shade. They were not introduced into Italy until about 400 B.C., and
were not easily grown. The elder Pliny says that there were people who
watered theirs with wine, _Historia naturalis_, XII. 4 (8). I never went
as far as that with any tree, nor did my grandfather, although my
grandmother always made a point of watering the myrtle with cold tea. No
doubt, all plants have their appropriate food. I sometimes get the
parings off the hoofs when a horse is being shod, and then I give my
olive trees a feed.
I respect the elder Pliny as a man--his nephew has told us how his
steady snoring could be heard amidst the thunders of Vesuvius, when
everybody else was scared, _Epistolæ_, VI. 16. 13--but as an author he
was not at his best. His nephew has described his ways: how he gave
every moment of spare time to reading books or having books read to him,
always making notes and extracts as he went along, _Epistolæ_, III. 5.
But he did not always take things down correctly. Theophrastos says that
the plane tree was rare (spanian) in Italy, _Historia plantarum_, IV. 5.
6, and Pliny has turned this into plane trees in Italy and Spain,
_Historia naturalis_, XII. 3 (7). More than half of what he says of
trees is copied out of Theophrastos, but he has interspersed it with his
snippets out of other authors who were not always speaking of the same
varieties. And thus he has created things that never have existed and
could not possibly exist. At the end of an impossible tale, _Gargantua_,
I. 6, Rabelais very justly says that after all he wasn’t as big a liar
as Pliny, “et toutesfoys ie ne suis poinct menteur tant asseuré comme il
a esté.”
The trees which shed their leaves are gorgeous with their autumn tints,
and many kinds of them are graceful in the winter with bare boughs,
especially just after snow. Writing at the window where I am writing
now, my grandfather notes down, 3 January 1847, “Each flake takes up its
position and there remains. I hope no wind will disturb it before I can
go out and take a view of the country around: which I hope to do, even
if it’s up to knees.” I feel that too; but bare boughs always remind me
it is winter-time, and I might easily forget that dismal fact down here,
if all the trees were green. If I were making a fresh start, I would
surround myself with cedar and cypress, pine and fir, holly trees and
bay trees, palm trees, yucca and New Zealand flax, Portugal laurel,
arbutus, camellia, rhododendron, and other such trees and shrubs. The
earliest kind of rhododendron (the Nobleanum) starts flowering here at
Christmas. One of mine has nearly a hundred great red trusses of bloom
now--January--and the red camellias are coming out. Sometimes on winter
days the thermometer goes up to 90° in the sun; and there is seldom any
great extremity of cold. My grandfather notes, 11 February 1855,
“Thermometer at front door now 20°, such as I never remember seeing
before.”
He noted thermometer, barometer, wind and weather, every day in books he
kept for that, and every week he sent a copy to my father to compare
with his own notes. But my father’s notes were very irregular, as he was
often away, whereas my grandfather seldom stirred, at any rate in his
later years (1840 to 1870) for which I have his notes. Also, my father
met with difficulties that were unknown down here. Instead of the
temperature on 11 September 1850 there is a note of “My thermometer
stolen from the garden wall last night,” and no more temperatures for
several days.
These notes, of course, were of no use except for forecasting in future
years; and my grandfather at last perceived they were of very little use
at all. He writes on 10 February 1860, “These phenomena used to indicate
immediate storms, but really the weather has been such of late that all
my old calculations and observations are gone to the winds, so now do
not pretend to rely on any of them.”
Some of his prognostications had been lamentably wrong. He writes on 23
November 1851, “My mind tells me we shall have a deal of snow this
winter,” and his record of the weather shows that there was practically
none. As he says that his mind told him so, I suppose he was not
consciously relying on his observations or his calculations here, though
he could hardly have dismissed them from his mind. I think it came of
the hereditary wisdom of old countryfolk. Their observations may be less
exact, but there have been many generations of observers; and thus they
form opinions that come true in nine years out of ten.
