The Age of Elegance (52 page)

For the farm labourer on the other hand these improvements meant a fatal deprivation of amenities. He lost with the open field and common his milk, butter, poultry, eggs and cooking fuel. Having no stake in what he raised, he gained nothing from its increased price.
¹
On the contrary, having now to buy most of his own and his family's food, he was doubly the loser. Though his wages rose during the war, they did not rise as quickly as prices. The inflationary rise began for him at the wrong end, with the proceeds of labour instead of its reward. It was aggravated by the growing tendency of farmers, producing no longer for sustenance but for profit, to sell to middlemen whose profits had to be added to the price of his bread and ale. At the same time his family's supplementary earnings from domestic hand
icrafts were being reduced or eli
minated by the growing competition of machines. The farmhouse where the young unmarried labourer had formerly boarded with the homely family of his yeoman employer became the residence of a finer kind of farmer, whose sons hunted and whose daughters played the piano and who could not be bothered with the board of farm domestics. Many of the smaller farmhouses disappeared altogether in the engrossment of farms which followed the enclosures. The landlords and their new tenants, Cobbett wrote in 1821, stripped the land of all shelter for the poor. Simond earlier noted the same phenomenon; the countryside swarmed with gentlemen's houses and opulent farms, but the dwellings of the real poor were hard to discover. Among the roofless ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey he saw peasants and their children squatting with pigs and poultry. "The poor are swept out of the way," he wrote, "as the dust out of the walks of the rich."
²

Before enclosure the chief source of hired agricultural labour had been the smallholder or commoner, who devoted two or three days a week to looking after his own land and worked on that of a richer neighbour for the remainder. Though the latter was now becoming the peasant's sole support, the farmer who employed him, being in an advantageous bargaining position—for a man with a hungry family cannot stand on terms—was slow to raise his wages. By 1795

¹
"The labourer who sows and does not reap sees abundance all round him, creates it and does not partake of it." Simond, I,
172-5.
"Shall we never cease to make him a miserable being, a creature famishing in the midst of abundance?" Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
I,
502.
"The poor forger is hanged, but where is the prosecutor of the monopolising farmer?" See Ernie,
305-12;
Hammond,
Village Labourer,
97-145, 161-5;
Woodward,
9, 158.

²
Simond, 1,
222.
See
idem,
II,
72;
Fowler,
260-1;
Grote,
26;
Hammond,
Village Labourer,
112-120.

the rapidity with which prices rocketed under the triple stimulus of war, increased urban population, and a bad harvest temporarily threatened the landless labourer with immediate famine. In the face of this threat the Berkshire magistrates at their meetin
g at Speenham
land that summer took a fateful decision. Instead of enforcing a minimum wage—a measure which, though empowered to take, they shirked out of deference to the new economic teaching—they fixed a basic rate of subsistence, based on the fluctuating price of corn and the size of the family, and authorised a grant in aid to all who were being paid less than this by their employers. By thus subsidising wages out of rates, they pauperised the labourer.

Magistrates in many parts of the country had followed their well-intentioned example. Not only were farmers countenanced in their reluctance to pay an economic wage, but poor-rates had rocketed out of all proportion to the incomes of the smaller ratepayers, who had thus become saddled with part of the working costs of their richer neighbours. The decent employer was taxed to subsidise his unfair competitor and—since no man with savings could qualify for relief— the thrifty husbandman to maintain the unthrifty. By 1818 the annual national contribution t
o poor-rates, little more than
£700,000 in 1750, had risen to nearly eight millions. More than a fifth of the rural population, of England and Wales—Scotland had no poor-law —was in receipt of some form of parochial relief. Thousands of small husbandmen, faced by rate demands beyond their means, were also driven into the ranks of the landless workers and became themselves a charge on the rates. The poor-laws, wrote Malthus, had created the poor they assisted.
¹

