CHAPTER VII

THE REMEDIES OF 1795

The collapse of the economic position of the labourer was the result of

many causes, and in examining the various remedies that were proposed

we shall see that they touch in turn on the several deficiencies

that produced this failure. The governing fact of the situation was

that the labourer’s wages no longer sufficed to provide even a bare

and comfortless existence. It was necessary then that his wages

should be raised, or that the effects of the rise in prices should

be counteracted by changes of diet and manner of life, or that the

economic resources which formerly supplemented his earnings should in

some way be restored, unless he was to be thrown headlong on to the

Poor Law. We shall see what advice was given and what advice was taken

in these momentous years.

DIET REFORM

A disparity between income and expenditure may be corrected by

increasing income or by reducing expenditure. Many of the upper classes

thought that the second method might be tried in this emergency, and

that a judicious change of diet would enable the labourer to face the

fall of wages with equanimity. The solution seemed to lie in the simple

life. Enthusiasts soon began to feel about this proposal the sort of

excitement that Robinson Crusoe enjoyed when discovering new resources

on his island: an infinite vista of kitchen reform beckoned to their

ingenious imaginations: and many of them began to persuade themselves

that the miseries of the poor arose less from the scantiness of their

incomes than from their own improvidence and unthriftiness.[184]

The rich set an example in the worst days by cutting off pastry and

restricting their servants to a quartern loaf a week each.[185] It was

surely not too much in these circumstances to ask the poor to adapt

their appetites to the changed conditions of their lives, and to shake

off what Pitt called ‘groundless prejudices’ to mixed bread of barley,

rye, and wheat.[186] Again oatmeal was a common food in the north, why

should it not be taken in the south? If no horses except post horses

and perhaps cavalry horses were allowed oats, there would be plenty for

the poor.[187] A Cumberland labourer with a wife and family of five

was shown by Eden[188] to have spent £7, 9s. 2d. a year on oatmeal and

barley, whereas a Berkshire labourer with a wife and four children at

home spent £36, 8s. a year on wheaten bread alone.[189] Clearly the

starving south was to be saved by the introduction of cheap cereals.

Other proposals of this time were to break against the opposition of

the rich. This broke against the opposition of the poor. All attempts

to popularise substitutes failed, and the poorer the labourer grew

the more stubbornly did he insist on wheaten bread. ‘Even household

bread is scarcely ever used: they buy the finest wheaten bread, and

declare (what I much doubt), that brown bread disorders their bowels.

Bakers do not now make, as they formerly did, bread of unsifted flour:

at some farmers’ houses, however, it is still made of flour, as it

comes from the mill; but this practice is going much into disuse.

20 years ago scarcely any other than brown bread was used.’[190] At

Ealing, when the charitable rich raised a subscription to provide

the distressed poor with brown bread at a reduced price, many of the

labourers thought it so coarse and unpalatable that they returned the

tickets though wheaten bread was at 1s. 3d. the quartern loaf.[191]

Correspondent after correspondent to the _Annals of Agriculture_ notes

and generally deplores the fact that the poor, as one of them phrases

it, are too fine-mouthed to eat any but the finest bread.[192] Lord

Sheffield, judging from his address to Quarter Sessions at the end of

1795, would have had little mercy on such grumblers. After explaining

that in his parish relief was now given partly in potatoes, partly in

wheaten flour, and partly in oaten or barley flour, he declared: ‘If

any wretches should be found so lost to all decency, and so blind as

to revolt against the dispensations of providence, and to refuse the

food proposed for their relief, the parish officers will be justified

in refusing other succour, and may be assured of support from the

magistracy of the county.’[193]

To the rich, the reluctance of the labourer to change his food came

as a painful surprise. They had thought of him as a roughly built and

hardy animal, comparatively insensible to his surroundings, like the

figure Lucretius drew of the primeval labourer:

Et majoribus et solidis magis ossibus intus

Fundatum, et validis aptum per viscera nervis;

Nec facile ex aestu, nec frigore quod caperetur,

Nec novitate cibi, nec labi corporis ulla.

They did not know that a romantic and adventurous appetite is one of

the blessings of an easy life, and that the more miserable a man’s

condition, and the fewer his comforts, the more does he shrink from

experiments of diet. They were therefore surprised and displeased to

find that labourers rejected soup, even soup served at a rich man’s

table, exclaiming, ‘This is washy stuff, that affords no nourishment:

we will not be fed on meal, and chopped potatoes like hogs.’[194] The

dislike of change of food was remarked by the Poor Law Commissioners

in 1834, who observed that the labourer had acquired or retained ‘with

the moral helplessness some of the other peculiarities of a child. He

is often disgusted to a degree which other classes scarcely conceive

possible, by slight differences in diet; and is annoyed by anything

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

Apart from the constitutional conservatism of the poor there were good

reasons for the obstinacy of the labourers. Davies put one aspect

of the case very well. ‘If the working people of other countries are

content with bread made of rye, barley, or oats, have they not milk,

cheese, butter, fruits, or fish, to eat with that coarser bread? And

was not this the case of our own people formerly, when these grains

were the common productions of our land, and when scarcely wheat

enough was grown for the use of the nobility and principal gentry?

Flesh-meat, butter, and cheese, were then at such moderate prices,

compared with the present prices, that poor people could afford to

use them in common. And with a competent quantity of these articles,

a coarser kind of bread might very well satisfy the common people of

any country.’[196] He also states that where land had not been so

highly improved as to produce much wheat, barley, oatmeal, or maslin

bread were still in common use. Arthur Young himself realised that the

labourer’s attachment to wheaten bread was not a mere superstition of

the palate. ‘In the East of England I have been very generally assured,

by the labourers who work the hardest, that they prefer the finest

bread, not because most pleasant, but most contrary to a lax habit of

body, which at once prevents all _strong_ labour. The quality of the

bread that is eaten by those who have meat, and perhaps porter and

port, is of very little consequence indeed; but to the hardworking

man, who nearly lives on it, the case is abundantly different.’[197]

Fox put this point in a speech in the House of Commons in the debate

on the high price of corn in November 1795. He urged gentlemen, who

were talking of mixed bread for the people, ‘not to judge from any

experiment made with respect to themselves. I have myself tasted bread

of different sorts, I have found it highly pleasant, and I have no

doubt it is exceedingly wholesome. But it ought to be recollected

how very small a part the article of bread forms of the provisions

consumed by the more opulent classes of the community. To the poor it

constitutes, the chief, if not the sole article of subsistence.’[198]

The truth is that the labourer living on bread and tea had too delicate

a digestion to assimilate the coarser cereals, and that there was,

apart from climate and tradition, a very important difference between

the labourer in the north and the labourer in the south, which the

rich entirely overlooked. That difference comes out in an analysis of

the budgets of the Cumberland labourer and the Berkshire labourer.

The Cumberland labourer who spent only £7, 9s. on his cereals, spent

£2, 13s. 7d. a year on milk. The Berkshire labourer who spent £36, 8s.

on wheaten bread spent 8s. 8d. a year on milk. The Cumberland family

consumed about 1300 quarts in the year, the Berkshire family about two

quarts a week. The same contrast appears in all budget comparisons

between north and south. A weaver at Kendal (eight in the family)

spends £12, 9s. on oatmeal and wheat, and £5, 4s. on milk.[199] An

agricultural labourer at Wetherall in Cumberland (five in family)

spends £7, 6s. 9d. on cereals and £2, 13s. 4d. on milk.[200] On the

other side we have a labourer in Shropshire (four in family) spending

£10, 8s. on bread (of wheat rye), and only 8s. 8d. on milk,[201] and

a cooper at Frome, Somerset (seven in family) spending £45, 10s. on

bread, and about 17s. on milk.[202] These figures are typical.[203]

Now oatmeal eaten with milk is a very different food from oatmeal taken

alone, and it is clear from a study of the budgets that if oatmeal

was to be acclimatised in the south, it was essential to increase

the consumption of milk. But the great difference in consumption

represented not a difference of demand, but a difference of supply. The

southern labourer went without milk not from choice but from necessity.

In the days when he kept cows he drank milk, for there was plenty of

milk in the village. After enclosure, milk was not to be had. It may

be that more cows were kept under the new system of farming, though

this is unlikely, seeing that at this time every patch of arable was

a gold-mine, but it is certainly true that milk became scarce in the

villages. The new type of farmer did not trouble to sell milk at home.

‘Farmers are averse to selling milk; while poor persons who have only

one cow generally dispose of all they can spare.’[204] The new farmer

produced for a larger market: his produce was carried away, as Cobbett

said, to be devoured by ‘the idlers, the thieves, the prostitutes who

are all taxeaters in the wens of Bath and London.’ Davies argued, when

pleading for the creation of small farms, ‘The occupiers of these small

farms, as well as the occupiers of Mr. _Kent’s_ larger cottages, would

not think much of retailing to their poorer neighbours a little corn or

a little milk, as they might want, which the poor can now seldom have

at all, and never but as a great favour from the rich farmers.’[205]

Sir Thomas Bernard mentioned among the advantages of the Winchilsea

system the ‘no inconsiderable convenience to the inhabitants of that

neighbourhood, that these cottagers are enabled to supply them, at a

very moderate price, with milk, cream, butter, poultry, pig-meat, and

veal: articles which, in general, are not worth the farmer’s attention,

and which, therefore, are supplied by speculators, who greatly enhance

the price on the public.’[206] Eden[207] records that in Oxfordshire

the labourers bitterly complain that the farmers, instead of selling

their milk to the poor, give it to their pigs, and a writer in the

Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor says

that this was a practice not unusual in many parts of England.[208]

The scarcity of milk must be considered a contributory cause of the

growth of tea-drinking, a habit that the philanthropists and Cobbett

agreed in condemning. Cobbett declared in his _Advice to Young

Men_[209] that ‘if the slops were in fashion amongst ploughmen and

carters, we must all be starved; for the food could never be raised.

The mechanics are half ruined by them.’ In the Report on the Poor

presented to the Hants Quarter Sessions in 1795,[210] the use of tea is

described as ‘a vain present attempt to supply to the spirits of the

mind what is wanting to the strength of the body; but in its lasting

effects impairing the nerves, and therein equally injuring both the

body and the mind.’ Davies retorted on the rich who found fault with

the extravagance of the poor in tea-drinking, by pointing out that it

was their ‘last resource.’ ‘The topic on which the declaimers against

the extravagance of the poor display their eloquence with most success,

is _tea-drinking_. Why should such people, it is asked, indulge in a

luxury which is only proper for their betters; and not rather content

themselves with milk, which is in every form wholesome and nourishing?

