The village labourer, 1760-1832 / A study in the government of England before the Reform Bill

by J. L. Hammond; Barbara Bradby Hammond

DIET REFORM

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.[184] The rich set an example in the worst days by cutting off pastry and restricting their servants to a quartern loaf a week each.[185] It was 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.[186] 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.[187] A Cumberland labourer with a wife and family of five was shown by Eden[188] 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.[189] Clearly the starving south was to be saved by the introduction of cheap cereals.

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.’[190] 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.[191] Correspondent after correspondent to the Annals of Agriculture 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.[192] 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 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.’[193]

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:

Et majoribus et solidis magis ossibus intus

Fundatum, et validis aptum per viscera nervis;

Nec facile ex aestu, nec frigore quod caperetur,

Nec novitate cibi, nec labi corporis ulla.

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.’[194] 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.’[195]

Apart from the constitutional conservatism of the poor there were good reasons for the obstinacy of the labourers. 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.’[196] 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 strong 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.’[197] 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.’[198] 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 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.[199] An agricultural labourer at Wetherall in Cumberland (five in family) spends £7, 6s. 9d. on cereals and £2, 13s. 4d. on milk.[200] 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,[201] and a cooper at Frome, Somerset (seven in family) spending £45, 10s. on bread, and about 17s. on milk.[202] These figures are typical.[203]

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.’[204] 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. Kent’s larger cottages, would not think much of retailing to their poorer neighbours a little corn or a little milk, as they might want, which the poor can now seldom have at all, and never but as a great favour from the rich farmers.’[205] 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.’[206] Eden[207] 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.[208]

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 Advice to Young Men[209] 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,[210] 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 tea-drinking. 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 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?[211]... Still you exclaim, Tea is a luxury. If you mean fine hyson tea, sweetened with refined sugar, and softened with cream, I readily admit it to be so. But this 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.’[212] We learn from the Annals of Agriculture that at Sedgefield in Durham[213] many of the poor declared that they had been driven to drinking tea from not being able to procure milk.[214]

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.[215] 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.

A few isolated attempts were made to remedy the scarcity of milk,[216] which had been caused by enclosure and the consolidation 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,’[217] 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.[218] 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.[219]

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’[220]; 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 Annals of Agriculture,[221] ‘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’[222]; to the labourer whose scanty earnings left little margin over the expense of bread alone, the loss of firing was not balanced by the economy of time.[223]

Insufficient firing added to the miseries caused by insufficient clothes and food. An ingenious writer in the Annals of Agriculture[224] 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,[225] ‘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.’[226] 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.’[227] 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.’[228] There were probably many families like the two described in Davies[229] who spent nothing on fuel, which they procured by gathering cow-dung, and breaking their neighbours’ hedges.’[230]

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 Reports on the Poor,[231] 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.[232]