CHAPTER VIII_The village labourer, 1760-1832 A study in the government of England before the Reform Bill

AFTER SPEENHAMLAND

The Speenhamland system is often spoken of as a piece of pardonable

but disastrous sentimentalism on the part of the upper classes. This

view overlooks the predicament in which these classes found themselves

at the end of the eighteenth century. We will try to reconstruct the

situation and to reproduce their state of mind. Agriculture, which

had hitherto provided most people with a livelihood, but few people

with vast fortunes, had become by the end of the century a great

capitalist and specialised industry. During the French war its profits

were fabulous, and they were due partly to enclosures, partly to the

introduction of scientific methods, partly to the huge prices caused

by the war. It was producing thus a vast surplus over and above the

product necessary for maintenance and for wear and tear. Consequently,

as students of Mr. Hobson’s _Industrial System_ will perceive, there

arose an important social problem of distribution, and the Poor Law was

closely involved with it.

This industry maintained, or helped to maintain, four principal

interests: the landlords, the tithe-owners, the farmers, and the

labourers. Of these interests the first two were represented in the

governing class, and in considering the mind of that class we may

merge them into one. The sympathies of the farmers were rather with

the landlords than with the labourers, but their interests were not

identical. The labourers were unrepresented either in the Government or

in the voting power of the nation. If the forces had been more equally

matched, or if Parliament had represented all classes, the surplus

income of agriculture would have gone to increase rents, tithes,

profits, and wages. It might, besides turning the landlords into great

magnates like the cotton lords of Lancashire, and throwing up a race of

farmers with scarlet coats and jack boots, have raised permanently the

standard and character of the labouring class, have given them a decent

wage and decent cottages. The village population whose condition, as

Whitbread said, was compared by supporters of the slave trade with that

of the negroes in the West Indies, to its disadvantage, might have been

rehoused on its share of this tremendous revenue. In fact, the revenue

went solely to increase rent, tithes, and to some extent profits.

The labourers alone had made no advance when the halcyon days of the

industry clouded over and prices fell. The rent receiver received

more rent than was needed to induce him to let his land, the farmer

made larger profits than were necessary to induce him to apply his

capital and ability to farming, but the labourer received less than was

necessary to maintain him, the balance being made up out of the rates.

Thus not only did the labourer receive no share of this surplus; he did

not even get his subsistence directly from the product of his labour.

Now let us suppose that instead of having his wages made up out of the

rates he had been paid a maintenance wage by the farmer. The extra cost

would have come out of rent to the same extent as did the subsidy from

the rates. The landlord therefore made no sacrifice in introducing the

Speenhamland system, for though the farmers thought that they could

obtain a reduction of rent more easily if they could plead high rates

than if they pleaded the high price of labour,[310] it is obvious that

the same conditions which produced a reduction of rents in the one case

must ultimately have produced a reduction in the other. As it was, none

of this surplus went to labour, and the proportion in which it was

divided between landlord and farmer was not affected by the fact that

the labourer was kept alive partly from the rates and not wholly from

wages.[311]

Now the governing class which was confronted with the situation that

we have described in a previous chapter consisted of two classes who

had both contrived to slip off their obligations to the State. They

were both essentially privileged classes. The landlords were not

in the eye of history absolute owners; they had held their land on

several conditions, one of which was the liability to provide military

services for the Crown, and this obligation they had commuted into a

tax on the nation. The tithe-owners had for centuries appropriated to

their own use a revenue that was designed in part for the poor. Tithes

were originally taxation for four objects: (1) the bishop; (2) the

maintenance of the fabric of the Church; (3) the relief of the poor;

(4) the incumbent. After the endowment of the bishopricks the first of

these objects dropped out. The poor had not a very much longer life.

It is true that the clergy were bidden much later to use tithes, _non

quasi suis sed quasi commendatis_, and Dryden in his character of the

Good Parson had described their historical obligations:

‘True priests, he said, and preachers of the Word

Were only stewards of their sovereign Lord:

Nothing was theirs but all the public store,

Intrusted riches to relieve the poor.’

The right of the poor to an allowance from the tithes was declared in

an Act of Richard II. and an Act of Henry IV. After that it disappears

from view. Of course, great masses of tithe property had passed, by

the time we are considering, into secular hands. The monasteries

appropriated about a third of the livings of England, and the tithes

in these parishes passed at the Reformation to the Crown, whence they

passed in grants to private persons. No responsibility for the poor

troubled either the lay or spiritual owners of tithes, and though

they used the name of God freely in defending their claims, they were

stewards of God in much the same sense as George IV. was the defender

of the faith. The landowners and tithe-owners had their differences

when it came to an Enclosure Bill, but these classes had the same

interests in the disposal of the surplus profits of agriculture; and

both alike were in a vulnerable position if the origin and history of

their property came under too fierce a discussion.

There was a special reason why the classes that had suddenly become

very much richer should dread too searching a discontent at this

moment. They had seen tithes, and all seignorial dues abolished

almost at a single stroke across the Channel, and they were at this

time associating constantly with the emigrant nobility of France,

whose prospect of recovering their estates seemed to fade into a more

doubtful distance with every battle that was fought between the France

who had given the poor peasant such a position as the peasant enjoyed

nowhere else, and her powerful neighbour who had made her landlords

the richest and proudest class in Europe. The French Convention had

passed a decree (November 1792), declaring that ‘wherever French

armies shall come, all taxes, tithes, and privileges of rank are to

be abolished, all existing authorities cancelled, and provisional

administrations elected by universal suffrage. The property of the

fallen Government, of the privileged classes and their adherents to be

placed under French protection.’ This last sentence had an unpleasant

ring about it; it sounded like a terse paraphrase of _non quasi suis

sed quasi commendatis_. In point of fact there was not yet any violent

criticism of the basis of the social position of the privileged classes

in England. Even Paine, when he suggested a scheme of Old Age Pensions

for all over fifty, and a dowry for every one on reaching the age of

twenty-one, had proposed to finance it by death duties. Thelwall,

who wrote with a not unnatural bitterness about the great growth of

ostentatious wealth at a time when the poor were becoming steadily

poorer, told a story which illustrated very well the significance of

the philanthropy of the rich. ‘I remember I was once talking to a

friend of the charity and benevolence exhibited in this country, when

stopping me with a sarcastic sneer, “Yes,” says he, “we steal the

goose, and we give back the giblets.” “No,” said a third person who was

standing by, “giblets are much too dainty for the common herd, we give

them only the pen feathers.”’[312] But the literature of Radicalism

was not inflammatory, and the demands of the dispossessed were for

something a good deal less than their strict due. The richer classes,

however, were naturally anxious to soothe and pacify the poor before

discontent spread any further, and the Speenhamland system turned out,

from their point of view, a very admirable means to that end, for it

provided a maintenance for the poor by a method which sapped their

spirit and disarmed their independence. They were anxious that the

labourers should not get into the way of expecting a larger share in

the profits of agriculture, and at the same time they wanted to make

them contented. Thelwall[313] stated that when he was in the Isle of

Wight, the farmers came to a resolution to raise the price of labour,

and that they were dissuaded by one of the greatest proprietors in the

island, who called a meeting and warned the farmers that they would

make the common people insolent and would never be able to reduce their

wages again.

An account of the introduction of the system into Warwickshire and

Worcestershire illustrates very well the state of mind in which this

policy had its origin. ‘In Warwickshire, the year 1797 was mentioned

as the date of its commencement in that county, and the scales of

relief giving it authority were published in each of these counties

previously to the year 1800. It was apprehended by many at that time,

that either the wages of labour would rise to a height from which it

would be difficult to reduce them when the cause for it had ceased,

or that during the high prices the labourers might have had to endure

privations to which it would be unsafe to expose them. To meet the

emergency of the time, various schemes are said to have been adopted,

such as weekly distributions of flour, providing families with clothes,

or maintaining entirely a portion of their families, until at length

the practice became general, and a right distinctly admitted by the

magistrates was claimed by the labourer to parish relief, on the ground

of inadequate wages and number in family. I was informed that the

consequences of the system were not wholly unforeseen at the time, as

affording a probable inducement to early marriages and large families;

but at this period there was but little apprehension on that ground.

A prevalent opinion, supported by high authority, that population was

in itself a source of wealth, precluded all alarm. The demands for the

public service were thought to endure a sufficient draught for any

surplus people; and it was deemed wise by many persons at this time

to present the Poor Laws to the lower classes, as an institution for

their advantage, peculiar to this country; and to encourage an opinion

among them, that by this means their own share in the property of the

kingdom was recognised.’[314] To the landlords the Speenhamland system

was a safety-valve in two ways. The farmers got cheap labour, and the

labourers got a maintenance, and it was hoped thus to reconcile both

classes to high rents and the great social splendour of their rulers.

There was no encroachment on the surplus profits of agriculture, and

landlords and tithe-owners basked in the sunshine of prosperity. It

would be a mistake to represent the landlords as deliberately treating

the farmers and the labourers on the principle which Cæsar boasted

that he had applied with such success, when he borrowed money from his

officers to give it to his soldiers, and thus contrived to attach both

classes to his interest; but that was in effect the result and the

significance of the Speenhamland system.

This wrong application of those surplus profits was one element in

the violent oscillations of trade during the generation after the

war. A long war adding enormously to the expenditure of Government

must disorganise industry seriously in any case, and in this case the

demoralisation was increased by a bad currency system. The governing

class, which was continually meditating on the subject of agricultural

distress, holding inquiries, and appointing committees, never conceived

the problem as one of distribution. The Select Committee of 1833 on

Agriculture, for example, expressly disclaims any interest in the

question of rents and wages, treating these as determined by a law

of Nature, and assuming that the only question for a Government was

the question of steadying prices by protection. What they did not

realise was that a bad distribution of profits was itself a cause of

disturbance. The most instructive speech on the course of agriculture

during the French war was that in which Brougham showed in the House

of Commons, on 9th April 1816, how the country had suffered from

over-production during the wild elation of high prices, and how a

tremendous system of speculative farming had been built up, entangling

a variety of interests in this gamble. If those days had been employed

to raise the standard of life among the labourers and to increase their

powers of consumption, the subsequent fall would have been broken.

The economists of the time looked on the millions of labourers as an

item of cost, to be regarded like the price of raw material, whereas

it is clear that they ought to have been regarded also as affording

the best and most stable of markets. The landlord or the banker who

put his surplus profits into the improvement and cultivation of land,

only productive under conditions that could not last and could not

return, was increasing unemployment in the future, whereas if the same

profits had been distributed in wages among the labourers, they would

have permanently increased consumption and steadied the vicissitudes

of trade. Further, employment would have been more regular in another

respect, for the landowner spent his surplus on luxuries, and the

labourer spent his wages on necessaries.