Were it true that poor people could every where procure so excellent

an article as milk, there would be then just reason to reproach them

for giving the preference to the miserable infusion of which they

are so fond. But it is not so. Wherever the poor can get milk, do

they not gladly use it? And where they cannot get it, would they not

gladly exchange their tea for it?[211]... Still you exclaim, _Tea is

a luxury_. If you mean fine hyson tea, sweetened with refined sugar,

and softened with cream, I readily admit it to be so. But _this_ is

not the tea of the poor. Spring water, just coloured with a few leaves

of the lowest-priced tea, and sweetened with the brownest sugar, is

the luxury for which you reproach them. To this they have recourse

from mere necessity: and were they now to be deprived of this, they

would immediately be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not

the cause, but the consequence, of the distresses of the poor.’[212]

We learn from the _Annals of Agriculture_ that at Sedgefield in

Durham[213] many of the poor declared that they had been driven to

drinking tea from not being able to procure milk.[214]

No doubt the scarcity of milk helped to encourage a taste that was

very quickly acquired by all classes in England, and not in England

only, for, before the middle of the eighteenth century, the rapid

growth of tea-drinking among the poor in the Lowlands of Scotland was

affecting the revenue very seriously.[215] The English poor liked tea

for the same reason that Dr. Johnson liked it, as a stimulant, and the

fact that their food was monotonous and insipid made it particularly

attractive. Eden shows that by the end of the eighteenth century it

was in general use among poor families, taking the place both of beer

and of milk, and excluding the substitutes that Eden wished to make

popular. It seems perhaps less surprising to us than it did to him,

that when the rich, who could eat or drink what they liked, enjoyed

tea, the poor thought bread and tea a more interesting diet than bread

and barley water.

A few isolated attempts were made to remedy the scarcity of milk,[216]

which had been caused by enclosure and the consolidation of farms.

Lord Winchilsea’s projects have already been described. In the Reports

of the Society for bettering the Condition of the Poor, there are two

accounts of plans for supplying milk cheap, one in Staffordshire, where

a respectable tradesman undertook to keep a certain number of cows

for the purpose in a parish where ‘the principal number of the poorer

inhabitants were destitute of all means of procuring milk for their

families,’[217] another at Stockton in Durham, where the bishop made

it a condition of the lease of a certain farm, that the tenant should

keep fifteen cows whose milk was to be sold at 1/2d. a pint to the

poor.[218] Mr. Curwen again, the Whig M.P. for Carlisle, had a plan

for feeding cows in the winter with a view to providing the poor with

milk.[219]

There was another way in which the enclosures had created an

insuperable obstacle to the popularising of ‘cheap and agreeable

substitutes’ for expensive wheaten bread. The Cumberland housewife

could bake her own barley bread in her oven ‘heated with heath, furze

or brush-wood, the expence of which is inconsiderable’[220]; she had

stretches of waste land at her door where the children could be sent

to fetch fuel. ‘There is no comparison to the community,’ wrote a

contributor to the _Annals of Agriculture_,[221] ‘whether good wheat,

rye, turnips, etc., are not better than brakes, goss, furz, broom, and

heath,’ but as acre after acre in the midlands and south was enclosed,

the fuel of the poor grew ever scantier. When the common where he had

gleaned his firing was fenced off, the poor man could only trust for

his fuel to pilferings from the hedgerows. To the spectator, furze from

the common might seem ‘gathered with more loss of time than it appears

to be worth’[222]; to the labourer whose scanty earnings left little

margin over the expense of bread alone, the loss of firing was not

balanced by the economy of time.[223]

Insufficient firing added to the miseries caused by insufficient

clothes and food. An ingenious writer in the _Annals of

Agriculture_[224] suggested that the poor should resort to the stables

for warmth, as was the practice in the duchy of Milan. Fewer would

suffer death from want of fire in winter, he argued, and also it would

be a cheap way of helping them, as it cost no fuel, for cattle were so

obliging as to dispense warmth from their persons for nothing. But even

this plan (which was not adopted) would not have solved the problem

of cooking. The labourer might be blamed for his diet of fine wheaten

bread and for having his meat (when he had any) roasted instead of made

into soup, but how could cooking be done at home without fuel? ‘No

doubt, a labourer,’ says Eden,[225] ‘whose income was only £20 a year,

would, in general, act wisely in substituting hasty-pudding, barley

bread, boiled milk, and potatoes, for bread and beer; but in most parts

of this county, he is debarred not more by prejudice, than by local

difficulties, from using a diet that requires cooking at home. The

extreme dearness of fuel in Oxfordshire, compels him to purchase his

dinner at the baker’s; and, from his unavoidable consumption of bread,

he has little left for cloaths, in a country where warm cloathing is

most essentially wanted.’ In Davies’ more racy and direct language, ‘it

is but little that in the present state of things the belly can spare

for the back.’[226] Davies also pointed out the connection between dear

fuel and the baker. ‘Where fuel is scarce and dear, poor people find it

cheaper to buy their bread of the baker than to bake for themselves....

But where fuel abounds, and costs only the trouble of cutting and

carrying home, there they may save something by baking their own

bread.’[227] Complaints of the pilfering of hedgerows were very common.

‘Falstaff says “his soldiers found linen on every hedge”; and I fear

it is but too often the case, that labourers’ children procure fuel

from the same quarter.’[228] There were probably many families like

the two described in Davies[229] who spent nothing on fuel, which

they procured by gathering cow-dung, and breaking their neighbours’

hedges.’[230]

In some few cases, the benevolent rich did not content themselves with

attempting to enforce the eighth commandment, but went to the root of

the matter, helping to provide a substitute for their hedgerows. An

interesting account of such an experiment is given in the _Reports

on the Poor_,[231] by Scrope Bernard. ‘There having been several

prosecutions at the Aylesbury Quarter Sessions, for stealing fuel last

winter, I was led to make particular inquiries, respecting the means

which the poor at Lower Winchendon had of providing fuel. I found that

there was no fuel then to be sold within several miles of the place;

and that, amid the distress occasioned by the long frost, a party of

cottagers had joined in hiring a person, to fetch a load of pit-coal

from Oxford, for their supply. In order to encourage this disposition

to acquire fuel in an honest manner,’ a present was made to all this

party of as much coal again as they had already purchased carriage

free. Next year the vestry determined to help, and with the aid of

private donations coal was distributed at 1s. 4d. the cwt. (its cost

at the Oxford wharf), and kindling faggots at 1d. each. ‘It had been

said that the poor would not find money to purchase them, when they

were brought: instead of which out of 35 poor families belonging to

the parish, 29 came with ready money, husbanded out of their scanty

means, to profit with eagerness of this attention to their wants; and

among them a person who had been lately imprisoned by his master for

stealing wood from his hedges.’ Mr. Bernard concludes his account with

some apt remarks on the difficulties of combining honesty with grinding

poverty.[232]

MINIMUM WAGE

The attempts to reduce cottage expenditure were thus a failure. We must

now describe the attempts to increase the cottage income. There were

two ways in which the wages of the labourers might have been raised.

One way, the way of combination, was forbidden by law. The other way

was the fixing of a legal minimum wage in relation to the price of

food. This was no new idea, for the regulation of wages by law was a

venerable English institution, as old as the Statute of Edward III. The

most recent laws on the subject were the famous Act of Elizabeth, an

Act of James I., and an Act of George II. (1747). The Act of Elizabeth

provided that the Justices of the Peace should meet annually and assess

the wages of labourers in husbandry and of certain other workmen.

Penalties were imposed on all who gave or took a wage in excess of

this assessment. The Act of James I. was passed to remove certain

ambiguities that were believed to have embarrassed the operation of the

Act of Elizabeth, and among other provisions imposed a penalty on all

who gave a wage below the wage fixed by the magistrates. The Act of

1747[233] was passed because the existing laws were ‘insufficient and

defective,’ and it provided that disputes between masters and men could

be referred to the magistrates, ‘although no rate or assessment of

wages has been made that year by the Justices of the shire where such

complaint shall be made.’

Two questions arise on the subject of this legislation, Was it

operative? In whose interests was it administered, the interests of the

employers or the interests of the employed? As to the first question

there is a good deal of negative evidence to show that during the

eighteenth century these laws were rarely applied. An example of an

assessment (an assessment declaring a maximum) made by the Lancashire

magistrates in 1725, was published in the _Annals of Agriculture_ in

1795[234] as an interesting curiosity, and the writer remarks: ‘It

appears from Mr. Ruggles’ excellent _History of the Poor_ that such

orders must in general be searched for in earlier periods, and a

friend of ours was much surprised to hear that any magistrates in the

present century would venture on so bold a measure.’[235]

As to the second question, at the time we are discussing it was

certainly taken for granted that this legislation was designed to keep

wages down. So implicitly was this believed that the Act of James I.

which provided penalties in cases where wages were given below the

fixed rate was generally ignored, and speakers and writers mentioned

only the Act of Elizabeth, treating it as an Act for fixing a maximum.

Whitbread, for example, when introducing a Bill in 1795 to fix a

minimum wage, with which we deal later, argued that the Elizabethan

Act ought to be repealed because it fixed a maximum. This view of the

earlier legislation was taken by Fox, who supported Whitbread’s Bill,

and by Pitt who opposed it. Fox said of the Act of Elizabeth that

‘it secured the master from a risk which could but seldom occur, of

being charged exorbitantly for the quantity of service; but it did not

authorise the magistrate to protect the poor from the injustice of a

grinding and avaricious master, who might be disposed to take advantage

of their necessities, and undervalue the rate of their services.’[236]

Pitt said that Whitbread ‘imagined that he had on his side of the

question the support of experience in this country, and appealed to

certain laws upon the statute-book in confirmation of his proposition.

He did not find himself called upon to defend the principle of these

statutes, but they were certainly introduced for purposes widely

different from the object of the present bill. They were enacted to

guard the industry of the country from being checked by a general

combination among labourers; and the bill now under consideration was

introduced solely for the purpose of remedying the inconveniences which

labourers sustain from the disproportion existing between the price of

labour and the price of living.’[237] Only one speaker in the debates,

Vansittart, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, took the view

that legislation was not needed because the Act of James I. gave the

magistrates the powers with which Whitbread sought to arm them.

It was natural that many minds searching after a way of escape from the

growing distress of the labourers, at a time when wages had not kept

pace with prices, should have turned to the device of assessing wages

by law in accordance with the price of provisions. If prices could

not be assimilated to wages, could not wages be assimilated to prices?

Nathaniel Kent, no wild visionary, had urged employers to raise wages

in proportion to the increase of their profits, but his appeal had

been without effect. But the policy of regulating wages according to

the price of food was recommended in several quarters, and it provoked

a great deal of discussion. Burke, whose days were closing in, was

tempted to take part in it, and he put an advertisement into the papers

announcing that he was about to publish a series of letters on the

subject. The letters never appeared, but Arthur Young has described the

visit he paid to Beaconsfield at this time and Burke’s rambling thunder

about ‘the absurdity of regulating labour and the mischief of our

poor laws,’ and Burke’s published works include a paper _Thoughts and

Details on Scarcity_, presented to Pitt in November 1795. In this paper

Burke argued that the farmer was the true guardian of the labourer’s

interest, in that it would never be profitable to him to underpay the

labourer: an uncompromising application of the theory of the economic

man, which was not less superficial than the Jacobins’ application of

the theory of the natural man.

