The Age of Elegance (23 page)

After the salads and cheeses the servants set on the table, with oranges and nuts, the brandy-primed sherries, ports, marsalas and madeiras in which Englishmen delighted. Except in Scotland and the exotic little world of the higher aristocracy, which remained gal-licised even during the war, clarets were little drunk by men; such thin, washy stuff was thought unworthy of gentlemen of bottom, at least until the port was finished. By that time there were better things to crown a festive evening: broiled bones and a bowl of punch or "Bishop," that noble concoction of steaming port and roasted lemons so loved of the higher Anglican clergy. Or, if it was Scotland, there would be a salver of silver quaighs brimful of Glenivet. Those who survived would top up, before retiring, with a night-cap of hot brown brandy or a glass of Hollands gin with a lump of sugar in it.
¹

The poor, of course, did not fare like this. In days when international trade was confined mainly to goods of small bulk, the price of grain fluctuated widely with the season. Though England was normally better off in this respect than any other country, the prolonged closure of Europe's ports hit her hard. There were times during the blockade when, under her dazzling appearances of wealth, she had faced famine and the shadow of social collapse. Five times during the war, with the Baltic shut to her ships, the harvest had failed. Though the rich and middle classes suffered little, those who lived largely on bread had been reduced almost to starvation. "For two seasons," wrote a poor dyer, "the corn was spoiled in the fields with wet, and when the winter came we would scoop out the middle of the soft distasteful loaf; and to eat it brought on sickness."
²
Such seasons had fallen with particular severity on the manufacturing districts where the workers, divorced from the land, were dependent on shop prices and where, at the height of the Continental blockade, there had appeared anew phenomenon, mass-unemployment, which, sweeping the young manufacturing districts of the North and Midlands like a pestilence, temporarily deprived whole populations— producing for export instead of subsistence—of the wherewithal to

¹
Ashton, I, 331-3;
Creev
ey Papers,
II, 92-3;
English Spy.
I. 134; II, 233; Farington, VIII, 104; Fowler, 221; Gronow, II, 208-10; Letts, 206; Lockhart, I, 89; IV, 167; Ncvill, 41;
Romany Rye,
10; Simond, I, 46-7; II, 164.

²
Cooper, 26.

buy. Scarcity prices
for grain, while benefiting the l
andlord and farmer, hit, with what seemed a monstrous injustice, the landless labourer in the newly enclosed villages of the east Midlands. For having forfeited his ancient copyhold or manorial rights, he had lost with them the grain, grazing and firewood which had enabled him, regardless of price and w
age levels, to provide his own
milk, eggs, poultry and cooking fuel. In time of shortage he was now reduced to living on baker's bread, occasional cheese and weak tea.

Such times, however, had been the exception, not the rule, and had lasted only a season. If the population had doubled, the agricultural improvements of the past sixty years enabled the soil to support twice as many mouths as before. The war which quickened the threat of famine had also brought new markets and means of livelihood; after the Baltic had been reopened by Nelson's victory at Copenhagen, and again in 1812, a period of widespread prosperity and full employment ensued. At the time of their victory over Napoleon the British did not look like a people used to going hungry. The very bitterness of their resentment when they did so implied that, unlike the poor of other lands, they regarded it as something out of the course of nature. The peasants in the south, it is true, tended to be rather small and pallid, suggesting to one foreign traveller that, for all their neat appearance, they were better dressed than fed. But in the north they were more often giants, with stiff bony frames and rugged majestic features, like "the fearless, sword-heaving English dragoon, engrafted on the simple, incredulous, ineradicable rusticity of the old Lancashire moorlander" whom Bam-ford remembered keeping the gate of the Manchester infirmary. And many of the London labourers—draymen, coal-heavers, bargees —were huge fellows with massive shoulders and ruddy faces, the kind of Englishmen who figured in the patriotic cartoons belabouring whole packs of starveling Frenchmen. There was about the race an unmistakable air of health and good living; an Italian lady was amazed by the beauty of the adventuresses in the theatres. The country lasses whom Simond saw as he travelled through Lancashire had rosy cheeks, cherry-lips, fine shapes and arms red as apples. The carpenter's daughter in
Our Village
was "of square, sturdy, upright form with the finest limbs in the world, a complexion purely English, a round, la
ughing face, sunburnt and rosy,
large, merry, blue eyes, curling brown hair and a wonderful play of countenance.
^,,I

