THE LABOURER IN 1795
In an unenclosed village, as we have seen, the normal labourer did not
depend on his wages alone. His livelihood was made up from various
sources. His firing he took from the waste, he had a cow or a pig
wandering on the common pasture, perhaps he raised a little crop on a
strip in the common fields. He was not merely a wage earner, receiving
so much money a week or a day for his labour, and buying all the
necessaries of life at a shop: he received wages as a labourer, but in
part he maintained himself as a producer. Further, the actual money
revenue of the family was not limited to the labourer’s earnings, for
the domestic industries that flourished in the village gave employment
to his wife and children.
In an enclosed village at the end of the eighteenth century the
position of the agricultural labourer was very different. All his
auxiliary resources had been taken from him, and he was now a wage
earner and nothing more. Enclosure had robbed him of the strip that he
tilled, of the cow that he kept on the village pasture, of the fuel
that he picked up in the woods, and of the turf that he tore from the
common. And while a social revolution had swept away his possessions,
an industrial revolution had swept away his family’s earnings. To
families living on the scale of the village poor, each of these losses
was a crippling blow, and the total effect of the changes was to
destroy their economic independence.
Some of these auxiliary resources were not valued very highly by
the upper classes, and many champions of enclosure proved to their
own satisfaction that the advantage, for example, of the right of
cutting fuel was quite illusory. Such writers had a very superficial
knowledge of the lot of the cottagers. They argued that it would be
more economical for the labourer to spend on his ordinary employment
the time he devoted to cutting fuel and turf, and to buy firing out of
his wages: an argument from the theory of the division of labour that
assumed that employment was constant. Fortunately we have, thanks to
Davies, a very careful calculation that enables us to form rather a
closer judgment. He estimates[139] that a man could cut nearly enough
in a week to serve his family all the year, and as the farmers will
give the carriage of it in return for the ashes, he puts the total
cost at 10s. a year, or a little more than a week’s wages.[140] If we
compare this with his accounts of the cost of fuel elsewhere, we soon
see how essential common fuel rights were to a labourer’s economy.
At Sidlesham in Surrey, for instance,[141] in the expenses of five
families of labourers, the fuel varies from £1, 15s. 0d. up to £4, 3s.
0d., with an average of £2, 8s. 0d. per family. It must be remembered,
too, that the sum of 10s. for fuel from the common is calculated on
the assumption that the man would otherwise be working; whereas, in
reality, he could cut his turf in slack times and in odd hours, when
there was no money to be made by working for some one else.
There was another respect in which the resources of a labouring family
were diminished towards the end of the century, and this too was a
loss that the rich thought trifling. From time immemorial the labourer
had sent his wife and children into the fields to glean or leaze
after the harvest. The profits of gleaning, under the old, unimproved
system of agriculture, were very considerable. Eden says of Rode in
Northamptonshire, where agriculture was in a ‘wretched state, from the
land being in common-fields,’ that ‘several families will gather as
much wheat as will serve them for bread the whole year, and as many
beans as will keep a pig.’[142] From this point of view enclosure, with
its improved methods of agriculture, meant a sensible loss to the poor
of the parish, but even when there was less to be gleaned the privilege
was by no means unimportant. A correspondent in the _Annals of
Agriculture_,[143] writing evidently of land under improved cultivation
in Shropshire, estimates that a wife can glean three or four bushels.
The consumption of wheat, exclusive of other food, by a labourer’s
family he puts at half a bushel a week at least; the price of wheat at
13s. 6d. a bushel; the labourer’s wages at 7s. or 8s. To such a family
gleaning rights represented the equivalent of some six or seven weeks’
wages.