Now labour might have received its share of these profits either in an

increase of wages, or in the expenditure of part of the revenue in a

way that was specially beneficial to it. Wages did not rise, and it was

a felony to use any pressure to raise them. What was the case of the

poor in regard to taxation and expenditure? Taxation was overwhelming.

A Herefordshire farmer stated that in 1815 the rates and taxes on a

farm of three hundred acres in that county were:--

£ _s._ _d._

Property tax, landlord and tenant 95 16 10

Great tithes 64 17 6

Lesser tithes 29 15 0

Land tax 14 0 0

Window lights 24 1 6

Poor rates, landlord 10 0 0

Poor rates, tenant 40 0 0

Cart-horse duty, landlord, 3 horses 2 11 0

Two saddle horses, landlord 9 0 0

Gig 6 6 0

Cart-horse duty, tenant 7 2 0

One saddle horse, tenant 2 13 6

Landlord’s malt duty on 60 bushels of barley 21 0 0

Tenant’s duty for making 120 bushels of barley

into malt 42 0 0

New rate for building shire hall, paid by landlord 9 0 0

New rate for building shire hall, paid by tenant 3 0 0

Surcharge 2 8 0

----------

£383 11 4[315]

----------

The _Agricultural and Industrial Magazine_, a periodical published by

a philanthropical society in 1833, gave the following analysis of the

taxation of a labourer earning £22, 10s. a year:--

£ _s._ _d._

1. Malt 4 11 3

2. Sugar 0 17 4

3. Tea and Coffee 1 4 0

4. Soap 0 13 0

5. Housing 0 12 0

6. Food 3 0 0

7. Clothes 0 10 0

---------

£11 7 7

---------

But in the expenditure from this taxation was there a single item

in which the poor had a special interest? The great mass of the

expenditure was war expenditure, and that was not expenditure in which

the poor were more interested than the rest. Indeed, much of it was

expenditure which could not be associated directly or indirectly with

their interests, such as the huge subsidies to the courts of Europe.

Nearly fifty millions went in these subventions, and if some of them

were strategical others were purely political. Did the English labourer

receive any profit from the two and a half millions that Pitt threw to

the King of Prussia, a subsidy that was employed for crushing Kosciusko

and Poland, or from the millions that he gave to Austria, in return

for which Austria ceded Venice to Napoleon? Did he receive any benefit

from the million spent every year on the German legion, which helped

to keep him in order in his own country? Did he receive any benefit

from the million and a half which, on the confession of the Finance

Committee of the House of Commons in 1810, went every year in absolute

sinecures? Did he receive any benefit from the interest on the loans

to the great bankers and contractors, who made huge profits out of the

war and were patriotic enough to lend money to the Government to keep

it going? Did he receive any benefit from the expenditure on crimping

boys or pressing seamen, or transporting and imprisoning poachers and

throwing their families by thousands on the rates? Pitt’s brilliant

idea of buying up a cheap debt out of money raised by a dear one cost

the nation twenty millions, and though Pitt considered the Sinking

Fund his best title to honour, nobody will pretend that the poor of

England gained anything from this display of his originality.[316]

In these years Government was raising by taxation or loans over a

hundred millions, but not a single penny went to the education of

the labourer’s children, or to any purpose that made the perils and

difficulties of his life more easy to be borne. If the sinecures had

been reduced by a half, or if the great money-lenders had been treated

as if their claims to the last penny were not sacrosanct, and had been

made to take their share of the losses of the time, it would have been

possible to set up the English cottager with allotments on the modest

plan proposed by Young or Cobbett, side by side with the great estates

with which that expenditure endowed the bankers and the dealers in

scrip.

* * * * *

Now, so long as prices kept up, the condition of the labourer was

masked by the general prosperity of the times. The governing class

had found a method which checked the demand for higher wages and the

danger that the labourer might claim a share in the bounding wealth of

the time. The wolf was at the door, it is true, but he was chained, and

the chain was the Speenhamland system. Consequently, though we hear

complaints from the labourers, who contended that they were receiving

in a patronising and degrading form what they were entitled to have

as their direct wages, the note of rebellion was smothered for the

moment. At this time it was a profitable proceeding to grow corn on

almost any soil, and it is still possible to trace on the unharvested

downs of Dartmoor the print of the harrow that turned even that wild

moorland into gold, in the days when Napoleon was massing his armies

for invasion. During these years parishes did not mind giving aid from

the rates on the Speenhamland scale, and, though under this mischievous

system population was advancing wildly, there was such a demand for

labour that this abundance did not seem, as it seemed later, a plague

of locusts, but a source of strength and wealth. The opinion of the

day was all in favour of a heavy birth rate, and it was generally

agreed, as we have seen, that Pitt’s escapades in the West Indies and

elsewhere would draw off the surplus population fast enough to remove

all difficulties. But although the large farmers prayed incessantly to

heaven to preserve Pitt and to keep up religion and prices, the day

came when it did not pay to plough the downs or the sands, and tumbling

prices brought ruin to the farmers whose rents and whole manner of

living were fixed on the assumption that there was no serious danger

of peace, and that England was to live in a perpetual heyday of famine

prices.

With the fall in prices, the facts of the labourer’s condition were

disclosed. Doctors tell us that in some cases of heart disease there

is a state described as compensation, which may postpone failure for

many years. With the fall in 1814 compensation ceased, and the disease

which it obscured declared itself. For it was now no longer possible

to absorb the redundant population in the wasteful roundsman system,

and the maintenance standard tended to fall with the growing pressure

on the resources from which the labourer was kept. By this time all

labour had been swamped in the system. The ordinary village did not

contain a mass of decently paid labourers and a surplus of labourers,

from time to time redundant, for whom the parish had to provide as best

it could. It contained a mass of labourers, all of them underpaid, whom

the parish had to keep alive in the way most convenient to the farmers.

Bishop Berkeley once said that it was doubtful whether the prosperity

that preceded, or the calamities that succeeded, the South Sea Bubble

had been the more disastrous to Great Britain: that saying would very

well apply to the position of the agricultural labourer in regard to

the rise and the fall of prices. With the rise of prices the last

patch of common agriculture had been seized by the landlords, and the

labourer had been robbed even of his garden;[317] with the fall, the

great mass of labourers were thrown into destitution and misery. We may

add that if that prosperity had been briefer, the superstition that an

artificial encouragement of population was needed--the superstition of

the rich for which the poor paid the penalty--would have had a shorter

life. As it was, at the end of the great prosperity the landlords

were enormously rich; rents had in some cases increased five-fold

between 1790 and 1812:[318] the large farmers had in many cases climbed

into a style of life which meant a crash as soon as prices fell; the

financiers had made great and sudden fortunes; the only class for whom

a rise in the standard of existence was essential to the nation, had

merely become more dependent on the pleasure of other classes and the

accidents of the markets. The purchasing power of the labourer’s wages

had gone down.

The first sign of the strain is the rioting of 1816. In that year

the spirit which the governing class had tried to send to sleep by

the Speenhamland system, burst out in the first of two peasants’

revolts. Let us remember what their position was. They were not the

only people overwhelmed by the fall in prices. Some landlords, who

had been so reckless and extravagant as to live up to the enormous

revenue they were receiving, had to surrender their estates to the

new class of bankers and money-lenders that had been made powerful by

the war. Many farmers, who had taken to keeping liveried servants and

to copying the pomp of their landlords, and who had staked everything

on the permanence of prices, were now submerged. Small farmers too,

as the answers sent to the questions issued this year by the Board

of Agriculture show, became paupers. The labourer was not the only

sufferer. But he differed from the other victims of distress in that

he had not benefited, but, as we have seen, had lost, by the prosperity

of the days when the plough turned a golden furrow. His housing had

not been improved; his dependence had not been made less abject or

less absolute; his wages had not risen; and in many cases his garden

had disappeared. When the storm broke over agriculture his condition

became desperate. In February 1816 the Board of Agriculture sent out

a series of questions, one of which asked for an account of the state

of the poor, and out of 273 replies 237 reported want of employment

and distress, and 25 reported that there was not unemployment or

distress.[319] One of the correspondents explained that in his district

the overseer called a meeting every Saturday, when he put up each

labourer by name to auction, and they were let generally at from

1s. 6d. to 2s. per week and their provisions, their families being

supported by the parish.[320]

In 1816 the labourers were suffering both from unemployment and

from high prices. In 1815, as the _Annual Register_[321] puts it,

‘much distress was undergone in the latter part of the year by the

trading portion of the community. This source of private calamity was

unfortunately coincident with an extraordinary decline in agricultural

prosperity, immediately proceeding from the greatly reduced price of

corn and other products, which bore no adequate proportion to the

exorbitant rents and other heavy burdens pressing upon the farmer.’

At the beginning of 1816 there were gloomy anticipations of a fall in

prices, and Western[322] moved a series of resolutions designed to

prevent the importation of corn. But as the year advanced it became

evident that the danger that threatened England was not the danger

of abundance but the danger of scarcity. A bitterly cold summer was

followed by so meagre a harvest that the price of corn rose rapidly

beyond the point at which the ports were open for importation. But high

prices which brought bidders at once for farms that had been unlet made

bread and meat dear to the agricultural labourer, without bringing him

more employment or an advance of wages, and the riots of 1816 were the

result of the misery due to this combination of misfortunes.

The riots broke out in May of that year, and the counties affected

were Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire. Nightly

assemblies were held, threatening letters were sent, and houses, barns

and ricks were set on fire. These fires were a prelude to a more

determined agitation, which had such an effect on the authorities that

the Sheriff of Suffolk and Mr. Willet, a banker of Brandon near Bury,

hastened to London to inform the Home Secretary and to ask for the

help of the Government in restoring tranquillity. Mr. Willet’s special

interest in the proceedings is explained in a naïve sentence in the

_Annual Register_: ‘A reduction in the price of bread and meat was the

avowed object of the rioters. They had fixed a maximum for the price of

both. They insisted that the lowest price of wheat must be half a crown

a bushel, and that of prime joints of beef fourpence per pound. Mr.

