THE ISOLATION OF THE POOR
The upper classes, to whom the fact that the labourers were more
wretched in 1830 than they had been in 1795 was a reason for making
punishment more severe, were not deliberately callous and cruel in
their neglect of all this growing misery and hunger. Most of those who
thought seriously about it had learnt a reasoned insensibility from
the stern Sibyl of the political economy in fashion, that strange and
partial interpretation of Adam Smith, Malthus and Ricardo which was
then in full power. This political economy had robbed poverty of its
sting for the rich by representing it as Nature’s medicine, bitter
indeed, but less bitter than any medicine that man could prescribe.
If poverty was sharper at one time than another, this only meant
that society was more than ever in need of this medicine. But the
governing class as a whole did not think out any such scheme or order
of society, or master the new science of misery and vice. They thought
of the poor not in relation to the mysterious forces of Nature, but
in relation to the privileges of their own class in which they saw
no mystery at all. Their state of mind is presented in a passage
in Bolingbroke’s _Idea of a Patriot King_. ‘As men are apt to make
themselves the measure of all being, so they make themselves the final
cause of all creation. Thus the reputed orthodox philosophers in all
ages have taught that the world was made for man, the earth for him
to inhabit, and all the luminous bodies in the immense expanse around
us for him to gaze at. Kings do no more, nay not so much, when they
imagine themselves the final cause for which societies were formed and
governments instituted.’ If we read ‘the aristocracy’ for ‘kings’ we
shall have a complete analysis of the social philosophy of the ruling
class. It was from this centre that they looked out upon the world.
When the misery of the poor reacted on their own comfort, as in the
case of poaching or crime or the pressure on the rates, they were aware
of it and took measures to protect their property, but of any social
problem outside these relations they were entirely unconscious. Their
philosophy and their religion taught them that it was the duty of the
rich to be benevolent, and of the poor to be patient and industrious.
The rich were ready to do their part, and all they asked of the poor
was that they should learn to bear their lot with resignation. Burke
had laid down the true and full philosophy of social life once and for
all. ‘Good order is the foundation of all good things. To be enabled
to acquire, the people, without being servile, must be tractable and
obedient. The magistrate must have his reverence, the laws their
authority. The body of the people must not find the principles of
natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must
respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour
to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as
they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they
must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal
justice.’[378]
The upper classes, looking upon the world in this way, considered that
it was the duty of the poor man to adapt himself, his tastes, his
habits, and his ambitions, to the arrangements of a society which it
had pleased Providence to organise on this interesting plan. We have
in the pages of Eden the portrait of the ideal poor woman, whose life
showed what could be done if poverty were faced in the proper spirit.
‘Anne Hurst was born at Witley in Surrey; there she lived the whole
period of a long life, and there she died. As soon as she was thought
able to work, she went to service: there, before she was twenty, she
married James Strudwick, who, like her own father, was a day labourer.
With this husband she lived, a prolific, hard-working, contented wife,
somewhat more than fifty years. He worked more than threescore years on
one farm, and his wages, summer and winter, were regularly a shilling a
day. He never asked more nor was never offered less. They had between
them seven children: and lived to see six daughters married and three
the mothers of sixteen children: all of whom were brought up, or are
bringing up, to be day labourers. Strudwick continued to work till
within seven weeks of the day of his death, and at the age of four
score, in 1787, he closed, in peace, a not inglorious life; for, to the
day of his death, he never received a farthing in the way of parochial
aid. His wife survived him about seven years, and though bent with age
and infirmities, and little able to work, excepting as a weeder in a
gentleman’s garden, she also was too proud to ask or receive any relief
from the parish. For six or seven of the last years of her life, she
received twenty shillings a year from the person who favoured me with
this account, which he drew up from her own mouth. With all her virtue,
and all her merit, she yet was not much liked in her neighbourhood;
people in affluence thought her haughty, and the Paupers of the parish,
seeing, as they could not help seeing, that her life was a reproach
to theirs, aggravated all her little failings. Yet, the worst thing
they had to say of her was, that she was proud; which, they said, was
manifested by the way in which she buried her husband. Resolute, as she
owned she was, to have the funeral, and everything that related to it,
what she called decent, nothing could dissuade her from having handles
to his coffin and a plate on it, mentioning his age. She was also
charged with having behaved herself crossly and peevishly towards one
of her sons-in-law, who was a mason and went regularly every Saturday
evening to the ale house as he said just to drink a pot of beer.
