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      The Village Labourer 1760-1832, by J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond&mdash;A Project Gutenberg eBook
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69002 ***</div>














<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_i">[i]</span></p>
<h1>
THE VILLAGE LABOURER<br />
1760&ndash;1832
</h1>

<div class="chapter">

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iii">[iii]</span></p>

<p class="titlepage">
<span class="x-large">THE VILLAGE LABOURER</span><br />

<span class="large">1760&ndash;1832</span></p>

<p class="titlepage">
A Study in the Government of England<br />
before the Reform Bill</p>

<p class="titlepage">
BY<br />
J. L. HAMMOND <span class="allsmcap">AND</span> BARBARA HAMMOND
</p>

<div class="blockquot p2">

<p>... The men who pay wages ought not to be the political
masters of those who earn them (because laws should be
adapted to those who have the heaviest stake in the
country, for whom misgovernment means not mortified
pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain, and degradation
and risk to their own lives and to their children’s souls)....</p>


<p class="sig">
<span class="smcap">Lord Acton.</span></p>
</div>
<p class="titlepage small p2">
SECOND IMPRESSION</p>


<p class="titlepage p2">
<span class="large">LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.</span><br />
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON<br />
<span class="small">NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA</span><br />
1912
</p>

</div>

<div class="chapter">

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[v]</span></p>

<p class="titlepage p4 break">
TO<br />
GILBERT <span class="allsmcap">AND</span> MARY MURRAY
</p>

</div>

<div class="chapter">

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[vii]</span></p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="PREFACE">PREFACE</h2>
</div>


<p>Many histories have been written of the governing class that
ruled England with such absolute power during the last century
of the old régime. Those histories have shown how that class
conducted war, how it governed its colonies, how it behaved
to the continental Powers, how it managed the first critical
chapters of our relations with India, how it treated Ireland,
how it developed the Parliamentary system, how it saved
Europe from Napoleon. One history has only been sketched
in outline: it is the history of the way in which this class
governed England. The writers of this book have here attempted
to describe the life of the poor during this period.
It is their object to show what was in fact happening to the
working classes under a government in which they had no
share. They found, on searching through the material for such
a study, that the subject was too large for a single book; they
have accordingly confined themselves in this volume to the
treatment of the village poor, leaving the town worker for
separate treatment. It is necessary to mention this, for it
helps to explain certain omissions that may strike the reader.
The growth and direction of economic opinion, for example,
are an important part of any examination of this question,
but the writers have been obliged to reserve the consideration
of that subject for their later volume, to which it seems more
appropriate. The writers have also found it necessary to
leave entirely on one side for the present the movement for
Parliamentary Reform which was alive throughout this period,
and very active, of course, during its later stages.</p>

<p>Two subjects are discussed fully in this volume, they believe,
for the first time. One is the actual method and procedure of
Parliamentary Enclosure; the other the labourers’ rising of
1830. More than one important book has been written on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[viii]</span>
enclosures during the last few years, but nowhere can the
student find a full analysis of the procedure and stages by
which the old village was destroyed. The rising of 1830 has
only been mentioned incidentally in general histories: it has
nowhere been treated as a definite demand for better conditions,
and its course, scope, significance, and punishment
have received little attention. The writers of this book have
treated it fully, using for that purpose the Home Office Papers
lately made accessible to students in the Record Office. They
wish to express their gratitude to Mr. Hubert Hall for his help
and guidance in this part of their work.</p>

<p>The obligations of the writers to the important books
published in recent years on eighteenth-century local government
are manifest, and they are acknowledged in the text,
but the writers desire to mention specially their great debt to
Mr. Hobson’s <i>Industrial System</i>, a work that seems to them
to throw a new and most illuminating light on the economic
significance of the history of the early years of the last century.</p>

<p>Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Ponsonby and Miss M. K. Bradby have
done the writers the great service of reading the entire book
and suggesting many important improvements. Mr. and Mrs.
C. R. Buxton, Mr. A. Clutton Brock, Professor L. T. Hobhouse,
and Mr. H. W. Massingham have given them valuable help
and advice on various parts of the work.</p>



<p class="sig"><span class="smcap">Hampstead</span>, <i>August 1911</i></p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[ix]</span></p>

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
</div>


<table class="toc" summary="">
<tr>
<td><span class="small">CHAP.</span></td>
<td> </td>
<td><span class="small">PAGE</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">I. </td><td><span class="smcap">The Concentration of Power</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Comparison between English and French Aristocracy&mdash;Control of English Aristocracy over (1) Parliament; (2) Local Government&mdash;The Justices&mdash;Family Settlements&mdash;Feudal Dues.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">II.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The Village before Enclosure</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>The Common-field System&mdash;Classes in the Village&mdash;Motives for Enclosure&mdash;Agricultural Considerations&mdash;Moral Considerations&mdash;Extent of Parliamentary Enclosure.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">III. </td><td> <span class="smcap">Enclosure</span> (I),</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Procedure in Parliament&mdash;Composition of Private Bill Committees&mdash;Proportion of Consents required&mdash;Helplessness of Small Men&mdash;Indifference of Parliament to Local Opinion&mdash;Appointment and Powers of Enclosure Commissioners&mdash;Story of Sedgmoor.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">IV. </td><td> <span class="smcap">Enclosure</span> (II),</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_71">71</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Standing Orders&mdash;General Enclosure Bills&mdash;Consolidating Act of 1801&mdash;Popular Feeling against Enclosure&mdash;Proposals for Amending Procedure&mdash;Arthur Young’s Protest&mdash;Story of Otmoor.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">V.</td><td><span class="smcap">The Village after Enclosure</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Effects of Enclosure on (1) Small Farmers; (2) Cottagers; (3) Squatters&mdash;Expenses&mdash;Loss of Common Rights&mdash;Village Officials&mdash;Changed Outlook of Labourer.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">VI. </td><td> <span class="smcap">The Labourer in 1795</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_106">106</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Loss of Auxiliary Resources&mdash;Fuel&mdash;Gleaning&mdash;Rise in Prices&mdash;Effect of Settlement Laws&mdash;Food Riots of 1795.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">VII. </td><td> <span class="smcap">The Remedies of 1795</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>The Remedies proposed but not adopted: (1) <i>Change of Diet</i>&mdash;Cheap Cereals&mdash;Soup; (2) <i>Minimum Wage</i>&mdash;Demand from Norfolk Labourers&mdash;Whitbread’s Bills, 1795 and 1800;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[x]</span> (3) <i>Poor Law Reform</i>&mdash;Pitt’s Poor Law Bill&mdash;-Amendments of Settlement Laws; (4) <i>Allotments</i>&mdash;Success of Experiments&mdash;Hostility of Farmers&mdash;The Remedy adopted: Speenhamland System of supplementing Wages from Rates&mdash;Account of Speenhamland Meeting&mdash;Scale of Relief drawn up.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">VIII.</td><td>  <span class="smcap">After Speenhamland</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Prosperity of Agriculture during French War&mdash;Labourers not benefited&mdash;Heavy Taxation&mdash;Agricultural Depression at Peace&mdash;Labourers’ Rising in 1816&mdash;Poor Law Legislation of 1818, 1819 to relieve Ratepayers, compared with Whitbread’s Scheme in 1807&mdash;Salaried Overseers&mdash;Parish Carts&mdash;Drop in Scale of Relief for Labourers after Waterloo&mdash;New Auxiliary Resources&mdash;Poaching&mdash;Game Laws&mdash;Distress and Crime&mdash;Criminal Justice&mdash;Transportation.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">IX. </td><td> <span class="smcap">The Isolation of the Poor</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_207">207</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Attitude of Governing Class towards the Poor&mdash;An Ideal Poor Woman&mdash;Gulf between Farmers and Labourers due to Large Farms&mdash;Bailiffs&mdash;Lawyers and the Poor&mdash;The Church and the Poor&mdash;Gloom of the Village.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">X. </td><td> <span class="smcap">The Village in 1830</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Poor Law Commission Report of 1834&mdash;Effects of Speenhamland System: Degradation of Labourer; Demoralisation of Middle Classes&mdash;Possible Success of Alternative Policies&mdash;Minimum Wage&mdash;Cobbett’s Position.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XI. </td><td> <span class="smcap">The Last Labourers’ Revolt</span> (I),</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Rising in Kent&mdash;Threshing Machines&mdash;Sussex Rising: Brede&mdash;Spread of Rising Westwards&mdash;Description of Outbreak in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire&mdash;Alarm of Upper Classes&mdash;Melbourne’s Circular&mdash;Repressive Measures&mdash;Archbishop’s Prayer.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XII. </td><td><span class="smcap">The Last Labourers’ Revolt</span> (II),</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_272">272</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Special Commissions&mdash;Temper of Judges&mdash;Treatment of Prisoners&mdash;Trials at Winchester, Salisbury, Dorchester, Reading, Abingdon, Aylesbury&mdash;Cases of Arson&mdash;Position of Whig Government&mdash;Trials of Carlile and Cobbett&mdash;Proposals for helping Labourers&mdash;Lord King&mdash;Lord Suffield&mdash;Collapse of Proposals.</td>
<td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XIII. </td><td><span class="smcap">Conclusion</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_325">325</a></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td><span class="smcap">Index</span>,</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_405">405</a></td>
</tr>
</table>


<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p>

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I<br />


<span class="smaller">THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER</span></h2>
</div>

<p>‘Là l’aristocratie a pris pour elle les charges publiques les plus
lourdes afin qu’on lui permît de gouverner; ici elle a retenu
jusqu’à la fin l’immunité d’impôt pour se consoler d’avoir perdu
le gouvernement.’</p>

<p>De Tocqueville has set out in this antithesis the main argument
that runs through his analysis of the institutions of
ancient France. In England the aristocracy had power and
no privileges: in France the aristocracy had privileges and
no power. The one condition produced, as he read history,
the blending of classes, a strong and vigorous public spirit,
the calm of liberty and order: the other a society lacking
vitality and leadership, classes estranged and isolated, a concentration
of power and responsibility that impoverished
private effort and initiative without creating public energy or
public wealth.</p>

<p>De Tocqueville’s description of the actual state of France
during the eighteenth century has, of course, been disputed
by later French writers, and notably by Babeau. Their
differences are important, but for the moment we are concerned
to note that in one particular they are in complete
agreement. Neither Babeau, nor any other historian, has
questioned the accuracy of De Tocqueville’s description of
the position of the French nobles, from the day when the great
cardinals crushed their conspiracies to the day when the
Revolution destroyed the monarchy, whose heart and pulse
had almost ceased to beat. The great scheme of unity and
discipline in which Richelieu had stitched together the discords
of France left no place for aristocracy. From that danger, at
any rate, the French monarchy was safe. Other dangers were
to overwhelm it, for Richelieu, in giving to it its final form, had
secured it from the aggressions of nobles but not from the
follies of kings. <i>Tout marche, et le hasard corrige le hasard.</i>
The soliloquy of Don Carlos in <i>Hernani</i> contains an element<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>
of truth and hope for democracy which is wanting in all systems
of personal government, where the chances of recovery all
depend on a single caprice. It was the single caprice that
Versailles represented. It was the single caprice that destroyed
Richelieu’s great creation. When Louis <span class="allsmcap">XIV.</span> took to piety
and to Madame de Maintenon, he rescinded in one hour of
fatal zeal the religious settlement that had given her prosperity
to France. Her finance and her resources foundered in his
hurricanes of temper and of arrogance. Louis <span class="allsmcap">XV.</span> was known
in boyhood as ‘the beloved.’ When he fell ill in the campaign
of 1744 in Flanders, all France wept and prayed for him. It
would have been not less happy for him than it would have
been for Pompey if the intercessions of the world had died on
the breeze and never ascended to the ear of Heaven. When
thirty years later his scarred body passed to the royal peace
of St. Denis, amid the brutal jeers and jests of Paris, the history
of the French monarchy was the richer for a career as sensual
and selfish and gross as that of a Commodus, and the throne
which Richelieu had placed absolute and omnipotent above
the tempests of faction and civil war had begun to rock in the
tempests of two sovereigns’ passions.</p>

<p>One half-hearted attempt had indeed been made to change
the form and character of the monarchy. When he became
regent in 1715, Orleans played with the ideas of St. Simon
and substituted for the government of secretaries a series of
councils, on which the great nobles sat, with a supreme Council
of Regency. As a departure from the Versailles system, the experiment
at first excited enthusiasm, but it soon perished of
indifference. The bureaucrats, whom Orleans could not afford
to put on one side, quarrelled with the nobles: the nobles found
the business tedious and uninteresting: the public soon tired of
a scheme that left all the abuses untouched: and the regent,
at the best a lukewarm friend to his own innovation, had his
mind poisoned against it by the artful imagination of Dubois.
One by one the councils flickered out; the Council of the
Regency itself disappeared in 1728, and the monarchy fell
back into its old ways and habits.</p>

<p>As at Versailles, so in France. If the noble had been reduced
to a trifling but expensive cypher at the Court, the
position of seigneur in the village was not very different. In
the sixteenth century he had been a little king. His relations
with the peasants, with whom his boyhood was often spent in
the village school, were close and not seldom affectionate.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>
But though he was in many cases a gentle ruler, a ruler he undoubtedly
was, and royal ordinances had been found necessary
to curb his power. By the eighteenth century his situation
had been changed. There were survivals of feudal justice
and feudal administration that had escaped the searching eye
of Richelieu, but the seigneur had been pushed from the helm,
and the government of the village had passed into other hands.
It was the middle-class intendant and not the seigneur who
was the master. The seigneur who still resided was become
a mere rent receiver, and the people called him the ‘<i>Hobereau</i>.’
But the seigneur rarely lived in the village, for the Court, which
had destroyed his local power, had drawn him to Paris to
keep him out of mischief, and when later the Court wished
to change its policy, the seigneur refused to change his habits.
The new character of the French nobility found its expression
in its new homes. Just as the tedious splendour of Versailles,
built out of the lives and substance of an exhausted nation,
recorded the decadence and the isolation of the French
monarchy, so in the countryside the new palaces of the nobles
revealed the tastes and the life of a class that was allowed no
duties and forbidden no pleasures. The class that had once
found its warlike energy reflected in the castles of Chinon and
Loches was now only at home in the agreeable indolence of
Azay le Rideau or the delicious extravagance of Chenonceaux.
The nobles, unable to feed their pride on an authority no
longer theirs, refused no stimulant to their vanity and no sop
to their avarice. Their powers had passed to the intendant;
their land was passing to the bourgeois or the peasant; but
their privileges increased. Distinctions of rank were sharper
edged. It was harder for a plebeian to become an officer under
Louis <span class="allsmcap">XVI.</span> than it had been under Louis <span class="allsmcap">XIV</span>., and the exemptions
from taxation became a more considerable and invidious
privilege as the general burdens grew steadily more oppressive.
Nature had made the French nobleman less, but circumstances
made him more haughty than the English. Arthur Young,
accustomed to the bearing of English landlords, was struck by
the very distant condescension with which the French seigneur
treated the farmer. The seigneur was thus on the eve of the
Revolution a privileged member of the community, very jealous
of his precedence, quarrelsome about trifles, with none of the
responsibilities of a ruler, and with few of the obligations of a
citizen. It was an unenviable and an uninspiring position. It
is not surprising that Fénelon, living in the frivolous prison of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>
Versailles, should have inspired the young Duke of Burgundy
with his dream of a governing aristocracy, or that Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse should have described the public-spirited members
of this class as caged lions, or that a nobleman of the fierce
energy of the Marquis de Mirabeau should have been driven
to divide his time between the public prosecution of his noisy
and interminable quarrels with his wife and his sons, and the
composition of his feeling treatise on <i>L’Ami des Hommes</i>.</p>

<p>For in the France whose king had no thought save for hunting,
women and morbid disease, there was endless energy and
intellectual life. France sparkled with ideas. The enthusiasms
of the economists and philosophers filled the minds
of nobles who in England would have been immersed in the
practical duties of administration. The atmosphere of social
sensibility melted the dry language of official reports, and the
intendants themselves dropped a graceful tear over the
miseries of the peasants. Amid the decadence of the monarchy
and the uncivilised and untamed license of Louis <span class="allsmcap">XV.</span>, there
flourished the emancipating minds of Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Diderot and Quesnai, as well as Rousseau, the passion and
the spirit of the Revolution. On the one side is Versailles,
abandoned to gross and shameless pleasures, on the other a
society pursuing here a warm light of reason and science
with a noble rage for progress and improvement, bewitched
there by the Nouvelle Héloïse and Clarissa, delighting in
those storms of the senses that were sweeping over France.
The memoirs, the art, the literature of the time are full of these
worlds, ruled, one by philosophy and illumination, the other
by the gospel of sensibility and tender feeling, the two mingling
in a single atmosphere in such a salon as that of Julie de
Lespinasse, or in such a mind as that of Diderot. A kind of
public life tries, too, to break out of its prison in the zealous, if
somewhat mistaken exertions of agricultural societies and benevolent
landowners. But amid all this vitality and inspiration
and energy of mind and taste, the government and the
fortunes of the race depend ultimately on Versailles, who lives
apart, her voluptuous sleep undisturbed by the play of thought
and hope and eager curiosity, wrapt and isolated in her scarlet
sins.</p>

<p>When Louis <span class="allsmcap">XVI.</span> called to office Turgot, fresh from his reforms
at Limoges, it looked as if the intellect of France might be
harnessed to the monarchy. The philosophers believed that
their radiant dreams were about to come gloriously true.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>
Richelieu had planned his system for an energetic minister
and a docile king; Turgot had not less energy than Richelieu,
and Turgot’s master was not more ambitious than Louis <span class="allsmcap">XIII.</span>
But the new régime lasted less than two years, for Louis <span class="allsmcap">XVI.</span>,
cowed by courtiers and ruled by a queen who could not sacrifice
her pleasures to the peace of France, dismissed his minister,
the hopes of the reformers were destroyed, and France settled
down to the unrolling of events. The monarchy was almost
dead. It went out in a splendid catastrophe, but it was
already spent and exhausted before the States-General were
summoned. This vast, centralised scheme was run down,
exhausted by the extravagance of the Court, unable to
discharge its functions, causing widespread misery by its
portentous failure. The monarchy that the Revolution destroyed
was anarchy. Spenser talks in the <i>Faerie Queene</i> of a
little sucking-fish called the remora, which collects on the
bottom of a ship and slowly and invisibly, but surely,
arrests its progress. The last kings were like the remora,
fastening themselves on Richelieu’s creation and steadily and
gradually depriving it of power and life.</p>

<p>It was natural that De Tocqueville, surveying these two
centuries of national life, so full of mischief, misdirection and
waste, seeing, too, in the new régime the survival of many
features that he condemned in the old, should have traced all
the calamities of France to the absence of a ruling aristocracy.
It was natural that in such a temper and with such preoccupations
he should have turned wistfully and not critically to
England, for if France was the State in which the nobles had
least power, England was the State in which they had most. The
Revolution of 1688 established Parliamentary Government. The
manners and the blunders of James <span class="allsmcap">II.</span> had stripped the Crown
of the power that his predecessor had gained by his seductive
and unscrupulous politics, and when the great families settled
with the sovereign of their choice, their memories of James
were too recent and vivid to allow them to concede more than
they could help to William. The Revolution put the law of the
land over the will of the sovereign: it abolished his suspending
and dispensing powers, and it obliged him to summon Parliament
every year. It set up a limited monarchy with Parliament
controlling the Crown. But though the Revolution gave England
a constitutional Parliamentary government, that government
had no homogeneous leadership, and it looked as if its effective
force might be dissipated in the chaos and confusion of ministries.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>
In such a situation one observer at least turned his eyes to
France. There exists in the British Museum a paper by Daniel
Defoe, written apparently for the guidance of Harley, who
was Secretary of State in 1704. In this paper Defoe dwelt
on the evils of divided and dilatory government, and sketched
a scheme by which his patron might contrive to build up for
himself a position like that once enjoyed by Richelieu and
Mazarin. Defoe saw that the experiment meant a breach
with English tradition, but he does not seem to have seen,
what was equally true, that success was forbidden by the
conditions of Parliamentary government and the strength of
the aristocracy. The scheme demanded among other things the
destruction of the new Cabinet system. As it happened, this
mischievous condition of heterogeneous administration, in
which one minister counterworked and counteracted another,
came to an end in Defoe’s lifetime, and it came to an end
by the consolidation of the system which he wished to see
destroyed.</p>

<p>This was the work of Walpole, whose career, so uninviting
to those who ask for the sublime or the heroic in politics, for
it is as unromantic a story as can be desired of perseverance,
and coarse method, and art without grace, and fruits without
flowers, is one of the capital facts of English history. Walpole
took advantage of the fortunate accident that had placed on
the throne a foreigner, who took no interest in England and
did not speak her language, and laid the foundations of
Cabinet government. Walpole saw that if Parliamentary
supremacy was to be a reality, it was essential that ministers
should be collectively responsible, and that they should severally
recognise a common aim and interest; otherwise, by choosing
incompatible ministers, the king could make himself stronger
than the Cabinet and stronger than Parliament. It is true that
George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>, disdaining the docility of his predecessors, disputed
later the Parliamentary supremacy which Walpole had thus
established, and disputed it by Walpole’s own methods of corruption
and intrigue. But George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>, though he assailed the
liberal ideas of his time, and assailed them with an unhappy
success, did not threaten the power of the aristocracy. He
wanted ministers to be eclectic and incoherent, because he
wanted them to obey him rather than Parliament, but his
impulse was mere love of authority and not any sense or feeling
for a State released from this monopoly of class. Self-willed
without originality, ambitious without imagination, he wanted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
to cut the knot that tethered the Crown to the Cabinet, but
he had neither the will nor the power to put a knife in the
system of aristocracy itself. He wished to set back the clock,
but only by half a century, to the days when kings could play
minister against minister, and party against party, and not to
the days of the more resolute and daring dreams of the Stuart
fancy. The large ideas of a sovereign like Henry of Navarre
were still further from his petty and dusty vision. He was so
far successful in his intrigues as to check and defeat the better
mind of his generation, but if he had won outright, England
would have been ruled less wisely indeed, but not less deliberately
in the interests of the governing families. Thus it comes
that though his interventions are an important and demoralising
chapter in the history of the century, they do not disturb
or qualify the general progress of aristocratic power.</p>

<p>In France there was no institution, central or local, in which
the aristocracy held power: in England there was no institution,
central or local, which the aristocracy did not control.
This is clear from a slight survey of Parliament and of local
administration.</p>

<p>The extent to which this is true had probably not been
generally grasped before the publication of the studies of
Messrs. Redlich and Hirst, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb, on the
history of local government or the recent works of Dr. Slater
and Professor Hasbach on the great enclosures. Most persons
were aware of the enormous power of the aristocracy, but many
did not know that that power was greater at the end than at
the beginning of the century. England was, in fact, less like a
democracy, and more remote from the promise of democracy
when the French Revolution broke out, than it had been when
the governing families and the governing Church, whose cautions
and compromises and restraint Burke solemnly commended to
the impatient idealists of 1789, settled their account with the
Crown in the Revolution of 1688.</p>

<p>The corruptions that turned Parliamentary representation
into the web of picturesque paradoxes that fascinated Burke,
were not new in the eighteenth century. As soon as a seat
in the House of Commons came to be considered a prize,
which was at least as early as the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the avarice and ambition of powerful interests began
to eat away the democratic simplicity of the old English franchise.
Thus, by the time of James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>, England had travelled
far from the days when there was a uniform franchise, when<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
every householder who did watch and ward could vote at a
Parliamentary election, and when the practice of throwing
the provision of the Members’ wages upon the electorate discouraged
the attempt to restrict the franchise, and thereby
increase the burden of the voters. Indeed, when the Whig
families took over the government of England, the case for
Parliamentary Reform was already pressing. It had been
admitted by sovereigns like Elizabeth and James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>, and it
had been temporarily and partially achieved by Cromwell.
But the monopolies which had been created and the abuses
which had been introduced had nothing to fear from the great
governing families, and the first acts of the Revolution Parliament,
so far from threatening them, tended to give them sanction
and permanence. Down to this time there had been a
constant conflict within the boroughs between those who had
been excluded from the franchise and the minorities, consisting
of burgage-holders or corrupt corporations or freemen, who
had appropriated it. These conflicts, which were carried to
Parliament, were extinguished by two Acts, one of 1696, the
other of 1729, which declared that the last determination in
each case was final and irrevocable. No borough whose fate
had been so decided by a Parliamentary committee could ever
hope to recover its stolen franchise, and all these local reform
movements settled down to their undisturbed euthanasia.
These Acts were modified by a later Act of 1784, which allowed
a determination to be disputed within twelve months, but by
that time 127 boroughs had already received their final verdict:
in the others, where the franchise was determined after 1784,
there was some revival of local agitation.</p>

<p>The boroughs that were represented in Parliament in the
eighteenth century have been classified by Mr. Porritt, in
his learned work, in four categories. They were (1) Scot and
lot and potwalloper boroughs, (2) Burgage boroughs, (3) Corporation
boroughs, and (4) Freemen boroughs.</p>

<p>The Scot and lot boroughs, of which there were 59, ranged
from Gatton, with 135 inhabitants, to Westminster and
Northampton. On paper they approached most nearly to
the old conditions as to the franchise. A uniform qualification
of six months residence was established in 1786. In
other respects the qualifications in these boroughs varied.
In some the franchise depended on the payment of poor rate
or church rate: in others the only condition was that the
voter had not been a charge on the poor rate. The boroughs<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
of the second of these classes were called potwalloper, because
the voter had to prove that he was an inhabitant in the borough,
had a family, and boiled a pot there. This potwalloper franchise
was a survival from the days when freemen took their
meals in public to prove that they did not depend on the table
of a lord. In the eighteenth century the potwalloper sometimes
put his table in the street to show that he had a vote.
But these boroughs, in spite of their wide franchise, fell under
the control of the aristocracy almost as completely as the
others, for the reason that when the borough itself developed,
the Parliamentary borough stood still, and in many cases
the inhabitant householders who had the right to vote were
the inhabitants of a small and ancient area of the town. All
that was necessary in such circumstances in order to acquire
the representation of the borough, was to buy the larger part
of the property within this area. This was done, for example,
at Aldborough and at Steyning.</p>

<p>The Burgage boroughs were 39. They were Parliamentary
boroughs in which the right to vote attached exclusively to the
possession of burgage properties. The burgage tenants were the
owners of land, houses, shops or gardens in certain ancient
boroughs. The holders of these sites were originally tenants
who discharged their feudal obligations by a money payment,
corresponding to the freeholder in the country, who held
by soccage. They thus became the men of the township
who met in the churchyard or town hall. In many cases
residence was unnecessary to the enjoyment of the franchise.
The only qualification was the possession of title-deeds to
particular parcels of land, or registration in the records of a
manor. These title-deeds were called ‘snatch papers,’ from
the celerity with which they were transferred at times of election.
The burgage property that enfranchised the elector of
Old Sarum was a ploughed field. Lord Radnor explained
that at Downton he held 99 out of the 100 burgage tenures,
and that one of the properties was in the middle of a watercourse.
At Richmond, pigeon-lofts and pig-styes conferred
the franchise. In some cases, on the other hand, residence
was required; at Haslemere, for example, Lord Lonsdale
settled a colony of Cumberland miners in order to satisfy
this condition. Sometimes the owner of a burgage property
had to show that the house was occupied, and one proof of
this was the existence of a chimney. In all of these boroughs
the aristocracy and other controllers of boroughs worked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
hard, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to
restrict the number of properties that carried the right to
vote. The holder of burgage property and the borough patron
had a common interest in these restrictions. The burgage
boroughs provided a great many cases for the decision of Parliamentary
committees, and the borough owners mortgaged their
estates under the strain of litigation of this kind. Parliamentary
committees had to determine for example whether the Widows’
Row at Petersfield really stood on the foundation of the house
which conferred the franchise in the reign of William <span class="allsmcap">III</span>. The
most successful borough-monger was the patron who had
contrived to exclude first the non-burgage owners, and then
the majority of the burgage owners, thus reducing his expenses
within the narrowest compass.</p>

<p>The Corporation boroughs, or boroughs in which the corporation
had acquired by custom the right to elect, independently
of the burgesses, were 43. In days when Parliamentary
elections were frequent, the inhabitants of many boroughs
waived their right of election and delegated it to the corporations.
When seats in the House of Commons became more
valuable, the corporations were tenacious of this customary
monopoly, and frequently sought to have it established by
charter. These claims were contested in the seventeenth
century, but without much success, and the charters bestowed
at this time restricted the franchise to the corporations in
order to prevent ‘popular tumult, and to render the elections
and other things and the public business of the said borough
into certainty and constant order.’ It is easy to trace in these
transactions, besides the rapacity of the corporations themselves,
the influence of the landed aristocracy who were already beginning
to finger these boroughs. There was, indeed, an interval
during which the popular attacks met with some success.
When Eliot and Hampden were on the Committee of Privileges,
some towns, including Warwick, Colchester, and Boston,
regained their rights. But the Restoration was fatal to the
movement for open boroughs, and though it was hoped that
the Revolution, which had been in part provoked by the tricks
the Stuarts had played with the boroughs, would bring a more
favourable atmosphere, this expectation was defeated. All
of these boroughs fell under the rule of a patron, who bribed
the members of the corporation with money, with livings or
clerkships in the state departments, cadetships in the navy
and in India. Croker complained that he had further to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
dance with the wives and daughters of the corporation at
‘tiresome and foolish’ balls. There was no disguise or mistake
about the position. The patron spoke not of ‘my constituents’
but of ‘my corporation.’ The inhabitants outside
this little group had no share at all in Parliamentary representation,
and neither the patron nor his nominee gave them a single
thought. The members of the corporation themselves were
often non-resident, and the mayor sometimes never went near
the borough from the first day of his magistracy to the last.
His office was important, not because it made him responsible
for municipal government, but because it made him returning
officer. He had to manage the formalities of an election
for his patron.</p>

<p>The Freemen boroughs, of which there were 62, represent
in Mr. Porritt’s opinion the extreme divergence from
the old franchise. In these boroughs restrictions of different
kinds had crept in, a common restriction being that in force
at Carlisle, which limited the franchise to the inhabitants
who belonged to the trade guild. For some time these restrictions,
though they destroyed the ancient significance
of ‘freeman’ as a person to be distinguished from the ‘villein,’
did not really destroy the representative character of the
electorate. But these boroughs suffered like the others, and even
more than the others, from the demoralising effects of the appreciation
of the value of seats in Parliament, and as soon as votes
commanded money, the corporations had every inducement to
keep down the number of voters. In many boroughs there
set in a further development that was fatal to the elementary
principles of representation: the practice of selling the freedom
of the borough to non-residents. There were three classes
of buyers: men who wanted to become patrons, men who
wanted to become members, and men who wanted to become
voters. The making of honorary freemen became a favourite
process for securing the control of a borough to the corporation
or to a patron. Dunwich, which was a wealthy and
famous seaport in the time of Henry II., gradually crumbled
into the German Ocean, and in 1816 it was described by Oldfield
as consisting of forty-two houses and half a church. This
little borough contained in 1670 forty resident freemen, and in
that year it largessed its freedom on four hundred non-residents.
The same methods were applied at Carlisle, King’s Lynn, East
Grinstead, Nottingham, Liverpool, and in many other places.
A particularly flagrant case at Durham in 1762, when 215<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
freemen were made in order to turn an election, after the
issue of the writ, led to a petition which resulted in the unseating
of the member and the passing of an Act of Parliament
in the following year. This Act excluded from the franchise
honorary freemen who had been admitted within twelve
months of the first day of an election, but it did not touch
the rights of ordinary freemen admitted by the corporation.
Consequently, when a Parliamentary election was impending
or proceeding, new freemen used to swarm into the electorate
whenever the corporation or the patron had need of them.
At Bristol in 1812 seventeen hundred and twenty freemen, and
at Maldon in 1826 a thousand freemen, were so admitted and
enfranchised. Generally speaking, corporations seem to have
preferred the method of exclusion to that of flooding the electorate
with outside creations. On the eve of the Reform Bill,
there were six electors at Rye and fourteen at Dunwich. At
Launceston, early in the eighteenth century, the members of the
corporation systematically refused freedom to all but members
of their own party, and the same practices were adopted at East
Retford, Ludlow, Plympton, Hastings, and other places. Legal
remedies were generally out of reach of the excluded freemen.
There were some exceptions to the abuses which prevailed in
most of these boroughs, notably the case of the City of London.
A special Act of Parliament (1774) made it a condition of the
enjoyment of the freemen’s franchise there, that the freeman
had not received alms, and that he had been a freeman for twelve
calendar months. But in most of these boroughs, by the end
of the eighteenth century, the electorate was entirely under the
influence of the corporations. Nor was the device of withholding
freedom from those qualified by custom, and of bestowing
it on those who were only qualified by subservience, the
only resource at the command of the borough-mongers.
Charities were administered in an electioneering spirit, and
recalcitrant voters were sometimes threatened with impressment.</p>

<p>Of the 513 members representing England and Wales
in 1832, 415 sat for cities and boroughs. Fifty members
were returned by 24 cities, 332 by 166 English boroughs,
5 by single-member boroughs, 16 by the Cinque Ports, and
12 by as many Welsh boroughs. The twelve Welsh counties
returned 12 members, and the forty English counties 82,
the remaining 4 members being representatives of the Universities.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span></p>

<p>The county franchise had a much less chequered history
than the various franchises in boroughs. Before the reign
of Henry <span class="allsmcap">VI.</span>, every free inhabitant householder, freeholder
or non-freeholder, could vote at elections of Knights of the
Shire. The Act of 1430 limited the franchise to forty-shilling
freeholders. Many controversies raged round this definition,
and by the eighteenth century, men were voting in respect
of annuities, rent-charges, the dowries of their wives and
pews in church. Mr. Porritt traces the faggot voter to the
early days of Charles <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> Two changes were made in the county
franchise between 1430 and 1832. The residential qualification
disappears by 1620: in 1702 a tax-paying qualification
was introduced under which a property did not carry a
vote unless it had been taxed for a year. In 1781 the
year was cut down to six months. Great difficulties and
irregularities occurred with regard to registration, and a Bill
was passed into law in 1784 to establish a public system of
registration. The Act, however, was repealed in the next year,
in consequence of the agitation against the expense. The
county franchise had a democratic appearance but the county
constituencies were very largely under territorial sway, and
by the middle of the fifteenth century Jack Cade had complained
of the pressure of the great families on their
tenants. Fox declared that down to 1780 one of the members
for Yorkshire had always been elected in Lord
Rockingham’s dining-room, and from that time onwards
the representation of that county seems to have been a
battle of bribes between the Rockinghams, the Fitzwilliams
and the Harewoods.</p>

<p>It is easy to see from this sketch of the manner in which the
Parliamentary franchise had been drawn into the hands of
patrons and corporations, that the aristocracy had supreme command
of Parliament. Control by patrons was growing steadily
throughout the eighteenth century. The Society of Friends
of the People presented a petition to the House of Commons
in 1793, in which it was stated that 157 members were sent
to Parliament by 84 individuals, and 150 other members
were returned by the recommendation of 70 powerful individuals.
The relations of such members to their patrons
were described by Fox in 1797, ‘When Gentlemen represent
populous towns and cities, then it is a disputed point whether
they ought to obey their voice or follow the dictates of their
own conscience. But if they represent a noble lord or a noble<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>
duke then it becomes no longer a question of doubt, and he
is not considered a man of honour who does not implicitly
obey the orders of a single constituent.’<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> The petition of the
Society of Friends of the People contained some interesting
information as to the number of electors in certain constituencies:
90 members were returned by 46 places, in none
of which the number of voters exceeded 50, 37 ‘by 19
places in none of which the number of voters exceeds 100,
and 52 by 26 in none of which the number of voters exceeded
200. Seventy-five members were returned for 35 places in
which it would be to trifle with the patience of your Honourable
House to mention any number of voters at all,’ the elections
at the places alluded to being notoriously a matter of
form.</p>

<p>If the qualifications of voters had changed, so had the
qualifications of members. A power that reposed on this
basis would have seemed reasonably complete, but the aristocracy
took further measures to consolidate its monopoly.
In 1710 Parliament passed an Act, to which it gave the prepossessing
title ‘An Act for securing the freedom of Parliament,
by further qualifying the Members to sit in the House
of Commons,’ to exclude all persons who had not a certain
estate of land, worth in the case of knights of the shire, £500,
and in the case of burgesses, £300. This Act was often evaded
by various devices, and the most famous of the statesmen
of the eighteenth century sat in Parliament by means of
fictitious qualifications, among others Pitt, Burke, Fox and
Sheridan. But the Act gave a tone to Parliament, and it
was not a dead letter.<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> It had, too, the effect of throwing
the ambitious merchant into the landlord class, and of enveloping
him in the landlord atmosphere. Selection and assimilation,
as De Tocqueville saw, and not exclusion, are the true
means of preserving a class monopoly of power. We might,
indeed, sum up the contrast between the English and French
aristocracy by saying that the English aristocracy understood
the advantages of a scientific social frontier, whereas the French
were tenacious of a traditional frontier. More effectual in practice
than this imposition of a property qualification was the
growing practice of throwing on candidates the official expenses<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>
of elections. During the eighteenth century these expenses
grew rapidly, and various Acts of Parliament, in particular
that of 1745, fixed these charges on candidates.</p>

<p>It followed naturally, from a system which made all municipal
government merely one aspect of Parliamentary electioneering,
that the English towns fell absolutely into the hands of
corrupt oligarchies and the patrons on whom they lived.
The Tudor kings had conceived the policy of extinguishing
their independent life and energies by committing their
government to select bodies with power to perpetuate themselves
by co-opting new members. The English aristocracy
found in the boroughs&mdash;with the mass of inhabitants disinherited
and all government and power vested in a small
body&mdash;a state of things not less convenient and accommodating
to the new masters of the machine than it had been to the
old. The English towns, which three centuries earlier had
enjoyed a brisk and vigorous public life, were now in a state
of stagnant misgovernment: as the century advanced, they
only sank deeper into the slough, and the Report of the Commission
of 1835 showed that the number of inhabitants who
were allowed any share in public life or government was infinitesimal.
In Plymouth, for example, with a population
of 75,000, the number of resident freemen was under 300:
in Ipswich, with more than 20,000 inhabitants, there were
350 freemen of whom more than 100 were not rated, and
some forty were paupers. Municipal government throughout
the century was a system not of government but of property.
It did not matter to the patron whether Winchester
or Colchester had any drains or constables: the patron had
to humour the corporation or the freemen, the corporation
or the freemen had to keep their bargain with the patron.
The patron gave the corporation money and other considerations:
the corporation gave the patron control over a seat
in Parliament. Neither had to consider the interests or the
property of the mass of burgesses. Pitt so far recognised
the ownership of Parliamentary boroughs as property, that
he proposed in 1785 to compensate the patrons of the boroughs
he wished to disenfranchise. Every municipal office was regarded
in the same spirit. The endowments and the charities
that belonged to the town belonged to a small oligarchy
which acknowledged no responsibility to the citizens for its
proceedings, and conducted its business in secret. The whole
system depended on the patron, who for his part represented<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
the absolute supremacy of the territorial aristocracy to which
he belonged. Civic life there was none.</p>

<p>If we turn to local government outside the towns there is
the same decay of self-government.</p>

<p>One way of describing the changes that came over English
society after the break-up of feudalism would be to say that
as in France everything drifted into the hands of the intendant,
in England everything drifted into the hands of the Justice
of the Peace. This office, created in the first year of Edward <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>,
had grown during his reign to very great importance and
power. Originally the Justices of the Peace were appointed
by the state to carry out certain of its precepts, and generally
to keep the peace in the counties in which they served. In
their quarterly sittings they had the assistance of a jury, and
exercised a criminal jurisdiction concurrent with that which the
king’s judges exercised when on circuit. But from early days
they developed an administrative power which gradually drew to
itself almost all the functions and properties of government.
Its quasi-judicial origin is seen in the judicial form under
which it conducted such business as the supervision of roads
and bridges. Delinquencies and deficiencies were ‘presented’
to the magistrates in court. It became the habit, very early
in the history of the Justices of the Peace, to entrust to them
duties that were new, or duties to which existing authorities
were conspicuously inadequate. In the social convulsions
that followed the Black Death, it was the Justice of the Peace
who was called in to administer the elaborate legislation by
which the capitalist classes sought to cage the new ambitions
of the labourer. Under the Elizabethan Poor Law, it was the
Justice of the Peace who appointed the parish overseers and
approved their poor rate, and it was the Justice of the Peace
who held in his hand the meshes of the law of Settlement.
In other words, the social order that emerged from mediæval
feudalism centred round the Justice of the Peace in England
as conspicuously as it centred round the bureaucracy in
France. During the eighteenth century, the power of the
Justice of the Peace reached its zenith, whilst his government
acquired certain attributes that gave it a special significance.</p>

<p>At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were still
many small men taking some part in the affairs of the village.
The old manorial civilisation was disappearing, but Mr. and
Mrs. Webb have shown that manor courts of one kind or
another were far more numerous and had far more to do at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>
the beginning of the eighteenth century than has been commonly
supposed. Such records as survive, those, <i>e.g.</i> of
Godmanchester and Great Tew, prove that the conduct and
arrangement of the business of the common fields&mdash;and England
was still, at the beginning of this period, very largely a country
of common fields&mdash;required and received very full and careful
attention. Those courts crumble away as the common
fields vanish, and with them there disappears an institution
in which, as Professor Vinogradoff has shown, the small man
counted and had recognised rights. By the time of the Reform
Bill, a manor court was more or less of a local curiosity. The
village vestries again, which represented another successor
to the manorial organisation, democratic in form, were losing
their vitality and functions, and coming more and more under
the shadow of the Justices of the Peace. Parochial government
was declining throughout the century, and though Professor
Lowell in his recent book speaks of village government
as still democratic in 1832, few of those who have examined
the history of the vestry believe that much was left of its
democratic character. By the end of the eighteenth century,
the entire administration of county affairs, as well as the
ultimate authority in parish business, was in the hands of the
Justice of the Peace, the High Sheriff, and the Lord-Lieutenant.</p>

<p>The significance of this development was increased by the
manner in which the administration of the justices was conducted.
The transactions of business fell, as the century
advanced, into fewer and fewer hands, and became less and
less public in form and method. The great administrative
court, Quarter Sessions, remained open as a court of justice,
but it ceased to conduct its county business in public. Its
procedure, too, was gradually transformed. Originally the
court received ‘presentments’ or complaints from many
different sources&mdash;the grand juries, the juries from the Hundreds,
the liberties and the boroughs, and from constable juries.
The grand juries presented county bridges, highways or gaols
that needed repair: the Hundred juries presented delinquencies
in their divisions: constable juries presented such minor anti-social
practices as the keeping of pigs. Each of these juries
represented some area of public opinion. The Grand Jury,
besides giving its verdict on all these presentments, was in
other ways a very formidable body, and acted as a kind of
consultative committee, and perhaps as a finance committee.
Now all this elaborate machinery was simplified in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
eighteenth century, and it was simplified by the abandonment
of all the quasi-democratic characteristics and
methods. Presentments by individual justices gradually
superseded presentments by juries. By 1835 the Hundred
Jury and Jury of Constables had disappeared: the Grand
Jury had almost ceased to concern itself with local government,
and the administrative business of Quarter Sessions
was no longer discussed in open court.</p>

<p>Even more significant in some respects was the delegation
of a great part of county business, including the protection
of footpaths, from Quarter Sessions to Petty Sessions or to
single justices out of sessions. Magistrates could administer
in this uncontrolled capacity a drastic code for the punishment
of vagrants and poachers without jury or publicity.
The single justice himself determined all questions of law and
of fact, and could please himself as to the evidence he chose
to hear. In 1822 the Duke of Buckingham tried and convicted
a man of coursing on his estate. The trial took place in the
duke’s kitchen: the witnesses were the duke’s keepers. The
defendant was in this case not a poacher, who was <i>fera naturæ</i>,
but a farmer, who was in comparison a person of substance
and standing. The office of magistrate possessed a special
importance for the class that preserved game, and readers
of <i>Rob Roy</i> will remember that Mr. Justice Inglewood had to
swallow his prejudices against the Hanoverian succession
and take the oaths as a Justice of the Peace, because the
refusal of most of the Northumberland magistrates, being
Jacobites, to serve on the bench, had endangered the strict
administration of the Game Laws. We know from the novels
of Richardson and Fielding and Smollett how this power
enveloped village life. Richardson has no venom against
the justices. In <i>Pamela</i> he merely records the fact that Mr.
B. was a magistrate for two counties, and that therefore it was
hopeless for Pamela, whom he wished to seduce, to elude
his pursuit, even if she escaped from her duress in his country
house.</p>

<p>Fielding, who saw the servitude of the poor with less patience
and composure, wrote of country life with knowledge and
experience. In <i>Joseph Andrews</i> he describes the young squire
who forbids the villagers to keep dogs, and kills any dog that
he finds, and the lawyer who assures Lady Booby that ‘the
laws of the land are not so vulgar to permit a mean fellow
to contend with one of your ladyship’s fortune. We have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
one sure card, which is to carry him before Justice Frolic, who
upon hearing your ladyship’s name, will commit him without
any further question.’ Mr. Justice Frolic was as good as his
reputation, and at the moment of their rescue Joseph and
Fanny were on the point of being sent to Bridewell on the
charge of taking a twig from a hedge. Fielding and Richardson
wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1831 Denman,
the Attorney-General in Grey’s Government, commented
on the difference between the punishments administered by
judges at Assize and those administered by justices at Quarter
Sessions, in the defence of their game preserves, observing
that the contrast ‘had a very material effect in confusing in
the minds of the people the notions of right and wrong.’ This
territorial power was in fact absolute. In France the peasant
was in some cases shielded from the caprice of the seigneur
by the Crown, the Parlements and the intendants. Both
Henry <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> and Louis <span class="allsmcap">XIII.</span> intervened to protect the communities
in the possession of their goods from the encroachments of
seigneurs, while Louis <span class="allsmcap">XIV.</span> published an edict in 1667 restoring
to the communities all the property they had alienated since
1620. In England he was at the landlord’s mercy: he stood
unprotected beneath the canopy of this universal power.</p>

<p>Nor was the actual authority, administrative or judicial,
of the magistrates and their surveillance of the village the
full measure of their influence. They became, as Mr. and
Mrs. Webb have shown, the domestic legislature. The most
striking example of their legislation was the Berkshire Bread
Act. In 1795 the Berkshire Court of Quarter Sessions summoned
justices and ‘several discreet persons’ to meet at Speenhamland
for the purpose of rating husbandry wages. This
meeting passed the famous resolution providing for the supplementing
of wages out of the rates, on a certain fixed scale,
according to the price of flour. The example of these seven
clergymen and eleven squires was quickly followed in other
counties, and Quarter Sessions used to have tables drawn up and
printed, giving the justices’ scale, to be issued by the Clerk of
the Peace to every acting magistrate and to the churchwardens
and overseers of every parish. It was a handful of magistrates
in the different counties, acting on their own initiative,
without any direction from Parliament, that set loose this social
avalanche in England. Parliament, indeed, had developed
the habit of taking the opinion of the magistrates as conclusive
on all social questions, and whereas a modern elected local<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
authority has to submit to the control of a department subject
to Parliament, in the eighteenth century a non-elected local
authority, not content with its own unchecked authority,
virtually controlled the decisions of Parliament as well. The
opposition of the magistrates to Whitbread’s Bill in 1807,
for example, was accepted as fatal and final.</p>

<p>Now if the Crown had been more powerful or had followed
a different policy, the Justices of the Peace, instead of developing
into autonomous local oligarchies, might have become its
representatives. When feudal rights disappeared with the
Wars of the Roses, the authority of the Justice of the Peace,
an officer of the Crown, superseded that of the local lord.
Mr. Jenks<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> is therefore justified in saying that ‘the governing
caste in English country life since the Reformation has not
been a feudal but an official caste.’ But this official caste
is, so to speak, only another aspect of the feudal caste, for
though on paper the representatives of the central power,
the county magistrates were in practice, by the end of the
eighteenth century, simply the local squires putting into force
their own ideas and policy. Down to the Rebellion, the Privy
Council expected judges of assize to choose suitable persons
for appointment as magistrates. Magistrates were made and
unmade until the reign of George <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>, according to the political
prepossessions of governments. But by the end of the eighteenth
century the Lord Lieutenant’s recommendations were
virtually decisive for appointment, and dismissal from the bench
became unknown. Thus though the system of the magistracy,
as Redlich and Hirst pointed out, enabled the English constitution
to rid itself of feudalism a century earlier than the
continent, it ultimately gave back to the landlords in another
form the power that they lost when feudalism disappeared.</p>

<p>Another distinctive feature of the English magistracy contributed
to this result. The Justice of the Peace was unpaid.
The statutes of Edward <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> and Richard <span class="allsmcap">II.</span> prescribed wages
at the handsome rate of four shillings a day, but it seems to
be clear, though the actual practice of benches is not very
easy to ascertain, that the wages in the rare instances when
they were claimed were spent on hospitality, and did not go
into the pockets of the individual justices. Lord Eldon gave
this as a reason for refusing to strike magistrates off the list
in cases of private misconduct. ‘As the magistrates gave
their services gratis they ought to be protected.’ When it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>
was first proposed in 1785 to establish salaried police commissioners
for Middlesex, many Whigs drew a contrast between
the magistrates who were under no particular obligation to
the executive power and the officials proposed to be appointed
who would receive salaries, and might be expected to take
their orders from the Government.</p>

<p>The aristocracy was thus paramount both in local government
and in Parliament. But to understand the full significance
of its absolutism we must notice two important social
events&mdash;the introduction of family settlements and the abolition
of military tenures.</p>

<p>A class that wishes to preserve its special powers and privileges
has to discover some way of protecting its corporate
interests from the misdemeanours and follies of individual
members. The great landlords found such a device in the
system of entail which gave to each successive generation
merely a life interest in the estates, and kept the estates
themselves as the permanent possession of the family. But
the lawyers managed to elude this device of the landowners
by the invention of sham law-suits, an arrangement by which
a stranger brought a claim for the estate against the limited
owner in possession, and got a judgment by his connivance.
The stranger was in truth the agent of the limited owner,
who was converted by this procedure into an absolute owner.
The famous case known as Taltarums case in 1472, established
the validity of these lawsuits, and for the next two hundred
years ‘Family Law’ no longer controlled the actions of the
landowners and the market for their estates. During this
time Courts of Law and Parliament set their faces against all
attempts to reintroduce the system of entails. As a consequence
estates were sometimes melted down, and the inheritances
of ancient families passed into the possession of yeomen
and merchants. The landowners had never accepted their
defeat. In the reign of Elizabeth they tried to devise family
settlements that would answer their purpose as effectually
as the old law of entail, but they were foiled by the great
judges, Popham and Coke. After the Restoration, unhappily,
conditions were more propitious. In the first place, the risks
of the Civil War had made it specially important for rich men
to save their estates from forfeiture by means of such settlements,
and in the second place the landowning class was
now all-powerful. Consequently the attempt which Coke
had crushed now succeeded, and rich families were enabled<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
to tie up their wealth.<a id="FNanchor_4" href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> Family settlements have ever
since been a very important part of our social system.
The merchants who became landowners bought up the
estates of yeomen, whereas in eighteenth-century France
it was the land of noblemen that passed to the <i>nouveaux
riches</i>.</p>

<p>The second point to be noticed in the history of this landlord
class is the abolition of the military tenures in 1660.
The form and the method of this abolition are both significant.
The military dues were the last remaining feudal liability of
the landlords to the Crown. They were money payments
that had taken the place of old feudal services. The landlords,
who found them vexatious and capricious, had been trying
to get rid of them ever since the reign of James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> In 1660
they succeeded, and the Restoration Parliament revived the
Act of Cromwell’s Parliament four years earlier which abolished
military tenures. The bargain which the landlords made with
the Crown on this occasion was ingenious and characteristic;
it was something like the Concordat between Francis <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> and
Leo <span class="allsmcap">X.</span>, which abolished the Pragmatic sanction at the expense
of the Gallican Church; for the landowners simply transferred
their liability to the general taxpayer. The Crown forgave
the landlords their dues in consideration of receiving a grant
from the taxation of the food of the nation. An Excise tax
was the substitute.</p>

<p>Now the logical corollary of the abolition of the feudal dues
that vexed the large landowners would have been the abolition
of the feudal dues that vexed the small landowners. If
the great landlords were no longer to be subject to their
dues in their relation to the Crown, why should the small
copyholder continue to owe feudal dues to the lord? The
injustice of abolishing the one set of liabilities and retaining
the other struck one observer very forcibly, and he was
an observer who knew something, unlike most of the governing
class, from intimate experience of the grievances of the
small landowner under this feudal survival. This was Francis
North (1637&ndash;1685), the first Lord Guildford, the famous lawyer
and Lord Chancellor. North had begun his career by acting
as the steward of various manors, thinking that he would
gain an insight into human nature which would be of great
value to him in his practice at the bar. His experience in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>
this capacity, as we know from Roger North’s book <i>The Lives
of the Norths</i>, disclosed to him an aspect of feudalism which
escaped the large landowners&mdash;the hardships of their dependants.
He used to describe the copyhold exactions, and to say that
in many cases that came under his notice small tenements
and pieces of land which had been in a poor family for generations
were swallowed up in the monstrous fines imposed on
copyholders. He said he had often found himself the executioner
of the cruelty of the lords and ladies of manors upon
poor men, and he remarked the inconsistency that left all
these oppressions untouched in emancipating the large landowners.
Maine, in discussing this system, pointed out that
these signorial dues were of the kind that provoked the French
Revolution. There were two reasons why a state of things
which produced a revolution in France remained disregarded
in England. One was that the English copyholders were a
much smaller class: the other that, as small proprietors were
disappearing in England, the English copyholder was apt to
contrast his position with the status of the landless labourer,
and to congratulate himself on the possession of a property,
whereas in France the copyholder contrasted his position with
the status of the freeholder and complained of his services.
The copyholders were thus not in a condition to raise a violent
or dangerous discontent, and their grievances were left unredressed.
It is sometimes said that England got rid of feudalism
a century earlier than the continent. That is true
of the English State, but to understand the agrarian history
of the eighteenth century we must remember that, as it has
been well said, ‘whereas the English State is less feudal, the
English land law is more feudal than that of any other country
in Europe.’<a id="FNanchor_5" href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>

<p>Lastly, the class that is armed with all these social and political
powers dominates the universities and the public schools.
The story of how the colleges changed from communities of poor
men into societies of rich men, and then gradually swallowed
up the university, has been told in the Reports of University
Commissions. By the eighteenth century the transformation
was complete, and both the ancient universities were the
universities of the rich. There is a passage in Macaulay
describing the state and pomp of Oxford at the end of the
seventeenth century, ‘when her Chancellor, the venerable
Duke of Ormonde, sat in his embroidered mantle on his throne<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian theatre, surrounded
by hundreds of graduates robed according to their
rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly
presented to him as candidates for academical honours.’ The
university was a power, not in the sense in which that could
be said of a university like the old university of Paris,
whose learning could make popes tremble, but in the sense
that the university was part of the recognised machinery
of aristocracy. What was true of the universities was
true of the public schools. Education was the nursery not
of a society, but of an order; not of a state, but of a race
of rulers.</p>

<p>Thus on every side this class is omnipotent. In Parliament
with its ludicrous representation, in the towns with their
decayed government, in the country, sleeping under the absolute
rule of the Justice of the Peace, there is no rival power. The
Crown is for all purposes its accomplice rather than its competitor.
It controls the universities, the Church, the law,
and all the springs of life and discussion. Its own influence
is consolidated by the strong social discipline embodied
in the family settlements. Its supremacy is complete and
unquestioned. Whereas in France the fermentation of ideas
was an intellectual revolt against the governing system and
all literature spoke treason, in England the existing régime
was accepted, we might say assumed, by the world of letters
and art, by the England that admired Reynolds and Gibbon,
or listened to Johnson and Goldsmith, or laughed with
Sheridan and Sterne. To the reason of France, the government
under which France lived was an expensive paradox: to the
reason of England, any other government than the government
under which England lived was unthinkable. Hence
De Tocqueville saw only a homogeneous society, a society
revering its institutions in the spirit of Burke in contrast with
a society that mocked at its institutions in the spirit of
Voltaire.</p>

<p>‘You people of great families and hereditary trusts and
fortunes,’ wrote Burke to the Duke of Richmond in 1772,
‘are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be by
the rapidity of our growth and even by the fruit we bear,
flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the ground, we belly
into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour, yet still
we are but annual plants that perish with our season, and
leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country,
and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation.’
We propose in this book to examine the social history of
England in the days when the great oaks were in the fulness
of their vigour and strength, and to see what happened to
some of the classes that found shelter in their shade.</p>


<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span></p>

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II<br />

<span class="smaller">THE VILLAGE BEFORE ENCLOSURE</span></h2>
</div>


<div class="blockquot">

<p>To elucidate these chapters, and to supply further information for
those who are interested in the subject, we publish an Appendix containing
the history, and tolerably full particulars, of twelve separate
enclosures. These instances have not been chosen on any plan. They
are taken from different parts of the country, and are of various dates;
some are enclosures of common fields, some enclosures of commons and
waste, and some include enclosures of both kinds.</p>
</div>


<p>At the time of the great Whig Revolution, England was in
the main a country of commons and of common fields<a id="FNanchor_6" href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>; at the
time of the Reform Bill, England was in the main a country of
individualist agriculture and of large enclosed farms. There
has probably been no change in Europe in the last two centuries
comparable to this in importance of which so little is
known to-day, or of which so little is to be learnt from the
general histories of the time. The accepted view is that this
change marks a great national advance, and that the hardships
which incidentally followed could not have been avoided:
that it meant a vast increase in the food resources of England
in comparison with which the sufferings of individuals counted
for little: and that the great estates which then came into
existence were rather the gift of economic forces than the
deliberate acquisitions of powerful men. We are not concerned
to corroborate or to dispute the contention that enclosure
made England more productive,<a id="FNanchor_7" href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> or to discuss the merits of
enclosure itself as a public policy or a means to agricultural
progress in the eighteenth century. Our business is with the
changes that the enclosures caused in the social structure of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
England, from the manner in which they were in practice
carried out. We propose, therefore, to describe the actual
operations by which society passed through this revolution,
the old village vanished, and rural life assumed its modern
form and character.</p>

<p>It is difficult for us, who think of a common as a wild sweep
of heather and beauty and freedom, saved for the enjoyment
of the world in the midst of guarded parks and forbidden
meadows, to realise that the commons that disappeared from
so many an English village in the eighteenth century belonged
to a very elaborate, complex, and ancient economy. The
antiquity of that elaborate economy has been the subject of
fierce contention, and the controversies that rage round the
nursery of the English village recall the controversies that
raged round the nursery of Homer. The main subject of
contention has been this. Was the manor or the township,
or whatever name we like to give to the primitive unit of
agricultural life, an organisation imposed by a despotic landowner
on his dependents, or was it created by the co-operation
of a group of free tribesmen, afterwards dominated by a military
overlord? Did it owe more to Roman tradition or to Teutonic
tendencies? Professor Vinogradoff, the latest historian, inclines
to a compromise between these conflicting theories. He thinks
that it is impossible to trace the open-field system of cultivation
to any exclusive right of ownership or to the power of coercion,
and that the communal organisation of the peasantry, a
village community of shareholders who cultivated the land
on the open-field system and treated the other requisites
of rural life as appendant to it, is more ancient than the
manorial order. It derives, in his view, from the old English
society. The manor itself, an institution which partakes
at once of the character of an estate and of a unit of local
government, was produced by the needs of government and
the development of individualist husbandry, side by side
with this communal village. These conditions lead to the
creation of lordships, and after the Conquest they take form
in the manor. The manorial element, in fact, is superimposed
on the communal, and is not the foundation of it: the mediæval
village is a free village gradually feudalised. Fortunately
it is not incumbent on us to do more than touch on this fascinating
study, as it is enough for our purposes to note that the
greater part of England in cultivation at the beginning of the
eighteenth century was cultivated on a system which, with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
certain local variations, belonged to a common type, representing
this common ancestry.</p>

<p>The term ‘common’ was used of three kinds of land in the
eighteenth-century village, and the three were intimately
connected with each other. There were (1) the arable fields,
(2) the common meadowland, and (3) the common or waste.
The arable fields were divided into strips, with different owners,
some of whom owned few strips, and some many. The various
strips that belonged to a particular owner were scattered
among the fields. Strips were divided from each other, sometimes
by a grass band called a balk, sometimes by a furrow.
They were cultivated on a uniform system by agreement,
and after harvest they were thrown open to pasturage. The
common meadow land was divided up by lot, pegged out,
and distributed among the owners of the strips; after the
hay was carried, these meadows, like the arable fields, were
used for pasture. The common or waste, which was used as
a common pasture at all times of the year, consisted sometimes
of woodland, sometimes of roadside strips, and sometimes of
commons in the modern sense.<a id="FNanchor_8" href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>

<p>Such, roughly, was the map of the old English village. What
were the classes that lived in it, and what were their several
rights? In a normal village there would be (1) a Lord of the
Manor, (2) Freeholders, some of whom might be large proprietors,
and many small, both classes going by the general name of
Yeomanry, (3) Copyholders, (4) Tenant Farmers, holding by
various sorts of tenure, from tenants at will to farmers with
leases for three lives, (5) Cottagers, (6) Squatters, and (7) Farm
Servants, living in their employers’ houses. The proportions
of these classes varied greatly, no doubt, in different villages,
but we have an estimate of the total agricultural population
in the table prepared by Gregory King in 1688, from which
it appears that in addition to the Esquires and Gentlemen,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
there were 40,000 families of freeholders of the better sort,
120,000 families of freeholders of the lesser sort, and 150,000
farmers. Adam Smith, it will be remembered, writing nearly
a century later, said that the large number of yeomen was at
once the strength and the distinction of English agriculture.</p>

<p>Let us now describe rather more fully the different people
represented in these different categories, and the different
rights that they enjoyed. We have seen in the first chapter
that the manorial courts had lost many of their powers by
this time, and that part of the jurisdiction that the Lord of
the Manor had originally exercised had passed to the Justice
of the Peace. No such change had taken place in his relation
to the economic life of the village. He might or he might
not still own a demesne land. So far as the common arable
or common meadow was concerned, he was in the same position
as any other proprietor: he might own many strips or
few strips or no strips at all. His position with regard to the
waste was different, the difference being expressed by Blackstone
‘in those waste grounds, which are usually called commons,
the property of the soil is generally in the Lord of the Manor,
as in the common fields it is in the particular tenant.’ The
feudal lawyers had developed a doctrine that the soil of the
waste was vested in the Lord of the Manor, and that originally
it had all belonged to him. But feudal law acknowledged
certain definite limitations to his rights over the waste. The
Statute of Merton, 1235, allowed him to make enclosures on
the waste, but only on certain terms; he was obliged to leave
enough of the waste for the needs of his tenants. Moreover,
his powers were limited, not only by the concurrent rights of
freeholders and copyholders thus recognised by this ancient
law, but also by certain common rights of pasture and turbary
enjoyed by persons who were neither freeholders nor copyholders,
namely cottagers. These rights were explained by
the lawyers of the time as being concessions made by the Lord
of the Manor in remote antiquity. The Lord of the Manor
was regarded as the owner of the waste, subject to these
common rights: that is, he was regarded as owning the minerals
and the surface rights (sand and gravel) as well as sporting
rights.</p>

<p>Every grade of property and status was represented in the
ranks of the freeholders, the copyholders and the tenant
farmers, from the man who employed others to work for him
to the man who was sometimes employed in working for others.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
No distinct line, in fact, can be drawn between the small
farmer, whether freeholder, copyholder or tenant, and the
cottager, for the cottager might either own or rent a few strips;
the best dividing-line can be drawn between those who made
their living mainly as farmers, and those who made their living
mainly as labourers.</p>

<p>It is important to remember that no farmer, however large
his holdings or property, or however important his social position,
was at liberty to cultivate his strips as he pleased. The
system of cultivation would be settled for him by the Jury of
the Manor Court, a court that had different names in different
places. By the eighteenth century the various courts of the
manorial jurisdiction had been merged in a single court, called
indifferently the View of Frankpledge, the Court Leet, the
Court Baron, the Great Court or the Little Court, which transacted
so much of the business hitherto confided to various
courts as had not been assigned to the Justices of the Peace.<a id="FNanchor_9" href="#Footnote_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>
Most of the men of the village, freeholders, copyholders,
leaseholders, or cottagers, attended the court, but the constitution
of the Jury or Homage seems to have varied in different
manors. Sometimes the tenants of the manor were taken
haphazard in rotation: sometimes the steward controlled
the choice, sometimes a nominee of the steward or a nominee
of the tenants selected the Jury: sometimes the steward took
no part in the selection at all. The chief part of the business
of these courts in the eighteenth century was the management
of the common fields and common pastures, and the appointment
of the village officers. These courts decided which seed
should be sown in the different fields, and the dates at which
they were to be opened and closed to common pasture. Under
the most primitive system of rotation the arable land was
divided into three fields, of which one was sown with wheat,
another with spring corn, and the third lay fallow: but by
the end of the eighteenth century there was a great variety
of cultivation, and we find a nine years’ course at Great Tew
in Oxfordshire, a six years’ course in Berkshire, while the
Battersea common fields were sown with one uniform round
of grain without intermission, and consequently without
fallowing.<a id="FNanchor_10" href="#Footnote_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>

<p>By Sir Richard Sutton’s Act<a id="FNanchor_11" href="#Footnote_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> for the cultivation of common<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
fields, passed in 1773, a majority of three-fourths in number
and value of the occupiers, with the consent of the owner and
titheholder, was empowered to decide on the course of husbandry,
to regulate stinted commons, and, with the consent
of the Lord of the Manor, to let off a twelfth of the common,
applying the rent to draining or improving the rest of it.<a id="FNanchor_12" href="#Footnote_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>
Before this Act, a universal consent to any change of system
was necessary.<a id="FNanchor_13" href="#Footnote_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> The cultivation of strips in the arable fields
carried with it rights of common over the waste and also over
the common fields when they were thrown open. These
rights were known as ‘common appendant’ and they are
thus defined by Blackstone: ‘Common appendant is a right
belonging to the owners or occupiers of arable land to put
commonable beasts upon the Lord’s waste and upon the lands
of other persons within the same manor.’</p>

<p>The classes making their living mainly as labourers were
the cottagers, farm servants, and squatters. The cottagers
either owned or occupied cottages and had rights of common
on the waste, and in some cases over the common
fields. These rights were of various kinds: they generally
included the right to pasture certain animals, to cut turf and
to get fuel. The cottagers, as we have already said, often
owned or rented land. This is spoken of as a common practice
by Addington, who knew the Midland counties well;
Arthur Young gives instances from Lincolnshire and Oxfordshire,
and Eden from Leicestershire and Surrey. The squatters
or borderers were, by origin, a separate class, though in time they
merged into the cottagers. They were settlers who built themselves
huts and cleared a piece of land in the commons or
woods, at some distance from the village. These encroachments
were generally sanctioned. A common rule in one part
of the country was that the right was established if the settler
could build his cottage in the night and send out smoke from
his chimney in the morning.<a id="FNanchor_14" href="#Footnote_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> The squatters also often went out
as day labourers. The farm servants were usually the children<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
of the small farmers or cottagers; they lived in their masters’
houses until they had saved enough money to marry and take
a cottage of their own.</p>

<p>Were there any day labourers without either land or common
rights in the old village? It is difficult to suppose that there
were many.<a id="FNanchor_15" href="#Footnote_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> Blackstone said of common appurtenant that
it was not a general right ‘but can only be claimed by special
grant or by prescription, which the law esteems sufficient
proof of a special grant or agreement for this purpose.’ Prescription
covers a multitude of encroachments. Indeed, it
was only by the ingenuity of the feudal lawyers that these
rights did not attach to the inhabitants of the village at large.
These lawyers had decided in Gateward’s case, 1603, that
‘inhabitants’ were too vague a body to enjoy a right, and on
this ground they had deprived the inhabitants of the village
of Stixswold in Lincolnshire of their customary right of
turning out cattle on the waste.<a id="FNanchor_16" href="#Footnote_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> From that time a charter
of incorporation was necessary to enable the inhabitants at
large to prove a legal claim to common rights. But rights
that were enjoyed by the occupiers of small holdings or of
cottages by long prescription, or by encroachments tacitly
sanctioned, must have been very widely scattered.</p>

<p>Such were the classes inhabiting the eighteenth-century
village. As the holdings in the common fields could be sold,
the property might change hands, though it remained subject
to common rights and to the general regulations of the manor
court. Consequently the villages exhibited great varieties of
character. In one village it might happen that strip after
strip had been bought up by the Lord of the Manor or some
proprietor, until the greater part of the arable fields had come
into the possession of a single owner. In such cases, however,
the land so purchased was still let out as a rule to a number
of small men, for the engrossing of farms as a practice comes
into fashion after enclosure. Sometimes such purchase was
a preliminary to enclosure. The Bedfordshire reporter gives
an example in the village of Bolnhurst, in that county. Three
land speculators bought up as much of the land as they could
with a view to enclosing the common fields and then selling
at a large profit. But the land turned out to be much less
valuable than they had supposed, and they could not get it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
off their hands: all improvements were at a standstill, for
the speculators only let from year to year, hoping still to find
a market.<a id="FNanchor_17" href="#Footnote_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> In other villages, land might have changed hands
in just the opposite direction. The Lord of the Manor might
sell his property in the common fields, and sell it not to some
capitalist or merchant, but to a number of small farmers.
We learn from the evidence of the Committee of 1844 on enclosures
that sometimes the Lord of the Manor sold his property
in the waste to the commoners. Thus there were
villages with few owners, as there were villages with many
owners. The writer of the <i>Report on Middlesex</i>, which was
published in 1798 says, ‘I have known thirty landlords in a
field of 200 acres, and the property of each so divided as to
lie in ten or twenty places, containing from an acre or two
downwards to fifteen perches; and in a field of 300 acres
I have met with patches of arable land, containing eight
perches each. In this instance the average size of all the
pieces in the field was under an acre. In all cases they lie
in long, narrow, winding or worm-like slips.’<a id="FNanchor_18" href="#Footnote_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>

<p>The same writer states that at the time his book was written
(1798) 20,000 out of the 23,000 arable acres in Middlesex
were cultivated on the common-field system.<a id="FNanchor_19" href="#Footnote_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> Perhaps the
parish of Stanwell, of which we describe the enclosure in detail
elsewhere, may be taken as a fair example of an eighteenth-century
village. In this parish there were, according to the
enclosure award, four large proprietors, twenty-four moderate
proprietors, twenty-four small proprietors, and sixty-six
cottagers with common rights.</p>

<p>The most important social fact about this system is that it
provided opportunities for the humblest and poorest labourer
to rise in the village. Population seems to have moved slowly,
and thus there was no feverish competition for land. The
farm servant could save up his wages and begin his married
life by hiring a cottage which carried rights of common, and
gradually buy or hire strips of land. Every village, as Hasbach
has put it, had its ladder, and nobody was doomed to stay
on the lowest rung. This is the distinguishing mark of the old
village. It would be easy, looking only at this feature, to idealise
the society that we have described, and to paint this age as an
age of gold. But no reader of Fielding or of Richardson would
fall into this mistake, or persuade himself that this community<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>
was a society of free and equal men, in which tyranny was
impossible. The old village was under the shadow of the
squire and the parson, and there were many ways in which
these powers controlled and hampered its pleasures and habits:
there were quarrels, too, between farmers and cottagers, and
there are many complaints that the farmers tried to take the
lion’s share of the commons: but, whatever the pressure
outside and whatever the bickerings within, it remains true
that the common-field system formed a world in which the
villagers lived their own lives and cultivated the soil on a
basis of independence.</p>

<p>It was this community that now passed under the unqualified
rule of the oligarchy. Under that rule it was to disappear.
Enclosure was no new menace to the poor. English literature
before the eighteenth century echoes the dismay and
lamentations of preachers and prophets who witnessed the
havoc that it spread. Stubbes had written in 1553 his bitter
protest against the enclosures which enabled rich men to
eat up poor men, and twenty years later a writer had given a
sombre landscape of the new farming: ‘We may see many
of their houses built alone like ravens’ nests, no birds building
near them.’ The Midlands had been the chief scene of these
changes, and there the conversion of arable land into pasture
had swallowed up great tracts of common agriculture, provoking
in some cases an armed resistance. The enclosures of
this century were the second and the greater of two waves.<a id="FNanchor_20" href="#Footnote_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
In one respect enclosure was in form more difficult now
than in earlier periods, for it was generally understood at this
time that an Act of Parliament was necessary. In reality
there was less check on the process. For hitherto the enclosing
class had had to reckon with the occasional panic or ill-temper
of the Crown. No English king, it is true, had intervened
in the interests of the poor so dramatically as did the
earlier and unspoilt Louis <span class="allsmcap">XIV.</span>, who restored to the French
village assemblies the public lands they had alienated within
a certain period. But the Crown had not altogether overlooked
the interests of the classes who were ruined by enclosure,
and in different ways it had tried to modify the worst consequences
of this policy. From 1490 to 1601 there were various
Acts and proclamations designed for this purpose. Charles <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>
had actually annulled the enclosures of two years in certain
midland counties, several Commissions had been issued, and
the Star Chamber had instituted proceedings against enclosures<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
on the ground that depopulation was an offence against the
Common Law. Mr. Firth holds that Cromwell’s influence in
the eastern counties was due to his championship of the
commoners in the fens. Throughout this time, however
ineffectual the intervention of the Crown, the interests of
the classes to whom enclosures brought wealth and power
were not allowed to obliterate all other considerations.</p>

<p>From the beginning of the eighteenth century the reins
are thrown to the enclosure movement, and the policy of
enclosure is emancipated from all these checks and afterthoughts.
One interest is supreme throughout England,
supreme in Parliament, supreme in the country; the Crown
follows, the nation obeys.</p>

<p>The agricultural community which was taken to pieces in
the eighteenth century and reconstructed in the manner in
which a dictator reconstructs a free government, was threatened
from many points. It was not killed by avarice alone. Cobbett
used to attribute the enclosure movement entirely to the
greed of the landowners, but, if greed was a sufficient motive,
greed was in this case clothed and almost enveloped in public
spirit. Let us remember what this community looked like
to men with the mind of the landlord class. The English
landowners have always believed that order would be resolved
into its original chaos, if they ceased to control the lives and
destinies of their neighbours. ‘A great responsibility rests
on us landlords; if we go, the whole thing goes.’ So says the
landlord in Mr. Galsworthy’s novel, and so said the landlords
in the eighteenth century. The English aristocracy always
thinking of this class as the pillars of society, as the Atlas that
bears the burden of the world, very naturally concluded that
this old peasant community, with its troublesome rights, was
a public encumbrance. This view received a special impetus
from all the circumstances of the age. The landlord class
was constantly being recruited from the ranks of the manufacturers,
and the new landlords, bringing into this charmed
circle an energy of their own, caught at once its taste for power,
for direction, for authority, for imposing its will. Readers of
<i>Shirley</i> will remember that when Robert Moore pictures to
himself a future of usefulness and success, he says that he will
obtain an Act for enclosing Nunnely Common, that his brother
will be put on the bench, and that between them they will
dominate the parish. The book ends in this dream of triumph.
Signorial position owes its special lustre for English minds to
the association of social distinction with power over the life<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>
and ways of groups of men and women. When Bagehot
sneered at the sudden millionaires of his day, who hoped to
disguise their social defects by buying old places and hiding
among aristocratic furniture, he was remarking on a feature
of English life that was very far from being peculiar to his
time. Did not Adam Smith observe that merchants were
very commonly ambitious of becoming country gentlemen?
This kind of ambition was the form that public spirit often
took in successful Englishmen, and it was a very powerful
menace to the old village and its traditions of collective
life.</p>

<p>Now this passion received at this time a special momentum
from the condition of agriculture. A dictatorship lends itself
more readily than any other form of government to the quick
introduction of revolutionary ideas, and new ideas were in
the air. Thus, in addition to the desire for social power,
there was behind the enclosure movement a zeal for economic
progress seconding and almost concealing the direct inspiration
of self-interest. Many an enclosing landlord thought
only of the satisfaction of doubling or trebling his rent: that
is unquestionable. If we are to trust so warm a champion
of enclosure as William Marshall, this was the state of mind
of the great majority. But there were many whose eyes
glistened as they thought of the prosperity they were to bring
to English agriculture, applying to a wider and wider domain
the lessons that were to be learnt from the processes of scientific
farming. A man who had caught the large ideas of a Coke,
or mastered the discoveries of a Bakewell, chafed under the
restraints that the system of common agriculture placed on
improvement and experiment. It was maddening to have
to set your pace by the slow bucolic temperament of small
farmers, nursed in a simple and old-fashioned routine, who
looked with suspicion on any proposal that was strange to them.
In this tiresome partnership the swift were put between the
shafts with the slow, and the temptation to think that what was
wanted was to get rid of the partnership altogether, was almost
irresistible. From such a state the mind passed rapidly and
naturally to the conclusion that the wider the sphere brought
into the absolute possession of the enlightened class, the greater
would be the public gain. The spirit in which the Board of Agriculture
approached the subject found appropriate expression in
Sir John Sinclair’s high-sounding language. ‘The idea of having
lands in common, it has been justly remarked, is to be derived
from that barbarous state of society, when men were strangers to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
any higher occupation than those of hunters or shepherds, or had
only just tasted the advantages to be reaped from the cultivation
of the earth.’<a id="FNanchor_21" href="#Footnote_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> Arthur Young<a id="FNanchor_22" href="#Footnote_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> compared the open-field system,
with its inconveniences ‘which the barbarity of their ancestors
had neither knowledge to discover nor government to remedy’
to the Tartar policy of the shepherd state.</p>

<p>It is not surprising that men under the influence of these
set ideas could find no virtue at all in the old system, and that
they soon began to persuade themselves that that system was
at the bottom of all the evils of society. It was harmful to
the morals and useless to the pockets of the poor. ‘The
benefit,’ wrote Arbuthnot,<a id="FNanchor_23" href="#Footnote_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> ‘which they are supposed to reap
from commons, in their present state, I know to be merely
nominal; nay, indeed, what is worse, I know, that, in many
instances, it is an essential injury to them, by being made a
plea for their idleness; for, some few excepted, if you offer
them work, they will tell you, that they must go to look up
their sheep, cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or,
perhaps, say they must take their horse to be shod, that he
may carry them to a horse-race or cricket-match.’ Lord
Sheffield, in the course of one of the debates in Parliament,
described the commoners as a ‘nuisance,’ and most people
of his class thought of them as something worse. Mr.
John Billingsley, who wrote the <i>Report on Somerset</i> for the
Board of Agriculture in 1795, describes in some detail the
enervating atmosphere of the commoners’ life. ‘Besides,
moral effects of an injurious tendency accrue to the cottager,
from a reliance on the imaginary benefits of stocking a common.
The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese,
naturally exalts the peasant, in his own conception, above
his brethren in the same rank of society. It inspires some
degree of confidence in a property, inadequate to his support.
In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence.
Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly
lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion increases
by indulgence; and at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or
hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.’<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span><a id="FNanchor_24" href="#Footnote_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a>
Mr. Bishton, who wrote the <i>Report on Shropshire</i> in 1794,
gives a still more interesting glimpse into the mind of the
enclosing class: ‘The use of common land by labourers operates
upon the mind as a sort of independence.’ When the commons
are enclosed ‘the labourers will work every day in the year, their
children will be put out to labour early,’ and ‘that subordination
of the lower ranks of society which in the present times
is so much wanted, would be thereby considerably secured.’</p>

<p>A similar view was taken of the moral effects of commons
by Middleton, the writer of the <i>Report on Middlesex</i>.<a id="FNanchor_25" href="#Footnote_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> ‘On
the other hand, they are, in many instances, of real injury
to the public; by holding out a lure to the poor man&mdash;I mean of
materials wherewith to build his cottage, and ground to erect it
upon: together with firing and the run of his poultry and pigs
for nothing. This is of course temptation sufficient to induce a
great number of poor persons to settle upon the borders of such
commons. But the mischief does not end here: for having gained
these trifling advantages, through the neglect or connivance of
the lord of the manor, it unfortunately gives their minds an
improper bias, and inculcates a desire to live, from that time
forward, without labour, or at least with as little as possible.’</p>

<p>One of the witnesses before the Select Committee on Commons
Inclosure in 1844 was Mr. Carus Wilson, who is interesting as
the original of the character of Mr. Brocklehurst in <i>Jane Eyre</i>.
We know how that zealous Christian would regard the commoners
from the speech in which he reproved Miss Temple
for giving the pupils at Lowood a lunch of bread and cheese
on one occasion when their meagre breakfast had been uneatable.
‘Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese,
instead of burnt porridge, into these children’s mouths, you
may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how
you starve their immortal souls!’ We are not surprised to
learn that Mr. Carus Wilson found the commoners ‘hardened
and unpromising,’ and that he was obliged to inform the
committee that the misconduct which the system encouraged
‘hardens the heart, and causes a good deal of mischief, and at
the same time puts the person in an unfavourable position for
the approach of what might be serviceable to him in a moral
and religious point of view.’<a id="FNanchor_26" href="#Footnote_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a></p>

<p>It is interesting, after reading all these confident generalisations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
about the influence of this kind of life upon the
character of the poor, to learn what the commoners themselves
thought of its moral atmosphere. This we can do
from such a petition as that sent by the small proprietors
and persons entitled to rights of common at Raunds, in
Northamptonshire. These unfortunate people lost their rights
by an Enclosure Act in 1797, and during the progress of the
Bill they petitioned Parliament against it, in these terms:
‘That the Petitioners beg Leave to represent to the House
that, under Pretence of improving Lands in the said Parish,
the Cottagers and other Persons entitled to Right of Common
on the Lands intended to be inclosed, will be deprived of an
inestimable Privilege, which they now enjoy, of turning a
certain Number of their Cows, Calves, and Sheep, on and over
the said Lands; a Privilege that enables them not only to
maintain themselves and their Families in the Depth of Winter,
when they cannot, even for their Money, obtain from the
Occupiers of other Lands the smallest Portion of Milk or Whey
for such necessary Purpose, but, in addition to this, they can
now supply the Grazier with young or lean Stock at a reasonable
Price, to fatten and bring to Market at a more moderate
Rate for general Consumption, which they conceive to be the
most rational and effectual Way of establishing Public Plenty
and Cheapness of Provision; and they further conceive, that
a more ruinous Effect of this Inclosure will be the almost total
Depopulation of their Town, now filled with bold and hardy
Husbandmen, from among whom, and the Inhabitants of
other open Parishes, the Nation has hitherto derived its greatest
Strength and Glory, in the Supply of its Fleets and Armies,
and driving them, from Necessity and Want of Employ, in
vast Crowds, into manufacturing Towns, where the very
Nature of their Employment, over the Loom or the Forge,
soon may waste their Strength, and consequently debilitate
their Posterity, and by imperceptible Degrees obliterate that
great Principle of Obedience to the Laws of God and their
Country, which forms the Character of the simple and artless
Villagers, more equally distributed through the Open Countries,
and on which so much depends the good Order and Government
of the State: These are some of the Injuries to themselves
as Individuals, and of the ill Consequences to the Public,
which the Petitioners conceive will follow from this, as they
have already done from many Inclosures, but which they
did not think they were entitled to lay before the House (the
Constitutional Patron and Protector of the Poor) until it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
unhappily came to their own Lot to be exposed to them through
the Bill now pending.’<a id="FNanchor_27" href="#Footnote_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a></p>

<p>When we remember that the enterprise of the age was under
the spell of the most seductive economic teaching of the time,
and that the old peasant society, wearing as it did the look of
confusion and weakness, had to fear not only the simplifying
appetites of the landlords, but the simplifying philosophy, in
England of an Adam Smith, in France of the Physiocrats,
we can realise that a ruling class has seldom found so plausible
an atmosphere for the free play of its interests and ideas.
<i>Des crimes sont flattés d’être présidés d’une vertu.</i> Bentham
himself thought the spectacle of an enclosure one of the most
reassuring of all the evidences of improvement and happiness.
Indeed, all the elements seemed to have conspired against the
peasant, for æsthetic taste, which might at other times have
restrained, in the eighteenth century encouraged the destruction
of the commons and their rough beauty. The rage for
order and symmetry and neat cultivation was universal. It
found expression in Burnet, who said of the Alps and Appenines
that they had neither form nor beauty, neither shape
nor order, any more than the clouds of the air: in Johnson,
who said of the Highlands that ‘the uniformity of barrenness
can afford very little amusement to the traveller’: and in
Cobbett, who said of the Cotswolds, ‘this is a sort of country
having less to please the eye than any other that I have ever
seen, always save and except the heaths like those of Bagshot
and Hindhead.’ The enjoyment of wild nature was a lost
sense, to be rediscovered one day by the Romanticists and
the Revolution, but too late to help the English village. In
France, owing to various causes, part economic, part political,
on which we shall touch later, the peasant persisted in his
ancient and ridiculous tenure, and survived to become the
envy of English observers: it was only in England that he
lost his footing, and that his ancient patrimony slipped away
from him.</p>

<p>We are not concerned at this juncture to inquire into the
truth of the view that the sweeping policy of enclosure increased
the productivity and resources of the State: we are
concerned only to inquire into the way in which the aristocracy
gave shape and effect to it. This movement, assumed
by the enlightened opinion of the day to be beneficent and
progressive, was none the less a gigantic disturbance; it broke
up the old village life; it transferred a great body of property;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
it touched a vast mass of interests at a hundred points. A
governing class that cared for its reputation for justice would
clearly regard it as of sovereign importance that this delicate
network of rights and claims should not be roughly disentangled
by the sheer power of the stronger: a governing class
that recognised its responsibility for the happiness and order
of the State would clearly regard it as of sovereign importance
that this ancient community should not be dissolved in such
a manner as to plunge great numbers of contented men into
permanent poverty and despair. To decide how far the aristocracy
that presided over these changes displayed insight or
foresight, sympathy or imagination, and how far it acted with
a controlling sense of integrity and public spirit, we must
analyse the methods and procedure of Parliamentary enclosure.</p>

<p>Before entering on a discussion of the methods by which
Parliamentary enclosure was effected, it is necessary to realise
the extent of its operations. Precise statistics, of course, are
not to be had, but there are various estimates based on careful
study of such evidence as we possess. Mr. Levy says that
between 1702 and 1760 there were only 246 Acts, affecting
about 400,000 acres, and that in the next fifty years the Acts
had reached a total of 2438, affecting almost five million acres.<a id="FNanchor_28" href="#Footnote_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a>
Mr. Johnson gives the following table for the years 1700&ndash;1844,
founded on Dr. Slater’s detailed <span class="lock">estimate<a id="FNanchor_29" href="#Footnote_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a>&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable right colvisible borderheader centerhead" summary="">
<tr>
<th rowspan="2">Years.</th><th colspan="2">Common Field and some Waste. </th><th colspan="2">Waste only.</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Acts. </th><th>Acreage. </th><th>Acts. </th><th>Acreage.</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1700&ndash;1760</td>
<td> 152</td>
<td> 237,845</td>
<td> 56</td>
<td> 74,518</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1761&ndash;1801</td>
<td> 1,479</td>
<td> 2,428,721</td>
<td> 521</td>
<td> 752,150</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1802&ndash;1844</td>
<td> 1,075</td>
<td> 1,610,302</td>
<td> 808</td>
<td> 939,043</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left total">Total,</td>
<td class="total"> 2,706</td>
<td class="total"> 4,276,868</td>
<td class="total"> 1,385</td>
<td class="total"> 1,765,711</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>This roughly corresponds with the estimate given before the
Select Committee on Enclosures in 1844, that there were
some one thousand seven hundred private Acts before 1800,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>
and some two thousand between 1800 and 1844. The
General Report of the Board of Agriculture on Enclosures
gives the acreage enclosed from the time of Queen Anne
down to 1805 as 4,187,056. Mr. Johnson’s conclusion is
that nearly 20 per cent. of the total acreage of England
has been enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
though Mr. Prothero puts the percentage still higher.
But we should miss the significance of these proportions if
we were to look at England at the beginning of the eighteenth
century as a map of which a large block was already shaded,
and of which another block, say a fifth or a sixth part, was to
be shaded by the enclosure of this period. The truth is that
the life of the common-field system was still the normal village
life of England, and that the land which was already enclosed
consisted largely of old enclosures or the lord’s demesne land
lying side by side with the open fields. This was put quite
clearly by the Bishop of St. Davids in the House of Lords in
1781. ‘Parishes of any considerable extent consisted partly
of old inclosures and partly of common fields.’<a id="FNanchor_30" href="#Footnote_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> If a village
living on the common-field system contained old enclosures,
effected some time or other without Act of Parliament, it
suffered just as violent a catastrophe when the common fields
or the waste were enclosed, as if there had been no previous
enclosure in the parish. The number of Acts passed in this
period varies of course with the different counties,<a id="FNanchor_31" href="#Footnote_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> but speaking
generally, we may say that the events described in the
next two chapters are not confined to any one part of the
country, and that they mark a national revolution, making
sweeping and profound changes in the form and the character
of agricultural society throughout England.<a id="FNanchor_32" href="#Footnote_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>




<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span></p><h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III<br />

<span class="smaller">ENCLOSURE (1)</span></h2>
</div>



<p>An enclosure, like most Parliamentary operations, began with
a petition from a local person or persons, setting forth the inconveniencies
of the present system and the advantages of
such a measure. Parliament, having received the petition,
would give leave for a Bill to be introduced. The Bill would
be read a first and a second time, and would then be referred
to a Committee, which, after considering such petitions
against the enclosure as the House of Commons referred to
it, would present its report. The Bill would then be passed,
sent to the Lords, and receive the Royal Assent. Finally, the
Commissioners named in the Bill would descend on the district
and distribute the land. That is, in brief, the history of a
successful enclosure agitation. We will now proceed to explore
its different stages in detail.</p>

<p>The original petition was often the act of a big landowner,
whose solitary signature was enough to set an enclosure process
in train.<a id="FNanchor_33" href="#Footnote_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> Before 1774 it was not even incumbent on
this single individual to let his neighbours know that he was
asking Parliament for leave to redistribute their property.
In that year the House of Commons made a Standing Order
providing that notice of any such petition should be affixed
to the church door in each of the parishes affected, for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
three Sundays in the month of August or the month of
September. This provision was laid down, as we learn from
the Report of the Committee that considered the Standing
Orders in 1775, because it had often happened that those
whose land was to be enclosed knew nothing whatever of
transactions in which they were rather intimately concerned,
until they were virtually completed.<a id="FNanchor_34" href="#Footnote_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a></p>

<p>But the publicity that was secured by this Standing Order,
though it prevented the process of enclosure from being completed
in the dark, did not in practice give the village any
kind of voice in its own destiny. The promoters laid all their
plans before they took their neighbours into the secret. When
their arrangements were mature, they gave notice to the parish
in accordance with the requirements of the Standing Order,
or they first took their petition to the various proprietors for
signature, or in some cases they called a public meeting.
The facts set out in the petition against the Enclosure Bill
for Haute Huntre, show that the promoters did not think
that they were bound to accept the opinion of a meeting.
In that case ‘the great majority’ were hostile, but the promoters
proceeded with their petition notwithstanding.<a id="FNanchor_35" href="#Footnote_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> Whatever
the precise method, unless some large proprietor stood out
against the scheme, the promoters were masters of the situation.
This we know from the evidence of witnesses favourable
to enclosure. ‘The proprietors of large estates,’ said
Arthur Young, ‘generally agree upon the measure, adjust
the principal points among themselves, and fix upon their
attorney before they appoint any general meeting of the proprietors.’<a id="FNanchor_36" href="#Footnote_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a>
Addington, in his <i>Inquiry into the Reasons for and
against Inclosing</i>, quoting another writer, says, ‘the whole
plan is generally settled between the solicitor and two or three
principal proprietors without ever letting the rest of them
into the secret till they are called upon to sign the petition.’<a id="FNanchor_37" href="#Footnote_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a>
What stand could the small proprietor hope to make against
such forces? The matter was a <i>chose jugée</i>, and his assent
a mere formality. If he tried to resist, he could be warned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>
that the success of the enclosure petition was certain, and that
those who obstructed it would suffer, as those who assisted
it would gain, in the final award. His only prospect of successful
opposition to the lord of the manor, the magistrate,
the impropriator of the tithes, the powers that enveloped
his life, the powers that appointed the commissioner who
was to make the ultimate award, lay in his ability to move a
dim and distant Parliament of great landlords to come to
his rescue. It needs no very penetrating imagination to
picture what would have happened in a village in which a
landowner of the type of Richardson’s hero in <i>Pamela</i> was
bent on an enclosure, and the inhabitants, being men like
Goodman Andrews, knew that enclosure meant their ruin.
What, in point of fact, could the poor do to declare their opposition?
They could tear down the notices from the church
doors:<a id="FNanchor_38" href="#Footnote_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> they could break up a public meeting, if one were
held: but the only way in which they could protest was by
violent and disorderly proceedings, which made no impression
at all upon Parliament, and which the forces of law and
order could, if necessary, be summoned to quell.</p>

<p>The scene now shifts to Parliament, the High Court of
Justice, the stronghold of the liberties of Englishmen. Parliament
hears the petition, and, almost as a matter of course,
grants it, giving leave for the introduction of a Bill, and
instructing the member who presents the petition to prepare
it. This is not a very long business, for the promoters have
generally taken the trouble to prepare their Bill in advance.
The Bill is submitted, read a first and second time, and then
referred to a Committee. Now a modern Parliamentary
Private Bill Committee is regarded as a tribunal whose integrity
and impartiality are beyond question, and justly, for
the most elaborate precautions are taken to secure that it
shall deserve this character. The eighteenth-century Parliament
treated its Committee with just as much respect,
but took no precautions at all to obtain a disinterested court.
Indeed, the committee that considered an enclosure was chosen
on the very contrary principle. This we know, not from the
evidence of unkind and prejudiced outsiders, but from the
Report of the Committee of the House of Commons, which
inquired in 1825 into the constitution of Committees on
Private Bills. ‘Under the present system each Bill is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
committed to the Member who is charged with its management
and such other Members as he may choose to name in
the House, and the Members serving for a particular County
(usually the County immediately connected with the object
of the Bill) <i>and the adjoining Counties</i>, and consequently it
has been practically found that the Members to whom Bills
have been committed have been generally those who have
been most interested in the result.’</p>

<p>During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there
developed the practice of opening the committees. This was
the system of applying to Private Bills the procedure followed
in the case of Public Bills, and proposing a resolution in the
House of Commons that ‘all who attend shall have voices,’
<i>i.e.</i> that any member of the House who cared to attend the
committee should be able to vote. We can see how this
arrangement acted. It might happen that some of the county
members were hostile to a particular enclosure scheme; in
that case the promoters could call for an open committee and
mass their friends upon it. It might happen, on the other
hand, that the committee was solid in supporting an enclosure,
and that some powerful person in the House considered that
his interests, or the interests of his friend, had not been duly
consulted in the division of the spoil. In such a case he would
call for all to ‘have voices’ and so compel the promoters to
satisfy his claims. This system then secured some sort of
rough justice as between the powerful interests represented
in Parliament, but it left the small proprietors and the
cottagers, who were unrepresented in this mêlée, absolutely
at the mercy of these conflicting forces.</p>

<p>It is difficult, for example, to imagine that a committee in
which the small men were represented would have sanctioned
the amazing clause in the Ashelworth Act<a id="FNanchor_39" href="#Footnote_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> which provided ‘that
all fields or inclosures containing the Property of Two or more
Persons within one fence, and also all inclosures containing the
property of one Person only, if the same be held by or under
different Tenures or Interests, shall be considered as commonable
land and be divided and allotted accordingly.’ This clause,
taken with the clause that follows, simply meant that some
big landowner had his eye on some particular piece of enclosed
property, which in the ordinary way would not have
gone into the melting-pot at all. The arrangements of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
Wakefield Act would hardly have survived the scrutiny of a
committee on which the Duke of Leeds’ class was not paramount.
Under that Act<a id="FNanchor_40" href="#Footnote_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> the duke was to have full power to
work mines and get minerals, and those proprietors whose
premises suffered in consequence were to have reasonable
satisfaction, not from the duke who was enriched by the disturbing
cause, but from all the allottees, including presumably
those whose property was damaged. Further, to save himself
inconvenience, the duke could forbid allottees on Westgate
Moor to build a house for sixty years. A different kind of
House of Commons would have looked closely at the Act at
Moreton Corbet which gave the lord of the manor all enclosures
and encroachments more than twenty years old, and
also at the not uncommon provision which exempted the
tithe-owner from paying for his own fencing.</p>

<p>The Report of the 1825 Committee describes the system
as ‘inviting all the interested parties in the House to take
part in the business of the committee, which necessarily
terminates in the prevalence of the strongest part, for they
who have no interest of their own to serve will not be
prevailed upon to take part in a struggle in which their unbiassed
judgment can have no effect.’ The chairman of the
committee was generally the member who had moved to
introduce the Bill. The unreformed Parliament of landowners
that passed the excellent Act of 1782, forbidding
Members of Parliament to have an interest in Government
contracts, never thought until the eve of the Reform Bill
that there was anything remarkable in this habit of referring
Enclosure Bills to the judgment of the very landowners who
were to profit by them. And in 1825 it was not the Enclosure
Bills, in which the rich took and the poor suffered, but the
Railway Bills, in which rich men were pitted against rich
men, that drew the attention of the House of Commons to the
disadvantages and risks of this procedure.</p>

<p>The committee so composed sets to work on the Bill, and
meanwhile, perhaps, some of the persons affected by the
enclosure send petitions against it to the House of Commons.
Difficulties of time and space would as a rule deter all but the
rich dissentients, unless the enclosure was near London. These
petitions are differently treated according to their origin.
If they emanate from a lord of the manor, or from a tithe-owner,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
who for some reason or other is dissatisfied with the
contemplated arrangements, they receive some attention.
In such a case the petitioner probably has some friend in Parliament,
and his point of view is understood. He can, if necessary,
get this friend to attend the committee and introduce amendments.
He is therefore a force to be reckoned with; the Bill
is perhaps altered to suit him; the petition is at any rate referred
to the committee. On the other hand, if the petition
comes from cottagers or small proprietors, it is safe, as a rule,
to neglect it.</p>

<p>The enclosure histories set out in the Appendix supply
some good examples of this differential treatment. Lord
Strafford sends a petition against the Bill for enclosing
Wakefield with the result that he is allowed to appoint a commissioner,
and also that his dispute with the Duke of Leeds
is exempted from the jurisdiction of the Enclosure Commissioners.
On the other hand, the unfortunate persons who
petition against the monstrous provision that forbade them
to erect any building for twenty, forty or sixty years, get no
kind of redress. In the case of Croydon, James Trecothick,
Esq., who is dissatisfied with the Bill, is strong enough to
demand special consideration. Accordingly a special provision
is made that the commissioners are obliged to sell
Mr. Trecothick, by private contract, part of Addington Hills,
if he so wishes. But when the various freeholders, copyholders,
leaseholders and inhabitant householders of Croydon, who
complain that the promoters of the Bill have named commissioners
without consulting the persons interested, ask
leave to nominate a third commissioner, only four members
of the House of Commons support Lord William Russell’s
proposal to consider this petition, and fifty-one vote the other
way. Another example of the spirit in which Parliament
received petitions from unimportant persons is furnished by
the case of the enclosure of Holy Island. In 1791 (Feb. 23)<a id="FNanchor_41" href="#Footnote_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a>
a petition was presented to Parliament for the enclosure of
Holy Island, asking for the division of a stinted pasture, and
the extinction of the rights of common or ‘eatage’ over certain
infield lands. Leave was given, and the Bill was prepared
and read a first time on 28th February. The same day Parliament
received a petition from freeholders and stallingers,
who ask to be heard by themselves or by counsel against the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
Bill. From Eden<a id="FNanchor_42" href="#Footnote_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> we learn that there were 26 freeholders
and 31 stallingers, and that the latter were in the strict sense
of the term as much freeholders as the former. Whilst, however,
a freeholder had the right to put 30 sheep, 4 black cattle
and 3 horses on the stinted common, a stallinger had a right
of common for one horse and one cow only. The House
ordered that this petition should lie on the table till the second
reading, and that the petitioners should then be heard. The
second reading, which had been fixed for 2nd April, was deferred
till 20th April, a change which probably put the petitioners
to considerable expense. On 20th April the Bill was read a
second time, and the House was informed that Counsel attended,
and a motion was made that Counsel be now called in. But
the motion was opposed, and on a division was defeated by
47 votes to 12. The Bill passed the House of Commons
on 10th May, and received the Royal Assent on 9th June.<a id="FNanchor_43" href="#Footnote_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a>
In this case the House of Commons broke faith with the
petitioners, and refused the hearing it had promised. Such
experience was not likely to encourage dissentients to waste
their money on an appeal to Parliament against a Bill that
was promoted by powerful politicians. It will be observed
that at Armley and Ashelworth the petitioners did not think
that it was worth the trouble and expense to be heard on
Second Reading.</p>

<p>The Report of the Committee followed a stereotyped formula:
‘That the Standing Orders had been complied with:
and that the Committee had examined the Allegations of the
Bill and found the same to be true; and that the Parties concerned
had given their Consent to the Bill, to the Satisfaction
of the Committee, except....’</p>

<p>Now what did this mean? What consents were necessary
to satisfy the committee? The Parliamentary Committee
that reported on the cost of enclosures in 1800<a id="FNanchor_44" href="#Footnote_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> said that there
was no fixed rule, that in some cases the consent of three-fourths
was required, in others the consent of four-fifths.
This proportion has a look of fairness until we discover that
we are dealing in terms, not of persons, but of property, and
that the suffrages were not counted but weighed. The method<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
by which the proportions were reckoned varied, as a glance
at the cases described in the Appendix will show. Value is
calculated sometimes in acres, sometimes in annual value,
sometimes in assessment to the land tax, sometimes in assessment
to the poor rate. It is important to remember that
it was the property interested that counted, and that in a case
where there was common or waste to be divided as well as
open fields, one large proprietor, who owned a considerable
property in old enclosures, could swamp the entire community
of smaller proprietors and cottagers. If Squire Western
owned an enclosed estate with parks, gardens and farms of
800 acres, and the rest of the parish consisted of a common or
waste of 1000 acres and open fields of 200 acres, and the village
population consisted of 100 cottagers and small farmers, each
with a strip of land in the common fields, and a right of
common on the waste, Squire Western would have a four-fifths
majority in determining whether the open fields and the waste
should be enclosed or not, and the whole matter would be
in his hands. This is an extreme example of the way in which
the system worked. The case of Ashelworth shows that a
common might be cut up, on the votes of persons holding
enclosed property, against the wishes of the great majority
of the commoners. At Laleham the petitioners against the Bill
claimed that they were ‘a great majority of the real Owners
and Proprietors of or Persons interested in, the Lands and
Grounds intended to be enclosed.’ At Simpson, where common
fields were to be enclosed, the Major Part of the Owners and Proprietors
petitioned against the Bill, stating that they were ‘very
well satisfied with the Situation and Convenience of their respective
Lands and Properties in their present uninclosed State.’<a id="FNanchor_45" href="#Footnote_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p>

<p>Even a majority of three-fourths in value was not always
required; for example, the Report of the Committee on the
enclosure of Cartmel in Lancashire in 1796 gave particulars
showing that the whole property belonging to persons interested
in the enclosure was assessed at £150, and that
the property of those actually consenting to the enclosure
was just under £110.<a id="FNanchor_46" href="#Footnote_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> Yet the enclosure was recommended<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>
and carried. Another illustration is supplied by the Report
of the Committee on the enclosure of Histon and Impington
in 1801, where the parties concerned are reported to have
consented except the proprietors of 1020 acres, out of a total
acreage of 3680.<a id="FNanchor_47" href="#Footnote_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> In this case the Bill was recommitted, and on
its next appearance the committee gave the consents in terms
of assessment to the Land Tax instead, putting the total
figure at £304, and the assessment of the consenting parties at
£188. This seems to have satisfied the House of Commons.<a id="FNanchor_48" href="#Footnote_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a>
Further, the particulars given in the case of the enclosure
of Bishopstone in Wilts (enclosed in 1809) show that the
votes of copyholders were heavily discounted. In this case
the copyholders who dissented held 1079 acres, the copyholders
who were neuter 81 acres, and the total area to be divided
was 2602 acres. But by some ingenious actuarial calculation
of the reversionary interest of the lord of the manor
and the interest of the tithe-owner, the 1079 acres held by
copyholders are written down to 474 acres.<a id="FNanchor_49" href="#Footnote_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> In the cases of
Simpson and Louth, as readers who consult the Appendix will
see, the committees were satisfied with majorities just above
three-fifths in value. At Raunds (see p. 39), where 4963 acres
were ‘interested,’ the owners of 570 are stated to be against, and
of 721 neuter.<a id="FNanchor_50" href="#Footnote_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> An interesting illustration of the lax practice
of the committees is provided in the history of an attempted
enclosure at Quainton (1801).<a id="FNanchor_51" href="#Footnote_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> In any case the signatures were
a doubtful evidence of consent. ‘It is easy,’ wrote an acute
observer, ‘for the large proprietors to overcome opposition.
Coaxing, bribing, threatening, together with many other acts
which superiors will make use of, often induce the inferiors to
consent to things which they think will be to their future
disadvantage.’<a id="FNanchor_52" href="#Footnote_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> We hear echoes of such proceedings in the
petition from various owners and proprietors at Armley, who ‘at
the instance of several other owners of land,’ signed a petition for
enclosure and wish to be heard against it, and also in the unavailing
petition of some of the proprietors and freeholders of
Winfrith Newburgh in Dorsetshire, in 1768,<a id="FNanchor_53" href="#Footnote_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> who declared that
if the Bill passed into law, their ‘Estates must be totally ruined<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
thereby, and that some of the Petitioners by Threats and
Menaces were prevailed upon to sign the Petition for the said
Bill: but upon Recollection, and considering the impending
Ruin,’ they prayed to ‘have Liberty to retract from their
seeming Acquiescence.’ From the same case we learn that
it was the practice sometimes to grant copyholds on the condition
that the tenant would undertake not to oppose enclosure.
Sometimes, as in the case of the Sedgmoor Enclosure,
which we shall discuss later, actual fraud was employed. But
even if the promoters employed no unfair methods they had
one argument powerful enough to be a deterrent in many
minds. For an opposed Enclosure Bill was much more
expensive than an unopposed Bill, and as the small men felt
the burden of the costs much more than the large proprietors,
they would naturally be shy of adding to the very heavy
expenses unless they stood a very good chance of defeating
the scheme.</p>

<p>It is of capital importance to remember in this connection
that the enumeration of ‘consents’ took account only of
proprietors. It ignored entirely two large classes to whom
enclosure meant, not a greater or less degree of wealth, but
actual ruin. These were such cottagers as enjoyed their
rights of common in virtue of renting cottages to which such
rights were attached, and those cottagers and squatters who
either had no strict legal right, or whose rights were difficult
of proof. Neither of these classes was treated even outwardly
and formally as having any claim to be consulted before an
enclosure was sanctioned.</p>

<p>It is clear, then, that it was only the pressure of the powerful
interests that decided whether a committee should approve or
disapprove of an Enclosure Bill. It was the same pressure that
determined the form in which a Bill became law. For a
procedure that enabled rich men to fight out their rival claims
at Westminster left the classes that could not send counsel to
Parliament without a weapon or a voice. And if there was
no lawyer there to put his case, what prospect was there
that the obscure cottager, who was to be turned adrift with
his family by an Enclosure Bill promoted by a Member or
group of Members, would ever trouble the conscience of a
committee of landowners? We have seen already how this
class was regarded by the landowners and the champions of
enclosure. No cottagers had votes or the means of influencing
a single vote at a single election. To Parliament, if they had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
any existence at all, they were merely dim shadows in the
very background of the enclosure scheme. It would require
a considerable effort of the imagination to suppose that the
Parliamentary Committee spent very much time or energy
on the attempt to give body and form to this hazy and remote
society, and to treat these shadows as living men and women,
about to be tossed by this revolution from their ancestral homes.
As it happens, we need not put ourselves to the trouble of such
speculation, for we have the evidence of a witness who will
not be suspected of injustice to his class. ‘This I know,’
said Lord Lincoln<a id="FNanchor_54" href="#Footnote_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> introducing the General Enclosure Bill of
1845, ‘that in nineteen cases out of twenty, Committees of
this House sitting on private Bills neglected the rights of the
poor. I do not say that they wilfully neglected those rights&mdash;far
from it: but this I affirm, that they were neglected
in consequence of the Committees being permitted to remain
in ignorance of the claims of the poor man, because by reason
of his very poverty he is unable to come up to London for
counsel, to produce witnesses, and to urge his claims before
a Committee of this House.’ Another Member<a id="FNanchor_55" href="#Footnote_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> had described
a year earlier the character of this private Bill procedure.
‘Inclosure Bills had been introduced heretofore and passed
without discussion, and no one could tell how many persons
had suffered in their interests and rights by the interference
of these Bills. Certainly these Bills had been referred to
Committees upstairs, but everyone knew how these Committees
were generally conducted. They were attended only
by honourable Members who were interested in them, being
Lords of Manor, and the rights of the poor, though they might
be talked about, had frequently been taken away under that
system.’</p>

<p>These statements were made by politicians who remembered
well the system they were describing. There is
another witness whose authority is even greater. In 1781
Lord Thurlow, then at the beginning of his long life of office as
Lord Chancellor,<a id="FNanchor_56" href="#Footnote_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> spoke for an hour and three quarters in favour
of recommitting the Bill for enclosing Ilmington in Warwickshire.
If the speech had been fully reported it would be a
contribution of infinite value to students of the social history<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
of eighteenth-century England, for we are told that ‘he proceeded
to examine, paragraph by paragraph, every provision
of the Bill, animadverting and pointing out some acts of
injustice, partiality, obscurity or cause of confusion in each.’<a id="FNanchor_57" href="#Footnote_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a>
Unfortunately this part of his speech was omitted in the
report as being ‘irrelative to the debate,’ which was concerned
with the question of the propriety of commuting
tithes. But the report, incomplete as it is, contains an illuminating
passage on the conduct of Private Bill Committees.
‘His Lordship ... next turned his attention to the mode in which
private bills were permitted to make their way through both
Houses, and that in matters in which property was concerned,
to the great injury of many, if not the total ruin of some
private families: many proofs of this evil had come to his
knowledge as a member of the other House, not a few in his
professional character, before he had the honour of a seat in
that House, nor had he been a total stranger to such evils
since he was called upon to preside in another place.’
Going on to speak of the committees of the House of Commons
and ‘the rapidity with which private Bills were hurried
through,’ he declared that ‘it was not unfrequent to decide
upon the merits of a Bill which would affect the property and
interests of persons inhabiting a district of several miles in
extent, in less time than it took him to determine upon the
propriety of issuing an order for a few pounds, by which no
man’s property could be injured.’ He concluded by telling
the House of Lords a story of how Sir George Savile once
noticed a man ‘rather meanly habited’ watching the proceedings
of a committee with anxious interest. When the
committee had agreed on its report, the agitated spectator
was seen to be in great distress. Sir George Savile asked
him what was the matter, and he found that the man would
be ruined by a clause that had been passed by the committee,
and that, having heard that the Bill was to be introduced, he
had made his way to London on foot, too poor to come in any
other way or to fee counsel. Savile then made inquiries
and learnt that these statements were correct, whereupon he
secured the amendment of the Bill, ‘by which means an
innocent, indigent man and his family were rescued from
destruction.’ It would not have been very easy for a
‘meanly habited man’ to make the journey to London from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
Wakefield or Knaresborough or Haute Huntre, even if he
knew when a Bill was coming on, and to stay in London
until it went into committee; and if he did, he would not
always be so lucky as to find a Sir George Savile on the
committee&mdash;the public man who was regarded by his contemporaries,
to whatever party they belonged, as the Bayard
of politics.<a id="FNanchor_58" href="#Footnote_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a></p>

<p>We get very few glimpses into the underworld of the common
and obscure people, whose homes and fortunes trembled on the
chance that a quarrel over tithes and the conflicting claims
of squire and parson might disturb the unanimity of a score
of gentlemen sitting round a table. London was far away,
and the Olympian peace of Parliament was rarely broken by
the protests of its victims. But we get one such glimpse in a
passage in the <i>Annual Register</i> for 1767.</p>

<p>‘On Tuesday evening a great number of farmers were
observed going along Pall Mall with cockades in their hats.
On enquiring the reason, it appeared they all lived in or near
the parish of Stanwell in the county of Middlesex, and they
were returning to their wives and families to carry them the
agreeable news of a Bill being rejected for inclosing the said
common, which if carried into execution, might have been the
ruin of a great number of families.’<a id="FNanchor_59" href="#Footnote_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a></p>

<p>When the Committee on the Enclosure Bill had reported
to the House of Commons, the rest of the proceedings
were generally formal. The Bill was read a third time,
engrossed, sent up to the Lords, where petitions might be
presented as in the Commons, and received the Royal
Assent.</p>

<p>A study of the pages of Hansard and Debrett tells us little
about transactions that fill the <i>Journals</i> of the Houses of
Parliament. Three debates in the House of Lords are fully reported,<a id="FNanchor_60" href="#Footnote_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a>
and they illustrate the play of forces at Westminster.
The Bishop of St. Davids<a id="FNanchor_61" href="#Footnote_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> moved to recommit an Enclosure<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
Bill in 1781 on the ground that, like many other Enclosure
Bills, it provided for the commutation of tithes&mdash;an arrangement
which he thought open to many objections. Here was
an issue that was vital, for it concerned the interests of the
classes represented in Parliament. Did the Church stand
to gain or to lose by taking land instead of tithe? Was it a
bad thing or a good thing that the parson should be put into
the position of a farmer, that he should be under the temptation
to enter into an arrangement with the landlord which
might prejudice his successor, that he should be relieved from
a system which often caused bad blood between him and
his parishioners? Would it ‘make him neglect the sacred
functions of his ministry’ as the Bishop of St. Davids feared,
or would it improve his usefulness by rescuing him from a
situation in which ‘the pastor was totally sunk in the tithe-collector’
as the Bishop of Peterborough<a id="FNanchor_62" href="#Footnote_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> hoped, and was a man
a better parson on the Sunday for being a farmer the rest of
the week as Lord Coventry believed? The bishops and the
peers had in this discussion a subject that touched very nearly
the lives and interests of themselves and their friends, and there
was a considerable and animated debate,<a id="FNanchor_63" href="#Footnote_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> at the end of which
the House of Lords approved the principle of commuting tithes
in Enclosure Bills. This debate was followed by another on
6th April, when Lord Bathurst (President of the Council) as a
counterblast to his colleague on the Woolsack, moved, but
afterwards withdrew, a series of resolutions on the same subject.
In the course of this debate Thurlow, who thought perhaps that
his zeal for the Church had surprised and irritated his fellow-peers,
among whom he was not conspicuous in life as a practising
Christian, explained that though he was zealous for the
Church, ‘his zeal was not partial or confined to the Church,
further than it was connected with the other great national
establishments, of which it formed a part, and no inconsiderable
one.’ The Bishop of St. Davids returned to the subject
on the 14th June, moving to recommit the Bill for enclosing
Kington in Worcestershire. He read a string of resolutions
which he wished to see applied to all future Enclosure Bills, in
order to defend the interests of the clergy from ‘the oppressions
of the Lord of the Manor, landowners, etc.’ Thurlow
spoke for him, but he was defeated by 24 votes to 4, his only<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
other supporters being Lord Galloway and the Bishop of
Lincoln.</p>

<p>Thurlow’s story of Sir George Savile’s ‘meanly habited
man’ did not disturb the confidence of the House of Lords
in the justice of the existing procedure towards the poor: the
enclosure debates revolve solely round the question of the relative
claims of the lord of the manor and the tithe-owner. The
House of Commons was equally free from scruple or misgiving.
One petitioner in 1800 commented on the extraordinary haste
with which a New Forest Bill was pushed through Parliament,
and suggested that if it were passed into law in this
rapid manner at the end of a session, some injustice might
unconsciously be done. The Speaker replied with a grave
and dignified rebuke: ‘The House was always competent to
give every subject the consideration due to its importance,
and could not therefore be truly said to be incapable at any
time of discussing any question gravely, dispassionately, and
with strict regard to justice.’<a id="FNanchor_64" href="#Footnote_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> He recommended that the
petition should be passed over as if it had never been presented.
The member who had presented the petition pleaded
that he had not read it. Such were the plausibilities and decorum
in which the House of Commons wrapped up its abuses.
We can imagine that some of the members must have smiled
to each other like the Roman augurs, when they exchanged
these solemn hypocrisies.</p>

<p>We have a sidelight on the vigilance of the House of
Commons, when an Enclosure Bill came down from a committee,
in a speech of Windham’s in defence of bull-baiting.
Windham attacked the politicians who had introduced the Bill
to abolish bull-baiting, for raising such a question at a time of
national crisis when Parliament ought to be thinking of other
things. He then went on to compare the subject to local
subjects that ‘contained nothing of public or general interest.
To procure the discussion of such subjects it was necessary
to resort to canvass and intrigue. Members whose attendance
was induced by local considerations in most cases of this description,
were present: the discussion, if any took place, was
managed by the friends of the measure: and the decision of
the House was ultimately, perhaps, a matter of mere chance.’
From Sheridan’s speech in answer, we learn that this is a description
of the passing of Enclosure Bills. ‘Another honourable
gentleman who had opposed this Bill with peculiar vehemence,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>
considered it as one of those light and trivial subjects,
which was not worthy to occupy the deliberations of Parliament:
and he compared it to certain other subjects of Bills:
that is to say, bills of a local nature, respecting inclosures and
other disposal of property, which merely passed by chance, as
Members could not be got to attend their progress by dint
of canvassing.’<a id="FNanchor_65" href="#Footnote_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> Doubtless most Members of the House of
Commons shared the sentiments of Lord Sandwich, who told
the House of Lords that he was so satisfied ‘that the more inclosures
the better, that as far as his poor abilities would
enable him, he would support every inclosure bill that should
be brought into the House.’<a id="FNanchor_66" href="#Footnote_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a></p>

<p>For the last act of an enclosure drama the scene shifts back
to the parish. The commissioners arrive, receive and determine
claims, and publish an award, mapping out the new
village. The life and business of the village are now in suspense,
and the commissioners are often authorised to prescribe the
course of husbandry during the transition.<a id="FNanchor_67" href="#Footnote_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> The Act which
they administer provides that a certain proportion of the land is
to be assigned to the lord of the manor, in virtue of his rights,
and a certain proportion to the owner of the tithes. An occasional
Act provides that some small allotment shall be made
to the poor: otherwise the commissioners have a free hand:
their powers are virtually absolute. This is the impression
left by all contemporary writers. Arthur Young, for example,
writes emphatically in this sense. ‘Thus is the property of
proprietors, and especially of the poor ones, entirely at their
mercy: every passion of resentment and prejudice may be
gratified without control, for they are vested with a despotic
power known in no other branch of business in this free
country.’<a id="FNanchor_68" href="#Footnote_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> Similar testimony is found in the Report of the
Select Committee (1800) on the Expense and Mode of Obtaining
Bills of Enclosure: ‘the expediency of despatch, without
the additional expense of multiplied litigation, has suggested
the necessity of investing them with a summary, and in most
cases uncontrollable jurisdiction.’<a id="FNanchor_69" href="#Footnote_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> In the General Report of
the Board of Agriculture on Enclosures, published in 1808,
though any more careful procedure is deprecated as likely to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
cause delay, it is stated that the adjusting of property worth
£50,000 was left to the arbitration of a majority of five, ‘often
persons of mean education.’ The author of <i>An Inquiry into
the Advantages and Disadvantages resulting from Bills of
Inclosure</i>, published in 1781, writes as if it was the practice
to allow an appeal to Quarter Sessions; such an appeal he
characterised as useless to a poor man, and we can well believe
that most of the squires who sat on such a tribunal to punish
vagrants or poachers had had a hand in an enclosure in the
past or had their eyes on an enclosure in the future. Thurlow
considered such an appeal quite inadequate, giving the more
polite reason that Quarter Sessions had not the necessary
time.<a id="FNanchor_70" href="#Footnote_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> The Act of 1801 is silent on the subject, but Sinclair’s
draft of a General Inclosure Bill, published in the <i>Annals of
Agriculture</i> in 1796,<a id="FNanchor_71" href="#Footnote_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> provided for an appeal to Quarter Sessions.
It will be seen that in five of the cases analysed in the Appendix
(Haute Huntre, Simpson, Stanwell, Wakefield and Winfrith
Newburgh), the decision of the commissioners on claims was
final, except that at Wakefield an objector might oblige the
commissioners to take the opinion of a counsel chosen by themselves.
In five cases (Ashelworth, Croydon, Cheshunt, Laleham
and Louth), a disappointed claimant might bring a suit
on a feigned issue against a proprietor. At Armley and Knaresborough
the final decision was left to arbitrators, but whereas
at Armley the arbitrator was to be chosen by a neutral authority,
the Recorder of Leeds, the arbitrators at Knaresborough were
named in the Act, and were presumably as much the nominees
of the promoters as the commissioners themselves.</p>

<p>The statements of contemporaries already quoted go to
show that none of these arrangements were regarded as seriously
fettering the power of the commissioners, and it is easy
to understand that a lawsuit, which might of course overwhelm
him, was not a remedy for the use of a small proprietor or a
cottager, though it might be of some advantage to a large
proprietor who had not been fortunate enough to secure
adequate representation of his interests on the Board of Commissioners.
But the decision as to claims was only part of the
business. A man’s claim might be allowed, and yet gross injustice
might be done him in the redistribution. He might be
given inferior land, or land in an inconvenient position. In<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>
ten of the cases in the Appendix the award of the commissioners
is stated to be final, and there is no appeal from it. The two
exceptions are Knaresborough and Armley. The Knaresborough
Act is silent on the point, and the Armley Act allows
an appeal to the Recorder of Leeds. So far therefore as the
claims and allotments of the poor were concerned, the commissioners
were in no danger of being overruled. Their
freedom in other ways was restricted by the Standing Orders
of 1774, which obliged them to give an account of their
expenses.</p>