Mild winters often end with falls of snow in March or April--at any
rate, it is so here--and this must be the basis of the saw, “A green
Christmas, a white Easter.” My Grandfather quotes it on 28 December 1857
as “an old adage--I fear it may be too true.” On 12 January 1862 he
writes, “How mild it is. Well, this verifies the saying of old that if
the hawthorn and holly berries are plenty, be sure of a hard winter, but
if none, a mild one; and there is scarcely a berry to be seen, even on
our hollies which are generally so thick. When I was young these sayings
were more general than now; and it is considered that the alwise
Providence is mindful of the birds as well as man.”
The birds come down here from the bleaker country round the moor as soon
as wintry weather sets in, and the ground below the hollies is red with
berries that the birds have dropped. But this last winter (1922, 23) was
so mild that no birds came, though berries were more abundant than ever
was known before. In another such winter my grandfather writes, 25
January 1846, “I cannot find any of the old men I meet can ever
recollect such a mild winter, so far. I have not yet seen a winter’s
bird, not a fieldfare or starling or even a whindle [redwing] nor a
covey of birds of any description: neither the linnet nor finch nor
yellowhammer have congregated together as heretofore: they are all about
singly as in summer. They do not appear to want the food of the barn’s
door, the cornricks, or stable court, so far. Hope it is all for a wise
purpose.”
Of course, there sometimes are hard winters here, as in 1907, 8 when
almost all the birds were killed; and he writes, 14 May 1855, “Birds of
all sorts are very scarce, the winter made great havoc of them: not a
thrush to be heard nor a blackbird to be seen. I have not a robin in the
garden.” But winters of that kind are rare.
With this climate and rich soil there is abundant produce from the land,
but very little profit--on agricultural land of mine (apart from
buildings) I have been paying close upon £3 an acre in rates and tithe
and taxes. During the War the Food Controller found that milk could be
produced for two pence a gallon less in the four Western counties than
in the rest of England; so he imposed a duty of two pence a gallon on
all milk sent out of these four counties, and thereby collected about
£250,000. But the Law decided that the duty was illegal; and the money
is being returned.
If milk can be produced so cheaply in the West, there ought to be more
dairy-farming, and more land should be laid down to permanent pasture.
But that is not a popular opinion now. Some acres will produce more food
if they are ploughed than if they stay in grass, and perhaps the average
acre will, but some acres certainly will not; and though the produce may
be more per acre, it may be less per man employed. This is forgotten,
and the cry is all for ploughing up. Experienced people will not go
ploughing up their pasture; but power may be given someday to a Ministry
or Board or Council, which has to lay down general rules and therefore
takes the average case regardless of abnormal cases, such as the rich
pastures here.
According to the Food Controller’s rules, milk could be produced much
cheaper on one farm than on the next adjoining farm, if the county
boundary happened to come between the two; and really there were places
fifty or a hundred miles inside the boundary where it could not be
produced as cheaply as at places just as far outside. No doubt, the line
must be drawn somewhere, if there is to be a line at all; but such lines
are merely nuisances when they do not represent the facts.
There was a letter of mine on agriculture in the _Times_ of 14 June
1920, and the editor of _Justice_ thereupon sent me a leading-article in
his paper of 17 June. I wrote a letter in reply, and he printed it in
_Justice_ of 1 July, and afterwards printed other letters from me in
reply to things that other people wrote there. These people, of course,
were socialists, and one of them was organizer of the Agricultural
Workers’ Union. He lamented “the want of knowledge of agriculture in the
Socialistic and Labour forces”; but his own facts and figures were very
often wrong, and his reasoning was not exact. I shared his aspirations
for Utopia; but he was going there across the clouds, and I was going
along the land.
On an average the wheat crop in England is about a ton for every acre
sown, or more than double the average for the United States or Canada.
But wheat is not sown here except on land that suits it; and the average
would soon go down, if wheat were sown on land that is less suitable.
These people seemed to think that there would always be a ton an acre,
however barren the land--or several tons an acre, if ‘Science’ were
invoked. And they also seemed to think that wheat alone is ‘food,’
although our forefathers ate barley, oats and rye. These can be grown on
land that is not good enough for wheat; and our island might perhaps
grow food enough for the whole population--as these people said it
should--but the population would have to be content with something less
luxurious than wheaten bread.
