small temporary advantages which sprang from it. True, I question if the
benefits experienced here were equal to those which are said to have
been realized in similar circumstances elsewhere. In other parishes,
where the farmers have been impoverished and the labourers out of work,
the latter, at the enclosure of a common, have sometimes found welcome
employment in digging out or fencing in the boundaries of the new
allotments, and in breaking up the fresh ground. So the landowners say.
But here, where there were few men wanting constant labour, the
opportunity of work to do was hardly called for, and the making of
boundaries was in many cases neglected. In that one way, therefore, not
many can have derived any profit from the enclosure. On the other hand,
an advantage was really felt, I think, in the opening that arose for
building cottages on the newly-acquired freeholds. Quite a number of
cottages seem to date from that period; and I infer that the opportunity
was seized by various men who wished to provide new house-room for
themselves, or for a married son or daughter. They could still go to
work almost on the old lines. Perhaps the recognized price--seventy
pounds, it is said to have been, for building a cottage of three
rooms--would have to be exceeded a little, when timbers for floor and
roof could no longer be had for the cutting out of fir-trees on the
common; and yet there, after all, were the trees, inexpensive to buy;
and there was the peasant tradition, still unimpaired, to encourage and
commend such enterprise.
There is really little need, however, for these explanations of the
people's unconcern at the disaster which had, in fact, befallen them.
The passing of the common seemed unimportant at the time, not so much
because a few short-lived advantages concealed its meaning as because
the real disadvantages were slow to appear. At first the enclosure was
rather a nominal event than an actual one. It had been made in theory;
in practice it was deferred. I have just said that in many cases the
boundaries were left unmarked; I may add now that to this day they have
not quite all been defined, although the few spots which remain unfenced
are not worthy of notice. They are to be found only in places where
building is impossible; elsewhere all is now closed in. For it is the
recent building boom that has at last caused the enclosure to take its
full effect. Before that began, not more than ten or twelve years ago,
there were abundant patches of heath still left open; and on many a spot
where nowadays the well-to-do have their tennis or their afternoon tea,
of old I have seen donkeys peacefully grazing. The donkeys have had to
go, their room being wanted, and not many cottagers can keep a donkey
now; but kept they were, and in considerable numbers, until these late
years, in spite of the enclosure. But if the end could be deferred so
long, one may judge how slowly the change began--slowly and
inconspicuously, so that those who saw the beginning could almost ignore
it. Even the cows--once as numerous as the donkeys--were not given up
quite immediately, though in a few years they were all gone, I am told.
But long after them, heath for thatching and firing might still be cut
in waste places; fern continued until six or seven years ago to yield
litter for pig-sties; and since these things still seemed to go on
almost as well after the enclosure as before it, how should the people
have imagined that their ancient mode of life had been cut off at the
roots, and that it had really begun to die where it stood, under their
undiscerning eyes?
Nevertheless, that was the effect. To the enclosure of the common more
than to any other cause may be traced all the changes that have
subsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystone
out of an arch. The keystone is not the arch; but, once it is gone, all
sorts of forces, previously resisted, begin to operate towards ruin, and
gradually the whole structure crumbles down. This fairly illustrates
what has happened to the village, in consequence of the loss of the
common. The direct results have been perhaps the least important in
themselves; but indirectly the enclosure mattered, because it left the
people helpless against influences which have sapped away their
interests, robbed them of security and peace, rendered their knowledge
and skill of small value, and seriously affected their personal pride
and their character. Observe it well. The enclosure itself, I say, was
not actually the cause of all this; but it was the opening, so to speak,
through which all this was let in. The other causes which have been at
work could hardly have operated as they have done if the village life
had not been weakened by the changes directly due to the loss of the
common.
They consisted--those changes--in a radical alteration of the domestic
economy of the cottagers. Not suddenly, but none the less inevitably,
the old thrift--the peasant thrift--which the people understood
thoroughly had to be abandoned in favour of a modern thrift--commercial
thrift--which they understood but vaguely. That was the essential effect
of the enclosure, the central change directly caused by it; and it
struck at the very heart of the peasant system.
For note what it involved. By the peasant system, as I have already
explained, people derived the necessaries of life from the materials and
soil of their own countryside. Now, so long as they had the common, the
inhabitants of the valley were in a large degree able to conform to this
system, the common being, as it were, a supplement to the cottage
gardens, and furnishing means of extending the scope of the little home
industries. It encouraged the poorest labourer to practise, for
instance, all those time-honoured crafts which Cobbett, in his little
book on Cottage Economy, had advocated as the one hope for labourers.