Even in the worst times of the war the dietary of the English had never fallen to the dreadful level of many parts of Europe where periodically starvation and typhus took toll of thousands. Frederic Eden, in his survey of the condition of the poor made during the famine years of 1795 and 1796, analysed the budget of a Leicester woolcomber with two children, who, out of an income of .£47 a year, made up of his own and his wife's and elder son's earnings and an -£11 grant from the Poor Law guardians, was able to buy weekly ten pounds of butcher's meat, two pounds of butter, three and a half of cheese and about nineteen pints of milk, as well as potatoes, vegetables, tea, sugar and beer. He was not even a particularly industrious man, for he was said to spend several days every month in the alehouse lamenting the hardness of the times.
²
Another case instanced by Eden was that of a Manchester dyer who only earned, with his wife's help, .£42 p.a., yet bought five pounds of meat weekly. Even in the workhouses meat usually figured on the dietary three or four days a week. When six Lancashire weavers were consigned by the Home Office to the Cold Bath Fields prison on a charge of treason, they were allowed between them for breakfast six pound-loaves of bread, two pounds of butter, two of sugar and one of tea, for dinner a quarter of pork with vegetables, potatoes and a pot of porter apiece, and for supper cold meat and tea. On another day they were given a leg of mutton weighing thirteen and a half pounds.

By and large, as the population increased, the feeding standards of the poor were declining. It was probably no longer true, as Defoe had claimed a century before, that the English labourer ate and drank three times more than any foreigner. In counties like Kent, where before the war farm-workers had enjoyed meat almost daily, there had been a big falling-off, but they were still better off than Continental peasants who lived part of the year on roots.
³
Even after enclosure many cottagers still contrived, so long as the war lasted,

¹
Mitford,
Our Village,
76,
82,126. "Oh! how I admire the Devonshire girls of about fifteen!'" wrote Keats. "There was one at the inn-door, holding a quartern of brandy; the very thought of her kept me warm a whole stage." See also Bewick, 104; Campbell, II, 270-1; Letts, 211-12; Simond, I, 3; II, 143; Green,
Stendhal,
128.

⁸
Eden, 228-9.

* Gronow of the Guards, comparing French soldiers with British, noted that the broth on which the latter campaigned would never do for the former, who required meat twice a day.. Gronow, II, 299.

to keep a pig; ham and eggs and "a bit of frizzle" figure with cheering frequency in Bamford's account of his early days of poverty. William Howitt in his youth once saw bacon ten inches thick on a farm-servant's breakfast flanked by a peck of boiled beans and a brown loaf the size of a beehive.
¹
Even in the enclosed villages, where wholemeal bread, cheese and ale had come to form the landless labourer's main dietary, there was in normal times as much of all three as he could eat or carry with him into the fields. Many-country folk still baked and brewed at home; the germ remained in the wheat, and the oven, like the porch and tank, was part of the peasant's birthright. So were the ale brewed in the copper, the mead, sweet and mellow but strong as brandy, made from home-raised honey, the cowslip and other rustic wines distilled from traditional recipes and drunk on special occasions. The old skills and habits were dying out with enclosure, but large numbers of country workers still quenched their thirst on untaxed ale of their own making. And what they bought in the alehouse, if not always wholesome, was at least strong and cheap: an old Buckinghamshire labourer declared he didn't think nothing of no beer if it didn't give him three falls for a shilling. A poor man could drink his skinful; Jack Birt, the Berkshire shepherd in
Our Village
, had a pot of double X placed before his sheepdog, Watch, every evening.
²

In the north the poor man's food was usually much more varied. Its staples were oatmeal crowdie, riddle and girdle-cakes, thick porridge with buttermilk, pease-kail, dumpling, oaten jannocks and barley-bread, butter, treacle and plentiful milk. Thomas Bewick, who grew up among the Northumbrian peasantry, reckoned that, though they lived almost entirely on oatmeal, barley cakes, broth, potatoes and milk, they enjoyed better health than any men he knew. The Duke of Argyll recalled how as a boy he watched the farmhands eating their breakfast with spoons and mugs of horn out of a bowl of steaming porridge as big as a footbath. "I went to rest betimes," wrote Bamford, describing his early dietary, "and rose clear-headed and with a strength and buoyancy of limb that mocked

¹
Howitt, 115-16. See Bamford, I, 157; Clapham, I, 118, 316-17; De Selincourt, II, 878; Lord Coleridge, 233-4; Eden,
passim;
Simond, I, 256; II, 224; Woodward. 9.

