CHAPTER II
INTRODUCES THE READER TO A PHILANTHROPIC PARSON AND A GREAT SQUIRE.
In the years that elapsed between the close of the Napoleonic wars and the passing of the Reform Bill, as indeed often since, the debasement and misery of the agricultural poor rose to agony point, and soon after Thomas Wanless's marriage an outbreak of popular discontent, based on hunger, stirred a little the smooth surface of society. It became necessary, for very shame, to at least appear to do something for the pauperised masses on whose backs "society" was supported. Accordingly, a pseudo philanthropic agitation was started in the rural districts with the object of bettering, or rather of seeming to better, the peasant's lot. Mass meetings were held, parsons and even bishops threw themselves into the movement, patronised it, and sought to guide it to a consummation safe for themselves and their "dear church," itself then so great a landowner.
For rustic miseries these high personages had one main panacea, and one only. This was not free land, fixity of tenure for the besotted farmers always so content to lie at the feet of their earthly lords; it was not disendowment of the Church and the distribution of its lands among the people from whom they had been taken originally by chicane and greed; nor was it the dismissal, with due payment, of those inheritors of the ancient marauders and appropriators of the soil, with all that is on it and under it, for whom the people have been kept as slaves for many generations. No; none of these things did the servants of the British deity, that idealisation of the sacred rights of feudal property, advocate. Far be such traitor conduct from them. Their cure for the agricultural distress was the "allotment system." To these reformers the free migration of labour, the abolition of that abomination of the poor law which prevented the poor from leaving their parishes, was as nothing compared with allotments. Landlords and parish authorities had but to permit the labourers to cultivate for themselves little patches of land, let to them at a good rent, and what opulence would these serfs not reach.
In the agitation on this tremendous reform, Thomas Wanless took a keen interest, and then first felt sorely his inability to read. He tried to recall the lessons of his childhood, but could not, and was ashamed to apply for help. Few, indeed, amongst his neighbours could have helped him. His wife was as uneducated as himself, so he had to be contented with gathering the purport of what was going on from those he met at market or mill. As far as his mind could comprehend the question it was very clearly made up. He was convinced that all this agitation about professed interest in the down-trodden labourers would do them no good, and he doubted whether any good was meant.
"It's not a bit of charity land we want," he always said. "What I maintain is that you and me an' the likes of us ought to get 10 acres or more at a fair honest rent if we can do wi' it, and let's take our chance. Why shouldn't I be able to keep cows and grow corn as well as the farmer? He often wastes more than three labourers' families could live on, and yet pays his rent. I tell ye, lads, this talk of 'lotments and half acres, and all that, is just damned nonsense, an' that's what it be."
Sentiments like these did not make Thomas popular with the upper powers, and had old Parson Field been alive he might have smarted for his freedom of speech. But the old parson had died shortly before the noise about allotments came to a head, and the new vicar was supposed to be of a different stamp. He was reputed to be a favourite of one of those strange fungoid excrescences of Christianity, the "Lord" Bishop of the diocese, who recommended him for the vacancy, and as he was young and ignorant of the world, he began his work with some moral fervour and a tendency to religious zeal. The Rev. Josiah Codling, M.A., of Jesus College, Cambridge, was in fact a young man of liberal, not to say democratic tendencies. He had been sufficiently impressed by some of the more glorious precepts of the faith he came to teach to wish in a general sort of a way to do good. Left to follow his higher impulses he probably might have led a life of active philanthropy, and the democratic thoroughness of the Christian faith might have enabled him to do something to lift the down-trodden people who formed the bulk of his flock. It was well, at all events, that Mr. Codling began with good intent. He was hardly warm in the parish before he went into the allotment agitation with the feverish enthusiasm of inexperience, and he also had the temerity to start a school. Dismissing the old parish clerk who had drowsily mumbled the "amens" and "we beseech Thee's" for nigh forty years, he brought a young man from Birmingham who knew something of the three R's, and was rumoured to have even conned a Latin primer, and constituted him parish clerk and schoolmaster. The vicarage coach-house was turned into a schoolroom till better could be provided, and the vicar and his assistant began, the one to hunt up pupils, and the other to guide their feet in the way of knowledge.
The farmers for a time looked on, scarce able to realise the meaning of this innovation, but the more they looked the less they liked what they saw. So they grumbled when they met in the churchyard on Sundays, and shook their heads portentously over their beer or brandy punch at market ordinaries, hinting that the "Squoire" should interfere. In their bovine manner they soon began to place stumbling-blocks in the vicar's path. A sudden demand for the services of boys and girls sprang up. Nearly every farmer in the district found that he needed a new ploughboy or kitchen wench, and the universal shilling rose to eighteenpence a week, from the sheer pressure of this demand. Nothing daunted, Parson Codling determined to start a night school, and if possible get the grown lads and young men to attend. He succeeded in inducing nearly thirty youths to come to this night class, and among the first to do so was Thomas Wanless. Here was his chance, he thought, and he seized it with avidity. Soon the numbers thinned away. Some left because they could see no good in learning, but most of them because their masters on hearing of the class threatened to dismiss them at once unless they promised to stop "going to play the fool with that young Varsity ninny o' a parson, as knew nowt o' plain country folks' wants;" and at the end of a month the young schoolmaster had only seven pupils. To these he stuck fast, and they made great progress that winter, for the poor pale-faced Birmingham lad was an enthusiast in his way. Thomas and he became close friends, and the former drank in the current political ideas which William Brown brought with him from Birmingham as a sponge drinks up water. Early and late, at every spare moment, Thomas was busy with his book, and by the time spring came round again he was able to read with tolerable ease the small county newspaper that found its way a week old from the Grange to the village inn. He had read the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and some other books lent him by the vicar, who looked upon him as his model scholar, and took glory to himself over the labourer's success.