With the introduction of large farming these customary rights were
in danger. It was a nuisance for the farmer to have his fenced fields
suddenly invaded by bands of women and children. The ears to be
picked up were now few and far between, and there was a risk that
the labourers, husbands and fathers of the gleaners, might wink at
small thefts from the sheaves. Thus it was that customary rights,
which had never been questioned before, and seemed to go back to
the Bible itself, came to be the subject of dispute. On the whole
question of gleaning there is an animated controversy in the _Annals of
Agriculture_[144] between Capel Lofft,[145] a romantic Suffolk Liberal,
who took the side of the gleaners, and Ruggles,[146] the historian,
who argued against them. Capel Lofft was a humane and chivalrous
magistrate who, unfortunately for the Suffolk poor, was struck off the
Commission of the Peace a few years later, apparently at the instance
of the Duke of Portland, for persuading the Deputy-Sheriff to postpone
the execution of a girl sentenced to death for stealing, until he had
presented a memorial to the Crown praying for clemency. The chief
arguments on the side of the gleaners were (1) that immemorial custom
gave legal right, according to the maxim, _consuetudo angliae lex est
angliae communis_; (2) that Blackstone had recognised the right in
his _Commentaries_, basing his opinion upon Hale and Gilbert, ‘Also
it hath been said, that by the common law and customs of England the
poor are allowed to enter and glean on another’s ground after harvest
without being guilty of trespass, which humane provision seems borrowed
from the Mosaic law’ (iii. 212, 1st edition); (3) that in Ireland the
right was recognised by statutes of Henry VIII.’s reign, which modified
it; (4) that it was a custom that helped to keep the poor free from
degrading dependence on poor relief. It was argued, on the other hand,
by those who denied the right to glean, that though the custom had
existed from time immemorial, it did not rest on any basis of actual
right, and that no legal sanction to it had ever been explicitly given,
Blackstone and the authorities on whom he relied being too vague to be
considered final. Further, the custom was demoralising to the poor;
it led to idleness, ‘how many days during the harvest are lost by the
mother of a family and all her children, in wandering about from field
to field, to glean what does not repay them the wear of their cloathes
in seeking’; it led to pilfering from the temptation to take handfuls
from the swarth or shock; and it was deplorable that on a good-humoured
permission should be grafted ‘a legal claim, in its use and exercise so
nearly approaching to licentiousness.’
Whilst this controversy was going on, the legal question was decided
against the poor by a majority of judges in the Court of Common Pleas
in 1788. One judge, Sir Henry Gould,[147] dissented in a learned
judgment; the majority based their decision partly on the mischievous
consequences of the practice to the poor. The poor never lost a right
without being congratulated by the rich on gaining something better.
It did not, of course, follow from this decision that the practice
necessarily ceased altogether, but from that time it was a privilege
given by the farmer at his own discretion, and he could warn off
obnoxious or ‘saucy’ persons from his fields. Moreover, the dearer the
corn, and the more important the privilege for the poor, the more the
farmer was disinclined to largess the precious ears. Capel Lofft had
pleaded that with improved agriculture the gleaners could pick up so
little that that little should not be grudged, but the farmer found
that under famine prices this little was worth more to him than the
careless scatterings of earlier times.[148]
The loss of his cow and his produce and his common and traditional
rights was rendered particularly serious to the labourer by the general
growth of prices. For enclosure which had produced the agrarian
proletariat, had raised the cost of living for him. The accepted
opinion that under enclosure England became immensely more productive
tends to obscure the truth that the agricultural labourer suffered in
his character of consumer, as well as in his character of producer,
when the small farms and the commons disappeared. Not only had he to
buy the food that formerly he had produced himself, but he had to buy
it in a rising market. Adam Smith admitted that the rise of price of
poultry and pork had been accelerated by enclosure, and Nathaniel
Kent laid stress on the diminution in the supply of these and other
small provisions. Kent has described the change in the position of
the labourers in this respect: ‘Formerly they could buy milk, butter,
and many other small articles in every parish, in whatever quantity
they are wanted. But since small farms have decreased in number, no
such articles are to be had; for the great farmers have no idea of
retailing such small commodities, and those who do retail them carry
them all to town. A farmer is even unwilling to sell the labourer who
works for him a bushel of wheat, which he might get ground for three
or four pence a bushel. For want of this advantage he is driven to the
mealman or baker, who, in the ordinary course of their profit, get
at least ten per cent. of them, upon this principal article of their
consumption.’[149] Davies, the author of _The Case of Labourers in
Husbandry_, thus describes the new method of distribution: ‘The great
farmer deals in a wholesale way with the miller: the miller with the
mealman: the mealman with the shopkeeper, of which last the poor man
buys his flour by the bushel. For neither the miller nor the mealman
will sell the labourer a less quantity than a sack of flour, under the
retail price of shops, and the poor man’s pocket will seldom allow of
his buying a whole sack at once.’[150]
It is clear from these facts that it would have needed a very large
increase of wages to compensate the labourer for his losses under
enclosure. But real wages, instead of rising, had fallen, and fallen
far. The writer of the _Bedfordshire Report_ (p. 67), comparing the
period of 1730-50 with that of 1802-6 in respect of prices of wheat
and labour, points out that to enable him to purchase equal quantities
of bread in the second period and in the first, the pay of the day
labourer in the second period should have been 2s. a day, whereas it
was 1s. 6d. Nathaniel Kent, writing in 1796,[151] says that in the last
forty or fifty years the price of provisions had gone up by 60 per
cent., and wages by 25 per cent., ‘but this is not all, for the sources
of the market which used to feed him are in a great measure cut off
since the system of large farms has been so much encouraged.’ Professor
Levy estimates that wages rose between 1760 and 1813 by 60 per cent.,
and the price of wheat by 130 per cent.[152] Thus the labourer who now
lived on wages alone earned wages of a lower purchasing power than the
wages which he had formerly supplemented by his own produce. Whereas
his condition earlier in the century had been contrasted with that of
Continental peasants greatly to his advantage in respect of quantity
and variety of food, he was suddenly brought down to the barest
necessities of life. Arthur Young had said a generation earlier that
in France bread formed nineteen parts in twenty of the food of the
people, but that in England all ranks consumed an immense quantity of
meat, butter and cheese.[153] We know something of the manner of life
of the poor in 1789 and 1795 from the family budgets collected by Eden
and Davies from different parts of the country.[154] These budgets
show that the labourers were rapidly sinking in this respect to the
condition that Young had described as the condition of the poor in
France. ‘Bacon and other kinds of meat form a very small part of their
diet, and cheese becomes a luxury.’ But even on the meagre food that
now became the ordinary fare of the cottage, the labourers could not
make ends meet. All the budgets tell the same tale of impoverished diet
accompanied by an overwhelming strain and an actual deficit. The normal
labourer, even with constant employment, was no longer solvent.