²
Mitford,
Our Village.
Cobbett a decade later, when conditions had worsened, mentioned that the haymakers at Redbourne got two quarts a day of what they called strong beer and as much small beer as they could drink.
Rural Rides,
I, 81-2. See
idem,
62; Austen, 27; Bamford, I, 60, 120-1, 129-30, 152, 208, 217; II, 212, 279; Bewick, 73; Clapham, I, 170-1; Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
1,
62-3, 82; Eden, 107; Fowler,
1,
25,251;
Old Oak,
36;
Romany Rye,
123; Howitt, 115-16; Lockhart, IV, 194, 242; Grote, 21.

toil and weariness." The same witness has left the picture of a Lancashire weaving family's meals at the beginning of the century: the brown earthenware dish on a low table, the breakfast of boiling water-porridge poured into it from the pan, the children standing round, each with his spoon, oaten-cake and dish of milk, the fatherly blessing be
fore the eager
silent feast; the dinners of crisp-crusted potato pie, dumpling, meat-broth or butcher's meat taken in the same patriarchal fashion, the meat apportioned to each child on a piece of oatcake, the potatoes poured into the central dish from which all helped themselves until it was empty, after which the children stole out to their play munching the remnants of meat and cake. And all the while not a word was spoken.
¹

Some idea of the London workers' dietary can be seen from the capital's feeding statistics. In 1807, London, with a population of just over a million, consumed, on its market returns alone, 110,000 bullocks, 776,000 sheep and lambs, 210,000 calves, 300,000 pigs, 700,000 quarters of wheat, 16,600,000 pounds of butter and 21,000,000 pounds of cheese. It also ate the fruit and vegetables of 14,000 acres of intensively cultivated market-garden land fertilised by dung from the London streets. In the same period it consumed 1,113,500 barrels of ale and porter, each containing 36 gallons, as well as 11,146,782 gallons of spirits. The division of this great quantity of food was left to the laws of supply and demand, but only a small proportion of it can have been consumed by the well-to-do. Most of it must have found its way into working-class homes.
²
One recalls the young Dickens's account of the meals of the Thames-side coal-heavers in the little, rickety taverns of Scotland Yard: "Joints of a magnitude and puddings of a solidity which coal-heavers could appreciate," washed down with huge draughts of Barclay's best entire and rounded off with "large, white compositions of flour and dripping ornamented with pink stains giving rich promise of the fruit within." Cobbett, using the measuring-rod of what was customary in his youth, reckoned that a working-class family of five—father, mother, baby,

¹
"How different was this sententious and becoming manner at table from the one which now prevails around fashionable boards, where, if a person cannot or will not both gabble and gobble at the same time,
he is looked upon as vulgar
' Bamford, I, 98-9. See
idem,
I, 60, 94, 178, 223; Argyll, I, 58; Bewick, 37-8; Clapham, I, 118; Eden, 101-6; Howitt, 130; Sydney, II, 59.

²
Feltham, 37-41. A quarter of a century later the comparable figures, allowing for the great increase in population, were less favourable; Eden's figures of a decade earlier, so far as they are comparable, had been rather better. Eden, 107; Partington, 7. In other words, England was growing poorer in
food-wealth as she gained in oth
er and machine-made forms of wealth—a process she tried to check in the middle of the century by cheap imports from abroad.

and two growing children—needed daily five pounds of bread, two pounds of bacon and one pound of mutton and a gallon and a half of beer.
¹

About nearly everything English there seemed an air of what, to a foreigner, was an almost insulting opulence. The verminous tatters of the Continental peasantry had no part in this tidy countryside. Such distress as existed was tucked away out of sight. One had, wrote Simond, who spent two years towards the end of the war studying the country's institutions, to go out and seek it. In sixty miles between Ormskirk and Kendal the only signs of it he could see were a few itinerant paupers—a crippled old man or a widow with a swarm of barefooted children—tramping back to their place of settlement. The clothes of English working folk looked as if they had come straight from the manufactory. The cottage wives in their grey stuff gowns, woollen petticoats and checked aprons lacked the wretched, ragged appearance that so shocked Dorothy Wordsworth in the Low Countries. Their menfolk did not go about in bare feet; except in the north, where the clogs on the cobbles was traditional music,
²
even wooden shoes were regarded as symbols of poverty and popery. What particularly struck one foreigner were the scarlet cloaks and black silk bonnets of the country women in the market towns. "When a class, so inferior, is so well dressed, who can doubt," he asked, "of the prosperity and comfort of the nation to which it belongs?"

Jolly country squires, beautifully mounted, with huge boots, snowy shirt-frills and wide overcoats with capacious pockets; red-faced merchants and farmers in low-crowned, broad-brimmed hats and tail-coats of blue, buff or brown; clergymen and lawyers in black silk gowns; sailors in reefer jackets with mother-of-pearl buttons, straw hats and loose white canvas trousers; mechanics in striped shirts and leather aprons; gamekeepers in green coats and gold-laced hats; drovers in dark green slops with tin vessels jangling at their sides to catch the ewes' "milk of the plains"; farmers' wives and milkmaids wearing combs and earrings, all spoke of the diversity, wealth and cohesion of English society. The field labourer's wear was a straw hat and a round smock-frock—blue, tawny or olive-

¹
Rural Rides,
II, 366.

²
The turnkey of a Lincoln gaol begged a pair of clogs from an imprisoned Lancashire weaver to add to his museum of prison curiosities. Bamford, II, 329.