They also put the claims of labour very high: unreasonably high, I
thought. When a labourer comes to a farm, he finds fields fenced and
drained and ready for cultivation, barns and stables, carts and ploughs
and every needful implement, horses and food for the horses, and manures
and seeds for the land. It is surely an abuse of language to talk of the
crop as the produce of his labour. Suppose the crop fails utterly, as it
sometimes will, from bad weather or other causes quite beyond control.
As there is no crop, there is no produce of his labour; and (logically)
he ought not to get anything at all. By accepting a fixed wage, he
insures against that risk.
A maximum wage for agricultural labourers was fixed by the magistrates
for Devon at Quarter Sessions, 13 April 1795. They were empowered to do
this by the Acts of 5 Elizabeth and 1 James I, and “having made due
enquiry of the wages of the labourers in husbandry in this county, and
having had respect to the price of provisions and other articles
necessary for the maintenance and support of such labourers at this
time,” they made an order that “all manner of men labourers in husbandry
shall take, with the meat and drink accustomed to be given in each
district of the county respectively, the sum of fourteen pence per day
and not above.” But piece-work was excepted--“all labourers in husbandry
shall take by the great or task work as they shall agree.”
In his report to the Board of Agriculture in 1807 Vancouver says that
agricultural wages had not changed in Devon since 1795. He puts the
daily wage at 1_s._ 2_d._ and a quart of cider for the regular hands,
and 1_s._ 4_d._ and the quart for casual hands, or 8_s._ a week instead
of 7_s._, as they had none of the allowances the others had--ground for
pig-keeping, and corn for bread-baking, and other things, at less than
market price; and he mentions that the 7_s._ could be commuted into
3_s._ 6_d._ and maintenance: pages 361 to 363 and 446. And while a man
was earning his 7_s._ on the land, his wife could be earning 3_s._ 6_d._
at her spinning wheel, and there might be other spinners in the family:
pages 446 and 464. But he adds that this home industry was being
destroyed by factories; so that whole families had now become dependent
on their earnings on the land.
Agriculture was thus called upon to pay a wage that would support men’s
wives and families, just when it could not pay enough to support
unmarried men. The industrial North was a necessity, but it meant
destruction for the agricultural South; and many people here expressed
themselves as forcibly as Cobbett, _Cottage Economy_, section 232, “The
lords of the loom, the crabbed-voiced, hard-favoured, hard-hearted,
puffed-up, insolent, savage and bloody wretches of the North, assisted
by a blind and greedy Government, have taken all the employment away
from the agricultural women and children.”
Instead of fixing a maximum wage, as in Devon, the magistrates for Berks
drew up a plan, 6 May 1795, ‘the Speenhamland plan,’ which was copied by
other counties but never had the force of law. (The old Roman town of
Spinæ was a mile or two from Newbury, and Quarter Sessions held at
Newbury were nominally held at Spinæ, then known as Speenhamland.) The
plan was drawn up clumsily. It allowed too little for the wage-earner
and too much for his family: he had from 3_s._ to 5_s._ a week according
to the cost of living as measured by the price of corn, but he also had
1_s._ 6_d._ to 2_s._ 6_d._ for his wife and each one of his children.
Thus a man with a wife and seven children had twice as much as a man
with a wife and two children, and five times as much as an unmarried
man, though the cost of living would not be five times as much or even
twice as much. That wrecked the plan: it meant paying one man a great
deal more than another for getting through the same amount of work.
Still, the old plan took account of facts, whereas the present notion is
to fix a wage that is sufficient for an average family. This leaves big
families short, and also takes money out of industry to pay unmarried
men the cost of families they have not got.
In a letter to my father, 2 December 1849, my grandfather sends a
message to a friend who had been talking of the good old times, and then
describes the bad old times that he remembered here. “I have sold
potatoes for 9_d._ per bag and hog sheep for 2_s._ 9_d._ a head. [A bag
of potatoes is 160 lbs., and hogs are sheep between one and two years
old.] Such was the distress among farmers then that labourers were put
up to auction by the parish authorities, and hired for 6_d._ to 9_d._
per day.” Under the Speenhamland plan 6_d._ a day (3_s._ a week) was the
minimum for a single man, and 9_d._ a day (4_s._ 6_d._ a week) was the
minimum for a married man without a family. No doubt the 6_d._ or 9_d._
was quite as much as farmers could afford to pay when prices were so
low; but men with families could not subsist on that. In their case (to
use the modern terms) the economic wage was less than a subsistence
wage; and the parish authorities paid them a subsistence wage and took
the economic wage, the balance coming from the rates.