Willet, a butcher at Brandon, was a marked object of their ill-will,

in which Mr. Willet, the banker, was, from the similarity of his name,

in danger of sharing. This circumstance, and a laudable anxiety to

preserve the public peace, induced him to take an active part and exert

all his influence for that purpose.’[323] The rioters numbered some

fifteen hundred, and they broke up into separate parties, scattering

into different towns and villages. In the course of their depredations

the house of the right Mr. Willet was levelled to the ground, after

which the wrong Mr. Willet, it is to be hoped, was less restless.[324]

‘They were armed with long, heavy sticks, the ends of which, to the

extent of several inches, were studded with short iron spikes, sharp at

the sides and point. Their flag was inscribed “_Bread or Blood!_” and

they threatened to march to London.’[325]

During the next few days there were encounters between insurgent mobs

in Norwich and Bury and the yeomanry, the dragoons, and the West

Norfolk Militia. No lives seem to have been lost, but a good deal

of property was destroyed, and a number of rioters were taken into

custody. The _Times_ of 25th May says, in an article on these riots,

that wages had been reduced to a rate lower than the magistrates

thought reasonable, for the magistrates, after suppressing a riot near

Downham, acquiesced in the propriety of raising wages, and released the

offenders who had been arrested with a suitable remonstrance. There was

a much more serious battle at Littleport in the Isle of Ely, when the

old fighting spirit of the fens seems to have inspired the rioters.

They began by driving from his house a clergyman magistrate of the name

of Vachel, after which they attacked several houses and extorted money.

They then made for Ely, where they carried out the same programme.

This state of anarchy, after two or three days, ended in a battle in

Littleport in which two rioters were killed, and seventy-five taken

prisoners. The prisoners were tried next month by a Special Commission:

twenty-four were capitally convicted; of these five were hung, five

were transported for life, one was transported for fourteen years,

three for seven years, and ten were imprisoned for twelve months in

Ely gaol.[326] The spirit in which one of the judges, Mr. Christian,

the Chief Justice of the Isle of Ely, conducted the proceedings may be

gathered from his closing speech, in which he said that the rioters

were receiving ‘great wages’ and that ‘any change in the price of

provisions could only lessen that superfluity, which, I fear, they too

frequently wasted in drunkenness.’[327]

* * * * *

The pressure of the changed conditions of the nation on this system

of maintenance out of the rates is seen, not only in the behaviour of

the labourers, but also in the growing anxiety of the upper classes

to control the system, and in the tenacity with which the parishes

contested settlement claims. This is the great period of Poor Law

litigation. Parish authorities kept a stricter watch than ever on

immigrants. In 1816, for example, the Board of Agriculture reported

that according to a correspondent ‘a late legal decision, determining

that keeping a cow gained a settlement, has deprived many cottagers

of that comfort, as it is properly called.’[328] This decision was

remedied by the 1819 Act[329] to amend the Settlement Laws as regards

renting tenements, and the Report on the Poor Law in 1819 states

that in consequence there ‘will no longer be an obstacle to the

accommodation which may be afforded in some instances to a poor family,

by renting the pasturage of a cow, or some other temporary profit from

the occupation of land.’[330] Lawsuits between parishes were incessant,

and in 1815 the money spent on litigation and the removal of paupers

reached the gigantic figure of £287,000.

In Parliament, too, the question of Poor Law Reform was seen to be

urgent, but the problem assumed a particular and very limited shape.

The significance of this development can be illustrated by comparing

the character and the fate of a measure Whitbread had introduced in

1807 with the character and the fate of the legislation after Waterloo.

Whitbread’s scheme had aimed at (1) improving and humanising the Law of

Settlement; (2) reforming the administration of the Poor Law as such

in such a way as to give greater encouragement to economy and a fairer

distribution of burdens; (3) stimulating thrift and penalising idleness

in the labourers; (4) reforming unemployment policy.

The proposals under the first head provided that settlement might be

gained by five years’ residence as a householder, if the householder

had not become chargeable or been convicted of crime, or been absent

for more than six weeks in a year. Two Justices of the Peace were to

have power on complaint of the parish authorities to adjudicate on the

settlement of any person likely to become chargeable, subject to an

appeal to Quarter Sessions.

The proposals under the second head aimed partly at vestry reform

and partly at rating reform. In those parishes where there was an

open vestry, all ratepayers were still equal as voters, but Whitbread

proposed to give extra voting power at vestry meetings in proportion

to assessment.[331] He wished to reform rating, by making stock in

trade and personal property (except farming stock), which produced

profit liable to assessment, by authorising the vestry to exempt such

occupiers of cottages as they should think fit, and by giving power

to the Justices of the Peace to strike out of the rate any person

occupying a cottage not exceeding five pounds in yearly value, who

should make application to them, such exemptions not to be considered

parochial relief. He also proposed that the county rate should be

charged in every parish in proportion to the assessed property in the

parish, and that any parish whose poor rate was for three years more

than double the average of the parish rate in the county, should have

power to apply to Quarter Sessions for relief out of county stock.

Whitbread’s proposals for stimulating thrift and penalising idleness

were a strange medley of enlightenment and childishness. He proposed

to give the parish officers power to build cottages which were to be

let at the best rents that were to be obtained: but the parish officers

might with the consent of the vestry allow persons who could not pay

rent to occupy them rent free, or at a reduced rent. He proposed also

to create a National Bank, something of the nature of a Post Office

Savings Bank, to be employed both as a savings bank and an insurance

system for the poor. With these two excellent schemes he combined a

ridiculous system of prizes and punishments for the thrifty and the

irresponsible. Magistrates were to be empowered to give rewards (up to

a maximum of £20) with a badge of good conduct, to labourers who had

brought up large families without parish help, and to punish any man

who appeared to have become chargeable from idleness or misconduct, and

to brand him with the words, ‘criminal Poor.’

In his unemployment policy Whitbread committed the fatal mistake,

common to almost all the proposals of the time, of mixing up poor

relief with wages in a way to depress and demoralise the labour market.

The able-bodied unemployed, men, youths, or single women, were to be

hired out by parish officers at the best price to be obtained. The

wages were to be paid to the worker. If the worker was a single man

or woman, or a widower with no children dependent on him, his or her

earnings were to be made up by the parish to a sum necessary to his or

her subsistence. If he or she had children, they were to be made up to

three-quarters, or four-fifths, or the full average rate, according to

the number of children. No single man or woman was to be hired out for

more than a year, and no man or woman with dependent children for more

than a month.

The proposals were attacked vigorously by two critics who were not

often found in company, Cobbett and Malthus. Cobbett criticised the

introduction of plural voting at vestry meetings in an excellent

passage in the _Political Register_.[332] ‘Many of those who pay rates

are but a step or two from pauperism themselves; and they are the most

likely persons to consider duly the important duty of doing, in case of

relief, what they would be done unto. “But,” Mr. Whitbread will say,

“is it right for these persons to _give away the money of others_.” It

is _not_ the money of others, any more than the amount of tithes is

the farmer’s money. The maintenance of the poor is a charge upon the

land, a charge duly considered in every purchase and in every lease.

Besides, as the law now stands, though every parishioner has a vote

in vestry, must it not be evident, to every man who reflects, that a

man of large property and superior understanding will have weight in

proportion? That he will, in fact, have _many votes_? If he play the

tyrant, even little men will rise against him, and it is right they

should have the power of so doing; but, while he conducts himself with

moderation and humanity, while he behaves as he ought to do to those

who are beneath him in point of property, there is no fear but he will

have a sufficiency of weight at every vestry. The votes of the inferior

persons in the parish are, in reality, dormant, unless in cases where

some innovation, or some act of tyranny, is attempted. They are, like

the sting of the bee, weapons merely of defence.’

Malthus’ criticisms were of a very different nature.[333] He objected

particularly to the public building of cottages, and the assessment of

personal property to the rates. He argued that the scarcity of houses

was the chief reason ‘why the Poor Laws had not been so extensive

and prejudicial in their effects as might have been expected.’ If a

stimulus was given to the building of cottages there would be no check

on the increase of population. A similar tendency he ascribed to the

rating of personal property. The employers of labour had an interest

in the increase of population, and therefore in the building of

cottages. This instinct was at present held in check by consideration

of the burden of the rates. If, however, they could distribute that

burden more widely, this consideration would have much less weight.

Population would increase and wages would consequently go down. ‘It

has been observed by Dr. Adam Smith that no efforts of the legislature

had been able to raise the salary of curates to that price which

seemed necessary for their decent maintenance: and the reason which

he justly assigns is that the bounties held out to the profession by

the scholarships and fellowships of the universities always occasioned

a redundant supply. In the same manner, if a more than usual supply

of labour were encouraged by the premiums of small tenements, nothing

could prevent a great and general fall in its price.’

The Bill was introduced in 1807, before the fall of the Whig Ministry,

and it went to a Committee. But the Tory Parliament elected that year

to support Portland and his anti-Catholic Government was unfriendly,

and the county magistrates to whom the draft of the Bill was sent

for criticisms were also hostile. Whitbread accordingly proceeded no

further. At this time the Speenhamland system seemed to be working

without serious inconvenience, and there was therefore no driving power

behind such proposals. But after 1815 the conditions had changed, and

the apathy of 1807 had melted away. The ruling class was no longer

passive and indifferent about the growth of the Speenhamland system:

both Houses of Parliament set inquiries on foot, schemes of emigration

were invited and discussed, and measures of Vestry Reform were carried.

But the problem was no longer the problem that Whitbread had set out

to solve. Whitbread had proposed to increase the share of property

in the control of the poor rates, but he had also brought forward a

constructive scheme of social improvement. The Vestry Reformers of

this period were merely interested in reducing the rates; the rest of

Whitbread’s programme was forgotten.

In 1818 an Act[334] was passed which established plural voting in

vestries, every ratepayer whose rateable value was £50 and over being

allowed a vote for every £25 of rateable property. In the following

year an Act[335] was passed which allowed parishes to set up a select

vestry, and ordained that in these parishes the overseers should

give such relief as was ordered by the Select Vestry, and further

allowed the appointment of salaried assistant overseers. These

changes affected the administration of the Speenhamland system very

considerably: and the salaried overseers made themselves hated in many

parishes by the Draconian regime which they introduced. The parish

cart, or the cart to which in some parishes men and women who asked

for relief were harnessed, was one of the innovations of this period.

The administrative methods that were adopted in these parishes are

illustrated by a fact mentioned by a clerk to the magistrates in Kent,

in October 1880.[336] The writer says that there was a severe overseer

at Ash, who had among other applicants for relief an unemployed

shepherd, with a wife and five children living at Margate, thirteen

miles away. The shepherd was given 9s. a week, but the overseer

made him walk to Ash every day except Sunday for his eighteenpence.