<p>It would seem to be obvious that any society which had an
elementary notion of the meaning and importance of justice
would have taken the utmost pains to see that the men appointed
to this extraordinary office had no motive for showing
partiality. This might not unreasonably have been expected
of the society about which Pitt declared in the House of
Commons, that it was the boast of the law of England that
it afforded equal security and protection to the high and low,
the rich and poor.<a id="FNanchor_72" href="#Footnote_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> How were these commissioners appointed
at the time that Pitt was Prime Minister? They were
appointed in each case before the Bill was presented to Parliament,
and generally, as Young tells us, they were appointed
by the promoters of the enclosure before the petition was submitted
for local signatures, so that in fact they were nominated
by the persons of influence who agreed on the measure. In
one case (Moreton Corbet in Shropshire; 1950 acres enclosed in
1797) the Act appointed one commissioner only, and he was
to name his successor. Sometimes, as in the case of Otmoor,<a id="FNanchor_73" href="#Footnote_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a>
it might happen that the commissioners were changed while
the Bill was passing through Committee, if some powerful
persons were able to secure better representation of their own
interests. In the case of Wakefield again, the House of Commons
Committee placated Lord Strafford by giving him a commissioner.</p>

<p>Now, who was supposed to have a voice in the appointment
of the commissioners? There is to be found in the <i>Annals of
Agriculture</i><a id="FNanchor_74" href="#Footnote_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> an extremely interesting paper by Sir John Sinclair,
preliminary to a memorandum of the General Enclosure Bill
which he promoted in 1796. Sinclair explains that he had had
eighteen hundred Enclosure Acts (taken indiscriminately) examined
in order to ascertain what was the usual procedure and
what stipulations were made with regard to particular interests;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>
this with the intention of incorporating the recognised practice
in his General Bill. In the course of these remarks he says, ‘the
probable result will be the appointment of one Commissioner by
the Lord of the Manor, of another by the tithe-owner, and of a
third by the major part in value of the proprietors.’<a id="FNanchor_75" href="#Footnote_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> It will
be observed that the third commissioner is not appointed by
a majority of the commoners, nor even by the majority of the
proprietors, but by the votes of those who own the greater
part of the village. This enables us to assess the value of
what might have seemed a safeguard to the poor&mdash;the provision
that the names of the commissioners should appear in
the Bill presented to Parliament. The lord of the manor,
the impropriator of tithes, and the majority in value of the
owners are a small minority of the persons affected by an
enclosure, and all that they have to do is to meet round a
table and name the commissioners who are to represent them.<a id="FNanchor_76" href="#Footnote_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a>
Thus we find that the powerful persons who carried an enclosure
against the will of the poor nominated the tribunal
before which the poor had to make good their several claims.
This was the way in which the constitution that Pitt was
defending afforded equal security and protection to the rich
and to the poor.</p>

<p>It will be noticed further that two interests are chosen
out for special representation. They are the lord of the
manor and the impropriator of tithes: in other words, the
very persons who are formally assigned a certain minimum
in the distribution by the Act of Parliament. Every Act
after 1774 declares that the lord of the manor is to have a
certain proportion, and the tithe-owner a certain proportion of
the land divided: scarcely any Act stipulates that any share
at all is to go to the cottager or the small proprietor. Yet
in the appointment of commissioners the interests that are
protected by the Act have a preponderating voice, and the
interests that are left to the caprice of the commissioners have
no voice at all. Thurlow, speaking in the House of Lords in
1781,<a id="FNanchor_77" href="#Footnote_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> said that it was grossly unjust to the parson that his
property should be at the disposal of these commissioners,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
of whom he only nominated one. ‘He thanked God that the
property of an Englishman depended not on so loose a tribunal
in any other instance whatever.’ What, then, was the position of
the poor and the small farmers who were not represented at all
among the commissioners? In the paper already quoted, Sinclair
mentions that in some cases the commissioners were peers,
gentlemen and clergymen, residing in the neighbourhood,
who acted without fees or emolument. He spoke of this as
undertaking a useful duty, and it does not seem to have occurred
to him that there was any objection to such a practice. ‘To
lay down the principle that men are to serve for nothing,’ said
Cobbett, in criticising the system of unpaid magistrates, ‘puts
me in mind of the servant who went on hire, who being asked
what wages he demanded, said he wanted no wages: for that
he always found about the house little things to pick up.’</p>

<p>There is a curious passage in the General Report of the Board
of Agriculture<a id="FNanchor_78" href="#Footnote_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> on the subject of the appointment of commissioners.
The writer, after dwelling on the unexampled
powers that the commissioners enjoy, remarks that they are
not likely to be abused, because a commissioner’s prospect
of future employment in this profitable capacity depends on
his character for integrity and justice. This is a reassuring
reflection for the classes that promoted enclosures and appointed
commissioners, but it rings with a very different sound in
other ears. It would clearly have been much better for the
poor if the commissioners had not had any prospect of future
employment at all. We can obtain some idea of the kind of
men whom the landowners considered to be competent and
satisfactory commissioners from the Standing Orders of 1801,
which forbade the employment in this capacity of the bailiff
of the lord of the manor. It would be interesting to know
how much of England was appropriated on the initiative of
the lord of the manor, by his bailiff, acting under the authority
given to him by the High Court of Parliament. It is significant,
too, that down to 1801 a commissioner was only debarred
from buying land in a parish in which he had acted in this
capacity, until his award was made. The Act of 1801 debarred
him from buying land under such circumstances for the following
five years.</p>

<p>The share of the small man in these transactions from first
to last can be estimated from the language of Arthur Young
in 1770. ‘The small proprietor whose property in the township<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>
is perhaps his all, has little or no weight in regulating the
clauses of the Act of Parliament, has seldom, if ever, an opportunity
of putting a single one in the Bill favourable to his
rights, and has as little influence in the choice of Commissioners.’<a id="FNanchor_79" href="#Footnote_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a>
But even this description does less than justice to
his helplessness. There remains to be considered the procedure
before the commissioners themselves. Most Enclosure
Acts specified a date before which all claims had to be presented.
It is obvious that there must have been very many
small proprietors who had neither the courage nor the knowledge
necessary to put and defend their case, and that vast
numbers of claims must have been disregarded because they
were not presented, or because they were presented too late,
or because they were irregular in form. The Croydon Act,
for example, prescribes that claimants must send in their
claims ‘in Writing under their Hands, or the Hands of their
Agents, distinguishing in such Claims the Tenure of the Estates
in respect whereof such Claims are made, and stating therein
such further Particulars as shall be necessary to describe such
Claims with Precision.’ And if this was a difficult fence for
the small proprietor, unaccustomed to legal forms and documents,
or to forms and documents of any kind, what was the
plight of the cottager? Let us imagine the cottager, unable
to read or write, enjoying certain customary rights of common
without any idea of their origin or history or legal basis:
knowing only that as long as he can remember he has kept a
cow, driven geese across the waste, pulled his fuel out of the
neighbouring brushwood, and cut turf from the common, and
that his father did all these things before him. The cottager
learns that before a certain day he has to present to his landlord’s
bailiff, or to the parson, or to one of the magistrates into
whose hands perhaps he has fallen before now over a little
matter of a hare or a partridge, or to some solicitor from the
country town, a clear and correct statement of his rights and
his claim to a share in the award. Let us remember at the
same time all that we know from Fielding and Smollett of
the reputation of lawyers for cruelty to the poor. Is a cottager
to be trusted to face the ordeal, or to be in time with his statement,
or to have that statement in proper legal form? The
commissioners can reject his claim on the ground of any
technical irregularity, as we learn from a petition presented
to Parliament in 1774 by several persons interested in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>
enclosure of Knaresborough Forest, whose claims had been
disallowed by the commissioners because of certain ‘mistakes
made in the description of such tenements ... notwithstanding
the said errors were merely from inadvertency, and
in no way altered the merits of the petitioners’ claims.’ A
Bill was before Parliament to amend the previous Act for
enclosing Knaresborough Forest, in respect of the method of
payment of expenses, and hence these petitioners had an
opportunity of making their treatment public.<a id="FNanchor_80" href="#Footnote_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> It is easy
to guess what was the fate of many a small proprietor or
cottager, who had to describe his tenement or common right
to an unsympathetic tribunal. We are not surprised that
one of the witnesses told the Enclosure Committee of 1844
that the poor often did not know what their claims were, or
how to present them. It is significant that in the case of
Sedgmoor, out of 4063 claims sent in, only 1798 were allowed.<a id="FNanchor_81" href="#Footnote_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a></p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>We have now given an account of the procedure by which
Parliamentary enclosures were carried out. We give elsewhere
a detailed analysis, disentangled from the <i>Journals</i> of
Parliament and other sources, of particular enclosures. We
propose to give here two illustrations of the temper of the
Parliamentary Committees. One illustration is provided
by a speech made by Sir William Meredith, one of the Rockingham
Whigs, in 1772, a speech that needs no comment.
‘Sir William Meredith moved, That it might be a general
order, that no Bill, or clause in a Bill, making any offence
capital, should be agreed to but in a Committee of the whole
House. He observed, that at present the facility of passing
such clauses was shameful: that he once passing a Committee-room,
when only one Member was holding a Committee,
with a clerk’s boy, he happened to hear something of hanging;
he immediately had the curiosity to ask what was going
forward in that small Committee that could merit such a
punishment? He was answered, that it was an Inclosing
Bill, in which a great many poor people were concerned, who
opposed the Bill; that they feared those people would obstruct
the execution of the Act, and therefore this clause was to make
it capital felony in anyone who did so. This resolution was
unanimously agreed to.’<a id="FNanchor_82" href="#Footnote_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a></p>

<p>The other illustration is provided by the history of an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>
attempted enclosure in which we can watch the minds of
the chief actors without screen or disguise of any kind: in
this case we have very fortunately a vivid revelation of the
spirit and manner in which Committees conducted their business,
from the pen of the chairman himself. George Selwyn
gives us in his letters, published in the <i>Carlisle Papers</i>, a view
of the proceedings from the inside. It is worth while to set
out in some detail the passages from these letters published in
the <i>Carlisle Papers</i>, by way of supplementing and explaining
the official records of the House of Commons.</p>

<p>We learn from the <i>Journals</i> of the House of Commons that,
on 10th November, 1775, a petition was presented to the
House of Commons for the enclosure of King’s Sedgmoor, in
the County of Somerset, the petitioners urging that this land
was of very little value in its present state, and that it was
capable of great improvement by enclosure and drainage.
Leave was given to bring in a Bill, to be prepared by Mr.
St. John and Mr. Coxe. Mr. St. John was brother of Lord
Bolingbroke. On 13th November, the Bill was presented
and read a first time. Four days later it received a second
reading, and was sent to a Committee of Mr. St. John and
others. At this point, those who objected to the enclosure
began to take action. First of all there is a petition from
William Waller, Esq., who says that under a grant of Charles <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>
he is entitled to the soil of the moor: it is agreed that he shall
be heard by counsel before the Committee. The next day
there arrives a petition from owners and occupiers in thirty-five
‘parishes, hamlets and places,’ who state that all these parishes
have enjoyed rights of common without discrimination over
the 18,000 acres of pasture on Sedgmoor: that these rights
of pasture and cutting turf and rushes and sedges have existed
from time immemorial, and that no Enclosure Act is wanted
for the draining of Sedgmoor, because an Act of the reign of
William <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> had conferred all the necessary powers for this
purpose on the Justices of the Peace. The petitioners prayed
to be heard by themselves and counsel against the application
for enclosure on Committee and on Report. The House
of Commons ordered that the petition should lie on the Table,
and that the petitioners should be heard when the Report
had been received from Committee. Five days later three
lords of manors (Sir Charles Kemys Tynte, Baronet, Copleston
Warre Bampfylde, Esq., and William Hawker, Esq.) petition
against the Bill and complain of the haste with which the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>
promoters are pushing the Bill through Parliament. This
petition is taken more seriously: a motion is made and defeated
to defer the Bill for two months, but the House orders
that the petitioners shall be heard before the Committee.
Two of these three lords of manor present a further petition
early in December, stating that they and their tenants are
more than a majority in number and value of the persons
interested, and a second petition is also presented by the
thirty-seven parishes and hamlets already mentioned, in
which it is contended that, in spite of the difficulties of collecting
signatures in a scattered district in a very short time,
749 persons interested had already signed the petition against
the Bill, that the effect of the Bill had been misrepresented
to many of the tenants, that the facts as to the different
interests affected had been misrepresented to the Committee,
that the number and rights of the persons supporting the Bill
had been exaggerated (only 213 having signed their names
as consenting), and that if justice was to be done to the various
parties concerned, it was essential that time should be given
for the hearing of complaints and the circulation of the Bill
in the district. This petition was presented on 11th December,
and the House of Commons ordered that the petitioners should
be heard when the Report was received. Next day Mr.
Selwyn, as Chairman of the Committee, presented a Report in
favour of the Bill, mentioning among other things that the
number of tenements concerned was 1269, and that 303 refused
to sign; but attention was drawn to the fact that there
were several variations between the Bill as it was presented
to the House, and the Bill as it was presented to the parties
concerned for their consent, and on this ground the Bill was
defeated by 59 to 35 votes.</p>

<p>This is the cold impersonal account of the proceedings
given in the official journals, but the letters of Selwyn take
us behind the scenes and supply a far livelier picture.<a id="FNanchor_83" href="#Footnote_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> His
account begins with a letter to Lord Carlisle in November:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘Bully has a scheme of enclosure, which, if it succeeds, I am
told will free him from all his difficulties. It is to come into our
House immediately. If I had this from a better judgment than
that of our sanguine counsellors, I should have more hopes from
it. I am ready to allow that he has been very faulty, but I cannot
help wishing to see him once more on his legs....’</p>
</div>

<p>(Bully, of course, is Bolingbroke, brother of St. John, called<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>
the counsellor, author of the Bill.) We learn from this letter
that there are other motives than a passion to drain Sedgmoor
in the promotion of this great improvement scheme. We
learn from the next letter that it is not only Bully’s friends
and creditors who have some reason for wishing it well:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘Stavordale is returning to Redlinch; I believe that he sets
out to-morrow. He is also deeply engaged in this Sedgmoor
Bill, and it is supposed that he or Lord Ilchester, which you
please, will get 2000<i>l.</i> a year by it. He will get more, or save
more at least, by going away and leaving the Moor in my hands,
for he told me himself the other night that this last trip to town
had cost him 4000<i>l.</i>’</p>
</div>

<p>Another letter warns Lord Carlisle that the only way to
get his creditors to pay their debts to him, when they come
into their money through the enclosure, is to press for payment,
and goes on to describe the unexpected opposition the Bill
had encountered. Selwyn had been made chairman of the
Committee.</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘... My dear Lord, if your delicacy is such that you will not
be pressing with him about it, you may be assured that you will
never receive a farthing. I have spoke to Hare about it, who
[was] kept in it till half an hour after 4; as I was also to-day, and
shall be to-morrow. I thought that it was a matter of form only,
but had no sooner begun to read the preamble to the Bill,
but I found myself in a nest of hornets. The room was full, and
an opposition made to it, and disputes upon every word, which
kept me in the Chair, as I have told you. I have gained it seems
great reputation, and am at this minute reputed one of the best
Chairmen upon this stand. Bully and Harry came home and
dined with me....’</p>
</div>

<p>The next letter, written on 9th December, shows that
Selwyn is afraid that Stavordale may not get his money out
of his father, and also that he is becoming still more anxious
about the fate of the Enclosure Bill, on which of course the
whole pack of cards depends:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘... I have taken the liberty to talk a good deal to Lord
Stavordale, partly for his own sake and partly for yours, and
pressed him much to get out of town as soon as possible, and not
quit Lord I. [Ilchester] any more. His attention there cannot be
of long duration, and his absence may be fatal to us all. I
painted it in very strong colours, and he has promised me to go,
as soon as this Sedgmoor Bill is reported. I moved to have
Tuesday fixed for it. We had a debate and division upon my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>
motion, and this Bill will at last not go down so glibly as Bully
hoped that it would. It will meet with more opposition in the
H. of Lords, and Lord North being adverse to it, does us no
good. Lord Ilchester gets, it is said, £5000 a year by it, and
amongst others Sir C. Tynte something, who, for what reason I
cannot yet comprehend, opposes it....’</p>
</div>

<p>The next letter describes the final catastrophe:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘December 12. Tuesday night.... Bully has lost his Bill.
I reported it to-day, and the Question was to withdraw it. There
were 59 against us, and we were 35. It was worse managed by
the agents, supposing no treachery, than ever business was. Lord
North, Robinson, and Keene divided against. Charles<a id="FNanchor_84" href="#Footnote_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> said all
that could be said on our side. But as the business was managed,
it was the worst Question that I ever voted for. We were a
Committee absolutely of Almack’s,<a id="FNanchor_85" href="#Footnote_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> so if the Bill is not resumed,
and better conducted and supported, this phantom of 30,000<i>l.</i>
clear in Bully’s pocket to pay off his annuities vanishes.</p>

<p>‘It is surprising what a fatality attends some people’s proceedings.
I begged last night as for alms, that they would meet me
to settle the Votes. I have, since I have been in Parliament,
been of twenty at least of these meetings, and always brought
numbers down by those means. But my advice was slighted, and
twenty people were walking about the streets who could have
carried this point.</p>

<p>‘The cause was not bad, but the Question was totally indigestible.
The most conscientious man in the House in Questions of
this nature, Sir F. Drake, a very old acquaintance of mine, told
me that nothing could be so right as the enclosure. But they
sent one Bill into the country for the assent of the people interested,
and brought me another, differing in twenty particulars, to
carry through the Committee, without once mentioning to me
that the two Bills differed. This they thought was cunning, and
I believe a happy composition of Bully’s cunning and John’s idea
of his own parts. I had no idea, or could have, of this difference.
The adverse party said nothing of it, <i>comme de raison</i>, reserving
the objection till the Report, and it was insurmountable. If one
of the Clerks only had hinted it to me, inexperienced as I am in
these sort of Bills, I would have stopped it, and by that means have
given them a better chance by a new Bill than they can have
now, that people will have a pretence for not altering their
opinion....’</p>
</div>

<p>These letters compensate for the silence of Hansard, so real
and instructive a picture do they present of the methods and
motives of enclosure. ‘Bully has a scheme of enclosure<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>
which, if it succeeds, I am told will free him from all his difficulties.’
The journals may talk of the undrained fertility
of Sedgmoor, but we have in this sentence the aspect of the
enclosure that interests Selwyn, the Chairman of the Committee,
and from beginning to end of the proceedings no other
aspect ever enters his head. And it interests a great many
other people besides Selwyn, for Bully owes money; so too
does Stavordale, another prospective beneficiary: he owes
money to Fox, and Fox owes money to Carlisle. Now Bully
and Stavordale are not the only eighteenth-century aristocrats
who are in difficulties; the waiters at Brooks’s and at White’s
know that well enough, as Selwyn felt when, on hearing that
one of them had been arrested for felony, he exclaimed, ‘What
an idea of us he will give in Newgate.’ Nor is Bully the only
aristocrat in difficulties whose thoughts turn to enclosure;
Selwyn’s letters alone, with their reference to previous successes,
would make that clear. It is here that we begin to
appreciate the effect of our system of family settlements in
keeping the aristocracy together. These young men, whose
fortunes come and go in the hurricanes of the faro table, would
soon have dissipated their estates if they had been free to
do it; as they were restrained by settlements, they could
only mortgage them. But there is a limit to this process,
and after a time their debts begin to overwhelm them; perhaps
also too many of their fellow gamblers are their creditors
to make Brooks’s or White’s quite as comfortable a place as
it used to be, for we may doubt whether all of these creditors
were troubled with Lord Carlisle’s morbid delicacy of feeling.
Happily there is an escape from this painful situation: a
scheme of enclosure which will put him ‘once more on his
legs.’ The other parties concerned are generally poor men,
and there is not much danger of failure. Thus if we trace
the adventures of the gaming table to their bitter end, we
begin to understand that these wild revellers are gambling
not with their own estates but with the estates of their neighbours.
This is the only property they can realise. <i>Quidquid
delirant reges plectuntur Achivi.</i></p>

<p>The particular obstacle on which the scheme split was a
fraudulent irregularity: the Bill submitted for signature to
the inhabitants differing seriously (in twenty particulars)
from the Bill presented to Parliament. Selwyn clearly attached
no importance at all to the Petitions that were received against
the Bill, or to the evidence of its local unpopularity. It is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>
clear too, that it was very rare for a scheme like this to
miscarry, for, speaking of his becoming Chairman of the Committee,
he adds, ‘I thought it was a matter of form only.’
Further with a little care this project would have weathered
the discovery of the fraud of which the authors were guilty.
‘I begged last night as for alms that they would meet us to
settle the Votes. I have, since I have been in Parliament, been
of twenty at least of these meetings, and always brought
numbers down by these means. But my advice was slighted,
and twenty people were walking about the streets who could
have carried this point.’ In other words, the Bill would have
been carried, all its iniquities notwithstanding, if only Bully’s
friends had taken Selwyn’s advice and put themselves out to
go down to Westminster. So little impression did this piece
of trickery make on the mind of the Chairman of the Committee,
that he intended to the last, by collecting his friends,
to carry the Bill, for the fairness and good order of which he
was responsible, through the House of Commons. This
glimpse into the operations of the Committee enables us to
picture the groups of comrades who sauntered down from
Almack’s of an afternoon to carve up a manor in Committee
of the House of Commons. We can see Bully’s friends meeting
round the table in their solemn character of judges and
legislators, to give a score of villages to Bully, and a dozen
to Stavordale, much as Artaxerxes gave Magnesia to Themistocles
for his bread, Myus for his meat and Lampsacus for
his wine. And if those friends happened to be Bully’s creditors
as well, it would perhaps not be unjust to suppose that their
action was not altogether free from the kind of gratitude that
inspired the bounty of the great king.<a id="FNanchor_86" href="#Footnote_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a></p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV<br />

<span class="smaller">ENCLOSURE (2)</span></h2>
</div>



<p>In the year 1774, Lord North’s Government, which had already
received a bad bruise or two in the course of its quarrels with
printers and authors, got very much the worst of it in an
encounter that a little prudence would have sufficed to avert
altogether. The affair has become famous on account of the
actors, and because it was the turning point in a very important
career. The cause of the quarrel has passed into the background,
but students of the enclosure movement will find
more to interest them in its beginning than in its circumstances
and development.</p>

<p>Mr. De Grey, Member for Norfolk, and Lord of the Manor
of Tollington in that county, had a dispute of long standing
with Mr. William Tooke of Purley, a landowner in Tollington,
who had resisted Mr. De Grey’s encroachments on the common.
An action on this subject was impending, but Mr. De Grey,
who held, as Sir George Trevelyan puts it, ‘that the law’s
delay was not intended for Members of Parliament’ got another
Member of Parliament to introduce a petition for a Bill for
the enclosure of Tollington. As it happened, Mr. Tooke
was a friend of one of the clerks in the House of Commons,
and this friend told him on 6th January that a petition from
De Grey was about to be presented. A fortnight later Mr.
Tooke received from this clerk a copy of Mr. De Grey’s petition,
in which the Lord Chief Justice, brother of Mr. De Grey
was included. Mr. Tooke hurried to London and prepared
a counter petition, and Sir Edward Astley, the member for
the constituency, undertook to present that petition together
with the petition from Mr. De Grey. There were some further
negotiations, with the result that both sides revised their respective
petitions, and it was arranged that they should be
presented on 4th February. On that day the Speaker said
the House was not full enough, and the petitions must be
presented on the 7th. Accordingly Sir Edward Astley brought<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>
up both petitions on the 7th, but the Speaker said it was very
extraordinary to present two contrary petitions at the same
time. ‘Bring the first petition first.’ When members began
to say ‘Hear, hear,’ the Speaker remarked, ‘It is only a
common petition for a common enclosure,’ and the Members
fell into general conversation, paying no heed to the proceedings
at the Table. In the midst of this the petition was read,
and the Speaker asked for ‘Ayes and Noes,’ and declared that
the Ayes had it. The petition asking for the Bill had thus
been surreptitiously carried without the House being made
aware that there was a contrary petition to be presented, the
contrary petition asking for delay. The second petition was
then read and ordered to lie on the Table.</p>

<p>In ordinary circumstances nothing more would have been
heard of the opposition to Mr. De Grey’s Bill. Hundreds of
petitions may have been so stifled without the world being
any the wiser. But Mr. Tooke, who would never have known
of Mr. De Grey’s intention if he had not had a friend among
the clerks of the House of Commons, happened to have another
friend who was able to help him in a very different way in his
predicament. This was Horne, who was now living in a
cottage at Purley, reading law, on the desperate chance that
a man, who was a clergyman against his will, would be admitted
to the bar. Flushed rather than spent by his public quarrel
with Wilkes, which was just dying down, Horne saw in Mr.
Tooke’s wrongs an admirable opportunity for a champion of
freedom, whose earlier exploits had been a little tarnished
by his subsequent feuds with his comrades. Accordingly he
responded very promptly, and published in the <i>Public Advertiser</i>
of 11th February, an anonymous indictment of the Speaker,
Sir Fletcher Norton, based on his unjust treatment of these
petitions. This letter scandalised the House of Commons and
drew the unwary Government into a quarrel from which
Horne emerged triumphant; for the Government, having been
led on to proceed against Horne, was unable to prove his
authorship of the letter. The incident had consequences of
great importance for many persons. It was the making of
Horne, for he became Horne Tooke, with £8000 from his
friend and a reputation as an intrepid and vigilant champion
of popular liberty that he retained to the day of his death.
It was also the making of Fox, for it was this youth of twenty-five
who had led the Government into its scrape, and the king
could not forgive him. His temerity on this occasion provoked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>
the famous letter from North. ‘Sir, His Majesty has
thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury
to be made out, in which I do not see your name.’ Fox left
the court party to lend his impetuous courage henceforth
to very different causes. But for social students the incident
is chiefly interesting because it was the cause of the introduction
of Standing Orders on Enclosure Bills. It had shown
what might happen to rich men under the present system.
Accordingly the House of Commons set to work to construct
a series of Standing Orders to regulate the proceedings on
Enclosure Bills.</p>

<p>Most of these Standing Orders have already been mentioned
in the previous chapter, but we propose to recapitulate their
main provisions in order to show that the gross unfairness
of the procedure, described in the last chapter, as between
the rich and the poor, made no impression at all upon
Parliament. The first Standing Orders dealing with Enclosure
Bills were passed in 1774, and they were revised in 1775,
1781, 1799, 1800 and 1801. These Standing Orders prevented
a secret application to Parliament by obliging promoters
to publish a notice on the church door; they introduced
some control over the extortions of commissioners, and laid
down that the Bill presented to Parliament should contain
the names of the commissioners and a description of the compensation
to be given to the lord of the manor and the impropriator
of tithes. But they contained no safeguard at all
against robbery of the small proprietors or the commoners.
Until 1801 there was no restriction on the choice of a commissioner,
and it was only in that year that Parliament adopted
the Standing Order providing that no lord of the manor, or
steward, or bailiff of any lord or lady or proprietor should be
allowed to act as commissioner in an enclosure in which he
was an interested party.<a id="FNanchor_87" href="#Footnote_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> In one respect Parliament deliberately
withdrew a rule introduced to give greater regularity and
publicity to the proceedings of committees. Under the Standing
Orders of 1774, the Chairman of a Committee had to report
not only whether the Standing Orders had been complied with,
but also what evidence had been submitted to show that all
the necessary formalities had been observed; but in the
following year the House of Commons struck out this second
provision. A Committee of the House of Commons suggested in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>
1799 that no petition should be admitted for a Parliamentary
Bill unless a fourth part of the proprietors in number and
value signed the application, but this suggestion was rejected.</p>

<p>The poor then found no kind of shelter in the Standing
Orders. The legislation of this period, from first to last,
shows just as great an indifference to the injustice to which
they were exposed. The first public Act of the time deals
not with enclosures for growing corn, but with enclosures for
growing wood. The Act of 1756 states in its preamble that
the Acts of Henry <span class="allsmcap">VIII.</span>, Charles <span class="allsmcap">II.</span> and William <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> for encouraging
the growth of timber had been obstructed by the resistance
of the commoners, and Parliament therefore found it
necessary to enact that any owner of waste could enclose for
the purpose of growing timber with the approval of the majority
in number and value of those who had common rights, and
any majority of those who had common rights could enclose
with the approval of the owner of the waste. Any person
or persons who thought themselves aggrieved could appeal
to Quarter Sessions, within six months after the agreement
had been registered. We hear very little of this Act, and the
enclosures that concern us are enclosures of a different kind. In
the final years of the century there was a succession of General
Enclosure Bills introduced and debated in Parliament, under
the stimulus of the fear of famine. These Bills were promoted
by the Board of Agriculture, established in 1793 with
Sir John Sinclair as President, and Arthur Young as secretary.
This Board of Agriculture was not a State department in the
modern sense, but a kind of Royal Society receiving, not too
regularly, a subsidy from Parliament.<a id="FNanchor_88" href="#Footnote_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> As a result of its efforts
two Parliamentary Committees were appointed to report on the
enclosure of waste lands, and the Reports of these Committees,
which agreed in recommending a General Enclosure Bill, were
presented in 1795 and 1799. Bills were introduced in 1795,
1796, 1797 and 1800, but it was not until 1801 that any Act
was passed.</p>

<p>The first Bills presented to Parliament were General Enclosure
Bills, that is to say, they were Bills for prescribing conditions
on which enclosure could be carried out without application
to Parliament. The Board of Agriculture was set on this policy
partly, as we have seen, in the interest of agricultural expansion,
partly as the only way of guaranteeing a supply of food<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>
during the French war. But these were not the only considerations
in the mind of Parliament, and we are able in this case to
see what happened to a disinterested proposal when it had to
pass through the sieve of a Parliament of owners of land and
tithes. For we have in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i><a id="FNanchor_89" href="#Footnote_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> the form of
the General Enclosure Bill of 1796 as it was presented to the
Government by that expert body, the Board of Agriculture, and
we have among the Parliamentary Bills in the British Museum
(1) the form in which this Bill left a Select Committee, and (2)
the form in which it left a second Select Committee of Knights
of the Shire and Gentlemen of the Long Robe. We are thus
able to see in what spirit the lords of the manor who sat in
Parliament regarded, in a moment of great national urgency,
the policy put before it by the Board of Agriculture. We
come at once upon a fact of great importance. In the first
version it is recognised that Parliament has to consider the
future as well as the present, that it is dealing not only with
the claims of a certain number of living cottagers, whose
rights and property may be valued by the commissioners
at a five pound note, but with the necessities of generations
still to be born, and that the most liberal recognition of the
right to pasture a cow, in the form of a cash payment to an
individual, cannot compensate for the calamities that a society
suffers in the permanent alienation of all its soil. The Bill
as drafted in the Board of Agriculture enacted that in view
of the probable increase of population, a portion of the waste
should be set aside, and vested in a corporate body (composed
of the lord of the manor, the rector, the vicar, the churchwardens
and the overseers), for allotments for ever. Any
labourer over twenty-one, with a settlement in the parish, could
claim a portion and hold it for fifty years, rent free, on condition
of building a cottage and fencing it. When the fifty years
were over, the cottages, with their parcels of land, were to
be let on leases of twenty-one years and over at reasonable
rents, half the rent to go to the owner of the soil, and half to
the poor rates. The land was never to be alienated from the
cottage. All these far-sighted clauses vanish absolutely under
the sifting statesmanship of the Parliament, of which Burke
said in all sincerity, in his <i>Reflections on the Revolution in
France</i>, that ‘our representation has been found perfectly
adequate to all the purposes for which a representation of
the people can be desired or devised.’</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span></p>
<p>There was another respect in which the Board of Agriculture
was considered to be too generous to the poor by the
lords of the manor, who made the laws of England. In
version 1 of the Bill, not only those entitled to such right but
also those who have enjoyed or exercised the right of getting
fuel are to have special and inalienable fuel allotments made
to them: in version 2 only those who are entitled to such
rights are to have a fuel allotment, and in version 3, this compensation
is restricted to those who have possessed fuel rights
for ten years. Again in version 1, the cost of enclosing and
fencing small allotments, where the owners are unable to pay,
is to be borne by the other owners: in version 2, the small
owners are to be allowed to mortgage their allotments in order
to cover the cost. The importance of the proposal thus
rejected by the Parliamentary Committee will appear when
we come to consider the practical effects of Enclosure Acts.
The only people who got their fencing done for them under
most Acts were the tithe-owners, a class neither so poor nor
so powerless in Parliament.</p>

<p>However this Bill shared the fate of all other General Enclosure
Bills at this time. There were many obstacles to a
General Enclosure Bill. Certain Members of Parliament
resisted them on the ground that if it were made legal for a
majority to coerce a minority into enclosure without coming
to Parliament, such protection as the smaller commoners
derived from the possibility of Parliamentary discussion would
disappear. Powis quarrelled with the Bill of 1796 on this
ground, and he was supported by Fox and Grey, but his
objections were overruled. However a more formidable
opposition came from other quarters. Enclosure Acts furnished
Parliamentary officials with a harvest of fees,<a id="FNanchor_90" href="#Footnote_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> and
the Church thought it dangerous that enclosure, affecting
tithe-owners, should be carried through without the bishops
being given an opportunity of interfering. These and other
forces were powerful enough to destroy this and all General<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>
Enclosure Bills, intended to make application to Parliament
unnecessary.</p>

<p>The Board of Agriculture accordingly changed its plans.
In 1800 the Board abandoned its design of a General
Enclosure Bill, and presented instead a consolidating Bill,
which was to cheapen procedure. Hitherto there had been
great diversities of form and every Bill was an expensive little
work of art of its own. The Act of 1801 was designed to save
promoters of enclosure some of this trouble and expense. It
took some forty clauses that were commonly found in Enclosure
Bills and provided that they could be incorporated
by reference in private Bills, thus cheapening legal procedure.
Further, it allowed affidavits to be accepted as
evidence, thus relieving the promoters from the obligation
of bringing witnesses before the Committee to swear to every
signature. All the recognition that was given to the difficulties
and the claims of the poor was comprised in sections
12 and 13, which allow small allotments to be laid together
and depastured in common, and instruct the commissioners
to have particular regard to the convenience of the owners or
proprietors of the smallest estates. In 1813, the idea of a
General Bill was revived once more, and a Bill passed the
House of Commons which gave a majority of three-fifths in
value the right to petition Quarter Sessions for an enclosure.
The Bill was rejected in the Lords. In 1836 a General Enclosure
Bill was passed, permitting enclosure when two-thirds
in number and value desired it, and in 1845 Parliament
appointed central Commissioners with a view to preventing
local injustice.</p>

<p>It is unfortunate that the Parliamentary Reports of the
debates on General Enclosure Bills in the unreformed Parliament
are almost as meagre as the debates on particular Enclosure
Bills. We can gather from various indications that
the rights of the clergy received a good deal of notice, and
Lord Grenville made an indignant speech to vindicate his zeal
in the cause of the Church, which had been questioned by
opponents. The cause of the poor does not often ruffle the
surface of discussion. This we can collect not only from
negative evidence but also from a statement by Mr. Lechmere,
Member for Worcester. Lechmere, whose loss of his seat
in 1796 deprived the poor of one of their very few champions in
Parliament, drew attention more than once during the discussions
on scarcity and the high price of corn to the lamentable<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>
consequences of the disappearances of the small farms, and recommended
drastic steps to arrest the process. Philip Francis
gave him some support. The general temper of Parliament
can be divined from his complaint that when these subjects
were under discussion it was very difficult to make a House.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>It must not be supposed that the apathy of the aristocracy
was part of a universal blindness or anæsthesia, and that the
method and procedure of enclosure were accepted as just and
inevitable, without challenge or protest from any quarter.
The poor were of course bitterly hostile. This appears not
only from the petitions presented to Parliament, but from the
echoes that have reached us of actual violence. It was naturally
easier for the threatened commoners to riot in places where a
single enclosure scheme affected a wide district, and most of
the records of popular disturbances that have come down to
us are connected with attempts to enclose moors that were
common to several parishes. An interesting example is
afforded by the history of the enclosure of Haute Huntre Fen
in Lincolnshire. This enclosure, which affected eleven parishes,
was sanctioned by Parliament in 1767, but three years later
the Enclosure Commissioners had to come to Parliament to
explain that the posts and rails that they had set up had been
destroyed ‘by malicious persons, in order to hinder the execution
of the said Act,’ and to ask for permission to make ditches
instead of fences.<a id="FNanchor_91" href="#Footnote_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> An example of disturbances in a single
village is given by the Bedfordshire reporter for the Board
of Agriculture, who says that when Maulden was enclosed
it was found necessary to send for troops from Coventry to
quell the riots:<a id="FNanchor_92" href="#Footnote_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a> and another in the <i>Annual Register</i> for 1799<a id="FNanchor_93" href="#Footnote_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a>
describing the resistance of the commoners at Wilbarston in
Northamptonshire, and the employment of two troops of
yeomanry to coerce them. The general hatred of the poor
for enclosures is evident from the language of Eden, and from
statements of contributors to the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>. Eden
had included a question about commons and enclosures in
the questions he put to his correspondents, and he says in his
preface that he had been disappointed that so few of his correspondents
had given an answer to this question. He then
proceeds to give this explanation: ‘This question, like most
others, that can now be touched upon, has its popular and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>
its unpopular sides: and where no immediate self-interest,
or other partial leaning, interferes to bias the judgment, a
good-natured man cannot but wish to think with the multitudes;
stunned as his ears must daily be, with the oft-repeated
assertion, that, to condemn commons, is to determine on
depopulating the country.’<a id="FNanchor_94" href="#Footnote_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a> The writer of the <i>Bedfordshire
Report</i> in 1808 says that ‘it appears that the poor have invariably
been inimical to enclosures, as they certainly remain
to the present day.’<a id="FNanchor_95" href="#Footnote_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> Dr. Wilkinson, writing in the <i>Annals
of Agriculture</i><a id="FNanchor_96" href="#Footnote_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a> in favour of a General Enclosure Bill says,
‘the grand objection to the inclosure of commons arises from
the unpopularity which gentlemen who are active in the cause
expose themselves to in their own neighbourhood, from the
discontent of the poor when any such question is agitated.’
Arthur Young makes a similar statement.<a id="FNanchor_97" href="#Footnote_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> ‘A general inclosure
has been long ago proposed to administration, but particular
ones have been so unpopular in some cases that government
were afraid of the measure.’</p>

<p>The popular feeling, though quite unrepresented in Parliament,
was not unrepresented in contemporary literature.
During the last years of the eighteenth century there was a
sharp war of pamphlets on the merits of enclosure, and it is
noticeable that both supporters and opponents denounced
the methods on which the governing class acted. There is,
among others, a very interesting anonymous pamphlet, published
in 1781 under the title of <i>An Inquiry into the Advantages
and Disadvantages resulting from Bills of Inclosure</i>, in
which the existing practice is reviewed and some excellent
suggestions are made for reform. The writer proposed that
the preliminary to a Bill should be not the fixing of a notice<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>
to the church door, but the holding of a public meeting, that
there should be six commissioners, that they should be elected
by the commoners by ballot, that no decision should be valid
that was not unanimous, and that an appeal from that decision
should lie not to Quarter Sessions, but to Judges of Assize.
The same writer proposed that no enclosure should be sanctioned
which did not allot one acre to each cottage.</p>

<p>These proposals came from an opponent of enclosure, but
the most distinguished supporters of enclosure were also discontented
with the procedure. Who are the writers on
eighteenth-century agriculture whose names and publications
are known and remembered? They are, first of all, Arthur
Young (1741&ndash;1820), who, though he failed as a merchant and
failed as a farmer, and never ceased to regret his father’s
mistake in neglecting to put him into the soft lap of a living in
the Church, made for himself, by the simple process of observing
and recording, a European reputation as an expert adviser
in the art which he had practised with so little success. A
scarcely less important authority was William Marshall (1745&ndash;1818),
who began by trading in the West Indies, afterwards
farmed in Surrey, and then became agent in Norfolk to Sir
Harbord Harbord. It was Marshall who suggested the creation
of a Board of Rural Affairs, and the preparation of Surveys and
Minutes. Though he never held an official position, it was
from his own choice, for he preferred to publish his own Minutes
and Surveys rather than to write them for the Board. He
was interested in philology as well as in agriculture; he published
a vocabulary of the Yorkshire dialect and he was a friend
of Johnson, whom he rather scandalised by condoning Sunday
labour in agriculture under special circumstances. Nathaniel
Kent (1737&ndash;1810) studied husbandry in the Austrian Netherlands,
where he had been secretary to an ambassador, and on
his return to England in 1766 he was employed as an estate
agent and land valuer. He wrote a well-known book <i>Hints
to Gentlemen of Landed Property</i>, and he had considerable
influence in improving the management of various estates.
He was, for a short time, bailiff of George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>’s farm at Windsor.</p>

<p>All of these writers, though they are very far from taking
the view which found expression in the riots in the Lincolnshire
fens, or in the anonymous pamphlet already mentioned,
addressed some very important criticisms and recommendations
to the class that was enclosing the English commons.
Both Marshall and Young complained of the injustice of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>
method of choosing commissioners. Marshall, ardent champion
of enclosure as he was, and no sentimentalist on the subject of
the commoners, wrote a most bitter account of the motives
of the enclosers. ‘At this juncture, it is true, the owners of
manors and tithes, whether clergy or laity, men of ministry or
men of opposition, are equally on the alert: not however
pressing forward with offerings and sacrifices to relieve the
present distresses of the country, but searching for vantage
ground to aid them in the scramble.’<a id="FNanchor_98" href="#Footnote_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> Holding this view, he
was not unnaturally ill-content with the plan of letting the
big landlords nominate the commissioners, and proposed that
the lord of the soil and the owner or owners of tithes should
choose one commissioner each, that the owner or owners of
pasturage should choose two, and that the four should choose
a fifth. Arthur Young proposed that the small proprietors
should have a share in the nomination of commissioners either
by a union of votes or otherwise, as might be determined.</p>

<p>The general engrossing of farms was arraigned by Thomas
Stone, the author of an important pamphlet, <i>Suggestions for
rendering the inclosure of common fields and waste lands a
source of population and of riches</i>, 1787, who proposed that in
future enclosures farms should be let out in different sizes from
£40 to £200 a year. He thought further that Parliament
should consider the advisability of forbidding the alienation
of cottagers’ property, in order to stop the frittering away of
cottagers’ estates which was general under enclosure. Kent,
a passionate enthusiast for enclosing, was not less critical of
the practice of throwing farms together, a practice which had
raised the price of provisions to the labourer, and he appealed
to landlords to aid the distressed poor by reducing the size of
their farms, as well as by raising wages. Arbuthnot, the
author of a pamphlet on <i>An Inquiry into the Connection between
the present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms</i>, by a Farmer,
1773, who had defended the large-farm system against Dr.
Price, wrote, ‘My plan is to allot to each cottage three or four
acres which should be annexed to it without power or alienation
and without rent while under the covenant of being kept
in grass.’</p>

<p>So much for writers on agriculture. But the eighteenth
century produced two authoritative writers on social conditions.
Any student of social history who wishes to understand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>
this period would first turn to the three great volumes of Eden’s
<i>State of the Poor</i>, published in 1797, as a storehouse of cold facts.
Davies, who wrote <i>The Case of Labourers in Husbandry</i>, published
in 1795, is less famous than he deserves to be, if we are to
judge from the fact that the <i>Dictionary of National Biography</i>
only knows about him that he was Rector of Barkham in Berkshire,
and a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford, that he received
a D.D. degree in 1800, that he is the author of this book, and
that he died, perhaps, in the year 1809. But Davies’ book,
which contains the result of most careful and patient investigation,
made a profound impression on contemporary observers.
Howlett called it ‘incomparable,’ and it is impossible for the
modern reader to resist its atmosphere of reality and truth.
This country parson gives us a simple, faithful and sincere
picture of the facts, seen without illusion or prejudice, and
free from all the conventional affectations of the time: a
priceless legacy to those who are impatient of the generalisations
with which the rich dismiss the poor. Now both of
these writers warned their contemporaries of the danger of the
uncontrolled tendencies of the age. Eden proposed that in
every enclosure a certain quantity of land should be reserved
for cottagers and labourers, to be vested in the whole district.
He spoke in favour of the crofters in Scotland, and declared
that provision of this kind was made for the labouring classes
in the first settled townships of New England. Davies was
still more emphatic in calling upon England to settle cottagers
and to arrest the process of engrossing farms.<a id="FNanchor_99" href="#Footnote_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a></p>

<p>Thus of all the remembered writers of the period who had
any practical knowledge of agriculture or of the poor, there is
not one who did not try to teach the governing class the need
for reform, and the dangers of the state into which they were
allowing rural society to drift. Parliament was assailed on
all sides with criticisms and recommendations, and its refusal
to alter its ways was deliberate.</p>

<p>Of the protests of the time the most important and significant
came from Arthur Young. No man had been so
impatient of objections to enclosure: no man had taken so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>
severe and disciplinary a view of the labourer: no man had
dismissed so lightly the appeals for the preservation of the
fragmentary possessions of the poor. He had taught a very
simple philosophy, that the more the landowner pressed the
farmer, and the more the farmer pressed the labourer, the
better it was for agriculture. He had believed as implicitly
as Sinclair himself, and with apparently as little effort to master
the facts, that the cottagers were certain to benefit by enclosure.
All this gives pathos, as well as force, to his remarkable
paper, published under the title <i>An Inquiry into the
Propriety of applying Wastes to the better Maintenance and
Support of the Poor</i>.</p>

<p>The origin of this document is interesting. It was written
in 1801, a few years after the Speenhamland system had begun
to fix itself on the villages. The growth of the poor rates was
troubling the minds of the upper and middle classes. Arthur
Young, in the course of his travels at this time, stumbled on the
discovery that in those parishes where the cottagers had been
able to keep together a tiny patch of property, they had shown
a Spartan determination to refuse the refuge of the Poor Law.
When once he had observed this, he made further investigations
which only confirmed his first impressions. This opened
his eyes to the consequences of enclosure as it had been carried
out, and he began to examine the history of these operations
in a new spirit. He then found that enclosure had destroyed
with the property of the poor one of the great incentives to
industry and self-respect, and that his view that the benefit of
the commons to the poor was ‘perfectly contemptible,’ and
‘when it tempts them to become owners of cattle or sheep usually
ruinous,’<a id="FNanchor_100" href="#Footnote_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> was fundamentally wrong. Before the enclosures, the
despised commons had enabled the cottager to keep a cow, and
this, so far from bringing ruin, had meant in very many cases all
the difference between independence and pauperism. His scrutiny
of the Acts convinced him that in respect of this they had been
unjust. ‘By nineteen out of twenty Inclosure Bills the poor are
injured, and some grossly injured.... Mr. Forster of Norwich,
after giving me an account of twenty inclosures in which he
had acted as Commissioner, stated his opinion on their general
effect on the poor, and lamented that he had been accessory
to the injuring of 2000 poor people, at the rate of twenty
families per parish.... The poor in these parishes may say,
and with truth, “Parliament may be tender of property: all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>
I know is that I had a cow and an Act of Parliament has taken
it from me.”’</p>

<p>This paper appeared on the eve of the Enclosure Act of
1801, the Act to facilitate and cheapen procedure, which
Young and Sinclair had worked hard to secure. It was therefore
an opportune moment for trying to temper enclosure
to the difficulties of the poor. Arthur Young made a passionate
appeal to the upper classes to remember these difficulties.
‘To pass Acts beneficial to every other class in the State and
hurtful to the lowest class only, when the smallest alteration
would prevent it, is a conduct against which reason, justice
and humanity equally plead.’ He then proceeded to outline
a constructive scheme. He proposed that twenty millions
should be spent in setting up half a million families with allotments
and cottages: the fee-simple of the cottage and land
to be vested in the parish, and possession granted under an
Act of Parliament, on condition that if the father or his family
became chargeable to the rates, the cottage and land should
revert to the parish. The parishes were to carry out the
scheme, borrowing the necessary money on the security of
the rates.<a id="FNanchor_101" href="#Footnote_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a> ‘A man,’ he told the landlords, in a passage
touched perhaps with remorse as well as with compassion, ‘will
love his country the better even for a pig.’ ‘At a moment,’
so he concludes, ‘when a General Inclosure of Wastes is before
Parliament, to allow such a measure to be carried into execution
in conformity with the practice hitherto, without entering
one voice, however feeble, in defence of the interests of the
poor, would have been a wound to the feelings of any man not
lost to humanity who had viewed the scenes which I have
visited.’</p>

<p>The appeal broke against a dense mass of class prejudice,
and so far as any effect on the Consolidating Act of 1801 is
concerned, Arthur Young might never have written a line.
This is perhaps not surprising, for we know from Young’s
autobiography (p. 350) that he did not even carry the Board
of Agriculture with him, and that Lord Carrington, who was
then President, only allowed him to print his appeal on the
understanding that it was not published as an official document,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>
and that the Board was in no way identified with it.
Sinclair, who shared Young’s conversion, had ceased to be
President in 1798. The compunction he tried to awaken did
affect an Act here and there. A witness before the Allotments
Committee of 1843 described the arrangements he
contrived to introduce into an Enclosure Act. The witness
was Mr. Demainbray, an admirable and most public-spirited
parson, Rector of Broad Somerford in Wiltshire. Mr. Demainbray
explained that when the Enclosure Act for his parish
was prepared in 1806, he had been pressed to accept land in
lieu of tithes, and that he took the opportunity to stipulate
for some provision for the poor. As a consequence of his
efforts, half an acre was attached to each cottage on the waste,
the land being vested in the rector, churchwardens and overseers
for the time being, and eight acres were reserved for the
villagers for allotment and reallotment every Easter. This
arrangement, which had excellent results, ‘every man looking
forward to becoming a man of property,’ was copied in several
of the neighbouring parishes. Dr. Slater has collected some
other examples. One Act, passed in 1824 for Pottern in
Wiltshire, vested the ownership of the enclosed common in
the Bishop of Salisbury, who was lord of the manor, the
vicar, and the churchwardens, in trust for the parish. The
trustees were required to lease it in small holdings to poor,
honest and industrious persons, who had not, except in cases
of accident or sickness, availed themselves of Poor Law Relief.<a id="FNanchor_102" href="#Footnote_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a>
Thomas Stone’s proposal for making inalienable allotments to
cottagers was adopted in two or three Acts in the eastern
counties, but the Acts that made some provision for the poor
do not amount, in Dr. Slater’s opinion, to more than one per
cent. of the Enclosure Acts passed before 1845,<a id="FNanchor_103" href="#Footnote_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> and this view
is corroborated by the great stress laid in the Reports of the
Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, upon a few
cases where the poor were considered, and by a statement
made by Mr. Demainbray in a pamphlet published in 1831.<a id="FNanchor_104" href="#Footnote_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a>
In this pamphlet Mr. Demainbray quotes what Davies had
said nearly forty years earlier about the effect of enclosures
in robbing the poor, and then adds: ‘Since that time many
hundred enclosures have taken place, but in how few of them<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>
has any reserve been made for the privileges which the poor
man and his ancestors had for centuries enjoyed?’</p>

<p>Some interesting provisions are contained in certain of
the Acts analysed in the Appendix. At Stanwell the commissioners
were to set aside such parcel as they thought
proper not exceeding thirty acres, to be let out and the
rents and profits were to be given for the benefit of such
occupiers and inhabitants as did not receive parochial relief
or occupy lands and tenements of more than £5 a year, and
had not received any allotment under the Act. Middleton,
the writer of the <i>Report on Middlesex</i>, says that the land produced
£30 a year,<a id="FNanchor_105" href="#Footnote_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> and he remarks that this is a much better
way of helping the poor than leaving them land for their use.
We may doubt whether the arrangement seemed equally
attractive to the poor. It could not have been much compensation
to John Carter, who owned a cottage, to receive
three roods, twenty-six perches in lieu of his rights of common,
which is his allotment in the award, for three-quarters of an
acre is obviously insufficient for the pasture of a cow, but it
was perhaps still less satisfactory for James Carter to know
that one acre and seven perches were allotted to the ‘lawful
owner or owners’ of the cottage and land which he occupied,
and that his own compensation for the loss of his cow or sheep
or geese was the cold hope that if he kept off the rates, Sir
William Gibbons, the vicar, and the parish officers might give
him a dole. The Laleham Commissioners were evidently
men of a rather grim humour, for, in setting aside thirteen acres
for the poor, they authorised the churchwardens and overseers
to encourage the poor, if they were so minded, by letting this
plot for sixty years and using the money so received to build a
workhouse. A much more liberal provision was made at
Cheshunt, where the poor were allowed 100 acres. At Knaresborough
and Louth, the poor got nothing at all.</p>

<p>Before we proceed to describe the results of enclosure on
village life, we may remark one curious fact. In 1795 and
1796 there was some discussion in the House of Commons
of the condition of the agricultural labourers, arising out of
the proposal of Whitbread’s to enable the magistrates to fix
a minimum wage. Pitt made a long speech in reply, and
promised to introduce a scheme of his own for correcting evils
that were too conspicuous to be ignored. This promise he
kept next year in the ill-fated Poor Law Bill, which died,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>
almost at its birth, of general hostility. That Bill will be
considered elsewhere. All that we are concerned to notice
here is that neither speech nor Bill, though they cover a wide
range of topics, and though Pitt said that they represented
the results of long and careful inquiry, hint at this cause of
social disturbance, or at the importance of safe-guarding the
interests of the poor in future enclosure schemes: this in spite
of the fact that, as we have seen, there was scarcely any contemporary
writer or observer who had not pointed out that
the way in which the governing class was conducting these
revolutions was not only unjust to the poor but perilous to
the State.</p>

<p>It is interesting, in the light of the failure to grasp and
retrieve an error in national policy which marks the progress
of these transactions, to glance at the contemporary history
of France. The Legislative Assembly, under the influence
of the ideas of the economists, decreed the division of the land
of the communes in 1792. The following year this decree
was modified. Certain provincial assemblies had asked for
division, but many of the villages were inexorably hostile.
The new decree of June 1793 tried to do justice to these
conflicting wishes by making division optional. At the same
time it insisted on an equitable division in cases where partition
took place. But this policy of division was found to
have done such damage to the interests of the poor that there
was strenuous opposition, with the result that in 1796 the
process was suspended, and in the following year it was forbidden.<a id="FNanchor_106" href="#Footnote_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a>
Can any one suppose that if the English legislature
had had as swift and ready a sense for things going wrong, the
policy of enclosure would have been pursued after 1801 with
the same reckless disregard for its social consequences?</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>We have given in the last chapter the history of an enclosure
project for the light it throws on the play of motive in the
enclosing class. We propose now to give in some detail the
history of an enclosure project that succeeded for the light it
throws on the attention which Parliament paid to local opinion,
and on the generally received views as to the rights of the
small commoners. Our readers will observe that this enclosure<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>
took place after the criticisms and appeals which we have
described had all been published.</p>

<p>Otmoor is described in Dunkin’s <i>History of Oxfordshire</i>,<a id="FNanchor_107" href="#Footnote_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a>
as a ‘dreary and extensive common.’ Tradition said that the
tract of land was the gift of some mysterious lady ‘who gave
as much ground as she could ride round while an oat-sheaf
was burning, to the inhabitants of its vicinity for a public
common,’ and hence came its name of Oatmoor, corrupted into
Otmoor. Whatever the real origin of the name, which more
prosaic persons connected with ‘<i>Oc</i>’, a Celtic word for ‘water,’
this tract of land had been used as a ‘public common without
stint ... from remote antiquity.’ Lord Abingdon, indeed,
as Lord of the Manor of Beckley, claimed and exercised the
right of appointing a moor-driver, who at certain seasons
drove all the cattle into Beckley, where those which were
unidentified became Lord Abingdon’s property. Lord
Abingdon also claimed rights of soil and of sport: these, like
his other claim, were founded on prescription only, as there
was no trace of any grant from the Crown.</p>

<p>The use to which Otmoor, in its original state, was put, is
thus described by Dunkin. ‘Whilst this extensive piece of
land remained unenclosed, the farmers of the several adjoining
townships estimated the profits of a summer’s pasturage
at 20s. per head, subject to the occasional loss of a beast by
a peculiar distemper called the moor-evil. But the greatest
benefit was reaped by the cottagers, many of whom turned
out large numbers of geese, to which the coarse aquatic
sward was well suited, and thereby brought up their families
in comparative plenty.<a id="FNanchor_108" href="#Footnote_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a></p>

<p>‘Of late years, however, this dreary waste was surveyed
with longing eyes by the surrounding landowners, most of
whom wished to annex a portion of it to their estates, and in
consequence spared no pains to recommend the enclosure as
a measure beneficial to the country.’</p>

<p>The promoters of the enclosure credited themselves with
far loftier motives: prominent among them being a desire
to improve the morals of the poor. An advocate of the
enclosure afterwards described the pitiable state of the poor
in pre-enclosure days in these words: ‘In looking after a
brood of goslings, a few rotten sheep, a skeleton of a cow<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>
or a mangy horse, they lost more than they might have
gained by their day’s work, and acquired habits of idleness
and dissipation and a dislike to honest labour, which has
rendered them the riotous and lawless set of men which they
have now shown themselves to be.’ A pious wish to second
the intention of Providence was also a strong incentive:
‘God did not create the earth to lie waste for feeding a few
geese, but to be cultivated by man, in the sweat of his brow.’<a id="FNanchor_109" href="#Footnote_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a></p>

<p>The first proposal for enclosure came to Parliament from
George, Duke of Marlborough, and others on 11th March, 1801.
The duke petitioned for the drainage and the allotment of the
4000 acres of Otmoor among the parishes concerned, namely
Beckley (with Horton and Studley), Noke, Oddington, and
Charlton (with Fencott and Moorcott). This petition was
referred to a Committee, to consider amongst other things,
whether the Standing Orders with reference to Drainage
Bills had been duly complied with. The Committee reported
in favour of allowing the introduction of the Bill, but made
this remarkable admission, that though the Standing Orders
with respect to the affixing of notices on church doors had
been complied with on Sunday, 3rd August, ‘it appeared to
the Committee that on the following Sunday, the 10th of
August, the Person employed to affix the like Notices was
prevented from so doing at Beckley, Oddington and Charlton,
by a Mob at each Place, but that he read the Notices to the
Persons assembled, and afterwards threw them amongst them
into the Church Yards of those Parishes.’ Notice was duly
affixed that Sunday at Noke. The next Sunday matters were
even worse, for no notices were allowed to be fixed in any parish.</p>

<p>The Bill that was introduced in spite of this local protest,
was shipwrecked during its Committee stage by a petition
from Alexander Croke, LL.D., Lord of the Manor of Studley
with Whitecross Green, and from John Mackarness, Esq.,
who stated that as proprietors in the parish of Beckley, their
interests had not been sufficiently considered.</p>

<p>The next application to Parliament was not made till 1814.
In the interval various plans were propounded, and Arthur
Young, in his <i>Survey of Oxfordshire for the Board of Agriculture</i>,
published in 1809 (a work which Dunkin describes as supported
by the farmers and their landlords and as having caught their
strain), lamented the wretched state of the land. ‘I made
various inquiries into the present value of it by rights of commonage;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>
but could ascertain no more than the general fact,
of its being to a very beggarly amount.... Upon the
whole, the present produce must be quite contemptible, when
compared with the benefit which would result from enclosing
it. And I cannot but remark, that such a tract of waste land
in summer, and covered the winter through with water, to
remain in such a state, within five miles of Oxford and the
Thames, in a kingdom that regularly imports to the amount
of a million sterling in corn, and is almost periodically visited
with apprehensions of want&mdash;is a scandal to the national
policy.... If drained and enclosed, it is said that no difficulty
would occur in letting it at 30s. per acre, and some assert
even 40s.’ (p. 228).</p>

<p>When the new application was made in November 1814, it
was again referred to a Committee, who again had to report
turbulent behaviour in the district concerned. Notices had
been fixed on all the church doors on 7th August, and on three
doors on 14th August, ‘but it was found impracticable to affix
the Notices on the Church doors of the other two Parishes on
that day, owing to large Mobs, armed with every description
of offensive weapons, having assembled for the purpose of
obstructing the persons who went to affix the Notices, and
who were prevented by violence, and threats of immediate
death, from approaching the Churches.’<a id="FNanchor_110" href="#Footnote_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> From the same
cause no notices could be affixed on these two church doors
on 21st or 28th August.</p>

<p>These local disturbances were not allowed to check the
career of the Bill. It was read a first time on 21st February,
and a second time on 7th March. But meanwhile some
serious flaws had been discovered. The Duke of Marlborough
and the Earl of Abingdon both petitioned against it. The
Committee, however, were able to introduce amendments
that satisfied both these powerful personages, and on 1st May
Mr. Fane reported from the Committee that no persons had
appeared for the said petitions, and that the parties concerned
had consented to the satisfaction of the Committee, and had
also consented ‘to the changing the Commissioners therein
named.’ Before the Report had been passed, however, a
petition was received on behalf of Alexander Croke,<a id="FNanchor_111" href="#Footnote_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> Esq.,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>
who was now in Nova Scotia, which made further amendments
necessary, and the Committee was empowered to send
for persons, papers and records. Meanwhile the humbler
individuals whose future was imperilled were also bestirring
themselves. They applied to the Keeper of the Records in
the Augmentation Office for a report on the history of Otmoor.
This Report, which is published at length by Dunkin,<a id="FNanchor_112" href="#Footnote_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> states
that in spite of laborious research no mention of Otmoor
could be found in any single record from the time of William
the Conqueror to the present day. Even <i>Doomsday Book</i> contained
no reference to it. Nowhere did it appear in what
manor Otmoor was comprehended, nor was there any record
that any of the lords of neighbouring manors had ever been
made capable of enjoying any rights of common upon it.
The custom of usage without stint, in fact, pointed to some
grant before the memory of man, and made it unlikely that
any lord of the manor had ever had absolute right of soil.
Armed, no doubt, with this learned report, some ‘Freeholders,
Landholders, Cottagers and Persons’ residing in four parishes
sent up a petition asking to be heard against the Bill. But
they were too late: their petition was ordered to lie on the
Table, and the Bill passed the Commons the same day (26th
June) and received the Royal Assent on 12th July.</p>

<p>The Act directed that one-sixteenth of the whole (which
was stated to be over 4000 acres) should be given to the
Lord of the Manor of Beckley, Lord Abingdon, in compensation
of his rights of soil, and one-eighth as composition for all
tithes. Thus Lord Abingdon received, to start with, about
750 acres. The residue was to be allotted among the various
parishes, townships and hamlets, each allotment to be held
as a common pasture for the township. So far, beyond the
fact that Lord Abingdon had taken off more than a sixth
part of their common pasture, and that the pasture was now
divided up into different parts, it did not seem that the ordinary
inhabitants were much affected. The sting lay in the arrangements
for the future of these divided common pastures.
‘And if at any future time the major part in value of the
several persons interested in such plot or parcels of land,
should require a separate division of the said land, he (the
commissioner) is directed to divide and allot the same among
the several proprietors, in proportion to their individual rights
and interests therein.’<a id="FNanchor_113" href="#Footnote_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span></p>

<p>We have, fortunately, a very clear statement of the way in
which the ‘rights and interests’ of the poorer inhabitants of
the Otmoor towns were regarded in the enclosure. These
inhabitants, it must be remembered, had enjoyed rights of
common without any stint from time immemorial, simply
by virtue of living in the district. In a letter from ‘An Otmoor
Proprietor’ to the Oxford papers in 1830, the writer (Sir
Alexander Croke himself?), who was evidently a man of some
local importance, explains that by the general rule of law a
commoner is not entitled to turn on to the common more
cattle than are sufficient to manure and stock the land to which
the right of common is annexed. Accordingly, houses without
land attached to them cannot, strictly speaking, claim a
right of common. How then explain the state of affairs at
Otmoor, where all the inhabitants, landed or landless, enjoyed
the same rights? By prescription, he answers, mere houses
do in point of fact sometimes acquire a right of common, but
this right, though it may be said to be without stint, is in
reality always liable to be stinted by law. Hence, when a
common like Otmoor is enclosed, the allotments are made as
elsewhere in proportion to the amount of land possessed by
each commoner, whilst a ‘proportionable share’ is thrown
in to those who own mere houses. But even this share, he
points out, does not necessarily belong to the person who has
been exercising the right of common, unless he happens to
own his own house. It belongs to his landlord, who alone is
entitled to compensation. A superficial observer might
perhaps think this a hardship, but in point of fact it is quite
just. The tenants, occupying the houses, must have been
paying a higher rent in consideration of the right attached
to the houses, and they have always been liable to be turned
out by the landlord at will. ‘They had no permanent interest,
and it has been decided by the law that <i>no man can have any
right in any common, as belonging to a house, wherein he has
no interest but only habitation</i>: so that the poor, as such, had
no right to the common whatever.’<a id="FNanchor_114" href="#Footnote_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a></p>

<p>The results of the Act, framed and administered on these
lines, were described by Dunkin,<a id="FNanchor_115" href="#Footnote_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> writing in 1823, as follows:
‘It now only remains to notice the effect of the operation
of this act. On the division of the land allotted to the
respective townships, a certain portion was assigned to each
cottager in lieu of his accustomed commonage, but the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>
delivery of the allotment did not take place, unless the party
to whom it was assigned paid his share of the expenses
incurred in draining and dividing the waste: and he was also
further directed to enclose the same with a fence. The poverty
of the cottager in general prevented his compliance with
these conditions, and he was necessitated to sell his share for
any paltry sum that was offered. In the spring of 1819,
several persons at Charlton and elsewhere made profitable
speculations by purchasing these commons for £5 each, and
afterwards prevailing on the commissioners to throw them
into one lot, thus forming a valuable estate. In this way
was Otmoor lost to the poor man, and awarded to the rich,
under the specious idea of benefitting the public.’ The
expenses of the Act, it may be mentioned, came to something
between £20,000 and £30,000, or more than the fee-simple
of the soil.<a id="FNanchor_116" href="#Footnote_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a></p>

<p>Enclosed Otmoor did not fulfil Arthur Young’s hopes:
‘... instead of the expected improvement in the quality
of the soil, it has been rendered almost totally worthless;
a great proportion being at this moment over-rated at 5s. an
acre yearly rent, few crops yielding any more than barely
sufficient to pay for labour and seed.’<a id="FNanchor_117" href="#Footnote_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> This excess of
expenses over profits was adduced by the ‘Otmoor proprietor,’
to whom we have already referred, as an illustration of the
public-spirited self-sacrifice of the enclosers, who were paying
out of their own pockets for a national benefit, and by making
some, at any rate, of the land capable of cultivation, were
enabling the poor to have ‘an honest employment, instead of
losing their time in idleness and waste.’<a id="FNanchor_118" href="#Footnote_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a> But fifteen years
of this ‘honest employment’ failed to reconcile the poor
to their new position, and in 1830 they were able to express
their feelings in a striking manner.<a id="FNanchor_119" href="#Footnote_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a></p>

<p>In the course of his drainage operations, the commissioner
had made a new channel for the river Ray, at a higher level,
with the disastrous result that the Ray overflowed into a
valuable tract of low land above Otmoor. For two years
the farmers of this tract suffered severe losses (one farmer was
said to have lost £400 in that time), then they took the law<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>
into their own hands, and in June 1829 cut the embankments,
so that the waters of the Ray again flowed over Otmoor and
left their valuable land unharmed. Twenty-two farmers
were indicted for felony for this act, but they were acquitted
at the Assizes, under the direction of Mr. Justice Parke, on the
grounds that the farmers had a right to abate the nuisance,
and that the commissioner had exceeded his powers in making
this new channel and embankment.</p>

<p>This judgment produced a profound impression on the
Otmoor farmers and cottagers. They misread it to mean
that all proceedings under the Enclosure Act were illegal
and therefore null and void, and they determined to regain
their lost privileges. Disturbances began at the end of August
(28th August). For about a week, straggling parties of
enthusiasts paraded the moor, cutting down fences here and
there. A son of Sir Alexander Croke came out to one of
these parties and ordered them to desist. He had a loaded
pistol with him, and the moor-men, thinking, rightly or
wrongly, that he was going to fire, wrested it from him and
gave him a severe thrashing. Matters began to look serious:
local sympathy with the rioters was so strong that special
constables refused to be sworn in; the High Sheriff accordingly
summoned the Oxfordshire Militia, and Lord Churchill’s
troop of Yeomanry Cavalry was sent to Islip. But the
inhabitants were not overawed. They determined to perambulate
the bounds of Otmoor in full force, in accordance with
the old custom. On Monday, 6th September, five hundred
men, women and children assembled from the Otmoor towns,
and they were joined by five hundred more from elsewhere.
Armed with reap-hooks, hatchets, bill-hooks and duckets, they
marched in order round the seven-mile-long boundary of
Otmoor, destroying all the fences on their way. By noon
their work of destruction was finished. ‘A farmer in the
neighbourhood who witnessed the scene gives a ludicrous
description of the zeal and perseverance of the women and
children as well as the men, and the ease and composure with
which they waded through depths of mud and water and
overcame every obstacle in their march. He adds that he did
not hear any threatening expressions against any person or
his property, and he does not believe any individuals present
entertained any feeling or wish beyond the assertion of what
they conceived (whether correctly or erroneously) to be their
prescriptive and inalienable right, and of which they speak<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>
precisely as the freemen of Oxford would describe their right
to Port Meadow.’<a id="FNanchor_120" href="#Footnote_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a></p>

<p>By the time the destruction of fences was complete, Lord
Churchill’s troop of yeomanry came up to the destroying
band: the Riot Act was read, but the moormen refused to
disperse. Sixty or seventy of them were thereupon seized
and examined, with the result that forty-four were sent
off to Oxford Gaol in wagons, under an escort of yeomanry.
Now it happened to be the day of St. Giles’ Fair, and the
street of St. Giles, along which the yeomanry brought their
prisoners, was crowded with countryfolk and townsfolk, most
of whom held strong views on the Otmoor question. The
men in the wagons raised the cry ‘Otmoor for ever,’ the
crowd took it up, and attacked the yeomen with great
violence, hurling brickbats, stones and sticks at them from
every side. The yeomen managed to get their prisoners as
far as the turning down Beaumont Street, but there they
were overpowered, and all forty-four prisoners escaped.
At Otmoor itself peace now reigned. Through the broken
fences cattle were turned in to graze on all the enclosures,
and the villagers even appointed a herdsman to look after
them. The inhabitants of the seven Otmoor towns formed
an association called ‘the Otmoor Association,’ which boldly
declared that ‘the Right of Common on Otmoor was always
in the inhabitants, and that a non-resident proprietor had no
Right of Common thereon,’ and determined to raise subscriptions
for legal expenses in defence of their right, calling upon
‘the pecuniary aid of a liberal and benevolent public ...
to assist them in attempting to restore Otmoor once more to
its original state.’<a id="FNanchor_121" href="#Footnote_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a></p>

<p>Meanwhile the authorities who had lost their prisoners once,
sent down a stronger force to take them next time, and although
at the Oxford City Sessions a bill of indictment against William
Price and others for riot in St. Giles and rescue of the prisoners
was thrown out, at the County Sessions the Grand Jury found
a true Bill against the same William Price and others for the
same offence, and also against Cooper and others for riot at
Otmoor. The prisoners were tried at the Oxford Assizes next
month, before Mr. Justice Bosanquet and Sir John Patteson.
The jury returned a verdict which shows the strength of public
opinion. ‘We find the defendants guilty of having been present
at an unlawful assembly on the 6th September at Otmoor, but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>
it is the unanimous wish of the Jury to recommend all the
parties to the merciful consideration of the Court.’ The judges
responded to this appeal and the longest sentence inflicted
was four months’ imprisonment.<a id="FNanchor_122" href="#Footnote_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a></p>

<p>The original enclosure was now fifteen years old, but
Otmoor was still in rebellion, and the Home Office Papers
of the next two years contain frequent applications for troops
from Lord Macclesfield, Lord-Lieutenant, Sir Alexander Croke
and other magistrates. Whenever there was a full moon,
the patriots of the moor turned out and pulled down the
fences. How strong was the local resentment of the overriding
of all the rights and traditions of the commoners may be
seen not only from the language of one magistrate writing
to Lord Melbourne in January 1832: ‘all the towns in
the neighbourhood of Otmoor are more or less infected
with the feelings of the most violent, and cannot at all
be depended on’: but also from a resolution passed by the
magistrates at Oxford in February of that year, declaring that
no constabulary force that the magistrates could raise would
be equal to suppressing the Otmoor outrages, and asking for
soldiers. The appeal ended with this significant warning: ‘Any
force which Government may send down should not remain
for a length of time together, but that to avoid the possibility
of an undue connexion between the people and the Military,
a succession of troops should be observed.’ So long and so
bitter was the civil war roused by an enclosure which Parliament
had sanctioned in absolute disregard of the opinions or the
traditions or the circumstances of the mass of the people it
affected.</p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V<br />

<span class="smaller">THE VILLAGE AFTER ENCLOSURE</span></h2>
</div>



<p>THE governing class continued its policy of extinguishing
the old village life and all the relationships and interests
attached to it, with unsparing and unhesitating hand; and
as its policy progressed there were displayed all the consequences
predicted by its critics. Agriculture was revolutionised:
rents leapt up: England seemed to be triumphing
over the difficulties of a war with half the world. But it had
one great permanent result which the rulers of England
ignored. The anchorage of the poor was gone.</p>

<p>For enclosure was fatal to three classes: the small farmer,
the cottager, and the squatter. To all of these classes their
common rights were worth more than anything they received
in return. Their position was just the opposite of that of
the lord of the manor. The lord of the manor was given a
certain quantity of land (the conventional proportion was
one-sixteenth<a id="FNanchor_123" href="#Footnote_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a>) in lieu of his surface rights, and that compact
allotment was infinitely more valuable than the rights so compensated.
Similarly the tithe-owner stood to gain with the
increased rent. The large farmer’s interests were also in
enclosure, which gave him a wider field for his capital and
enterprise. The other classes stood to lose.</p>

<p>For even if the small farmer received strict justice in the
division of the common fields, his share in the legal costs
and the additional expense of fencing his own allotments often
overwhelmed him, and he was obliged to sell his property.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span><a id="FNanchor_124" href="#Footnote_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a>
The expenses were always very heavy, and in some cases
amounted to £5 an acre.<a id="FNanchor_125" href="#Footnote_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a> The lord of the manor and the
tithe-owner could afford to bear their share, because they
were enriched by enclosure: the classes that were impoverished
by enclosure were ruined when they had to pay for the very
proceeding that had made them the poorer. The promoter
of the General Enclosure Bill of 1796, it will be remembered,
had proposed to exempt the poor from the expense of fencing,
but the Select Committee disapproved, and the only persons
exempted in the cases we have examined were the lords of the
manor or tithe-owners.</p>

<p>If these expenses still left the small farmer on his feet, he
found himself deprived of the use of the fallow and stubble
pasture, which had been almost as indispensable to him as the
land he cultivated. ‘Strip the small farms of the benefit
of the commons,’ said one observer, ‘and they are all at one
stroke levelled to the ground.’<a id="FNanchor_126" href="#Footnote_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> It was a common clause in
Enclosure Acts that no sheep were to be depastured on allotments
for seven years.<a id="FNanchor_127" href="#Footnote_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a> The small farmer either emigrated<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>
to America or to an industrial town, or became a day labourer.
His fate in the last resort may perhaps be illustrated by the
account given by the historian of <i>Oxfordshire</i> of the enclosure
of Merton. ‘About the middle of last century a very considerable
alteration was produced in the relative situation of different
classes in the village. The Act of Parliament for the inclosure
of the fields having annulled all leases, and the inclosure itself
facilitated the plan of throwing several small farms into a
few large bargains,<a id="FNanchor_128" href="#Footnote_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> the holders of the farms who had heretofore
lived in comparative plenty, became suddenly reduced to
the situation of labourers, and in a few years were necessitated
to throw themselves and their families upon the parish. The
overgrown farmers who had fattened upon this alteration,
feeling the pressure of the new burden, determined if possible
to free themselves: they accordingly decided upon reducing
the allowance of these poor to the lowest ratio,<a id="FNanchor_129" href="#Footnote_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> and resolved
to have no more servants so that their parishioners might
experience no further increase from that source. In a few
years the numbers of the poor rapidly declined: the more
aged sank into their graves, and the youth, warned by their
parents’ sufferings, sought a settlement elsewhere. The
farmers, rejoicing in the success of their scheme, procured the
demolition of the cottages, and thus endeavoured to secure
themselves and their successors from the future expenses of
supporting an increased population, so that in 1821 the parish
numbered only thirty houses inhabited by thirty-four families.’<a id="FNanchor_130" href="#Footnote_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a>
Another writer gave an account of the results of a Norfolk
enclosure. ‘In passing through a village near Swaffham, in
the County of Norfolk a few years ago, to my great mortification
I beheld the houses tumbling into ruins, and the
common fields all enclosed; upon enquiring into the cause
of this melancholy alteration, I was informed that a gentleman
of Lynn had bought that township and the next adjoining
to it: that he had thrown the one into three, and the
other into four farms; which before the enclosure were in
about twenty farms: and upon my further enquiring what
was becoming of the farmers who were turned out, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>
answer was that some of them were dead and the rest were
become labourers.’<a id="FNanchor_131" href="#Footnote_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a></p>

<p>The effect on the cottager can best be described by saying
that before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land,
after enclosure he was a labourer without land. The economic
basis of his independence was destroyed. In the first place,
he lost a great many rights for which he received no compensation.
There were, for instance, the cases mentioned
by Mr. Henry Homer (1719&ndash;1791), Rector of Birdingbury
and Chaplain to Lord Leigh, in the pamphlet he published
in 1769,<a id="FNanchor_132" href="#Footnote_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a> where the cottagers lost the privileges of cutting
furze and turf on the common land, the proprietor contending
that they had no right to these privileges, but only enjoyed
them by his indulgence. In every other case, Mr. Homer
urged, uninterrupted, immemorial usage gives a legal sanction
even to encroachments. ‘Why should the poor, as poor, be
excluded from the benefit of this general Indulgence; or why
should any set of proprietors avail themselves of the inability
of the poor to contend with them, to get possession of more
than they enjoyed?’<a id="FNanchor_133" href="#Footnote_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a></p>

<p>Another right that was often lost was the prescriptive
right of keeping a cow. The <i>General Report on Enclosures</i>
(p. 12) records the results of a careful inquiry made in a
journey of 1600 miles, which showed that before enclosure
cottagers often kept cows without a legal right, and that
nothing was given them for the practice. Other cottagers
kept cows by right of hiring their cottages and common
rights, and on enclosure the land was thrown into a farm,
and the cottager had to sell his cow. Two examples taken
from the <i>Bedfordshire Report</i> illustrate the consequences of
enclosure to the small man. One is from Maulden:<a id="FNanchor_134" href="#Footnote_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> ‘The
common was very extensive. I conversed with a farmer,
and several cottagers. One of them said, enclosing would
ruin England; it was worse than ten wars. Why, my friend,
what have you lost by it? <i>I kept four cows before the parish<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>
was enclosed, and now I don’t keep so much as a goose; and you
ask me what I lose by it!</i>’<a id="FNanchor_135" href="#Footnote_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a> The other is from Sandy:<a id="FNanchor_136" href="#Footnote_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> ‘This
parish was very peculiarly circumstanced; it abounds with
gardeners, many cultivating their little freeholds, so that on
the enclosure, there were found to be sixty-three proprietors,
though nine-tenths, perhaps, of the whole belonged to Sir
P. Monoux and Mr. Pym. These men kept cows on the
boggy common, and cut fern for litter on the warren, by which
means they were enabled to raise manure for their gardens,
besides fuel in plenty: the small allotment of an acre and a
half, however good the land, has been no compensation for
what they were deprived of. They complain heavily, and
know not how they will now manage to raise manure. This
was no reason to preserve the deserts in their old state, but
an ample one for giving a full compensation.’</p>

<p>Lord Winchilsea stated in his letter to the Board of Agriculture
in 1796: ‘Whoever travels through the Midland
Counties and will take the trouble of inquiring, will generally
receive for answer that formerly there were a great many
cottagers who kept cows, but that the land is now thrown to
the farmers, and if he inquires still further, he will find that
in those parishes the Poor Rates have increased in an amazing
degree more than according to the average rise throughout
England.’</p>

<p>These cottagers often received nothing at all for the right
they had lost, the compensation going to the owner of the
cottage only. But even those cottagers who owned their cottage
received in return for their common right something infinitely
less valuable. For a tiny allotment was worth much less than
a common right, especially if the allotment was at a distance
from their cottage, and though the Haute Huntre Act binds
the commissioners to give Lord FitzWilliam an allotment near
his gardens, there was nothing in any Act that we have seen
to oblige the commissioners to give the cottager an allotment
at his door. And the cottagers had to fence their allotments
or forfeit them. Anybody who glances at an award will
understand what this meant. It is easy, for example, to
imagine what happened under this provision to the following<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>
cottagers at Stanwell: Edmund Jordan (1&frac12; acres) J. and F.
Ride (each 1&frac14; acres) T. L. Rogers (1&frac14; acres) Brooker Derby (1&frac14;)
Mary Gulliver (1&frac14; acres) Anne Higgs (1&frac14;) H. Isherwood (1&frac14;)
William Kent (1&frac14;) Elizabeth Carr (1 acre) Thomas Nash
(1 acre) R. Ride (just under 1 acre) William Robinson (just
under 1 acre) William Cox (&frac34; acre) John Carter (&frac34; acre)
William Porter (&frac34; acre) Thomas King (&frac12; acre) John Hetherington
(under &frac12; an acre) J. Trout (&frac14; acre and 4 perches)
and Charles Burkhead (12 perches). It would be interesting
to know how many of these small parcels of land found their
way into the hands of Sir William Gibbons and Mr. Edmund
Hill.</p>

<p>The Louth award is still more interesting from this point
of view. J. Trout and Charles Burkhead passing rich, the one
on &frac14; acre and 4 perches, the other on 12 perches, had only to
pay their share of the expenses of the enclosure, and for their
own fencing. Sir William Gibbons was too magnanimous
a man to ask them to fence his 500 acres as well. But at
Louth the tithe-owners, who took more than a third of the
whole, were excused their share of the costs, and also had their
fencing done for them by the other proprietors. The prebendary
and the vicar charged the expenses of fencing their
600 acres on persons like Elizabeth Bryan who went off
with 39 perches, Ann Dunn (35 perches), Naomi Hodgson,
widow (35 perches), John Betts (34 perches), Elizabeth Atkins
(32 perches), Will Boswell (31 perches), Elizabeth Eycon
(28 perches), Ann Hubbard, widow (15 perches), and Ann
Metcalf, whose share of the spoil was 14 perches. The award
shows that there were 67 persons who received an acre or
less. Cottagers who received such allotments and had to
fence them had no alternative but to sell, and little to do
with the money but to drink it. This is the testimony of the
<i>General Report on Enclosures</i>.<a id="FNanchor_137" href="#Footnote_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a></p>

<p>The squatters, though they are often spoken of as cottagers,
must be distinguished from the cottager in regard to their
legal and historical position. They were in a sense outside
the original village economy. The cottager was, so to speak,
an aboriginal poor man: the squatter a poor alien. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>
settled on a waste, built a cottage, and got together a few
geese or sheep, perhaps even a horse or a cow, and proceeded to
cultivate the ground.</p>

<p>The treatment of encroachments seems to have varied very
greatly, as the cases analysed in the Appendix show, and there
was no settled rule. Squatters of less than twenty years’
standing seldom received any consideration beyond the privilege
of buying their encroachment. Squatters of more than
twenty or forty years’ standing, as the case might be, were
often allowed to keep their encroachments, and in some cases
were treated like cottagers, with a claim to an allotment. But,
of course, like the cottagers, they lost their common rights.</p>

<p>Lastly, enclosure swept away the bureaucracy of the old
village: the viewers of fields and letters of the cattle, who
had general supervision of the arrangements for pasturing
sheep or cows in the common meadow, the common shepherd,
the chimney peepers who saw that the chimneys were kept
properly, the hayward, or pinder, who looked after the pound.
Most of these little officials of the village court had been paid
either in land or by fees. When it was proposed to abolish
Parliamentary Enclosure, and to substitute a General Enclosure
Bill, the Parliamentary officials, who made large sums
out of fees from Enclosure Bills, were to receive compensation;
but there was no talk of compensation for the stolen
livelihood of a pinder or a chimney peeper, as there had been
for the lost pickings of the officials of Parliament, or as there
was whenever an unhappy aristocrat was made to surrender
one of his sinecures. George Selwyn, who had been Paymaster
of the Works for twenty-seven years at the time that
Burke’s Act of 1782 deprived him of that profitable title, was
not allowed to languish very long on the two sinecures that
were left to him. In 1784 Pitt consoled him with the lucrative
name of Surveyor-General of Crown Lands. The pinder and
the viewer received a different kind of justice. For the rich
there is compensation, as the weaver said in Disraeli’s <i>Sybil</i>,
but ‘sympathy is the solace of the poor.’ In this case, if
the truth be told, even this solace was not administered with
too liberal a hand.</p>

<p>All these classes and interests were scattered by enclosure,
but it was not one generation alone that was struck down by
the blow. For the commons were the patrimony of the poor.
The commoner’s child, however needy, was born with a spoon
in his mouth. He came into a world in which he had a share
and a place. The civilisation which was now submerged had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>
spelt a sort of independence for the obscure lineage of the
village. It had represented, too, the importance of the interest
of the community in its soil, and in this aspect also the robbery
of the present was less important than the robbery of the
future. For one act of confiscation blotted out a principle of
permanent value to the State.</p>

<p>The immediate consequences of this policy were only partially
visible to the governing or the cultivated classes. The
rulers of England took it for granted that the losses of individuals
were the gains of the State, and that the distresses
of the poor were the condition of permanent advance.
Modern apologists have adopted the same view; and the
popular resistance to enclosure is often compared to the wild
and passionate fury that broke against the spinning and
weaving machines, the symbols and engines of the Industrial
Revolution. History has drawn a curtain over those days of
exile and suffering, when cottages were pulled down as if by
an invader’s hand, and families that had lived for centuries
in their dales or on their small farms and commons were driven
before the torrent, losing</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘Estate and house ... and all their sheep,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">A pretty flock, and which for aught I know</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Had clothed the Ewbanks for a thousand years.’</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>Ancient possessions and ancient families disappeared. But
the first consequence was not the worst consequence: so far
from compensating for this misery, the ultimate result was
still more disastrous. The governing class killed by this policy
the spirit of a race. The petitions that are buried with their
brief and unavailing pathos in the <i>Journals</i> of the House of
Commons are the last voice of village independence, and the
unnamed commoners who braved the dangers of resistance to
send their doomed protests to the House of Commons that
obeyed their lords, were the last of the English peasants.
These were the men, it is not unreasonable to believe, whom
Gray had in mind when he <span class="lock">wrote:&mdash;</span></p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">The little tyrant of his fields withstood.’</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>As we read the descriptions of the state of France before the
Revolution, there is one fact that comforts the imagination
and braces the heart. We read of the intolerable services of
the peasant, of his forced labour, his confiscated harvests, his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>
crushing burdens, his painful and humiliating tasks, including
in some cases even the duty of protecting the sleep of the
seigneur from the croaking of the neighbouring marshes.
The mind of Arthur Young was filled with this impression of
unsupportable servitude. But a more discerning eye might
have perceived a truth that escaped the English traveller.
It is contained in an entry that often greets us in the official
reports on the state of the provinces: <i>ce seigneur litige avec
ses vassaux</i>. Those few words flash like a gleam of the dawn
across this sombre and melancholy page. The peasant may
be overwhelmed by the dîme, the taille, the corvée, the hundred
and one services that knit his tenure to the caprice of a lord:
he may be wretched, brutal, ignorant, ill-clothed, ill-fed, and
ill-housed: but he has not lost his status: he is not a casual
figure in a drifting proletariat: he belongs to a community
that can withstand the seigneur, dispute his claims at law,
resume its rights, recover its possessions, and establish, one
day, its independence.</p>

<p>In England the aristocracy destroyed the promise of such a
development when it broke the back of the peasant community.
The enclosures created a new organisation of classes.
The peasant with rights and a status, with a share in the
fortunes and government of his village, standing in rags, but
standing on his feet, makes way for the labourer with no
corporate rights to defend, no corporate power to invoke, no
property to cherish, no ambition to pursue, bent beneath the
fear of his masters, and the weight of a future without hope.
No class in the world has so beaten and crouching a history,
and if the blazing ricks in 1830 once threatened his rulers with
the anguish of his despair, in no chapter of that history could
it have been written, ‘This parish is at law with its squire.’
For the parish was no longer the community that offered
the labourer friendship and sheltered his freedom: it was
merely the shadow of his poverty, his helplessness, and his
shame. ‘Go to an ale-house kitchen of an old enclosed
country, and there you will see the origin of poverty and poor-rates.
For whom are they to be sober? For whom are they to
save? For the parish? If I am diligent, shall I have leave
to build a cottage? If I am sober, shall I have land for a cow?
If I am frugal, shall I have half an acre of potatoes? You
offer no motives; you have nothing but a parish officer and
a workhouse!&mdash;Bring me another pot&mdash;.’<a id="FNanchor_138" href="#Footnote_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a></p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI<br />

<span class="smaller">THE LABOURER IN 1795</span></h2>
</div>



<p>In an unenclosed village, as we have seen, the normal labourer
did not depend on his wages alone. His livelihood was made
up from various sources. His firing he took from the waste,
he had a cow or a pig wandering on the common pasture,
perhaps he raised a little crop on a strip in the common fields.
He was not merely a wage earner, receiving so much money a
week or a day for his labour, and buying all the necessaries
of life at a shop: he received wages as a labourer, but in part
he maintained himself as a producer. Further, the actual
money revenue of the family was not limited to the labourer’s
earnings, for the domestic industries that flourished in the
village gave employment to his wife and children.</p>

<p>In an enclosed village at the end of the eighteenth century
the position of the agricultural labourer was very different.
All his auxiliary resources had been taken from him, and he
was now a wage earner and nothing more. Enclosure had
robbed him of the strip that he tilled, of the cow that he kept
on the village pasture, of the fuel that he picked up in the
woods, and of the turf that he tore from the common. And
while a social revolution had swept away his possessions, an
industrial revolution had swept away his family’s earnings.
To families living on the scale of the village poor, each of these
losses was a crippling blow, and the total effect of the changes
was to destroy their economic independence.</p>

<p>Some of these auxiliary resources were not valued very
highly by the upper classes, and many champions of enclosure
proved to their own satisfaction that the advantage, for
example, of the right of cutting fuel was quite illusory. Such
writers had a very superficial knowledge of the lot of the
cottagers. They argued that it would be more economical for
the labourer to spend on his ordinary employment the time he
devoted to cutting fuel and turf, and to buy firing out of his
wages: an argument from the theory of the division of labour
that assumed that employment was constant. Fortunately we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>
have, thanks to Davies, a very careful calculation that enables
us to form rather a closer judgment. He estimates<a id="FNanchor_139" href="#Footnote_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a> that a
man could cut nearly enough in a week to serve his family all
the year, and as the farmers will give the carriage of it in
return for the ashes, he puts the total cost at 10s. a year, or
a little more than a week’s wages.<a id="FNanchor_140" href="#Footnote_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> If we compare this with
his accounts of the cost of fuel elsewhere, we soon see how
essential common fuel rights were to a labourer’s economy.
At Sidlesham in Surrey, for instance,<a id="FNanchor_141" href="#Footnote_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> in the expenses of
five families of labourers, the fuel varies from £1, 15s. 0d. up
to £4, 3s. 0d., with an average of £2, 8s. 0d. per family. It
must be remembered, too, that the sum of 10s. for fuel from
the common is calculated on the assumption that the man
would otherwise be working; whereas, in reality, he could cut
his turf in slack times and in odd hours, when there was no
money to be made by working for some one else.</p>

<p>There was another respect in which the resources of a labouring
family were diminished towards the end of the century,
and this too was a loss that the rich thought trifling.
From time immemorial the labourer had sent his wife and
children into the fields to glean or leaze after the harvest.
The profits of gleaning, under the old, unimproved system of
agriculture, were very considerable. Eden says of Rode in
Northamptonshire, where agriculture was in a ‘wretched
state, from the land being in common-fields,’ that ‘several
families will gather as much wheat as will serve them for
bread the whole year, and as many beans as will keep a pig.’<a id="FNanchor_142" href="#Footnote_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a>
From this point of view enclosure, with its improved methods
of agriculture, meant a sensible loss to the poor of the parish,
but even when there was less to be gleaned the privilege was
by no means unimportant. A correspondent in the <i>Annals
of Agriculture</i>,<a id="FNanchor_143" href="#Footnote_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a> writing evidently of land under improved
cultivation in Shropshire, estimates that a wife can glean
three or four bushels. The consumption of wheat, exclusive
of other food, by a labourer’s family he puts at half a bushel a
week at least; the price of wheat at 13s. 6d. a bushel; the
labourer’s wages at 7s. or 8s. To such a family gleaning
rights represented the equivalent of some six or seven weeks’
wages.</p>

<p>With the introduction of large farming these customary<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>
rights were in danger. It was a nuisance for the farmer to
have his fenced fields suddenly invaded by bands of women
and children. The ears to be picked up were now few and
far between, and there was a risk that the labourers, husbands
and fathers of the gleaners, might wink at small thefts from
the sheaves. Thus it was that customary rights, which had
never been questioned before, and seemed to go back to the
Bible itself, came to be the subject of dispute. On the whole
question of gleaning there is an animated controversy in the
<i>Annals of Agriculture</i><a id="FNanchor_144" href="#Footnote_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a> between Capel Lofft,<a id="FNanchor_145" href="#Footnote_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a> a romantic
Suffolk Liberal, who took the side of the gleaners, and Ruggles,<a id="FNanchor_146" href="#Footnote_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a>
the historian, who argued against them. Capel Lofft was a
humane and chivalrous magistrate who, unfortunately for the
Suffolk poor, was struck off the Commission of the Peace a
few years later, apparently at the instance of the Duke of
Portland, for persuading the Deputy-Sheriff to postpone the
execution of a girl sentenced to death for stealing, until he
had presented a memorial to the Crown praying for clemency.
The chief arguments on the side of the gleaners
were (1) that immemorial custom gave legal right, according
to the maxim, <i>consuetudo angliae lex est angliae communis</i>;
(2) that Blackstone had recognised the right in his <i>Commentaries</i>,
basing his opinion upon Hale and Gilbert, ‘Also it
hath been said, that by the common law and customs of
England the poor are allowed to enter and glean on another’s
ground after harvest without being guilty of trespass, which
humane provision seems borrowed from the Mosaic law’
(iii. 212, 1st edition); (3) that in Ireland the right was recognised
by statutes of Henry <span class="allsmcap">VIII.</span>’s reign, which modified it;
(4) that it was a custom that helped to keep the poor free from
degrading dependence on poor relief. It was argued, on the
other hand, by those who denied the right to glean, that though
the custom had existed from time immemorial, it did not rest
on any basis of actual right, and that no legal sanction to it
had ever been explicitly given, Blackstone and the authorities
on whom he relied being too vague to be considered final.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>
Further, the custom was demoralising to the poor; it led to
idleness, ‘how many days during the harvest are lost by the
mother of a family and all her children, in wandering about
from field to field, to glean what does not repay them the
wear of their cloathes in seeking’; it led to pilfering from the
temptation to take handfuls from the swarth or shock; and
it was deplorable that on a good-humoured permission should
be grafted ‘a legal claim, in its use and exercise so nearly
approaching to licentiousness.’</p>

<p>Whilst this controversy was going on, the legal question
was decided against the poor by a majority of judges in the
Court of Common Pleas in 1788. One judge, Sir Henry
Gould,<a id="FNanchor_147" href="#Footnote_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> dissented in a learned judgment; the majority
based their decision partly on the mischievous consequences
of the practice to the poor. The poor never lost a right
without being congratulated by the rich on gaining something
better. It did not, of course, follow from this decision
that the practice necessarily ceased altogether, but from
that time it was a privilege given by the farmer at his own
discretion, and he could warn off obnoxious or ‘saucy’
persons from his fields. Moreover, the dearer the corn, and
the more important the privilege for the poor, the more the
farmer was disinclined to largess the precious ears. Capel
Lofft had pleaded that with improved agriculture the gleaners
could pick up so little that that little should not be grudged, but
the farmer found that under famine prices this little was worth
more to him than the careless scatterings of earlier times.<a id="FNanchor_148" href="#Footnote_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a></p>

<p>The loss of his cow and his produce and his common and
traditional rights was rendered particularly serious to the
labourer by the general growth of prices. For enclosure which
had produced the agrarian proletariat, had raised the cost of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>
living for him. The accepted opinion that under enclosure
England became immensely more productive tends to obscure
the truth that the agricultural labourer suffered in his character
of consumer, as well as in his character of producer, when the
small farms and the commons disappeared. Not only had
he to buy the food that formerly he had produced himself,
but he had to buy it in a rising market. Adam Smith admitted
that the rise of price of poultry and pork had been accelerated
by enclosure, and Nathaniel Kent laid stress on the diminution
in the supply of these and other small provisions. Kent has
described the change in the position of the labourers in this
respect: ‘Formerly they could buy milk, butter, and many
other small articles in every parish, in whatever quantity
they are wanted. But since small farms have decreased in
number, no such articles are to be had; for the great farmers
have no idea of retailing such small commodities, and those
who do retail them carry them all to town. A farmer is even
unwilling to sell the labourer who works for him a bushel of
wheat, which he might get ground for three or four pence a
bushel. For want of this advantage he is driven to the mealman
or baker, who, in the ordinary course of their profit, get
at least ten per cent. of them, upon this principal article
of their consumption.’<a id="FNanchor_149" href="#Footnote_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> Davies, the author of <i>The Case of
Labourers in Husbandry</i>, thus describes the new method of
distribution: ‘The great farmer deals in a wholesale way
with the miller: the miller with the mealman: the mealman
with the shopkeeper, of which last the poor man buys his
flour by the bushel. For neither the miller nor the mealman
will sell the labourer a less quantity than a sack of flour, under
the retail price of shops, and the poor man’s pocket will seldom
allow of his buying a whole sack at once.’<a id="FNanchor_150" href="#Footnote_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span></p>

<p>It is clear from these facts that it would have needed a very
large increase of wages to compensate the labourer for his
losses under enclosure. But real wages, instead of rising,
had fallen, and fallen far. The writer of the <i>Bedfordshire
Report</i> (p. 67), comparing the period of 1730&ndash;50 with that of
1802&ndash;6 in respect of prices of wheat and labour, points out
that to enable him to purchase equal quantities of bread in
the second period and in the first, the pay of the day labourer
in the second period should have been 2s. a day, whereas it
was 1s. 6d. Nathaniel Kent, writing in 1796,<a id="FNanchor_151" href="#Footnote_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> says that in
the last forty or fifty years the price of provisions had gone
up by 60 per cent., and wages by 25 per cent., ‘but this is not
all, for the sources of the market which used to feed him are
in a great measure cut off since the system of large farms has
been so much encouraged.’ Professor Levy estimates that
wages rose between 1760 and 1813 by 60 per cent., and the
price of wheat by 130 per cent.<a id="FNanchor_152" href="#Footnote_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> Thus the labourer who now
lived on wages alone earned wages of a lower purchasing
power than the wages which he had formerly supplemented
by his own produce. Whereas his condition earlier in the
century had been contrasted with that of Continental peasants
greatly to his advantage in respect of quantity and variety of
food, he was suddenly brought down to the barest necessities
of life. Arthur Young had said a generation earlier that in
France bread formed nineteen parts in twenty of the food of
the people, but that in England all ranks consumed an immense
quantity of meat, butter and cheese.<a id="FNanchor_153" href="#Footnote_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a> We know something
of the manner of life of the poor in 1789 and 1795 from the
family budgets collected by Eden and Davies from different
parts of the country.<a id="FNanchor_154" href="#Footnote_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a> These budgets show that the labourers
were rapidly sinking in this respect to the condition that
Young had described as the condition of the poor in France.
‘Bacon and other kinds of meat form a very small part of
their diet, and cheese becomes a luxury.’ But even on the
meagre food that now became the ordinary fare of the cottage,
the labourers could not make ends meet. All the budgets tell
the same tale of impoverished diet accompanied by an overwhelming
strain and an actual deficit. The normal labourer,
even with constant employment, was no longer solvent.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span></p>

<p>If we wish to understand fully the predicament of the
labourer, we must remember that he was not free to roam over
England, and try his luck in some strange village or town
when his circumstances became desperate at home. He
lived under the capricious tyranny of the old law of settlement,
and enclosure had made that net a much more serious
fact for the poor. The destruction of the commons had
deprived him of any career within his own village; the Settlement
Laws barred his escape out of it. It is worth while to
consider what the Settlement Laws were, and how they acted,
and as the subject is not uncontroversial it will be necessary
to discuss it in some detail.</p>

<p>Theoretically every person had one parish, and one only,
in which he or she had a settlement and a right to parish relief.
In practice it was often difficult to decide which parish had
the duty of relief, and disputes gave rise to endless litigation.
From this point of view eighteenth-century England was like
a chessboard of parishes, on which the poor were moved about
like pawns. The foundation of the various laws on the subject
was an Act passed in Charles <span class="allsmcap">II.</span>’s reign (13 and 14 Charles <span class="allsmcap">II.</span>
c. 12) in 1662. Before this Act each parish had, it is true, the
duty of relieving its own impotent poor and of policing its own
vagrants, and the infirm and aged were enjoined by law to
betake themselves to their place of settlement, which might
be their birthplace, or the place where they had lived for three
years, but, as a rule, ‘a poor family might, without the fear
of being sent back by the parish officers, go where they choose,
for better wages, or more certain employment.’<a id="FNanchor_155" href="#Footnote_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> This Act of
1662 abridged their liberty, and, in place of the old vagueness,
established a new and elaborate system. The Act was
declared to be necessary in the preamble, because ‘by reason
of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from
going from one parish to another, and therefore do endeavour
to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best
stock, the largest commons or wastes to build cottages, and
the most woods for them to burn and destroy; and when they
have consumed it, then to another parish; and at last become
rogues and vagabonds; to the great discouragement of parishes
to provide stock, when it is liable to be devoured by strangers.’
By the Act any new-comer, within forty days of arrival, could
be ejected from a parish by an order from the magistrates,
upon complaint from the parish officers, and removed to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>
parish where he or she was last legally settled. If, however,
the new-comer settled in a tenement of the yearly value of £10,
or could give security for the discharge of the parish to the
magistrates’ satisfaction, he was exempt from this provision.</p>

<p>As this Act carried with it the consequence that forty days’
residence without complaint from the parish officers gained
the new-comer a settlement, it was an inevitable temptation to
Parish A to smuggle its poor into Parish B, where forty days’
residence without the knowledge of the parish officers would
gain them a settlement. Fierce quarrels broke out between
the parishes in consequence. To compose these it was enacted
(1 James <span class="allsmcap">II.</span> c. 17) that the forty days’ residence were to be
reckoned only after a written notice had been given to a
parish officer. Even this was not enough to protect Parish B,
and by 3 William and Mary, c. 11 (1691) it was provided
that this notice must be read in church, immediately after
divine service, and then registered in the book kept for
poor’s accounts. Such a condition made it practically impossible
for any poor man to gain a settlement by forty days’
residence, unless his tenement were of the value of £10 a year,
but the Act allowed an immigrant to obtain a settlement
in any one of four ways; (1) by paying the parish taxes;
(2) by executing a public annual office in the parish; (3) by
serving an apprenticeship in the parish; (4) by being hired
for a year’s service in the parish. (This, however, only applied
to the unmarried.) In 1697 (8 and 9 William <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 30) a further
important modification of the settlement laws was made.
To prevent the arbitrary ejection of new-comers by parish
officers, who feared that the fresh arrival or his children might
somehow or other gain a settlement, it was enacted that if
the new-comer brought with him to Parish B a certificate
from the parish officers of Parish A taking responsibility for
him, then he could not be removed till he became actually
chargeable. It was further decided by this and subsequent
Acts and by legal decisions, that the granting of a certificate
was to be left to the discretion of the parish officers and
magistrates, that the cost of removal fell on the certificating
parish, and that a certificate holder could only gain a settlement
in a new parish by renting a tenement of £10 annual
value, or by executing a parish office, and that his apprentice
or hired servant could not gain a settlement.</p>

<p>In addition to these methods of gaining a settlement there
were four other ways, ‘through which,’ according to Eden,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>
‘it is probable that by far the greater part of the labouring
Poor ... are actually settled.’<a id="FNanchor_156" href="#Footnote_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a> (1) Bastards, with some
exceptions, acquired a settlement by birth<a id="FNanchor_157" href="#Footnote_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a>; (2) legitimate
children also acquired a settlement by birth if their father’s,
or failing that, their mother’s legal settlement was not known;
(3) women gained a settlement by marriage; (4) persons with
an estate of their own were irremovable, if residing on it,
however small it might be.</p>

<p>Very few important modifications had been made in the
laws of Settlement during the century after 1697. In 1722
(9 George <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> c. 7) it was provided that no person was to obtain
a settlement in any parish by the purchase of any estate or
interest of less value than £30, to be ‘bona fide paid,’ a provision
which suggests that parishes had connived at gifts of
money for the purchase of estates in order to discard their
paupers: by the same Act the payment of the scavenger
or highway rate was declared not to confer a settlement. In
1784 (24 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 6) soldiers, sailors and their families
were allowed to exercise trades where they liked, and were
not to be removable till they became actually chargeable;
and in 1793 (33 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 54) this latter concession was
extended to members of Friendly Societies. None of these
concessions affected the normal labourer, and down to 1795 a
labourer could only make his way to a new village if his own
village would give him a certificate, or if the other village
invited him. His liberty was entirely controlled by the
parish officers.</p>

<p>How far did the Settlement Acts operate? How far did this
body of law really affect the comfort and liberty of the poor?
The fiercest criticism comes from Adam Smith, whose fundamental
instincts rebelled against so crude and brutal an interference
with human freedom. ‘To remove a man who has
committed no misdemeanour, from a parish where he chuses to
reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice.
The common people of England, however, so jealous of their
liberty, but, like the common people of most other countries,
never rightly understanding wherein it consists, have now, for
more than a century together, suffered themselves to be exposed
to this oppression without a remedy. Though men of reflexion,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>
too, have sometimes complained of the law of settlements
as a public grievance; yet it has never been the object of
any general popular clamour, such as that against general
warrants, an abusive practice undoubtedly, but such a one as
was not likely to occasion any general oppression. There is
scarce a poor man in England, of forty years of age, I will
venture to say, who has not, in some part of his life, felt
himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of
settlements.’<a id="FNanchor_158" href="#Footnote_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a></p>

<p>Adam Smith’s view is supported by two contemporary
writers on the Poor Law, Dr. Burn and Mr. Hay. Dr. Burn,
who published a history of the Poor Law in 1764, gives this
picture of the overseer: ‘The office of an Overseer of the Poor
seems to be understood to be this, to keep an extraordinary
look-out to prevent persons coming to inhabit without certificates,
and to fly to the Justices to remove them: and if a
man brings a certificate, then to caution the inhabitants not
to let him a farm of £10 a year, and to take care to keep him
out of all parish offices.’<a id="FNanchor_159" href="#Footnote_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> He further says that the parish
officers will assist a poor man in taking a farm in a neighbouring
parish, and give him £10 for the rent. Mr. Hay, M.P., protested
in his remarks on the Poor Laws against the hardships
inflicted on the poor by the Laws of Settlement. ‘It leaves
it in the breast of the parish officers whether they will grant
a poor person a certificate or no.’<a id="FNanchor_160" href="#Footnote_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a> Eden, on the other hand,
thought Adam Smith’s picture overdrawn, and he contended
that though there were no doubt cases of vexatious removal,
the Laws of Settlement were not administered in this way
everywhere. Howlett also considered the operation of the
Laws of Settlement to be ‘trifling,’ and instanced the growth
of Sheffield, Birmingham, and Manchester as proof that there
was little interference with the mobility of labour.</p>

<p>A careful study of the evidence seems to lead to the conclusion
that the Laws of Settlement were in practice, as they
were on paper, a violation of natural liberty; that they did not
stop the flow of labour, but that they regulated it in the interest
of the employing class. The answer to Howlett is given
by Ruggles in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>.<a id="FNanchor_161" href="#Footnote_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a> He begins by
saying that the Law of Settlement has made a poor family
‘of necessity stationary; and obliged them to rest satisfied
with those wages they can obtain where their legal settlement<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>
happens to be; a restraint on them which ought to
insure to them wages in the parish where they must remain,
more adequate to their necessities, because it precludes them
in a manner from bringing their labour, the only marketable
produce they possess, to the best market; it is this restraint
which has, in all manufacturing towns, been one cause of
reducing the poor to such a state of miserable poverty; for,
among the manufacturers, they have too frequently found
masters who have taken, and continue to take every advantage,
which strict law will give; of consequence, the prices of
labour have been, in manufacturing towns, in an inverse ratio
of the number of poor settled in the place; and the same cause
has increased that number, by inviting foreigners, in times
when large orders required many workmen; the masters
themselves being the overseers, whose duty as parish officers
has been opposed by their interest in supplying the demand.’
In other words, when it suited an employer to let fresh workers
in, he would, <i>qua</i> overseer, encourage them to come with or
without certificates; but when they were once in and ‘settled’
he would refuse them certificates to enable them to go and
try their fortunes elsewhere, in parishes where a certificate
was demanded with each poor new-comer.<a id="FNanchor_162" href="#Footnote_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a> Thus it is not surprising
to find, from Eden’s <i>Reports</i>, that certificates are never
granted at Leeds and Skipton; seldom granted at Sheffield;
not willingly granted at Nottingham, and that at Halifax
certificates are not granted at present, and only three have been
granted in the last eighteen years.</p>

<p>It has been argued that the figures about removals in different
parishes given by Eden in his second and third volumes show
that the Law of Settlement was ‘not so black as it has been
painted.’<a id="FNanchor_163" href="#Footnote_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a> But in considering the small number of removals,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>
we must also consider the large number of places where there
is this entry, ‘certificates are never granted.’ It needed
considerable courage to go to a new parish without a certificate
and run the risk of an ignominious expulsion, and though all
overseers were not so strict as the one described by Dr. Burn,
yet the fame of one vexatious removal would have a far-reaching
effect in checking migration. It is clear that the
law must have operated in this way in districts where enclosures
took away employment within the parish. Suppose
Hodge to have lived at Kibworth-Beauchamp in Leicestershire.
About 1780, 3600 acres were enclosed and turned from
arable to pasture; before enclosure the fields ‘were solely
applied to the production of corn,’ and ‘the Poor had then
plenty of employment in weeding, reaping, threshing, etc.,
and could also collect a great deal of corn by gleaning.’<a id="FNanchor_164" href="#Footnote_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a>
After the change, as Eden admits, a third or perhaps a fourth
of the number of hands would be sufficient to do all the farming
work required. Let us say that Hodge was one of the
superfluous two-thirds, and that the parish authorities refused
him a certificate. What did he do? He applied to the
overseer, who sent him out as a roundsman.<a id="FNanchor_165" href="#Footnote_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a> He would
prefer to bear the ills he knew rather than face the unknown
in the shape of a new parish officer, who might demand a
certificate, and send him back with ignominy if he failed to
produce one. If he took his wife and family with him there
was even less chance of the demand for a certificate being
waived.<a id="FNanchor_166" href="#Footnote_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> So at Kibworth-Beauchamp Hodge and his companions
remained, in a state of chronic discontent. ‘The
Poor complain of hard treatment from the overseers, and
the overseers accuse the Poor of being saucy.’<a id="FNanchor_167" href="#Footnote_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a></p>

<p>Now, at first sight, it seems obvious that it would be to the
interest of a parish to give a poor man a certificate, if there
were no market for his labour at home, in order to enable him
to go elsewhere and make an independent living. This seems
the reasonable view, but it is incorrect. In the same way,
it would seem obvious that a parish would give slight relief
to a person whose claim was in doubt rather than spend ten<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>
times the amount in contesting that claim at law. In point
of fact, in neither case do we find what seems the reasonable
course adopted. Parishes spent fortunes in lawsuits. And
to the parish authorities it would seem that they risked more
in giving Hodge a certificate than in obliging him to stay at
home, even if he could not make a living in his native place;
for he might, with his certificate, wander a long way off, and
then fall into difficulties, and have to be fetched back at great
expense, and the cost of removing him would fall on the
certificating parish. There is a significant passage in the
<i>Annals of Agriculture</i><a id="FNanchor_168" href="#Footnote_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a> about the wool trade in 1788. ‘We
have lately had some hand-bills scattered about Bocking, I
am told, promising full employ to combers and weavers, that
would migrate to Nottingham. Even if they chose to try
this offer; as probably a parish certificate for such a distance
would be refused; it cannot be attempted.’ Where parishes
saw an immediate prospect of getting rid of their superfluous
poor into a neighbouring parish with open fields or a
common, they were indeed not chary of granting certificates.
At Hothfield in Kent, for example, ‘full half of the labouring
poor are certificated persons from other parishes: the
above-mentioned common, which affords them the means of
keeping a cow, or poultry, is supposed to draw many Poor
into the parish; certificated persons are allowed to dig
peat.’<a id="FNanchor_169" href="#Footnote_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a></p>

<p>In the Rules for the government of the Poor in the hundreds
of Loes and Wilford in Suffolk<a id="FNanchor_170" href="#Footnote_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a> very explicit directions are
given about the granting of certificates. In the first place,
before any certificate is granted the applicant must produce an
examination taken before a Justice of the Peace, showing that
he belongs to one of the parishes within the hundred. Granted
that he has complied with this condition, then, (1) if he be
a labourer or husbandman no certificate will be granted him
out of the hundreds unless he belongs to the parish of Kenton,
and even in that case it is ‘not to exceed the distance of three
miles’; (2) if he be a tradesman, artificer, or manufacturer
a certificate may be granted to him out of the hundreds, but
in no case is it to exceed the distance of twenty miles from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>
the parish to which he belongs. The extent of the hundreds
was roughly fourteen miles by five and a half.</p>

<p>Eden, describing the neighbourhood of Coventry, says:
‘In a country parish on one side the city, chiefly consisting
of cottages inhabited by ribbon-weavers, the Rates are as
high as in Coventry; whilst, in another parish, on the opposite
side, they do not exceed one-third of the City Rate: this is
ascribed to the care that is taken to prevent manufacturers
from settling in the parish.’<a id="FNanchor_171" href="#Footnote_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a> In the neighbourhood of
Mollington (Warwickshire and Oxon) the poor rates varied
from 2s. to 4s. in the pound. ‘The difference in the several
parishes, it is said, arises, in a great measure, from the facility
or difficulty of obtaining settlements: in several parishes, a
fine is imposed on a parishioner, who settles a newcomer by
hiring, or otherwise, so that a servant is very seldom hired for
a year. Those parishes which have for a long time been in
the habit of using these precautions, are now very lightly
burthened with Poor. This is often the case, where farms are
large, and of course in few hands; while other parishes, not
politic enough to observe these rules, are generally burthened
with an influx of poor neighbours.’<a id="FNanchor_172" href="#Footnote_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a> Another example of
this is Deddington (Oxon) which like other parishes that
possessed common fields suffered from an influx of small
farmers who had been turned out elsewhere, whereas neighbouring
parishes, possessed by a few individuals, were cautious in
permitting newcomers to gain settlements.<a id="FNanchor_173" href="#Footnote_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a></p>

<p>This practice of hiring servants for fifty-one weeks only
was common: Eden thought it fraudulent and an evasion of
the law that would not be upheld in a court of justice,<a id="FNanchor_174" href="#Footnote_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> but he
was wrong, for the 1817 Report on the Poor Law mentions
among ‘the measures, justifiable undoubtedly in point of law,
which are adopted very generally in many parts of the kingdom,
to defeat the obtaining a settlement, that of hiring labourers
for a less period than a year; from whence it naturally and
necessarily follows, that a labourer may spend the season of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>
his health and industry in one parish, and be transferred in
the decline of life to a distant part of the kingdom.’<a id="FNanchor_175" href="#Footnote_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a> We
hear little about the feelings of the unhappy labourers who
were brought home by the overseers when they fell into want
in a parish which had taken them in with their certificate,
but it is not difficult to imagine the scene. It is significant
that the Act of 1795 (to which we shall refer later), contained
a provision that orders of removal were to be suspended in
cases where the pauper was dangerously ill.</p>

<p>From the Rules for the Government of the Poor in the
Hundreds of Loes and Wilford, already alluded to, we learn
some particulars of the allowance made for the removal of
paupers. Twenty miles was to be considered a day’s journey;
2d. was to be allowed for one horse, and so on in proportion
per mile: but if the distance were over twenty miles, or the
overseer were obliged to be out all night, then 2s. was to be
allowed for him, 1s. for his horse, and 6d. for each pauper.<a id="FNanchor_176" href="#Footnote_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a>
It is improbable that such a scale of payment would induce the
overseer to look kindly on the causes of his trouble: much
less would a pauper be a <i>persona grata</i> if litigation over his
settlement had already cost the parish large sums.</p>

<p>It has been necessary to give these particulars of the Law of
Settlement for two reasons. In the first place, the probability
of expulsion, ‘exile by administrative order,’ as it has been
called, threw a shadow over the lives of the poor. In the second
place, the old Law of Settlement became an immensely more
important social impediment when enclosure and the great
industrial inventions began to redistribute population. When
the normal labourer had common rights and a strip and a cow,
he would not wish to change his home on account of temporary
distress: after enclosure he was reduced to a position in which
his distress, if he stayed on in his own village, was likely to be
permanent.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The want and suffering revealed in Davies’ and Eden’s
budgets came to a crisis in 1795, the year of what may be
called the revolt of the housewives. That year, when exceptional
scarcity sharpened the edge of the misery caused by the
changes we have summarised, was marked by a series of food
riots all over England, in which a conspicuous part was taken
by women. These disturbances are particularly interesting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>
from the discipline and good order which characterise the
conduct of the rioters. The rioters when they found themselves
masters of the situation did not use their strength to
plunder the shops: they organised distribution, selling the
food they seized at what they considered fair rates, and
handing over the proceeds to the owners. They did not rob:
they fixed prices, and when the owner of provisions was
making for a dearer market they stopped his carts and made
him sell on the spot. At Aylesbury in March ‘a numerous
mob, consisting chiefly of women, seized on all the wheat
that came to market, and compelled the farmers to whom it
belonged to accept of such prices as they thought proper
to name.’<a id="FNanchor_177" href="#Footnote_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a> In Devonshire the rioters scoured the country
round Chudleigh, destroying two mills: ‘from the great
number of petticoats, it is generally supposed that several
men were dressed in female attire.’<a id="FNanchor_178" href="#Footnote_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a> At Carlisle a band of
women accompanied by boys paraded the streets, and in spite
of the remonstrances of a magistrate, entered various houses
and shops, seized all the grain, deposited it in the public hall,
and then formed a committee to regulate the price at which it
should be sold.<a id="FNanchor_179" href="#Footnote_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a> At Ipswich there was a riot over the price
of butter, and at Fordingbridge, a certain Sarah Rogers, in
company with other women started a cheap butter campaign.
Sarah took some butter from Hannah Dawson ‘with a determination
of keeping it at a reduced price,’ an escapade for
which she was afterwards sentenced to three months’ hard
labour at the Winchester Assizes. ‘Nothing but the age of
the prisoner (being very young) prevented the Court from
passing a more severe sentence.’<a id="FNanchor_180" href="#Footnote_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a> At Bath the women actually
boarded a vessel, laden with wheat and flour, which was lying
in the river and refused to let her go. When the Riot Act
was read they retorted that they were not rioting, but were
resisting the sending of corn abroad, and sang God save the
King. Although the owner took an oath that the corn was
destined for Bristol, they were not satisfied, and ultimately
soldiers were called in, and the corn was relanded and put into
a warehouse.<a id="FNanchor_181" href="#Footnote_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a> In some places the soldiers helped the populace
in their work of fixing prices: at Seaford, for example, they
seized and sold meat and flour in the churchyard, and at
Guildford they were the ringleaders in a movement to lower<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>
the price of meat to 4d. a pound, and were sent out of the
town by the magistrates in consequence.<a id="FNanchor_182" href="#Footnote_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a> These spontaneous
leagues of consumers sprang up in many different parts, for
in addition to the places already mentioned there were disturbances
of sufficient importance to be chronicled in the
newspapers, in Wiltshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk, whilst Eden
states that at Deddington the populace seized on a boat laden
with flour, but restored it on the miller’s promising to sell
it at a reduced price.<a id="FNanchor_183" href="#Footnote_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a></p>

<p>These riots are interesting from many points of view. They
are a rising of the poor against an increasing pressure of want,
and the forces that were driving down their standard of life.
They did not amount to a social rebellion, but they mark a
stage in the history of the poor. To the rich they were a
signal of danger. Davies declared that if the ruling classes learnt
from his researches what was the condition of the poor, they
would intervene to rescue the labourers from ‘the abject state
into which they are sunk.’ Certainly the misery of which
his budgets paint the plain surface could not be disregarded.
If compassion was not a strong enough force to make the
ruling classes attend to the danger that the poor might starve,
fear would certainly have made them think of the danger that
the poor might rebel. Some of them at any rate knew their
Virgil well enough to remember that in the description of the
threshold of Orcus, while ‘senectus’ is ‘tristis’ and ‘egestas’
is ‘turpis,’ ‘fames’ is linked with the more ominous epithet
‘malesuada.’ If a proletariat were left to starve despair
might teach bad habits, and this impoverished race might
begin to look with ravenous eyes on the lot of those who lived
on the spoils and sinecures of the State. Thus fear and pity
united to sharpen the wits of the rich, and to turn their minds
to the distresses of the poor.</p>




