50 THE COTTAGERS-THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS. [1689–1714 their industry for their support, or only partially so. These households, living upon a total revenue of sixteen millions and a half, comprise about cleven hundred thousand persons, or one-fifth of the whole population. The income from the land is very nearly equal to the total income of the other accumulating classes,-of the clergy, the lawyers, the physicians, the naval and military officers, the civil officers, the merchants, the men of science and arts, the traders, the artisans, and the farmers. These possess an aggregate revenue from their industry of eighteen millions, and maintain about sixteen hundred thousand persons. The independent classes, and their dependents, and the other accumulating classes, comprise one-half of the population, each person deriving twelve pounds for his annual support. The remaining population of very nearly three millions have an income of nine million pounds, or three pounds for the annual support of each person. The labouring people and out-servants have been supposed by us to belong, half to the town population and half to the country population. They are estimated to receive fifteen pounds for each family. But the income of each family of the cottagers and paupers is put as low as six pounds ten shillings, or one-sixth of the income of the artisan. We would recommend this consideration to those who are in the habit of asserting that in such happy times as the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English cottager was abundantly fed and clothed; comfortably housed; was well cared for by his betters-a contented man, who enjoyed a golden age that will never return. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the enclosed land of England was estimated at half the area of the kingdom. Since that time there have been enclosed ten thousand square miles of land, which, a hundred and fifty years ago, was heath, morass, and forest. This vast tract of land, which was capable of yielding something to spade cultivation, was the region in which Gregory King's "cottagers" gained their scanty livelihood. They were the squatters" upon the edges of commons; and the farmer regarded them with as much suspicion as he regarded the "vagrants." The squire would toss them a penny when they opened a gate, or told him which way the fox was gone. The parson cared very little for them, for they were too ragged to appear in church. Undoubtedly the out-door agricultural labourer was in a better condition than this wretched class who were so much below him. His wages varied in different localities, from four shillings to six shillings a week, without food. The average was probably five shillings. This rate agrees with King's calculation, that fifteen pounds was the annual income for a labouring man's family. The mode in which we are accustomed to regard the difference in the value of money might lead us to the conclusion, that the labourer had a better lot with five shillings a week, than with ten shillings in the present day. He indeed bought many things cheaper than the labourer of our time, but there were many articles of necessity or comfort much dearer than now, or wholly out of his reach. In 1706 wheat was forty shillings a quarter. The difference is not great between the price of 1858. But the labourer of the eighteenth century never ate wheaten bread. Woollen clothing of every sort was far dearer then. Linen was almost beyond the reach of his wife and children. There were no cheap calicoes for their shirts; no smart prints equally cheap for their frocks. 1689-1714.] CHARACTER OF THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 51 Tea and sugar, the comforts of the modern cottage, were wholly for the rich. Fresh meat was only eaten twice a week by half the working people; and never tasted at all by the other half. The salt to cure the flesh of his hog was very dear, and frightfully unwholesome. His hovel with "one chimney," was unglazed, and its thatched roof and battered walls offered the most miserable shelter. Furniture he had none, beyond a bench and a plank on tressels,-an iron-pot, and a brown basin or two. All the minor comforts of the poorest in our age were absolutely wanting. He was no partaker of the common advantages that have accrued during a century and a half, to the humblest as well as to the highest. No commodity was made cheap to him by modern facilities of communication, which in that age would have been considered miraculous. He had the ague, and his children died of the small-pox, without medical aid. The village practitioner, who might be called in at the last extremity, was an empiric, to whom the knowledge and sagacity of Sydenham were unknown, and who had no faith in the theories of Harvey. Less fortunate than the peasant of the nineteenth century, he had, in England, not the slightest chance of going out of his condition through education; or of making a humble lot more endurable by some small share of the scantily diffused stores of knowledge. His children were equally shut out from any broader view of life than that of their native hamlet; for charity schools, few and mean as they were, founded for the education of the poor, were only established in some favoured towns. Yet the peasant of the reigns of William and Anne was not an unhappy or degraded being. He had not been humiliated by a century of pauperism. He was emphatically a man-ignorant, in our sense of ignorance; believing in witches and omens; fond of rough sports, his wrestling and his cudgel-playing, and of some cruel sports, his cock-fighting, and his bull-baiting. He was not unfrequently a poacher, without any great sense of criminality. But he had a salutary respect for the constable and the justice, and was under a willing submission to the law, as were most other Englishmen. On rare occasions he freely took his glass of strong ale at the fair or the wake, the sheepshearing or the harvest home; had his honest merriment on the village-green, and sometimes was asleep on the bench over which the arms of the parish squire creaked in the wind. But he was not an habitual drunkard. He had a clean smock frock for the day when he heard the bells tolling for church; and he felt, when listening to the same words, and joining in the same ritual, as the lord of the manor heard or joined in, that he had some position in the human family. He was always a hard-worker; and he moreover knew that without industry he should fall to a condition below that in which God had placed him. "A neighbour of mine made it his remark," writes Berkeley, "in a journey from London to Bristol, that all the labourers of whom he inquired Sydenham. 