Now oatmeal eaten with milk is a very different food from oatmeal taken alone, and it is clear from a study of the budgets that if oatmeal was to be acclimatised in the south, it was essential to increase the consumption of milk. But the great difference in consumption represented not a difference of demand, but a difference of supply. The southern labourer went without milk not from choice but from necessity. In the days when he kept cows he drank milk, for there was plenty of milk in the village. After enclosure, milk was not to be had. It may be that more cows were kept under the new system of farming, though this is unlikely, seeing that at this time every patch of arable was a gold-mine, but it is certainly true that milk became scarce in the villages. The new type of farmer did not trouble to sell milk at home. ‘Farmers are averse to selling milk; while poor persons who have only one cow generally dispose of all they can spare.’[204] The new farmer produced for a larger market: his produce was carried away, as Cobbett said, to be devoured by ‘the idlers, the thieves, the prostitutes who are all taxeaters in the wens of Bath and London.’ Davies argued, when pleading for the creation of small farms, ‘The occupiers of these small farms, as well as the occupiers of Mr. Kent’s larger cottages, would not think much of retailing to their poorer neighbours a little corn or a little milk, as they might want, which the poor can now seldom have at all, and never but as a great favour from the rich farmers.’[205] Sir Thomas Bernard mentioned among the advantages of the Winchilsea system the ‘no inconsiderable convenience to the inhabitants of that neighbourhood, that these cottagers are enabled to supply them, at a very moderate price, with milk, cream, butter, poultry, pig-meat, and veal: articles which, in general, are not worth the farmer’s attention, and which, therefore, are supplied by speculators, who greatly enhance the price on the public.’[206] Eden[207] records that in Oxfordshire the labourers bitterly complain that the farmers, instead of selling their milk to the poor, give it to their pigs, and a writer in the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor says that this was a practice not unusual in many parts of England.[208]

The scarcity of milk must be considered a contributory cause of the growth of tea-drinking, a habit that the philanthropists and Cobbett agreed in condemning. Cobbett declared in his Advice to Young Men[209] that ‘if the slops were in fashion amongst ploughmen and carters, we must all be starved; for the food could never be raised. The mechanics are half ruined by them.’ In the Report on the Poor presented to the Hants Quarter Sessions in 1795,[210] the use of tea is described as ‘a vain present attempt to supply to the spirits of the mind what is wanting to the strength of the body; but in its lasting effects impairing the nerves, and therein equally injuring both the body and the mind.’ Davies retorted on the rich who found fault with the extravagance of the poor in tea-drinking, by pointing out that it was their ‘last resource.’ ‘The topic on which the declaimers against the extravagance of the poor display their eloquence with most success, is tea-drinking. Why should such people, it is asked, indulge in a luxury which is only proper for their betters; and not rather content themselves with milk, which is in every form wholesome and nourishing? Were it true that poor people could every where procure so excellent an article as milk, there would be then just reason to reproach them for giving the preference to the miserable infusion of which they are so fond. But it is not so. Wherever the poor can get milk, do they not gladly use it? And where they cannot get it, would they not gladly exchange their tea for it?[211]... Still you exclaim, Tea is a luxury. If you mean fine hyson tea, sweetened with refined sugar, and softened with cream, I readily admit it to be so. But this is not the tea of the poor. Spring water, just coloured with a few leaves of the lowest-priced tea, and sweetened with the brownest sugar, is the luxury for which you reproach them. To this they have recourse from mere necessity: and were they now to be deprived of this, they would immediately be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not the cause, but the consequence, of the distresses of the poor.’[212] We learn from the Annals of Agriculture that at Sedgefield in Durham[213] many of the poor declared that they had been driven to drinking tea from not being able to procure milk.[214]

No doubt the scarcity of milk helped to encourage a taste that was very quickly acquired by all classes in England, and not in England only, for, before the middle of the eighteenth century, the rapid growth of tea-drinking among the poor in the Lowlands of Scotland was affecting the revenue very seriously.[215] The English poor liked tea for the same reason that Dr. Johnson liked it, as a stimulant, and the fact that their food was monotonous and insipid made it particularly attractive. Eden shows that by the end of the eighteenth century it was in general use among poor families, taking the place both of beer and of milk, and excluding the substitutes that Eden wished to make popular. It seems perhaps less surprising to us than it did to him, that when the rich, who could eat or drink what they liked, enjoyed tea, the poor thought bread and tea a more interesting diet than bread and barley water.

A few isolated attempts were made to remedy the scarcity of milk,[216] which had been caused by enclosure and the consolidation of farms. Lord Winchilsea’s projects have already been described. In the Reports of the Society for bettering the Condition of the Poor, there are two accounts of plans for supplying milk cheap, one in Staffordshire, where a respectable tradesman undertook to keep a certain number of cows for the purpose in a parish where ‘the principal number of the poorer inhabitants were destitute of all means of procuring milk for their families,’[217] another at Stockton in Durham, where the bishop made it a condition of the lease of a certain farm, that the tenant should keep fifteen cows whose milk was to be sold at ½d. a pint to the poor.[218] Mr. Curwen again, the Whig M.P. for Carlisle, had a plan for feeding cows in the winter with a view to providing the poor with milk.[219]

