Dickleburgh, the next village after Scole, is in its way as imposing a place, only not an inn, but a church, is its chief feature. The great church of Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced) charmingly screened from the street by a row of limes, but not so charmingly enclosed by a very long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to the road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims who once passed on their way to Our Lady of Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on either side of the east window, holding effigies of popular saints, and halting many a sinner for supplication. The saints are gone, torn down by Henry the Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing. They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond, or, broken up, serve the useful part of metalling the road. Adjoining the church stands the "King's Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of kings than intended as a portrait of any particular one. At any rate it resembles none of the long line of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough to have been painted in the hey-day of his popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large for the present size of the place and for the empty country side; but there is a reason for the solitudes, and there was one for these huge buildings, ten times too large for the present needs of the shrunken villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most thickly-peopled of English counties, were practically depopulated in 1348 by that dreadful scourge, the Black Death. One-third of the total population of England perished under that terrible plague. The working classes were the worst sufferers, and the agriculturists, the weavers and labourers died in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground, industries decayed, and no man would work. When the pestilence was stayed, other parts of the country flourished in greater proportion, than this. Manufacturing industries arose elsewhere and attracted the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining consistently agricultural throughout the centuries, has never shared the increase; only the few and scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in the form of weaving in mediæval and later times, and in the manufacture of agricultural machinery nowadays. In the last two decades, with the decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry to London and the great centres of population, the country, and the eastern counties in especial, has become almost deserted.
DICKLEBURGH.
The present state of agriculture in Eastern England is made manifest in deserted farms, in broken gates left hanging precariously on one hinge, in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted ploughs and decrepit waggons standing derelict in the once fertile fields, now overrun with foul weeds and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles; and farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely to remain tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible to grow seeds and flowers, and market-gardening is profitable only in the lands more immediately surrounding the great towns. With wheat at its present price of thirty shillings a quarter, it does not pay to grow corn for the market, and the land is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still struggles on, he lays down most of his holding in grass for sheep and cattle, and grows, grudgingly, as little wheat as possible, for sake of the straw. Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat was down to twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers fed their pigs on the harvest which cost them three pounds more per acre to grow than it would have brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it yields no profit. Agricultural England is, in short, ruined, and there seems no present hope of things becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States, Russia and other wheat-producing countries can be cultivated, reaped, and carried to these shores at the prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as advantageously, the English farmer must needs go without a living wage. As matters stand at present, we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat used in the country; the acreage under corn having gone down from 4,058,731 acres in 1852, to about half that at the present day. Meanwhile the population has increased by thirteen millions; so that, with many more mouths to fill, we grow only half the staple food these islands produced then. There are, of course, those who reap the advantage of cheap corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling millions of the towns and cities thrive on those benefits; but what if, through war, or from any other cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what avail would have been this generation of cheapness if at last the nation must starve? Extinguish agriculture and the farmer, and you cannot recall them at need, nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a land which has long gone untilled.
But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more than the walls of a house can be demolished and the roof yet left standing. It was the farmer who in prosperous times supported the country gentleman in one direction, and the agricultural labourer in the other. With wheat, as it was a generation ago, at seventy shillings a quarter, and other products of the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms in those days were difficult to obtain, and there was great competition among farmers for holdings. To-day, even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed proprietors has dwindled away. The results are painfully evident here, in the old families reduced or beggared, and their seats either in the market or let to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while the old owners have disappeared or live humbly in small houses once occupied by the steward or bailiff of the estate.
While rents have thus, with the iron logic of circumstances, gone down to vanishing-point, and while farms have actually been offered rent free in order to prevent the disaster of the land being let go out of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances of the agricultural labourer have been, most illogically, improving. Instead of the miserable six to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives thirteen or fourteen shillings, lives in a decent cottage, instead of a wretched hovel, and finds the cost of food and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than his grandfather ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers are as difficult to get now as they were immediately after the Black Death had swept away three quarters of the working class, five hundred and fifty years ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they have done of recent years in East Anglia—for lack of hands to gather them in. It was in 1899 that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and adjacent parishes were sold by auction for a farmer who could find no labourer willing to be hired.
What has been called the "rural exodus" is well named. London and the great towns have proved so attractive to the children of the middle-aged peasant that they despise the country. They can all read and write now, and at a pinch do simple sums in arithmetic; so off they go to the crowded streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a stool in an office, and others become workmen of many kinds; but all are attracted by the higher wages to be earned in the towns, and by the excitement of living in the great centres of population, and only the aged and the aging will soon be left to till the fields.
Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for the agricultural labourer's attempts to better himself. To them they are almost impious; but the farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of culture. He is a vastly different fellow from his grandfather, who actually helped to till the soil among his own men; whose wife and daughters were noted hands at milking and buttermaking; who lived in the kitchen, among the hams and the domestic utensils, and was not above eating the same food as, and at the same table with, his ploughmen and carters. He has, in fact, and so also have the landed proprietor and the labourer, undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process which had started certainly by 1825, when Cobbett noticed it.
Hear him:—