If we wish to understand fully the predicament of the labourer, we
must remember that he was not free to roam over England, and try his
luck in some strange village or town when his circumstances became
desperate at home. He lived under the capricious tyranny of the old law
of settlement, and enclosure had made that net a much more serious fact
for the poor. The destruction of the commons had deprived him of any
career within his own village; the Settlement Laws barred his escape
out of it. It is worth while to consider what the Settlement Laws were,
and how they acted, and as the subject is not uncontroversial it will
be necessary to discuss it in some detail.
Theoretically every person had one parish, and one only, in which he
or she had a settlement and a right to parish relief. In practice it
was often difficult to decide which parish had the duty of relief,
and disputes gave rise to endless litigation. From this point of view
eighteenth-century England was like a chessboard of parishes, on which
the poor were moved about like pawns. The foundation of the various
laws on the subject was an Act passed in Charles II.’s reign (13 and
14 Charles II. c. 12) in 1662. Before this Act each parish had, it
is true, the duty of relieving its own impotent poor and of policing
its own vagrants, and the infirm and aged were enjoined by law to
betake themselves to their place of settlement, which might be their
birthplace, or the place where they had lived for three years, but, as
a rule, ‘a poor family might, without the fear of being sent back by
the parish officers, go where they choose, for better wages, or more
certain employment.’[155] This Act of 1662 abridged their liberty,
and, in place of the old vagueness, established a new and elaborate
system. The Act was declared to be necessary in the preamble, because
‘by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained
from going from one parish to another, and therefore do endeavour to
settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock,
the largest commons or wastes to build cottages, and the most woods
for them to burn and destroy; and when they have consumed it, then
to another parish; and at last become rogues and vagabonds; to the
great discouragement of parishes to provide stock, when it is liable
to be devoured by strangers.’ By the Act any new-comer, within forty
days of arrival, could be ejected from a parish by an order from the
magistrates, upon complaint from the parish officers, and removed to
the parish where he or she was last legally settled. If, however, the
new-comer settled in a tenement of the yearly value of £10, or could
give security for the discharge of the parish to the magistrates’
satisfaction, he was exempt from this provision.
As this Act carried with it the consequence that forty days’ residence
without complaint from the parish officers gained the new-comer a
settlement, it was an inevitable temptation to Parish A to smuggle its
poor into Parish B, where forty days’ residence without the knowledge
of the parish officers would gain them a settlement. Fierce quarrels
broke out between the parishes in consequence. To compose these it
was enacted (1 James II. c. 17) that the forty days’ residence were
to be reckoned only after a written notice had been given to a parish
officer. Even this was not enough to protect Parish B, and by 3 William
and Mary, c. 11 (1691) it was provided that this notice must be read in
church, immediately after divine service, and then registered in the
book kept for poor’s accounts. Such a condition made it practically
impossible for any poor man to gain a settlement by forty days’
residence, unless his tenement were of the value of £10 a year, but
the Act allowed an immigrant to obtain a settlement in any one of four
ways; (1) by paying the parish taxes; (2) by executing a public annual
office in the parish; (3) by serving an apprenticeship in the parish;
(4) by being hired for a year’s service in the parish. (This, however,
only applied to the unmarried.) In 1697 (8 and 9 William III. c. 30)
a further important modification of the settlement laws was made.
