In England the aristocracy destroyed the promise of such a development when it broke the back of the peasant community. The enclosures created a new organisation of classes. The peasant with rights and a status, with a share in the fortunes and government of his village, standing in rags, but standing on his feet, makes way for the labourer with no corporate rights to defend, no corporate power to invoke, no property to cherish, no ambition to pursue, bent beneath the fear of his masters, and the weight of a future without hope. No class in the world has so beaten and crouching a history, and if the blazing ricks in 1830 once threatened his rulers with the anguish of his despair, in no chapter of that history could it have been written, ‘This parish is at law with its squire.’ For the parish was no longer the community that offered the labourer friendship and sheltered his freedom: it was merely the shadow of his poverty, his helplessness, and his shame. ‘Go to an ale-house kitchen of an old enclosed country, and there you will see the origin of poverty and poor-rates. For whom are they to be sober? For whom are they to save? For the parish? If I am diligent, shall I have leave to build a cottage? If I am sober, shall I have land for a cow? If I am frugal, shall I have half an acre of potatoes? You offer no motives; you have nothing but a parish officer and a workhouse!—Bring me another pot—.’[138]
CHAPTER VI
THE LABOURER IN 1795
In an unenclosed village, as we have seen, the normal labourer did not depend on his wages alone. His livelihood was made up from various sources. His firing he took from the waste, he had a cow or a pig wandering on the common pasture, perhaps he raised a little crop on a strip in the common fields. He was not merely a wage earner, receiving so much money a week or a day for his labour, and buying all the necessaries of life at a shop: he received wages as a labourer, but in part he maintained himself as a producer. Further, the actual money revenue of the family was not limited to the labourer’s earnings, for the domestic industries that flourished in the village gave employment to his wife and children.
In an enclosed village at the end of the eighteenth century the position of the agricultural labourer was very different. All his auxiliary resources had been taken from him, and he was now a wage earner and nothing more. Enclosure had robbed him of the strip that he tilled, of the cow that he kept on the village pasture, of the fuel that he picked up in the woods, and of the turf that he tore from the common. And while a social revolution had swept away his possessions, an industrial revolution had swept away his family’s earnings. To families living on the scale of the village poor, each of these losses was a crippling blow, and the total effect of the changes was to destroy their economic independence.
Some of these auxiliary resources were not valued very highly by the upper classes, and many champions of enclosure proved to their own satisfaction that the advantage, for example, of the right of cutting fuel was quite illusory. Such writers had a very superficial knowledge of the lot of the cottagers. They argued that it would be more economical for the labourer to spend on his ordinary employment the time he devoted to cutting fuel and turf, and to buy firing out of his wages: an argument from the theory of the division of labour that assumed that employment was constant. Fortunately we have, thanks to Davies, a very careful calculation that enables us to form rather a closer judgment. He estimates[139] that a man could cut nearly enough in a week to serve his family all the year, and as the farmers will give the carriage of it in return for the ashes, he puts the total cost at 10s. a year, or a little more than a week’s wages.[140] If we compare this with his accounts of the cost of fuel elsewhere, we soon see how essential common fuel rights were to a labourer’s economy. At Sidlesham in Surrey, for instance,[141] in the expenses of five families of labourers, the fuel varies from £1, 15s. 0d. up to £4, 3s. 0d., with an average of £2, 8s. 0d. per family. It must be remembered, too, that the sum of 10s. for fuel from the common is calculated on the assumption that the man would otherwise be working; whereas, in reality, he could cut his turf in slack times and in odd hours, when there was no money to be made by working for some one else.
There was another respect in which the resources of a labouring family were diminished towards the end of the century, and this too was a loss that the rich thought trifling. From time immemorial the labourer had sent his wife and children into the fields to glean or leaze after the harvest. The profits of gleaning, under the old, unimproved system of agriculture, were very considerable. Eden says of Rode in Northamptonshire, where agriculture was in a ‘wretched state, from the land being in common-fields,’ that ‘several families will gather as much wheat as will serve them for bread the whole year, and as many beans as will keep a pig.’[142] From this point of view enclosure, with its improved methods of agriculture, meant a sensible loss to the poor of the parish, but even when there was less to be gleaned the privilege was by no means unimportant. A correspondent in the Annals of Agriculture,[143] writing evidently of land under improved cultivation in Shropshire, estimates that a wife can glean three or four bushels. The consumption of wheat, exclusive of other food, by a labourer’s family he puts at half a bushel a week at least; the price of wheat at 13s. 6d. a bushel; the labourer’s wages at 7s. or 8s. To such a family gleaning rights represented the equivalent of some six or seven weeks’ wages.