The cow-keeping, the bread-making, the fattening of pigs and curing of
bacon, were actually carried on here thirty years after Cobbett's time,
besides other things not mentioned by him, such as turf-cutting on the
heath and wheat-growing in the gardens. But it was the common that made
all this possible. It was only by the spacious "turn-out" which it
afforded that the people were enabled to keep cows and get milk and
butter; it was only with the turf-firing cut on the common that they
could smoke their bacon, hanging it in the wide chimneys over those old
open hearths where none but such fuel could be used; and, again, it was
only because they could get furze from the common to heat their bread
ovens that it was worth their while to grow a little wheat at home, and
have it ground into flour for making bread. With the common, however,
they could, and did, achieve all this. I am not dealing in supposition.
I have mentioned nothing here that I have not learnt from men who
remember the system still flourishing--men who in their boyhood took
part in it, and can tell how the turfs were harvested, and how the
pig-litter was got home and stacked in ricks; men who, if you lead them
on, will talk of the cows they themselves watched over on the
heath--two from this cottage, three from that one yonder, one more from
Master Hack's, another couple from Trusler's, until they have numbered a
score, perhaps, and have named a dozen old village names. It all
actually happened. The whole system was "in full swing" here, within
living memory. But the very heart of it was the open common.
Accordingly, when the enclosure began to be a fact, when the cottager
was left with nothing to depend upon save his garden alone, as a peasant
he was a broken man--a peasant shut out from his countryside and cut off
from his resources. True, he might still grow vegetables, and keep a pig
or two, and provide himself with pork; but there was little else that he
could do in the old way. It was out of the question to obtain most of
his supplies by his own handiwork: they had to be procured, ready-made,
from some other source. That source, I need hardly say, was a shop. So
the once self-supporting cottager turned into a spender of money at the
baker's, the coal-merchant's, the provision-dealer's; and, of course,
needing to spend money, he needed first to get it.
The change was momentous, as events have sufficiently proved. In the
matter of earning, to be sure, the difference has appeared rather in the
attitude of the people than in the actual method of going about to get
money. To a greater or less extent, most of them were already
wage-earners, though not regularly. If a few had been wont to furnish
themselves with money in true peasant fashion--that is to say, by
selling their goods, their butter, or milk, or pig-meat, instead of
their labour--still, the majority had wanted for their own use whatever
they could produce in this way, and had been obliged to sell their
labour itself, when they required money. Wage-earning, therefore, was no
new thing in the village; only, the need to earn became more insistent,
when so many more things than before had to be bought with the wages.
Consequently, it had to be approached in a more businesslike, a more
commercial, spirit. Unemployment, hitherto not much worse than a
regrettable inconvenience, became a calamity. Every hour's work acquired
a market value. The sense of taking part in time-honoured duties of the
countryside disappeared before the idea--so very important now--of
getting shillings with which to go to a shop; while even the home
industries which were still practicable began to be valued in terms of
money, so that a man was tempted to neglect his own gardening if he
could sell his labour in somebody else's garden. Thus undermined, the
peasant outlook gave way, perforce, to that of the modern labourer, and
the old attachment to the countryside was weakened. In all this change
of attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of the
enclosure of the common which were spoken of above. If the villagers
became more mercenary, it was not because the fencing in of the heaths
immediately caused them to become so, but because it left them helpless
to resist becoming so--left them a prey to considerations whose weight
they had previously not so much felt. After all, the new order of things
did but intensify the need of wage-earning; it made no difference in the
procedure of it.
But in regard to spending the case was otherwise. Under the old regime,
although probably a small regular expenditure of money had been usual,
yet in the main the peasant's expenditure was not regular, but
intermittent. Getting so much food and firing by his own labour, he
might go for weeks without needing more than a few shillings to make up
occasional deficiencies. His purse was subject to no such constant drain
as that for which the modern labourer has to provide. In short, the
regular expenses were small, the occasional ones not crushing. But
to-day, when the people can no longer produce for themselves, the
proportion has changed. It has swung round so completely that nearly all
the expenses have become regular, while those of the other sort have
wellnigh disappeared. Every week money has to be found, and not only, as
of old, for rent, and boots, and for some bread and flour, but also for
butter or margarine, sugar, tea, bacon or foreign meat if possible,
lard, jam, and--in the winter, at least--coal. Even water is an item of
weekly expense; for where the company's water is laid on to a cottage,
there is sixpence a week or so added to the rent. The only important
thing which is still not bought regularly is clothing. The people get
their clothes when they can, and when they positively must.