James Strudwick in all his life, as she often told this ungracious
son-in-law, never spent five shillings in any idleness: luckily (as
she was sure to add) he had it not to spend. A more serious charge
against her was that, living to a great age, and but little able to
work, she grew to be seriously afraid, that, at last, she might become
chargeable to the parish (the heaviest, in her estimation, of all human
calamities), and that thus alarmed she did suffer herself more than
once, during the exacerbations of a fit of distempered despondency,
peevishly (and perhaps petulantly) to exclaim that God Almighty, by
suffering her to remain so long upon earth, seemed actually to have
forgotten her.’ ‘Such,’ concludes Eden, ‘are the simple annals of Dame
Strudwick: and her historian, partial to his subject, closes it with
lamenting that such village memoirs have not oftener been sought for
and recorded.’[379] This was the ideal character for the cottage. How
Eden or anybody else would have hated this poor woman in whom every
kindly feeling had been starved to death if she had been in his own
class! We know from Creevey what his friends thought of ‘the stingy
kip’ Lambton when they found themselves under his roof, where ‘a round
of beef at a side table was run at with as much keenness as a banker’s
shop before a stoppage.’ A little peevishness or even petulance with
God Almighty would not have seemed the most serious charge that could
be brought against such a neighbour. But if every villager had had Dame
Strudwick’s hard and narrow virtues, and had crushed all other tastes
and interests in the passion for living on a shilling a day in a cold
and bitter independence, the problem of preserving the monopolies of
the few without disorder or trouble would have been greatly simplified.
There would have been little danger, as Burke would have said, that the
fruits of successful industry and the accumulations of fortune would
be exposed to ‘the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed, and the
unprosperous.’
The way in which the ruling class regarded the poor is illustrated in
the tone of the discussions when the problem of poverty had become
acute at the end of the eighteenth century. When Pitt, who had been
pestered by Eden to read his book, handed a volume to Canning, then his
secretary, that brilliant young politician spent his time writing a
parody on the grotesque names to be found in the Appendix, and it will
be recollected that Pitt excused himself for abandoning his scheme for
reforming the Poor Law, on the ground that he was inexperienced in the
condition of the poor. It was no shame to a politician to be ignorant
of such subjects. The poor were happy or unhappy in the view of the
ruling class according to the sympathy the rich bestowed on them. If
there were occasional misgivings they were easily dispelled. Thus one
philosopher pointed out that though the position of the poor man might
seem wanting in dignity or independence, it should be remembered by way
of consolation that he could play the tyrant over his wife and children
as much as he liked.[380] Another train of soothing reflections was
started by such papers as that published in the _Annals of Agriculture_
in 1797, under the title ‘On the Comforts enjoyed by the Cottagers
compared to those of the ancient Barons.’ In such a society a sentiment
like that expressed by Fox when supporting Whitbread’s Bill in 1795,
that ‘it was not fitting in a free country that the great body of the
people should depend on the charity of the rich,’ seemed a challenging
paradox. Eden thought this an extraordinary way of looking at the
problem, and retorted that it was gratifying to see how ready the rich
were to bestow their benevolent attentions. This was the point of view
of Pitt and of almost all the speakers in the debate that followed
Fox’s outburst, Buxton going so far as to say that owing to those
attentions the condition of the poor had never been ‘so eligible.’ Just
as the boisterous captain in _Evelina_ thought it was an honour to a
wretched Frenchwoman to be rolled in British mud, so the English House
of Commons thought that poverty was turned into a positive blessing by
the kindness of the rich.
Writing towards the end of the ancient régime, Cobbett maintained
that in his own lifetime the tone and language of society about the
poor had changed very greatly for the worse, that the old name of
‘the commons of England’ had given way to such names as ‘the lower
orders,’ ‘the peasantry,’ and ‘the population,’ and that when the poor
met together to demand their rights they were invariably spoken of by
such contumelious terms as ‘the populace’ or ‘the mob.’ ‘In short,
by degrees beginning about fifty years ago the industrious part of
the community, particularly those who create every useful thing by
their labour, have been spoken of by everyone possessing the power
to oppress them in any degree in just the same manner in which we
speak of the animals which compose the stock upon a farm. This is not
the manner in which the forefathers of us, the common people, were
treated.’[381] Such language, Cobbett said, was to be heard not only
from ‘tax-devourers, bankers, brewers, monopolists of every sort, but
also from their clerks, from the very shopkeepers and waiters, and from
the fribbles stuck up behind the counter to do the business that ought
to be done by a girl.’ This is perhaps only another way of saying that
the isolation of the poor was becoming a more and more conspicuous
feature of English society.