In agricultural districts the ratepayers were chiefly landowners,
parsons with glebe and tithe, farmers, millers, and blacksmiths and
others who made things for the farms; and thus the contribution from the
rates came indirectly out of agriculture. It was, in fact, a general
charge upon the industry, based on the employing classes’ means, but
applied according to the labouring classes’ needs, so that no labourer
was worse off for having a big family. No doubt it also was a subsidy to
agriculture from ratepayers who were wholly unconnected with the land;
but few such people could be found in country places. At the census in
1801 the parish of Lustleigh had a population of 246, and 236 of them
were classed as agricultural.
Subsidies to any industry are open to abuse; but in a choice of evils
this may be the lesser of the two. At present, if an economic wage is
less than a subsistence wage, the industry slows down or stops,
production is decreased or ceases, and hands are unemployed; and then
these hands receive subsistence wages out of rates and taxes. But in a
subsidy the public would only pay the difference between the economic
and subsistence wages, all hands would be employed and production would
go steadily on.
Since the passing of the Truck Act in 1831 payments in money have been
replacing the old payments in kind. The old system was open to abuses;
but I doubt if agricultural labourers have benefitted by the change, as
there now are middlemen’s profits to be paid. Under the old system (as
mentioned by Vancouver on pages 361, 363 of his report) farm-hands could
buy their bread-corn from the farmer at fixed rates--two bushels a month
of barley at 3_s._ a bushel, or a bushel of wheat at 6_s_.; and now they
say the baker charges too much for their bread, whilst farmers say the
miller pays too little for the wheat. So also with drink, the labourer
did better with the cider he had helped to make, than with a small
increase of wages for buying something else. He now buys tea or beer at
prices that allow for profits and taxation, whereas his cider was taken
at cost-price. No doubt, political economists would like to see all
wages paid in cash, to save them trouble with statistics; but ‘real’
wages might be higher, if partly paid in produce of the farm.
A little while before the War I listened to a long dispute between two
brothers, one a railway man at 30_s._ a week and the other a farm hand
at 15_s._ The railway man maintained that he was worse off than his
brother; he was paying 7_s._ a week for cramped accommodation in a town,
whereas his brother had a cottage, free, and ground enough for growing
vegetables and keeping poultry and a pig. And he went on comparing town
and country prices, and town and country needs; and, on the whole, I
think he proved his case. But there is an outcry against free cottages
now, as a farm hand must vacate his cottage if he ceases working on the
farm, the cottage being wanted for the man who takes his place. There is
a great deal in a name. If these ‘tied cottages’ were called ‘official
residences,’ less nonsense might be talked.
A slovenly housewife soon gives her cottage the aspect of a slum, and
often gets it into such a mess that it can never be made quite nice
again without almost rebuilding it; and at one time or another most of
the old cottages have suffered in that way. Good housewives did their
best, and scrubbed; but there was no such scrubbing here as I have seen
in Holland. I stayed a night at Delft, 22 August 1872, at a hotel that
looked out on a wide street with a canal running down the middle of it;
and in the morning I watched the house opposite being cleaned up for the
day. After all the windows had been cleaned inside and out, the front
door was taken off its hinges and well scrubbed and then was carried
over the canal and dipped in it.
After doing repairs, my grandfather notes, 29 October 1843, “Such is
ever the case with house property: it is but a nominal income.” Matters
have not improved since then; and I therefore try to build things that
will never need repair. After viewing an addition that I was making at
the Hall House, a village elder justly said, “There: ‘tbe everlastin’:
and everlastin’: and everlastin’ after that.” It was a big granite
staircase with granite walls laid in cement. I wish that former
generations had used cement here: they used bad mortar with a core of
rubble between the inside and outside stones--their walls were seldom
less than three feet thick--and when the mortar has decayed, there is
nothing to keep the outside stones from falling off and the rubble from
going after them. When they were building ‘dry walls’ (that is, with
neither mortar nor cement) they took more pains to get the stones to
fit.
