The exertions of the reforming bishops did not achieve a conspicuous success, for the second of the difficulties touched on by Porteus was insurmountable. In his Legacy to Parsons, Cobbett, quoting from the Clerical Guide, showed that 332 parsons shared the revenues of 1496 parishes, and 500 more shared those of 1524. Among the pluralists were Lord Walsingham, who besides enjoying a pension of £700 a year, was Archdeacon of Surrey, Prebendary of Winchester, Rector of Calbourne, Rector of Fawley, perpetual Curate of Exbury, and Rector of Merton; the Earl of Guildford, Rector of Old Alresford, Rector of New Alresford, perpetual Curate of Medsted, Rector of St. Mary, Southampton, including the great parish of South Stoneham, Master of St. Cross Hospital, with the revenue of the parish of St. Faith along with it. There were three Pretymans dividing fifteen benefices, and Wellington’s brother was Prebendary of Durham, Rector of Bishopwearmouth, Rector of Chelsea, and Rector of Therfield. This method of treating the parson’s profession as a comfortable career was so closely entangled in the system of aristocracy, that no Government which represented those interests would ever dream of touching it. Parliament intervened indeed, but intervened to protect those who lived on these abuses. For before 1801 there were Acts of Parliament on the Statute Book (21 Henry VIII. c. 13, and 13 Elizabeth c. 20), which provided certain penalties for non-residence. In 1799 a certain Mr. Williams laid informations against hundreds of the clergy for offences against these Acts. Parliament replied by passing a series of Acts to stay proceedings, and finally in 1803 Sir William Scott, member for the University of Oxford, passed an Act which allowed the bishops to authorise parsons to reside out of their parishes. It is not surprising to find that in 1812, out of ten thousand incumbents, nearly six thousand were non-resident.
In the parishes where the incumbent was non-resident, if there was a clergyman at all in the place, it was generally a curate on a miserable pittance. Bishop Porteus, in the charge already mentioned, gives some interesting information about the salaries of curates: ‘It is also highly to the honour of this Diocese that in general the stipends allowed to the curates are more liberal than in many other parts of the kingdom. In several instances I find that the stipend for one church only is £50 a year; for two £60 and the use of a parsonage; and in the unwholesome parts of the Diocese £70 and even £80 (that is £40 for each church), with the same indulgence of a house to reside in.’ Many of the parishes did not see much of the curate assigned to them. ‘A man must have travelled very little in the kingdom,’ said Arthur Young in 1798, ‘who does not know that country towns abound with curates who never see the parishes they serve, but when they are absolutely forced to it by duty.’[395] But the ill-paid curate, even when he was resident and conscientious, as he often was, moved like the pluralist rector in the orbit of the rich. He was in that world though not of it. All his hopes hung on the squire. To have taken the side of the poor against him would have meant ruin, and the English Church was not a nursery of this kind of heroism. It is significant that almost every eighteenth-century novelist puts at least one sycophantic parson in his or her gallery of portraits.[396]
In addition to the social ties that drew the clergy to the aristocracy, there was a powerful economic hindrance to their friendship with the poor. De Tocqueville thought that the tithe system brought the French priest into interesting and touching relations with the peasant: a view that has seemed fanciful to later historians, who are more impressed by the quarrels that resulted. But De Tocqueville himself could scarcely argue that the tithe system helped to warm the heart of the labourer to the Church of England in cases such as those recorded in the Parliamentary Paper issued in 1833, in which parson magistrates sent working men to prison for refusing to pay tithes to their rector. Day labouring men had originally been exempted from liability to pay tithes, but just as the French Church brought more and more of the property and industry of the State within her confiscating grasp, so the English Parliament, from the reign of William III., had been drawing the parson’s net more closely round the labourer. Moreover, as we shall see in a later chapter, the question of tithes was in the very centre of the social agitations that ended in the rising of 1830 and its terrible punishment. In this particular quarrel the farmers and labourers were on the same side, and the parsons as a body stood out for their own property with as much determination as the landlords.