Many causes combined to destroy the companionship of classes, and most
of all the break-up of the old village which followed on the enclosures
and the consolidation of farms. In the old village, labourers and
cottagers and small farmers were neighbours. They knew each other
and lived much the same kind of life. The small farmer was a farmer
one day of the week and a labourer another; he married, according to
Cobbett, the domestic servant of the gentry, a fact that explains the
remark of Sophia Western’s maid to the landlady of the inn, ‘and let
me have the bacon cut very nice and thin, for I can’t endure anything
that’s gross. Prythee try if you can’t do a little tolerably for once;
and don’t think you have a farmer’s wife or some of those creatures
in the house.’ The new farmer lived in a different latitude. He
married a young lady from the boarding school. He often occupied the
old manor house.[382] He was divided from the labourer by his tastes,
his interests, his ambitions, his display and whole manner of life.
The change that came over the English village in consequence was
apparent to all observers with social insight. When Goldsmith wanted to
describe a happy village he was careful to choose a village of the old
kind, with the farmers ‘strangers alike to opulence and to poverty,’
and Crabbe, to whose sincere and realist pen we owe much of our
knowledge of the social life of the time, gives a particularly poignant
impression of the cold and friendless atmosphere that surrounded the
poor:
‘Where Plenty smiles, alas! she smiles for few,
And those who taste not, yet behold her store,
Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,
The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.’[383]
Perhaps the most vivid account of the change is given in a letter from
Cobbett in the _Political Register_ for 17th March 1821,[384] addressed
to Mr. Gooch:--
‘I hold a return to _small farms_ to be _absolutely necessary_ to a
restoration to anything like an English community; and I am quite
sure, that the ruin of the present race of farmers, generally, is
a necessary preliminary to this.... The life of the husbandman
cannot be that of _a gentleman_ without injury to society at large.
When farmers become _gentlemen_ their labourers become _slaves_. A
_Virginian_ farmer, as he is called, very much resembles a _great
farmer_ in England; but then, the Virginian’s work is done by slaves.
It is in those States of America, where the farmer is only the
_first labourer_ that all the domestic virtues are to be found, and
all that public-spirit and that valour, which are the safeguards
of American independence, freedom, and happiness. You, Sir, with
others, complain of the increase of the _poor-rates_. But, you seem
to forget, that, in the destruction of the small farms, as separate
farms, small-farmers have become mere hired labourers.... Take
England throughout _three farms have been turned into one within
fifty years_, and the far greater part of the change has taken place
within the last _thirty years_; that is to say, since the commencement
of the deadly system of PITT. Instead of families of small farmers
with all their exertions, all their decency of dress and of manners,
and all their scrupulousness as to character, we have _families of
paupers_, with all the improvidence and wrecklessness belonging to an
irrevocable sentence of poverty for life. Mr. CURWEN in his _Hints on
Agriculture_, observes that he saw some where in Norfolk, I believe
it was, _two hundred_ farmers worth from _five to ten thousand pounds
each_; and exclaims “What a _glorious_ sight!” In commenting on this
passage in the Register, in the year 1810, I observed “Mr. CURWEN only
saw the _outside_ of the sepulchre; if he had seen the _two or three
thousand_ half-starved labourers of these two hundred farmers, and the
_five or six thousand_ ragged wives and children of those labourers;
if the farmers had brought those with them, the sight would not have
been so _glorious_.”’
A practice referred to in the same letter of Cobbett’s that tended
to widen the gulf between the farmer and the labourer was the
introduction of bailiffs: ‘Along with enormous prices for corn came
in the employment of _Bailiffs_ by farmers, a natural consequence of
large farms; and to what a degree of insolent folly the system was
leading, may be guessed from an observation of Mr. ARTHUR YOUNG, who
recommended, that the Bailiff should have a good horse to ride, and
a _bottle of port wine every day at his dinner_: while in the same
work, Mr. YOUNG gives great numbers of rules for saving labour upon
a farm. A pretty sort of farm where the bailiff was to have a bottle
of port wine at his dinner! The custom was, too, to bring bailiffs
from some _distant part_, in order to prevent them from having any
feeling of compassion for the labourers. _Scotch_ bailiffs above
all, were preferred, as being thought harder than any others that
could be obtained; and thus (with shame I write the words!) the farms
of _England_, like those of _Jamaica_, were supplied with drivers
from Scotland!... Never was a truer saying, than that of the common
people, that a Scotchman makes a “good _sole_, but a d----d bad _upper
leather_.”’[385] Bamford, speaking of 1745, says: ‘Gentlemen then lived
as they ought to live: as real gentlemen will ever be found living: in
kindliness with their neighbours; in openhanded charity towards the
poor, and in hospitality towards all friendly comers. There were no
grinding bailiffs and land stewards in those days to stand betwixt the
gentleman and his labourer or his tenant: to screw up rents and screw
down livings, and to invent and transact all little meannesses for so
much per annum.’[386] Cobbett’s prejudice against Scotsmen, the race of
‘feelosofers,’ blinded him to virtues which were notoriously theirs, as
in his round declaration that all the hard work of agriculture was done
by Englishmen and Irishmen, and that the Scotsmen chose such tasks as
‘peeping into melon frames.’ But that his remarks upon the subject of
the introduction of Scottish bailiffs reflected a general feeling may
be seen from a passage in Miss Austen’s _Emma_, ‘Mr. Graham intends to
have a Scotch bailiff for his new estate. Will it answer? Will not the
old prejudice be too strong?’