As a result, the former thrift of the village has been entirely
subverted. For earning and spending are not the whole of economy. There
is saving to be considered; and, in consequence of the turn-over of
expenses from the occasional to the regular group, the cottagers have
been obliged to resort to methods of saving specially adapted to the
changed conditions. The point is of extreme importance. Under the old
style, a man's chief savings were in the shape of commodities ready for
use, or growing into use. They were, too, a genuine capital, inasmuch as
they supported him while he replaced and increased them. The flitches of
bacon, the little stores of flour and home-made wine, the stack of
firing, the small rick of fern or grass, were his savings-bank, which,
while he drew from it daily, he replenished betimes as he planted his
garden, and brought home heath and turf from the common, and minded his
pigs and his cow, and put by odd shillings for occasional need. Notice
that putting-by of shillings. It was not the whole, it was only the
completion, of the peasant's thrift. At a pinch he could even do without
the money, paying for what he wanted with a sack of potatoes, or a day's
work with his donkey-cart; but a little money put by was a convenience.
When it was wanted, it was wanted in lump sums--ten shillings now, say,
for a little pig; and then fifteen shillings or so in six weeks' time
for mending the donkey-cart, and so on; and, thanks to the real savings
in the shape of food and firing ready for use, the shillings, however
come by, could be hoarded up.
But under the new thrift they cannot be so hoarded up; nor, fortunately,
are the little lump sums so necessary as before. The real savings now,
the real stores of useful capital, are no longer in the cottager's home.
They are in shops. What the modern labourer chiefly requires, therefore,
is not a little hoard of money lying by, but a regular supply of money,
a constant stream of it, flowing in, to enable him to go to the shops
regularly. In a word, he wants an income--a steady income of shillings.
And since his earnings are not steady--since his income may cease any
day, and continue in abeyance for weeks at a time, during which the
shops will be closed against him, his chief economy is directed upon the
object of insuring his weekly income. Most miserably for him, he has
never been able to insure it against all reverses. Against trade
depression, which throws him out of work and dries up the stream of
money that should come flowing in, he has no protection. He has none if
his employer should go bankrupt, or leave the neighbourhood, and dismiss
him; none against the competition of machinery. Still, the labourers do
as much as they can. Sickness, at least, does not find them unprepared.
To cover loss of wages during sickness, they pay into a benefit society.
The more careful, indeed, pay into two--the Oddfellows or the Foresters,
or some such society--and a local "slate-club." I have known men out of
work living on tea and bread, and not much of that, so that they may
keep up their club payments, and be sure of an income if they should
fall sick; and I have known men so circumstanced immediately feel the
advantage if sickness should actually fall upon them.
This is the new thrift, which has replaced that of the peasant. I do not
say that there is no other saving--that no little sums are hoarded up;
for, in fact, I could name one or two men who, after illness protracted
to the stage when sick-pay from the club is reduced, have still fought
off destitution with the small savings from better times. In most cases,
however, no hoarding is possible. The club takes all the spare money;
and the club alone stands between the labourer and destitution. And let
this be clearly understood. At first it looks as if the member of a club
had money invested in his society--money there, instead of perishable
goods at home. Yet, in fact, that is not the case. His payments into the
club funds are no investment. They bring him no profit; they are not a
useful capital that can be renewed with interest. At the Christmas
"share-out" he does get back a part of the twenty-six shillings
contributed to the slate-club during the year; but the two pounds a
year paid to the benefit society are his no longer; they cannot be
"realized"; they are gone beyond reclaiming. Though he be out of work
and his family starving, he cannot touch the money; to derive any
advantage from it he himself must first fall ill. That is what the
modern thrift means to the labourer. It does nothing to further--on the
contrary, it retards--his prosperity; but it helps him in a particular
kind of adversity. It drains his personal wealth away, and leaves him
destitute of his capital; it robs his wife and children of his savings;
but in return it makes him one of a brotherhood which guarantees to him
a minimum income for a short time, if he should be out of health.
An oldish man, who had been telling me one evening how they used to live
in his boyhood, looked pensively across the valley when he had done, and
so stood for a minute or two, as if trying to recover his impressions of
that lost time. At last, with appearance of an effort to speak
patiently, "Ah," he said, "they tells me times are better now, but I
can't see it;" and it was plain enough that he thought our present times
the worse. So far as this valley is concerned I incline to agree with
him, although in general it is a debatable question. On the one hand, it
may be that the things a labourer can buy at a shop for fifteen
shillings a week are more in quantity and variety, if not better in
quality, than those which his forefathers could produce by their own
industry; and to that extent the advantage is with the present times.