The shepherd walked his twenty-six miles a day on such food as he

could obtain out of his share of the 9s. for nine weeks, and then

his strength could hold out no longer. The writer remarked that the

shepherd was an industrious and honest man, out of work through no

fault of his own. It was by such methods that the salaried overseers

tried to break the poor of the habit of asking for relief, and it

is not surprising that such methods rankled in the memories of the

labourers. In this neighbourhood the writer attributed the fires of

1830 more to this cause than to any other.

These attempts to relieve the ratepayer did nothing to relieve the

labourer from the incubus of the system. His plight grew steadily

worse. A Committee on Agricultural Wages, of which Lord John Russell

was chairman, reported in 1824 that whereas in certain northern

counties, where the Speenhamland system had not yet taken root, wages

were 12s. to 15s., in the south they varied from 8s. or 9s. a week to

3s. for a single man and 4s. 6d. for a married man.[337] In one part of

Kent the lowest wages in one parish were 6d. a day, and in the majority

of parishes 1s. a day. The wages of an unmarried man in Buckinghamshire

in 1828, according to a clergyman who gave evidence before the

Committee of that year on the Poor Laws, were 3s. a week, and the wages

of a married man were 6s. a week. In one parish in his neighbourhood

the farmers had lately reduced the wages of able-bodied married men to

4s. a week. Thus the Speenhamland system had been effective enough in

keeping wages low, but as a means of preserving a minimum livelihood

it was breaking down by this time on all sides. We have seen from the

history of Merton in Oxfordshire[338] what happened in one parish long

before the adversities of agriculture had become acute. It is easy from

this case to imagine what happened when the decline in employment

and agriculture threw a steadily increasing burden on the system of

maintenance from the rates. In some places, as the Commissioners of

1834 reported, the labourers were able by intimidation to keep the

system in force, but though parishes did not as a rule dare to abandon

or reform the system, they steadily reduced their scale.

* * * * *

The most direct and graphic demonstration of this fact, which has not

apparently ever been noticed in any of the voluminous discussions

of the old Poor Law system, is to be seen in the comparison of the

standards of life adopted at the time the system was introduced with

the standards that were adopted later. In 1795, as we have seen, the

magistrates at Speenhamland recommended an allowance of three gallon

loaves for each labourer, and a gallon loaf and a half for his wife

and for each additional member of his family. This scale, it must be

remembered, was not peculiar to Berkshire. It was the authoritative

standard in many counties. We are able to compare this with some

later scales, and the comparison yields some startling results. In

Northamptonshire in 1816 the magistrates fixed a single man’s allowance

at 5s., and the allowance for a man and his wife at 6s., the price

of wheat the quartern loaf being 11-1/2d.[339] On this scale a man

is supposed to need a little over two and a half gallon loaves, and

a man and his wife a little more than three gallon loaves, or barely

more than a single man was supposed to need in 1795. This is a grave

reduction, but the maintenance standard fell very much lower before

1832. For though we have scales for Cambridgeshire and Essex for 1821

published in the Report of the Poor Law Commission of 1834,[340] which

agree roughly with the Northamptonshire scale (two gallon loaves for a

man, and one and a half for a woman), in Wiltshire, according to the

complicated scale adopted at Hindon in 1817, a man was allowed one

and three-fifths gallon loaves, and a woman one and one-tenth.[341] A

Hampshire scale, drawn up in 1822 by eight magistrates, of whom five

were parsons, allowed only one gallon loaf a head, with 4d. a week

per head in addition to a family of four persons, the extra allowance

being reduced by a penny in cases where there were six in the family,

and by twopence in cases where there were more than six.[342] The

Dorsetshire magistrates in 1826 allowed a man the equivalent of one

and a half gallon loaves and a penny over, and a woman or child over

fourteen one and one-sixth.[343] We have a general statement as to

the scales in force towards the end of our period in a passage in

M‘Culloch’s _Political Economy_ quoted in the _Edinburgh Review_ for

January 1831 (p. 353): ‘The allowance scales now issued from time to

time by the magistrates are usually framed on the principle that every

labourer should have a gallon loaf of standard wheaten bread weekly for

every member of his family and one over: that is four loaves for three

persons, five for four, six for five, and so on.’ That is, a family of

four persons would have had seven and a half gallon loaves in 1795, and

only five gallon loaves in 1831.

Now the Speenhamland scale did not represent some easy and luxurious

standard of living; it represented the minimum on which it was supposed

that a man employed in agriculture could support life. In thirty-five

years the standard had dropped, according to M‘Culloch’s statement, as

much as a third, and this not because of war or famine, for in 1826

England had had eleven years of peace, but in the ordinary course of

the life of the nation. Is such a decline in the standard of life

recorded anywhere else in history?

How did the labourers live at all under these conditions? Their life

was, of course, wretched and squalid in the extreme. Cobbett describes

a group of women labourers whom he met by the roadside in Hampshire

as ‘such an assemblage of rags as I never saw before even amongst the

hoppers at Farnham.’ Of the labourers near Cricklade he said: ‘Their

dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate

that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. These wretched

hovels are stuck upon little beds of ground on the _roadside_ where

the space has been wider than the road demanded. In many places they

have not two rods to a hovel. It seems as if they had been swept off

the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under

the banks on the roadside. Yesterday morning was a sharp frost, and

this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plots of

potatoes. In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal

to this; no, not even amongst the free negroes in America who, on

an average, do not work one day out of four.’[344] The labourers’

cottages in Leicestershire he found were ‘hovels made of mud and

straw, bits of glass or of old cast-off windows, without frames or

hinges frequently, and merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them and

look at the bits of chairs or stools, the wretched boards tacked

together to serve for a table, the floor of pebble broken or of the

bare ground; look at the thing called a bed, and survey the rags on

the backs of the inhabitants.’[345] A Dorsetshire clergyman, a witness

before the Committee on Wages in 1824, said that the labourers lived

almost entirely on tea and potatoes; a Bedfordshire labourer said that

he and his family lived mainly on bread and cheese and water, and

that sometimes for a month together he never tasted meat; a Suffolk

magistrate described how a labourer out of work, convicted of stealing

wood, begged to be sent at once to a House of Correction, where he

hoped to find food and employment. If Davies had written an account

of the labouring classes in 1820 or 1830, the picture he drew in 1795

would have seemed bright in comparison. But even this kind of life

could not be supported on such provision as was made by the parish.

How, then, did the labourers maintain any kind of existence when

society ceased to piece together a minimum livelihood out of rates and

wages?

* * * * *

For the answer to this question we must turn to the history of crime

and punishment; to the Reports of the Parliamentary Committees

on Labourers’ Wages (1824), on the Game Laws (1823 and 1828), on

Emigration (1826 and 1827), on Criminal Commitments and Convictions and

Secondary Punishments (1827, 1828, 1831, and 1832), and the evidence

of those who were in touch with this side of village life. From these

sources we learn that, rate aid not being sufficient to bring wages to

the maintenance level, poaching, smuggling, and ultimately thieving

were called in to rehabilitate the labourer’s economic position.[346]

He was driven to the wages of crime. The history of the agricultural

labourer in this generation is written in the code of the Game Laws,

the growing brutality of the Criminal Law, and the preoccupation of

the rich with the efficacy of punishment.

We know from Fielding with what sort of justice the magistrates treated

persons accused of poaching in the reign of George III.’s grandfather,

but when he wrote his account of Squire Western, and when Blackstone

wrote that the Game Laws had raised up a little Nimrod in every manor,

the blood of men and boys had not yet been spilt for the pleasures of

the rich. It is only after Fielding and Blackstone were both in their

graves that this page of history became crimson, and that the gentlemen

of England took to guarding their special amusements by methods of

which a Member of Parliament declared that the nobles of France had not

ventured on their like in the days of their most splendid arrogance.

The little Nimrods who made and applied their code were a small and

select class. They were the persons qualified under the law of Charles

II. to shoot game, _i.e._ persons who possessed a freehold estate of at

least £100 a year, or a leasehold estate of at least £150 a year, or

the son or heir-apparent of an esquire or person of higher degree. The

legislation that occupies so much of English history during a period

of misery and famine is devoted to the protection of the monopoly of

this class, comprising less than one in ten thousand of the people of

England. A Member of Parliament named Warburton said in the House of

Commons that the only parallel to this monopoly was to be found in

Mariner’s account of the Tonga Islands, where rats were preserved as

game. Anybody might eat rats there, but nobody was allowed to kill them

except persons descended from gods or kings.

With the general growth of upper-class riches and luxury there came

over shooting a change corresponding with the change that turned

hunting into a magnificent and extravagant spectacle. The habit set

in of preserving game in great masses, of organising the battue, of

maintaining armies of keepers. In many parts of the country, pheasants

were now introduced for the first time. Whereas game had hitherto

kept something of the wildness, and vagrancy, and careless freedom of

Nature, the woods were now packed with tame and docile birds, whose gay

feathers sparkled among the trees, before the eyes of the half-starved

labourers breaking stones on the road at half a crown a week. The

change is described by witnesses such as Sir James Graham and Sir

Thomas Baring, magistrates respectively in Cumberland and Hampshire,

before the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions

in 1827. England was, in fact, passing through a process precisely

opposite to that which had taken place in France: the sport of the rich

was becoming more and more of an elaborate system, and more of a vested

interest. This development was marked by the growth of an offensive

combination among game preservers; in some parts of the country game

associations were formed, for the express purpose of paying the costs

of prosecutions, so that the poacher had against him not merely a bench

of game preservers, but a ring of squires, a sort of Holy Alliance for

the punishment of social rebels, which drew its meshes not round a

parish but round a county. Simultaneously, as we have seen, a general

change was coming over the circumstances and position of the poor. The

mass of the people were losing their rights and independence; they were

being forced into an absolute dependence on wages, and were living on

the brink of famine. These two developments must be kept in mind in

watching the building up of the game code in the last phase of the

ancient régime.