The change in the status of the farmer came at a time of a general
growth of luxury. All classes above the poor adopted a more extravagant
and ostentatious style and scale of living. This was true, for example,
of sporting England. Fox-hunting dates from this century. Before the
eighteenth century the amusement of the aristocracy was hunting the
stag, and that of the country squire was hunting the hare. It was
because Walpole kept beagles at Richmond and used to hunt once a week
that the House of Commons has always made Saturday a holiday. In the
Peninsular War, Wellington kept a pack of hounds at headquarters, but
they were fox-hounds. In its early days fox-hunting had continued the
simpler traditions of hare-hunting, and each small squire kept a few
couple of hounds and brought them to the meet. Gray has described his
uncle’s establishment at Burnham, where every chair in the house was
taken up by a dog. But as the century advanced the sport was organised
on a grander scale: the old buck-hounds and slow horses were superseded
by more expensive breeds, and far greater distances were covered.
Fox-hunting became the amusement both of the aristocracy and of the
squires, and it resembled rather the pomp and state of stag-hunting
than the modest pleasures of Walpole and his friends. In all other
directions there was a general increase of magnificence in life. The
eighteenth century was the century of great mansions, and some of
the most splendid palaces of the aristocracy were built during the
distress and famine of the French war. The ambitions of the aristocracy
became the ambitions of the classes that admired them, as we know
from Smollett, and Sir William Scott in 1802, speaking in favour of
the non-residence of the clergy, ‘expressly said that they and their
families ought to appear at watering-places, and that this was amongst
the means of making them respected by their flocks!’[387]
* * * * *
The rich and the poor were thus growing further and further apart, and
there was nobody in the English village to interpret these two worlds
to each other. M. Babeau has pointed out that in France, under the
ancient régime, the lawyers represented and defended in some degree
the rights of the peasants. This was one consequence of the constant
litigation between peasants and seigneurs over communal property.
The lawyers who took the side of the peasants lived at their expense
it is true, but they rendered public services, they presented the
peasants’ case before public opinion, and they understood their ideas
and difficulties. This explains a striking feature of the French
Revolution, the large number of local lawyers who became prominent
as champions of revolutionary ideas. One of Burke’s chief complaints
of the Constituent Assembly was that it contained so many country
attorneys and notaries, ‘the fomenters and conductors of the petty war
of village vexation.’[388] In England the lawyers never occupied this
position, and it is impossible to imagine such a development taking
place there. The lawyers who interested themselves in the poor were
enlisted not in the defence of the rights of the commoners but in the
defence of the purses of the parishes. For them the all-important
question was not what rights the peasant had against his lord, but on
which parish he had a claim for maintenance.
The causes of litigation were endless: if a man rented a tenement of
the annual value of £10 he acquired a settlement. But his rental might
not have represented the annual value, and so the further question
would come up, Was the annual value actually £10? ‘If it may be really
not far from that sum, and the family of the pauper be numerous, the
interests of the contending parishes, supported by the conflicting
opinions of their respective surveyors, leads to the utmost expense
and extremity of litigation.’[389] If the annual value were not in
dispute there might be nice and intricate questions about the kind of
tenement and the nature of the tenure: if the settlement was claimed
in virtue of a contract of hiring, was the contract ‘general, special,
customary, retrospective, conditional, personal’ or what not?[390] If
the settlement was claimed in virtue of apprenticeship,[391] what was
the nature of the indentures and so on. If claimed for an estate of
£30, was the estate really worth £30, and how was it acquired? These
are a few of the questions in dispute, and to add to the confusion ‘on
no branch of the law have the judgments of the superior court been so
contradictory.’[392]
Thus the principal occupation of those lawyers whose business brought
them into the world of the poor was of a nature to draw their
sympathies and interests to the side of the possessing classes, and
whereas peasants’ ideas were acclimatised outside their own class in
France as a consequence of the character of rural litigation and of
rural lawyers, the English villager came before the lawyer, not as a
client, but as a danger; not as a person whose rights and interests
had to be explored and studied, but as a person whose claims on the
parish had to be parried or evaded. It is not surprising, therefore,
to find that both Fielding and Smollett lay great stress on the
reputation of lawyers for harshness and extortion in their treatment
of the poor, regarding them, like Carlyle, as ‘attorneys and law
beagles who hunt ravenous on the earth.’ Readers of the adventures
of Sir Launcelot Greaves will remember Tom Clarke ‘whose goodness
of heart even the exercise of his profession had not been able to
corrupt. Before strangers he never owned himself an attorney without
blushing, though he had no reason to blush for his own practice, for he
constantly refused to engage in the cause of any client whose character
was equivocal, and was never known to act with such industry as when
concerned for the widow and orphan or any other object that sued _in
forma pauperis_.’ Fielding speaks in a foot-note to _Tom Jones_ of
the oppression of the poor by attorneys, as a scandal to the law, the
nation, Christianity, and even human nature itself.