There was another way in which the enclosures had created an insuperable obstacle to the popularising of ‘cheap and agreeable substitutes’ for expensive wheaten bread. The Cumberland housewife could bake her own barley bread in her oven ‘heated with heath, furze or brush-wood, the expence of which is inconsiderable’[220]; she had stretches of waste land at her door where the children could be sent to fetch fuel. ‘There is no comparison to the community,’ wrote a contributor to the Annals of Agriculture,[221] ‘whether good wheat, rye, turnips, etc., are not better than brakes, goss, furz, broom, and heath,’ but as acre after acre in the midlands and south was enclosed, the fuel of the poor grew ever scantier. When the common where he had gleaned his firing was fenced off, the poor man could only trust for his fuel to pilferings from the hedgerows. To the spectator, furze from the common might seem ‘gathered with more loss of time than it appears to be worth’[222]; to the labourer whose scanty earnings left little margin over the expense of bread alone, the loss of firing was not balanced by the economy of time.[223]

Insufficient firing added to the miseries caused by insufficient clothes and food. An ingenious writer in the Annals of Agriculture[224] suggested that the poor should resort to the stables for warmth, as was the practice in the duchy of Milan. Fewer would suffer death from want of fire in winter, he argued, and also it would be a cheap way of helping them, as it cost no fuel, for cattle were so obliging as to dispense warmth from their persons for nothing. But even this plan (which was not adopted) would not have solved the problem of cooking. The labourer might be blamed for his diet of fine wheaten bread and for having his meat (when he had any) roasted instead of made into soup, but how could cooking be done at home without fuel? ‘No doubt, a labourer,’ says Eden,[225] ‘whose income was only £20 a year, would, in general, act wisely in substituting hasty-pudding, barley bread, boiled milk, and potatoes, for bread and beer; but in most parts of this county, he is debarred not more by prejudice, than by local difficulties, from using a diet that requires cooking at home. The extreme dearness of fuel in Oxfordshire, compels him to purchase his dinner at the baker’s; and, from his unavoidable consumption of bread, he has little left for cloaths, in a country where warm cloathing is most essentially wanted.’ In Davies’ more racy and direct language, ‘it is but little that in the present state of things the belly can spare for the back.’[226] Davies also pointed out the connection between dear fuel and the baker. ‘Where fuel is scarce and dear, poor people find it cheaper to buy their bread of the baker than to bake for themselves.... But where fuel abounds, and costs only the trouble of cutting and carrying home, there they may save something by baking their own bread.’[227] Complaints of the pilfering of hedgerows were very common. ‘Falstaff says “his soldiers found linen on every hedge”; and I fear it is but too often the case, that labourers’ children procure fuel from the same quarter.’[228] There were probably many families like the two described in Davies[229] who spent nothing on fuel, which they procured by gathering cow-dung, and breaking their neighbours’ hedges.’[230]

In some few cases, the benevolent rich did not content themselves with attempting to enforce the eighth commandment, but went to the root of the matter, helping to provide a substitute for their hedgerows. An interesting account of such an experiment is given in the Reports on the Poor,[231] by Scrope Bernard. ‘There having been several prosecutions at the Aylesbury Quarter Sessions, for stealing fuel last winter, I was led to make particular inquiries, respecting the means which the poor at Lower Winchendon had of providing fuel. I found that there was no fuel then to be sold within several miles of the place; and that, amid the distress occasioned by the long frost, a party of cottagers had joined in hiring a person, to fetch a load of pit-coal from Oxford, for their supply. In order to encourage this disposition to acquire fuel in an honest manner,’ a present was made to all this party of as much coal again as they had already purchased carriage free. Next year the vestry determined to help, and with the aid of private donations coal was distributed at 1s. 4d. the cwt. (its cost at the Oxford wharf), and kindling faggots at 1d. each. ‘It had been said that the poor would not find money to purchase them, when they were brought: instead of which out of 35 poor families belonging to the parish, 29 came with ready money, husbanded out of their scanty means, to profit with eagerness of this attention to their wants; and among them a person who had been lately imprisoned by his master for stealing wood from his hedges.’ Mr. Bernard concludes his account with some apt remarks on the difficulties of combining honesty with grinding poverty.[232]

MINIMUM WAGE

The attempts to reduce cottage expenditure were thus a failure. We must now describe the attempts to increase the cottage income. There were two ways in which the wages of the labourers might have been raised. One way, the way of combination, was forbidden by law. The other way was the fixing of a legal minimum wage in relation to the price of food. This was no new idea, for the regulation of wages by law was a venerable English institution, as old as the Statute of Edward III. The most recent laws on the subject were the famous Act of Elizabeth, an Act of James I., and an Act of George II. (1747). The Act of Elizabeth provided that the Justices of the Peace should meet annually and assess the wages of labourers in husbandry and of certain other workmen. Penalties were imposed on all who gave or took a wage in excess of this assessment. The Act of James I. was passed to remove certain ambiguities that were believed to have embarrassed the operation of the Act of Elizabeth, and among other provisions imposed a penalty on all who gave a wage below the wage fixed by the magistrates. The Act of 1747[233] was passed because the existing laws were ‘insufficient and defective,’ and it provided that disputes between masters and men could be referred to the magistrates, ‘although no rate or assessment of wages has been made that year by the Justices of the shire where such complaint shall be made.’

Two questions arise on the subject of this legislation, Was it operative? In whose interests was it administered, the interests of the employers or the interests of the employed? As to the first question there is a good deal of negative evidence to show that during the eighteenth century these laws were rarely applied. An example of an assessment (an assessment declaring a maximum) made by the Lancashire magistrates in 1725, was published in the Annals of Agriculture in 1795[234] as an interesting curiosity, and the writer remarks: ‘It appears from Mr. Ruggles’ excellent History of the Poor that such orders must in general be searched for in earlier periods, and a friend of ours was much surprised to hear that any magistrates in the present century would venture on so bold a measure.’[235]