The most direct and graphic demonstration of this fact, which has not apparently ever been noticed in any of the voluminous discussions of the old Poor Law system, is to be seen in the comparison of the standards of life adopted at the time the system was introduced with the standards that were adopted later. In 1795, as we have seen, the magistrates at Speenhamland recommended an allowance of three gallon loaves for each labourer, and a gallon loaf and a half for his wife and for each additional member of his family. This scale, it must be remembered, was not peculiar to Berkshire. It was the authoritative standard in many counties. We are able to compare this with some later scales, and the comparison yields some startling results. In Northamptonshire in 1816 the magistrates fixed a single man’s allowance at 5s., and the allowance for a man and his wife at 6s., the price of wheat the quartern loaf being 11½d.[339] On this scale a man is supposed to need a little over two and a half gallon loaves, and a man and his wife a little more than three gallon loaves, or barely more than a single man was supposed to need in 1795. This is a grave reduction, but the maintenance standard fell very much lower before 1832. For though we have scales for Cambridgeshire and Essex for 1821 published in the Report of the Poor Law Commission of 1834,[340] which agree roughly with the Northamptonshire scale (two gallon loaves for a man, and one and a half for a woman), in Wiltshire, according to the complicated scale adopted at Hindon in 1817, a man was allowed one and three-fifths gallon loaves, and a woman one and one-tenth.[341] A Hampshire scale, drawn up in 1822 by eight magistrates, of whom five were parsons, allowed only one gallon loaf a head, with 4d. a week per head in addition to a family of four persons, the extra allowance being reduced by a penny in cases where there were six in the family, and by twopence in cases where there were more than six.[342] The Dorsetshire magistrates in 1826 allowed a man the equivalent of one and a half gallon loaves and a penny over, and a woman or child over fourteen one and one-sixth.[343] We have a general statement as to the scales in force towards the end of our period in a passage in M‘Culloch’s Political Economy quoted in the Edinburgh Review for January 1831 (p. 353): ‘The allowance scales now issued from time to time by the magistrates are usually framed on the principle that every labourer should have a gallon loaf of standard wheaten bread weekly for every member of his family and one over: that is four loaves for three persons, five for four, six for five, and so on.’ That is, a family of four persons would have had seven and a half gallon loaves in 1795, and only five gallon loaves in 1831.

Now the Speenhamland scale did not represent some easy and luxurious standard of living; it represented the minimum on which it was supposed that a man employed in agriculture could support life. In thirty-five years the standard had dropped, according to M‘Culloch’s statement, as much as a third, and this not because of war or famine, for in 1826 England had had eleven years of peace, but in the ordinary course of the life of the nation. Is such a decline in the standard of life recorded anywhere else in history?

How did the labourers live at all under these conditions? Their life was, of course, wretched and squalid in the extreme. Cobbett describes a group of women labourers whom he met by the roadside in Hampshire as ‘such an assemblage of rags as I never saw before even amongst the hoppers at Farnham.’ Of the labourers near Cricklade he said: ‘Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. These wretched hovels are stuck upon little beds of ground on the roadside where the space has been wider than the road demanded. In many places they have not two rods to a hovel. It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the roadside. Yesterday morning was a sharp frost, and this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plots of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this; no, not even amongst the free negroes in America who, on an average, do not work one day out of four.’[344] The labourers’ cottages in Leicestershire he found were ‘hovels made of mud and straw, bits of glass or of old cast-off windows, without frames or hinges frequently, and merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them and look at the bits of chairs or stools, the wretched boards tacked together to serve for a table, the floor of pebble broken or of the bare ground; look at the thing called a bed, and survey the rags on the backs of the inhabitants.’[345] A Dorsetshire clergyman, a witness before the Committee on Wages in 1824, said that the labourers lived almost entirely on tea and potatoes; a Bedfordshire labourer said that he and his family lived mainly on bread and cheese and water, and that sometimes for a month together he never tasted meat; a Suffolk magistrate described how a labourer out of work, convicted of stealing wood, begged to be sent at once to a House of Correction, where he hoped to find food and employment. If Davies had written an account of the labouring classes in 1820 or 1830, the picture he drew in 1795 would have seemed bright in comparison. But even this kind of life could not be supported on such provision as was made by the parish. How, then, did the labourers maintain any kind of existence when society ceased to piece together a minimum livelihood out of rates and wages?