In one respect the Church took an active part in oppressing the village poor, for Wilberforce and his friends started, just before the French Revolution, a Society for the Reformation of Manners, which aimed at enforcing the observance of Sunday, forbidding any kind of social dissipation, and repressing freedom of speech and of thought whenever they refused to conform to the superstitions of the morose religion that was then in fashion. This campaign was directed against the license of the poor alone. There were no stocks for the Sabbath-breakers of Brooks’s: a Gibbon might take what liberties he pleased with religion: the wildest Methodist never tried to shackle the loose tongues or the loose lives of the gay rich. The attitude of the Church to the excesses of this class is well depicted in Fielding’s account of Parson Supple, who never remonstrated with Squire Western for swearing, but preached so vigorously in the pulpit against the habit that the authorities put the laws very severely in execution against others, ‘and the magistrate was the only person in the parish who could swear with impunity.’ This description might seem to border on burlesque, but there is an entry in Wilberforce’s diary that reveals a state of mind which even Fielding would have found it impossible to caricature. Wilberforce was staying at Brighton, and this is his description of an evening he spent at the Pavilion with the first gentleman of Europe: ‘The Prince and Duke of Clarence too very civil. Prince showed he had read Cobbett. Spoke strongly of the blasphemy of his late papers and most justly.’[397] We can only hope that Sheridan was there to enjoy the scene, and that the Prince was able for once to do justice to his strong feelings in language that would not shock Wilberforce’s ears.
Men like Wilberforce and the magistrates whom he inspired did not punish the rich for their dissolute behaviour; they only found in that behaviour another argument for coercing the poor. As they watched the dishevelled lives of men like George Selwyn, their one idea of action was to punish a village labourer for neglecting church on Sunday morning. We have seen how the cottagers paid in Enclosure Bills for their lords’ adventures at play. They paid also for their lords’ dissipations in the loss of innocent pleasures that might have brought some colour into their grey lives. The more boisterous the fun at Almack’s, the deeper the gloom thrown over the village. The Select Committee on Allotments that reported in 1843 found one of the chief causes of crime in the lack of recreations. Sheridan at one time and Cobbett at another tried to revive village sports, but social circumstances were too strong for them. In this respect the French peasant had the advantage. Babeau’s picture of his gay and sociable Sunday may be overdrawn, but a comparison of Crabbe’s description of the English Sunday with contemporary descriptions of Sunday as it was spent in a French village, shows that the spirit of common gaiety, killed in England by Puritanism and by the destruction of the natural and easy-going relations of the village community, survived in France through all the tribulations of poverty and famine. The eighteenth-century French village still bore a resemblance in fact to the mediæval English village, and Goldsmith has recorded in The Traveller his impressions of ‘mirth and social ease.’ Babeau gives an account of a great variety of village games, from the violent contests in Brittany for the ‘choule,’ in one of which fourteen players were drowned, to the gentler dances and the children’s romps that were general in other parts of France, and Arthur Young was very much struck by the agility and the grace that the heavy peasants displayed in dancing on the village green. Windham, speaking in a bad cause, the defence of bull-baiting in 1800, laid stress on the contrast: ‘In the south of France and in Spain, at the end of the day’s labour, and in the cool of the evening’s shade, the poor dance in mirthful festivity on the green, to the sound of the guitar. But in this country no such source of amusement presents itself. If they dance, it must be often in a marsh, or in the rain, for the pleasure of catching cold. But there is a substitute in this country well known by the name of Hops. We all know the alarm which the very word inspires, and the sound of the fiddle calls forth the magistrate to dissolve the meeting. Men bred in ignorance of the world, and having no opportunity of mixing in its scenes or observing its manners, may be much worse employed than in learning something of its customs from theatrical representations; but if a company of strolling players make their appearance in a village, they are hunted immediately from it as a nuisance, except, perhaps, there be a few people of greater wealth in the neighbourhood, whose wives and daughters patronize them.’[398] Thus all the influences of the time conspired to isolate the poor, and the changes, destructive of their freedom and happiness, that were taking place in their social and economic surroundings, were aggravated by a revival of Puritanism which helped to rob village life of all its natural melody and colour.