In October 1795 Arthur Young sent out to the various correspondents of

the Board of Agriculture a circular letter containing this question

among others: ‘It having been recommended by various quarter-sessions,

that the price of labour should be regulated by that of bread corn,

have the goodness to state what you conceive to be the advantages or

disadvantages of such a system?’[238] Arthur Young was himself in

favour of the proposal, and the Suffolk magistrates, at a meeting which

he attended on the 12th of October, ordered: ‘That the Members for this

county be requested by the chairman to bring a bill into parliament, so

to regulate the price of labour, that it may fluctuate with the average

price of bread corn.’[239] Most of the replies were adverse, but the

proposal found a warm friend in Mr. Howlett, the Vicar of Dunmow,

who put into his answer some of the arguments which he afterwards

developed in a pamphlet published in reply to Pitt’s criticisms of

Whitbread’s Bill.[240] Howlett argued that Parliament had legislated

with success to prevent combinations of workmen, and as an example he

quoted the Acts of 8 George III., which had made the wages of tailors

and silk-weavers subject to the regulations of the magistrates. It was

just as necessary and just as practicable to prevent a combination of

a different kind, that of masters. ‘Not a combination indeed formally

drawn up in writing and sanctioned under hand and seal, a combination,

however, as certain (the result of contingencies or providential

events) and as fatally efficacious as if in writing it had filled five

hundred skins of parchment: a combination which has operated for many

years with a force rapidly increasing, a combination which has kept

back the hire of our labourers who have reaped down our fields, and

has at length torn the clothes from their backs, snatched the food

from their mouths, and ground the flesh from their bones.’ Howlett, it

will be seen, took the same view as Thelwall, that the position of the

labourers was deteriorating absolutely and relatively. He estimated

from a survey taken at Dunmow that the average family should be taken

as five; if wages had been regulated on this basis, and the labourer

had been given per head no more than the cost of a pauper’s keep in the

workhouse sixty years ago, he would have been very much better off in

1795. He would himself take a higher standard. In reply to the argument

that the policy of the minimum wage would deprive the labourers of all

spur and incentive he pointed to the case of the London tailors; they

at any rate displayed plenty of life and ingenuity, and nobody could

say that the London fashions did not change fast enough. Employers

would no more raise wages without compulsion than they would make good

roads without the aid of turnpikes or the prescription of statutes

enforced by the magistrates. His most original contribution to the

discussion was the argument that the legal regulation should not be

left to the unassisted judgment of the magistrates: ‘it should be

the result of the clearest, fullest, and most accurate information,

and at length be judiciously adapted to each county, hundred, or

district in every quarter of the kingdom.’ Howlett differed from some

of the supporters of a minimum wage, in thinking that wages should be

regulated by the prices of the necessaries of life, not merely by that

of bread corn.

The same policy was advocated by Davies in _The Case of Labourers

in Husbandry_.[241] Davies argued that if the minimum only were

fixed, emulation would not be discouraged, for better workmen would

both be more sure of employment and also obtain higher wages. He

suggested that the minimum wage should be fixed by calculating the

sum necessary to maintain a family of five, or by settling the scale

of day wages by the price of bread alone, treating the other expenses

as tolerably steady. He did not propose to regulate the wages of any

but day labourers, nor did he propose to deal with piecework, although

piecework had been included in the Act of Elizabeth. He further

suggested that the regulation should be in force only for half the

year, from November to May, when the labourers’ difficulties pressed

hardest upon them. Unfortunately he coupled with his minimum wage

policy a proposal to give help from the rates to families with more

than five members, if the children were unable to earn.

But the most interesting of all the declarations in favour of a minimum

wage was a declaration from labourers. A correspondent sent the

following advertisement to the _Annals of Agriculture_:--

‘The following is an advertisement which I cut out of a Norwich

newspaper:--

“DAY LABOURERS

“At a numerous meeting of the day labourers of the little parishes

of Heacham, Snettisham, and Sedgford, this day, 5th November, in the

parish church of Heacham, in the county of Norfolk, in order to take

into consideration the best and most peaceable mode of obtaining a

redress of all the severe and peculiar hardships under which they

have for many years so patiently suffered, the following resolutions

were unanimously agreed to:--1st, That--_The labourer is worthy of

his hire_, and that the mode of lessening his distresses, as hath

been lately the fashion, by selling him flour under the market

price, and thereby rendering him an object of a parish rate, is

not only an indecent insult on his lowly and humble situation (in

itself sufficiently mortifying from his degrading dependence on the

caprice of his employer) but a fallacious mode of relief, and every

way inadequate to a radical redress of the manifold distresses of

his calamitous state. 2nd, That the price of labour should, at all

times, be proportioned to the price of wheat, which should invariably

be regulated by the average price of that necessary article of life;

and that the price of labour, as specified in the annexed plan, is

not only well calculated to make the labourer happy without being

injurious to the farmer, but it appears to us the only rational means

of securing the permanent happiness of this valuable and useful class

of men, and, if adopted in its full extent, will have an immediate and

powerful effect in reducing, if it does not entirely annihilate, that

disgraceful and enormous tax on the public--the POOR RATE.

“_Plan of the Price of Labour proportionate to the Price of Wheat_

per last. per day.

When wheat shall be 14l. the price of labour shall be 1s. 2d.

„ „ 16 „ „ „ 1s. 4d.

„ „ 18 „ „ „ 1s. 6d.

„ „ 20 „ „ „ 1s. 8d.

„ „ 22 „ „ „ 1s. 10d.

„ „ 24 „ „ „ 2s. 0d.

„ „ 26 „ „ „ 2s. 2d.

„ „ 28 „ „ „ 2s. 4d.

„ „ 30 „ „ „ 2s. 6d.

„ „ 32 „ „ „ 2s. 8d.

„ „ 34 „ „ „ 2s. 10d.

„ „ 36 „ „ „ 3s. 0d.

And so on, according to this proportion.

“3rd, That a petition to parliament to regulate the price of labour,

conformable to the above plan, be immediately adopted; and that

the day labourers throughout the county be invited to associate

and co-operate in this necessary application to parliament, as a

peaceable, legal, and probable mode of obtaining relief; and, in doing

this, no time should be lost, as the petition must be presented before

the 29th January 1796.

“4th, That one shilling shall be paid into the hands of the treasurer

by every labourer, in order to defray the expences of advertising,

attending on meetings, and paying counsel to support their petition in

parliament.

“5th, That as soon as the sense of the day labourers of this county,

or a majority of them, shall be made known to the clerk of the

meeting, a general meeting shall be appointed, in some central town,

in order to agree upon the best and easiest mode of getting the

petition signed: when it will be requested that one labourer, properly

instructed, may be deputed to represent two or three contiguous

parishes, and to attend the above intended meeting with a list of

all the labourers in the parishes he shall represent, and pay their

respective subscriptions; and that the labourer, so deputed, shall

be allowed two shillings and six pence a day for his time, and two

shillings and six pence a day for his expences.

“6th, That Adam Moore, clerk of the meeting, be directed to have the

above resolutions, with the names of the farmers and labourers who

have subscribed to and approved them, advertised in one Norwich and

one London paper; when it is hoped that the above plan of a petition

to parliament will not only be approved and immediately adopted by the

day labourers of this county, but by the day labourers of every county

in the kingdom.

“7th, That all letters, _post paid_, addressed to Adam Moore,

labourer, at Heacham, near Lynn, Norfolk, will be duly noticed.”[242]

This is one of the most interesting and instructive documents of the

time. It shows that the labourers, whose steady decline during the

next thirty years we are about to trace, were animated by a sense of

dignity and independence. Something of the old spirit of the commoners

still survived. But there is no sequel to this incident. This great

scheme of a labourers’ organisation vanishes: it passes like a flash of

summer lightning. What is the explanation? The answer is to be found,

we suspect, in the Treason and Sedition Acts that Pitt was carrying

through Parliament in this very month. Under those Acts no language

of criticism was safe, and fifty persons could not meet except in the

presence of a magistrate, who had power to extinguish the meeting and

arrest the speaker. Those measures inflicted even wider injury upon the

nation than Fox and Sheridan and Erskine themselves believed.

* * * * *

The policy of a minimum wage was brought before Parliament in the

winter of 1795, in a Bill introduced by Samuel Whitbread, one of

the small band of brave Liberals who had stood by Fox through the

revolutionary panic. Whitbread is a politician to whom history has done

less than justice, and he is generally known only as an implacable

opponent of the Peninsular War. That opposition he contrived to

conduct, as we know from the _Creevey Papers_, in such a way as to

win and keep the respect of Wellington. Whitbread’s disapproval of

that war, of which Liberals like Holland and Lord John Russell, who

took Fox’s view of the difference of fighting revolutions by the aid

of kings and fighting Napoleon by the aid of peoples, were strong

supporters, sprang from his compassion for the miseries of the English

poor. His most notable quality was his vivid and energetic sympathy;

he spent his life in hopeless battles, and he died by his own hand of

public despair. The Bill he now introduced was the first of a series of

proposals designed for the rescue of the agricultural labourers. It was

backed by Sheridan and Grey,[243] and the members for Suffolk.

The object of the Bill[244] was to explain and amend the Act of

Elizabeth, which empowered Justices of the Peace at or within six weeks

of every General Quarter Sessions held at Easter to regulate the wages

of labourers in husbandry. The provisions of the Bill were briefly as

follows. At any Quarter Sessions the justices could agree, if they

thought fit, to hold a General Sessions for carrying into execution

the powers given them by the Act. If they thought good to hold such

a General Sessions, the majority of them could ‘rate and appoint the

wages and fix and declare the hours of working of all labourers in

husbandry, by the day, week, month or year, and with beer or cyder or

without, respect being had to the value of money and the plenty or

scarcity of the time.’ This rate was to be printed and posted on the

church doors, and was to hold good till superseded by another made in

the same way. The rate was not to apply to any tradesman or artificer,

nor to any labourer whose diet was wholly provided by his employer, nor

to any labourer _bona fide_ employed on piecework, nor to any labourer

employed by the parish. The young, the old, and the infirm were also

exempted from the provisions of the Act. It was to be lawful ‘to

contract with and pay to any male person, under the age of ----[245]

years, or to any man who from age or infirmity or any other incapacity

shall be unable to do the ordinary work of a labouring man, so much as

he shall reasonably deserve for the work which he shall be able to do

and shall do.’ In case of complaint the decision as to the ability of

the labourer rested with the justices.

With the above exceptions no labourer was to be hired under the

appointed rates, and any contract for lower wages was void. If

convicted of breaking the law, an employer was to be fined; if he

refused to pay the fine, his goods were to be distrained on, and

if this failed to produce enough to pay the expenses, he could be

committed to the common gaol or House of Correction. A labourer with

whom an illegal contract was made was to be a competent witness.

The first discussions of the Bill were friendly in tone. On 25th

November Whitbread asked for leave to bring it in. Sir William Young,

Lechmere, Charles Dundas, and Sir John Rous all spoke with sympathy

and approval. The first reading debate took place on 9th December, and

though Whitbread had on that occasion the powerful support of Fox,

who, while not concealing his misgivings about the Bill, thought the

alternative of leaving the great body of the people to depend on the

charity of the rich intolerable, an ominous note was struck by Pitt and

Henry Dundas on the other side. The Bill came up for second reading

on 12th February 1796.[246] Whitbread’s opening speech showed that he

was well aware that he would have to face a formidable opposition.

