The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
it is light two constables are in the village; they make their way to Robin's cottage, and, instead of going to work that morning, he is handcuffed and marched off in the cold grey dawn to the county gaol. A true bill is found, and during the assize, pale, haggard, and speechless, Robin stands in the dock. Too bewildered to follow the evidence, he only knows that the chief witness is the worst of the gang, the man who persuaded him into the act, and nothing is clear to him until he hears the foreman of the jury say, "Guilty, my lord," and he sees the judge put on his black cap. He knows then what is going to happen, and trembling from head to foot he awaits the dreadful sentence. Taken back to prison, he is loaded with heavy irons, and led down into a loathsome dungeon, where he finds a number of other convicts; some are swearing or laughing, while one or two appear agonised at the thought of their fate.
On the morning of the execution they have all been brought up into the prison yard, and a hubbub goes on almost as bad as a Jews' market. Loud curses from angry quarrellers, shouts for the pot-boys who scuttle about, pouring out ale and other liquids, blows of the blacksmith's hammer, as he pinions those who are going to suffer. At last all is in readiness, the prisoners have mounted the cart, the Ordinary has got up behind, and Jack Ketch in front; the soldiers press round for fear of a rescue, and the great gates of the prison are swung open.
If it was hubbub within, 'tis the roar of the ocean without. Jack Ketch and his unhappy freight are received with a storm of oaths and coarse ribaldry, in which some of the convicts join for most of them are already half drunk. The sorry procession makes its way through a thick mob, which sways to and fro; the sellers of gin and other liquors bawling loud enough to be heard above the general din. Again and again the hangman's cart stops before a public-house, and while the condemned are taking another draught, the mob rush round them to shake their hands. So eager indeed are the people to show this mark of sympathy, that the struggling and fighting get worse at every stage, until at last the cart is hemmed in. Then heavy blows are struck, pieces of swinging sticks go flying, people are knocked down and trampled under foot, every one gets spattered with blood and dirt; screams groans, and brutal cries of all sorts produce a tumult beyond description.
At last the cavalcade reaches the gallows, around which a number of hackney carriages are assembled. These vehicles have brought or contain the people's betters, who have thus come by a more convenient route, and secured the best places to see the show. The Ordinary and the Hangman dispatch their duties with small ceremony and equal unconcern, and very soon half a dozen human bodies are dangling in the air.
What the people thought of these sights, no one has cared to tell us. We may be certain, however, of one thing, their whole sympathy went with the sufferers and not with the law.
IX.
How to Destroy a People's Soul.
"Pauper ubique jacet," said Queen Elizabeth as she made a progress through the kingdom, and found herself everywhere surrounded by vast flocks of poor people. In the midst of individual wealth and national greatness the complaint was ever rising, "There is no country with so many poor as England." The reason was simple: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." Henry and Elizabeth so merged the Church and State one into the other that those who dared to say nay became guilty of a sort of treason, and were thrown into prison, whipped, pilloried, mutilated, or sent to the gallows.
In thus asserting the nation to be a Church of Christ, Parliament proclaimed the English people a Society of Brothers, and on the ground of this very brotherhood commenced their first essay in making provision for the wants of the impotent poor. But, as we have seen, everything had combined to stir up the spirit of selfishness in England, so that, from the court to the city, from the baronial hall to the counting-house, there never was a time in which individual greed had more thoroughly taken possession of a nation. Gentle asking of every man and woman what in their charity they would be contented to give weekly towards the relief of their poor brethren in Christ; charitable ways and means of persuading obstinate persons and parishes to take their share in this duty, had to be given up, and the recalcitrants handed over to the Justices of the Peace, who were to tax them in a weekly sum, and commit them to prison until it was paid.
By the end of the reign of Elizabeth the voluntary offering had given place to a regular system of taxation, the amount being settled by the overseers of each parish, who were appointed every Easter Day by the Justices of the Peace. The two statutes of the 39th and 43rd of Elizabeth became the system upon which England dealt with its poor for 230 years. It was in principle a system of Christian Socialism, but being worked throughout by persons animated by secular motives, its action was vacillating: at once feeble and hard, and, in its final development, it came as near to the work of the devil as it is possible to imagine.
The Christian Socialism of the Elizabethan Poor Law distinguished, in the most forcible manner, between the idle and industrious, the wilful and the impotent. For the one class there were stripes and imprisonment, and in the end the gibbet; for the other, relief and shelter. Everything, however, depended on the honesty, capacity, and Christian spirit of the Justices of the Peace and Overseers into whose hands the whole care of the poor was confided. As early as 1622 we find signs that many shirked the work. In a tract of that date, called, "Greevous Grones for the Poor," we are told, "The poor dailie increase, in many parishes there being no collection for them, so that they are driven out of these parishes to beg, and filtch, and steal for their maintenance."
Each parish began jealously to guard its frontier, fearing that the surrounding parishes would shift upon it the burden of their poor. This led to a series of acts which virtually imprisoned the labourer in the limits of his parish, tying him down for a third time to the soil. The place of a man's nativity being originally the parish from which he could claim assistance, it became the object of every parish to prevent any being born in its limits who might come on the rates. If a young man who had no right of settlement in a parish attempted to get married, the officials immediately sought to have him removed, lest he should have a family, some of whom might become chargeable. This deterred young men from matrimony, and the result was a large number of bastard children. That unfortunate being whom the English law pursued so relentlessly: the homeless wanderer, was still more cruelly dealt with. In the reign of James I. it was enacted that a woman wandering and begging, if delivered of a child in a parish to which she did not belong, was to be liable to whipping and six months' imprisonment. Yet notwithstanding all this severity the poor were ever on the increase.
Some seventy years after the Elizabethan Poor Law had been in operation the rates had risen to no less a sum than £840,000 a year. Twelve years later, 1685, the poor were numbered at 1,330,000 heads, 400,000 of whom were in receipt of parish relief. By the reign of Queen Anne the maintenance of the poor cost one million sterling.
During the early years of the eighteenth century the rapid growth of pauperism occupied many powerful minds, but the remedies they proposed were not adopted, or quite failed to arrest its progress; so that in 1795, Mr. Fox told the House of Commons "that the greater part of the working classes of the country were lying at the mercy and almost lay on the charity of the rich." Mr. Fox was far from exaggerating the disease, for English pauperism was now entering an acute stage. By the end of the War it could be said to have risen fifty per cent., and there were very few of the labouring classes out of its grasp.
To estimate the full force of this steady growth of pauperism we must never lose sight of the fact that it took place side by side with an ever-enlarging commerce, with the development of the manufacturing system and the enormous increase in the wealth of the ruling classes.
The writers of the early part of the eighteenth century—Locke, Defoe, Sir Joshua Child, Mandeville, and Henry Fielding—more or less attribute it to relaxation in discipline and corruption in manners. They appear to have thought, and probably with reason, that through careless management, a great deal of the money went in the support of idleness and debauchery. When we recall the laws by which, in addition to their long education in servility and dependence, the labourers were drawn into the practice of poaching, smuggling, and the worst forms of drinking, our surprise will be how any virtue could remain in the labouring poor, how it was possible for any of them to have escaped this cesspool of moral misery into which their whole class was falling.
Defoe