Now, so long as prices kept up, the condition of the labourer was masked by the general prosperity of the times. The governing class had found a method which checked the demand for higher wages and the danger that the labourer might claim a share in the bounding wealth of the time. The wolf was at the door, it is true, but he was chained, and the chain was the Speenhamland system. Consequently, though we hear complaints from the labourers, who contended that they were receiving in a patronising and degrading form what they were entitled to have as their direct wages, the note of rebellion was smothered for the moment. At this time it was a profitable proceeding to grow corn on almost any soil, and it is still possible to trace on the unharvested downs of Dartmoor the print of the harrow that turned even that wild moorland into gold, in the days when Napoleon was massing his armies for invasion. During these years parishes did not mind giving aid from the rates on the Speenhamland scale, and, though under this mischievous system population was advancing wildly, there was such a demand for labour that this abundance did not seem, as it seemed later, a plague of locusts, but a source of strength and wealth. The opinion of the day was all in favour of a heavy birth rate, and it was generally agreed, as we have seen, that Pitt’s escapades in the West Indies and elsewhere would draw off the surplus population fast enough to remove all difficulties. But although the large farmers prayed incessantly to heaven to preserve Pitt and to keep up religion and prices, the day came when it did not pay to plough the downs or the sands, and tumbling prices brought ruin to the farmers whose rents and whole manner of living were fixed on the assumption that there was no serious danger of peace, and that England was to live in a perpetual heyday of famine prices.

With the fall in prices, the facts of the labourer’s condition were disclosed. Doctors tell us that in some cases of heart disease there is a state described as compensation, which may postpone failure for many years. With the fall in 1814 compensation ceased, and the disease which it obscured declared itself. For it was now no longer possible to absorb the redundant population in the wasteful roundsman system, and the maintenance standard tended to fall with the growing pressure on the resources from which the labourer was kept. By this time all labour had been swamped in the system. The ordinary village did not contain a mass of decently paid labourers and a surplus of labourers, from time to time redundant, for whom the parish had to provide as best it could. It contained a mass of labourers, all of them underpaid, whom the parish had to keep alive in the way most convenient to the farmers. Bishop Berkeley once said that it was doubtful whether the prosperity that preceded, or the calamities that succeeded, the South Sea Bubble had been the more disastrous to Great Britain: that saying would very well apply to the position of the agricultural labourer in regard to the rise and the fall of prices. With the rise of prices the last patch of common agriculture had been seized by the landlords, and the labourer had been robbed even of his garden;[317] with the fall, the great mass of labourers were thrown into destitution and misery. We may add that if that prosperity had been briefer, the superstition that an artificial encouragement of population was needed—the superstition of the rich for which the poor paid the penalty—would have had a shorter life. As it was, at the end of the great prosperity the landlords were enormously rich; rents had in some cases increased five-fold between 1790 and 1812:[318] the large farmers had in many cases climbed into a style of life which meant a crash as soon as prices fell; the financiers had made great and sudden fortunes; the only class for whom a rise in the standard of existence was essential to the nation, had merely become more dependent on the pleasure of other classes and the accidents of the markets. The purchasing power of the labourer’s wages had gone down.

The first sign of the strain is the rioting of 1816. In that year the spirit which the governing class had tried to send to sleep by the Speenhamland system, burst out in the first of two peasants’ revolts. Let us remember what their position was. They were not the only people overwhelmed by the fall in prices. Some landlords, who had been so reckless and extravagant as to live up to the enormous revenue they were receiving, had to surrender their estates to the new class of bankers and money-lenders that had been made powerful by the war. Many farmers, who had taken to keeping liveried servants and to copying the pomp of their landlords, and who had staked everything on the permanence of prices, were now submerged. Small farmers too, as the answers sent to the questions issued this year by the Board of Agriculture show, became paupers. The labourer was not the only sufferer. But he differed from the other victims of distress in that he had not benefited, but, as we have seen, had lost, by the prosperity of the days when the plough turned a golden furrow. His housing had not been improved; his dependence had not been made less abject or less absolute; his wages had not risen; and in many cases his garden had disappeared. When the storm broke over agriculture his condition became desperate. In February 1816 the Board of Agriculture sent out a series of questions, one of which asked for an account of the state of the poor, and out of 273 replies 237 reported want of employment and distress, and 25 reported that there was not unemployment or distress.[319] One of the correspondents explained that in his district the overseer called a meeting every Saturday, when he put up each labourer by name to auction, and they were let generally at from 1s. 6d. to 2s. per week and their provisions, their families being supported by the parish.[320]

In 1816 the labourers were suffering both from unemployment and from high prices. In 1815, as the Annual Register[321] puts it, ‘much distress was undergone in the latter part of the year by the trading portion of the community. This source of private calamity was unfortunately coincident with an extraordinary decline in agricultural prosperity, immediately proceeding from the greatly reduced price of corn and other products, which bore no adequate proportion to the exorbitant rents and other heavy burdens pressing upon the farmer.’ At the beginning of 1816 there were gloomy anticipations of a fall in prices, and Western[322] moved a series of resolutions designed to prevent the importation of corn. But as the year advanced it became evident that the danger that threatened England was not the danger of abundance but the danger of scarcity. A bitterly cold summer was followed by so meagre a harvest that the price of corn rose rapidly beyond the point at which the ports were open for importation. But high prices which brought bidders at once for farms that had been unlet made bread and meat dear to the agricultural labourer, without bringing him more employment or an advance of wages, and the riots of 1816 were the result of the misery due to this combination of misfortunes.