Pitt rose at once after the motion had been formally seconded by one

of the Suffolk members, and assailed the Bill in a speech that made

an immediate and overwhelming impression. He challenged Whitbread’s

argument that wages had not kept pace with prices; he admitted the

hardships of the poor, but he thought the picture overdrawn, for

their hardships had been relieved by ‘a display of beneficence never

surpassed at any period,’ and he argued that it was a false remedy

to use legislative interference, and to give the justices the power

to regulate the price of labour, and to endeavour ‘to establish by

authority what would be much better accomplished by the unassisted

operation of principles.’ This led naturally to an attack on the

restrictions on labour imposed by the Law of Settlement, and a

discussion of the operation of the Poor Laws, and the speech ended,

after a glance at the great possibilities of child employment, with

the promise of measures which should restore the original purity of

the Poor Laws, and make them a blessing instead of the curse they had

become. The speech seems to have dazzled the House of Commons, and few

stood up against the general opinion that Whitbread’s proposal was

dangerous, and that the whole question had better be left to Pitt.

Lechmere, a Worcestershire member, was one of them, and he made an

admirable little speech in which he tried to destroy the general

illusion that the poor could not be unhappy in a country where the

rich were so kind. Whitbread himself defended his Bill with spirit

and ability, showing that Pitt had not really found any substantial

argument against it, and that Pitt’s own remedies were all hypothetical

and distant. Fox reaffirmed his dislike of compulsion, but restated

at the same time his opinion that Whitbread’s Bill, though not an

ideal solution, was the best solution available of evils which pressed

very hardly on the poor and demanded attention. General Smith pointed

out that one of Pitt’s remedies was the employment of children, and

warned him that he had himself seen some of the consequences of the

unregulated labour of children ‘whose wan and pale complexions bespoke

that their constitutions were already undermined, and afforded but

little promise of a robust manhood, or of future usefulness to the

community.’ But the general sense of the House was reflected in the

speeches of Buxton, Coxhead and Burdon, whose main argument was that

the poor were not in so desperate a plight as Whitbread supposed, and

that whatever their condition might be, Pitt was the most likely person

to find such remedies as were practicable and effective. The motion for

second reading was negatived without a division. The verdict of the

House was a verdict of confidence in Pitt.

Four years later (11th February 1800) Whitbread repeated his

attempt.[247] He asked for leave to bring in a Bill to explain and

amend the Act of Elizabeth, and said that he had waited for Pitt to

carry out his promises. He was aware of the danger of overpaying

the poor, but artificers and labourers should be so paid as to be

able to keep themselves and their families in comfort. He saw no

way of securing this result in a time of distress except the way he

had suggested. Pitt rose at once to reply. He had in the interval

brought in and abandoned his scheme of Poor Law Reform. He had spent

his only idea, and he was now confessedly without any policy at all.

All that he could contribute was a general criticism of legislative

interference, and another discourse on the importance of letting labour

find its own level. He admitted the fact of scarcity, but he believed

the labouring class seldom felt fewer privations. History scarcely

provides a more striking spectacle of a statesman paying himself with

soothing phrases in the midst of a social cyclone. The House was more

than ever on his side. All the interests and instincts of class were

disguised under the gold dust of Adam Smith’s philosophy. Sir William

Young, Buxton, Wilberforce, Ellison, and Perceval attacked the Bill.

Whitbread replied that charity as a substitute for adequate wages had

mischievous effects, for it took away the independence of the poor,

‘a consideration as valuable to the labourer as to the man of high

rank,’ and as for the argument that labour should be left to find

its own level, the truth surely was that labour found its level by

combinations, and that this had been found to be so great an evil that

Acts of Parliament had been passed against it.

The date of the second reading of the Bill was hotly disputed:[248] the

friends of the measure wanted it to be fixed for 28th April, so that

Quarter Sessions might have time to deliberate on the proposals; the

opponents of the measure suggested 25th February, on the grounds that

it was dangerous to keep the Bill in suspense so long: ‘the eyes of all

the labouring poor,’ said Mr. Ellison, ‘must in that interval be turned

upon it.’ The opponents won their point, and when the Bill came up for

second reading its fate was a foregone conclusion. Whitbread made one

last appeal, pleading the cause of the labourers bound to practical

serfdom in parishes where the landowner was an absentee, employed at

starvation wages by farmers, living in cottages let to them by farmers.

But his appeal was unheeded: Lord Belgrave retorted with the argument

that legislative interference with agriculture could not be needed,

seeing that five hundred Enclosure Bills had passed the House during a

period of war, and the Bill was rejected.

So died the policy of the minimum wage. Even later it had its

adherents, for, in 1805, Sir Thomas Bernard criticised it[249] as

the ‘favourite idea of some very intelligent and benevolent men.’ He

mentioned as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the scheme, that had the rate

of wages been fixed by the standard of 1780 when the quartern loaf was

6d. and the labourer’s pay 9s. a week, the result in 1800 when the

quartern loaf cost 1s. 9d. would have been a wage of £1, 11s. 6d.

When Whitbread introduced his large and comprehensive Poor Law Bill in

1807,[250] the proposal for a minimum wage was not included.

From an examination of the speeches of the time and of the answers

to Arthur Young’s circular printed in the _Annals of Agriculture_,

it is evident that there was a genuine fear among the opponents of

the measure that if once wages were raised to meet the rise in prices

it would not be easy to reduce them when the famine was over. This

was put candidly by one of Arthur Young’s correspondents: ‘it is

here judged more prudent to indulge the poor with bread corn at a

reduced price than to raise the price of wages.’[251] The policy of

a minimum wage was revived later by a society called ‘The General

Association established for the Purpose of bettering the Condition of

the Agricultural and Manufacturing Labourers.’ Three representatives of

this society gave evidence before the Select Committee on Emigration in

1827, and one of them pointed out as an illustration of the injustice

with which the labourers were treated, that in 1825 the wages of

agricultural labourers were generally 9s. a week, and the price of

wheat 9s. a bushel, whereas in 1732 the wages of agricultural labour

were fixed by the magistrates at 6s. a week, and the price of wheat was

2s. 9d. the bushel. In support of this comparison he produced a table

from _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ of 1732:--

Wheat in February 1732, 23s. to 25s. per quarter.

Wheat in March 1732, 20s. to 22s. per quarter.

Yearly wages appointed by the Justices to be taken by the servants in

the county of Kent, not exceeding the following sums:

Head ploughman waggoner or seedsman £8 0 0

His mate 4 0 0

Best woman 3 0 0

Second sort of woman 2 0 0

Second ploughman 6 0 0

His mate 3 0 0

Labourers by day in summer 1 2

In winter 1 0

JUSTICES OF GLOUCESTER

Head servant in husbandry 5 0 0

Second servant in husbandry 4 0 0

Driving boy under fourteen 1 0 0

Head maid servant or dairy servant 2 10 0

Mower in harvest without drink per day 1 2

With drink 1 0

Other day labourers with drink 1 0

From corn to hay harvest with drink 0 8

Mowers and reapers in corn harvest with drink 1 0

Labourers with diet 0 4

Without diet or drink 0 10

Carpenter wheelwright or mason without drink 1 2

With drink 1 0

One of the witnesses pointed out that there were five millions of

labourers making with their families eight millions, and that if the

effect of raising their wages was to increase their expenditure by a

penny a day, there would be an increase of consumption amounting to

twelve millions a year. These arguments made little impression on the

Committee, and the representations of the society were dismissed with

contempt: ‘It is from an entire ignorance of the universal operation of

the principle of Supply and Demand regulating the rate of wages that

all these extravagant propositions are advanced, and recommendations

spread over the country which are so calculated to excite false

hopes, and consequently discontent, in the minds of the labouring

classes. Among the most extravagant are those brought forward by the

Society established for the purpose of bettering the condition of the

manufacturing and agricultural labourers.’

POOR LAW REFORM

Pitt, having secured the rejection of Whitbread’s Minimum Wage Bill in

1796, produced his own alternative: Poor Law Reform. It is necessary to

state briefly what were the Poor Law arrangements at the time of his

proposals.

The Poor Law system reposed on the great Act of Elizabeth (1601), by

which the State had acknowledged and organised the duty to the poor

which it had taken over from the Church. The parish was constituted

the unit, and overseers, unsalaried and nominated by the J.P.’s, were

appointed for administering relief, the necessary funds being obtained

by a poor rate. Before 1722 a candidate for relief could apply either

to the overseers or to the magistrate. By an Act passed in that year,

designed to make the administration stricter, application was to be

made first to the overseer. If the overseer rejected the application

the claimant could submit his case to a magistrate, and the magistrate,

after hearing the overseer’s objection, could order that relief

should be given. There were, however, a number of parishes in which

applications for relief were made to salaried guardians. These were

the parishes that had adopted an Act known as Gilbert’s Act, passed in

1782.[252] In these parishes,[253] joined in incorporations, the parish

overseers were not abolished, for they still had the duty of collecting

and accounting for the rates, but the distribution was in the hands

of paid guardians, one for each parish, appointed by the justices

out of a list of names submitted by the parishioners. In each set of

incorporated parishes there was a ‘Visitor’ appointed by the justices,

who had practically absolute power over the guardians. If the guardians

refused relief, the claimant could still appeal, as in the case of the

overseers, to the justices.

Such was the parish machinery. The method of giving relief varied

greatly, but the main distinction to be drawn is between (1) out

relief, or a weekly pension of a shilling or two at home; and (2)

indoor relief, or relief in a workhouse, or poorhouse, or house of

industry. Out relief was the earlier institution, and it held its own

throughout the century, being the only form of relief in many parishes.

Down to 1722 parishes that wished to build a workhouse had to get a

special Act of Parliament. In that year a great impetus was given to

the workhouse movement by an Act[254] which authorised overseers, with

the consent of the vestry, to start workhouses, or to farm out the

poor, and also authorised parishes to join together for this purpose.

If applicants for relief refused to go into the workhouse, they

forfeited their title to any relief at all. A great many workhouses

were built in consequence of this Act: in 1732 there were stated to be

sixty in the country, and about fifty in the metropolis.[255]

Even if the applicant for relief lived in a parish which had built or

shared in a workhouse, it did not follow that he was forced into it.

He lost his title to receive relief outside, but his fate would depend

on the parish officers. In the parishes which had adopted Gilbert’s

Act the workhouse was reserved for the aged, for the infirm, and for

young children. In most parishes there was out relief as well as indoor

relief: in some parishes outdoor relief being allowed to applicants

of a certain age or in special circumstances. In some parishes all

outdoor relief had stopped by 1795.[256] There is no doubt that

in most parishes the workhouse accommodation would have been quite

inadequate for the needs of the parish in times of distress. It was

quite common to put four persons into a single bed.

The workhouses were dreaded by the poor,[257] not only for the dirt

and disease and the devastating fevers that swept through them,[258]

but for reasons that are intelligible enough to any one who has read

Eden’s descriptions. Those descriptions show that Crabbe’s picture is

no exaggeration:--

‘Theirs is yon House that holds the Parish-Poor,

Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;

There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,

And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;--

There Children dwell who know no Parents’ care;

Parents, who know no Children’s love, dwell there!

Heart-broken Matrons on their joyless bed,

Forsaken Wives and Mothers never wed;

Dejected Widows with unheeded tears,

And crippled Age with more than childhood fears;

The Lame, the Blind, and, far the happiest they!