The Acts for protecting game passed after the accession of George III.

are in a crescendo of fierceness. The first important Act was passed

In 1770. Under this Act any one who killed game of any kind between

sunsetting and sunrising, or used any gun, or dog, snare, net, or other

engine for destroying game at night, was, on conviction by one witness

before one Justice of the Peace, to be punished with imprisonment for

not less than three months or more than six. For a subsequent offence

he was to be imprisoned for not more than twelve months or less than

six, and to be whipped publicly between the hours of twelve and one

o’clock. This was light punishment compared with the measures that were

to follow. In the year 1800, the year of Marengo, when all England

was braced up for its great duel with the common enemy of freedom and

order, and the labourers were told every day that they would be the

first to suffer if Napoleon landed in England, the English Parliament

found time to pass another Act to punish poachers, and to teach justice

to mend her slow pace. By this Act when two or more persons were found

in any forest, chase, park, wood, plantation, paddock, field, meadow,

or other open or enclosed ground, having any gun, net, engine, or other

instrument, with the intent to destroy, take, or kill game, they were

to be seized by keepers or servants, and on conviction before a J.P.,

they were to be treated as rogues and vagabonds under the Act of 1744,

_i.e._ they were to be punished by imprisonment with hard labour; an

incorrigible rogue, _i.e._ a second offender, was to be imprisoned for

two years with whipping. Further, if the offender was over twelve years

of age, the magistrates might sentence him to serve in the army or

navy. If an incorrigible rogue escaped from the House of Correction he

was to be liable to transportation for seven years.

Two consequences followed from this Act. Now that punishment was made

so severe, the poacher had a strong reason for violence: surrender

meant service in a condemned regiment, and he therefore took the risks

of resistance. The second consequence was the practice of poaching in

large groups. The organisation of poaching gangs was not a natural

development of the industry; it was adopted in self-defence.[347] This

Act led inevitably to those battles between gamekeepers and labourers

that became so conspicuous a feature of English life at this time, and

in 1803 Lord Ellenborough passed an Act which provided that any persons

who presented a gun or tried to stab or cut ‘with intent to obstruct,

resist, or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of the person or

persons so stabbing or cutting, or the lawful apprehension or detainer

of any of his, her, or their accomplices for any offences for which

he, she, or they may respectively be liable by law to be apprehended,

imprisoned, or detained,’ should suffer death as a felon. In 1816, when

peace and the fall of prices were bringing new problems in their train,

there went through Parliament, without a syllable of debate, a Bill of

which Romilly said that no parallel to it could be found in the laws of

any country in the world. By that Act a person who was found at night

unarmed, but with a net for poaching, in any forest, chase, or park

was to be punished by transportation for seven years. This Act Romilly

induced Parliament to repeal in the following year, but the Act that

took its place only softened the law to the extent of withdrawing this

punishment from persons found with nets, but without guns or bludgeons:

it enacted that any person so found, armed with gun, crossbow,

firearms, bludgeon, or any other offensive weapon, was to be tried at

Quarter Sessions, and if convicted, to be sentenced to transportation

for seven years: if such offender were to return to Great Britain

before his time was over, he was to be transported for the rest of his

life.[348]

This savage Act, though by no means a dead letter, as Parliamentary

Returns show, seems to have defeated its own end, for in 1828 it was

repealed, because, as Lord Wharncliffe told the House of Lords, there

was a certain reluctance on the part of juries to convict a prisoner,

when they knew that conviction would be followed by transportation.

The new Act of 1828, which allowed a person to be convicted before two

magistrates, reserved transportation for the third offence, punishing

the first offence by three months’, and the second by six months’

imprisonment. But the convicted person had to find sureties after his

release, or else go back to hard labour for another six months if it

was a first offence, or another twelve months if it was his second.

Further, if three men were found in a wood and one of them carried a

gun or bludgeon, all three were liable to be transported for fourteen

years.[349] Althorp’s Bill of 1831 which abolished the qualifications

of the Act of Charles II., gave the right to shoot to every landowner

who took out a certificate, and made the sale of game legal, proposed

in its original form to alter these punishments, making that for the

first and second offences rather more severe (four and eight months),

and that for the third, two years’ imprisonment. In Committee in the

House of Commons the two years were reduced to one year on the proposal

of Orator Hunt. The House of Lords, however, restored the punishments

of the Act of 1828.

These were the main Acts for punishing poachers that were passed

during the last phase of the ancient régime. How large a part they

played in English life may be imagined from a fact mentioned by the

Duke of Richmond in 1831.[350] In the three years between 1827 and

1830 one in seven of all the criminal convictions in the country were

convictions under the Game Code. The number of persons so convicted

was 8502, many of them being under eighteen. Some of them had been

transported for life, and some for seven or fourteen years. In some

years the proportion was still higher.[351] We must remember, too, what

kind of judges had tried many of these men and boys. ‘There is not a

worse-constituted tribunal on the face of the earth,’ said Brougham

in 1828, ‘not even that of the Turkish Cadi, than that at which

summary convictions on the Game Laws constantly take place; I mean

a bench or a brace of sporting justices. I am far from saying that,

on such subjects, they are actuated by corrupt motives; but they are

undoubtedly instigated by their abhorrence of that _caput lupinum_,

that _hostis humani generis_, as an Honourable Friend of mine once

called him in his place, that _fera naturæ_--a poacher. From their

decisions on those points, where their passions are the most likely to

mislead them, no appeal in reality lies to a more calm and unprejudiced

tribunal; for, unless they set out any matter illegal on the face of

the conviction, you remove the record in vain.’[352]

The close relation of this great increase of crime to the general

distress was universally recognised. Cobbett tells us that a gentleman

in Surrey asked a young man, who was cracking stones on the roadside,

how he could live upon half a crown a week. ‘I don’t live upon it,’

said he. ‘How do you live then?’ ‘Why,’ said he, ‘I _poach_: it is

better to be hanged than to be starved to death.’[353] This story

receives illustration after illustration in the evidence taken by

Parliamentary Committees. The visiting Justices of the Prisons in

Bedfordshire reported in 1827 that the great increase in commitments,

and particularly the number of commitments for offences against the

Game Laws, called for an inquiry. More than a third of the commitments

during the last quarter had been for such offences. The Report

continues:--

‘In many parishes in this county the wages given to young unmarried

agricultural labourers, in the full strength and vigour of life, seldom

exceed 3s. or 3s. 6d. a week, paid to them, generally, under the

description of roundsmen, by the overseers out of the poor rates; and

often in the immediate vicinity of the dwellings of such half-starved

labourers there are abundantly-stocked preserves of game, in which,

during a single night, these dissatisfied young men can obtain a rich

booty by snaring hares and taking or killing pheasants ... offences

which they cannot be brought to acknowledge to be any violation of

private property. Detection generally leads to their imprisonment, and

imprisonment introduces these youths to familiarity with criminals of

other descriptions, and thus they become rapidly abandoned to unlawful

pursuits and a life of crime.’[354] Mr. Orridge, Governor of the

Gaol of Bury St. Edmunds, gave to the Committee on Commitments and

Convictions[355] the following figures of prisoners committed to the

House of Correction for certain years:--

1805, 221 1815, 387 1824, 457

1806, 192 1816, 476 1825, 439

1807, 173 1817, 430 1826, 573.

He stated that the great increase in the number of commitments began

in the year 1815 with the depression of agriculture and the great

dearth of employment: that men were employed on the roads at very low

rates: that the commitments under the Game Laws which in 1810 were

five, in 1811 four, and in 1812 two, were seventy-five in 1822, a year

of great agricultural distress, sixty in 1823, sixty-one in 1824, and

seventy-one in 1825. Some men were poachers from the love of sport, but

the majority from distress. Mr. Pym, a magistrate in Cambridgeshire,

and Sir Thomas Baring, a magistrate for Hampshire, gave similar

evidence as to the cause of the increase of crime, and particularly of

poaching, in these counties. Mr. Bishop, a Bow Street officer, whose

business it was to mix with the poachers in public-houses and learn

their secrets, told the Committee on the Game Laws in 1823 that there

had not been employment for the labouring poor in most of the places

he had visited. Perhaps the most graphic picture of the relation of

distress to crime is given in a pamphlet, _Thoughts and Suggestions on

the Present Condition of the Country_, published in 1830 by Mr. Potter

Macqueen, late M.P. for Bedford.

‘In January 1829, there were ninety-six prisoners for trial in Bedford

Gaol, of whom seventy-six were able-bodied men, in the prime of life,

and, chiefly, of general good character, who were driven to crime by

sheer want, and who would have been valuable subjects had they been

placed in a situation, where, by the exercise of their health and

strength, they could have earned a subsistence. There were in this

number eighteen poachers, awaiting trial for the capital offence of

using arms in self-defence when attacked by game-keepers; of these

eighteen men, one only was not a parish pauper, and he was the agent

of the London poulterers, who, passing under the apparent vocation of

a rat-catcher, paid these poor creatures more in one night than they

could obtain from the overseer for a week’s labour. I conversed with

each of these men singly, and made minutes of their mode of life. The

two first I will mention are the two brothers, the Lilleys, in custody

under a charge of firing on and wounding a keeper, who endeavoured to

apprehend them whilst poaching. They were two remarkably fine young

men, and very respectably connected. The elder, twenty-eight years

of age, married, with two small children. When I inquired how he

could lend himself to such a wretched course of life, the poor fellow

replied: ‘Sir, I had a pregnant wife, with one infant at her knee, and

another at her breast; I was anxious to obtain work, I offered myself

in all directions, but without success; if I went to a distance, I was

told to go back to my parish, and when I did so, I was allowed ...

What? Why, for myself, my babes, and my wife, in a condition requiring

more than common support, and unable to labour, I was allowed 7s. a

week for all; for which I was expected to work on the roads from light

to dark, and to pay three guineas a year for the hovel which sheltered

us.’ The other brother, aged twenty-two, unmarried, received 6d. a day.

These men were hanged at the spring assizes. Of the others, ten were

single men, their ages varying from seventeen to twenty-seven. Many had

never been in gaol before, and were considered of good character. Six

of them were on the roads at 6d. per day. Two could not obtain even

this pittance. One had been refused relief on the ground that he had

shortly previous obtained a profitable piece of job-work, and one had

existed on 1s. 6d. during the fortnight before he joined the gang in

question. Of five married men, two with wife and two children received

7s., two with wife and one child 6s., and one with wife and four small

children 11s.’[356]

If we wish to obtain a complete picture of the social life of the

time, it is not enough to study the construction of this vindictive

code. We must remember that a sort of civil war was going on between

the labourers and the gamekeepers. The woods in which Tom Jones

fought his great fight with Thwackum and Blifil to cover the flight

of Molly Seagrim now echoed on a still and moonless night with the

din of a different sort of battle: the noise of gunshots and blows

from bludgeons, and broken curses from men who knew that, if they were

taken, they would never see the English dawn rise over their homes

again: a battle which ended perhaps in the death or wounding of a

keeper or poacher, and the hanging or transportation of some of the

favourite Don Quixotes of the village. A witness before the Committee

on the Game Laws said that the poachers preferred a quiet night.