<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span></p><h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII<br />

<span class="smaller">THE REMEDIES OF 1795</span></h2>
</div>



<p>The collapse of the economic position of the labourer was the
result of many causes, and in examining the various remedies
that were proposed we shall see that they touch in turn on the
several deficiencies that produced this failure. The governing
fact of the situation was that the labourer’s wages no longer
sufficed to provide even a bare and comfortless existence. It
was necessary then that his wages should be raised, or that the
effects of the rise in prices should be counteracted by changes
of diet and manner of life, or that the economic resources which
formerly supplemented his earnings should in some way be
restored, unless he was to be thrown headlong on to the Poor
Law. We shall see what advice was given and what advice
was taken in these momentous years.</p>


<h3>DIET REFORM</h3>

<p>A disparity between income and expenditure may be corrected
by increasing income or by reducing expenditure. Many of
the upper classes thought that the second method might
be tried in this emergency, and that a judicious change of
diet would enable the labourer to face the fall of wages with
equanimity. The solution seemed to lie in the simple life.
Enthusiasts soon began to feel about this proposal the sort
of excitement that Robinson Crusoe enjoyed when discovering
new resources on his island: an infinite vista of kitchen reform
beckoned to their ingenious imaginations: and many of them
began to persuade themselves that the miseries of the poor
arose less from the scantiness of their incomes than from their
own improvidence and unthriftiness.<a id="FNanchor_184" href="#Footnote_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a> The rich set an example
in the worst days by cutting off pastry and restricting
their servants to a quartern loaf a week each.<a id="FNanchor_185" href="#Footnote_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a> It was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>
surely not too much in these circumstances to ask the poor
to adapt their appetites to the changed conditions of their
lives, and to shake off what Pitt called ‘groundless prejudices’
to mixed bread of barley, rye, and wheat.<a id="FNanchor_186" href="#Footnote_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a> Again oatmeal
was a common food in the north, why should it not be taken
in the south? If no horses except post horses and perhaps
cavalry horses were allowed oats, there would be plenty for
the poor.<a id="FNanchor_187" href="#Footnote_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> A Cumberland labourer with a wife and family
of five was shown by Eden<a id="FNanchor_188" href="#Footnote_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a> to have spent £7, 9s. 2d. a year
on oatmeal and barley, whereas a Berkshire labourer with
a wife and four children at home spent £36, 8s. a year on
wheaten bread alone.<a id="FNanchor_189" href="#Footnote_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a> Clearly the starving south was to be
saved by the introduction of cheap cereals.</p>

<p>Other proposals of this time were to break against the opposition
of the rich. This broke against the opposition of the
poor. All attempts to popularise substitutes failed, and the
poorer the labourer grew the more stubbornly did he insist
on wheaten bread. ‘Even household bread is scarcely ever
used: they buy the finest wheaten bread, and declare (what
I much doubt), that brown bread disorders their bowels.
Bakers do not now make, as they formerly did, bread of
unsifted flour: at some farmers’ houses, however, it is still
made of flour, as it comes from the mill; but this practice
is going much into disuse. 20 years ago scarcely any other
than brown bread was used.’<a id="FNanchor_190" href="#Footnote_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a> At Ealing, when the charitable
rich raised a subscription to provide the distressed poor with
brown bread at a reduced price, many of the labourers thought
it so coarse and unpalatable that they returned the tickets
though wheaten bread was at 1s. 3d. the quartern loaf.<a id="FNanchor_191" href="#Footnote_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a>
Correspondent after correspondent to the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>
notes and generally deplores the fact that the poor,
as one of them phrases it, are too fine-mouthed to eat any but
the finest bread.<a id="FNanchor_192" href="#Footnote_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> Lord Sheffield, judging from his address
to Quarter Sessions at the end of 1795, would have had little
mercy on such grumblers. After explaining that in his parish
relief was now given partly in potatoes, partly in wheaten
flour, and partly in oaten or barley flour, he declared: ‘If
any wretches should be found so lost to all decency, and so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>
blind as to revolt against the dispensations of providence,
and to refuse the food proposed for their relief, the parish
officers will be justified in refusing other succour, and may
be assured of support from the magistracy of the county.’<a id="FNanchor_193" href="#Footnote_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a></p>

<p>To the rich, the reluctance of the labourer to change his
food came as a painful surprise. They had thought of him
as a roughly built and hardy animal, comparatively insensible
to his surroundings, like the figure Lucretius drew of
the primeval labourer:</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">Et majoribus et solidis magis ossibus intus</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Fundatum, et validis aptum per viscera nervis;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Nec facile ex aestu, nec frigore quod caperetur,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Nec novitate cibi, nec labi corporis ulla.</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>They did not know that a romantic and adventurous appetite
is one of the blessings of an easy life, and that the more miserable
a man’s condition, and the fewer his comforts, the more
does he shrink from experiments of diet. They were therefore
surprised and displeased to find that labourers rejected
soup, even soup served at a rich man’s table, exclaiming,
‘This is washy stuff, that affords no nourishment: we will
not be fed on meal, and chopped potatoes like hogs.’<a id="FNanchor_194" href="#Footnote_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a> The
dislike of change of food was remarked by the Poor Law
Commissioners in 1834, who observed that the labourer had
acquired or retained ‘with the moral helplessness some of the
other peculiarities of a child. He is often disgusted to a
degree which other classes scarcely conceive possible, by
slight differences in diet; and is annoyed by anything that
seems to him strange and new.’<a id="FNanchor_195" href="#Footnote_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a></p>

<p>Apart from the constitutional conservatism of the poor
there were good reasons for the obstinacy of the labourers.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>
Davies put one aspect of the case very well. ‘If the working
people of other countries are content with bread made of
rye, barley, or oats, have they not milk, cheese, butter, fruits,
or fish, to eat with that coarser bread? And was not this
the case of our own people formerly, when these grains were
the common productions of our land, and when scarcely wheat
enough was grown for the use of the nobility and principal
gentry? Flesh-meat, butter, and cheese, were then at such
moderate prices, compared with the present prices, that
poor people could afford to use them in common. And with
a competent quantity of these articles, a coarser kind of
bread might very well satisfy the common people of any
country.’<a id="FNanchor_196" href="#Footnote_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a> He also states that where land had not been so
highly improved as to produce much wheat, barley, oatmeal,
or maslin bread were still in common use. Arthur
Young himself realised that the labourer’s attachment to
wheaten bread was not a mere superstition of the palate.
‘In the East of England I have been very generally assured, by
the labourers who work the hardest, that they prefer the finest
bread, not because most pleasant, but most contrary to a
lax habit of body, which at once prevents all <i>strong</i> labour.
The quality of the bread that is eaten by those who have
meat, and perhaps porter and port, is of very little consequence
indeed; but to the hardworking man, who nearly lives on it,
the case is abundantly different.’<a id="FNanchor_197" href="#Footnote_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a> Fox put this point in a
speech in the House of Commons in the debate on the high
price of corn in November 1795. He urged gentlemen, who
were talking of mixed bread for the people, ‘not to judge from
any experiment made with respect to themselves. I have
myself tasted bread of different sorts, I have found it highly
pleasant, and I have no doubt it is exceedingly wholesome.
But it ought to be recollected how very small a part the
article of bread forms of the provisions consumed by the more
opulent classes of the community. To the poor it constitutes,
the chief, if not the sole article of subsistence.’<a id="FNanchor_198" href="#Footnote_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a> The truth
is that the labourer living on bread and tea had too delicate
a digestion to assimilate the coarser cereals, and that there
was, apart from climate and tradition, a very important
difference between the labourer in the north and the labourer
in the south, which the rich entirely overlooked. That difference
comes out in an analysis of the budgets of the Cumberland<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span>
labourer and the Berkshire labourer. The Cumberland
labourer who spent only £7, 9s. on his cereals, spent £2, 13s. 7d.
a year on milk. The Berkshire labourer who spent £36, 8s.
on wheaten bread spent 8s. 8d. a year on milk. The Cumberland
family consumed about 1300 quarts in the year, the
Berkshire family about two quarts a week. The same contrast
appears in all budget comparisons between north and south.
A weaver at Kendal (eight in the family) spends £12, 9s. on
oatmeal and wheat, and £5, 4s. on milk.<a id="FNanchor_199" href="#Footnote_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a> An agricultural
labourer at Wetherall in Cumberland (five in family) spends
£7, 6s. 9d. on cereals and £2, 13s. 4d. on milk.<a id="FNanchor_200" href="#Footnote_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a> On the other
side we have a labourer in Shropshire (four in family) spending
£10, 8s. on bread (of wheat rye), and only 8s. 8d. on milk,<a id="FNanchor_201" href="#Footnote_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a>
and a cooper at Frome, Somerset (seven in family) spending
£45, 10s. on bread, and about 17s. on milk.<a id="FNanchor_202" href="#Footnote_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a> These figures
are typical.<a id="FNanchor_203" href="#Footnote_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a></p>

<p>Now oatmeal eaten with milk is a very different food
from oatmeal taken alone, and it is clear from a study of
the budgets that if oatmeal was to be acclimatised in the
south, it was essential to increase the consumption of milk.
But the great difference in consumption represented not a
difference of demand, but a difference of supply. The
southern labourer went without milk not from choice but from
necessity. In the days when he kept cows he drank milk,
for there was plenty of milk in the village. After enclosure,
milk was not to be had. It may be that more cows were kept
under the new system of farming, though this is unlikely,
seeing that at this time every patch of arable was a gold-mine,
but it is certainly true that milk became scarce in the
villages. The new type of farmer did not trouble to sell
milk at home. ‘Farmers are averse to selling milk; while
poor persons who have only one cow generally dispose of all
they can spare.’<a id="FNanchor_204" href="#Footnote_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a> The new farmer produced for a larger
market: his produce was carried away, as Cobbett said, to
be devoured by ‘the idlers, the thieves, the prostitutes who
are all taxeaters in the wens of Bath and London.’ Davies
argued, when pleading for the creation of small farms, ‘The
occupiers of these small farms, as well as the occupiers of
Mr. <i>Kent’s</i> larger cottages, would not think much of retailing
to their poorer neighbours a little corn or a little milk, as they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>
might want, which the poor can now seldom have at all, and
never but as a great favour from the rich farmers.’<a id="FNanchor_205" href="#Footnote_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a> Sir
Thomas Bernard mentioned among the advantages of the
Winchilsea system the ‘no inconsiderable convenience to the
inhabitants of that neighbourhood, that these cottagers are
enabled to supply them, at a very moderate price, with milk,
cream, butter, poultry, pig-meat, and veal: articles which,
in general, are not worth the farmer’s attention, and which,
therefore, are supplied by speculators, who greatly enhance
the price on the public.’<a id="FNanchor_206" href="#Footnote_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> Eden<a id="FNanchor_207" href="#Footnote_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a> records that in Oxfordshire
the labourers bitterly complain that the farmers, instead of
selling their milk to the poor, give it to their pigs, and a writer
in the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of
the Poor says that this was a practice not unusual in many
parts of England.<a id="FNanchor_208" href="#Footnote_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a></p>

<p>The scarcity of milk must be considered a contributory cause
of the growth of tea-drinking, a habit that the philanthropists
and Cobbett agreed in condemning. Cobbett declared in his
<i>Advice to Young Men</i><a id="FNanchor_209" href="#Footnote_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a> that ‘if the slops were in fashion
amongst ploughmen and carters, we must all be starved;
for the food could never be raised. The mechanics are half
ruined by them.’ In the Report on the Poor presented to the
Hants Quarter Sessions in 1795,<a id="FNanchor_210" href="#Footnote_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a> the use of tea is described as
‘a vain present attempt to supply to the spirits of the mind
what is wanting to the strength of the body; but in its lasting
effects impairing the nerves, and therein equally injuring both
the body and the mind.’ Davies retorted on the rich who
found fault with the extravagance of the poor in tea-drinking,
by pointing out that it was their ‘last resource.’ ‘The topic
on which the declaimers against the extravagance of the poor
display their eloquence with most success, is <i>tea-drinking</i>.
Why should such people, it is asked, indulge in a luxury which
is only proper for their betters; and not rather content themselves
with milk, which is in every form wholesome and
nourishing? Were it true that poor people could every
where procure so excellent an article as milk, there would
be then just reason to reproach them for giving the preference<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>
to the miserable infusion of which they are so fond. But it
is not so. Wherever the poor can get milk, do they not gladly
use it? And where they cannot get it, would they not gladly
exchange their tea for it?<a id="FNanchor_211" href="#Footnote_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a>... Still you exclaim, <i>Tea is a
luxury</i>. If you mean fine hyson tea, sweetened with refined
sugar, and softened with cream, I readily admit it to be so.
But <i>this</i> is not the tea of the poor. Spring water, just coloured
with a few leaves of the lowest-priced tea, and sweetened with
the brownest sugar, is the luxury for which you reproach
them. To this they have recourse from mere necessity:
and were they now to be deprived of this, they would immediately
be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not
the cause, but the consequence, of the distresses of the poor.’<a id="FNanchor_212" href="#Footnote_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a>
We learn from the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i> that at Sedgefield
in Durham<a id="FNanchor_213" href="#Footnote_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> many of the poor declared that they had been
driven to drinking tea from not being able to procure milk.<a id="FNanchor_214" href="#Footnote_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a></p>

<p>No doubt the scarcity of milk helped to encourage a taste
that was very quickly acquired by all classes in England, and
not in England only, for, before the middle of the eighteenth
century, the rapid growth of tea-drinking among the poor in
the Lowlands of Scotland was affecting the revenue very
seriously.<a id="FNanchor_215" href="#Footnote_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a> The English poor liked tea for the same reason
that Dr. Johnson liked it, as a stimulant, and the fact that
their food was monotonous and insipid made it particularly
attractive. Eden shows that by the end of the eighteenth
century it was in general use among poor families, taking the
place both of beer and of milk, and excluding the substitutes
that Eden wished to make popular. It seems perhaps less
surprising to us than it did to him, that when the rich, who could
eat or drink what they liked, enjoyed tea, the poor thought
bread and tea a more interesting diet than bread and barley
water.</p>

<p>A few isolated attempts were made to remedy the scarcity
of milk,<a id="FNanchor_216" href="#Footnote_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a> which had been caused by enclosure and the consolidation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>
of farms. Lord Winchilsea’s projects have already
been described. In the Reports of the Society for bettering
the Condition of the Poor, there are two accounts of plans
for supplying milk cheap, one in Staffordshire, where a respectable
tradesman undertook to keep a certain number of cows
for the purpose in a parish where ‘the principal number of
the poorer inhabitants were destitute of all means of procuring
milk for their families,’<a id="FNanchor_217" href="#Footnote_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a> another at Stockton in Durham,
where the bishop made it a condition of the lease of a certain
farm, that the tenant should keep fifteen cows whose milk was
to be sold at ½d. a pint to the poor.<a id="FNanchor_218" href="#Footnote_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a> Mr. Curwen again, the
Whig M.P. for Carlisle, had a plan for feeding cows in the
winter with a view to providing the poor with milk.<a id="FNanchor_219" href="#Footnote_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a></p>

<p>There was another way in which the enclosures had created
an insuperable obstacle to the popularising of ‘cheap and
agreeable substitutes’ for expensive wheaten bread. The
Cumberland housewife could bake her own barley bread in
her oven ‘heated with heath, furze or brush-wood, the expence
of which is inconsiderable’<a id="FNanchor_220" href="#Footnote_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a>; she had stretches of waste land at
her door where the children could be sent to fetch fuel. ‘There
is no comparison to the community,’ wrote a contributor to
the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>,<a id="FNanchor_221" href="#Footnote_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a> ‘whether good wheat, rye, turnips,
etc., are not better than brakes, goss, furz, broom, and heath,’
but as acre after acre in the midlands and south was enclosed,
the fuel of the poor grew ever scantier. When the common
where he had gleaned his firing was fenced off, the poor man
could only trust for his fuel to pilferings from the hedgerows.
To the spectator, furze from the common might seem ‘gathered
with more loss of time than it appears to be worth’<a id="FNanchor_222" href="#Footnote_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a>; to the
labourer whose scanty earnings left little margin over the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>
expense of bread alone, the loss of firing was not balanced by
the economy of time.<a id="FNanchor_223" href="#Footnote_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a></p>

<p>Insufficient firing added to the miseries caused by insufficient
clothes and food. An ingenious writer in the <i>Annals
of Agriculture</i><a id="FNanchor_224" href="#Footnote_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a> suggested that the poor should resort to the
stables for warmth, as was the practice in the duchy of Milan.
Fewer would suffer death from want of fire in winter, he argued,
and also it would be a cheap way of helping them, as it cost
no fuel, for cattle were so obliging as to dispense warmth from
their persons for nothing. But even this plan (which was
not adopted) would not have solved the problem of cooking.
The labourer might be blamed for his diet of fine wheaten
bread and for having his meat (when he had any) roasted
instead of made into soup, but how could cooking be
done at home without fuel? ‘No doubt, a labourer,’ says
Eden,<a id="FNanchor_225" href="#Footnote_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a> ‘whose income was only £20 a year, would, in general,
act wisely in substituting hasty-pudding, barley bread, boiled
milk, and potatoes, for bread and beer; but in most parts
of this county, he is debarred not more by prejudice, than
by local difficulties, from using a diet that requires cooking
at home. The extreme dearness of fuel in Oxfordshire,
compels him to purchase his dinner at the baker’s; and,
from his unavoidable consumption of bread, he has little left
for cloaths, in a country where warm cloathing is most essentially
wanted.’ In Davies’ more racy and direct language,
‘it is but little that in the present state of things the belly
can spare for the back.’<a id="FNanchor_226" href="#Footnote_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a> Davies also pointed out the connection
between dear fuel and the baker. ‘Where fuel is
scarce and dear, poor people find it cheaper to buy their bread
of the baker than to bake for themselves.... But where fuel
abounds, and costs only the trouble of cutting and carrying
home, there they may save something by baking their own
bread.’<a id="FNanchor_227" href="#Footnote_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a> Complaints of the pilfering of hedgerows were very
common. ‘Falstaff says “his soldiers found linen on every
hedge”; and I fear it is but too often the case, that labourers’
children procure fuel from the same quarter.’<a id="FNanchor_228" href="#Footnote_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a> There were
probably many families like the two described in Davies<a id="FNanchor_229" href="#Footnote_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a> who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>
spent nothing on fuel, which they procured by gathering
cow-dung, and breaking their neighbours’ hedges.’<a id="FNanchor_230" href="#Footnote_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a></p>

<p>In some few cases, the benevolent rich did not content
themselves with attempting to enforce the eighth commandment,
but went to the root of the matter, helping to provide
a substitute for their hedgerows. An interesting account of
such an experiment is given in the <i>Reports on the Poor</i>,<a id="FNanchor_231" href="#Footnote_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a>
by Scrope Bernard. ‘There having been several prosecutions
at the Aylesbury Quarter Sessions, for stealing fuel last
winter, I was led to make particular inquiries, respecting the
means which the poor at Lower Winchendon had of providing
fuel. I found that there was no fuel then to be sold within
several miles of the place; and that, amid the distress occasioned
by the long frost, a party of cottagers had joined in
hiring a person, to fetch a load of pit-coal from Oxford, for
their supply. In order to encourage this disposition to acquire
fuel in an honest manner,’ a present was made to all this party
of as much coal again as they had already purchased carriage
free. Next year the vestry determined to help, and with the
aid of private donations coal was distributed at 1s. 4d. the
cwt. (its cost at the Oxford wharf), and kindling faggots at
1d. each. ‘It had been said that the poor would not find
money to purchase them, when they were brought: instead
of which out of 35 poor families belonging to the parish, 29
came with ready money, husbanded out of their scanty means,
to profit with eagerness of this attention to their wants; and
among them a person who had been lately imprisoned by his
master for stealing wood from his hedges.’ Mr. Bernard concludes
his account with some apt remarks on the difficulties
of combining honesty with grinding poverty.<a id="FNanchor_232" href="#Footnote_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span></p>
<h3>MINIMUM WAGE</h3>

<p>The attempts to reduce cottage expenditure were thus a
failure. We must now describe the attempts to increase the
cottage income. There were two ways in which the wages
of the labourers might have been raised. One way, the way
of combination, was forbidden by law. The other way was
the fixing of a legal minimum wage in relation to the price
of food. This was no new idea, for the regulation of wages by
law was a venerable English institution, as old as the Statute
of Edward <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> The most recent laws on the subject were the
famous Act of Elizabeth, an Act of James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>, and an Act of
George <span class="allsmcap">II.</span> (1747). The Act of Elizabeth provided that the
Justices of the Peace should meet annually and assess the
wages of labourers in husbandry and of certain other workmen.
Penalties were imposed on all who gave or took a wage in
excess of this assessment. The Act of James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> was passed
to remove certain ambiguities that were believed to have
embarrassed the operation of the Act of Elizabeth, and among
other provisions imposed a penalty on all who gave a wage
below the wage fixed by the magistrates. The Act of 1747<a id="FNanchor_233" href="#Footnote_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a>
was passed because the existing laws were ‘insufficient and
defective,’ and it provided that disputes between masters and
men could be referred to the magistrates, ‘although no rate
or assessment of wages has been made that year by the Justices
of the shire where such complaint shall be made.’</p>

<p>Two questions arise on the subject of this legislation, Was it
operative? In whose interests was it administered, the interests
of the employers or the interests of the employed? As to
the first question there is a good deal of negative evidence to
show that during the eighteenth century these laws were rarely
applied. An example of an assessment (an assessment declaring
a maximum) made by the Lancashire magistrates in
1725, was published in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i> in 1795<a id="FNanchor_234" href="#Footnote_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a> as
an interesting curiosity, and the writer remarks: ‘It appears
from Mr. Ruggles’ excellent <i>History of the Poor</i> that such
orders must in general be searched for in earlier periods, and a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>
friend of ours was much surprised to hear that any magistrates
in the present century would venture on so bold a measure.’<a id="FNanchor_235" href="#Footnote_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a></p>

<p>As to the second question, at the time we are discussing
it was certainly taken for granted that this legislation was
designed to keep wages down. So implicitly was this believed
that the Act of James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> which provided penalties in cases
where wages were given below the fixed rate was generally
ignored, and speakers and writers mentioned only the Act of
Elizabeth, treating it as an Act for fixing a maximum. Whitbread,
for example, when introducing a Bill in 1795 to fix a
minimum wage, with which we deal later, argued that the
Elizabethan Act ought to be repealed because it fixed a
maximum. This view of the earlier legislation was taken by
Fox, who supported Whitbread’s Bill, and by Pitt who opposed
it. Fox said of the Act of Elizabeth that ‘it secured the master
from a risk which could but seldom occur, of being charged
exorbitantly for the quantity of service; but it did not
authorise the magistrate to protect the poor from the injustice
of a grinding and avaricious master, who might be disposed to
take advantage of their necessities, and undervalue the rate of
their services.’<a id="FNanchor_236" href="#Footnote_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a> Pitt said that Whitbread ‘imagined that
he had on his side of the question the support of experience
in this country, and appealed to certain laws upon the statute-book
in confirmation of his proposition. He did not find
himself called upon to defend the principle of these statutes,
but they were certainly introduced for purposes widely different
from the object of the present bill. They were enacted to
guard the industry of the country from being checked by a
general combination among labourers; and the bill now under
consideration was introduced solely for the purpose of remedying
the inconveniences which labourers sustain from the disproportion
existing between the price of labour and the price
of living.’<a id="FNanchor_237" href="#Footnote_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a> Only one speaker in the debates, Vansittart,
afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, took the view that
legislation was not needed because the Act of James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> gave
the magistrates the powers with which Whitbread sought to
arm them.</p>

<p>It was natural that many minds searching after a way of
escape from the growing distress of the labourers, at a time
when wages had not kept pace with prices, should have
turned to the device of assessing wages by law in accordance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>
with the price of provisions. If prices could not be assimilated
to wages, could not wages be assimilated to prices?
Nathaniel Kent, no wild visionary, had urged employers to
raise wages in proportion to the increase of their profits, but
his appeal had been without effect. But the policy of regulating
wages according to the price of food was recommended in
several quarters, and it provoked a great deal of discussion.
Burke, whose days were closing in, was tempted to take part
in it, and he put an advertisement into the papers announcing
that he was about to publish a series of letters on the subject.
The letters never appeared, but Arthur Young has described
the visit he paid to Beaconsfield at this time and Burke’s
rambling thunder about ‘the absurdity of regulating labour
and the mischief of our poor laws,’ and Burke’s published works
include a paper <i>Thoughts and Details on Scarcity</i>, presented
to Pitt in November 1795. In this paper Burke argued that
the farmer was the true guardian of the labourer’s interest,
in that it would never be profitable to him to underpay the
labourer: an uncompromising application of the theory of
the economic man, which was not less superficial than the
Jacobins’ application of the theory of the natural man.</p>

<p>In October 1795 Arthur Young sent out to the various
correspondents of the Board of Agriculture a circular letter
containing this question among others: ‘It having been
recommended by various quarter-sessions, that the price of
labour should be regulated by that of bread corn, have the
goodness to state what you conceive to be the advantages
or disadvantages of such a system?’<a id="FNanchor_238" href="#Footnote_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a> Arthur Young was
himself in favour of the proposal, and the Suffolk magistrates,
at a meeting which he attended on the 12th of October, ordered:
‘That the Members for this county be requested by the chairman
to bring a bill into parliament, so to regulate the price
of labour, that it may fluctuate with the average price of bread
corn.’<a id="FNanchor_239" href="#Footnote_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a> Most of the replies were adverse, but the proposal
found a warm friend in Mr. Howlett, the Vicar of Dunmow,
who put into his answer some of the arguments which he
afterwards developed in a pamphlet published in reply to
Pitt’s criticisms of Whitbread’s Bill.<a id="FNanchor_240" href="#Footnote_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a> Howlett argued that
Parliament had legislated with success to prevent combinations
of workmen, and as an example he quoted the Acts of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>
8 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>, which had made the wages of tailors and silk-weavers
subject to the regulations of the magistrates. It
was just as necessary and just as practicable to prevent a
combination of a different kind, that of masters. ‘Not a
combination indeed formally drawn up in writing and
sanctioned under hand and seal, a combination, however, as
certain (the result of contingencies or providential events)
and as fatally efficacious as if in writing it had filled five
hundred skins of parchment: a combination which has operated
for many years with a force rapidly increasing, a combination
which has kept back the hire of our labourers who have reaped
down our fields, and has at length torn the clothes from their
backs, snatched the food from their mouths, and ground the
flesh from their bones.’ Howlett, it will be seen, took the same
view as Thelwall, that the position of the labourers was deteriorating
absolutely and relatively. He estimated from a survey
taken at Dunmow that the average family should be taken
as five; if wages had been regulated on this basis, and the
labourer had been given per head no more than the cost of a
pauper’s keep in the workhouse sixty years ago, he would have
been very much better off in 1795. He would himself take a
higher standard. In reply to the argument that the policy of
the minimum wage would deprive the labourers of all spur and
incentive he pointed to the case of the London tailors; they
at any rate displayed plenty of life and ingenuity, and nobody
could say that the London fashions did not change fast enough.
Employers would no more raise wages without compulsion
than they would make good roads without the aid of turnpikes
or the prescription of statutes enforced by the magistrates.
His most original contribution to the discussion was the
argument that the legal regulation should not be left to the
unassisted judgment of the magistrates: ‘it should be the
result of the clearest, fullest, and most accurate information,
and at length be judiciously adapted to each county, hundred,
or district in every quarter of the kingdom.’ Howlett differed
from some of the supporters of a minimum wage, in thinking
that wages should be regulated by the prices of the necessaries
of life, not merely by that of bread corn.</p>

<p>The same policy was advocated by Davies in <i>The Case of
Labourers in Husbandry</i>.<a id="FNanchor_241" href="#Footnote_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a> Davies argued that if the minimum
only were fixed, emulation would not be discouraged, for
better workmen would both be more sure of employment<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>
and also obtain higher wages. He suggested that the minimum
wage should be fixed by calculating the sum necessary
to maintain a family of five, or by settling the scale of day
wages by the price of bread alone, treating the other expenses
as tolerably steady. He did not propose to regulate the
wages of any but day labourers, nor did he propose to deal
with piecework, although piecework had been included in the
Act of Elizabeth. He further suggested that the regulation
should be in force only for half the year, from November to
May, when the labourers’ difficulties pressed hardest upon
them. Unfortunately he coupled with his minimum wage
policy a proposal to give help from the rates to families with
more than five members, if the children were unable to earn.</p>

<p>But the most interesting of all the declarations in favour
of a minimum wage was a declaration from labourers. A
correspondent sent the following advertisement to the <i>Annals
of Agriculture</i>:&mdash;</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘The following is an advertisement which I cut out of a
Norwich <span class="lock">newspaper:&mdash;</span></p>

<p class="center">“DAY LABOURERS</p>

<p>“At a numerous meeting of the day labourers of the little
parishes of Heacham, Snettisham, and Sedgford, this day,
5th November, in the parish church of Heacham, in the county
of Norfolk, in order to take into consideration the best and
most peaceable mode of obtaining a redress of all the severe
and peculiar hardships under which they have for many years
so patiently suffered, the following resolutions were unanimously
agreed to:&mdash;1st, That&mdash;<i>The labourer is worthy of his
hire</i>, and that the mode of lessening his distresses, as hath
been lately the fashion, by selling him flour under the market
price, and thereby rendering him an object of a parish rate,
is not only an indecent insult on his lowly and humble situation
(in itself sufficiently mortifying from his degrading dependence
on the caprice of his employer) but a fallacious mode
of relief, and every way inadequate to a radical redress of
the manifold distresses of his calamitous state. 2nd, That the
price of labour should, at all times, be proportioned to the
price of wheat, which should invariably be regulated by
the average price of that necessary article of life; and that
the price of labour, as specified in the annexed plan, is not
only well calculated to make the labourer happy without being<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>
injurious to the farmer, but it appears to us the only rational
means of securing the permanent happiness of this valuable
and useful class of men, and, if adopted in its full extent, will
have an immediate and powerful effect in reducing, if it does
not entirely annihilate, that disgraceful and enormous tax on
the public&mdash;the <span class="smcap">Poor Rate</span>.</p>

<p>“<i>Plan of the Price of Labour proportionate to the Price of Wheat</i></p>

<table class="autotable center" summary="">
<tr>
<td colspan="2"></td>
<td>per last.</td><td colspan="3"></td>
<td>per day.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">When wheat shall be </td><td>14l. </td><td colspan="3">the price of labour shall be</td>
<td class="left">1s. 2d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>16</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">1s. 4d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>18</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">1s. 6d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>20</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">1s. 8d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>22</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">1s. 10d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>24</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">2s. 0d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>26</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">2s. 2d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>28</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">2s. 4d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>30</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">2s. 6d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>32</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">2s. 8d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>34</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">2s. 10d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>36</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">3s. 0d.</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>And so on, according to this proportion.</p>

<p>“3rd, That a petition to parliament to regulate the price
of labour, conformable to the above plan, be immediately
adopted; and that the day labourers throughout the county
be invited to associate and co-operate in this necessary application
to parliament, as a peaceable, legal, and probable mode
of obtaining relief; and, in doing this, no time should be lost,
as the petition must be presented before the 29th January
1796.</p>

<p>“4th, That one shilling shall be paid into the hands of
the treasurer by every labourer, in order to defray the expences
of advertising, attending on meetings, and paying counsel to
support their petition in parliament.</p>

<p>“5th, That as soon as the sense of the day labourers of
this county, or a majority of them, shall be made known to
the clerk of the meeting, a general meeting shall be appointed,
in some central town, in order to agree upon the best and easiest
mode of getting the petition signed: when it will be requested
that one labourer, properly instructed, may be deputed to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>
represent two or three contiguous parishes, and to attend the
above intended meeting with a list of all the labourers in the
parishes he shall represent, and pay their respective subscriptions;
and that the labourer, so deputed, shall be allowed
two shillings and six pence a day for his time, and two shillings
and six pence a day for his expences.</p>

<p>“6th, That Adam Moore, clerk of the meeting, be directed
to have the above resolutions, with the names of the farmers
and labourers who have subscribed to and approved them,
advertised in one Norwich and one London paper; when it
is hoped that the above plan of a petition to parliament will
not only be approved and immediately adopted by the day
labourers of this county, but by the day labourers of every
county in the kingdom.</p>

<p>“7th, That all letters, <i>post paid</i>, addressed to Adam
Moore, labourer, at Heacham, near Lynn, Norfolk, will be
duly noticed.”<a id="FNanchor_242" href="#Footnote_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a></p>
</div>

<p>This is one of the most interesting and instructive documents
of the time. It shows that the labourers, whose steady
decline during the next thirty years we are about to trace,
were animated by a sense of dignity and independence. Something
of the old spirit of the commoners still survived. But
there is no sequel to this incident. This great scheme of a
labourers’ organisation vanishes: it passes like a flash of
summer lightning. What is the explanation? The answer is
to be found, we suspect, in the Treason and Sedition Acts
that Pitt was carrying through Parliament in this very month.
Under those Acts no language of criticism was safe, and fifty
persons could not meet except in the presence of a magistrate,
who had power to extinguish the meeting and arrest the
speaker. Those measures inflicted even wider injury upon the
nation than Fox and Sheridan and Erskine themselves believed.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The policy of a minimum wage was brought before Parliament
in the winter of 1795, in a Bill introduced by Samuel
Whitbread, one of the small band of brave Liberals who
had stood by Fox through the revolutionary panic. Whitbread
is a politician to whom history has done less than
justice, and he is generally known only as an implacable
opponent of the Peninsular War. That opposition he contrived
to conduct, as we know from the <i>Creevey Papers</i>, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>
such a way as to win and keep the respect of Wellington.
Whitbread’s disapproval of that war, of which Liberals like
Holland and Lord John Russell, who took Fox’s view of the
difference of fighting revolutions by the aid of kings and
fighting Napoleon by the aid of peoples, were strong supporters,
sprang from his compassion for the miseries of the English
poor. His most notable quality was his vivid and energetic
sympathy; he spent his life in hopeless battles, and he died
by his own hand of public despair. The Bill he now introduced
was the first of a series of proposals designed for the rescue of
the agricultural labourers. It was backed by Sheridan and
Grey,<a id="FNanchor_243" href="#Footnote_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a> and the members for Suffolk.</p>

<p>The object of the Bill<a id="FNanchor_244" href="#Footnote_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a> was to explain and amend the Act
of Elizabeth, which empowered Justices of the Peace at or
within six weeks of every General Quarter Sessions held at
Easter to regulate the wages of labourers in husbandry. The
provisions of the Bill were briefly as follows. At any Quarter
Sessions the justices could agree, if they thought fit, to hold a
General Sessions for carrying into execution the powers given
them by the Act. If they thought good to hold such a General
Sessions, the majority of them could ‘rate and appoint the
wages and fix and declare the hours of working of all labourers
in husbandry, by the day, week, month or year, and with beer
or cyder or without, respect being had to the value of money
and the plenty or scarcity of the time.’ This rate was to be
printed and posted on the church doors, and was to hold good
till superseded by another made in the same way. The rate
was not to apply to any tradesman or artificer, nor to any
labourer whose diet was wholly provided by his employer, nor
to any labourer <i>bona fide</i> employed on piecework, nor to any
labourer employed by the parish. The young, the old, and the
infirm were also exempted from the provisions of the Act. It
was to be lawful ‘to contract with and pay to any male person,
under the age of &mdash;&mdash;<a id="FNanchor_245" href="#Footnote_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a> years, or to any man who from age or
infirmity or any other incapacity shall be unable to do the
ordinary work of a labouring man, so much as he shall reasonably
deserve for the work which he shall be able to do and shall
do.’ In case of complaint the decision as to the ability of the
labourer rested with the justices.</p>

<p>With the above exceptions no labourer was to be hired under
the appointed rates, and any contract for lower wages was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>
void. If convicted of breaking the law, an employer was to
be fined; if he refused to pay the fine, his goods were to be
distrained on, and if this failed to produce enough to pay the
expenses, he could be committed to the common gaol or House
of Correction. A labourer with whom an illegal contract was
made was to be a competent witness.</p>

<p>The first discussions of the Bill were friendly in tone. On
25th November Whitbread asked for leave to bring it in.
Sir William Young, Lechmere, Charles Dundas, and Sir John
Rous all spoke with sympathy and approval. The first
reading debate took place on 9th December, and though
Whitbread had on that occasion the powerful support of Fox,
who, while not concealing his misgivings about the Bill, thought
the alternative of leaving the great body of the people to depend
on the charity of the rich intolerable, an ominous note
was struck by Pitt and Henry Dundas on the other side. The
Bill came up for second reading on 12th February 1796.<a id="FNanchor_246" href="#Footnote_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a>
Whitbread’s opening speech showed that he was well aware
that he would have to face a formidable opposition. Pitt rose
at once after the motion had been formally seconded by
one of the Suffolk members, and assailed the Bill in a speech
that made an immediate and overwhelming impression. He
challenged Whitbread’s argument that wages had not kept
pace with prices; he admitted the hardships of the poor, but
he thought the picture overdrawn, for their hardships had been
relieved by ‘a display of beneficence never surpassed at any
period,’ and he argued that it was a false remedy to use legislative
interference, and to give the justices the power to
regulate the price of labour, and to endeavour ‘to establish
by authority what would be much better accomplished by the
unassisted operation of principles.’ This led naturally to an
attack on the restrictions on labour imposed by the Law of
Settlement, and a discussion of the operation of the Poor Laws,
and the speech ended, after a glance at the great possibilities
of child employment, with the promise of measures which
should restore the original purity of the Poor Laws, and make
them a blessing instead of the curse they had become. The
speech seems to have dazzled the House of Commons, and
few stood up against the general opinion that Whitbread’s
proposal was dangerous, and that the whole question had better
be left to Pitt. Lechmere, a Worcestershire member, was one
of them, and he made an admirable little speech in which he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>
tried to destroy the general illusion that the poor could not be
unhappy in a country where the rich were so kind. Whitbread
himself defended his Bill with spirit and ability, showing that
Pitt had not really found any substantial argument against it,
and that Pitt’s own remedies were all hypothetical and distant.
Fox reaffirmed his dislike of compulsion, but restated at the
same time his opinion that Whitbread’s Bill, though not an
ideal solution, was the best solution available of evils which
pressed very hardly on the poor and demanded attention.
General Smith pointed out that one of Pitt’s remedies was the
employment of children, and warned him that he had himself
seen some of the consequences of the unregulated labour of
children ‘whose wan and pale complexions bespoke that their
constitutions were already undermined, and afforded but little
promise of a robust manhood, or of future usefulness to the
community.’ But the general sense of the House was reflected
in the speeches of Buxton, Coxhead and Burdon, whose main
argument was that the poor were not in so desperate a plight
as Whitbread supposed, and that whatever their condition
might be, Pitt was the most likely person to find such remedies
as were practicable and effective. The motion for second
reading was negatived without a division. The verdict of the
House was a verdict of confidence in Pitt.</p>

<p>Four years later (11th February 1800) Whitbread repeated
his attempt.<a id="FNanchor_247" href="#Footnote_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a> He asked for leave to bring in a Bill to explain
and amend the Act of Elizabeth, and said that he had waited
for Pitt to carry out his promises. He was aware of the
danger of overpaying the poor, but artificers and labourers
should be so paid as to be able to keep themselves and their
families in comfort. He saw no way of securing this result in
a time of distress except the way he had suggested. Pitt rose
at once to reply. He had in the interval brought in and abandoned
his scheme of Poor Law Reform. He had spent his only
idea, and he was now confessedly without any policy at all. All
that he could contribute was a general criticism of legislative
interference, and another discourse on the importance of letting
labour find its own level. He admitted the fact of scarcity,
but he believed the labouring class seldom felt fewer privations.
History scarcely provides a more striking spectacle of a statesman
paying himself with soothing phrases in the midst of a
social cyclone. The House was more than ever on his side.
All the interests and instincts of class were disguised under<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>
the gold dust of Adam Smith’s philosophy. Sir William
Young, Buxton, Wilberforce, Ellison, and Perceval attacked
the Bill. Whitbread replied that charity as a substitute for
adequate wages had mischievous effects, for it took away the
independence of the poor, ‘a consideration as valuable to the
labourer as to the man of high rank,’ and as for the argument
that labour should be left to find its own level, the truth
surely was that labour found its level by combinations, and
that this had been found to be so great an evil that Acts of
Parliament had been passed against it.</p>

<p>The date of the second reading of the Bill was hotly disputed:<a id="FNanchor_248" href="#Footnote_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a>
the friends of the measure wanted it to be fixed for
28th April, so that Quarter Sessions might have time to
deliberate on the proposals; the opponents of the measure
suggested 25th February, on the grounds that it was dangerous
to keep the Bill in suspense so long: ‘the eyes of all the
labouring poor,’ said Mr. Ellison, ‘must in that interval be
turned upon it.’ The opponents won their point, and when
the Bill came up for second reading its fate was a foregone
conclusion. Whitbread made one last appeal, pleading the
cause of the labourers bound to practical serfdom in parishes
where the landowner was an absentee, employed at starvation
wages by farmers, living in cottages let to them by farmers.
But his appeal was unheeded: Lord Belgrave retorted with
the argument that legislative interference with agriculture
could not be needed, seeing that five hundred Enclosure Bills
had passed the House during a period of war, and the Bill
was rejected.</p>

<p>So died the policy of the minimum wage. Even later it had
its adherents, for, in 1805, Sir Thomas Bernard criticised it<a id="FNanchor_249" href="#Footnote_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a> as
the ‘favourite idea of some very intelligent and benevolent
men.’ He mentioned as a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of the scheme,
that had the rate of wages been fixed by the standard of 1780
when the quartern loaf was 6d. and the labourer’s pay 9s.
a week, the result in 1800 when the quartern loaf cost 1s. 9d.
would have been a wage of £1, 11s. 6d.</p>

<p>When Whitbread introduced his large and comprehensive
Poor Law Bill in 1807,<a id="FNanchor_250" href="#Footnote_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a> the proposal for a minimum wage was
not included.</p>

<p>From an examination of the speeches of the time and of the
answers to Arthur Young’s circular printed in the <i>Annals of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>
Agriculture</i>, it is evident that there was a genuine fear among
the opponents of the measure that if once wages were raised
to meet the rise in prices it would not be easy to reduce them
when the famine was over. This was put candidly by one of
Arthur Young’s correspondents: ‘it is here judged more
prudent to indulge the poor with bread corn at a reduced
price than to raise the price of wages.’<a id="FNanchor_251" href="#Footnote_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a>
The policy of a minimum wage was revived later by a society
called ‘The General Association established for the Purpose of
bettering the Condition of the Agricultural and Manufacturing
Labourers.’ Three representatives of this society gave evidence
before the Select Committee on Emigration in 1827, and one
of them pointed out as an illustration of the injustice with
which the labourers were treated, that in 1825 the wages of
agricultural labourers were generally 9s. a week, and the
price of wheat 9s. a bushel, whereas in 1732 the wages of
agricultural labour were fixed by the magistrates at 6s. a
week, and the price of wheat was 2s. 9d. the bushel. In
support of this comparison he produced a table from <i>The
Gentleman’s Magazine</i> of <span class="lock">1732:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>
Wheat in February 1732, 23s. to 25s. per quarter.<br />
Wheat in March 1732, 20s. to 22s. per quarter.<br />
</p>

<p>Yearly wages appointed by the Justices to be taken by the
servants in the county of Kent, not exceeding the following
sums:</p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left">Head ploughman waggoner or seedsman</td>
<td>£8</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">His mate</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Best woman</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Second sort of woman</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Second ploughman</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">His mate</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Labourers by day in summer</td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">In winter</span></td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
</table>


<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Justices of Gloucester</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left">Head servant in husbandry</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Second servant in husbandry</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Driving boy under fourteen</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Head maid servant or dairy servant</td>
<td>2 </td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Mower in harvest without drink per day</td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">With drink</span></td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Other day labourers with drink</td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">From corn to hay harvest with drink</td>
<td> </td>
<td>0</td>
<td>8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Mowers and reapers in corn harvest with drink</td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Labourers with diet</td>
<td> </td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Without diet or drink</span></td>
<td> </td>
<td>0 </td>
<td>10</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Carpenter wheelwright or mason without drink</td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">With drink</span></td>
<td> </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>One of the witnesses pointed out that there were five millions
of labourers making with their families eight millions, and that
if the effect of raising their wages was to increase their expenditure
by a penny a day, there would be an increase of consumption
amounting to twelve millions a year. These arguments
made little impression on the Committee, and the representations
of the society were dismissed with contempt:
‘It is from an entire ignorance of the universal operation of
the principle of Supply and Demand regulating the rate of
wages that all these extravagant propositions are advanced,
and recommendations spread over the country which are so
calculated to excite false hopes, and consequently discontent,
in the minds of the labouring classes. Among the most
extravagant are those brought forward by the Society established
for the purpose of bettering the condition of the manufacturing
and agricultural labourers.’</p>


<h3>POOR LAW REFORM</h3>

<p>Pitt, having secured the rejection of Whitbread’s Minimum
Wage Bill in 1796, produced his own alternative: Poor Law
Reform. It is necessary to state briefly what were the Poor
Law arrangements at the time of his proposals.</p>

<p>The Poor Law system reposed on the great Act of Elizabeth
(1601), by which the State had acknowledged and organised
the duty to the poor which it had taken over from the Church.
The parish was constituted the unit, and overseers, unsalaried
and nominated by the J.P.’s, were appointed for administering
relief, the necessary funds being obtained by a poor rate.
Before 1722 a candidate for relief could apply either to the
overseers or to the magistrate. By an Act passed in that year,
designed to make the administration stricter, application was
to be made first to the overseer. If the overseer rejected the
application the claimant could submit his case to a magistrate,
and the magistrate, after hearing the overseer’s objection,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>
could order that relief should be given. There were, however,
a number of parishes in which applications for relief were made
to salaried guardians. These were the parishes that had
adopted an Act known as Gilbert’s Act, passed in 1782.<a id="FNanchor_252" href="#Footnote_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a> In
these parishes,<a id="FNanchor_253" href="#Footnote_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a> joined in incorporations, the parish overseers
were not abolished, for they still had the duty of collecting
and accounting for the rates, but the distribution was in the
hands of paid guardians, one for each parish, appointed by
the justices out of a list of names submitted by the parishioners.
In each set of incorporated parishes there was a ‘Visitor’ appointed
by the justices, who had practically absolute power
over the guardians. If the guardians refused relief, the
claimant could still appeal, as in the case of the overseers,
to the justices.</p>

<p>Such was the parish machinery. The method of giving relief
varied greatly, but the main distinction to be drawn is between
(1) out relief, or a weekly pension of a shilling or two at home;
and (2) indoor relief, or relief in a workhouse, or poorhouse, or
house of industry. Out relief was the earlier institution, and
it held its own throughout the century, being the only form of
relief in many parishes. Down to 1722 parishes that wished
to build a workhouse had to get a special Act of Parliament.
In that year a great impetus was given to the workhouse movement
by an Act<a id="FNanchor_254" href="#Footnote_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a> which authorised overseers, with the consent
of the vestry, to start workhouses, or to farm out the poor, and
also authorised parishes to join together for this purpose. If
applicants for relief refused to go into the workhouse, they
forfeited their title to any relief at all. A great many workhouses
were built in consequence of this Act: in 1732 there
were stated to be sixty in the country, and about fifty in the
metropolis.<a id="FNanchor_255" href="#Footnote_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a></p>

<p>Even if the applicant for relief lived in a parish which had
built or shared in a workhouse, it did not follow that he was
forced into it. He lost his title to receive relief outside, but
his fate would depend on the parish officers. In the parishes
which had adopted Gilbert’s Act the workhouse was reserved
for the aged, for the infirm, and for young children. In most
parishes there was out relief as well as indoor relief: in some
parishes outdoor relief being allowed to applicants of a certain
age or in special circumstances. In some parishes all outdoor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>
relief had stopped by 1795.<a id="FNanchor_256" href="#Footnote_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a> There is no doubt that in most
parishes the workhouse accommodation would have been quite
inadequate for the needs of the parish in times of distress. It
was quite common to put four persons into a single bed.</p>

<p>The workhouses were dreaded by the poor,<a id="FNanchor_257" href="#Footnote_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a> not only for the
dirt and disease and the devastating fevers that swept through
them,<a id="FNanchor_258" href="#Footnote_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a> but for reasons that are intelligible enough to any one
who has read Eden’s descriptions. Those descriptions show
that Crabbe’s picture is no <span class="lock">exaggeration:&mdash;</span></p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘Theirs is yon House that holds the Parish-Poor,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;&mdash;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">There Children dwell who know no Parents’ care;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Parents, who know no Children’s love, dwell there!</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Heart-broken Matrons on their joyless bed,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Forsaken Wives and Mothers never wed;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Dejected Widows with unheeded tears,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">And crippled Age with more than childhood fears;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">The Lame, the Blind, and, far the happiest they!</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">The moping Idiot and the Madman gay.</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Here too the Sick their final doom receive,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Mixt with the clamours of the crowd below;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Here sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">And the cold charities of man to man:</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Whose laws indeed for ruin’d Age provide,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">And pride embitters what it can’t deny.’<a id="FNanchor_259" href="#Footnote_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a></div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>A good example of this mixture of young and old, virtuous
and vicious, whole and sick, sane and mad, is given in Eden’s
catalogue of the inmates of Epsom Workhouse in January
1796.<a id="FNanchor_260" href="#Footnote_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a> There were eleven men, sixteen women, and twenty-three
children. We read of J. H., aged forty-three, ‘always ...<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>
somewhat of an idiot, he is now become quite a driveller’;
of E. E., aged sixty-two, ‘of a sluggish, stupid character’;
of A. M., aged twenty-six, ‘afflicted with a leprosy’; of R. M.,
aged seventy-seven, ‘worn out and paralytic’; of J. R., aged
seventeen, who has contracted so many disorderly habits that
decent people will not employ him. It is interesting to notice
that it was not till 1790 that the Justices of the Peace were
given any power of inspecting workhouses.</p>

<p>In 1796, before Pitt’s scheme was brought in, the Act of
1722, which had been introduced to stiffen the administration
of the Poor Laws, was relaxed. An Act,<a id="FNanchor_261" href="#Footnote_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a> of which Sir William
Young was the author, abolished the restriction of right to
relief to persons willing to enter the workhouse, and provided
that claimants could apply for relief directly to a magistrate.
The Act declares that the restrictions had been found ‘inconvenient
and oppressive.’ It is evidence, of course, of the
increasing pressure of poverty.</p>

<p>But to understand the arrangements in force at this time,
and also the later developments, we must glance at another
feature of the Poor Law system. The Poor Laws were a
system of employment as well as a system of relief. The
Acts before 1722 are all called Acts for the Relief of the Poor:
the Act of 1722 speaks of ‘the Settlement, Employment and
Relief.’ That Act empowered parishes to farm out the poor
to an employer. Gilbert’s Act of 1782 provided that in the
parishes incorporated under that Act the guardians were not
to send able-bodied poor to the poorhouse, but to find work
for them or maintain them until work was found: the guardian
was to take the wage and provide the labourer with a maintenance.
Thus there grew up a variety of systems of public
employment: direct employment of paupers on parish work:
the labour rate system, or the sharing out of the paupers
among the ratepayers: the roundsman system by which pauper
labour was sold to the farmers.<a id="FNanchor_262" href="#Footnote_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span></p>

<p>This was the state of things that Pitt proposed to reform.
His general ideas on Poor Law reform were put before the
House of Commons in the debate on the second reading of
Whitbread’s Bill.<a id="FNanchor_263" href="#Footnote_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a> He thought that persons with large families
should be treated as entitled to relief, that persons without a
settlement, falling into want, should not be liable to removal
at the caprice of the parish officer, that Friendly Societies
should be encouraged, and that Schools of Industry should be
established. ‘If any one would take the trouble to compute
the amount of all the earnings of the children who are already
educated in this manner, he would be surprised, when he came
to consider the weight which their support by their own
labours took off the country, and the addition which, by the
fruits of their toil, and the habits to which they were formed,
was made to its internal opulence.’ On 22nd December of
that year, in a new Parliament, he asked for leave to bring in a
Bill for the better Support and Maintenance of the Poor. He
said the subject was too extensive to be discussed at that
stage, that he only proposed that the Bill should be read a
first and second time and sent to a committee where the blanks
could be filled up, and the Bill printed before the holidays, ‘in
order that during the interval of Parliament it might be circulated
in the country and undergo the most serious investigation.’<a id="FNanchor_264" href="#Footnote_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a>
Sheridan hinted that it was unfortunate for the poor
that Pitt had taken the question out of Whitbread’s hands,
to which Pitt replied that any delay in bringing forward his
Bill was due to the time spent on taking advice. On
28th February of the next year (1797), while strangers were
excluded from the Gallery, there occurred what the <i>Parliamentary
Register</i> calls ‘a conversation upon the farther
consideration of the report of the Poor’s Bill,’ in which nobody
but Pitt defended the Bill, and Sheridan and Joliffe attacked
it. With this its Parliamentary history ends.</p>

<p>The main features of the Bill were these.<a id="FNanchor_265" href="#Footnote_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a> Schools of
Industry were to be established in every parish or group of
parishes. These schools were to serve two purposes. First,
the young were to be trained there (this idea came, of course,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>
from Locke). Every poor man with more than two children
who were not self-supporting, and every widow with more
than one such child, was to be entitled to a weekly allowance
in respect of each extra child. Every allowance child who
was five years or over was to be sent to the School of Industry,
unless his parent could instruct and employ him, and the proceeds
of his work was to go towards the upkeep of the school.
Secondly, grown-up people were to be employed there. The
authorities were to provide ‘a proper stock of hemp, flax, silk,
cotton, wool, iron, leather or other materials, and also proper
tools and implements for the employment of the poor,’ and
they were empowered to carry on all trades under this Act,
‘any law or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.’ Any
person lawfully settled in a parish was entitled to be employed
in the school; any person residing in a parish, able and willing
to be employed at the usual rates, was entitled to be employed
there when out of work. Poor persons refusing to be employed
there were not to be entitled to relief. The authorities might
either pay wages at a rate fixed by the magistrates, or they
might let the employed sell their products and merely repay
the school for the material, or they might contract to feed them
and take a proportion of their receipts. If the wages paid in
the school were insufficient, they were to be supplemented out
of the rates.</p>

<p>The proposals for outside relief were briefly and chiefly these.
A person unable to earn the full rate of wages usually given
might contract with his employer to work at an inferior rate, and
have the balance between his earnings and an adequate maintenance
made up by the parish. Money might be advanced
under certain circumstances for the purchase of a cow or other
animal, if it seemed likely that such a course would enable
the recipient to maintain himself without the help of the
parish. The possession of property up to thirty pounds was
not to disqualify a person for relief. A parochial insurance
fund was to be created, partly from private subscriptions
and partly from the rates. No person was to be removed
from a parish on account of relief for temporary disability or
sickness.</p>

<p>The most celebrated and deadly criticism came from Bentham,
who is often supposed to have killed the Bill. Some of his
objections are captious and eristical, and he is a good deal less
than just to the good elements of the scheme. Pitt deserves
credit for one statesmanlike discovery, the discovery that it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>
is bad policy to refuse to help a man until he is ruined. His
cow-money proposal was also conceived in the right spirit if
its form was impracticable. But the scheme as a whole was
confused and incoherent, and it deserved the treatment it
received. It was in truth a huge patchwork, on which the
ideas of living and dead reformers were thrown together
without order or plan. As a consequence, its various parts
did not agree. It is surprising that the politician who had
attacked Whitbread’s Bill as an interference with wages
could have included in his scheme the proposal to pay wages
in part out of rates. The whole scheme, though it would
have involved a great expenditure, would have produced
very much the same result as the Speenhamland system, by
virtue of this clause. Pitt showed no more judgment or foresight
than the least enlightened of County Justices in introducing
into a scheme for providing relief, and dealing with
unemployment, a proposal that could only have the effect
of reducing wages. The organisation of Schools of Industry
as a means of dealing with unemployment has sometimes been
represented as quite a new proposal, but it was probably
based on the suggestion made by Fielding in 1753 in his paper,
‘A proposal for making an effectual provision for the poor,
for amending their morals, and for rendering them useful
members of society.’ Fielding proposed the erection of a
county workhouse, which was to include a house of correction.
He drew up a sharp and drastic code which would have
authorised the committal to his County House, not only of
vagrants, but of persons of low degree found harbouring in
an ale-house after ten o’clock at night. But the workhouse
was not merely to be used as a penal settlement, it was to find
work for the unemployed. Any person who was unable to
find employment in his parish could apply to the minister or
churchwardens for a pass, and this pass was to give him the
right to claim admission to the County House where he was to
be employed. The County House was also to be provided
with instructors who could teach native and foreign manufactures
to the inmates. Howlett, one of Pitt’s critics,
was probably right in thinking that Pitt was reviving this
scheme.</p>

<p>The Bill excited general opposition. Bentham’s analysis
is the most famous of the criticisms that have survived,
but in some senses his opposition was less serious than the
dismay of magistrates and ratepayers. Hostile petitions<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>
poured into the House of Commons from London and from
all parts of the country; among others there were petitions
from Shrewsbury, Oswestry, Worcester, Bristol, Lincoln,
Carmarthen, Bedford, Chester and Godalming.<a id="FNanchor_266" href="#Footnote_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a> Howlett
attacked the scheme on the ground of the danger of parish
jobbery and corruption. Pitt apparently made no attempt
to defend his plan, and he surrendered it without a murmur.
We are thus left in the curious and disappointing position of
having before us a Bill on the most important subject of the
day, introduced and abandoned by the Prime Minister without
a word or syllable in its defence. Whitbread observed<a id="FNanchor_267" href="#Footnote_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a> four
years later that the Bill was brought in and printed, but never
brought under the discussion of the House. Pitt’s excuse is
significant: ‘He was, as formerly, convinced of its propriety;
but many objections had been started to it by those whose
opinion he was bound to respect. Inexperienced himself in
country affairs, and in the condition of the poor, he was
diffident of his own opinion, and would not press the measure
upon the attention of the House.’</p>

<p>Poor Law Reform was thus abandoned, but two attempts
were made, at the instance of Pitt, one of them with success,
to soften the brutalities of the Law of Settlement. Neither
proposal made it any easier to gain a settlement, and Pitt
very properly declared that they did not go nearly far enough.
Pitt had all Adam Smith’s just hatred of these restrictions,
and in opposing Whitbread’s Bill for a minimum wage he
pointed to ‘a radical amendment’ of the Law of Settlement
as the true remedy. He was not the formal author of the
Act of 1795, but it may safely be assumed that he was the
chief power behind it. This Act<a id="FNanchor_268" href="#Footnote_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a> provided that nobody was
to be removeable until he or she became actually chargeable
to the parish. The preamble throws light on the working of
the Settlement laws. It declares that ‘Many industrious
poor persons, chargeable to the parish, township, or place
where they live, merely from want of work there, would in
any other place where sufficient employment is to be had,
maintain themselves and families without being burthensome
to any parish, township, or place; and such poor persons
are for the most part compelled to live in their own parishes,
townships, or places, and are not permitted to inhabit elsewhere,
under pretence that they are likely to become chargeable<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span>
to the parish, township, or place into which they go for
the purpose of getting employment, although the labour of
such poor persons might, in many instances, be very beneficial
to such parish, township, or place.’ The granting of certificates
is thus admitted to have been ineffectual. The same
Act provided that orders of removal were to be suspended
in cases where the pauper was dangerously ill, a provision that
throws some light on the manner in which these orders had
been executed, and that no person should gain a settlement
by paying levies or taxes, in respect of any tenement of a
yearly value of less than ten pounds.<a id="FNanchor_269" href="#Footnote_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a></p>

<p>From this time certificates were unnecessary, and if a
labourer moved from Parish A to Parish B he was no longer
liable to be sent back at the caprice of Parish B’s officers until
he became actually chargeable, but, of course, if from any
cause he fell into temporary distress, for example, if he were
out of work for a few weeks, unless he could get private aid
from ‘the opulent,’ he had to return to his old parish. An
attempt was made to remedy this state of things by Mr. Baker
who, in March 1800, introduced a Bill<a id="FNanchor_270" href="#Footnote_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a> to enable overseers to
assist the deserving but unsettled poor in cases of temporary
distress. He explained that the provisions of the Bill would
apply only to men who could usually keep themselves, but
from the high cost of provisions had to depend on parochial
aid. He found a powerful supporter in Pitt, who argued
that if people had enriched a parish with their industry, it
was unfair that owing to temporary pressure they should
be removed to a place where they were not wanted, and that
it was better for a parish to suffer temporary inconvenience
than for numbers of industrious men to be rendered unhappy
and useless. But in spite of Pitt’s unanswerable case, the
Bill, which was denounced by Mr. Buxton as oppressive to
the landed interest, by Lord Sheffield as ‘subversive of the
whole economy of the country,’ by Mr. Ellison as submerging
the middle ranks, and by Sir William Pulteney as being a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>
‘premium for idleness and extravagance,’ was rejected by
thirty votes to twenty-three.<a id="FNanchor_271" href="#Footnote_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a></p>


<h3><span class="smcap">Allotments</span></h3>

<p>Another policy that was pressed upon the governing class
was the policy of restoring to the labourer some of the resources
he had lost with enclosure, of putting him in such a position
that he was not obliged to depend entirely on the purchasing
power of his wages at the shop. This was the aim of the allotment
movement. The propaganda failed, but it did not fail
for the want of vigorous and authoritative support. We have
seen in a previous chapter that Arthur Young awoke in 1801 to
the social mischief of depriving the poor of their land and their
cows, and that he wanted future Enclosure Acts to be juster
and more humane. Cobbett suggested a large scheme of
agrarian settlement to Windham in 1806. These proposals
had been anticipated by Davies, whose knowledge of the
actual life of the poor made him understand the important
difference between a total and a partial dependence on wages.
‘Hope is a cordial, of which the poor man has especially
much need, to cheer his heart in the toilsome journey through
life. And the fatal consequence of that policy, which deprives
labouring people of the expectation of possessing any property
in the soil, must be the extinction of every generous principle
in their minds.... No gentleman should be permitted to
pull down a cottage, until he had first erected another, upon
one of Mr. Kent’s plans, either on some convenient part of the
waste, or on his own estate, with a certain quantity of land
annexed.’ He praised the Act of Elizabeth which forbade the
erection of cottages with less than four acres of land around
them, ‘that poor people might secure for themselves a maintenance,
and not be obliged on the loss of a few days labour to
come to the parish,’<a id="FNanchor_272" href="#Footnote_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a> and urged that this prohibition, which
had been repealed in 1775,<a id="FNanchor_273" href="#Footnote_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a> should be set up again.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span></p>

<p>The general policy of providing allotments was never tried,
but we know something of individual experiments from the
Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing
the Comforts of the Poor. This society took up the cause
of allotments very zealously, and most of the examples of
private benevolence seem to have found their way into the
pages of its reports.</p>

<p>These experiments were not very numerous. Indeed, the
name of Lord Winchilsea recurs so inevitably in every allusion
to the subject as to create a suspicion that the movement and
his estates were coextensive. This is not the truth, but it is
not very wide of the truth, for though Lord Winchilsea had
imitators, those imitators were few. The fullest account of
his estate in Rutlandshire is given by Sir Thomas Bernard.<a id="FNanchor_274" href="#Footnote_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a>
The estate embraced four parishes&mdash;Hambledon, Egleton,
Greetham, and Burley on the Hill. The tenants included eighty
cottagers possessing one hundred and seventy-four cows.
‘About a third part have all their land in severalty; the rest
of them have the use of a cow-pasture in common with others;
most of them possessing a small homestead, adjoining to their
cottage; every one of them having a good garden, and keeping
one pig at least, if not more.... Of all the rents of the estate,
none are more punctually paid than those for the cottagers’
land.’ In this happy district if a man seemed likely to become
a burden on the parish his landlord and neighbours saved the
man’s self-respect and their own pockets as ratepayers, by setting
him up with land and a cow instead. So far from neglecting
their work as labourers, these proprietors of cows are described
as ‘most steady and trusty.’ We have a picture of this little
community leading a hard but energetic and independent life,
the men going out to daily work, but busy in their spare hours
with their cows, sheep, pigs, and gardens; the women and
children looking after the live stock, spinning, or working in
the gardens: a very different picture from that of the landless
and ill-fed labourers elsewhere.</p>

<p>Other landlords, who, acting on their own initiative, or at the
instance of their agents, helped their cottagers by letting them
land on which to keep cows were Lord Carrington and Lord
Scarborough in Lincolnshire, and Lord Egremont on his Yorkshire
estates (Kent was his agent). Some who were friendly to
the allotments movement thought it a mistake to give allotments
of arable land in districts where pasture land was not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>
available. Mr. Thompson, who writes the account of Lord
Carrington’s cottagers with cows, thought that ‘where cottagers
occupy arable land, it is very rarely of advantage to them, and
generally a prejudice to the estate.’<a id="FNanchor_275" href="#Footnote_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a> He seems, however, to
have been thinking more of small holdings than of allotments.
‘The late Abel Smith, Esq., from motives of kindness to several
cottagers on his estates in Nottinghamshire, let to each of them
a small piece of arable land. I have rode over that estate with
Lord Carrington several times since it descended to him, and
I have invariably observed that the tenants upon it, who
occupy only eight or ten acres of arable land, are poor, and their
land in bad condition. They would thrive more and enjoy
greater comfort with the means of keeping two or three cows
each than with three times their present quantity of arable
land; but it would be a greater mortification to them to be
deprived of it than their landlord is disposed to inflict.’<a id="FNanchor_276" href="#Footnote_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a> On
the other hand, a striking instance of successful arable allotments
is described by a Mr. Estcourt in the Reports of the Society
for Bettering the Condition of the Poor.<a id="FNanchor_277" href="#Footnote_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a> The scene was the
parish of Long Newnton in Wilts, which contained one hundred
and forty poor persons, chiefly agricultural labourers, distributed
in thirty-two families, and the year was 1800. The price of provisions
was very high, and ‘though all had a very liberal allowance
from the poor rate’ the whole village was plunged in debt and
misery. From this hopeless plight the parish was rescued by
an allotment scheme that Mr. Estcourt established and
described. Each cottager who applied was allowed to rent a
small quantity of land at the rate of £1, 12s. an acre<a id="FNanchor_278" href="#Footnote_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a> on a
fourteen years’ lease: the quantity of land let to an applicant
depended on the number in his family, with a maximum of
one and a half acres: the tenant was to forfeit his holding if
he received poor relief other than medical relief. The offer
was greedily accepted, two widows with large families and four
very old and infirm persons being the only persons who did not
apply for a lease. A loan of £44 was divided among the
tenants to free them from their debts and give them a fresh
start. They were allowed a third of their plot on Lady Day
1801, a second third on Lady Day 1802, and the remainder
on Lady Day 1803. The results as recorded in 1805 were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>
astonishing. None of the tenants had received any poor relief:
all the conditions had been observed: the loan of £44 had
long been repaid and the poor rate had fallen from £212, 16s.
to £12, 6s. ‘They are so much beforehand with the world
that it is supposed that it must be some calamity still more
severe than any they have ever been afflicted with that could
put them under the necessity of ever applying for relief to the
parish again.... The farmers of this parish allow that they
never had their work better done, their servants more able,
willing, civil, and sober, and that their property was never so
free from depredation as at present.’<a id="FNanchor_279" href="#Footnote_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a></p>

<p>Some philanthropists, full of the advantages to the poor of
possessing live-stock, argued that it was a good thing for
cottagers to keep cows even in arable districts. Sir Henry
Vavasour wrote an account in 1801<a id="FNanchor_280" href="#Footnote_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a> of one of his cottagers who
managed to keep two cows and two pigs and make a profit of
£30 a year on three acres three perches of arable with a
summer’s gait for one of his cows. The man, his wife, and his
daughter of twelve worked on the land in their spare hours.
The Board of Agriculture offered gold medals in 1801 for the
best report of how to keep one or two cows on arable land, and
Sir John Sinclair wrote an essay on the subject, reproduced in
the account of ‘Useful Projects’ in the <i>Annual Register</i>.<a id="FNanchor_281" href="#Footnote_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a>
Sir John Sinclair urged that if the system was generally adopted
it would remove the popular objections to enclosure.</p>

<p>Other advocates of the policy of giving the labourers land
pleaded only for gardens in arable districts; ‘a garden,’ wrote
Lord Winchilsea, ‘may be allotted to them in almost every
situation, and will be found of infinite use to them. In countries,
where it has never been the custom for labourers to keep cows,
it may be difficult to introduce it; but where no gardens have
been annexed to the cottages, it is sufficient to give the ground,
and the labourer is sure to know what to do with it, and will
reap an immediate benefit from it. Of this I have had experience
in several places, particularly in two parishes near Newport
Pagnell, Bucks, where there never have been any gardens
annexed to the labourers’ houses, and where, upon land being
allotted to them, they all, without a single exception, have
cultivated their gardens extremely well, and profess receiving<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>
the greatest benefits from them.’<a id="FNanchor_282" href="#Footnote_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a> ‘A few roods of land, at a
fair rent,’ wrote a correspondent in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>
in 1796,<a id="FNanchor_283" href="#Footnote_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a> ‘would do a labourer as much good as wages almost
doubled: there would not, then, be an idle hand in his family,
and the man himself would often go to work in his root
yard instead of going to the ale house.’<a id="FNanchor_284" href="#Footnote_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a> The interesting
report on the ‘Inquiry into the General State of the
Poor’ presented at the Epiphany General Quarter Sessions
for Hampshire and published in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>,<a id="FNanchor_285" href="#Footnote_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a>
a document which does not display too much indulgence to
the shortcomings of labourers, recommends the multiplication
of cottages with small pieces of ground annexed, so that
labourers might live nearer their work, and spend the time
often wasted in going to and from their work, in cultivating
their plot of ground at home. ‘As it is chiefly this practice
which renders even the state of slavery in the West Indies
tolerable, what an advantage would it be to the state of free
service here!’<a id="FNanchor_286" href="#Footnote_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a></p>

<p>The experiments in the provision of allotments of any kind
were few, and they are chiefly interesting for the light they
reflect on the character of the labourer of the period. They
show of what those men and women were capable whose
degradation in the morass of the Speenhamland system is the
last and blackest page in the history of the eighteenth century.
Their rulers put a stone round their necks, and it was not their
character but their circumstances that dragged them into the
mire. In villages where allotments were tried the agricultural
labourer is an upright and self-respecting figure. The immediate
moral effects were visible enough at the time. Sir
Thomas Bernard’s account of the cottagers on Lord Winchilsea’s
estate contains the following reflections: ‘I do not mean
to assert that the English cottager, narrowed as he now is in
the means and habits of life, may be immediately capable of
taking that active and useful station in society, that is filled
by those who are the subject of this paper. To produce so
great an improvement in character and circumstances of life,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>
will require time and attention. The cottager, however, of
this part of the county of Rutland, <i>is not of a different species
from other English cottagers</i>; and if he had not been protected
and encouraged by his landlord, he would have been the same
hopeless and comfortless creature that we see in some other
parts of England. The farmer (with the assistance of the
steward) would have taken his land; the creditor, his cow and
pig; and the workhouse, his family.’<a id="FNanchor_287" href="#Footnote_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a></p>

<p>We have seen, in discussing enclosures, that the policy of
securing allotments to the labourers in enclosure Acts was
defeated by the class interests of the landlords. Why, it may
be asked, were schemes such as those of Lord Winchilsea’s
adopted so rarely in villages already enclosed? These arrangements
benefited all parties. There was no doubt about the
demand; ‘in the greatest part of this kingdom,’ wrote one
correspondent, ‘the cottager would rejoice at being permitted
to pay the utmost value given by the farmers, for as much
land as would keep a cow, if he could obtain it at that price.’<a id="FNanchor_288" href="#Footnote_288" class="fnanchor">[288]</a>
The steadiness and industry of the labourers, stimulated by
this incentive, were an advantage both to the landlords and
to the farmers. Further, it was well known that in the villages
where the labourers had land, poor rates were light.<a id="FNanchor_289" href="#Footnote_289" class="fnanchor">[289]</a> Why
was it that a policy with so many recommendations never
took root? Perhaps the best answer is given in the following
story. Cobbett proposed to the vestry of Bishops Walthams
that they should ‘ask the Bishop of Winchester to grant an
acre of waste land to every married labourer. All, however,
but the village schoolmaster voted against it, on the ground
... that it would make the men “too saucy,” that they
would “breed more children” and “want higher wages.”’<a id="FNanchor_290" href="#Footnote_290" class="fnanchor">[290]</a></p>

<p>The truth is that enclosures and the new system of farming
had set up two classes in antagonism to allotments, the large
farmer, who disliked saucy labourers, and the shopkeeper, who
knew that the more food the labourer raised on his little estate
the less would he buy at the village store. It had been to the
interest of a small farmer in the old common-field village to
have a number of semi-labourers, semi-owners who could help
at the harvest: the large farmer wanted a permanent supply
of labour which was absolutely at his command. Moreover,
the roundsman system maintained his labourers for him when<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>
he did not want them. The strength of the hostility of the
farmers to allotments is seen in the language of those few
landlords who were interested in this policy. Lord Winchilsea
and his friends were always urging philanthropists to proceed
with caution, and to try to reason the farmers out of their
prejudices. The Report of the Poor Law Commission in 1834
showed that these prejudices were as strong as ever. ‘We can
do little or nothing to prevent pauperism; the farmers will
have it: they prefer that the labourers should be slaves;
they object to their having gardens, saying “The more they
work for themselves, the less they work for us.”’<a id="FNanchor_291" href="#Footnote_291" class="fnanchor">[291]</a> This was
the view of Boys, the writer in agricultural subjects, who,
criticising Kent’s declaration in favour of allotments, remarks:
‘If farmers in general were to accommodate their labourers
with two acres of land, a cow and two or three pigs, they would
probably have more difficulty in getting their hard work done&mdash;as
the cow, land, etc., would enable them to live with less
earnings.’<a id="FNanchor_292" href="#Footnote_292" class="fnanchor">[292]</a> Arthur Young and Nathaniel Kent made a great
appeal to landlords and to landlords’ wives to interest themselves
in their estates and the people who lived on them, but
landlords’ bailiffs did not like the trouble of collecting a
number of small rents, and most landlords preferred to leave
their labourers to the mercy of the farmers. There was,
however, one form of allotment that the farmers themselves
liked: they would let strips of potato ground to labourers,
sometimes at four times the rent they paid themselves, getting
the land manured and dug into the bargain.<a id="FNanchor_293" href="#Footnote_293" class="fnanchor">[293]</a></p>

<p>The Select Vestry Act of 1819<a id="FNanchor_294" href="#Footnote_294" class="fnanchor">[294]</a> empowered parishes to buy
or lease twenty acres of land, and to set the indigent poor to
work on it, or to lease it out to any poor and industrious
inhabitant. A later Act of 1831<a id="FNanchor_295" href="#Footnote_295" class="fnanchor">[295]</a> raised the limit from twenty
to fifty acres, and empowered parishes to enclose fifty acres
of waste (with the consent of those who had rights on it) and
to lease it out for the same purposes. Little use was made of
these Acts, and perhaps the clearest light is thrown on the
extent of the allotment movement by a significant sentence
that occurs in the Report of the Select Committee on Allotments
in 1843. ‘It was not until 1830, when discontent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>
had been so painfully exhibited amongst the peasantry of the
southern counties that this method of alleviating their situation
was much resorted to.’ In other words, little was done till
labourers desperate with hunger had set the farmers’ ricks
blazing.</p>


<h3>THE REMEDY ADOPTED. SPEENHAMLAND</h3>

<p>The history has now been given of the several proposals
made at this time that for one reason or another fell to the
ground. A minimum wage was not fixed, allotments were
only sprinkled with a sparing hand on an estate here and
there, there was no revolution in diet, the problems of local
supply and distribution were left untouched, the reconstruction
of the Poor Law was abandoned. What means then did
the governing class take to tranquillise a population made
dangerous by hunger? The answer is, of course, the Speenhamland
Act. The Berkshire J.P.’s and some discreet persons
met at the Pelican Inn at Speenhamland<a id="FNanchor_296" href="#Footnote_296" class="fnanchor">[296]</a> on 6th May 1795,
and there resolved on a momentous policy which was gradually
adopted in almost every part of England.</p>

<p>There is a strange irony in the story of this meeting which
gave such a fatal impetus to the reduction of wages. It was
summoned in order to raise wages, and so make the labourer
independent of parish relief. At the General Quarter Sessions
for Berkshire held at Newbury on the 14th April, Charles
Dundas, M.P.,<a id="FNanchor_297" href="#Footnote_297" class="fnanchor">[297]</a> in his charge to the Grand Jury<a id="FNanchor_298" href="#Footnote_298" class="fnanchor">[298]</a> dwelt on the
miserable state of the labourers and the necessity of increasing
their wages to subsistence level, instead of leaving them to
resort to the parish officers for support for their families, as
was the case when they worked for a shilling a day. He
quoted the Acts of Elizabeth and James with reference to the
fixing of wages. The Court, impressed by his speech, decided
to convene a meeting for the rating of wages. The advertisement
of the meeting shows that this was the only object in
view. ‘At the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace for
this county held at Newbury, on Tuesday, the 14th instant,
the Court, having taken into consideration the great Inequality<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>
of Labourers’ Wages, and the insufficiency of the same
for the necessary support of an industrious man and his family;
and it being the opinion of the Gentlemen assembled on the
Grand Jury, that many parishes have not advanced their
labourers’ weekly pay in proportion to the high price of corn
and provisions, do (in pursuance of the Acts of Parliament,
enabling and requiring them so to do, either at the Easter
Sessions, yearly, or within six weeks next after) earnestly
request the attendance of the Sheriff, and all the Magistrates
of this County, at a Meeting intended to be held at the Pelican
Inn in Speenhamland, on Wednesday, the sixth day of May
next, at ten o’clock in the forenoon, for the purpose of consulting
together with such discreet persons as they shall think
meet, and they will then, having respect to the plenty and
scarcity of the time, and other circumstances (if approved of)
proceed to limit, direct, and appoint the wages of day
labourers.’<a id="FNanchor_299" href="#Footnote_299" class="fnanchor">[299]</a></p>

<p>The meeting was duly held on 6th May.<a id="FNanchor_300" href="#Footnote_300" class="fnanchor">[300]</a> Mr. Charles
Dundas was in the chair, and there were seventeen other
magistrates and discreet persons present, of whom seven were
clergymen. It was resolved unanimously ‘that the present
state of the poor does require further assistance than has
been generally given them.’ Of the details of the discussion
no records have come down to us, nor do we know by what
majority the second and fatal resolution rejecting the rating
of wages and substituting an allowance policy was adopted.
According to Eden, the arguments in favour of adopting the
rating of wages were ‘that by enforcing a payment for labour,
from the employers, in proportion to the price of bread, some
encouragement would have been held out to the labourer,
as what he would have received, would have been payment
for labour. He would have considered it as his right, and not
as charity.’<a id="FNanchor_301" href="#Footnote_301" class="fnanchor">[301]</a> But these arguments were rejected, and a
pious recommendation to employers to raise wages, coupled
with detailed directions for supplementing those wages from
parish funds, adopted instead.<a id="FNanchor_302" href="#Footnote_302" class="fnanchor">[302]</a> The text of the second resolution
runs thus: ‘Resolved, that it is not expedient for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>
Magistrates to grant that assistance by regulating the wages
of Day Labourers according to the directions of the Statutes
of the 5th Elizabeth and 1st James: But the Magistrates
very earnestly recommend to the Farmers and others throughout
the county to increase the Pay of their Labourers in
proportion to the present Price of Provisions; and agreeable
thereto the Magistrates now present have unanimously
Resolved, That they will in their several divisions, make the
following calculations and allowances for the relief of all poor
and industrious men and their families, who, to the satisfaction
of the Justices of their parish, shall endeavour (as far as they
can), for their own support and maintenance, that is to say,
when the gallon loaf of second flour, weighing 8 lbs. 11 oz.
shall cost one shilling, then every poor and industrious man
shall have for his own support 3s. weekly, either produced by
his own or his family’s labour or an allowance from the poor rates,
and for the support of his wife and every other of his family
1s. 6d. When the gallon loaf shall cost 1s. 4d., then every
poor and industrious man shall have 4s. weekly for his own,
and 1s. 10d. for the support of every other of his family.</p>

<p>‘And so in proportion as the price of bread rises or falls
(that is to say), 3d. to the man and 1d. to every other of the
family, on every penny which the loaf rises above a shilling.’</p>

<p>In other words, it was estimated that the man must have
three gallon loaves a week, and his wife and each child one and
a half.</p>

<p>It is interesting to notice that at this same famous Speenhamland
meeting the justices ‘wishing, as much as possible, to
alleviate the Distresses of the Poor with as little burthen on
the occupiers of the Land as possible’ recommended overseers
to cultivate land for potatoes and to give the workers a quarter
of the crop, selling the rest at one shilling a bushel; overseers
were also recommended to purchase fuel and to retail it at a loss.</p>

<p>The Speenhamland policy was not a full-blown invention
of that unhappy May morning in the Pelican Inn. The
principle had already been adopted elsewhere. At the Oxford
Quarter Sessions on 13th January 1795, the justices had
resolved that the following incomes were ‘absolutely necessary
for the support of the poor, industrious labourer, and that when
the utmost industry of a family cannot produce the undermentioned
sums, it must be made up by the overseer, exclusive
of rent, <span class="lock">viz.:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>‘A single Man according to his labour.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span></p>

<p>‘A Man and his Wife not less than 6s. a week.</p>

<p>‘A Man and his Wife with one or two Small Children, not
less than 7s. a week.</p>

<p>‘And for every additional Child not less than 1s. a week.’
This regulation was to be sent to all overseers within the
county.<a id="FNanchor_303" href="#Footnote_303" class="fnanchor">[303]</a></p>

<p>But the Speenhamland magistrates had drawn up a table
which became a convenient standard, and other magistrates
found it the simplest course to accept the table as it stood.
The tables passed rapidly from county to county. The allowance
system spread like a fever, for while it is true to say that
the northern counties took it much later and in a milder form,
there were only two counties still free from it in 1834&mdash;Northumberland
and Durham.</p>

<p>To complete our picture of the new system we must remember
the results of Gilbert’s Act. It had been the practice in those
parishes that adopted the Act to reserve the workhouse for the
infirm and to find work outside for the unemployed, the parish
receiving the wages of such employment and providing maintenance.
This outside employment had spread to other
parishes, and the way in which it had been worked may be
illustrated by cases mentioned by Eden, writing in the summer
and autumn of 1795. At Kibworth-Beauchamp in Leicestershire,
‘in the winter, and at other times, when a man is out of
work, he applies to the overseer, who sends him from house to
house to get employ: the housekeeper, who employs him, is
obliged to give him victuals, and 6d. a day; and the parish
adds 4d.; (total 10d. a day;) for the support of his family: persons
working in this manner are called rounds-men, from their going
round the village or township for employ.’<a id="FNanchor_304" href="#Footnote_304" class="fnanchor">[304]</a> At Yardley
Goben, in Northamptonshire, every person who paid more than
£20 rent was bound in his turn to employ a man for a day and
to pay him a shilling.<a id="FNanchor_305" href="#Footnote_305" class="fnanchor">[305]</a> At Maids Morton the roundsman got
6d. from the employer and 6d. or 9d. from the parish.<a id="FNanchor_306" href="#Footnote_306" class="fnanchor">[306]</a>
At Winslow in Bucks the system was more fully developed.
‘There seems to be here a great want of employment: most
labourers are (as it is termed,) <i>on the Rounds</i>; that is, they go
to work from one house to another <i>round</i> the parish. In winter,
sometimes 40 persons are on the rounds. They are wholly
paid by the parish, unless the householders choose to employ
them; and from these circumstances, labourers often become
very lazy, and imperious. Children, about ten years old, are put<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>
on the rounds, and receive from the parish from 1s. 6d. to 3s.
a week.’<a id="FNanchor_307" href="#Footnote_307" class="fnanchor">[307]</a> The Speenhamland systematised scale was easily
grafted on to these arrangements. ‘During the late dear
season, the Poor of the parish went in a body to the Justices,
to complain of their want of bread. The Magistrates sent orders
to the parish officers to raise the earnings of labourers, to
certain weekly sums, according to the number of their children;
a circumstance that should invariably be attended to in
apportioning parochial relief. These sums were from 7s. to
19s.; and were to be reduced, proportionably with the price
of bread.’<a id="FNanchor_308" href="#Footnote_308" class="fnanchor">[308]</a></p>

<p>The Speenhamland system did not then spring Athene-like
out of the heads of the justices and other discreet persons whose
place of meeting has given the system its name. Neither was
the unemployment policy thereafter adopted a sudden inspiration
of the Parliament of 1796. The importance of these years
is that though the governing classes did not then introduce a
new principle, they applied to the normal case methods of relief
and treatment that had hitherto been reserved for the exceptions.
The Poor Law which had once been the hospital became
now the prison of the poor. Designed to relieve his necessities,
it was now his bondage. If a labourer was in private employment,
the difference between the wage his master chose to give
him and the recognised minimum was made up by the parish.
Those labourers who could not find private employment were
either shared out among the ratepayers, or else their labour
was sold by the parish to employers, at a low rate, the parish
contributing what was needed to bring the labourers’ receipts
up to scale. Crabbe has described the roundsman system:</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘Alternate Masters now their Slave command,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Urge the weak efforts of his feeble hand,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">And when his age attempts its task in vain,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">With ruthless taunts, of lazy poor complain.’<a id="FNanchor_309" href="#Footnote_309" class="fnanchor">[309]</a></div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>The meshes of the Poor Law were spread over the entire
labour system. The labourers, stripped of their ancient
rights and their ancient possessions, refused a minimum wage
and allotments, were given instead a universal system of
pauperism. This was the basis on which the governing class
rebuilt the English village. Many critics, Arthur Young and
Malthus among them, assailed it, but it endured for forty years,
and it was not disestablished until Parliament itself had passed
through a revolution.</p>




<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span></p><h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII<br />

<span class="smaller">AFTER SPEENHAMLAND</span></h2>
</div>



<p>The Speenhamland system is often spoken of as a piece of
pardonable but disastrous sentimentalism on the part of the
upper classes. This view overlooks the predicament in which
these classes found themselves at the end of the eighteenth
century. We will try to reconstruct the situation and to
reproduce their state of mind. Agriculture, which had hitherto
provided most people with a livelihood, but few people with
vast fortunes, had become by the end of the century a great
capitalist and specialised industry. During the French war its
profits were fabulous, and they were due partly to enclosures,
partly to the introduction of scientific methods, partly to the
huge prices caused by the war. It was producing thus a vast
surplus over and above the product necessary for maintenance
and for wear and tear. Consequently, as students of
Mr. Hobson’s <i>Industrial System</i> will perceive, there arose an
important social problem of distribution, and the Poor Law
was closely involved with it.</p>

<p>This industry maintained, or helped to maintain, four
principal interests: the landlords, the tithe-owners, the farmers,
and the labourers. Of these interests the first two were represented
in the governing class, and in considering the mind of
that class we may merge them into one. The sympathies of
the farmers were rather with the landlords than with the
labourers, but their interests were not identical. The labourers
were unrepresented either in the Government or in the voting
power of the nation. If the forces had been more equally
matched, or if Parliament had represented all classes, the surplus
income of agriculture would have gone to increase rents, tithes,
profits, and wages. It might, besides turning the landlords
into great magnates like the cotton lords of Lancashire, and
throwing up a race of farmers with scarlet coats and jack boots,
have raised permanently the standard and character of the
labouring class, have given them a decent wage and decent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>
cottages. The village population whose condition, as Whitbread
said, was compared by supporters of the slave trade with
that of the negroes in the West Indies, to its disadvantage,
might have been rehoused on its share of this tremendous
revenue. In fact, the revenue went solely to increase rent,
tithes, and to some extent profits. The labourers alone had
made no advance when the halcyon days of the industry
clouded over and prices fell. The rent receiver received more
rent than was needed to induce him to let his land, the farmer
made larger profits than were necessary to induce him to apply
his capital and ability to farming, but the labourer received
less than was necessary to maintain him, the balance being
made up out of the rates. Thus not only did the labourer receive
no share of this surplus; he did not even get his subsistence
directly from the product of his labour. Now let us suppose
that instead of having his wages made up out of the rates he
had been paid a maintenance wage by the farmer. The extra
cost would have come out of rent to the same extent as did
the subsidy from the rates. The landlord therefore made no
sacrifice in introducing the Speenhamland system, for though
the farmers thought that they could obtain a reduction of rent
more easily if they could plead high rates than if they pleaded
the high price of labour,<a id="FNanchor_310" href="#Footnote_310" class="fnanchor">[310]</a> it is obvious that the same conditions
which produced a reduction of rents in the one case must
ultimately have produced a reduction in the other. As it
was, none of this surplus went to labour, and the proportion
in which it was divided between landlord and farmer was not
affected by the fact that the labourer was kept alive partly
from the rates and not wholly from wages.<a id="FNanchor_311" href="#Footnote_311" class="fnanchor">[311]</a></p>

<p>Now the governing class which was confronted with the
situation that we have described in a previous chapter consisted
of two classes who had both contrived to slip off their obligations
to the State. They were both essentially privileged
classes. The landlords were not in the eye of history absolute
owners; they had held their land on several conditions, one of
which was the liability to provide military services for the
Crown, and this obligation they had commuted into a tax on
the nation. The tithe-owners had for centuries appropriated
to their own use a revenue that was designed in part for
the poor. Tithes were originally taxation for four objects:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>
(1) the bishop; (2) the maintenance of the fabric of the Church;
(3) the relief of the poor; (4) the incumbent. After the
endowment of the bishopricks the first of these objects dropped
out. The poor had not a very much longer life. It is true
that the clergy were bidden much later to use tithes, <i>non quasi
suis sed quasi commendatis</i>, and Dryden in his character of the
Good Parson had described their historical obligations:</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘True priests, he said, and preachers of the Word</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Were only stewards of their sovereign Lord:</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Nothing was theirs but all the public store,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Intrusted riches to relieve the poor.’</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>The right of the poor to an allowance from the tithes was
declared in an Act of Richard <span class="allsmcap">II.</span> and an Act of Henry <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span>
After that it disappears from view. Of course, great masses
of tithe property had passed, by the time we are considering,
into secular hands. The monasteries appropriated about a
third of the livings of England, and the tithes in these parishes
passed at the Reformation to the Crown, whence they passed
in grants to private persons. No responsibility for the poor
troubled either the lay or spiritual owners of tithes, and though
they used the name of God freely in defending their claims,
they were stewards of God in much the same sense as George <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span>
was the defender of the faith. The landowners and tithe-owners
had their differences when it came to an Enclosure
Bill, but these classes had the same interests in the disposal
of the surplus profits of agriculture; and both alike were in
a vulnerable position if the origin and history of their property
came under too fierce a discussion.</p>

<p>There was a special reason why the classes that had suddenly
become very much richer should dread too searching a discontent
at this moment. They had seen tithes, and all
seignorial dues abolished almost at a single stroke across the
Channel, and they were at this time associating constantly
with the emigrant nobility of France, whose prospect of recovering
their estates seemed to fade into a more doubtful
distance with every battle that was fought between the
France who had given the poor peasant such a position as the
peasant enjoyed nowhere else, and her powerful neighbour
who had made her landlords the richest and proudest class
in Europe. The French Convention had passed a decree
(November 1792), declaring that ‘wherever French armies
shall come, all taxes, tithes, and privileges of rank are to be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>
abolished, all existing authorities cancelled, and provisional
administrations elected by universal suffrage. The property
of the fallen Government, of the privileged classes and their
adherents to be placed under French protection.’ This last
sentence had an unpleasant ring about it; it sounded like
a terse paraphrase of <i>non quasi suis sed quasi commendatis</i>.
In point of fact there was not yet any violent criticism of the
basis of the social position of the privileged classes in England.
Even Paine, when he suggested a scheme of Old Age Pensions
for all over fifty, and a dowry for every one on reaching the
age of twenty-one, had proposed to finance it by death duties.
Thelwall, who wrote with a not unnatural bitterness about
the great growth of ostentatious wealth at a time when the
poor were becoming steadily poorer, told a story which illustrated
very well the significance of the philanthropy of the
rich. ‘I remember I was once talking to a friend of the
charity and benevolence exhibited in this country, when
stopping me with a sarcastic sneer, “Yes,” says he, “we steal
the goose, and we give back the giblets.” “No,” said a third
person who was standing by, “giblets are much too dainty for
the common herd, we give them only the pen feathers.”’<a id="FNanchor_312" href="#Footnote_312" class="fnanchor">[312]</a>
But the literature of Radicalism was not inflammatory, and
the demands of the dispossessed were for something a good
deal less than their strict due. The richer classes, however,
were naturally anxious to soothe and pacify the poor before
discontent spread any further, and the Speenhamland system
turned out, from their point of view, a very admirable means
to that end, for it provided a maintenance for the poor by a
method which sapped their spirit and disarmed their independence.
They were anxious that the labourers should not
get into the way of expecting a larger share in the profits of
agriculture, and at the same time they wanted to make them
contented. Thelwall<a id="FNanchor_313" href="#Footnote_313" class="fnanchor">[313]</a> stated that when he was in the Isle
of Wight, the farmers came to a resolution to raise the price
of labour, and that they were dissuaded by one of the greatest
proprietors in the island, who called a meeting and warned
the farmers that they would make the common people insolent
and would never be able to reduce their wages again.</p>

<p>An account of the introduction of the system into Warwickshire
and Worcestershire illustrates very well the state of mind
in which this policy had its origin. ‘In Warwickshire, the year
1797 was mentioned as the date of its commencement in that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>
county, and the scales of relief giving it authority were published
in each of these counties previously to the year 1800. It was
apprehended by many at that time, that either the wages of
labour would rise to a height from which it would be difficult to
reduce them when the cause for it had ceased, or that during
the high prices the labourers might have had to endure privations
to which it would be unsafe to expose them. To meet the
emergency of the time, various schemes are said to have been
adopted, such as weekly distributions of flour, providing
families with clothes, or maintaining entirely a portion of
their families, until at length the practice became general,
and a right distinctly admitted by the magistrates was claimed
by the labourer to parish relief, on the ground of inadequate
wages and number in family. I was informed that the consequences
of the system were not wholly unforeseen at the time,
as affording a probable inducement to early marriages and
large families; but at this period there was but little apprehension
on that ground. A prevalent opinion, supported by
high authority, that population was in itself a source of wealth,
precluded all alarm. The demands for the public service were
thought to endure a sufficient draught for any surplus people;
and it was deemed wise by many persons at this time to present
the Poor Laws to the lower classes, as an institution for their
advantage, peculiar to this country; and to encourage an
opinion among them, that by this means their own share in
the property of the kingdom was recognised.’<a id="FNanchor_314" href="#Footnote_314" class="fnanchor">[314]</a> To the landlords
the Speenhamland system was a safety-valve in two
ways. The farmers got cheap labour, and the labourers got
a maintenance, and it was hoped thus to reconcile both classes
to high rents and the great social splendour of their rulers.
There was no encroachment on the surplus profits of agriculture,
and landlords and tithe-owners basked in the sunshine
of prosperity. It would be a mistake to represent the
landlords as deliberately treating the farmers and the labourers
on the principle which Cæsar boasted that he had applied
with such success, when he borrowed money from his officers
to give it to his soldiers, and thus contrived to attach both
classes to his interest; but that was in effect the result and
the significance of the Speenhamland system.</p>

<p>This wrong application of those surplus profits was one
element in the violent oscillations of trade during the generation
after the war. A long war adding enormously to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>
expenditure of Government must disorganise industry seriously
in any case, and in this case the demoralisation was increased
by a bad currency system. The governing class, which was
continually meditating on the subject of agricultural distress,
holding inquiries, and appointing committees, never conceived
the problem as one of distribution. The Select Committee of
1833 on Agriculture, for example, expressly disclaims any
interest in the question of rents and wages, treating these as
determined by a law of Nature, and assuming that the only question
for a Government was the question of steadying prices by
protection. What they did not realise was that a bad distribution
of profits was itself a cause of disturbance. The most
instructive speech on the course of agriculture during the
French war was that in which Brougham showed in the House
of Commons, on 9th April 1816, how the country had suffered
from over-production during the wild elation of high prices, and
how a tremendous system of speculative farming had been built
up, entangling a variety of interests in this gamble. If those
days had been employed to raise the standard of life among
the labourers and to increase their powers of consumption, the
subsequent fall would have been broken. The economists of
the time looked on the millions of labourers as an item of cost,
to be regarded like the price of raw material, whereas it is clear
that they ought to have been regarded also as affording the
best and most stable of markets. The landlord or the banker
who put his surplus profits into the improvement and cultivation
of land, only productive under conditions that could not
last and could not return, was increasing unemployment in
the future, whereas if the same profits had been distributed
in wages among the labourers, they would have permanently
increased consumption and steadied the vicissitudes of trade.
Further, employment would have been more regular in another
respect, for the landowner spent his surplus on luxuries, and
the labourer spent his wages on necessaries.</p>

<p>Now labour might have received its share of these profits
either in an increase of wages, or in the expenditure of part of
the revenue in a way that was specially beneficial to it. Wages
did not rise, and it was a felony to use any pressure to raise
them. What was the case of the poor in regard to taxation
and expenditure? Taxation was overwhelming. A Herefordshire
farmer stated that in 1815 the rates and taxes on
a farm of three hundred acres in that county <span class="lock">were:&mdash;</span></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>£</th>
<th><i>s.</i></th>
<th><i>d.</i></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Property tax, landlord and tenant</td>
<td>95</td>
<td>16</td>
<td>10</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Great tithes</td>
<td>64</td>
<td>17</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Lesser tithes</td>
<td>29</td>
<td>15</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Land tax</td>
<td>14</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Window lights</td>
<td>24</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Poor rates, landlord</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Poor rates, tenant</td>
<td>40</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Cart-horse duty, landlord, 3 horses</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>11</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Two saddle horses, landlord</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Gig</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Cart-horse duty, tenant</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">One saddle horse, tenant</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Landlord’s malt duty on 60 bushels of barley</td>
<td>21</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Tenant’s duty for making 120 bushels of barley into malt</td>
<td>42</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">New rate for building shire hall, paid by landlord</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">New rate for building shire hall, paid by tenant</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Surcharge</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td class="total">£383</td>
<td class="total">11</td>
<td class="total">4<a id="FNanchor_315" href="#Footnote_315" class="fnanchor">[315]</a></td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>The <i>Agricultural and Industrial Magazine</i>, a periodical
published by a philanthropical society in 1833, gave the
following analysis of the taxation of a labourer earning £22, 10s.
a <span class="lock">year:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>£</th>
<th><i>s.</i></th>
<th><i>d.</i></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">1. Malt</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>11</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">2. Sugar</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>17</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">3. Tea and Coffee</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">4. Soap</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">5. Housing</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>12</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">6. Food</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">7. Clothes</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td class="total">£11</td>
<td class="total">7</td>
<td class="total">7</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>But in the expenditure from this taxation was there a single
item in which the poor had a special interest? The great mass
of the expenditure was war expenditure, and that was not
expenditure in which the poor were more interested than the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>
rest. Indeed, much of it was expenditure which could not be
associated directly or indirectly with their interests, such as
the huge subsidies to the courts of Europe. Nearly fifty
millions went in these subventions, and if some of them were
strategical others were purely political. Did the English
labourer receive any profit from the two and a half millions
that Pitt threw to the King of Prussia, a subsidy that was
employed for crushing Kosciusko and Poland, or from the
millions that he gave to Austria, in return for which Austria
ceded Venice to Napoleon? Did he receive any benefit from
the million spent every year on the German legion, which
helped to keep him in order in his own country? Did he
receive any benefit from the million and a half which, on
the confession of the Finance Committee of the House of
Commons in 1810, went every year in absolute sinecures?
Did he receive any benefit from the interest on the loans to the
great bankers and contractors, who made huge profits out of
the war and were patriotic enough to lend money to the
Government to keep it going? Did he receive any benefit
from the expenditure on crimping boys or pressing seamen, or
transporting and imprisoning poachers and throwing their
families by thousands on the rates? Pitt’s brilliant idea of
buying up a cheap debt out of money raised by a dear one cost
the nation twenty millions, and though Pitt considered the
Sinking Fund his best title to honour, nobody will pretend that
the poor of England gained anything from this display of his
originality.<a id="FNanchor_316" href="#Footnote_316" class="fnanchor">[316]</a> In these years Government was raising by taxation
or loans over a hundred millions, but not a single penny
went to the education of the labourer’s children, or to any purpose
that made the perils and difficulties of his life more easy to
be borne. If the sinecures had been reduced by a half, or if
the great money-lenders had been treated as if their claims to
the last penny were not sacrosanct, and had been made to take
their share of the losses of the time, it would have been possible
to set up the English cottager with allotments on the modest
plan proposed by Young or Cobbett, side by side with the great
estates with which that expenditure endowed the bankers and
the dealers in scrip.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>Now, so long as prices kept up, the condition of the labourer
was masked by the general prosperity of the times. The governing
class had found a method which checked the demand for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>
higher wages and the danger that the labourer might claim a
share in the bounding wealth of the time. The wolf was at
the door, it is true, but he was chained, and the chain was the
Speenhamland system. Consequently, though we hear complaints
from the labourers, who contended that they were
receiving in a patronising and degrading form what they were
entitled to have as their direct wages, the note of rebellion was
smothered for the moment. At this time it was a profitable
proceeding to grow corn on almost any soil, and it is still
possible to trace on the unharvested downs of Dartmoor the
print of the harrow that turned even that wild moorland into
gold, in the days when Napoleon was massing his armies for
invasion. During these years parishes did not mind giving aid
from the rates on the Speenhamland scale, and, though under
this mischievous system population was advancing wildly,
there was such a demand for labour that this abundance did
not seem, as it seemed later, a plague of locusts, but a source of
strength and wealth. The opinion of the day was all in favour
of a heavy birth rate, and it was generally agreed, as we have
seen, that Pitt’s escapades in the West Indies and elsewhere
would draw off the surplus population fast enough to remove all
difficulties. But although the large farmers prayed incessantly
to heaven to preserve Pitt and to keep up religion and prices,
the day came when it did not pay to plough the downs or the
sands, and tumbling prices brought ruin to the farmers whose
rents and whole manner of living were fixed on the assumption
that there was no serious danger of peace, and that England
was to live in a perpetual heyday of famine prices.</p>

<p>With the fall in prices, the facts of the labourer’s condition
were disclosed. Doctors tell us that in some cases of heart
disease there is a state described as compensation, which may
postpone failure for many years. With the fall in 1814 compensation
ceased, and the disease which it obscured declared itself.
For it was now no longer possible to absorb the redundant population
in the wasteful roundsman system, and the maintenance
standard tended to fall with the growing pressure on the resources
from which the labourer was kept. By this time all
labour had been swamped in the system. The ordinary village
did not contain a mass of decently paid labourers and a surplus
of labourers, from time to time redundant, for whom the parish
had to provide as best it could. It contained a mass of
labourers, all of them underpaid, whom the parish had to keep
alive in the way most convenient to the farmers. Bishop<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>
Berkeley once said that it was doubtful whether the prosperity
that preceded, or the calamities that succeeded, the South Sea
Bubble had been the more disastrous to Great Britain: that
saying would very well apply to the position of the agricultural
labourer in regard to the rise and the fall of prices. With the
rise of prices the last patch of common agriculture had been
seized by the landlords, and the labourer had been robbed even
of his garden;<a id="FNanchor_317" href="#Footnote_317" class="fnanchor">[317]</a> with the fall, the great mass of labourers were
thrown into destitution and misery. We may add that if
that prosperity had been briefer, the superstition that an
artificial encouragement of population was needed&mdash;the
superstition of the rich for which the poor paid the penalty&mdash;would
have had a shorter life. As it was, at the end of the
great prosperity the landlords were enormously rich; rents
had in some cases increased five-fold between 1790 and 1812:<a id="FNanchor_318" href="#Footnote_318" class="fnanchor">[318]</a>
the large farmers had in many cases climbed into a style of
life which meant a crash as soon as prices fell; the financiers
had made great and sudden fortunes; the only class for whom
a rise in the standard of existence was essential to the nation,
had merely become more dependent on the pleasure of other
classes and the accidents of the markets. The purchasing
power of the labourer’s wages had gone down.</p>

<p>The first sign of the strain is the rioting of 1816. In that
year the spirit which the governing class had tried to send to
sleep by the Speenhamland system, burst out in the first of two
peasants’ revolts. Let us remember what their position was.
They were not the only people overwhelmed by the fall in
prices. Some landlords, who had been so reckless and extravagant
as to live up to the enormous revenue they were receiving,
had to surrender their estates to the new class of bankers and
money-lenders that had been made powerful by the war.
Many farmers, who had taken to keeping liveried servants and
to copying the pomp of their landlords, and who had staked
everything on the permanence of prices, were now submerged.
Small farmers too, as the answers sent to the questions issued
this year by the Board of Agriculture show, became paupers.
The labourer was not the only sufferer. But he differed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>
from the other victims of distress in that he had not benefited,
but, as we have seen, had lost, by the prosperity of the
days when the plough turned a golden furrow. His housing
had not been improved; his dependence had not been made
less abject or less absolute; his wages had not risen; and in
many cases his garden had disappeared. When the storm
broke over agriculture his condition became desperate. In
February 1816 the Board of Agriculture sent out a series of
questions, one of which asked for an account of the state of
the poor, and out of 273 replies 237 reported want of employment
and distress, and 25 reported that there was not
unemployment or distress.<a id="FNanchor_319" href="#Footnote_319" class="fnanchor">[319]</a> One of the correspondents
explained that in his district the overseer called a meeting
every Saturday, when he put up each labourer by name to
auction, and they were let generally at from 1s. 6d. to 2s. per
week and their provisions, their families being supported by
the parish.<a id="FNanchor_320" href="#Footnote_320" class="fnanchor">[320]</a></p>

<p>In 1816 the labourers were suffering both from unemployment
and from high prices. In 1815, as the <i>Annual Register</i><a id="FNanchor_321" href="#Footnote_321" class="fnanchor">[321]</a>
puts it, ‘much distress was undergone in the latter part of the
year by the trading portion of the community. This source of
private calamity was unfortunately coincident with an extraordinary
decline in agricultural prosperity, immediately
proceeding from the greatly reduced price of corn and other
products, which bore no adequate proportion to the exorbitant
rents and other heavy burdens pressing upon the farmer.’ At
the beginning of 1816 there were gloomy anticipations of a fall
in prices, and Western<a id="FNanchor_322" href="#Footnote_322" class="fnanchor">[322]</a> moved a series of resolutions designed
to prevent the importation of corn. But as the year advanced
it became evident that the danger that threatened England
was not the danger of abundance but the danger of scarcity.
A bitterly cold summer was followed by so meagre a harvest
that the price of corn rose rapidly beyond the point at which
the ports were open for importation. But high prices which
brought bidders at once for farms that had been unlet made
bread and meat dear to the agricultural labourer, without
bringing him more employment or an advance of wages, and
the riots of 1816 were the result of the misery due to this
combination of misfortunes.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span></p>

<p>The riots broke out in May of that year, and the counties
affected were Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire.
Nightly assemblies were held, threatening letters were
sent, and houses, barns and ricks were set on fire. These
fires were a prelude to a more determined agitation, which had
such an effect on the authorities that the Sheriff of Suffolk and
Mr. Willet, a banker of Brandon near Bury, hastened to
London to inform the Home Secretary and to ask for the help
of the Government in restoring tranquillity. Mr. Willet’s
special interest in the proceedings is explained in a naïve
sentence in the <i>Annual Register</i>: ‘A reduction in the price of
bread and meat was the avowed object of the rioters. They
had fixed a maximum for the price of both. They insisted
that the lowest price of wheat must be half a crown a bushel,
and that of prime joints of beef fourpence per pound. Mr.
Willet, a butcher at Brandon, was a marked object of their
ill-will, in which Mr. Willet, the banker, was, from the similarity
of his name, in danger of sharing. This circumstance,
and a laudable anxiety to preserve the public peace, induced
him to take an active part and exert all his influence for that
purpose.’<a id="FNanchor_323" href="#Footnote_323" class="fnanchor">[323]</a> The rioters numbered some fifteen hundred, and
they broke up into separate parties, scattering into different
towns and villages. In the course of their depredations the
house of the right Mr. Willet was levelled to the ground, after
which the wrong Mr. Willet, it is to be hoped, was less restless.<a id="FNanchor_324" href="#Footnote_324" class="fnanchor">[324]</a>
‘They were armed with long, heavy sticks, the ends of which,
to the extent of several inches, were studded with short iron
spikes, sharp at the sides and point. Their flag was inscribed
“<i>Bread or Blood!</i>” and they threatened to march to
London.’<a id="FNanchor_325" href="#Footnote_325" class="fnanchor">[325]</a></p>

<p>During the next few days there were encounters between
insurgent mobs in Norwich and Bury and the yeomanry, the
dragoons, and the West Norfolk Militia. No lives seem to
have been lost, but a good deal of property was destroyed, and
a number of rioters were taken into custody. The <i>Times</i> of
25th May says, in an article on these riots, that wages had
been reduced to a rate lower than the magistrates thought<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>
reasonable, for the magistrates, after suppressing a riot near
Downham, acquiesced in the propriety of raising wages, and
released the offenders who had been arrested with a suitable
remonstrance. There was a much more serious battle at
Littleport in the Isle of Ely, when the old fighting spirit of
the fens seems to have inspired the rioters. They began by
driving from his house a clergyman magistrate of the name
of Vachel, after which they attacked several houses and
extorted money. They then made for Ely, where they carried
out the same programme. This state of anarchy, after two or
three days, ended in a battle in Littleport in which two rioters
were killed, and seventy-five taken prisoners. The prisoners
were tried next month by a Special Commission: twenty-four
were capitally convicted; of these five were hung, five were
transported for life, one was transported for fourteen years,
three for seven years, and ten were imprisoned for twelve
months in Ely gaol.<a id="FNanchor_326" href="#Footnote_326" class="fnanchor">[326]</a> The spirit in which one of the judges,
Mr. Christian, the Chief Justice of the Isle of Ely, conducted
the proceedings may be gathered from his closing speech, in
which he said that the rioters were receiving ‘great wages’
and that ‘any change in the price of provisions could only
lessen that superfluity, which, I fear, they too frequently
wasted in drunkenness.’<a id="FNanchor_327" href="#Footnote_327" class="fnanchor">[327]</a></p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The pressure of the changed conditions of the nation on this
system of maintenance out of the rates is seen, not only in the
behaviour of the labourers, but also in the growing anxiety of
the upper classes to control the system, and in the tenacity
with which the parishes contested settlement claims. This is
the great period of Poor Law litigation. Parish authorities
kept a stricter watch than ever on immigrants. In 1816,
for example, the Board of Agriculture reported that according
to a correspondent ‘a late legal decision, determining that
keeping a cow gained a settlement, has deprived many cottagers
of that comfort, as it is properly called.’<a id="FNanchor_328" href="#Footnote_328" class="fnanchor">[328]</a> This decision was
remedied by the 1819 Act<a id="FNanchor_329" href="#Footnote_329" class="fnanchor">[329]</a> to amend the Settlement Laws<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>
as regards renting tenements, and the Report on the Poor
Law in 1819 states that in consequence there ‘will no longer
be an obstacle to the accommodation which may be afforded
in some instances to a poor family, by renting the pasturage
of a cow, or some other temporary profit from the occupation
of land.’<a id="FNanchor_330" href="#Footnote_330" class="fnanchor">[330]</a> Lawsuits between parishes were incessant,
and in 1815 the money spent on litigation and the removal of
paupers reached the gigantic figure of £287,000.</p>

<p>In Parliament, too, the question of Poor Law Reform was seen
to be urgent, but the problem assumed a particular and very
limited shape. The significance of this development can be
illustrated by comparing the character and the fate of a
measure Whitbread had introduced in 1807 with the character
and the fate of the legislation after Waterloo.</p>

<p>Whitbread’s scheme had aimed at (1) improving and humanising
the Law of Settlement; (2) reforming the administration
of the Poor Law as such in such a way as to give greater
encouragement to economy and a fairer distribution of burdens;
(3) stimulating thrift and penalising idleness in the labourers;
(4) reforming unemployment policy.</p>

<p>The proposals under the first head provided that settlement
might be gained by five years’ residence as a householder, if
the householder had not become chargeable or been convicted
of crime, or been absent for more than six weeks in a year.
Two Justices of the Peace were to have power on complaint of
the parish authorities to adjudicate on the settlement of any
person likely to become chargeable, subject to an appeal to
Quarter Sessions.</p>

<p>The proposals under the second head aimed partly at vestry
reform and partly at rating reform. In those parishes where
there was an open vestry, all ratepayers were still equal as
voters, but Whitbread proposed to give extra voting power
at vestry meetings in proportion to assessment.<a id="FNanchor_331" href="#Footnote_331" class="fnanchor">[331]</a> He wished
to reform rating, by making stock in trade and personal property
(except farming stock), which produced profit liable to assessment,
by authorising the vestry to exempt such occupiers
of cottages as they should think fit, and by giving power to
the Justices of the Peace to strike out of the rate any person<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>
occupying a cottage not exceeding five pounds in yearly value,
who should make application to them, such exemptions not to
be considered parochial relief. He also proposed that the county
rate should be charged in every parish in proportion to the
assessed property in the parish, and that any parish whose
poor rate was for three years more than double the average
of the parish rate in the county, should have power to apply to
Quarter Sessions for relief out of county stock.</p>

<p>Whitbread’s proposals for stimulating thrift and penalising
idleness were a strange medley of enlightenment and childishness.
He proposed to give the parish officers power to build
cottages which were to be let at the best rents that were to be
obtained: but the parish officers might with the consent of the
vestry allow persons who could not pay rent to occupy them rent
free, or at a reduced rent. He proposed also to create a
National Bank, something of the nature of a Post Office Savings
Bank, to be employed both as a savings bank and an insurance
system for the poor. With these two excellent schemes he
combined a ridiculous system of prizes and punishments for
the thrifty and the irresponsible. Magistrates were to be
empowered to give rewards (up to a maximum of £20) with
a badge of good conduct, to labourers who had brought up
large families without parish help, and to punish any man
who appeared to have become chargeable from idleness or
misconduct, and to brand him with the words, ‘criminal Poor.’</p>

<p>In his unemployment policy Whitbread committed the fatal
mistake, common to almost all the proposals of the time, of
mixing up poor relief with wages in a way to depress and
demoralise the labour market. The able-bodied unemployed,
men, youths, or single women, were to be hired out by parish
officers at the best price to be obtained. The wages were to
be paid to the worker. If the worker was a single man or
woman, or a widower with no children dependent on him, his
or her earnings were to be made up by the parish to a sum
necessary to his or her subsistence. If he or she had
children, they were to be made up to three-quarters, or four-fifths,
or the full average rate, according to the number of
children. No single man or woman was to be hired out for
more than a year, and no man or woman with dependent
children for more than a month.</p>

<p>The proposals were attacked vigorously by two critics who
were not often found in company, Cobbett and Malthus.
Cobbett criticised the introduction of plural voting at vestry<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>
meetings in an excellent passage in the <i>Political Register</i>.<a id="FNanchor_332" href="#Footnote_332" class="fnanchor">[332]</a>
‘Many of those who pay rates are but a step or two from
pauperism themselves; and they are the most likely persons
to consider duly the important duty of doing, in case of relief,
what they would be done unto. “But,” Mr. Whitbread will
say, “is it right for these persons to <i>give away the money of
others</i>.” It is <i>not</i> the money of others, any more than the
amount of tithes is the farmer’s money. The maintenance
of the poor is a charge upon the land, a charge duly considered
in every purchase and in every lease. Besides, as the law
now stands, though every parishioner has a vote in vestry,
must it not be evident, to every man who reflects, that a man
of large property and superior understanding will have weight
in proportion? That he will, in fact, have <i>many votes</i>? If
he play the tyrant, even little men will rise against him, and
it is right they should have the power of so doing; but, while
he conducts himself with moderation and humanity, while
he behaves as he ought to do to those who are beneath him
in point of property, there is no fear but he will have a
sufficiency of weight at every vestry. The votes of the inferior
persons in the parish are, in reality, dormant, unless in cases
where some innovation, or some act of tyranny, is attempted.
They are, like the sting of the bee, weapons merely of defence.’</p>

<p>Malthus’ criticisms were of a very different nature.<a id="FNanchor_333" href="#Footnote_333" class="fnanchor">[333]</a> He
objected particularly to the public building of cottages, and
the assessment of personal property to the rates. He argued
that the scarcity of houses was the chief reason ‘why the
Poor Laws had not been so extensive and prejudicial in their
effects as might have been expected.’ If a stimulus was
given to the building of cottages there would be no check on
the increase of population. A similar tendency he ascribed
to the rating of personal property. The employers of labour
had an interest in the increase of population, and therefore
in the building of cottages. This instinct was at present held
in check by consideration of the burden of the rates. If,
however, they could distribute that burden more widely,
this consideration would have much less weight. Population
would increase and wages would consequently go down.
‘It has been observed by Dr. Adam Smith that no efforts of
the legislature had been able to raise the salary of curates<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>
to that price which seemed necessary for their decent maintenance:
and the reason which he justly assigns is that the
bounties held out to the profession by the scholarships and
fellowships of the universities always occasioned a redundant
supply. In the same manner, if a more than usual supply
of labour were encouraged by the premiums of small tenements,
nothing could prevent a great and general fall in its price.’</p>

<p>The Bill was introduced in 1807, before the fall of the Whig
Ministry, and it went to a Committee. But the Tory Parliament
elected that year to support Portland and his anti-Catholic
Government was unfriendly, and the county magistrates
to whom the draft of the Bill was sent for criticisms
were also hostile. Whitbread accordingly proceeded no
further. At this time the Speenhamland system seemed to be
working without serious inconvenience, and there was therefore
no driving power behind such proposals. But after 1815
the conditions had changed, and the apathy of 1807 had
melted away. The ruling class was no longer passive and
indifferent about the growth of the Speenhamland system:
both Houses of Parliament set inquiries on foot, schemes of
emigration were invited and discussed, and measures of Vestry
Reform were carried. But the problem was no longer the
problem that Whitbread had set out to solve. Whitbread had
proposed to increase the share of property in the control of
the poor rates, but he had also brought forward a constructive
scheme of social improvement. The Vestry Reformers of
this period were merely interested in reducing the rates; the
rest of Whitbread’s programme was forgotten.</p>

<p>In 1818 an Act<a id="FNanchor_334" href="#Footnote_334" class="fnanchor">[334]</a> was passed which established plural voting
in vestries, every ratepayer whose rateable value was £50 and
over being allowed a vote for every £25 of rateable property.
In the following year an Act<a id="FNanchor_335" href="#Footnote_335" class="fnanchor">[335]</a> was passed which allowed
parishes to set up a select vestry, and ordained that in these
parishes the overseers should give such relief as was ordered
by the Select Vestry, and further allowed the appointment
of salaried assistant overseers. These changes affected the
administration of the Speenhamland system very considerably:
and the salaried overseers made themselves hated in
many parishes by the Draconian regime which they introduced.
The parish cart, or the cart to which in some parishes
men and women who asked for relief were harnessed, was one
of the innovations of this period. The administrative methods<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>
that were adopted in these parishes are illustrated by a fact
mentioned by a clerk to the magistrates in Kent, in October
1880.<a id="FNanchor_336" href="#Footnote_336" class="fnanchor">[336]</a> The writer says that there was a severe overseer at
Ash, who had among other applicants for relief an unemployed
shepherd, with a wife and five children living at Margate,
thirteen miles away. The shepherd was given 9s. a week,
but the overseer made him walk to Ash every day except
Sunday for his eighteenpence. The shepherd walked his
twenty-six miles a day on such food as he could obtain out of
his share of the 9s. for nine weeks, and then his strength could
hold out no longer. The writer remarked that the shepherd
was an industrious and honest man, out of work through no
fault of his own. It was by such methods that the salaried
overseers tried to break the poor of the habit of asking for
relief, and it is not surprising that such methods rankled in
the memories of the labourers. In this neighbourhood the
writer attributed the fires of 1830 more to this cause than to
any other.</p>