But, on the other hand, the fifteen shillings are not every week
forthcoming; and whereas the old-time cottager out of work could
generally find something profitable to do for himself, the modern man,
having once got his garden into order, stands unprofitably idle.
Perhaps the worst is that, owing to the lowness of their wages, the
people have never been able to give the new thrift a fair trial. After
all, they miss the lump sums laid by against need. If their earnings
would ever overtake their expenses and give a little margin, they might
do better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth,
they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me about
twenty-six shillings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again as
that, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So,
too, the boots he can get for four or five shillings a pair are the
dearest of all boots. They wear out in a couple of months or so, and
another pair must be bought almost before another four or five shillings
can be spared. In its smaller degree, a still more absurd difficulty
handicaps the people in dealing with their own fruit-crops. To make
raspberry or gooseberry jam should be, you would think, an economy
delightful to the cottage women, if only as a piece of old-fashioned
thrift; yet they rarely do it. If they had the necessary utensils,
still the weekly money at their disposal will not run to the purchase of
extra firing and sugar. It is all too little for everyday purposes, and
they are glad to eke it out by selling their fruit for middle-class
women to preserve, though in the end they have to buy for their own
families an inferior quality of jam at a far higher price.
Wherever you follow it up, you will find the modern thrift not quite
successful in the cottages. It is not elastic enough; or, rather, the
people's means are not elastic enough, and will not stretch to its
demands. There is well-being in it--variety of food, for instance, and
comfort of clothing--as soon as both ends can be made to meet and to lap
over a little; but it strains the small incomes continually to the
breaking-point, so that every other consideration has to give way under
it to a pitiful calculation of pence. For the sake of pence the people
who keep fowls sell the eggs, and feed their children on bread and
margarine; and, on the same principle, they do not even seek to produce
other things which are well within their power to produce, but are too
luxurious for their means. "'Twouldn't be no use for me to grow
strawberries," a man explained; "my children'd have 'em." It sounded a
strange reason, for to what better use could strawberries be put? But it
shows how tightly the people are bound down by their commercial
conditions. In order to make the Saturday's shopping easier, they must
weigh the shillings and pence value of everything they possess and
everything they attempt to do.
These considerations, however, though showing that present times are not
good, do not prove that they are worse than past times. It may be that
there was poverty in the valley before the enclosure of the common quite
as severe as there is now; and, so far as concerns mere economics, that
event did but change the mode of the struggle for existence, without
greatly affecting its intensity. People are poor in a different way now,
that is all. Hence, in its more direct results, the loss of the common
has not mattered much, and it might be forgotten if those results were
the only ones.
But they are not the only ones. The results have spread from the
economic centre outwards until the whole life of the people has been
affected, new influences coming into play which previously were but
little felt. So searching, indeed, has the change been, and so
revolutionary, that anything like a full account of it would be out of
the question. The chapters that follow, therefore, do not pretend to
deal with it at all exhaustively; at most they will but draw attention
to a few of its more striking aspects.
X
COMPETITION
When the half-peasant men of the valley began to enter the labour market
as avowed wage-earners, a set of conditions confronted them which we are
apt to think of as established by a law of Nature, but which, in fact,
may be almost unknown in a peasant community. For the first time the
importance of a "demand for labour" came home to them. I do not say that
it was wholly a new thing; but to the older villagers it had not been,
as it is now to their descendants, the dominating factor in their
struggle for life. On the contrary, in proportion as their labour was
bestowed immediately on productive work for their own uses, the question
whether there was a demand for labour elsewhere did not arise. The
common was indifferent; it wanted none of them. It neither asked them to
avail themselves of its resources, nor paid them money for doing so, nor
refused employment to one because another was already engaged there. But
to-day, instead of going for a livelihood to the impartial heath, the
people must wait for others to set them to work. The demand which they
supply is their own no longer, and no longer, therefore, is their
living in their own hands. Of all the old families in the village, I
think there are only two left now who have not drifted wholly into this
dependent state; but I know numbers of labourers, often out of work,
whose grandfathers were half independent of employers.
In theory, no doubt the advantage ought to be with the present times.
Under the new system a far larger population is able to live in the
parish than could possibly have been supported here under the old; for
now, in place of the scanty products of the little valley and the
heaths, the stores of the whole world may be drawn upon by the
inhabitants in return for the wages they earn. Only there is the awkward
condition that they must earn wages. Those limitless stores cannot be
approached by the labourer until he is invited--until there is "a
demand" for his labour. Property owners, or capitalists, standing
between him and the world's capital, are able to pick and choose between
him and his neighbours as the common never did, and to decide which of
them shall work and have some of the supplies.