52 THE FARMERS AND SMALL FREEHOLDERS. [1689-1714. the road constantly answered without looking up, or interrupting their work, except one, who stood staring and leaning on his spade, and him he found to be an Irishman.” * The Farmers, and the smaller Freeholders, were, with the exception of their greater command over the necessaries and comforts of life, at no great elevation above the husbandman who worked for wages. They were almost equally shut out from any very extensive commerce with the general world. They attended markets and fairs, but there the price of grain and of stock was the principal object of their inquiries. The local rate was the sole guide of their dealings. They had no price-currents to enable them to sell, or to hold back, according to the averages of the kingdom; nor indeed had they the power, in their limited command of labour, and in their utter want of machinery more effective than labour, to take advantage of a sudden rise in the price of food. Their bargains were hurried and improvident. The laws against forestalling prevented speculation in corn, and interfered with the natural foresight against coming seasons of scarcity. After the harvest the grain was sold as speedily as possible, to provide capital for the labour of another season. The people consumed without stint for a time; and then came terrible scarcities, with miseries innumerable in their train. The cultivators, as we have indicated, were slow to receive any improvement; and in their pursuit, as in many commercial pursuits, it was held that laboursaving expedients were an injury to the poor. They worked with the same rough tools as their grandfathers had used; for the plough and the harrow were incompetent to prepare the soil for seed without being followed up by 1 5 Husbandry Implements. (From Gervase Markham's "Farewell to Husbandry," 1620.) 1. Hack for breaking Clods after Ploughing. 2. Clotting Beetle for breaking Clods after Harrowing. 3. Clotting Beetle for Wet Clods. 4. Weeding Nippers. 5. Paring Shovel, for Clearing Ground and Destroying Weeds. much manual industry. There was a rough hospitality in their households. The great kitchen served for all domestic uses. Their home-servants took their meals at the same board with themselves; the children crowded about the floor; the dogs and the poultry gathered up the bones and the crumbs. "Works," vol. ii., p. 229. 1689-1714.] THE GENTLEMEN AND ESQUIRES. 53 They were a sturdy race, full of the independence which they had inherited from the times which made them free of the old lords of the soil; with many prejudices which had an intimate alliance with virtues-a very difficult race for courtiers and preachers of divine right to manage; such a race as rallied round Hampden when he stood up against ship-money; such a race as Cromwell chose for his Ironsides; men who preserved their traditions in their hatred of Popery, and of everything which approached Popery and arbitrary power. The forty thousand "Freeholders of the better sort," whose incomes are reckoned at ninety-one pounds a year for each family, though entitled to some of the privileges of men of worship, were separated from the "Gentlemen" and the "Esquires" by barriers more difficult to pass than those of mere wealth. We have a precise description of the "yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year, an honest man." He may sport over his own lands without being informed against. "He is just within the Game Act, and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant." He often earns his dinner with his gun. "In short, he is a very sensible man; shoots flying, and has been several times foreman of the petty jury."* But there was an insurmountable obstacle to any approach to equality between even the richest yeoman and the most impoverished esquire. The genealogy of the esquire was at once his strength and his weakness. His family pride kept him from meannesses "Spectator," No. 122. 54 CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. [1689-1714. unworthy of a gentleman; but it did not always preserve him from excesses that would appear more properly to belong to the humble origin of the coarsest peasant. Too often he fancied that his rank exempted him from the ordinary restraints of decent society. Yet, in the dissipation of the higher classes, which inevitably followed a quarter of a century of profligacy that had almost destroyed the old English character, there was, we are inclined to believe, some struggle against the fashionable temptations to which the great wholly abandoned themselves in the court of Charles II. The family ties were too often worn loosely; but the belief in those happy times "ere one to one was cursedly confined," was not a general creed. The barbarous hospitality that induced "gentlemen to think it is one of the honours of their houses that none must go out of them sober," was a little wearing away. One who looked at mankind from the philosophical as well as the religious point of view, attributes to idleness and ignorance the sensual excesses of "the uneducated fine gentleman." The Englishman is held to be "the most unsuccessful rake in the world. He is at variance with himself. He is neither brute enough to enjoy his appetites, nor man enough to govern them."+ Burnet boldly says of the gentry of his time, "They are for the most part the worst instructed, and the least knowing, of any of their rank I ever met with." They are ill-taught and ill-bred; haughty and insolent; they have no love for their country, or of public liberty; they desire to return to tyranny, provided they might be the under-tyrants. In their marriages they look only for fortune. This is an awful picture, though some of the shadows may be a little too dark. Burnet was a Whig. The majority of the country gentlemen, having set up a constitutional sovereign, were again howling for divine right, and manifesting their love for a Protestant Church by sighing for the old days of confiscation and imprisonment to sweep out non-conformity. The times are long past when a lover of his country's liberty had a right to be angry at this temper. We would rather look at it as a folly to be laughed at, as Addison looked at it. His Tory Fox-hunter is the true representative of that class of "country gentlemen, who have always lived out of the way of being better informed." The Fox-hunter was of opinion that there had been no good weather since the Revolution; and that the weather was always fine in Charles II.'s reign. He loved his spaniel, because he had once worried a Dissenting teacher. He chose an inn for his quarters because the landlord was the best Church of England man upon the road. England, he maintained, would be the happiest country in the world, if we could live within ourselves, for trade would be the ruin of the nation.§ The Toryism of sir Roger de Coverley, whom all love, was never offensive. He maintained the landed interest as opposed to the moneyed. He would not bait at a Whig inn. When he saw the headless statue of an English king in Westminster Abbey, and was told that it had been stolen, "Some Whig, I warrant you," says sir Roger. Burnet may denounce the gentry of his time as ignorant and irreligious. A far greater historian may describe the squires who were in Charles II.'s commissions of peace and lieutenancy-and they could not have changed much, in less than the term of one generation-as differing + Burnet, "Own Time," vol. vi. p. 199. * Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel." |