* * * * *
There was another class that might, under different circumstances, have
helped to soothe and soften the isolation of the poor, but the position
and the sympathies of the English Church made this impossible. This
was seen very clearly by Adam Smith, who was troubled by the fear that
‘enthusiasm,’ the religious force so dreaded by the men of science and
reason, would spread among the poor, because the clergy who should have
controlled and counteracted it were so little in touch with the mass
of the people. Under the government of the Anglican Church, as set up
by the Reformation, he pointed out, ‘the clergy naturally endeavour
to recommend themselves to the sovereign, to the court, and to the
nobility and gentry of the country, by whose influence they chiefly
expect to obtain preferment.’[393] He added that such a clergy are very
apt to neglect altogether the means of maintaining their influence and
authority with the lower ranks of life. The association of the Anglican
Church with the governing class has never been more intimate and
binding than it was during the eighteenth century. This was true alike
of bishops and of clergy. The English bishop was not a gay Voltairean
like the French, but he was just as zealous a member of the privileged
orders, and the system over which he presided and which he defended
was a faint copy of the gloriously coloured scandals of the French
Church. The prelates who lived upon those scandals were described by
Robespierre, with a humour that he did not often indulge, as treating
the deity in the same way as the mayor of the palace used to treat
the French kings. ‘Ils l’ont traité comme jadis les maires du palais
traitèrent les descendants de Clovis pour régner sous son nom et se
mettre à sa place. Ils l’ont relégué dans le ciel comme dans un palais,
et ne l’ont appelé sur la terre que pour demander à leur profit des
dîmes, des richesses, des honneurs, des plaisirs et de la puissance.’
When Archbishop Dillon declared against the civil constitution he said
that he and his colleagues acted as gentlemen and not as theologians.
The Archbishop of Aix spoke of tithes as a voluntary offering
from the piety of the faithful. ‘As to that,’ said the Duke de la
Rochefoucault, ‘there are now forty thousand cases in the Courts.’
Both these archbishops would have found themselves quite at home among
the spiritual peers in the House of Lords, where the same decorous
hypocrisies mingled with the same class atmosphere. For the English
bishops, though they were not libertines like the French, never learnt
so to be Christians as to forget to be aristocrats, and their religious
duties were never allowed to interfere with the demands of scholarship
or of pleasure. Perhaps the most distinguished product of this régime
was Bishop Watson of Llandaff, who invented an improved gunpowder
and defended Christianity against Paine and Gibbon. These were his
diversions; his main business was carried on at his magnificent country
seat on the banks of Windermere. He was bishop for thirty-four years,
and during the whole of that time he never lived within his diocese,
preferring to play the part of the grand seigneur planting trees in
Westmorland. He has left a sympathetic and charming account of what
he modestly calls his retirement from public life, an event not to be
confused with abdication of his see, and of how he built the palace
where he spent the emoluments of Llandaff and the long autumn of his
life.
It was natural to men who lived in this atmosphere to see politics
through the spectacles of the aristocracy. To understand how strongly
the view that the Church existed to serve the aristocracy, and the
rest of the State through the aristocracy, was fixed in the minds of
the higher clergy, we have only to look at the case of a reformer
like Bishop Horsley. The bishop is chiefly known as a preacher, a
controversialist, and the author of the celebrated dictum that the
poor had nothing to do with the laws except to obey them. His battle
with Priestley has been compared to the encounter of Bentley and
Collins, a comparison that may not give Horsley more, but certainly
gives Priestley less than his due. When he preached before the House
of Lords on the death of Louis XVI. his audience rose and stood in
silent reverence during his peroration. The cynical may feel that it
was not difficult to inspire emotion and awe in such a congregation
on such a subject at such a time, but we know from De Quincey that
Horsley’s reputation as a preacher stood remarkably high. He was one
of the leaders of the Church in politics; for our purposes it is more
important to note that he was one of the reforming bishops. Among other
scandals he attacked the scandal of non-residence, and he may be taken
as setting in this regard the strictest standard of his time; yet he
did not scruple to go and live in Oxford for some years as tutor to
Lord Guernsey, during the time that he was Rector of Newington, as
plain a confession as we could want that in the estimation of the most
public-spirited of the clergy the nobility had the first claims on the
Church. These social sympathies were confirmed by common political
interests. The privileges of the aristocracy and of the bishops were
in fact bound up together, and both bishops and aristocracy had good
reason to shrink from breaking a thread anywhere. Perhaps the malicious
would find the most complete and piquant illustration of the relations
of the Church and the governing class in the letter written by Dr.