To prevent the arbitrary ejection of new-comers by parish officers,
who feared that the fresh arrival or his children might somehow or
other gain a settlement, it was enacted that if the new-comer brought
with him to Parish B a certificate from the parish officers of
Parish A taking responsibility for him, then he could not be removed
till he became actually chargeable. It was further decided by this
and subsequent Acts and by legal decisions, that the granting of a
certificate was to be left to the discretion of the parish officers and
magistrates, that the cost of removal fell on the certificating parish,
and that a certificate holder could only gain a settlement in a new
parish by renting a tenement of £10 annual value, or by executing a
parish office, and that his apprentice or hired servant could not gain
a settlement.
In addition to these methods of gaining a settlement there were four
other ways, ‘through which,’ according to Eden, ‘it is probable
that by far the greater part of the labouring Poor ... are actually
settled.’[156] (1) Bastards, with some exceptions, acquired a
settlement by birth[157]; (2) legitimate children also acquired a
settlement by birth if their father’s, or failing that, their mother’s
legal settlement was not known; (3) women gained a settlement by
marriage; (4) persons with an estate of their own were irremovable, if
residing on it, however small it might be.
Very few important modifications had been made in the laws of
Settlement during the century after 1697. In 1722 (9 George I. c. 7) it
was provided that no person was to obtain a settlement in any parish by
the purchase of any estate or interest of less value than £30, to be
‘bona fide paid,’ a provision which suggests that parishes had connived
at gifts of money for the purchase of estates in order to discard
their paupers: by the same Act the payment of the scavenger or highway
rate was declared not to confer a settlement. In 1784 (24 George III.
c. 6) soldiers, sailors and their families were allowed to exercise
trades where they liked, and were not to be removable till they became
actually chargeable; and in 1793 (33 George III. c. 54) this latter
concession was extended to members of Friendly Societies. None of these
concessions affected the normal labourer, and down to 1795 a labourer
could only make his way to a new village if his own village would give
him a certificate, or if the other village invited him. His liberty was
entirely controlled by the parish officers.
How far did the Settlement Acts operate? How far did this body of
law really affect the comfort and liberty of the poor? The fiercest
criticism comes from Adam Smith, whose fundamental instincts rebelled
against so crude and brutal an interference with human freedom. ‘To
remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour, from a parish where
he chuses to reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and
justice. The common people of England, however, so jealous of their
liberty, but, like the common people of most other countries, never
rightly understanding wherein it consists, have now, for more than a
century together, suffered themselves to be exposed to this oppression
without a remedy. Though men of reflexion, too, have sometimes
complained of the law of settlements as a public grievance; yet it has
never been the object of any general popular clamour, such as that
against general warrants, an abusive practice undoubtedly, but such
a one as was not likely to occasion any general oppression. There is
scarce a poor man in England, of forty years of age, I will venture to
say, who has not, in some part of his life, felt himself most cruelly
oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements.’[158]
Adam Smith’s view is supported by two contemporary writers on the Poor
Law, Dr. Burn and Mr. Hay. Dr. Burn, who published a history of the
Poor Law in 1764, gives this picture of the overseer: ‘The office of
an Overseer of the Poor seems to be understood to be this, to keep an
extraordinary look-out to prevent persons coming to inhabit without
certificates, and to fly to the Justices to remove them: and if a man
brings a certificate, then to caution the inhabitants not to let him
a farm of £10 a year, and to take care to keep him out of all parish
offices.’[159] He further says that the parish officers will assist a
poor man in taking a farm in a neighbouring parish, and give him £10
for the rent. Mr. Hay, M.P., protested in his remarks on the Poor Laws
against the hardships inflicted on the poor by the Laws of Settlement.
‘It leaves it in the breast of the parish officers whether they will
grant a poor person a certificate or no.’[160] Eden, on the other hand,
thought Adam Smith’s picture overdrawn, and he contended that though
there were no doubt cases of vexatious removal, the Laws of Settlement
were not administered in this way everywhere. Howlett also considered
the operation of the Laws of Settlement to be ‘trifling,’ and instanced
the growth of Sheffield, Birmingham, and Manchester as proof that there
was little interference with the mobility of labour.