The effect on the labourer was even more disastrous, for he was robbed of his self-respect. Having lost his proprietary rights, he found himself a member of a pariah class; a labour reserve from which landlords and farmers drew when it suited them without regard to human rights and feelings. In many places the overseers—generally farmers little above those they administered in birth and education— insisted that the grant of parish relief entitled them to a complete control over the lives of those whose wages they subsidised. They sent them round the local farms, including their own, in chains or gangs, as though they were serfs. A visitor from Jamaica who saw some of

¹
Simond, I,
225.
See
idem,
229;
II,
295.
It was a system, said Southey, which converted the peasantry into the poor. See also Darvall,
46;
De Selincourt, II; Dicey,
101;
Ernie,
308-12, 327-8;
Hammond,
Village Labourer,
104;
Porter,
88, 90;
Smart,
137-8;
Woodward,
431.

these gangs at work considered that his negro slaves were better off.
¹
This accumulation of evil circumstances had fallen on the rural poor so rapidly, first in one locality and then in another, that few of those who were not directly affected were even aware of what was occurring. In most places its effect was not felt until the great agricultural depression set in after the war. But wherever it struck, it left the English peasantry, the traditional backbone of the country, suffering from a feeling of bewildered helplessness. Old England was tightening into neat-hedged and gated fields and high-walled parks; the sense of property was running mad and cruel, and there seemed no place in it save a serf's for the poor countryman whose ill-requited labour had wrought the transformation. Though many landlords and farmers maintained the old kindly, paternal relations with those who worked on their own farms and gardens or lived in their immediate vicinity, others, in their absorption in fashionable and sporting pleasures, increasingly left the management of their estates to professional intermediaries. The way in which bailiffs and land-stewards whittled away or ignored ancient rights was bitterly resented. In the manor of East Burnham, bought in the early years of the century by the great Whig family of Grenville, the latter's agent claimed an absolute rather than a manorial property in the soil, contemptuously refusing to fulfil the lord's duties of ringing pigs and maintaining fences, and selling the peat, wood, turf and sand from the common to non-parishioners.
²
At Middleton Lord Suffield's steward broke up the village bowling green and turned it into a burial ground, because he could not keep its rustic frequenters in "respectful bounds." As he passed through Savernake Forest, Cobbett noted how many small farms had been swallowed up to add park after park to Lord Ailesbury's domain.

"Hence, yeoman, hence!—thy grandsire's land resign;

Yield, peasant, to my lord and power divine!

Thy grange is gone, your cluster'd hovels fall;

Proud domes expand, the park extends its wall;

Then kennels rise, the massive Tuscan grows,

And dogs sublime, like couchant Kings, repose!

Lo! 'still-all-Greek-and-glorious' art is here!

Behold the pagod of a British peer!"
³

¹
Farington, VIII,
39.
See Cobbett, I,
94;
Fowler,
246-7;
Simond, I,
224-6.

²
Grote,
40-1, 44-6.
³
Ebenezer Elliot,
The Splendid Village
(1833).

The labourer's suffering was aggravated by the increasing rigour with which the game laws were enforced by landowners obsessed with the new mania for vast battues and game-bags. A Parliament of game-preservers, in the south of England at least, was banishing the peasant from the sports of his fathers. Men whose families were hungry and who saw pheasants, hares and partridges swarming in every wood around them, could not resist the temptation of going out at night with gun and net to fill the pot or reap the rewards— far higher than their wages—offered by the agents of the London poulterers. When caught, they received short shrift from magistrates, who in this matter, so close to their hearts, could be utterly ruthless. By a savage act of 1816 a man caught at night in an enclosure with instruments for trapping game could be sentenced to transportation, by two magistrates, one of whom might be the injured property owner, while a blow, struck or even threatened in a poaching fray, could be punished by the gallows. The war between poachers and gamekeepers reached a terrible crescendo in the agricultural depression after the Napoleonic wars. Hundreds were killed or maimed in pitched battles in the woods or by the spring-guns and man-traps with which the more ignoble landlords protected their property and pleasures.
¹

