The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
this be so, what truer word can be said of the history just narrated than that "Jesus Christ has been evidently set forth crucified among us." And not only "crucified," but "dead and buried," His very soul being made an offering for sin. For that soul which awoke in the cowherd Cœdmon, which touched the conscience of Norman kings, which appeared in Plantagenet times as the prophet and guide of the people, which stood forth boldly in the fourteenth century to claim our common rights, and in the sixteenth century to recall a government of adventurers to its duty;—that soul finally gathered on itself all the penalties due to national sin, until, exceedingly filled with contempt, it sank lower and lower in the mire, uttered a plaintive cry and entered the tomb. Do not say this is rhetoric, each phrase represents various facts, and a still more cruel story has to come, for the soul of the English labourer has not only passed through those stages fittingly described by the words "crucified, dead and buried," but in our own age, it has "descended into hell."
When the war closed, the glory of Trafalgar and of Waterloo was soon forgotten in the collapse which followed the inflation of trade, caused by the extravagance which had spent £625,000,000 in order to overthrow the French Revolution. And not only were the people of this country saddled for ever with this overwhelming debt, but the Nemesis also came in an ever-widening estrangement of classes.
The war found the farmer and his men living and working together in a somewhat patriarchal fashion; it left the master a gentleman, the labourer a pauper. The latter, no longer an inmate at the farm, lodged in some hovel and took his meals at the alehouse. But the widespread ruin the collapse produced led to the consolidation of farms in fewer hands. The separation between master and men became more complete; financial success the one end aimed at—"buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest"—the one principle that prevailed. But such was the state of things that the masters were able not only to take full advantage of this law, but to go beyond it. For not only did one large farm require less labourers than the same area divided into several smaller ones, not only was the labour market abnormally increased by the stimulus given to human production by the Poor Law System, but that same system rendered the men careless of the amount of wages they received, since they knew the deficiency would be made up by the parish. Wages were accordingly given which, without this parochial dole, could not have kept the labourer alive. Seven, eight, or at the highest nine or ten shillings a week, when the quartern loaf averaged eighteenpence, simply meant wholesale murder. But the screw was put on gradually, and in a few years, when bread had fallen to 11½d. the quartern loaf, there were places, Northamptonshire for example, where the magistrates fixed the parish allowance at 5s. a single man, 6s. a man and wife, and 2s. each child, whatever the family earned to be deducted from the allowance.
As 14s. or 15s. was the least a single man could live upon when bread was still cheaper, it is manifest that the wages which have been given to the Agricultural Labourer during the greater part of this century—7s., 8s. or the utmost 9s. or 10s. have meant starvation during the lifetime of at least one generation and a portion of two others. For be it remembered that on these miserable sums not one person, but very frequently four or five have had to live. It was only done by reducing the quantity of bread, bacon and beer, and taking in their place gruel, potatoes, suet and rice puddings, with decoctions of washed-out tea leaves. But even such fare was hardly possible under the varying prices which obtained during the Protective system. An old man told me that he remembered the time when the bread they had to eat was almost black, and so hard that they had to chop it. At such times, and perhaps many others, parents were glad on dark winter afternoons to fill their children's stomachs with a fluid made of hot water and coarse brown sugar, flavoured with a modicum of milk, and putting them to bed, get rid of their cries for food until the next morning. "No wonder," as Cobbett said to one of his labourers, "no wonder that you are all as thin as owlets, and that that son of yours there, who is nineteen years old, and is five feet nine inches high, is as you told me last summer, 'too weakly to do a man's work.' No wonder that his knees bend under him, and that he has a voice like that of a girl, instead of being able to carry a sack of wheat and jump a five-barred gate."
In Warwickshire I met two infirm men crawling like beetles along the road. After some conversation the elder of the two told me that he had brought eight children into the world and had buried five. What they died of he could hardly tell. Decline, one died of that, he knew—they called it "consumpted decline." Phthisis and scrofula, as every country practitioner has known, found its most frequent victims amongst this famine-struck race.
The degradation of pauperism is far worse than that of slavery, and of all pauperism none surely exceeded in cruelty this which fell to the lot of the English Labourer. Pampered at first, led even into a coarse luxury, he was rapidly let down until he was treated to such degradations as being put up to auction, and his labour sold to the highest bidder, or to being made to drag gravel carts like a beast of burden.
Left in ignorance so dense that probably not one in five could read or write, was it surprising that agricultural labourers should view the introduction of threshing machines as calculated to put the finishing stroke to their ruin? When a prairie has been dried up by a long drought the merest spark will produce a conflagration, carrying destruction over hundreds of miles; so it is with a popular movement, no one knows how it began or where it will end. Thus in the autumn of 1830, Agricultural England was panic-stricken by the news that the labourers were rising everywhere, destroying machines and setting fire to ricks. The movement spread through the southern, eastern and midland counties, and even showed itself in Cumberland. Sometimes it was a mere riot with an onslaught on some poor-house, parsonage, or manor-house, sometimes it was content with merely destroying machinery, but the most usual form was rick-burning. Night after night in many parts of England the blazing sky told that Captain Swing had been at his work.
In the roughly printed booklet from whence this mythic personage sprang, he is made to say: "I am not the author of these burnings. What can have caused them? Those fires," said I, "are caused by farmers having been turned out of their lands to make room for foxes, peasants confined two years in prison for picking up a dead partridge, and parsons taking a poor man's only cow for the tithe of his cabbage-garden. These are the things that caused the burnings and not unfortunate 'Swing.'"
No, these rick burnings, this machine breaking, these attacks on manor-houses and parsonages had in them nothing preconcerted. Men who in the morning had gone quietly to their work found themselves before day was out, part of a great mob, the infection siezed them in a moment, and laying hold of some pitchfork or chopper they hurried on to riot in the rector's garden or break up the farmer's machine.
The contrast between the tremendous energy displayed by the Government, and the extreme feebleness of the unhappy rioters, was suggestive of the great gulf between rich and poor. Neither had the least idea of each other's real power. The greatest general England has ever had was sent down into the disturbed districts to support the Judges in the special assize held during December 1830.
Three hundred prisoners, many of them convicts expecting sentence of death, lay in the gaol at Winchester. We are not told if the old cathedral city muffled its joy-bells on that unhappy Christmas morn, most probably with our characteristic indifference to sentiment they pealed forth the conventional—
"Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
Peace and goodwill to all mankind."
Anyhow the Judges did not forget to go to church nor to omit their lugubrious sermons to the men they condemned to death.
When on the 30th of the month the Court, met, the jury-box and the dock were filled with convicted felons. The three judges in scarlet robes, supported by Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, proceeded to condemn these poor rustics according to the cruel English law. They were brought up in batches of twenty at a time, and every one had sentence of death recorded against them. Six were actually sentenced to suffer on the gallows, twenty were transported for life, the remainder for periods varying according to judicial discretion.
The real nature of the crimes committed was shown by the youth of some of the offenders. In another part of the country a child of fourteen had sentence of death recorded against him; and two brothers, one twenty, the other nineteen, William and Henry Packman, were ruthlessly hanged on