Crabbe, in the poacher poem (Book XXI. of _Tales of the Hall_) which

he wrote at the suggestion of Romilly, takes what would seem to be the

more probable view that poachers liked a noisy night:

‘It was a night such bold desires to move

Strong winds and wintry torrents filled the grove;

The crackling boughs that in the forest fell,

The cawing rooks, the cur’s affrighted yell;

The scenes above the wood, the floods below,

Were mix’d, and none the single sound could know;

“Loud blow the blasts,” they cried, “and call us as they blow.”’

Such an encounter is put into cold arithmetic in an official return

like this[357]:--

‘An account of the nineteen persons committed to Warwick Gaol for trial

at the Lent Assizes 1829 for shooting and wounding John Slinn at Combe

Fields in the County of Warwick whilst endeavouring to apprehend them

for destroying game in the night with the result thereof:--

+---------+--------+---------------------------------------------+------------+

| | +--------------+--------------+---------------+ |

+---------+--------+--------------+--------------+---------------+------------+

| 11 | 8 | 7 | 9 | 1 | 2 |

+---------+--------+--------------+--------------+---------------+------------+

Seven peasants exiled for life, nine exiled for fourteen years, and two

condemned to the worst exile of all. In that village at any rate there

were many homes that had reason to remember the day when the pleasures

of the rich became the most sacred thing in England.

But the warfare was not conducted only by these methods. For the

gentlemen of England, as for the genius who fought Michael and Gabriel

in the great battle in the sixth book of _Paradise Lost_, science did

not spread her light in vain. There was a certain joy of adventure

in a night skirmish, and a man who saw his wife and children slowly

starving, to whom one of those golden birds that was sleeping on its

perch the other side of the hedge, night after night, till the day when

it should please the squire to send a shot through its purple head,

meant comfort and even riches for a week, was not very much afraid of

trusting his life and his freedom to his quick ear, his light foot, or

at the worst his powerful arm. So the game preservers invented a cold

and terrible demon: they strewed their woods with spring guns, that

dealt death without warning, death without the excitement of battle,

death that could catch the nimblest as he slipped and scrambled through

the hiding bracken. The man who fell in an affray fell fighting, his

comrades by his side; it was a grim and uncomforted fate to go out

slowly and alone, lying desolate in the stained bushes, beneath the

unheeding sky. It is not clear when these diabolical engines, as Lord

Holland called them, were first introduced, but they were evidently

common by 1817, when Curwen made a passionate protest in the House of

Commons, and declared, ‘Better the whole race of game was extinct than

that it should owe its preservation to such cruel expedients.’[358]

Fortunately for England the spring guns, though they scattered murder

and wounds freely enough (Peel spoke in 1827 of ‘daily accidents and

misfortunes’), did not choose their victims with so nice an eye as a

Justice of the Peace, and it was often a gamekeeper or a farm servant

who was suddenly tripped up by this lurking death. By 1827 this state

of things had become such a scandal that Parliament intervened and

passed an Act, introduced in the Lords by Lord Suffield, who had made

a previous attempt in 1825, to make the setting of spring guns a

misdemeanor.[359]

The Bill did not pass without considerable opposition. Tennyson, who

introduced it in the Commons, declared that the feudal nobility in

ancient France had never possessed a privilege comparable with this

right of killing and maiming, and he said that the fact that Coke of

Norfolk[360] and Lord Suffield, both large game preservers, refused

to employ them showed that they were not necessary. Members of both

Houses of Parliament complained bitterly of the ‘morbid sensibility’

that inspired the proposal, and some of them defended spring guns as

a labour-saving machine, speaking of them with the enthusiasm that

a manufacturer might bestow on the invention of an Arkwright or a

Crompton. One member of the House of Commons, a Colonel French, opposed

the Bill with the argument that the honest English country gentleman

formed ‘the very subject and essence of the English character,’ while

Lord Ellenborough opposed it in the other House on the ground that it

was contrary to the principles of the English law, which gave a man

protection for his property in proportion to the difficulty with which

it could be defended by ordinary means.

The crime for which men were maimed or killed by these engines or

torn from their homes by summary and heartless justice was, it must

be remembered, no crime at all in the eyes of the great majority of

their countrymen. At this time the sale of game was prohibited under

stern penalties, and yet every rich man in London, from the Lord Mayor

downwards, entertained his guests with game that he had bought from

a poulterer. How had the poulterer bought it? There was no secret

about the business. It was explained to two Select Committees, the

first of the House of Commons in 1823, and the second of the House of

Lords in 1828, by poulterers who lived by these transactions, and by

police officers who did nothing to interfere with them. Daniel Bishop,

for example, one of the chief Bow Street officers, described the

arrangements to the Committee in 1823.[361]

‘Can you state to the Committee, how the Game is brought from the

poachers up to London, or other market?... The poachers generally

meet the coachman or guards of the mails or vans, and deliver it to

them after they are out of a town, they do not deliver it in a town;

then it is brought up to London, sometimes to their agents; but the

coachmen and guards mostly have their friends in London where they

know how to dispose of it, and they have their contracts made at so

much a brace.... There is no intermediate person between the poacher

and the coachman or guard that conveys it to town?... Very seldom;

generally the head of the gang pays the rest of the men, and he sends

off the Game.... When the game arrives in London, how is it disposed

of?... They have their agents, the bookkeepers at most of the inns, the

porters who go out with the carts; any persons they know may go and get

what quantity they like, by sending an order a day or two before; there

are great quantities come up to Leadenhall and Newgate markets.’

Nobody in London thought the worse of a poulterer for buying poached

game; and nobody in the country thought any the worse of the poacher

who supplied it. A witness before the Committee in 1823 said that in

one village the whole of the village were poachers, ‘the constable

of the village, the shoemaker and other inhabitants of the village.’

Another witness before the Lords in 1828 said that occupiers and

unqualified proprietors agreed with the labourers in thinking that

poaching was an innocent practice.

Those who wished to reform the Game Laws argued that if the sale

of game were legalised, and if the anomalous qualifications were

abolished, the poacher’s prize would become much less valuable, and

the temptation would be correspondingly diminished. This view was

corroborated by the evidence given to the Select Committees. But all

such proposals were bitterly attacked by the great majority of game

preservers. Lord Londonderry urged against this reform in 1827 ‘that

it would deprive the sportsman of his highest gratification ... the

pleasure of furnishing his friends with presents of game: nobody

would care for a present which everybody could give’![362] Other game

preservers argued that it was sport that made the English gentlemen

such good officers, on which the _Edinburgh Review_ remarked: ‘The

hunting which Xenophon and Cicero praise as the best discipline for

forming great generals from its being war in miniature must have been

very unlike pheasant shooting.’[363] Lord Deerhurst declared, when the

proposal was made fourteen years earlier, that this was not the time to

disgust resident gentlemen. The English aristocracy, like the French,

would only consent to live in the country on their own terms. When the

squires threatened to turn _émigrés_ if anybody else was allowed to

kill a rabbit, or if a poacher was not put to risk of life and limb,

Sydney Smith gave an answer that would have scandalised the House of

Commons, ‘If gentlemen cannot breathe fresh air without injustice, let

them putrefy in Cranbourne Court.’

But what about the justice of the laws against poachers? To most

members of Parliament there would have been an element of paradox in

such a question. From the discussions on the subject of the Game Laws

a modern reader might suppose that poachers were not men of flesh and

blood, but some kind of vermin. There were a few exceptions. In 1782,

when Coke of Norfolk, acting at the instance of the magistrates of that

county, proposed to make the Game Laws more stringent, Turner, the

member for York, made a spirited reply; he ‘exclaimed against those

laws as cruel and oppressive on the poor: he said it was a shame that

the House should always be enacting laws for the safety of gentlemen;

he wished they would make a few for the good of the poor.... For his

own part, he was convinced, that if he had been a common man, he would

have been a poacher, in spite of all the laws; and he was equally

sure that the too great severity of the laws was the cause that the

number of poachers had increased so much.’[364] Fox (29th April 1796)

protested with vigour against the morality that condemned poachers

without mercy, and condoned all the vices of the rich, but he, with

Sheridan, Curwen, Romilly, and a few others were an infinitesimal

minority.

The aristocracy had set up a code, under which a man or boy who had

offended against the laws, but had done nothing for which any of his

fellows imputed discredit to him, was snatched from his home, thrown

into gaol with thieves and criminals, and perhaps flung to the other

side of the world, leaving his family either to go upon the rates or

to pick up a living by such dishonesties as they could contrive. This

last penalty probably meant final separation. Mr. T. G. B. Estcourt,

M.P., stated in evidence before the Select Committee on Secondary

Punishments in 1831[365] that as men who had been transported were not

brought back at the public expense, they scarcely ever returned,[366]

that agricultural labourers specially dreaded transportation, because

it meant ‘entire separation’ from ‘former associates, relations, and

friends,’ and that since he and his brother magistrates in Wiltshire

had taken to transporting more freely, committals had decreased. The

special misery that transportation inflicted on men of this class

is illustrated in Marcus Clarke’s famous novel, _For the Term of

His Natural Life_. In the passage describing the barracoon on the

transport ship, Clarke throws on the screen all the different types of

character--forgers, housebreakers, cracksmen, footpads--penned up in

that poisonous prison. ‘The poacher grimly thinking of his sick wife

and children would start as the night-house ruffian clapped him on the

shoulder and bade him with a curse to take good heart and be a man.’

Readers of Mr. Hudson’s character sketches of the modern Wiltshire

labourer can imagine the scene. To the lad who had never been outside

his own village such a society must have been unspeakably alien and

terrible: a ring of callous and mocking faces, hardened, by crime and

wrong and base punishment, to make bitter ridicule of all the memories

of home and boyhood and innocence that were surging and breaking round

his simple heart.

* * * * *

The growing brutality of the Game Laws, if it is the chief, is not the

only illustration of the extent to which the pressure of poverty was

driving the labourers to press upon law and order, and the kind of

measures that the ruling class took to protect its property. Another

illustration is the Malicious Trespass Act.

In 1820 Parliament passed an Act which provided that any person

convicted before a single J.P. within four months of the act of doing

any malicious injury to any building, hedge, fence, tree, wood, or

underwood was to pay damage not exceeding £5, and if he was unable to

pay these damages he was to be sent to hard labour in a common gaol

or House of Correction for three months. The law before the passing

of this Act was as it is to-day, _i.e._ the remedy lay in an action

at law against the trespasser, and the trespasser under the Act of

William and Mary had to pay damages. The Act of 1820 was passed without

any debate that is reported in _Hansard_, but it is not unreasonable

to assume that it was demanded for the protection of enclosures and

game preserves.[367] This Act exempted one set of persons entirely,

‘persons engaged in hunting, and qualified persons in pursuit of game.’

