, encouraged by the works
of the curate of Crowhurst, and by the bloody old _Times_, whose former
editor and now printer is actually a candidate for Berkshire, supported
by that unprincipled political prattler, Jephthah Marsh, whom I will
call to an account as soon as I get back to the South. My readers will
further recollect that the bloody old _Times_ then put forth another
document as a confession of Goodman, made to Burrell, Tredcroft, and
Scawen Blunt, while the culprit was in Horsham jail with a halter
actually about his neck. My readers know the _result_ of this affair;
but they have yet to learn some circumstances belonging to its progress,
which circumstances are not to be stated here. They recollect, however,
that from the very first I treated this TREVOR with the utmost disdain;
and that at the head of the articles which I wrote about him I put these
words, "TREVOR AND POTATOES;" meaning that he hated me because I was
resolved, fire or fire not, that working men should not live upon
potatoes in my country. Now, mark; now, chopsticks of the South, mark
the sagacity, the justice, the promptitude, and the excellent taste of
these lads of the North! At the last general election, which took place
after the "liberal Whig prosecution" had been begun, Trevor was a
candidate for the city of Durham, which is about fourteen miles from
this busy town of Sunderland. The freemen of Durham are the voters in
that city, and some of these freemen reside at Sunderland. Therefore
this fellow (I wish to God you could _see_ him!) went to Sunderland to
canvass these freemen residing there; and they pelted him out of the
town; and (oh appropriate missiles!) pelted him out with the "accursed
root," hallooing and shouting after him--"_Trevor and potatoes!_" Ah!
stupid coxcomb! little did he imagine, when he was playing his game with
Althorp and Denman, what would be the ultimate effect of that game!
From Newcastle to Morpeth (the country is what I before described it to
be). From Morpeth to this place (Alnwick), the country, generally
speaking, is very poor as to land, scarcely any trees at all; the farms
enormously extensive; only two churches, I think, in the whole of the
twenty miles; scarcely anything worthy the name of a tree, and not one
single dwelling having the appearance of a labourer's house. Here
appears neither hedging nor ditching; no such thing as a sheep-fold or a
hurdle to be seen; the cattle and sheep very few in number; the farm
servants living in the farm-houses, and very few of them; the thrashing
done by machinery and horses; a country without people. This is a pretty
country to take a minister from to govern the South of England! A pretty
country to take a Lord Chancellor from to prattle about _Poor Laws_ and
about _surplus population_! My Lord Grey has, in fact, spent his life
here, and Brougham has spent his life in the Inns of Court, or in the
botheration of speculative books. How should either of them know
anything about the eastern, southern, or western counties? I wish I had
my dignitary Dr. Black here; I would soon make him see that he has all
these number of years been talking about the bull's horns instead of his
tail and his buttocks. Besides the indescribable pleasure of having seen
Newcastle, the Shieldses, Sunderland, Durham, and Hexham, I have now
discovered the true ground of all the errors of the Scotch _feelosofers_
with regard to population, and with regard to poor-laws. The two
countries are as different as any two things of the same nature can
possibly be; that which applies to the one does not at all apply to the
other. The agricultural counties are covered all over with parish
churches, and with people thinly distributed here and there.
Only look at the two counties of Dorset and Durham. Dorset contains
1,005 square miles; Durham contains 1,061 square miles. Dorset has 271
_parishes_; Durham has 75 parishes. The population of Dorset is
scattered over the whole of the county, there being no town of any
magnitude in it. The population of Durham, though larger than that of
Dorset, is almost all gathered together at the mouths of the Tyne, the
Wear, and the Tees. Northumberland has 1,871 square miles; and Suffolk
has 1,512 square miles. Northumberland has _eighty-eight parishes_; and
Suffolk has _five hundred and ten parishes_. So that here is a county
one third part smaller than that of Northumberland with six times as
many villages in it! What comparison is there to be made between states
of society so essentially different? What rule is there, with regard to
population and poor-laws, which can apply to both cases? And how is my
Lord Howick, born and bred up in Northumberland, to know how to judge of
a population suitable to Suffolk? Suffolk is a county teeming with
production, as well as with people; and how brutal must that man be who
would attempt to reduce the agricultural population of Suffolk to that
of the number of Northumberland! The population of Northumberland,
larger than Suffolk as it is, does not equal it in total population by
nearly one-third, notwithstanding that one half of its whole population
have got together on the banks of the Tyne. And are we to get rid of our
people in the South, and supply the places of them by horses and
machines? Why not have the people in the fertile counties of the South,
where their very existence causes their food and their raiment to come?
Blind and thoughtless must that man be who imagines that all but _farms_
in the South are unproductive. I much question whether, taking a strip
three miles each way from the road, coming from Newcastle to Alnwick, an
equal quantity of what is called _waste ground_, together with the
cottages that skirt it, do not exceed such strip of ground in point of
produce. Yes, the cows, pigs, geese, poultry, gardens, bees and fuel
that arise from those _wastes_, far exceed, even in the capacity of
sustaining people, similar breadths of ground, distributed into these
large farms in the poorer parts of Northumberland. I have seen not less
than ten thousand geese in one tract of common, in about six miles,
going from Chobham towards Farnham in Surrey. I believe these geese
alone, raised entirely by care and by the common, to be worth more than
the clear profit that can be drawn from any similar breadth of land
between Morpeth and Alnwick. What folly is it to talk, then, of applying
to the counties of the South, principles and rules applicable to a
country like this!
To-morrow morning I start for "Modern Athens"! My readers will, I dare
say, perceive how much my "_antalluct_" has been improved since I
crossed the Tyne. What it will get to when I shall have crossed the
Tweed, God only knows. I wish very much that I could stop a day at
Berwick, in order to find some _feelosofer_ to ascertain, by some
chemical process, the exact degree of the improvement of the
"_antalluct_." I am afraid, however, that I shall not be able to manage
this; for I must get along; beginning to feel devilishly home-sick
since I have left Newcastle.
* * * * *
They tell me that Lord Howick, who is just married by-the-by, made a
speech here the other day, during which he said, "that the Reform was
only the means to an end; and that the end was cheap government." Good!
stand to that, my Lord, and, as you are now married, pray let the
country fellows and girls marry too: let us have _cheap government_, and
I warrant you that there will be room for us all, and plenty for us to
eat and drink. It is the drones, and not the bees, that are too
numerous; it is the vermin who live upon the taxes, and not those who
work to raise them, that we want to get rid of. We are keeping fifty
thousand tax-eaters to breed gentlemen and ladies for the industrious
and laborious to keep. These are the opinions which I promulgate; and
whatever your flatterers may say to the contrary, and whatever
_feelosofical_ stuff Brougham and his rabble of writers may put forth,
these opinions of mine will finally prevail. I repeat my anxious wish (I
would call it a _hope_ if I could) that your father's resolution may be
equal to his sense, and that he will do that which is demanded by the
right which the people have to insist upon measures necessary to restore
the greatness and happiness of the country; and, if he show a
disposition to do this, I should deem myself the most criminal of all
mankind, if I were to make use of any influence that I possess to render
his undertaking more difficult than it naturally must be; but, if he
show not that disposition, it will be my bounden duty to endeavour to
drive him from the possession of power; for, be the consequences to
individuals what they may, the greatness, the freedom, and the happiness
of England must be restored.