A careful study of the evidence seems to lead to the conclusion that
the Laws of Settlement were in practice, as they were on paper, a
violation of natural liberty; that they did not stop the flow of
labour, but that they regulated it in the interest of the employing
class. The answer to Howlett is given by Ruggles in the _Annals of
Agriculture_.[161] He begins by saying that the Law of Settlement
has made a poor family ‘of necessity stationary; and obliged them to
rest satisfied with those wages they can obtain where their legal
settlement happens to be; a restraint on them which ought to insure to
them wages in the parish where they must remain, more adequate to their
necessities, because it precludes them in a manner from bringing their
labour, the only marketable produce they possess, to the best market;
it is this restraint which has, in all manufacturing towns, been one
cause of reducing the poor to such a state of miserable poverty; for,
among the manufacturers, they have too frequently found masters who
have taken, and continue to take every advantage, which strict law will
give; of consequence, the prices of labour have been, in manufacturing
towns, in an inverse ratio of the number of poor settled in the place;
and the same cause has increased that number, by inviting foreigners,
in times when large orders required many workmen; the masters
themselves being the overseers, whose duty as parish officers has been
opposed by their interest in supplying the demand.’ In other words,
when it suited an employer to let fresh workers in, he would, _qua_
overseer, encourage them to come with or without certificates; but when
they were once in and ‘settled’ he would refuse them certificates to
enable them to go and try their fortunes elsewhere, in parishes where
a certificate was demanded with each poor new-comer.[162] Thus it is
not surprising to find, from Eden’s _Reports_, that certificates are
never granted at Leeds and Skipton; seldom granted at Sheffield; not
willingly granted at Nottingham, and that at Halifax certificates are
not granted at present, and only three have been granted in the last
eighteen years.
It has been argued that the figures about removals in different
parishes given by Eden in his second and third volumes show that the
Law of Settlement was ‘not so black as it has been painted.’[163] But
in considering the small number of removals, we must also consider the
large number of places where there is this entry, ‘certificates are
never granted.’ It needed considerable courage to go to a new parish
without a certificate and run the risk of an ignominious expulsion, and
though all overseers were not so strict as the one described by Dr.
Burn, yet the fame of one vexatious removal would have a far-reaching
effect in checking migration. It is clear that the law must have
operated in this way in districts where enclosures took away employment
within the parish. Suppose Hodge to have lived at Kibworth-Beauchamp in
Leicestershire. About 1780, 3600 acres were enclosed and turned from
arable to pasture; before enclosure the fields ‘were solely applied to
the production of corn,’ and ‘the Poor had then plenty of employment
in weeding, reaping, threshing, etc., and could also collect a great
deal of corn by gleaning.’[164] After the change, as Eden admits, a
third or perhaps a fourth of the number of hands would be sufficient
to do all the farming work required. Let us say that Hodge was one of
the superfluous two-thirds, and that the parish authorities refused him
a certificate. What did he do? He applied to the overseer, who sent
him out as a roundsman.[165] He would prefer to bear the ills he knew
rather than face the unknown in the shape of a new parish officer,
who might demand a certificate, and send him back with ignominy if he
failed to produce one. If he took his wife and family with him there
was even less chance of the demand for a certificate being waived.[166]
So at Kibworth-Beauchamp Hodge and his companions remained, in a state
of chronic discontent. ‘The Poor complain of hard treatment from the
overseers, and the overseers accuse the Poor of being saucy.’[167]
Now, at first sight, it seems obvious that it would be to the interest
of a parish to give a poor man a certificate, if there were no market
for his labour at home, in order to enable him to go elsewhere and
make an independent living. This seems the reasonable view, but it
is incorrect. In the same way, it would seem obvious that a parish
would give slight relief to a person whose claim was in doubt rather
than spend ten times the amount in contesting that claim at law. In
point of fact, in neither case do we find what seems the reasonable
course adopted. Parishes spent fortunes in lawsuits. And to the parish
authorities it would seem that they risked more in giving Hodge a
certificate than in obliging him to stay at home, even if he could not
make a living in his native place; for he might, with his certificate,
wander a long way off, and then fall into difficulties, and have to
be fetched back at great expense, and the cost of removing him would
fall on the certificating parish. There is a significant passage in
the _Annals of Agriculture_[168] about the wool trade in 1788. ‘We
have lately had some hand-bills scattered about Bocking, I am told,
promising full employ to combers and weavers, that would migrate
to Nottingham. Even if they chose to try this offer; as probably a
parish certificate for such a distance would be refused; it cannot be
attempted.’ Where parishes saw an immediate prospect of getting rid
of their superfluous poor into a neighbouring parish with open fields
or a common, they were indeed not chary of granting certificates. At
Hothfield in Kent, for example, ‘full half of the labouring poor are
certificated persons from other parishes: the above-mentioned common,
which affords them the means of keeping a cow, or poultry, is supposed
to draw many Poor into the parish; certificated persons are allowed to
dig peat.’[169]
In the Rules for the government of the Poor in the hundreds of Loes and
Wilford in Suffolk[170] very explicit directions are given about the
granting of certificates. In the first place, before any certificate
is granted the applicant must produce an examination taken before a
Justice of the Peace, showing that he belongs to one of the parishes
within the hundred. Granted that he has complied with this condition,
then, (1) if he be a labourer or husbandman no certificate will be
granted him out of the hundreds unless he belongs to the parish of
Kenton, and even in that case it is ‘not to exceed the distance of
three miles’; (2) if he be a tradesman, artificer, or manufacturer a
certificate may be granted to him out of the hundreds, but in no case
is it to exceed the distance of twenty miles from the parish to which
he belongs. The extent of the hundreds was roughly fourteen miles by
five and a half.