<p>These attempts to relieve the ratepayer did nothing to
relieve the labourer from the incubus of the system. His
plight grew steadily worse. A Committee on Agricultural
Wages, of which Lord John Russell was chairman, reported
in 1824 that whereas in certain northern counties, where the
Speenhamland system had not yet taken root, wages were 12s.
to 15s., in the south they varied from 8s. or 9s. a week to 3s.
for a single man and 4s. 6d. for a married man.<a id="FNanchor_337" href="#Footnote_337" class="fnanchor">[337]</a> In one part
of Kent the lowest wages in one parish were 6d. a day, and
in the majority of parishes 1s. a day. The wages of an
unmarried man in Buckinghamshire in 1828, according to a
clergyman who gave evidence before the Committee of that
year on the Poor Laws, were 3s. a week, and the wages of a
married man were 6s. a week. In one parish in his neighbourhood
the farmers had lately reduced the wages of able-bodied
married men to 4s. a week. Thus the Speenhamland
system had been effective enough in keeping wages low, but
as a means of preserving a minimum livelihood it was breaking
down by this time on all sides. We have seen from the
history of Merton in Oxfordshire<a id="FNanchor_338" href="#Footnote_338" class="fnanchor">[338]</a> what happened in one
parish long before the adversities of agriculture had become
acute. It is easy from this case to imagine what happened<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>
when the decline in employment and agriculture threw a
steadily increasing burden on the system of maintenance from
the rates. In some places, as the Commissioners of 1834 reported,
the labourers were able by intimidation to keep the system in
force, but though parishes did not as a rule dare to abandon
or reform the system, they steadily reduced their scale.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The most direct and graphic demonstration of this fact,
which has not apparently ever been noticed in any of the
voluminous discussions of the old Poor Law system, is to be
seen in the comparison of the standards of life adopted at the
time the system was introduced with the standards that were
adopted later. In 1795, as we have seen, the magistrates at
Speenhamland recommended an allowance of three gallon
loaves for each labourer, and a gallon loaf and a half for his
wife and for each additional member of his family. This
scale, it must be remembered, was not peculiar to Berkshire.
It was the authoritative standard in many counties. We are
able to compare this with some later scales, and the comparison
yields some startling results. In Northamptonshire in 1816 the
magistrates fixed a single man’s allowance at 5s., and the
allowance for a man and his wife at 6s., the price of wheat
the quartern loaf being 11½d.<a id="FNanchor_339" href="#Footnote_339" class="fnanchor">[339]</a> On this scale a man is supposed
to need a little over two and a half gallon loaves, and a man
and his wife a little more than three gallon loaves, or barely
more than a single man was supposed to need in 1795. This
is a grave reduction, but the maintenance standard fell very
much lower before 1832. For though we have scales for
Cambridgeshire and Essex for 1821 published in the Report
of the Poor Law Commission of 1834,<a id="FNanchor_340" href="#Footnote_340" class="fnanchor">[340]</a> which agree roughly
with the Northamptonshire scale (two gallon loaves for a
man, and one and a half for a woman), in Wiltshire, according
to the complicated scale adopted at Hindon in 1817, a
man was allowed one and three-fifths gallon loaves, and a
woman one and one-tenth.<a id="FNanchor_341" href="#Footnote_341" class="fnanchor">[341]</a> A Hampshire scale, drawn up in
1822 by eight magistrates, of whom five were parsons, allowed
only one gallon loaf a head, with 4d. a week per head in addition
to a family of four persons, the extra allowance being reduced
by a penny in cases where there were six in the family, and by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>
twopence in cases where there were more than six.<a id="FNanchor_342" href="#Footnote_342" class="fnanchor">[342]</a> The
Dorsetshire magistrates in 1826 allowed a man the equivalent
of one and a half gallon loaves and a penny over, and a
woman or child over fourteen one and one-sixth.<a id="FNanchor_343" href="#Footnote_343" class="fnanchor">[343]</a> We have a
general statement as to the scales in force towards the end
of our period in a passage in M‘Culloch’s <i>Political Economy</i>
quoted in the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> for January 1831 (p. 353):
‘The allowance scales now issued from time to time by the
magistrates are usually framed on the principle that every
labourer should have a gallon loaf of standard wheaten bread
weekly for every member of his family and one over: that is
four loaves for three persons, five for four, six for five, and
so on.’ That is, a family of four persons would have had seven
and a half gallon loaves in 1795, and only five gallon loaves
in 1831.</p>

<p>Now the Speenhamland scale did not represent some easy
and luxurious standard of living; it represented the minimum
on which it was supposed that a man employed in agriculture
could support life. In thirty-five years the standard had
dropped, according to M‘Culloch’s statement, as much as a third,
and this not because of war or famine, for in 1826 England
had had eleven years of peace, but in the ordinary course of
the life of the nation. Is such a decline in the standard of
life recorded anywhere else in history?</p>

<p>How did the labourers live at all under these conditions?
Their life was, of course, wretched and squalid in the extreme.
Cobbett describes a group of women labourers whom he met
by the roadside in Hampshire as ‘such an assemblage of rags
as I never saw before even amongst the hoppers at Farnham.’
Of the labourers near Cricklade he said: ‘Their dwellings are
little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their
food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. These wretched
hovels are stuck upon little beds of ground on the <i>roadside</i>
where the space has been wider than the road demanded. In
many places they have not two rods to a hovel. It seems as
if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had
dropped and found shelter under the banks on the roadside.
Yesterday morning was a sharp frost, and this had set the poor
creatures to digging up their little plots of potatoes. In my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>
whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this;
no, not even amongst the free negroes in America who, on an
average, do not work one day out of four.’<a id="FNanchor_344" href="#Footnote_344" class="fnanchor">[344]</a> The labourers’
cottages in Leicestershire he found were ‘hovels made of
mud and straw, bits of glass or of old cast-off windows,
without frames or hinges frequently, and merely stuck in
the mud wall. Enter them and look at the bits of chairs
or stools, the wretched boards tacked together to serve for
a table, the floor of pebble broken or of the bare ground;
look at the thing called a bed, and survey the rags on the
backs of the inhabitants.’<a id="FNanchor_345" href="#Footnote_345" class="fnanchor">[345]</a> A Dorsetshire clergyman, a
witness before the Committee on Wages in 1824, said that the
labourers lived almost entirely on tea and potatoes; a Bedfordshire
labourer said that he and his family lived mainly on bread
and cheese and water, and that sometimes for a month together
he never tasted meat; a Suffolk magistrate described how a
labourer out of work, convicted of stealing wood, begged to be
sent at once to a House of Correction, where he hoped to find
food and employment. If Davies had written an account of
the labouring classes in 1820 or 1830, the picture he drew in
1795 would have seemed bright in comparison. But even this
kind of life could not be supported on such provision as was
made by the parish. How, then, did the labourers maintain
any kind of existence when society ceased to piece together a
minimum livelihood out of rates and wages?</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>For the answer to this question we must turn to the history
of crime and punishment; to the Reports of the Parliamentary
Committees on Labourers’ Wages (1824), on the Game Laws
(1823 and 1828), on Emigration (1826 and 1827), on Criminal
Commitments and Convictions and Secondary Punishments
(1827, 1828, 1831, and 1832), and the evidence of those who
were in touch with this side of village life. From these sources
we learn that, rate aid not being sufficient to bring wages to
the maintenance level, poaching, smuggling, and ultimately
thieving were called in to rehabilitate the labourer’s economic
position.<a id="FNanchor_346" href="#Footnote_346" class="fnanchor">[346]</a> He was driven to the wages of crime. The history
of the agricultural labourer in this generation is written in
the code of the Game Laws, the growing brutality of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>
Criminal Law, and the preoccupation of the rich with the
efficacy of punishment.</p>

<p>We know from Fielding with what sort of justice the magistrates
treated persons accused of poaching in the reign of George
<span class="allsmcap">III.</span>’s grandfather, but when he wrote his account of Squire
Western, and when Blackstone wrote that the Game Laws had
raised up a little Nimrod in every manor, the blood of men and
boys had not yet been spilt for the pleasures of the rich. It
is only after Fielding and Blackstone were both in their graves
that this page of history became crimson, and that the gentlemen
of England took to guarding their special amusements
by methods of which a Member of Parliament declared that
the nobles of France had not ventured on their like in the days
of their most splendid arrogance. The little Nimrods who
made and applied their code were a small and select class.
They were the persons qualified under the law of Charles <span class="allsmcap">II.</span>
to shoot game, <i>i.e.</i> persons who possessed a freehold estate of
at least £100 a year, or a leasehold estate of at least £150 a
year, or the son or heir-apparent of an esquire or person of
higher degree. The legislation that occupies so much of English
history during a period of misery and famine is devoted to
the protection of the monopoly of this class, comprising less
than one in ten thousand of the people of England. A Member
of Parliament named Warburton said in the House of Commons
that the only parallel to this monopoly was to be found in
Mariner’s account of the Tonga Islands, where rats were
preserved as game. Anybody might eat rats there, but
nobody was allowed to kill them except persons descended
from gods or kings.</p>

<p>With the general growth of upper-class riches and luxury
there came over shooting a change corresponding with the
change that turned hunting into a magnificent and extravagant
spectacle. The habit set in of preserving game in great masses,
of organising the battue, of maintaining armies of keepers. In
many parts of the country, pheasants were now introduced for
the first time. Whereas game had hitherto kept something of
the wildness, and vagrancy, and careless freedom of Nature,
the woods were now packed with tame and docile birds, whose
gay feathers sparkled among the trees, before the eyes of the
half-starved labourers breaking stones on the road at half a
crown a week. The change is described by witnesses such as
Sir James Graham and Sir Thomas Baring, magistrates
respectively in Cumberland and Hampshire, before the Select<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>
Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions in 1827.
England was, in fact, passing through a process precisely
opposite to that which had taken place in France: the sport
of the rich was becoming more and more of an elaborate
system, and more of a vested interest. This development was
marked by the growth of an offensive combination among
game preservers; in some parts of the country game associations
were formed, for the express purpose of paying the costs
of prosecutions, so that the poacher had against him not merely
a bench of game preservers, but a ring of squires, a sort of
Holy Alliance for the punishment of social rebels, which drew
its meshes not round a parish but round a county. Simultaneously,
as we have seen, a general change was coming over the
circumstances and position of the poor. The mass of the people
were losing their rights and independence; they were being
forced into an absolute dependence on wages, and were living
on the brink of famine. These two developments must be
kept in mind in watching the building up of the game code in
the last phase of the ancient régime.</p>

<p>The Acts for protecting game passed after the accession of
George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> are in a crescendo of fierceness. The first important
Act was passed In 1770. Under this Act any one who killed
game of any kind between sunsetting and sunrising, or used any
gun, or dog, snare, net, or other engine for destroying game at
night, was, on conviction by one witness before one Justice of
the Peace, to be punished with imprisonment for not less than
three months or more than six. For a subsequent offence he
was to be imprisoned for not more than twelve months or less
than six, and to be whipped publicly between the hours of
twelve and one o’clock. This was light punishment compared
with the measures that were to follow. In the year 1800, the
year of Marengo, when all England was braced up for its great
duel with the common enemy of freedom and order, and
the labourers were told every day that they would be the
first to suffer if Napoleon landed in England, the English
Parliament found time to pass another Act to punish poachers,
and to teach justice to mend her slow pace. By this Act
when two or more persons were found in any forest, chase, park,
wood, plantation, paddock, field, meadow, or other open or
enclosed ground, having any gun, net, engine, or other instrument,
with the intent to destroy, take, or kill game, they were
to be seized by keepers or servants, and on conviction before
a J.P., they were to be treated as rogues and vagabonds<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>
under the Act of 1744, <i>i.e.</i> they were to be punished by imprisonment
with hard labour; an incorrigible rogue, <i>i.e.</i> a
second offender, was to be imprisoned for two years with
whipping. Further, if the offender was over twelve years
of age, the magistrates might sentence him to serve in the
army or navy. If an incorrigible rogue escaped from the
House of Correction he was to be liable to transportation for
seven years.</p>

<p>Two consequences followed from this Act. Now that punishment
was made so severe, the poacher had a strong reason for
violence: surrender meant service in a condemned regiment,
and he therefore took the risks of resistance. The second
consequence was the practice of poaching in large groups.
The organisation of poaching gangs was not a natural development
of the industry; it was adopted in self-defence.<a id="FNanchor_347" href="#Footnote_347" class="fnanchor">[347]</a> This
Act led inevitably to those battles between gamekeepers and
labourers that became so conspicuous a feature of English life
at this time, and in 1803 Lord Ellenborough passed an Act
which provided that any persons who presented a gun or tried
to stab or cut ‘with intent to obstruct, resist, or prevent the
lawful apprehension or detainer of the person or persons so
stabbing or cutting, or the lawful apprehension or detainer of
any of his, her, or their accomplices for any offences for which
he, she, or they may respectively be liable by law to be apprehended,
imprisoned, or detained,’ should suffer death as a
felon. In 1816, when peace and the fall of prices were bringing
new problems in their train, there went through Parliament,
without a syllable of debate, a Bill of which Romilly said
that no parallel to it could be found in the laws of any country
in the world. By that Act a person who was found at night
unarmed, but with a net for poaching, in any forest, chase, or
park was to be punished by transportation for seven years.
This Act Romilly induced Parliament to repeal in the following
year, but the Act that took its place only softened the law to
the extent of withdrawing this punishment from persons found
with nets, but without guns or bludgeons: it enacted that any
person so found, armed with gun, crossbow, firearms, bludgeon,
or any other offensive weapon, was to be tried at Quarter
Sessions, and if convicted, to be sentenced to transportation for
seven years: if such offender were to return to Great Britain<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>
before his time was over, he was to be transported for the rest
of his life.<a id="FNanchor_348" href="#Footnote_348" class="fnanchor">[348]</a></p>

<p>This savage Act, though by no means a dead letter, as
Parliamentary Returns show, seems to have defeated its
own end, for in 1828 it was repealed, because, as Lord Wharncliffe
told the House of Lords, there was a certain reluctance
on the part of juries to convict a prisoner, when they knew
that conviction would be followed by transportation. The
new Act of 1828, which allowed a person to be convicted
before two magistrates, reserved transportation for the third
offence, punishing the first offence by three months’, and the
second by six months’ imprisonment. But the convicted
person had to find sureties after his release, or else go back
to hard labour for another six months if it was a first offence,
or another twelve months if it was his second. Further, if
three men were found in a wood and one of them carried a
gun or bludgeon, all three were liable to be transported for
fourteen years.<a id="FNanchor_349" href="#Footnote_349" class="fnanchor">[349]</a> Althorp’s Bill of 1831 which abolished the
qualifications of the Act of Charles <span class="allsmcap">II.</span>, gave the right to
shoot to every landowner who took out a certificate, and
made the sale of game legal, proposed in its original form
to alter these punishments, making that for the first and
second offences rather more severe (four and eight months),
and that for the third, two years’ imprisonment. In Committee
in the House of Commons the two years were
reduced to one year on the proposal of Orator Hunt. The
House of Lords, however, restored the punishments of the
Act of 1828.</p>

<p>These were the main Acts for punishing poachers that were
passed during the last phase of the ancient régime. How
large a part they played in English life may be imagined from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>
a fact mentioned by the Duke of Richmond in 1831.<a id="FNanchor_350" href="#Footnote_350" class="fnanchor">[350]</a> In the
three years between 1827 and 1830 one in seven of all the
criminal convictions in the country were convictions under
the Game Code. The number of persons so convicted was
8502, many of them being under eighteen. Some of them
had been transported for life, and some for seven or fourteen
years. In some years the proportion was still higher.<a id="FNanchor_351" href="#Footnote_351" class="fnanchor">[351]</a> We
must remember, too, what kind of judges had tried many
of these men and boys. ‘There is not a worse-constituted
tribunal on the face of the earth,’ said Brougham in 1828, ‘not
even that of the Turkish Cadi, than that at which summary
convictions on the Game Laws constantly take place; I
mean a bench or a brace of sporting justices. I am far from
saying that, on such subjects, they are actuated by corrupt
motives; but they are undoubtedly instigated by their
abhorrence of that <i>caput lupinum</i>, that <i>hostis humani generis</i>,
as an Honourable Friend of mine once called him in his place,
that <i>fera naturæ</i>&mdash;a poacher. From their decisions on those
points, where their passions are the most likely to mislead
them, no appeal in reality lies to a more calm and unprejudiced
tribunal; for, unless they set out any matter illegal on the
face of the conviction, you remove the record in vain.’<a id="FNanchor_352" href="#Footnote_352" class="fnanchor">[352]</a></p>

<p>The close relation of this great increase of crime to the
general distress was universally recognised. Cobbett tells
us that a gentleman in Surrey asked a young man, who was
cracking stones on the roadside, how he could live upon half
a crown a week. ‘I don’t live upon it,’ said he. ‘How do
you live then?’ ‘Why,’ said he, ‘I <i>poach</i>: it is better to be
hanged than to be starved to death.’<a id="FNanchor_353" href="#Footnote_353" class="fnanchor">[353]</a> This story receives
illustration after illustration in the evidence taken by Parliamentary
Committees. The visiting Justices of the Prisons
in Bedfordshire reported in 1827 that the great increase in
commitments, and particularly the number of commitments
for offences against the Game Laws, called for an inquiry.
More than a third of the commitments during the last quarter
had been for such offences. The Report <span class="lock">continues:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>‘In many parishes in this county the wages given to young<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>
unmarried agricultural labourers, in the full strength and
vigour of life, seldom exceed 3s. or 3s. 6d. a week, paid to
them, generally, under the description of roundsmen, by the
overseers out of the poor rates; and often in the immediate
vicinity of the dwellings of such half-starved labourers there
are abundantly-stocked preserves of game, in which, during
a single night, these dissatisfied young men can obtain a rich
booty by snaring hares and taking or killing pheasants ...
offences which they cannot be brought to acknowledge to be
any violation of private property. Detection generally leads
to their imprisonment, and imprisonment introduces these
youths to familiarity with criminals of other descriptions,
and thus they become rapidly abandoned to unlawful pursuits
and a life of crime.’<a id="FNanchor_354" href="#Footnote_354" class="fnanchor">[354]</a> Mr. Orridge, Governor of the Gaol of
Bury St. Edmunds, gave to the Committee on Commitments
and Convictions<a id="FNanchor_355" href="#Footnote_355" class="fnanchor">[355]</a> the following figures of prisoners committed
to the House of Correction for certain <span class="lock">years:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable" summary="">
<tr>
<td>1805, 221</td>
<td><span class="widecol">1815, 387</span></td>
<td>1824, 457</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1806, 192</td>
<td><span class="widecol">1816, 476</span></td>
<td>1825, 439</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1807, 173</td>
<td><span class="widecol">1817, 430</span></td>
<td>1826, 573.</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>He stated that the great increase in the number of commitments
began in the year 1815 with the depression of agriculture
and the great dearth of employment: that men were
employed on the roads at very low rates: that the commitments
under the Game Laws which in 1810 were five, in 1811
four, and in 1812 two, were seventy-five in 1822, a year of great
agricultural distress, sixty in 1823, sixty-one in 1824, and
seventy-one in 1825. Some men were poachers from the
love of sport, but the majority from distress. Mr. Pym, a
magistrate in Cambridgeshire, and Sir Thomas Baring, a
magistrate for Hampshire, gave similar evidence as to the
cause of the increase of crime, and particularly of poaching,
in these counties. Mr. Bishop, a Bow Street officer, whose
business it was to mix with the poachers in public-houses and
learn their secrets, told the Committee on the Game Laws
in 1823 that there had not been employment for the labouring
poor in most of the places he had visited. Perhaps the most
graphic picture of the relation of distress to crime is given
in a pamphlet, <i>Thoughts and Suggestions on the Present Condition
of the Country</i>, published in 1830 by Mr. Potter
Macqueen, late M.P. for Bedford.</p>

<p>‘In January 1829, there were ninety-six prisoners for trial<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>
in Bedford Gaol, of whom seventy-six were able-bodied men,
in the prime of life, and, chiefly, of general good character, who
were driven to crime by sheer want, and who would have been
valuable subjects had they been placed in a situation, where,
by the exercise of their health and strength, they could have
earned a subsistence. There were in this number eighteen
poachers, awaiting trial for the capital offence of using arms
in self-defence when attacked by game-keepers; of these
eighteen men, one only was not a parish pauper, and he was
the agent of the London poulterers, who, passing under the
apparent vocation of a rat-catcher, paid these poor creatures
more in one night than they could obtain from the overseer
for a week’s labour. I conversed with each of these men
singly, and made minutes of their mode of life. The two
first I will mention are the two brothers, the Lilleys, in custody
under a charge of firing on and wounding a keeper, who endeavoured
to apprehend them whilst poaching. They were two
remarkably fine young men, and very respectably connected.
The elder, twenty-eight years of age, married, with two small
children. When I inquired how he could lend himself to such
a wretched course of life, the poor fellow replied: ‘Sir, I had
a pregnant wife, with one infant at her knee, and another at
her breast; I was anxious to obtain work, I offered myself
in all directions, but without success; if I went to a distance,
I was told to go back to my parish, and when I did so, I was
allowed ... What? Why, for myself, my babes, and my
wife, in a condition requiring more than common support,
and unable to labour, I was allowed 7s. a week for all; for
which I was expected to work on the roads from light to
dark, and to pay three guineas a year for the hovel which
sheltered us.’ The other brother, aged twenty-two, unmarried,
received 6d. a day. These men were hanged at the spring
assizes. Of the others, ten were single men, their ages varying
from seventeen to twenty-seven. Many had never been in
gaol before, and were considered of good character. Six of
them were on the roads at 6d. per day. Two could not obtain
even this pittance. One had been refused relief on the ground
that he had shortly previous obtained a profitable piece of job-work,
and one had existed on 1s. 6d. during the fortnight
before he joined the gang in question. Of five married men,
two with wife and two children received 7s., two with wife and
one child 6s., and one with wife and four small children 11s.’<a id="FNanchor_356" href="#Footnote_356" class="fnanchor">[356]</a></p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span></p>
<p>If we wish to obtain a complete picture of the social life of
the time, it is not enough to study the construction of this
vindictive code. We must remember that a sort of civil war
was going on between the labourers and the gamekeepers.
The woods in which Tom Jones fought his great fight with
Thwackum and Blifil to cover the flight of Molly Seagrim now
echoed on a still and moonless night with the din of a different
sort of battle: the noise of gunshots and blows from bludgeons,
and broken curses from men who knew that, if they were taken,
they would never see the English dawn rise over their homes
again: a battle which ended perhaps in the death or wounding
of a keeper or poacher, and the hanging or transportation
of some of the favourite Don Quixotes of the village. A
witness before the Committee on the Game Laws said that the
poachers preferred a quiet night. Crabbe, in the poacher
poem (Book <span class="allsmcap">XXI.</span> of <i>Tales of the Hall</i>) which he wrote at the
suggestion of Romilly, takes what would seem to be the more
probable view that poachers liked a noisy night:</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘It was a night such bold desires to move</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Strong winds and wintry torrents filled the grove;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">The crackling boughs that in the forest fell,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">The cawing rooks, the cur’s affrighted yell;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">The scenes above the wood, the floods below,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Were mix’d, and none the single sound could know;</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">“Loud blow the blasts,” they cried, “and call us as they blow.”’</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>Such an encounter is put into cold arithmetic in an official
return like <span class="lock">this<a id="FNanchor_357" href="#Footnote_357" class="fnanchor">[357]</a>:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>‘An account of the nineteen persons committed to Warwick
Gaol for trial at the Lent Assizes 1829 for shooting and wounding
John Slinn at Combe Fields in the County of Warwick
whilst endeavouring to apprehend them for destroying game
in the night with the result <span class="lock">thereof:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable center" border="1" summary="">
<tr>
<th rowspan="2">Above 14 and under 20 years of age.</th>
<th rowspan="2">Above 20 years of age.</th>
<th colspan="3">Capitally convicted and reprieved with&mdash;</th>
<th rowspan="2">Admitted to Evidence.</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Transportation for life.</th>
<th>Transportation for 14 years.</th>
<th>Imprisonment with hard labour in House of Correction for 2 years.</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>11</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
</table>


<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span></p>

<p>Seven peasants exiled for life, nine exiled for fourteen years,
and two condemned to the worst exile of all. In that village
at any rate there were many homes that had reason to remember
the day when the pleasures of the rich became the most sacred
thing in England.</p>

<p>But the warfare was not conducted only by these methods.
For the gentlemen of England, as for the genius who fought
Michael and Gabriel in the great battle in the sixth book of
<i>Paradise Lost</i>, science did not spread her light in vain. There
was a certain joy of adventure in a night skirmish, and a man
who saw his wife and children slowly starving, to whom one
of those golden birds that was sleeping on its perch the other
side of the hedge, night after night, till the day when it should
please the squire to send a shot through its purple head,
meant comfort and even riches for a week, was not very much
afraid of trusting his life and his freedom to his quick ear, his
light foot, or at the worst his powerful arm. So the game
preservers invented a cold and terrible demon: they strewed
their woods with spring guns, that dealt death without warning,
death without the excitement of battle, death that could
catch the nimblest as he slipped and scrambled through
the hiding bracken. The man who fell in an affray fell
fighting, his comrades by his side; it was a grim and uncomforted
fate to go out slowly and alone, lying desolate in
the stained bushes, beneath the unheeding sky. It is not clear
when these diabolical engines, as Lord Holland called them,
were first introduced, but they were evidently common by
1817, when Curwen made a passionate protest in the House
of Commons, and declared, ‘Better the whole race of game
was extinct than that it should owe its preservation to such
cruel expedients.’<a id="FNanchor_358" href="#Footnote_358" class="fnanchor">[358]</a> Fortunately for England the spring guns,
though they scattered murder and wounds freely enough (Peel
spoke in 1827 of ‘daily accidents and misfortunes’), did not
choose their victims with so nice an eye as a Justice of the
Peace, and it was often a gamekeeper or a farm servant
who was suddenly tripped up by this lurking death. By 1827
this state of things had become such a scandal that Parliament
intervened and passed an Act, introduced in the Lords by Lord
Suffield, who had made a previous attempt in 1825, to make
the setting of spring guns a misdemeanor.<a id="FNanchor_359" href="#Footnote_359" class="fnanchor">[359]</a></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span></p>

<p>The Bill did not pass without considerable opposition.
Tennyson, who introduced it in the Commons, declared that
the feudal nobility in ancient France had never possessed a
privilege comparable with this right of killing and maiming,
and he said that the fact that Coke of Norfolk<a id="FNanchor_360" href="#Footnote_360" class="fnanchor">[360]</a> and Lord
Suffield, both large game preservers, refused to employ them
showed that they were not necessary. Members of both
Houses of Parliament complained bitterly of the ‘morbid
sensibility’ that inspired the proposal, and some of them
defended spring guns as a labour-saving machine, speaking of
them with the enthusiasm that a manufacturer might bestow
on the invention of an Arkwright or a Crompton. One member
of the House of Commons, a Colonel French, opposed the Bill
with the argument that the honest English country gentleman
formed ‘the very subject and essence of the English character,’
while Lord Ellenborough opposed it in the other House on the
ground that it was contrary to the principles of the English law,
which gave a man protection for his property in proportion to the
difficulty with which it could be defended by ordinary means.</p>

<p>The crime for which men were maimed or killed by these
engines or torn from their homes by summary and heartless
justice was, it must be remembered, no crime at all in the eyes
of the great majority of their countrymen. At this time the
sale of game was prohibited under stern penalties, and yet
every rich man in London, from the Lord Mayor downwards,
entertained his guests with game that he had bought from a
poulterer. How had the poulterer bought it? There was
no secret about the business. It was explained to two Select
Committees, the first of the House of Commons in 1823, and the
second of the House of Lords in 1828, by poulterers who lived
by these transactions, and by police officers who did nothing
to interfere with them. Daniel Bishop, for example, one of the
chief Bow Street officers, described the arrangements to the
Committee in 1823.<a id="FNanchor_361" href="#Footnote_361" class="fnanchor">[361]</a></p>

<p>‘Can you state to the Committee, how the Game is brought
from the poachers up to London, or other market?... The
poachers generally meet the coachman or guards of the mails
or vans, and deliver it to them after they are out of a town,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span>
they do not deliver it in a town; then it is brought up to
London, sometimes to their agents; but the coachmen and
guards mostly have their friends in London where they know
how to dispose of it, and they have their contracts made at so
much a brace.... There is no intermediate person between
the poacher and the coachman or guard that conveys it to
town?... Very seldom; generally the head of the gang pays
the rest of the men, and he sends off the Game.... When
the game arrives in London, how is it disposed of?... They
have their agents, the bookkeepers at most of the inns, the
porters who go out with the carts; any persons they know
may go and get what quantity they like, by sending an order
a day or two before; there are great quantities come up to
Leadenhall and Newgate markets.’</p>

<p>Nobody in London thought the worse of a poulterer for buying
poached game; and nobody in the country thought any the
worse of the poacher who supplied it. A witness before the
Committee in 1823 said that in one village the whole of the
village were poachers, ‘the constable of the village, the shoemaker
and other inhabitants of the village.’ Another witness
before the Lords in 1828 said that occupiers and unqualified
proprietors agreed with the labourers in thinking that poaching
was an innocent practice.</p>

<p>Those who wished to reform the Game Laws argued that if
the sale of game were legalised, and if the anomalous qualifications
were abolished, the poacher’s prize would become much
less valuable, and the temptation would be correspondingly
diminished. This view was corroborated by the evidence given
to the Select Committees. But all such proposals were bitterly
attacked by the great majority of game preservers. Lord
Londonderry urged against this reform in 1827 ‘that it would
deprive the sportsman of his highest gratification ... the
pleasure of furnishing his friends with presents of game:
nobody would care for a present which everybody could give’!<a id="FNanchor_362" href="#Footnote_362" class="fnanchor">[362]</a>
Other game preservers argued that it was sport that made the
English gentlemen such good officers, on which the <i>Edinburgh
Review</i> remarked: ‘The hunting which Xenophon and Cicero
praise as the best discipline for forming great generals from
its being war in miniature must have been very unlike pheasant
shooting.’<a id="FNanchor_363" href="#Footnote_363" class="fnanchor">[363]</a> Lord Deerhurst declared, when the proposal was
made fourteen years earlier, that this was not the time to disgust
resident gentlemen. The English aristocracy, like the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>
French, would only consent to live in the country on their own
terms. When the squires threatened to turn <i>émigrés</i> if anybody
else was allowed to kill a rabbit, or if a poacher was not put to
risk of life and limb, Sydney Smith gave an answer that would
have scandalised the House of Commons, ‘If gentlemen cannot
breathe fresh air without injustice, let them putrefy in Cranbourne
Court.’</p>

<p>But what about the justice of the laws against poachers?
To most members of Parliament there would have been an
element of paradox in such a question. From the discussions
on the subject of the Game Laws a modern reader might suppose
that poachers were not men of flesh and blood, but some
kind of vermin. There were a few exceptions. In 1782,
when Coke of Norfolk, acting at the instance of the magistrates
of that county, proposed to make the Game Laws more stringent,
Turner, the member for York, made a spirited reply; he
‘exclaimed against those laws as cruel and oppressive on the
poor: he said it was a shame that the House should always be
enacting laws for the safety of gentlemen; he wished they
would make a few for the good of the poor.... For his own
part, he was convinced, that if he had been a common man,
he would have been a poacher, in spite of all the laws; and he
was equally sure that the too great severity of the laws was
the cause that the number of poachers had increased so much.’<a id="FNanchor_364" href="#Footnote_364" class="fnanchor">[364]</a>
Fox (29th April 1796) protested with vigour against the morality
that condemned poachers without mercy, and condoned all
the vices of the rich, but he, with Sheridan, Curwen, Romilly,
and a few others were an infinitesimal minority.</p>

<p>The aristocracy had set up a code, under which a man or
boy who had offended against the laws, but had done nothing
for which any of his fellows imputed discredit to him, was
snatched from his home, thrown into gaol with thieves and
criminals, and perhaps flung to the other side of the world,
leaving his family either to go upon the rates or to pick up
a living by such dishonesties as they could contrive. This
last penalty probably meant final separation. Mr. T. G. B.
Estcourt, M.P., stated in evidence before the Select Committee
on Secondary Punishments in 1831<a id="FNanchor_365" href="#Footnote_365" class="fnanchor">[365]</a> that as men who had
been transported were not brought back at the public expense,
they scarcely ever returned,<a id="FNanchor_366" href="#Footnote_366" class="fnanchor">[366]</a> that agricultural labourers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>
specially dreaded transportation, because it meant ‘entire
separation’ from ‘former associates, relations, and friends,’
and that since he and his brother magistrates in Wiltshire
had taken to transporting more freely, committals had decreased.
The special misery that transportation inflicted on men of this
class is illustrated in Marcus Clarke’s famous novel, <i>For the
Term of His Natural Life</i>. In the passage describing the barracoon
on the transport ship, Clarke throws on the screen all
the different types of character&mdash;forgers, housebreakers, cracksmen,
footpads&mdash;penned up in that poisonous prison. ‘The
poacher grimly thinking of his sick wife and children would
start as the night-house ruffian clapped him on the shoulder
and bade him with a curse to take good heart and be a man.’
Readers of Mr. Hudson’s character sketches of the modern
Wiltshire labourer can imagine the scene. To the lad who had
never been outside his own village such a society must have
been unspeakably alien and terrible: a ring of callous and
mocking faces, hardened, by crime and wrong and base punishment,
to make bitter ridicule of all the memories of home and
boyhood and innocence that were surging and breaking round
his simple heart.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The growing brutality of the Game Laws, if it is the chief,
is not the only illustration of the extent to which the pressure
of poverty was driving the labourers to press upon law and
order, and the kind of measures that the ruling class took to
protect its property. Another illustration is the Malicious
Trespass Act.</p>

<p>In 1820 Parliament passed an Act which provided that any
person convicted before a single J.P. within four months of
the act of doing any malicious injury to any building, hedge,
fence, tree, wood, or underwood was to pay damage not
exceeding £5, and if he was unable to pay these damages he
was to be sent to hard labour in a common gaol or House of
Correction for three months. The law before the passing of
this Act was as it is to-day, <i>i.e.</i> the remedy lay in an action at
law against the trespasser, and the trespasser under the Act
of William and Mary had to pay damages. The Act of 1820
was passed without any debate that is reported in <i>Hansard</i>,
but it is not unreasonable to assume that it was demanded for
the protection of enclosures and game preserves.<a id="FNanchor_367" href="#Footnote_367" class="fnanchor">[367]</a> This Act<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>
exempted one set of persons entirely, ‘persons engaged in
hunting, and qualified persons in pursuit of game.’ These
privileged gentlemen could do as much injury as they pleased.</p>

<p>One clause provided that every male offender under sixteen
who did not pay damages, and all costs and charges and
expenses forthwith, might be sent by the magistrate to hard
labour in the House of Correction for six weeks. Thus a child
who broke a bough from a tree by the roadside might be sent
by the magistrate, who would in many cases be the owner of
the tree, to the House of Correction, there to learn the ways of
criminals at an age when the magistrate’s own children were
about half-way through their luxurious education. This
was no <i>brutum fulmen</i>. Children were sent to prison in great
numbers.<a id="FNanchor_368" href="#Footnote_368" class="fnanchor">[368]</a> Brougham said in 1828: ‘There was a Bill introduced
by the Rt. Hon. Gentleman opposite for extending the
payment of expenses of witnesses and prosecutors out of the
county rates. It is not to be doubted that it has greatly
increased the number of Commitments, and has been the cause
of many persons being brought to trial, who ought to have
been discharged by the Magistrates. The habit of committing,
from this and other causes, has grievously increased everywhere
of late, and especially of boys. Eighteen hundred and odd,
many of them mere children, have been committed in the
Warwick district during the last seven years.’<a id="FNanchor_369" href="#Footnote_369" class="fnanchor">[369]</a> The Governor
of the House of Correction in Coldbath Fields, giving evidence
before the Committee on Secondary Punishments in 1831, said
that he had under his charge a boy of ten years old who had
been in prison eight times. Capper, the Superintendent of the
Convict Establishment, told the same Committee that some of
the boy convicts were so young that they could scarcely put on
their clothes, and that they had to be dressed. Richard Potter’s
diary for 1813 contains this entry: ‘Oct. 13.&mdash;I was attending
to give evidence against a man. Afterwards, two boys, John
and Thomas Clough, aged 12 and 10 years, were tried and
found guilty of stealing some Irish linen out of Joseph Thorley’s
warehouse during the dinner hour. The Chairman sentenced
them to seven years’ transportation. On its being pronounced,
the Mother of those unfortunate boys came to the Bar to her
children, and with them was in great agony, imploring mercy
of the Bench. With difficulty the children were removed.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>
The scene was so horrifying I could remain no longer in court.’<a id="FNanchor_370" href="#Footnote_370" class="fnanchor">[370]</a>
Parliament put these tremendous weapons into the hands of
men who believed in using them, who administered the law
on the principle by which Sir William Dyott regulated his
conduct as a magistrate, that ‘nothing but the terror of human
suffering can avail to prevent crime.’</p>

<p>The class that had, in Goldsmith’s words, hung round ‘our
paltriest possessions with gibbetts’ never doubted its power
to do full justice to the helpless creatures who tumbled into
the net of the law. Until 1836 a man accused of a felony was
not allowed to employ counsel to make his defence in the Court.
His counsel (if he could afford to have one) could examine and
cross-examine witnesses, and that was all; the prisoner,
whatever his condition of mind, or his condition of body, had
to answer the speech of the prosecuting counsel himself. In
nine cases out of ten he was quite an unlearned man; he was
swept into the glare of the Court blinking from long months of
imprisonment in dark cells; the case against him was woven
into a complete and perfect story by the skilled fingers of a
lawyer, and it was left to this rude and illiterate man, by the
aid of his own memory and his own imagination, his life on the
razor’s edge, his mind bewildered by his strange and terrible
surroundings, to pick that story to pieces, to expose what was
mere and doubtful inference, to put a different complexion on
a long and tangled set of events, to show how a turn here or
a turn there in the narrative would change black into white
and apparent guilt into manifest innocence. Sydney Smith,
whose opinions on the importance of giving the poor a fair trial
were as enlightened as his opinions on their proper treatment
in prison were backward, has described the scene.</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘It is a most affecting moment in a Court of Justice, when the
evidence has all been heard, and the Judge asks the prisoner
what he has to say in his defence. The prisoner who has (by
great exertions, perhaps of his friends) saved up money enough
to procure Counsel, says to the Judge “that he leaves his defence
to his Counsel.” We have often blushed for English humanity
to hear the reply. “Your Counsel cannot speak for you, you
must speak for yourself”; and this is the reply given to a poor
girl of eighteen&mdash;to a foreigner&mdash;to a deaf man&mdash;to a stammerer&mdash;to
the sick&mdash;to the feeble&mdash;to the old&mdash;to the most abject and
ignorant of human beings!... How often have we seen a poor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>
wretch, struggling against the agonies of his spirit, and the rudeness
of his conceptions, and his awe of better-dressed men and
better-taught men, and the shame which the accusation has
brought upon his head, and the sight of his parents and children
gazing at him in the Court, for the last time perhaps, and after
a long absence!’<a id="FNanchor_371" href="#Footnote_371" class="fnanchor">[371]</a></p>
</div>

<p>Brougham said in the House of Commons that there was
no man who visited the Criminal Courts who did not see the
fearful odds against the prisoner. This anomaly was peculiar
to England, and in England it was peculiar to cases of felony.
Men tried for misdemeanours, or for treason, or before the
House of Lords could answer by the mouth of counsel. It was
only in those cases where the prisoners were almost always poor
and uneducated men and women, as Lord Althorp pointed out
in an admirable speech in the House of Commons, that the
accused was left to shift for himself. Twice, in 1824 and in
1826, the House of Commons refused leave to bring in a Bill
to redress this flagrant injustice, encouraged in that refusal not
only by Canning, but, what is much more surprising, by Peel.</p>

<p>The favourite argument against this reform, taking precedence
of the arguments that to allow persons the aid of counsel in
putting their statement of fact would make justice slower, more
expensive, and more theatrical, was the contention that the
judge did, in point of fact, represent the interest of the prisoner:
a confused plea which it did not require any very highly developed
gift of penetration to dissect. But how far, in point
of fact, were the judges able to enter into the poor prisoner’s
mind? They had the power of sentencing to death for
hundreds of trivial offences. It was the custom to pass the
brutal sentence which the law allowed to be inflicted for
felonies, and then to commute it in all except a few cases. By
what considerations did judges decide when to be severe?
Lord Ellenborough told Lauderdale that he had left a man to
be hanged at the Worcester Assizes because he lolled out his
tongue and pretended to be an idiot, on which Lauderdale asked
the Chief Justice what law there was to punish that particular
offence with death. We learn from Romilly’s <i>Memoirs</i><a id="FNanchor_372" href="#Footnote_372" class="fnanchor">[372]</a>
that one judge left three men to be hanged for thefts at the
Maidstone Assizes because none of them could bring a witness
to his character.</p>

<p>The same disposition to trust to the discretion of the judge,
which Camden described as the law of tyrants, explains the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>
vitality of the system of prescribing death as the punishment
for hundreds of paltry offences. During the last fifty years
the energy of Parliament in passing Enclosure Acts had been
only rivalled by its energy in creating capital offences. The
result was a penal code which had been condemned by almost
every Englishman of repute of the most various opinions,
from Blackstone, Johnson, and Goldsmith to Burke and
Bentham. This system made the poor man the prey of his
rich neighbours. The most furious punishments were held
<i>in terrorem</i> over the heads of prisoners, and the wretched man
who was caught in the net was exposed to all the animosities
that he might have provoked in his ordinary life. Dr. Parr
put this point writing to Romilly in 1811.</p>

<p>‘There is, indeed, one consideration in the case of bad men
which ought to have a greater weight than it usually has in
the minds of the Judges. Dislike from party, quarrels with
servants or neighbours, offence justly or unjustly taken in a
quarrel, jealousy about game, and twenty other matters of
the same sort, frequently induce men to wish to get rid of
a convicted person: and well does it behove every Judge to
be sure that the person who recommends the execution of
the sentence is a man of veracity, of sense, of impartiality
and kindness of nature in the habitual character of his mind.
I remember hearing from Sergeant Whitaker that, while he
was trying a man for a capital offence at Norwich, a person
brought him a message from the late Lord Suffield, “that the
prisoner was a good-for-nothing fellow, and he hoped the
Judge would look to him”; and the Sergeant kindled with
indignation, and exclaimed in the hearing of the Court,
“Zounds! would Sir Harbord Harbord have me condemn the
man before I have tried him?” What Sir Harbord did
during the trial, many squires and justices of the peace,
upon other occasions, do after it; and were I a Judge,
I should listen with great caution to all unfavourable representations.
The rich, the proud, the irascible, and the
vindictive are very unfit to estimate the value of life to
their inferiors.’<a id="FNanchor_373" href="#Footnote_373" class="fnanchor">[373]</a></p>

<p>We can see how the squires and the justices would close
in round a man of whom they wanted, with the best intentions
in the world, to rid their parish, woods, and warrens, when
the punishment he was to receive turned on his reputation
as it was estimated by the gentlemen of his neighbourhood.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>
Was Sir Harbord Harbord very far removed from the state
of mind described in the Sixth Satire of Juvenal?</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘“Pone crucem servo.” “Meruit quo crimine servus</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Supplicium? quis testis adest? quis detulit? Audi:</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Nulla unquam de morte hominis cunctatio longa est.”</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">“O demens, ita servus homo est? nil fecerit, esto:</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas.”’</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>And Sir Harbord Harbord had in hundreds of cases what he
had not in this case, the power to wreak his anger on ‘a
good-for-nothing fellow.’</p>

<p>When Romilly entered on his noble crusade and tried
very cautiously to persuade Parliament to repeal the death
penalty in cases in which it was rarely carried out, he found
the chief obstacle in his way was the fear that became common
among the governing class at this time, the fear that existing
methods of punishment were ceasing to be deterrent. In
1810 he carried his Bill, for abolishing this penalty for the
crime of stealing privately to the amount of five shillings in a
shop, through the House of Commons, and the Bill was introduced
in the House of Lords by Lord Holland. There it was
rejected by twenty-one to eleven, the majority including the
Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops.<a id="FNanchor_374" href="#Footnote_374" class="fnanchor">[374]</a> The chief
speeches against the Bill were made by Eldon and Ellenborough.
Ellenborough argued that transportation was regarded, and
justly regarded, by those who violated the law as ‘a summer
airing by an easy migration to a milder climate.’</p>

<p>The nightmare that punishment was growing gentle and
attractive to the poor came to haunt the mind of the governing
class. It was founded on the belief that as human wretchedness
was increasing, there was a sort of law of Malthus, by
which human endurance tended to outgrow the resources of
repression. The agricultural labourers were sinking into such
a deplorable plight that some of them found it a relief to be
committed to the House of Correction, where, at least, they
obtained food and employment, and the magistrates began to
fear in consequence that ordinary punishments could no
longer be regarded as deterrent, and to reason that some
condition had yet to be discovered which would be more
miserable than the general existence of the poor. The justices
who punished Wiltshire poachers found such an El Dorado
of unhappiness in transportation. But disturbing rumours<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span>
came to the ears of the authorities that transportation was
not thought a very terrible punishment after all, and the
Government sent out to Sir George Arthur, the Governor of
Van Diemen’s Land, certain complaints of this kind. The
answer which the Governor returned is published with the
Report of the Committee on Secondary Punishments, and the
complete correspondence forms a very remarkable set of
Parliamentary Papers. The Governor pointed out that these
complaints, which made such an impression on Lord Melbourne,
came from employers in Australia, who wanted to have
greater control over their servants. Arthur was no sentimentalist;
his sympathies had been drilled in two hard schools,
the army and the government of prisoners; his account of
his own methods shows that in describing the life of a convict
he was in no danger of falling into the exaggerations or the
rhetoric of pity. In these letters he made it very clear that
nobody who knew what transportation meant could ever make
the mistake of thinking it a light punishment. The ordinary
convict was assigned to a settler. ‘Deprived of liberty, exposed
to all the caprice of the family to whose service he may happen
to be assigned, and subject to the most summary laws, the
condition of a convict in no respect differs from that of a slave,
except that his master cannot apply corporal punishment by
his own hands or those of his overseer, and has a property in
him for a limited period only.’ Further, ‘idleness and insolence
of expression, or even of looks, anything betraying the insurgent
spirit, subjects him to the chain-gang, or the triangle, or to
hard labour on the roads.’<a id="FNanchor_375" href="#Footnote_375" class="fnanchor">[375]</a> We can imagine what the life
of an ordinary convict might become. In earlier days every
convict who went out began as an assigned servant, and it
was only for misconduct in the colony or on the way thither
that he was sent to a Penal Settlement, but the growing alarm
of the ruling class on the subject of punishment led to a
demand for more drastic sentences, and shortly after the close
of our period Lord Melbourne introduced a new system, under
which convicts might be sentenced from home to the Penal
Settlement, and any judge who thought badly of a prisoner
might add this hideous punishment to transportation.</p>

<p>The life of these Settlements has been described in one
of the most vivid and terrible books ever written. Nobody
can read Marcus Clarke’s great novel without feeling that
the methods of barbarism had done their worst and most<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>
devilish in Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur. The lot of
the prisoners in <i>Resurrection</i> is by comparison a paradise.
Not a single feature that can revolt and stupefy the imagination
is wanting to the picture. Children of ten committing
suicide, men murdering each other by compact as
an escape from a hell they could no longer bear, prisoners
receiving a death sentence with ecstasies of delight, punishments
inflicted that are indistinguishable from torture, men
stealing into the parched bush in groups, in the horrible
hope that one or two of them might make their way to freedom
by devouring their comrades&mdash;an atmosphere in which the
last faint glimmer of self-respect and human feeling was extinguished
by incessant and degrading cruelty. Few books
have been written in any language more terrible to read.
Yet not a single incident or feature is imaginary: the whole
picture is drawn from the cold facts of the official reports.<a id="FNanchor_376" href="#Footnote_376" class="fnanchor">[376]</a>
And this system was not the invention of some Nero or
Caligula; it was the system imposed by men of gentle and
refined manners, who talked to each other in Virgil and Lucan
of liberty and justice, who would have died without a murmur
to save a French princess from an hour’s pain or shame, who
put down the abominations of the Slave Trade, and allowed
Clive and Warren Hastings to be indicted at the bar of public
opinion as monsters of inhumanity; and it was imposed by
them from the belief that as the poor were becoming poorer,
only a system of punishment that was becoming more brutal
could deter them from crime.</p>

<p>If we want to understand how completely all their natural
feelings were lost in this absorbing fear, we must turn to the
picture given by an observer who was outside their world;
an observer who could enter into the misery of the punished,
and could describe what transportation meant to boys of nine
and ten, exposed to the most brutal appetites of savage men;
to chained convicts, packed for the night in boxes so narrow
that they could only lie on one side; to crushed and broken men,
whose only prayer it was to die. From him we learn how these
scenes and surroundings impressed a mind that could look
upon a convict settlement as a society of living men and boys,
and not merely as the Cloaca Maxima of property and order.<a id="FNanchor_377" href="#Footnote_377" class="fnanchor">[377]</a></p>




<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span></p><h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX<br />

<span class="smaller">THE ISOLATION OF THE POOR</span></h2>
</div>



<p>The upper classes, to whom the fact that the labourers were
more wretched in 1830 than they had been in 1795 was a reason
for making punishment more severe, were not deliberately
callous and cruel in their neglect of all this growing misery
and hunger. Most of those who thought seriously about it
had learnt a reasoned insensibility from the stern Sibyl of
the political economy in fashion, that strange and partial
interpretation of Adam Smith, Malthus and Ricardo which
was then in full power. This political economy had robbed
poverty of its sting for the rich by representing it as Nature’s
medicine, bitter indeed, but less bitter than any medicine that
man could prescribe. If poverty was sharper at one time
than another, this only meant that society was more than
ever in need of this medicine. But the governing class as a
whole did not think out any such scheme or order of society,
or master the new science of misery and vice. They thought of
the poor not in relation to the mysterious forces of Nature,
but in relation to the privileges of their own class in which
they saw no mystery at all. Their state of mind is presented
in a passage in Bolingbroke’s <i>Idea of a Patriot King</i>. ‘As
men are apt to make themselves the measure of all being, so
they make themselves the final cause of all creation. Thus
the reputed orthodox philosophers in all ages have taught
that the world was made for man, the earth for him to inhabit,
and all the luminous bodies in the immense expanse around us
for him to gaze at. Kings do no more, nay not so much, when
they imagine themselves the final cause for which societies
were formed and governments instituted.’ If we read ‘the
aristocracy’ for ‘kings’ we shall have a complete analysis of the
social philosophy of the ruling class. It was from this centre
that they looked out upon the world. When the misery of the
poor reacted on their own comfort, as in the case of poaching
or crime or the pressure on the rates, they were aware of it and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>
took measures to protect their property, but of any social
problem outside these relations they were entirely unconscious.
Their philosophy and their religion taught them that it was
the duty of the rich to be benevolent, and of the poor to be
patient and industrious. The rich were ready to do their part,
and all they asked of the poor was that they should learn to
bear their lot with resignation. Burke had laid down the true
and full philosophy of social life once and for all. ‘Good order
is the foundation of all good things. To be enabled to acquire,
the people, without being servile, must be tractable and
obedient. The magistrate must have his reverence, the laws
their authority. The body of the people must not find the
principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their
minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot
partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be
obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success
disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their
consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice.’<a id="FNanchor_378" href="#Footnote_378" class="fnanchor">[378]</a></p>

<p>The upper classes, looking upon the world in this way, considered
that it was the duty of the poor man to adapt himself,
his tastes, his habits, and his ambitions, to the arrangements
of a society which it had pleased Providence to organise on
this interesting plan. We have in the pages of Eden the portrait
of the ideal poor woman, whose life showed what could be
done if poverty were faced in the proper spirit. ‘Anne Hurst
was born at Witley in Surrey; there she lived the whole period
of a long life, and there she died. As soon as she was thought
able to work, she went to service: there, before she was twenty,
she married James Strudwick, who, like her own father, was
a day labourer. With this husband she lived, a prolific, hard-working,
contented wife, somewhat more than fifty years.
He worked more than threescore years on one farm, and his
wages, summer and winter, were regularly a shilling a day.
He never asked more nor was never offered less. They had
between them seven children: and lived to see six daughters
married and three the mothers of sixteen children: all of whom
were brought up, or are bringing up, to be day labourers.
Strudwick continued to work till within seven weeks of the day
of his death, and at the age of four score, in 1787, he closed,
in peace, a not inglorious life; for, to the day of his death, he
never received a farthing in the way of parochial aid. His
wife survived him about seven years, and though bent with age<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>
and infirmities, and little able to work, excepting as a weeder in
a gentleman’s garden, she also was too proud to ask or receive
any relief from the parish. For six or seven of the last years of
her life, she received twenty shillings a year from the person
who favoured me with this account, which he drew up from
her own mouth. With all her virtue, and all her merit, she
yet was not much liked in her neighbourhood; people in
affluence thought her haughty, and the Paupers of the parish,
seeing, as they could not help seeing, that her life was a reproach
to theirs, aggravated all her little failings. Yet, the worst
thing they had to say of her was, that she was proud; which,
they said, was manifested by the way in which she buried her
husband. Resolute, as she owned she was, to have the funeral,
and everything that related to it, what she called decent, nothing
could dissuade her from having handles to his coffin and a plate
on it, mentioning his age. She was also charged with having
behaved herself crossly and peevishly towards one of her
sons-in-law, who was a mason and went regularly every
Saturday evening to the ale house as he said just to drink a
pot of beer. James Strudwick in all his life, as she often told
this ungracious son-in-law, never spent five shillings in any
idleness: luckily (as she was sure to add) he had it not to spend.
A more serious charge against her was that, living to a great
age, and but little able to work, she grew to be seriously afraid,
that, at last, she might become chargeable to the parish (the
heaviest, in her estimation, of all human calamities), and that
thus alarmed she did suffer herself more than once, during the
exacerbations of a fit of distempered despondency, peevishly
(and perhaps petulantly) to exclaim that God Almighty, by
suffering her to remain so long upon earth, seemed actually to
have forgotten her.’ ‘Such,’ concludes Eden, ‘are the simple
annals of Dame Strudwick: and her historian, partial to his
subject, closes it with lamenting that such village memoirs
have not oftener been sought for and recorded.’<a id="FNanchor_379" href="#Footnote_379" class="fnanchor">[379]</a> This was the
ideal character for the cottage. How Eden or anybody else
would have hated this poor woman in whom every kindly
feeling had been starved to death if she had been in his own
class! We know from Creevey what his friends thought of
‘the stingy kip’ Lambton when they found themselves under
his roof, where ‘a round of beef at a side table was run at with
as much keenness as a banker’s shop before a stoppage.’ A
little peevishness or even petulance with God Almighty would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>
not have seemed the most serious charge that could be brought
against such a neighbour. But if every villager had had
Dame Strudwick’s hard and narrow virtues, and had crushed all
other tastes and interests in the passion for living on a shilling
a day in a cold and bitter independence, the problem of preserving
the monopolies of the few without disorder or trouble
would have been greatly simplified. There would have been
little danger, as Burke would have said, that the fruits of
successful industry and the accumulations of fortune would be
exposed to ‘the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed, and
the unprosperous.’</p>

<p>The way in which the ruling class regarded the poor is
illustrated in the tone of the discussions when the problem
of poverty had become acute at the end of the eighteenth
century. When Pitt, who had been pestered by Eden to read
his book, handed a volume to Canning, then his secretary, that
brilliant young politician spent his time writing a parody on
the grotesque names to be found in the Appendix, and it will be
recollected that Pitt excused himself for abandoning his scheme
for reforming the Poor Law, on the ground that he was inexperienced
in the condition of the poor. It was no shame to a
politician to be ignorant of such subjects. The poor were happy
or unhappy in the view of the ruling class according to the
sympathy the rich bestowed on them. If there were occasional
misgivings they were easily dispelled. Thus one philosopher
pointed out that though the position of the poor man might
seem wanting in dignity or independence, it should be remembered
by way of consolation that he could play the tyrant
over his wife and children as much as he liked.<a id="FNanchor_380" href="#Footnote_380" class="fnanchor">[380]</a> Another train
of soothing reflections was started by such papers as that
published in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i> in 1797, under the title
‘On the Comforts enjoyed by the Cottagers compared to those
of the ancient Barons.’ In such a society a sentiment like
that expressed by Fox when supporting Whitbread’s Bill in
1795, that ‘it was not fitting in a free country that the great
body of the people should depend on the charity of the rich,’
seemed a challenging paradox. Eden thought this an extraordinary
way of looking at the problem, and retorted that it was
gratifying to see how ready the rich were to bestow their
benevolent attentions. This was the point of view of Pitt and
of almost all the speakers in the debate that followed Fox’s
outburst, Buxton going so far as to say that owing to those<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>
attentions the condition of the poor had never been ‘so eligible.’
Just as the boisterous captain in <i>Evelina</i> thought it was an
honour to a wretched Frenchwoman to be rolled in British
mud, so the English House of Commons thought that poverty
was turned into a positive blessing by the kindness of the
rich.</p>

<p>Writing towards the end of the ancient régime, Cobbett
maintained that in his own lifetime the tone and language of
society about the poor had changed very greatly for the worse,
that the old name of ‘the commons of England’ had given way
to such names as ‘the lower orders,’ ‘the peasantry,’ and ‘the
population,’ and that when the poor met together to demand
their rights they were invariably spoken of by such contumelious
terms as ‘the populace’ or ‘the mob.’ ‘In short, by degrees
beginning about fifty years ago the industrious part of the
community, particularly those who create every useful thing
by their labour, have been spoken of by everyone possessing
the power to oppress them in any degree in just the same
manner in which we speak of the animals which compose the
stock upon a farm. This is not the manner in which the forefathers
of us, the common people, were treated.’<a id="FNanchor_381" href="#Footnote_381" class="fnanchor">[381]</a> Such
language, Cobbett said, was to be heard not only from ‘tax-devourers,
bankers, brewers, monopolists of every sort, but
also from their clerks, from the very shopkeepers and waiters,
and from the fribbles stuck up behind the counter to do the
business that ought to be done by a girl.’ This is perhaps
only another way of saying that the isolation of the poor
was becoming a more and more conspicuous feature of English
society.</p>

<p>Many causes combined to destroy the companionship of
classes, and most of all the break-up of the old village which
followed on the enclosures and the consolidation of farms. In
the old village, labourers and cottagers and small farmers were
neighbours. They knew each other and lived much the same
kind of life. The small farmer was a farmer one day of the week
and a labourer another; he married, according to Cobbett, the
domestic servant of the gentry, a fact that explains the remark
of Sophia Western’s maid to the landlady of the inn, ‘and let
me have the bacon cut very nice and thin, for I can’t endure
anything that’s gross. Prythee try if you can’t do a little
tolerably for once; and don’t think you have a farmer’s
wife or some of those creatures in the house.’ The new<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>
farmer lived in a different latitude. He married a young
lady from the boarding school. He often occupied the old
manor house.<a id="FNanchor_382" href="#Footnote_382" class="fnanchor">[382]</a> He was divided from the labourer by his
tastes, his interests, his ambitions, his display and whole
manner of life. The change that came over the English
village in consequence was apparent to all observers with social
insight. When Goldsmith wanted to describe a happy village
he was careful to choose a village of the old kind, with the
farmers ‘strangers alike to opulence and to poverty,’ and
Crabbe, to whose sincere and realist pen we owe much of our
knowledge of the social life of the time, gives a particularly
poignant impression of the cold and friendless atmosphere
that surrounded the poor:</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘Where Plenty smiles, alas! she smiles for few,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">And those who taste not, yet behold her store,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.’<a id="FNanchor_383" href="#Footnote_383" class="fnanchor">[383]</a></div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>Perhaps the most vivid account of the change is given in a
letter from Cobbett in the <i>Political Register</i> for 17th March
1821,<a id="FNanchor_384" href="#Footnote_384" class="fnanchor">[384]</a> addressed to Mr. <span class="lock">Gooch:&mdash;</span></p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘I hold a return to <i>small farms</i> to be <i>absolutely necessary</i> to a
restoration to anything like an English community; and I am
quite sure, that the ruin of the present race of farmers, generally,
is a necessary preliminary to this.... The life of the husbandman
cannot be that of <i>a gentleman</i> without injury to society at
large. When farmers become <i>gentlemen</i> their labourers become
<i>slaves</i>. A <i>Virginian</i> farmer, as he is called, very much resembles
a <i>great farmer</i> in England; but then, the Virginian’s work is done
by slaves. It is in those States of America, where the farmer is
only the <i>first labourer</i> that all the domestic virtues are to be found,
and all that public-spirit and that valour, which are the safeguards
of American independence, freedom, and happiness. You,
Sir, with others, complain of the increase of the <i>poor-rates</i>. But,
you seem to forget, that, in the destruction of the small farms, as
separate farms, small-farmers have become mere hired labourers....
Take England throughout <i>three farms have been turned into
one within fifty years</i>, and the far greater part of the change has
taken place within the last <i>thirty years</i>; that is to say, since the
commencement of the deadly system of PITT. Instead of families
of small farmers with all their exertions, all their decency of
dress and of manners, and all their scrupulousness as to character,
we have <i>families of paupers</i>, with all the improvidence and
wrecklessness belonging to an irrevocable sentence of poverty<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>
for life. Mr. CURWEN in his <i>Hints on Agriculture</i>, observes that
he saw some where in Norfolk, I believe it was, <i>two hundred</i>
farmers worth from <i>five to ten thousand pounds each</i>; and exclaims
“What a <i>glorious</i> sight!” In commenting on this passage in the
Register, in the year 1810, I observed “Mr. CURWEN only saw the
<i>outside</i> of the sepulchre; if he had seen the <i>two or three thousand</i>
half-starved labourers of these two hundred farmers, and the <i>five
or six thousand</i> ragged wives and children of those labourers; if
the farmers had brought those with them, the sight would not
have been so <i>glorious</i>.”’</p>
</div>

<p>A practice referred to in the same letter of Cobbett’s that
tended to widen the gulf between the farmer and the labourer
was the introduction of bailiffs: ‘Along with enormous prices
for corn came in the employment of <i>Bailiffs</i> by farmers, a natural
consequence of large farms; and to what a degree of insolent
folly the system was leading, may be guessed from an
observation of Mr. ARTHUR YOUNG, who recommended,
that the Bailiff should have a good horse to ride, and a <i>bottle
of port wine every day at his dinner</i>: while in the same work,
Mr. YOUNG gives great numbers of rules for saving labour
upon a farm. A pretty sort of farm where the bailiff was to
have a bottle of port wine at his dinner! The custom was,
too, to bring bailiffs from some <i>distant part</i>, in order to prevent
them from having any feeling of compassion for the labourers.
<i>Scotch</i> bailiffs above all, were preferred, as being thought
harder than any others that could be obtained; and thus
(with shame I write the words!) the farms of <i>England</i>, like
those of <i>Jamaica</i>, were supplied with drivers from Scotland!...
Never was a truer saying, than that of the common
people, that a Scotchman makes a “good <i>sole</i>, but a d&mdash;&mdash;d
bad <i>upper leather</i>.”’<a id="FNanchor_385" href="#Footnote_385" class="fnanchor">[385]</a> Bamford, speaking of 1745, says:
‘Gentlemen then lived as they ought to live: as real gentlemen
will ever be found living: in kindliness with their neighbours;
in openhanded charity towards the poor, and in hospitality
towards all friendly comers. There were no grinding bailiffs
and land stewards in those days to stand betwixt the gentleman
and his labourer or his tenant: to screw up rents and
screw down livings, and to invent and transact all little meannesses
for so much per annum.’<a id="FNanchor_386" href="#Footnote_386" class="fnanchor">[386]</a> Cobbett’s prejudice against
Scotsmen, the race of ‘feelosofers,’ blinded him to virtues
which were notoriously theirs, as in his round declaration that
all the hard work of agriculture was done by Englishmen and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>
Irishmen, and that the Scotsmen chose such tasks as ‘peeping
into melon frames.’ But that his remarks upon the subject of
the introduction of Scottish bailiffs reflected a general feeling
may be seen from a passage in Miss Austen’s <i>Emma</i>, ‘Mr.
Graham intends to have a Scotch bailiff for his new estate.
Will it answer? Will not the old prejudice be too strong?’</p>

<p>The change in the status of the farmer came at a time of a
general growth of luxury. All classes above the poor adopted
a more extravagant and ostentatious style and scale of living.
This was true, for example, of sporting England. Fox-hunting
dates from this century. Before the eighteenth century the
amusement of the aristocracy was hunting the stag, and that
of the country squire was hunting the hare. It was because
Walpole kept beagles at Richmond and used to hunt once a
week that the House of Commons has always made Saturday a
holiday. In the Peninsular War, Wellington kept a pack of
hounds at headquarters, but they were fox-hounds. In its
early days fox-hunting had continued the simpler traditions
of hare-hunting, and each small squire kept a few couple of
hounds and brought them to the meet. Gray has described
his uncle’s establishment at Burnham, where every chair
in the house was taken up by a dog. But as the century
advanced the sport was organised on a grander scale: the old
buck-hounds and slow horses were superseded by more expensive
breeds, and far greater distances were covered. Fox-hunting
became the amusement both of the aristocracy and of
the squires, and it resembled rather the pomp and state of
stag-hunting than the modest pleasures of Walpole and his
friends. In all other directions there was a general increase
of magnificence in life. The eighteenth century was the
century of great mansions, and some of the most splendid
palaces of the aristocracy were built during the distress and
famine of the French war. The ambitions of the aristocracy
became the ambitions of the classes that admired them, as we
know from Smollett, and Sir William Scott in 1802, speaking
in favour of the non-residence of the clergy, ‘expressly said
that they and their families ought to appear at watering-places,
and that this was amongst the means of making them respected
by their flocks!’<a id="FNanchor_387" href="#Footnote_387" class="fnanchor">[387]</a></p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The rich and the poor were thus growing further and further
apart, and there was nobody in the English village to interpret<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>
these two worlds to each other. M. Babeau has pointed
out that in France, under the ancient régime, the lawyers
represented and defended in some degree the rights of
the peasants. This was one consequence of the constant
litigation between peasants and seigneurs over communal
property. The lawyers who took the side of the peasants
lived at their expense it is true, but they rendered public
services, they presented the peasants’ case before public
opinion, and they understood their ideas and difficulties. This
explains a striking feature of the French Revolution, the large
number of local lawyers who became prominent as champions
of revolutionary ideas. One of Burke’s chief complaints of the
Constituent Assembly was that it contained so many country
attorneys and notaries, ‘the fomenters and conductors of the
petty war of village vexation.’<a id="FNanchor_388" href="#Footnote_388" class="fnanchor">[388]</a> In England the lawyers never
occupied this position, and it is impossible to imagine such a
development taking place there. The lawyers who interested
themselves in the poor were enlisted not in the defence of
the rights of the commoners but in the defence of the purses
of the parishes. For them the all-important question was not
what rights the peasant had against his lord, but on which
parish he had a claim for maintenance.</p>

<p>The causes of litigation were endless: if a man rented a
tenement of the annual value of £10 he acquired a settlement.
But his rental might not have represented the annual value, and
so the further question would come up, Was the annual value
actually £10? ‘If it may be really not far from that sum, and
the family of the pauper be numerous, the interests of the contending
parishes, supported by the conflicting opinions of their
respective surveyors, leads to the utmost expense and extremity
of litigation.’<a id="FNanchor_389" href="#Footnote_389" class="fnanchor">[389]</a> If the annual value were not in dispute there
might be nice and intricate questions about the kind of tenement
and the nature of the tenure: if the settlement was
claimed in virtue of a contract of hiring, was the contract
‘general, special, customary, retrospective, conditional,
personal’ or what not?<a id="FNanchor_390" href="#Footnote_390" class="fnanchor">[390]</a> If the settlement was claimed in
virtue of apprenticeship,<a id="FNanchor_391" href="#Footnote_391" class="fnanchor">[391]</a> what was the nature of the indentures
and so on. If claimed for an estate of £30, was the estate
really worth £30, and how was it acquired? These are a few
of the questions in dispute, and to add to the confusion ‘on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>
no branch of the law have the judgments of the superior court
been so contradictory.’<a id="FNanchor_392" href="#Footnote_392" class="fnanchor">[392]</a></p>

<p>Thus the principal occupation of those lawyers whose business
brought them into the world of the poor was of a nature to
draw their sympathies and interests to the side of the possessing
classes, and whereas peasants’ ideas were acclimatised outside
their own class in France as a consequence of the character of
rural litigation and of rural lawyers, the English villager came
before the lawyer, not as a client, but as a danger; not as a
person whose rights and interests had to be explored and
studied, but as a person whose claims on the parish had to be
parried or evaded. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that
both Fielding and Smollett lay great stress on the reputation of
lawyers for harshness and extortion in their treatment of the
poor, regarding them, like Carlyle, as ‘attorneys and law beagles
who hunt ravenous on the earth.’ Readers of the adventures
of Sir Launcelot Greaves will remember Tom Clarke ‘whose
goodness of heart even the exercise of his profession had not
been able to corrupt. Before strangers he never owned
himself an attorney without blushing, though he had no reason
to blush for his own practice, for he constantly refused to
engage in the cause of any client whose character was equivocal,
and was never known to act with such industry as when
concerned for the widow and orphan or any other object that
sued <i>in forma pauperis</i>.’ Fielding speaks in a foot-note to
<i>Tom Jones</i> of the oppression of the poor by attorneys, as a
scandal to the law, the nation, Christianity, and even human
nature itself.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>There was another class that might, under different circumstances,
have helped to soothe and soften the isolation of the
poor, but the position and the sympathies of the English
Church made this impossible. This was seen very clearly by
Adam Smith, who was troubled by the fear that ‘enthusiasm,’
the religious force so dreaded by the men of science and reason,
would spread among the poor, because the clergy who should
have controlled and counteracted it were so little in touch
with the mass of the people. Under the government of the
Anglican Church, as set up by the Reformation, he pointed out,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>
‘the clergy naturally endeavour to recommend themselves to
the sovereign, to the court, and to the nobility and gentry of
the country, by whose influence they chiefly expect to obtain
preferment.’<a id="FNanchor_393" href="#Footnote_393" class="fnanchor">[393]</a> He added that such a clergy are very apt to
neglect altogether the means of maintaining their influence and
authority with the lower ranks of life. The association of the
Anglican Church with the governing class has never been more
intimate and binding than it was during the eighteenth century.
This was true alike of bishops and of clergy. The English
bishop was not a gay Voltairean like the French, but he was
just as zealous a member of the privileged orders, and the
system over which he presided and which he defended was a
faint copy of the gloriously coloured scandals of the French
Church. The prelates who lived upon those scandals were
described by Robespierre, with a humour that he did not often
indulge, as treating the deity in the same way as the mayor
of the palace used to treat the French kings. ‘Ils l’ont traité
comme jadis les maires du palais traitèrent les descendants de
Clovis pour régner sous son nom et se mettre à sa place. Ils
l’ont relégué dans le ciel comme dans un palais, et ne l’ont
appelé sur la terre que pour demander à leur profit des dîmes,
des richesses, des honneurs, des plaisirs et de la puissance.’
When Archbishop Dillon declared against the civil constitution
he said that he and his colleagues acted as gentlemen and
not as theologians. The Archbishop of Aix spoke of tithes
as a voluntary offering from the piety of the faithful. ‘As to
that,’ said the Duke de la Rochefoucault, ‘there are now forty
thousand cases in the Courts.’ Both these archbishops would
have found themselves quite at home among the spiritual peers
in the House of Lords, where the same decorous hypocrisies
mingled with the same class atmosphere. For the English
bishops, though they were not libertines like the French, never
learnt so to be Christians as to forget to be aristocrats, and
their religious duties were never allowed to interfere with the
demands of scholarship or of pleasure. Perhaps the most
distinguished product of this régime was Bishop Watson of
Llandaff, who invented an improved gunpowder and defended
Christianity against Paine and Gibbon. These were his
diversions; his main business was carried on at his magnificent
country seat on the banks of Windermere. He was bishop for
thirty-four years, and during the whole of that time he never
lived within his diocese, preferring to play the part of the grand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>
seigneur planting trees in Westmorland. He has left a sympathetic
and charming account of what he modestly calls his
retirement from public life, an event not to be confused with
abdication of his see, and of how he built the palace where he
spent the emoluments of Llandaff and the long autumn of his
life.</p>

<p>It was natural to men who lived in this atmosphere to
see politics through the spectacles of the aristocracy. To
understand how strongly the view that the Church existed to
serve the aristocracy, and the rest of the State through the
aristocracy, was fixed in the minds of the higher clergy, we have
only to look at the case of a reformer like Bishop Horsley.
The bishop is chiefly known as a preacher, a controversialist,
and the author of the celebrated dictum that the poor had
nothing to do with the laws except to obey them. His battle
with Priestley has been compared to the encounter of Bentley
and Collins, a comparison that may not give Horsley more,
but certainly gives Priestley less than his due. When he
preached before the House of Lords on the death of Louis <span class="allsmcap">XVI.</span>
his audience rose and stood in silent reverence during his
peroration. The cynical may feel that it was not difficult to
inspire emotion and awe in such a congregation on such a
subject at such a time, but we know from De Quincey that
Horsley’s reputation as a preacher stood remarkably high. He
was one of the leaders of the Church in politics; for our
purposes it is more important to note that he was one of the
reforming bishops. Among other scandals he attacked the
scandal of non-residence, and he may be taken as setting in
this regard the strictest standard of his time; yet he did not
scruple to go and live in Oxford for some years as tutor to
Lord Guernsey, during the time that he was Rector of Newington,
as plain a confession as we could want that in the estimation
of the most public-spirited of the clergy the nobility had the
first claims on the Church. These social sympathies were
confirmed by common political interests. The privileges of
the aristocracy and of the bishops were in fact bound up
together, and both bishops and aristocracy had good reason to
shrink from breaking a thread anywhere. Perhaps the malicious
would find the most complete and piquant illustration of the
relations of the Church and the governing class in the letter
written by Dr. Goodenough to Addington, who had just made
him Dean of Rochester, when the clerkship of the Pells, worth
£3000 a year, was about to become vacant. ‘I understand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>
that Colonel Barré is in a very precarious state. I hope you
will have the fortitude to nominate Harry to be his successor.’
Harry, Addington’s son, was a boy at Winchester. The father’s
fortitude rose to the emergency: the dean blossomed a little
later into a bishop.</p>

<p>But if the French and the English bishops both belonged
to the aristocracy in feelings and in habits, a great difference
distinguishes the rank and file of the clergy in the two
countries. The French priest belonged by circumstances and
by sympathy to the peasant class. The bishop regarded the
country curé as <i>un vilain sentant le fumier</i>, and treated him
with about as much consideration as the seigneur showed
to his dependants. The priest’s quarrel with the bishop was
like the peasant’s quarrel with the seigneur: for both priest
and peasant smarted under the arrogant airs of their respective
superiors, and the bishop swallowed up the tithes as the seigneur
swallowed up the feudal dues. Sometimes the curé put himself
at the head of a local rebellion. In the reign of Louis <span class="allsmcap">XV.</span>
the priests round Saint-Germain led out their flocks to destroy
the game which devoured their crops, the campaign being
announced and sanctified from the pulpit. In the Revolution
the common clergy were largely on the side of the peasants.
Such a development was inconceivable in England. As the
curé’s windows looked to the village, the parson’s windows
looked to the hall. When the parson’s circumstances enabled
him to live like the squire, he rode to hounds, for though,
as Blackstone tells us, Roman Canon Law, under the influence
of the tradition that St. Jerome had once observed that
the saints had eschewed such diversions, had interdicted
<i>venationes et sylvaticas vagationes cum canibus et accipitribus</i>
to all clergymen, this early severity of life had vanished long
before the eighteenth century. He treated the calls of his
profession as trifling accidents interrupting his normal life
of vigorous pleasure. On becoming Bishop of Chester, Dr.
Blomfield astonished the diocese by refusing to license a
curate until he had promised to abstain from hunting, and
by the pain and surprise with which he saw one of his clergy
carried away drunk from a visitation dinner. One rector,
whom he rebuked for drunkenness, replied with an injured
manner that he was never drunk on duty.</p>

<p>There were, it is true, clergymen of great public spirit and
devoted lives, and such men figure in these pages, but the
Church, as a whole, was an easy-going society, careful of its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span>
pleasures and comforts, living with the moral ideas and as far as
possible in the manner of the rich. The rivalry of the Methodist
movement had given a certain stimulus to zeal, and the Vicar
of Corsley in Wilts,<a id="FNanchor_394" href="#Footnote_394" class="fnanchor">[394]</a> for example, added a second service to the
duties of the Sunday, though guarding himself expressly against
the admission of any obligation to make it permanent. But
it was found impossible to eradicate from the system certain
of the vices that belong to a society which is primarily a class.
Some of the bishops set themselves to reduce the practice of
non-residence. Porteus, Bishop of London, devoted a great
part of his charge to his clergy in 1790 to this subject, and
though he pleaded passionately for reform he cannot be said
to have shut his eyes to the difficulties of the clergy. ‘There
are, indeed, two impediments to constant residence which
cannot easily be surmounted; the first is (what unfortunately
prevails in some parts of this diocese) unwholesomeness of
situation; the other is the possession of a second benefice.
Yet even these will not justify <i>a total and perpetual</i> absence
from your cures. The unhealthiness of many places is of late
years by various improvements greatly abated, and there are
now few so circumstanced as not to admit of residence there
in <i>some</i> part of the year without any danger to the constitution.’
Thus even Bishop Porteus, who in this very charge reminded
the clergy that they were called by the titles of stewards,
watchmen, shepherds, and labourers, never went the length of
thinking that the Church was to be expected to minister to
the poor in all weathers and in all climates.</p>

<p>The exertions of the reforming bishops did not achieve a
conspicuous success, for the second of the difficulties touched
on by Porteus was insurmountable. In his <i>Legacy to Parsons</i>,
Cobbett, quoting from the <i>Clerical Guide</i>, showed that 332
parsons shared the revenues of 1496 parishes, and 500 more
shared those of 1524. Among the pluralists were Lord
Walsingham, who besides enjoying a pension of £700 a year,
was Archdeacon of Surrey, Prebendary of Winchester, Rector
of Calbourne, Rector of Fawley, perpetual Curate of Exbury,
and Rector of Merton; the Earl of Guildford, Rector of Old
Alresford, Rector of New Alresford, perpetual Curate of
Medsted, Rector of St. Mary, Southampton, including the
great parish of South Stoneham, Master of St. Cross Hospital,
with the revenue of the parish of St. Faith along with it.
There were three Pretymans dividing fifteen benefices, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>
Wellington’s brother was Prebendary of Durham, Rector of
Bishopwearmouth, Rector of Chelsea, and Rector of Therfield.
This method of treating the parson’s profession as a comfortable
career was so closely entangled in the system
of aristocracy, that no Government which represented those
interests would ever dream of touching it. Parliament intervened
indeed, but intervened to protect those who lived on
these abuses. For before 1801 there were Acts of Parliament
on the Statute Book (21 Henry <span class="allsmcap">VIII.</span> c. 13, and 13 Elizabeth
c. 20), which provided certain penalties for non-residence.
In 1799 a certain Mr. Williams laid informations against
hundreds of the clergy for offences against these Acts. Parliament
replied by passing a series of Acts to stay proceedings,
and finally in 1803 Sir William Scott, member for the
University of Oxford, passed an Act which allowed the bishops
to authorise parsons to reside out of their parishes. It is not
surprising to find that in 1812, out of ten thousand incumbents,
nearly six thousand were non-resident.</p>

<p>In the parishes where the incumbent was non-resident,
if there was a clergyman at all in the place, it was generally
a curate on a miserable pittance. Bishop Porteus, in the
charge already mentioned, gives some interesting information
about the salaries of curates: ‘It is also highly to the honour
of this Diocese that in general the stipends allowed to the
curates are more liberal than in many other parts of the
kingdom. In several instances I find that the stipend for
one church only is £50 a year; for two £60 and the use of
a parsonage; and in the unwholesome parts of the Diocese
£70 and even £80 (that is £40 for each church), with the
same indulgence of a house to reside in.’ Many of the
parishes did not see much of the curate assigned to them.
‘A man must have travelled very little in the kingdom,’ said
Arthur Young in 1798, ‘who does not know that country
towns abound with curates who never see the parishes they
serve, but when they are absolutely forced to it by duty.’<a id="FNanchor_395" href="#Footnote_395" class="fnanchor">[395]</a>
But the ill-paid curate, even when he was resident and conscientious,
as he often was, moved like the pluralist rector in
the orbit of the rich. He was in that world though not of it.
All his hopes hung on the squire. To have taken the side of
the poor against him would have meant ruin, and the English
Church was not a nursery of this kind of heroism. It is
significant that almost every eighteenth-century novelist puts<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>
at least one sycophantic parson in his or her gallery of
portraits.<a id="FNanchor_396" href="#Footnote_396" class="fnanchor">[396]</a></p>

<p>In addition to the social ties that drew the clergy to the
aristocracy, there was a powerful economic hindrance to their
friendship with the poor. De Tocqueville thought that the
tithe system brought the French priest into interesting and
touching relations with the peasant: a view that has
seemed fanciful to later historians, who are more impressed
by the quarrels that resulted. But De Tocqueville himself
could scarcely argue that the tithe system helped to warm
the heart of the labourer to the Church of England in cases
such as those recorded in the Parliamentary Paper issued in
1833, in which parson magistrates sent working men to prison
for refusing to pay tithes to their rector. Day labouring
men had originally been exempted from liability to pay
tithes, but just as the French Church brought more and more
of the property and industry of the State within her confiscating
grasp, so the English Parliament, from the reign of William
<span class="allsmcap">III.</span>, had been drawing the parson’s net more closely round
the labourer. Moreover, as we shall see in a later chapter,
the question of tithes was in the very centre of the social
agitations that ended in the rising of 1830 and its terrible
punishment. In this particular quarrel the farmers and
labourers were on the same side, and the parsons as a body
stood out for their own property with as much determination
as the landlords.</p>

<p>In one respect the Church took an active part in oppressing
the village poor, for Wilberforce and his friends started, just
before the French Revolution, a Society for the Reformation of
Manners, which aimed at enforcing the observance of Sunday,
forbidding any kind of social dissipation, and repressing freedom
of speech and of thought whenever they refused to conform to
the superstitions of the morose religion that was then in fashion.
This campaign was directed against the license of the poor
alone. There were no stocks for the Sabbath-breakers of
Brooks’s: a Gibbon might take what liberties he pleased with
religion: the wildest Methodist never tried to shackle the
loose tongues or the loose lives of the gay rich. The attitude
of the Church to the excesses of this class is well depicted in
Fielding’s account of Parson Supple, who never remonstrated
with Squire Western for swearing, but preached so vigorously<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>
in the pulpit against the habit that the authorities put the
laws very severely in execution against others, ‘and the
magistrate was the only person in the parish who could swear
with impunity.’ This description might seem to border on
burlesque, but there is an entry in Wilberforce’s diary that
reveals a state of mind which even Fielding would have found
it impossible to caricature. Wilberforce was staying at
Brighton, and this is his description of an evening he spent at
the Pavilion with the first gentleman of Europe: ‘The Prince
and Duke of Clarence too very civil. Prince showed he had
read Cobbett. Spoke strongly of the blasphemy of his late
papers and most justly.’<a id="FNanchor_397" href="#Footnote_397" class="fnanchor">[397]</a> We can only hope that Sheridan
was there to enjoy the scene, and that the Prince was able
for once to do justice to his strong feelings in language that
would not shock Wilberforce’s ears.</p>

<p>Men like Wilberforce and the magistrates whom he inspired
did not punish the rich for their dissolute behaviour; they only
found in that behaviour another argument for coercing the poor.
As they watched the dishevelled lives of men like George
Selwyn, their one idea of action was to punish a village labourer
for neglecting church on Sunday morning. We have seen how
the cottagers paid in Enclosure Bills for their lords’ adventures
at play. They paid also for their lords’ dissipations in the loss
of innocent pleasures that might have brought some colour into
their grey lives. The more boisterous the fun at Almack’s,
the deeper the gloom thrown over the village. The Select
Committee on Allotments that reported in 1843 found one of
the chief causes of crime in the lack of recreations. Sheridan
at one time and Cobbett at another tried to revive village
sports, but social circumstances were too strong for them.
In this respect the French peasant had the advantage.
Babeau’s picture of his gay and sociable Sunday may be
overdrawn, but a comparison of Crabbe’s description of the
English Sunday with contemporary descriptions of Sunday
as it was spent in a French village, shows that the spirit of
common gaiety, killed in England by Puritanism and by the
destruction of the natural and easy-going relations of the
village community, survived in France through all the tribulations
of poverty and famine. The eighteenth-century French
village still bore a resemblance in fact to the mediæval English
village, and Goldsmith has recorded in <i>The Traveller</i> his
impressions of ‘mirth and social ease.’ Babeau gives an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>
account of a great variety of village games, from the violent
contests in Brittany for the ‘choule,’ in one of which fourteen
players were drowned, to the gentler dances and the children’s
romps that were general in other parts of France, and Arthur
Young was very much struck by the agility and the grace that
the heavy peasants displayed in dancing on the village green.
Windham, speaking in a bad cause, the defence of bull-baiting
in 1800, laid stress on the contrast: ‘In the south of France
and in Spain, at the end of the day’s labour, and in the cool of
the evening’s shade, the poor dance in mirthful festivity on
the green, to the sound of the guitar. But in this country no
such source of amusement presents itself. If they dance, it
must be often in a marsh, or in the rain, for the pleasure of
catching cold. But there is a substitute in this country well
known by the name of <i>Hops</i>. We all know the alarm which the
very word inspires, and the sound of the fiddle calls forth the
magistrate to dissolve the meeting. Men bred in ignorance
of the world, and having no opportunity of mixing in its scenes
or observing its manners, may be much worse employed than
in learning something of its customs from theatrical representations;
but if a company of strolling players make their appearance
in a village, they are hunted immediately from it as a
nuisance, except, perhaps, there be a few people of greater
wealth in the neighbourhood, whose wives and daughters
patronize them.’<a id="FNanchor_398" href="#Footnote_398" class="fnanchor">[398]</a> Thus all the influences of the time conspired
to isolate the poor, and the changes, destructive of their freedom
and happiness, that were taking place in their social and
economic surroundings, were aggravated by a revival of Puritanism
which helped to rob village life of all its natural melody
and colour.</p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X<br />

<span class="smaller">THE VILLAGE IN 1830</span></h2>
</div>



<p>We have described the growing misery of the labourer, the
increasing rigours of the criminal law, and the insensibility of
the upper classes, due to the isolation of the poor. What
kind of a community was created by the Speenhamland
system after it had been in force for a generation? We have,
fortunately, a very full picture given in a Parliamentary Report
that is generally regarded as one of the landmarks of English
history. We cannot do better than set out the main features
of the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834, and the
several effects they traced to this system.</p>

<p>The first effect is one that everybody could have anticipated:
the destruction of all motives for effort and ambition. Under
this system ‘the most worthless were sure of <i>something</i>, while
the prudent, the industrious, and the sober, with all their care
and pains, obtained <i>only something</i>; and even that scanty
pittance was doled out to them by the overseer.’<a id="FNanchor_399" href="#Footnote_399" class="fnanchor">[399]</a> All
labourers were condemned to live on the brink of starvation,
for no effort of will or character could improve their position.
The effect on the imagination was well summed up in a
rhetorical question from a labourer who gave evidence to a
Commissioner. ‘When a man has his spirit broken what is he
good for?’<a id="FNanchor_400" href="#Footnote_400" class="fnanchor">[400]</a> The Poor Law Commissioners looked at it from
a different point of view: ‘The labourer feels that the existing
system, though it generally gives him low wages, always gives
him work. It gives him also, strange as it may appear, what
he values more, a sort of independence. He need not bestir
himself to seek work; he need not study to please his master;
he need not put any restraint upon his temper; he need not
ask relief as a favour. He has all a slave’s security for subsistence,
without his liability to punishment.... All the other
classes of society are exposed to the vicissitudes of hope and
fear; he alone has nothing to lose or to gain.’<a id="FNanchor_401" href="#Footnote_401" class="fnanchor">[401]</a></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span></p>

<p>But it is understating the result of the system on individual
enterprise to say that it destroyed incentives to ambition; for in
some parishes it actually proscribed independence and punished
the labourer who owned some small property. Wages under
these conditions were so low that a man with a little property
or a few savings could not keep himself alive without help
from the parish, but if a man was convicted of possessing
anything he was refused parish help. It was dangerous even
to look tidy or neat, ‘ragged clothes are kept by the poor, for
the express purpose of coming to the vestry in them.’<a id="FNanchor_402" href="#Footnote_402" class="fnanchor">[402]</a> The
Report of the Commissioners on this subject recalls Rousseau’s
description of the French peasant with whom he stayed in
the course of his travels, who, when his suspicions had been
soothed, and his hospitable instincts had been warmed by
friendly conversation, produced stores of food from the secret
place where they had been hidden to escape the eye of the tax-collector.
A man who had saved anything was ruined. A
Mr. Hickson, a Northampton manufacturer and landowner in
Kent, gave an illustration of this.</p>

<p>‘The case of a man who has worked for me will show the
effect of the parish system in preventing frugal habits. This
is a hard-working, industrious man, named William Williams.
He is married, and had saved some money, to the amount of
about £70, and had two cows; he had also a sow and ten pigs.
He had got a cottage well furnished; he was a member of a
benefit club at Meopham, from which he received 8s. a week
when he was ill. He was beginning to learn to read and write,
and sent his children to the Sunday School. He had a legacy
of about £46, but he got his other money together by saving
from his fair wages as a waggoner. Some circumstances
occurred which obliged me to part with him. The consequence
of this labouring man having been frugal and saved money,
and got the cows, was that no one would employ him, although
his superior character as a workman was well known in the
parish. He told me at the time I was obliged to part with
him: “Whilst I have these things I shall get no work; I
must part with them all; I must be reduced to a state of
beggary before any one will employ me.” I was compelled
to part with him at Michaelmas; he has not yet got work,
and he has no chance of getting any until he has become a
pauper; for until then the paupers will be preferred to him.
He cannot get work in his own parish, and he will not be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>
allowed to get any in other parishes. Another instance of the
same kind occurred amongst my workmen. Thomas Hardy,
the brother-in-law of the same man, was an excellent workman,
discharged under similar circumstances; he has a very
industrious wife. They have got two cows, a well-furnished
cottage, and a pig and fowls. Now he cannot get work,
because he has property. The pauper will be preferred to him,
and he can qualify himself for it only by becoming a pauper.
If he attempts to get work elsewhere, he is told that they do
not want to fix him on the parish. Both these are fine young
men, and as excellent labourers as I could wish to have. The
latter labouring man mentioned another instance of a labouring
man in another parish (Henstead), who had once had more
property than he, but was obliged to consume it all, and is now
working on the roads.’<a id="FNanchor_403" href="#Footnote_403" class="fnanchor">[403]</a> This effect of the Speenhamland
arrangements was dwelt on in the evidence before the Committee
on Agricultural Labourers’ Wages in 1824. Labourers
had to give up their cottages in a Dorsetshire village because
they could not become pensioners if they possessed a cottage,
and farmers would only give employment to village pensioners.
Thus these cottagers who had not been evicted by enclosure
were evicted by the Speenhamland system.</p>

<p>It is not surprising that in the case of another man of
independent nature in Cambridgeshire, who had saved money
and so could get no work, we are told that the young men
pointed at him, and called him a fool for not spending his money
at the public-house, ‘adding that then he would get work.’<a id="FNanchor_404" href="#Footnote_404" class="fnanchor">[404]</a>
The statesmen who condemned the labourer to this fate had
rejected the proposal for a minimum wage, on the ground
that it would destroy emulation.</p>

<p>There was one slight alleviation of this vicious system,
which the Poor Law Commissioners considered in the very
different light of an aggravation. If society was to be reorganised
on such a basis as this, it was at any rate better that
the men who were made to live on public money should not be
grateful to the ratepayers. The Commissioners were pained
by the insolence of the paupers. ‘The parish money,’ said a
Sussex labourer, ‘is now chucked to us like as to a dog,’<a id="FNanchor_405" href="#Footnote_405" class="fnanchor">[405]</a>
but the labourers did not lick the hand that threw it. All
through the Report we read complaints of the ‘insolent, discontented,
surly pauper,’ who talks of ‘right’ and ‘income,’<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>
and who will soon fight for these supposed rights and income
‘unless some step is taken to arrest his progress to open
violence.’ The poor emphasised this view by the terms they
applied to their rate subsidies, which they sometimes called
‘their reglars,’ sometimes ‘the county allowance,’ and sometimes
‘The Act of Parliament allowance.’ Old dusty rentbooks
of receipts and old dirty indentures of apprenticeship
were handed down from father to son with as much care as
if they had been deeds of freehold property, as documentary
evidence to their right to a share in the rates of a particular
parish.<a id="FNanchor_406" href="#Footnote_406" class="fnanchor">[406]</a> Of course there was not a uniform administration,
and the Commissioners reported that whilst in some districts
men were disqualified for relief if they had any wages, in others
there was no inquiry into circumstances, and non-necessitous
persons dipped like the rest into the till. In many cases only
the wages received during the last week or fortnight were taken
into account, and thus the allowance would be paid to some
persons who at particular periods received wages in excess of
the scale. This accounts for the fact stated by Thorold
Rogers from his own experience that there were labourers
who actually saved considerable sums out of the system.</p>

<p>The most obvious and immediate effect was the effect
which had been foreseen without misgiving in Warwickshire
and Worcestershire. The married man was employed in
preference to the bachelor, and his income rose with the birth
of each child. But there was one thing better than to marry
and have a family, and that was to marry a mother of
bastards, for bastards were more profitable than legitimate
children, since the parish guaranteed the contribution for
which the putative father was legally liable. It was easier to
manage with a family than with a single child. As one young
woman of twenty-four with four bastard children put it, ‘If
she had one more she should be very comfortable.’<a id="FNanchor_407" href="#Footnote_407" class="fnanchor">[407]</a> Women
with bastard children were thus very eligible wives. The effect
of the whole system on village morals was striking and widespread,
and a witness from a parish which was overwhelmed
with this sudden deluge of population said to the Commission,
‘the eighteen-penny children will eat up this parish in ten
years more, unless some relief be afforded us.’<a id="FNanchor_408" href="#Footnote_408" class="fnanchor">[408]</a> Before this
period, if we are to believe Cobbett, it had been rare for a
woman to be with child at the time of her marriage; in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>
these days of demoralisation and distress it became the
habit.</p>

<p>The effects produced by this system on the recipients of
relief were all of them such as might have been anticipated,
and in this respect the Report of the Commissioners contained
no surprises. It merely illustrated the generalisations that
had been made by all Poor Law Reformers during the last
fifteen years. But the discovery of the extent of the corruption
which the system had bred in local government and administration
was probably a revelation to most people. It demoralised
not only those who received but those who gave. A network
of tangled interests spread over local life, and employers
and tradesmen were faced with innumerable temptations and
opportunities for fraud. To take the case of the overseer first.
Suppose him to be a tradesman: he was liable to suffer in his
custom if he refused to relieve the friends, or it might be the
workmen of his customers. It would require a man of almost
superhuman rigidity of principle to be willing not only to lose
time and money in serving a troublesome and unprofitable
office, but to lose custom as well.<a id="FNanchor_409" href="#Footnote_409" class="fnanchor">[409]</a> From the resolve not to
lose custom he might gradually slip down to the determination
to reimburse himself for ‘the vexatious demands’ on his
time, till a state of affairs like that in Slaugham came
about.</p>

<p>‘Population, 740. Expenditure, £1706. The above large
sum of money is expended principally in orders on the village
shops for flour, clothes, butter, cheese, etc.: the tradesmen
serve the office of overseer by turns; the two last could neither
read nor write.’<a id="FNanchor_410" href="#Footnote_410" class="fnanchor">[410]</a></p>

<p>If the overseer were a farmer there were temptations to
pay part of the wages of his own and his friends’ labourers out
of parish money, or to supply the workhouse with his own
produce. The same temptations beset the members of vestries,
whether they were open or select. ‘Each vestryman, so
far as he is an immediate employer of labour, is interested
in keeping down the rate of wages, and in throwing part of
their payment on others, and, above all, on the principal
object of parochial fraud, the tithe-owner: if he is the owner
of cottages, he endeavours to get their rent paid by the parish;
if he keeps a shop, he struggles to get allowance for his
customers or debtors; if he deals in articles used in the workhouse,
he tries to increase the workhouse consumption; if<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>
he is in humble circumstances, his own relations or friends may
be among the applicants.’<a id="FNanchor_411" href="#Footnote_411" class="fnanchor">[411]</a> Mr. Drummond, a magistrate
for Hants and Surrey, said to the Committee on Labourers’
Wages in 1824, that part of the poor-rate expenditure was
returned to farmers and landowners in exorbitant cottage
rents, and that the farmers always opposed a poor man who
wished to build himself a cottage on the waste.</p>

<p>In the case of what was known as the ‘labour rate’ system,
the members of one class combined together to impose the
burden of maintaining the poor on the shoulders of the other
classes. By this system, instead of the labourer’s wages
being made up to a fixed amount by the parish, each ratepayer
was bound to employ, and to pay at a certain rate, a
certain number of labourers, whether he wanted them or not.
The number depended sometimes on his assessment to the
poor rate, sometimes on the amount of acres he occupied
(of the use to which the land was put no notice was taken, a
sheep-walk counting for as much as arable fields): when the
occupiers of land had employed a fixed number of labourers,
the surplus labourers were divided amongst all the ratepayers
according to their rental. This plan was superficially
fair, but as a matter of fact it worked out to the advantage of
the big farmers with much arable land, and pressed hard on
the small ones who cultivated their holdings by their own
and their children’s labour, and, in cases where they were
liable to the rate, on the tradesmen who had no employment
at which to set an agricultural labourer. After 1832 (2 and 3
William <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> c. 96) the agreement of three-fourths of the ratepayers
to such a system was binding on all, and the large
farmers often banded together to impose it on their fellow
ratepayers by intimidation or other equally unscrupulous
means: thus at Kelvedon in Essex we read: ‘There was no
occasion in this parish, nor would it have been done but for
a junto of powerful landholders, putting down opposition by
exempting a sufficient number, to give themselves the means
of a majority.’<a id="FNanchor_412" href="#Footnote_412" class="fnanchor">[412]</a></p>

<p>Landlords in some cases resorted to Machiavellian tactics
in order to escape their burdens.</p>

<p>‘Several instances have been mentioned to us, of parishes
nearly depopulated, in which almost all the labour is performed
by persons settled in the neighbouring villages or towns;
drawing from them, as allowance, the greater part of their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span>
subsistence.’<a id="FNanchor_413" href="#Footnote_413" class="fnanchor">[413]</a> This method is described more at length in
the following <span class="lock">passage:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>‘When a parish is in the hands of only one proprietor,
or of proprietors so few in number as to be able to act, and to
compel their tenants to act, in unison, and adjoins to parishes
in which property is much divided, they may pull down every
cottage as it becomes vacant, and prevent the building of new
ones. By a small immediate outlay they may enable and
induce a considerable portion of those who have settlements
in their parish to obtain settlements in the adjoining parishes:
by hiring their labourers for periods less than a year, they
may prevent the acquisition of new settlements in their own.
They may thus depopulate their own estates, and cultivate
them by means of the surplus population of the surrounding
district.’<a id="FNanchor_414" href="#Footnote_414" class="fnanchor">[414]</a> A clergyman in Reading<a id="FNanchor_415" href="#Footnote_415" class="fnanchor">[415]</a> said that he had between
ten and twenty families living in his parish and working for
the farmers in their original parish, whose cottages had been
pulled down over their heads. Occasionally a big proprietor
of parish A, in order to lessen the poor rates, would, with unscrupulous
ingenuity, take a farm in parish B, and there hire
for the year a batch of labourers from A: these at the end
of their term he would turn off on to the mercies of parish B
which was now responsible for them, whilst he sent for a fresh
consignment from parish A.<a id="FNanchor_416" href="#Footnote_416" class="fnanchor">[416]</a></p>

<p>The Report of the Commission is a remarkable and searching
picture of the general demoralisation produced by the Speenhamland
system, and from that point of view it is most graphic
and instructive. But nobody who has followed the history of
the agricultural labourer can fail to be struck by its capital
omission. The Commissioners, in their simple analysis of that
system, could not take their eyes off the Speenhamland goblin,
and instead of dealing with that system as a wrong and disastrous
answer to certain difficult questions, they treated the
system itself as the one and original source of all evils. They
sighed for the days when ‘the paupers were a small disreputable
minority, whose resentment was not to be feared, and whose
favour was of no value,’ and ‘all other classes were anxious
to diminish the number of applicants, and to reduce the expenses
of their maintenance.’<a id="FNanchor_417" href="#Footnote_417" class="fnanchor">[417]</a> They did not realise that the
governing class had not created a Frankenstein monster for
the mere pleasure of its creation; that they had not set out<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>
to draw up an ideal constitution, as Rousseau had done for
the Poles. In 1795 there was a fear of revolution, and the
upper classes threw the Speenhamland system over the villages
as a wet blanket over sparks. The Commissioners merely
isolated the consequences of Speenhamland and treated them
as if they were the entire problem, and consequently, though
their report served to extinguish that system, it did nothing
to rehabilitate the position of the labourer, or to restore the
rights and status he had lost. The new Poor Law was the only
gift of the Reformed Parliament to the agricultural labourer;
it was an improvement on the old, but only in the sense that
the east wind is better than the sirocco.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>What would have happened if either of the other two
remedies had been adopted for the problem to which the
Speenhamland system was applied, it is impossible to say.
But it is easy to see that the position of the agricultural labourer,
which could not have been worse, might have been very much
better, and that the nation, as apart from the landlords and
money-lords, would have come out of this whirlpool much
stronger and much richer. This was clear to one correspondent
of the Poor Law Commission, whose memorandum, printed in
an Appendix,<a id="FNanchor_418" href="#Footnote_418" class="fnanchor">[418]</a> is more interesting and profound than any
contribution to the subject made by the Commissioners themselves.
M. Chateauvieux set out an alternative policy to
Speenhamland, which, if the governing class of 1795 or the
governing class of 1834 had been enlightened enough to follow
it, would have set up a very different labouring class in the
villages from the helpless proletariat that was created by the
enclosures.</p>

<p>‘Mais si au lieu d’opérer le partage des biens communaux,
l’administration de la commune s’était bornée à louer pour
quelques années des parcelles des terres qu’elle possède en
vaine pâture, et cela à très bas prix, aux journaliers domiciliés
sur son territoire, il en serait resulté:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘(1) Que le capital de ces terres n’aurait point été aliéné et
absorbé dans la propriété particulière.</p>

<p>‘(2) Que ce capital aurait été néanmoins utilisé pour la
reproduction.</p>

<p>‘(3) Qu’il aurait servi à l’amélioration du sort des pauvres
qui l’auraient défriché, de toute la différence entre le prix du<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>
loyer qu’ils en auraient payé, et le montant du revenu qu’ils
auraient obtenu de sa recolte.</p>

<p>‘(4) Que la commune aurait encaissé le montant de ses
loyers, et aurait augmenté d’autant les moyens dont elle dispose
pour le soulagement de ces pauvres.’</p>
</div>

<p>M. Chateauvieux understood better than any of the Commissioners,
dominated as they were by the extreme individualist
economy of the time, the meaning of Bolingbroke’s maxim
that a wise minister considers his administration as a single day
in the great year of Government; but as a day that is affected
by those which went before and must affect those which are to
come after. A Government of enclosing landowners was perhaps
not to be expected to understand all that the State was in
danger of losing in the reckless alienation of common property.</p>

<p>What of the prospects of the other remedy that was proposed?
At first sight it seems natural to argue that had
Whitbread’s Minimum Wage Bill become an Act of Parliament
it would have remained a dead letter. The administration
depended on the magistrates and the magistrates represented
the rent-receiving and employing classes. A closer scrutiny
warrants a different conclusion. At the time that the Speenhamland
plan was adopted there were many magistrates in
favour of setting a minimum scale. The Suffolk magistrates,
for example, put pressure on the county members to vote for
Whitbread’s Bill, and those members, together with Grey and
Sheridan, were its backers. The Parliamentary support for
the Bill was enough to show that it was not only in Suffolk
that it would have been adopted; there were men like Lechmere
and Whitbread scattered about the country, and though
they were men of far more enlightened views than the average
J.P., they were not without influence in their own neighbourhoods.
It is pretty certain, therefore, that if the Bill had been
carried, it would have been administered in some parts of the
country. The public opinion in support of the Act would
have been powerfully reinforced by the pressure of the labourers,
and this would have meant a more considerable stimulus than
might at first be supposed, for the Report of the Poor Law
Commissioners shows that the pressure of the labourers was a
very important factor in the retention of the allowance system
in parishes where the overseers wished to abandon it, and if the
labourers could coerce the local authorities into continuing the
Speenhamland system, they could have coerced the magistrates<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>
into making an assessment of wages. The labourers were able
by a show of violence to raise wages and to reduce prices
temporarily, as is clear from the history of 1816 and 1830. It
is not too much to suppose that they could have exercised
enough influence in 1795 to induce magistrates in many places
to carry out a law that was on the Statute Book. Further, it
is not unreasonable to suppose that agricultural labourers’
unions to enforce the execution of the law would have escaped
the monstrous Combination Law of 1799 and 1800, for even
in 1808 the Glasgow and Lancashire cotton-weavers were
permitted openly to combine for the purpose of seeking a legal
fixing of wages.<a id="FNanchor_419" href="#Footnote_419" class="fnanchor">[419]</a></p>

<p>If assessment had once become the practice, the real struggle
would have arisen when the great prosperity of agriculture
began to decline; at the time, that is, when the Speenhamland
system began to show those symptoms of strain that we have
described. Would the customary wage, established under the
more favourable conditions of 1795, have stood against that
pressure? Would the labourers have been able to keep up
wages, as critics of the Whitbread Bill had feared that they
would? In considering the answers to that question, we have
to reckon with a force that the debaters of 1795 could not
have foreseen. In 1795 Cobbett was engaged in the politics
and polemics of America, and if any member of the House of
Commons knew his name, he knew it as the name of a fierce
champion of English institutions, and a fierce enemy of revolutionary
ideas; a hero of the <i>Anti-Jacobin</i> itself. In 1810
Cobbett was rapidly making himself the most powerful tribune
that the English poor have ever known. Cobbett’s faults are
plain enough, for they are all on the surface. His egotism
sometimes seduced his judgment; he had a strongly perverse
element in his nature; his opinion of any proposals not his
own was apt to be petulant and peevish, and it might perhaps
be said of him that he generally had a wasp in his bonnet.
These qualities earned for him his title of the Contentious
Man. They would have been seriously disabling in a Cabinet
Minister, but they did not affect his power of collecting and
mobilising and leading the spasmodic forces of the poor.</p>

<p>Let us recall his career in order to understand what his
influence would have been if the labourers had won their
customary wage in 1795, and had been fighting to maintain it
fifteen or twenty years later. His adventures began early.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>
When he was thirteen his imagination was fired by stories
the gardener at Farnham told him of the glories of Kew. He
ran away from home, and made so good an impression on
the Kew gardener that he was given work there. His last
coppers on that journey were spent in buying Swift’s <i>Tale of
a Tub</i>. He returned home, but his restless dreams drove
him again into the world. He tried to become a sailor, and
ultimately became a soldier. He left the army, where he had
made his mark and received rapid promotion, in order to
expose a financial scandal in his regiment, but on discovering
that the interests involved in the countenance of military
abuses were far more powerful than he had supposed, he
abandoned his attempt and fled to France. A few months
later he crossed to America, and settled down to earn a living
by teaching English to French refugees. This peaceful
occupation he relinquished for the congenial excitements of
polemical journalism, and he was soon the fiercest pamphleteer
on the side of the Federals, who took the part of England, in
their controversies with the Democrats, who took the part of
the Revolution. So far as the warfare of pamphlets went,
Cobbett turned the scale. The Democrats could not match
his wit, his sarcasm, his graphic and pointed invectives, his
power of clever and sparkling analysis and ridicule. This
warfare occupied him for nearly ten years, and he returned to
England in time to have his windows broken for refusing to
illuminate his house in celebration of the Peace of Amiens.
In 1802 he started the <i>Political Register</i>. At that time he was
still a Tory, but a closer study of English life changed his
opinions, and four years later he threw himself into the Radical
movement. The effect of his descent on English politics can
only be compared to the shock that was given to the mind of
Italy by the French methods of warfare, when Charles <span class="allsmcap">VIII.</span>
led his armies into her plains to fight pitched battles without
any of the etiquette or polite conventions that had graced the
combats of the condottieri. He gave to the Reform agitation
an uncompromising reality and daring, and a movement which
had become the dying echo of a smothered struggle broke into
storm and thunder. Hazlitt scarcely exaggerated his dæmonic
powers when he said of him that he formed a fourth estate
of himself.</p>

<p>Now Cobbett may be said to have spent twenty years
of his life in the effort to save the labourers from degradation
and ruin. He was the only man of his generation who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>
regarded politics from this standpoint. This motive is the
key to his career. He saw in 1816 that the nation had to
choose between its sinecures, its extravagant army, its rulers’
mad scheme of borrowing at a higher rate to extinguish debt,
for which it was paying interest at a low rate, its huge Civil
List and privileged establishments, the interests of the fund-holders
and contractors on the one hand, and its labourers
on the other. In that conflict of forces the labourer could not
hold his own. Later, Cobbett saw that there were other
interests, the interests of landowners and of tithe-holders,
which the State would have to subordinate to national claims
if the labourer was to be saved. In that conflict, too, the
labourer was beaten. He was unrepresented in Parliament,
whereas the opposing interests were massed there. Cobbett
wanted Parliamentary Reform, not like the traditional Radicals
as a philosophy of rights, but as an avalanche of social
power. Parliamentary Reform was never an end to him,
nor the means to anything short of the emancipation of the
labourer. In this, his main mission, Cobbett failed. The
upper classes winced under his ruthless manners, and they
trembled before his Berserker rage, but it is the sad truth of
English history that they beat him. Now if, instead of
throwing himself against this world of privilege and vested
interests in the hopes of wringing a pittance of justice for a
sinking class, it had been his task to maintain a position
already held, he would have fought under very different
conditions. If, when prices began to fall, there had been
a customary wage in most English villages, the question would
not have been whether the ruling class was to maintain its
privileges and surplus profits by letting the labourer sink
deeper into the morass, but whether it was to maintain
these privileges and profits by taking something openly from
him. It is easier to prevent a dog from stealing a bone than
to take the bone out of his mouth. Cobbett was not strong
enough to break the power of the governing class, but he
might have been strong enough to defend the customary
rights of the labouring class. As it was, the governing class
was on the defensive at every point. The rent receivers, the
tithe owners, the mortgagers, the lenders to the Government
and the contractors all clung to their gains, and the food
allowance of the labourer slowly and steadily declined.</p>

<p>There was this great difference between the Speenhamland
system and a fixed standard of wages. The Speenhamland<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>
system after 1812 was not applied so as to maintain an equilibrium
between the income and expenditure of the labourer: it
was applied to maintain an equilibrium between social forces.
The scale fell not with the fall of prices to the labourer, but with
the fall of profits to the possessing classes. The minimum was
not the minimum on which the labourer could live, but the
minimum below which rebellion was certain. This was the
way in which wages found their own level. They gravitated
lower and lower with the growing weakness of the wage-earner.
If Cobbett had been at the head of a movement for preserving
to the labourer a right bestowed on him by Act of Parliament,
either he would have succeeded, or the disease would have
come to a crisis in 1816, instead of taking the form of a lingering
and wasting illness. Either, that is, other classes would have
had to make the economies necessary to keep the labourers’
wages at the customary point, or the labourers would have
made their last throw before they had been desolated and
weakened by another fifteen years of famine.</p>

<p>There is another respect in which the minimum wage policy
would have profoundly altered the character of village society.
It would have given the village labourers a bond of union
before they had lost the memories and the habits of their more
independent life; it would have made them an organised force,
something like the organised forces that have built up a standard
of life for industrial workmen. An important passage in
Fielding’s <i>Tom Jones</i> shows that there was material for such
combination in the commoners of the old village. Fielding is
talking of his borrowings from the classics and he defends himself
with this analogy: ‘The ancients may be considered as a rich
common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement
in Parnassus hath a free right to batten his muse: or, to place
it in a clearer light, we moderns are to the ancients what the
poor are to the rich. By the poor here I mean that large and
venerable body which in English we call the mob. Now
whoever hath had the honour to be admitted to any degree of
intimacy with this mob must well know, that it is one of
their established maxims to plunder and pillage their rich
neighbours without any reluctance: and that this is held to
be neither sin nor crime among them. And so constantly
do they abide and act by this maxim, that in every parish
almost in the kingdom there is a kind of confederacy ever
carrying on against a certain person of opulence called the
squire whose property is considered as free booty by all his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>
poor neighbours; who, as they conclude that there is no
manner of guilt in such depredations, look upon it as a point
of honour and moral obligation to conceal and to preserve
each other from punishment on all such occasions. In like
manner are the ancients such as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Cicero
and the rest to be esteemed among us writers as so many
wealthy squires from whom we, the poor of Parnassus, claim
an immemorial custom of taking whatever we can come at.’<a id="FNanchor_420" href="#Footnote_420" class="fnanchor">[420]</a></p>

<p>It would not have been possible to create a great labourers’
union before the Combination Laws were repealed in 1824,
but if the labourers had been organised to defend their
standard wage, they would have established a tradition of
permanent association in each village. The want of this was
their fatal weakness. All the circumstances make the spirit
of combination falter in the country. In towns men are face to
face with the brutal realities of their lives, unsoftened by any
of the assuaging influences of brook and glade and valley.
Men and women who work in the fields breathe something
of the resignation and peace of Nature; they bear trouble
and wrong with a dangerous patience. Discontent moves,
but it moves slowly, and whereas storms blow up in the towns,
they beat up in the country. That is one reason why the
history of the anguish of the English agricultural labourer so
rarely breaks into violence. Castlereagh’s Select Committee
in 1817 rejoiced in the discovery that ‘notwithstanding the
alarming progress which has been made in extending disaffection,
its success has been confined to the principal manufacturing
districts, and that scarcely any of the agricultural population
have lent themselves to these violent projects.’ There is a
Russian saying that the peasant must ‘be boiled in the factory
pot’ before a revolution can succeed. And if it is difficult in the
nature of things to make rural labourers as formidable to
their masters as industrial workers, there is another reason
why the English labourer rebelled so reluctantly and so tardily
against what Sir Spencer Walpole called, in the true spirit of a
classical politician, ‘his inevitable and hereditary lot.’ Village
society was constantly losing its best and bravest blood.
Bamford’s description of the poacher who nearly killed a
gamekeeper’s understrapper in a quarrel in a public-house,
and then hearing from Dr. Healey that his man was only
stunned, promised the doctor that if there was but one single
hare on Lord Suffield’s estates, that hare should be in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>
doctor’s stew-pot next Sunday, reminds us of the loss a
village suffered when its poachers were snapped up by a
game-preserving bench, and tossed to the other side of the
world. During the years between Waterloo and the Reform
Bill the governing class was decimating the village populations
on the principle of the Greek tyrant who flicked off the heads
of the tallest blades in his field; the Game Laws, summary
jurisdiction, special commissions, drove men of spirit and enterprise,
the natural leaders of their fellows, from the villages
where they might have troubled the peace of their masters.
The village Hampdens of that generation sleep on the shores
of Botany Bay. Those who blame the supine character of the
English labourer forget that his race, before it had quite lost
the memories and the habits of the days of its independence
and its share in the commons, was passed through this sieve.
The scenes we shall describe in the next chapter show that
the labourers were capable of great mutual fidelity when once
they were driven into rebellion. If they had had a right to
defend and a comradeship to foster from the first, Cobbett,
who spent his superb strength in a magnificent onslaught on
the governing class, might have made of the race whose wrongs
he pitied as his own, an army no less resolute and disciplined
than the army O’Connell made of the broken peasants of the
West.</p>


<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span></p>

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI<br />

<span class="smaller">THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT</span></h2>
</div>


<div class="blockquot">

<p>Where not otherwise stated the authorities for the two following
chapters are the Home Office Papers for the time (Municipal and
Provincial, Criminal, Disturbances, Domestic, etc.), the <i>Times</i> and local
papers.</p>
</div>


<p class="center">I</p>

<p>A traveller who wished to compare the condition of the
English and the French rural populations in 1830 would have
had little else to do than to invert all that had been written
on the subject by travellers a century earlier. At the beginning
of the eighteenth century England had the prosperous and
France the miserable peasantry. But by the beginning of the
nineteenth century the French peasant had been set free from
the impoverishing and degrading services which had made his
lot so intolerable in the eyes of foreign observers; he cultivated
his own land, and lived a life, spare, arduous, and exacting but
independent. The work of the Revolution had been done so
thoroughly in this respect that the Bourbons, when Wellington
and the allies lifted them back on to their throne, could not
undo it. It is true that the future of the French peasants
was a subject of some anxiety to English observers, and that
M‘Culloch committed himself to the prediction that in half
a century, owing to her mass of small owners, France would be
the greatest pauper-warren in Europe. If any French peasant
was disturbed by this nightmare of the political economy of
the time, he had the grim satisfaction of knowing that his
position could hardly become worse than the position that the
English labourer already occupied. He would have based
his conclusion, not on the wild language of revolutionaries,
but on the considered statement of those who were so far from
meditating revolution that they shrank even from a moderate
reform of Parliament. Lord Carnarvon said in one House of
Parliament that the English labourer had been reduced to a
plight more abject than that of any race in Europe; English<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>
landlords reproduced in the other that very parallel between
the English labourer and the West Indian negro which had
figured so conspicuously in Thelwall’s lectures. Thelwall, as
Canning reminded him in a savage parody on the Benedicite,
got pelted for his pains. Since the days of those lectures all
Europe had been overrun by war, and England alone had
escaped what Pitt had called the liquid fire of Jacobinism.
There had followed for England fifteen years of healing peace.
Yet at the end of all this time the conquerors of Napoleon found
themselves in a position which they would have done well
to exchange with the position of his victims. The German
peasant had been rescued from serfdom; Spain and Italy had
at least known a brief spell of less unequal government. The
English labourer alone was the poorer; poorer in money,
poorer in happiness, poorer in sympathy, and infinitely poorer
in horizon and in hope. The riches that he had been promised
by the champions of enclosure had faded into something less
than a maintenance. The wages he received without land had
a lower purchasing power than the wages he had received in
the days when his wages were supplemented by common rights.
The standard of living which was prescribed for him by the
governing class was now much lower than it had been in 1795.</p>

<p>This was not part of a general decline. Other classes for
whom the rulers of England prescribed the standard had
advanced during the years in which the labourers had lost
ground. The King’s Civil List had been revised when provisions
rose. The salaries of the judges had been raised by three several
Acts of Parliament (1799, 1809, and 1825), a similar course had
been taken in the case of officials. Those who have a taste for
the finished and unconscious cynicism of this age will note&mdash;recollecting
that the upper classes refused to raise wages in
1795 to meet the extra cost of living, on the ground that it
would be difficult afterwards to reduce them&mdash;that all the
upper-class officials, whose salaries were increased because
living was more expensive, were left to the permanent enjoyment
of that increase. The lives of the judges, the landlords,
the parsons, and the rest of the governing class were not
become more meagre but more spacious in the last fifty years.
During that period many of the great palaces of the English
nobility had been built, noble libraries had been collected, and
famous galleries had grown up, wing upon wing. The agricultural
labourers whose fathers had eaten meat, bacon, cheese,
and vegetables were living on bread and potatoes. They had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>
lost their gardens, they had ceased to brew their beer in their
cottages. In their work they had no sense of ownership or
interest. They no longer ‘sauntered after cattle’ on the open
common, and at twilight they no longer ‘played down the
setting sun’; the games had almost disappeared from the English
village, their wives and children were starving before their
eyes, their homes were more squalid, and the philosophy of the
hour taught the upper classes that to mend a window or to put
in a brick to shield the cottage from damp or wind was to
increase the ultimate miseries of the poor. The sense of sympathy
and comradeship, which had been mixed with rude and
unskilful government, in the old village had been destroyed in
the bitter days of want and distress. Degrading and repulsive
work was invented for those whom the farmer would not or
could not employ. De Quincey, wishing to illustrate the
manners of eighteenth-century France, used to quote M. Simond’s
story of how he had seen, not very long before the Revolution,
a peasant ploughing with a team consisting of a donkey and a
woman. The English poor could have told him that half a
century later there were English villages in which it was the
practice of the overseer to harness men and women to the
parish cart, and that the sight of an idiot woman between the
shafts was not unknown within a hundred miles of London.<a id="FNanchor_421" href="#Footnote_421" class="fnanchor">[421]</a>
Men and women were living on roots and sorrel; in the summer
of the year 1830 four harvest labourers were found under a
hedge dead of starvation, and Lord Winchilsea, who mentioned
the fact in the House of Lords, said that this was not an
exceptional case. The labourer was worse fed and worse
housed than the prisoner, and he would not have been able to
keep body and soul together if he had not found in poaching or
in thieving or in smuggling the means of eking out his doles and
wages.</p>

<p>The feelings of this sinking class, the anger, dismay, and
despair with which it watched the going out of all the warm
comfort and light of life, scarcely stir the surface of history.
The upper classes have told us what the poor ought to have
thought of these vicissitudes; religion, philosophy, and political
economy were ready with alleviations and explanations which
seemed singularly helpful and convincing to the rich. The
voice of the poor themselves does not come to our ears. This
great population seems to resemble nature, and to bear all the
storms that beat upon it with a strange silence and resignation.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span>
But just as nature has her power of protest in some sudden
upheaval, so this world of men and women&mdash;an underground
world as we trace the distance that its voices have to travel
to reach us&mdash;has a volcanic character of its own, and it is only
by some volcanic surprise that it can speak the language of
remonstrance or menace or prayer, or place on record its
consciousness of wrong. This world has no member of Parliament,
no press, it does not make literature or write history;
no diary or memoirs have kept alive for us the thoughts and
cares of the passing day. It is for this reason that the events
of the winter of 1830 have so profound an interest, for in the
scenes now to be described we have the mind of this class hidden
from us through all this period of pain, bursting the silence by
the only power at its command. The demands presented to
the farmer, the parson, and the squire this winter tell us as
much about the South of England labourer in 1830 as the
cahiers tell us of the French peasants in 1789.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>We have seen that in 1795 and in 1816 there had been
serious disturbances in different parts of England. These had
been suppressed with a firm hand, but during hard winters
sporadic violence and blazing hay-stacks showed from time to
time that the fire was still alive under the ashes. The rising
of 1830 was far more general and more serious; several counties
in the south of England were in state bordering on insurrection;
London was in a panic, and to some at least of those who had
tried to forget the price that had been paid for the splendour
of the rich, the message of red skies and broken mills and mob
diplomacy and villages in arms sounded like the summons
that came to Hernani. The terror of the landowners during
those weeks is reflected in such language as that of the Duke of
Buckingham, who talked of the country being in the hands
of the rebels, or of one of the Barings, who said in the House of
Commons that if the disorders went on for three or four days
longer they would be beyond the reach of almost any power
to control them. This chapter of social history has been
overshadowed by the riots that followed the rejection of the
Reform Bill. Every one knows about the destruction of the
Mansion House at Bristol, and the burning of Nottingham
Castle; few know of the destruction of the hated workhouses
at Selborne and Headley. The riots at Nottingham and Bristol
were a prelude to victory; they were the wild shout of power.
If the rising of 1830 had succeeded, and won back for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span>
labourer his lost livelihood, the day when the Headley workhouse
was thrown down would be remembered by the poor
as the day of the taking of the Bastille. But this rebellion
failed, and the men who led that last struggle for the labourer
passed into the forgetfulness of death and exile.</p>