These ‘dry walls’ abound here. The countryside was strewn with granite
boulders: when a piece was cleared to make a field, the boulders were
broken up and used for walls enclosing it; and the walls were sometimes
made immensely large, to use up the material. It is marvellous to see a
skilled man building such a wall. The stones are of all shapes and
sizes, from half a hundredweight to three or four, just as the rock or
boulder happens to split up; and there may be many dozens of them lying
about. He glances round and selects a stone, perhaps fifty feet away,
and has it brought to him; and it fits in exactly with the stones he has
just used, or only needs a single blow to knock off some protuberance.
This all looks so easy that I have tried selecting stones myself; but
they have never come right.
While I was having one of these walls built, I had a letter from a
friend in London asking me if I could give a man a job: the man was
strong enough for anything, but had been ill; and the doctor said he
needed six weeks in the country, out of doors all day. I had him down
for the six weeks, and set him to work at picking up the stones the
skilled man wanted, and carrying them over to the wall. He happened to
be a prizefighter, and he was still here at the time of Newton fair, and
there happened to be a booth for boxing. He went in and boxed, and local
men came in and boxed with him, not knowing who he was. They gained
experience, and he brought home the stakes.--In his solicitude for my
education, my father sent me to a prizefighter when I was twelve years
old. I went twice a-week, but did not know enough to profit by his
teaching--his gloves were always up against my eyes, and I saw nothing
else. I did, however, learn a little of the language of the Ring.
A dozen years ago some people were talking to me here about the good old
times, and their children meanwhile were giving the donkey and the dog
some bits of bread. I said, “These are the good old times, and people
will look back on them and say, in those days dogs and donkeys might eat
wheaten bread.” I was looking ahead, a century or more, and never
thought that in a few years time bread would be rationed out in England
and made of other things than wheat. In what we call the good old times
the labourer had no wheaten bread. In a letter of 3 December 1844 my
grandfather remarks that wheat was then so cheap and oats so dear that
wheat was being given to horses; and he calls wheat “food for
Christians,” but then corrects himself, “when I say wheat is food for
Christians, I do not mean to say the labourer is not a Christian,”
although the labourer had only barley bread, not wheat.
Though wheat is so esteemed, a vast amount is wasted here in reaping and
in threshing and with rats in ricks and barns. I have seen the ears
gathered by hand in Turkey and in Spain, and with astonishing speed; and
nothing is wasted then. And there is, I believe, an American machine
which cuts the stalks so high that it reaps hardly anything below the
ears; but I imagine that it does not get the ears off any of the shorter
stalks.
After living in Long Island (New York) in 1817 and 1818, Cobbett says in
his _Cottage Economy_, section 82, “Few people upon the face of the
earth live better than the Long Islanders, yet nine families out of ten
seldom eat wheaten bread. Rye is the flour that they principally make
use of. Now, rye is seldom more than two-thirds the price of wheat, and
barley is seldom more than half the price of wheat. Half rye and half
wheat, taking out a little more of the offal, make very good bread. Half
wheat, a quarter rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third of each, make
bread that I could be very well content to live upon all my lifetime.”
Of course the Americans also had what they call ‘corn’ and we call
‘maize.’ We grow this for fodder, as it seldom ripens here; and we
import the product as cornflour. Cobbett tried the American sort here,
but found another sort near Calais--a dwarf plant--and tried this in
1827 and the following years; and in 1828 he reckoned that he had eleven
thousand quartern loaves upon eleven acres, though three of the eleven
had failed. These experiments of his were made at Kensington and Barnes;
and in 1828 he says in _Cobbett’s Corn_, section 155, that he was paying
his men three shillings a-week with board and lodging. They had porridge
for breakfast: as much hot mutton as they could eat for dinner, and also
apple-dumplings: bread and cheese, as much as they could eat, for
supper: a pint of beer at dinner and another pint at supper. He lived on
the same diet himself.