The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
sent to the gallows under the Tudors. How many were whipped until their backs streamed with blood, how many were branded with the red-hot iron, or had their ears cropped, how many rotted in prison, how many died on the galleys in the Thames, how many were enslaved, no historian has told us; but it is evident these draconian laws engendered their own prey, for work them as they would the prisons were so full that to make room for fresh comers quantities of desperate persons were set free at each assize.
Such numbers had taken to this bandit life that there were not sufficient labourers to do the ordinary tillage of the land. What with rack rents, what with the competition of men who had made money in towns, what with the scarcity of labourers, what with the necessity of watching their flocks day and night, what with the rates for keeping up gaols and maintaining hosts of prisoners, the small yeomanry of England, the twenty-pound men, were ruined and sank themselves to farm labourers or sturdy rogues. No wonder the latter proclaimed deadly war against society. "They must live," they said; "they would not starve." No wonder they thought it a sufficient excuse for highway robbery, burglary, and sheep-stealing, to cry, "The rich have gotten all into their hands and will starve the poor."
The prosperous members of the body politic were in despair at the ill-success of their efforts to get rid of what King Edward in one of his Essays describes as its "spittle and filth." There had never been more idle persons than in his day, he writes, and after puzzling his wits as to the cause, he comes to the conclusion that "slack execution of the laws has been the chiefest sore of all."
The truth was the selfish tyranny of the ruling classes had perverted the very conscience of the nation, and a secret sympathy was not only felt through the lower strata of society for "the sturdy rogue" and "the valiant beggar," but probably avowed openly, for King Edward speaks of the "disobedient and contentious talking and doing of the foolish and fond people," as one great cause of the wilful breaking of the laws of the realm. Many who appeared to get an honest living were really in league with thieves. Receivers of stolen goods were everywhere—the tinker's budget, the peddler's bag, the glassman's basket, all were ready receptacles. In 1596 we are told that in every county there were three to four hundred able-bodied men who lived by rapine and theft, and such daring deeds as they did could never have been successful if they had not found a sympathetic public. Men who were robbed would not prosecute, either through fear or from what King Edward calls "foolish pity;" juries would not convict, and judges were bribed or terrorised. "A piteous case for a Commonwealth!" says Bernard Gilpin, and well he might.
VIII.
Degradation and Death.
I suppose that the English agricultural labourer has never had two more faithful limners than William Langland and George Crabbe. Let anyone compare "Piers the Plowman" and "The Village," and he will be forced to the conviction that in the 400 years that elapsed between those works the English labourer had fallen wofully. In the fourteenth-century poem we have a man animated by the noblest moral purpose, one who in the strength of that purpose takes a position of equality with the highest, yet without a shadow of insolence; a man, in fact, who is Christ's freeman. But if we turn to the eighteenth-century picture, we meet with nothing but a poor, wailing, broken-hearted slave. He has toiled early and late, and has laid up for his old age such a store of aches and pains that he never knows what rest is; his food has been stinted and unwholesome, and now that he is growing weak, he who won the prize for the straightest furrow, can only get a day's work here and there, "and when his age attempts its task in vain," he is then taunted with being one of the lazy poor; his children find him a burden and look coldly on him. His only refuge will be the workhouse, where in dirt, neglect, starvation, and noise, he ends his days to be thrown into a pauper's grave—
"There lie the happy dead, from trouble free,
And the glad parish pays the frugal fee."
So great a fall must have had many stages, of which we can only gather an indication here and there. For instance, I have seen a copy of a play performed by labourers in the presence of King Charles I., and to this proof of their intelligence in the early part of the seventeenth century, we may add one of their independence at its close. Defoe writes in terse though unpoetic lines—
"The meanest English plowman studies law,
And keeps thereby the magistrates in awe.
Will boldly tell them what they ought to do,
And sometimes punish their omissions too."
But the English labourer had already then fallen, as Defoe's descriptions elsewhere prove, and from Defoe's times to those of Charles Dickens, the descent went on with increasing speed. The causes have been numerous, but all have had their origin in the persistent selfishness of those who have had the presumption to think that wealth and learning gave the right and the ability to manage the labourer's affairs without asking his opinion or obtaining his consent.
The idea the ruling classes have had of their position comes out in a phrase used by a noble lord in the debate in the House of Lords on the Spirituous Liquors Bill in 1743, "If any accidental public misfortune should render the people likely to mutiny." But the ruling classes of England have never been equal even to the military conception of duty, for they have cruelly and persistently sacrificed the lives and morals of the myriads of privates they pretend to command. Take, for instance, the Distilleries Act of 2 William and Mary. Its object was to ruin French commerce and to encourage the distilling of English brandy and spirits. What was its result? Little more than sixty years had passed away when Fielding and Hogarth drew their appalling pictures of the result of gin-drinking in England. Gin Lane, "full of strange images of death," shows vividly the moral murder which had been going on. "Should," said Fielding, "the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height during the next twenty years, there will be very few of the common people left to drink it."
But the interest of some powerful class has constantly outweighed the moral welfare of the people. Take the brewers, for instance. Hundreds of them in former times were spread all over the country, and their profits enabled them to almost rank with the gentry. How were these profits obtained? From innumerable alehouses in the district, many of which were actually the property of the brewer. Dunning, a writer on Pauperism at the time of the Revolution, connects the small country alehouses with the brandy-shops, as affording incredible returns to the Excise.
What need to paint the results? In the drawings of Moreland we see the labourer, bloated and lazy, seated on a bench of the village alehouse, drinking away his wages, or ascending the steps of the roadside inn, to get another draught of ale, or it may be, a quartern of gin, while wife and children are waiting for him in the cart below, Crabbe speaks of the "riots of the Green, that sprang at first from yonder noisy Inn," and he indicates, in a strong touch, how furiously brutal the heavy drinking often made the churl. Fruitful source of most wretched poverty and dastardly crime, its profit has been too great for the brewer, the maltster, the innkeeper, and all the money-makers of the country-side, for a middle-class Parliament to do other than give its control to the country magistrates, men, who if not brewers, maltsters, and distillers themselves, have lived in immediate connection with them, often as friends or as landlords. Besides, many of them were as hard drinkers as the most besotted clowns on their estates. " A poor man," said Defoe in 1700, "gets drunk in a country alehouse. 'Why, are you not ashamed to be such a beast?' says a good, honest neighbour to him next day. 'Ashamed!' says the fellow. ' Why should I be ashamed? Why, there was Sir John——, and Sir Robert——, and the Parson, and they were all as drunk as I. And why a beast, pray? I heard Sir Robert—— say, that—
"'He that drinks least,
Is most like a beast.'"
These were the sort of men who had the licensing of country alehouses in those days. Such men as these were Justices of the Peace, and with the clergy and the overseers, had the fate, moral as well as material, of the English labourer in their hands. During the latter part of the seventeenth century and the commencement of the eighteenth century, the power of these rural magnates must have been overwhelming. The dissenting yeomen who, during the middle of the century had taken so important a stand, had to choose between losing their souls or becoming