Since the passing of the Truck Act in 1831 payments in money have been replacing the old payments in kind. The old system was open to abuses; but I doubt if agricultural labourers have benefitted by the change, as there now are middlemen’s profits to be paid. Under the old system (as mentioned by Vancouver on pages 361, 363 of his report) farm-hands could buy their bread-corn from the farmer at fixed rates—two bushels a month of barley at 3s. a bushel, or a bushel of wheat at 6s.; and now they say the baker charges too much for their bread, whilst farmers say the miller pays too little for the wheat. So also with drink, the labourer did better with the cider he had helped to make, than with a small increase of wages for buying something else. He now buys tea or beer at prices that allow for profits and taxation, whereas his cider was taken at cost-price. No doubt, political economists would like to see all wages paid in cash, to save them trouble with statistics; but ‘real’ wages might be higher, if partly paid in produce of the farm.
A little while before the War I listened to a long dispute between two brothers, one a railway man at 30s. a week and the other a farm hand at 15s. The railway man maintained that he was worse off than his brother; he was paying 7s. a week for cramped accommodation in a town, whereas his brother had a cottage, free, and ground enough for growing vegetables and keeping poultry and a pig. And he went on comparing town and country prices, and town and country needs; and, on the whole, I think he proved his case. But there is an outcry against free cottages now, as a farm hand must vacate his cottage if he ceases working on the farm, the cottage being wanted for the man who takes his place. There is a great deal in a name. If these ‘tied cottages’ were called ‘official residences,’ less nonsense might be talked.
A slovenly housewife soon gives her cottage the aspect of a slum, and often gets it into such a mess that it can never be made quite nice again without almost rebuilding it; and at one time or another most of the old cottages have suffered in that way. Good housewives did their best, and scrubbed; but there was no such scrubbing here as I have seen in Holland. I stayed a night at Delft, 22 August 1872, at a hotel that looked out on a wide street with a canal running down the middle of it; and in the morning I watched the house opposite being cleaned up for the day. After all the windows had been cleaned inside and out, the front door was taken off its hinges and well scrubbed and then was carried over the canal and dipped in it.
After doing repairs, my grandfather notes, 29 October 1843, “Such is ever the case with house property: it is but a nominal income.” Matters have not improved since then; and I therefore try to build things that will never need repair. After viewing an addition that I was making at the Hall House, a village elder justly said, “There: ‘tbe everlastin’: and everlastin’: and everlastin’ after that.” It was a big granite staircase with granite walls laid in cement. I wish that former generations had used cement here: they used bad mortar with a core of rubble between the inside and outside stones—their walls were seldom less than three feet thick—and when the mortar has decayed, there is nothing to keep the outside stones from falling off and the rubble from going after them. When they were building ‘dry walls’ (that is, with neither mortar nor cement) they took more pains to get the stones to fit.
These ‘dry walls’ abound here. The countryside was strewn with granite boulders: when a piece was cleared to make a field, the boulders were broken up and used for walls enclosing it; and the walls were sometimes made immensely large, to use up the material. It is marvellous to see a skilled man building such a wall. The stones are of all shapes and sizes, from half a hundredweight to three or four, just as the rock or boulder happens to split up; and there may be many dozens of them lying about. He glances round and selects a stone, perhaps fifty feet away, and has it brought to him; and it fits in exactly with the stones he has just used, or only needs a single blow to knock off some protuberance. This all looks so easy that I have tried selecting stones myself; but they have never come right.
While I was having one of these walls built, I had a letter from a friend in London asking me if I could give a man a job: the man was strong enough for anything, but had been ill; and the doctor said he needed six weeks in the country, out of doors all day. I had him down for the six weeks, and set him to work at picking up the stones the skilled man wanted, and carrying them over to the wall. He happened to be a prizefighter, and he was still here at the time of Newton fair, and there happened to be a booth for boxing. He went in and boxed, and local men came in and boxed with him, not knowing who he was. They gained experience, and he brought home the stakes.—In his solicitude for my education, my father sent me to a prizefighter when I was twelve years old. I went twice a-week, but did not know enough to profit by his teaching—his gloves were always up against my eyes, and I saw nothing else. I did, however, learn a little of the language of the Ring.
A dozen years ago some people were talking to me here about the good old times, and their children meanwhile were giving the donkey and the dog some bits of bread. I said, “These are the good old times, and people will look back on them and say, in those days dogs and donkeys might eat wheaten bread.” I was looking ahead, a century or more, and never thought that in a few years time bread would be rationed out in England and made of other things than wheat. In what we call the good old times the labourer had no wheaten bread. In a letter of 3 December 1844 my grandfather remarks that wheat was then so cheap and oats so dear that wheat was being given to horses; and he calls wheat “food for Christians,” but then corrects himself, “when I say wheat is food for Christians, I do not mean to say the labourer is not a Christian,” although the labourer had only barley bread, not wheat.
Though wheat is so esteemed, a vast amount is wasted here in reaping and in threshing and with rats in ricks and barns. I have seen the ears gathered by hand in Turkey and in Spain, and with astonishing speed; and nothing is wasted then. And there is, I believe, an American machine which cuts the stalks so high that it reaps hardly anything below the ears; but I imagine that it does not get the ears off any of the shorter stalks.
After living in Long Island (New York) in 1817 and 1818, Cobbett says in his Cottage Economy, section 82, “Few people upon the face of the earth live better than the Long Islanders, yet nine families out of ten seldom eat wheaten bread. Rye is the flour that they principally make use of. Now, rye is seldom more than two-thirds the price of wheat, and barley is seldom more than half the price of wheat. Half rye and half wheat, taking out a little more of the offal, make very good bread. Half wheat, a quarter rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third of each, make bread that I could be very well content to live upon all my lifetime.” Of course the Americans also had what they call ‘corn’ and we call ‘maize.’ We grow this for fodder, as it seldom ripens here; and we import the product as cornflour. Cobbett tried the American sort here, but found another sort near Calais—a dwarf plant—and tried this in 1827 and the following years; and in 1828 he reckoned that he had eleven thousand quartern loaves upon eleven acres, though three of the eleven had failed. These experiments of his were made at Kensington and Barnes; and in 1828 he says in Cobbett’s Corn, section 155, that he was paying his men three shillings a-week with board and lodging. They had porridge for breakfast: as much hot mutton as they could eat for dinner, and also apple-dumplings: bread and cheese, as much as they could eat, for supper: a pint of beer at dinner and another pint at supper. He lived on the same diet himself.
My grandfather had most of Cobbett’s agricultural books, and read them with respect, as Cobbett never recommended anything without trying it himself or having seen it tried. These books of his are shrewd and sensible, and may be right in what they say of that “degrading curse,” the “pernicious practice of drinking tea,” Cottage Economy, sections 23 to 33. “But is it in the power of any man, any good labourer who has attained the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into England?” Parson Davy was preaching against tea-drinking here in 1803, and as early as 1748 Wesley was exhorting his followers to abhor tea as a deadly poison. (A prophet is without honour in his own chapels.) Cobbett likewise talks of “the corrosive, gnawing, and poisonous powers” of tea. “Tea has no useful strength in it: it contains nothing nutritious.... It is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens for the moment and deadens afterwards.”