Eden, describing the neighbourhood of Coventry, says: ‘In a country
parish on one side the city, chiefly consisting of cottages inhabited
by ribbon-weavers, the Rates are as high as in Coventry; whilst, in
another parish, on the opposite side, they do not exceed one-third of
the City Rate: this is ascribed to the care that is taken to prevent
manufacturers from settling in the parish.’[171] In the neighbourhood
of Mollington (Warwickshire and Oxon) the poor rates varied from 2s.
to 4s. in the pound. ‘The difference in the several parishes, it is
said, arises, in a great measure, from the facility or difficulty of
obtaining settlements: in several parishes, a fine is imposed on a
parishioner, who settles a newcomer by hiring, or otherwise, so that a
servant is very seldom hired for a year. Those parishes which have for
a long time been in the habit of using these precautions, are now very
lightly burthened with Poor. This is often the case, where farms are
large, and of course in few hands; while other parishes, not politic
enough to observe these rules, are generally burthened with an influx
of poor neighbours.’[172] Another example of this is Deddington (Oxon)
which like other parishes that possessed common fields suffered from
an influx of small farmers who had been turned out elsewhere, whereas
neighbouring parishes, possessed by a few individuals, were cautious in
permitting newcomers to gain settlements.[173]
This practice of hiring servants for fifty-one weeks only was common:
Eden thought it fraudulent and an evasion of the law that would not
be upheld in a court of justice,[174] but he was wrong, for the 1817
Report on the Poor Law mentions among ‘the measures, justifiable
undoubtedly in point of law, which are adopted very generally in many
parts of the kingdom, to defeat the obtaining a settlement, that
of hiring labourers for a less period than a year; from whence it
naturally and necessarily follows, that a labourer may spend the season
of his health and industry in one parish, and be transferred in the
decline of life to a distant part of the kingdom.’[175] We hear little
about the feelings of the unhappy labourers who were brought home by
the overseers when they fell into want in a parish which had taken
them in with their certificate, but it is not difficult to imagine
the scene. It is significant that the Act of 1795 (to which we shall
refer later), contained a provision that orders of removal were to be
suspended in cases where the pauper was dangerously ill.
From the Rules for the Government of the Poor in the Hundreds of Loes
and Wilford, already alluded to, we learn some particulars of the
allowance made for the removal of paupers. Twenty miles was to be
considered a day’s journey; 2d. was to be allowed for one horse, and so
on in proportion per mile: but if the distance were over twenty miles,
or the overseer were obliged to be out all night, then 2s. was to be
allowed for him, 1s. for his horse, and 6d. for each pauper.[176] It is
improbable that such a scale of payment would induce the overseer to
look kindly on the causes of his trouble: much less would a pauper be a
_persona grata_ if litigation over his settlement had already cost the
parish large sums.
It has been necessary to give these particulars of the Law of
Settlement for two reasons. In the first place, the probability of
expulsion, ‘exile by administrative order,’ as it has been called,
threw a shadow over the lives of the poor. In the second place, the
old Law of Settlement became an immensely more important social
impediment when enclosure and the great industrial inventions began to
redistribute population. When the normal labourer had common rights
and a strip and a cow, he would not wish to change his home on account
of temporary distress: after enclosure he was reduced to a position in
which his distress, if he stayed on in his own village, was likely to
be permanent.
* * * * *
The want and suffering revealed in Davies’ and Eden’s budgets came to
a crisis in 1795, the year of what may be called the revolt of the
housewives. That year, when exceptional scarcity sharpened the edge
of the misery caused by the changes we have summarised, was marked by
a series of food riots all over England, in which a conspicuous part
was taken by women. These disturbances are particularly interesting
from the discipline and good order which characterise the conduct
of the rioters. The rioters when they found themselves masters of
the situation did not use their strength to plunder the shops: they
organised distribution, selling the food they seized at what they
considered fair rates, and handing over the proceeds to the owners.