<p>Kent was the scene of the first disturbances. There had
been some alarming fires in the west of the county during the
summer, at Orpington and near Sevenoaks. In one case the
victim had made himself unpopular by pulling down a cottage
built on a common adjoining his property, and turning out the
occupants. How far these fires were connected with later
events it is impossible to say: the authors were never discovered.
The first riot occurred at Hardres on Sunday the
29th of August, when four hundred labourers destroyed some
threshing machines.<a id="FNanchor_422" href="#Footnote_422" class="fnanchor">[422]</a> Next day two magistrates with a hundred
special constables and some soldiers went to Hardres Court,
and no more was heard of the rioters. The <i>Spectator</i> early next
year announced that it had found as a result of inquiries that
the riots began with a dispute between farmers over a threshing
machine, in the course of which a magistrate had expressed
strong views against the introduction of these machines. The
labourers proceeded to destroy the machine, whereupon, to
their surprise, the magistrate turned on them and punished
them; in revenge they fired his ricks. ‘A farmer in another
village, talking of the distress of the labourers, said, “Ah, I
should be well pleased if a plague were to break out among
them, and then I should have their carcases as manure, and
right good stuff it would make for my hops.” This speech,
which was perhaps only intended as a brutal jest, was reported;
it excited rage instead of mirth, and the stacks of the jester
were soon in a blaze. This act of incendiarism was open and
deliberate. The incendiary is known, and not only has he not
been tried, he has not even been charged.’<a id="FNanchor_423" href="#Footnote_423" class="fnanchor">[423]</a> Cobbett, on the
other hand, maintained that the occasion of the first riots was
the importation of Irish labourers, a practice now some years
old, that might well inflame resentment, at a time when the
governing class was continually contending that the sole cause
of distress was excessive population, and that the true solution
was the removal of surplus labourers to the colonies.</p>

<p>Whatever the actual origin of the first outbreak may have
been, the destruction of machinery was to be a prominent
feature of this social war. This was not merely an instinct<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span>
of violence, there was method and reason in it. Threshing
was one of the few kinds of work left that provided the labourer
with a means of existence above starvation level. A landowner
and occupier near Canterbury wrote to the <i>Kent Herald</i>,<a id="FNanchor_424" href="#Footnote_424" class="fnanchor">[424]</a> that
in his parish, where no machines had been introduced, there
were twenty-three barns. He calculated that in these barns
fifteen men at least would find employment threshing corn up
till May. If we suppose that each man had a wife and three
children, this employment would affect seventy-five persons.
‘An industrious man who has a barn never requires poor
relief; he can earn from 15s. to 20s. per week; he considers it
almost as his little freehold, and that in effect it certainly is.’
It is easy to imagine what the sight of one of these hated
engines meant to such a parish; the fifteen men, their wives
and families would have found cold comfort, when they had
become submerged in the morass of parish relief, in the reflection
that the new machine extracted for their master’s and the
public benefit ten per cent. more corn than they could hammer
out by their free arms. The destruction of threshing machines
by bands of men in the district round Canterbury continued
through September practically unchecked. By the end of the
month three of the most active rioters were in custody, and
the magistrates were under the pleasant illusion that there
would be voluntary surrenders. In this they were disappointed,
and the disturbances spread over a wider area,
which embraced the Dover district. Early in October there
was a riot at Lyminge, at which Sir Edward Knatchbull and
the Rev. Mr. Price succeeded in arresting the ringleaders, and
bound over about fifty other persons. Sir Edward Knatchbull,
in writing to the Home Office, stated that the labourers said
‘they would rather do anything than encounter such a winter
as the last.’ Mr. Price had to pay the penalty for his active
part in this affair, and his ricks were fired.</p>

<p>Large rewards were promised from the first to informers,
these rewards including a wise offer of establishment elsewhere,
but the prize was refused, and rick-burning spread steadily
through a second month. Threatening letters signed ‘Swing,’
a mysterious name that for the next few weeks spread
terror over England, were received by many farmers and
landowners. The machine-breakers were reported not to
take money or plunder, and to refuse it if offered. Their
programme was extensive and formidable. When the High<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span>
Sheriff attended one of their meetings to remonstrate with
them, they listened to his homily with attention, but before
dispersing one of them said, ‘We will destroy the cornstacks
and threshing machines this year, next year we will have
a turn with the parsons, and the third we will make war upon
the statesmen.’<a id="FNanchor_425" href="#Footnote_425" class="fnanchor">[425]</a></p>

<p>On 24th October seven prisoners were tried at the East
Kent Quarter Sessions, for machine-breaking. They pleaded
guilty, and were let off with a lenient sentence of three days’
imprisonment and an harangue from Sir Edward Knatchbull.
Hitherto all attempts to discover the incendiaries had been
baffled, but on 21st October a zealous magistrate wrote
to the Home Office to say that he had found a clue. He had
apprehended a man called Charles Blow, and since the evidence
was not sufficient to warrant committal for arson, he had sent
him to Lewes Jail as a vagrant for three months. ‘In company
with Blow was a girl of about ten years of age (of the
name of Mary Ann Johnson), but of intelligence and cunning
far beyond her age. It having been stated to me that she
had let fall some expressions which went to show that she
could if she pleased communicate important information, I
committed her also for the same period as Blow.’ Now the
fires in question had taken place in Kent, and the vagrants
were apprehended in Sussex, consequently the officials of both
counties meddled with the matter and between them spoilt
the whole plan, for Mary Ann and her companion were questioned
by so many different persons that they were put on
their guard, and failed to give the information that was expected.
Thus at any rate, Lord Camden, the Lord-Lieutenant,
explained their silence, but he did not despair, ‘if the Parties
cannot even be convicted I am apt to think their Committal
now will do good, though they may be to be liberated afterwards,
but nothing is so likely to produce alarm and produce
evidence as a Committal for a Capital Crime.’ However, as
no more is heard of Mary Ann, it may be assumed that when
she had served her three months she left Lewes Jail a sadder
and a wiser child.</p>

<p>Towards the end of October, after something of a lull in the
middle of the month, the situation became more serious. Dissatisfaction,
or, as some called it, ‘frightful anarchy,’ spread
to the Maidstone and Sittingbourne districts. Sir Robert Peel
was anxious to take strong measures. ‘I beg to repeat to you<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span>
that I will adopt any measure&mdash;will incur any expense at
the public charge&mdash;that can promote the suppression of the
outrages in Kent and the detection of the offenders.’ A troop
of cavalry was sent to Sittingbourne. In the last days of
October, mobs scoured the country round Maidstone, demanding
half a crown a day wages and constant employment,
forcing all labourers to join them, and levying money, beer,
and provisions. At Stockbury, between Maidstone and
Sittingbourne, one of these mobs paraded a tricolour and a
black flag. On 30th October the Maidstone magistrates
went out with a body of thirty-four soldiers to meet a mob
of four hundred people, about four miles from Maidstone, and
laid hold of the three ringleaders. The arrests were made
without difficulty or resistance, from which it looks as if these
bands of men were not very formidable, but the officer in
command of the soldiers laid stress in his confidential report
on the dangers of the situation and the necessity for fieldpieces,
and Peel promptly ordered two pieces of artillery to be
dispatched.</p>

<p>At the beginning of November disturbances broke out in
Sussex, and the movement developed into an organised demand
for a living wage. By the middle of the month the labourers
were masters over almost all the triangle on the map, of which
Maidstone is the apex and Hythe and Brighton are the bases.
The movement, which was more systematic, thorough, and
successful in this part of the country than anywhere else, is
thus described by the special correspondent of the <i>Times</i>,
17th November: ‘Divested of its objectionable character, as
a dangerous precedent, the conduct of the peasantry has been
admirable. There is no ground for concluding that there has
been any extensive concert amongst them. Each parish,
generally speaking, has risen <i>per se</i>; in many places their
proceedings have been managed with astonishing coolness and
regularity; there has been little of the ordinary effervescence
displayed on similar occasions. The farmers have notice to
meet the men: a deputation of two or more of the latter
produce a written statement, well drawn up, which the farmers
are required to sign; the spokesman, sometimes a Dissenting
or Methodist teacher, fulfils his office with great propriety and
temper. Where disorder has occurred, it has arisen from
dislike to some obnoxious clergyman, or tithe man, or assistant
overseer, who has been trundled out of the parish in a wheelbarrow,
or drawn in triumph in a load of ballast by a dozen<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span>
old women. The farmers universally agreed to the demands
they made: that is, they were not mad enough to refuse
requests which they could not demonstrate to be unreasonable
in themselves, and which were urged by three hundred or
four hundred men after a barn or two had been fired, and each
farmer had an incendiary letter addressed to him in his pocket.’</p>

<p>There was another development of the movement which is
not noted in this account by the correspondent of the <i>Times</i>.
It often happened that the farmers would agree to pay the wages
demanded by the labourers, but would add that they could not
continue to pay those wages unless rents and tithes were
reduced. The labourers generally took the hint and turned
their attention to tithes and rents, particularly to tithes.
Their usual procedure was to go in a body to the rector, often
accompanied by the farmers, and demand an abatement of
tithes, or else to attend the tithe audit and put some not
unwelcome pressure upon the farmers to prevent them from
paying.</p>

<p>It must not be supposed that the agitation for a living
wage was confined to the triangular district named above,
though there it took a more systematic shape. Among the
Home Office Papers is a very interesting letter from Mr. D.
Bishop, a London police officer, written from Deal on 11th
November, describing the state of things in that neighbourhood:
‘I have gone to the different Pot Houses in the Villages,
disguised among the Labourers, of an evening and all their
talk is about the wages, some give 1s. 8d. per day some 2s.
some 2s. 3d.... all they say they want is 2s. 6d. per day
and then they say they shall be comfortable. I have every
reason to believe the Farmers will give the 2s. 6d. per day
after a bit ... they are going to have a meeting and I think
it will stop all outrages.’</p>

<p>The disturbances in Sussex began with a fire on 3rd
November at an overseer’s in Battle. The explanation
suggested by the authorities was that the paupers had been
‘excited by a lecture lately given here publicly by a person
named Cobbett.’ Next night there was another fire at Battle;
but it was at Brede, a village near Rye, that open hostilities
began. As the rising at Brede set the fashion for the district,
it is perhaps worth while to describe it in some detail.<a id="FNanchor_426" href="#Footnote_426" class="fnanchor">[426]</a></p>

<p>For a long time the poor of Brede had smarted under the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span>
insults of Mr. Abel, the assistant overseer, who, among other
innovations, had introduced one of the hated parish carts, and
the labourers were determined to have a reckoning with him.
After some preliminary discussions on the previous day, the
labourers held a meeting on 5th November, and deputed four
men to negotiate with the farmers. At the conference which
resulted, the following resolutions, drawn up by the labourers,
were signed by both <span class="lock">parties<a id="FNanchor_427" href="#Footnote_427" class="fnanchor">[427]</a>:&mdash;</span></p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘Nov. 5, 1830. At a meeting held this day at the Red
Lion, of the farmers, to meet the poor labourers who delegated
David Noakes Senior, Thomas Henley, Joseph Bryant and
Th. Noakes, to meet the gentlemen this day to discuss the
present distress of the poor.... Resolution 1. The gentlemen
agree to give to every able-bodied labourer with wife and
two children 2s. 3d. per day, from this day to the 1st of March
next, and from the 1st of March to the 1st of Oct. 2s. 6d. per
day, and to have 1s. 6d. per week with three children, and so
on according to their family. Resolution 2. The poor are
determined to take the present overseer, Mr. Abell, out
of the parish to any adjoining parish and to use him with
civility.’</p>
</div>

<p>The meeting over, the labourers went to Mr. Abel’s house
with their wives and children and some of the farmers, and
placed the parish cart at his door. After some hammering at
the gates, Mr. Abel was persuaded to come out and get into
the cart. He was then solemnly drawn along by women
and children, accompanied by a crowd of five hundred, to the
place of his choice, Vine Hall, near Robertsbridge, on the
turnpike road, where he was deposited with all due solemnity.
Mr. Abel made his way to the nearest magistrate to lodge his
complaint, while the people of the parish returned home and
were regaled with beer by the farmers: ‘and Mr. Coleman ...
he gave every one of us half a pint of Beer, women and men,
and Mr. Reed of Brede High gave us a Barrel because we had
done such a great thing in the Parish as to carry that man
away, and Mr. Coleman said he never was better pleased in
his life than with the day’s work which had been done.’<a id="FNanchor_428" href="#Footnote_428" class="fnanchor">[428]</a></p>

<p>The parish rid of Mr. Abel, the next reform in the new era
was to be the reduction of tithes, and here the farmers needed
the help of the labourers. What happened is best told in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span>
words of one of the chief actors. He describes how, a little
before the tithe audit, his employer came to him when he was
working in the fields and suggested that the labourers should
see if they could ‘get a little of the tithe off’; they were only
to show themselves and not to take any violent action. Other
farmers made the same suggestions to their labourers. ‘We
went to the tithe audit and Mr. Hele came out and spoke to
us a good while and I and David Noakes and Thomas Noakes
and Thomas Henley answered him begging as well as we could
for him to throw something off for us and our poor Children
and to set up a School for them and Mr. Hele said he would see
what he could do.</p>

<p>‘Mr. Coleman afterwards came out and said Mr. Hele had
satisfied them all well and then Mr. Hele came out and we
made our obedience to him and he to us, and we gave him
three cheers and went and set the Bells ringing and were all
as pleased as could be at what we had done.’</p>

<p>The success of the Brede rising had an immediate effect on
the neighbourhood, and every parish round prepared to deport
its obnoxious overseer and start a new life on better wages.
Burwash, Ticehurst, Mayfield, Heathfield, Warbleton and
Ninfield were among the parishes that adopted the Brede
programme. Sometimes the assistant overseer thought it
wise to decamp before the cart was at his door. Sometimes
the mob was aggressive in its manners. ‘A very considerable
Mob,’ wrote Sir Godfrey Webster from Battle Abbey on 9th
November, ‘to the amount of nearly 500, having their Parish
Officer in custody drawn in a Dung Cart, attempted to enter
this town at eleven o’clock this Morning.’ The attempt was
unsuccessful, and twenty of the rioters were arrested. The
writer of this letter is chiefly famous as Lady Holland’s first
husband. In this emergency he seems to have displayed
great zeal and energy. A second letter of his on 12th
November gives a good description of the state of affairs round
Mayfield. ‘The Collector of Lord Carrington’s Tithes had
been driven out of the Parish and the same Proceeding was
intended to be adopted towards the Parish Officer who fled
the place, it had been intended by the Rioters to have taken
by Force this Morning as many Waggons as possible (forcibly)
carried off the Tithe Corn and distributed it amongst themselves
in case of interruption they were resolved to burn it. One of
the most violent and dangerous papers I have yet seen (a copy
of which I enclose) was carried round the 3 adjoining Parishes<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>
and unfortunately was assented to by too many Occupiers of
Land. I arrived in Time to prevent its circulation at Mayfield
a small Town tho’ populous parish 3000. By apprehending
the Bearer of the Paper who acted as Chief of the Party and
instantly in presence of a large Mob committing him for
Trial I succeeded in repressing the tumultuous action then
going on, and by subsequently calling together the Occupiers
of Land, and afterwards the Mob (composed wholly of
Agricultural Labourers) I had the satisfaction of mediating
an arrangement between them perfectly to the content of each
party, and on my leaving Mayfield this afternoon tranquillity
was perfectly restored at that Place.’ The violent and dangerous
paper enclosed ran thus: ‘Now gentlemen this is wat we
intend to have for a maried man to have 2s. and 3d. per Day
and all over two children 1s. 6d. per head a week and if a Man
has got any boys or girls over age for to have employ that they
may live by there Labour and likewise all single men to have
1s. 9d. a day per head and we intend to have the rents lowered
likewise and this is what we intend to have before we leave
the place and if ther is no alteration we shall proceed further
about it. For we are all at one and we will keep to each
other.’</p>

<p>At Ringmer in Sussex the proceedings were marked by
moderation and order. Lord Gage, the principal landowner
of the neighbourhood, knowing that disturbances were imminent,
met the labourers by appointment on the village green. There
were about one hundred and fifty persons present. By this
time magistrates in many places had taken to arresting
arbitrarily the ringleaders of the men, and hence when Lord
Gage, who probably had no such intention, asked for the
leader or captain nobody came forward, but a letter was
thrown into the ring with a general shout. The letter which
Lord Gage picked up and took to the Vestry for consideration
read as follows: ‘We the labourers of Ringmer and surrounding
villages, having for a long period suffered the greatest
privations and endured the most debasing treatment with
the greatest resignation and forbearance, in the hope that time
and circumstances would bring about an amelioration of our
condition, till, worn out by hope deferred and disappointed
in our fond expectations, we have taken this method of
assembling ourselves in one general body, for the purpose of
making known our grievances, and in a peaceable, quiet, and
orderly manner, to ask redress; and we would rather appeal<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span>
to the good sense of the magistracy, instead of inflaming the
passions of our fellow labourers, and ask those gentlemen
who have done us the favour of meeting us this day whether
7d. a day is sufficient for a working man, hale and hearty, to
keep up the strength necessary to the execution of the labour
he has to do? We ask also, is 9s. a week sufficient for a married
man with a family, to provide the common necessaries of life?
Have we no reason to complain that we have been obliged for
so long a period to go to our daily toil with only potatoes in
our satchels, and the only beverage to assuage our thirst the
cold spring; and on retiring to our cottages to be welcomed
by the meagre and half-famished offspring of our toilworn
bodies? All we ask, then, is that our wages may be advanced
to such a degree as will enable us to provide for ourselves and
families without being driven to the overseer, who, by the
bye, is a stranger amongst us, and as in most instances where
permanent overseers are appointed, are men callous to the
ties of nature, lost to every feeling of humanity, and deaf to
the voice of reason. We say we want wages sufficient to
support us, without being driven to the overseer to experience
his petty tyranny and dictation. We therefore ask for
married men 2s. 3d. per day to the first of March, and from
that period to the first of October 2s. 6d. a day: for single
men 1s. 9d. a day to the first of March, and 2s. from that time
to the first of October. We also request that the permanent
overseers of the neighbouring parishes may be directly discharged,
particularly Finch, the governor of Ringmer poorhouse
and overseer of the parish, that in case we are obliged,
through misfortune or affliction, to seek parochial relief, we
may apply to one of our neighbouring farmers or tradesmen,
who would naturally feel some sympathy for our situation,
and who would be much better acquainted with our characters
and claims. This is what we ask at your hands&mdash;this is
what we expect, and we sincerely trust this is what we shall
not be under the painful necessity of demanding.’</p>

<p>While the Vestry deliberated the labourers remained quietly
in the yard of the poorhouse. One of them, a veteran from
the Peninsular War who had lost a limb, contrasted his situation
on 9d. a day with that of the Duke of Wellington whose ‘skin
was whole’ and whose pension was £60,000 a year. After
they had waited some time, they were informed that their
demands were granted, and they dispersed to their homes
with huzzas and tears of joy, and as a sign of the new and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span>
auspicious era they broke up the parish grindstone, a memory
of the evil past.<a id="FNanchor_429" href="#Footnote_429" class="fnanchor">[429]</a></p>

<p>An important feature of the proceedings in Kent and Sussex
was the sympathy of other classes with the demands of
the labourers. The success of the movement in Kent and
Sussex, and especially of the rising that began at Brede, was
due partly, no doubt, to the fact that smuggling was still a
common practice in those counties, and that the agricultural
labourers thus found their natural leaders among men who had
learnt audacity, resourcefulness, and a habit of common action
in that school of danger. But the movement could not have
made such headway without any serious attempt to suppress
it if the other classes had been hostile. There was a general
sense that the risings were due to the neglect of the Government.
Mr. Hodges, one of the Members for Kent, declared in
the House of Commons on 10th December that if the Duke of
Wellington had attended to a petition received from the entire
Grand Jury of Kent there would have been no disturbances.<a id="FNanchor_430" href="#Footnote_430" class="fnanchor">[430]</a></p>

<p>The same spirit is displayed in a letter written by a magistrate
at Battle, named Collingwood. ‘I have seen three or four of
our parochial insurrections, and been with the People for hours
alone and discussing their matters with them which they do
with a temper and respectful behaviour and an intelligence
which must interest everyone in their favor. The poor in the
Parishes in the South of England, and in Sussex and Kent
greatly, have been ground to the dust in many instances by
the Poor Laws. Instead of happy peasants they are made
miserable and sour tempered paupers. Every Parish has its
own peculiar system, directed more strictly, and executed
with more or less severity or harshness. A principal tradesman
in Salehurst (Sussex) in one part of which, Robertsbridge, we
had our row the other night, said to me these words “You
attended our meeting the other day and voted with me against
the two principal Rate payers in this parish, two Millers, paying
the people in two gallons of bad flour instead of money. You
heard how saucy they were to their betters, can you wonder if<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span>
they are more violent to their inferiors? They never call a
man Tom, Dick etc. but you d&mdash;&mdash;d rascal etc., at every
word, and force them to take their flour. Should you wonder
that they are dissatisfied?” These words he used to me a
week before our Robertsbridge Row. Each of these Parochial
Rows differs in character as the man whom they select as leader
differs in impudence or courage or audacity or whatever you
may call it. If they are opposed at the moment, their resistance
shows itself in more or less violent outrages; personally I
witnessed but one, that of Robertsbridge putting Mr. Johnson
into the cart, and that was half an accident. I was a stranger
to them, went among them and was told by hundreds after
that most unjustifiable assault that I was safe among them as
in my bed, and I never thought otherwise. One or two desperate
characters, and such there are, may at any moment make the
contest of Parish A differ from that of Parish B, but their
spirit, as far as regards loyalty and love for the King and Laws,
is, I believe, on my conscience, sound. I feel convinced that
all the cavalry in the world, if sent into Sussex, and all the
spirited acts of Sir Godfrey Webster, who, however, is invaluable
here will (not?) stop this spirit from running through Hampshire,
Wiltshire, Somersetshire, where Mr. Hobhouse, your
predecessor, told me the other day that they have got the
wages for single men down to 6s. per week (on which they
<i>cannot live</i>) through many other counties. In a week you
will have demands for cavalry from Hampshire under the same
feeling of alarm as I and all here entertained: the next week
from Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and all the counties in which the
poor Rates have been raised for the payment of the poor up
to Essex and the very neighbourhood of London, where Mr.
Geo. Palmer, a magistrate, told me lately that the poor single
man is got down to 6s. I shall be over to-morrow probably at
Benenden where they are resolved not to let either Mr. Hodges’s
taxes, the tithes or the King’s taxes be paid. So I hear, and
so I dare say two or three carter boys may have said. I shall
go to-morrow and if I see occasion will arrest some man, and
break his head with my staff. But do you suppose that that
(though a show of vigor is not without avail) will prevent
Somersetshire men from crying out, when the train has got to
them, we will not <i>live</i> on 6s. per week, for living it is not, but
a long starving, and we will have tithes and taxes, and I know
not what else done away with. The only way to stop them is
to run before the evil. Let the Hampshire Magistrates and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span>
Vestries raise the wages before the Row gets to their County,
and you will stop the thing from spreading, otherwise you will
not, I am satisfied. In saying all this, I know that I differ
with many able and excellent Magistrates, and my opinion
may be wrong, but I state it to you.’</p>

<p>It is not surprising that magistrates holding these opinions
acted rather less vigorously than the central Government
wished, and that Lord Camden’s appeals to them not to let
their political feelings and ‘fanciful Crotchets’<a id="FNanchor_431" href="#Footnote_431" class="fnanchor">[431]</a> interfere with
their activity were unsuccessful. But even had all the magistrates
been united and eager to crush the risings they could not
act without support from classes that were reluctant to give it.
The first thought of the big landed proprietors was to re-establish
the yeomanry, but they found an unexpected obstacle
in the temper of the farmers. The High Sheriff, after consultation
with the Home Secretary, convened a meeting for this
purpose at Canterbury on 1st November, but proceedings took
an unexpected turn, the farmers recommending as a preferable
alternative that public salaries should be reduced, and the
meeting adjourned without result. There were similar surprises
at other meetings summoned with this object, and landlords
who expected to find the farmers rallying to their support were
met with awkward resolutions calling for reductions in rent and
tithes. The <i>Kent Herald</i> went so far as to say that only the
dependents of great landowners will join the yeomanry,
‘this most unpopular corps.’ The magistrates found it equally
difficult to enlist special constables, the farmers and tradesmen
definitely refusing to act in this capacity at Maidstone, at
Cranbrook, at Tonbridge, and at Tonbridge Wells,<a id="FNanchor_432" href="#Footnote_432" class="fnanchor">[432]</a> as well as
in the smaller villages. The chairman of the Battle magistrates
wrote to the Home Office to say that he intended to reduce his
rents in the hope that the farmers would then consent to serve.</p>

<p>Even the Coast Blockade Service was not considered trustworthy.
‘It is the last force,’ wrote one magistrate, ‘I should
resort to, on account of the feeling which exists between them
and the people hereabouts.’<a id="FNanchor_433" href="#Footnote_433" class="fnanchor">[433]</a> In the absence of local help, the
magistrates had to rely on military aid to quell a mob, or to
execute a warrant. Demands for troops from different quarters
were incessant, and sometimes querulous. ‘If you cannot
send a military force,’ wrote one indignant country gentleman
from Heathfield on 14th November, ‘for God’s sake, say so,
without delay, in order that we may remove our families to a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>
place of safety from a district which want of support renders us
totally unable longer to defend.’<a id="FNanchor_434" href="#Footnote_434" class="fnanchor">[434]</a> Troops were despatched to
Cranbrook, but when the Battle magistrates sent thither for
help they were told to their great annoyance that no soldiers
could be spared. The Government indeed found it impossible
to supply enough troops. ‘My dear Lord Liverpool,’ wrote
Sir Robert Peel on 15th November, ‘since I last saw you I
have made arrangements for sending every disposable cavalry
soldier into Kent and the east part of Sussex. General Dalbiac
will take the command. He will be at Battel to-day to confer
with the Magistracy and to attempt to establish some effectual
plan of operations against the rioters.’</p>

<p>The 7th Dragoon Guards at Canterbury were to provide for
East Kent; the 2nd Dragoon Guards at Maidstone were to
provide for Mid-Kent; and the 5th Dragoon Guards at
Tunbridge Wells for the whole of East Sussex. Sir Robert
Peel meanwhile thought that the magistrates should themselves
play a more active part, and he continually expressed the
hope that they would ‘meet and concert some effectual mode
of resisting the illegal demands.’<a id="FNanchor_435" href="#Footnote_435" class="fnanchor">[435]</a> He deprecated strongly
the action of certain magistrates in yielding to the mobs.
Mr. Collingwood, who has been mentioned already, received
a severe reproof for his behaviour at Goudhurst, where he had
adopted a conciliatory policy and let off the rioters on their own
recognisances. ‘We did not think the case a very strong one,’
he wrote on 18th November, ‘or see any very urgent necessity
for the apprehension of Eaves, nor after Captain King’s statement
that he had not felt a blow, could we consider the assault
of a magistrate proved. The whole parish unanimously
begged them off, and said that their being discharged on their
own recognisances would probably contribute to the peace of
the parish.’</p>

<p>The same weakness, or sympathy, was displayed by magistrates
in the western part of Sussex, where the rising spread
after the middle of November. In the Arundel district the
magistrates anticipated disturbances by holding a meeting
of the inhabitants to fix the scale of wages. The wages agreed
on were ‘2s. a day wet and dry and 1s. 6d. a week for every
child (above 2) under 4,’ during the winter: from Lady
Day to Michaelmas 14s. a week, wet and dry, with the same
allowance for children. A scale was also drawn up for lads
and young men. The mobs were demanding 14s. a week all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span>
the year round, but they seem to have acquiesced in the
Arundel scale, and to have given no further trouble. At
Horsham, the labourers adopted more violent measures and
met with almost universal sympathy. There was a strong
Radical party in that town, and one magistrate described it
later as ‘a hot Bed of Sedition.’ Attempts were made, without
success, to show that the Radicals were at the bottom of the
disturbances. The district round Horsham was in an agitated
state. Among others who received threatening letters was Sir
Timothy Shelley of Field Place. The letter was couched in
the general spirit of Shelley’s song to the men of <span class="lock">England:&mdash;</span></p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘Men of England, wherefore plough,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">For the lords who lay ye low,’</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>which his father may, or may not, have read. The writer
urged him, ‘if you wish to escape the impending danger in
this world and in that which is to come,’ to go round to the
miserable beings from whom he exacted tithes, ‘and enquire
and hear from there own lips what disstres there in.’ Like
many of these letters, it contained at the end a rough picture
of a knife, with ‘Beware of the fatel daggar’ inscribed on it.</p>

<p>In Horsham itself the mob, composed of from seven hundred
to a thousand persons, summoned a vestry meeting in the
church. Mr. Sanctuary, the High Sheriff for Sussex, described
the episode in a letter to the Home Office on the same day
(18th November). The labourers, he said, demanded 2s. 6d.
a day, and the lowering of rents and tithes: ‘all these
complaints were attended to&mdash;&mdash;thought reasonable and complied
with,’ and the meeting dispersed quietly. Anticipating,
it may be, some censure, he added, ‘I should have found it
quite impossible to have prevailed upon any person to serve
as special constable&mdash;&mdash;most of the tradespeople and many
of the farmers considering the demands of the people but
just (and) equitable&mdash;&mdash;indeed many of them advocated
(them)&mdash;&mdash;a doctor spoke about the taxes&mdash;&mdash;but no one
backed him&mdash;&mdash;that was not the object of the meeting.’ A
lady living at Horsham wrote a more vivid account of the
day’s work. She described how the mob made everybody
come to the church. Mr. Simpson, the vicar, went without
more ado, but Mr. Hurst, senior, owner of the great tithes,
held out till the mob seized a chariot from the King’s Arms
and dragged it to his door. Whilst the chariot was being
brought he slipped out, and entered the church with his two<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span>
sons. All the gentlemen stood up at the altar, while the
farmers encouraged the labourers in the body of the church.
‘Mr. Hurst held out so long that it was feared blood would
be shed, the Doors were shut till the Demands were granted,
no lights were allowed, the Iron railing that surrounds the
Monuments torn up, and the sacred boundary between the
chancel and Altar overleapt before he would yield.’ Mr.
Hurst himself wrote to the Home Office to say that it was
only the promise to reduce rents and tithes that had prevented
serious riots, but he met with little sympathy at headquarters.
‘I cannot concur,’ wrote Sir Robert Peel, ‘in the opinion of
Mr. Hurst that it was expedient or necessary for the Vestry
to yield to the demands of the Mob. In every case that I
have seen, in which the mob has been firmly and temperately
resisted, they have given way without resorting to personal
violence.’ A neighbouring magistrate, who shared Sir Robert
Peel’s opinion about the affair, went to Horsham a day or
two later to swear in special constables. He found that out
of sixty-three ‘respectable householders’ four only would
take the oath. Meanwhile the difficulties of providing troops
increased with the area of disturbances. ‘I have requested
that every effort may be made to reinforce the troops in the
western part of Sussex,’ wrote Sir Robert Peel to a Horsham
magistrate on 18th November, ‘and you may judge of the
difficulty of doing so, when I mention to you that the most
expeditious mode of effecting this is to bring from Dorchester
<i>the only</i> cavalry force that is in the West of England. This,
however, shall be done, and 100 men (infantry) shall be brought
from the Garrison of Portsmouth.’</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>Until the middle of November the rising was confined to
Kent, Sussex and parts of Surrey, with occasional fires and
threatening letters in neighbouring counties. After that time
the disturbances became more serious, spreading not only to
the West of Sussex, but to Berkshire, Hampshire, and Wiltshire.
On 22nd November the Duke of Buckingham wrote from
Avington in Hampshire to the Duke of Wellington: ‘Nothing
can be worse than the state of this neighbourhood. I may say
that this part of the country is wholly in the hands of the
rebels ... 1500 rioters are to assemble to-morrow morning,
and will attack any farmhouses where there are threshing
machines. They go about levying contributions on every
gentleman’s house. There are very few magistrates; and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span>
what there are are completely cowed. In short, something
decisive must instantly be done.’</p>

<p>The risings in these counties differed in some respects from
the rising in Kent and Sussex. The disturbances were not so
much like the firing of a train of discontent, they were rather a
sudden and spontaneous explosion. They lasted only about
a week, and were well described in a report of Colonel
Brotherton, one of the two military experts sent by Lord
Melbourne to Wiltshire to advise the magistrates. He wrote
on 28th November: ‘The insurrectionary movement seems to
be directed by no plan or system, but merely actuated by the
spontaneous feeling of the peasantry and quite at random.’
The labourers went about in larger numbers, combining with
the destruction of threshing machines and the demand for
higher wages a claim for ‘satisfaction’ as they called it in
the form of ready money. It was their practice to charge £2
for breaking a threshing machine, but in some cases the mobs
were satisfied with a few coppers. The demand for ready
money was not a new feature, for many correspondents of the
Home Office note in their letters that the mobs levied money
in Kent and Sussex, but hitherto this ‘sturdy begging,’ as
Cobbett called it, had been regarded by the magistrates as
unimportant. The wages demanded in these counties were
2s. a day, whereas the demands in Kent and usually in Sussex
had been for 2s. 6d. or 2s. 3d. Wages had fallen to a lower
level in Hampshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. The current
rate in Wiltshire was 7s., and Colonel Mair, the second
officer sent down by the Home Office, reported that wages
were sometimes as low as 6s. It is therefore not surprising to
learn that in two parishes the labourers instead of asking for
2s. a day, asked only for 8s. or 9s. a week. In Berkshire wages
varied from 7s. to 9s., and in Hampshire the usual rate seems
to have been 8s.</p>

<p>The rising in Hampshire was marked by a considerable
destruction of property. At Fordingbridge, the mob under
the leadership of a man called Cooper, broke up the machinery
both at a sacking manufactory and at a manufactory of threshing
machines. Cooper was soon clothed in innumerable
legends: he was a gipsy, a mysterious gentleman, possibly the
renowned ‘Swing’ himself. At the Fordingbridge riots he
rode on horseback and assumed the title of Captain Hunt.
His followers addressed him bareheaded. In point of fact he
was an agricultural labourer of good character, a native of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[260]</span>
East Grimstead in Wilts, who had served in the artillery in
the French War. Some two months before the riots his wife
had robbed him, and then eloped with a paramour. This
unhinged his self-control; he gave himself up to drink and
despair, and tried to forget his misery in reckless rioting.
Near Andover again a foundry was destroyed by a mob, after
the ringleader, Gilmore, had entered the justices’ room at
Andover, where the justices were sitting, and treated with
them on behalf of the mob. Gilmore also was a labourer;
he was twenty-five years old and had been a soldier.</p>

<p>The most interesting event in the Hampshire rising was the
destruction of the workhouses at Selborne and Headley.
Little is reported of the demolition of the poorhouse at
Selborne. The indictment of the persons accused of taking
part in it fell through on technical grounds, and as the
defendants were also the persons charged with destroying the
Headley workhouse, the prosecution in the Selborne case
was abandoned. The mob first went to Mr. Cobbold, Vicar
of Selborne, and demanded that he should reduce his tithes,
telling him with some bluntness ‘we must have a touch of
your tithes: we think £300 a year quite enough for you ... £4
a week is quite enough.’ Mr. Cobbold was thoroughly alarmed,
and consented to sign a paper promising to reduce his tithes,
which amounted to something over £600, by half that sum.
The mob were accompanied by a good many farmers who had
agreed to raise wages if the labourers would undertake to
obtain a reduction of tithes, and these farmers signed the
paper also. After Mr. Cobbold’s surrender the mob went on
to the workhouse at Headley, which served the parishes of
Bramshott, Headley and Kingsley. Their leader was a certain
Robert Holdaway, a wheelwright, who had been for a short
time a publican. He was a widower, with eight small children,
described by the witnesses at his trial as a man of excellent
character, quiet, industrious, and inoffensive. The master
of the workhouse greeted Holdaway with ‘What, Holdy, are
you here?’ ‘Yes, but I mean you no harm nor your wife
nor your goods: so get them out as soon as you can, for the
house must come down.’ The master warned him that there
were old people and sick children in the house. Holdaway
promised that they should be protected, asked where they
were, and said the window would be marked. What followed
is described in the evidence given by the master of the workhouse:
‘There was not a room left entire, except that in which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[261]</span>
the sick children were. These were removed into the yard on
two beds, and covered over, and kept from harm all the time.
This was done by the mob. They were left there because
there was no room for them in the sick ward. The sick ward
was full of infirm old paupers. It was not touched, but of all
the rest of the place not a room was left entire.’ The farmers
looked on whilst the destruction proceeded, and one at least
of the labourers in the mob declared afterwards that his master
had forced him to join.</p>

<p>In Wiltshire also the destruction of property was not confined
to threshing machines. At Wilton, the mob, under the
leadership of a certain John Jennings, aged eighteen,<a id="FNanchor_436" href="#Footnote_436" class="fnanchor">[436]</a> who
declared that he ‘was going to break the machinery to make
more work for the poor people,’ did £500 worth of damage in a
woollen mill. Another cloth factory at Quidhampton was also
injured; in this affair an active part was taken by a boy even
younger than Jennings, John Ford, who was only seventeen
years old.<a id="FNanchor_437" href="#Footnote_437" class="fnanchor">[437]</a></p>

<p>The riot which attracted most attention of all the disturbances
in Wiltshire took place at Pyt House, the seat of Mr. John
Benett, M.P. for the county. Mr. Benett was a well-known
local figure, and had given evidence before several Committees
on Poor Laws. The depth of his sympathy with the labourers
may be gauged by the threat that he uttered before the Committee
of 1817 to pull down his cottages if Parliament should
make length of residence a legal method of gaining a settlement.
Some member of the Committee suggested that if there
were no cottages there would be no labourers, but Mr. Benett
replied cheerfully enough that it did not matter to a labourer
how far he walked to his work: ‘I have many labourers
coming three miles to my farm every morning during the
winter’ (the hours were six to six) ‘and they are the most
punctual persons we have.’ At the time he gave this evidence,
he stated that about three-quarters of the labouring population
in his parish of Tisbury received relief from the poor rates in aid
of wages, and he declared that it was useless to let them small
parcels of land. The condition of the poor had not improved
in Mr. Benett’s parish between 1817 and 1830, and Lord
Arundel, who lived in it, described it as ‘a Parish in which the
Poor have been more oppressed and are in greater misery as a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[262]</span>
whole than any Parish in the Kingdom.’<a id="FNanchor_438" href="#Footnote_438" class="fnanchor">[438]</a> It is not surprising
that when the news of what had been achieved in Kent and
Sussex spread west to Wiltshire, the labourers of Tisbury rose
to demand 2s. a day, and to destroy the threshing machines.
A mob of five hundred persons collected, and their first act was
to destroy a threshing machine, with the sanction of the owner,
Mr. Turner, who sat by on horseback, watching them. They
afterwards proceeded to the Pyt House estate. Mr. Benett
met them, parleyed and rode with them for some way; they
behaved politely but firmly, telling him their intentions.
One incident throws a light on the minds of the actors in these
scenes. ‘I then,’ said Mr. Benett afterwards, ‘pointed out
to them that they could not trust each other, for any man, I
said, by informing against ten of you will obtain at once £500.’
It was an adroit speech, but as it happened the Wiltshire
labourers, half starved, degraded and brutalised, as they might
be, had a different standard of honour from that imagined by
this magistrate and member of Parliament, and the devilish
temptation he set before them was rejected. The mob
destroyed various threshing machines on Mr. Benett’s farms,
and refused to disperse; at last, after a good deal of sharp
language from Mr. Benett, they threw stones at him. At
the same time a troop of yeomanry from Hindon came up and
received orders to fire blank cartridges above the heads of the
mob. This only produced laughter; the yeomanry then
began to charge; the mob took shelter in the plantations round
Pyt House and stoned the yeomanry, who replied by a fierce
onslaught, shooting one man dead on the spot,<a id="FNanchor_439" href="#Footnote_439" class="fnanchor">[439]</a> wounding six by
cutting off fingers and opening skulls, and taking a great number
of prisoners. At the inquest at Tisbury on the man John
Harding, who was killed, the jury returned a verdict of justifiable
homicide, and the coroner refused to grant a warrant for burial,
saying that the man’s action was equivalent to <i>felo de se</i>. Hunt
stated in the House of Commons that the foreman of the jury
was the father of one of the yeomen.</p>

<p>We have seen that in these counties the magistrates took a
very grave view of the crime of levying money from householders.
This was often done by casual bands of men and
boys, who had little connection with the organised rising.
An examination of the cases described before the Special<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[263]</span>
Commissions gives the impression that in point of fact there was
very little danger to person or property. A farmer’s wife at
Aston Tirrold in Berkshire described her own experience to
the Abingdon Special Commission. A mob came to her house
and demanded beer. Her husband was out and she went to
the door. ‘Bennett was spokesman. He said “Now a little
of your beer if you please.” I answered “Not a drop.” He
asked “Why?” and I said “I cannot give beer to encourage
riot.” Bennett said “Why you don’t call this rioting do
you?” I said “I don’t know what you call it, but it is a
number of people assembled together to alarm others: but
don’t think I’m afraid or daunted at it.” Bennett said
“Suppose your premises should be set on fire?” I said “Then
I certainly should be alarmed but I don’t suppose either of
you intends doing that.” Bennett said “No, we do not intend
any such thing, I don’t wish to alarm you and we are not come
with the intention of mischief.”’ The result of the dialogue was
that Bennett and his party went home without beer and
without giving trouble.</p>

<p>It was natural that when mob-begging of this kind became
fashionable, unpopular individuals should be singled out for
rough and threatening visits. Sometimes the assistant overseers
were the objects of special hatred, sometimes the parson.
It is worth while to give the facts of a case at St. Mary Bourne
in Hampshire, because stress was laid upon it in the subsequent
prosecutions as an instance of extraordinary violence. The
clergyman, Mr. Easton, was not a favourite in his parish, and he
preached what the poor regarded as a harsh and a hostile sermon.
When the parish rose, a mob of two hundred forced their way
into the vicarage and demanded money, some of them repeating,
‘Money or blood.’ Mrs. Easton, who was rather an invalid,
Miss Lucy Easton, and Master Easton were downstairs, and
Mrs. Easton was so much alarmed that she sent Lucy upstairs
to fetch 10s. Meanwhile Mr. Easton had come down, and was
listening to some extremely unsympathetic criticisms of his
performances in the pulpit. ‘Damn you,’ said Daniel Simms,<a id="FNanchor_440" href="#Footnote_440" class="fnanchor">[440]</a>
‘where will your text be next Sunday?’ William Simms
was equally blunt and uncompromising. Meanwhile Lucy
had brought down the half-sovereign, and Mrs. Easton gave it
to William Simms,<a id="FNanchor_441" href="#Footnote_441" class="fnanchor">[441]</a> who thereupon cried ‘All out,’ and the
mob left the Eastons at peace.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[264]</span></p>

<p>One representative of the Church was distinguished from
most of the country gentlemen and clergymen of the time by
his treatment of one of these wandering mobs. Cobbett’s
letter to the Hampshire parsons, published in the <i>Political
Register</i>, 15th January 1831, contains an account of the conduct
of Bishop Sumner, the Bishop of Winchester. ‘I have, at last,
found a Bishop of the <i>Law</i> Church to <i>praise</i>. The facts are
these: the Bishop, in coming from Winchester to his palace
at Farnham, was met about a mile before he got to the latter
place, by a band of sturdy beggars, whom some call robbers.
They stopped his carriage, and asked for some money, which
he gave them. But he did not <i>prosecute</i> them: he had not a
man of them called to account for his conduct, but, the next day,
set <i>twenty-four labourers to constant work</i>, opened his Castle to
the distressed of all ages, and supplied all with food and other
necessaries who stood in need of them. This was becoming a
Christian teacher.’ Perhaps the bishop remembered the lines
from Dryden’s <i>Tales from Chaucer</i>, describing the spirit in
which the good parson regarded the poor:</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent0">‘Who, should they steal for want of his relief,</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">He judged himself accomplice with the thief.’</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<p>There was an exhibition of free speaking at Hungerford,
where the magistrates sat in the Town Hall to receive deputations
from various mobs, in connection with the demand for
higher wages. The magistrates had made their peace with the
Hungerford mob, when a deputation from the Kintbury mob
arrived, led by William Oakley, a young carpenter of twenty-five.
Oakley addressed the magistrates in language which they
had never heard before in their lives and were never likely to
hear again. ‘You have not such d&mdash;&mdash;d flats to deal with
now, as you had before; we will have 2s. a day till Lady Day,
and 2s. 6d. afterwards for labourers and 3s. 6d. for tradesmen.
And as we are here we will have £5 before we leave the place or
we will smash it.... You gentlemen have been living long
enough on the good things, now is our time and we will have
them. You gentlemen would not speak to us now, only you
are afraid and intimidated.’ The magistrates acceded to the
demands of the Kintbury mob and also gave them the £5,
after which they gave the Hungerford mob £5, because they
had behaved well, and it would be unjust to treat them worse
than their Kintbury neighbours. Mr. Page, Deputy-Lieutenant
for Berks, sent Lord Melbourne some tales about this same<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[265]</span>
Kintbury mob, which was described by Mr. Pearse, M.P., as a
set of ‘desperate savages.’ ‘I beg to add some anecdotes of the
mob yesterday to illustrate the nature of its component parts.
They took £2 from Mr. Cherry a magistrate and broke his
Machine. Afterwards another party came and demanded
One Pound&mdash;&mdash;when the two parties had again formed into
one, they passed by Mr. Cherry’s door and said they had taken
one pound too much, which they offered to return to him
which it is said he refused&mdash;they had before understood that
Mrs. Cherry was unwell and therefore came only in small parties.
A poor woman passed them selling rabbitts, some few of the
mob took some by force, the ringleader ordered them to be
restored. At a farmer’s where they had been regaled with
bread cheese and beer one of them stole an umbrella: the
ringleader hearing of it, as they were passing the canal threw
him into it and gave him a good ducking.’<a id="FNanchor_442" href="#Footnote_442" class="fnanchor">[442]</a></p>

<p>In the early days of the rising in Hampshire, Wiltshire and
Berkshire, there was a good deal of sympathy with the
labourers. The farmers in many cases made no objection to
the destruction of their threshing machines. One gentleman
of Market Lavington went so far as to say that ‘nearly all the
Wiltshire Farmers were willing to destroy or set aside their
machines.’ ‘My Lord,’ wrote Mr. Williams, J.P., from
Marlborough, ‘you will perhaps be surprised to hear that the
greatest number of the threshing machines destroyed have
been put out for the Purpose by the Owners themselves.’
The Duke of Buckingham complained that in the district
round Avington ‘the farmers have not the Spirit and in some
instances not the Wish to put down’ disturbances.<a id="FNanchor_443" href="#Footnote_443" class="fnanchor">[443]</a> At a
meeting in Winchester, convened by the Mayor to preserve
the peace (reported in the <i>Hampshire Chronicle</i> of 22nd November),
Dr. Newbolt, a clergyman and magistrate, described his
own dealings with one of the mobs. The mob said they
wanted 12s. a week wages: this he said was a reasonable
demand. He acted as mediator between the labourers and
farmers, and as a result of his efforts the farmers agreed to
these terms, and the labourers returned to work, abandoning
their project of a descent on Winchester. The Mayor of
Winchester also declared that the wages demanded were not
unreasonable, and he laid stress on the fact that the object
of the meeting was not to appoint special constables to come
into conflict with the people, but merely to preserve the peace.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[266]</span>
Next week Dr. Newbolt put an advertisement into the
<i>Hampshire Chronicle</i>, acknowledging the vote of thanks that
had been passed to him, and reaffirming his belief that conciliation
was the right policy.<a id="FNanchor_444" href="#Footnote_444" class="fnanchor">[444]</a> At Overton, in Hampshire,
Henry Hunt acted as mediator between the farmers and a
hungry and menacing mob. Such was the fear of the farmers
that they gave him unlimited power to make promises on their
behalf: he promised the labourers that their wages should be
raised from 9s. to 12s., with house rent in addition, and they
dispersed in delight.</p>

<p>Fortune had so far smiled upon the rising, and there was some
hope of success. If the spirit that animated the farmers, and
in Kent many of the landowners, had lasted, the winter of
1830 might have ended in an improvement of wages and a
reduction of rents and tithes throughout the south of England.
In places where the decline of the labourer had been watched
for years without pity or dismay, magistrates were now calling
meetings to consider his circumstances, and the Home Office
Papers show that some, at any rate, of the country gentlemen
were aware of the desperate condition of the poor. Unhappily
the day of conciliatory measures was a brief one.
Two facts frightened the upper classes into brutality: one
was the spread of the rising, the other the scarcity of troops.<a id="FNanchor_445" href="#Footnote_445" class="fnanchor">[445]</a>
As the movement spread, the alarm of the authorities
inspired a different policy, and even those landowners who
recognised that the labourers were miserable, thought that
they were in the presence of a rising that would sweep them
away unless they could suppress it at once by drastic means.
They pictured the labourers as Huns and the mysterious
Swing as a second Attila, and this panic they contrived to
communicate to the other classes of society.</p>

<p>Conciliatory methods consequently ceased; the upper classes
substituted action for diplomacy, and the movement rapidly
collapsed. Little resistance was offered, and the terrible hosts
of armed and desperate men melted down into groups of weak<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[267]</span>
and ill-fed labourers, armed with sticks and stones. On 26th
November the <i>Times</i> could report that seventy persons had been
apprehended near Newbury, and that ‘about 60 of the most
forward half-starved fellows’ had been taken into custody
some two miles from Southampton. Already the housing of
the Berkshire prisoners was becoming a problem, the gaols
at Reading and Abingdon being overcrowded: by the end of
the month the Newbury Mansion House and Workhouse had
been converted into prisons. This energy had been stimulated
by a circular letter issued on 24th November, in which Lord
Melbourne urged the lord-lieutenants and the magistrates to
use firmness and vigour in quelling disturbances, and virtually
promised them immunity for illegal acts done in discharge
of their duty. A village here and there continued to give the
magistrates some uneasiness, for example, Broughton in
Hants, ‘an open village in an open country ... where there is
no Gentleman to overawe them,’<a id="FNanchor_446" href="#Footnote_446" class="fnanchor">[446]</a> but these were exceptions.
The day of risings was over, and from this time forward,
arson was the only weapon of discontent. At Charlton in
Wilts, where ‘the magistrates had talked of 12s. and the
farmers had given 10s.,’ a certain Mr. Polhill, who had lowered
the wages one Saturday to 9s., found his premises in flame.
‘The poor,’ remarked a neighbouring magistrate, ‘naturally
consider that they will be beaten down again to 7s.’<a id="FNanchor_447" href="#Footnote_447" class="fnanchor">[447]</a> By
4th December the <i>Times</i> correspondent in Wiltshire and
Hampshire could report that quiet was restored, that the
peasantry were cowed, and that men who had been prominent
in the mobs were being picked out and arrested every day.
He gave an amusing account of the trials of a special correspondent,
and of the difficulties of obtaining information. ‘The
circular of Lord Melbourne which encourages the magistrates
to seize suspected persons, and promises them impunity if the
motives are good (such is the construction of the circular in
these parts), and which the magistrates are determined to act
upon, renders inquiries unsafe, and I have received a few good
natured hints on this head. Gentlemen in gigs and post chaises
are peculiar objects of jealousy. A cigar, which is no slight
comfort in this humid atmosphere, is regarded on the road as
a species of pyrotechnical tube; and even an eye glass is in
danger of being metamorphosed into a newly invented air
gun, with which these <i>gentlemen</i> ignite stacks and barns
as they pass. An innocent enquiry of whose house or farm<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[268]</span>
is that? is, under existing circumstances, an overt act of
incendiarism.’</p>

<p>In such a state of feeling, it was not surprising that labourers
were bundled into prison for sour looks or discontented conversation.
A zealous magistrate wrote to the Home Office
on 13th December after a fire near Maidenhead, to say that he
had committed a certain Greenaway to prison on the following
evidence: ‘Dr. Vansittart, Rector of Shottesbrook, gave
a sermon a short time before the fire took place, recommending
a quiet conduct to his Parishioners. Greenaway said openly
in the churchyard, we have been quiet too long. His temper
is bad, always discontented and churlish, frequently changing
his Master from finding great difficulty in maintaining a
large family from the Wages of labour.’</p>

<p>Meanwhile the rising had spread westward to Dorset and
Gloucestershire, and northward to Bucks. In Dorsetshire and
Gloucestershire, the disturbances were much like those in
Wiltshire. In Bucks, in addition to the usual agricultural
rising, with the breaking of threshing machines and the demand
for higher wages, there were riots in High Wycombe, and
considerable destruction of paper-making machinery by the
unemployed. Where special grievances existed in a village,
the labourers took advantage of the rising to seek redress for
them. Thus at Walden in Bucks, in addition to demanding
2s. a day wages with 6d. for each child and a reduction of
tithes, they made a special point of the improper distribution
of parish gifts. ‘Another person said that buns used to be
thrown from the church steeple and beer given away in the
churchyard, and a sermon preached on the bun day. Witness
(the parson) told them that the custom had ceased before he
came to the parish, but that he always preached a sermon on
St. George’s day, and two on Sundays, one of which was a
volunteer. He told them that he had consulted the Archdeacon
on the claim set up for the distribution of buns, and
that the Archdeacon was of opinion that no such claim could
be maintained.’</p>

<p>At Benson or Bensington, in Oxfordshire, the labourers,
after destroying some threshing machines, made a demonstration
against a proposal for enclosure. Mr. Newton, a
large proprietor, had just made one of many unsuccessful
attempts to obtain an Enclosure Act for the parish. Some
thousand persons assembled in the churchyard expecting
that Mr. Newton would try to fix the notice on the church<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[269]</span>
door, but as he did not venture to appear, they proceeded to
his house, and made him promise never again to attempt to
obtain an Enclosure Act.<a id="FNanchor_448" href="#Footnote_448" class="fnanchor">[448]</a></p>

<p>The movement for obtaining higher wages by this rude
collective bargaining was extinguished in the counties already
mentioned by the beginning of December, but disturbances
now developed over a larger area. A ‘daring riot’ took place
at Stotfold in Bedfordshire. The labourers met together to
demand exemption from taxes, dismissal of the assistant
overseer, and the raising of wages to 2s. a day. The last
demand was refused, on which the labourers set some straw
alight in a field to alarm the farmers. Mr. Whitbread, J.P.,
brought a hundred special constables, and arrested ten ringleaders,
after which the riot ceased. There were disturbances
in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex; and in many other counties
the propertied classes were terrified from time to time by the
news of fires. In Cambridgeshire there were meetings of
labourers to demand higher wages, in some places with
immediate success, and one magistrate was alarmed by
rumours of a design to march upon Cambridge itself on
market day. In Devonshire Lord Ebrington reported an
agitation for higher wages with encouragement from the
farmers. He was himself impressed by the low wages in
force, and had raised them in places still quiet; a mistake for
which he apologised. Even Hereford, ‘this hitherto submissive
and peaceful county,’ was not unaffected. In Northamptonshire
there were several fires, and also risings round
Peterborough, Oundle and Wellingborough, and a general
outbreak in the Midlands was thought to be imminent. Hayricks
began to blaze as far north as Carlisle. Swing letters were
delivered in Yorkshire, and in Lincolnshire the labourer was
said to be awakening to his own importance. There were in
fact few counties quite free from infection, and a leading
article appeared in the <i>Times</i> on 6th December, in which it
was stated that never had such a dangerous state of things
existed to such an extent in England, in the period of well-authenticated
records. ‘Let the rich be taught that Providence
will not suffer them to oppress their fellow creatures with
impunity. Here are tens of thousands of Englishmen, industrious,
kind-hearted, but broken-hearted beings, exasperated
into madness by insufficient food and clothing, by utter want
of necessaries for themselves and their unfortunate families.’</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[270]</span></p>
<p>Unfortunately Providence, to whom the <i>Times</i> attributed
these revolutionary sentiments, was not so close to the scene as
Lord Melbourne, whose sentiments on the subject were very
different. On 8th December he issued a circular, which gave a
death-blow to the hope that the magistrates would act as
mediators on behalf of the labourers. After blaming those
magistrates who, under intimidation, had advised the establishment
of a uniform rate of wages, the Home Secretary went on,
‘Reason and experience concur in proving that a compliance
with demands so unreasonable in themselves, and urged in such
a manner, can only lead, and probably within a very short
period of time, to the most disastrous results.’ He added that
the justices had ‘no general legal authority to settle the
amount of the wages of labour.’ The circular contained a
promise on the part of the Government that they would adopt
‘every practicable and reasonable measure’ for the alleviation
of the labourers’ privations.</p>

<p>From this time the magistrates were everywhere on the
alert for the first signs of life and movement among the
labourers, and they forbade meetings of any kind. In Suffolk
and Essex the labourers who took up the cry for higher wages
were promptly thrown into prison, and arbitrary arrests
became the custom. The movement was crushed, and the time
for retribution had come. The gaols were full to overflowing,
and the Government appointed Special Commissions to try the
rioters in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Berks, and Bucks.
Brougham, who was now enjoying the office in whose pompous
manner he must have lisped in his cradle, told the House of
Lords on 2nd December, ‘Within a few days from the time I am
addressing your Lordships, the sword of justice shall be unsheathed
to smite, if it be necessary, with a firm and vigorous
hand, the rebel against the law.’</p>

<p>The disturbances were over, but the panic had been such
that the upper classes could not persuade themselves that
England was yet tranquil. As late as Christmas Eve the
Privy Council gave orders to the archbishop to prepare ‘a
form of prayer to Almighty God, on account of the troubled
state of certain parts of the United Kingdom.’ The archbishop’s
composition, which was published after scores of men
and boys had been sentenced to transportation for life, must
have been recited with genuine feeling by those clergymen who
had either broken, or were about to break, their agreement
to surrender part of their tithes. One passage ran as follows:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[271]</span>
‘Restore, O Lord, to Thy people the quiet enjoyment of the
many and great blessings which we have received from Thy
bounty: defeat and frustrate the malice of wicked and turbulent
men, and turn their hearts: have pity, O Lord, on the
simple and ignorant, who have been led astray, and recall them
to a sense of their duty; and to persons of all ranks and
conditions in this country vouchsafe such a measure of Thy
grace, that our hearts being filled with true faith and devotion,
and cleansed from all evil affections, we may serve Thee with
one accord, in duty and loyalty to the King, in obedience to
the laws of the land, and in brotherly love towards each
other....’</p>

<p>We shall see in the next chapter what happened to ‘the
simple and ignorant’ who had fallen into the hands of the
English judges.</p>


<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[272]</span></p>

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII<br />

<span class="smaller">THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT</span></h2>
</div>


<p class="center">II</p>


<p>The bands of men and boys who had given their rulers one
moment of excitement and lively interest in the condition of
the poor had made themselves liable to ferocious penalties.
For the privileged classes had set up a code under which no
labourer could take a single step for the improvement of the
lot of his class without putting his life and liberties in a noose.
It is true that the savage laws which had been passed against
combination in 1799 and 1800 had been repealed in 1824, and
that even under the less liberal Act of the following year,
which rescinded the Act of 1824, it was no longer a penal
offence to form a Trades Union. But it is easy to see that the
labourers who tried to raise their wages were in fact on a
shelving and most perilous slope. If they used threats or
intimidation or molested or obstructed, either to get a labourer
to join with them or to get an employer to make concessions,
they were guilty of a misdemeanour punishable with three
months’ imprisonment. They were lucky if they ran no graver
risk than this. Few of the prosecutions at the Special
Commissions were under the Act of 1825. A body of men holding
a meeting in a village where famine and unemployment
were chronic, and where hardly any one had been taught to
read or write, might very soon find themselves becoming
what the Act of 1714 called a riotous assembly, and if a magistrate
took alarm and read the Riot Act, and they did not
disperse within one hour, every one of them might be punished
as a felon. The hour’s interval did not mean an hour’s grace,
for, as Mr. Justice Alderson told the court at Dorchester,
within that hour ‘all persons, even private individuals, may do
anything, using force even to the last extremity to prevent the
commission of a felony.’</p>

<p>There were at least three ways in which labourers meeting
together to demonstrate for higher wages ran a risk of losing
their lives, if any of their fellows got out of hand from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[273]</span>
temper, or from drink, or from hunger and despair. Most
of the prosecutions before the Special Commissions were prosecutions
under three Acts of 1827 and 1828, consolidating the
law on the subject of offences against property and offences
against the person. Under the eighth section of one Act
(7 and 8 George <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> c. 30), any persons riotously or tumultuously
assembled together who destroyed any house, stable,
coach-house, outhouse, barn, granary, or any building or
erection or machinery used in carrying on any trade or manufacture
were to suffer death as felons. In this Act there is no
definition of riot, and therefore ‘the common law definition of
a riot is resorted to, and in such a case if any one of His Majesty’s
subjects was terrified there was a sufficient terror and alarm
to substantiate that part of the charge.’<a id="FNanchor_449" href="#Footnote_449" class="fnanchor">[449]</a> Under the sixth
section of another Act, any person who robbed any other
person of any chattel, money, or valuable security was to
suffer death as a felon. Now if a mob presented itself before a
householder with a demand for money, and the householder
in fear gave even a few coppers, any person who was in that
mob, whether he had anything to do with this particular
transaction or not, whether he was aware or ignorant of it,
was guilty of robbery, and liable to the capital penalty. Under
section 12 of the Act of the following year, generally known
as Lansdowne’s Act, which amended Ellenborough’s Act of
1803, it was a capital offence to attempt to shoot at a person,
or to stab, cut, or wound him, with intent to murder, rob, or
maim. Under this Act, as it was interpreted, if an altercation
arose and any violence was offered by a single individual in
the mob, the lives of the whole band were forfeit. This was
put very clearly by Baron Vaughan: ‘There seems to be some
impression that unless the attack on an individual is made
with some deadly weapons, those concerned are not liable
to capital punishment; but it should be made known to all
persons that if the same injury were inflicted by a blow of a
stone, all and every person forming part of a riotous assembly
is equally guilty as he whose hand may have thrown it, and all
alike are liable to death.’ Under section 4 of one Act of 1827
the penalty for destroying a threshing machine was transportation
for seven years, and under section 17 the penalty
for firing a rick was death. These were the terrors hanging
over the village labourers of whom several hundreds were
now awaiting their trial.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[274]</span></p>
<p>The temper of the judges was revealed in their charges to
the Grand Juries. In opening the Maidstone Assizes on
14th December, Mr. Justice Bosanquet<a id="FNanchor_450" href="#Footnote_450" class="fnanchor">[450]</a> declared that though
there might be some distress it was much exaggerated, and
that he was sure that those whom he had the honour to address
would find it not only their duty but their pleasure to lend an
ear to the wants of the poor.<a id="FNanchor_451" href="#Footnote_451" class="fnanchor">[451]</a> Mr. Justice Taunton<a id="FNanchor_452" href="#Footnote_452" class="fnanchor">[452]</a> was even
more reassuring on this subject at the Lewes Assizes: the
distress was less than it had been twelve months before. ‘I
regret to say,’ he went on, ‘there are persons who exaggerate
the distress and raise up barriers between different classes&mdash;who
use the most inflammatory language&mdash;who represent the
rich as oppressors of the poor. It would be impertinent in
me to say anything to you as to your treatment of labourers
or servants. That man must know little of the gentry of
England, whether connected with the town or country, who
represents them as tyrants to the poor, as not sympathising
in their distress, and as not anxious to relieve their burdens
and to promote their welfare and happiness.’<a id="FNanchor_453" href="#Footnote_453" class="fnanchor">[453]</a> In opening the
Special Commission at Winchester Baron Vaughan<a id="FNanchor_454" href="#Footnote_454" class="fnanchor">[454]</a> alluded
to the theory that the tumults had arisen from distress and
admitted that it might be partly true, but, he continued,
‘every man possessed of the feelings common to our nature
must deeply lament it, and endeavour to alleviate it (as you
gentlemen no doubt have done and will continue to do), by
every means which Providence has put within his power.’
If individuals were aggrieved by privations and injuries, they
must apply to the Legislature, which alone could afford them
relief, ‘but it can never be tolerated in any country which
professes to acknowledge the obligations of municipal law,
that any man or body of men should be permitted to sit in
judgment upon their own wrongs, or to arrogate to themselves
the power of redressing them. To suffer it would be to relapse
into the barbarism of savage life and to dissolve the very elements
by which society is held together.’<a id="FNanchor_455" href="#Footnote_455" class="fnanchor">[455]</a> The opinions of
the Bench on the sections of the Act (7 and 8 George <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> c. 30)
under which men could be hung for assembling riotously and
breaking machinery were clearly expressed by Mr. Justice<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[275]</span>
Parke<a id="FNanchor_456" href="#Footnote_456" class="fnanchor">[456]</a> (afterwards Lord Wensleydale) at Salisbury: ‘If
that law ceases to be administered with due firmness, and men
look to it in vain for the security of their rights, our wealth
and power will soon be at an end, and our capital and industry
would be transferred to some more peaceful country, whose laws
are more respected or better enforced.’<a id="FNanchor_457" href="#Footnote_457" class="fnanchor">[457]</a> By another section of
that Act seven years was fixed as the maximum penalty for
breaking a threshing machine. Mr. Justice Alderson<a id="FNanchor_458" href="#Footnote_458" class="fnanchor">[458]</a> chafed
under this restriction, and he told two men, Case and Morgan,
who were found guilty at the Salisbury Special Commission of
going into a neighbouring parish and breaking a threshing
machine, that had the Legislature foreseen such crimes as
theirs, it would have enabled the court to give them a severer
sentence.<a id="FNanchor_459" href="#Footnote_459" class="fnanchor">[459]</a></p>

<p>Mr. Justice Park<a id="FNanchor_460" href="#Footnote_460" class="fnanchor">[460]</a> was equally stern and uncompromising
in defending the property of the followers of the carpenter of
Nazareth against the unreasoning misery of the hour. Summing
up in a case at Aylesbury, in which one of the charges
was that of attempting to procure a reduction of tithes, he
remarked with warmth: ‘It was highly insolent in such men to
require of gentlemen, who had by an expensive education
qualified themselves to discharge the sacred duties of a Minister
of the Gospel, to descend from that station and reduce themselves
to the situation of common labourers.’<a id="FNanchor_461" href="#Footnote_461" class="fnanchor">[461]</a></p>

<p>Few judges could resist the temptation to introduce into
their charges a homily on the economic benefits of machinery.
Mr. Justice Park was an exception, for he observed at Aylesbury
that the question of the advantages of machinery was outside
the province of the judges, ‘and much mischief often resulted
from persons stepping out of their line of duty.’<a id="FNanchor_462" href="#Footnote_462" class="fnanchor">[462]</a> Mr. Justice
Alderson took a different view, and the very next day he was
expounding the truths of political economy at Dorchester,
starting with what he termed the ‘beautiful and simple
illustration’ of the printing press.<a id="FNanchor_463" href="#Footnote_463" class="fnanchor">[463]</a> The illustration must have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[276]</span>
seemed singularly intimate and convincing to the labourers in
the dock who had never been taught their letters.</p>

<p>Such was the temper of the judges. Who and what were the
prisoners before them? After the suppression of the riots,
the magistrates could pick out culprits at their leisure, and
when a riot had involved the whole of the village the temptation
to get rid by this method of persons who for one reason
or another were obnoxious to the authorities was irresistible.
Hunt, speaking in the House of Commons,<a id="FNanchor_464" href="#Footnote_464" class="fnanchor">[464]</a> quoted the case of
Hindon; seven men had been apprehended for rioting and
they were all poachers. Many of the prisoners had already
spent a month in an overcrowded prison; almost all of them
were poor men; the majority could not read or write.<a id="FNanchor_465" href="#Footnote_465" class="fnanchor">[465]</a> Few
could afford counsel, and it must be remembered that counsel
could not address the court on behalf of prisoners who were
being tried for breaking machines, or for belonging to a mob
that asked for money or destroyed property. By the rules of
the gaol, the prisoners at Salisbury were not allowed to see
their attorney except in the presence of the gaoler or his
servant. The labourers’ ignorance of the law was complete and
inevitable. Many of them thought that the King or the
Government or the magistrates had given orders that machines
were to be broken. Most of them supposed that if a person
from whom they demanded money threw it down or gave it
without the application of physical force, there was no question
of robbery. We have an illustration of this illusion in a trial
at Winchester when Isaac Hill, junior, who was charged with
breaking a threshing machine near Micheldever, for which
the maximum penalty was seven years, pleaded in his defence
that he had not broken the machine and that all that he did
‘was to ask the prosecutor civilly for the money, which the
mob took from him, and the prosecutor gave it to him, and
that he thanked him very kindly for it,’<a id="FNanchor_466" href="#Footnote_466" class="fnanchor">[466]</a> an admission which
made him liable to a death penalty. A prisoner at Salisbury,
when he was asked what he had to say in his defence to the
jury, replied: ‘Now, my Lord, I ‘se got nothing to say to ’em,
I doant knaow any on ’em.’<a id="FNanchor_467" href="#Footnote_467" class="fnanchor">[467]</a> The prisoners were at this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[277]</span>
further disadvantage that all the witnesses whom they could
call as to their share in the conduct of a mob had themselves
been in the mob, and were thus liable to prosecution. Thus
when James Lush (who was afterwards selected for execution)
and James Toomer appealed to a man named Lane, who had
just been acquitted on a previous charge, to give evidence
that they had not struck Mr. Pinniger in a scuffle, Mr. Justice
Alderson cautioned Lane that if he acknowledged that he had
been in the mob he would be committed. Lane chose the safer
part of silence.<a id="FNanchor_468" href="#Footnote_468" class="fnanchor">[468]</a> In another case a witness had the courage to
incriminate himself. When the brothers Simms were being tried
for extorting money from Parson Easton’s wife, a case which we
have already described, Henry Bunce, called as a witness for
the defence, voluntarily declared, in spite of a caution from
the judge (Alderson), that he had been present himself and that
William Simms did not use the expression ‘blood or money.’
He was at once ordered into custody. ‘The prisoner immediately
sprung over the bar into the dock with his former
comrades, seemingly unaffected by the decision of the learned
judge.’<a id="FNanchor_469" href="#Footnote_469" class="fnanchor">[469]</a></p>

<p>Perhaps the darkest side of the business was the temptation
held out to prisoners awaiting trial to betray their comrades.
Immunity or a lighter sentence was freely offered to those who
would give evidence. Stokes, who was found guilty at Dorchester
of breaking a threshing machine, was sentenced by Mr.
Justice Alderson to a year’s imprisonment, with the explanation
that he was not transported because ‘after you were taken
into custody, you gave very valuable information which tended
greatly to further the ends of justice.’<a id="FNanchor_470" href="#Footnote_470" class="fnanchor">[470]</a> These transactions
were not often dragged into the daylight, but some negotiations
of this character were made public in the trial of Mr. Deacle
next year. Mr. Deacle, a well-to-do gentleman farmer, was
tried at the Lent Assizes at Winchester for being concerned in
the riots. One of the witnesses against him, named Collins,
admitted in cross-examination that he believed he should
have been prosecuted himself, if he had not promised to give
evidence against Mr. Deacle; another witness, named Barnes, a
carpenter, stated in cross-examination that during the trials at
the Special Commission, ‘he being in the dock, and about to
be put on his trial, the gaoler Beckett called him out, and took<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[278]</span>
him into a room where there were Walter Long, a magistrate,
and another person, whom he believed to be Bingham Baring,
who told him that he should not be put upon his trial if he
would come and swear against Deacle.’ When the next witness
was about to be cross-examined, the counsel for the prosecution
abruptly abandoned the case.<a id="FNanchor_471" href="#Footnote_471" class="fnanchor">[471]</a></p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The first Special Commission was opened at Winchester with
suitable pomp on 18th December. Not only the prison but the
whole town was crowded, and the inhabitants of Winchester
determined to make the best of the windfall. The jurymen
and the <i>Times</i> special correspondent complained bitterly of
the abnormal cost of living, the latter mentioning that in
addition to extraordinary charges for beds, 5s. a day was
exacted for firing and tallow candles, bedroom fire not included.
The three judges sent down as commissioners were Baron
Vaughan, Mr. Justice Parke, and Mr. Justice Alderson. With
them were associated two other commissioners, Mr. Sturges
Bourne, of assistant overseer fame, and Mr. Richard Pollen.
The Duke of Wellington, as Lord-Lieutenant, sat on the Bench.
The Attorney-General, Mr. Sergeant Wilde, and others appeared
to prosecute for the Crown. The County took up every charge,
the Government only the more serious ones.</p>

<p>There were three hundred prisoners, most of them
charged with extorting money by threats or with breaking
machinery. What chance had they of a fair trial? They
started with the disabilities already described. They were
thrown by batches into the dock; the pitiless law was explained
to the jury; extenuating circumstances were ruled out
as irrelevant. ‘We do not come here,’ said Mr. Justice
Alderson, ‘to inquire into grievances. We come here to decide
law.’ But though evidence about wages or distress was not
admitted, the judges did not scruple to give their own views of
the social conditions which had produced these disturbances.
Perhaps the most flagrant example was provided by a trial
which happily was for a misdemeanour only. Seven men were
indicted for conspiring together and riotously assembling for
the purpose of raising wages and for compelling others to join
them. The labourers of the parish of Fawley had combined
together for two objects, the first to raise their wages, which
stood at 9s. a week, the second to get rid of the assistant
overseer, who had introduced a parish cart, to which he had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[279]</span>
harnessed women and boys, amongst others an idiot woman,
named Jane Stevens. The labourers determined to break up
the cart, but they desisted on the promise of a farmer that a
horse should be bought for it. Lord Cavan was the large
landowner of the parish. He paid his men as a rule 9s. a week,
but two of them received 10s. The mob came up to his house
to demand an increase of wages: Lord Cavan was out, quelling
rioters elsewhere. Lady Cavan came down to see them.
‘Seeing you are my neighbours and armed,’ said she, ‘yet, as
I am an unprotected woman, I am sure you will do no harm.’
The labourers protested that they meant no harm, and they
did no harm. ‘I asked them,’ said Lady Cavan afterwards, in
evidence, ‘why they rose then, there was no apparent distress
round Eaglehurst, and the wages were the same as they had
been for several years. I have been in several of their cottages
and never saw any appearance of distress. They said they
had been oppressed long and would bear it no longer.’ One
man told her that he had 9s. a week wages and 3s. from the
parish, he had heard that the 3s. was to be discontinued.
With the common-sense characteristic of her class Lady Cavan
assured him that he was not improving his position by idling.
The labourers impressed the Cavan men, and went on their
peaceful way round the parish. The farmers who gave
evidence for the prosecution were allowed to assert that there
was no distress, but when it came to evidence for the defence
a stricter standard of relevancy was exacted. One witness for
the prisoners said of the labourers: ‘The men were in very great
distress; many of the men had only a few potatoes in their bag
when they came to work.’ ‘The learned judges objected to
this course of examination being continued: it might happen
that through drinking a man might suffer distress.’ The
Attorney-General, in his closing speech, asserted again that the
prisoners did not seem to have been in distress. Baron
Vaughan, in summing up, said that men were not to assemble
and conspire together for the purpose of determining what their
wages should be. ‘That which at first might be in itself a
lawful act, might in the event become illegal.... A respectful
statement or representation of their grievances was legal, and
to which no one would object, but the evidence, if they believed
it, showed that the conduct of this assembly was far from being
respectful. No one could feel more for the distresses of the
people than he did, but he would never endure that persons
should by physical strength compel wages to be raised. There<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[280]</span>
was no country where charity fell in a purer stream than in
this. Let the man make his appeal in a proper and respectful
manner, and he might be assured that appeal would never be
heard in vain.... His Lordship spoke very highly of the
conduct of Lady Cavan. She had visited the cottages of all
those who lived in the neighbourhood, she knew they were not
distressed, and she also felt confident from her kindness to
them that they would not offer her any violence.’ All seven
were found guilty; four were sentenced to six months hard
labour, and three to three months.</p>

<p>Very few, however, of the cases at Winchester were simple
misdemeanours, for in most instances, in addition to asking
for higher wages, the labourers had made themselves liable to a
prosecution for felony, either by breaking a threshing machine
or by asking for money. Those prisoners who had taken part
in the Fordingbridge riots, or in the destruction of machinery
near Andover, or in the demolition of the Headley Workhouse,
were sentenced to death or to transportation for life. Case
after case was tried in which prisoners from different villages
were indicted for assault and robbery. The features varied
little, and the spectators began to find the proceedings monotonous.
Most of the agricultural population of Hampshire
had made itself liable to the death penalty, if the authorities
cared to draw the noose. The three hundred who actually
appeared in Court were like the men on whom the tower of
Siloam fell.</p>

<p>A case to which the prosecution attached special importance
arose out of an affair at the house of Mr. Eyre Coote. A
mob of forty persons, some of whom had iron bars, presented
themselves before Mr. Coote’s door at two o’clock in the
morning. Two bands of men had already visited Mr. Coote
that evening, and he had given them beer: this third band
was a party of stragglers. Mr. Coote stationed his ten
servants in the portico, and when the mob arrived he asked
them, ‘What do you want, my lads?’ ‘Money,’ was the
answer. ‘Money,’ said Mr. Coote, ‘you shan’t have.’ One
of the band seemed to Mr. Coote about to strike him. Mr.
Coote seized him, nine of the mob were knocked down and
taken, and the rest fled. Six of the men were prosecuted
for feloniously demanding money. Baron Vaughan remarked
that outrages like this made one wonder whether one was in a
civilised country, and he proceeded to raise its moral tone by
sentencing all the prisoners to transportation for life, except<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[281]</span>
one, Henry Eldridge, who was reserved for execution. He
had been already capitally convicted of complicity in the
Fordingbridge riots, and this attempt to ‘enter the sanctuary
of Mr. Eyre Coote’s home’ following upon that crime, rendered
him a suitable ‘sacrifice to be made on the altar of the
offended justice’ of his country.</p>

<p>In many of the so-called robberies punished by the Special
Commissions the sums taken were trifling. George Steel, aged
eighteen, was sentenced to transportation for life for obtaining
a shilling, when he was in liquor, from Jane Neale: William
Sutton, another boy of eighteen, was found guilty of taking
4d. in a drunken frolic: Sutton, who was a carter boy receiving
1s. 6d. a week and his food, was given an excellent character
by his master, who declared that he had never had a better
servant. The jury recommended him to mercy, and the
judges responded by sentencing him to death and banishing
him for life. George Clerk, aged twenty, and E. C. Nutbean,
aged eighteen, paid the same price for 3d. down and the
promise of beer at the Greyhound. Such cases were not
exceptional, as any one who turns to the reports of the trials
will see.</p>

<p>The evidence on which prisoners were convicted was often
of the most shadowy kind. Eight young agricultural labourers,
of ages varying from eighteen to twenty-five, were found
guilty of riotously assembling in the parish of St. Lawrence
Wootten and feloniously stealing £2 from William Lutely
Sclater of Tangier Park. ‘We want to get a little satisfaction
from you’ was the phrase they used. Two days later another
man, named William Farmer, was charged with the same
offence. Mr. Sclater thought that Farmer was like the man
in the mob who blew a trumpet or horn, but could not swear
to his identity. Other witnesses swore that he was with the
mob elsewhere, and said, ‘Money wa want and money wa will
hae.’ On this evidence he was found guilty, and though Mr.
Justice Alderson announced that he felt warranted in
recommending that he should not lose his life, ‘yet, it was
his duty,’ he continued, ‘to state that he should for this
violent and disgraceful outrage be sent out of the country,
and separated for life from those friends and connections
which were dear to him here: that he should have to employ
the rest of his days in labour, at the will and for the profit of
another, to show the people of the class to which the prisoner
belonged that they cannot with impunity lend their aid to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[282]</span>
such outrages against the peace and security of person and
property.’</p>

<p>We have seen that at the time of the riots it was freely
stated that the farmers incited the labourers to make disturbances.
Hunt went so far as to say in the House of
Commons that in nineteen cases out of twenty the farmers
encouraged the labourers to break the threshing machines.
The county authorities evidently thought it unwise to
prosecute the farmers, although it was proved in evidence
that there were several farmers present at the destruction of
the Headley Workhouse, and at the demonstration at Mr.
Cobbold’s house. Occasionally a farmer, in testifying to a
prisoner’s character, would admit that he had been in a mob
himself. In such cases the judge administered rebukes, but
the prosecution took no action. There was, however, one
exception. A small farmer, John Boys, of the parish of
Owslebury, had thrown himself heartily into the labourers’
cause. A number of small farmers met and decided that the
labourers’ wages ought to be raised. Boys agreed to take a
paper round for signature. The paper ran as follows: ‘We
the undersigned are willing to give 2s. per day for able-bodied
married men, and 9s. per week for single men, on consideration
of our rents and tithes being abated in proportion.’ In
similar cases, as a rule, the farmers left it to the labourers to
collect signatures, and Boys, by undertaking the work himself,
made himself a marked man. He had been in a mob which
extorted money from Lord Northesk’s steward at Owslebury,
and for this he was indicted for felony. But the jury, to the
chagrin of the prosecution, acquitted him. What followed is
best described in the report of Sergeant Wilde’s speech in the
House of Commons (21st July 1831). ‘Boyce was tried and
acquitted: but he (Mr. Wilde) being unable to account for the
acquittal, considering the evidence to have been clear against
him, and feeling that although the jury were most respectable
men, they might possibly entertain some sympathy for him
in consequence of his situation in life, thought it his duty to
send a communication to the Attorney-General, stating that
Boyce was deeply responsible for the acts which had taken
place: that he thought he should not be allowed to escape, and
recommending that he be tried before a different jury in the
other Court. The Attorney-General sent to him (Mr. Wilde) to
come into the other Court, and the result was that Boyce was
then tried and convicted.’ In the other more complaisant<span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[283]</span>
Court, Farmer Boys and James Fussell, described as a genteel
young man of about twenty, living with his mother, were found
guilty of heading a riotous mob for reducing rents and tithes
and sentenced to seven years’ transportation.<a id="FNanchor_472" href="#Footnote_472" class="fnanchor">[472]</a></p>

<p>This was not the only case in which the sympathies of the
jury created a difficulty. The Home Office Papers contain a
letter from Dr. Quarrier, a Hampshire magistrate, who had
been particularly vigorous in suppressing riots, stating that
Sir James Parke discharged a jury at the Special Commission
‘under the impression that they were reluctant to convict the
Prisoners which was more strongly impressed upon the mind
of the Judge, by its being reported to his Lordship that “some
of the Gosport Jurors had said, while travelling in the stage
coach to Winchester, that they would not convict in cases
where the Labourers had been driven to excess by Poverty
and low Wages!” It was ascertained that some of those
empannelled upon the acquitting Jury were from Gosport,
which confirmed the learned Judge in the determination to
discharge them.’<a id="FNanchor_473" href="#Footnote_473" class="fnanchor">[473]</a></p>

<p>An interesting feature of the trials at Winchester was the
number of men just above the condition of agricultural
labourers who threw in their lot with the poor: the village
mechanics, the wheelwrights, carpenters, joiners, smiths, and
the bricklayers, shoemakers, shepherds and small holders
were often prominent in the disturbances. To the judges
this fact was a riddle. The threshing machines had done
these men no injury; they had not known the sting of hunger;
till the time of the riots their characters had been as a rule
irreproachable. <i>Nemo repente turpissimus fuit</i>, and yet
apparently these persons had suddenly, without warning,
turned into the ‘wicked and turbulent men’ of the archbishop’s
prayer. Such culprits deserved, in the opinions of
the bench, severer punishment than the labourers, whom their
example should have kept in the paths of obedience and
peace.<a id="FNanchor_474" href="#Footnote_474" class="fnanchor">[474]</a> Where the law permitted, they were sentenced to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[284]</span>
transportation for life. One heinous offender of this type,
Gregory, a carpenter, was actually earning 18s. a week in the
service of Lord Winchester. But the most interesting instances
were two brothers, Joseph and Robert Mason, who lived at
Bullington. They rented three or four acres, kept a cow,
and worked for the neighbouring farmers as well. Joseph,
who was thirty-two, had a wife and one child; Robert, who was
twenty-four, was unmarried. Between them they supported
a widowed mother. Their characters were exemplary, and
the most eager malice could detect no blot upon their past.
But their opinions were dangerous: they regularly took in
Cobbett’s <i>Register</i> and read it aloud to twenty or thirty of
the villagers. Further, Joseph had carried on foot a petition
for reform to the king at Brighton from a hundred and seventy-seven
‘persons, belonging to the working and labouring
classes’ of Wonston, Barton Stacey and Bullington, and
was reported to have given some trouble to the king’s porter
by an importunate demand for an audience. The recital of
these facts gave rise to much merriment at his trial, and was
not considered irrelevant by judges who ruled out all allusions
to distress.<a id="FNanchor_475" href="#Footnote_475" class="fnanchor">[475]</a> An interesting light is thrown on the history of
this petition by a fragment of a letter, written by Robert
Mason to a friend, which somehow fell into the hands of a
Captain Thompson of Longparish, and was forwarded by him
to the Home Office as a valuable piece of evidence.</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>‘<i>P.S.</i>&mdash;Since I wrote the above I have saw and talked with
two persons who say “Bullington Barton and Sutton has sent
a petition and why not Longparish Hursborne and Wherwell
send another.” I think as much, to be sure if we had all
signed one, one journey and expense would have served but
what is expence? Why I would engage to carry a Petition
and deliver it at St. James for 30 shillings, and to a place
like Longparish what is that? If you do send one pray do
not let Church property escape your notice. There is the
Church which cost Longparish I should think nearly £1500
yearly: yes and there is an old established Chaple which I will
be bound does not cost £25 annually. For God sake....’
(illegible).</p>
</div>

<p>The first charge brought against the Masons was that of
robbing Sir Thomas Baring’s steward of £10 at East Stretton.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[285]</span>
The money had been taken by one of the mobs; the Masons
were acquitted. They were next put on their trial together
with William Winkworth, a cobbler and a fellow reader of
Cobbett, and ten others, for a similar offence. This time they
were accused of demanding £2 or £5 from Mr. W. Dowden of
Micheldever. The Attorney-General, in opening the case,
drew attention to the circumstances of the Masons and Winkworth,
saying that the offence with which they were charged
was of a deeper dye, because they were men of superior education
and intelligence. A humane clergyman, Mr. Cockerton,
curate of Stoke Cheriton, gave evidence to the effect that if
the men had been met in a conciliatory temper in the morning
they would have dispersed. Joseph Mason and William
Winkworth were found guilty, and sentenced, in the words
of the judge, to ‘be cut off from all communion with
society’ for the rest of their lives. Robert Mason was still
unconvicted, but he was not allowed to escape. The next
charge against him was that of going with a mob which extorted
five shillings from the Rev. J. Joliffe at Barton Stacey. He
admitted that he had accompanied the mob, partly because
the labourers had urged him to do so, partly because he hoped
that Mr. Joliffe, being accustomed to public speaking, would
be able to persuade the labourers to disperse before any harm
was done. There was no evidence to show that he had anything
to do with the demand for money. He was found guilty
and sentenced to transportation for life. When asked what
he had to say for himself, he replied, ‘If the learned Counsel,
who has so painted my conduct to you, was present at that place
and wore a smock frock instead of a gown, and a straw hat
instead of a wig, he would now be standing in this dock instead
of being seated where he is.’</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>Six men were reserved for execution, and told that they must
expect no mercy on this side of the grave: Cooper, the leader
in the Fordingbridge riots; Holdaway, who had headed the
attack on Headley Workhouse; Gilmore, who had entered the
justices’ room in Andover ‘in rather a violent manner’ and
parleyed with the justices, and afterwards, in spite of their
remonstrances, been a ringleader in the destruction of a foundry
in the parish of Upper Clatford; Eldridge, who had taken part
in the Fordingbridge riot and also ‘invaded the sanctuary’ of
Mr. Eyre Coote’s home; James Aunalls, a lad of nineteen, who
had extorted money at night with threats of a fire, from a person<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[286]</span>
whom he bade look over the hills, where a fire was subsequently
seen, and Henry Cook. Cook was a ploughboy of nineteen,
who could neither read nor write. For most of his life, since
the age of ten, he had been a farm hand. For six months
before the riots he had been employed at sawing, at 10s. a week,
but at the time of the rising he was out of work. After the riots
he got work as a ploughboy at about 5s. a week till his arrest.
Like the other lads of the neighbourhood he had gone round
with a mob, and he was found guilty, with Joseph Mason, of
extorting money from William Dowden. For this he might
have got off with transportation for life, but another charge
was preferred against him. Mr. William Bingham Baring, J.P.,
tried, with the help of some of his servants, to quell a riot at
Northingdon Down Farm. Silcock, who seemed the leader of
the rioters, declared that they would break every machine.
Bingham Baring made Silcock repeat these words several times
and then seized him. Cook then aimed a blow at Bingham
Baring with a sledge-hammer and struck his hat. So far there
was no dispute as to what had happened. One servant of
the Barings gave evidence to the effect that he had saved his
master’s life by preventing Cook from striking again; another
afterwards put in a sworn deposition to the effect that Cook
never attempted to strike a second blow. All witnesses
agreed that Bingham Baring’s hat had suffered severely:
some of them said that he himself had been felled to the ground.
Whatever his injuries may have been, he was seen out a few
hours later, apparently in perfect health; next day he was
walking the streets of Winchester; two days later he was
presented at Court, and within a week he was strong enough to
administer a sharp blow himself with his stick to a handcuffed
and unconvicted prisoner, a display of zeal for which he had to
pay £50. Cook did not put up any defence. He was sentenced
to death.</p>

<p>Perhaps it was felt that this victim to justice was in
some respects ill chosen, for reasons for severity were soon
invented. He was a heavy, stolid, unattractive boy, and his
appearance was taken to indicate a brutal and vicious disposition.
Stories of his cruelties to animals were spread abroad.
‘The fate of Henry Cook,’ said the <i>Times</i> correspondent
(3rd January 1831), ‘excites no commiseration. From everything
I have heard of him, justice has seldom met with a more
appropriate sacrifice. He shed some tears shortly after hearing
his doom, but has since relapsed into a brutal insensibility to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[287]</span>
his fate.’ His age was raised to thirty, his wages to 30s. a
week. Denman described him in the House of Commons, after
his execution, as a carpenter earning 30s. a week, who had
struck down one of the family of his benefactor, and had only
been prevented from killing his victim by the interposition of
a more faithful individual. This is the epitaph written on
this obscure ploughboy of nineteen by the upper classes.
His own fellows, who probably knew him at least as well as
a Denman or a Baring, regarded his punishment as murder.
Cobbett tells us that the labourers of Micheldever subscribed
their pennies to get Denman’s misstatements about Cook
taken out of the newspapers. When his body was brought
home after execution, the whole parish went out to meet it,
and he was buried in Micheldever churchyard in solemn silence.</p>

<p>Bingham Baring himself, as has been mentioned, happened
to offend against the law by an act of violence at this time.
He was not like Cook, a starving boy, but the son of a man
who was reputed to have made seven millions of money, and
was called by Erskine the first merchant in Europe. He did
not strike his victim in a riot, but in cold blood. His victim
could not defend himself, for he was handcuffed, being taken to
prison on a charge on which he was subsequently acquitted.
The man struck was a Mr. Deacle, a small farmer who had had
his own threshing machine broken, and was afterwards arrested
with his wife, by Bingham Baring and a posse of magistrates,
on suspicion of encouraging the rioters. Deacle’s story was
that Baring and the other magistrates concerned in the arrest
treated his wife with great insolence in the cart in which they
drove the Deacles to prison, and that Bingham Baring further
struck him with a stick. For this Deacle got £50 damages
in an action he brought against Baring. ‘This verdict,’ said
the <i>Morning Herald</i>, ‘seemed to excite the greatest astonishment;
for most of the Bar and almost every one in Court said,
if on the jury, they would have given at least £5000 for so gross
and wanton an insult and unfeeling conduct towards those who
had not offered the least resistance; the defendants not addressing
the slightest evidence in palliation or attempting to
justify it.’ The judge, in summing up, ‘could not help
remarking that the handcuffing was, to say the least of it, a
very harsh proceeding towards a lady and gentleman who had
been perfectly civil and quiet.’ Meanwhile the case of the
magistrates against the Deacles had collapsed in the most
inglorious manner. Though they had handcuffed these two<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[288]</span>
unresisting people, they had thought it wiser not to proceed
against them. Deacle, however, insisted on being tried, and
by threatening the magistrates with an action, he obliged them
to prosecute. He was tried at the Assizes, and, as we have
seen, the trial came to an abrupt conclusion under circumstances
that threw the gravest suspicion on the methods of the
authorities.<a id="FNanchor_476" href="#Footnote_476" class="fnanchor">[476]</a> Meanwhile the treatment these two persons had
received (and we can imagine from their story how innocent
poor people, without friends or position, were handled) had
excited great indignation, and the newspapers were full of it.
There were petitions sent up to Parliament for a Committee of
Inquiry. Now the class to which Cook was unlucky enough to
belong had never sent a single member to Parliament, but the
Baring family had five Members in the House of Commons at
this very moment, one of whom had taken part with Bingham
Baring in the violent arrest of the Deacles. The five, moreover,
were very happily distributed, one of them being Junior Lord
of the Treasury in Grey’s Government and husband of Grey’s
niece, and another an important member of the Opposition
and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer under Peel.
The Barings therefore were in less danger of misrepresentation
or misunderstanding; the motion for a Committee was rejected
by a great majority on the advice of Althorp and Peel; the
leader of the House of Commons came forward to testify that
the Barings were friends of his, and the discussion ended in a
chorus of praise for the family that had been judged so harshly
outside the walls of Parliament.</p>

<p>When the Special Commission had finished its labours at
Winchester, 101 prisoners had been capitally convicted; of
these 6 were left for execution. The remaining 95 were, with
few exceptions, transported for life. Of the other prisoners
tried, 36 were sentenced to transportation for various periods,
65 were imprisoned with hard labour, and 67 were acquitted.
Not a single life had been taken by the rioters, not a single
person wounded. Yet the riots in this county alone were
punished by more than a hundred capital convictions, or
almost double the number that followed the devilish doings of
Lord George Gordon’s mob. The spirit in which Denman
regarded the proceedings is illustrated by his speech in the
House of Commons on the amnesty debate: ‘No fewer than
a hundred persons were capitally convicted at Winchester, of
offences for every one of which their lives might have been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[289]</span>
justly taken, and ought to have been taken, if examples to such
an extent had been necessary.’<a id="FNanchor_477" href="#Footnote_477" class="fnanchor">[477]</a></p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>These sentences came like a thunderclap on the people of
Winchester, and all classes, except the magistrates, joined in
petitions to the Government for mercy. The <i>Times</i> correspondent
wrote as <span class="lock">follows:&mdash;</span></p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p class="i4">

‘<span class="smcap">Winchester</span>, Friday Morning, <i>7th Jan.</i><br />
</p>

<p>‘The scenes of distress in and about the jail are most terrible.
The number of men who are to be torn from their homes and
connexions is so great that there is scarcely a hamlet in the
county into which anguish and tribulation have not entered.
Wives, sisters, mothers, children, beset the gates daily, and the
governor of the jail informs me that the scenes he is obliged to
witness at the time of locking up the prison are truly heart-breaking.</p>

<p>‘You will have heard before this of the petitions which have
been presented to the Home Office from Gosport, Portsmouth,
Romsey, Whitchurch, and Basingstoke, praying for an extension
of mercy to all the men who now lie under sentence of death.
A similar petition has been got up in this city. It is signed by
the clergy of the Low Church, some of the bankers, and every
tradesman in the town without exception. Application was made
to the clergy of the Cathedral for their signatures, but they
refused to give them, except conditionally, upon reasons which
I cannot comprehend. They told the petitioners, as I am
informed, that they would not sign any such petition unless the
grand jury and the magistracy of the county previously affixed
their names to it. Now such an answer, as it appears to me, is an
admission on their part that no mischief would ensue from not
carrying into effect the dreadful sentence of the law; for I cannot
conceive that if they were of opinion that mischief would
ensue from it, they would sign the petition, even though it were
recommended by all the talent and respectability of the Court of
Quarter Sessions. I can understand the principles on which
that man acts, who asserts and laments the necessity of vindicating
the majesty of the law by the sacrifice of human life; but
I cannot understand the reasons of those who, admitting that
there is no necessity for the sword of justice to strike the
offender, decline to call upon the executive government to stay
its arm, and make their application for its mercy dependent on
the judgment, or it may be the caprice, of an influential aristocracy.
Surely, of all classes of society, the clergy is that which
ought not to be backward in the remission of offences. They are
daily preaching mercy to their flocks, and it wears but an ill grace
when they are seen refusing their consent to a practical application<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[290]</span>
of their own doctrines. Whatever my own opinion may be,
as a faithful recorder of the opinions of those around me, I am
bound to inform you, that, except among the magistracy of the
county, there is a general, I had almost said a universal, opinion
among all ranks of society, that no good will be effected by
sacrificing human life.’<a id="FNanchor_478" href="#Footnote_478" class="fnanchor">[478]</a></p>
</div>

<p>This outburst of public opinion saved the lives of four of the
six men who had been left for execution. The two who were
hung were Cooper and Cook. But the Government and the
judges were determined that the lessons of civilisation should
not be wanting in impressiveness or in dignity. They compelled
all the prisoners who had been condemned by the
Commission to witness the last agonies of the two men whom
public opinion had been unable to rescue. The account given
in the <i>Times</i> of 17th January shows that this piece of refined
and spectacular discipline was not thrown away, and that the
wretched comrades of the men who were hanged suffered as
acutely as Denman or Alderson themselves could have desired.
‘At this moment I cast my eyes down into the felons’ yard,
and saw many of the convicts weeping bitterly, some burying
their faces in their smock frocks, others wringing their hands
convulsively, and others leaning for support against the wall
of the yard and unable to cast their eyes upwards.’ This
was the last vision of English justice that each labourer
carried to his distant and dreaded servitude, a scene that
would never fade from his mind. There was much that
England had not taught him. She had not taught him that
the rich owed a duty to the poor, that society owed any
shelter to the freedom or the property of the weak, that the
mere labourer had a share in the State, or a right to be considered
in its laws, or that it mattered to his rulers in what
wretchedness he lived or in what wretchedness he died. But
one lesson she had taught him with such savage power that
his simple memory would not forget it, and if ever in an
exile’s gilding dreams he thought with longing of his boyhood’s
famine-shadowed home, that inexorable dawn would
break again before his shrinking eyes and he would thank
God for the wide wastes of the illimitable sea.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The Special Commission for Wiltshire opened at Salisbury<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[291]</span>
on 2nd January 1831. The judges were the same as those
at Winchester; the other commissioners were Lord Radnor,
the friend of Cobbett, and Mr. T. G. B. Estcourt. Lord
Lansdowne, the Lord-Lieutenant, sat on the bench. The
foreman of the Grand Jury was Mr. John Benett, who has
already figured in these pages as the proprietor whose property
was destroyed and the magistrate who committed the culprits.
There were three hundred prisoners awaiting trial.</p>

<p>The method in which the prosecutions were conducted in
Wiltshire, though it did not differ from the procedure followed
in Hampshire and elsewhere, provoked some criticism from the
lawyers. The prosecutions were all managed by the county
authorities. The clerks of the committing magistrates in the
different districts first took the depositions, and then got up
all the prosecutions in their capacity of solicitors to the same
magistrates prosecuting as county authorities, to the exclusion
of the solicitors of the individual prosecutors. Further, all the
prosecutions were managed for the county by a single barrister,
who assisted the Attorney-General and left no opening for other
members of the Bar. The counsel for one of the prisoners
objected to this method, not only on the ground of its unfairness
to the legal profession, but on the wider ground of the interests
of justice. For it was inconsistent with the impartiality required
from magistrates who committed prisoners, that they
should go on to mix themselves up with the management of the
prosecution; in many cases these magistrates served again as
grand jurors in the proceedings against the prisoners. Such
procedure, he argued ‘was calculated to throw at least a strong
suspicion on the fair administration of justice.’ These protests,
however, were silenced by the judges, and though the Attorney-General
announced that he was willing that the counsel for
the magistrates should retire, no change was made in the
arrangements.</p>

<p>The Salisbury prisoners were under a further disadvantage
peculiar, it is to be hoped, to that gaol. They were forbidden
to see their attorney except in the presence of the gaoler or
his servants. This rule seems to have been construed by the
authorities in a manner that simplified considerably the task
of the prosecution. The facts of the case of James Lush, condemned
to death on two charges of extorting money in a mob,
were made public by Hunt in a letter to the <i>Times</i>, 22nd January
1831. Lush was a very poor man, but when first committed
he sent for an attorney and made a full confession. ‘This<span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[292]</span>
confession, so confidentially made to his attorney (by an
extraordinary rule of the gaol) the legal adviser was compelled
to submit to the inspection of the gaoler, which paper he kept
in his hands for several days and in all human probability,
this document, or a copy of it, was either submitted to the
inspection of the judge, or placed in the hands of the prosecutor,
the Crown Solicitor, or the Attorney-General: when this man
was called up for trial, such was his extreme poverty, that
he could not raise a guinea to fee counsel, and he was left
destitute, without legal advice or assistance.’ The Attorney-General
could only answer this charge in the House of Commons
by declaring that he had no recollection of any such circumstance
himself, and that no gentleman of the Bar would avail
himself of information obtained in such a manner. Lush could
not distinguish these niceties of honour, or understand why his
confession should be examined and kept by the gaoler unless it
was to be used against him, and it is not surprising that he
thought himself betrayed. It is only fair to Lord Melbourne
to add that when Hunt drew his attention to this iniquitous
rule in Salisbury Gaol he had it abolished.</p>

<p>The cases tried were very similar to those at Winchester;
batch after batch of boys and men in the prime of life were
brought up to the dock for a brief trial and sentence of exile.
Such was the haste that in one case at least the prisoners
appeared with the handcuffs still on their wrists, a circumstance
which elicited a rebuke from the judge, and an excuse of overwork
from the gaoler. Amongst the first cases eight prisoners,
varying in age from seventeen to thirty, were sentenced to
transportation for life for doing £500 worth of damage at
Brasher’s cloth mill at Wilton. Thirteen men were transported
for seven years and one for fourteen years for breaking threshing
machines on the day of the Pyt House affray. Mr. John Benett
was satisfied with this tale of victims in addition to the man
killed by the yeomanry, and refrained from prosecuting for
the stones thrown at him. For this he took great credit in the
House of Commons, and no doubt it was open to him to
imitate Bingham Baring’s friends, and to talk of that kind of
outrage as ‘murder.’</p>

<p>At Salisbury, as at Winchester, evidence about distress
and wages was ruled out by the judges whenever possible;
thus when twelve men, nine of whom were afterwards transported
for seven years, were being tried for breaking a threshing
machine on the farm of a man named Ambrose Patience, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[293]</span>
cross-examination of Patience, which aimed at eliciting facts
about wages and distress, was stopped by the court on the
ground that in a case of this sort such evidence was scarcely
regular; it was intimated, however, that the court would hear
representations of this kind later. But some light was thrown
incidentally in the course of the trials on the circumstances of
the prisoners. Thus one of the Pyt House prisoners urged in
his defence: ‘My Lord, I found work very bad in my own
parish for the last three years, and having a wife and three
children to support I was glad to get work wherever I could
get it. I had some work at a place four miles from my house.’
He then described how on his way to work he was met by the
mob and forced to join them. ‘It is a hard case with me, my
Lord; I was glad to get work though I could earn only seven
shillings per week, and it cost me a shilling a week for iron, so
that I had only six shillings a week to support five persons.’
Another prisoner, Mould of Hatch, was stated by Lord
Arundel to be very poor: he had a wife and six children,
of whom one or two had died of typhus since his committal.
They had nothing to live on but what they got at Lord
Arundel’s house. The benevolent Lord Arundel, or the parish,
must have supported the survivors indefinitely, for Mould
was exiled for seven years. Barett again, another of these
prisoners, was supporting himself, a wife, and a child on 5s.
a week. The usual rate of wages in Wiltshire was 7s. a week.</p>

<p>Evidence about the instigation of the labourers by those in
good circumstances was also ruled out, and much that would
be interesting in the history of the riots has thus perished.
When six men were being prosecuted for breaking a threshing
machine on the farm of Mr. Judd at Newton Toney, counsel
for the defence started a cross-examination of the prosecutor
designed to show that certain landowners in the parish had
instigated the labourers to the outrages, but he was stopped
by Mr. Justice Alderson, who declared that such an inquiry
was not material to the issue, which was the guilt or innocence
of the prisoners. If the prisoners were found guilty these
circumstances would be laid before the court in mitigation of
punishment. However strong the mitigating circumstances
in this case were, the punishment was certainly not mitigated,
for all six men were sentenced to the maximum penalty of
seven years’ transportation. In a similar case in Whiteparish
it came out in the evidence that Squire Bristowe had sent down
buckets of strong beer, and that Squire Wynne, who was staying<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[294]</span>
with Squire Bristowe, was present at the breaking of the machine.
In the affair at Ambrose Patience’s farm already mentioned,
the defence of the prisoners was that Farmer Parham had
offered them half a hogshead of cider if they would come and
break his machine, whilst in another case three men were
acquitted because one of the witnesses for the prosecution,
a young brother of the farmer whose property had been
destroyed, unexpectedly disclosed the fact that his brother
had said to the mob: ‘Act like men, go and break the machine,
but don’t go up to the house.’</p>

<p>The proportion of charges of extorting money was smaller
at Salisbury than at Winchester: most of the indictments
were for breaking machines only. In some instances the
prosecution dropped the charge of robbery, thinking transportation
for seven years a sufficient punishment for the
offence. Three brothers were sentenced to death for taking
half a crown: nobody received this sentence for a few coppers.
In this case the three brothers, William, Thomas, and John
Legg, aged twenty-eight, twenty-one, and eighteen, had gone at
midnight to the kitchen door of the house of Mrs. Montgomery,
wife of a J.P., and asked the manservant for money or beer.
The man gave them half a crown, and they thanked him
civilly and went away. A curious light is thrown on the
relations between robbers and the robbed in the trial of six
men for machine-breaking at West Grimstead: the mob of
fifty persons asked the farmer for a sovereign, he promised
to pay it next day, whereupon one of the mob, a man named
Light who was his tenant, offered to pay the sovereign himself
and to deduct it from the rent.</p>

<p>At Salisbury, as at Winchester, the fate of the victims
depended largely on the character given to the prisoners by
the local gentry. This was especially the case towards the
end when justice began to tire, and a good many charges were
dropped. Thus Charles Bourton was only imprisoned for
three months for breaking a threshing machine, whilst John
Perry was transported for seven years for the same offence.
But then John Perry had been convicted seven or eight times
for poaching.</p>

<p>In Wiltshire, as in Hampshire, the judges were particularly
severe to those prisoners who were not agricultural labourers.
A striking instance is worth quoting, not only as illustrating
this special severity, but also because it shows that the judges
when inflicting the maximum penalty of seven years’ transportation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[295]</span>
for machine-breaking were well aware that it was
tantamount to exile for life. Thomas Porter, aged eighteen,
a shepherd, Henry Dicketts, aged nineteen, a bricklayer’s
labourer, Aaron Shepherd, aged forty (occupation not stated),
James Stevens, aged twenty-five, an agricultural labourer,
and George Burbage, aged twenty-four, also an agricultural
labourer, were found guilty of machine-breaking at Mr. Blake’s
at Idmiston. Stevens and Burbage escaped with two years’
and one year’s imprisonment with hard labour, respectively,
and the following homily from Mr. Justice Alderson to think
over in prison: ‘You are both thrashers and you might in
the perversion of your understanding think that these machines
are detrimental to you. Be assured that your labour cannot
ultimately be hurt by the employment of these machines.
If they are profitable to the farmer, they will also be profitable
ultimately to the labourer, though they may for a time injure
him. If they are not profitable to the farmer he will soon
cease to employ them.’ The shepherd boy of eighteen, the
bricklayer’s labourer of nineteen, and their companion of forty
were reserved for a heavier penalty: ‘As to you, Aaron
Shepherd, I can give you no hope of remaining in this country.
You Thomas Porter, are a shepherd, and you Henry Dicketts,
are a bricklayer’s labourer. You have nothing to do with
threshing machines. They do not interfere with your labour,
and you could not, even in the darkness of your ignorance,
suppose that their destruction would do you any good....
I hope that your fate will be a warning to others. You will
leave the country, all of you: you will see your friends and
relations no more: for though you will be transported for
seven years only, it is not likely that at the expiration of that
term you will find yourselves in a situation to return. You
will be in a distant land at the expiration of your sentence.
The land which you have disgraced will see you no more:
the friends with whom you are connected will be parted from
you for ever in this world.’</p>

<p>Mr. Justice Alderson’s methods received a good deal of
attention in one of the Salisbury trials, known as the Looker
case. Isaac Looker, a well-to-do farmer, was indicted for
sending a threatening letter to John Rowland: ‘Mr. Rowland,
Haxford Farm, Hif you goes to sware against or a man in
prisson, you have here farm burnt down to ground, and thy
bluddy head chopt off.’ Some evidence was produced to
show that Isaac Looker had asserted in conversation that it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[296]</span>
was the magistrates and the soldiers, and not the mobs, who
were the real breakers of the peace. But this did not amount
to absolute proof that he had written the letter: to establish
this conclusion the prosecution relied on the evidence of four
witnesses; the first had quarrelled with Looker, and had not
seen his writing for four or five years; the second denied that
there had been any quarrel, but had not been in the habit of
speaking to the prisoner for five or six years, or seen his
writing during that time; the third had not had ‘much of a
quarrel’ with him, but had not seen his writing since 1824;
the fourth was the special constable who found in Looker’s
bureau, which was unlocked and stood in the kitchen where
the family sat, a blank piece of paper that fitted on to the
piece on which the letter was written. More witnesses were
called for the defence than for the prosecution, and they
included the vestry clerk of Wimborne, an ex-schoolmaster;
all of these witnesses had known Looker’s writing recently,
and all of them swore that the threatening letter was not in
his writing. Mr. Justice Alderson summed up against the
prisoner, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and sentence
of transportation for life was passed upon Looker in spite
of his vehement protestations of innocence. ‘I cannot attend
to these asseverations,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘for we
all know that a man who can be guilty of such an offence
as that of which you have been convicted, will not hesitate to
deny it as you now do. I would rather trust to such evidence
as has been given in your case, than to the most solemn declarations
even on the scaffold.’</p>

<p>The learned judge and the jury then retired for refreshment,
when a curious development took place. Edward,
son of Isaac Looker, aged eighteen years, came forward and
declared that he had written the letter in question and other
letters as well. He wrote a copy from memory, and the handwriting
was precisely similar. He explained that he had
written the letters without his father’s knowledge and without
a thought of the consequences, in order to help two cousins
who were in gaol for machine-breaking. He had heard people
say that ‘it would get my cousins off if threatening letters
were written.’ He had let his father know in prison that he
had written the letters, and had also told his father’s solicitor.
Edward Looker was subsequently tried and sentenced to seven
years’ transportation: Isaac’s case was submitted to the Home
Secretary for pardon.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[297]</span></p>

<p>Although, as we have said, the Government, or its representatives,
grew rather more lenient towards the end of the
proceedings at Salisbury, it was evidently thought essential
to produce some crime deserving actual death. The
culprit in this case was Peter Withers, a young man of twenty-three,
married and with five children. His character till the
time of the riots was exemplary. He was committed on a
charge of riot, and briefed a lawyer to defend him for this
misdemeanour. Just before the trial came on the charge
was changed, apparently by the Attorney-General, to the
capital charge of assaulting Oliver Calley Codrington with a
hammer. His counsel was of course unprepared to defend
him on this charge, and, as he explained afterwards, ‘it was
only by the humane kindness of the Attorney-General who
allowed him to look at his brief that he was aware of all the
facts to be alleged against his client.’ Withers himself seemed
equally unprepared; when asked for his defence he said that
he would leave it to his counsel, as of course he had arranged
to do when the charge was one of misdemeanour only.</p>

<p>The incident occurred in an affray at Rockley near
Marlborough. Mr. Baskerville, J.P., rode up with some
special constables to a mob of forty or fifty men, Withers
amongst them, and bade them go home. They refused,
declaring that they did not care a damn for the magistrates.
Mr. Baskerville ordered Mr. Codrington, who was a special
constable, to arrest Withers. A general mêlée ensued, blows
were given and received, and Codrington was hit by a hammer
thrown by Withers. Withers’ own version of the affair was
that Codrington attacked him without provocation in a
ferocious manner with a hunting whip, loaded with iron at
the end. Baskerville also struck him. He aimed his hammer
at Codrington and it missed. Codrington’s horse then crushed
him against the wall, and he threw his hammer a second time
with better aim. There was nothing in the evidence of the
prosecution to discredit this version, and both Baskerville and
Codrington admitted that they might have struck him. Codrington’s
injuries were apparently more serious than Bingham
Baring’s; it was stated that he had been confined to bed for
two or three days, and to the house from Tuesday to Saturday,
and that he had a scar of one and a half inches on the right
side of his nose. No surgeon, however, appeared as a witness,
and the hammer was not produced in court. Withers was
found guilty and reserved, together with Lush, for execution.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[298]</span></p>

<p>The special correspondent of the <i>Times</i> who had been present
at Winchester made an interesting comparison between the
Hampshire and the Wiltshire labourers on trial (8th January
1831). The Wiltshire labourers he described as more athletic
in appearance and more hardy in manner. ‘The prisoners
here turn to the witnesses against them with a bold and
confident air: cross-examine them, and contradict their
answers, with a confidence and a want of common courtesy,
in terms of which comparatively few instances occurred in the
neighbouring county.’ In this behaviour the correspondent
detected the signs of a very low state of moral intelligence.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>When the time came for the last scene in court there was no
trace of the bold demeanour which had impressed the <i>Times</i>
correspondent during the conduct of the trials. For the people
of Wiltshire, like the people of Hampshire, were stunned by
the crash and ruin of this catastrophic vengeance. The two
men sentenced to death were reprieved, but one hundred and
fifty-four men and boys were sentenced to transportation,
thirty-three of them for life, the rest for seven or fourteen years,
with no prospect of ever returning to their homes. And
Alderson and his brother judges in so punishing this wild fling
of folly, or hope, or despair, were not passing sentence only on
the men and boys before them: they were pronouncing a doom
not less terrible on wives and mothers and children and babes
in arms in every village on the Wiltshire Downs. One man
begged to be allowed to take his child, eight months old, into
exile, for its mother had died in childbirth, and it would be left
without kith or kin. He was told by the judge that he should
have remembered this earlier. The sentence of final separation
on all these families and homes was received with a frenzy of
consternation and grief, and the judges themselves were affected
by the spectacle of these broken creatures in the dock and
round the court, abandoned to the unchecked paroxysms of
despair.<a id="FNanchor_479" href="#Footnote_479" class="fnanchor">[479]</a> ‘Such a total prostration of the mental faculties
by fear,’ wrote the <i>Times</i> correspondent, ‘and such a terrible
exhibition of anguish and despair, I never before witnessed in
a Court of Justice.’ ‘Immediately on the conclusion of this
sentence a number of women, who were seated in court behind
the prisoners, set up a dreadful shriek of lamentation. Some
of them rushed forward to shake hands with the prisoners,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[299]</span>
and more than one voice was heard to exclaim, “Farewell, I
shall never see you more.”’</p>

<p>‘The whole proceedings of this day in court were of the most
afflicting and distressing nature. But the laceration of the
feelings did not end with the proceedings in court. The car
for the removal of the prisoners was at the back entrance to
the court-house and was surrounded by a crowd of mothers,
wives, sisters and children, anxiously waiting for a glance of
their condemned relatives. The weeping and wailing of the
different parties, as they pressed the hands of the convicts as
they stepped into the car, was truly heartrending. We never
saw so distressing a spectacle before, and trust that the restored
tranquillity of the country will prevent us from ever seeing
anything like it again.’</p>

<p>The historian may regret that these men do not pass out
before him in a cold and splendid defiance. Their blind blow
had been struck and it had been answered; they had dreamt
that their lot might be made less intolerable, and the governing
class had crushed that daring fancy for ever with banishment
and the breaking of their homes; it only remained for them to
accept their fate with a look of stone upon their faces and a
curse of fire in their hearts. So had Muir and Palmer and
many a political prisoner, victims of the tyrannies of Pitt and
Dundas, of Castlereagh and Sidmouth, gone to their barbarous
doom. So had the Lantenacs and the Gauvains alike gone to
the guillotine. History likes to match such calm and unshaken
bearing against the distempered justice of power. Here she
is cheated of her spectacle. Outwardly it might seem a worse
fate for men of education to be flung to the hulks with the
coarsest of felons: for men whose lives had been comfortable
to be thrust into the dirt and disorder of prisons. But political
prisoners are martyrs, and martyrs are not the stuff for pity.
However bitter their sufferings, they do not suffer alone: they
are sustained by a Herculean comradeship of hopes and of
ideas. The darkest cage is lighted by a ray from Paradise to
men or women who believe that the night of their sufferings
will bring a dawn less cold and sombre to mankind than the
cold and sombre dawn of yesterday. But what ideas befriended
the ploughboy or the shepherd torn from his rude home?
What vision had he of a nobler future for humanity? To
what dawn did he leave his wife or his mother, his child, his
home, his friends, or his trampled race? What robe of dream
and hope and fancy was thrown over his exile or their hunger,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[300]</span>
his poignant hour of separation, or their ceaseless ache of
poverty and cold</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
  <div class="stanza">
    <div class="verse indent2">‘to comfort the human want</div>
    <div class="verse indent0">From the bosom of magical skies’?</div>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The three judges who had restored respect for law and order
in Wiltshire and Hampshire next proceeded to Dorchester,
where a Special Commission to try the Dorsetshire rioters was
opened on 11th January. The rising had been less serious in
Dorset than in the two other counties, and there were only
some fifty prisoners awaiting trial on charges of machine-breaking,
extorting money and riot. The Government took
no part in the prosecutions; for, as it was explained in a letter
to Denman, ‘the state of things is quite altered; great effect
has been produced: the law has been clearly explained, and
prosecutions go on without the least difficulty.’<a id="FNanchor_480" href="#Footnote_480" class="fnanchor">[480]</a> Baron
Vaughan and Mr. Justice Parke had given the charges at
Winchester and Salisbury: it was now the turn of Mr. Justice
Alderson, and in his opening survey of the social conditions of
the time he covered a wide field. To the usual dissertation on
the economics of machinery he added a special homily on the
duties incumbent on the gentry, who were bidden to discourage
and discountenance, and if necessary to prosecute, the dangerous
publications that were doing such harm in rural districts.
But their duties did not end here, and they were urged to go
home and to educate their poorer neighbours and to improve
their conditions. The improvement to be aimed at, however,
was not material but moral. ‘Poverty,’ said Mr. Justice
Alderson, ‘is indeed, I fear, inseparable from the state of the
human race, but poverty itself and the misery attendant on it,
would no doubt be greatly mitigated if a spirit of prudence were
more generally diffused among the people, and if they understood
more fully and practised better their civil, moral and
religious duties.’</p>

<p>The Dorsetshire labourers had unfortunately arrived at the
precipitate conclusion that a spirit of prudence would not
transform 7s. a week into a reasonable livelihood. They
used no violence beyond breaking up the threshing machines.
‘We don’t intend to hurt the farmer,’ they told the owner of
one machine, ‘but we are determined that the land shall come
down, and the tithes, and we will have more wages.’ When<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[301]</span>
money was taken it seems to have been demanded and received
in an amicable spirit. The sums asked for were often
very small. Sentence of death was pronounced on two men,
Joseph Sheppard and George Legg, for taking 2s. from Farmer
Christopher Morey at Buckland Newton. The mob asked for
money, and the farmer offered them 1s.: they replied that they
wanted 1s. 6d., and the farmer gave them 2s. Sheppard’s
character was very good, and it came out that he and the
prosecutor had had a dispute about money some years before.
He was transported, but not for life. Legg was declared by
the prosecutor to have been ‘saucy and impudent,’ and to
have ‘talked rough and bobbish.’ His character, however,
was stated by many witnesses, including the clergyman, to be
exemplary. He had five children whom he supported without
parish help on 7s. a week: a cottage was given him but no fuel.
Baron Vaughan was so much impressed by this evidence that
he declared that he had never heard better testimony to
character, and that he would recommend a less severe penalty
than transportation. But Legg showed a lamentable want
of discretion, for he interrupted the judge with these words:
‘I would rather that your Lordship would put twenty-one
years’ transportation upon me than be placed in the condition
of the prosecutor. I never said a word to him, that I
declare.’ Baron Vaughan sardonically remarked that he had
not benefited himself by this observation.</p>

<p>The tendency to give less severe punishment, noticed in the
closing trials at Salisbury, was more marked at Dorchester.
Nine men were let off on recognisances and ten were not proceeded
against: in the case of six of these ten the prosecutor,
one Robert Bullen, who had been robbed of 4s. and 2s. 6d.,
refused to come forward. But enough sharp sentences were
given to keep the labourers in submission for the future. One
man was transported for life and eleven for seven years: fifteen
were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment; seven were
acquitted. It was not surprising that the special correspondent
of the <i>Times</i> complained that such meagre results scarcely
justified the pomp and expense of a Special Commission. In
the neighbouring county of Gloucester, where the country
gentlemen carried out the work of retribution without help
from headquarters, seven men were transported for fourteen
years, twenty for seven years, and twenty-five were sentenced to
terms of imprisonment ranging from six months to three years.
All of these sentences were for breaking threshing machines.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[302]</span></p>