Because of these things the peasant's unquestioning patriotism and respect for his feudal superiors were being replaced by a growing sense of injustice. At the time of Waterloo the social cataclysm which befell him was still far from universal. In the north, where the competition of the industrial towns for labour kept up wages, its effects had been comparatively little felt. And everywhere the sufferings of the poor, in this tremendous and little understood revolution, were modified by the decency and kindliness of thousands of worthy men and women, whose sense of duty to their fellow-beings remained unaffected by opportunities of self-enrichment or by the new philosophy of
laissez faire.
Yet taking a broad view, while the horizon had lifted for the rich and strong, beckoning to an illimitable future of wealth and opportunity, for the poor it was fast darkening. The

¹
"Nothing would induce me to put up* boards threatening prosecution or cautioning one's fellow-creatures to beware of man-traps and spring-guns." Walter Scott,
8th
Jan.,
1825.
Lockhart, V,
399.
See Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
I,
110-11:
Coupland,
Wilberforce
%
428-9;
Cranboum Chase,
35-7, 39-41;
Green,
Stendhal,
183;
Hammond,
Village Labourer,
187-206;
Woodward,
439.

rulers of Christian England, and those who by their writings helped to form educated opinion, were blind to the changes which these new opportunities of enrichment had brought and were bringing, at an ever-increasing rate, to their poorer countrymen. They only saw their material manifestations—the new, neatly-hedged fields and smoking chimneys and the rising revenues of their estates and of the national Exchequer. They failed to see the hopelessness and hunger of the peasant deprived of his stake in the land and of the produce that had sustained his family. They failed to comprehend the agony of once independent countrymen imprisoned in the discipline of the factory and surrounded by the hideous squalor of the industrial town, or the mentality of children who grew up among these gloomy phenomena knowing no other. There was some excuse for their incapacity to realise the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution, since this, in the year 1815, was still in its lusty infancy and cradled in the most remote and unfrequented parts of the island. There was far less for their failure to understand the tragic social transformation wrought by the agricultural revolution at their park gates. They knew that by its means more food was obtained for their country and more rent for themselves. They turned a blind eye to its inability to produce the free and contented men and women who were the main source of England's wealth.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

The Years of Disillusion

"The festal blazes of the war at an end, the sun of Peace is scarcely yet above the horizon; we must take care that during this cold and cheerless twilight the spoiler and assassin don't break in."

Canning

"Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low,

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear?"

Shelley
(1819)

Y
ET
it could be said in excuse of the rich that, while the war continued and prosperity with it, many poor men shared in that prosperity, and that when the war ended and the full force of depression fell on the landless poor, it was no longer in the power of the rich, struggling with lapsing leases and tumbling rentals, to help them. An observer of the English scene pointed out that a prodigal could not be generous. When rents and prices fell, the rich had to choose between reducing their extravagant but by now customary standards of living or allowing the poor to suffer. And, contrary to all expectation, prices fell even before the war ended. The cessation of Government buying to feed the armies and the opening of the European and American grain ports brought down agricultural profits with a run. The magnificent English harvests of 1813 and 1815, and that of 1814 in France, flooded the markets. Few farmers had saved money, for, unable to visualise anything but rising prices, they had reinvested everything in their land. The poorer soils that they had ploughed to satisfy wartime demand became economically unworkable with wheat prices dropping from 120s. a quarter—the 1813 level—to 76s. in 1815 and 53s.
6d.
in the spring of 1816. The value of farming stock fell by fifty per cent.

Having undertaken leases on terms compatible only with wartime profits, farmers found themselves unable to pay their rents or to meet the interest on their loans and mortgages. The banks, fearful for the
capital they had advanced, called in their money. Hundreds of tenants defaulted, and thousands sought rent remission. Rentals everywhere shrank, though to a level much higher than that of a generation before. The doors of the landed gentry were still guarded by armies of liveried retainers, their woods abounded with game, their wonderful horses shook the earth. But they were thrown into a flurry of anxiety and spoke of ruin, both national and personal.
¹

Their representatives in Parliament tried to bolster up prices by legislation. For twenty years the Corn Laws, which from time immemorial had prevented the export of corn in domestic shortages and protected the home-grower during foreign gluts, had been abrogated by war and blockade. Now they had suddenly become a necessity if the farmer was to pay his rent, taxes, tithes and mortgage interest. On both sides of the House it was contended—though a few Whig enthusiasts for complete freedom of trade demurred—that the rising number of mouths to be fed necessitated more home-grown corn, even if it involved uneconomic tillage. To rely for part of the nation's food on foreign supplies was too risky; more than once during the war England had nearly starved. It seemed better that the people should pay more for their corn in fat years to be sure of it in lean. It was to their interest, too, it was argued, that prices should be stabilised—a traditional aim of the Corn Laws.