The moping Idiot and the Madman gay.

Here too the Sick their final doom receive,

Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,

Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,

Mixt with the clamours of the crowd below;

Here sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,

And the cold charities of man to man:

Whose laws indeed for ruin’d Age provide,

And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;

But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,

And pride embitters what it can’t deny.’[259]

A good example of this mixture of young and old, virtuous and vicious,

whole and sick, sane and mad, is given in Eden’s catalogue of the

inmates of Epsom Workhouse in January 1796.[260] There were eleven

men, sixteen women, and twenty-three children. We read of J. H., aged

forty-three, ‘always ... somewhat of an idiot, he is now become

quite a driveller’; of E. E., aged sixty-two, ‘of a sluggish, stupid

character’; of A. M., aged twenty-six, ‘afflicted with a leprosy’; of

R. M., aged seventy-seven, ‘worn out and paralytic’; of J. R., aged

seventeen, who has contracted so many disorderly habits that decent

people will not employ him. It is interesting to notice that it was

not till 1790 that the Justices of the Peace were given any power of

inspecting workhouses.

In 1796, before Pitt’s scheme was brought in, the Act of 1722, which

had been introduced to stiffen the administration of the Poor Laws,

was relaxed. An Act,[261] of which Sir William Young was the author,

abolished the restriction of right to relief to persons willing to

enter the workhouse, and provided that claimants could apply for relief

directly to a magistrate. The Act declares that the restrictions had

been found ‘inconvenient and oppressive.’ It is evidence, of course, of

the increasing pressure of poverty.

But to understand the arrangements in force at this time, and also the

later developments, we must glance at another feature of the Poor Law

system. The Poor Laws were a system of employment as well as a system

of relief. The Acts before 1722 are all called Acts for the Relief

of the Poor: the Act of 1722 speaks of ‘the Settlement, Employment

and Relief.’ That Act empowered parishes to farm out the poor to

an employer. Gilbert’s Act of 1782 provided that in the parishes

incorporated under that Act the guardians were not to send able-bodied

poor to the poorhouse, but to find work for them or maintain them until

work was found: the guardian was to take the wage and provide the

labourer with a maintenance. Thus there grew up a variety of systems

of public employment: direct employment of paupers on parish work:

the labour rate system, or the sharing out of the paupers among the

ratepayers: the roundsman system by which pauper labour was sold to the

farmers.[262]

This was the state of things that Pitt proposed to reform. His general

ideas on Poor Law reform were put before the House of Commons in the

debate on the second reading of Whitbread’s Bill.[263] He thought that

persons with large families should be treated as entitled to relief,

that persons without a settlement, falling into want, should not be

liable to removal at the caprice of the parish officer, that Friendly

Societies should be encouraged, and that Schools of Industry should be

established. ‘If any one would take the trouble to compute the amount

of all the earnings of the children who are already educated in this

manner, he would be surprised, when he came to consider the weight

which their support by their own labours took off the country, and the

addition which, by the fruits of their toil, and the habits to which

they were formed, was made to its internal opulence.’ On 22nd December

of that year, in a new Parliament, he asked for leave to bring in a

Bill for the better Support and Maintenance of the Poor. He said the

subject was too extensive to be discussed at that stage, that he only

proposed that the Bill should be read a first and second time and

sent to a committee where the blanks could be filled up, and the Bill

printed before the holidays, ‘in order that during the interval of

Parliament it might be circulated in the country and undergo the most

serious investigation.’[264] Sheridan hinted that it was unfortunate

for the poor that Pitt had taken the question out of Whitbread’s hands,

to which Pitt replied that any delay in bringing forward his Bill was

due to the time spent on taking advice. On 28th February of the next

year (1797), while strangers were excluded from the Gallery, there

occurred what the _Parliamentary Register_ calls ‘a conversation upon

the farther consideration of the report of the Poor’s Bill,’ in which

nobody but Pitt defended the Bill, and Sheridan and Joliffe attacked

it. With this its Parliamentary history ends.

The main features of the Bill were these.[265] Schools of Industry were

to be established in every parish or group of parishes. These schools

were to serve two purposes. First, the young were to be trained there

(this idea came, of course, from Locke). Every poor man with more

than two children who were not self-supporting, and every widow with

more than one such child, was to be entitled to a weekly allowance in

respect of each extra child. Every allowance child who was five years

or over was to be sent to the School of Industry, unless his parent

could instruct and employ him, and the proceeds of his work was to go

towards the upkeep of the school. Secondly, grown-up people were to

be employed there. The authorities were to provide ‘a proper stock of

hemp, flax, silk, cotton, wool, iron, leather or other materials, and

also proper tools and implements for the employment of the poor,’ and

they were empowered to carry on all trades under this Act, ‘any law or

custom to the contrary notwithstanding.’ Any person lawfully settled

in a parish was entitled to be employed in the school; any person

residing in a parish, able and willing to be employed at the usual

rates, was entitled to be employed there when out of work. Poor persons

refusing to be employed there were not to be entitled to relief. The

authorities might either pay wages at a rate fixed by the magistrates,

or they might let the employed sell their products and merely repay the

school for the material, or they might contract to feed them and take

a proportion of their receipts. If the wages paid in the school were

insufficient, they were to be supplemented out of the rates.

The proposals for outside relief were briefly and chiefly these. A

person unable to earn the full rate of wages usually given might

contract with his employer to work at an inferior rate, and have the

balance between his earnings and an adequate maintenance made up by

the parish. Money might be advanced under certain circumstances for

the purchase of a cow or other animal, if it seemed likely that such a

course would enable the recipient to maintain himself without the help

of the parish. The possession of property up to thirty pounds was not

to disqualify a person for relief. A parochial insurance fund was to be

created, partly from private subscriptions and partly from the rates.

No person was to be removed from a parish on account of relief for

temporary disability or sickness.

The most celebrated and deadly criticism came from Bentham, who is

often supposed to have killed the Bill. Some of his objections are

captious and eristical, and he is a good deal less than just to the

good elements of the scheme. Pitt deserves credit for one statesmanlike

discovery, the discovery that it is bad policy to refuse to help a

man until he is ruined. His cow-money proposal was also conceived in

the right spirit if its form was impracticable. But the scheme as

a whole was confused and incoherent, and it deserved the treatment

it received. It was in truth a huge patchwork, on which the ideas

of living and dead reformers were thrown together without order

or plan. As a consequence, its various parts did not agree. It is

surprising that the politician who had attacked Whitbread’s Bill as an

interference with wages could have included in his scheme the proposal

to pay wages in part out of rates. The whole scheme, though it would

have involved a great expenditure, would have produced very much the

same result as the Speenhamland system, by virtue of this clause. Pitt

showed no more judgment or foresight than the least enlightened of

County Justices in introducing into a scheme for providing relief, and

dealing with unemployment, a proposal that could only have the effect

of reducing wages. The organisation of Schools of Industry as a means

of dealing with unemployment has sometimes been represented as quite

a new proposal, but it was probably based on the suggestion made by

Fielding in 1753 in his paper, ‘A proposal for making an effectual

provision for the poor, for amending their morals, and for rendering

them useful members of society.’ Fielding proposed the erection of a

county workhouse, which was to include a house of correction. He drew

up a sharp and drastic code which would have authorised the committal

to his County House, not only of vagrants, but of persons of low degree

found harbouring in an ale-house after ten o’clock at night. But the

workhouse was not merely to be used as a penal settlement, it was

to find work for the unemployed. Any person who was unable to find

employment in his parish could apply to the minister or churchwardens

for a pass, and this pass was to give him the right to claim admission

to the County House where he was to be employed. The County House was

also to be provided with instructors who could teach native and foreign

manufactures to the inmates. Howlett, one of Pitt’s critics, was

probably right in thinking that Pitt was reviving this scheme.

The Bill excited general opposition. Bentham’s analysis is the most

famous of the criticisms that have survived, but in some senses

his opposition was less serious than the dismay of magistrates and

ratepayers. Hostile petitions poured into the House of Commons from

London and from all parts of the country; among others there were

petitions from Shrewsbury, Oswestry, Worcester, Bristol, Lincoln,

Carmarthen, Bedford, Chester and Godalming.[266] Howlett attacked the

scheme on the ground of the danger of parish jobbery and corruption.

Pitt apparently made no attempt to defend his plan, and he surrendered

it without a murmur. We are thus left in the curious and disappointing

position of having before us a Bill on the most important subject of

the day, introduced and abandoned by the Prime Minister without a

word or syllable in its defence. Whitbread observed[267] four years

later that the Bill was brought in and printed, but never brought

under the discussion of the House. Pitt’s excuse is significant: ‘He

was, as formerly, convinced of its propriety; but many objections had

been started to it by those whose opinion he was bound to respect.

Inexperienced himself in country affairs, and in the condition of the

poor, he was diffident of his own opinion, and would not press the

measure upon the attention of the House.’

Poor Law Reform was thus abandoned, but two attempts were made, at the

instance of Pitt, one of them with success, to soften the brutalities

of the Law of Settlement. Neither proposal made it any easier to gain

a settlement, and Pitt very properly declared that they did not go

nearly far enough. Pitt had all Adam Smith’s just hatred of these

restrictions, and in opposing Whitbread’s Bill for a minimum wage he

pointed to ‘a radical amendment’ of the Law of Settlement as the true

remedy. He was not the formal author of the Act of 1795, but it may

safely be assumed that he was the chief power behind it. This Act[268]

provided that nobody was to be removeable until he or she became

actually chargeable to the parish. The preamble throws light on the

working of the Settlement laws. It declares that ‘Many industrious

poor persons, chargeable to the parish, township, or place where they

live, merely from want of work there, would in any other place where

sufficient employment is to be had, maintain themselves and families

without being burthensome to any parish, township, or place; and

such poor persons are for the most part compelled to live in their

own parishes, townships, or places, and are not permitted to inhabit

elsewhere, under pretence that they are likely to become chargeable to

the parish, township, or place into which they go for the purpose of

getting employment, although the labour of such poor persons might, in

many instances, be very beneficial to such parish, township, or place.’

The granting of certificates is thus admitted to have been ineffectual.

The same Act provided that orders of removal were to be suspended in

cases where the pauper was dangerously ill, a provision that throws

some light on the manner in which these orders had been executed, and

that no person should gain a settlement by paying levies or taxes, in

respect of any tenement of a yearly value of less than ten pounds.[269]

From this time certificates were unnecessary, and if a labourer moved

from Parish A to Parish B he was no longer liable to be sent back at

the caprice of Parish B’s officers until he became actually chargeable,

but, of course, if from any cause he fell into temporary distress, for

example, if he were out of work for a few weeks, unless he could get

private aid from ‘the opulent,’ he had to return to his old parish.