Goodenough to Addington, who had just made him Dean of Rochester, when
the clerkship of the Pells, worth £3000 a year, was about to become
vacant. ‘I understand that Colonel Barré is in a very precarious
state. I hope you will have the fortitude to nominate Harry to be
his successor.’ Harry, Addington’s son, was a boy at Winchester. The
father’s fortitude rose to the emergency: the dean blossomed a little
later into a bishop.
But if the French and the English bishops both belonged to the
aristocracy in feelings and in habits, a great difference distinguishes
the rank and file of the clergy in the two countries. The French priest
belonged by circumstances and by sympathy to the peasant class. The
bishop regarded the country curé as _un vilain sentant le fumier_, and
treated him with about as much consideration as the seigneur showed
to his dependants. The priest’s quarrel with the bishop was like the
peasant’s quarrel with the seigneur: for both priest and peasant
smarted under the arrogant airs of their respective superiors, and
the bishop swallowed up the tithes as the seigneur swallowed up the
feudal dues. Sometimes the curé put himself at the head of a local
rebellion. In the reign of Louis XV. the priests round Saint-Germain
led out their flocks to destroy the game which devoured their crops,
the campaign being announced and sanctified from the pulpit. In the
Revolution the common clergy were largely on the side of the peasants.
Such a development was inconceivable in England. As the curé’s windows
looked to the village, the parson’s windows looked to the hall. When
the parson’s circumstances enabled him to live like the squire, he rode
to hounds, for though, as Blackstone tells us, Roman Canon Law, under
the influence of the tradition that St. Jerome had once observed that
the saints had eschewed such diversions, had interdicted _venationes et
sylvaticas vagationes cum canibus et accipitribus_ to all clergymen,
this early severity of life had vanished long before the eighteenth
century. He treated the calls of his profession as trifling accidents
interrupting his normal life of vigorous pleasure. On becoming Bishop
of Chester, Dr. Blomfield astonished the diocese by refusing to license
a curate until he had promised to abstain from hunting, and by the pain
and surprise with which he saw one of his clergy carried away drunk
from a visitation dinner. One rector, whom he rebuked for drunkenness,
replied with an injured manner that he was never drunk on duty.
There were, it is true, clergymen of great public spirit and devoted
lives, and such men figure in these pages, but the Church, as a whole,
was an easy-going society, careful of its pleasures and comforts,
living with the moral ideas and as far as possible in the manner of
the rich. The rivalry of the Methodist movement had given a certain
stimulus to zeal, and the Vicar of Corsley in Wilts,[394] for example,
added a second service to the duties of the Sunday, though guarding
himself expressly against the admission of any obligation to make it
permanent. But it was found impossible to eradicate from the system
certain of the vices that belong to a society which is primarily a
class. Some of the bishops set themselves to reduce the practice of
non-residence. Porteus, Bishop of London, devoted a great part of his
charge to his clergy in 1790 to this subject, and though he pleaded
passionately for reform he cannot be said to have shut his eyes to
the difficulties of the clergy. ‘There are, indeed, two impediments
to constant residence which cannot easily be surmounted; the first
is (what unfortunately prevails in some parts of this diocese)
unwholesomeness of situation; the other is the possession of a second
benefice. Yet even these will not justify _a total and perpetual_
absence from your cures. The unhealthiness of many places is of late
years by various improvements greatly abated, and there are now few so
circumstanced as not to admit of residence there in _some_ part of the
year without any danger to the constitution.’ Thus even Bishop Porteus,
who in this very charge reminded the clergy that they were called by
the titles of stewards, watchmen, shepherds, and labourers, never went
the length of thinking that the Church was to be expected to minister
to the poor in all weathers and in all climates.