With the introduction of large farming these customary rights were in danger. It was a nuisance for the farmer to have his fenced fields suddenly invaded by bands of women and children. The ears to be picked up were now few and far between, and there was a risk that the labourers, husbands and fathers of the gleaners, might wink at small thefts from the sheaves. Thus it was that customary rights, which had never been questioned before, and seemed to go back to the Bible itself, came to be the subject of dispute. On the whole question of gleaning there is an animated controversy in the Annals of Agriculture[144] between Capel Lofft,[145] a romantic Suffolk Liberal, who took the side of the gleaners, and Ruggles,[146] the historian, who argued against them. Capel Lofft was a humane and chivalrous magistrate who, unfortunately for the Suffolk poor, was struck off the Commission of the Peace a few years later, apparently at the instance of the Duke of Portland, for persuading the Deputy-Sheriff to postpone the execution of a girl sentenced to death for stealing, until he had presented a memorial to the Crown praying for clemency. The chief arguments on the side of the gleaners were (1) that immemorial custom gave legal right, according to the maxim, consuetudo angliae lex est angliae communis; (2) that Blackstone had recognised the right in his Commentaries, basing his opinion upon Hale and Gilbert, ‘Also it hath been said, that by the common law and customs of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean on another’s ground after harvest without being guilty of trespass, which humane provision seems borrowed from the Mosaic law’ (iii. 212, 1st edition); (3) that in Ireland the right was recognised by statutes of Henry VIII.’s reign, which modified it; (4) that it was a custom that helped to keep the poor free from degrading dependence on poor relief. It was argued, on the other hand, by those who denied the right to glean, that though the custom had existed from time immemorial, it did not rest on any basis of actual right, and that no legal sanction to it had ever been explicitly given, Blackstone and the authorities on whom he relied being too vague to be considered final. Further, the custom was demoralising to the poor; it led to idleness, ‘how many days during the harvest are lost by the mother of a family and all her children, in wandering about from field to field, to glean what does not repay them the wear of their cloathes in seeking’; it led to pilfering from the temptation to take handfuls from the swarth or shock; and it was deplorable that on a good-humoured permission should be grafted ‘a legal claim, in its use and exercise so nearly approaching to licentiousness.’
Whilst this controversy was going on, the legal question was decided against the poor by a majority of judges in the Court of Common Pleas in 1788. One judge, Sir Henry Gould,[147] dissented in a learned judgment; the majority based their decision partly on the mischievous consequences of the practice to the poor. The poor never lost a right without being congratulated by the rich on gaining something better. It did not, of course, follow from this decision that the practice necessarily ceased altogether, but from that time it was a privilege given by the farmer at his own discretion, and he could warn off obnoxious or ‘saucy’ persons from his fields. Moreover, the dearer the corn, and the more important the privilege for the poor, the more the farmer was disinclined to largess the precious ears. Capel Lofft had pleaded that with improved agriculture the gleaners could pick up so little that that little should not be grudged, but the farmer found that under famine prices this little was worth more to him than the careless scatterings of earlier times.[148]
The loss of his cow and his produce and his common and traditional rights was rendered particularly serious to the labourer by the general growth of prices. For enclosure which had produced the agrarian proletariat, had raised the cost of living for him. The accepted opinion that under enclosure England became immensely more productive tends to obscure the truth that the agricultural labourer suffered in his character of consumer, as well as in his character of producer, when the small farms and the commons disappeared. Not only had he to buy the food that formerly he had produced himself, but he had to buy it in a rising market. Adam Smith admitted that the rise of price of poultry and pork had been accelerated by enclosure, and Nathaniel Kent laid stress on the diminution in the supply of these and other small provisions. Kent has described the change in the position of the labourers in this respect: ‘Formerly they could buy milk, butter, and many other small articles in every parish, in whatever quantity they are wanted. But since small farms have decreased in number, no such articles are to be had; for the great farmers have no idea of retailing such small commodities, and those who do retail them carry them all to town. A farmer is even unwilling to sell the labourer who works for him a bushel of wheat, which he might get ground for three or four pence a bushel. For want of this advantage he is driven to the mealman or baker, who, in the ordinary course of their profit, get at least ten per cent. of them, upon this principal article of their consumption.’[149] Davies, the author of The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, thus describes the new method of distribution: ‘The great farmer deals in a wholesale way with the miller: the miller with the mealman: the mealman with the shopkeeper, of which last the poor man buys his flour by the bushel. For neither the miller nor the mealman will sell the labourer a less quantity than a sack of flour, under the retail price of shops, and the poor man’s pocket will seldom allow of his buying a whole sack at once.’[150]
It is clear from these facts that it would have needed a very large increase of wages to compensate the labourer for his losses under enclosure. But real wages, instead of rising, had fallen, and fallen far. The writer of the Bedfordshire Report (p. 67), comparing the period of 1730–50 with that of 1802–6 in respect of prices of wheat and labour, points out that to enable him to purchase equal quantities of bread in the second period and in the first, the pay of the day labourer in the second period should have been 2s. a day, whereas it was 1s. 6d. Nathaniel Kent, writing in 1796,[151] says that in the last forty or fifty years the price of provisions had gone up by 60 per cent., and wages by 25 per cent., ‘but this is not all, for the sources of the market which used to feed him are in a great measure cut off since the system of large farms has been so much encouraged.’ Professor Levy estimates that wages rose between 1760 and 1813 by 60 per cent., and the price of wheat by 130 per cent.[152] Thus the labourer who now lived on wages alone earned wages of a lower purchasing power than the wages which he had formerly supplemented by his own produce. Whereas his condition earlier in the century had been contrasted with that of Continental peasants greatly to his advantage in respect of quantity and variety of food, he was suddenly brought down to the barest necessities of life. Arthur Young had said a generation earlier that in France bread formed nineteen parts in twenty of the food of the people, but that in England all ranks consumed an immense quantity of meat, butter and cheese.[153] We know something of the manner of life of the poor in 1789 and 1795 from the family budgets collected by Eden and Davies from different parts of the country.[154] These budgets show that the labourers were rapidly sinking in this respect to the condition that Young had described as the condition of the poor in France. ‘Bacon and other kinds of meat form a very small part of their diet, and cheese becomes a luxury.’ But even on the meagre food that now became the ordinary fare of the cottage, the labourers could not make ends meet. All the budgets tell the same tale of impoverished diet accompanied by an overwhelming strain and an actual deficit. The normal labourer, even with constant employment, was no longer solvent.