An attempt was made to remedy this state of things by Mr. Baker who,

in March 1800, introduced a Bill[270] to enable overseers to assist

the deserving but unsettled poor in cases of temporary distress. He

explained that the provisions of the Bill would apply only to men who

could usually keep themselves, but from the high cost of provisions had

to depend on parochial aid. He found a powerful supporter in Pitt, who

argued that if people had enriched a parish with their industry, it was

unfair that owing to temporary pressure they should be removed to a

place where they were not wanted, and that it was better for a parish

to suffer temporary inconvenience than for numbers of industrious men

to be rendered unhappy and useless. But in spite of Pitt’s unanswerable

case, the Bill, which was denounced by Mr. Buxton as oppressive to

the landed interest, by Lord Sheffield as ‘subversive of the whole

economy of the country,’ by Mr. Ellison as submerging the middle ranks,

and by Sir William Pulteney as being a ‘premium for idleness and

extravagance,’ was rejected by thirty votes to twenty-three.[271]

ALLOTMENTS

Another policy that was pressed upon the governing class was the policy

of restoring to the labourer some of the resources he had lost with

enclosure, of putting him in such a position that he was not obliged

to depend entirely on the purchasing power of his wages at the shop.

This was the aim of the allotment movement. The propaganda failed, but

it did not fail for the want of vigorous and authoritative support. We

have seen in a previous chapter that Arthur Young awoke in 1801 to the

social mischief of depriving the poor of their land and their cows,

and that he wanted future Enclosure Acts to be juster and more humane.

Cobbett suggested a large scheme of agrarian settlement to Windham in

1806. These proposals had been anticipated by Davies, whose knowledge

of the actual life of the poor made him understand the important

difference between a total and a partial dependence on wages. ‘Hope is

a cordial, of which the poor man has especially much need, to cheer his

heart in the toilsome journey through life. And the fatal consequence

of that policy, which deprives labouring people of the expectation of

possessing any property in the soil, must be the extinction of every

generous principle in their minds.... No gentleman should be permitted

to pull down a cottage, until he had first erected another, upon one of

Mr. Kent’s plans, either on some convenient part of the waste, or on

his own estate, with a certain quantity of land annexed.’ He praised

the Act of Elizabeth which forbade the erection of cottages with less

than four acres of land around them, ‘that poor people might secure for

themselves a maintenance, and not be obliged on the loss of a few days

labour to come to the parish,’[272] and urged that this prohibition,

which had been repealed in 1775,[273] should be set up again.

The general policy of providing allotments was never tried, but we

know something of individual experiments from the Reports of the

Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the

Poor. This society took up the cause of allotments very zealously, and

most of the examples of private benevolence seem to have found their

way into the pages of its reports.

These experiments were not very numerous. Indeed, the name of Lord

Winchilsea recurs so inevitably in every allusion to the subject as to

create a suspicion that the movement and his estates were coextensive.

This is not the truth, but it is not very wide of the truth, for

though Lord Winchilsea had imitators, those imitators were few. The

fullest account of his estate in Rutlandshire is given by Sir Thomas

Bernard.[274] The estate embraced four parishes--Hambledon, Egleton,

Greetham, and Burley on the Hill. The tenants included eighty cottagers

possessing one hundred and seventy-four cows. ‘About a third part

have all their land in severalty; the rest of them have the use of a

cow-pasture in common with others; most of them possessing a small

homestead, adjoining to their cottage; every one of them having a

good garden, and keeping one pig at least, if not more.... Of all the

rents of the estate, none are more punctually paid than those for the

cottagers’ land.’ In this happy district if a man seemed likely to

become a burden on the parish his landlord and neighbours saved the

man’s self-respect and their own pockets as ratepayers, by setting

him up with land and a cow instead. So far from neglecting their work

as labourers, these proprietors of cows are described as ‘most steady

and trusty.’ We have a picture of this little community leading a

hard but energetic and independent life, the men going out to daily

work, but busy in their spare hours with their cows, sheep, pigs, and

gardens; the women and children looking after the live stock, spinning,

or working in the gardens: a very different picture from that of the

landless and ill-fed labourers elsewhere.

Other landlords, who, acting on their own initiative, or at the

instance of their agents, helped their cottagers by letting them land

on which to keep cows were Lord Carrington and Lord Scarborough in

Lincolnshire, and Lord Egremont on his Yorkshire estates (Kent was his

agent). Some who were friendly to the allotments movement thought it a

mistake to give allotments of arable land in districts where pasture

land was not available. Mr. Thompson, who writes the account of Lord

Carrington’s cottagers with cows, thought that ‘where cottagers occupy

arable land, it is very rarely of advantage to them, and generally a

prejudice to the estate.’[275] He seems, however, to have been thinking

more of small holdings than of allotments. ‘The late Abel Smith,

Esq., from motives of kindness to several cottagers on his estates in

Nottinghamshire, let to each of them a small piece of arable land. I

have rode over that estate with Lord Carrington several times since it

descended to him, and I have invariably observed that the tenants upon

it, who occupy only eight or ten acres of arable land, are poor, and

their land in bad condition. They would thrive more and enjoy greater

comfort with the means of keeping two or three cows each than with

three times their present quantity of arable land; but it would be a

greater mortification to them to be deprived of it than their landlord

is disposed to inflict.’[276] On the other hand, a striking instance

of successful arable allotments is described by a Mr. Estcourt in the

Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor.[277]

The scene was the parish of Long Newnton in Wilts, which contained

one hundred and forty poor persons, chiefly agricultural labourers,

distributed in thirty-two families, and the year was 1800. The price of

provisions was very high, and ‘though all had a very liberal allowance

from the poor rate’ the whole village was plunged in debt and misery.

From this hopeless plight the parish was rescued by an allotment scheme

that Mr. Estcourt established and described. Each cottager who applied

was allowed to rent a small quantity of land at the rate of £1, 12s. an

acre[278] on a fourteen years’ lease: the quantity of land let to an

applicant depended on the number in his family, with a maximum of one

and a half acres: the tenant was to forfeit his holding if he received

poor relief other than medical relief. The offer was greedily accepted,

two widows with large families and four very old and infirm persons

being the only persons who did not apply for a lease. A loan of £44

was divided among the tenants to free them from their debts and give

them a fresh start. They were allowed a third of their plot on Lady

Day 1801, a second third on Lady Day 1802, and the remainder on Lady

Day 1803. The results as recorded in 1805 were astonishing. None of

the tenants had received any poor relief: all the conditions had been

observed: the loan of £44 had long been repaid and the poor rate had

fallen from £212, 16s. to £12, 6s. ‘They are so much beforehand with

the world that it is supposed that it must be some calamity still more

severe than any they have ever been afflicted with that could put them

under the necessity of ever applying for relief to the parish again....

The farmers of this parish allow that they never had their work better

done, their servants more able, willing, civil, and sober, and that

their property was never so free from depredation as at present.’[279]

Some philanthropists, full of the advantages to the poor of possessing

live-stock, argued that it was a good thing for cottagers to keep

cows even in arable districts. Sir Henry Vavasour wrote an account in

1801[280] of one of his cottagers who managed to keep two cows and two

pigs and make a profit of £30 a year on three acres three perches of

arable with a summer’s gait for one of his cows. The man, his wife, and

his daughter of twelve worked on the land in their spare hours. The

Board of Agriculture offered gold medals in 1801 for the best report of

how to keep one or two cows on arable land, and Sir John Sinclair wrote

an essay on the subject, reproduced in the account of ‘Useful Projects’

in the _Annual Register_.[281] Sir John Sinclair urged that if the

system was generally adopted it would remove the popular objections to

enclosure.

Other advocates of the policy of giving the labourers land pleaded only

for gardens in arable districts; ‘a garden,’ wrote Lord Winchilsea,

‘may be allotted to them in almost every situation, and will be found

of infinite use to them. In countries, where it has never been the

custom for labourers to keep cows, it may be difficult to introduce

it; but where no gardens have been annexed to the cottages, it is

sufficient to give the ground, and the labourer is sure to know what

to do with it, and will reap an immediate benefit from it. Of this I

have had experience in several places, particularly in two parishes

near Newport Pagnell, Bucks, where there never have been any gardens

annexed to the labourers’ houses, and where, upon land being allotted

to them, they all, without a single exception, have cultivated their

gardens extremely well, and profess receiving the greatest benefits

from them.’[282] ‘A few roods of land, at a fair rent,’ wrote a

correspondent in the _Annals of Agriculture_ in 1796,[283] ‘would do

a labourer as much good as wages almost doubled: there would not,

then, be an idle hand in his family, and the man himself would often

go to work in his root yard instead of going to the ale house.’[284]

The interesting report on the ‘Inquiry into the General State of the

Poor’ presented at the Epiphany General Quarter Sessions for Hampshire

and published in the _Annals of Agriculture_,[285] a document which

does not display too much indulgence to the shortcomings of labourers,

recommends the multiplication of cottages with small pieces of ground

annexed, so that labourers might live nearer their work, and spend

the time often wasted in going to and from their work, in cultivating

their plot of ground at home. ‘As it is chiefly this practice which

renders even the state of slavery in the West Indies tolerable, what an

advantage would it be to the state of free service here!’[286]

The experiments in the provision of allotments of any kind were few,

and they are chiefly interesting for the light they reflect on the

character of the labourer of the period. They show of what those

men and women were capable whose degradation in the morass of the

Speenhamland system is the last and blackest page in the history of

the eighteenth century. Their rulers put a stone round their necks,

and it was not their character but their circumstances that dragged

them into the mire. In villages where allotments were tried the

agricultural labourer is an upright and self-respecting figure. The

immediate moral effects were visible enough at the time. Sir Thomas

Bernard’s account of the cottagers on Lord Winchilsea’s estate contains

the following reflections: ‘I do not mean to assert that the English

cottager, narrowed as he now is in the means and habits of life, may

be immediately capable of taking that active and useful station in

society, that is filled by those who are the subject of this paper.