The exertions of the reforming bishops did not achieve a conspicuous
success, for the second of the difficulties touched on by Porteus was
insurmountable. In his _Legacy to Parsons_, Cobbett, quoting from the
_Clerical Guide_, showed that 332 parsons shared the revenues of 1496
parishes, and 500 more shared those of 1524. Among the pluralists were
Lord Walsingham, who besides enjoying a pension of £700 a year, was
Archdeacon of Surrey, Prebendary of Winchester, Rector of Calbourne,
Rector of Fawley, perpetual Curate of Exbury, and Rector of Merton; the
Earl of Guildford, Rector of Old Alresford, Rector of New Alresford,
perpetual Curate of Medsted, Rector of St. Mary, Southampton, including
the great parish of South Stoneham, Master of St. Cross Hospital, with
the revenue of the parish of St. Faith along with it. There were three
Pretymans dividing fifteen benefices, and Wellington’s brother was
Prebendary of Durham, Rector of Bishopwearmouth, Rector of Chelsea, and
Rector of Therfield. This method of treating the parson’s profession
as a comfortable career was so closely entangled in the system of
aristocracy, that no Government which represented those interests
would ever dream of touching it. Parliament intervened indeed, but
intervened to protect those who lived on these abuses. For before 1801
there were Acts of Parliament on the Statute Book (21 Henry VIII. c.
13, and 13 Elizabeth c. 20), which provided certain penalties for
non-residence. In 1799 a certain Mr. Williams laid informations against
hundreds of the clergy for offences against these Acts. Parliament
replied by passing a series of Acts to stay proceedings, and finally
in 1803 Sir William Scott, member for the University of Oxford, passed
an Act which allowed the bishops to authorise parsons to reside out of
their parishes. It is not surprising to find that in 1812, out of ten
thousand incumbents, nearly six thousand were non-resident.
In the parishes where the incumbent was non-resident, if there was a
clergyman at all in the place, it was generally a curate on a miserable
pittance. Bishop Porteus, in the charge already mentioned, gives some
interesting information about the salaries of curates: ‘It is also
highly to the honour of this Diocese that in general the stipends
allowed to the curates are more liberal than in many other parts of the
kingdom. In several instances I find that the stipend for one church
only is £50 a year; for two £60 and the use of a parsonage; and in the
unwholesome parts of the Diocese £70 and even £80 (that is £40 for each
church), with the same indulgence of a house to reside in.’ Many of the
parishes did not see much of the curate assigned to them. ‘A man must
have travelled very little in the kingdom,’ said Arthur Young in 1798,
‘who does not know that country towns abound with curates who never
see the parishes they serve, but when they are absolutely forced to it
by duty.’[395] But the ill-paid curate, even when he was resident and
conscientious, as he often was, moved like the pluralist rector in the
orbit of the rich. He was in that world though not of it. All his hopes
hung on the squire. To have taken the side of the poor against him
would have meant ruin, and the English Church was not a nursery of this
kind of heroism. It is significant that almost every eighteenth-century
novelist puts at least one sycophantic parson in his or her gallery of
portraits.[396]
In addition to the social ties that drew the clergy to the aristocracy,
there was a powerful economic hindrance to their friendship with the
poor. De Tocqueville thought that the tithe system brought the French
priest into interesting and touching relations with the peasant: a view
that has seemed fanciful to later historians, who are more impressed
by the quarrels that resulted. But De Tocqueville himself could
scarcely argue that the tithe system helped to warm the heart of the
labourer to the Church of England in cases such as those recorded in
the Parliamentary Paper issued in 1833, in which parson magistrates
sent working men to prison for refusing to pay tithes to their rector.
Day labouring men had originally been exempted from liability to pay
tithes, but just as the French Church brought more and more of the
property and industry of the State within her confiscating grasp,
so the English Parliament, from the reign of William III., had been
drawing the parson’s net more closely round the labourer. Moreover,
as we shall see in a later chapter, the question of tithes was in the
very centre of the social agitations that ended in the rising of 1830
and its terrible punishment. In this particular quarrel the farmers and
labourers were on the same side, and the parsons as a body stood out
for their own property with as much determination as the landlords.
In one respect the Church took an active part in oppressing the
village poor, for Wilberforce and his friends started, just before
the French Revolution, a Society for the Reformation of Manners,
which aimed at enforcing the observance of Sunday, forbidding any
kind of social dissipation, and repressing freedom of speech and of
thought whenever they refused to conform to the superstitions of the
morose religion that was then in fashion. This campaign was directed
against the license of the poor alone. There were no stocks for the
Sabbath-breakers of Brooks’s: a Gibbon might take what liberties he
pleased with religion: the wildest Methodist never tried to shackle the
loose tongues or the loose lives of the gay rich. The attitude of the
Church to the excesses of this class is well depicted in Fielding’s
account of Parson Supple, who never remonstrated with Squire Western
for swearing, but preached so vigorously in the pulpit against the
habit that the authorities put the laws very severely in execution
against others, ‘and the magistrate was the only person in the parish
who could swear with impunity.’ This description might seem to border
on burlesque, but there is an entry in Wilberforce’s diary that reveals
a state of mind which even Fielding would have found it impossible
to caricature. Wilberforce was staying at Brighton, and this is his
description of an evening he spent at the Pavilion with the first
gentleman of Europe: ‘The Prince and Duke of Clarence too very civil.