These privileged gentlemen could do as much injury as they pleased.

One clause provided that every male offender under sixteen who did not

pay damages, and all costs and charges and expenses forthwith, might

be sent by the magistrate to hard labour in the House of Correction

for six weeks. Thus a child who broke a bough from a tree by the

roadside might be sent by the magistrate, who would in many cases be

the owner of the tree, to the House of Correction, there to learn

the ways of criminals at an age when the magistrate’s own children

were about half-way through their luxurious education. This was no

_brutum fulmen_. Children were sent to prison in great numbers.[368]

Brougham said in 1828: ‘There was a Bill introduced by the Rt. Hon.

Gentleman opposite for extending the payment of expenses of witnesses

and prosecutors out of the county rates. It is not to be doubted that

it has greatly increased the number of Commitments, and has been

the cause of many persons being brought to trial, who ought to have

been discharged by the Magistrates. The habit of committing, from

this and other causes, has grievously increased everywhere of late,

and especially of boys. Eighteen hundred and odd, many of them mere

children, have been committed in the Warwick district during the last

seven years.’[369] The Governor of the House of Correction in Coldbath

Fields, giving evidence before the Committee on Secondary Punishments

in 1831, said that he had under his charge a boy of ten years old

who had been in prison eight times. Capper, the Superintendent of

the Convict Establishment, told the same Committee that some of the

boy convicts were so young that they could scarcely put on their

clothes, and that they had to be dressed. Richard Potter’s diary for

1813 contains this entry: ‘Oct. 13.--I was attending to give evidence

against a man. Afterwards, two boys, John and Thomas Clough, aged 12

and 10 years, were tried and found guilty of stealing some Irish linen

out of Joseph Thorley’s warehouse during the dinner hour. The Chairman

sentenced them to seven years’ transportation. On its being pronounced,

the Mother of those unfortunate boys came to the Bar to her children,

and with them was in great agony, imploring mercy of the Bench. With

difficulty the children were removed. The scene was so horrifying

I could remain no longer in court.’[370] Parliament put these

tremendous weapons into the hands of men who believed in using them,

who administered the law on the principle by which Sir William Dyott

regulated his conduct as a magistrate, that ‘nothing but the terror of

human suffering can avail to prevent crime.’

The class that had, in Goldsmith’s words, hung round ‘our paltriest

possessions with gibbetts’ never doubted its power to do full justice

to the helpless creatures who tumbled into the net of the law. Until

1836 a man accused of a felony was not allowed to employ counsel to

make his defence in the Court. His counsel (if he could afford to have

one) could examine and cross-examine witnesses, and that was all; the

prisoner, whatever his condition of mind, or his condition of body,

had to answer the speech of the prosecuting counsel himself. In nine

cases out of ten he was quite an unlearned man; he was swept into the

glare of the Court blinking from long months of imprisonment in dark

cells; the case against him was woven into a complete and perfect story

by the skilled fingers of a lawyer, and it was left to this rude and

illiterate man, by the aid of his own memory and his own imagination,

his life on the razor’s edge, his mind bewildered by his strange and

terrible surroundings, to pick that story to pieces, to expose what was

mere and doubtful inference, to put a different complexion on a long

and tangled set of events, to show how a turn here or a turn there in

the narrative would change black into white and apparent guilt into

manifest innocence. Sydney Smith, whose opinions on the importance of

giving the poor a fair trial were as enlightened as his opinions on

their proper treatment in prison were backward, has described the scene.

‘It is a most affecting moment in a Court of Justice, when the

evidence has all been heard, and the Judge asks the prisoner what he

has to say in his defence. The prisoner who has (by great exertions,

perhaps of his friends) saved up money enough to procure Counsel, says

to the Judge “that he leaves his defence to his Counsel.” We have

often blushed for English humanity to hear the reply. “Your Counsel

cannot speak for you, you must speak for yourself”; and this is the

reply given to a poor girl of eighteen--to a foreigner--to a deaf

man--to a stammerer--to the sick--to the feeble--to the old--to the

most abject and ignorant of human beings!... How often have we seen a

poor wretch, struggling against the agonies of his spirit, and the

rudeness of his conceptions, and his awe of better-dressed men and

better-taught men, and the shame which the accusation has brought upon

his head, and the sight of his parents and children gazing at him in

the Court, for the last time perhaps, and after a long absence!’[371]

Brougham said in the House of Commons that there was no man who

visited the Criminal Courts who did not see the fearful odds against

the prisoner. This anomaly was peculiar to England, and in England it

was peculiar to cases of felony. Men tried for misdemeanours, or for

treason, or before the House of Lords could answer by the mouth of

counsel. It was only in those cases where the prisoners were almost

always poor and uneducated men and women, as Lord Althorp pointed

out in an admirable speech in the House of Commons, that the accused

was left to shift for himself. Twice, in 1824 and in 1826, the House

of Commons refused leave to bring in a Bill to redress this flagrant

injustice, encouraged in that refusal not only by Canning, but, what is

much more surprising, by Peel.

The favourite argument against this reform, taking precedence of the

arguments that to allow persons the aid of counsel in putting their

statement of fact would make justice slower, more expensive, and more

theatrical, was the contention that the judge did, in point of fact,

represent the interest of the prisoner: a confused plea which it did

not require any very highly developed gift of penetration to dissect.

But how far, in point of fact, were the judges able to enter into the

poor prisoner’s mind? They had the power of sentencing to death for

hundreds of trivial offences. It was the custom to pass the brutal

sentence which the law allowed to be inflicted for felonies, and then

to commute it in all except a few cases. By what considerations did

judges decide when to be severe? Lord Ellenborough told Lauderdale that

he had left a man to be hanged at the Worcester Assizes because he

lolled out his tongue and pretended to be an idiot, on which Lauderdale

asked the Chief Justice what law there was to punish that particular

offence with death. We learn from Romilly’s _Memoirs_[372] that one

judge left three men to be hanged for thefts at the Maidstone Assizes

because none of them could bring a witness to his character.

The same disposition to trust to the discretion of the judge, which

Camden described as the law of tyrants, explains the vitality of the

system of prescribing death as the punishment for hundreds of paltry

offences. During the last fifty years the energy of Parliament in

passing Enclosure Acts had been only rivalled by its energy in creating

capital offences. The result was a penal code which had been condemned

by almost every Englishman of repute of the most various opinions, from

Blackstone, Johnson, and Goldsmith to Burke and Bentham. This system

made the poor man the prey of his rich neighbours. The most furious

punishments were held _in terrorem_ over the heads of prisoners, and

the wretched man who was caught in the net was exposed to all the

animosities that he might have provoked in his ordinary life. Dr. Parr

put this point writing to Romilly in 1811.

‘There is, indeed, one consideration in the case of bad men which

ought to have a greater weight than it usually has in the minds of

the Judges. Dislike from party, quarrels with servants or neighbours,

offence justly or unjustly taken in a quarrel, jealousy about game, and

twenty other matters of the same sort, frequently induce men to wish to

get rid of a convicted person: and well does it behove every Judge to

be sure that the person who recommends the execution of the sentence is

a man of veracity, of sense, of impartiality and kindness of nature in

the habitual character of his mind. I remember hearing from Sergeant

Whitaker that, while he was trying a man for a capital offence at

Norwich, a person brought him a message from the late Lord Suffield,

“that the prisoner was a good-for-nothing fellow, and he hoped the

Judge would look to him”; and the Sergeant kindled with indignation,

and exclaimed in the hearing of the Court, “Zounds! would Sir Harbord

Harbord have me condemn the man before I have tried him?” What Sir

Harbord did during the trial, many squires and justices of the peace,

upon other occasions, do after it; and were I a Judge, I should listen

with great caution to all unfavourable representations. The rich, the

proud, the irascible, and the vindictive are very unfit to estimate the

value of life to their inferiors.’[373]

We can see how the squires and the justices would close in round a man

of whom they wanted, with the best intentions in the world, to rid

their parish, woods, and warrens, when the punishment he was to receive

turned on his reputation as it was estimated by the gentlemen of his

neighbourhood. Was Sir Harbord Harbord very far removed from the state

of mind described in the Sixth Satire of Juvenal?

‘“Pone crucem servo.” “Meruit quo crimine servus

Supplicium? quis testis adest? quis detulit? Audi:

Nulla unquam de morte hominis cunctatio longa est.”

“O demens, ita servus homo est? nil fecerit, esto:

Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas.”’

And Sir Harbord Harbord had in hundreds of cases what he had not in

this case, the power to wreak his anger on ‘a good-for-nothing fellow.’

When Romilly entered on his noble crusade and tried very cautiously

to persuade Parliament to repeal the death penalty in cases in which

it was rarely carried out, he found the chief obstacle in his way

was the fear that became common among the governing class at this

time, the fear that existing methods of punishment were ceasing to be

deterrent. In 1810 he carried his Bill, for abolishing this penalty for

the crime of stealing privately to the amount of five shillings in a

shop, through the House of Commons, and the Bill was introduced in the

House of Lords by Lord Holland. There it was rejected by twenty-one to

eleven, the majority including the Archbishop of Canterbury and six

other bishops.[374] The chief speeches against the Bill were made by

Eldon and Ellenborough. Ellenborough argued that transportation was

regarded, and justly regarded, by those who violated the law as ‘a

summer airing by an easy migration to a milder climate.’