To produce so great an improvement in character and circumstances of

life, will require time and attention. The cottager, however, of

this part of the county of Rutland, _is not of a different species

from other English cottagers_; and if he had not been protected and

encouraged by his landlord, he would have been the same hopeless and

comfortless creature that we see in some other parts of England. The

farmer (with the assistance of the steward) would have taken his land;

the creditor, his cow and pig; and the workhouse, his family.’[287]

We have seen, in discussing enclosures, that the policy of securing

allotments to the labourers in enclosure Acts was defeated by the class

interests of the landlords. Why, it may be asked, were schemes such

as those of Lord Winchilsea’s adopted so rarely in villages already

enclosed? These arrangements benefited all parties. There was no

doubt about the demand; ‘in the greatest part of this kingdom,’ wrote

one correspondent, ‘the cottager would rejoice at being permitted to

pay the utmost value given by the farmers, for as much land as would

keep a cow, if he could obtain it at that price.’[288] The steadiness

and industry of the labourers, stimulated by this incentive, were

an advantage both to the landlords and to the farmers. Further, it

was well known that in the villages where the labourers had land,

poor rates were light.[289] Why was it that a policy with so many

recommendations never took root? Perhaps the best answer is given in

the following story. Cobbett proposed to the vestry of Bishops Walthams

that they should ‘ask the Bishop of Winchester to grant an acre of

waste land to every married labourer. All, however, but the village

schoolmaster voted against it, on the ground ... that it would make the

men “too saucy,” that they would “breed more children” and “want higher

wages.”’[290]

The truth is that enclosures and the new system of farming had set up

two classes in antagonism to allotments, the large farmer, who disliked

saucy labourers, and the shopkeeper, who knew that the more food the

labourer raised on his little estate the less would he buy at the

village store. It had been to the interest of a small farmer in the old

common-field village to have a number of semi-labourers, semi-owners

who could help at the harvest: the large farmer wanted a permanent

supply of labour which was absolutely at his command. Moreover, the

roundsman system maintained his labourers for him when he did not

want them. The strength of the hostility of the farmers to allotments

is seen in the language of those few landlords who were interested

in this policy. Lord Winchilsea and his friends were always urging

philanthropists to proceed with caution, and to try to reason the

farmers out of their prejudices. The Report of the Poor Law Commission

in 1834 showed that these prejudices were as strong as ever. ‘We can do

little or nothing to prevent pauperism; the farmers will have it: they

prefer that the labourers should be slaves; they object to their having

gardens, saying “The more they work for themselves, the less they work

for us.”’[291] This was the view of Boys, the writer in agricultural

subjects, who, criticising Kent’s declaration in favour of allotments,

remarks: ‘If farmers in general were to accommodate their labourers

with two acres of land, a cow and two or three pigs, they would

probably have more difficulty in getting their hard work done--as the

cow, land, etc., would enable them to live with less earnings.’[292]

Arthur Young and Nathaniel Kent made a great appeal to landlords and to

landlords’ wives to interest themselves in their estates and the people

who lived on them, but landlords’ bailiffs did not like the trouble of

collecting a number of small rents, and most landlords preferred to

leave their labourers to the mercy of the farmers. There was, however,

one form of allotment that the farmers themselves liked: they would

let strips of potato ground to labourers, sometimes at four times the

rent they paid themselves, getting the land manured and dug into the

bargain.[293]

The Select Vestry Act of 1819[294] empowered parishes to buy or lease

twenty acres of land, and to set the indigent poor to work on it, or

to lease it out to any poor and industrious inhabitant. A later Act of

1831[295] raised the limit from twenty to fifty acres, and empowered

parishes to enclose fifty acres of waste (with the consent of those who

had rights on it) and to lease it out for the same purposes. Little

use was made of these Acts, and perhaps the clearest light is thrown

on the extent of the allotment movement by a significant sentence

that occurs in the Report of the Select Committee on Allotments in

1843. ‘It was not until 1830, when discontent had been so painfully

exhibited amongst the peasantry of the southern counties that this

method of alleviating their situation was much resorted to.’ In other

words, little was done till labourers desperate with hunger had set the

farmers’ ricks blazing.

THE REMEDY ADOPTED. SPEENHAMLAND

The history has now been given of the several proposals made at this

time that for one reason or another fell to the ground. A minimum wage

was not fixed, allotments were only sprinkled with a sparing hand on an

estate here and there, there was no revolution in diet, the problems of

local supply and distribution were left untouched, the reconstruction

of the Poor Law was abandoned. What means then did the governing class

take to tranquillise a population made dangerous by hunger? The answer

is, of course, the Speenhamland Act. The Berkshire J.P.’s and some

discreet persons met at the Pelican Inn at Speenhamland[296] on 6th

May 1795, and there resolved on a momentous policy which was gradually

adopted in almost every part of England.

There is a strange irony in the story of this meeting which gave such

a fatal impetus to the reduction of wages. It was summoned in order to

raise wages, and so make the labourer independent of parish relief. At

the General Quarter Sessions for Berkshire held at Newbury on the 14th

April, Charles Dundas, M.P.,[297] in his charge to the Grand Jury[298]

dwelt on the miserable state of the labourers and the necessity of

increasing their wages to subsistence level, instead of leaving them

to resort to the parish officers for support for their families, as

was the case when they worked for a shilling a day. He quoted the

Acts of Elizabeth and James with reference to the fixing of wages.

The Court, impressed by his speech, decided to convene a meeting for

the rating of wages. The advertisement of the meeting shows that this

was the only object in view. ‘At the General Quarter Sessions of the

Peace for this county held at Newbury, on Tuesday, the 14th instant,

the Court, having taken into consideration the great Inequality of

Labourers’ Wages, and the insufficiency of the same for the necessary

support of an industrious man and his family; and it being the opinion

of the Gentlemen assembled on the Grand Jury, that many parishes

have not advanced their labourers’ weekly pay in proportion to the

high price of corn and provisions, do (in pursuance of the Acts of

Parliament, enabling and requiring them so to do, either at the Easter

Sessions, yearly, or within six weeks next after) earnestly request the

attendance of the Sheriff, and all the Magistrates of this County, at

a Meeting intended to be held at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland, on

Wednesday, the sixth day of May next, at ten o’clock in the forenoon,

for the purpose of consulting together with such discreet persons as

they shall think meet, and they will then, having respect to the plenty

and scarcity of the time, and other circumstances (if approved of)

proceed to limit, direct, and appoint the wages of day labourers.’[299]

The meeting was duly held on 6th May.[300] Mr. Charles Dundas was in

the chair, and there were seventeen other magistrates and discreet

persons present, of whom seven were clergymen. It was resolved

unanimously ‘that the present state of the poor does require further

assistance than has been generally given them.’ Of the details of the

discussion no records have come down to us, nor do we know by what

majority the second and fatal resolution rejecting the rating of wages

and substituting an allowance policy was adopted. According to Eden,

the arguments in favour of adopting the rating of wages were ‘that

by enforcing a payment for labour, from the employers, in proportion

to the price of bread, some encouragement would have been held out

to the labourer, as what he would have received, would have been

payment for labour. He would have considered it as his right, and

not as charity.’[301] But these arguments were rejected, and a pious

recommendation to employers to raise wages, coupled with detailed

directions for supplementing those wages from parish funds, adopted

instead.[302] The text of the second resolution runs thus: ‘Resolved,

that it is not expedient for the Magistrates to grant that assistance

by regulating the wages of Day Labourers according to the directions of

the Statutes of the 5th Elizabeth and 1st James: But the Magistrates

very earnestly recommend to the Farmers and others throughout the

county to increase the Pay of their Labourers in proportion to the

present Price of Provisions; and agreeable thereto the Magistrates now

present have unanimously Resolved, That they will in their several

divisions, make the following calculations and allowances for the

relief of all poor and industrious men and their families, who, to the

satisfaction of the Justices of their parish, shall endeavour (as far

as they can), for their own support and maintenance, that is to say,

when the gallon loaf of second flour, weighing 8 lbs. 11 oz. shall

cost one shilling, then every poor and industrious man shall have for

his own support 3s. weekly, either produced by his own or his family’s

labour or an allowance from the poor rates, and for the support of his

wife and every other of his family 1s. 6d. When the gallon loaf shall

cost 1s. 4d., then every poor and industrious man shall have 4s. weekly

for his own, and 1s. 10d. for the support of every other of his family.

‘And so in proportion as the price of bread rises or falls (that is to

say), 3d. to the man and 1d. to every other of the family, on every

penny which the loaf rises above a shilling.’

In other words, it was estimated that the man must have three gallon

loaves a week, and his wife and each child one and a half.

It is interesting to notice that at this same famous Speenhamland

meeting the justices ‘wishing, as much as possible, to alleviate the

Distresses of the Poor with as little burthen on the occupiers of the

Land as possible’ recommended overseers to cultivate land for potatoes

and to give the workers a quarter of the crop, selling the rest at one

shilling a bushel; overseers were also recommended to purchase fuel and

to retail it at a loss.

The Speenhamland policy was not a full-blown invention of that unhappy

May morning in the Pelican Inn. The principle had already been adopted

elsewhere. At the Oxford Quarter Sessions on 13th January 1795, the

justices had resolved that the following incomes were ‘absolutely

necessary for the support of the poor, industrious labourer, and that

when the utmost industry of a family cannot produce the undermentioned

sums, it must be made up by the overseer, exclusive of rent, viz.:--

‘A single Man according to his labour.

‘A Man and his Wife not less than 6s. a week.

‘A Man and his Wife with one or two Small Children, not less than 7s. a

week.

‘And for every additional Child not less than 1s. a week.’ This

regulation was to be sent to all overseers within the county.[303]

But the Speenhamland magistrates had drawn up a table which became

a convenient standard, and other magistrates found it the simplest

course to accept the table as it stood. The tables passed rapidly from

county to county. The allowance system spread like a fever, for while

it is true to say that the northern counties took it much later and

in a milder form, there were only two counties still free from it in

1834--Northumberland and Durham.

To complete our picture of the new system we must remember the results

of Gilbert’s Act. It had been the practice in those parishes that

adopted the Act to reserve the workhouse for the infirm and to find

work outside for the unemployed, the parish receiving the wages of

such employment and providing maintenance. This outside employment

had spread to other parishes, and the way in which it had been worked

may be illustrated by cases mentioned by Eden, writing in the summer

and autumn of 1795. At Kibworth-Beauchamp in Leicestershire, ‘in the

winter, and at other times, when a man is out of work, he applies to

the overseer, who sends him from house to house to get employ: the

housekeeper, who employs him, is obliged to give him victuals, and 6d.

a day; and the parish adds 4d.; (total 10d. a day;) for the support

of his family: persons working in this manner are called rounds-men,

from their going round the village or township for employ.’[304] At

Yardley Goben, in Northamptonshire, every person who paid more than

£20 rent was bound in his turn to employ a man for a day and to pay

him a shilling.[305] At Maids Morton the roundsman got 6d. from the

employer and 6d. or 9d. from the parish.[306] At Winslow in Bucks the

system was more fully developed. ‘There seems to be here a great want

of employment: most labourers are (as it is termed,) _on the Rounds_;

that is, they go to work from one house to another _round_ the parish.

In winter, sometimes 40 persons are on the rounds. They are wholly paid

by the parish, unless the householders choose to employ them; and from

these circumstances, labourers often become very lazy, and imperious.

Children, about ten years old, are put on the rounds, and receive

from the parish from 1s. 6d. to 3s. a week.’[307] The Speenhamland

systematised scale was easily grafted on to these arrangements. ‘During

the late dear season, the Poor of the parish went in a body to the

Justices, to complain of their want of bread. The Magistrates sent

orders to the parish officers to raise the earnings of labourers, to

certain weekly sums, according to the number of their children; a

circumstance that should invariably be attended to in apportioning

parochial relief. These sums were from 7s. to 19s.; and were to be

reduced, proportionably with the price of bread.’[308]

The Speenhamland system did not then spring Athene-like out of the

heads of the justices and other discreet persons whose place of meeting

has given the system its name. Neither was the unemployment policy

thereafter adopted a sudden inspiration of the Parliament of 1796. The

importance of these years is that though the governing classes did

not then introduce a new principle, they applied to the normal case

methods of relief and treatment that had hitherto been reserved for the

exceptions. The Poor Law which had once been the hospital became now

the prison of the poor. Designed to relieve his necessities, it was now

his bondage. If a labourer was in private employment, the difference

between the wage his master chose to give him and the recognised

minimum was made up by the parish. Those labourers who could not find

private employment were either shared out among the ratepayers, or else

their labour was sold by the parish to employers, at a low rate, the

parish contributing what was needed to bring the labourers’ receipts up

to scale. Crabbe has described the roundsman system:

‘Alternate Masters now their Slave command,

Urge the weak efforts of his feeble hand,

And when his age attempts its task in vain,

With ruthless taunts, of lazy poor complain.’[309]

The meshes of the Poor Law were spread over the entire labour system.