<p>The disturbances in Berks and Bucks had been considered
serious enough to demand a Special Commission, and Sir James
Alan Park, Sir William Bolland and Sir John Patteson were the
judges appointed. The first of the two Berkshire Commissions
opened at Reading on 27th December. The Earl of Abingdon,
Lord-Lieutenant of the County, and Mr. Charles Dundas were
the two local commissioners. Mr. Dundas has figured already
in these pages as chairman of the meeting at Speenhamland.
One hundred and thirty-eight prisoners were awaiting trial at
Reading: they were most of them young, only eighteen being
forty or over. The rest, with few exceptions, varied from
seventeen to thirty-five in age, and must have lived all their
lives under the Speenhamland system.</p>

<p>It is impossible to compare the accounts of the Special
Commissions in Berks and Bucks with those in Hampshire
and Wiltshire without noticing a difference in the treatment
of the rioters. The risings had been almost simultaneous,
the offences were of the same character, and the Commissions
sat at the same time. The difference was apparent from the
first, and on 1st January the <i>Times</i> published a leading article
pleading for uniformity, and pointing out that the Berkshire
Commission was ‘a merciful contrast’ to that at Winchester.
The cause is probably to be found in the dispositions and
characters of the authorities responsible in the two cases. The
country gentlemen of Berkshire, represented by a man like
Mr. Dundas, were more humane than the country gentlemen
of Hampshire, represented by men like the Duke of Wellington
and the Barings; Mr. Gurney, the public prosecutor at Reading,
was more lenient than Sir Thomas Denman, and the
Reading judges were more kindly and considerate than the
judges at Winchester. Further, there had been in Berkshire
little of the wild panic that swept over the country houses in
Hampshire and Wiltshire. The judges at Reading occasionally
interjected questions on the prisoners’ behalf, and in many
cases they did not conceal their satisfaction at an acquittal.
Further, they had a more delicate sense for the proprieties.
Contrary to custom, they asked neither the Grand Jury nor the
magistrates to dinner on the first day, being anxious, we are
told, to free the administration of justice ‘from the slightest
appearance of partiality in the eyes of the lower classes.’ The
Lord Chancellor and Lord Melbourne had been consulted and
had approved.</p>

<p>It must not be supposed that Mr. Justice Park’s theories of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[303]</span>
life and social relationships differed from those of his brothers
at Winchester. In his address to the Grand Jury he repudiated
with indignation the ‘impudent and base slander ... that
the upper ranks of society care little for the wants and
privations of the poor. I deny this positively, upon a very
extensive means of knowledge upon subjects of this nature.
But every man can deny it who looks about him and sees the
vast institutions in every part of the kingdom for the relief
of the young and the old, the deaf and the lame, the blind,
the widow, the orphan&mdash;&mdash;and every child of wretchedness
and woe. There is not a calamity or distress incident to
humanity, either of body or of mind, that is not humbly
endeavoured to be mitigated or relieved, by the powerful and
the affluent, either of high or middling rank, in this our happy
land, which for its benevolence, charity, and boundless
humanity, has been the admiration of the world.’ The theory
that the rich kept the poor in a state of starvation and that
this was the cause of the disturbances, he declared later to
be entirely disproved by the conduct of one of the mobs in
destroying a threshing machine belonging to William Mount,
Esq., at Wasing, ‘Mr. Mount having given away £100 no
longer ago than last winter to assist the lower orders during
that inclement season.’</p>

<p>A feature of the Reading Commission was the difficulty of
finding jurymen. All farmers were challenged on behalf of
the prisoners, and matters were at a deadlock until the judges
ordered the bystanders to be impannelled.</p>

<p>The earlier cases were connected with the riots in Hungerford.
Property in an iron foundry had been destroyed, and
fifteen men were found guilty on this capital charge. One
of the fifteen was William Oakley, who now paid the penalty
for his £5 and strong language. But when the first cases were
over, Mr. Gurney began to drop the capital charge, and to
content himself, as a rule, with convictions for breaking
threshing machines. One case revealed serious perjury on
one side or the other. Thomas Goodfellow and Cornelius
Bennett were charged with breaking a threshing machine at
Matthew Batten’s farm. The prisoners produced four
witnesses, two labourers, a woman whose husband was in
prison for the riots, and John Gaiter, who described himself
as ‘not quite a master bricklayer,’ to prove that Matthew
Batten had encouraged the riots. The first three witnesses
declared that Batten had asked the rioters to come and break<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[304]</span>
his machine in order to serve out his landlord and Mr. Ward,
and had promised them victuals and £1. Batten and his
son, on the other hand, swore that these statements were false.
The prisoners were found guilty, with a recommendation to
mercy which was disregarded. Goodfellow, who was found
guilty of breaking other machines as well, was sentenced to
fourteen, and Cornelius Bennett to seven years’ transportation.
The judge spoke of their scandalous attempt to blacken the
character of a respectable farmer: ‘it pleased God however
that the atrocious attempt had failed.’ It would be interesting
to know what were the relations between Matthew
Batten and his landlord.</p>

<p>On the last day of the trials Mr. Gurney announced that
there would be no more prosecutions for felony, as enough
had been done in the way of making examples. Some interesting
cases of riot were tried. The most important riot had
taken place as early as 19th November, and the hero of the
proceedings was the Rev. Edward Cove, the venerable Vicar
of Brimpton, one of the many parson magistrates. A mob
had assembled in order to demand an increase of wages, and
it was met by Mr. Cove and his posse of special constables.
On occasions like this, Mr. Gurney remarked, we become
sensible of the great advantages of our social order. Mr.
Cove without more ado read the Riot Act; the mob refused
to disperse; his special constables thereupon attacked them,
and a general mêlée followed in which hard blows were given
and taken. No one attempted to strike Mr. Cove himself,
but one of his companions received from a rioter, whom he
identified, a blow rivalling that given to Mr. Bingham Baring,
which beat the crown of his hat in and drove the rim over his
eyes: it was followed by other and more serious blows on his
head and body. The counsel for the defence tried to show
that it was distress that had caused the rioters to assemble,
and he quoted a remark of the Chairman of Quarter Sessions
that the poor were starved almost into insurrection; but all
evidence about wages was ruled out. The court were deeply
impressed by this riot, and Mr. Justice Park announced that
it had alarmed him and his fellow judges more ‘than anything
that had hitherto transpired in these proceedings.’ ‘Had
one life been lost,’ he continued, ‘the lives of every individual
of the mob would have been forfeited, and the law must have
been carried into effect against those convicted.’ As it was,
nobody was condemned to death for his share in the affray,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[305]</span>
though the more violent, such as George Williams, alias
‘Staffordshire Jack,’ a ‘desperate character,’ received heavier
penalties for machine-breaking in consequence.</p>

<p>Three men were reserved for execution: William Oakley,
who was told that as a carpenter he had no business to mix
himself up in these transactions; Alfred Darling, a blacksmith
by trade, who had been found guilty on several charges
of demanding money; and Winterbourne, who had taken part
in the Hungerford affair in the magistrates’ room, and had
also acted as leader in some cases when a mob asked for money.
In one instance the mob had been content with £1 instead
of the £2 for which it had asked for breaking a threshing
machine, Winterbourne remarking, ‘we will take half price
because he has stood like a man.’</p>

<p>Public opinion in Berkshire was horrified at the prospect
of taking life. Petitions for mercy poured in from Reading,
including one from ladies to the queen, from Newbury, from
Hungerford, from Henley, and from other places. Two
country gentlemen, Mr. J. B. Monck and Mr. Wheble, made
every exertion to save the condemned men. They waited
with petitions on Lord Melbourne, who heard them patiently
for an hour. They obtained a reprieve for Oakley and for
Darling, who were transported for life; Winterbourne they
could not save: he was hung on 11th January, praying to
the last that his wife, who was dangerously ill of typhus,
might die before she knew of his fate.</p>

<p>Fifty-six men were sentenced to transportation from Reading&mdash;twenty-three
for life, sixteen for fourteen years, seventeen
for seven years: thirty-six were sent to prison for various terms.</p>

<p>The same commissioners went on to Abingdon where proceedings
opened on 6th January. Here there were only
forty-seven prisoners, all but two of whom were agricultural
labourers, most of them very young. The cases resembled
those tried at Reading, but it is clear that the evidence of
Mrs. Charlotte Slade, whose conduct we have already described,
and her method of dealing with the rioters, made a
great impression on Mr. Justice Park and his colleagues, and
opened their eyes to the true perspective of the rhetorical
language that had assumed such terrifying importance to
other judges. One young labourer, Richard Kempster by
name, who was found guilty of breaking a threshing machine,
had carried a black-and-red flag in the mob, and when arrested
had exclaimed, ‘be damned if I don’t wish it was a revolution,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[306]</span>
and that all was a fire together’: it is easy to imagine the
grave homily on the necessity of cutting such a man off for
ever from his kind that these words would have provoked from
the judges at Winchester. Mr. Justice Park and his colleagues
sentenced Kempster to twelve months’ imprisonment. At
Abingdon only one man was sentenced to be transported;
Thomas Mackrell, an agricultural labourer of forty-three.
Another, Henry Woolridge, had sentence of death commuted
to eighteen months’ imprisonment. Thirty-five others were
sent to prison for various terms.</p>

<p>The same three judges proceeded to Aylesbury to try the
Buckinghamshire rioters. The chief event in this county
had been the destruction of paper-making machinery at
Wycombe. The Commission opened on 11th January: the
Duke of Buckingham and Mr. Maurice Swabey were the local
commissioners. There were one hundred and thirty-six
prisoners to be tried, almost all young and illiterate: only
eighteen were forty years of age or over. Forty-four men
and boys were found guilty of the capital charge of destroying
paper machinery. Most of the other prisoners who were
charged with breaking threshing machines were allowed to
plead guilty and let off on their own recognisances, or else the
charge was not pressed. An exception was made in a case in
which some members of a mob had been armed with guns.
Three men who had carried guns were sent to transportation
for seven years, and thirteen others involved were sent to prison
for two years or eighteen months. Several men were tried for
rioting, and those who had combined a demand for increased
wages with a request for the restoration of parish buns were
sent to prison for six weeks.<a id="FNanchor_481" href="#Footnote_481" class="fnanchor">[481]</a> One more trial is worth notice,
because it suggests that even in Buckinghamshire, where the
general temper was more lenient, individuals who had made
themselves obnoxious were singled out for special treatment.
John Crook, a miller, was indicted with four others for riotously
assembling and breaking a winnowing machine at Mr. Fryer’s
at Long Crendon. As Crook was charged with a misdemeanour
his counsel could address the jury, and we learn from his speech
that Crook had been kept in prison since 2nd December,
though £2000 had been offered in bail and many other prisoners
had been allowed out. The explanation, it was argued, was
to be found in the fact that Crook had come into some property
which qualified him to hold a gun licence and to kill game.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[307]</span>
He was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment without hard
labour, and to pay a fine of £10.</p>

<p>Thirty-two men in all were sent to prison for the agricultural
disturbances in addition to the three sentenced to transportation.
Forty-two of those concerned in the breaking of paper-making
machinery received sentence of death, but their
punishment was commuted to life transportation for one,
seven years’ transportation for twenty-two, and imprisonment
for various terms for the rest. Two men were reserved for
execution. One, Thomas Blizzard, was thirty years old, with
a wife and three children. His character was excellent. At
the time of the riots he was a roundsman, receiving 1s. a day
from the overseer’s and 1s. 6d. a week from a farmer. He told
his employer at Little Marlow that he would take a holiday to
go machine-breaking, for he would endure imprisonment, or
even transportation, rather than see his wife and children cry
for bread. John Sarney, the other, was fifty-six years old
and had a wife and six children: he kept a small beer-shop
and his character was irreproachable. Petitions on behalf of
the two men were signed extensively, and the sentence was
commuted to transportation for life. The Aylesbury sentences
seem lenient in comparison with those given at Salisbury and
Winchester, but they did not seem lenient to the people in the
district. ‘Pen cannot describe,’ wrote a <i>Times</i> correspondent,
‘the heart-rending scene of despair, misery and want, prevailing
at Flackwell-Heath, the residence of the families of the
major part of the misguided men now incarcerated at Aylesbury.’
The same correspondent tells of a benevolent Quaker,
who had become rich as a maker of paper, helping these
families by stealth.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>The work of the Special Commissions was now over.
Melbourne had explained in Parliament that they had been
set up ‘to expound the law’ and to bring home to the ignorant
the gravity of their crimes against social order. In spite of
the daily imposition of ferocious punishments on poachers
and thieves, the poor apparently did not know in what letters
of blood the code against rioting and discontent was composed.
These three weeks had brought a lurid enlightenment into their
dark homes. In the riots, as we have seen, the only man who
had been killed was a rioter, killed according to the reports of
the time by a yeomanry soldier, according to local tradition
by a farmer, and for that offence he had been refused Christian<span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[308]</span>
burial. On the other side, not a single person had been
killed or seriously wounded. For these riots, apart from
the cases of arson, for which six men or boys were hung,
aristocratic justice exacted three lives, and the transportation
of four hundred and fifty-seven men and boys,<a id="FNanchor_482" href="#Footnote_482" class="fnanchor">[482]</a> in addition to
the imprisonment of about four hundred at home. The
shadow of this vengeance still darkens the minds of old men
and women in the villages of Wiltshire, and eighty years have
been too short a time to blot out its train of desolating
memories.<a id="FNanchor_483" href="#Footnote_483" class="fnanchor">[483]</a> Nobody who does not realise what Mr. Hudson
has described with his intimate touch, the effect on the
imagination and the character of ‘a life of simple unchanging
action and of habits that are like instincts, of hard labour in
sun and rain and wind from day to day,’ can ever understand
what the breaking of all the ties of life and home and memory
meant to the exiles and to those from whose companionship
they were then torn for ever.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>We have said that one feature of the rising was the firing
of stacks and ricks and barns. This practice was widespread,
and fires broke out even in counties where the organised
rising made little progress. Associations for the detection
of incendiaries were formed at an early stage, and immense
rewards were offered. Yet not a single case of arson was
tried before the Special Commissions, and the labourers kept<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[309]</span>
their secret well. Many of the governing class in the early
days persuaded themselves that the labourers had no secret
to keep, and that the fires were due to any one except the
labourers, and to any cause except distress. Perhaps the
wish was father to the thought, for as the <i>Times</i> observed,
persons responsible for grinding the faces of their labourers
preferred to think the outrages the work of strangers. Sometimes
it was smugglers, suffering from the depression in their
trade: sometimes it was foreigners: sometimes it was mysterious
gentlemen in gigs, driving furiously about the country, led
by Captain Swing, scattering fireballs and devastation. These
were the fashionable theories in the House of Lords, although
Richmond reminded his brother peers that there had been a
flood of petitions representing the sufferings of the labourers
from the very beginning of the year, and that the House of
Lords had not thought it necessary to give them the slightest
attention. Lord Camden ascribed the outrages to the French
spirit, and argued that the country was enjoying ‘what was
undeniably a genial autumn.’ The Duke of Wellington took
the same view, denying that the troubles were due to distress:
the most influential cause of disturbances was the example,
‘and I will unhesitatingly say the bad and the mischievous
example, afforded by the neighbouring States.’ Eldon remarked
that many of the prisoners taken in the riots were
foreigners, a point on which Melbourne undeceived him.
The speakers who regarded the disturbances in the south of
England as the overflow of the Paris Revolution had no
positive evidence to produce, but they had a piece of negative
evidence which they thought conclusive. For if the labourers
knew who were the incendiaries, they would surely have given
information. In some cases a reward of £1000 with a free
pardon for all except the actual author was waiting to be
claimed, ‘and yet not one of the miserable beings have availed
themselves of the prospect of becoming rich.’</p>

<p>Some eleven cases of arson were tried at the Assizes in Essex,
Kent, Sussex, and Surrey: all the prisoners were agricultural
labourers and most of them were boys. Eight were convicted,
often on very defective evidence, and six were executed.
One of the eight, Thomas Goodman, a boy of eighteen, saved
his life by declaring in prison that the idea had been put into
his head by a lecture of Cobbett’s. Two brothers of the name
of Pakeman, nineteen and twenty years old, were convicted
on the evidence of Bishop, another lad of eighteen, who had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[310]</span>
prompted them to set fire to a barn, and later turned king’s
evidence ‘after a gentleman in the gaol had told him of the big
reward.’ This fire seems to have been a piece of bravado, as
no doubt many others were, for Bishop remarked, as the three
were sitting under a hedge after lighting the barn, ‘who says we
can’t have a fire too, as well as them at Blean?’ The two boys,
who had never been taught to read or write, scandalised the
public by displaying a painful indifference to the ministrations
of the chaplain, and dying without receiving the sacrament.<a id="FNanchor_484" href="#Footnote_484" class="fnanchor">[484]</a>
A half-witted boy of fourteen, Richard Pennells, was tried at
Lewes for setting fire to his master’s haystack for a promise of
sixpence from a man who was not discovered. His master, who
prosecuted, remarked that he was ‘dull of apprehension, but
not so much as not to know right from wrong.’ The boy, who
had no counsel, offered no defence, and stood sobbing in the
dock. The jury found him guilty, with a recommendation
to mercy on account of his youth and imperfect understanding.
Sentence of death was recorded, but he was told that his life
would be spared.</p>

<p>These same Lewes Assizes, conducted by Mr. Justice Taunton,
afforded a striking example of the comparative treatment
of different crimes. Thomas Brown, a lad of seventeen, was
charged with writing the following letter to Lord Sheffield,
‘Please, my Lord, I dont wise to hurt you. This is the case
al the world over. If you dont get rid of your foreign steward
and farmer and bailiff in a few days time&mdash;less than a month&mdash;we
will burn him up, and you along with him. My writing
is bad, but my firing is good my Lord.’ Lord Sheffield gave
evidence as to the receipt of the letter: the prisoner, who
had no counsel, was asked by the judge if he would like to put
any questions, and he only replied that he hoped that his
lordship would forgive him. The judge answered that his
lordship had not the power, and sentenced Brown to transportation
for life.<a id="FNanchor_485" href="#Footnote_485" class="fnanchor">[485]</a> Later on in the same Assizes, Captain
Winter, a man of sixty, captain of a coasting vessel, was tried
for the murder of his wife, who had been killed in a most
brutal manner. He had been hacking and wounding her
for four hours at night, and she was last seen alive at half
past two in the morning, naked and begging for mercy. Her<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[311]</span>
body was covered with wounds. The man’s defence was that
he came home drunk, that he found his wife drunk, and that he
had no knowledge of what followed. To the general surprise
Captain Winter escaped with a verdict of manslaughter.
‘The prisoner,’ wrote the <i>Times</i> correspondent, ‘is indebted
for his life to the very merciful way in which Mr. Justice
Taunton appeared to view the case, and the hint which he
threw out to the jury, that the parties might have had a
quarrel, in which case her death by the prisoner would amount
to manslaughter only.’</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>When the disturbances began, the Duke of Wellington was
Prime Minister, and Sir Robert Peel Home Secretary. But
in November 1830 Wellington, who had made a last effort to
rally the old Tories, sulking over his surrender on Catholic
Emancipation, by some sudden thunder against Reform,
had been beaten on the Civil List and resigned. Reform was
inevitable, and with Reform the Whigs. Thus, towards the
close of the year of the Revolution that drove Charles <span class="allsmcap">X.</span> from
France, Lord Grey became Prime Minister, to carry the measure
which as Charles Grey, lieutenant of Charles Fox, he had proposed
in the House of Commons in 1793, a few months after
Louis <span class="allsmcap">XVI.</span> had lost his head in the Revolution which had
maddened and terrified the English aristocracy. Fortune had
been sparing in her favours to this cold, proud, honourable
and courageous man. She had shut him out from power for
twenty-three years, waiting to make him Prime Minister until
he was verging on seventy, and all the dash and ardour of
youth had been chilled by disappointment and delay. But
she had reserved her extreme of malice to the end, for it was
her chief unkindness that having waited so long she did not
wait a little longer. Grey, who had been forty-four years in
public life, and forty-three in opposition, took office at the
moment that the rising passed into Hampshire and Wiltshire,
and thus his first act as Prime Minister was to summon his
colleagues to a Cabinet meeting to discuss, not their plans
for Parliamentary Reform, but the measures to be taken in
this alarming emergency. After a lifetime of noble protest
against war, intolerance, and repression, he found himself in
the toils and snares of the consequences of a policy in which
war, intolerance, and repression had been constant and conspicuous
features. And those consequences were especially
to be dreaded by such a man at such a time.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[312]</span></p>

<p>Grey became Prime Minister to carry Reform, and Reform
was still enveloped to many minds in the wild fancies and
terrors of a Jacobin past. To those who knew, conscious as
they were of their own modest purposes and limited aim,
that their accession to power boded to many violence, confusion,
and the breaking up of the old ways and life of the
State, it was maddening that these undiscerning peasants
should choose this moment of all others for noise and riot.
The struggle for Reform was certain to lead to strife, and it was
hard that before they entered upon it England should already
be in tumult from other causes. Moreover, Grey had to reckon
with William <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> So long as he could remember, the Court
had been the refuge of all that was base in English politics,
and it was a question whether Liberal ideas had suffered more
from the narrow and darkened mind of George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> or the
mean and incorrigible perfidy of George <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> In comparison
with his father, the new king had the wisdom of a Bentham
or an Adam Smith; in comparison with his brother, he had
the generous and loyal heart of a Philip Sidney or a Falkland.
But seen in any less flattering mirror, he was a very ordinary
mortal, and Grey had known this jolly, drinking, sailor prince
too long and too well to trust either his intellect or his
character, under too fierce or too continuous a strain.
These riots tried him severely. No sooner was William on his
throne than the labourers came out of their dens, looking like
those sansculottes whose shadows were never far from the
imagination of the English upper classes. The king’s support
of Reform was no violent enthusiasm, and the slightest threat
of disorder might disturb the uneasy equilibrium of his likes
and fears. In the long run it depended on the will of this
genial mediocrity&mdash;so strangely had Providence mixed caprice
and design in this world of politics&mdash;whether or not Reform
should be carried, and carried without bloodshed. Throughout
these months then, the king, always at Melbourne’s elbow,
trying to tempt and push the Government into more drastic
measures, was a very formidable enemy to the cause of
moderation and of justice.</p>

<p>These influences were strong, and there was little to
counteract them. For there was nobody in the world which
Grey and Melbourne alike inhabited who could enter into
the minds of the labourers. This is readily seen, if we glance
at two men who were regarded as extreme Radicals in the
House of Commons, Hobhouse and Burdett. Each of these<span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[313]</span>
men had served the cause of Reform in prison as well as in
Parliament, and each with rather ridiculous associations;
Hobhouse’s imprisonment being connected with the ballad
inspired by the malicious and disloyal wit of his friend and
hero, Byron, and Burdett’s with the ludicrous scene of his
arrest, with his boy spelling out Magna Charta on his knee.
It is difficult for those who have read Hobhouse’s <i>Diaries</i>
to divine what play of reason and feeling ever made him
a Radical, but a Radical he was, an indefatigable critic of the
old régime, and in particular of such abuses as flogging in the
army. Burdett was a leader in the same causes. To these
men, if to any, the conduct of the labourers might have seemed
to call for sympathy rather than for violence. But if we turn
to Hobhouse’s <i>Diary</i> we see that he was never betrayed into
a solitary expression of pity or concern for the scenes we
have described, and as for Burdett, he was all for dragooning
the discontented counties and placing them under martial
law. And even Radnor, who as a friend of Cobbett was
much less academic in his Radicalism, sat on the Wiltshire
Commission without making any protest that has reached
posterity.</p>

<p>All the circumstances then made it easy for Grey and his
colleagues to slip into a policy of violence and repression.
They breathed an atmosphere of panic, and they dreaded the
recoil of that panic on their own schemes. Yet when all
allowance is made for this insidious climate, when we remember
that no man is so dangerous as the kind man haunted by the
fear of seeming weak, at a moment when he thinks his power
of doing good depends on his character for strength; when we
remember, too, the tone of Society caught between scare and
excitement, the bad inspiration of the Court, the malevolent
influence of an alarmed Opposition, the absorbing interest
of making a ministry, the game apart from the business of
politics, it is still difficult to understand how men like Grey
and Holland and Durham could ever have lent themselves to
the cruelties of this savage retribution. When first there were
rumours of the intention of the Government to put down the
riots with severe measures, Cobbett wrote a passage in which
he reviewed the characters of the chief ministers, Grey with
his ‘humane disposition,’ Holland ‘who never gave his consent
to an act of cruelty,’ Althorp ‘who has never dipped his
hand in blood,’ Brougham ‘who with all his half Scotch
crotchets has at any rate no blood about him,’ to show that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[314]</span>
the new ministers, unlike many of their Tory predecessors,
might be trusted to be lenient and merciful. Two of these
men, Grey and Holland, had made a noble stand against all
the persecutions of which Tory Governments had been guilty,
defending with passion men whose opinions they regarded
with horror; if any record could justify confidence it was
theirs. Unfortunately the politician who was made Home
Secretary did not share in this past. The common talk at the
time of Melbourne’s appointment was that he was too lazy for
his office; the real criticism should have been that he had
taken the side of Castlereagh and Sidmouth in 1817. As
Home Secretary he stopped short of the infamous measures
he had then approved; he refused to employ spies, and the
Habeas Corpus was not suspended. But nobody can follow
the history of this rising, and the history of the class that
made it, without recognising that the punishment which
exiled these four hundred and fifty labourers is a stain, and
an indelible stain, on the reputation of the Government that
lives in history on the fame of the Reform Bill. It is difficult
to believe that either Fox or Sheridan could have been parties
to it. The chief shame attaches to Melbourne, who let the
judges do their worst, and to Lansdowne, who sat beside
the judges on the Salisbury bench, but the fact that the
Prime Minister was immersed in the preparation of a reform,
believed by his contemporaries to be a revolution, does not
relieve him of his share of the odium, which is the due of
Governments that are cruel to the weak, and careless of justice
to the poor.</p>

<p>One effort was made, apart from the intercession of public
opinion, to induce the Government to relax its rigours. When
the panic had abated and the last echo of the riots had been
stilled by this summary retribution, a motion was proposed in
the House of Commons for a general amnesty. Unhappily the
cause of the labourers was in the hands of Henry Hunt, a man
whose wisdom was not equal to his courage, and whose egregious
vanity demoralised and spoilt his natural eloquence. If those
who were in close sympathy with his general aims could not
tolerate his manners, it is not surprising that his advocacy was
a doubtful recommendation in the unsympathetic atmosphere
of the House of Commons. He was a man of passionate
sincerity, and had already been twice in prison for his opinions,
but the ruling class thinking itself on the brink of a social
catastrophe, while very conscious of Hunt’s defects, was in no<span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[315]</span>
mood to take a detached view of this virtue. The debate,
which took place on the 8th of February 1831, reflects little
credit on the House of Commons, and the division still less, for
Hume was Hunt’s only supporter. The chief speakers against
the motion were Benett of Wiltshire, George Lamb, brother of
Melbourne and Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and
Denman, the Attorney-General. Lamb amused himself and
the House with jests on the illiterate letter for writing which the
boy Looker was then on the high seas, and Denman threw out
a suggestion that Looker’s father had had a share in the boy’s
guilt. Denman closed his speech by pouring scorn on those
who talked sentimentality, and declaring that he would ever
look back with pride on his part in the scenes of this memorable
winter.</p>

<p>So far the Government had had it all their own way. But
in their anxiety to show a resolute front and to reassure those
who had suspected that a reform Government would encourage
social disorder by weakness, Lord Grey and his colleagues
were drawn into a scrape in which they burnt their fingers
rather badly. They decided to prosecute two writers for inciting
the labourers to rebel. The two writers were Richard
Carlile and William Cobbett. Carlile was the natural prey for
a Government in search of a victim. He had already spent
six or seven years of his lion-hearted life in prison for publishing
the writings of Paine and Hone: his wife, his sister, and his
shopman had all paid a similar penalty for their association,
voluntary or involuntary, with his public-spirited adventures.
The document for which he stood in the dock at the Old Bailey
early in January 1831 was an address to the agricultural
labourers, praising them for what they had done, and reviewing
their misfortunes in this sentence: ‘The more tame you have
grown, the more you have been oppressed and despised, the
more you have been trampled on.’ Carlile defended himself in
a speech that lasted four hours and a half. The jury disagreed,
but after several hours they united on a verdict of acquittal
on the charge of bringing the Crown into contempt, and of
guilty on the charge of addressing inflammatory language to
the labouring classes. He was sentenced to imprisonment
for two years, to pay a fine, and to find sureties.</p>

<p>Cobbett’s trial was a more important event, for whereas
Carlile was the Don Quixote of liberty of mind, Cobbett was
a great political force, and his acquittal would give a very
serious shock to the prestige of the Government that attacked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[316]</span>
him. The attention of the authorities had been called to
Cobbett’s speeches very early in the history of the riots, and
the Home Office Papers show that appeals to the Government
to prosecute Cobbett were the most common of all the recommendations
and requests that poured into Whitehall from the
country. Some of these letters were addressed to Sir Robert
Peel, and one of them is endorsed with the draft of a reply:
‘My dear Sir,&mdash;If you can give me the name of the person who
heard Cobbett make use of the expression to which you refer
you would probably enable me to render no small public service
by the prosecution of Cobbett for sedition.&mdash;Very faithfully
Yours, Robert Peel.’</p>

<p>In an evil moment for themselves, Peel’s successors decided
to take action, not indeed on his speeches, but on his articles
in the <i>Political Register</i>. The character of those articles might
perhaps be described as militant and uncompromising truth.
They were inflammatory, because the truth was inflammatory.
Nobody who knew the condition of the labourers could have
found in them a single misstatement or exaggeration. The
only question was whether it was in the public interest to publish
them in a time of disturbance. From this point of view the
position of the Government was seriously weakened by the fact
that the <i>Times</i> had used language on this very subject which
was not one whit less calculated to excite indignation against
the rich, and the <i>Times</i>, though it was the organ of wealthy
men, was in point of fact considerably cheaper to buy than the
<i>Register</i>, the price of which Cobbett had raised to a shilling in
the autumn of 1830. But this was not the only reason why
the Government was in danger of exposing itself to a charge
of malice in choosing Cobbett for a prosecution. The unrest
in the southern counties had been due to a special set of
economic causes, but there was unrest due to other causes in
other parts of England. It was not the misery of ploughboys
and labourers in Hampshire and Kent that had made Wellington
and Peel decide that it was unsafe for the King to dine at the
Guildhall in the winter of 1830: the Political Unions, which
struck such terror into the Court and the politicians, were not
bred in the villages. There was a general and acute discontent
with extravagant government, with swollen lists and the burden
of sinecures, with the whole system of the control of the
boroughs and its mockery of representation. Now in such a
state of opinion every paper on the side of reform might be
charged with spreading unrest. Statistics of sinecures, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[317]</span>
pensions, and the fat revenues of bishopricks, were scattered all
over England, and the facts published in every such sheet were
like sparks thrown about near a powder magazine. The private
citizens who wrote to the Home Office in the winter of 1830
mentioned these papers almost as often as they mentioned
Cobbett’s lectures. Many of these papers were based on a
pamphlet written by Sir James Graham, First Lord of the
Admiralty in the very Government that prosecuted Cobbett.
One of the Barings complained in the House of Commons in
December 1830, that the official papers on offices and sinecures
which the Reform Government had itself presented to Parliament
to satisfy public opinion of its sincerity in the cause of
retrenchment were the cause of mischief and danger. At
such a time no writer, who wished to help the cause of reform,
could measure the effects of every sentence so nicely as to escape
the charge of exciting passion, and the Government was guilty
of an extraordinary piece of folly in attacking Cobbett for
conduct of which their own chief supporters were guilty every
time they put a pen to paper.</p>

<p>The trial took place in July 1831 at the Guildhall. It was
the great triumph of Cobbett’s life, as his earlier trial had been
his great humiliation. There was very little of the lion in the
Cobbett who faltered before Vicary Gibbs in 1810; there was
very little of the lamb in the Cobbett who towered before
Denman in 1831. And the court that witnessed his triumph
presented a strange scene. The trial had excited intense
interest, and Cobbett said that every county in England was
represented in the company that broke, from time to time, into
storms of cheering. The judge was Tenterden, the Chief
Justice, who, as a bitter enemy of reform, hated alike accusers
and accused. Six members of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister
himself and the Lord Chancellor, Melbourne and Durham,
Palmerston and Goderich listened, from no choice of their own,
to the scathing speech in which Cobbett reviewed their conduct.
Benett of Pyt House was there, a spectre of vengeance from one
Commission, and the father of the boy Cook of Micheldever,
a shadow of death from another. All the memories of those
terrible weeks seemed to gather together in the suspense of
that eager crowd watching this momentous encounter.</p>

<p>Denman, who prosecuted, employed a very different tone
towards Cobbett from the tone that Perceval had used at the
first of Cobbett’s trials. Perceval, when prosecuting Cobbett
for some articles on Ireland in the <i>Register</i> in 1803, asked the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">[318]</span>
jury with the patrician insolence of a class that held all the
prizes of life, ‘Gentlemen, who is Mr. Cobbett? Is he a man
writing purely from motives of patriotism? <i>Quis homo hic est?
Quo patre natus?</i>’ No counsel prosecuting Cobbett could open
with this kind of rhetoric in 1831: Denman preferred to describe
him as ‘one of the greatest masters of the English language.’
Denman’s speech was brief, and it was confined mainly to a
paraphrase of certain of Cobbett’s articles and to comments
upon their effect. It was no difficult task to pick out passages
which set the riots in a very favourable light, and emphasised
the undoubted fact that they had brought some improvement
in the social conditions, and that nothing else had moved the
heart or the fears of the ruling class. But the speech was not
long over before it became evident that Cobbett, like another
great political defendant, though beginning as the accused,
was to end as the accuser. His reply to the charge of exciting
the labourers to violence was immediate and annihilating.
In December 1830, after the publication of the article for
which he was now being tried, Brougham, as President of the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, had asked and
obtained Cobbett’s leave to reprint his earlier ‘Letter to the
Luddites,’ as the most likely means of turning the labourers
from rioting and the breaking of machines. There stood the
Lord Chancellor in the witness-box, in answer to Cobbett’s
subpœna, to admit that crushing fact. This was a thunderclap
to Denman, who was quite ignorant of what Brougham had
done, and, as we learn from Greville, he knew at once that his
case was hopeless. Cobbett passed rapidly from defence to attack.
Grey, Melbourne, Palmerston, Durham, and Goderich had
all been subpœna’d in order to answer some very awkward
questions as to the circumstances under which Thomas Goodman
had been pardoned. The Lord Chief Justice refused to
allow the questions to be put, but at least these great Ministers
had to listen as Cobbett told the story of those strange transactions,
including a visit from a parson and magistrates to a
‘man with a rope round his neck,’ which resulted in Goodman’s
unexplained pardon and the publication of a statement purporting
to come from him ascribing his conduct to the incitement
at Cobbett’s ‘lacture.’ Cobbett destroyed any effect that
Goodman’s charge might have had by producing a declaration
signed by one hundred and three persons present at the lecture&mdash;farmers,
tradesmen, labourers, carpenters, and shoemakers&mdash;denying
that Cobbett had made the statement ascribed to him<span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">[319]</span>
in Goodman’s confession, one of the signatories being the
farmer whose barn Goodman had burnt. He then proceeded
to contrast the treatment Goodman had received with the
treatment received by others convicted of incendiarism, and
piecing together all the evidence of the machinations of the
magistrates, constructed a very formidable indictment to which
Denman could only reply that he knew nothing of the matter,
and that Cobbett was capable of entertaining the most absurd
suspicions. On another question Denman found himself
thrown on the defensive, for he was now confronted with his
own misstatements in Parliament about Cook, and the affidavits
of Cook’s father present in court. Denman could only answer
that till that day no one had contradicted him, though he could
scarcely have been unaware that the House of Commons was
not the place in which a Minister’s statement about the age,
occupation, pay, and conduct of an obscure boy was most
likely to be challenged. Denman made a chastened reply,
and the jury, after spending the night at the Guildhall, disagreed,
six voting each way. Cobbett was a free man, for the
Whigs, overwhelmed by the invective they had foolishly
provoked, remembered, when too late, the wise saying of
Maurice of Saxony about Charles <span class="allsmcap">V.</span>: ‘I have no cage big
enough for such a bird,’ and resisted all the King’s invitations
to repeat their rash adventure. To those who have made their
melancholy way through the trials at Winchester and Salisbury,
at which rude boys from the Hampshire villages and the
Wiltshire Downs, about to be tossed across the sea, stood
shelterless in the unpitying storm of question and insinuation
and abuse, there is a certain grim satisfaction in reading this
last chapter and watching Denman face to face, not with the
broken excuses and appeals of ignorant and helpless peasants,
but with a volleyed thunder that swept into space all his
lawyer’s artifice and skill. Justice plays strange tricks upon
mankind, but who will say that she has not her inspirations?</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>One more incident has to be recorded in the tale of suppression.
The riots were over, but the fires continued. In the
autumn of 1831 Melbourne, in a shameful moment, proposed
a remedy borrowed from the evil practices which a Tory
Parliament had consented at last to forbid. The setting of
spring guns and man-traps, the common device of game
preservers, had been made a misdemeanour in 1826 by an Act
of which Suffield was the author. Melbourne now proposed to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">[320]</span>
allow persons who obtained a license from two magistrates to
protect their property by these means. The Bill passed the
House of Lords, and the <i>Journals</i> record that it was introduced
in the House of Commons, but there, let us hope from very
horror at the thought of this moral relapse, silently it disappears.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>When Grey met Parliament as Prime Minister he said that
the Government recognised two duties: the duty of finding
a remedy for the distress of the labourers, and the duty of
repressing the riots with severity and firmness. We have seen
how the riots were suppressed; we have now to see what was
done towards providing a remedy. This side of the picture is
scarcely less melancholy than the other; for when we turn to
the debates in Parliament we see clearly how hopeless it was to
expect any solution of an economic problem from the legislators
of the time. Now, if ever, circumstances had forced the
problem on the mind of Parliament, and in such an emergency
as this men might be trusted to say seriously and sincerely
what they had to suggest. Yet the debates are a mêlée of
futile generalisations, overshadowed by the doctrine which
Grey himself laid down that ‘all matters respecting the
amount of rent and the extent of farms would be much better
regulated by the individuals who were immediately interested
than by any Committee of their Lordships.’ One peer got into
trouble for blurting out the truth that the riots had raised
wages; another would curse machinery as vigorously as any
labourer; many blamed the past inattention of the House of
Lords to the labourers’ misery; and one considered the first
necessity of the moment was the impeachment of Wellington.
Two men had actual and serious proposals to make. They
were Lord King and Lord Suffield.</p>

<p>Both of these men are striking figures. King (1776&ndash;1833) was
an economist who had startled the Government in 1811 by
calling for the payments of his rents in the lawful coin of the
realm. This dramatic manœuvre for discrediting paper money
had been thwarted by Lord Stanhope, who, though in agreement
with King on many subjects, strongly approved of paper
money in England as he had approved of assignats in France.
Lord Holland tells a story of how he twitted Stanhope with
wanting to see history repeat itself, and how Stanhope answered
with a chuckle: ‘And if they take property from the drones
and give it to the bees, where, my dear Citoyen, is the great
harm of that?’ King was always in a small minority and his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">[321]</span>
signature was given, together with those of Albemarle, Thanet,
and Holland, to the protest against establishing martial law
in Ireland in 1801, which was written with such wounding
directness that it was afterwards blackened out of the records
of the House of Lords, on the motion of the infamous Lord
Clare. But he was never in a smaller minority than he was
on this occasion when he told his fellow landlords that the only
remedy for the public distress was the abolition of the Corn
Laws. Such a proposal stood no chance in the House of Lords
or in the House of Commons. Grey declared that the abolition
of the Corn Laws would lead to the destruction of the country,
and though there were Free Traders among the Whigs, even
nine years after this Melbourne described such a policy as
‘the wildest and maddest scheme that has ever entered into
the imagination of man to conceive.’</p>

<p>Suffield (1781&ndash;1835), the only other politician with a remedy,
is an interesting and attractive character. Originally a Tory,
and the son of Sir Harbord Harbord, who was not a man of
very tender sensibilities, Suffield gradually felt his way towards
Liberalism. He was too large-minded a man to be happy and
at ease in an atmosphere where the ruling class flew instinctively
in every crisis to measures of tyranny and repression. Peterloo
completed his conversion. From that time he became a
champion of the poor, a fierce critic of the Game Laws, and a
strong advocate of prison reform. He is revealed in his diary
and all the traditions of his life as a man of independence and
great sincerity. Suffield’s policy in this crisis was the policy
of home colonisation, and its fate can best be described by means
of extracts from a memoir prepared by R. M. Bacon, a Norwich
journalist and publicist of importance, and printed privately in
1838, three years after Suffield had been killed by a fall from his
horse. They give a far more intimate and graphic picture of
the mind of the Government than the best reported debates in
the records of Parliament.</p>

<p>We have seen in a previous chapter that there had been
at this time a revival of the movement for restoring the land
to the labourers. One of the chief supporters of this policy
was R. M. Bacon, who, as editor of the <i>Norwich Mercury</i>, was
in close touch with Suffield. Bacon set out an elaborate
scheme of home colonisation, resembling in its main ideas
the plan sketched by Arthur Young thirty years earlier, and
this scheme Suffield took up with great enthusiasm. Its chief
recommendation in his eyes was that it applied public money<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">[322]</span>
to establishing labourers with a property of their own, so that
whereas, under the existing system, public money was used,
in the form of subsidies from the rates, to depress wages, public
money would be used under this scheme to raise them. For
it was the object of the plan to make the labourers independent
of the farmers, and to substitute the competition of employers
for the competition of employed. No other scheme, Suffield
used to maintain, promised any real relief. If rents and taxes
were reduced the farmer would be able, but would not be
compelled, to give better wages: if taxes on the labourers’
necessaries were reduced, the labourers would be able to
live on a smaller wage, and as long as they were scrambling
for employment they were certain to be ground down to the
minimum of subsistence. The only way to rescue them from
this plight was to place them again in such a position that
they were not absolutely dependent on the farmers. This
the Government could do by purchasing land, at present waste,
and compelling parishes, with the help of a public loan, to set
up labourers upon it, and to build cottages with a fixed
allotment of land.</p>

<p>Suffield’s efforts to persuade the Government to take up
this constructive policy began as soon as Grey came into
office. His first letters to Bacon on the subject are written
in November. The opposition, he says, is very strong, and
Sturges Bourne and Lansdowne are both hostile. On 17th
November he writes that a peer had told him that he had sat
on an earlier committee on this subject with Sturges Bourne,
as chairman, and that ‘those who understood the subject
best agreed with Malthus that vice and misery alone could
<i>cure</i> the evil.’ On 19th November he writes that he has had
a conference with Brougham, with about the same success as
his conference with Lansdowne and Sturges Bourne. On the
23rd he writes that he has been promised an interview at the
Home Office; on the 25th ‘no invitation from Lord Melbourne&mdash;&mdash;the
truth is he cannot find one moment of leisure. The
Home Office is distracted by the numerous representations of
imminent danger to property, if not to life, and applications
for protection.’ Later in the same day he writes that he has
seen both Grey and Melbourne: ‘I at once attacked Grey.
I found him disposed to give every possible consideration to
the matter. He himself has in Northumberland seen upon his
own property the beneficent effects of my plan, namely of
apportioning land to cottagers, but he foresaw innumerable<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">[323]</span>
difficulties.’ A House of Lords Committee had been appointed
on the Poor Laws at the instance of Lord Salisbury, and
Suffield hoped to persuade this committee to report in favour
of his scheme. He therefore pressed Grey to make a public
statement of sympathy. Grey said ‘he would intimate that
Government would be disposed to carry into effect any measure
of relief recommended by the Committee; very pressed but
would call Cabinet together to-morrow.’ The interview with
Melbourne was very different. ‘Next I saw Lord Melbourne.
“Oppressed as you are,” said I, “I am willing to relieve you
from a conference, but you must say something on Monday
next and I fear you have not devoted much attention to the
subject.” “I understand it perfectly,” he replied, “and that
is the reason for my saying nothing about it.” “How is this
to be explained?” “Because I consider it hopeless.” “Oh,
you think with Malthus that vice and misery are the only
cure?” “No,” said Lord Melbourne, “but the evil is in
numbers and the sort of competition that ensues.” “Well
then I have measures to propose which may meet this difficulty.”
“Of these,” said Lord Melbourne, “I know nothing,”
and he turned away from me to a friend to enquire respecting
outrages.’ Suffield concludes on a melancholy note: ‘The
fact is, with the exception of a few individuals, the subject
is deemed by the world a bore: every one who touches on it
is a bore, and nothing but the strongest conviction of its
importance to the country would induce me to subject myself
to the indifference that I daily experience when I venture to
intrude the matter on the attention of legislators.’</p>

<p>A fortnight later Suffield was very sanguine: ‘Most satisfactory
interview with Melbourne: thinks Lord Grey will do
the job in the recess.’ But the sky soon darkens again, and on
the 27th Suffield writes strongly to Melbourne on the necessity
of action, and he adds: ‘Tranquillity being now restored, all
the farmers are of course reducing their wages to that miserable
rate that led to the recent disturbances.’ Unhappily
the last sentence had a significance which perhaps escaped
Suffield. Believing as he did in his scheme, he thought that
its necessity was proved by the relapse of wages on the restoration
of tranquillity, but vice and misery-ridden politicians
might regard the restoration of tranquillity as an argument
for dropping the scheme. After this the first hopes fade away.
There is strong opposition on the Select Committee to Suffield’s
views, and he is disappointed of the prompt report in favour<span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">[324]</span>
of action which he had expected from it. The Government
are indisposed to take action, and Suffield, growing sick and
impatient of their slow clocks, warns Melbourne in June that
he cannot defend them. Melbourne replies that such a
measure could not be maturely considered or passed during
the agitation over the Reform Bill. Later in the month
there was a meeting between Suffield and Melbourne, of which
unfortunately no record is preserved in the Memoir, with the
result that Suffield declared in Parliament that the Government
had a plan. In the autumn of 1831 an Act was placed on
the Statute Book which was the merest mockery of all
Suffield’s hopes, empowering churchwardens or overseers to
hire or lease, and under certain conditions to enclose, land up
to a limit of fifty acres, for the employment of the poor.
It is difficult to resist the belief that if the riots had lasted
longer they might have forced the Government to accept the
scheme, in the efficacy of which it had no faith, as the price
of peace, and that the change in temperature recorded in
Suffield’s <i>Diary</i> after the middle of December marks the
restoration of confidence at Whitehall.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>So perished the last hope of reform and reparation for the
poor. The labourers’ revolt was ended; and four hundred
and fifty men had spent their freedom in vain. Of these
exiles we have one final glimpse; it is in a letter from the
Governor of Van Diemen’s Land to Lord Goderich: ‘If, my
Lord, the evidence, or conduct, of particular individuals, can
be relied on as proof of the efficiency or non-efficiency of
transportation, I am sure that a strong case indeed could be
made out in its favour. I might instance the rioters who
arrived by the <i>Eliza</i>, several of whom died almost immediately
from disease, induced apparently by despair. A great many
of them went about dejected and stupefied with care and
grief, and their situation after assignment was not for a
long time much less unhappy.’<a id="FNanchor_486" href="#Footnote_486" class="fnanchor">[486]</a></p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">[325]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII<br />

<span class="smaller">CONCLUSION</span></h2>
</div>



<p>A row of eighteenth-century houses, or a room of normal
eighteenth-century furniture, or a characteristic piece of
eighteenth-century literature, conveys at once a sense of
satisfaction and completeness. The secret of this charm is not
to be found in any special beauty or nobility of design or
expression, but simply in an exquisite fitness. The eighteenth-century
mind was a unity, an order; it was finished, and it
was simple. All literature and art that really belong to the
eighteenth century are the language of a little society of men
and women who moved within one set of ideas; who understood
each other; who were not tormented by any anxious
or bewildering problems; who lived in comfort, and, above
all things, in composure. The classics were their freemasonry.
There was a standard for the mind, for the emotions, for the
taste: there were no incongruities. When you have a society
like this, you have what we roughly call a civilisation, and it
leaves its character and canons in all its surroundings and
its literature. Its definite ideas lend themselves readily to
expression. A larger society seems an anarchy in contrast;
just because of its escape into a greater world it seems powerless
to stamp itself on wood or stone; it is condemned as an age
of chaos and mutiny, with nothing to declare. In comparison
with the dishevelled century that follows, the eighteenth
century was neat, well dressed and nicely appointed. It had
a religion, the religion of quiet common sense and contentment
with a world that it found agreeable and encouraging; it had
a style, the style of the elegant and polished English of Addison
or Gibbon. Men who were not conscious of any strain or great
emotion asked of their writers and their painters that they
should observe in their art the equanimity and moderation
that were desirable in life. They did not torture their minds
with eager questions; there was no piercing curiosity or
passionate love or hatred in their souls; they all breathed the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">[326]</span>
same air of distinguished satisfaction and dignified self-control.
English institutions suited them admirably; a monarchy so
reasonable nobody could mind; Parliament was a convenient
instrument for their wishes, and the English Church was the
very thing to keep religion in its place. What this atmosphere
could produce at its best was seen in Gibbon or in Reynolds;
and neither Gibbon nor Reynolds could lose themselves in a
transport of the imagination. To pass from the eighteenth
century to the Revolt, from Pope to Blake, or from Sheridan
to Shelley, is to burst from this little hothouse of sheltered and
nurtured elegance into an infinite wild garden of romance
and mystery. For the eighteenth century such escape was
impossible, and if any one fell into the fatal crime of enthusiasm,
his frenzy took the form of Methodism, which was a more
limited world than the world he had quitted.</p>

<p>The small class that enjoyed the monopoly of political
power and social luxuries, round whose interests and pleasures
the State revolved, consisted, down to the French war, of
persons accustomed to travel, to find amusement and instruction
in foreign galleries and French salons, and to study the fashions
and changes of thought, and letters and religion, outside
England; of persons who liked to surround themselves
with the refinements and the decorations of life, and to display
their good taste in collecting old masters, or fine fragments
of sculpture, or the scattered treasures of an ancient library.
Perhaps at no time since the days when Isabella d’Este consoled
herself for the calamities of her friends and relatives
with the thought of the little Greek statues that were brought
by these calamities into the market, has there been a class so
keenly interested in the acquisition of beautiful workmanship,
for the sake of the acquisition rather than for the sake of the
renown of acquiring it. The eighteenth-century collectors
bought with discernment as well as with liberality: they were
not the slaves of a single rage or passion, and consequently
they enriched the mansions of England with the achievements
of various schools. Of course the eighteenth century had its
own fashion in art, and no admiration is more unintelligible to
modern taste than the admiration for Guercino and Guido Reni
and the other seventeenth-century painters of Bologna. But
the pictures that came across the Channel in such great numbers
were not the products of one school, or indeed the products of
one country. Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian, they all
streamed into England, and the nation suddenly found itself,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">[327]</span>
or rather its rulers, very rich in masterpieces. The importance
of such a school of manners as this, with its knowledge of other
worlds and other societies, its interest in literature and art, its
cosmopolitan atmosphere, can only be truly estimated by
those who remember the boorish habits of the country gentlemen
of the earlier eighteenth century described by Fielding.
With the French war this cosmopolitan atmosphere disappeared.
Thenceforth the aristocracy were as insular in their
prejudices as any of their countrymen, and Lord Holland,
who preserved the larger traditions of his class, provoked
suspicion and resentment by travelling in Spain during the
Peninsular War.<a id="FNanchor_487" href="#Footnote_487" class="fnanchor">[487]</a></p>

<p>But if the art and literature of the eighteenth century show
the predominance of a class that cultivated its taste outside
England, and that regarded art and literature as mere ministers
to the pleasure of a few,<a id="FNanchor_488" href="#Footnote_488" class="fnanchor">[488]</a> they show also that that class had
political power as well as social privileges. There is no art of
the time that can be called national either in England or in
France, but the art of eighteenth-century England bears a less
distant relation to the English people than the art of eighteenth-century
France to the people of France, just in proportion
as the great English houses touched the English people more
closely than Versailles touched the French. English art is less
of mere decoration and less of mere imitation, for, though it
is true that Chippendale, Sheraton, and the Adam brothers
were all in one sense copying the furniture of other countries&mdash;Holland,
China, France&mdash;they all preserved a certain English
strain, and it was the flavour of the vernacular, so to speak,
that saved their designs from the worst foreign extravagance.
They were designing, indeed, for a class and not for a nation,
but it was for a class that had never broken quite away from
the life of the society that it controlled. The English aristocracy
remained a race of country gentlemen. They never
became mere loungers or triflers, kicking their heels about a
Court and amusing themselves with tedious gallantries and
intrigues. They threw themselves into country life and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">[328]</span>
government, and they were happiest away from London.
The great swarms of guests that settled on such country seats
as Holkham were like gay and boisterous schoolboys compared
with the French nobles who had forgotten how to live in the
country, and were tired of living at Versailles. If anything
could exceed Grey’s reluctance to leave his great house in
Northumberland for the excitements of Parliament, it was
Fox’s reluctance to leave his little house in Surrey. The
taste for country pleasures and for country sports was never
lost, and its persistence explains the physical vitality of the
aristocracy. This was a social fact of great importance, for it
is health after all that wins half the battles of classes. No
quantity of Burgundy and Port could kill off a race that was
continually restoring its health by life in the open air; it did
not matter that Squire Western generally spent the night under
the table if he generally spent the day in the saddle. This
inheritance of an open-air life is probably the reason that in
England, in contrast to France and Italy, good looks are more
often to be found in the aristocracy than in other classes of
society.</p>

<p>It was due to this physical vigour that the aristocracy,
corrupt and selfish though it was, never fell into the supreme
vice of moral decadence. The other European aristocracies
crumbled at once before Napoleon: the English aristocracy,
amidst all its blunders and errors, kept its character for
endurance and fortitude. Throughout that long struggle,
when Napoleon was strewing Europe with his triumphs and,
as Sheridan said, making kings the sentinels of his power,
England alone never broke a treaty or made a surrender at
his bidding. For ten years Pitt seems the one fixed point
among the rulers of Europe. It is not, of course, to be argued
that the ruling class showed more valour and determination
than any other class of Englishmen would have shown: the
empire-builders of the century, men of daring and enterprise on
distant frontiers, were not usually of the ruling class, and
Dr. Johnson once wrote an essay to explain why it was that
the English common soldier was the bravest of the common
soldiers of the world. The comparison is between the English
aristocracy and the other champions of law and order in the
great ordeal of this war, and in that comparison the English
aristocracy stands out in conspicuous eminence in a Europe
of shifting and melting governments.</p>

<p>The politics of a small class of privileged persons enjoying
an undisputed power might easily have degenerated into a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">[329]</span>
mere business of money-making and nothing else. There is
plenty of this atmosphere in the eighteenth-century system:
a study merely of the society memoirs of the age is enough to
dissipate the fine old illusion that men of blood and breeding
have a nice and fastidious sense about money. Just the
opposite is the truth. Aristocracies have had their virtues,
but the virtue of a magnificent disdain for money is not to be
expected in a class which has for generations taken it as a
matter of course that it should be maintained by the State.
At no time in English history have sordid motives been so
conspicuous in politics as during the days when power was most
a monopoly of the aristocracy. No politicians have sacrificed
so much of their time, ability, and principles to the pursuit of
gain as the politicians of the age when poor men could only
squeeze into politics by twos or threes in a generation, when the
aristocracy put whole families into the House of Commons as
a matter of course, and Burke boasted that the House of Lords
was wholly, and the House of Commons was mainly, composed
for the defence of hereditary property.</p>

<p>But the politics of the eighteenth century are not a mere
scramble for place and power. An age which produced the
two Pitts could not be called an age of mere avarice. An age
which produced Burke and Fox and Grey could not be called
an age of mere ambition. The politics of this little class are
illuminated by the great and generous behaviour of individuals.
If England was the only country where the ruling class made a
stand against Napoleon, England was the only country where
members of the ruling class were found to make a stand for
the ideas of the Revolution. Perhaps the proudest boast
that the English oligarchy can make is the boast that some
of its members, nursed as they had been in a soft and feathered
world of luxury and privilege, could look without dismay on
what Burke called the strange, wild, nameless, enthusiastic
thing established in the centre of Europe. The spectacle of
Fox and Sheridan and Grey leading out their handful of
Liberals night after night against the Treason and Sedition
Bills, at a time when an avalanche of terror had overwhelmed
the mind of England, when Pitt, Burke, and Dundas thought
no malice too poisoned, Gillray and Rowlandson no deforming
touch of the brush too brutal, when the upper classes thought
they were going to lose their property, and the middle classes
thought they were going to lose their religion, is one of the
sublime spectacles of history. This quality of fearlessness in
the defence of great causes is displayed in a fine succession<span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">[330]</span>
of characters and incidents; Chatham, whose courage in facing
his country’s dangers was not greater than his courage in
blaming his country’s crimes; Burke, with his elaborate rage
playing round the dazzling renown of a Rodney; Fox, whose
voice sounds like thunder coming over the mountains, hurled
at the whole race of conquerors; Holland, pleading almost
alone for the abolition of capital punishment for stealing before
a bench of bishops; a man so little given to revolutionary
sympathies as Fitzwilliam, leaving his lord-lieutenancy rather
than condone the massacre of Peterloo. If moral courage is
the power of combating and defying an enveloping atmosphere
of prejudice, passion, and panic, a generation which was
poor in most of the public virtues was, at least, conspicuously
rich in one. Foreign policy, the treatment of Ireland, of
India, of slaves, are beyond the scope of this book, but in
glancing at the class whose treatment of the English poor
has been the subject of our study, it is only just to record that
in other regions of thought and conduct they bequeathed a
great inheritance of moral and liberal ideas: a passion for
justice between peoples, a sense for national freedom, a great
body of principle by which to check, refine, and discipline the
gross appetites of national ambition. Those ideas were the
ideas of a minority, but they were expressed and defended
with an eloquence and a power that have made them an
important and a glorious part of English history. In all this
development of liberal doctrine it is not fanciful to see the
ennobling influence of the Greek writers on whom every
eighteenth-century politician was bred and nourished.</p>

<p>Fox thought in the bad days of the war with the Revolution
that his own age resembled the age of Cicero, and that Parliamentary
government in England, undermined by the power
of the Court, would disappear like liberty in republican Rome.
There is a strange letter in which, condoling with Grey on
his father’s becoming a peer, he remarks that it matters the
less because the House of Commons will soon cease to be of
any importance. This prediction was falsified, and England
never produced a Cæsar. There is, however, a real analogy
in the social history of the two periods. The English ruling
class corresponds to the Roman senatorial order, both classes
claiming office on the same ground of family title, a Cavendish
being as inevitable as a Claudius, and an Æmilius as a Gower.
The <i>equites</i> were the second rank of the Roman social
aristocracy, as the manufacturers or bankers were of the
English. A Roman <i>eques</i> could pass into the senatorial<span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">[331]</span>
order by holding the quæstorship; an English manufacturer
could pass into the governing class by buying an estate. The
English aristocracy, like the Roman, looked a little doubtfully
on new-comers, and even a Cicero or a Canning might
complain of the freezing welcome of the old nobles; but it
preferred to use rather than to exclude them.</p>

<p>In both societies the aristocracy regarded the poor in much
the same spirit, as a problem of discipline and order, and passed
on to posterity the same vague suggestion of squalor and turbulence.
Thus it comes that most people who think of the
poor in the Roman Republic think only of the great corn largesses;
and most people who think of the poor in eighteenth-century
England think only of the great system of relief from
the rates. Mr. Warde Fowler has shown how hard it is to find
in the Roman writers any records of the poor. So it is with
the records of eighteenth-century England. In both societies
the obscurity which surrounded the poor in life has settled
on their wrongs in history. For one person who knows anything
about so immense an event as the disappearance of the
old English village society, there are a hundred who know
everything about the fashionable scenes of high politics and
high play, that formed the exciting world of the upper classes.
The silence that shrouds these village revolutions was not
quite unbroken, but the cry that disturbed it is like a noise
that breaks for a moment on the night, and then dies away,
only serving to make the stillness deeper and more solemn.
The <i>Deserted Village</i> is known wherever the English language
is spoken, but Goldsmith’s critics have been apt to treat it,
as Dr. Johnson treated it, as a beautiful piece of irrelevant
pathos, and his picture of what was happening in England has
been admired as a picture of what was happening in his discolouring
dreams. Macaulay connected that picture with
reality in his ingenious theory, that England provided the
village of the happy and smiling opening, and Ireland the
village of the sombre and tragical end. One enclosure has
been described in literature, and described by a victim, John
Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant, who drifted into a madhouse
through a life of want and trouble. Those who recall the
discussions of the time, and the assumption of the upper classes
that the only question that concerned the poor was the question
whether enclosure increased employment, will be struck by
the genuine emotion with which Clare dwells on the natural
beauties of the village of his childhood, and his attachment
to his home and its memories. But Clare’s day was brief<span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">[332]</span>
and he has few readers.<a id="FNanchor_489" href="#Footnote_489" class="fnanchor">[489]</a> In art the most undistinguished
features of the most undistinguished members of the aristocracy
dwell in the glowing colours of a Reynolds; the poor
have no heirlooms, and there was no Millet to preserve the
sorrow and despair of the homeless and dispossessed. So
comfortably have the rich soothed to sleep the sensibilities
of history. These debonair lords who smile at us from the
family galleries do not grudge us our knowledge of the
escapades at Brooks’s or at White’s in which they sowed their
wild oats, but we fancy they are grateful for the poppy seeds
of oblivion that have been scattered over the secrets of their
estates. Happy the race that can so engage the world with
its follies that it can secure repose for its crimes.</p>

<p>De Quincey has compared the blotting out of a colony of
Alexander’s in the remote and unknown confines of civilisation,
to the disappearance of one of those starry bodies which, fixed
in longitude and latitude for generations, are one night observed
to be missing by some wandering telescope. ‘The agonies
of a perishing world have been going on, but all is bright and
silent in the heavenly host.’ So is it with the agonies of the
poor. Wilberforce, in the midst of the scenes described in
this volume, could declare, ‘What blessings do we enjoy in this
happy country; I am reading ancient history, and the pictures
it exhibits of the vices and the miseries of men fill me with
mixed emotions of indignation, horror and gratitude.’ Amid
the great distress that followed Waterloo and peace, it was a
commonplace of statesmen like Castlereagh and Canning that
England was the only happy country in the world, and that
so long as the monopoly of their little class was left untouched,
her happiness would survive. That class has left bright and
ample records of its life in literature, in art, in political traditions,
in the display of great orations and debates, in
memories of brilliant conversation and sparkling wit; it has
left dim and meagre records of the disinherited peasants that
are the shadow of its wealth; of the exiled labourers that are
the shadow of its pleasures; of the villages sinking in poverty
and crime and shame that are the shadow of its power and
its pride.</p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">[333]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_1">APPENDIX A (1)</h2>
</div>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>The information about Parliamentary Proceedings in Appendix A
is taken from the <i>Journals</i> of the House of Commons or of the
House of Lords for the dates mentioned. The place where the
Award is at present enrolled is given, where possible, under the
heading ‘Award.’ A Return, asked for by Sir John Brunner,
was printed February 15, 1904, of Inclosure Awards, deposited
with Clerks of the Peace or of County Councils.</p>
</div>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Armley, Leeds, Yorks.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1793</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;About 175 acres.</p>

<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Waste Ground, called Armley Moor or
Common.</p>

<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>February 21, 1793.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from ‘several of the Owners of Lands within the Manor
and Township of Armley,’ stating that this parcel of waste ground
is, in its present state, incapable of improvement. Leave given,
bill presented March 15.</p>

<p><i>March 28.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from various owners
and proprietors of Messuages, Cottages, Lands and Tenements
who ‘by virtue thereof, or otherwise, have an indisputable
Right of Common upon the said Moor,’ stating that ‘they
conceive that an Inclosure of the said Moor and Waste Ground
would be productive of no Advantage to any of the Proprietors
claiming a Right of Common thereon, but, on the
contrary, would very materially injure and prejudice their respective
Estates in the said Townships, by laying upon the said
Township the Burthen of making, maintaining, and repairing the
necessary new Roads, which must be set out to a considerable
Extent over the said Moor and Waste Ground, and also by
increasing the Poors Rate, inasmuch as the Petitioners conceive
that the Inhabitants of the said Town of Armley, who are very
numerous, and principally poor Manufacturers of broad Woollen
Cloth, receive considerable Benefit and Advantage from the
present open State of the said Moor and Waste Ground, particularly
in having Tenters and Frames to stretch and dry their
Cloth, Warps, and Wool, after it has been dyed, put up and fixed
upon the said Moor and Waste Ground, which Privileges and
Advantages have hitherto conduced to alleviate the Distresses and
Hardships of the said poor Manufacturers in the said Township of
Armley, and which, if the said Inclosure takes Place, they will be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">[334]</span>
totally deprived of and reduced to Poverty and Want.’ The
Petition was ordered to be heard on second reading.</p>

<p><i>April 9.</i>&mdash;Bill read a second time. House informed that
Petitioners declined to be heard on second reading. The Petition
was referred to the Committee.</p>

<p><i>April 17.</i>&mdash;(1) Petition against the bill from John Taylor, giving
same reasons as last petition. (2) Petition from various master
manufacturers of broad woollen cloth in Armley against the bill,
stating that, as the Moor only contains about 160 Acres, inclosure
which involves division ‘amongst so great a Number of Claimants
in small Allotments,’ and also ‘the heavy and unavoidable
Expenses of obtaining the Act, surveying, dividing, inclosing, and
improving’ will confer little or no Benefit on the proprietors,
whereas it will certainly deprive the poor Manufacturers, who are
very numerous, of (1) the Privileges and Advantages of fixing their
Tenters, etc., ‘which they and their Ancestors have hitherto
enjoyed’; and (2) ‘of that Pasturage upon the said Common
which they have hitherto much depended upon.’ Both Petitions to
be heard at Report stage; (3) Petition against the bill from various
owners and proprietors who ‘at the Instance of several other
Owners of Lands’ signed a petition for inclosure, ‘under an Idea,
that the Inclosure would meet with the Approbation of, and be
of general Utility to the Inhabitants of the said Town,’ but now
finding that this idea was mistaken, and that Inclosure would be
of general disadvantage, ask that their names should be erased,
and that if the bill is brought in, they should be heard against it.
Petition referred to Committee. Petitioners to be heard, ‘if
they think fit’ (‘they’ ambiguous, might be Committee or Petitioners).</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>April 29.</i>&mdash;Wilberforce
reported from the Committee; Standing Orders complied with,
Committee had considered the two petitions referred to them
(apparently they had not heard Counsel), and had found that the
Allegations of the Bill were true, and that the parties concerned had
given their consent ‘(except the Owners of Land of the Annual
Value of £172, 8s. 2d. who refused to sign the Bill; and also,
except the Owners of Lands of the Annual Value of £35, 15s. 9d.,
who declared themselves neuter; and that the Whole of the
Land entitled to Right of Common is of the Annual Value of
£901, 12s. 1d.).’ There is nothing to suggest that the petitioners
against the bill were heard at this stage. The Bill passed Commons
and Lords. Royal Assent, June 3, 1793.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 33 George. <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 61.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;One only. William Whitelock of Brotherton,
Yorks, Gentleman. He is also to act as surveyor. Vacancy to
be filled, if necessary, by ‘the major part in value’ of those
interested in the Common. An arbitrator is to be appointed by
the Recorder of Leeds.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">[335]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment to Commissioner.</span>&mdash;£1, 11s. 6d. for each working day.
As surveyor, his remuneration is to be settled by the Recorder of
Leeds.</p>

<p><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;The Commissioner is to hear and to determine upon all
claims, but if any one is dissatisfied the matter can be referred to
the Arbitrator, whose decision is final. If the appeal is vexatious,
the Arbitrator can award costs against the appellant. The
Arbitrator’s decision is final except in respect of matters of Title
which can still be tried at law.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Provisions for Lord of the Manor.</i>&mdash;(1) The equivalent in value
of one-sixteenth of the whole in lieu of his right in the soil.</p>

<p>(2) His other manorial rights to continue as before, including
his mineral rights, but he is forbidden to ‘enter into or damage
any House, Garden, or Pleasure Ground’ hereafter made on the
Common, and if he damages property he must pay for satisfaction
either a yearly rent of £3 an acre or part of an acre actually used
and damaged, or else make such compensation as shall be awarded
by two indifferent persons, one chosen by the Lord of the Manor,
the other by the person who sustains the damage. If these two
cannot agree, they must choose an Umpire whose decision is to be
final.</p>

<p>(3) The Lord of the Manor is to have the use of a spring in the
close belonging to Samuel Blackburn.</p>

<p><i>Provisions for Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;None.</p>

<p><i>Provisions for the Poor.</i>&mdash;(1) Allotment to Cottagers of 8&frac12; acres
in six or more distinct and separate places, as near as possible to
the Cottages on or adjoining the Common ‘which shall for ever
hereafter remain open and uninclosed, and shall be used and
enjoyed by the Occupiers of the several Cottages or Dwelling
Houses now or hereafter to be built within the said Township of
Armley, for the setting up and using of Tenters, Stretchers for
Warp, Wool Hedges,’ etc., under the direction of the Minister,
Chapel Wardens, and Overseers. No buildings are to be erected
on this ground, and no rent paid for the use of it; no roads or
paths may be made through it, and no buildings erected within
20 yards on the South or West.</p>

<p>(2) Allotment to the Poor.&mdash;2 acres, to be vested in the
Minister, Chapel Wardens, and Overseers, and used for a Poor
House, School House, and for the benefit of a School master. Until
used for these purposes, the rent and profits are to go towards the
Poor Assessment.</p>

<p><i>Allotment for Stone</i> for roads, etc.&mdash;5 acres (for the making and
repairing of highways and private roads).</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;To be divided out amongst the persons
having right of common according to their several rights and
interests, quantity, quality, and situation considered, provided ‘that
in case it shall be determined that the Owners of any Messuages<span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">[336]</span>
or Cottages, or Scites of Messuages and Cottages, are entitled to
Right of Common on the said Common or Waste Ground, then
that the said Commissioner ... shall award and allot such
Parcels of the Common and Waste Ground to the Owners of such
Messuages or Cottages, as have been erected for Sixty Years and
upwards, unless the same shall have been erected upon the Scite
of an ancient Messuage or Cottage, as to him ... shall appear a
fair Compensation for such Right,’ and in making this allotment
he is not to pay any regard to the value of these Messuages and
Cottages one to another, except with reference to the Quantity of
land. If any allottee is dissatisfied with his share, he can appeal
for arbitration to the Recorder of Leeds, whose decision is to be
final, except in cases where the question concerns any Right of
Common claimed ‘for or in respect of any ancient Houses or
Scites of Houses, Lands or Grounds,’ when there may be an appeal
at law, if notice is given within a specified time. Allotments
must be accepted within 6 months after award. Failure to
accept excludes allottee from all benefits. (Saving clause for
infants, etc.).</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;(1) Incroachments 60 years old and more to
be treated as old inclosures with right of common, except such
Incroachments as have been made by or for the Curate of Armley
for the time being. (2) Incroachments from 40 to 60 years old
to remain with possessors but not to confer any right of common.
(3) Incroachments made within 40 years to be deemed part of the
Common to be divided, but to be allotted to present holders as
part of their allotments. But if they do not lie adjoining the incroacher’s
ancient estates then the Commissioner can allot them to
anyone, giving ‘adequate Satisfaction for any Improvement’ to
the incroacher. The above does not apply to two inclosures made
by Stephen Todd, Esqr. and by Joseph Akeroyd which are to be
allotted to them respectively under their present indentures of
lease.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;To be done by allottees under the Commissioner’s
directions. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;The allotment of 2 acres for the poor is to
be fenced and enclosed at the expense of the other proprietors.
If allottees refuse to fence, the Commissioner can do it for them
and charge them, ultimately distraining. To protect the young
quickset, no sheep or lambs are to be depastured in allotments for
7 years, unless special fences are made, and no cattle, sheep or
lambs are to graze in the roads and ways for 10 years.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;To be paid by the proprietors in such proportion as
the Commissioner decides. The Commissioner’s accounts are to be
entered in a book, and produced when 5 proprietors require it.
To meet expenses, allotments may be mortgaged in some cases,
with consent of the Commissioner, up to 60s. an acre.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation to Occupiers.</span>&mdash;All leases, as regards right of
common and other rights on the waste ground for 21 years and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">[337]</span>
under to be null and void, the lessor making such satisfaction to
the lessee as the Commissioner thinks a fit equivalent.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners have full power to set out and stop up
roads and footpaths.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases
where the Commissioner’s or Arbitrator’s decision is said to be
final; or where some other provision is made, <i>e.g.</i> to Recorder of
Leeds about allotments.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Not with Clerk of the Peace or of County Council or
in Record Office.</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_2">APPENDIX A (2)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Ashelworth, Gloucester.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1797</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;Not given in Act. Commonable Land of every kind
stated in Petition (see below) as 310 Acres in all.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;‘Open and Common Fields, Meadows, and
Pastures, Commonable and intermixed Lands, and a Tract of
Waste Ground, being Part and Parcel of a Common called Corse
Lawn,<a id="FNanchor_490" href="#Footnote_490" class="fnanchor">[490]</a> and also a Plot, Piece, or Parcel of Land or Ground, on the
Eastern Side of the said Parish,<a id="FNanchor_491" href="#Footnote_491" class="fnanchor">[491]</a> adjoining to, and lately Part of the
Parish of Hasfield ... but now Part of the Parish of Ashelworth’.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>February 21, 1797.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from various owners of lands and estates. March 24, Bill
read first time.</p>

<p><i>April 7, 1797.</i>&mdash;Petition from various Landowners and Owners
of Mease Places, against the bill, stating ‘That there are only
about 310 Acres of Commonable Land belonging to Land Owners
of the said Parish, of which 148 Acres are Meadow Land, called
the <i>Upper Ham</i>, lying in the Manor of <i>Hasfield</i>, the Right of
Common upon which belongs exclusively to the Petitioners (and
some others) as Owners of Fifty Five Mease Places within the
said Parish, and the Petitioners are the Owners of Thirty-four of
such Mease Places; and that the Remainder of the said Commonable
Land consists of a Common Meadow, called <i>Lonkergins Ham</i>,
containing about eight Acres (upon which Six Persons have a
Right of Common) and about 150 Acres of Waste Land, Part
of a Tract of Land called Corse Lawn, upon which Waste Land all
the Land Owners of the said Parish are entitled to a Right of
Common; and that the several Estates within the said Parish, lie
very compact and convenient, and many of such Estates are exempt
from the Payment of Great Tithes; and that of the
Remainder of such Estates the Great Tithes (except a Portion of
which the Vicar was endowed) belong to Charles Hayward Esq.,
who is Lord of the Manor of Ashelworth, and Owner of an Estate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">[338]</span>
in the said Parish; and that there is no one Object in the Bill
sufficient, under the Circumstances of the Case, to justify the
enormous Expences which will attend the obtaining and carrying
it into Execution, but that, on the Contrary, it is fraught with
great Evil, and will be extremely injurious to the Petitioners,’
and asking that the Petitioners may be permitted to examine
Witnesses and to be heard by their Counsel against the bill.</p>

<p>Petitioners to be heard on Second reading.</p>

<p><i>April 10.</i>&mdash;Second reading of bill. House informed that
Petitioners did not wish to be heard at that stage. Bill committed.
Petitioners to be heard when Bill reported if they think fit.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>May 3, 1797.</i>&mdash;Mr.
Lygon reported from the Committee that the Standing Orders
were complied with; that the allegations were true; and that
the Parties concerned had consented to the satisfaction of the
Committee ‘(except the Owners of Property assessed to the
Land Tax at £11, 0s. 5d., and that the whole of the Property is
assessed at £86, 14s. 10d.) and that no Person appeared before
the Committee to oppose the Bill.’ (Nothing about hearing
Petitioners.) Bill passed both Houses with some amendments.
In the House of Lords an amendment was made about referring
the quarrel between the Vicar of Ashelworth and the Rector of
Hasfield on the subject of tithes to arbitration. Royal Assent,
June 6, 1797.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 37 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 108.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Three appointed. Richard Richardson of
Bath: Francis Webb of Salisbury: Thomas Fulljames of
Gloucester, Gentlemen. Two to be a quorum. Surveyor to be
appointed by Commissioners. Vacancies, both Commissioners and
Surveyors, to be filled up by remaining Commissioners from
persons not interested. If they fail to fill up, ‘the major part
in value’ of the Proprietors and Persons interested can do so.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment to Commissioners.</span>&mdash;2 guineas each working day.
Survey to be made, unless the existing one seems satisfactory
and correct.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Special Clauses.</span>&mdash;It is enacted ‘That all Fields or Inclosures
containing the Property of Two or more Persons within One
Fence, and also all Inclosures containing the Property of One
Person only, if the same be held by or under different Tenures or
Interests, shall be considered as Commonable Land, and be
divided and allotted accordingly.’</p>

<p>Also ‘all Homesteads, Gardens, Orchards, old Inclosures, and
other Lands and Grounds,’ shall, with the consent of their proprietors
or Trustees, ‘be deemed and considered to be open and
uninclosed Land for the Purpose of the Division and Allotment
hereby intended,’ provided that Charles Hayward has to get
Bishop of Bristol’s consent.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">[339]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;All claims to be delivered in writing at first and second
Meeting, and no claim to be received after second Meeting, except
for some special cause allowed by Commissioners. Commissioners
to hold a subsequent meeting and give account in writing of what
claims are admitted and rejected.</p>

<p>Persons whose claims are rejected can bring an action on a
feigned issue against some other Proprietor. Verdict to be final
and conclusive. If Plaintiff wins, Commissioners pay costs; if
Defendant wins, Plaintiff pays. Action must be brought within a
specified time (3 months).</p>

<p><i>Exceptions.</i>&mdash;(1) If the Commissioners disallow the claim of the
Dean and Chapter of Westminster to the Right of Soil in ‘A,’
then the Dean and Chapter may bring an action within 12 months
against the Bishop of Bristol and Charles Hayward for ascertaining
the rights of soil. Costs to be paid by losers.</p>

<p>(2) If the Commissioners allow the above claim, then the
Bishop of Bristol or Charles Hayward can bring an action <i>mutatis
mutandis</i>.</p>

<p>Also, If any dispute or difference arises between the Parties
interested in the inclosure ‘touching or concerning the respective
Shares, Rights, and Interests which they or any of them shall
claim’ in the land to be inclosed, ‘or touching and concerning the
respective Shares and Proportions’ which they ought to have, the
Commissioners have power to examine and determine the same;
their determination to be ‘final, binding and conclusive upon and to
all Parties.’ Commissioners can on request of person who wins his
point assess costs on person who loses it, and ultimately distrain
on his goods.</p>

<p><i>Exception.</i>&mdash;Commissioners to have no jurisdiction about
Titles.</p>

<p>Tithe owners are to send in their claims with all particulars.
Commissioners’ determination to be final ‘(if the Parties in Dispute
think proper and agree thereto)’; but not to affect power to try
titles at law.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Lord of the Manor.</i>&mdash;(1) The Bishop of Bristol is Lord of the
Manor of Ashelworth (except ‘A’ and ‘B’), and Charles Hayward
is his lessee. He is to have such part as Commissioners judge
full compensation, to be ‘not less than ¹⁄₁₅’ of the Waste Land to
be inclosed.</p>

<p>(2) Dean and Chapter of Westminster and also the Bishop of
Bristol claim Right of Soil in ‘A,’ whichever establishes his claim
to have not less than ¹⁄₁₅ of ‘A.’</p>

<p>(3) John Parker Esq., is Lord of Manor of ‘B’: to have not
less than ¹⁄₁₅ of ‘B’.</p>

<p><i>Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;Allotment to be made from land about to be
inclosed for all tithes on all land (including present inclosures), as
<span class="lock">follows:&mdash;</span></p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">[340]</span></p>

<p>Not less in value than One Fifth of Arable Land. Not less in
value than One Ninth of Meadow or Pasture Ground, Homesteads,
Gardens, Orchards and Woodlands. Where Tithes only
partially due, full equivalent to be given.</p>

<p>The Vicar of Ashelworth and the Rector of Hasfield can have
their disputed rights to tithes of ‘B’ settled by Arbitration.</p>

<p>Owners of old inclosures who have not large enough allotments
to pay their due proportion of the tithe allotments, are to pay a
lump sum of money instead; <i>unless</i> the Commissioners deem it
convenient to allot part of the old inclosures to the tithe owners
instead; in which case the land so set out is to ‘be deemed Part
of the Lands to be divided, allotted, and inclosed by virtue of
this Act.’</p>

<p>Full equivalent to the Vicar for his Glebe Lands and their right
of Common.</p>

<p><i>For Stone, Gravel</i>, etc.&mdash;From 2 to 3 acres; ‘to be used and
enjoyed in Common’ by proprietors and inhabitants, ‘for the
Purpose only of getting Stone, Gravel, or other Materials for
making and repairing the Roads and Ways within the said Parish.’
Herbage of above to be allotted to whomsoever Commissioners
direct, or for some general, parochial or other use.</p>

<p><i>To Proprietors of Cottages.</i>&mdash;Every proprietor or owner of a
cottage and land of the annual value of £4 or under is to have
from &frac12; acre to 2 acres ‘as they the said Commissioners shall think
proper.’</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;Amongst the various persons interested
according to their respective rights and interests. Allotments to
be as near homestead or old inclosure as conveniently may be. If
two or more persons with allotments of not more than 2 acres each
want to have the same laid together in order to avoid the expence
of inclosing, they are to give notice to the Commissioners, and
the Commissioners are then to put these allotments together ‘and
in and by their Award to direct how and in what manner such
small Allotments shall be cultivated, and in what Manner and Proportion,
and with what Cattle the same shall be stocked, depastured
and fed, during the Time the same shall lie open to each other,’
and if at any time the Major part of proprietors of the small
Allotments wish it, they are to be inclosed.</p>

<p>Award with full particulars of allotments and of orders and
regulations for putting Act in execution to be drawn up, and to be
‘binding and conclusive upon and to all Persons, to all Intents
and Purposes whatsoever.’</p>

<p>Allotments to be of same tenure as property in virtue of which
they are given. Allotments must be accepted within 6 months;
if allottee fails to accept, the Commissioners can put in a salaried
Bailiff or Receiver to manage allotment till allottee accepts, when
any surplus profits are to be handed over to allottee. (Saving
clause for infants, etc.).</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">[341]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;To be done by respective allottees according to
Commissioners’ directions.</p>

<p><i>Exceptions.</i>&mdash;(1) In the case of allotments to Trustees for
parochial or charitable purposes, the Commissioners are to deduct
a portion for these allottees’ share of fencing and expenses. This
deducted land is to be divided amongst other proprietors. The
Commissioners do the fencing.</p>

<p>(2) Glebe and Tithe Allotments to be fenced by other proprietors,
and the fences to be kept in repair for 7 years at expense
of persons named by the Commissioners.</p>

<p>If an allottee fails to fence, his neighbour can complain to a
J. P. (not interested) and obtain an order to do it and charge expenses
on allottee, or else enter and receive rents.</p>

<p>If any allottee has an unfair share of fencing the Commissioners
can equalise matters. No sheep or lambs to be kept in any
inclosure for 7 years, unless special fences are made. No sheep
or lambs ever to be kept in the roads.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;Part of the Common or Waste Land to be sold to
defray expenses. If the money so raised is not sufficient, ‘the
deficiency shall be paid, borne, and defrayed’ by the various proprietors
(excluding the Tithe owners and the Lords of the Manor
for their respective allotments) in such proportion as the
Commissioners direct.</p>

<p>Land may be mortgaged up to 40s. an acre.</p>

<p>Money advanced for Act to have 5 per cent. interest.</p>

<p>Commissioners must keep accounts, which must be open to
inspection.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to set out roads, ways and footpaths, all
others to be stopped up. But no turnpike road to be interfered
with.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation.</span>&mdash;Leases at rack-rent to be void; owners paying
or receiving such satisfaction as the Commissioners think right.</p>

<p>Compensation (under Commissioners’ direction) to be paid by
new allottee to former owner for timber, underwood, etc., or else
former owner can enter and cut down, unless Commissioners
direct that trees etc. are not to be cut.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arrangements Between Act and Award.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to
have full power to direct the course of husbandry.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power or Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases
‘where the Orders, Directions and Determinations of the said
Commissioners are directed to be conclusive, binding and final.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Date, August 24, 1798. With Clerk of Peace or of
County Council, Gloucester.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">[342]</span></p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_3">APPENDIX A (3)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Cheshunt.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1799</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;2741 Acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Common Fields and common Lammas
meadows about 1555 acres; A common called Cheshunt Common
about 1186 acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>February 23, 1799.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from Sir George William Prescott Bt. (Lord of the Manor),
the Rev. Joseph Martin (Tithe owner), Oliver Cromwell, William
Tatnall and others. Leave given. Bill read twice; committed
April 25.</p>

<p><i>May 7, 1799.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from various proprietors
of Lands and Common Rights setting forth ‘That a very great
Proportion of such Open Fields and Commonable Lands are of so
bad a Quality, as to be incapable of any Improvement equivalent
to the Expenses of the Inclosure; and that the said Commons in
their present State, are well fitted for the breeding of Sheep and
Support of lean Stock, and that many of the Inhabitants of the
said Parish, who, by reason of their Residence and Occupation of
small Tenements, have Rights of Common, are enabled, by the
lawful Enjoyment of such Common Rights, to support themselves
and their Families; but, as almost all the said Commons lie at the
extreme Edge of the Parish, and are subject to very numerous and
extensive Common Rights, any Allotments of the said Commons to
the lesser Commoners must be too small, and too distant from their
Habitations, to be of any substantial Use to them, which Inconveniences
are now prevented by the Use of general Herdsmen;
and that the Inclosure of the said Open Fields and other Commonable
Lands would be, in many other Respects highly injurious to
the Rights and Interests of the Petitioners.’ Petitioners to be
heard before the Committee. All to have voices.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>May 24.</i>&mdash;Mr. Baker
reported from the Committee that they had heard Counsel for
the Petitioners; that the allegations were true; that the Parties
concerned had given their consent to the bill, and also to the
changing of one of the Commissioners named therein ‘(except
the Proprietors of 314 Acres and 19 Perches of Land, who refused
to sign the Bill; and also, the Proprietors of 408 Acres, 3 Roods
and 22 Perches who were neuter; and that the whole Property
belonging to Persons interested in the Inclosure consists of 6930
Acres, or thereabouts).’</p>

<p>Bill passed both Houses. June 13, Royal Assent.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 39 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 75.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Three appointed.</p>

<p>(1) John Foakes of Gray’s Inn, Gentleman representing the
Lord of the Manor.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">[343]</span></p>

<p>(2) Richard Davis of Lewknor, Oxford, Gentleman representing
the Impropriator of the Great Tithes.</p>

<p>(3) Daniel Mumford, of Greville St., Hatton Gardens, Gentleman,
representing the other Proprietors of Estates with Right of
Common or a major part in value. Two to be a quorum. Vacancies
to be filled up by the parties represented from persons not
interested in the enclosure. Surveyor appointed, Henry Craster
of Cheshunt.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment.</span>&mdash;Commissioners, Surveyor, and Clerk or Agent to
Commissioners each to have 2 guineas a day for each working
day.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;All claims with particulars of tenure, etc., to be
handed in at specified times; claimants must give such particulars
‘as shall be necessary to describe such Claims with as much
Precision as they can.’ No claim to be received afterwards, unless
for some special cause. Commissioners’ determination on claims to
be final and conclusive, if no objection is made. If objection is made,
the objector can (1) try the matter at law on a feigned issue; or
(2) submit the question to 2 arbitrators, the claimant naming
one arbitrator, the objector naming the other. If the arbitrators
disagree, they can name an umpire, whose decision is final and
conclusive. Commissioners can award costs. Commissioners to
have no jurisdiction over matters of title which can be tried at law.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>To Lords of the Manor.</i>&mdash;(7 of them.)</p>

<p>(1) Sir G. W. Prescott of Cheshunt.</p>

<p>(2) Rev. J. Martin of the Manors of the Rectory of Cheshunt.</p>

<p>(3) Anne Shaw, widow, of the Manors of Andrews and Le Mott.</p>

<p>(4) Francis Morland of the Manors of Theobalds, Tongs, Clays,
Clarks, Dareys, Cross-Brookes, and Cullens.</p>

<p>(5) Robert William Sax, and</p>

<p>(6) Mary Jane Sax, and</p>

<p>(7) Joseph Jackson, of the Manors of Beaumont and Perriers.</p>

<p>So much ‘as shall in the Judgment of the said Commissioners
be an adequate Compensation and Satisfaction’ for their Rights
and Interests.</p>

<p><i>Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;One-fifth of arable or tillage, and one-ninth of
the other land to be divided which is subject to tithes.</p>

<p>Above to be divided between Impropriator of Great Tithes and
Vicar.</p>

<p>For Glebe Lands, a full equivalent. If any owner of old
inclosed land who has no land in the common fields, but possesses
a Right of Common over Cheshunt Common, wishes it, part of his
allotment can (with the tithe owner’s consent) be set aside and
given to the tithe owners, and his Land will be free of tithes for
ever.</p>

<p><i>For Stone and Gravel</i>, etc.&mdash;2 Acres, to be used in common
by proprietors and tenants, for their own use and also for the roads.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">[344]</span></p>

<p><i>For Cottagers.</i>&mdash;An allotment of 100 Acres, exclusive of Roads,
to be vested in the Lord of the Manor, the Vicar, Churchwardens,
and Overseers, ‘for the Use of the Occupiers of Houses or
Cottages within the said Parish already having Right of Common,
without more than One Rood of Land belonging to and used with
the same as a Garden or Orchard, the Yearly Rent of which, at
the Time of passing this Act, shall not exceed Six Pounds, without
paying any thing for such Use.’</p>

<p>The number of the Houses with their rents and the number of
cattle are to be described in the Award. No one else is to send
cattle on to the 100 acres.</p>

<p>These cottagers are also to have the herbage of the 2-acre
allotment for stone and gravel.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;Amongst the various persons interested
in proportion to their various rights and interests, Quantity,
Quality, and Situation considered.</p>

<p>Small allotments may, on application of allottees, if Commissioners
think proper, be laid together, and enjoyed in common
under Commissioners’ direction.</p>

<p>Each Copyholder of all the Manors is to have a separate and
distinct allotment. If any allottee is dissatisfied with his allotment,
he can send in a complaint to the Commissioners, who are
to hear and determine the matter; their determination is to be
final and conclusive.</p>

<p>The Award is to be final and conclusive. If any allottee fails
to accept his allotment, or molests another in accepting, he is to
be ‘divested of all Right, Estate, and Interest whatsoever’ in the
Lands to be divided.</p>

<p>The tenure of the allotment to be that of the estate in virtue of
which it is given.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Not mentioned.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;Not specifically mentioned, but from clauses <i>re</i> tithe
owners, etc., must be done at allottee’s expense.</p>

<p>Beasts, cattle, etc., not to be depastured on the new allotments
for 7 years unless special fences made, or a proper person sent to
look after cattle.</p>

<p>Tithe owners’ allotments to be fenced, and fencing kept in
repair for 7 years by the other proprietors.</p>

<p>The 100-acre allotment for cottagers to be fenced at the expense
of the owners of the residue of the common. Mortgage up to £2
an acre allowed for expense of fencing.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;To be borne by all owners and proprietors (except
the Rector and the Vicar, in regard to their Glebe and Tythe
Allotments) in proportion to their shares, at an equal pound rate
to be fixed by the Commissioners. If allottees fail to pay, Commissioners
can distrain or enter and receive rents, etc.</p>

<p>Commissioners must keep accounts which must be open to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">[345]</span>
inspection. If they receive more money than is needed, the
surplus is to go to the Poor Rates.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation.</span>&mdash;All rack-rent leases to be void, the owners
giving the tenants ‘reasonable Satisfaction’; but where it seems
more equitable to the Commissioners, the allotment can be held
by the tenant during his lease at a rent to the owner fixed by the
Commissioners.</p>

<p>Satisfaction for crops and for ploughing, manuring and tilling
to be given by new allottee.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arrangements between Act and Award.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to
have full power to direct the course of husbandry.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to have full power to set out and to
stop up roads and footpaths (except that they are not to make
them over ‘Gardens, Orchards, Plantations, and other Private
Grounds’), and if ancient footways or paths are stopped up, the
owners of old inclosed land, for whose accommodation it is done,
are to pay something towards the general expenses of the act.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not when
Commissioners’ or others’ determination is said to be final and
conclusive.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Enrolled at Westminster, February 27, 1806. Record
Office.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of <span class="lock">Award</span>:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left" rowspan="2">Whole area divided out including roads, some old inclosures and homesteads given up to be allotted,</td>
<td><i>a.</i> </td><td><i>r.</i> </td><td><i>p.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="totalbottom">2,667</td>
<td class="totalbottom">2</td>
<td class="totalbottom">33</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left" rowspan="2">Tithe owners in various allotments including 106 acres for exonerating old inclosures, and 1&frac34; acre for Vicar’s Glebe and Right of Common,</td>
<td><i>a.</i> </td><td><i>r.</i> </td><td><i>p.</i></td></tr>
<tr>
<td>474</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>13</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">The Lord of the Manor (Sir G. B. Prescott) and the trustees of the late Lord of the Manor, including 38&frac34; acres or ¹⁄₁₈8 for manorial rights,</td>
<td>438</td>
<td>0 </td><td>24</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Mrs. Anne Shaw,</td>
<td>376</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Oliver Cromwell, Esq.,</td>
<td>107</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>29</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Occupiers of Cottages,</td>
<td>100</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Gravel Pits,</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>13</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>The remainder (excluding roads) is allotted amongst 213
<span class="lock">allottees:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable" summary="">
<tr>
<td>From 50&ndash;100 acres </td>
<td class="right">4</td>
<td class="tdl borderl" rowspan="3">Above 10 acres</td>
<td class="right" rowspan="3">23</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>From 30&ndash;50 acres</td>
<td class="right">3</td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td>From 10&ndash;30 acres </td>
<td class="right">16</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"></td>
<td>From 1&ndash;10 acres</td>
<td class="right">141</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>From &frac12;-1 acre </td>
<td class="right">37</td>
<td class="tdl borderl" rowspan="3">Below 1 acre</td>
<td class="right" rowspan="3">49</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>From &frac14;-&frac12; acre </td>
<td class="right">8</td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td>Below &frac14; acre </td>
<td class="right">4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3"></td>
<td class="right total">213</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">[346]</span></p>

<p>The Award shows that there must have been 86 owners of the
1555 acres of Open Fields and Lammas Meadows as 86 allottees
receive allotments in lieu of land. Of these 86, 63 receive allotments
of under 10 acres in lieu of their land. (13 from 5&ndash;10
acres, 37 from 1&ndash;5 acres, 13 below 1 acre.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Amending Act</span> <i>re</i> the 100 Acres Allotment, 1813.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>November 6, 1813.</i>&mdash;Petition from
the Lord of the Manor, the Vicar, Churchwardens and Overseers
for amending Act.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>November 20, 1813.</i>&mdash;Reported
that the parties concerned had consented except 9 Persons
with right of common who refused, and 3 who were neuter; the
total number of persons having right of common being 183.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Amending Act.</span>&mdash;(Local and Personal, 54
George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 2.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">New Arrangements Respecting 100-Acre Allotment.</span>&mdash;The
Commissioners had set out the 100 Acres for the use of certain
occupiers, who were to be entitled to turn out on May 12 till
February 2 either 1 Horse or 2 Cows or other Neat Cattle, or 7
Sheep; ‘And whereas, partly owing to the great Extent of the
said Parish of Cheshunt, and to the Distance at which the greater
Part of the Cottages or Houses, mentioned in the Schedule to
the said Award, are situated from the said Plot or Allotment of
One hundred Acres, and partly to the Inability of most of the
Occupiers of such Cottages or Houses to maintain or keep any
Horses, Cows, or other Neat Cattle or Sheep, the Persons for
whose Benefit and Advantage such Plot or Allotment of Land was
intended, derive little if any Advantage therefrom; but the
Herbage of such Plot or Allotment of Land is consumed by the
Cattle of Persons having no Right to depasture the same’; it is
enacted that the Trustees are to have power to let out the 100
Acres to one or more tenants for not more than 21 years, ‘at the
best and most improved yearly Rent or Rents that can at the
Time be reasonably had and obtained for the same. The proceeds
of the rents (when expenses are paid, see below) are to be
divided among the occupiers of the houses and cottages mentioned
in the Schedule.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;The Allotment is to be mortgaged up to £500 for
the expenses.</p>

<p>To repay the mortgage £50 is to be set aside from the rents
yearly.</p>

<p>Interest at 5% on the sum borrowed is to be paid from the
rents.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">[347]</span></p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_4">APPENDIX A (4)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Croydon, Surrey.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1797</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;2950 acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Open and Common Fields, about 750
acres, Commons, Marshes, Heaths, Wastes and Commonable
Woods, Lands, and Grounds about 2200 acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>November 7, 1796.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from Hon. Richard Walpole, John Cator, Esq., Richard
Carew, Esq., John Brickwood, Esq., and others. Leave given;
bill presented May 8, 1797; read twice and committed.</p>

<p><i>May 18, 1797.</i>&mdash;(1) Petition against the bill from Richard Davis
and others, as prejudicial to their rights and interests; (2) Petition
against it from James Trecothick, Esq. Both petitions to be heard
before Committee. May 26, Petition against the bill from Richard
Davis and others stating ‘that the said Bill goes to deprive the
Inhabitants of the said Parish and the Poor thereof in particular,
of certain ancient Rights and Immunities granted to them (as
they have been informed) by some, or one, of the Predecessors of
His present Majesty, and that the said Bill seems calculated to
answer the Ends of certain Individuals.’</p>

<p>Petitioners to be heard when the Bill was reported.</p>

<p><i>June 7.</i>&mdash;Petition of various inhabitants of Croydon against the
bill; similar to last petition. To be heard when Bill reported.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>June 19.</i>&mdash;Lord
William Russell reported from the Committee, standing orders
complied with, that the Petitions had been considered, allegations
true; parties concerned had given their consent to the satisfaction
of the Committee, ‘(except the Owners of 230 Acres 2 Roods
and 25 Perches of Inclosed Land, and 67 Acres 1 Rood and 31
Perches of Common Field Land, who refused to sign the Bill; and
also the Owners of 225 Acres 1 Rood and 34 Perches of Inclosed
Land, and 7 Acres 3 Roods and 5 Perches of Common Field
Land, who, on being applied to, returned no Answer; and that
the Whole of the Land consists of 6316 Acres and 37 Perches of
Inclosed Land, and 733 Acres 1 Rood and 39 Perches of Common
Field Land, or thereabouts)....’</p>

<p>The same day (June 19) petition from various Freeholders,
Copyholders, Leaseholders and Inhabitant Householders of Croydon
stating that the promoters of the bill have named Commissioners
without consulting the persons interested ‘at an open and public
meeting,’ and that since the Archbishop of Canterbury as Lord of
the Soil of the Wastes has named one Commissioner (James Iles of
Steyning, Gentleman) the other two Commissioners ought, ‘in
common Justice and Impartiality’ to be nominated by the proprietors
of lands and the Parish at large; and as they understand
that the Tithe owners and other Proprietors wish John Foakes,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">[348]</span>
named in the bill, to remain a Commissioner, asking leave to
nominate as the third Thomas Penfold of Croydon, Gentleman.
Lord William Russell proposed to recommit the bill in order
to consider this petition, but obtained only 5 votes for his motion
against 51.</p>

<p>The Bill passed Commons.</p>

<p>In the Lords a Petition was read July 4, 1797, against the Bill
from the Freeholders, Copyholders, Leaseholders and Inhabitant-Freeholders
of Croydon, praying their Lordships, ‘To take their
Case into their most serious Consideration.’ Petition referred
to Committee.</p>

<p><i>July 10, 1797.</i>&mdash;Bill passed Lords in a House of 4 Peers.
(Bishop of Bristol, Lords Walsingham, Kenyon, and Stewart of
Garlies.)</p>

<p>[3 of these had been members of the Committee of 6 to whom
the Bill was committed.]</p>

<p>Royal Assent, July 19.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 37 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 144.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Three appointed. (1) James Iles of Steyning,
Sussex; (2) John Foakes of Gray’s Inn; (3) Thomas Crawter of
Cobham, Gentlemen.</p>

<p>The first represents the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord of the
Manor of Croydon, the other two represent the proprietors of
estates with right of common (the Archbishop excluded) ‘or the
major part in value’ (such value to be collected from the rentals
in land tax assessments). Vacancies to be filled up by the parties
represented. New Commissioners not to be interested in the
inclosure. Two Surveyors appointed by name: vacancies to be
filled up by Commissioners.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment To Commissioners.</span>&mdash;2 guineas a day. Surveyors to
be paid what the Commissioners think ‘just and reasonable.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;To be delivered in at the meeting or meetings
advertised for the purpose. None to be received after, except
for some special cause. Claimants must send in claims ‘in
Writing under their Hands, or the Hands of their Agents, distinguishing
in such Claims the Tenure of the Estates in respect
whereof such Claims are made, and stating therein such further
Particulars as shall be necessary to describe such Claims with
Precision.’ The Commissioners are to hold a meeting to hear and
determine about claims, and if no objections are raised, then their
determination is final and conclusive. If objections are raised,
then any one person whose claim is disallowed, or any three
persons who object to the allowance of some one else’s claim, can
proceed to trial at the Assizes on a feigned issue. The verdict
of the trial is to be final. Due notice of trial must be given and
the allotment suspended. The Commissioners cannot determine
on questions of title which may still be tried at law.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">[349]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Provisions for Lord of the Manor.</i>&mdash;The Archbishop of Canterbury
is Lord of the Manor of Croydon and also of Waddon, and
there are six other Lords whose manors lie either wholly or partly
within the parish, <i>i.e.</i> (1) Robert Harris, Esq., of Bermondsey;
(2) Richard Carew, Esq., of Norbury; (3) John Cator, Esq., of
Bensham; (4) William Parker Hamond, Esq., of Haling; (5)
James Trecothick, Esq., of Addington, otherwise Temple, who
also claims for Bardolph and Bures. (6) The Warden and Poor
of the Hospital of Holy Trinity (Whitgift Foundation) of Croham.
Each of these 7 Lords is to have one-eighteenth of the Commons
and Wastes lying within his Manor. But whereas James Trecothick
claims some quit-rents in the Manor of Croydon, if he makes good
his claim to the Commissioners, then the Archbishop’s eighteenth
is to be divided between James Trecothick and the Archbishop,
and this is to be taken by James Trecothick as his whole share
as Lord of a Manor. The Archbishop can also have part of
Norwood Common in lieu of his due share of Norwood woodlands.</p>

<p>Manorial rights, save Right of Soil, continue as before.</p>

<p>Compensation for the timber in Norwood Woodlands is to be
fixed by the Commissioners and paid by the allottees to the
Archbishop.</p>

<p><i>Provision for Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;For Rectorial Tithes, such parcel
or parcels as Commissioners judge to be full equivalent.</p>

<p>Whereas the Archbishop claims that Norwood Woodlands (295
acres) are exempt from all tithes, this claim is to be determined
by the Commissioners or at law, and if not found good, another
parcel to be set out as full equivalent.</p>

<p>But the tithe allotments in all are not to equal in value more
than one-ninths of the Commons, marshes etc.</p>

<p>For Vicar’s tithes over Norwood Common, an equivalent parcel
of land.</p>

<p><i>Provisions for the Poor.</i>&mdash;If the inhabitants of Croydon prove
their claim to Rights of Common on Norwood Common, and in
Norwood Commonable Woods to the satisfaction of the Commissioners,
or before a Court (if it is tried at law) then the Commissioners
are to set out from the Commons, Wastes, etc., as much
land as they judge to be equivalent to such right, ‘having
particular Regard to the Accommodation of Houses and Cottages
contiguous to the said Commons, etc.,’ and this land is to remain
common, for the use of the inhabitants of Croydon, subject to the
right of getting gravel from it. Suppose, however, that the
inhabitants’ claim is not allowed, or if allowed does not equal
215 acres of common in value: even then the Commissioners are
to set out 215 acres for the above purpose. These 215 acres are
to be vested in the Vicar, Churchwardens, Overseers, and 6
Inhabitants chosen at a Vestry meeting. These trustees can
inclose as much as a seventh part and let it on lease for 21 years.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">[350]</span>
They are to manage the common with regard to stint, etc., and to
dispose of rents.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;The open common fields, commons,
marshes, etc., to be divided amongst the several persons ‘according
to their respective Rights and Interests,’ due regard being paid
to Quality, Quantity, and Situation, and the allotments being
placed as near the Homesteads, etc., as is consistent with general
convenience.</p>

<p>All houses erected 20 years and more before the Act, and
the Sites of all such houses to be considered as ancient messuages
entitled to right of common, with the exception of houses
built on encroachments, the owners of which are to have whatever
allotment the Commissioners think fair and reasonable.</p>

<p>The Commissioners are to give notice of a place where a
schedule of allotments can be inspected and of a meeting where
objections can be heard. The Commissioners are to hear
complaints, but their determination is to be binding and conclusive
on all parties.</p>

<p>When the award is drawn up ‘the said Allotments, Partitions,
Divisions, and Exchanges, and all Orders, and Directions,
Penalties, Impositions, Regulations and Determinations so to
be made as aforesaid, in and by such Award or Instrument, shall
be, and are hereby declared to be final, binding and conclusive
unto and upon all Persons interested in the said Division and
Inclosure.’ Persons who refuse to accept within an appointed
time, or who molest others who accept, are ‘divested of all Right
of Possession, Right of Pasturage and Common, and all other
Right, Estate and Interest whatsoever in the allotments.’
Allotments are to be of the same tenure as the estates in right
of which they are given. Copyhold allotments in the Manors of
Croydon and Waddon can be enfranchised by the Commissioners
at the request of the allottees, a part of such allotments being
deducted and given to the Archbishop for compensation.
Allotments may be laid together if the different owners wish it.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Those made within 6 months not to count.
Those of 20 years old and over to remain with present possessor,
but not to confer right to an allotment.</p>

<p>Encroachments under 20 years old, (1) if the encroacher has a
right to an allotment, then it shall be given to him as whole or
part of that allotment (not reckoning the value of buildings and
improvements); (2) if the allotment to which he has a right is
unequal in value to the encroachment, or if he has no right to an
allotment, he can pay the surplus or the whole price at the rate
of £10 an acre; (3) if the encroacher cannot or will not purchase,
the Commissioners are to allot him his encroachment for which
he is to pay rent at the rate of 12s. an acre a year for ever, such
rent being apportioned to whomever the Commissioners direct
as part of their allotment.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">[351]</span></p>

<p>Provisions are also made for giving encroachers allotments
elsewhere instead, in certain cases.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;To be done by allottees. If the proportion of
fencing to be done by any allottee is unfair, the Commissioners
have power to equalise it. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;(1) The allotment to
Rector for Tithes which is to be fenced at the expense of or by
the person or persons whom the Commissioners appoint; (2) The
allotments belonging to certain estates leased out at reserved
rents by the Archbishop and by Trinity Hospital for 21 years,
are to be fenced by the lessees; to compensate lessees new leases
are to be allowed; (3) Allotments to Charity Estates (except
Trinity Hospital) are to have a part deducted from them and be
fenced by the Commissioners. If any proprietor refuses to fence,
his neighbour can, on complaint to a J.P., obtain an order or an
authorisation to enter, do the fencing, and take the rents till it is
paid for.</p>

<p>Guard fences to protect the quickset are allowed.</p>

<p><i>Penalty for damaging fences</i> from 40s. to £10. The owner of
the damaged fence may give evidence. Half the penalty goes to
the informer and half to the owner. But if the owner informs,
the whole penalty goes to the Overseer.</p>

<p>Estates may be mortgaged up to 40s. an acre to meet expenses
of fencing. Roads are not to be depastured for 10 years.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;To meet all expenses (including the lawsuits on
feigned issues) part of the Commons, Wastes, etc., are to be sold by
public auction. Private sales are also authorised, but no one
person may buy privately more than 2 acres; except that if
James Trecothick, Esq., so wishes, the Commissioners are to sell
him by private contract part of Addington Hills at what they
judge a fair and reasonable price.</p>

<p>Any surplus is to be paid to the Highways or Poor Rates
within 6 months after award. Commissioners are to keep
Accounts, which must be open to Inspection.</p>

<p>Common Rights and Interests may be sold before the execution
of the award by allottees except the Archbishop, the Vicar,
Trinity Hospital, and Trustees for Charitable purposes.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation to Occupiers.</span>&mdash;In the case of leases at rack-rent
the Commissioners are to set out the allotment to the owner, but
the owner is to pay fair compensation to the tenant for loss of
right of common, either by lowering his rent or by paying him a
gross sum of money as the Commissioners direct. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;If
the Commissioners think it a more equitable course they
may allot the allotment to the tenant during his lease, and
settle what extra rent he shall pay in respect of the owner’s
expense in fencing, etc.</p>

<p>Satisfaction for crops, ploughing, tilling, manuring, etc. is to be
given in cases where the ground is allotted to a new possessor.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">[352]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners have power to set out and shut up
roads (turnpike roads excluded), footpaths, etc., but if they shut
up a footpath through old inclosed land, the person for whose
benefit it is shut is to pay such compensation as the Commissioners
decide, the money going towards the Expenses of the Act.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases,
<i>e.g.</i> claims and allotment, where the Commissioners’ decisions are
final and conclusive or a provision for trial at law is made.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arrangements between Act and Award.</span>&mdash;As soon as the Act
is passed the Commissioners are to have sole direction of the
course of husbandry. Exception.&mdash;They are not to interfere with
Thomas Wood and Peter Wood, Gentlemen, in their cultivation of
such parts of the common fields of Waddon as are leased to them
by the Archbishop. (Four years of the lease are still to run.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Date, March 2, 1801. Clerk of Peace or of County
Council, Surrey.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Amending Act, 1803.</span>&mdash;(Private, 43 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 53.)</p>

<p>Passed in response to a petition (February 16, 1803) from the
Vicar, Churchwardens, Overseers, and other inhabitants of Croydon,
stating that whereas the Commissioners have set out 237 acres
2 roods for the inhabitants of Croydon, instead of 215 acres, doubts
have arisen as to whether this land is vested in trustees as was
directed to be done with the 215 acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features.</span>&mdash;The 237 acres 2 roods to be treated as the 215
acres. Land up to 5 acres to be sold to defray cost of this new
Act; any surplus to go to Use and Benefit of Poor, any deficit to
be made up by rents or sale of gravel.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Note on Results.</span>&mdash;Third Report of Select Committee on
Emigration, 1826&ndash;7, p. 369. Dr. Benjamin Wills stated that as
the result of the loss of common rights suffered under the Bill, he
had seen some 900 persons summoned for the Poor Rate.
‘By the destruction of the common rights, and giving no
remuneration to the poor man, a gentleman has taken an
immense tract of it and converted it into a park: a person in
the middling walk of life has bought an acre or two; and though
this common in its original state was not so valuable as it has
been made, yet the poor man should have been consulted in it;
and the good that it was originally to him was of such a nature
that, destroying that, has had an immense effect.’</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_5">APPENDIX A (5)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Haute Huntre, Lincs.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1767</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;22,000 Acres ‘more or less.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Haute Huntre, Eight Hundred or
Holland Fen and other commonable places adjacent.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">[353]</span></p>

<p>Owners and Proprietors of Houses and Toftsteads in the
following 11 Parishes or Townships have Right of Common:&mdash;Boston
West, Skirbeck Quarter, Wyberton, Frampton, Kirton,
Algarkirke, Fosdyke, Sutterton, Wigtoft, Swineshead, and
Brothertoft; and also in a place called Dog Dyke in the Parish of
Billinghay.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>December 4, 1766.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from various owners and proprietors with right of
common, asking that the fen shall be divided up into specific
allotments for each Town. Leave given. Bill read first time,
December 9.</p>

<p><i>March 4, 1767.</i>&mdash;Long petition against the bill from (1) the
Master, Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College, Cambridge,
which College is Impropriator of the Great Tythes, and Patron of
the Vicarage of Swineshead, (2) the Rev. John Shaw, Patron and
Rector of Wyberton, (3) Zachary Chambers, Esq., Lord of the
Manor of Swineshead, and others. The petition gave a history of
the movement for enclosure. On August 26, 1766, a meeting of
several gentlemen and others was held at the Angel Inn, Sleaford,
at which a resolution was passed that a Plan or Survey of the
fen with a return of the Houses etc., with Right of Common
should be made before a bill was brought in. On October 16, 1766,
a public meeting of several proprietors was held at Sleaford at
which some of those present proposed to read a bill for dividing
and inclosing the fen; the great majority however of those
present objected to this course, and requested and insisted that as
no Survey had been produced, nothing further should be done
till the following spring, ‘but notwithstanding the said Request,
some few of the said Proprietors then present proposed that a
Petition for the said Bill might then be signed; which Proposition
being rejected by a considerable Majority, the said few Proprietors
declared their Resolution to sign such a Petition, as soon as their
then Meeting was broke up, without any Resolutions being
concluded upon, or the Sentiments of the Majority of the
Proprietors either entered down or paid any Regard to, and
without making any Adjournment of the said Meeting; and that,
soon after the said Meeting broke up, some of the Proprietors
present at the said Meeting signed the Petition, in consequence
of which the said Bill hath been brought in.’ The petitioners
also pointed out that the petition for enclosure was signed by
very few proprietors except those in Boston West, and requested
that no further measures should be taken till next session, and
that meanwhile the Survey in question should be made, and
suggested that the present bill was in many respects exceptionable,
and asked to be heard by Counsel against the bill as it now stood.
Petition to lie on table till second reading.</p>

<p><i>March 6, 1767.</i>&mdash;Bill read second time and committed. Petition
referred to Committee.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">[354]</span></p>

<p><i>March 21.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from Sir Charles Frederick,
Knight of the Bath, sole owner of Brothertoft, where there are
51 Cottages or Toftsteads with right of common. Referred to
Committee.</p>

<p><i>March 27.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from Sir Gilbert Heathcote,
Bart. and others; bill injurious to interests. Referred to Committee.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>April 29, 1767.</i>&mdash;Lord
Brownlow Bertie reported from the Committee; Committee had
heard Counsel in favour of the first petition and considered the other
two; that the Allegations of the Bill were true; and that the
Parties concerned had given their consent to the Bill to the
satisfaction of the Committee ‘(except 94 Persons with Right of
Common and Property of the Annual Value of £3177, 2s. 6d.
who refused, and except 53 Persons with Right of Common and
Property of the Annual Value of £694, 10s. who could not be
found, and except 40 Persons with Right of Common and
Property of the Annual Value of £1310, 0s. 6d. who declared
they were indifferent, and that the whole Number of Persons
with Right of Common is 614, and the whole Property of the
Annual Value of £23,347, 8s.).’ Several amendments were made
in the Bill and it was sent up to the Lords. In the Lords,
petitions against it were received from Sir Gilbert Heathcote
(May 7) and Samuel Reynardson, Esq. (May 14), both of which
were referred to the Committee. Several amendments were made,
including the insertion of a clause giving the Proprietors or
Occupiers the same right of common over the Parish allotment
as they already had over the whole. Royal Assent, June 29,
1767.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 7 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 112.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Five are to be appointed; they are to be chosen
by eleven persons, each representing one of the eleven townships.
These eleven persons are to be elected in each township by the
owners and proprietors of Houses, Toftsteads, and Lands which
formerly paid Dyke-reeve assessments; except in the case of
Brothertoft, where Sir Charles Frederick, as sole owner and
proprietor, nominates the person. No person interested in the
inclosure is to be chosen as Commissioner, and in addition to the
usual oath of acting ‘without favour or affection’ the Commissioners
are required to take the following <span class="lock">oath:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>‘I, A. B., do swear, that I am neither Proprietor nor Occupier
of, nor, to the best of my Knowledge, am I concerned as Guardian,
Steward or Agent for any Proprietor of any Houses, Toftsteads, or
Lands within any of the Parishes of’ (names given) ‘or for any
Person to whom any Allotment is to be made by virtue of the said
Act.’</p>

<p>Three Commissioners are a quorum. Vacancies are to be filled
by the 11 persons elected as before. If they fail to do so, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">[355]</span>
remaining Commissioners can nominate. Survey to be made by
persons appointed by the Commissioners, and number of present
Houses and Toftsteads to be recorded except in Boston West and
Brothertoft. Edward Draper of Boston, Gentleman, to be Clerk.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment.</span>&mdash;Commissioners each to have £210 and no more.
Two guineas to be deducted for each day’s absence.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;Nothing is said about sending in claims, as the survey
giving the Houses, etc., does instead. If any difference or dispute
arise between parties interested in the division with respect to
shares, rights, interests, and proportions, the Commissioners are
to hear them, and their determination is to be binding and conclusive.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>To Lords of the Manor.</i>&mdash;Zachary Chambers, Esq., is Lord of
the Manor of Swineshead; Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is
Lord of the Manor of Frampton. These two are intitled jointly
to the soil of the fen, and Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is
also intitled ‘to the Brovage or Agistment’ of 480 head of cattle
on the fen every year.</p>

<p>(1) Zachary Chambers, Esq., is to have 120 Acres in one piece
in a part called Brand End in lieu of his rights of soil and of all
mines and quarries of what nature whatsoever.</p>

<p>(2) Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is to have 120 Acres in one
piece, near Great Beets, for his rights of soil and of mines and
quarries.<a id="FNanchor_492" href="#Footnote_492" class="fnanchor">[492]</a></p>

<p>Charles Anderson Pelham, Esq., is also to have in lieu of his
right of Brovage a parcel of the same number of acres that were
given by an Act of 9 James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> to the Lords of the Manor of
Swineshead for Brovage.</p>

<p><i>Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;Not mentioned.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;After part has been sold for expenses
(see below) and after allotment to the Lords of the Manor, the
residue is to be divided amongst the eleven townships and Dog
Dyke in proportion and according to the number of Houses and
Toftsteads in each parish. For Brothertoft and Dog Dyke there
are special arrangements; in the ten remaining townships or
parishes, the following method is to be pursued:&mdash;For each House
or Tenement there must be 4 acres, and for each Toftstead 2 acres
allowed; when this proportion has been set out, the remainder
is to be shared out in proportion to the Dyke-reeve assessments
before the passing of a recent drainage Act. Quantity, Quality,
and Situation are to be considered. <i>Special provision.</i>&mdash;Boston
West is to have the same proportion of fen as Frampton.</p>

<p>The share that each of the above ten townships receives is to
be the common fen belonging to the township or parish, subject<span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">[356]</span>
to the same common rights as the present fen, and is to be contiguous
to the township.</p>

<p><i>Brothertoft and Dog Dyke allotments.</i>&mdash;The allotment for Brothertoft
is to be half as many acres as are allotted to Boston West, and
is to go to Sir Charles Frederick, sole owner and proprietor, and
to be near Brothertoft.</p>

<p>The Allotment to Dog Dyke is to be calculated in reference to
the share that Brothertoft receives. Each House or Toftstead in
Dog Dyke is to have ⅔ of the proportion that each House or
Toftstead in Brothertoft is assigned. The Dog Dyke Allotment
is to go to Earl Fitzwilliam, the sole owner, and is to be near the
Earl’s gardens.</p>

<p>If any half-year lands, and other inclosed lands, directed to be
sold (see Expenses) remain unsold, these are to be sold and the
leases are to be allotted to the parishes in such proportions as
the Commissioners direct.</p>

<p>An award is to be drawn up and its provisions are binding
and conclusive.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;Each township’s share is to be divided by an 8-feet
wide ditch and a quick hedge, and guarded with a fence and
rail 4&frac12; feet high, with double bars of fir or deal and with oak
posts; the fence and the rail are to be nailed or mortified together.
The Commissioners do this fencing out of the money raised for
defraying the expenses of the Act, but each township is to keep
up its fences according to the Commissioners’ directions. The
fences, etc., are to be made within 18 months.</p>

<p><i>Penalty</i> for wilfully and maliciously cutting, breaking down,
burning, demolishing, or destroying any division fence:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>1st offence (before 2 J.P.’s), fine of £5 to £20, or from 1 to 3
months in House of Correction.</p>

<p>2nd offence (before 2 J.P.’s), fine of £10 to £40, or from 6 to
12 months in House of Correction.</p>

<p>3rd offence (before Quarter Sessions), transportation for 7 years
as a felon.</p>
</div>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;To defray all expenses the Commissioners <span class="lock">can&mdash;</span></p>

<p>(1) sell the Right of Acreage or Common upon certain specified
half-year lands,<a id="FNanchor_493" href="#Footnote_493" class="fnanchor">[493]</a> <i>e.g.</i> The Frith, Great Beets, Little Beets, the
Mown Rakes, etc., to the owners and proprietors of these lands.
If the owners refuse to buy or do not pay enough to cover the
expenses of the Act, the Commissioners <span class="lock">can&mdash;</span></p>

<p>(2) sell part of the Fen. In this case the first land to be sold
is Coppin Sykes Plot, Ferry Corner Plot, Pepper Gowt Plot, and
Brand End Plot; the next land, Gibbet Hills.</p>

<p>As Coppin Sykes Plot, etc., belong to the Commissioners of two
Drainage Acts, the drainage Commissioners can as compensation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">[357]</span>
charge rates on the respective townships instead, and if any
township refuses to pay, they can inclose a portion of its allotment,
but not for tillage.</p>

