Cheap Jack Zita

by S. Baring-Gould

SEVERAL and various causes had combined to produce discontent in the Fens.

Those who lived by fishing and fowling were angry because the improved drainage had destroyed their sporting grounds. Those who had been left behind in the scramble for land were discontented because others had seized the advantageous moment for purchasing which they had let slip.

The labourers were discontented because of the lowness of the wage and the high price of corn. How was it possible for a man on ten or eleven shillings a week to maintain a family, when wheat was at four to five shillings a stone?

It is proverbial that such as have risen from poverty prove the harshest masters. Such was the case in the Fens. The landowners were related by blood and marriage to the labourers they employed, but, nevertheless, they ground them under their own heels. A specimen of their brutality may be instanced. Twice or thrice the wheat had to be hoed, and the hoers were women. Over them the farmers set a ganger armed with an ox goad, who thrust on the lagging women with a prod between the shoulder-blades.

The men were paid partly in money, partly in corn, and were given the refuse wheat that would not sell, wheat that had been badly harvested, and had sprouted in the ear, wheat that made heavy and unwholesome bread.

Labour in the Fens was of a specially trying nature. The clayer was underground all day in pits throwing up the marl that was to serve as manure to the surface earth, and was half stifled by the noxious exhalations from the decomposing vegetable matter, and was immersed half-way up his calves in fetid, phosphorescent ooze.

The cleaning out and deepening of the dykes was trying work, for the workman was plunged to his waist in stagnant water and slime, tormented by mosquitos, and poisoned by the stings of the terrible gadfly that threw him into fever for a fortnight. Everything was poisonous. The fen-water entering a cut produced gangrene. If the hand or foot were wounded by a reed, a sore was the result that resisted healing.

The expenses of the fen-labourer were heavy. He could not do the tasks set him without a pair of well-tanned leather boots reaching to the hips, that cost him from thirty-six shillings to two pounds the pair.

His comforts were small, and were disregarded by the landowners. His cottage, though quite modern, was supremely wretched. It had been run up at the least possible expense, one brick thick, and one room deep, on piles. But 'the moor' beneath the surface had shrunk through the drainage, and the walls gaped, letting wind and rain drive through the rents, and frost enter, impossible to expel by the largest fire.

There was then, as there is now, and always will be, a body of social failures—fraudulent dealers detected and exposed, but not shamed, men who, through their sourness of temper, or indolence, or dishonesty, had failed in whatever they took in hand. These were ready-made demagogues, all talkers, all dissatisfied with every person and thing save themselves, accusing every institution of corruption, and every person of injustice, because of their own incompetence. They were in their element when real discontent prevailed on account of real wrongs. They rose into influence as agitators; they worked on the minds of the ignorant peasantry, dazzling them with expectations impossible to be realised, and exciting them to a frenzy of anger against all who were in any way their superiors. These men were rarely sincere in their convictions. They were for the most part unscrupulous fishers in troubled waters. Of the few that were sincere, Ephraim Beamish was one.