For the answer to this question we must turn to the history of crime and punishment; to the Reports of the Parliamentary Committees on Labourers’ Wages (1824), on the Game Laws (1823 and 1828), on Emigration (1826 and 1827), on Criminal Commitments and Convictions and Secondary Punishments (1827, 1828, 1831, and 1832), and the evidence of those who were in touch with this side of village life. From these sources we learn that, rate aid not being sufficient to bring wages to the maintenance level, poaching, smuggling, and ultimately thieving were called in to rehabilitate the labourer’s economic position.[346] He was driven to the wages of crime. The history of the agricultural labourer in this generation is written in the code of the Game Laws, the growing brutality of the Criminal Law, and the preoccupation of the rich with the efficacy of punishment.

We know from Fielding with what sort of justice the magistrates treated persons accused of poaching in the reign of George III.’s grandfather, but when he wrote his account of Squire Western, and when Blackstone wrote that the Game Laws had raised up a little Nimrod in every manor, the blood of men and boys had not yet been spilt for the pleasures of the rich. It is only after Fielding and Blackstone were both in their graves that this page of history became crimson, and that the gentlemen of England took to guarding their special amusements by methods of which a Member of Parliament declared that the nobles of France had not ventured on their like in the days of their most splendid arrogance. The little Nimrods who made and applied their code were a small and select class. They were the persons qualified under the law of Charles II. to shoot game, i.e. persons who possessed a freehold estate of at least £100 a year, or a leasehold estate of at least £150 a year, or the son or heir-apparent of an esquire or person of higher degree. The legislation that occupies so much of English history during a period of misery and famine is devoted to the protection of the monopoly of this class, comprising less than one in ten thousand of the people of England. A Member of Parliament named Warburton said in the House of Commons that the only parallel to this monopoly was to be found in Mariner’s account of the Tonga Islands, where rats were preserved as game. Anybody might eat rats there, but nobody was allowed to kill them except persons descended from gods or kings.

With the general growth of upper-class riches and luxury there came over shooting a change corresponding with the change that turned hunting into a magnificent and extravagant spectacle. The habit set in of preserving game in great masses, of organising the battue, of maintaining armies of keepers. In many parts of the country, pheasants were now introduced for the first time. Whereas game had hitherto kept something of the wildness, and vagrancy, and careless freedom of Nature, the woods were now packed with tame and docile birds, whose gay feathers sparkled among the trees, before the eyes of the half-starved labourers breaking stones on the road at half a crown a week. The change is described by witnesses such as Sir James Graham and Sir Thomas Baring, magistrates respectively in Cumberland and Hampshire, before the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions in 1827. England was, in fact, passing through a process precisely opposite to that which had taken place in France: the sport of the rich was becoming more and more of an elaborate system, and more of a vested interest. This development was marked by the growth of an offensive combination among game preservers; in some parts of the country game associations were formed, for the express purpose of paying the costs of prosecutions, so that the poacher had against him not merely a bench of game preservers, but a ring of squires, a sort of Holy Alliance for the punishment of social rebels, which drew its meshes not round a parish but round a county. Simultaneously, as we have seen, a general change was coming over the circumstances and position of the poor. The mass of the people were losing their rights and independence; they were being forced into an absolute dependence on wages, and were living on the brink of famine. These two developments must be kept in mind in watching the building up of the game code in the last phase of the ancient régime.