They did not rob: they fixed prices, and when the owner of provisions
was making for a dearer market they stopped his carts and made him sell
on the spot. At Aylesbury in March ‘a numerous mob, consisting chiefly
of women, seized on all the wheat that came to market, and compelled
the farmers to whom it belonged to accept of such prices as they
thought proper to name.’[177] In Devonshire the rioters scoured the
country round Chudleigh, destroying two mills: ‘from the great number
of petticoats, it is generally supposed that several men were dressed
in female attire.’[178] At Carlisle a band of women accompanied by boys
paraded the streets, and in spite of the remonstrances of a magistrate,
entered various houses and shops, seized all the grain, deposited it
in the public hall, and then formed a committee to regulate the price
at which it should be sold.[179] At Ipswich there was a riot over the
price of butter, and at Fordingbridge, a certain Sarah Rogers, in
company with other women started a cheap butter campaign. Sarah took
some butter from Hannah Dawson ‘with a determination of keeping it at
a reduced price,’ an escapade for which she was afterwards sentenced
to three months’ hard labour at the Winchester Assizes. ‘Nothing but
the age of the prisoner (being very young) prevented the Court from
passing a more severe sentence.’[180] At Bath the women actually
boarded a vessel, laden with wheat and flour, which was lying in the
river and refused to let her go. When the Riot Act was read they
retorted that they were not rioting, but were resisting the sending of
corn abroad, and sang God save the King. Although the owner took an
oath that the corn was destined for Bristol, they were not satisfied,
and ultimately soldiers were called in, and the corn was relanded and
put into a warehouse.[181] In some places the soldiers helped the
populace in their work of fixing prices: at Seaford, for example, they
seized and sold meat and flour in the churchyard, and at Guildford
they were the ringleaders in a movement to lower the price of meat
to 4d. a pound, and were sent out of the town by the magistrates in
consequence.[182] These spontaneous leagues of consumers sprang up in
many different parts, for in addition to the places already mentioned
there were disturbances of sufficient importance to be chronicled in
the newspapers, in Wiltshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk, whilst Eden states
that at Deddington the populace seized on a boat laden with flour,
but restored it on the miller’s promising to sell it at a reduced
price.[183]
These riots are interesting from many points of view. They are a rising
of the poor against an increasing pressure of want, and the forces
that were driving down their standard of life. They did not amount to
a social rebellion, but they mark a stage in the history of the poor.
To the rich they were a signal of danger. Davies declared that if the
ruling classes learnt from his researches what was the condition of the
poor, they would intervene to rescue the labourers from ‘the abject
state into which they are sunk.’ Certainly the misery of which his
budgets paint the plain surface could not be disregarded. If compassion
was not a strong enough force to make the ruling classes attend to the
danger that the poor might starve, fear would certainly have made them
think of the danger that the poor might rebel. Some of them at any rate
knew their Virgil well enough to remember that in the description of
the threshold of Orcus, while ‘senectus’ is ‘tristis’ and ‘egestas’ is
‘turpis,’ ‘fames’ is linked with the more ominous epithet ‘malesuada.’
If a proletariat were left to starve despair might teach bad habits,
and this impoverished race might begin to look with ravenous eyes on
the lot of those who lived on the spoils and sinecures of the State.
Thus fear and pity united to sharpen the wits of the rich, and to turn
their minds to the distresses of the poor.
FOOTNOTES:
[139] Davies, _The Case of Labourers in Husbandry_, p. 15.
[140] In some instances it is reckoned as costing only 7s. _Ibid._, see
p. 185.
[141] Davies, p. 181.
[142] Eden, vol. ii. p. 547.
[143] Vol. xxv. p. 488.
[144] See _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. ix. pp. 13, 14, 165-167,
636-646, and vol. x. pp. 218-227.
[145] Capel Lofft (1751-1824); follower of Fox; writer of poems and
translations from Virgil and Petrarch; patron of Robert Bloomfield,
author of _Farmer’s Boy_. Called by Boswell ‘This little David of
popular spirit.’
[146] Thomas Ruggles (1737-1813), author of _History of the Poor_,
published in 1793, Deputy-Lieutenant of Essex and Suffolk.
[147] Sir Henry Gould, 1710-1794.