Prince showed he had read Cobbett. Spoke strongly of the blasphemy of
his late papers and most justly.’[397] We can only hope that Sheridan
was there to enjoy the scene, and that the Prince was able for once
to do justice to his strong feelings in language that would not shock
Wilberforce’s ears.
Men like Wilberforce and the magistrates whom he inspired did not
punish the rich for their dissolute behaviour; they only found in that
behaviour another argument for coercing the poor. As they watched
the dishevelled lives of men like George Selwyn, their one idea of
action was to punish a village labourer for neglecting church on
Sunday morning. We have seen how the cottagers paid in Enclosure
Bills for their lords’ adventures at play. They paid also for their
lords’ dissipations in the loss of innocent pleasures that might have
brought some colour into their grey lives. The more boisterous the
fun at Almack’s, the deeper the gloom thrown over the village. The
Select Committee on Allotments that reported in 1843 found one of the
chief causes of crime in the lack of recreations. Sheridan at one time
and Cobbett at another tried to revive village sports, but social
circumstances were too strong for them. In this respect the French
peasant had the advantage. Babeau’s picture of his gay and sociable
Sunday may be overdrawn, but a comparison of Crabbe’s description
of the English Sunday with contemporary descriptions of Sunday as
it was spent in a French village, shows that the spirit of common
gaiety, killed in England by Puritanism and by the destruction of the
natural and easy-going relations of the village community, survived
in France through all the tribulations of poverty and famine. The
eighteenth-century French village still bore a resemblance in fact
to the mediæval English village, and Goldsmith has recorded in _The
Traveller_ his impressions of ‘mirth and social ease.’ Babeau gives
an account of a great variety of village games, from the violent
contests in Brittany for the ‘choule,’ in one of which fourteen players
were drowned, to the gentler dances and the children’s romps that
were general in other parts of France, and Arthur Young was very much
struck by the agility and the grace that the heavy peasants displayed
in dancing on the village green. Windham, speaking in a bad cause, the
defence of bull-baiting in 1800, laid stress on the contrast: ‘In the
south of France and in Spain, at the end of the day’s labour, and in
the cool of the evening’s shade, the poor dance in mirthful festivity
on the green, to the sound of the guitar. But in this country no such
source of amusement presents itself. If they dance, it must be often in
a marsh, or in the rain, for the pleasure of catching cold. But there
is a substitute in this country well known by the name of _Hops_. We
all know the alarm which the very word inspires, and the sound of the
fiddle calls forth the magistrate to dissolve the meeting. Men bred
in ignorance of the world, and having no opportunity of mixing in its
scenes or observing its manners, may be much worse employed than in
learning something of its customs from theatrical representations; but
if a company of strolling players make their appearance in a village,
they are hunted immediately from it as a nuisance, except, perhaps,
there be a few people of greater wealth in the neighbourhood, whose
wives and daughters patronize them.’[398] Thus all the influences of
the time conspired to isolate the poor, and the changes, destructive of
their freedom and happiness, that were taking place in their social and
economic surroundings, were aggravated by a revival of Puritanism which
helped to rob village life of all its natural melody and colour.
FOOTNOTES:
[378] _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (fourth edition), p.
359.
[379] Eden, vol. i. p. 579.
[380] _Reports on Poor_, vol. ii. p. 325.
[381] _Political Register_, vol. lxxviii. p. 710.
[382] Hasbach, p. 131.
[383] ‘Village,’ Book 1.
[384] Vol. xxxviii. p. 750 ff.
[385] Cobbett’s _Political Register_, March 17, 1821, p. 779.
[386] Bamford, _Passages in the Life of a Radical_, p. 38.
[387] _Rural Rides_, p. 460.
[388] _Reflections_, p. 61.
[389] _Poor Law Report_, 1817.
[390] Cf. _Ibid._, 1834, p. 161.
[391] Cf. case of apprentice, _Annual Register_, 1819, p. 195.
[392] _Poor Law Report_, 1817; in some cases there were amicable
arrangements to keep down legal expenses; _e.g._ at Halifax (Eden), the
overseer formed a society of the officers of adjoining parishes. Cases
were referred to them, and the decision of the majority was accepted.
[393] _Wealth of Nations_, vol. iii. p. 234.
[394] _Life in an English Village_, by Maude F. Davies, p. 58.
[395] _Inquiry into the State of the Public Mind among the Lower
Classes_, p. 27.
[396] The parsons under Squire Allworthy’s roof, the parson to whom
Pamela appealed in vain, and, most striking of all, Mr. Collins in
_Pride and Prejudice_.
[397] _Life_, vol. iv. p. 277.
[398] _Parliamentary Register_, April 18, 1800.