<p><i>Penalty for taking turf or sod</i> after Act.</p>

<p>Culprit can be tried before one J.P., and fined from 40s. to £10,
or, if he or she fails to pay, be given hard labour in the House of
Correction for 1 to 3 months, or till the penalty is paid. Notice of
this penalty is to be fixed on Church and Chapel Doors and
published in newspapers.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases
where the Commissioners’ decisions are said to be final and conclusive.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Date, May 19, 1769. With Clerk of Peace or County
Council, Lincoln.</p>

<p>From <i>Annual Register</i>, 1769, p. 116 (Chronicle for July 16):</p>

<p>‘Holland Fen, in Lincolnshire, being to be inclosed by act of
parliament, some desperate persons have been so incensed at
what they called their right being taken from them, that in
the dead of night they shot into the windows of several gentlemen
whom they thought active in procuring the act for
inclosure; but happily no person has been killed.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Amending Act, 1770.</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>January 25, 1770.</i>&mdash;Petition for
an amending Act from the Commissioners who carried out the
previous one; stating that ‘the Posts and Rails for many Miles
in the Division Fences, which have been erected pursuant to the
Directions of the said Act, have been pulled down, and the
greatest Part thereof destroyed, together with great Part of the
Materials for completing the said Fencing,’ and asking for leave
to take down the Fencing and to make wide ditches instead.</p>

<p>Leave given. Bill passed both Houses and received Royal
Assent.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Amending Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 10 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>
c. 40.)</p>

<p>The Commissioners are empowered to take down the posts and
rails, and to make ditches 10 feet wide and 5 feet deep as boundaries
instead.</p>

<p>The Posts and Rails are to be sold, and the proceeds are to defray
the expenses of this Act and the costs of the Commissioners. The
Commissioners are to have a sum of £31, 10s. each as payment,
with 2 guineas deducted for each day’s absence.</p>

<p>Edward Draper, Clerk to the Commissioners, is to be repaid up
to £1000, his costs in prosecuting fence-destroyers.</p>

<p>If any proprietor has already made ditches wide enough, he is
to be repaid his proportion.</p>

<p>Any surplus is to be handed over to Drainage Commissioners.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">[358]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Notes</span>:&mdash;</p>

<table class="autotable" summary="">
<tr>
<th colspan="4"></th>
<th>Act.</th>
<th>Award.</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="4">Boston West division was enclosed in</td>
<td>1771</td>
<td>1772</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3">Algarkirke cum Fosdyke</td>
<td>„</td>
<td>1771</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Frampton</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1784</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Kirton</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1772</td>
<td>1773</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Skirbeck</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1771</td>
<td>1772</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Swineshead</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1773</td>
<td>1774</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Sutterton</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1772</td>
<td>1773</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Wigtoft</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1772</td>
<td>1773</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Wyberton</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1789</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_6">APPENDIX A (6)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Knaresborough Forest.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1770</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;About 20,000 acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Open, Commonable or Waste Lands.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>February 8, 1770.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from several freehold and copyhold tenants within the
Forest; stating that the said tracts are of little advantage now,
whereas it would be of public utility to have them divided into
just allotments and enclosed. Leave given, bill presented, read
twice, March 19; committed March 28. Petition against the bill
from ‘a very great Number of the Freeholders, and Customary or
Copyhold Tenants having Right of Common,’ stating that the bill
contains provisions very injurious to the petitioners and others.
Referred to the Committee.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>May 7, 1770.</i>&mdash;Lord
Strange reported from the Committee that the allegations of
the bill were true, that no person had appeared before the
Committee to oppose the bill, and that ‘the Parties concerned
had given their Consent’ ‘(except the Proprietors of Land in the
Seven Lower Constableries, assessed to the Land Tax at
£47, 2s. 3d. per Annum, and the Proprietors of Land in the Four
Higher Constableries assessed to the Land Tax at £118, 3s. 6¾d.,
and that the whole of the Assessment in the Seven Lower
Constableries, and for Estates of several Persons adjoining, being
within the District called the Forest, in virtue whereof Right of
Common is enjoyed, amounts to £497, 1s. 4½d., and in the Four
High Hamlets to £183, 9s. 8d.).’</p>

<p>The bill passed both Houses and received the Royal Assent on
May 19.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 10 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 94.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Five appointed. William Hill of Tadcaster,
Gentleman; Joseph Butter of Bowthorp, Surveyor; William
Chippendale of Ripley, Surveyor; John Flintoff of Boroughbridge,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">[359]</span>
Surveyor; Thomas Furness of Otley, Gentleman. Vacancies
to be filled up by remaining Commissioners. Three are a quorum.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arbitrators.</span>&mdash;Nine appointed by name. Two can act.
Vacancies to be filled up by Commissioners from barristers.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Surveyors.</span>&mdash;Three named, two of them are also Commissioners.
Vacancies to be filled up by Commissioners.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment to Commissioners, Arbitrators and Surveyors.</span>&mdash;Nothing
stated.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;All claims to be delivered in at the first, second or
third meeting; claims must be in writing and must specify and
contain ‘an Account and Description of the Messuage or Messuages,
antient Building or Buildings, and Lands’ in respect of which the
claim is made, and also the name or names of the person or persons
in actual possession. For a month after the third meeting all
claims are to be open to the inspection of other claimants.
Failure to deliver in ‘such Writing and Account as aforesaid’ at
the first three meetings debars the would-be claimant from all
right to allotment, ‘Infancy, Coverture, Lunacy, or any other
general legal Impediment whatsoever of or in any such Person in
anywise notwithstanding.’</p>

<p>If claims are duly made and no objection raised to them by
any person, they are to be allowed finally and conclusively at the
fourth meeting; and no right so allowed can be disputed afterwards.
Supposing objections are made by any two other
claimants or by any Commissioner present, then the matter is to
be referred to two or more of the arbitrators whose decision is to
be final and conclusive. If unreasonable, unjust, frivolous or
vexatious claims or objections are made, the Arbitrators can assess
the costs on the maker.</p>

<p>In deciding on claims, 40 years’ enjoyment of commonage is to
be considered to confer a right, when it is enjoyed in respect of
owning ancient messuages, etc., whether situated within or without
the limits of the Forest (save and except in respect of Commonage
by Vicinage).</p>

<p>The quantity and the value of the lands in virtue of which
claims are made, are to be adjudged by the Commissioners, and
such judgment is to be final and conclusive, but no ancient
Messuage or Building or Scite thereof is to be allowed at greater
value than any other.</p>

<p>Disputes between landlords and tenants are to be referred to
the Arbitrators, and their award is to be final and conclusive.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Provisions for the Lord of the Manor</i> (the King).&mdash;(1) One-tenth
part of the whole, after allotments for Stone Quarries, watering
places and roads have been deducted; ‘the said Tenth Part to
consist of a proportionable Share of the best and worst kind of
Land as near as may be.’</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">[360]</span></p>

<p>(2) All incroachments made within 40 years, and held by
persons not entitled to right of common; but see Incroachments.</p>

<p>(3) The King’s rights to Mines, Minerals, and Quarries (except
Stone Quarries) are not to be prejudiced, but he or his lessee is to
pay reasonable satisfaction for any damage done, such satisfaction
to be determined by 2 or more J.P.’s, or, if the parties are still
dissatisfied, by a Jury of 12.</p>

<p><i>Provisions for Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;Such portions as the Commissioners
shall adjudge to be ‘full Recompence and Satisfaction.’</p>

<p><i>For Stone Quarries, Watering Places, and Roads.</i>&mdash;Such allotment
as the Commissioners think requisite.</p>

<p><i>For Harrogate Stray.</i>&mdash;‘Whereas there are within the constableries
of Bilton with Harrowgate and Beckwith with Rosset, or
One of them, certain Wells or Springs of medicinal Waters,
commonly called Harrowgate Spaws, to which during the Summer
Season great Numbers of Persons constantly resort to receive the
Benefit of the said Waters to the great Advantage and Emolument
of Tradesmen, Farmers, and other Persons in that Neighbourhood,
and the Persons resorting to the said Waters now have the Benefit
of taking the Air upon the open Part of the said Constableries,’
it is enacted that 200 acres of land near the said springs shall be set
apart and left free and open for ever. The Freeholders and
Copyholders within the said Constableries are to have right of
pasture on these 200 acres, the stint being regulated by the
Commissioners, and such right of common being taken as part of
their respective allotments.</p>

<p><i>For the Poor.</i>&mdash;None.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;To be allotted to the Persons entitled
to commonage ‘in Proportion to the real Value of their several
and respective Messuages, Lands, and Tenements’ in respect of
which they are entitled. Quality and situation to be considered
in settling the Quantum. Allotments must be accepted within
six months after award (see also Fencing).</p>

<p>Award to be drawn up with all particulars, but nothing is
specifically said about its being final. It is to be Evidence in
Courts of Law.</p>

<p>Stone Quarries are to be vested in the landholders. Allotments
to be of the same tenure as the property in virtue of which they
are given. Timber is to belong to copyholders as if they were
freeholders. Disputes arising in the execution of the Act, which
do not affect the persons in general interested in the Inclosure,
can, if all the Parties concerned in the particular dispute wish it,
be referred to some other Arbitrator or Arbitrators not mentioned
in the Act, and his or their decision is to be final.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;(1) Incroachments 40 years old and upwards,
with all buildings thereon, to be absolute property of persons in
possession; but Copyhold.</p>

<p>(2) Incroachments made within 40 years.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">[361]</span></p>

<p>(<i>a</i>) If incroachers are also owners who have a right of common,
then the incroachments are to be given as their respective allotments
(reckoning the value of the land only). If any particular
incroachment is bigger than the allotment to which the incroacher
is entitled, the surplus ground is to be treated as ordinary distributable
ground.</p>

<p>(<i>b</i>) If incroachers are not entitled to right of common, then
their incroachments, together with all the buildings on them, are
to go to the King as Lord of the Manor; But whereas these
incroachments ‘consist chiefly of Buildings and Inclosures which
have been erected and inclosed, or are held and enjoyed by poor
Persons who have, by their own Industry and Labour, built and
improved the same, or by Persons who have been at considerable
Charges therein,’ His Majesty is graciously pleased to grant
Leases for 40 years in possession, ‘to the End no Person whatsoever
may be removed from or deprived of his, her, or their
present Possessions.’ These leases are to hold good even though
not amounting to one-third of the improved annual value of the
incroachments. After 40 years, full rents must be taken. <i>Exception</i>
to (2 <i>b</i>).&mdash;Small incroachments made for Workhouses, for
cottages of Poor chargeable to the Parish, or for Free Schools, are
to be assigned to Trustees for benefit of the users.</p>

<p>In spite of above provisions any Incroachments which the
Commissioners think fit can be set out for roads, ditches, or
fences, etc.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;In the paragraph about selling land for expenses it
says that the Ring fences to be made by Commissioners, but elsewhere
it says fencing to be done by allottees under Commissioners’
directions. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;Tithe allotments which are to be fenced
by other proprietors, and certain other cases. If allottees do not
fence, Commissioners do it for them and charge. If any persons
think their allotments not worth fencing, then two or more of
them whose allotments are contiguous can agree to leave them
unenclosed, provided that within 12 months they set up a good
stone wall or other substantial Fence between their allotments
and those of others. They must keep this wall or fence in repair
always.</p>

<p>No sheep or goats to be kept for 7 years in any Inclosure
adjoining a boundary fence, unless a special wall or Pale-fence is
provided.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;To be defrayed by sale at auction of parcels of
land. Any surplus to be distributed amongst allottees in proportion
to allotments. But if a Majority in Value of the persons
interested do not wish any land sold, they can signify the same in
writing, and can deposit a sufficient sum of money for the purposes
of the Act with the Commissioners, and then the provisions
for sale cease. Mortgages, in certain cases up to 50s. an acre, to
meet expenses are allowed.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">[362]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;In Award, Commissioners are to give orders for laying
out roads, etc.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation to Occupiers.</span>&mdash;None.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not in cases
where decisions are said to be final and conclusive.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;June 25, 1775. Duchy of Lancaster.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Amending Act</span>, 1774.&mdash;(Private, 14 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 54.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>February 21, 1774.</i>&mdash;Petition from
Sir Bellingham Graham, Bart., Walter Masterman, Esq., and others
stating that the land to defray expenses is not yet sold, and
asking for an amending Act to enable the Petitioners and others
to pay their respective shares instead of the land being sold.
Leave given and bill brought in. March 23, 1774, Petition from
Mary Denison of Leeds, widow, and her heirs, who had ‘neglected
to deliver her Claim of Common Right within the Time limited
by the said Act, of which Neglect the Petitioners were not acquainted
till after the Third Meeting of the Commissioners;
soon after which the Petitioners caused a Claim to be made
and delivered, but the said Commissioners refused to accept the
same,’ asking for relief. Petition referred to the Committee, with
instructions that they have power to make provision in the bill.</p>

<p><i>March 25.</i>&mdash;Petition from several persons asking relief on same
grounds as Ellen Oxley (see April 15 below).</p>

<p>Petition from various persons asking that their allotments
may be near within their townships.</p>

<p><i>April 14.</i>&mdash;Petition from Daniel Lascelles, Esq., Sir Savile
Slingsby, Oliver Coghill, Esq., and the Rev. William Roundell
stating that they sent in claims as owners of rights of common;
that these claims were referred to the Arbitrators; and that ‘it
was discovered that Mistakes were made in the Description of
such Tenements, or some Parts therof; and that, notwithstanding
the said Errors arose merely from Inadvertency, and in no respect
altered the Merits of the Petitioners’ Claims, the Arbitrators did
not think fit to permit the Petitioners to rectify the same,’ but
disallowed the claims. The Petitioners ask for reconsideration.</p>

<p><i>April 15.</i>&mdash;Petitions from Rev. Thomas Collins who through
‘Inadvertency’ had neglected to deliver in his claim of common
right in respect of two Copyhold Messuages within the specified
time, and from Francis Bedford, ditto, <i>re</i> copyhold close.</p>

<p><i>April 15.</i>&mdash;Petition from Ellen Oxley and John Clarke, stating
that they preferred claims of common rights to the Commissioners;
that these claims were objected to and referred to the Arbitrators,
who heard divers claims, several of which they disallowed; that
as Ellen Oxley and John Clarke could not produce such evidence
as was required by the Arbitrators in support of their claims, they
withdrew them; that subsequently a Verdict was produced and
read in evidence to the Arbitrators, by means of which similar
claims were allowed.</p>

<p>Bill passed both Houses. Royal Assent.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">[363]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Amending Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 14 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 54.)</p>

<p>New Commissioner added, Richard Richardson (who was one of
the Surveyors under the former Act).</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;Commissioners can set out allotments without
abatement for sale to 48 persons named, and other allottees
who give notice. In the case of these allottees, the Commissioners
are to settle their quota of charges and assess them accordingly.</p>

<p>The Commissioners in rendering their account may charge one
guinea a day for loss of time, and 10s. a day for expenses.
The surveyors’ charges must be ‘reasonable and moderate.’
The Commissioners must give an account before they call for
payment, and the account is to be open to inspection at the
charge of 6d.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;The claims of 32 persons named, which have been
disallowed or withdrawn (1) for want of evidence; (2) for
misnomers; (3) for failure to deliver in time, are to be reconsidered.
Such claims must be delivered in at the first meeting,
and must not be greater than they were before. They can be
referred on appeal to the Arbitrators as before, but the appellant
must now give security for costs in case the appeal fails.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;As some encroachments of over 40 years
standing are found to have no right of common (and so cannot
contribute their share to the Tithe Allotment), tithes can be
charged on these in the form of rent charges.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions in respect of the
Commissioners’ accounts, if any person interested thinks any item
unreasonable, and no satisfactory explanation is forthcoming.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award</span> (for 2 Acts).&mdash;June 25, 1775. Duchy of Lancaster.</p>

<p>From the Award we learn as <span class="lock">follows:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>Over 2751 Acres were sold to meet the expenses of the Act.</p>

<p>The King received 2344 acres.</p>

<p>The tithe owners received 4694 acres odd.</p>

<p>The remainder was divided amongst over 700 different persons
and bodies. The allottees’ shares varied from as much as 1386
acres (Devisees of Sir John Ingelby, Bart.) down to a few perches.</p>

<p>The amount that went to trustees for the use of the poor,
including the various small incroachments (for schools, workhouses,
etc.), which were allowed to stand was about 32 acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Notes on After-History.</span>&mdash;<i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxvii.
p. 292.&mdash;In 1793 Arthur Young bought an estate in Knaresborough
Forest of about 4400 acres; 4000 acres of this was
waste land, let out at a rental of 6d. an acre; 2751 acres
of the estate were copyhold, and had been sold to pay the
expenses of inclosure. The rest had formed part of the King’s
allotment, and was hired on a long lease. On the 400 acres of
cultivated land there were 3 farmhouses. The game of the
waste was let for £30 a year; peats dug from it produced £6 to
£8 a year, and Arthur Young calculated that one Scotch wether
could be supported per acre.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">[364]</span></p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_7">APPENDIX A (7)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Laleham.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1774</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;(From Award), 918 Acres.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;‘Several large and open Fields,’ ‘and
likewise certain Wastes and Commons.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary <span class="lock">Proceedings.</span>&mdash;</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">First attempt, January 31, 1767.</span>&mdash;Petition from Sir James Lowther,
Lord of the Manor, and from ‘divers owners’ for enclosure of
the open fields and commons, and also of ‘a large Pasture called
Laleham Burway.’ Leave given, but bill dropped after first
reading.</p>

<p><i>Second attempt, December 7, 1767.</i>&mdash;Petition for enclosure from
Sir James Lowther alone, on behalf of himself and others. Leave
given; bill prepared by Mr. Anthony Bacon and Mr. Fuller, read
twice and committed (December 14) to Mr. Bacon, Mr. Jenkinson,
Sir James Lowther, and others.</p>

<p><i>December 21, 1767.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from various persons,
being Owners, Proprietors and Occupiers entitled to Rights of
Common, and also Owners of Cow Gates on Laleham Burway,
setting forth ‘that the Inclosure sought by the said Bill is
contrary to the general Sense and Opinion of the Petitioners and
others, who compose a Majority in Number of the Owners or
Proprietors of, or Persons interested’ in the Inclosure, and also
stating that the meadow of Laleham Burway is not within the
Manor of Laleham, but has been proved by a trial at law to be
part of the Manor of Chertsey Beaumont. Petitioners to be
heard on Report.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>December 21, 1767</i>
(same day).&mdash;Mr. Anthony Bacon reported from the Committee that
the Allegations of the Bill were true, and ‘that the Parties concerned
had given their Consent to the Bill, to the Satisfaction of
the Committee (except the Proprietors of Estates, who are entitled
to Right of Common in the said Manor, who are rated to the
Poors Rate to the Amount of £8, 2s. 0d. per Annum; and also
the Proprietors of Estates, who are intitled to Right of Common
in the said Manor, who are rated to the Poors Rate to the Amount
of 15s. per Annum, who, being applied to, refused to sign the
Bill, but declared they would not oppose the same; and that the
whole of the Estates, in the said Manor, are rated to the Poors
Rate to the Amount of £27, 6s. 6d. or thereabouts; and that the
Proprietors of Eighty-six Cow Pastures or Farines, had refused to
give their Consent to the said Bill; and that the whole Number
of Cow Pastures, or Farines, are 292&frac12;); and that no Person appeared
before the Committee to oppose the said Bill.’</p>

<p>The consideration of the Report was put off several times; February<span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">[365]</span>
25, 1768, a debate on the subject, resumed on February 29,
with the result that the Bill was defeated.</p>

<p><i>Third Attempt, February 28, 1774.</i>&mdash;Petition from various owners
and occupiers for enclosure of Laleham and of Laleham Burway.
Leave given. Bill read first time March 18.</p>

<p><i>March 22.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from various owners and proprietors
of certain Messuages, Cottages, Farmsteads, Lands and
Rights of Common, and also owners of Cattle gates on Laleham Burway,
setting forth that the ‘Bill is contrary to the general Sense
and Opinion of the Petitioners and others, who compose a great
Majority of the real Owners and Proprietors of, or Persons interested
in, the Lands and Grounds intended to be inclosed: and that the
Petitioners conceive that the said Bill, if passed into a Law, will in
general be injurious to all the Petitioners, and in particular highly
burthensome and oppressive to such of them who enjoy small and
inconsiderable Rights and Interests therein.’ The Petition again
pointed out that Laleham Burway was not in the Manor of
Laleham, and that apart from that fact, ‘Inclosure would render
the Enjoyment thereof’ inconvenient if not impracticable. To be
heard by Counsel on second reading. On April 15 came another
Petition from William Barwell, Esq., and other proprietors in and
near Chertsey, opposing the enclosure of Laleham Burway as
detrimental to the proprietors thereof and to the inhabitants in
general of Chertsey, and suggesting that it is ‘calculated only for
the private Emolument of some One or few’ of the proprietors.
Petition to lie on table.</p>

<p><i>May 20.</i>&mdash;Bill read a second time. Both above Petitions read
and Counsel against the Bill heard and several witnesses examined.
Bill committed.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>June 7, 1774.</i>&mdash;Mr.
Norton reported from the Committee, that the allegations were
true and that the parties concerned had consented ‘(except the
Owners of 13 Houses intitled to Right of Common and the Proprietors
of Lands rated to the Land Tax of £35, 4s. 6d. per Annum
who refused to sign the Bill, and also except the Proprietors of
Lands rated to the Land Tax at 9s. per Annum who could not be
found; and that the whole Number of Houses having Right of
Common is 80, and the whole of the said Lands are rated to the
Land Tax at £168, 2s. 6d. per Annum).’</p>

<p>A Clause was offered to be added to the Bill, for giving an
Appeal to Quarter Sessions,<a id="FNanchor_494" href="#Footnote_494" class="fnanchor">[494]</a> and this was agreed to. Other
clauses to restrain the Commissioners from setting out a road over
Laleham South Field and for saving the rights of tithe owners
were also added.</p>

<p>The Bill passed both Houses and received the Royal Assent,
June 22, 1774.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 14 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 114.)</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">[366]</span></p>

<p><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Three appointed:&mdash;Ralph Gowland, Esq., of
Laleham; Thomas Jackman of Guildford; Henry Brumbridge of
Thorpe.</p>

<p>Two a quorum. Vacancies to be filled by remaining Commissioners
from persons not interested in allotments or division.</p>

<p>Surveyor or surveyors to be appointed by Commissioners.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment.</span>&mdash;Nothing stated.</p>

<p>A special clause enacting that they are to make the division
and allotment on or before December 24, 1774, ‘or as soon after as
conveniently may be done.’<a id="FNanchor_495" href="#Footnote_495" class="fnanchor">[495]</a></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;All claims to be delivered in writing with particulars
of right or title in respect of which claim is made at 1st or 2nd
meeting. If any claim is objected to at 1st, 2nd, or 3rd meeting
by another claimant then the Commissioners can hear and determine,
and their determination is final and binding. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;If
a claimant refuses to refer the matter to the Commissioners, then
he or she can bring an action at law against the objector on an
issue to be settled if necessary by the officer of the Court. But if
the claimant whose claim is objected to fails to bring the action,
and still refuses to refer the question to the Commissioners, then
(after 3 months) he loses all his rights.</p>

<p>There is also a clause ‘for the better settling the Rights and
Claims of all the said parties so interested and concerned as
aforesaid’ by which it is enacted that in case any difference touching
rights and claims arises between any of the parties so interested
and concerned, the Commissioners have power to hear and
finally determine the same, ‘which Determination shall be binding
and conclusive to all Parties.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Lord of the Manor</i> (Sir James Lowther).&mdash;No special provision
mentioned, but see Award.</p>

<p>Clause to say that the Lord of the Manor’s rights are not to be
prejudiced by the Act ‘(except such Common of Pasture, or other
Rights of Common, as can or may be claimed by or belonging to
him).’</p>

<p><i>Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;Nothing in the Act to affect any right or title
to tithes.</p>

<p><i>Provision for the Poor.</i>&mdash;Nothing mentioned, but see Award.</p>

<p><i>Allotment.</i>&mdash;The Commissioners are to make the allotments
amongst the several persons ‘intitled to any Lands, Grounds,
Right of Common or other Property,’ in proportion to ‘the real
value of their several and respective Shares and Interests and
Right of Common or other Property through and over the said
Common Fields, or other the Premises to be allotted and divided.’
Quantity, Quality and Convenience are to be considered. The
Commissioners are to draw up an Award as soon as is convenient<span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">[367]</span>
after allotment, and ‘the several Allotments, Partitions and
Divisions so made’ in and by the Award ‘shall be and are hereby
declared to be binding and conclusive unto and upon all and every
the several Parties interested in the said open and common Fields,
common Pastures, and commonable Lands.’ Allotments must
be accepted within 12 months after award. (Saving clause for
infants, etc.) Failure to accept excludes allottee from all benefits
in lands and estates allotted to any other person, and the Commissioners
can appoint a Bailiff or rent receiver with full power
to manage the allotment in question, any surplus of profits to go to
the original allottee who has refused to accept&mdash;until he changes
his mind and accepts it.</p>

<p>Allotments are to be of the same tenure as the estates for which
they are claimed. The Herbage of the Lanes and Public Roads
to be allotted to such person or persons as the Commissioners
direct.</p>

<p>A special clause to exempt Laleham Burway from division.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Not mentioned.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;No instructions given; except that when an allotment
abuts on the highway, the fences are to be kept up by the
owner.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;To be paid by the ‘Owners and Proprietors and
Persons interested of and in the said Lands and Grounds’ in such
proportion as the Commissioners decide. If persons refuse to pay,
Commissioners can distrain or else enter on allotment and take
rents. Allotments may be mortgaged up to 40s. an acre.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation To Occupiers and Others.</span>&mdash;Leases at rack-rent
‘shall cease and be totally extinguished’ if Commissioners give
notice; the owner giving such compensation to the tenant as the
Commissioners direct.</p>

<p>Underwoods, hedges, shrubs, etc., are not to be grubbed up or
destroyed before allotment without special permission from the
Commissioners, but are to remain for the benefit of the allottee,
the allottee paying the former owner such compensation as the
Commissioners direct.</p>

<p>Also, If any land with woods, underwoods, hedges, shrubs, etc.,
is allotted to someone who does not already hold it, then the first
owner may enter and fell, grub up and cut down the underwood,
hedges, etc., and take them away, unless the same have been
allotted by the Commissioners to the new owner.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;Only with respect to roads, and then to
Quarter Sessions only.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arrangements between Act and Award.</span>&mdash;Not mentioned.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Date, 1803. Record Office. During the 29 years
between the Act and the Award 10 Commissioners were concerned,
(A) Ralph Gowland, (B) Thomas Jackman, (C) Henry
Brumbridge, (D) George Wheatley, (E) John Baynes Garforth,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">[368]</span>
(F) Sir Philip Jennings Clarke, (G) Richard Penn, (H) Sir William
Gibbons (see Stanwell), (I) Thomas Chapman, (J) George
Kinderley, as <span class="lock">follows:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>C refused to act straight away. A then appointed D. B refused
to sit in 1781. A and D appointed E. A died 1787. D and E
appointed F. F died 1788. D and E appointed G. D died
1802. E and G were desirous of being discharged from acting
further. H was ‘duly appointed.’ E and G refused to act. H
appointed I and J. H, I and J gave the award.</p>

<p><i>Distribution of Land.</i>&mdash;918 acres odd, exclusive of roads, were
divided out as <span class="lock">follows:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable center" summary="">
<tr>
<th> </th>
<th>Acres.</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Lord Lowther</i><a id="FNanchor_496" href="#Footnote_496" class="fnanchor">[496]</a> (including 18&frac12; for his rights of soil),</td>
<td>626&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Six other owners</i> (in shares varying from 68&frac14; to John Coggan, Martha his wife, to 16&frac14; to the Vicar,</td>
<td>223&frac14;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Twenty-three owners</i> (in shares varying from 7&frac12; acres, Messrs. Blackwell and Elson, to 16 perches John Goodwin,</td>
<td>51&frac14;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Churchwardens and Overseers for the Poor (see below),</td>
<td>13</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Gravel Pit,</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td class="total">918</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>The destiny of the 13 acres vested in the Churchwardens and
Overseers is described thus: they are ‘for the use of the poor of
Laleham, as a compensation for their loss of Common, the said 13
acres in lieu of the herbage of the roads the use of which by the
poor was thought might be injurious to the young quick by the
grazing of their cattle on the roads, and as the Majority of the
Proprietors have agreed’ to give up this 13 acres as an equivalent
for the Herbage, the Herbage is given to the proprietors instead.</p>

<p>The Churchwardens and Overseers may do one of two things
with the 13 acres plot, they may (1) lease it out for 21 years at
‘the best and greatest rent’ to a parishioner: (the plan shows the
13 acres to have been wedged in between Lord Lowther’s fields),
or (2) ‘if they should think it more advantageous to the parish to
raise a certain sum of money upon it for the Purpose of erecting
a Workhouse’ they may let it out for 60 years.</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_8">APPENDIX A (8)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Louth, Lincolnshire.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1801</span></p>


<table class="autotable" summary="">
<tr>
<td><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;</td>
<td>In Petition </td><td>for Enclosure, </td><td>about </td><td>1770 </td><td>Acres.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>In Act</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1854</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>In Award</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
<td>1701</td>
<td class="tdc">„</td>
</tr>
</table>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;‘Open Common Fields, Meadows,
Pastures, and other Commonable Lands and Waste Grounds.’</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">[369]</span></p>
<p>Description from Eden, vol. ii. p. 395 (June 1795).&mdash;‘Most
of the land belonging to this town lies in 2 large common fields,
which are fallowed and cropped alternately: in several parts of
these common fields there are large tracts of waste land, upon
which a great number of poor people summer each a cow, which in
winter go at large in these fields. The Poor complain heavily of
the farmers, saying, “That they encroach on their property”;
and the farmers say, “That the Poor take the opportunity of
eating their corn with their cattle.” Tithes are here taken
in kind.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>March 11, 1801.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from various persons, owners, or interested in estates
in Louth. Leave given. Bill read twice, and committed
on June 5. Same day, Petition of various Freeholders and
Proprietors of old inclosed land against the bill; setting forth
that there are ‘now more than 750 acres of old inclosed Meadows
and Pasture Lands very contiguous to the Town; and that the
Soil of these Open Fields is best adapted for Wheat and Beans,
of which it produces excellent Crops alternately, and is in a very
high State of Cultivation; and that there is no Waste Land, as
the Commons are a very rich Pasture, which keep a large
Quantity of Cattle, the Property of a great many industrious
People, who have Common Rights, and are enabled by their
Common Rights to maintain their Families, and increase the
Population and Prosperity of the Town of Louth’; and asking the
House either to reject the Bill ‘or not to suffer that Part thereof to
pass into a Law, which would compel the Petitioners to relinquish
Part of their Old Inclosed Land against their Consent, but permit
them to remain subject to the Tythes they have hitherto paid.’
Petition referred to the Committee. All to have Voices.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>June 17, 1801.</i>&mdash;Mr.
Annesley reported from the Committee that the Standing Orders
had been complied with; that the allegations were true; and that
the parties concerned had consented ‘(except the Proprietors of
Messuages, Cottages and Toftsteads, having Right of Common
of the Annual Value of £465, 10s. who refused to sign the Bill,
and also except the Proprietors of Messuages, Cottages and
Toftsteads having Right of Common of the Annual Value of
£177, 15s. who were neuter; and that the Whole of the Property
interested in the Inclosure is of the Annual Value of £1670, 12s.).’
The Bill passed both Houses. Royal Assent, June 24, 1801.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Local and Personal, 41 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>
c. 124.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Three appointed. (1) John Renshaw of
Owthorpe, Notts, gentleman, on behalf of Tithe owners;</p>

<p>(2) Isaac Leatham of Barton-le-Street, Yorks, gentleman, on
behalf of the majority in value of the proprietors of common fields,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">[370]</span>
meadows and commonable Lands and Waste Grounds (tithe
owners excluded);</p>

<p>(3) John Parkinson of Asgarby, Lincs, gentleman, on behalf of
the majority in value of the proprietors of ancient inclosures and
of Common Right Houses and Toftsteads (tithe owners excluded).</p>

<p>Two to be a quorum. Vacancies to be filled by the party
represented from persons ‘not interested in the inclosure.’</p>

<p>Surveyor appointed by name. Vacancy to be filled by majority
in value of all those interested.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment to Commissioners.</span>&mdash;2 guineas each a day. Surveyor
to be paid what Commissioners think fit.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;All claims to be delivered in with full particulars at
meetings held for the purpose; no claims to be received afterwards
except for some special cause. Full notice of a meeting to
examine claims to be given. Commissioners can determine on
claims, but if any claimant is dissatisfied with their determination
he or she can try the matter at law by bringing an action on a
feigned issue against any person interested in the Lands. Jury’s
Verdict to be final. Defendant’s costs to be borne by all or some
of the persons interested, as the Commissioners determine. If no
notice of such action is given, then the determination of the
Commissioners on claims is final and conclusive. But the Commissioners
are not to determine on questions of title which can
be tried at law. Such suits are not to impede inclosure, and
the allotment is to be set out to the person in possession.
Claimants in respect of Messuages, Cottages, Tofts, or Toftsteads
need not prove usage of Right of Common.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>The Lord of the Manor</i> (<i>i.e.</i> The Warden and Six Assistants
of the Town of Louth and Free School of King Edward the Sixth)
to have one twentieth in value of the Waste Lands and other
Lands which are not the separate Property of any Person or
Persons; in particular a piece of Common called <i>Julian Bower</i>
with the Trees on it is to be included as part of the Allotment.</p>

<p><i>Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;(1) The Worshipful Roger Kedington, M.A.,
Prebendary of the Prebendal of Louth in Lincoln, impropriator
of the Rectory of Louth, and patron of Vicarage;
(2) William Hutton, Esq., lessee of above for 3 Lives; (3) Rev.
Wolley Jolland, Vicar of Louth, entitled to Vicarage House
and Garden and also to a Right of Common, and to small Tythes.</p>

<p>(1) Allotments which Commissioners consider equal in value
and a full Compensation for present unenclosed Glebe Lands and
Rights of Common.</p>

<p>(2) Such pieces of the Lands and Grounds to be enclosed (of
every kind) as shall equal in value ⅕ part of all the open,
arable and tillage land ‘(although the same may be occasionally
used in Meadow or Pasture)’ ‘and which are not Waste Lands.’</p>

<p>(3) Such pieces of the Lands and Grounds to be enclosed as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_371">[371]</span>
shall, in Commissioners’ judgment, equal in value all the Great
and Small Tythes and other Ecclesiastical Dues on ancient
Inclosed Arable and Tillage Lands.</p>

<p>(4) Such pieces of the Lands and Grounds to be enclosed as
shall equal in value ⅛ part of all the ancient enclosed Meadow and
Pasture Lands, Grounds and Homesteads ‘(not being Glebe Lands,
consecrated Burying Grounds, or Orchards or Gardens),’ and of
the Near East Field, Far East Field, Great Roarings, Butter
Closes, and all other open and commonable Meadow or Pasture
Lands, Commons and Grounds to be inclosed which are subject
to tithes and ecclesiastical dues.</p>

<p><i>Arrangements for Owners of Old Inclosures.</i>&mdash;(See Petition
on March 11, 1801). Owners of old Inclosures who have not
sufficient allotments in the land to be inclosed, to contribute from
them their proportion of the above Tithe allotments, can <i>either</i> have
part of their old inclosures allotted instead (with their consent) <i>or</i>
pay such gross sum of money towards the expenses of the Act as
the Commissioners direct, whilst a portion of the land to be inclosed
is given to the tithe owner.</p>

<p>After this Act the only Tithes which remain are those for
Gardens and Orchards, and Tithes of Mills, Pigs, Poultry, Bees and
Honey; also Surplice Fees, Easter Offering and Mortuaries are
untouched.</p>

<p><i>For Repair of Roads.</i>&mdash;Sufficient pieces or parcels to be vested
in the Surveyor of Highways.</p>

<p><i>For Fairs.</i>&mdash;A piece of ground called ‘The Quarry’ is to be
allotted to the Lords of the Manor for the holding of Fairs.</p>

<p><i>Provision for the Poor.</i>&mdash;None.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;Amongst the various persons interested
with due regard to Quantity, Quality and Situation. No undue
Preference to be shown. The open fields to be allotted to their
present owners, unless the owners ask for allotment elsewhere.</p>

<p>If an allottee is dissatisfied with his allotment, the Commissioners
must hear his complaints, but their determination is
final till the Award is made.</p>

<p>The Award is to be drawn up and read over to the Proprietors
and all the orders and directions, penalties, impositions, regulations
and determinations of the Award are to be final, binding and
conclusive on all parties.</p>

<p>If an allottee refuses to accept or molests anyone else who
accepts, he or she must pay the penalties decided on by the
Commissioners.</p>

<p>The tenure of allotments is to be the same as that of the estate
in virtue of which they are claimed.</p>

<p>The grass on the road allotment is to be allotted to such person
or persons as the Commissioners direct, or else be applied for some
general, Parochial, or other use.</p>

<p>No person is to graze cattle, dig, cultivate or plant in any road
or way under penalty of a fine of £3.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_372">[372]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Incroachments 20 years old and over are to
stand. Incroachments made within 20 years are to be treated as
part of the Commons to be divided, but, if the Commissioners
think it fit and convenient they can be allotted to the person in
possession, without considering the value of erections or
improvements (1) as the whole or part of his allotment; (2) as his
allotment, the allottee paying such extra sum of money as the
Commissioners think fit (this is supposing the allotment he is entitled
to is less in value than the incroachment); (3) for such sum
of money as the Commissioners think fit (this is supposing he is
not entitled to any allotment).</p>

<p><i>But</i> if the Commissioners do not think it fit and convenient to
allot an incroachment to the person in possession, they may (1)
sell it at public auction and apply the money to the purposes of
the Act; (2) allot it to someone else, in which case a ‘reasonable’
sum of money is to be given to the dispossessed owner, the new
allottee paying the whole or part of it.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;To be done by the several proprietors as the
Commissioners direct.</p>

<p><i>Exception.</i>&mdash;(1) The Tithe Owners’ allotments are to be fenced
by the other proprietors.</p>

<p>(2) In the case of allotments to Churchwardens, Overseers or
Colleges, Chantries, Charities, etc., the Commissioners are to fence,
deducting such portion of the allotments as is equal to the expenses
of fencing and to these allottees’ share of the expenses of
the Act.</p>

<p>The portion deducted is to be divided amongst the other
Proprietors who have to pay the expenses.</p>

<p>If any allottee refuses to fence, the Commissioners can do it and
charge the expenses on the allotment, appointing a Bailiff to receive
rents and money.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;The expenses of the Act are to be defrayed by all
the Proprietors benefited in proportion to the value of their allotments,
<i>except</i> the Lords of the Manor and the Tithe owners in
respect of their special allotments, and except the holders in trust
for public bodies. (These last have had a portion deducted. See
Fencing.)</p>

<p>The cost of the survey of the land to be inclosed is to be borne
by those interested in it, and the cost of the survey of the old
inclosures by the proprietors of old inclosures.</p>

<p>Mortgages are allowed under certain conditions (except to Tithe
owners) up to £4 an acre.</p>

<p>Commissioners are to keep accounts which must be open to inspection.
A penalty is specified for failure to keep them. Money
amounting to £50 is to be paid in to a Banker.</p>

<p>Proprietors (tithe owners excepted) can sell their Common
Rights or allotments before the Award.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_373">[373]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation.</span>&mdash;(1) Leases at Rack Rent of any land to be inclosed,
either alone or together with any Messuages, Cottages,
Toftsteads, etc., to be void; the proprietor paying the lessee such
satisfaction as the Commissioners direct. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;No lease
of any Messuage, Cottage, Toftstead, Lands, Hereditaments or
ancient Estate in respect of which allotment is made for Right
of Common is to be void; but the allotments made to these are
to belong to the proprietors who must pay to the lessees such
satisfaction as the Commissioners direct.</p>

<p>(2) Satisfaction (adjudged by the Commissioners) is to be given
for standing crops by the new allottee, unless the owner of the
crops likes to come and reap them.</p>

<p>Satisfaction is also to be given to the occupier for ploughing,
tilling and manuring, but no Swarth 6 years old is to be ploughed
till allotments are entered on.</p>

<p>(3) If any trees, shrubs, etc., go with the ground to a new
proprietor, the old proprietor is to be paid their valuation (as
judged by the Commissioners).</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arrangements between Act and Award.</span>&mdash;The Commissioners
are to have absolute power to determine the course of husbandry.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to have power to set out and stop up
roads and footpaths (turnpike roads excepted), but are to give notice
in a local newspaper <i>re</i> public carriage roads, and any person who
thinks himself or herself aggrieved can appeal to Quarter Sessions
whose decision is final.</p>

<p>If an ancient road or path is shut up, the person for whose
accommodation it is shut up may be required by the Commissioners
to pay compensation either (1) to person or persons injured or (2)
for general expenses of the Act.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not where
Commissioners’ determinations are said to be final.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Date, 1806. Record Office.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Award</span>:&mdash;</p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<th></th>
<th class="totalbottom"><i>a.</i></th>
<th class="totalbottom"><i>r.</i> </th>
<th class="totalbottom"><i>p.</i></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Whole Area divided out,</td>
<td>1701</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>21</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Tithe Owners (various allotments), in all,</td>
<td>584</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>6<a id="FNanchor_497" href="#Footnote_497" class="fnanchor">[497]</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">One of the tithe holders also receives,</td>
<td>24</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">The Lords of the Manor,</td>
<td>109</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>4<a id="FNanchor_498" href="#Footnote_498" class="fnanchor">[498]</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Lords of the Manor, as Guardians of the Free School,</td>
<td>69</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>19</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Allotments for repairing roads,</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">For Fairs,</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>12</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td class="total">795</td>
<td class="total">1</td>
<td class="total">8<span class="pagenum" id="Page_374">[374]</span></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>
The remainder is divided out amongst 130 <span class="lock">allottees:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left">From 50&ndash;100 acres</td>
<td>4 </td>
<td class="tdl borderl" rowspan="4">Above 10 acres </td><td rowspan="4">21</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">From 30&ndash;50 acres</td>
<td>7 </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">From 10&ndash;30 acres</td>
<td>10 </td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td class="total">21</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"></td>
<td class="left">From 1&ndash;10 acres </td><td>42</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">From &frac12; acre-1 acre</td>
<td>22</td>
<td class="tdl borderl" rowspan="3">Below 1 acre</td>
<td rowspan="3">67</td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td>From &frac14; acre-&frac12; acre</td>
<td>10</td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Below &frac14; acre</td>
<td>35<a id="FNanchor_499" href="#Footnote_499" class="fnanchor">[499]</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td class="total">67</td>
<td class="borderl"></td>
<td class="total">130</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>The smallest allotments are, Ann Metcalf, Spinster, 14 perches,
which she must fence on the N. and W. sides; Ann Hubbard,
Widow, 15 perches, which she must fence on the S. and W. sides.</p>

<p>These, like the other small allotments, are in lieu of Right of
Common and all other Interest.</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_9">APPENDIX A (9)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Simpson, Bucks.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1770</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;Not specified anywhere. The annual value unenclosed
is stated to be £773, so the acreage was probably over 1500.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Open and Common Fields, Lammas
Grounds and Pastures.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;</p>

<p><i>First Attempt, December 13, 1762.</i>&mdash;Petition from Walden
Hanmer, Esq., Lord of the Manor, William Edge, Gentleman, and
other owners and proprietors, stating that the holdings are at present
intermixed and dispersed, that the land in its present state is
in great measure incapable of Improvement, and that if it were
divided and inclosed great Benefit would accrue, and asking for
leave to bring in a Bill to enclose. Leave was given, and the
Bill passed its second reading and was sent to Committee.
On March 16, 1763, came a petition against it from John
Goodman and Nicholas Lucas, Gentlemen, and other owners and
proprietors against the bill, ‘alleging that the Petitioners are
Owners and Proprietors of Four Fifth Parts, and upwards, of the
said Fields, Grounds, and Pastures, so intended to be inclosed, and
of several Rights and Privileges incident thereto,’ stating that the
bill would be greatly detrimental to all of them and ‘tend to the
Ruin of many of them,’ and asking to be heard by Counsel
against the bill. Petition to be heard when the bill was
reported.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_375">[375]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>March 25, 1763.</i>&mdash;Mr.
Lowndes reported from the Committee, that the allegations were
true and that ‘the Parties concerned had given their Consent to
the Bill, to the Satisfaction of the Committee (except Michael
Woodward, Nicholas Lucas, senior, Lewis Goodman, who, being
asked to sign a Bill testifying their Consent, and whose Interest
in the said Lands and Grounds amounts to £31 a Year, or thereabouts,
but the Witness could not ascertain the Interest of the
said Lewis Goodman and Thomas Goodman, said that they had
no Objection to the Inclosure, but did not care to sign, and
also except Luke Goodman and Edward Chad, whose Interest in
the said Lands and Grounds is £16 a Year; Edward Chad said
he was by no means for it, and Luke Goodman said, he would
neither meddle nor make; and also except Joseph Etheridge, a
Minor, whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds is £38 a
Year; and Mary Etheridge, his Guardian whose Interest in the
said Lands and Grounds is £16 a Year, said, she never was for it,
as being a Woman, and having nobody to look after her Fencing;
and also except &mdash;&mdash; Loughton, John Goodman, and Son, whose
Interest in the said Lands and Grounds is £24 a Year; John
Goodman said, he would lose his Life before he would lose his
Land; his Son said, he did not care to meddle; and also except
John Goodman, who, being asked to sign a Bill, testifying his
Consent, and whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds is
£55 a year, said he would not sign it; and except Sear Newman,
whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds amounts to £30 a
Year, who said he had no Objection to it, but did not care to meddle
or make, upon Account of his Father being so much against it;
and it appeared to your Committee, by Articles of Agreement,
dated the 31st Day of December, 1761, that the said John
Goodman and Sear Newman did thereby consent and agree to an
Inclosure of all the Open and Commonable Fields, Lands, Cow
Pasture, and Fields, within the said Parish of Simpson, and to
pay their respective Proportions of the Expence of an Act of
Parliament; and other the necessary Expences attending the
same; and also except John Newman, whose Interest in the said
Lands and Grounds is £30 a Year, who said he would not sign it;
and also except Nicholas Lucas the younger, whose Interest in the
said Fields is £36 a Year, who said he had no Objection to sign, if
the Cow Pasture had been left open; and also except Daniel
Lucas, whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds is £25 a Year,
who refused signing; and also except George Wilkes, whose
Interest in the said Lands and Grounds is £1, 10s. a Year, who
said he had no Occasion to sign, because he had agreed with Mr.
Hanmer for the Purchase of his Commons; and also except
Richard Goodman, Edward Ashwell, for a Minor, Edward Cooke
and John Fox, whose Interest in the said Lands and Grounds
together amounts to £5, 10s. a Year, who were not applied to;
and also except Sarah Hawes, Widow, who is lately dead; and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_376">[376]</span>
also except George Stone, whose Interest in the said Lands and
Grounds is £3 a Year, who was not applied to, because he had
sold his Interest to Mr. Hanmer, who has consented to the Bill;
and also except Six out of Eight of the Feoffees of Lands belonging
to the Poor of Simpson, which Lands are of the yearly
Value of £24: and also except the Feoffees of certain Charity
Lands and Grounds, of the yearly Value of £16; William Cooper,
one of the Feoffees, being asked to sign a Bill testifying his
Consent, said he was against it; and that the yearly Value of the
said Lands and Grounds, in the said Fields, Cow Pasture, Common
Meadows, Lammas Grounds, and Waste Grounds, amounts to
Seven Hundred Ninety-nine Pounds, Fifteen Shillings, or thereabouts;)....’</p>

<p>After the Report was read, Counsel was heard for the Petitioners
against the Bill, but the Bill was read a third time and sent up to
the Lords. March 29, it was read a second time, and a
Petition against it from John Goodman, John Newman, Nicholas
Lucas and others was received. April 14, Lord St. John of
Bletsoe reported it without amendments from the Committee,
but it was defeated on its third reading.</p>

<p><i>Second Attempt, January 15, 1765.</i>&mdash;Walden Hanmer, Esquire,
the Rector, and others again petitioned for enclosure. Leave was
given to bring in a bill, but nothing came of it.</p>

<p><i>Third Attempt, February 6, 1770.</i>&mdash;Walden Hanmer, Esquire, and
others again petitioned for enclosure. Leave was given, and a bill
read twice and sent to Committee.</p>

<p><i>March 6, 1770.</i>&mdash;‘A Petition of the Major Part of the Owners
and Proprietors’ against the Bill, stating ‘that the Petitioners
are very well satisfied with the Situation and Convenience of their
respective Lands and Properties in their present uninclosed
State,’ and that the Bill will do them great Injury.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>March 6, 1770</i> (same
day).&mdash;Mr. Kynaston reported that the allegations were true, and
that the Parties concerned had consented to the Bill ‘to the
Satisfaction of the Committee,’ with the following exceptions&mdash;Five
Persons with property of the annual value of £192, 10s.;
Sear Numan, with property of annual value of £20, 15s., ‘who
said he must do as his Father would have him’; John Lucas the
younger, with property of the annual value of 15s.; George Cross,
‘who would not say any Thing,’ with property of the annual
value of £5; Elizabeth Mead, ‘who said she should sell when
inclosed,’ with property of the annual value of £2, 10s.; and Five
Persons, who said they would not oppose the Bill, with property
of the annual value of £77, 10s. The annual value of ‘the whole
of the Estates in the said Fields intended to be inclosed’ was
given as £773. The Bill passed the Commons and the Lords,
where a petition against it was considered. It received the Royal
Assent on March 29, 1770.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_377">[377]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 10 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 42.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Three appointed. (1) The Rev. John Lord of
Drayton Parslow, Clerk; (2) Thomas Harrison of Stoney Stratford,
Gentleman; (3) Francis Burton of Aynho, Northamptonshire,
Gentleman. Two a quorum. Vacancies to be filled up by
remaining Commissioner or Commissioners from persons ‘not
interested in the Division and Inclosure.’ No particulars of
payment.</p>

<p>A survey to be made by a surveyor nominated by Commissioners.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;The Commissioners are ‘to hear and finally determine’
any differences about Interests and Rights.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Provisions for Lord of the Manor.</i>&mdash;None (as there seems to have
been no common or waste ground concerned).</p>

<p>His manorial rights, right of common excepted, to go on as
before.</p>

<p><i>Provisions for Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;The Rector to have (1) such
parcels of Land as shall be a full equivalent of his glebe lands
and common Right; (2) ⅐ part of all the rest, ‘Quantity as well
as Quality considered,’ as full compensation for all Tithes.</p>

<p>In the case of old inclosures which have allotments, the
Commissioners can give him either part of these or part of the
owner’s allotment in place of tithes, and in case of old inclosures,
etc., which have no allotment, they remain subject to Tithes.</p>

<p>The Rector is exonerated from keeping a Bull and a Boar.</p>

<p><i>Provision for Gravel</i>, <i>Sand</i>, <i>etc.</i>&mdash;See Allotment of Residue.</p>

<p><i>Provision for Poor.</i>&mdash;None.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;As soon as is convenient after the
survey is made, the Commissioners are to set out and allot the
land in proportion to the respective interests and right of common
of the claimants, ‘having a due Regard to the Situation and Convenience,
as well as to the Quantity and Quality of the Lands
and Grounds.’ The award, which contains their decision, is to be
final and conclusive.</p>

<p>Allotments must be accepted within 12 calendar months.
Failure to accept excludes the allottee from all Benefits under the
Act. (Saving clause for infants, etc.)</p>

<p>If material is needed for the roads, the surveyors may, under an
order from two J. P.’s not interested in the inclosure, enter
on any allotment and take it, except where the allotment is
a garden, park, orchard, paddock, wood, or ground planted with
an avenue of trees for the ornament of any House.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Not mentioned; as no common.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;To be done ‘at the proper Costs and Charges’ of
the respective allottees, as directed by the Commissioners, except
in the case of the Rector, whose allotment is to be fenced for him
by the other proprietors, and whose fences, if they abut on a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_378">[378]</span>
highway, are to be kept up by the other proprietors for 7
years. The fencing of all allotments must be carried out within
12 months after the Award, and if any person refuse to fence,
the Commissioners, on complaint of a neighbour, can do the
fencing and charge it to the recalcitrant owner, distraining on his
goods, if necessary. If any one proprietor has more than his fair
share of fencing to do, then the Commissioners can make the
other proprietors pay something towards it. If any allotment
abuts on a common field, fencing is not compulsory.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;These are to be paid by the Owners and Proprietors
‘by an equal Pound Rate according to the Value of the
Lands and Grounds each Person shall have allotted to him.’
Proprietors are allowed to mortgage their allotments up to 40s. an
acre in order to meet expenses.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation to Occupiers.</span>&mdash;All rack-rent leases are to be
null and void, the owners making such satisfaction to the tenants
as the Commissioners think reasonable.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to have full power to set out and shut
up roads, footpaths, etc.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only; and not in cases
where the Commissioners’ decisions are final and conclusive,
as, <i>e.g.</i>, on claims and allotments.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arrangements between Act and Award.</span>&mdash;Directly the Act is
passed, till the allotments are made, the Commissioners are to
have ‘the sole, intire and absolute Management, Order and
Direction’ of all the land with regard to cultivation, flocks, etc.,
any usage to the contrary notwithstanding.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Bucks, with Clerk of the Peace or Clerk of the Council.
Date, April 26, 1771.</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_10">APPENDIX A (10)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Stanwell.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1789</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;According to Act ‘by Estimation about 3000 Acres,’
but Award gives 2126 Acres only.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;‘Large open fields, Arable and Meadow
Grounds, and Lammas Lands, about 1621 acres, and also several
Commons, Moors and Waste Lands,’ about 505 acres (unstinted).</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;</p>

<p><i>First Attempt, December 12, 1766.</i>&mdash;Petition for Enclosure from
the Lord of the Manor, the Impropriator of the Great Tythes, the
Vicar, and the most considerable Proprietors. Leave given. Bill
read first time, January 27, 1767.</p>

<p><i>February 18, 1767.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from various<span class="pagenum" id="Page_379">[379]</span>
‘Owners or Occupiers of Cottages or Tenements in the parish of
Stanwell,’ setting forth ‘that the Petitioners in Right of their
said Cottages and Tenements are severally intitled to Common of
Pasture for their Cattle and Sheep upon all the said Commons,
Moors, and Waste Lands, at all Times of the Year, except for Sheep,
without any Stint whatsoever, as also a Right of intercommoning
their Cattle and Sheep, with those of the Tenants of divers other
Manors, at all Times in the Year, upon the large Common called
<i>Hounslow Heath</i>: and the Petitioners in the Rights aforesaid, are
also intitled to and do enjoy Common of Turbary on the said
Commons and Heath, and that the Lord of the Manor of Stanwell
lately caused part of the said Moors within the said Parish, to be
fenced in, and inclosed with Pales for his own sole and separate
Use, without the Consent of the Petitioners and other Persons
intitled to a Right of Common therein, which said Pales have
been since pulled down by several of the Petitioners and others,
against whom several Actions have been commenced by the Lord
of the said Manor, in order to try the Petitioners’ said Right of
Common therein, all which Actions are now depending; and that
the Petitioners apprehend, and believe, in case the said Bill should
pass into a Law, the Legality of the Petitioners’ said Rights will
be left to the Determination of Commissioners unqualified to
judge of the same: and that in case the Petitioners’ said Rights
should be allowed by such Commissioners, that no adequate
Compensation in Land will or can be awarded to the Petitioners
for the same: and that the dividing and inclosing the said
Commons, Moors, and Waste Lands within the said Parish, will
greatly injure and distress many....’ Another petition was
presented on the same day from George Richard Carter, Esq.,
Samuel Clark, Esq., Jervoise Clark, Esq., John Bullock, Esq.,
and several others, being owners and proprietors of Farms and
Lands in the parish of Stanwell, setting forth that the Petitioners,
as also the Owners of near 100 Cottages or Tenements within the
said Parish, and their respective Tenants are entitled to right of
pasture as in the petition given above, and stating that inclosing
will be attended with great inconvenience.</p>

<p>On February 26 came yet another petition from owners and
occupiers in the parishes of Harmondsworth, Harlington, Cranford,
Heston, Isleworth, Twickenham, Teddington, Hampton,
Hanworth, Feltham, and East Bedfont in Middlesex, setting forth
that the Commons and Waste Lands in the parish of Stanwell
were part of Hounslow Heath, over which the petitioners had
right of pasture, and stating that if the part of the Heath in
Stanwell parish were inclosed it would be very injurious to all
the owners and occupiers in the parish of Stanwell, except to the
Lord of the Manor, and would also be prejudicial to the petitioners.</p>

<p>All these petitions were ordered to lie on the table till the
second reading, which took place on February 26. Counsel was
heard for and against the Bill; the motion that the Bill should be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_380">[380]</span>
committed was defeated by 34 to 17 votes, and thus the farmers
were able to parade along Pall Mall with cockades in their hats.<a id="FNanchor_500" href="#Footnote_500" class="fnanchor">[500]</a></p>

<p><i>Second Attempt, February 20, 1789.</i>&mdash;Petition from the Lord
of the Manor (Sir William Gibbons), the Vicar and others
for enclosure. Leave given. Bill read twice.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>March 30, 1789.</i>&mdash;Sir
William Lemon reported from the Committee that the
Standing Orders had been complied with; that the allegations
were true, and that the parties concerned had given their consent
‘(except the Proprietors of Estates of the Annual Value of £164,
14s. or thereabouts who refused to sign the Bill, and also except
the Proprietors of £220, 5s. 8d. per Annum or thereabouts who
did not chuse to sign the Bill, but made no Objection to the
Inclosure, and also except some small Proprietors of about £76
per Annum who could not be found, and that the whole Property
belonging to Persons interested in the Inclosure amounts to
£2,929, 5s. 4d. per annum or thereabouts).’ Bill passed both
Houses. Royal Assent, May 19, 1789.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 29 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 15.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Edward Hare of Castor, Northampton, Gentleman;
William Young of Chancery Lane, Gentleman; Richard
Davis of Lewknor, Oxford, Gentleman. Two a quorum. Vacancies
to be filled by remaining Commissioners from persons not interested
in the Inclosure.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Surveyor.</span>&mdash;One named. Vacancy to be filled by Commissioners.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment to Commissioners.</span>&mdash;£2, 2s. for each working day.
Nothing about Surveyor’s pay.</p>

<p>Special clause that certain Surveys already made may be
used.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;All claims about Right of Common ‘and all Differences
and Disputes which shall arise between the Parties interested, or
claiming to be interested in the said intended Division and
Inclosure, or any of them concerning their respective Rights,
Shares, and Interests in the said open Fields, arable and meadow
Grounds, and Lammas Lands, Commons, Moors, and Waste
Grounds, or their respective Allotments, Shares and Proportions
which they, or any of them ought to have’ in the division, are to
be heard and determined by the Commissioners. This determination
is to be binding and conclusive on all parties; except with
regard to matters of Title which can be tried at law.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p>(1) <i>Lords of the Manor</i> (Sir William Gibbons, Thomas Somers
Cocks, Esq., and Thomas Graham, Esq.).&mdash;One sixteenth part of
the residue of the Moors and Waste Lands, when roads and allotment
for gravel have been deducted.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_381">[381]</span></p>
<p>(2) <i>Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;Not to be prejudiced by the Act. Land
still to be liable to tithes as before.</p>

<p>(3) <i>Gravel Pits.</i>&mdash;For roads and for use of inhabitants; not more
than 3 acres.</p>

<p>(4) <i>Provision for Poor.</i>&mdash;Such parcel as the Commissioners think
proper (‘not exceeding in the whole 30 Acres’). To be vested in
the Lords of the Manor, the Vicar, Churchwardens, and Overseers,
and to be let out, and the rents and profits thereof to be given
for the benefit of such occupiers and inhabitants as do not receive
parish relief, or occupy lands and tenements of more than £5
a year, or receive any allotment under the Act.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;The land to be divided among the various
persons interested ‘in proportion and according (Quantity,
Quality and Situation considered) to their several and respective
Shares, Rights, and Interests therein.’ If the Commissioners
think that any of the allotments in the common fields are too
small to be worth enclosing they may lay such proprietors’ allotments
together.</p>

<p><i>Certain principles to be followed.</i>&mdash;Owners of cottage commons
who are also proprietors of lands in the open fields are to have
their allotment in virtue of their Right of Common added
to the other allotment to which they are entitled.</p>

<p>Owners of cottage commons who do not possess land in the open
fields as well, are to have their allotments put all together for
a cow common, with such stint as the Commissioners decide.
But if they wish for separate allotments they may have them.</p>

<p>Allotments must be accepted within six months after award.
Failure to accept excludes allottee from all ‘Benefit Advantage’
by this Act, and also from all estate right or interest in any other
allotment. (Saving clause for infants, etc.)</p>

<p>The award is to be drawn up; ‘and the Award, and
all Orders, Directions, Regulations, and Determinations therein
contained, and thereby declared, shall be binding and conclusive
to and upon all Persons whomsoever.’ Tenure of allotments to be
that of estates in virtue of which they are granted. Copyhold
allotments can be enfranchised if wished, the Commissioners
deducting a certain amount as compensation for Lord of the Manor.
Allottees lose all Right of Common on any common in adjoining
parishes.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Not mentioned in Act.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Exchanges.</span>&mdash;Allowed (as always). Also former exchanges can
be confirmed by the Commissioners ‘notwithstanding any legal
or natural Incapacity of any Proprietor or Owner having made
any such Exchanges.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;To be done by allottees. If any person has an
undue proportion Commissioners have power to equalise.</p>

<p><i>Exceptions.</i>&mdash;(1) Fences of cow common allotment for those
who have Cottage Common only (see above), which are to be made<span class="pagenum" id="Page_382">[382]</span>
and kept in repair by the other proprietors; but if these allottees
choose to have separate allotments they must fence them
themselves.</p>

<p>(2) Allotment for the Poor (30 acres).&mdash;To be fenced by other
proprietors.</p>

<p>(3) Allotments to charities, ditto.</p>

<p>If any allottee refuses to fence or keep fences in repair his neighbour
can complain to a J.P. ‘not interested’ in the inclosure, and the
J.P. can either make an order, or else empower the complainant
to enter and carry the work out at the charge of the owner.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;Part of the Commons and Wastes to be sold by
auction to cover expenses. Any surplus to be laid out by Commissioners
on some lasting improvements; any deficit to be
made up by proprietors as Commissioners direct.</p>

<p>Commissioners are to keep accounts which must be open to
inspection.</p>

<p>To meet expenses allotments may be mortgaged up to 40s. an
acre.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation to Occupiers.</span>&mdash;Leases at rack or extended rents
of any of the land to be inclosed by this Act to be void, owners
paying tenants such compensation as Commissioners direct.
Satisfaction is also to be given for standing crops, for ploughing,
manuring, and tilling.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Arrangements between the Act and Award.</span>&mdash;The Commissioners
are to direct the course of husbandry ‘as well with
respect to the Stocking as to the Plowing, Tilling, Cropping,
Sowing, and Laying down the same.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Full power to set out roads and footpaths and to shut
up others. Turnpike roads excluded.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;None.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Record Office.</p>

<p>From the Award we learn as <span class="lock">follows:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>14 parcels of land, containing in all over 123 acres were sold
to cover expenses for £2512.</p>

<p>31&frac12; acres are allotted to the Lords of the Manor (Sir William
Gibbons, Thomas Somers Cocks, and Thomas Graham) in lieu
of their rights as Lords of the Soil.</p>

<p>490 acres to Sir William Gibbons in trust for himself and the
other Lords of the Manor in lieu of all other claims (freehold
lands, rights of common, etc.).</p>

<p>69 acres to the mortgagees of the late Sir J. Gibbons.</p>

<p>6 acres to the Trustees of the late Sir J. Gibbons.</p>

<p>400 acres to Edmund Hill, Esq. (who also bought 117 acres of
the land sold to defray costs).</p>

<p>100 acres to Henry Bullock, Esq.</p>

<p>72 acres to Thomas Hankey, Esq.</p>

<p>45 acres to Jervoise Clark Jervoise, Esq.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_383">[383]</span></p>

<p>Allotments of from 20 to 40 acres to eleven other allottees.</p>

<p>Allotments of from 10 to 20 acres to twelve allottees.</p>

<p>Allotments of from 12 perches to 9 acres to seventy-nine
allottees.</p>

<p>Twenty-four of these smaller allotments (including six of less
than 2 acres) are given in lieu of open field property; the remaining
fifty-five are given in compensation for common rights of some
sort or other.</p>

<p>Sixty-six cottages appear as entitling their owners to compensation.<a id="FNanchor_501" href="#Footnote_501" class="fnanchor">[501]</a>
Of these 66, 16 belong to Henry Bullock and 8 to Sir
William Gibbons, and the remaining 42 to 38 different owners.
The allotments to cottages vary from a quarter of an acre (John
Merrick) to over an acre (Anne Higgs). The owners of cottage
commons only had their allotments separately and not in
common.</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_11">APPENDIX A (11)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Wakefield, Yorks.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1793</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;2300 acres ‘or thereabouts.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Open Common Fields, Ings, Commons,
Waste Grounds, within the townships of Wakefield, Stanley,
Wrenthorpe, Alverthorpe, and Thornes.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>January 23, 1793.</i>&mdash;Petition from
several owners and proprietors for enclosure. Leave given to
prepare bill. January 28, Wilberforce presented it; February 18,
it was committed to Wilberforce, Duncombe and others.</p>

<p><i>February 28.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from the Earl of
Strafford, stating that the bill will greatly affect and prejudice his
property. Petition referred to Committee.</p>

<p>Same day, Petition against the bill from several Persons, being
Owners of Estates and Occupiers of Houses in the Town and Parish
of Wakefield. ‘Setting forth, That, if the said Bill should pass
into a Law, as it now stands, the same will greatly affect and
prejudice the Estates and Property of the Petitioners, (viz.), their
being deprived of the Benefit they now receive from the Pasturage
of the Ings, from the 12th of August to the 5th of April, and for
which they cannot receive any Compensation adequate thereto, as
well as the Restrictions which exclude the Inhabitants from
erecting Buildings on Land that may be allotted to them for
Twenty, Forty, and Sixty Years, on different Parts of Westgate
Common, as specified in the said Bill.’ This petition also was
referred to the Committee.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>March 12.</i>&mdash;Wilberforce
reported from the Committee that the Standing Orders had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_384">[384]</span>
been complied with, that they had considered the first Petition
(Lord Strafford’s), (no one had appeared to be heard on behalf of
the second Petition), that they found the allegations of the Bill
true, that ‘the Parties concerned’ had given their consent to the
Bill, and also to adding one Commissioner to the three named in
the Bill ‘(except the Owners of Estates whose Property in the
Lands and Grounds to be divided and inclosed is assessed to the
Land Tax at £5 per Annum or thereabouts, who refused to sign
the Bill; and also, except the Owners of Estates whose Property
in the said Lands and Grounds is assessed to the Land Tax at
about £51 per Annum, who have either declared themselves
perfectly indifferent about the Inclosure, or not given any Answer
to the Application made to them respecting it; and that the
whole Property belonging to Persons interested in the Inclosure is
assessed to the Land Tax at £432 per Annum, or thereabouts ...).’</p>

<p>Bill passed Commons and Lords. March 28, Royal Assent.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 33 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 11.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Four appointed. (1) Richard Clark of Rothwell
Haigh, Gentleman; (2) John Renshaw of Owthorp, Notts,
Gentleman; (3) John Sharp of Gildersome, Yorks, Gentleman;
(4) William Whitelock of Brotherton, Yorks, Gentleman; the first
representing the Duke of Leeds, the second the Earl of Strafford
(no doubt this was the Commissioner added in Committee), and
the other two representing the Majority in Value of the Persons
interested. Any vacancy to be filled up by the party represented,
and new Commissioners to be ‘not interested in the said Inclosure.’
Three to be a quorum. In case of dispute and equal division of
opinion amongst the Commissioners, an Umpire is appointed
(Isaac Leatham of Barton, Gentleman); the decision of Commissioners
and Umpire to be final and conclusive.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment To Commissioners.</span>&mdash;2 guineas each for each working
day. The Surveyors (2 appointed) to be paid as Commissioners
think fit.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;All claims with full particulars of the nature and
tenure of the property on behalf of which the claim is made are
to be handed in at the 1st or 2nd meeting of the Commissioners;
no claim is to be received later except for some special cause;
and the determination of the Commissioners as to the various
claims is to be binding and final. There are, however, three
exceptions to the above, (1) Persons claiming in virtue of
Messuages and Tofts need not prove usage of common; (2) Any
Person who is dissatisfied with regard to his own or some one
else’s claim, may give notice in writing, and the Commissioners
are then to take Counsel’s opinion on the matter. The Commissioners
are to choose the Counsel, who is to be ‘not interested
in the Premises.’ The Commissioners may also on their own
responsibility take Counsel’s opinion at any time they think
proper; Counsel’s opinion is to be final. The costs are to be paid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_385">[385]</span>
by the party against whom the dispute is determined, or otherwise
as the Commissioners decide; (3) The Earl of Strafford is
exempted from specifying particulars of Tenure in making his
claim, for there are disputes on this subject between the Duke
and the Earl, ‘which Matters in Difference the said Duke and
Earl have not agreed to submit to the Consideration or Determination
of the said Commissioners.’ The Commissioners need not
specify the tenure of the Earl’s share in making their award, and
if the Duke and Earl go to law about their dispute and the matter
is settled in a Court of Equity, then the Commissioners are to
make a second special Award for them.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Provisions for the Lord of the Manor</i>&mdash;‘the Most Noble Francis,
Duke of <span class="lock">Leeds.’&mdash;</span></p>

<p>(1) Such part of the Commons and Waste Grounds as is ‘equal
in Value to One full Sixteenth Part thereof in lieu of and as a
sufficient Recompence for his Right to the Soil of the said
Commons and Waste Grounds, and for his Consent to the Division
and Inclosure thereof;</p>

<p>(2) An allotment of the Commons and Waste Grounds to be
(in the judgment of the Commissioners) a fair compensation for
his Coney Warrens which are to be destroyed;</p>

<p>(3) An allotment equal in value (in the judgment of the
Commissioners) to £40 a year as compensation for the reserved
Rents he has been receiving from persons who have made incroachments
during the last 20 years;</p>

<p>(4) An allotment or allotments of not more than 5 acres in the
whole, to be awarded in such place as the Duke or his Agents
appoint, close to one of his stone quarries, as compensation for the
right given by the Act to other allottees of the Common of
getting stone on their allotments;</p>

<p>(5) The value of all the timber on allotments from the
common is to be assessed by the Commissioners, and paid by the
respective allottees to the Duke. If they refuse to pay, the Duke
may come and cut down the timber ‘without making any Allowance
or Satisfaction whatsoever to the Person or Persons to whom
any such Allotment shall belong, for any Injury to be done
thereby’;</p>

<p>(6) The Duke’s power to work Mines and to get all Minerals is
not to be interfered with by anything in this Act but the ‘Owners
or Proprietors of the Ground wherein such Pits or Soughs shall be
made, driven, or worked, or such Engines, Machines or Buildings
erected, or such Coals or Rubbish laid, or such Ways, Roads or
Passages made and used,’ are to have a ‘reasonable Satisfaction
for Damages.’ The payment of the reasonable Satisfaction however
is not to fall on the Duke, but on all the allottees of the
Commons and Waste Grounds who are to meet together in the
Moot Hall and appoint a salaried officer to settle the damages and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_386">[386]</span>
collect the money by a rate raised according to the Poor Rate of
the previous year. If the claimant and the officer fail to agree,
arbitrators, and ultimately an umpire, can be appointed.</p>

<p><i>Provisions for Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;A fair allotment is to be given to
the Vicar in compensation for his small Tythes. In cases where
the allottees have not enough land to contribute their due share
to the tithe allotment, they have to pay a yearly sum instead.</p>

<p><i>For Stone and Gravel</i>, <i>etc.</i>&mdash;Suitable allotments for stone and
gravel, etc., to be made ‘for the Use and Benefit’ of all allottees
‘for the Purpose of getting Stone, Sand, Gravel, or other Materials
for making and repairing of the public Roads and Drains’; but
these allotments are not to include any of the Duke’s or of his
tenants’ stone quarries.</p>

<p><i>Provision for the Poor.</i>&mdash;None.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;(1) The open fields are to be divided out
amongst the present proprietors in proportion to their present value
and with regard to convenience; unless any owner of open-field
land specially asks for an allotment elsewhere; (2) The owners of
Ings are to have Ings allotted to them, unless they wish for land
elsewhere; (3) The Commons and Waste grounds are first to have
the various allotments to the Lord of the Manor and the Vicar specified
above, and also the allotment for Stone and Gravel for roads
deducted from them, and then the residue is to be allotted
‘among the several Persons (considering the said Duke of Leeds
as one) having Right of Common in or upon the said Commons
and Waste Grounds’ in the following fashion; one half is to be
divided among the Owners or Proprietors of Messuages, Cottages
or Tofts with Right of Common, according to their several
Rights and Interests; the other half, together with the rest
and residue of Land to be divided, is to be allotted among the
Owners or Proprietors of open common fields, Ings, and old
inclosed Lands according to their several rights and interests
‘without any undue Preference whatsoever.’ The Commissioners
are also directed to pay due regard to situation and to putting
the different allotments of the same person together. Allotments
are to be of the same tenure, <i>i.e.</i> freehold or copyhold, as the
holdings in respect of which they are claimed, but no fines are
to be taken on account of the allotment.</p>

<p>With respect to the allottees of allotments on Westgate Moor, a
special clause (see petition on January 23) is inserted. They are
forbidden to put up any House, Building or Erection of any kind
on one part for 20, on another for 40, on another for 60, years,
unless the Duke consents, the object being ‘thereby the more
advantageously to enable the said Duke, his Heirs and Assigns,
to work his Colliery in and upon the same Moor.’</p>

<p>The award, with full particulars of allotments, etc., is to be
drawn up and is to be ‘final, binding, and conclusive upon all
Parties and Persons interested therein.’</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_387">[387]</span></p>

<p>If any person (being Guardian, etc., tenant in tail or for life of
lessee, etc.) fails to accept and fence, then Commissioners can do
it for him and charge; if he still refuses, Commissioners can
lease allotment out and take rent till Expenses are paid.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Incroachments 20 years old are to stand; those
made within 20 years are to be treated as part of the Commons
to be divided, but they are, if the Commissioners think it fit and
convenient, to be allotted to the person in possession without
considering the value of erections and improvements. Three
contingencies for allotment to the person in possession are provided
for;&mdash;(1) if he is entitled to an allotment, his incroachment
is to be treated as part or the whole of his allotment;</p>

<p>(2) If his incroachment is of greater value than the allotment
he is entitled to, then he is to pay whatever extra sum of money
the Commissioners judge right;</p>

<p>(3) If he is not entitled to any allotment at all, then he has to
pay the price set on his incroachment by the Commissioners.</p>

<p>If the Commissioners do not allot an incroachment to the person
in possession, they may sell it at public auction and apply the
money to the purposes of the Act, or they may allot it to someone
not in possession, in which case a ‘reasonable’ sum of money is
to be given to the dispossessed owner, the new allottee paying the
whole or part of it.</p>

<p>The above provisions apply to the ordinary incroachers; the
Duke has special arrangements. If he has made any new incroachments
during the last 20 years in addition to any older incroachments,
these new incroachments are to be valued by the Commissioners,
and the Duke is to have them either as part of his
allotment or for a money payment, as he chooses; also ‘whereas
the Tenants of the said Duke of Leeds of the Collieries on
the said Commons and Waste Lands ... have from Time to
Time erected Fire Engines, Messuages, Dwelling Houses, Cottages
and other Buildings upon the said Commons and Waste Lands,
and made several other Conveniences thereon for the Use and
Accommodation of the said Collieries, and the Persons managing
and working the same, a great Part of which have been erected
and made within the last Twenty Years, these are not to be
treated like other incroachments, but are to ‘be and continue the
absolute Property of the said Duke of Leeds, his Heirs and Assigns,
in as full and ample Manner’ as if the erections had been made
more than 20 years before.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing.</span>&mdash;All allotments are to be fenced at the expense of
their several proprietors ‘in such Manner, Shares and Proportions
as the said Commissioners shall ... direct’ with the following
exceptions&mdash;(1) the Vicar’s allotment for small Tithes is to be
fenced by the other proprietors; (2) the allotments to Hospitals,
Schools, and other public Charities are to have a certain proportion
deducted from them to cover the cost of fencing. Allottees<span class="pagenum" id="Page_388">[388]</span>
who refuse to fence can be summoned before a J.P. by their
neighbours, and the J.P. (who is not to be interested in the
Enclosure) can make an order compelling them to fence.</p>

<p>To protect the new hedges, it is ordered that no sheep or lambs
are to be turned out in any allotment for 7 years, unless the
allottee makes special provision to protect his neighbour’s young
quickset, and no beasts, cattle or horses are to be turned into any
roads or lanes where there is a new-growing fence.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;Part of the Commons and Waste Grounds is to be
sold to cover the expences; if the proceeds do not cover the
costs the residue is to be paid by the allottees in proportion to
their shares, and any surplus is to be divided among them, But
Hospitals, Schools, and Public Charities are exempted from this
payment, a portion of their allotments, in fact, having been
already deducted in order to pay their share of Expenses. The
Commissioners are to keep an account of Expenses, which is to
be open to inspection. The owners of Ings are to pay a sum of
money in return for the extinction of the right of Eatage (referred
to by the Petitioners) on their land from August 12 to April 5;
and this money is to be applied for the purposes of the Act.</p>

<p>If allottees find the expenses of the Act and of fencing more
than they can meet, they are allowed (with the consent of the
Commissioners) to mortgage their allotments up to 40s. an acre.
If they dislike this prospect, they are empowered by the Act, at
any time before the execution of the Award, to sell their rights
to allotment in respect of any common right.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation to Occupiers.</span>&mdash;Occupiers are to pay a higher rent
in return for the loss of the use of common rights. The clause runs
as follows:&mdash;‘That the several Persons who hold any Lands or other
Estates, to which a Right of Common upon the said Commons and
Waste Grounds is appurtenant or belonging, or any Part of the
said Open Common Fields or Inclosures, by virtue of any Lease, of
which a longer Term than One Year is unexpired, shall and are
hereby required to pay to their respective Landlords such Increase
of Rent towards the Expences such Landlords will be respectively
put to in Consequence of this Act, as the said Commissioners shall
judge reasonable, and shall by Writing under their Hands direct
or appoint, having Regard to the Duration of such respective
Leases, and to the probable Benefit which will accrue to such
respective Lessees by Reason of the said Inclosure.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to have full power to set out and shut
up roads and footpaths (turnpike roads excepted).</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not in any
cases where the Commissioners’ decisions are final, binding, or
conclusive, as they are, <i>e.g.</i> on claims (except the Earl of Strafford’s)
and on allotments.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;Not with Clerks of Peace or of County Council, or in
Record Office.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_389">[389]</span></p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_12">APPENDIX A (12)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Winfrith Newburgh, Dorset.&mdash;Enclosure Act, 1768</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Area.</span>&mdash;2254 Acres or thereabouts.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Nature of Ground.</span>&mdash;Common Fields, Meadow Grounds,
Sheep Downs, Commons, Common Heaths, and other Waste
Grounds.</p>

<p>(In Report, Common Arable Fields and Common Meadows =
1218 acres.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>December 1, 1767.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosure from Edward Weld, Esq., George Clavell, Esq., Benjamin
Thornton, Clerk, William Weston, Clerk, John Felton, Gentleman,
and others. Leave given; bill read twice and committed on
December 11 to a Committee of 42 members in addition to the
members for Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. All to have
Voices. January 25, 1768, Petition from persons being Freeholders,
Proprietors of Estates or otherwise interested, against the bill
stating ‘that if the said Bill should pass into a Law the Estates
of the Petitioners and others in the said Parish will be greatly
injured, and several of them must be totally ruined thereby; and
that some of the Petitioners, by Threats and Menaces, were
prevailed upon to sign the Petition for the said Bill; but upon
Recollection, and considering the impending Ruin they shall be
subject to by the Inclosure, beg Leave now to have Liberty to
retract from their seeming Acquiescence in the said Petition,’ and
ask to be heard by Counsel against the Bill. Petition referred to
the Committee.</p>

<p><i>January 29, 1768.</i>&mdash;Mr. Bond reported from the Committee that
there was an erasure in the prayer of the said Petition and asked
for instructions. A fresh Committee of 36 members (many of
whom were also members of the other Committee) was appointed
to examine into the question of how the erasure was made, and
whether it was previous or subsequent to the signing. This
Committee was ordered to report to the House, but there is no
record of its report.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>February 2, 1768.</i>&mdash;Mr.
Bond reported from the Committee that the allegations were true,
and that the ‘Parties concerned’ had given their consent ‘(except
Four Persons who could not be found whose Property in the
Common Meadows to be inclosed amounts to Five Acres, Three
Roods, Twenty Three Perches and a half; and also except Four
other Persons who, when applied to for their Consent to the Bill,
refused to sign, though they declared they had no Objection, and
whose Property in the Common Meadows to be inclosed amounts
to Four Acres, One Rood, Thirty Eight Perches; and also except
Six Persons whose Property in the Common Arable Fields and
Common Meadows to be inclosed mounts to One hundred and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_390">[390]</span>
twenty two Acres, Thirty Three Perches, who refused to sign the
Bill; and also, except Three Persons, whose Property in the
Common Arable Fields and Common Meadows, to be inclosed,
amounts to One hundred and seven Acres, Twenty Three Perches,
who hold under Copies of Court Roll, granted on Condition that
they would join in any Act or Deed for the dividing and inclosing
the said Common Fields, and Meadows, and other Commonable
Lands within the said Manor, when thereto requested by the
Lord of the said Manor; and that the whole Number of Acres in
the said Common Arable Fields and Common Meadows is One
thousand, Two hundred and eighteen, Twenty Eight Perches and
a half, and that the Rector of Winfrith Newburgh and Vicar of
Campden, who are intitled to all the Great and Small Tithes
arising out of the said Common Arable Fields and Common
Meadows have consented thereto).’</p>

<p><i>February 2, 1768</i> (same day).&mdash;Another Petition against the bill
from Freeholders, Proprietors and Persons otherwise interested
stating that the Inclosure is ‘contrary to the general Sense of the
Persons interested therein,’ and will be ‘injurious to the Property
of the Petitioners and others, the smaller Landholders within the
said Parish, some of whom must, in the Petitioners’ Judgment, be
totally ruined thereby.’ Petitioners to be heard when Report
considered.</p>

<p><i>February 3, 1768.</i>&mdash;Report considered. House informed that
no Counsel attended. Report read. Clause added settling the
expenses to be paid by Copyholders and Lessees for Lives. Bill
sent to Lords. February 9, Committed. Same day, Petition against
it from various persons as ‘contrary to the general Sense of the
Persons interested therein.’ Referred to Committee. February 12,
Lord Delamer reported from the Committee without amendment.
February 24, Royal Assent.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Main Features of Act.</span>&mdash;(Private, 8 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 18.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Commissioners.</span>&mdash;Seven appointed. (1) John Bond, Esq., of
Grange; (2) David Robert Mitchell, Esq., of Dewlish; (3)
Nathaniel Bond, Esq., of West Lulworth; (4) Thomas Williams,
Esq., of Herringstone; (5) William Churchill, Esq., of Dorchester;
(6) George Lillington of Burngate, Gentleman; (7) Joseph
Garland of Chaldon, Gentleman; all of Dorset.</p>

<p>Sometimes 3, sometimes 4 a quorum. Vacancies to be filled up
by remaining Commissioners from persons not interested in the
land to be inclosed.</p>

<p>Survey to be made if Commissioners ‘shall think the same
necessary.’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Payment.</span>&mdash;Nothing stated.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Claims.</span>&mdash;Commissioners to examine into and determine on all
claims; and ‘in case any Difference or Dispute shall arise between
all or any of the Parties interested in the said Division and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_391">[391]</span>
Inclosure, with respect to the Premises, or any Matter or Thing
herein contained or consequent thereon, or in relation thereunto,
the same shall be adjusted and finally determined between the
said Parties, and every of them, by the said Commissioners, or any
Three or more of them.’ Commissioners can examine witnesses
on oath, ‘and the Determinations of the said Commissioners, or
any Three or more of them therein, shall be binding and conclusive
to all and every the said Parties....’</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">System of Division&mdash;Special Provisions</span>:</p>

<p><i>Lords of the Manor</i> (Edward Weld, Esq., of Winfrith Newburgh;
George Clavell, Esq., of Langcotts and East Fossell).&mdash;No
special provision for allotment. Their Manorial Rights are not to
be prejudiced by Act except as regards ‘the Mines, Delves, and
Quarries lying within and under such Parts, Shares, and Proportions
of the said Common Fields, Meadow Grounds, Sheep
Downs, Commons, Common Heaths and other Waste Grounds, as
shall or may be allotted and assigned to the several other Freeholders
and Owners of Lands’ within these Manors ‘or to any
Person or Persons not having any Lands within the said In-Parish
or Manors, or within the Precincts thereof as aforesaid, in Lieu of
or as an Equivalent for such Right or Claim as aforesaid; and
other than and except such Common of Pasture and other Common
Rights as can or may be claimed by or belonging to the Lord or
Lords of the said Manors in and upon the Premises so intended to
be divided and inclosed as aforesaid.’</p>

<p><i>Tithe Owners.</i>&mdash;Tithe owners to have the same rights to Tithes
over the land about to be inclosed as they have over the lands
already inclosed.</p>

<p>If arable land is converted to pasture on inclosure (for Dairy
Cows or Black Cattle) then allottees shall pay an annual 3s. an
acre to tithe owners as compensation for corn tithes. Allotments
given in virtue of estates which are Cistertian Lands, are to be
deemed Cistertian Lands too, <i>i.e.</i> to have same exemption from
tithes, but any Cistertian Lands which are allotted are to be under
the same obligations for tithes as the estates in virtue of which
they are allotted.</p>

<p><i>Provision for the Poor.</i>&mdash;None.</p>

<p><i>Provision for Fuel Allotment.</i>&mdash;Commissioners are to ascertain
and determine all Rights of Common over the land to be enclosed,
and are then to set out such part or parts ‘as shall appear to them
to be sufficient, and to be conveniently situate for the preserving
and raising Furze, Turf, or other Fuel, for the Use of the several
Persons’ who shall appear to the Commissioners to be intitled to
a Right of Common.</p>

<p><i>Allotment of Residue.</i>&mdash;Amongst all persons who appear to
the Commissioners to be intitled to a Right of Common, or to
have or be intitled to any other Property in the said Common
Fields, etc., in such proportions as the Commissioners judge right<span class="pagenum" id="Page_392">[392]</span>
‘without giving any undue Preference,’ and with due regard to
Quality, Quantity, and Situation.</p>

<p>But the following Rules are to be observed with regard to
<span class="lock">proportions:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>(1) Common Fields and Sheep Downs are to be divided ‘by
and according to the Parts and Proportions of the Arable Lands
lying in the said Common Fields, where the said Parties respectively
now are, or, at the Time of such Allotments so as aforesaid
to be made shall be intitled to.’</p>

<p>(2) Meadow Grounds, Commons, Common Heaths, and other
Waste Grounds to be divided ‘according to the Sum or Sums of
money which the said Parties and each of them now stand charged
with towards the Relief of the Poor of the said Parish’ in respect
of their lands which have right of common.</p>

<p><i>Special Clause.</i>&mdash;In case it appears to the Commissioners that any
persons who have no land, nevertheless have a right of common,
then the Commissioners can allot such person such part of the land
to be inclosed as they think an equivalent for such right of common.
In order to prevent all Differences and Disputes, the Commissioners
are to draw up an Award, and this Award shall be binding and
conclusive to all and every Person and Persons interested.
Failure to accept within 6 months excludes allottee from all
benefit and advantage of this Act, and also ‘from any Estate,
Interest or Right of Common, or other Property whatsoever’ in
any other allotment. (Saving clause for infants, etc.)</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Incroachments.</span>&mdash;Not mentioned.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Fencing</span>, etc.&mdash;To be done by allottees in such proportions as
Commissioners direct. Such directions to be put in award,
and to be final and binding. Fences to be made within 12
months, or some other convenient space of time.</p>

<p>If an allottee fails to fence, his neighbour can complain to
a J.P. (not interested in the inclosure), who can authorise complainant
to do it, and either charge defaulter or to enter on
premises and receive rents till expenses paid. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;Allotment
of Copyholders and leaseholders for one or more lives are
to be fenced partly by the Lord of the Manor and partly by the
allottees in such proportion as the Commissioners (or 4 of them)
direct.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Expenses.</span>&mdash;(1) Expenses of obtaining and passing the Act to
be borne by the Lords of the Manor.</p>

<p>(2) Expenses of carrying out the Act (survey, allotment,
Commissioners’ charges, etc.) to be borne by the several allottees
in proportion to the Quantity of Land allotted to them, or
otherwise as Commissioners direct. <i>Exception.</i>&mdash;Tithe owners’
share to be borne by the Lords of the Manor. Commissioners
can distrain for payment.</p>

<p>Trustees, Tenants in Tail or for Life may mortgage up to 40s.
an acre.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_393">[393]</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Compensation.</span>&mdash;Leases and agreements at Rack Rent to be
void, owners making such compensation to Lessees as Commissioners
judge right.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Roads.</span>&mdash;Commissioners have power to set out and shut up
roads and footpaths.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Power of Appeal.</span>&mdash;To Quarter Sessions only, and not when
Commissioners’ determination said to be final.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Award.</span>&mdash;August 17, 1771. With Dorset Clerk of Peace or of
County Council.</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_13">APPENDIX A (13)</h2>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Quainton.&mdash;Attempted Enclosure, 1801</span></p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>March 20, 1801.</i>&mdash;Petition for
enclosures from ‘several persons.’ Leave given. Earl Temple,
Sir William Young, and Mr. Praed to prepare bill.</p>

<p><i>April 2.</i>&mdash;Bill read first time.</p>

<p><i>April 13.</i>&mdash;Petition from various proprietors of Lands, Common
Rights, and other Hereditaments against the bill, stating that
enclosure ‘would be attended with an Expence to the Proprietors
far exceeding any Improvement to be derived therefrom.’
Ordered to be heard on second reading.</p>

<p><i>April 15.</i>&mdash;Bill read second time. Petitioners declined to be
heard. Bill committed to Mr. Praed, Earl Temple, etc.</p>

<p><i>April 21.</i>&mdash;Petition against the bill from various proprietors
stating ‘that the Proprietors of the said Commonable Lands are
very numerous, and the Shares or Properties belonging to most of
them are so small that the proposed Division and Inclosure would
be attended with an Expence far exceeding any Improvement to
be derived therefrom; and that a great Majority in Number of
the said Proprietors dissent to the said Bill, and the Proprietors
of more than One-third, and very nearly One-half Part in Value,
of the Lands to be inclosed, also dissent thereto; and that many
of the Clauses and Provisions in the said Bill are also highly
injurious’ to the petitioners.</p>

<p>Referred to the Committee. All to have voices.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>June 12.</i>&mdash;Mr. Praed
reported from the Committee that the Standing Orders had
been complied with, that the allegations were true, and that the
Parties concerned had given their consent (except the owners of
Estates assessed to the Land Tax at £39, 12s. 6¼d. who refused
to sign the bill, and the owners of Estates assessed at £3, 10s. 0d.
who were neuter; and that the whole of the Estates ‘interested’
were assessed at £246, 8s. 6d.).</p>

<p>Same day.&mdash;Petition against the bill from Richard Wood on
behalf of himself and other proprietors who were parties to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_394">[394]</span>
the former petition, Richard Wood being the only one left in
London, setting forth ‘that the said Bill proposes to inclose only
a Part of the said Parish of Quainton, consisting of 3 open Arable
Fields, and about 280 Acres of Commonable Land, lying dispersedly
in, or adjoining to the said Open Fields, the rest of the
said Parish being Old inclosed Lands’; that the agent for the bill
had given the Committee a statement (1) of the names of the
persons interested; (2) of the amount at which these persons were
assessed to the Land Tax for their property throughout the parish,
according to which statement it appeared, first, that of the
34 persons interested, ‘not being Cottagers,’ 8 assented, 4
were neuter, and 22 dissented; but that, second, as stated in
terms of Land Tax Assessment, £203, 5s. 11¾d. assented, and
£39, 12s. 6¼d. dissented; that this statement was wrong inasmuch
as the proprietors of old inclosed lands had in respect of old
inclosures no rights over the commonable lands, and that therefore
no old inclosed land could rank as property ‘interested’ in
the inclosure. The petitioners gave the following enumeration of
Consents as the correct one; whole quantity of land in the Open
Fields, ‘in respect of which only a Right of Common could be
claimed,’ 42&frac14; yard <span class="lock">lands:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable center" summary="">
<tr>
<td>Land belonging</td>
<td>to those who </td>
<td class="left">assented,</td>
<td>21&frac34; </td>
<td>yard lands</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">dissented,</td>
<td>19&frac12;</td>
<td>„</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>„</td>
<td>„</td>
<td class="left">were neutral,</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>yard land</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>or in terms of annual <span class="lock">value&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left">Assenting,</td>
<td>£406</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Dissenting,</td>
<td>370</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Neutral,</td>
<td>37</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>The petitioners further stated that their Counsel had offered to
call witnesses before the Committee to prove the above facts; that
the agent for the bill had retorted that old inclosed lands had a
right in the Commons, although he did not pretend that such
right had ever been enjoyed, or produce any witness to show that
it had ever been claimed, but supported his claim by quoting
a clause in the bill by which it was proposed that the Rector’s
Tithes for the old inclosures as well as the new should be
commuted for an allotment of land; and that the Committee
refused to hear the evidence tendered by the petitioners’ Counsel.
This Petition was referred to the Committee to whom the bill
was recommitted, and the bill was dropped.</p>


<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_A_14">APPENDIX A (14)</h2>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Subsequent History of King’s Sedgmoor</span></p>

<p>In 1775, Mr. Allen, Member of Parliament for Bridgwater, tried
to get an enclosure bill passed. ‘Sanguine of success, and highly
impressed with the idea of its importance, he purchased a large<span class="pagenum" id="Page_395">[395]</span>
number of rights, and having obtained a signature of consents,
went to Parliament; but not having interest enough in the House
to stem the torrent of opposition, all his delusive prospects of
profit vanished, and he found himself left in a small but respectable
minority.’<a id="FNanchor_502" href="#Footnote_502" class="fnanchor">[502]</a> No further attempt was made till 1788, when a
meeting to consider the propriety of draining and dividing the
moor, was held at Wells. ‘At this meeting Sir Philip Hales presided;
and after much abuse and opposition from the lower order
of commoners, who openly threatened destruction to those who
supported such a measure, the meeting was dissolved without
coming to any final determination.</p>

<p>‘The leading idea was, however, afterwards pursued, with great
assiduity, by Sir Philip, and his agent Mr. Symes of Stowey; and
by their persevering industry, and good management,’<a id="FNanchor_503" href="#Footnote_503" class="fnanchor">[503]</a> application
was again made to Parliament in 1791.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Parliamentary Proceedings.</span>&mdash;<i>February 18, 1791.</i>&mdash;Petition from
several Owners and Proprietors for a bill to drain and divide the
tract of waste ground of about 18,000 acres called King’s Sedgmoor.
Petitioners point out that the moor is liable to be overflowed, ‘and
thereby the same is not only less serviceable and useful to the
Commoners, but also, by reason of the Vapours and Exhalations
which arise from thence, the Air of the circumjacent Country is
rendered less salubrious’; also that it would be ‘beneficial, as well
to the wholesomeness of the neighbouring Country as also to the
Profitableness of the Pasturage of the said Moor’ if it were
drained and divided into Parochial or other large allotments. The
House was also informed that the expense of the undertaking was
not proposed to be levied by Tolls or Duties upon the Parties
interested.</p>

<p>Leave given. Mr. Philips and Sir John Trevelyan to prepare.
February 28. Bill committed to Mr. Philips, Mr. Templar, etc.</p>


<p class="appspace"><span class="smcap">Report and Enumeration of Consents.</span>&mdash;<i>March 7.</i>&mdash;Mr. Philips
reported that the Standing Orders had been complied with, that
the allegations were true, and that the parties concerned had consented
‘(except the Owners of 107 Rights on the said Moor, who
declared themselves neuter in respect to the Bill; and also except
the Owners of 84 Rights, who declared themselves against the
Bill; and that the whole of the Rights on the said Moor consist
of 1740, or thereabouts; and that no Person appeared before the
Committee to oppose the Bill).’</p>

<p>The Bill passed Commons, March 9; Lords, April 15. Royal
Assent, May 13.</p>

<p>Billingsley, after describing the attempts to enclose Sedgmoor,
remarks (p. 192): ‘I have been thus particular in stating the
progress of this business merely to show the impropriety of calling
public meetings with a view of gaining signatures of consent or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_396">[396]</span>
taking the sense of the proprietors in that way. At all publick
meetings of this nature which I ever attended noise and clamour
have silenced sound sense and argument. A party generally
attends with a professed desire to oppose, and truth and propriety
have a host of foes to combat. Whoever therefore has an object
of this kind in view let him acquire consent by <i>private application</i>;
for I have frequently seen the good effects thereof manifested by
the irresistible influence of truth when coolly and quietly administered;
and it has frequently happened that men hostile to your
scheme have by dispassionate argument not only changed their
sentiment but become warm partisans in that cause which at first
they meant to oppose.’</p>

<p>The task of Sir Philip and Mr. Symes in acquiring consents
by the cool and quiet administration of truth must have been
considerably lightened by the fact that Parliament anticipated the
Commissioners with extraordinary accuracy in disregarding 55% of
the claims. The Commissioners, says Billingsley, investigated
4063 claims, of which only 1798 were allowed. The Parliamentary
Committee had asserted that there were 1740 rights, ‘or
thereabouts.’</p>

<p>The Act for draining and dividing King’s Sedgmoor is not, so
far as we have been able to discover, amongst the printed
Statutes.</p>

<p>Particulars of the expenses are given by Billingsley (p. 196),
who estimates the area at 12,000 <span class="lock">acres:&mdash;</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<th> </th>
<th>£</th>
<th><i>s.</i></th>
<th><i>d.</i></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">To act of parliament and all other incidental expenses,</td>
<td>1,628</td>
<td>15</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Interest of money borrowed,</td>
<td>3,239</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>11</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Commissioners,</td>
<td>4,314</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Clerk,</td>
<td>1,215</td>
<td>19</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Surveyor,</td>
<td>908</td>
<td>12</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Printers,</td>
<td>362</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Petty expenses,</td>
<td>575</td>
<td>11</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Land purchased,</td>
<td>2,801</td>
<td>4 </td>
<td>11</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Drains, sluices, bridges and roads,</td>
<td>15,418</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left">Awards and incidentals,</td>
<td>1,160</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td class="total">£31,624</td>
<td class="total">4</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>About 700 acres were sold to discharge the expenses.</p>

<p>The drainage and division into parochial allotments was a
preliminary to enclosure of the different parochial shares, which
was of course made easier by the fact that 55% of the claims had
already been disallowed. In the years 1796, ’97, and ’98, fourteen
Enclosure Acts for the different parishes were passed.</p>

<p>(Butleigh and Woollavington, 1796. Aller, Ashcott, Compton
Dundon, Higham, Othery, Moorlinch, Somerton, Street, and
Weston Zoyland, 1797. Bridgwater, Chedjoy, and Midellzoy, 1798.)</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_397">[397]</span></p>

<p>Billingsley estimated that the total cost of subdividing parochial
allotments would be £28,000.</p>

<p>He also estimated that the value of the land rose from 10s. to
35s. an acre.</p>




<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="APPENDIX_B">APPENDIX B</h2>
</div>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Bedfordshire.&mdash;Clopshill, 1795.</span><a id="FNanchor_504" href="#Footnote_504" class="fnanchor">[504]</a></p>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Family of Six Persons.</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Expences by the Week</i>&mdash;</td>
<td class="center">£ </td>
<td class="center"><i>s.</i></td>
<td class="center"><i>d.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bread, flour, or oatmeal,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Yeast and salt,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Thread and worsted,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bacon or other meat,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Tea, sugar, and butter,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>10&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Soap,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Candles,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Beer,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total of the Week,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0 </td>
<td class="total">11</td>
<td class="total">8&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Amount per Annum,</span></td>
<td>£30</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>10</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Rent,</span></td>
<td>1</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Wood,</span></td>
<td>1</td>
<td>12</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cloaths,</span></td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Sickness,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Expences per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£35 </td>
<td class="total">18</td>
<td class="total">4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Earning per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The man,</span></td>
<td>£0</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The woman,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The children,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total of the Week,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0 </td>
<td class="total">13</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Earnings per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£33 </td>
<td class="total">16</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>
<i>N.B.</i>&mdash;‘The Harvest earnings not included: they go a great
way towards making up the deficiency.’
</p>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Dorset.&mdash;Sherborne, 1789.</span><a id="FNanchor_505" href="#Footnote_505" class="fnanchor">[505]</a></p>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Family of Five Persons.</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Expences per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
<td class="center">£</td>
<td class="center"><i>s.</i></td>
<td class="center"><i>d.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bread,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Salt,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Meat,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>8<span class="pagenum" id="Page_398">[398]</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Tea, etc.,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2<a id="FNanchor_506" href="#Footnote_506" class="fnanchor">[506]</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cheese,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Milk,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Soap,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Candles,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Thread, etc.,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">5</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Amount per Annum,</span></td>
<td>£14</td>
<td>14</td>
<td>8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Rent,</span></td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Fuel,</span></td>
<td>3</td>
<td>18</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Clothes, etc.,</span></td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Expences per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£21 </td>
<td class="total">12</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left" colspan="4"><i>Earnings per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The man,</span></td>
<td>£0</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The woman,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
<td class="total">6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Earnings per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£22</td>
<td class="total">2</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
</tr>
</table>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Hampshire.&mdash;Long Parish, 1789.</span><a id="FNanchor_507" href="#Footnote_507" class="fnanchor">[507]</a></p>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Family of Six Persons.</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Expences per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
<td class="center">£</td>
<td class="center"><i>s.</i> </td>
<td class="center"><i>d.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bread or Flour,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Yeast and Salt,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bacon or other Meat,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Tea, Sugar, and Butter,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cheese,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Soap, Starch, and Blue,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Candles,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Thread, Thrum, and Worsted,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">7</td>
<td class="total">9</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Amount per Annum,</span></td>
<td>£20</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Rent, Fuel (‘both very high and scarce’), Clothes, Lying-in, etc.,</span></td>
<td>7</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Expences per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£27</td>
<td class="total">3</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Earnings per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The man,</span></td>
<td>£0</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The woman,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">9</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Earnings per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£23</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_399">[399]</span></p>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Herts.&mdash;Hinksworth, 1795.</span><a id="FNanchor_508" href="#Footnote_508" class="fnanchor">[508]</a></p>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Family of Six Persons.</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Expences by the Week</i>&mdash;</td>
<td>£ </td>
<td class="center"><i>s.</i></td>
<td class="center"><i>d.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bread, flour, or oatmeal,</span></td>
<td>0 </td>
<td>10</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Heating the oven,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Yeast and salt,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bacon or pork,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Tea, sugar, and butter,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>9&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Soap,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cheese,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>7&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Candles,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Small beer,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>6&frac34;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Milk,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Potatoes,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Thread and worsted,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total of the Week,</span></td>
<td class="total">£1</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
<td class="total">0&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Amount per Annum,</span></td>
<td>£52</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Rent,</span></td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cloaths,</span></td>
<td>6</td>
<td>5 </td>
<td>10</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Fuel, coal, wood, etc.,</span></td>
<td>3 </td>
<td>15</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Births and burials,</span></td>
<td>1</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Expences per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£65</td>
<td class="total">6</td>
<td class="total">9</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Earnings per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The man,</span></td>
<td>£0</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>2&frac34;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The woman,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The children,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total of the Week,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0 </td>
<td class="total">15</td>
<td class="total">4&frac34;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Earnings per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£40</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
<td class="total">7</td>
</tr>
</table>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Northamptonshire.&mdash;Castor, 1794.</span><a id="FNanchor_509" href="#Footnote_509" class="fnanchor">[509]</a></p>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Family of Six Persons.</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Expences per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
<td class="center">£</td>
<td class="center"><i>s.</i> </td>
<td class="center"><i>d.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bread and Flour,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Salt,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Meat,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Tea, Sugar, and Butter,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cheese (sometimes),</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Soap &frac14; lb., Starch, etc.,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Candles &frac12; lb., Thread, etc.,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
<td class="total">0&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_400">[400]</span><span class="i2">Amount per Annum,</span></td>
<td>20 </td>
<td>18</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Rent,</span></td>
<td>1 </td>
<td>15</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Fuel and coals,</span></td>
<td>1 </td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Clothing,</span></td>
<td>2 </td>
<td>15</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Lying-in, loss of time, etc.,</span></td>
<td>1 </td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Expenses per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£28</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
<td class="total">2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Earnings per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The man,</span></td>
<td>£0</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The woman,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0 </td>
<td>10</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The children,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Earnings per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£22 </td>
<td class="total">10</td>
<td class="total">8</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>
<i>N.B.</i>&mdash;To the earnings may be added what is got by gleaning.
</p>


<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Norfolk.&mdash;Diss, 1793.</span><a id="FNanchor_510" href="#Footnote_510" class="fnanchor">[510]</a></p>

<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Family of Six Persons.</span></p>

<table class="autotable right" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Expences by the Week</i>&mdash;</td>
<td class="center">£</td>
<td class="center"><i>s.</i> </td>
<td class="center"><i>d.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bread, flour or oatmeal,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>7&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Yeast and salt,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Bacon or other meat,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Tea, sugar, and butter,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>9&frac14;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Soap,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2&frac14;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Candles,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cheese,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>5&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Milk,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Potatoes,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Thread and worsted,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total per Week,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">7</td>
<td class="total">10&frac12;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Total per Annum,</span></td>
<td>£20</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Rent,</span></td>
<td>3</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Fuel,</span></td>
<td>1</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Cloaths,</span></td>
<td>2</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Births, burials, sickness,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">Total Expenses per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£27</td>
<td class="total">9</td>
<td class="total">6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><i>Earnings per Week</i>&mdash;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The Man,</span></td>
<td>£0</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The Woman,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i2">The Children,</span></td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total,</span></td>
<td class="total">£0</td>
<td class="total">11</td>
<td class="total">6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="left"><span class="i4">Total Earnings per Annum,</span></td>
<td class="total">£29</td>
<td class="total">18</td>
<td class="total">0</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p>
<i>N.B.</i>&mdash;In 1795 the earnings of this family were the same but
their expenses had risen to £36, 11s. 4d. On bread they spent
8s. a week instead of 4s. 7½d.
</p>


<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_401">[401]</span></p>

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHIEF_AUTHORITIES">CHIEF AUTHORITIES</h2>
</div>



<p><i>Journals of House of Commons</i> for period.</p>

<p><i>Journals of House of Lords</i> for period.</p>

<p>Reports of Parliamentary Debates for period in <i>Parliamentary
Register</i>, <i>Parliamentary History</i>, <i>Senator</i> and <i>Parliamentary
Debates</i>.</p>

<p><i>Statutes, Public and Private</i> for period.</p>

<p><i>Enclosure Awards</i> in Record Office or Duchy of Lancaster.</p>

<p><i>Home Office Papers</i> in Record Office.</p>

<p><i>Parliamentary Papers</i> for period; <span class="lock">specially&mdash;</span></p>


<div class="blockquot">

<p>
<span class="smcap">For Enclosures</span>&mdash;</p>

<div class="blockquot">
<p>Report from Select Committee on Standing Orders relating
to Private Bills, 1775.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Waste Lands. Ordered
to be printed December 23, 1795.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Waste Lands, 1797.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Means of Facilitating
Inclosure, 1800. (Deals specially with Expense).</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Constitution of Select
Committees on Private Bills, 1825.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Commons Inclosure, 1844.</p>

</div>

<p><span class="smcap">For Poor Laws</span>&mdash;</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>Report from Select Committee on Poor Laws, 1817.</p>

<p>Report from Lords Committee on Poor Laws, 1818.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Poor Laws, 1819.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Relief of Able-Bodied
from the Poor Rate, 1828.</p>

<p>Report from Lords on Poor Law, 1828.</p>

<p>Documents in possession of Poor Law Commissioners, 1833.</p>

<p>Report of Poor Laws Commissioners, 1834</p>

</div>

<p><span class="smcap">For Game Laws, Crime, and Punishment</span>&mdash;</p>
<div class="blockquot">

<p>Report from Select Committee on Game Laws, 1823.</p>

<p>Report from Lords Committee on Game Laws, 1828.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and
Convictions, 1827.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and
Convictions, 1828.</p>

<p>Return of Convictions under the Game Laws from 1827&ndash;30.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Secondary Punishments,
1831.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_402">[402]</span></p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Secondary Punishments,
1832.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Transportation, 1838.</p>

</div>

<p><span class="smcap">For other Social Questions</span>&mdash;</p>
<div class="blockquot">

<p>Report from Select Committee on Agricultural Distress, 1821.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Labourers’ Wages, 1824.</p>

<p>Reports from Select Committee on Emigration, 1826&ndash;7.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Agriculture, 1833.</p>

<p>Report from Select Committee on Allotment System, 1843.</p>
</div>
</div>


<p>Publications of Board of Agriculture.</p>

<p><i>General Report on Enclosures</i>, 1808.</p>

<p><i>Report on the Agricultural State of the Kingdom</i>, 1816.</p>

<p><i>Agricultural Surveys</i> of different Counties, by various writers,
alluded to in text as <i>Bedford Report</i>, <i>Middlesex Report</i>, etc.</p>


<p class="appspace"><i>Annual Register</i> for period.</p>

<p><i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, 1784&ndash;1815 (46 vols.).</p>

<p>Cobbett’s <i>Political Register</i>, 1802&ndash;35.</p>

<p><i>The Tribune</i> (mainly Thelwall’s lectures), 1795&ndash;6.</p>

<p>Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Improving
the Comforts of the Poor, (5 vols.), 1795&ndash;1808.</p>

<p>Ruggles, Thomas, <i>History of the Poor</i>, 1793 (published first in
<i>Annals of Agriculture</i>).</p>

<p>Davies, David, <i>The Case of Labourers in Husbandry stated and
considered</i>, 1795.</p>

<p>Eden, Sir Frederic Morton, <i>The State of the Poor or An History
of the Labouring Classes in England</i>, 1797.</p>

<p>The Works of Arthur Young, William Marshall, and other
contemporary writers on agriculture and enclosures; see
list in Hasbach, <i>History of the English Agricultural Labourer</i>.</p>

<p>Cobbett’s <i>Works</i>.</p>

<p>Dunkin’s <i>History of Oxfordshire</i>.</p>

<p><i>Carlisle Papers, Historical MSS. Commission.</i></p>

<p><i>Memoir of Lord Suffield</i>, by R. M. Bacon, 1838.</p>

<p><i>Life of Sir Samuel Romilly</i>, 1842.</p>



<p class="center appspace"><span class="smcap">Modern Authorities</span></p>



<p>Babeau, A., <i>Le Village sous l’ancien Régime</i>.</p>

<p>Curtler, W. H. R., <i>A Short History of English Agriculture</i>.</p>

<p>Eversley, Lord, <i>Commons, Forests, and Footpaths</i>.</p>

<p>Hasbach, Wilhelm, <i>History of the English Agricultural Labourer</i>.</p>

<p>Hirst, F. W., and Redlich, J., <i>Local Government in England</i>.</p>

<p>Hobson, J. A., <i>The Industrial System</i>.</p>

<p>Hudson, W. H., <i>A Shepherd’s Life</i>.</p>

<p>Jenks, E., <i>Outlines of Local Government</i>.</p>

<p>Johnson, A. H., <i>The Disappearance of the Small Landowner</i>.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_403">[403]</span></p>

<p>Kovalewsky, M., <i>La France Économique et Sociale à la Veille de la
Révolution</i>.</p>

<p>Levy, H., <i>Large and Small Holdings</i>.</p>

<p>Mantoux, P., <i>La Révolution Industrielle</i>.</p>

<p>Porritt, E., <i>The Unreformed House of Commons</i>.</p>

<p>Scrutton, T. E., <i>Commons and Common Fields</i>.</p>

<p>Slater, G., <i>The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common
Fields</i>.</p>

<p>Smart, W., <i>Economic Annals of the Nineteenth Century</i>.</p>

<p>De Tocqueville, <i>L’ancien Régime</i>.</p>

<p>Vinogradoff, P., <i>The Growth of the Manor</i>.</p>

<p>Webb, S. and B., <i>English Local Government</i>.&mdash;<i>The Parish and the
County.</i></p>

<p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>English Local Government</i>.&mdash;<i>The Manor and the Borough.</i></p>



<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_405">[405]</span></p>

<h2 class="nobreak" id="INDEX">INDEX</h2>
</div>


<ul class="index">
<li class="ifrst">Abel, Mr., <a href="#Page_248">248</a>. f.</li>