But the workers of England, dreaming, after all that they had endured, of the traditional first-fruits of peace—a cheap loaf-viewed these landowners' arguments with suspicion. So did the northern manufacturers, seeking to effect cheap sales abroad through reduced wages at home—a policy impossible to enforce while food prices remained at their wartime level. Why, asked a Whig member of Parliament, should importation of foreign corn be feared, since none could take place without a corresponding export of British manufactures? A stock-jobber named Ricardo, who brought out a pamphlet on the beneficial influence of low corn prices on industrial profits, went further and maintained that dependence on foreign corn could never endanger Britain's
safety, since no foreign Governmen
t

¹
One Scottish earl, forced to reduce his rents by a third, told a friend that he had abandoned his carriage-horses, paid off his
chef
and was no longer called "the great Lion of Galloway," but added that he found himself as happy as before. Earl of Galloway to Sir Arthur Paget,
27th
Nov.,
1815.
Paget Brothers,
285-6.
See also Alison, I,
82-3;
Ashton, I,
377;
Broughton, I,
81;
Byron,
Age of Bronze\
Colchester, II,
558-60, 584-5;
Ernie,
174, 322, 318-21;
Farington, VII,
215, 218;
Halevy, II,
5;
Howitt,
203-4;
Smart,
406-9, 435-6". 445;
Woodward,
58.

would ever dare oppose the pressure of its farmers to grow for the British market. The House of Commons was flooded with petitions: one from Leeds bore 24,000 signatures, another from Bristol 40,000, others from Liverpool and Manchester 50,000 apiece. Despite, however, their reference to a select committee, a Bill excluding foreign corn until the price of native corn reached 80s. a quarter passed both Houses in March, 1815.

Legislators were left with no illusions about the measure's unpopularity. The degree to which the landed interest had been weakened by the destruction of the peasantry now became apparent. Outside Parliament landowners and farmers found themselves almost alone; even the peasantry, having nothing left to gain from high food prices, were apathetic or against them. There was a feeling that they had feathered their nests during the war at the expense of the nation, and that they now wished to do so indefinitely. It was a resentment which later found expression in Byron's
Age of Bronze:

"Safe in their barns, these Sabine tillers sent

Their brethren out to battle—why? for rent!

Year after year they voted, cent per cent,

Blood, sweat and tear-wrung millions—why? for rent!

They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant

To die for England—why then live? for rent!"

At the time crowds surrounded Parliament, holding up halters and shouting, "No starvation!" "No landlords!" The house of the Minister who had introduced the Bill was sacked. The Lord Chancellor, with the help of three sentries from the British Museum, drove out the undersized, undernourished hooligans who broke into his Bedford Square dwelling, and Castlereagh, calmly walking home through the mob that was stoning his windows, unconcernedly closed his drawing-room shutters with brickbats flying about his head. Even Wilberforce, who spoke in the House of the danger of dependence on foreign corn, had to garrison his country pleasance in Kensington with a squad of soldiers.
¹

The feeling against the Corn Laws was aggravated because
industry was also in trouble. There was no repetition of the boom

¹
They were asked to join in family prayers. Coupland,
Wilberforce,
408.
See also
Ann. Reg.,
1815,4-5;
Brownlow,
190;
Colchester, II,
527-8;
Croker, I,
63;
Testing,
195;
George IV,
Letters, JL
43-4;
Gomm,
346;
Gronow, I,
220-1, 346;
Smart,
90-1, 365, 372-89, 406-17, 441, 446-60;
Woodward,
58-9.