The labourers, stripped of their ancient rights and their ancient

possessions, refused a minimum wage and allotments, were given instead

a universal system of pauperism. This was the basis on which the

governing class rebuilt the English village. Many critics, Arthur

Young and Malthus among them, assailed it, but it endured for forty

years, and it was not disestablished until Parliament itself had passed

through a revolution.

FOOTNOTES:

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

[185] Resolution of Privy Council, July 6, 1795, and Debate and

Resolution in House of Commons. _Parliamentary Register_, December 11,

1795, and Lord Sheffield in _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxv. p. 31.

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

[187] See Wilberforce’s speech, _Parliamentary Register_ and _Senator_,

February 18, 1800.

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

[189] _Ibid._, p. 15.

[190] _Ibid._, p. 280.

[191] _Ibid._, p. 426.

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

285, 316, etc.

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

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

[195] Perhaps the unpopularity of soup is partly explained by a letter

published in the _Annals of Agriculture_ in December 1795, vol. xxvi.

p. 215. The writer says it is the custom for most families in the

country ‘to give their poor neighbours the pot liquor, that is, the

liquor in which any meat has been boiled, and to which they sometimes

add the broken bread from the parlour and kitchen tables: this,’ he

adds, ‘makes but an indifferent mess.’ The publications of the time

contain numerous recipes for cheap soups: ‘the power of giving an

increased effect to Christian benevolence by these soups’ (_Reports on

Poor_, vol. i. p. 167) was eagerly welcomed. Cf. Mrs. Shore’s account

of stewed ox’s head for the poor, according to which, at the cost of

2s. 6d. with the leavings of the family, a savoury mess for fifty-two

persons could be prepared (_Ibid._, p. 60).

[196] Davies, pp. 31-2.

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

[198] _Parliamentary Register_, November 2, 1795.

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

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

[201] _Ibid._, p. 621.

[202] _Ibid._, p. 645.

[203] In many budgets no milk is included.

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

[205] Davies, p. 104.

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

[207] Vol. ii. p. 587.

[208] _Reports on Poor_, vol. i. p. 134; another reason for the dearth

of milk was the growing consumption of veal in the towns. Davies says

(p. 19), ‘Suckling is here so profitable (to furnish veal for London)

that the poor can seldom either buy or beg milk.’

[209] P. 27.

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

[211] Davies, p. 37.

[212] _Ibid._, p. 39.

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

[214] The dearness of malt was another fact which helped the

introduction of tea. Cf. Davies, p. 38: ‘Time was when _small beer_ was

reckoned one of the necessaries of life, even in poor families.’

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

318.

[216] In connection with the dearth of milk it is important to notice

the rise in the price of cheese. ‘Poor people,’ says Davies, (p. 19),

‘reckon cheese the dearest article they can use’ (cf. also p. 143), and

in his comparison of prices in the middle of the eighteenth century

with those of 1787-94 he gives the price of 112 lbs. of cheese at

Reading Fair as from 17s. to 21s. in the first period, and 40s. to

46s. in the second. Retail cheese of an inferior sort had risen from

2-1/2d. or 3d. a lb. to 4-1/2d. or 5d. (p. 65); cf. also correspondent

in _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. ii. p. 442. ‘Every inhabitant of Bath

must be sensible that butter and cheese have risen in price one-third,

or more, within these twenty years.’ (Written in 1784).

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

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

[219] _Annual Register_, 1806, p. 974; ‘My local situation afforded

me ample means of knowing how greatly the lower orders suffered from

being unable to procure a supply of milk; and I am fully persuaded of

the correctness of the statement that the labouring poor lose a number

of their children from the want of a food so pre-eminently adapted to

their support’; cf. also Curwen’s _Hints_.

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

[221] Vol. iii. p. 96.

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

[223] Cf. _Reports on Poor_, vol. i. p. 43; ‘Where there are commons,

the ideal advantage of cutting flags, peat, or whins, often causes

a poor man to spend more time in procuring such fuel, than, if he

reckoned his labour, would purchase for him double the quantity of good

firing.’

[224] Vol. iv. p. 496.

[225] Vol. ii. p. 587.

[226] Davies, p. 28.

[227] _Ibid._, p. 118.

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

[229] P. 179.

[230] Cf. also Eden’s description of a labourer’s expenses, vol. iii.

p. 797, where he says that whilst hedging and ditching, they are

allowed to take home a faggot every evening, whilst the work lasts,

‘but this is by no means sufficient for his consumption: his children,

therefore, are sent into the fields, to collect wood where they can;

and neither hedges nor trees are spared by the young marauders, who are

thus, in some degree, educated in the art of thieving.’

[231] Vol. ii. p. 231.

[232] Cf. also for the difficulties of the poor in getting fuel, the

account by the Rev. Dr. Glasse; _Reports on Poor_, vol. i. p. 58.

‘Having long observed, that there is scarcely any article of life, in

respect to which the poor are under greater difficulties, or for the

supply of which they have stronger temptations to dishonest practices,

than that of fuel,’ he laid up in summer a store of coals in Greenford

(Middlesex), and Wanstead, and sold them rather under original cost

price, carriage free, in winter. ‘The benefit arising from the relief

afforded them in this article of coals, is obvious: they are habituated

to pay for what they have; whereas at the shop they ran in debt.

When their credit was at an end, they contrived to do without coals,

by having recourse to wood-stealing; than which I know no practise

which tends more effectually to introduce into young minds a habit of

dishonesty; it is also very injurious to the farmer, and excites a

degree of resentment in his breast, which, in many instances, renders

him averse to affording relief to the poor, even when real necessity

calls loudly for it.’

[233] 20 George II. c. 19.

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

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

[236] _Parliamentary Register_, December 9, 1795.

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

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

[239] _Ibid._, p. 316.

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

February 12, 1796._

[241] P. 106 ff.

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

[243] _Parliamentary Debates._

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

[245] The age was not filled up.

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

[247] See _Parliamentary Register_.

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

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

[250] See p. 179.

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

[252] 22 George III. c. 83.

[253] In 1834 there were 924 comprised in 67 incorporations (Nicholls,

vol. ii. p. 91.)

[254] 9 George I. c. 7.

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

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

[257] There is a significant entry in the Abstracts of Returns to

the 1775 Poor Relief Committee in reference to the building of that

death-trap, the Bulcamp House of Industry. ‘In the Expences for

Building is included £500 for building a Part which was pulled down by

a Mob.’

[258] At Heckingham in Norfolk a putrid fever, in 1774, killed 126

out of 220 inmates (Eden, vol. ii. p. 473, quoting Howlett); cf. also

Ruggles, _History of the Poor_, vol. ii. p. 266.

[259] ‘The Village,’ pp. 16 and 17.

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

[261] 36 George III. c. 23.

[262] The last of these systems had been included in a Bill introduced

by Sir William Young in 1788. ‘In order to relieve agricultural

labourers, who are often, during the winter, out of employment, the

vestry in every parish is empowered, by notice affixed to the church

door, to settle a rate of wages to be paid to labourers out of employ,

from the 30th Nov. to the 28th of Feb.; and to distribute and send

them round in rotation to the parishioners, proportionally as they pay

to the Rates; to be paid by the person employing them two-thirds of

the wages so settled, and one-third by the parish-officers out of the

Rates.’--Eden, vol. i. p. 397.

[263] _Parliamentary Register_, February 12, 1796.

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

[265] The Bill is printed in House of Commons Papers, 1796. The ‘Heads

of the Bill’ as circulated appear in the _Annals of Agriculture_, vol.

xxvi. pp. 260 ff. and 359 ff. Eden gives in the form of Appendices (1)

the Heads of the Bill, (2) the Amendments introduced in Committee.

[266] _House of Commons Journal._

[267] _Parliamentary Register_, February 11, 1800.

[268] 35 George III. c. 101.

[269] For Whitbread’s proposals to amend the Law of Settlement in 1807

see next chapter. An attempt was made in 1819 (59 George III. c. 50) to

define and simplify the conditions under which the hiring of a tenement

of £10 annual value conferred the right to a settlement. The term

of residence was extended to a year, the nature of the tenement was

defined, and it was laid down that the rent must be £10, and paid for

a whole year. But so unsuccessful was this piece of legislation that

it was found necessary to pass a second Act six years later (1826, 6

George IV. c. 57), and a third Act in 1831 (1 William IV. c. 18).

[270] _Senator_, March 1800.

[271] See Debates in _Senator_, March 31 and April 3, 1800, and

_Parliamentary Register_. Cf. for removals for temporary distress, Sir

Thomas Bernard’s Charge to Overseers in the Hundred of Stoke. Bucks.

_Reports on Poor_, vol. i. p. 260. ‘With regard to the removal of

labourers belonging to other parishes, consider thoroughly what you

may lose, and what the individual may suffer, by the removal, before

you apply to us on the subject. Where you have had, for a long time,

the benefit of their labour, and where all they want is a little

_temporary_ relief, reflect whether, after so many years spent in your

service, this is the _moment_ and the _cause_, for removing them from

the scene of their daily labour to a distant parish, etc.’ (1798).

[272] Davies, pp. 102-4.

[273] 15 George III. c. 32.

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

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

[276] _Ibid._, p. 137.

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

[278] Mr. Estcourt mentions that the land ‘would let to a farmer at

about 20s. per acre now.’

[279] It is interesting to find that these allotments were still

being let out successfully in 1868. See p. 4145 of the Report on the

Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, 1868.

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

[281] 1803, p. 850.

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

[283] Vol. xxvi. p. 4.

[284] The most distinguished advocate of this policy was William

Marshall, the agricultural writer who published a strong appeal for

the labourers in his book _On the Management of Landed Estates_, 1806,

p. 155; cf. also Curwen’s _Hints_, p. 239: ‘A farther attention to the

cottager’s comfort is attended with little cost; I mean giving him a

small garden, and planting that as well as the walls of his house with

fruit trees.’

[285] Vol. xxv. p. 349.

[286] _Ibid._, p. 358.

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

[288] _Ibid._, p. 134.

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

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

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

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

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

1843, p. 108.

[294] 59 George III. c. 12.

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

[296] Speenhamland is now part of Newbury. The Pelican Inn has

disappeared, but the Pelican Posting House survives.

[297] Charles Dundas, afterwards Lord Amesbury, 1751-1832; Liberal M.P.

for Berkshire, 1794-1832, nominated by Sheridan for the Speakership in

1802 but withdrew.

[298] _Reading Mercury_, April 20, 1795.

[299] _Reading Mercury_, April 20, 1795.

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

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

[302] On the same day a ‘respectable meeting’ at Basingstoke, with

the Mayor in the chair, was advocating the fixing of labourers’ wages

in accordance with the price of wheat without any reference to parish

relief.--_Reading Mercury_, May 11, 1795.

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

July 6, 1795.

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

[305] _Ibid._, p. 548.

[306] _Ibid._, p. 27.

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

[308] _Ibid._, p. 32.

[309] ‘The Village,’ Book I.