The nightmare that punishment was growing gentle and attractive to the

poor came to haunt the mind of the governing class. It was founded

on the belief that as human wretchedness was increasing, there was a

sort of law of Malthus, by which human endurance tended to outgrow the

resources of repression. The agricultural labourers were sinking into

such a deplorable plight that some of them found it a relief to be

committed to the House of Correction, where, at least, they obtained

food and employment, and the magistrates began to fear in consequence

that ordinary punishments could no longer be regarded as deterrent,

and to reason that some condition had yet to be discovered which

would be more miserable than the general existence of the poor. The

justices who punished Wiltshire poachers found such an El Dorado of

unhappiness in transportation. But disturbing rumours came to the ears

of the authorities that transportation was not thought a very terrible

punishment after all, and the Government sent out to Sir George Arthur,

the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, certain complaints of this kind. The

answer which the Governor returned is published with the Report of the

Committee on Secondary Punishments, and the complete correspondence

forms a very remarkable set of Parliamentary Papers. The Governor

pointed out that these complaints, which made such an impression on

Lord Melbourne, came from employers in Australia, who wanted to have

greater control over their servants. Arthur was no sentimentalist;

his sympathies had been drilled in two hard schools, the army and the

government of prisoners; his account of his own methods shows that in

describing the life of a convict he was in no danger of falling into

the exaggerations or the rhetoric of pity. In these letters he made

it very clear that nobody who knew what transportation meant could

ever make the mistake of thinking it a light punishment. The ordinary

convict was assigned to a settler. ‘Deprived of liberty, exposed to

all the caprice of the family to whose service he may happen to be

assigned, and subject to the most summary laws, the condition of a

convict in no respect differs from that of a slave, except that his

master cannot apply corporal punishment by his own hands or those

of his overseer, and has a property in him for a limited period

only.’ Further, ‘idleness and insolence of expression, or even of

looks, anything betraying the insurgent spirit, subjects him to the

chain-gang, or the triangle, or to hard labour on the roads.’[375]

We can imagine what the life of an ordinary convict might become. In

earlier days every convict who went out began as an assigned servant,

and it was only for misconduct in the colony or on the way thither that

he was sent to a Penal Settlement, but the growing alarm of the ruling

class on the subject of punishment led to a demand for more drastic

sentences, and shortly after the close of our period Lord Melbourne

introduced a new system, under which convicts might be sentenced from

home to the Penal Settlement, and any judge who thought badly of a

prisoner might add this hideous punishment to transportation.

The life of these Settlements has been described in one of the most

vivid and terrible books ever written. Nobody can read Marcus Clarke’s

great novel without feeling that the methods of barbarism had done

their worst and most devilish in Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur.

The lot of the prisoners in _Resurrection_ is by comparison a paradise.

Not a single feature that can revolt and stupefy the imagination

is wanting to the picture. Children of ten committing suicide, men

murdering each other by compact as an escape from a hell they could no

longer bear, prisoners receiving a death sentence with ecstasies of

delight, punishments inflicted that are indistinguishable from torture,

men stealing into the parched bush in groups, in the horrible hope that

one or two of them might make their way to freedom by devouring their

comrades--an atmosphere in which the last faint glimmer of self-respect

and human feeling was extinguished by incessant and degrading cruelty.

Few books have been written in any language more terrible to read. Yet

not a single incident or feature is imaginary: the whole picture is

drawn from the cold facts of the official reports.[376] And this system

was not the invention of some Nero or Caligula; it was the system

imposed by men of gentle and refined manners, who talked to each other

in Virgil and Lucan of liberty and justice, who would have died without

a murmur to save a French princess from an hour’s pain or shame, who

put down the abominations of the Slave Trade, and allowed Clive and

Warren Hastings to be indicted at the bar of public opinion as monsters

of inhumanity; and it was imposed by them from the belief that as

the poor were becoming poorer, only a system of punishment that was

becoming more brutal could deter them from crime.

If we want to understand how completely all their natural feelings were

lost in this absorbing fear, we must turn to the picture given by an

observer who was outside their world; an observer who could enter into

the misery of the punished, and could describe what transportation

meant to boys of nine and ten, exposed to the most brutal appetites

of savage men; to chained convicts, packed for the night in boxes so

narrow that they could only lie on one side; to crushed and broken men,

whose only prayer it was to die. From him we learn how these scenes and

surroundings impressed a mind that could look upon a convict settlement

as a society of living men and boys, and not merely as the Cloaca

Maxima of property and order.[377]

FOOTNOTES:

[310] _Poor Law Report_, 1834, p. 60.

[311] The big landlord under this method shared the privilege of paying

the labourer’s wages with the small farmer.

[312] _Tribune_, vol. ii. p. 317.

[313] _Ibid._, p. 339.

[314] Poor Law Commission Report of 1834, p. 126.

[315] See Curtler’s _Short History of Agriculture_, p. 249.

[316] Smart, _Economic Annals_, p. 36.

[317] ‘It was during the war that the cottagers of England were chiefly

deprived of the little pieces of land and garden, and made solely

dependent for subsistence on the wages of their daily labour, or the

poor rates. Land, and the produce of it, had become so valuable,

that the labourer was envied the occupation of the smallest piece

of ground which he possessed: and even “the bare-worn common” was

denied.’--_Kentish Chronicle_, December 14, 1830.

[318] Curtler, p. 243.

[319] _Agricultural State of the Kingdom_, Board of Agriculture, 1816,

p. 7.

[320] _Ibid._, pp. 250-1.

[321] P. 144.

[322] C. C. Western (1767-1844); whig M.P., 1790-1832; chief

representative of agricultural interests; made peer in 1833.

[323] _Annual Register_, 1816, Chron., p. 67.

[324] The disturbances at Brandon ceased immediately on the concession

of the demands of the rioters; flour was reduced to 2s. 6d. a stone,

and wages were raised for two weeks to 2s. a head. The rioters were

contented, and peace was restored.--_Times_, May 23, 1816.

[325] _Annual Register_, 1816, Chron., p. 67.

[326] _Cambridge Chronicle_, June 28, 1816.

[327] _Times_, June 26. A curious irony has placed side by side with

the account in the _Annual Register_ of the execution of the five men

who were hung for their share in this spasm of starvation and despair,

the report of a meeting, with the inevitable Wilberforce in the chair,

for raising a subscription for rebuilding the Protestant Church at

Copenhagen, which had been destroyed by the British Fleet at the

bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807.

[328] _Agricultural State of the Kingdom_, p. 13.

[329] 59 George III. c. 50.

[330] See _Annual Register_, 1819, p. 320.

[331] Those assessed at £100 were to have two votes, those at £150

three votes, and those at £400 four votes. Whitbread did not propose to

copy the provision of Gilbert’s Act, which withdrew all voting power

in vestries in parishes that adopted that Act from persons assessed at

less than £5.

[332] _Political Register_, August 29, 1807, p. 329.

[333] Letter to Samuel Whitbread, M.P., on his proposed Bill for the

Amendment of the Poor Laws, 1807.

[334] 58 George III. c. 69.

[335] 59 George III. c. 12.

[336] H. O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial.

[337] Of course the system was only one of the causes of this

difference in wages.

[338] P. 99.

[339] See _Agricultural State of the Kingdom_, Board of Agriculture, p.

231, and Cobbett, _Political Register_, October 5, 1816.

[340] Pp. 21 and 23.

[341] The table is given in the Report of the Committee on the Poor

Laws, 1828.

[342] Cobbett, _Political Register_, September 21, 1822. Cobbett wrote

one of his liveliest articles on this scale, setting out the number of

livings held by the five parsons, and various circumstances connected

with their families.

[343] _Ibid._, September 9, 1826.

[344] _Rural Rides_, p. 17.

[345] _Ibid._, p. 609.

[346] The farmers were usually sympathetic to poaching as a habit, but

it was not so much from a perception of its economic tendencies, as

from a general resentment against the Game Laws.

[347] See Cobbett; _Letters to Peel_; _Political Register_; and Dr.

Hunt’s evidence before the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and

Convictions, 1827.

[348] A manifesto was published in a Bath paper in reply to this Act;

it is quoted by Sydney Smith, _Essays_, p. 263: ‘TAKE NOTICE.--We

have lately heard and seen that there is an act passed, and whatever

poacher is caught destroying the game is to be transported for seven

years.--_This is English Liberty!_

‘Now we do swear to each other that the first of our company that this

law is inflicted on, that there shall not be one gentleman’s seat in

our country escape the rage of fire. The first that impeaches shall

be shot. We have sworn not to impeach. You may think it a threat, but

they will find it a reality. The Game Laws were too severe before. The

Lord of all men sent these animals for the peasants as well as for the

prince. God will not let his people be oppressed. He will assist us in

our undertaking, and we will execute it with caution.’

[349] The Archbishop of Canterbury prosecuted a man under this Act

in January 1831, for rescuing a poacher from a gamekeeper without

violence, on the ground that he thought it his duty to enforce the

provisions of the Act.

[350] House of Lords, September 19, 1831.

[351] A magistrate wrote to Sir R. Peel in 1827 to say that many

magistrates sent in very imperfect returns of convictions, and that the

true number far exceeded the records.--Webb, _Parish and County_, p.

598 note.

[352] _Brougham Speeches_, vol. ii. p. 373.

[353] _Political Register_, March 29, 1823, vol. xxiv. p. 796.

[354] Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions, 1827,

p. 30.

[355] _Ibid._, p. 39.

[356] Quoted in _Times_, December 18, 1830.

[357] Return of Convictions under the Game Laws from 1827 to 1830.

Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, February 14, 1831, p. 4.

[358] _Hansard_, June 9, 1817.

[359] Scotland was exempted from the operation of this statute, for

whilst the Bill was going through Parliament, a case raised in a

Scottish Court ended in a unanimous decision by the six Judges of the

High Court of Justiciary that killing by a spring gun was murder.

Hence the milder provisions of this Act were not required. See _Annual

Register_, 1827, p. 185, and Chron., p. 116.

[360] That Coke of Norfolk did not err on the side of mercy towards

poachers is clear from his record. His biographer (Mrs. Stirling)

states that one of his first efforts in Parliament was to introduce a

Bill to punish night poaching.

[361] P. 29 ff.

[362] _Annual Register_, 1827, p. 184.

[363] _Edinburgh Review_, December 1831.

[364] _Parliamentary Register_, February 25, 1782.

[365] P. 42.

[366] ‘Speaking now of country and agricultural parishes, I do not know

above one instance in all my experience.’

[367] Some Enclosure Acts prescribed special penalties for the breaking

of fences. See cases of Haute Huntre and Croydon in Appendix.

[368] See Mr. Estcourt’s evidence before Select Committee on Secondary

Punishments, 1831, p. 41.

[369] _Present State of the Law_, p. 41.

[370] _From Ploughshare to Parliament_, p. 186; the _Annual Register_

for 1791 records the execution of two boys at Newport for stealing, one

aged fourteen and the other fifteen.

[371] Sydney Smith, _Essays_, p. 487.

[372] Vol. ii. p. 153.

[373] Romilly, _Memoirs_, vol. ii. p. 181.

[374] It was again rejected in 1813 by twenty to fifteen, the majority

including five bishops.

[375] _Correspondence on the Subject of Secondary Punishments_, 1834,

p. 22.

[376] See Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, 1831, and Select

Committee on Transportation, 1838.

[377] See evidence of Dr. Ullathorne, Roman Catholic Vicar-General

of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land, before the 1838 Committee on

Transportation.

The village labourer, 1760-1832 A study in the government of England before the Reform Bill · 第 8 / 15 章