CHAPTER X
THE VILLAGE IN 1830
We have described the growing misery of the labourer, the increasing rigours of the criminal law, and the insensibility of the upper classes, due to the isolation of the poor. What kind of a community was created by the Speenhamland system after it had been in force for a generation? We have, fortunately, a very full picture given in a Parliamentary Report that is generally regarded as one of the landmarks of English history. We cannot do better than set out the main features of the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834, and the several effects they traced to this system.
The first effect is one that everybody could have anticipated: the destruction of all motives for effort and ambition. Under this system ‘the most worthless were sure of something, while the prudent, the industrious, and the sober, with all their care and pains, obtained only something; and even that scanty pittance was doled out to them by the overseer.’[399] All labourers were condemned to live on the brink of starvation, for no effort of will or character could improve their position. The effect on the imagination was well summed up in a rhetorical question from a labourer who gave evidence to a Commissioner. ‘When a man has his spirit broken what is he good for?’[400] The Poor Law Commissioners looked at it from a different point of view: ‘The labourer feels that the existing system, though it generally gives him low wages, always gives him work. It gives him also, strange as it may appear, what he values more, a sort of independence. He need not bestir himself to seek work; he need not study to please his master; he need not put any restraint upon his temper; he need not ask relief as a favour. He has all a slave’s security for subsistence, without his liability to punishment.... All the other classes of society are exposed to the vicissitudes of hope and fear; he alone has nothing to lose or to gain.’[401]
But it is understating the result of the system on individual enterprise to say that it destroyed incentives to ambition; for in some parishes it actually proscribed independence and punished the labourer who owned some small property. Wages under these conditions were so low that a man with a little property or a few savings could not keep himself alive without help from the parish, but if a man was convicted of possessing anything he was refused parish help. It was dangerous even to look tidy or neat, ‘ragged clothes are kept by the poor, for the express purpose of coming to the vestry in them.’[402] The Report of the Commissioners on this subject recalls Rousseau’s description of the French peasant with whom he stayed in the course of his travels, who, when his suspicions had been soothed, and his hospitable instincts had been warmed by friendly conversation, produced stores of food from the secret place where they had been hidden to escape the eye of the tax-collector. A man who had saved anything was ruined. A Mr. Hickson, a Northampton manufacturer and landowner in Kent, gave an illustration of this.
‘The case of a man who has worked for me will show the effect of the parish system in preventing frugal habits. This is a hard-working, industrious man, named William Williams. He is married, and had saved some money, to the amount of about £70, and had two cows; he had also a sow and ten pigs. He had got a cottage well furnished; he was a member of a benefit club at Meopham, from which he received 8s. a week when he was ill. He was beginning to learn to read and write, and sent his children to the Sunday School. He had a legacy of about £46, but he got his other money together by saving from his fair wages as a waggoner. Some circumstances occurred which obliged me to part with him. The consequence of this labouring man having been frugal and saved money, and got the cows, was that no one would employ him, although his superior character as a workman was well known in the parish. He told me at the time I was obliged to part with him: “Whilst I have these things I shall get no work; I must part with them all; I must be reduced to a state of beggary before any one will employ me.” I was compelled to part with him at Michaelmas; he has not yet got work, and he has no chance of getting any until he has become a pauper; for until then the paupers will be preferred to him. He cannot get work in his own parish, and he will not be allowed to get any in other parishes. Another instance of the same kind occurred amongst my workmen. Thomas Hardy, the brother-in-law of the same man, was an excellent workman, discharged under similar circumstances; he has a very industrious wife. They have got two cows, a well-furnished cottage, and a pig and fowls. Now he cannot get work, because he has property. The pauper will be preferred to him, and he can qualify himself for it only by becoming a pauper. If he attempts to get work elsewhere, he is told that they do not want to fix him on the parish. Both these are fine young men, and as excellent labourers as I could wish to have. The latter labouring man mentioned another instance of a labouring man in another parish (Henstead), who had once had more property than he, but was obliged to consume it all, and is now working on the roads.’[403] This effect of the Speenhamland arrangements was dwelt on in the evidence before the Committee on Agricultural Labourers’ Wages in 1824. Labourers had to give up their cottages in a Dorsetshire village because they could not become pensioners if they possessed a cottage, and farmers would only give employment to village pensioners. Thus these cottagers who had not been evicted by enclosure were evicted by the Speenhamland system.