[148] The _Annals of Agriculture_ (vol. xvii. p. 293) contains a
curious apology by a gleaner in 1791 to the owner of some fields, who
had begun legal proceedings against her and her husband. ‘Whereas
I, Margaret Abree, wife of Thomas Abree, of the city of New Sarum,
blacksmith, did, during the barley harvest, in the month of September
last, many times wilfully and maliciously go into the fields of, and
belonging to, Mr. Edward Perry, at Clarendon Park, and take with me my
children, and did there leaze, collect, and carry away a quantity of
barley.... Now we do hereby declare, that we are fully convinced of the
illegality of such proceedings, and that no person has a right to leaze
any sort of grain, or to come on any field whatsoever, without the
consent of the owner; and are also truly sensible of the obligation we
are under to the said Edward Perry for his lenity towards us, inasmuch
as the damages given, together with the heavy cost incurred, would have
been much greater than we could possibly have discharged, and must
have amounted to perpetual imprisonment, as even those who have least
disapproved of our conduct, would certainly not have contributed so
large a sum to deliver us from the legal consequences of it. And we do
hereby faithfully promise never to be guilty of the same, or any like
offence in future. Thomas Abree, Margaret Abree. Her + Mark.’ It is
interesting to compare with this judge-made law of England the Mosaic
precept: ‘And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not
make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest,
neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave
them unto the poor, and to the stranger’ (Leviticus xxiii. 22).
[149] Kent, _Hints_, p. 238.
[150] P. 34; cf. Marshall on the Southern Department, p. 9, ‘Yorkshire
bacon, generally of the worst sort, is retailed to the poor from little
chandlers’ shops at an advanced price, bread in the same way.’
[151] _Notes on the Agriculture of Norfolk_, p. 165.
[152] _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 11.
[153] Young’s _Political Arithmetic_, quoted by Lecky, vol. vii. p. 263
note.
[154] See Appendix B for six of these budgets.
[155] Ruggles, _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xiv. p. 205.
[156] Eden, vol. i. p. 180.
[157] The parish might have the satisfaction of punishing the mother by
a year’s hard labour (7 James I. c. 4, altered in 1810), but could not
get rid of the child.
[158] _Wealth of Nations_, vol. i. p. 194.
[159] Quoted by Eden, vol. i. p. 347.
[160] See _Ibid._, p. 296.
[161] Vol. xiv. pp. 205, 206.
[162] An example of a parish where the interests of the employer and
of the parish officers differed is given in the _House of Commons
Journal_ for February 4, 1788, when a petition was presented from Mr.
John Wilkinson, a master iron-founder at Bradley, near Bilston, in
the parish of Wolverhampton. The petitioner states ‘that the present
Demand for the Iron of his Manufacture and the Improvement of which
it is capable, naturally encourage a very considerable Extension of
his Works, but that the Experience he has had of the vexatious Effect,
as well as of the constantly increasing Amount of Poor Rates to which
he is subject, has filled him with Apprehensions of final Ruin to his
Establishment; and that the Parish Officers ... are constantly alarming
his Workmen with Threats of Removal to the various Parishes from which
the Necessity of employing skilful Manufacturers has obliged him to
collect them.’ He goes on to ask that his district shall be made
extra-parochial to the poor rates.
[163] Hasbach, pp. 172-3.
[164] Eden, vol. ii. p. 384.
[165] See p. 148.
[166] The unborn were the special objects of parish officers’ dread.
At Derby the persons sent out under orders of removal are chiefly
pregnant girls. (Eden, vol. ii. p. 126.) Bastards (see above) with
some exceptions gained a settlement in their birthplace, and Hodge’s
legitimate children might gain one too if there was any doubt about the
place of their parents’ settlements.
[167] Eden, vol. ii. p. 383.
[168] Vol. ix. p. 660.
[169] Eden, vol. ii. p. 288. In considering the accounts of the state
of the commons, it must be remembered that the open parishes thus paid
the penalty of enclosure elsewhere. _Colluvies vicorum._ But these open
fields and commons were becoming rapidly more scarce.
[170] _Ibid._, p. 691.
[171] Eden, vol. iii. p. 743.
[172] _Ibid._
[173] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 591.
[174] _Ibid._, p. 654, _re_ Litchfield. ‘In two or three small parishes
in this neighbourhood, which consist of large farms, there are very
few poor: the farmers, in order to prevent the introduction of poor
from other parishes, hire their servants for fifty-one weeks only. I
conceive, however, that this practice would be considered, by a court
of justice, as fraudulent, and a mere evasion in the master; and that
a servant thus hired, if he remained the fifty-second week with his
master, on a fresh contract, would acquire a settlement in the parish.’
[175] See _Annual Register_, 1817, p. 298.
[176] Eden, vol. ii. p. 689.
[177] _Reading Mercury_, April 20, 1795; also _Ipswich Journal_, March
28.
[178] _Ipswich Journal_, April 18.
[179] _Ibid._, August 8.
[180] _Ibid._
[181] _Ibid._
[182] _Reading Mercury_, April 27, 1795.
[183] Eden, vol. ii. p. 591.