<li class="indx">Abingdon, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Special Commission at, <a href="#Page_305">305</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Abingdon, Lord, and Otmoor, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Special Commission, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Abree, Margaret and Thomas, <a href="#Page_109">109</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Adam, the brothers, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Addington, H. <i>See</i> <a href="#Sidmouth">Sidmouth</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Stephen, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Addington Hills, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Addison, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Aglionby, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Agriculture, and enclosure, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">during French war, <a href="#Page_166">166</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Brougham on, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Aix, Archbishop of, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Albemarle, Lord, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Aldborough, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Alderson, Justice, on Special Commissions, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Looker case, <a href="#Page_295">295</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Allotments, and enclosure, <a href="#Page_84">84</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">experiments, <a href="#Page_154">154</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">hostility of farmers to, <a href="#Page_159">159</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">M. Chateauvieux on, <a href="#Page_232">232</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Suffield’s scheme in 1830, <a href="#Page_322">322</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Almack’s, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Althorp, Lord, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Cobbett on, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">America, farmers in, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Cobbett in, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Amnesty Debate, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Andover, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Appeal, against enclosure award, <a href="#Page_59">59</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Arbuthnot, J., <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Aristocracy, contrast between English and French, <a href="#Page_1">1</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">control over all English institutions, <a href="#Page_7">7</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Burke on, <a href="#Page_24">24</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">characteristics, <a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">Chapter xiii</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Armley (enclosure), <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_A_1">Appendix A (1)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Arson"></a>Arson, in 1830, <a href="#Page_243">243</a> ff., <a href="#Page_268">268</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">penalties for, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">trials for, <a href="#Page_309">309</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Artaxerxes, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Arthur, Sir George (Governor of Van Diemen’s Land), <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Arundel, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Arundel, Lord, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ash, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ashbury (enclosure), <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Ashelworth (enclosure), <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_A_2">Appendix A (2)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Astley, Sir E., <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Aston, Tirrold, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Atkins, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Attorney-General. <i>See</i> <a href="#Denman">Denman</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Aunalls, James, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Austen, Jane, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Avington, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Award, enclosure, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Aylesbury, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">riots in 1795, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Special Commission, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Azay le Rideau, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Babeau, M., <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bacon, R. M., <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bagehot, W., <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bagshot Heath, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bailiffs, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Baily, Mr., <a href="#Page_97">97</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Baker, Mr., M.P., and Settlement, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bakewell, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bamford, S., <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bampfylde, Copleston Warre, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Barett, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Baring, Bingham, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Cook 286;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Deacle case, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Sir Thomas, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Barings, the, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Barkham, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Barnes, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Common, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Barré, Colonel, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Barton Stacey, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Basingstoke, <a href="#Page_162">162</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Baskerville, Mr., J.P., <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bath, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Bathurst, Lord, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Batten, Matthew, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Battersea, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Battle, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Beaconsfield, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Beckett (the gaoler), <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_406">[406]</span>Beckley, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> f., <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bedford, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Gaol, account of prisoners in, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Belgrave, Lord, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Benett, John, M. P., and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">at Cobbett’s trial, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bennett, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Cornelius, <a href="#Page_303">303</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Benson or Bensington, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bentham, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on enclosure, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Pitt’s Bill, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bentley, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Berkeley, Bishop, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Berkshire, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">1830 rising in, <a href="#Page_258">258</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Bread Act. <i>See</i> <a href="#Speenhamland">Speenhamland</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bernard, Scrope, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Sir Thomas, on Lord Winchilsea’s allotments, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on minimum wage, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on removals, <a href="#Page_154">154</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Betts, John, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bicester, <a href="#Page_99">99</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Billingsley, J., <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Birdingbury, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Birmingham, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bishop, Daniel, on poaching, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bishop, <a href="#Page_310">310</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Bishops, the, comparison of French and English, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">reforming, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bishopstone (Wilts), (enclosure), <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bishops Walthams, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bishton, Mr., <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Blackstone, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on common rights, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on gleaning, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Blake, Mr., of Idmiston, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; William, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Blean, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Blizzard, Thomas, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Blomfield, Bishop, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Blow, Charles, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Board of Agriculture, and enclosures, <a href="#Page_74">74</a> ff., <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">questions to correspondents, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bocking, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Bolingbroke"></a>Bolingbroke, Lord (author of <i>Patriot King</i>), <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; and Sedgmoor, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bolland, Mr. Justice, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bolnhurst (enclosure), <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bologna, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Booby, Lady, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Borderers. <i>See</i> <a href="#Squatters">Squatters</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Boroughs, disputes about franchise, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Scot and lot, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">potwalloper, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">burgage, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">corporation, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">freemen, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bosanquet, Mr. Justice, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Boston, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Boswell, Will, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Botany Bay, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bourton, Charles, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Boys, John (agriculturist), <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; (farmer, in 1830 rising), <a href="#Page_282">282</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Bradley, <a href="#Page_116">116</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Bragge, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_44">44</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Bramshott, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brandon, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Braunston (enclosure), <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Bread, wheaten and mixed, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Diet">Diet</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brede, parish rising at, <a href="#Page_248">248</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Brighton, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brimpton, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bristol, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bristowe, Squire, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brittany, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Broad Somerford, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brocklehurst, Mr., <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brooks’s, <a href="#Page_68">68</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brotherton, Colonel, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Brougham"></a>Brougham, Henry, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on agriculture, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on J.P.’s, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on increase of commitments, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on criminal courts, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Cobbett on, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">at Cobbett’s trial, <a href="#Page_317">317</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Broughton, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Brown, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Thomas, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bryan, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bryant, Joseph, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Buckingham, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Duke of, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and rising of 1830, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Buckland Newton, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Budgets, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix B</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bulcamp, House of Industry, <a href="#Page_147">147</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Bull-baiting, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bullen, Robert, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bullington, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bully. <i>See</i> <a href="#Bolingbroke">Bolingbroke</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bunce, Henry, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Buns, parish, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burbage, George, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burdett, Sir F., <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burdon, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burgage boroughs, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burgundy, Duke of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burke, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on the aristocracy, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Parliamentary representation, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on regulating wages, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">philosophy of social life, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on French Assembly, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burkhead, Charles, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_407">[407]</span>Burley on the Hill, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burn, Dr., <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burnet, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burnham, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Burwash, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Bury St. Edmunds, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Buxton, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Byron, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Cabinet System established, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cade, Jack, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cæsar, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cambridge, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Cambridge Modern History</i>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Cambridgeshire, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Camden, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Camden, Lord, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Canning, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Canterbury, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Canterbury, Archbishop of, <a href="#Page_190">190</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prayer in 1830, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Capes, W. W., <a href="#Page_159">159</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Capital offences, and Private Bill Committees, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carbery, Lord, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Carlile, Richard, prosecution in 1831, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carlisle, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carlisle, Lord, and Sedgmoor, <a href="#Page_66">66</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Carlyle, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carmarthen, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carnarvon, Lord, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carr, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carrington, Lord, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carter, James, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; John, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cartmel (enclosure), <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Carus Wilson, Mr., <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Case, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Castlereagh, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cavan, Lord and Lady, <a href="#Page_279">279</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Certificates (under Settlement Laws), <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a> ff., <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Chancellor, Lord. <i>See</i> <a href="#Brougham">Brougham</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Charles <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>, and enclosures, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">V.</span>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">VIII.</span>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">X.</span>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Charlton (Otmoor), <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; (Wilts), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Chateauvieux, M., <a href="#Page_233">233</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Chatham, Lord, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cheese, dearness of, <a href="#Page_129">129</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Chenonceaux, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cherry, Mr., J.P., <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cheshunt (enclosure), <a href="#Page_58">58</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>n.</i>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_A_3">Appendix A (3)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Chester, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Chester, Charles, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Children, employment of, <a href="#Page_141">141</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">punishment of, <a href="#Page_200">200</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Chinon, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Chippendale, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Christian, Mr., <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Chudleigh, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Church, the (<i>see also</i> <a href="#Clergy">Clergy</a>), <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and enclosure, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a> f., <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and tithes, <a href="#Page_167">167</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and the poor, <a href="#Page_216">216</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Churchill, Lord, <a href="#Page_94">94</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Cicero, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cinque Ports, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Claims, presentation of, under enclosure Acts, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Clare, Lord, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; John, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Clarke, Marcus, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Tom, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Clergy"></a>Clergy, non-residence of the, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and the poor, <a href="#Page_216">216</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">association with governing class, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">salaries of curates, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and tithes, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Clerk, George, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Clive, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Clough, John and Thomas, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cobbett, William, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on enclosures, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on unpaid magistrates, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on tea, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on allotments, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Whitbread’s 1807 scheme, <a href="#Page_180">180</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">description of labourers, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on relations of rich to poor, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on change in farming, <a href="#Page_212">212</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on parsons, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">George <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> on, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and village sports, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">description of, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Whig ministers, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">trial in 1831, <a href="#Page_315">315</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Cobbold, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cockerton, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Codrington, O. C., <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coke, Lord, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; of Norfolk, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and spring guns, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Game Laws, <a href="#Page_196">196</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Colchester, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coleman, Mr., <a href="#Page_249">249</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Collingwood, Mr., J.P., <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Collins, A., <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; (in Deacle case), <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Combination Laws, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Commissioners, Enclosure, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">power of, <a href="#Page_58">58</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">appointment of, <a href="#Page_60">60</a> ff., <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Commissioners. <i>See</i> <a href="#Poor_Law_Commission">Poor Law Commission</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Commoners, character of, <a href="#Page_37">37</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">at Otmoor, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">theory of rights of, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Common fields, extent of, in 1688, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">system of cultivation, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">managed by manor courts, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_408">[408]</span>varieties in system, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a> <i>n.</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Sir R. Sutton’s Act, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">ownership of, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">subdivision of property in, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">position of labourers under system, <a href="#Page_33">33</a> f., <a href="#Page_159">159</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">disadvantages of, <a href="#Page_36">36</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">relation to old enclosures, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Common land, three uses of term, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Commons, relation to village economy, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">alleged deleterious effects of, on commoners, <a href="#Page_37">37</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">commoners’ own views on subject, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">aesthetic objections to, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Common rights, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">legal decision about inhabitants, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">claims for, on enclosure, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">at Otmoor, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Consents, proportion required for enclosure, <a href="#Page_49">49</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">how assessed, <a href="#Page_50">50</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">how obtained, <a href="#Page_51">51</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>see also</i> <a href="#Kings_Sedgmoor">King’s Sedgmoor</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Cook, Henry, <a href="#Page_286">286</a> f., <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cooper, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; and others, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coote, Eyre, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Copenhagen, <a href="#Page_178">178</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Copyholders, position of, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> f., <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Corn Laws, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cornwall, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Corporation boroughs, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Corsley (Wilts), <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cottagers, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">position before enclosure, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and enclosure, <a href="#Page_52">52</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">presentment of claims by, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">results of enclosure on, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and allotments, <a href="#Page_155">155</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Cotswolds, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coulson, Mr., <a href="#Page_97">97</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Councils, French, under Regency, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cove, Rev. Mr., J. P., <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coventry, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coventry, Lord, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cows, loss of, on enclosure, <a href="#Page_100">100</a> f., <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Raunds commoners on benefit of, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and allotments, <a href="#Page_155">155</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and settlement, <a href="#Page_178">178</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Cox, William, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coxe, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Coxhead, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Crabbe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on workhouse, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on roundsmen, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on poachers, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on poor, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cranbrook, <a href="#Page_255">255</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Craven, Lord, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Creevey, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cricklade, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Croke, Sir Alex., <a href="#Page_89">89</a> f., <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Croker, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Cromwell, Oliver, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and enclosures, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Crook, John, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Croxton, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Croydon (enclosure), <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a> <i>n.</i>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_A_4">Appendix A (4)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Curtler, W. H. R., <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Curwen, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Dalbiac, General, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Darling, Alfred, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Davenant, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Davies, Rev. David, his book, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on fuel, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on rise in prices, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">his budgets, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix B</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on mixed bread, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on milk, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on tea, <a href="#Page_128">128</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on minimum wage, <a href="#Page_136">136</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on land for labourers, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Miss M. F., <a href="#Page_220">220</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Dawson, Hannah, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Deacle, Mr., and the Deacle case, <a href="#Page_277">277</a> f., <a href="#Page_287">287</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Deal, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Debates in Parliament, on Private Enclosure Bills, <a href="#Page_55">55</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on General Enclosure Bills, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Whitbread’s Bill, <a href="#Page_140">140</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Pitt’s Poor Law Bill, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Settlement, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on rising of 1830, <a href="#Page_314">314</a> f., <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Deddington, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Deerhurst, Lord, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Defoe, Daniel, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">De Grey, Mr., <a href="#Page_71">71</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Demainbray, Rev. S., <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Denman"></a>Denman, Lord, on J.P.’s, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Cook, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Lush, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and amnesty debate, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Cobbett’s trial, <a href="#Page_317">317</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">De Quincey, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Derby, <a href="#Page_117">117</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Derby, Brooker, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Deserted Village, The</i>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">D’Este, Isabella, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">De Tocqueville, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Devon, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dicketts, Henry, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Diderot, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Diet"></a>Diet, of labourer, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">attempt to introduce cheap cereals, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">soup, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">tea, <a href="#Page_128">128</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Dillon, Archbishop, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Disraeli, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Domestic industries, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Doomsday Book</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dorchester, Special Commission at, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Dorset, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">1830 rising, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_409">[409]</span>Dover, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dowden, W., <a href="#Page_285">285</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Downton, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Drake, Sir F., <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Drummond, Mr., <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dryden, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dubois, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dudley, Lord, <a href="#Page_327">327</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Dundas, Charles, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Speenhamland, <a href="#Page_161">161</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Special Commission, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Henry, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dunkin, on Otmoor, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Merton, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dunmow, <a href="#Page_135">135</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Dunn, Ann, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dunwich, <a href="#Page_11">11</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Durham, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Durham_Lord"></a>Durham, Lord, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Dyott, Sir W., <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Ealing, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">East Grimstead, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Grinstead, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Retford, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Stretton, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Easton, Rev. Mr., and family, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Eaves, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ebrington, Lord, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Eden, Sir F. M., <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and enclosure, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">his book, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and gleaning, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">budgets, <a href="#Page_111">111</a> and <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix B</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Settlement Laws, <a href="#Page_113">113</a> f., <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a> <i>n.</i> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and food riots, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on diet, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;132</a> <i>passim</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on workhouses, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on roundsmen, <a href="#Page_148">148</a> <i>n.</i> and 164;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Speenhamland meeting, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">his ideal poor woman, <a href="#Page_208">208</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on rich and poor, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Edinburgh Review</i>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Egleton, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Egremont, Lord, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Eldon, Lord, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Eleanor</i>, the, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Eliot, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Eliza</i>, the, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Elizabeth, Queen, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ellenborough, Lord, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ellison, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ely, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Enclosures, and productivity, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">by voluntary agreement, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> <i>n.</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">extent of, before eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">motives for, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">extent of Parliamentary enclosure, <a href="#Page_41">41</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Parliamentary procedure, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">consents required, <a href="#Page_49">49</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Lord Thurlow on Parliamentary procedure, <a href="#Page_53">53</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">local procedure, <a href="#Page_58">58</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">General Enclosure Bills, <a href="#Page_74">74</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Act of 1801, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">hostility of poor to, <a href="#Page_78">78</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">criticism of methods, <a href="#Page_81">81</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">provision for poor, <a href="#Page_85">85</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">results on village, <a href="#CHAPTER_V">Chap. v.</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">effects on relationship of classes, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Encroachments, by squatters, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">treatment of, under enclosure, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Engrossing of farms, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Entail. <i>See</i> <a href="#Settlements_family">Family Settlements</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Epsom, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Erskine, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Essex, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Estcourt, Thomas, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; T. G. B., <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Evelina</i>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Eversley, Lord, <a href="#Page_32">32</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Ewbanks, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Expenses of enclosure, <a href="#Page_97">97</a> f.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Fees">Fees</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Eycon, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Falkland, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fane, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Farmers implicated in 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_248">248</a> f., <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; large, gained by enclosure, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and milk, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and allotments, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">divided from labourers, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Cobbett on, <a href="#Page_212">212</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; small, ruined by enclosure, <a href="#Page_97">97</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and milk, <a href="#Page_127">127</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and other classes, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Cobbett on, <a href="#Page_212">212</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Farmer, William, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Farm servants, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Farnham, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fawley, <a href="#Page_242">242</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Fees"></a>Fees for Enclosure Bills, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Felony, counsel in cases of, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fencing, cost of, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">penalties for breaking, <a href="#Page_199">199</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Fencott, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fénelon, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fielding, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on village life, <a href="#Page_18">18</a> f., <a href="#Page_33">33</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on lawyers, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">his scheme for the poor, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on solidarity of poor, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Finch, Mr., <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Firth, Mr., <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fitzwilliam, Lord, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fitzwilliams, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Flackwell Heath, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Flanders, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ford, John, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fordingbridge, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Forster, Mr., of Norwich, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fox, C. J., <a href="#Page_53">53</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on M.P.’s and patrons, <a href="#Page_13">13</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Sedgmoor, <a href="#Page_68">68</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Horne Tooke, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on mixed bread, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_410">[410]</span>on minimum wage, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on charity, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">despair of Parliamentary government, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fox-hunting, change in, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">France, position of aristocracy in, <a href="#Page_1">1</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">monarchy in, <a href="#Page_2">2</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">division of common land in, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">peasants compared with English labourers, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Franchise"></a>Franchise, Parliamentary, <a href="#Page_7">7</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">in boroughs, <a href="#Page_8">8</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">county, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Francis <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Philip, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Freeholders, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Freemen boroughs, <a href="#Page_11">11</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">French, Colonel, M.P., <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">French Convention, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; war, agriculture during, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Friends of the People, <a href="#Page_13">13</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Frome, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fryer, Mr., <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fuel rights, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">allotments, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">cost of, to labourer, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">scarcity after enclosure, <a href="#Page_130">130</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">taken from hedges, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Fussell, J., <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Gage, Lord, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gaiter, John, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Galloway, Lord, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Galsworthy, J., <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Game_Laws"></a>Game Laws, <a href="#Page_187">187</a> ff., <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">convictions under, <a href="#Page_191">191</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">supply of game to London, <a href="#Page_196">196</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Gardens for labourers, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gateward’s case, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gatton, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Geese on Otmoor, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Cobbett, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">German legion, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gibbon, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gibbons, Sir W., <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gibbs, Sir Vicary, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gilbert, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gilbert’s Act, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Gillray, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gilmore, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Glasse, Rev. Dr., <a href="#Page_132">132</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Gleaning, <a href="#Page_107">107</a> ff., <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">controversy on, <a href="#Page_108">108</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Gloucester, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">trials at, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gloucestershire, 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Godalming, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Goderich, Lord, <a href="#Page_317">317</a> f., <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Godmanchester, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Goldsmith, Oliver, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gooch, Mr., <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Goodenough, Dr., <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Goodfellow, Thomas, <a href="#Page_303">303</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Goodman, Thomas, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gordon riots, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gosport, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">jurors, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Goudhurst, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gould, Sir Henry, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Graham, Sir James, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gray, Thomas, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Great Tew, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Greenaway, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Greenford, <a href="#Page_132">132</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Greetham, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gregory, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Grenville, Lord, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Grey, Lord, <a href="#Page_14">14</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Prime Minister, <a href="#Page_311">311</a> ff., <a href="#Page_320">320</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Cobbett on, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">at Cobbett’s trial, <a href="#Page_317">317</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Corn Laws, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Suffield, <a href="#Page_322">322</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Guercino, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Guernsey, Lord, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Guildford, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Guildford, Lord, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#North_Francis">North, Francis</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gulliver, Mary, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Gurney, J., in 1830 trials, <a href="#Page_302">302</a> ff.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Hale, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Halifax, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Hambledon, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hampden, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hampshire, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">1830 rising in, <a href="#Page_258">258</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; and Wiltshire labourers compared, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Harbord_Harbord"></a>Harbord Harbord, Sir, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a> f., <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Harding, John, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hardres, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hardy, J., <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Harewoods, the, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hasbach, Professor, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Haslemere, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hastings, Warren, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hastings, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hatch, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Haute Huntre (enclosure), <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a> <i>n.</i>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_A_5">Appendix A (5)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hawker, W., <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hay, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hazlitt, William, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Heacham, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Headley Workhouse, <a href="#Page_243">243</a> f., <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Healey, Dr., <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Heathfield, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Heckingham, <a href="#Page_147">147</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Hele, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Helpstone, <a href="#Page_332">332</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_411">[411]</span>Henley, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Henley, Thomas, <a href="#Page_249">249</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Henry <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> (of France), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Henstead, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hereford, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hetherington, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hickson, Mr., <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Higgs, Ann, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Highlands, the, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hill, Edmund, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; G. S., <a href="#Page_249">249</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Isaac, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hinchcliffe, J. <i>See</i> <a href="#Peterborough_Bishop_of">Bishop of Peterborough</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hindhead, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hindon, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hirst. <i>See</i> <a href="#Redlich">Redlich</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Histon and Impington (enclosure), <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hobhouse, H., <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; John Cam, <a href="#Page_312">312</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_22">22</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Hobson, J. A., <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hodges, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_253">253</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Hodgson, Naomi, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Holdaway, Robert, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Holdsworth, W., <a href="#Page_23">23</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Holkham, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Holland, Lady, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on spring guns, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on penal code, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Holy Island (enclosure), <a href="#Page_48">48</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Homage. <i>See</i> <a href="#Juries">Juries</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Homer, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Rev. H., <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hone, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Horace, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Horsham, <a href="#Page_257">257</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Horsley, Bishop, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Horton, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hothfield, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Howlett, Rev. J., <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on minimum wage, <a href="#Page_135">135</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Hubbard, Ann, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hudson, W. H., <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hume, J., <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hungerford riots, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hunt, Henry, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Lush, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and amnesty debate, <a href="#Page_314">314</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Rev. Dr., <a href="#Page_189">189</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Huntingdon, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Hurst, Ann. <i>See</i> <a href="#Strudwick">Strudwick</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Mr., <a href="#Page_257">257</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Hurstbourne, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Hythe, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Idmiston, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ilchester, Lord, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ilmington, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ipswich, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Ipswich Journal</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Isherwood, H., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Isle of Wight, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Islip, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">II.</span>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Jenks, E., <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Jennings, John, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Jerome, St., <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Johnson, A. H., <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Mary Ann, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; (overseer), <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Samuel, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Joliffe, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Rev. J., <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Jones, Tom</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Jordan, Edmund, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Judd, Mr., <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Judges, discretion in sentences, <a href="#Page_202">202</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">salaries advanced, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">addresses at Special Commissions, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Juries"></a>Juries, presentments by, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">of Manor Courts, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Justices of the Peace, growth of power, <a href="#Page_16">16</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">autocratic character, <a href="#Page_18">18</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">unpaid, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and regulation of wages, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and workhouses, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Brougham on, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Juvenal, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Keene, Mr., <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kempster, Richard, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kemys Tynte, Sir C., <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kendal, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kent, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">1830 rising in, <a href="#Page_244">244</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Kent, Nathaniel, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; William, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kenton, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kew, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kibworth-Beauchamp, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">King, Gregory, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Captain, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Thomas, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kingsley, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">King’s Lynn, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <a id="Kings_Sedgmoor"></a>Sedgmoor (enclosure), <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a> ff., <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_14">Appendix A (14)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kington, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kintbury mob, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">anecdotes of, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Kirton, <a href="#Page_100">100</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_412">[412]</span>Knaresborough (enclosure), <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a> f., <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_6">Appendix A (6)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Knatchbull, Sir Edward, <a href="#Page_245">245</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Kosciusko, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">‘Labour Rate’ system, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Laleham (enclosure), <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_7">Appendix A (7)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lamb, George, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lambton. <i>See</i> <a href="#Durham_Lord">Durham, Lord</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lampsacus, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lancashire, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lane, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lansdowne, Lord, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lauderdale, Lord, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Launceston, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lawyers, French and English, compared, <a href="#Page_215">215</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Laxton, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Lechmere, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lecky, W. E. H., <a href="#Page_111">111</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Leeds, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Leeds, Duke of, <a href="#Page_47">47</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Legg, the brothers, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; George, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Leicestershire, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Leigh, Lord, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Leo <span class="allsmcap">X.</span>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lespinasse, Mlle. de, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Levy, Professor, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lewes Assizes, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Gaol, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Light, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lilley, the brothers, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Limoges, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lincoln, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lincoln, Bishop of, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lincolnshire, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Litchfield, <a href="#Page_119">119</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Little Marlow, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Littleport, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Liverpool, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Liverpool, Lord, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Llandaff, Bishop of. <i>See</i> <a href="#Watson">Watson</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Loches, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Locke, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Loes and Wilford, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lofft, Capel, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">London, City of, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Londonderry, Lord, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Long, Walter, J.P., <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Long Crendon, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Newnton, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Longparish, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lonsdale, Lord, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Looker case, the, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Lord"></a>Lord of the Manor, position under common-field system, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> f., <a href="#Page_32">32</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">position on enclosure, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Louis <span class="allsmcap">XIII.</span>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">XIV.</span>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">XV.</span>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">XVI.</span>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Louth (enclosure), <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_8">Appendix A (8)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lowell, Professor, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lower Winchendon, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lucan, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lucretius, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ludlow, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lush, James, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lyminge, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Lynn, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Macaulay, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on <i>Deserted Village</i>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Macclesfield, Lord, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Machinery, judges on benefits of, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">destruction of, in 1830, <a href="#Page_259">259</a> ff., <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">penalties for destruction, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Threshing_machines">Threshing Machines</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mackarness, John, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mackrell, Thomas, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Macquarie Harbour, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Magnesia, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Maidenhead, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Maids Morton, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Maidstone, <a href="#Page_246">246</a> f., <a href="#Page_255">255</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Assizes, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Maine, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mair, Colonel, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Maldon, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Malicious Trespass Act, <a href="#Page_199">199</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Malthus, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Whitbread’s scheme, <a href="#Page_180">180</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Manchester, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Manor, the, connection with common field system, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Courts, <a href="#Page_16">16</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and common field system, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord of the. <i>See</i> <a href="#Lord">Lord</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">March Phillipps, L., <a href="#Page_327">327</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Marengo, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Margate, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mariner, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Market Lavington, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Marlborough, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Marlborough, Duke of, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Marshall, William, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a> <i>n.</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on methods of enclosure, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Martin, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Mason, Joseph and Robert, <a href="#Page_284">284</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Maulden (enclosure), <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Maurice of Saxony, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mayfield, <a href="#Page_250">250</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Mazarin, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">M‘Culloch, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Melbourne, Lord, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a> <i>n.</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and transportation, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">circular of Nov. 24, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_413">[413]</span>of Dec. 8, <a href="#Page_266">266</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Special Commissions, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">at Cobbett’s trial, <a href="#Page_317">317</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and spring guns, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Corn Laws, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Suffield’s proposals, <a href="#Page_322">322</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Meredith, Sir William, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Merton, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Metcalf, Ann, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Methodist movement, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Micheldever, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Middleton, Mr., <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Middlesex, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Midlands, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Milan, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Millet, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Military tenures, abolition of, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Milk, and enclosure, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">attempts to provide, <a href="#Page_129">129</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Minimum wage, <a href="#Page_133">133</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Whitbread’s proposals, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">probable effects of, <a href="#Page_233">233</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Mirabeau, Marquis de, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mollington, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Monck, J. B., <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Monoux, Sir P., <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Montesquieu, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Montgomery, Mrs., <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Moorcott, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Moore, Adam, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; F., <a href="#Page_100">100</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Robert (in <i>Shirley</i>), <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Moreton Corbet (enclosure), <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Morey, Farmer C., <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Morgan, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mould of Hatch, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Mount, W., <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Muir, Thomas, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Municipal government, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Myus, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Napoleon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Nash, Thomas, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Neale, Jane, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Newbolt, Rev. Dr., <a href="#Page_265">265</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Newbury, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">New England, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Forest, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Newington, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Newport, <a href="#Page_201">201</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Pagnell, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">New Sarum, <a href="#Page_109">109</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; South Wales, <a href="#Page_261">261</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Newton, Mr., <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Newton Toney, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Nicholls, Sir George, <a href="#Page_146">146</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Ninfield, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Noakes, David and Thomas, <a href="#Page_249">249</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Noke, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Norfolk, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><a id="North_Francis"></a>North, Francis, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Roger, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Northampton, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Northamptonshire, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Northesk, Lord, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Norton, Sir Fletcher, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Norwich, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Norwich Mercury</i>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Nottingham, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">castle, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Nottinghamshire, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Nutbean, E. C., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Nylands, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>


<li class="ifrst">Oakley, William, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">O’Connell, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Oddington, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Officials, salaries raised, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Parliamentary">Parliamentary</a> <i>and</i> <a href="#Village_officials">Village</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Old Age Pensions, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Oldfield, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Old Sarum, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Orleans, Duke of, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ormonde, Duke of, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Orpington, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Orridge, Mr., <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Oswestry, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Otmoor"></a>Otmoor (enclosure), <a href="#Page_45">45</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Oundle, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Overseers, and relief, <a href="#Page_145">145</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">salaried, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">hostility to, in 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Overton, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Owslebury, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Oxford, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Oxford Journal</i>, Jackson’s, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><i>Oxford University and City Herald</i>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Oxfordshire, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>


<li class="ifrst">Page, Mr., <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Paine, Thomas, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pakeman, the brothers, <a href="#Page_309">309</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Palmer, G., <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; T. F., <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Palmerston, Lord, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Parham, Farmer, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Parish carts, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Park, Mr. Justice, on Special Commissions, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Parke_Mr_Justice"></a>Parke, Mr. Justice, and Otmoor, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Special Commissions, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_414">[414]</span>Parliament, qualifications for members, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Parliamentary"></a>Parliamentary Committees, on Private Enclosure Bills, <a href="#Page_45">45</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">how constituted, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; government, established, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; officials and enclosure, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Reform, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Cobbett and, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Grey’s Government and, <a href="#Page_311">311</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; representation, analysis of, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Franchise">Franchise</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Parr, Dr. 203.</li>

<li class="indx">Patience, Ambrose, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Patrons, control of boroughs by, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> f., <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">relations to M.P.’s, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Patteson, Sir John, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pearse, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Peel, Sir Robert, <a href="#Page_191">191</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and prosecution of Cobbett, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Penal Code, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Settlements, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Peninsular War, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pennells, Richard, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Perceval, Spencer, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Perry, E., <a href="#Page_109">109</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; John, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Peterborough, <a href="#Page_31">31</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Peterborough_Bishop_of"></a>Peterborough, Bishop of, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Peterloo, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Petersfield, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Petitions, for enclosure, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">against enclosure, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">how treated, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">about New Forest, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">about Tollington, <a href="#Page_71">71</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Pinniger, Mr., <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pitt, William, the younger, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on mixed bread, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on minimum wage, <a href="#Page_134">134</a> f., <a href="#Page_141">141</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">his Poor Law Bill, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a> ff., <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and settlement, <a href="#Page_152">152</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Sinking Fund, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and French War, <a href="#Page_328">328</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Plymouth, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Plympton, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Poachers, in Bedford Gaol, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">loss to village, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Game_Laws">Game Laws</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Polhill, Mr., <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Political economy, in fashion, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">judges on, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Unions, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pollen, R., J.P., <a href="#Page_275">275</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Pompey, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Poor Law, system of relief, <a href="#Page_145">145</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">of employment, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Pitt’s Bill of 1796, <a href="#Page_149">149</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Whitbread’s Bill of 1807, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">litigation, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Settlement">Settlement</a> <i>and</i> <a href="#Speenhamland">Speenhamland</a> system.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; <a id="Poor_Law_Commission"></a>Commission of 1834, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Pope, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Popham, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Population and Speenhamland system, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a> f., <a href="#Page_228">228</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Porritt, E., <a href="#Page_8">8</a> ff., <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Port Arthur, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Porter, Thomas, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; William, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Porteus, Bishop, charge to clergy, <a href="#Page_220">220</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Portland, Duke of, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Portsmouth, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Potato ground, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Potter, Richard, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Macqueen, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Pottern, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Potwalloper boroughs, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Powis, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pretymans, the, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Price, William, and others, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Prices, growth of, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Priestley, Dr., <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Privileges, Committee of, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Proteus</i>, the, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Prothero, R. E., <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Public schools, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pulteney, Sir William, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Punishment, discretion of judges, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">penal code, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">fears of its mildness, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Transportation">Transportation</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Purley, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pym, Mr., <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Mr., J.P., <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Pyt House affray, <a href="#Page_261">261</a> f., <a href="#Page_292">292</a> f.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Quainton (enclosure), <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_13">Appendix A (13)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Quarrier, Dr., <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Quarter Sessions, change in procedure, <a href="#Page_17">17</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Quesnai, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Quidhampton, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Radicals, the, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Radnor, Lord, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rastall, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Raunds (enclosure), <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ray, river, <a href="#Page_93">93</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Reading, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Special Commission at, <a href="#Page_302">302</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx"><i>Reading Mercury</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a> <i>n.</i> f., <a href="#Page_161">161</a> <i>n.</i> ff.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Redlich"></a>Redlich and Hirst, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Redlinch, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Reed, Mr., <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Reform Bill, riots, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">agitation for, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Parliamentary">Parliamentary Reform</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Government, and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_311">311</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">prosecution of Carlile and Cobbett, <a href="#Page_315">315</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_415">[415]</span>incapacity for social legislation, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Reni, Guido, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Revolution of 1688, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Reynolds, Sir J., <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ricardo, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Richardson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Richelieu, <a href="#Page_1">1</a> ff., <a href="#Page_5">5</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Richmond, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Richmond, Duke of, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rick-burning. <i>See</i> <a href="#Arson">Arson</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ride, J. and F., and R., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ringmer, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Riots, enclosure, <a href="#Page_78">78</a> (<i>see also</i> <a href="#Otmoor">Otmoor</a>);</li>
<li class="isub1">food riots of 1795, <a href="#Page_120">120</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">of 1816, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">law about riot, <a href="#Page_272">272</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">in 1830, Chaps. <a href="#CHAPTER_XI">xi.</a> and <a href="#CHAPTER_XII">xii.</a> <i>passim</i>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rising in 1830, <a href="#Page_240">240</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">origin in Kent, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">spread to Sussex, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">to Berks, Hants, and Wilts, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">alarm of authorities, <a href="#Page_266">266</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">spread West and North, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">wholesale arrests, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">trials, <a href="#Page_272">272</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Robertsbridge, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Robespierre, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Robinson, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; William, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rochefoucault, Duc de la, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rockingham, Lord, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rockley, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rode, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rogers, Sarah, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; T. L., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rome, comparison between English and Roman social history, <a href="#Page_330">330</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Romilly, S., <a href="#Page_202">202</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on Game Laws, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Romsey, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Roundsman system, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Rous, Sir John, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rousseau, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rowland, John, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rowlandson, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ruggles, Thomas, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Run-rig system, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Russell, Lord John, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord William, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <a href="#Page_273">273</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Rutland, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Rutland, Duke of, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Rye, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Sagnac, P., <a href="#Page_87">87</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><a id="St_Davids_Bishop_of"></a>St. Davids, Bishop of, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">St. Denis, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">St. Germain, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">St. John, H., and Sedgmoor, <a href="#Page_65">65</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">St. Lawrence Wootten, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">St. Mary Bourne, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">St. Neots, <a href="#Page_102">102</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Salehurst, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Salisbury, Special Commission at, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">gaol rules at, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">scene in court, <a href="#Page_298">298</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Salisbury, Bishop of, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_85">85</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sanctuary, Mr., <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sandwich, Lord, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sandy (enclosure), <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sarney, John, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Savile, Sir George, <a href="#Page_54">54</a> f., <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Scarborough, Lord, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Schools of Industry, <a href="#Page_149">149</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Sclater, W. L., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Scot and lot boroughs, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Scotland, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Scotsmen, Cobbett on, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Scott, Sir William, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Seaford, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sedgefield, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sedgford, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sedgmoor. <i>See</i> <a href="#Kings_Sedgmoor">King’s Sedgmoor</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Selborne Workhouse, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Select Committees. <i>See</i> <a href="#CHIEF_AUTHORITIES">List of Authorities</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Vestry. <i>See</i> <a href="#Vestry_Reform">Vestry Reform</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Selwyn, George, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Sedgmoor, <a href="#Page_65">65</a> ff., <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Settlement"></a>Settlement, Laws of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a> ff., <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a> f., <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">effect of, <a href="#Page_114">114</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">reforms made and proposed, <a href="#Page_152">152</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Whitbread’s proposals in 1807, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">litigation, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Settlements_family"></a>Settlements, family, <a href="#Page_21">21</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Sevenoaks, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sheffield, <a href="#Page_115">115</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Sheffield, Lord, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Shelley, Sir Timothy, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; P. B., <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Shepherd, Aaron, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sheppard, Joseph, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sheraton, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sheridan, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on enclosure Bills, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and minimum wage, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Pitt’s Poor Law Bill, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Game Laws, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Shooting, change in character, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Shopkeepers and allotments, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Shore, Mrs., <a href="#Page_125">125</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Shottesbrook, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Shrewsbury, <a href="#Page_147">147</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sidlesham, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Sidmouth"></a>Sidmouth, Lord, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sidney, Sir Philip, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Silcock, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Simms, the brothers, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Simond, M., <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_416">[416]</span>Simpson (enclosure), <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_9">Appendix A (9)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Simpson, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sinclair, Sir John, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on common-field system, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and enclosure, <a href="#Page_59">59</a> ff., <a href="#Page_83">83</a> ff., <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sinecures, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sinking Fund, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sittingbourne, <a href="#Page_246">246</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Skipton, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Slade, Mrs. Charlotte, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Slater, Dr., <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Slaugham, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Slinn, John, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Smart, Professor, <a href="#Page_173">173</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Smith, Abel, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Adam, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on settlement, <a href="#Page_114">114</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">on clergy, <a href="#Page_216">216</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; General, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Sydney, <a href="#Page_190">190</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Smollett, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Snettisham, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; for the Reformation of Manners, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Soldiers and food riots, <a href="#Page_121">121</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Somerset, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Soup for the poor, <a href="#Page_125">125</a> and <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Southampton, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Southey, <a href="#Page_14">14</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">South Sea Bubble, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Special Commissions, in 1816, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">in 1830, <a href="#Page_272">272</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">at Winchester, <a href="#Page_278">278</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Salisbury, <a href="#Page_290">290</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Dorchester, <a href="#Page_300">300</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Reading, <a href="#Page_302">302</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Abingdon, <a href="#Page_305">305</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Aylesbury, <a href="#Page_306">306</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">conduct of prosecutions, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Speenhamland"></a>Speenhamland, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; system, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">introduction of, <a href="#Page_161">161</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">scale, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">effects of, Chaps. <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">viii.</a> and <a href="#CHAPTER_X">x.</a> <i>passim</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">introduction into Warwickshire, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">reduction in scale, <a href="#Page_184">184</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Spenser, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Spring guns, <a href="#Page_195">195</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Melbourne’s suggested reintroduction, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Squatters"></a>Squatters, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">described, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">ignored in enclosure consents, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">results of enclosure on, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Standing Orders, about enclosures, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> f., <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">origin of, <a href="#Page_73">73</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Stanhope, Lord, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stanwell (enclosure), <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_10">Appendix A (10)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Star Chamber and enclosures, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">States-General, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stavordale, Lord, and Sedgmoor, <a href="#Page_67">67</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Steel, George, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sterne, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stevens, James, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Jane, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Steyning, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stirling, Mrs., <a href="#Page_196">196</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Stixswold, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stockbury, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stockton, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stoke, <a href="#Page_154">154</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Cheriton, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stokes, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stone, Thomas, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Stotfold, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Strafford, Lord, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Strudwick"></a>Strudwick, Dame, <a href="#Page_208">208</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Stubbes, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Studley, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sturges Bourne, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Suffield, Lord, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and spring guns, <a href="#Page_195">195</a> f., <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">scheme in 1830, <a href="#Page_320">320</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">interviews with ministers, <a href="#Page_322">322</a> ff.</li>
<li class="isub1"><i>See also</i> <a href="#Harbord_Harbord">Harbord Harbord</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Suffolk, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Sumner"></a>Sumner, Bishop, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Surplus profits, <a href="#Page_167">167</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Surrey, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Sussex, 1830 rising in, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Sutterton (enclosure), <a href="#Page_100">100</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Sutton, Sir Richard, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; William, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Swabey, Maurice, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Swaffham, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Swift, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Swing, Captain, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Taltarum’s Case, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Taunton, Mr. Justice, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Taxation, <a href="#Page_171">171</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">Tea-drinking, <a href="#Page_128">128</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Tenant farmers, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Tennyson, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tenterden, Chief Justice, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Thanet, Lord, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Thelwall, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Themistocles, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Thompson, Mr., <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Captain, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Threshing_machines"></a>Threshing machines, destruction of, Chap. <a href="#CHAPTER_XI">xi.</a> <i>passim</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">reason of hostility to, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">penalty for destruction, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Thurlow, Lord, on enclosure procedure, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a> f., <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Ticehurst, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tilsworth, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_417">[417]</span><i>Times</i>, the, <a href="#Page_177">177</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a> <i>n.</i>, and Chapters <a href="#CHAPTER_XI">xi.</a> and <a href="#CHAPTER_XII">xii.</a> <i>passim</i>, including articles quoted, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, and Special Correspondent, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tisbury, <a href="#Page_261">261</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Tithes, <a href="#Page_217">217</a> f., <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">origin, <a href="#Page_167">167</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">demand for abatement in 1830, Chap. <a href="#CHAPTER_XI">xi.</a> <i>passim</i>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tithe-owners, and enclosure, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a> f., <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tollington, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tonbridge, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tonga Islands, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tooke, J. Horne, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; William, <a href="#Page_71">71</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Toomer, James, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Transportation"></a>Transportation, dreaded by labourers, <a href="#Page_198">198</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">described, <a href="#Page_205">205</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">effect on village life, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Treason and Sedition Acts, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Trecothick, James, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Trevelyan, Sir George, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Trout, J., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Tunbridge Wells, <a href="#Page_255">255</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Turgot, <a href="#Page_4">4</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Turner, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Mr. (Pyt House affray), <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Ullathorne, Dr., <a href="#Page_206">206</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Universities, the, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Upper Clatford, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Vachel, Rev. Mr., <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Van Diemen’s Land, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Vansittart, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Rev. Dr., <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Vaughan, Baron, on Special Commissions, <a href="#Page_273">273</a> f., <a href="#Page_278">278</a> ff., <a href="#Page_300">300</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx">Vavasour, Sir Henry, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Venice, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Versailles, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Vestry_Reform"></a>Vestry Reform, Whitbread’s proposals, <a href="#Page_179">179</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">Acts of 1818 and 1819, <a href="#Page_182">182</a> f.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Village_officials"></a>Village officials, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Vine Hall, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Vinogradoff, Professor, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Virgil, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Voltaire, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Wages, and prices, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">regulation of, <a href="#Page_133">133</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">assessment in 1725, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">in 1732, <a href="#Page_144">144</a> f.;</li>
<li class="isub1">proposals to assess at Speenhamland, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">wages in 1824, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">demand for living wage in 1830, Chaps. <a href="#CHAPTER_XI">xi.</a> and <a href="#CHAPTER_XII">xii.</a> <i>passim</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">wages in Berks, Hants, and Wilts, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wakefield (enclosure), <a href="#Page_47">47</a> f., <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a> f., <a href="#APPENDIX_A_11">Appendix A (11)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Walden, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Waller, William, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Walpole, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Sir Spencer, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Walsingham, Lord, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Waltham (enclosure), <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Wanstead, <a href="#Page_132">132</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Warbleton, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Warburton, Mr., M.P., <a href="#Page_187">187</a></li>

<li class="indx">Ward, Mr., <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Warde Fowler, Mr., <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Warren, John. <i>See</i> <a href="#St_Davids_Bishop_of">St. Davids, Bishop of</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Warwick, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Warwickshire, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wasing, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Waterloo, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><a id="Watson"></a>Watson, Bishop, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Webb, Mr. and Mrs., <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Webster, Sir Godfrey, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wellingborough, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wellington, Duke of, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">as Prime Minister, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wensleydale, Lord. <i>See</i> <a href="#Parke_Mr_Justice">Mr. Justice Parke</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Westcote (enclosure), <a href="#Page_43">43</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Western, C. C., <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Squire, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Sophia, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">West Grimstead, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Westminster, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wetherall, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wharncliffe, Lord, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wheble, Mr., <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wherwell, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Whitaker, Sergeant, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Whitbread, Samuel, and minimum wage proposals, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a> ff., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">scheme of 1807, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a> ff.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Mr., J.P., <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Whitchurch, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Whitecross Green, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Whiteparish, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">White’s, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wickham, Mr., <a href="#Page_266">266</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Wigtoft (enclosure), <a href="#Page_100">100</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Wilbarston (enclosure), <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wilberforce, William, <a href="#Page_124">124</a> <i>n.</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and minimum wage, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Protestant Church in Copenhagen, <a href="#Page_178">178</a> <i>n.</i>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and the reform of manners, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Prince of Wales on Cobbett, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on blessings of England, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wilde, Mr. Serjeant, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wilford, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wilkes, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</li>

<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_418">[418]</span>Wilkinson, Dr., <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wilkinson, Mr. John, <a href="#Page_116">116</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Willet, Mr., the banker, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; the butcher, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">William <span class="allsmcap">III.</span>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Williams, Mr., <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Mr., J. P., <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; George, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; William, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wilton, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wiltshire, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">1830 rising in, <a href="#Page_258">258</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">labourers compared with Hampshire, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">prisoners, <a href="#Page_308">308</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Winchester, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and 1830 rising, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">Special Commission at, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a> ff.;</li>
<li class="isub1">scenes outside gaol, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Winchester, Bishop of. <i>See</i> <a href="#Sumner">Sumner</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Mayor of, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Winchilsea, Lord, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">his allotments, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> ff., <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Windermere, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Windham, W., <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Windsor, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Winfrith Newburgh, (enclosure), <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#APPENDIX_A_12">Appendix A (12)</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Winkworth, William, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Winslow, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Winter, Captain, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Winterbourne, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Withers, Peter, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Witley, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wonston, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Woolridge, Henry, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Worcester, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Worcestershire, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Workhouses, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">destroyed in 1830, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wraisbury, <a href="#Page_50">50</a> <i>n.</i></li>

<li class="indx">Wycombe, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Wynne, Squire, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Xenophon, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>


<li class="ifrst">Yardley Goben, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Yorkshire, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">Young, Arthur, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a> <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on France and England, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on common-field system, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on enclosure and its methods, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">protest against methods, <a href="#Page_82">82</a> ff., <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">scheme for allotments, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Otmoor, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">on wheaten bread, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and minimum wage, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and Speenhamland system, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and bailiffs, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</li>
<li class="isub1">and curates, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>

<li class="indx">&mdash;&mdash; Sir William, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
</ul>



<p class="center small">
Printed by T. and A. <span class="smcap">Constable</span>, Printers to His Majesty<br />
at the Edinburgh University Press<br />
</p>

<hr class="r65" />

<div class="footnotes">

<h2 class="nobreak">FOOTNOTES</h2>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> House of Commons, May 26, 1797, on Grey’s motion for Parliamentary
Reform.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[2]</a> The only person who is known to have declined to sit on this account is
Southey.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[3]</a> <i>Outline of English Local Government</i>, p. 152.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_4" href="#FNanchor_4" class="label">[4]</a> A clear and concise account of these developments is given by Lord Hobhouse,
<i>Contemporary Review</i>, February and March 1886.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_5" href="#FNanchor_5" class="label">[5]</a> Holdsworth’s <i>History of English Law</i>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_6" href="#FNanchor_6" class="label">[6]</a> Gregory King and Davenant estimated that the whole of the cultivated land
in England in 1685 did not amount to much more than half the total area, and
of this cultivated portion three-fifths was still farmed on the old common-field
system.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_7" href="#FNanchor_7" class="label">[7]</a> For a full discussion, in which the ordinary view is vigorously combated in
an interesting analysis, see Hasbach, <i>History of the Agricultural Labourer</i>: on
the other side, Levy, <i>Large and Small Holdings</i>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_8" href="#FNanchor_8" class="label">[8]</a> This was the general structure of the village that was dissolved in the
eighteenth century. It is distinguished from the Keltic type of communal
agriculture, known as run-rig, in two important respects. In the run-rig village
the soil is periodically redivided, and the tenant’s holding is compact. Dr.
Slater (<i>Geographical Journal</i>, Jan. 1907) has shown that in those parts of
England where the Keltic type predominated, <i>e.g.</i> in Devon and Cornwall,
enclosure took place early, and he argues with good reason that it was easier to
enclose by voluntary agreement where the holdings were compact than it was
where they were scattered in strips. But gradual enclosure by voluntary agreement
had a different effect from the cataclysm-like enclosure of the eighteenth
century, as is evident from the large number of small farmers in Devonshire.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_9" href="#FNanchor_9" class="label">[9]</a> See Webb, <i>Manor and Borough</i>, vol. i. p. 66 <i>seq.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_10" href="#FNanchor_10" class="label">[10]</a> Slater, <i>The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields</i>, p. 77.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_11" href="#FNanchor_11" class="label">[11]</a> 13 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 81.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_12" href="#FNanchor_12" class="label">[12]</a> This was done at Barnes Common; see for whole subject, <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>,
vol. xvii. p. 516.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_13" href="#FNanchor_13" class="label">[13]</a> For cases where changes in the system of cultivation of common fields had
been made, see <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xvi. p. 606: ‘To Peterborough,
crossing an open field, but sown by agreement with turnips.’ Cf. <i>Report on
Bedfordshire</i>: ‘Clover is sown in some of the open clay-fields by common
consent’ (p. 339), and ‘Turnips are sometimes cultivated, both on the sands
and gravels, by mutual consent’ (p. 340).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_14" href="#FNanchor_14" class="label">[14]</a> Slater, p. 119.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_15" href="#FNanchor_15" class="label">[15]</a> Dr. Slater’s conclusion is that ‘in the open field village the entirely landless
labourer was scarcely to be found,’ p. 130.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_16" href="#FNanchor_16" class="label">[16]</a> See <i>Commons, Forests, and Footpaths</i>, by Lord Eversley, p. 11.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_17" href="#FNanchor_17" class="label">[17]</a> <i>Bedfordshire Report</i>, 1808, p. 223, quoting from Arthur Young.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_18" href="#FNanchor_18" class="label">[18]</a> P. 114.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_19" href="#FNanchor_19" class="label">[19]</a> P. 138.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_20" href="#FNanchor_20" class="label">[20]</a> See on this point, Levy, <i>Large and Small Holdings</i>, p. 1.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_21" href="#FNanchor_21" class="label">[21]</a> <i>Report of Select Committee on Waste Lands</i>, 1795, p. 15, Appendix B.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_22" href="#FNanchor_22" class="label">[22]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. i. p. 72.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_23" href="#FNanchor_23" class="label">[23]</a> <i>An Inquiry into the Connection between the present Price of Provisions and
the Size of Farms</i>, 1773, p. 81.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_24" href="#FNanchor_24" class="label">[24]</a> <i>Report on Somerset</i>, reprinted 1797, p. 52; compare Report on Commons in
Brecknock, <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxii. p. 632, where commons are denounced
as ‘hurtful to society by holding forth a temptation to idleness, that fell
parent to vice and immorality’; also compare <i>Ibid.</i>, vol. xx. p. 145, where they
are said to encourage the commoners to be ‘hedge breakers, pilferers, nightly
trespassers ... poultry and rabbit stealers, or such like.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_25" href="#FNanchor_25" class="label">[25]</a> P. 103.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_26" href="#FNanchor_26" class="label">[26]</a> <i>Committee on Inclosures</i>, 1844, p. 135.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_27" href="#FNanchor_27" class="label">[27]</a> <i>House of Commons Journal</i>, June 19, 1797.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_28" href="#FNanchor_28" class="label">[28]</a> <i>Large and Small Holdings</i>, p. 24.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_29" href="#FNanchor_29" class="label">[29]</a> <i>Disappearance of Small Landowner</i>, p. 90; Slater’s <i>English Peasantry and
the Enclosure of Common Fields</i>, Appendix B.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_30" href="#FNanchor_30" class="label">[30]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, March 30, 1781.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_31" href="#FNanchor_31" class="label">[31]</a> See Dr. Slater’s detailed estimate.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_32" href="#FNanchor_32" class="label">[32]</a> There were probably many enclosures that had not the authority either of a
special Act or of the Act of 1756, particularly in the more distant counties. The
evidence of Mr. Carus Wilson upon the committee of 1844 shows that the
stronger classes interpreted their rights and powers in a liberal spirit. Mr.
Carus Wilson had arranged with the other large proprietors to let out the only
common which remained open in the thirteen parishes in which his father was
interested as a large landowner, and to pay the rent into the poor rates. Some
members of the committee asked whether the minority who dissented from this
arrangement could be excluded, and Mr. Wilson explained that he and his
confederates believed that the minority were bound by their action, and that by
this simple plan they could shut out all cattle from the common, except the
cattle of their joint tenants.&mdash;<i>Committee on Inclosures</i>, 1844, p. 127.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_33" href="#FNanchor_33" class="label">[33]</a> <i>E.g.</i> Laxton enclosed on petition of Lord Carbery in 1772. Total area
1200 acres. Enclosure proceedings completed in the Commons in nineteen
days. Also Ashbury, Berks, enclosed on petition of Lord Craven in 1770.
There were contrary petitions. Also Nylands, enclosed in 1790 on petition of
the lady of the manor. Also Tilsworth, Beds, enclosed on petition of Charles
Chester, Esq., 1767, and Westcote, Bucks, on petition of the most noble George,
Duke of Marlborough, January 24, 1765. Sometimes the lord of the manor
associated the vicar with his petition: thus Waltham, Croxton and Braunston,
covering 5600 acres, in Leicestershire, were all enclosed in 1766 by the Duke of
Rutland and the local rector or vicar. The relations of Church and State are
very happily illustrated by the language of the petitions, ‘A petition of the
most noble John, Duke of Rutland, and the humble petition’ of the Rev. &mdash;&mdash; Brown
or Rastall or Martin.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_34" href="#FNanchor_34" class="label">[34]</a> This Standing Order does not seem to have been applied universally, for
Mr. Bragge on December 1, 1800, made a motion that it should be extended to
the counties where it had not hitherto obtained. See <i>Senator</i>, vol. xxvii.,
December 1, 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_35" href="#FNanchor_35" class="label">[35]</a> See particulars in Appendix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_36" href="#FNanchor_36" class="label">[36]</a> <i>A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England</i>, 1771, vol. i. p. 122.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_37" href="#FNanchor_37" class="label">[37]</a> Pp. 21 f.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_38" href="#FNanchor_38" class="label">[38]</a> Cf. Otmoor in next chapter.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_39" href="#FNanchor_39" class="label">[39]</a> See Appendix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_40" href="#FNanchor_40" class="label">[40]</a> See Appendix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_41" href="#FNanchor_41" class="label">[41]</a> See <i>House of Commons Journal</i>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_42" href="#FNanchor_42" class="label">[42]</a> Eden, <i>The State of the Poor</i>, vol. ii. p. 157.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_43" href="#FNanchor_43" class="label">[43]</a> Eden, writing a few years later, remarks that since the enclosure ‘the
property in Holy Island has gotten into fewer hands,’ vol. ii. p. 149.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_44" href="#FNanchor_44" class="label">[44]</a> Report of Select Committee on Most Effectual Means of Facilitating
Enclosure, 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_45" href="#FNanchor_45" class="label">[45]</a> Cf. also Wraisbury in Bucks, <i>House of Commons Journal</i>, June 17, 1799,
where the petitioners against the Bill claimed that they spoke on behalf of
‘by much the greatest Part of the Proprietors of the said Lands and Grounds,’
yet in the enumeration of consents the committee state that the owners of
property assessed at £6, 18s. are hostile out of a total value of £295, 14s.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_46" href="#FNanchor_46" class="label">[46]</a> <i>House of Commons Journal</i>, March 21, 1796.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_47" href="#FNanchor_47" class="label">[47]</a> <i>House of Commons Journal</i>, June 10, 1801; cf. also case of Laleham. See
Appendix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_48" href="#FNanchor_48" class="label">[48]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, June 15, 1801.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_49" href="#FNanchor_49" class="label">[49]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, May 3, 1809.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_50" href="#FNanchor_50" class="label">[50]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, June 29, 1797.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_51" href="#FNanchor_51" class="label">[51]</a> See Appendix A (13).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_52" href="#FNanchor_52" class="label">[52]</a> <i>A Political Enquiry into the Consequences of enclosing Waste Lands</i>, 1785,
p. 108.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_53" href="#FNanchor_53" class="label">[53]</a> See Appendix A (12).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_54" href="#FNanchor_54" class="label">[54]</a> House of Commons, May 1, 1845.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_55" href="#FNanchor_55" class="label">[55]</a> Aglionby, House of Commons, June 5, 1844.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_56" href="#FNanchor_56" class="label">[56]</a> Thurlow was Chancellor from 1778 to 1783 (when Fox contrived to get rid
of him) and from 1783 to 1792.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_57" href="#FNanchor_57" class="label">[57]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, House of Lords, March 30, 1781.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_58" href="#FNanchor_58" class="label">[58]</a> Sir George Savile (1726&ndash;1784), M.P. for Yorkshire, 1759&ndash;1783; carried
the Catholic Relief Bill, which provoked the Gordon Riots, and presented the
great Yorkshire Petition for Economical Reform.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_59" href="#FNanchor_59" class="label">[59]</a> <i>Annual Register</i>, 1867, p. 68. For a detailed history of the Stanwell
Enclosure, see Appendix A (10). Unhappily the farmers were only reprieved;
Stanwell was enclosed at the second attempt.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_60" href="#FNanchor_60" class="label">[60]</a> See <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, House of Lords, March 30, 1781; April 6,
1781; June 14, 1781.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_61" href="#FNanchor_61" class="label">[61]</a> John Warren (1730&ndash;1800).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_62" href="#FNanchor_62" class="label">[62]</a> John Hinchcliffe (1731&ndash;1794), at one time Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_63" href="#FNanchor_63" class="label">[63]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, March 30, 1781.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_64" href="#FNanchor_64" class="label">[64]</a> <i>Senator</i>, vol. xxvi., July 2, 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_65" href="#FNanchor_65" class="label">[65]</a> For both speeches see <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, May 24, 1802.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_66" href="#FNanchor_66" class="label">[66]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, June 14, 1781.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_67" href="#FNanchor_67" class="label">[67]</a> See Cheshunt, Louth, Simpson, and Stanwell in Appendix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_68" href="#FNanchor_68" class="label">[68]</a> <i>Six Months’ Tour through the North of England</i>, 1771, vol. i. p. 122.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_69" href="#FNanchor_69" class="label">[69]</a> See <i>Annual Register</i>, 1800, Appendix to Chronicle, p. 87.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_70" href="#FNanchor_70" class="label">[70]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, June 14, 1781.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_71" href="#FNanchor_71" class="label">[71]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxvi. p. 111.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_72" href="#FNanchor_72" class="label">[72]</a> February 1, 1793.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_73" href="#FNanchor_73" class="label">[73]</a> See Chapter iv.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_74" href="#FNanchor_74" class="label">[74]</a> Vol. xxvi. p. 70.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_75" href="#FNanchor_75" class="label">[75]</a> Sinclair’s language shows that this was the general arrangement. Of course
there are exceptions. See <i>e.g.</i> Haute Huntre and other cases in Appendix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_76" href="#FNanchor_76" class="label">[76]</a> Cf. Billingsley’s <i>Report on Somerset</i>, p. 59, where the arrangements are
described as ‘a <i>little system of patronage</i>. The lord of the soil, the rector, and a
few of the principal commoners, monopolize and distribute the appointments.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_77" href="#FNanchor_77" class="label">[77]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, June 14, 1781.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_78" href="#FNanchor_78" class="label">[78]</a> <i>General Report on Enclosures</i>, 1808.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_79" href="#FNanchor_79" class="label">[79]</a> <i>Six Months’ Tour through the North of England</i>, vol. i. p. 122.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_80" href="#FNanchor_80" class="label">[80]</a> See Appendix A (6).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_81" href="#FNanchor_81" class="label">[81]</a> <i>Report on Somerset</i>, p. 192.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_82" href="#FNanchor_82" class="label">[82]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, January 21, 1772.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_83" href="#FNanchor_83" class="label">[83]</a> <i>Carlisle MSS.</i>; <i>Historical MSS. Commission</i>, pp. 301 ff.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_84" href="#FNanchor_84" class="label">[84]</a> Charles James Fox.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_85" href="#FNanchor_85" class="label">[85]</a> The earlier name of Brooks’s Club.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_86" href="#FNanchor_86" class="label">[86]</a> For the subsequent history of King’s Sedgmoor, see Appendix A (14).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_87" href="#FNanchor_87" class="label">[87]</a> Most private Enclosure Acts provided that if a commissioner died his successor
was to be somebody not interested in the property.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_88" href="#FNanchor_88" class="label">[88]</a> Sir John Sinclair complained in 1796 that the Board had not even the
privilege of franking its letters.&mdash;<i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxvi, p. 506.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_89" href="#FNanchor_89" class="label">[89]</a> Vol. xxvi. p. 85.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_90" href="#FNanchor_90" class="label">[90]</a> From the Select Committee on the Means of Facilitating Enclosures in 1800,
reprinted in <i>Annual Register</i>, 1800, Appendix to Chronicle, p. 85 ff., we learn that
the fees received alone in the House of Commons (Bill fees, small fees, committee
fees, housekeepers’ and messengers’ fees, and engrossing fees) for 707 Bills
during the fourteen years from 1786 to 1799 inclusive amounted to no less than
£59,867, 6s. 4d. As the scale of fees in the House of Lords was about the
same (Bill fees, yeoman, usher, door-keepers’ fees, order of committee, and
committee fees) during these years about £120,000 must have gone into the
pockets of Parliamentary officials.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_91" href="#FNanchor_91" class="label">[91]</a> See Appendix A (5).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_92" href="#FNanchor_92" class="label">[92]</a> <i>Bedford Report</i>, 1808, p. 235.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_93" href="#FNanchor_93" class="label">[93]</a> <i>Annual Register</i>, 1799, Chron., p. 27.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_94" href="#FNanchor_94" class="label">[94]</a> Eden, 1. Preface, p. xviii.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_95" href="#FNanchor_95" class="label">[95]</a> <i>Bedford Report</i>, p. 249. Cf. writer in Appendix of <i>Report on Middlesex</i>,
pp. 507&ndash;15, ‘a gentleman of the least sensibility would rather suffer his residence
to continue surrounded by marshes and bogs, than take the lead in what may be
deemed an obnoxious measure.’ This same writer urges, that the unpopularity
of enclosures would be overcome were care taken ‘to place the inferior orders of
mankind&mdash;the cottager and industrious poor&mdash;in such a situation, with regard to
inclosures, that they should certainly have some share secured to them, and be
treated with a gentle hand. Keep all in temper&mdash;let no rights be now disputed....
It is far more easy to prevent a clamour than to stop it when once it is
raised. Those who are acquainted with the business of inclosure must know
that there are more than four-fifths of the inhabitants in most neighbourhoods
who are generally left out of the bill for want of property, and therefore cannot
possibly claim any part thereof.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_96" href="#FNanchor_96" class="label">[96]</a> Vol. xx. p. 456.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_97" href="#FNanchor_97" class="label">[97]</a> Vol. xxiv. p. 543.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_98" href="#FNanchor_98" class="label">[98]</a> <i>The Appropriation and Enclosure of Commonable and Intermixed Lands</i>,
1801.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_99" href="#FNanchor_99" class="label">[99]</a> ‘Allow to the cottager a little land about his dwelling for keeping a cow,
for planting potatoes, for raising flax or hemp. 2ndly, Convert the waste lands
of the kingdom into <i>small</i> arable farms, a certain quantity every year, to be let
on favourable terms to industrious families. 3rdly, Restrain the engrossment and
over-enlargement of farms. The propriety of those measures cannot, I think, be
questioned.’&mdash;<i>The Case of Labourers in Husbandry</i>, p. 103.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_100" href="#FNanchor_100" class="label">[100]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. i. p. 52.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_101" href="#FNanchor_101" class="label">[101]</a> This scheme marks a great advance on an earlier scheme which Young
published in the first volume of the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>. He then proposed
that public money should be spent in settling cottagers or soldiers on the waste,
giving them their holding free of rent and tithes for three lives, at the end of
which time the land they had redeemed was to revert to its original owners.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_102" href="#FNanchor_102" class="label">[102]</a> Slater, pp. 126&ndash;7.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_103" href="#FNanchor_103" class="label">[103]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 128.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_104" href="#FNanchor_104" class="label">[104]</a> <i>The Poor Man’s Best Friend, or Land to cultivate for his own Benefit.</i>
Letter to the Marquis of Salisbury, by the Rev. S. Demainbray, B.D.,
1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_105" href="#FNanchor_105" class="label">[105]</a> P. 126.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_106" href="#FNanchor_106" class="label">[106]</a> See for this subject <i>Cambridge Modern History</i>, vol. viii. chap. 24, and
P. Sagnac, <i>La Législation Civile de la Révolution Française</i>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_107" href="#FNanchor_107" class="label">[107]</a> Vol. i. p. 119 ff.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_108" href="#FNanchor_108" class="label">[108]</a> Jackson’s <i>Oxford Journal</i>, September 11, 1830, said that a single cottager
sometimes cleared as much as £20 a year by geese.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_109" href="#FNanchor_109" class="label">[109]</a> <i>Oxford University and City Herald</i>, September 25, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_110" href="#FNanchor_110" class="label">[110]</a> <i>House of Commons Journal</i>, February 17, 1815.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_111" href="#FNanchor_111" class="label">[111]</a> Alexander Croke (1758&ndash;1842), knighted in 1816, was from 1801&ndash;1815 judge
in the Vice-Admiralty Court, Nova Scotia. As a lawyer, he could defend his own
interests.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_112" href="#FNanchor_112" class="label">[112]</a> Dunkin’s <i>Oxfordshire</i>, vol. i. pp. 122&ndash;3.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_113" href="#FNanchor_113" class="label">[113]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 123.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_114" href="#FNanchor_114" class="label">[114]</a> Jackson’s <i>Oxford Journal</i>, September 18, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_115" href="#FNanchor_115" class="label">[115]</a> Vol. i. p. 124.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_116" href="#FNanchor_116" class="label">[116]</a> Jackson’s <i>Oxford Journal</i>, September 11, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_117" href="#FNanchor_117" class="label">[117]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_118" href="#FNanchor_118" class="label">[118]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, September 18.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_119" href="#FNanchor_119" class="label">[119]</a> See Jackson’s <i>Oxford Journal</i>, and <i>Oxford University and City Herald</i>, for
September 11, 1830, and also <i>Annual Register</i>, 1830, Chron., p. 142, and Home
Office Papers, for what follows.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_120" href="#FNanchor_120" class="label">[120]</a> <i>Oxford University and City Herald</i>, September 11, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_121" href="#FNanchor_121" class="label">[121]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_122" href="#FNanchor_122" class="label">[122]</a> Jackson’s <i>Oxford Journal</i>, March 5, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_123" href="#FNanchor_123" class="label">[123]</a> See the Evidence of Witnesses before the Committee on Commons Inclosure
of 1844. (Baily, land-agent): ‘General custom to give the Lord of Manor
¹⁄₁₆th as compensation for his rights exclusive of the value of minerals and of
his rights as a common right owner.’ Another witness (Coulson, a solicitor)
defined the surface rights as ‘game and stockage,’ and said that the proportion
determined upon was the result of a bargain beforehand.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_124" href="#FNanchor_124" class="label">[124]</a> ‘Many small proprietors have been seriously injured by being obliged in
pursuance of ill-framed private bills to enclose lands which never repaid the
expense.’ Marshall, <i>The Appropriation and Enclosure of Commonable and
Intermixed Lands</i>, 1801, p. 52.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_125" href="#FNanchor_125" class="label">[125]</a> <span class="smcap">Cost of Enclosure.</span>&mdash;The expenses of particular Acts varied very much.
Billingsley in his <i>Report on Somerset</i> (p. 57) gives £3 an acre as the cost of
enclosing a lowland parish, £2, 10s. for an upland parish. The enclosure of
the 12,000 acre King’s Sedgmoor (<i>Ibid.</i>, p. 196) came (with the subdivisions) to
no less than £59,624, 4s. 8d., or nearly £5 an acre. Stanwell Enclosure, on
the other hand, came to about 23s. an acre, and various instances given in the
<i>Report for Bedfordshire</i> work out at about the same figure. When the allotments
to the tithe-owners and the lord of the manor were exempted, the sum
per acre would of course fall more heavily on the other allottees, <i>e.g.</i> of Louth,
where more than a third of the 1701 acres enclosed were exempt. In many
cases, of course, land was sold to cover expenses. The cost of fencing allotments
would also vary in different localities. In Somerset, from 7s. 7d. to 8s. 7d.
for 20 feet of quickset hedge was calculated, in Bedfordshire, 10s. 6d. per pole.
See also for expense Hasbach, pp. 64, 65, and <i>General Report on Enclosures</i>,
Appendix xvii. Main <span class="lock">Items:&mdash;</span></p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>1. Country solicitor’s fees for drawing up Bill and attending in town;</p>

<p>2. Attendance of witnesses at House of Commons and House of Lords to
prove that Standing Orders had been complied with;</p>

<p>3. Expenses of persons to get signatures of consents and afterwards to attend
at House of Commons to swear to them (it once cost from £70 to £80
to get consent of principal proprietor);</p>

<p>4. Expense of Parliamentary solicitor, 20 gs., but more if opposition;</p>

<p>5. Expense of counsel if there was opposition;</p>

<p>6. Parliamentary fees, see p. 76.</p>
</div>


</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_126" href="#FNanchor_126" class="label">[126]</a> <i>Inquiry into the Advantages and Disadvantages resulting from Bills of
Enclosure</i>, 1780, p. 14.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_127" href="#FNanchor_127" class="label">[127]</a> Cf. Ashelworth, Cheshunt, Knaresborough.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_128" href="#FNanchor_128" class="label">[128]</a> Previous to enclosure there were twenty-five farmers: the land is now
divided among five or six persons only.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_129" href="#FNanchor_129" class="label">[129]</a> It was then confidently said that several poor persons actually perished from
want, and so great was the outcry that some of the farmers were hissed in the
public market at Bicester.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_130" href="#FNanchor_130" class="label">[130]</a> Dunkin’s <i>Oxfordshire</i>, pp. 2 and 3.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_131" href="#FNanchor_131" class="label">[131]</a> F. Moore, <i>Considerations on the Exorbitant Price of Proprietors</i>, 1773,
p. 22; quoted by Levy, p. 27.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_132" href="#FNanchor_132" class="label">[132]</a> <i>Essay on the Nature and Method of ascertaining the specific Share of Proprietors
upon the Inclosure of Common fields, with observations on the inconveniences
of common fields, etc.</i>, p. 22.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_133" href="#FNanchor_133" class="label">[133]</a> The Kirton, Sutterton and Wigtoft (Lincs) Acts prescribed a penalty for
taking turf or sod after the passing of the Act, of £10, and in default of payment
imprisonment in the House of Correction with hard labour for three months.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_134" href="#FNanchor_134" class="label">[134]</a> P. 235.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_135" href="#FNanchor_135" class="label">[135]</a> The only provision for the poor in the Maulden Act, (36 Geo. <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 65)
was a fuel allotment as a compensation for the ancient usage of cutting peat or
moor turf. The trustees (rector, churchwarden and overseers) were to distribute
the turf to poor families, and were to pay any surplus from the rent of the
herbage to the poor rates.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_136" href="#FNanchor_136" class="label">[136]</a> P. 240.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_137" href="#FNanchor_137" class="label">[137]</a> At St. Neots a gentleman complained to Arthur Young in 1791 that in the
enclosure which took place sixteen years before, ‘the poor were ill-treated by
having about half a rood given them in lieu of a <i>cow keep</i>, the inclosure of which
land costing more than they could afford, they sold the lots at £5, the money
was drank out at the ale-house, and the men, spoiled by the habit, came, with
their families to the parish.’&mdash;<i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xvi. p. 482.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_138" href="#FNanchor_138" class="label">[138]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxxvi. p. 508.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_139" href="#FNanchor_139" class="label">[139]</a> Davies, <i>The Case of Labourers in Husbandry</i>, p. 15.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_140" href="#FNanchor_140" class="label">[140]</a> In some instances it is reckoned as costing only 7s. <i>Ibid.</i>, see p. 185.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_141" href="#FNanchor_141" class="label">[141]</a> Davies, p. 181.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_142" href="#FNanchor_142" class="label">[142]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 547.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_143" href="#FNanchor_143" class="label">[143]</a> Vol. xxv. p. 488.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_144" href="#FNanchor_144" class="label">[144]</a> See <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. ix. pp. 13, 14, 165&ndash;167, 636&ndash;646, and vol. x.
pp. 218&ndash;227.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_145" href="#FNanchor_145" class="label">[145]</a> Capel Lofft (1751&ndash;1824); follower of Fox; writer of poems and translations
from Virgil and Petrarch; patron of Robert Bloomfield, author of <i>Farmer’s Boy</i>.
Called by Boswell ‘This little David of popular spirit.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_146" href="#FNanchor_146" class="label">[146]</a> Thomas Ruggles (1737&ndash;1813), author of <i>History of the Poor</i>, published in
1793, Deputy-Lieutenant of Essex and Suffolk.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_147" href="#FNanchor_147" class="label">[147]</a> Sir Henry Gould, 1710&ndash;1794.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_148" href="#FNanchor_148" class="label">[148]</a> The <i>Annals of Agriculture</i> (vol. xvii. p. 293) contains a curious apology by a
gleaner in 1791 to the owner of some fields, who had begun legal proceedings
against her and her husband. ‘Whereas I, Margaret Abree, wife of Thomas Abree,
of the city of New Sarum, blacksmith, did, during the barley harvest, in the month
of September last, many times wilfully and maliciously go into the fields of, and
belonging to, Mr. Edward Perry, at Clarendon Park, and take with me my
children, and did there leaze, collect, and carry away a quantity of barley....
Now we do hereby declare, that we are fully convinced of the illegality of such
proceedings, and that no person has a right to leaze any sort of grain, or to come
on any field whatsoever, without the consent of the owner; and are also truly
sensible of the obligation we are under to the said Edward Perry for his lenity
towards us, inasmuch as the damages given, together with the heavy cost
incurred, would have been much greater than we could possibly have discharged,
and must have amounted to perpetual imprisonment, as even those who have
least disapproved of our conduct, would certainly not have contributed so large
a sum to deliver us from the legal consequences of it. And we do hereby faithfully
promise never to be guilty of the same, or any like offence in future.
Thomas Abree, Margaret Abree. Her + Mark.’ It is interesting to compare
with this judge-made law of England the Mosaic precept: ‘And when ye
reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the
corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning
of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger’
(Leviticus xxiii. 22).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_149" href="#FNanchor_149" class="label">[149]</a> Kent, <i>Hints</i>, p. 238.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_150" href="#FNanchor_150" class="label">[150]</a> P. 34; cf. Marshall on the Southern Department, p. 9, ‘Yorkshire bacon,
generally of the worst sort, is retailed to the poor from little chandlers’ shops
at an advanced price, bread in the same way.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_151" href="#FNanchor_151" class="label">[151]</a> <i>Notes on the Agriculture of Norfolk</i>, p. 165.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_152" href="#FNanchor_152" class="label">[152]</a> <i>Large and Small Holdings</i>, p. 11.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_153" href="#FNanchor_153" class="label">[153]</a> Young’s <i>Political Arithmetic</i>, quoted by Lecky, vol. vii. p. 263 note.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_154" href="#FNanchor_154" class="label">[154]</a> See Appendix B for six of these budgets.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_155" href="#FNanchor_155" class="label">[155]</a> Ruggles, <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xiv. p. 205.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_156" href="#FNanchor_156" class="label">[156]</a> Eden, vol. i. p. 180.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_157" href="#FNanchor_157" class="label">[157]</a> The parish might have the satisfaction of punishing the mother by a year’s
hard labour (7 James <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> c. 4, altered in 1810), but could not get rid of the
child.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_158" href="#FNanchor_158" class="label">[158]</a> <i>Wealth of Nations</i>, vol. i. p. 194.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_159" href="#FNanchor_159" class="label">[159]</a> Quoted by Eden, vol. i. p. 347.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_160" href="#FNanchor_160" class="label">[160]</a> See <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 296.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_161" href="#FNanchor_161" class="label">[161]</a> Vol. xiv. pp. 205, 206.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_162" href="#FNanchor_162" class="label">[162]</a> An example of a parish where the interests of the employer and of the
parish officers differed is given in the <i>House of Commons Journal</i> for February
4, 1788, when a petition was presented from Mr. John Wilkinson, a master
iron-founder at Bradley, near Bilston, in the parish of Wolverhampton. The
petitioner states ‘that the present Demand for the Iron of his Manufacture and
the Improvement of which it is capable, naturally encourage a very considerable
Extension of his Works, but that the Experience he has had of the vexatious
Effect, as well as of the constantly increasing Amount of Poor Rates to which he
is subject, has filled him with Apprehensions of final Ruin to his Establishment;
and that the Parish Officers ... are constantly alarming his Workmen with
Threats of Removal to the various Parishes from which the Necessity of employing
skilful Manufacturers has obliged him to collect them.’ He goes on to ask
that his district shall be made extra-parochial to the poor rates.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_163" href="#FNanchor_163" class="label">[163]</a> Hasbach, pp. 172&ndash;3.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_164" href="#FNanchor_164" class="label">[164]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 384.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_165" href="#FNanchor_165" class="label">[165]</a> See p. 148.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_166" href="#FNanchor_166" class="label">[166]</a> The unborn were the special objects of parish officers’ dread. At Derby
the persons sent out under orders of removal are chiefly pregnant girls. (Eden,
vol. ii. p. 126.) Bastards (see above) with some exceptions gained a settlement
in their birthplace, and Hodge’s legitimate children might gain one too if there
was any doubt about the place of their parents’ settlements.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_167" href="#FNanchor_167" class="label">[167]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 383.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_168" href="#FNanchor_168" class="label">[168]</a> Vol. ix. p. 660.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_169" href="#FNanchor_169" class="label">[169]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 288. In considering the accounts of the state of the
commons, it must be remembered that the open parishes thus paid the penalty
of enclosure elsewhere. <i>Colluvies vicorum.</i> But these open fields and commons
were becoming rapidly more scarce.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_170" href="#FNanchor_170" class="label">[170]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 691.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_171" href="#FNanchor_171" class="label">[171]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. 743.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_172" href="#FNanchor_172" class="label">[172]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_173" href="#FNanchor_173" class="label">[173]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, vol. ii. p. 591.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_174" href="#FNanchor_174" class="label">[174]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 654, <i>re</i> Litchfield. ‘In two or three small parishes in this neighbourhood,
which consist of large farms, there are very few poor: the farmers,
in order to prevent the introduction of poor from other parishes, hire their
servants for fifty-one weeks only. I conceive, however, that this practice would
be considered, by a court of justice, as fraudulent, and a mere evasion in the
master; and that a servant thus hired, if he remained the fifty-second week
with his master, on a fresh contract, would acquire a settlement in the parish.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_175" href="#FNanchor_175" class="label">[175]</a> See <i>Annual Register</i>, 1817, p. 298.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_176" href="#FNanchor_176" class="label">[176]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 689.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_177" href="#FNanchor_177" class="label">[177]</a> <i>Reading Mercury</i>, April 20, 1795; also <i>Ipswich Journal</i>, March 28.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_178" href="#FNanchor_178" class="label">[178]</a> <i>Ipswich Journal</i>, April 18.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_179" href="#FNanchor_179" class="label">[179]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, August 8.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_180" href="#FNanchor_180" class="label">[180]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_181" href="#FNanchor_181" class="label">[181]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_182" href="#FNanchor_182" class="label">[182]</a> <i>Reading Mercury</i>, April 27, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_183" href="#FNanchor_183" class="label">[183]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 591.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_184" href="#FNanchor_184" class="label">[184]</a> Eden, vol. i. p. 495.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_185" href="#FNanchor_185" class="label">[185]</a> Resolution of Privy Council, July 6, 1795, and Debate and Resolution in
House of Commons. <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, December 11, 1795, and Lord
Sheffield in <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxv. p. 31.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_186" href="#FNanchor_186" class="label">[186]</a> See <i>Senator</i> for March 1, 1796, p. 1147.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_187" href="#FNanchor_187" class="label">[187]</a> See Wilberforce’s speech, <i>Parliamentary Register</i> and <i>Senator</i>, February
18, 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_188" href="#FNanchor_188" class="label">[188]</a> Eden, vol. ii. pp. 104&ndash;6.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_189" href="#FNanchor_189" class="label">[189]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 15.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_190" href="#FNanchor_190" class="label">[190]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 280.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_191" href="#FNanchor_191" class="label">[191]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 426.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_192" href="#FNanchor_192" class="label">[192]</a> See <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxiv. pp. 63, 171, 177, 204, 285, 316, etc.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_193" href="#FNanchor_193" class="label">[193]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxv. p. 678.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_194" href="#FNanchor_194" class="label">[194]</a> Eden, vol. i. p. 533.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_195" href="#FNanchor_195" class="label">[195]</a> Perhaps the unpopularity of soup is partly explained by a letter published
in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i> in December 1795, vol. xxvi. p. 215. The
writer says it is the custom for most families in the country ‘to give their poor
neighbours the pot liquor, that is, the liquor in which any meat has been boiled,
and to which they sometimes add the broken bread from the parlour and kitchen
tables: this,’ he adds, ‘makes but an indifferent mess.’ The publications of
the time contain numerous recipes for cheap soups: ‘the power of giving
an increased effect to Christian benevolence by these soups’ (<i>Reports on Poor</i>,
vol. i. p. 167) was eagerly welcomed. Cf. Mrs. Shore’s account of stewed ox’s
head for the poor, according to which, at the cost of 2s. 6d. with the leavings
of the family, a savoury mess for fifty-two persons could be prepared (<i>Ibid.</i>,
p. 60).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_196" href="#FNanchor_196" class="label">[196]</a> Davies, pp. 31&ndash;2.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_197" href="#FNanchor_197" class="label">[197]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxv. p. 455.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_198" href="#FNanchor_198" class="label">[198]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, November 2, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_199" href="#FNanchor_199" class="label">[199]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. 769.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_200" href="#FNanchor_200" class="label">[200]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, vol. ii. p. 97.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_201" href="#FNanchor_201" class="label">[201]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 621.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_202" href="#FNanchor_202" class="label">[202]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 645.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_203" href="#FNanchor_203" class="label">[203]</a> In many budgets no milk is included.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_204" href="#FNanchor_204" class="label">[204]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. iv. p. 151.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_205" href="#FNanchor_205" class="label">[205]</a> Davies, p. 104.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_206" href="#FNanchor_206" class="label">[206]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. ii. p. 178.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_207" href="#FNanchor_207" class="label">[207]</a> Vol. ii. p. 587.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_208" href="#FNanchor_208" class="label">[208]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. i. p. 134; another reason for the dearth of milk was
the growing consumption of veal in the towns. Davies says (p. 19), ‘Suckling
is here so profitable (to furnish veal for London) that the poor can seldom either
buy or beg milk.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_209" href="#FNanchor_209" class="label">[209]</a> P. 27.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_210" href="#FNanchor_210" class="label">[210]</a> See <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxv. pp. 367&ndash;8.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_211" href="#FNanchor_211" class="label">[211]</a> Davies, p. 37.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_212" href="#FNanchor_212" class="label">[212]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 39.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_213" href="#FNanchor_213" class="label">[213]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxvi. p. 121.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_214" href="#FNanchor_214" class="label">[214]</a> The dearness of malt was another fact which helped the introduction of tea.
Cf. Davies, p. 38: ‘Time was when <i>small beer</i> was reckoned one of the necessaries
of life, even in poor families.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_215" href="#FNanchor_215" class="label">[215]</a> Lecky, <i>History of England in Eighteenth Century</i>, vol. ii. p. 318.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_216" href="#FNanchor_216" class="label">[216]</a> In connection with the dearth of milk it is important to notice the rise in
the price of cheese. ‘Poor people,’ says Davies, (p. 19), ‘reckon cheese the
dearest article they can use’ (cf. also p. 143), and in his comparison of prices
in the middle of the eighteenth century with those of 1787&ndash;94 he gives the
price of 112 lbs. of cheese at Reading Fair as from 17s. to 21s. in the first
period, and 40s. to 46s. in the second. Retail cheese of an inferior sort had
risen from 2½d. or 3d. a lb. to 4½d. or 5d. (p. 65); cf. also correspondent in
<i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. ii. p. 442. ‘Every inhabitant of Bath must be
sensible that butter and cheese have risen in price one-third, or more, within
these twenty years.’ (Written in 1784).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_217" href="#FNanchor_217" class="label">[217]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. i. p. 129.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_218" href="#FNanchor_218" class="label">[218]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, vol. iii. p. 78.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_219" href="#FNanchor_219" class="label">[219]</a> <i>Annual Register</i>, 1806, p. 974; ‘My local situation afforded me ample
means of knowing how greatly the lower orders suffered from being unable to
procure a supply of milk; and I am fully persuaded of the correctness of the
statement that the labouring poor lose a number of their children from the
want of a food so pre-eminently adapted to their support’; cf. also Curwen’s
<i>Hints</i>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_220" href="#FNanchor_220" class="label">[220]</a> Eden, vol. i. p. 510.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_221" href="#FNanchor_221" class="label">[221]</a> Vol. iii. p. 96.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_222" href="#FNanchor_222" class="label">[222]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. 694.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_223" href="#FNanchor_223" class="label">[223]</a> Cf. <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. i. p. 43; ‘Where there are commons, the ideal
advantage of cutting flags, peat, or whins, often causes a poor man to spend
more time in procuring such fuel, than, if he reckoned his labour, would
purchase for him double the quantity of good firing.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_224" href="#FNanchor_224" class="label">[224]</a> Vol. iv. p. 496.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_225" href="#FNanchor_225" class="label">[225]</a> Vol. ii. p. 587.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_226" href="#FNanchor_226" class="label">[226]</a> Davies, p. 28.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_227" href="#FNanchor_227" class="label">[227]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 118.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_228" href="#FNanchor_228" class="label">[228]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. 805.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_229" href="#FNanchor_229" class="label">[229]</a> P. 179.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_230" href="#FNanchor_230" class="label">[230]</a> Cf. also Eden’s description of a labourer’s expenses, vol. iii. p. 797, where
he says that whilst hedging and ditching, they are allowed to take home
a faggot every evening, whilst the work lasts, ‘but this is by no means sufficient
for his consumption: his children, therefore, are sent into the fields, to collect
wood where they can; and neither hedges nor trees are spared by the young
marauders, who are thus, in some degree, educated in the art of thieving.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_231" href="#FNanchor_231" class="label">[231]</a> Vol. ii. p. 231.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_232" href="#FNanchor_232" class="label">[232]</a> Cf. also for the difficulties of the poor in getting fuel, the account by the
Rev. Dr. Glasse; <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. i. p. 58. ‘Having long observed,
that there is scarcely any article of life, in respect to which the poor are under
greater difficulties, or for the supply of which they have stronger temptations to
dishonest practices, than that of fuel,’ he laid up in summer a store of coals in
Greenford (Middlesex), and Wanstead, and sold them rather under original cost
price, carriage free, in winter. ‘The benefit arising from the relief afforded them
in this article of coals, is obvious: they are habituated to pay for what they have;
whereas at the shop they ran in debt. When their credit was at an end, they
contrived to do without coals, by having recourse to wood-stealing; than which
I know no practise which tends more effectually to introduce into young minds
a habit of dishonesty; it is also very injurious to the farmer, and excites a degree
of resentment in his breast, which, in many instances, renders him averse to
affording relief to the poor, even when real necessity calls loudly for it.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_233" href="#FNanchor_233" class="label">[233]</a> 20 George <span class="allsmcap">II.</span> c. 19.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_234" href="#FNanchor_234" class="label">[234]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxv. p. 305 ff.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_235" href="#FNanchor_235" class="label">[235]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxv. p. 298.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_236" href="#FNanchor_236" class="label">[236]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, December 9, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_237" href="#FNanchor_237" class="label">[237]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, February 12, 1796.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_238" href="#FNanchor_238" class="label">[238]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxv. p. 345.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_239" href="#FNanchor_239" class="label">[239]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 316.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_240" href="#FNanchor_240" class="label">[240]</a> <i>An Examination of Mr. Pitt’s Speech in the House of Commons, February
12, 1796.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_241" href="#FNanchor_241" class="label">[241]</a> P. 106 ff.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_242" href="#FNanchor_242" class="label">[242]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, 1795, vol. xxv. p. 503.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_243" href="#FNanchor_243" class="label">[243]</a> <i>Parliamentary Debates.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_244" href="#FNanchor_244" class="label">[244]</a> Printed in <i>Parliamentary Papers</i> for 1795&ndash;6.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_245" href="#FNanchor_245" class="label">[245]</a> The age was not filled up.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_246" href="#FNanchor_246" class="label">[246]</a> For report of debate see <i>Parliamentary Register</i> for that date.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_247" href="#FNanchor_247" class="label">[247]</a> See <i>Parliamentary Register</i>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_248" href="#FNanchor_248" class="label">[248]</a> See <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, February 14, 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_249" href="#FNanchor_249" class="label">[249]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. v. p. 23.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_250" href="#FNanchor_250" class="label">[250]</a> See p. 179.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_251" href="#FNanchor_251" class="label">[251]</a> <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxvi. p. 178.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_252" href="#FNanchor_252" class="label">[252]</a> 22 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 83.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_253" href="#FNanchor_253" class="label">[253]</a> In 1834 there were 924 comprised in 67 incorporations (Nicholls, vol. ii.
p. 91.)</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_254" href="#FNanchor_254" class="label">[254]</a> 9 George <span class="allsmcap">I.</span> c. 7.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_255" href="#FNanchor_255" class="label">[255]</a> Eden, vol. i. p. 269.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_256" href="#FNanchor_256" class="label">[256]</a> <i>E.g.</i> Oxford and Shrewsbury.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_257" href="#FNanchor_257" class="label">[257]</a> There is a significant entry in the Abstracts of Returns to the 1775 Poor
Relief Committee in reference to the building of that death-trap, the Bulcamp
House of Industry. ‘In the Expences for Building is included £500 for building
a Part which was pulled down by a Mob.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_258" href="#FNanchor_258" class="label">[258]</a> At Heckingham in Norfolk a putrid fever, in 1774, killed 126 out of 220
inmates (Eden, vol. ii. p. 473, quoting Howlett); cf. also Ruggles, <i>History of
the Poor</i>, vol. ii. p. 266.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_259" href="#FNanchor_259" class="label">[259]</a> ‘The Village,’ pp. 16 and 17.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_260" href="#FNanchor_260" class="label">[260]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. 694 ff.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_261" href="#FNanchor_261" class="label">[261]</a> 36 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 23.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_262" href="#FNanchor_262" class="label">[262]</a> The last of these systems had been included in a Bill introduced by Sir
William Young in 1788. ‘In order to relieve agricultural labourers, who are
often, during the winter, out of employment, the vestry in every parish is
empowered, by notice affixed to the church door, to settle a rate of wages to be
paid to labourers out of employ, from the 30th Nov. to the 28th of Feb.; and to
distribute and send them round in rotation to the parishioners, proportionally as
they pay to the Rates; to be paid by the person employing them two-thirds of
the wages so settled, and one-third by the parish-officers out of the Rates.’&mdash;Eden,
vol. i. p. 397.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_263" href="#FNanchor_263" class="label">[263]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, February 12, 1796.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_264" href="#FNanchor_264" class="label">[264]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, December 22, 1796.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_265" href="#FNanchor_265" class="label">[265]</a> The Bill is printed in House of Commons Papers, 1796. The ‘Heads of
the Bill’ as circulated appear in the <i>Annals of Agriculture</i>, vol. xxvi. pp. 260 ff.
and 359 ff. Eden gives in the form of Appendices (1) the Heads of the Bill,
(2) the Amendments introduced in Committee.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_266" href="#FNanchor_266" class="label">[266]</a> <i>House of Commons Journal.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_267" href="#FNanchor_267" class="label">[267]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, February 11, 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_268" href="#FNanchor_268" class="label">[268]</a> 35 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 101.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_269" href="#FNanchor_269" class="label">[269]</a> For Whitbread’s proposals to amend the Law of Settlement in 1807 see next
chapter. An attempt was made in 1819 (59 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 50) to define and
simplify the conditions under which the hiring of a tenement of £10 annual
value conferred the right to a settlement. The term of residence was extended
to a year, the nature of the tenement was defined, and it was laid down that the
rent must be £10, and paid for a whole year. But so unsuccessful was this piece
of legislation that it was found necessary to pass a second Act six years later
(1826, 6 George <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> c. 57), and a third Act in 1831 (1 William <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> c. 18).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_270" href="#FNanchor_270" class="label">[270]</a> <i>Senator</i>, March 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_271" href="#FNanchor_271" class="label">[271]</a> See Debates in <i>Senator</i>, March 31 and April 3, 1800, and <i>Parliamentary
Register</i>. Cf. for removals for temporary distress, Sir Thomas Bernard’s Charge
to Overseers in the Hundred of Stoke. Bucks. <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. i. p. 260.
‘With regard to the removal of labourers belonging to other parishes, consider
thoroughly what you may lose, and what the individual may suffer, by the
removal, before you apply to us on the subject. Where you have had, for a
long time, the benefit of their labour, and where all they want is a little
<i>temporary</i> relief, reflect whether, after so many years spent in your service, this
is the <i>moment</i> and the <i>cause</i>, for removing them from the scene of their daily
labour to a distant parish, etc.’ (1798).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_272" href="#FNanchor_272" class="label">[272]</a> Davies, pp. 102&ndash;4.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_273" href="#FNanchor_273" class="label">[273]</a> 15 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 32.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_274" href="#FNanchor_274" class="label">[274]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. ii. p. 171.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_275" href="#FNanchor_275" class="label">[275]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. ii. p. 136.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_276" href="#FNanchor_276" class="label">[276]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 137.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_277" href="#FNanchor_277" class="label">[277]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, vol. v. p. 66.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_278" href="#FNanchor_278" class="label">[278]</a> Mr. Estcourt mentions that the land ‘would let to a farmer at about
20s. per acre now.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_279" href="#FNanchor_279" class="label">[279]</a> It is interesting to find that these allotments were still being let out successfully
in 1868. See p. 4145 of the Report on the Employment of Children, Young
Persons, and Women in Agriculture, 1868.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_280" href="#FNanchor_280" class="label">[280]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. iii. p. 329.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_281" href="#FNanchor_281" class="label">[281]</a> 1803, p. 850.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_282" href="#FNanchor_282" class="label">[282]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. i. p. 100.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_283" href="#FNanchor_283" class="label">[283]</a> Vol. xxvi. p. 4.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_284" href="#FNanchor_284" class="label">[284]</a> The most distinguished advocate of this policy was William Marshall, the
agricultural writer who published a strong appeal for the labourers in his book
<i>On the Management of Landed Estates</i>, 1806, p. 155; cf. also Curwen’s <i>Hints</i>,
p. 239: ‘A farther attention to the cottager’s comfort is attended with little
cost; I mean giving him a small garden, and planting that as well as the walls
of his house with fruit trees.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_285" href="#FNanchor_285" class="label">[285]</a> Vol. xxv. p. 349.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_286" href="#FNanchor_286" class="label">[286]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 358.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_287" href="#FNanchor_287" class="label">[287]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. ii. p. 184.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_288" href="#FNanchor_288" class="label">[288]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 134.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_289" href="#FNanchor_289" class="label">[289]</a> Cf. <i>Poor Law Report</i>, 1817, Appendix G, p. 4.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_290" href="#FNanchor_290" class="label">[290]</a> Capes, <i>Rural Life in Hampshire</i>, p. 282.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_291" href="#FNanchor_291" class="label">[291]</a> <i>Poor Law Report</i>, 1834, p. 61; cf. <i>ibid.</i>, p. 185.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_292" href="#FNanchor_292" class="label">[292]</a> Notes to Kent’s <i>Norfolk</i>, p. 178.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_293" href="#FNanchor_293" class="label">[293]</a> See <i>Poor Law Report</i>, 1834, p. 181, and <i>Allotments Committee</i>, 1843,
p. 108.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_294" href="#FNanchor_294" class="label">[294]</a> 59 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 12.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_295" href="#FNanchor_295" class="label">[295]</a> 1 and 2 William <span class="allsmcap">IV.</span> c. 42.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_296" href="#FNanchor_296" class="label">[296]</a> Speenhamland is now part of Newbury. The Pelican Inn has disappeared,
but the Pelican Posting House survives.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_297" href="#FNanchor_297" class="label">[297]</a> Charles Dundas, afterwards Lord Amesbury, 1751&ndash;1832; Liberal M.P. for
Berkshire, 1794&ndash;1832, nominated by Sheridan for the Speakership in 1802 but
withdrew.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_298" href="#FNanchor_298" class="label">[298]</a> <i>Reading Mercury</i>, April 20, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_299" href="#FNanchor_299" class="label">[299]</a> <i>Reading Mercury</i>, April 20, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_300" href="#FNanchor_300" class="label">[300]</a> See <i>Ibid.</i>, May 11, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_301" href="#FNanchor_301" class="label">[301]</a> Eden, vol. i. p. 578.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_302" href="#FNanchor_302" class="label">[302]</a> On the same day a ‘respectable meeting’ at Basingstoke, with the Mayor
in the chair, was advocating the fixing of labourers’ wages in accordance with the
price of wheat without any reference to parish relief.&mdash;<i>Reading Mercury</i>, May
11, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_303" href="#FNanchor_303" class="label">[303]</a> See <i>Ipswich Journal</i>, February 7, 1795, and <i>Reading Mercury</i>, July 6, 1795.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_304" href="#FNanchor_304" class="label">[304]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 384.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_305" href="#FNanchor_305" class="label">[305]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 548.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_306" href="#FNanchor_306" class="label">[306]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 27.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_307" href="#FNanchor_307" class="label">[307]</a> Eden, vol. ii. p. 29.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_308" href="#FNanchor_308" class="label">[308]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 32.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_309" href="#FNanchor_309" class="label">[309]</a> ‘The Village,’ Book <span class="allsmcap">I</span>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_310" href="#FNanchor_310" class="label">[310]</a> <i>Poor Law Report</i>, 1834, p. 60.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_311" href="#FNanchor_311" class="label">[311]</a> The big landlord under this method shared the privilege of paying the
labourer’s wages with the small farmer.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_312" href="#FNanchor_312" class="label">[312]</a> <i>Tribune</i>, vol. ii. p. 317.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_313" href="#FNanchor_313" class="label">[313]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 339.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_314" href="#FNanchor_314" class="label">[314]</a> Poor Law Commission Report of 1834, p. 126.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_315" href="#FNanchor_315" class="label">[315]</a> See Curtler’s <i>Short History of Agriculture</i>, p. 249.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_316" href="#FNanchor_316" class="label">[316]</a> Smart, <i>Economic Annals</i>, p. 36.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_317" href="#FNanchor_317" class="label">[317]</a> ‘It was during the war that the cottagers of England were chiefly deprived
of the little pieces of land and garden, and made solely dependent for subsistence
on the wages of their daily labour, or the poor rates. Land, and the produce of
it, had become so valuable, that the labourer was envied the occupation of the
smallest piece of ground which he possessed: and even “the bare-worn common”
was denied.’&mdash;<i>Kentish Chronicle</i>, December 14, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_318" href="#FNanchor_318" class="label">[318]</a> Curtler, p. 243.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_319" href="#FNanchor_319" class="label">[319]</a> <i>Agricultural State of the Kingdom</i>, Board of Agriculture, 1816, p. 7.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_320" href="#FNanchor_320" class="label">[320]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 250&ndash;1.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_321" href="#FNanchor_321" class="label">[321]</a> P. 144.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_322" href="#FNanchor_322" class="label">[322]</a> C. C. Western (1767&ndash;1844); whig M.P., 1790&ndash;1832; chief representative of
agricultural interests; made peer in 1833.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_323" href="#FNanchor_323" class="label">[323]</a> <i>Annual Register</i>, 1816, Chron., p. 67.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_324" href="#FNanchor_324" class="label">[324]</a> The disturbances at Brandon ceased immediately on the concession of the
demands of the rioters; flour was reduced to 2s. 6d. a stone, and wages were
raised for two weeks to 2s. a head. The rioters were contented, and peace was
restored.&mdash;<i>Times</i>, May 23, 1816.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_325" href="#FNanchor_325" class="label">[325]</a> <i>Annual Register</i>, 1816, Chron., p. 67.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_326" href="#FNanchor_326" class="label">[326]</a> <i>Cambridge Chronicle</i>, June 28, 1816.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_327" href="#FNanchor_327" class="label">[327]</a> <i>Times</i>, June 26. A curious irony has placed side by side with the account
in the <i>Annual Register</i> of the execution of the five men who were hung for their
share in this spasm of starvation and despair, the report of a meeting, with the
inevitable Wilberforce in the chair, for raising a subscription for rebuilding the
Protestant Church at Copenhagen, which had been destroyed by the British
Fleet at the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_328" href="#FNanchor_328" class="label">[328]</a> <i>Agricultural State of the Kingdom</i>, p. 13.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_329" href="#FNanchor_329" class="label">[329]</a> 59 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 50.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_330" href="#FNanchor_330" class="label">[330]</a> See <i>Annual Register</i>, 1819, p. 320.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_331" href="#FNanchor_331" class="label">[331]</a> Those assessed at £100 were to have two votes, those at £150 three votes,
and those at £400 four votes. Whitbread did not propose to copy the provision
of Gilbert’s Act, which withdrew all voting power in vestries in parishes that
adopted that Act from persons assessed at less than £5.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_332" href="#FNanchor_332" class="label">[332]</a> <i>Political Register</i>, August 29, 1807, p. 329.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_333" href="#FNanchor_333" class="label">[333]</a> Letter to Samuel Whitbread, M.P., on his proposed Bill for the Amendment
of the Poor Laws, 1807.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_334" href="#FNanchor_334" class="label">[334]</a> 58 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 69.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_335" href="#FNanchor_335" class="label">[335]</a> 59 George <span class="allsmcap">III.</span> c. 12.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_336" href="#FNanchor_336" class="label">[336]</a> H. O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_337" href="#FNanchor_337" class="label">[337]</a> Of course the system was only one of the causes of this difference in wages.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_338" href="#FNanchor_338" class="label">[338]</a> P. 99.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_339" href="#FNanchor_339" class="label">[339]</a> See <i>Agricultural State of the Kingdom</i>, Board of Agriculture, p. 231, and
Cobbett, <i>Political Register</i>, October 5, 1816.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_340" href="#FNanchor_340" class="label">[340]</a> Pp. 21 and 23.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_341" href="#FNanchor_341" class="label">[341]</a> The table is given in the Report of the Committee on the Poor Laws,
1828.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_342" href="#FNanchor_342" class="label">[342]</a> Cobbett, <i>Political Register</i>, September 21, 1822. Cobbett wrote one of his
liveliest articles on this scale, setting out the number of livings held by the five
parsons, and various circumstances connected with their families.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_343" href="#FNanchor_343" class="label">[343]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, September 9, 1826.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_344" href="#FNanchor_344" class="label">[344]</a> <i>Rural Rides</i>, p. 17.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_345" href="#FNanchor_345" class="label">[345]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 609.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_346" href="#FNanchor_346" class="label">[346]</a> The farmers were usually sympathetic to poaching as a habit, but it was
not so much from a perception of its economic tendencies, as from a general
resentment against the Game Laws.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_347" href="#FNanchor_347" class="label">[347]</a> See Cobbett; <i>Letters to Peel</i>; <i>Political Register</i>; and Dr. Hunt’s evidence
before the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions,
1827.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_348" href="#FNanchor_348" class="label">[348]</a> A manifesto was published in a Bath paper in reply to this Act; it is quoted
by Sydney Smith, <i>Essays</i>, p. 263: ‘<span class="smcap">Take Notice.</span>&mdash;We have lately heard and
seen that there is an act passed, and whatever poacher is caught destroying the
game is to be transported for seven years.&mdash;<i>This is English Liberty!</i></p>

<p>‘Now we do swear to each other that the first of our company that this law is
inflicted on, that there shall not be one gentleman’s seat in our country escape
the rage of fire. The first that impeaches shall be shot. We have sworn not to
impeach. You may think it a threat, but they will find it a reality. The Game
Laws were too severe before. The Lord of all men sent these animals for the
peasants as well as for the prince. God will not let his people be oppressed. He
will assist us in our undertaking, and we will execute it with caution.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_349" href="#FNanchor_349" class="label">[349]</a> The Archbishop of Canterbury prosecuted a man under this Act in January
1831, for rescuing a poacher from a gamekeeper without violence, on the ground
that he thought it his duty to enforce the provisions of the Act.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_350" href="#FNanchor_350" class="label">[350]</a> House of Lords, September 19, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_351" href="#FNanchor_351" class="label">[351]</a> A magistrate wrote to Sir R. Peel in 1827 to say that many magistrates sent
in very imperfect returns of convictions, and that the true number far exceeded
the records.&mdash;Webb, <i>Parish and County</i>, p. 598 note.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_352" href="#FNanchor_352" class="label">[352]</a> <i>Brougham Speeches</i>, vol. ii. p. 373.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_353" href="#FNanchor_353" class="label">[353]</a> <i>Political Register</i>, March 29, 1823, vol. xxiv. p. 796.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_354" href="#FNanchor_354" class="label">[354]</a> Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions, 1827, p. 30.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_355" href="#FNanchor_355" class="label">[355]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 39.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_356" href="#FNanchor_356" class="label">[356]</a> Quoted in <i>Times</i>, December 18, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_357" href="#FNanchor_357" class="label">[357]</a> Return of Convictions under the Game Laws from 1827 to 1830. Ordered
by the House of Commons to be printed, February 14, 1831, p. 4.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_358" href="#FNanchor_358" class="label">[358]</a> <i>Hansard</i>, June 9, 1817.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_359" href="#FNanchor_359" class="label">[359]</a> Scotland was exempted from the operation of this statute, for whilst the
Bill was going through Parliament, a case raised in a Scottish Court ended in a
unanimous decision by the six Judges of the High Court of Justiciary that
killing by a spring gun was murder. Hence the milder provisions of this Act
were not required. See <i>Annual Register</i>, 1827, p. 185, and Chron., p. 116.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_360" href="#FNanchor_360" class="label">[360]</a> That Coke of Norfolk did not err on the side of mercy towards poachers is clear
from his record. His biographer (Mrs. Stirling) states that one of his first efforts
in Parliament was to introduce a Bill to punish night poaching.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_361" href="#FNanchor_361" class="label">[361]</a> P. 29 ff.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_362" href="#FNanchor_362" class="label">[362]</a> <i>Annual Register</i>, 1827, p. 184.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_363" href="#FNanchor_363" class="label">[363]</a> <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, December 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_364" href="#FNanchor_364" class="label">[364]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, February 25, 1782.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_365" href="#FNanchor_365" class="label">[365]</a> P. 42.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_366" href="#FNanchor_366" class="label">[366]</a> ‘Speaking now of country and agricultural parishes, I do not know above
one instance in all my experience.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_367" href="#FNanchor_367" class="label">[367]</a> Some Enclosure Acts prescribed special penalties for the breaking of fences.
See cases of Haute Huntre and Croydon in Appendix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_368" href="#FNanchor_368" class="label">[368]</a> See Mr. Estcourt’s evidence before Select Committee on Secondary Punishments,
1831, p. 41.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_369" href="#FNanchor_369" class="label">[369]</a> <i>Present State of the Law</i>, p. 41.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_370" href="#FNanchor_370" class="label">[370]</a> <i>From Ploughshare to Parliament</i>, p. 186; the <i>Annual Register</i> for 1791
records the execution of two boys at Newport for stealing, one aged fourteen and
the other fifteen.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_371" href="#FNanchor_371" class="label">[371]</a> Sydney Smith, <i>Essays</i>, p. 487.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_372" href="#FNanchor_372" class="label">[372]</a> Vol. ii. p. 153.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_373" href="#FNanchor_373" class="label">[373]</a> Romilly, <i>Memoirs</i>, vol. ii. p. 181.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_374" href="#FNanchor_374" class="label">[374]</a> It was again rejected in 1813 by twenty to fifteen, the majority including
five bishops.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_375" href="#FNanchor_375" class="label">[375]</a> <i>Correspondence on the Subject of Secondary Punishments</i>, 1834, p. 22.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_376" href="#FNanchor_376" class="label">[376]</a> See Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, 1831, and Select
Committee on Transportation, 1838.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_377" href="#FNanchor_377" class="label">[377]</a> See evidence of Dr. Ullathorne, Roman Catholic Vicar-General of New Holland
and Van Diemen’s Land, before the 1838 Committee on Transportation.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_378" href="#FNanchor_378" class="label">[378]</a> <i>Reflections on the Revolution in France</i> (fourth edition), p. 359.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_379" href="#FNanchor_379" class="label">[379]</a> Eden, vol. i. p. 579.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_380" href="#FNanchor_380" class="label">[380]</a> <i>Reports on Poor</i>, vol. ii. p. 325.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_381" href="#FNanchor_381" class="label">[381]</a> <i>Political Register</i>, vol. lxxviii. p. 710.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_382" href="#FNanchor_382" class="label">[382]</a> Hasbach, p. 131.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_383" href="#FNanchor_383" class="label">[383]</a> ‘Village,’ Book 1.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_384" href="#FNanchor_384" class="label">[384]</a> Vol. xxxviii. p. 750 ff.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_385" href="#FNanchor_385" class="label">[385]</a> Cobbett’s <i>Political Register</i>, March 17, 1821, p. 779.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_386" href="#FNanchor_386" class="label">[386]</a> Bamford, <i>Passages in the Life of a Radical</i>, p. 38.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_387" href="#FNanchor_387" class="label">[387]</a> <i>Rural Rides</i>, p. 460.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_388" href="#FNanchor_388" class="label">[388]</a> <i>Reflections</i>, p. 61.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_389" href="#FNanchor_389" class="label">[389]</a> <i>Poor Law Report</i>, 1817.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_390" href="#FNanchor_390" class="label">[390]</a> Cf. <i>Ibid.</i>, 1834, p. 161.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_391" href="#FNanchor_391" class="label">[391]</a> Cf. case of apprentice, <i>Annual Register</i>, 1819, p. 195.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_392" href="#FNanchor_392" class="label">[392]</a> <i>Poor Law Report</i>, 1817; in some cases there were amicable arrangements to
keep down legal expenses; <i>e.g.</i> at Halifax (Eden), the overseer formed a
society of the officers of adjoining parishes. Cases were referred to them, and
the decision of the majority was accepted.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_393" href="#FNanchor_393" class="label">[393]</a> <i>Wealth of Nations</i>, vol. iii. p. 234.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_394" href="#FNanchor_394" class="label">[394]</a> <i>Life in an English Village</i>, by Maude F. Davies, p. 58.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_395" href="#FNanchor_395" class="label">[395]</a> <i>Inquiry into the State of the Public Mind among the Lower Classes</i>, p. 27.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_396" href="#FNanchor_396" class="label">[396]</a> The parsons under Squire Allworthy’s roof, the parson to whom Pamela
appealed in vain, and, most striking of all, Mr. Collins in <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_397" href="#FNanchor_397" class="label">[397]</a> <i>Life</i>, vol. iv. p. 277.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_398" href="#FNanchor_398" class="label">[398]</a> <i>Parliamentary Register</i>, April 18, 1800.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_399" href="#FNanchor_399" class="label">[399]</a> Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 243.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_400" href="#FNanchor_400" class="label">[400]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 84.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_401" href="#FNanchor_401" class="label">[401]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 56&ndash;7.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_402" href="#FNanchor_402" class="label">[402]</a> Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 244.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_403" href="#FNanchor_403" class="label">[403]</a> Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 78&ndash;9.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_404" href="#FNanchor_404" class="label">[404]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 80.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_405" href="#FNanchor_405" class="label">[405]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 291.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_406" href="#FNanchor_406" class="label">[406]</a> Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 94.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_407" href="#FNanchor_407" class="label">[407]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 172.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_408" href="#FNanchor_408" class="label">[408]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 66.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_409" href="#FNanchor_409" class="label">[409]</a> Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 98&ndash;104.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_410" href="#FNanchor_410" class="label">[410]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 100.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_411" href="#FNanchor_411" class="label">[411]</a> Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 108.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_412" href="#FNanchor_412" class="label">[412]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 210.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_413" href="#FNanchor_413" class="label">[413]</a> Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 73.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_414" href="#FNanchor_414" class="label">[414]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 157.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_415" href="#FNanchor_415" class="label">[415]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 158.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_416" href="#FNanchor_416" class="label">[416]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 161.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_417" href="#FNanchor_417" class="label">[417]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 130.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_418" href="#FNanchor_418" class="label">[418]</a> Appendix F, No. 3, to 1st Report of Commissioners.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_419" href="#FNanchor_419" class="label">[419]</a> See Webb’s <i>History of Trade Unionism</i>, p. 59.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_420" href="#FNanchor_420" class="label">[420]</a> <i>Tom Jones</i>, Bk. <span class="allsmcap">XII.</span> chap. i.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_421" href="#FNanchor_421" class="label">[421]</a> See Fawley, p. 279.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_422" href="#FNanchor_422" class="label">[422]</a> <i>Kent Herald</i>, September 2, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_423" href="#FNanchor_423" class="label">[423]</a> <i>Times</i>, January 3, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_424" href="#FNanchor_424" class="label">[424]</a> September 30, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_425" href="#FNanchor_425" class="label">[425]</a> <i>Brighton Chronicle</i>, October 6, quoted in <i>Times</i>, October 14.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_426" href="#FNanchor_426" class="label">[426]</a> For Brede see H. O. Papers, Extracts from Poor Law Commissioners’ Report,
published 1833, and newspapers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_427" href="#FNanchor_427" class="label">[427]</a> They were signed by G. S. Hill, minister, by eight farmers and the four
labourer delegates.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_428" href="#FNanchor_428" class="label">[428]</a> Affidavit in H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_429" href="#FNanchor_429" class="label">[429]</a> <i>Times</i>, November 25.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_430" href="#FNanchor_430" class="label">[430]</a> The petition was as follows: ‘We feel that in justice we ought not to suffer
a moment to pass away without communicating to your Grace the great and
unprecedented distress which we are enabled from our own personal experience
to state prevails among all the peasantry to a degree not only dreadful to individuals,
but also to an extent which, if not checked, must be attended with
serious consequences to the national prosperity.’ Mr. Hodges does not mention
the date, merely stating that it was sent to Wellington when Prime Minister.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_431" href="#FNanchor_431" class="label">[431]</a> H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_432" href="#FNanchor_432" class="label">[432]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_433" href="#FNanchor_433" class="label">[433]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_434" href="#FNanchor_434" class="label">[434]</a> H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_435" href="#FNanchor_435" class="label">[435]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_436" href="#FNanchor_436" class="label">[436]</a> Transported for life to New South Wales.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_437" href="#FNanchor_437" class="label">[437]</a> Ford was capitally convicted and sentenced to transportation for life, but
his sentence was commuted to imprisonment.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_438" href="#FNanchor_438" class="label">[438]</a> H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_439" href="#FNanchor_439" class="label">[439]</a> According to local tradition he was killed not by the yeomanry but by a
farmer, before the troop came up. See Hudson, <i>A Shepherd’s Life</i>, p. 248.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_440" href="#FNanchor_440" class="label">[440]</a> Transported for life to New South Wales.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_441" href="#FNanchor_441" class="label">[441]</a> Transported for life to New South Wales.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_442" href="#FNanchor_442" class="label">[442]</a> H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_443" href="#FNanchor_443" class="label">[443]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_444" href="#FNanchor_444" class="label">[444]</a> Ten days later, after Lord Melbourne’s circular of December 8, Dr.
Newbolt changed his tone. Writing to the Home Office he deprecated the
censure implied in that circular, and stated that his conduct was due to personal
infirmities and threats of violence: indeed he had subsequently heard from
a certain Mr. Wickham that ‘I left his place just in time to save my own life,
as some of the Mob had it in contemplation to drag me out of the carriage, and
to destroy me upon the spot, and it was entirely owing to the interference of
some of the better disposed of the Peasantry that my life was preserved.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_445" href="#FNanchor_445" class="label">[445]</a> See p. 258.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_446" href="#FNanchor_446" class="label">[446]</a> H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_447" href="#FNanchor_447" class="label">[447]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_448" href="#FNanchor_448" class="label">[448]</a> See <i>Oxford University and City Herald</i>, November 20 and 27, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_449" href="#FNanchor_449" class="label">[449]</a> Russell, <i>On Crimes and Misdemeanours</i>, p. 371.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_450" href="#FNanchor_450" class="label">[450]</a> Sir J. B. Bosanquet (1773&ndash;1847).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_451" href="#FNanchor_451" class="label">[451]</a> <i>Times</i>, December 15, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_452" href="#FNanchor_452" class="label">[452]</a> Sir W. E. Taunton (1773&ndash;1835).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_453" href="#FNanchor_453" class="label">[453]</a> The <i>Times</i> on December 25 quoted part of this charge in a leading article
with some sharp strictures.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_454" href="#FNanchor_454" class="label">[454]</a> Sir John Vaughan (1769&ndash;1839).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_455" href="#FNanchor_455" class="label">[455]</a> <i>Times</i>, December 21, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_456" href="#FNanchor_456" class="label">[456]</a> Sir James Parke (1782&ndash;1868).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_457" href="#FNanchor_457" class="label">[457]</a> <i>Times</i>, January 3, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_458" href="#FNanchor_458" class="label">[458]</a> Sir E. H. Alderson (1787&ndash;1857).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_459" href="#FNanchor_459" class="label">[459]</a> <i>Times</i>, January 6, 1831. Cf. letter of Mr. R. Pollen, J.P., afterwards one of
Winchester Commissioners, to Home Office, November 26: ‘It may be worth
considering the law, which exempts all <i>Threshing Machines</i> from capital punishment,
should such scenes as these occur again amongst the agricultural classes.
I confess I view with great regret that they have found the mode of combining,
which I had hoped was confined to the manufacturing classes.’</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_460" href="#FNanchor_460" class="label">[460]</a> Sir J. A. Park (1763&ndash;1838).</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_461" href="#FNanchor_461" class="label">[461]</a> <i>Times</i>, January 15, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_462" href="#FNanchor_462" class="label">[462]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, January 12, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_463" href="#FNanchor_463" class="label">[463]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_464" href="#FNanchor_464" class="label">[464]</a> February 8, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_465" href="#FNanchor_465" class="label">[465]</a> There are no statistics for Wilts, Hants, Bucks, and Dorsetshire prisoners.
At Reading out of 138 prisoners 37 could read, and 25 of the 37 could also write.
At Abingdon, out of 47, 17 could read, and 6 of them could also write. In
Wilts and Hants the proportion was probably smaller, as the people were more
neglected.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_466" href="#FNanchor_466" class="label">[466]</a> <i>Times</i>, December 24, 1830.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_467" href="#FNanchor_467" class="label">[467]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, January 8, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_468" href="#FNanchor_468" class="label">[468]</a> <i>Times</i>, January 7, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_469" href="#FNanchor_469" class="label">[469]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, December 24, 1830. Henry Bunce was transported for life to New
South Wales.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_470" href="#FNanchor_470" class="label">[470]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, January 14.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_471" href="#FNanchor_471" class="label">[471]</a> Cobbett, <i>Political Register</i>, vol. lxxiii. p. 535, and local papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_472" href="#FNanchor_472" class="label">[472]</a> Fussell’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Boys was sent to Van
Diemen’s Land.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_473" href="#FNanchor_473" class="label">[473]</a> H. O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial. Hants, 1831, March 24.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_474" href="#FNanchor_474" class="label">[474]</a> As early as November 26, Mr. Richard Pollen, Chairman of Quarter
Sessions and afterwards a commissioner at Winchester, had written to the
Home Office, ‘I have directed the Magistrates’ attention very much to the
class of People found in the Mobs many miles from their own homes, Taylors,
Shoemakers etc., who have been found always very eloquent, they are
universally politicians: they should be, I think, selected.’&mdash;H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_475" href="#FNanchor_475" class="label">[475]</a> For a full account of the incident, including the text of the petition and list
of signatures, see Cobbett’s <i>Two-penny Trash</i>, July 1, 1832.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_476" href="#FNanchor_476" class="label">[476]</a> See p. 277.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_477" href="#FNanchor_477" class="label">[477]</a> February 8, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_478" href="#FNanchor_478" class="label">[478]</a> <i>Times</i>, January 8, 1831. The <i>Times</i> of the same day contains an interesting
petition from the Birmingham Political Union on behalf of all the prisoners
tried before the Special Commissions.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_479" href="#FNanchor_479" class="label">[479]</a> The scene is still vividly remembered by an old woman over ninety years of
age with whom Mr. Hudson spoke.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_480" href="#FNanchor_480" class="label">[480]</a> H. O. Papers, Disturbance Entry-Book, Letter of January 3, 1831.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_481" href="#FNanchor_481" class="label">[481]</a> See p. 268.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_482" href="#FNanchor_482" class="label">[482]</a> Three boats carried the convicts, the <i>Eliza</i> and the <i>Proteus</i> to Van Diemen’s
Land, the <i>Eleanor</i> to New South Wales. The list of the prisoners on board
shows that they came from the following <span class="lock">counties:&mdash;</span></p>

<p>
Berks,       44<br />
Bucks,       29<br />
Dorset,      13<br />
Essex,       23<br />
Gloucester,  24<br />
Hampshire,  100<br />
Hunts,        5<br />
Kent,        22<br />
Norfolk,     11<br />
Oxford,      11<br />
Suffolk,      7<br />
Sussex,      17<br />
Wilts,      151<br />
<br />
<span class="smcap">Total</span>,    457<br />
</p>

<p>If this represents the total, some sentences of transportation must have been
commuted for imprisonment; possibly some rioters were sent later, for Mr. Potter
MacQueen, in giving evidence before the Committee on Secondary Punishments,
spoke of the six hundred able-bodied men who had been transported in consequence
of being concerned in the Swing offences.&mdash;Report of Committee, p. 95.
Four years later Lord John Russell, as Home Secretary, pardoned 264 of the
convicts, in 1836 he pardoned 86 more, and in 1837 the survivors, mostly men
sentenced for life or for fourteen years, were given pardons conditional on their
‘continuing to reside in Australia for the remainder of their sentences.’ No
free passages back were granted, and Mr. Hudson states that very few, not more
than one in five or six, ever returned.&mdash;<i>A Shepherd’s Life</i>, p. 247.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_483" href="#FNanchor_483" class="label">[483]</a> See Hudson, <i>Ibid.</i></p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_484" href="#FNanchor_484" class="label">[484]</a> See <i>Annual Register</i> and local papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_485" href="#FNanchor_485" class="label">[485]</a> He was sent to Van Diemen’s Land. It is only fair to Lord Sheffield to say
that he applied in vain to Lord Melbourne for a mitigation of the life sentence.
See Criminal Entry-Book, H. O. Papers.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_486" href="#FNanchor_486" class="label">[486]</a> Correspondence on Secondary Punishment, March 1834, p. 23.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_487" href="#FNanchor_487" class="label">[487]</a> See a remarkable letter from Lord Dudley. ‘He has already been enough
on the Continent for any reasonable end, either of curiosity or instruction, and
his availing himself so immediately of this opportunity to go to a foreign country
again looks a little too much like distaste for his own.’&mdash;Letters to Ivy
from the first Earl of Dudley, October 1808.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_488" href="#FNanchor_488" class="label">[488]</a> See on this subject a very interesting article by Mr. L. March Phillipps in
the <i>Contemporary Review</i>, August 1911.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_489" href="#FNanchor_489" class="label">[489]</a> Helpstone was enclosed by an Act of 1809. Clare was then sixteen years
old. His association with the old village life had been intimate, for he had
tended geese and sheep on the common, and he had learnt the old country songs
from the last village cowherd. His poem on Helpstone was published in 1820.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_490" href="#FNanchor_490" class="label">[490]</a> Referred to below as ‘A’.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_491" href="#FNanchor_491" class="label">[491]</a> Referred to below as ‘B’.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_492" href="#FNanchor_492" class="label">[492]</a> Note that the compensation to the Lords of the Manor added together
comes to less than one ninety-first part of the soil.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_493" href="#FNanchor_493" class="label">[493]</a> <i>I.e.</i> lands over which there is right of common for half the year between
Michaelmas and Lady Day or Lammas and Lady Day.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_494" href="#FNanchor_494" class="label">[494]</a> This referred to roads only, see Act.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_495" href="#FNanchor_495" class="label">[495]</a> It took twenty-nine years.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_496" href="#FNanchor_496" class="label">[496]</a> Sir James Lowther, afterwards Lord Lowther, who had originally petitioned
for enclosure, had died in 1802. He was succeeded by his cousin, Wordsworth’s
patron.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_497" href="#FNanchor_497" class="label">[497]</a> These allotments were fenced by the other proprietors and did not bear
any of the expenses of the Act.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_498" href="#FNanchor_498" class="label">[498]</a> Including 8 acres 1 rood 5 perches for rights of soil.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_499" href="#FNanchor_499" class="label">[499]</a> Nine of them women.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_500" href="#FNanchor_500" class="label">[500]</a> See p. 55.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_501" href="#FNanchor_501" class="label">[501]</a> See Petition, p. 379, where nearly a hundred are said to do so.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_502" href="#FNanchor_502" class="label">[502]</a> Billingsley’s <i>Somerset</i>, p. 191.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_503" href="#FNanchor_503" class="label">[503]</a> <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 191&ndash;2.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_504" href="#FNanchor_504" class="label">[504]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. cccxxxix.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_505" href="#FNanchor_505" class="label">[505]</a> Davies, p. 152.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_506" href="#FNanchor_506" class="label">[506]</a> Davies puts 1½d., but this is probably a slip.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_507" href="#FNanchor_507" class="label">[507]</a> Davies, p. 166.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_508" href="#FNanchor_508" class="label">[508]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. cccxlii.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_509" href="#FNanchor_509" class="label">[509]</a> Davies, p. 176.</p>

</div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a id="Footnote_510" href="#FNanchor_510" class="label">[510]</a> Eden, vol. iii. p. cccxlvi.</p>

</div>

</div>


<hr class="full" />


<div class="transnote p4">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Note">Transcriber's Note</h2>



<p>The following apparent errors have been corrected:</p>

<ul>
<li>p. 3 "Gobereau" changed to "Hobereau"</li>

<li>p. 22 "eighteeenth-century" changed to "eighteenth-century"</li>

<li>p. 31 (note) "consent (p. 339)" changed to "consent’ (p. 339)"</li>

<li>p. 51 "of 721 neuter.’" changed to "of 721 neuter."</li>

<li>p. 58 "of canvassing,’" changed to "of canvassing.’"</li>

<li>p. 62 "his award was made," changed to "his award was made."</li>

<li>p. 69 "irregularity the Bill" changed to "irregularity: the Bill"</li>

<li>p. 76 "no less that" changed to "no less than"</li>

<li>p. 78 "ask for permisson" changed to "ask for permission"</li>

<li>p. 79 "inariably" changed to "invariably"</li>

<li>p. 105 "ses vaissaux" changed to "ses vassaux"</li>

<li>p. 107 "As Sidlesham in Surrey" changed to "At Sidlesham in Surrey"</li>

<li>p. 113 "till be became" changed to "till he became"</li>

<li>p. 119 "a parishoner" changed to "a parishioner"</li>

<li>p. 121 "As Ipswich" changed to "At Ipswich"</li>

<li>p. 121 "severe sentence." changed to "severe sentence.’"</li>

<li>p. 146 (note) "p. 91." changed to "p. 91.)"</li>

<li>p. 148 (note) "vol. i. p. 397" changed to "vol. i. p. 397."</li>

<li>p. 160 "saying ‘The more" changed to "saying "The more"</li>

<li>p. 160 "for us.’" changed to "for us."’"</li>

<li>p. 217 "demander a leur" changed to "demander à leur"</li>

<li>p. 228 "p. 66" changed to "p. 66."</li>

<li>p. 274 (note) "Vaughan (1769&ndash;1839" changed to "Vaughan (1769&ndash;1839)."</li>

<li>p. 278 "Sergeant Wild" changed to "Sergeant Wilde"</li>

<li>p. 304 "years’ transportation," changed to "years’ transportation."</li>

<li>p. 342 "(Lord of the Manor)" changed to "(Lord of the Manor),"</li>

<li>p. 343 "Clarks, Darey’s" changed to "Clarks, Dareys"</li>

<li>p. 357 "asking for leave." changed to "asking for leave"</li>

<li>p. 365 "‘A Clause was offered" changed to "A Clause was offered"</li>

<li>p. 380 "Cocks, Esq" changed to "Cocks, Esq."</li>

<li>p. 395 "p, 191." changed to "p. 191."</li>

<li>p. 397 "oatmeal" changed to "oatmeal,"</li>

<li>p. 398 "scarce’) Clothes," changed to "scarce’), Clothes,"</li>

<li>p. 402 "<i>History of the English Agricultural Labourer</i>" changed to "<i>History of the English Agricultural Labourer</i>."</li>

<li>p. 405 "Aldeborough" changed to "Aldborough"</li>

<li>p. 405 "43 <i>n</i>" changed to "43 <i>n.</i>"</li>

<li>p. 405 "50 59" changed to "50, 59"</li>

<li>p. 405 "1795, 121" changed to "1795, 121;"</li>

<li>p. 405 "J.P, 297" changed to "J.P., 297."</li>

<li>p. 409 "Charles, 141," changed to "Charles, 141;"</li>

<li>p. 409 "148 <i>n</i>" changed to "148 <i>n.</i>"</li>

<li>p. 411 "Isle of Wight, 169" changed to "Isle of Wight, 169."</li>

<li>p. 411 "Holdsworth, W., 23 <i>n.</i>" was printed out of order</li>

<li>p. 414 "Prothero, R. E" changed to "Prothero, R. E."</li>

<li>p. 414 "against enclosure 47" changed to "against enclosure, 47"</li>

<li>p. 417 "Mr. Serjeant" changed to "Mr. Sergeant"</li>
</ul>


<p>Inconsistent or archaic spelling and punctuation have otherwise been kept as printed.</p>

</div>
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69002 ***</div>
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