The riots broke out in May of that year, and the counties affected were Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire. Nightly assemblies were held, threatening letters were sent, and houses, barns and ricks were set on fire. These fires were a prelude to a more determined agitation, which had such an effect on the authorities that the Sheriff of Suffolk and Mr. Willet, a banker of Brandon near Bury, hastened to London to inform the Home Secretary and to ask for the help of the Government in restoring tranquillity. Mr. Willet’s special interest in the proceedings is explained in a naïve sentence in the Annual Register: ‘A reduction in the price of bread and meat was the avowed object of the rioters. They had fixed a maximum for the price of both. They insisted that the lowest price of wheat must be half a crown a bushel, and that of prime joints of beef fourpence per pound. Mr. Willet, a butcher at Brandon, was a marked object of their ill-will, in which Mr. Willet, the banker, was, from the similarity of his name, in danger of sharing. This circumstance, and a laudable anxiety to preserve the public peace, induced him to take an active part and exert all his influence for that purpose.’[323] The rioters numbered some fifteen hundred, and they broke up into separate parties, scattering into different towns and villages. In the course of their depredations the house of the right Mr. Willet was levelled to the ground, after which the wrong Mr. Willet, it is to be hoped, was less restless.[324] ‘They were armed with long, heavy sticks, the ends of which, to the extent of several inches, were studded with short iron spikes, sharp at the sides and point. Their flag was inscribed “Bread or Blood!” and they threatened to march to London.’[325]

During the next few days there were encounters between insurgent mobs in Norwich and Bury and the yeomanry, the dragoons, and the West Norfolk Militia. No lives seem to have been lost, but a good deal of property was destroyed, and a number of rioters were taken into custody. The Times of 25th May says, in an article on these riots, that wages had been reduced to a rate lower than the magistrates thought reasonable, for the magistrates, after suppressing a riot near Downham, acquiesced in the propriety of raising wages, and released the offenders who had been arrested with a suitable remonstrance. There was a much more serious battle at Littleport in the Isle of Ely, when the old fighting spirit of the fens seems to have inspired the rioters. They began by driving from his house a clergyman magistrate of the name of Vachel, after which they attacked several houses and extorted money. They then made for Ely, where they carried out the same programme. This state of anarchy, after two or three days, ended in a battle in Littleport in which two rioters were killed, and seventy-five taken prisoners. The prisoners were tried next month by a Special Commission: twenty-four were capitally convicted; of these five were hung, five were transported for life, one was transported for fourteen years, three for seven years, and ten were imprisoned for twelve months in Ely gaol.[326] The spirit in which one of the judges, Mr. Christian, the Chief Justice of the Isle of Ely, conducted the proceedings may be gathered from his closing speech, in which he said that the rioters were receiving ‘great wages’ and that ‘any change in the price of provisions could only lessen that superfluity, which, I fear, they too frequently wasted in drunkenness.’[327]

The pressure of the changed conditions of the nation on this system of maintenance out of the rates is seen, not only in the behaviour of the labourers, but also in the growing anxiety of the upper classes to control the system, and in the tenacity with which the parishes contested settlement claims. This is the great period of Poor Law litigation. Parish authorities kept a stricter watch than ever on immigrants. In 1816, for example, the Board of Agriculture reported that according to a correspondent ‘a late legal decision, determining that keeping a cow gained a settlement, has deprived many cottagers of that comfort, as it is properly called.’[328] This decision was remedied by the 1819 Act[329] to amend the Settlement Laws as regards renting tenements, and the Report on the Poor Law in 1819 states that in consequence there ‘will no longer be an obstacle to the accommodation which may be afforded in some instances to a poor family, by renting the pasturage of a cow, or some other temporary profit from the occupation of land.’[330] Lawsuits between parishes were incessant, and in 1815 the money spent on litigation and the removal of paupers reached the gigantic figure of £287,000.

In Parliament, too, the question of Poor Law Reform was seen to be urgent, but the problem assumed a particular and very limited shape. The significance of this development can be illustrated by comparing the character and the fate of a measure Whitbread had introduced in 1807 with the character and the fate of the legislation after Waterloo.

Whitbread’s scheme had aimed at (1) improving and humanising the Law of Settlement; (2) reforming the administration of the Poor Law as such in such a way as to give greater encouragement to economy and a fairer distribution of burdens; (3) stimulating thrift and penalising idleness in the labourers; (4) reforming unemployment policy.