Here is another case:—"A man without children in this neighbourhood emerged from poverty and bequeathed many pecuniary legacies, some L100 apiece, and others larger and smaller, to a number of agricultural labourers who were his distant relatives. As soon as the legacies are paid the legatees would not be able to obtain any employment in husbandry until the legacies are spent! The employment in this parish is all wanted for those who from deep poverty can claim it of the Overseers, and these legatees will have no title to claim employment till they have reduced themselves again to poverty by having spent all their legacies!"
It was not, however, so much in favour of the farmer as the system might seem, for they got the worst of the labour—of the two whom Mr. Nash was obliged to take in the above instance, one killed a valuable mare, and the other he was obliged to prosecute for stealing corn—for the farmer was obliged to take his share of the unemployed labour, and often had a dozen idle worthless men on his hands at times when five or six would have done the work.
Those of us to whom the memory of the bent-backed figure of the "wheat-barn tasker" in every village, is now but a dim vision of the past, can hardly realize how bitter must have been the feeling when the threshing machine came to do away with the flail. A simple matter it may seem, yet the peasant revolt which it brought about was for the time more universal, and more effective, than Wat Tyler's rebellion, because, without Wat Tyler's organization, it found a means of working in every village. To the mind of the labourer this uprooting of the habitual daily work of a thousand years, taken in connection with the coming movement against allowing the labourer to go to the overseer to make up his wages out of the rates—these things together presented to his mind an outlook which was bad enough to arouse the sluggish mind of the peasant in every village. So he set about upon a course of retaliation and unreasoning revenge. The threshing machine was threatening their work, and so upon the threshing machine wherever they found it the labourers set with a vengeance. The effects of that vengeance are traceable in the criminal returns for the period. Thus the number of criminals for trial for malicious offences against property, which for the previous five or six years had scarcely averaged fifty a year, in the year 1831 went up at a hound to a total of 1,245, of which no less than 921 were for "destroying threshing machines." Riots, incendiarism, and sending letters threatening to burn houses, &c., also went up almost to a corresponding extent.
One or two local examples of pauper insolence and tyranny may be given from the Commissioners' report:—
"The tone assumed by the paupers towards those who dispense relief is generally very insolent and often assumes a more fearful character. At Great Gransden, the Overseer's wife told me that two days before my visit, two paupers came to her husband demanding an increase of allowance; he refused them, showing them that they had the full allowance sanctioned by the magistrates' scale; they swore, and threatened he should repent of it; and such was their violence, that she called them back, and prevailed on her husband to make them further allowance. Mr. Faircloth, by a stricter system, reduced the rates at Croydon; he became unpopular among the labourers, and after harvest they gathered in a riotous body about his threshing machine and broke it to pieces. At Guilden Morden, in the same neighbourhood, a burning took place of Mr. Butterfield's stacks to the amount of L1,500 damage. Mr. Butterfield was Overseer, and the Magistrates have committed, on strong circumstantial evidence, a man to whom he had denied relief, because he had refused to work for it. I have found that the apprehension of this dreadful and easily perpetrated mischief has greatly affected the minds of the rural parish officers, making the power of the paupers over the funds provided for their relief almost absolute as regards any discretion of the Overseers."
Report of Mr. Power, Assistant Commissioner for Cambs.:—
"If an Overseer refuses relief, or gives less than the pauper thinks himself entitled to, he (the Overseer) was liable to be summoned before Justices to defend himself against the charge of inhumanity and oppression, and unhappily the applicant, who has been refused relief, has frequently recourse to a much more summary remedy than the interference of the Magistrates. The tribunal which enforces it sits, not at the Petty Sessions, but at the beershop—it compels obedience, not by summons and distress, but by violence and conflagration. The most painful and the most formidable portion of our evidence, consists of the proof that in many districts the principal obstacle to improvement is the well-founded dread of these atrocities."
But worse than mere insolence of words were the acts of lawlessness and crime which prevailed. These items occur in a number of typical questions and answers in the report of the Commissioners, extracts from which I give below, with the name of the Overseers or other informants:—
BOURN (Mr. Whittet.)
The poverty which compelled the farmer to use the threshing machine, bore down the labourer to unprecedented distress, and drove him to desperation.