The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
as to the clergy, they played the part of the shepherd's dog rather than the shepherd, barking at and biting the poor sheep in the interest of their masters, the gentry. The spirit of their religion is set forth in the Conventicle Act, 16 Car. II., c. 4, which enforced anew the Statute of 35 Eliz. 1, by which all above the age of sixteen absenting themselves from church without cause for the space of a month, persuading others to be present at a Conventicle, were to be imprisoned without bail till they conformed and made submission.
The ideas of the clergy and the ruling classes on religion are well expressed by Mandeville, a clever writer of the period:
"The Poor more especially and their children should be made to go to church on Sunday, both in the fore and afternoon, because they have no time on any other. By precept and example they ought to be encouraged and used to it from their very infancy; the wilful neglect of it ought to be counted scandalous, and if downright compulsion to what I urge might seem too harsh and perhaps impracticable, all diversions at least ought to be strictly prohibited, and the poor hindered from every amusement abroad that might allure or draw them from it."
What Mandeville meant to effect by this careful church-going there can be no manner of doubt. He was philosopher enough to know that you can never be sure of a slave until you have mastered his conscience. The ancients did not understand this art, whence their terror of servile revolt. The Tudor statesmen were profoundly Machiavelian, and knew the value of mixing up respect for their position with reverence for the Almighty.
The Church of England, supported by the two Houses of Parliament, the Magistrates, and all the nobility, gentry and great landowners, had had its own way with the agricultural labourers of England for a good deal more than a thousand years. Every hostile influence has been crushed, and the whole formation of their moral and intellectual being had been in its hands. What the Church of England had done with this great trust, what it had made of its wards, to what a fate it had brought them let Crabbe, himself a clergyman, tell us. Let anyone read and ponder well "The Village," let him note that it is supported by all Crabbe says elsewhere, that it is in accord with what Clare and Bloomfield say; let him read those wonderful pieces of autobiography by another agricultural labourer:—Heaven taken by a Storm, The Bank of Faith, etc.; let him gather together such incidental references as he can find in books like that in which Hannah More recounts her work in the Mendip Hills, together with the whole literature of the Methodist Revival, and he will not be able to escape the conclusion that upon the labourer as the weakest member of the body politic all its ills have fallen.
The Game laws had their origin in that period so disastrous for England when the ruling classes managed, by means of the pretty lies of a young prince, to deceive and crush the People. From the preamble to the 7 Ric. II., c. iii. & iv., it would seem that the labourers were not disposed to accept their defeat as final, but that on Sundays and holidays, they collected in parks and warrens, under pretext of hunting; but really to confer and conspire with a view to a new rising. It was accordingly enacted that no artificer, labourer, etc., should keep any dog to hunt, nor use any means for taking deer, hares, conies or other "gentleman's game" on pain of a year's imprisonment.[4] Thus the protection up to that time limited to the game in the King's forests was now extended to that of all the great landowners.
We have seen how the destruction of the old nobility, and the stepping into their shoes of the successful among the middle classes made no real difference in the burdens laid on the people, but rather increased them. So in this question of the protection of their game, the landlord parliaments, which sat from the reign of Henry VII. to that of William and Mary, kept adding new provisions to the laws, until they related not only to deer, hares, and rabbits, but to pigs, pheasants, partridges, to heath, moor, and fen-fowl, and to various kinds of fish. Quite a network of prohibitions was constructed with reference to the possession of dogs, ferrets, guns, bows, snares, and every means used for taking wild animals. The popular notion of every Englishman's house being his castle was conspicuously demonstrated to be a fallacy, by 22 and 23 Car., 2, 15, which authorised a lord of the manor to license his gamekeeper not only to seize all prohibited means of taking game, but to search dwelling-houses and seize setting dogs, nets, etc., found in them. By the 4 and 5 William and Mary, c. 23, the private search was made more certain and odious by the promise of half the booty to the informer, and the detected poacher was subjected to the whip.
Nothing but fear of these penalties ever prevented our forefathers from taking possession of any wild creature which might come across their path, for it was long before Englishmen could believe in the right of any individual to the sole possession of the game of a district. This contempt for the Conscience is in itself a temptation to crime. The first step in opposition to the law appears very like the vindication of Justice, but the rubicon once passed, a disregard of all law ensues.
Lord Suffield, writing sixty years ago, showed that it was the most natural thing in the world for an English labourer to become a poacher. At that time over the greater part of England by incessant toil the agricultural labourer could scarcely earn more than ninepence or a shilling a day, while a gang of poachers had been known to take as much as three sacks of game in one night. Wherever there were game preserves the whole country side was demoralised, the most apparently respectable persons being implicated. A case occurred in 1816, in Gloucestershire of a large gang fully organised, having at its head the collector of the rates and taxes in the parish, who was looked upon as a respectable farmer. These gangs were co-operative societies, for they not only provided guns and other instruments, but hired men at wages little above that given to the gamekeepers to do the actual poaching while they took the booty, or at least the lion's share of it, and if these servants of the gang were arrested, money was forthcoming to pay the penalties.
It would have been bad enough if the moral ruin had been confined to a few, but it was widespread, for in some villages the whole of the inhabitants were poachers. And the law by making the taking of a wild creature as much a crime as stealing a domestic animal rendered the step from poaching to sheep-stealing perfectly natural and easy; and thus the man who commenced by snaring a rabbit frequently ended by stealing a horse, for which he was hanged or transported to Botany Bay.
If under the softened régime of the Game Laws introduced in the first year of William IV., there were, between 1833 and 1846, fifty inquests on gamekeepers found dead, twenty-nine of the cases being returned as wilful murder, and in the years 1844–1846 11,392 convictions for offences against the Game Laws in England and Wales, we may judge what must have been the amount of crime under the old régime, a régime which was in operation between four and five hundred years.
The same policy that made the English people gin-drinkers turned them into a race of smugglers. During the great struggle which William III. carried on with France all trade with that country was prohibited. The natural result was that an immense impetus was given to smuggling all along the Southern coast. The trade was so profitable that large capitalists took it up, and the people in the southern and eastern districts gave themselves up to its seductions.
Law after law was enacted to suppress this traffic, but it was found impossible to carry them out. The smugglers terrorised the people by murdering those who gave evidence against them; the Government sought to terrorise the smugglers by hanging in chains such as were convicted of these crimes. Many a dreary common or lonely spot by the sea-shore thus became invested with mysterious horror.
But men in these days were not hanged only for crimes of this sort. Blackstone refers to 168 offences in England punishable with death, four-fifths of which were made so during the reigns of the first three kings of the House of Hanover. But as late as 1812 a woman was hanged at Manchester for assisting to seize a man's potatoes, and compelling him to sell them for a lower price than he asked for them. The offences other than murder for which the agricultural labourers suffered death would be: Sheep, Cattle, and Horse stealing, and Highway robbery. Mandeville has given a picture of an execution in his day, which, with much abridgment, and an additional touch or two from other sources, will serve to show how many a wretched English labourer passed out of this life.
Debauched by the alehouse, corrupted by poaching or smuggling, he has joined on some fatal night in sheep-stealing. Some weeks have elapsed, the fear of detection has passed away, when