The Acts for protecting game passed after the accession of George III. are in a crescendo of fierceness. The first important Act was passed In 1770. Under this Act any one who killed game of any kind between sunsetting and sunrising, or used any gun, or dog, snare, net, or other engine for destroying game at night, was, on conviction by one witness before one Justice of the Peace, to be punished with imprisonment for not less than three months or more than six. For a subsequent offence he was to be imprisoned for not more than twelve months or less than six, and to be whipped publicly between the hours of twelve and one o’clock. This was light punishment compared with the measures that were to follow. In the year 1800, the year of Marengo, when all England was braced up for its great duel with the common enemy of freedom and order, and the labourers were told every day that they would be the first to suffer if Napoleon landed in England, the English Parliament found time to pass another Act to punish poachers, and to teach justice to mend her slow pace. By this Act when two or more persons were found in any forest, chase, park, wood, plantation, paddock, field, meadow, or other open or enclosed ground, having any gun, net, engine, or other instrument, with the intent to destroy, take, or kill game, they were to be seized by keepers or servants, and on conviction before a J.P., they were to be treated as rogues and vagabonds under the Act of 1744, i.e. they were to be punished by imprisonment with hard labour; an incorrigible rogue, i.e. a second offender, was to be imprisoned for two years with whipping. Further, if the offender was over twelve years of age, the magistrates might sentence him to serve in the army or navy. If an incorrigible rogue escaped from the House of Correction he was to be liable to transportation for seven years.

Two consequences followed from this Act. Now that punishment was made so severe, the poacher had a strong reason for violence: surrender meant service in a condemned regiment, and he therefore took the risks of resistance. The second consequence was the practice of poaching in large groups. The organisation of poaching gangs was not a natural development of the industry; it was adopted in self-defence.[347] This Act led inevitably to those battles between gamekeepers and labourers that became so conspicuous a feature of English life at this time, and in 1803 Lord Ellenborough passed an Act which provided that any persons who presented a gun or tried to stab or cut ‘with intent to obstruct, resist, or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of the person or persons so stabbing or cutting, or the lawful apprehension or detainer of any of his, her, or their accomplices for any offences for which he, she, or they may respectively be liable by law to be apprehended, imprisoned, or detained,’ should suffer death as a felon. In 1816, when peace and the fall of prices were bringing new problems in their train, there went through Parliament, without a syllable of debate, a Bill of which Romilly said that no parallel to it could be found in the laws of any country in the world. By that Act a person who was found at night unarmed, but with a net for poaching, in any forest, chase, or park was to be punished by transportation for seven years. This Act Romilly induced Parliament to repeal in the following year, but the Act that took its place only softened the law to the extent of withdrawing this punishment from persons found with nets, but without guns or bludgeons: it enacted that any person so found, armed with gun, crossbow, firearms, bludgeon, or any other offensive weapon, was to be tried at Quarter Sessions, and if convicted, to be sentenced to transportation for seven years: if such offender were to return to Great Britain before his time was over, he was to be transported for the rest of his life.[348]

This savage Act, though by no means a dead letter, as Parliamentary Returns show, seems to have defeated its own end, for in 1828 it was repealed, because, as Lord Wharncliffe told the House of Lords, there was a certain reluctance on the part of juries to convict a prisoner, when they knew that conviction would be followed by transportation. The new Act of 1828, which allowed a person to be convicted before two magistrates, reserved transportation for the third offence, punishing the first offence by three months’, and the second by six months’ imprisonment. But the convicted person had to find sureties after his release, or else go back to hard labour for another six months if it was a first offence, or another twelve months if it was his second. Further, if three men were found in a wood and one of them carried a gun or bludgeon, all three were liable to be transported for fourteen years.[349] Althorp’s Bill of 1831 which abolished the qualifications of the Act of Charles II., gave the right to shoot to every landowner who took out a certificate, and made the sale of game legal, proposed in its original form to alter these punishments, making that for the first and second offences rather more severe (four and eight months), and that for the third, two years’ imprisonment. In Committee in the House of Commons the two years were reduced to one year on the proposal of Orator Hunt. The House of Lords, however, restored the punishments of the Act of 1828.