A Short History of English Agriculture

by W. H. R. Curtler

A Dorset farmer told the Parliamentary committee that since 1815 he knew of fifty farmers, farming 24,000 acres, who had failed entirely.[589]

In the Tyne Mercury of October 30, 1821, it was recorded that Mr. Thos. Cooper of Bow purchased 3 milch cows and 40 sheep for £18 16s. 6d. which sum four years previously would only have bought their skins. Prime beef was sold in Salisbury market at 4d. retail, and good joints of mutton at 3¹/₂d.[590] Everywhere the farmers were complaining bitterly, but 'hanging on like sailors to the masts or hull of a wreck'. In Sussex labourers were being employed to dig holes and fill them in again, proof enough of distress but also of great folly. Many thousands of acres were now a mass of thistles and weeds, once fair grass land ploughed up during the war for wheat, and abandoned at the fall of prices. There were no less than 475 petitions on agricultural distress presented to the House from 1820 to March 31, 1822. In 1822, it was proposed that the Government should purchase wheat grown in England to the value of one million sterling and store it; also that when the average price of wheat was under 60s. the Government should advance money on such corn grown in the United Kingdom as should be deposited in certain warehouses, to an extent not exceeding two-thirds the value of the corn.[591] There were not wanting men, however, who put the other side of the question. In a tract called The Refutation of the Arguments used on the Subject of the Agricultural Petition, written in 1819, it was said that the increase in the farmer's expenditure was the cause of his discontent. 'He now assumes the manners and demands the equipage of a gentleman, keeps a table like his landlord, anticipates seasons in their productions, is as choice in his wines, his horses, and his furniture.' Let him be more thrifty. 'Let him dismiss his steward, a character a few years back only known to the great landowner, and cease from degrading the British farmer into a synonym for prodigality.' Lord Liverpool, in the House of Lords, in a speech which roused great opposition among agriculturists, minimized the distress; distress there was, he admitted, but it was not confined to England, it was world-wide; neither was it produced by excessive taxation, for since 1815 taxation had been reduced 25 per cent., while though rents and prices had fallen they were much higher than before the war. Another writer said at the time, 'Individuals of all classes have of late been as it were inflated above their natural size: let this unnatural growth be reduced; let them resume their proper places and appearances, and the quantum of substantial enjoyment, real comfort and happiness, will not be found lessened.' It was also asserted that the taxes on malt, leather, soap, salt, and candles, were not very pressing.

The persistent cries of distress produced a Bill giving still further protection to corn-growers, which was fortunately not carried into effect. There was no doubt, however, about the reality of the crisis through which the landed classes were passing. Many of the landowners were heavily in debt. Mortgages had been multiplied during the war, and while prices were high payment of interest was easy; but when prices fell and the tenant threw up his farm, the landlord could not throw over the mortgage, and the interest hung like a dead weight round his neck.[592]

The price to which wheat fell at the end of 1822 was to be the lowest for some years; it soon recovered, and until 1834 the average annual prices ranged from 53s. to 68s. 6d., while in 1825 beef at Smithfield was 5s. and mutton 5s. 4d. a stone.

In 1823 there was a marked improvement, and the king's speech congratulated the country on 'the gradual abatement of those difficulties under which agriculture has so long suffered.'[593] In 1824 'agriculture was recovering from the depression under which it laboured.'[594] In 1825 it was said, 'there never was a period in the history of this country when all the great interests of the nation were in so thriving a condition.'[595] In that year over-speculation produced a panic and agricultural distress was again evident. In 1826 Cobbett said, 'the present stock of the farms is not in one-half the cases the property of the farmer, it is borrowed stock.'[596] In 1828 all the farmers in Kent were said to be insolvent.[597]

At the meeting of Parliament in 1830 the king lamented the state of affairs, and ascribed it to unfavourable seasons and other causes beyond the reach of legislative remedy. Many had learnt that high protection was no protection for farmers, and it was stated more than once that the large foreign supply of grain, though only then about one-third of the home-grown, depressed our markets. At the same time, it must be admitted that agriculture, like all other industries, was suffering from the crisis of 1825. In 1830, the country was filled with unrest, in which the farm labourer shared. His motives, however, were hardly political. He had a rooted belief that machinery was injuring him, the threshing machine especially; and he avenged himself by burning the ricks of obnoxious farmers. Letters were sent to employers demanding higher wages and the disuse of machines, and notices signed 'Swing' were affixed to gates and buildings. Night after night incendiary fires broke out, and emboldened by impunity the rioters proceeded to pillage by day. In Hampshire they moved in bodies 1,500 strong. A special Commission was appointed, and the disorders put down at last with a firm hand. In 1828 there had been a relaxation in the duties on corn, the object of the Act passed in that year being to secure the farmer a constant price of 8s. a bushel instead of 10s. as in 1815, and by a sliding scale to prevent the disastrous fluctuations in prices. The best proof of its failure is afforded by the appointment of another parliamentary committee in 1833 to inquire into the distressed state of agriculture. At this inquiry many witnesses asserted that the cultivation of inferior soils and heavy clays had diminished from one-fourth to one-fifth.[598] It was also asserted that farmers were paying rent out of capital.[599] Tooke, however, thought there was much exaggeration of the distress, which was proved by the way the farmers weathered the low prices of 1835, when wheat, after a succession of four remarkably good seasons, averaged 39s. 4d. for the year. In these abundant years, too, he asserts that the home supply was equal to the demand,[600] though the committee of 1833 had stated that this had ceased to be the case.[601] Another committee, the last for many years, sat in 1835 to consider the distress; but although prices were low the whole tenor of the evidence established the improvement of farming, the extension of cultivation, and the increase of produce, and it was noticed at this time that towns dependent on agriculture were uniformly prosperous.[602]

On the whole, in spite of exaggeration from interested motives, the distress for the twenty years after the battle of Waterloo was real and deep; twenty years of depression succeeded the same period of false exaltation. The progress, too, during that time was real, and made, as was remarked, because of adversity. From this time agriculture slowly revived.

On one point both of the two last committees were agreed, that the condition of the labourer was improved, and they said he was better off than at any former period, for his wages remained the same, while prices of necessaries had fallen. That his wages went further is true, but they were still miserably low, and he was often housed worse than the animals on the farm. 'Wattle and dab' (or mud and straw) formed the walls of his cottage, the floors were often of mud, and all ages and both sexes frequently slept in one room. A block of ten cottages were put up in the parish of Holmer[603] at the commencement of the nineteenth century, which were said to have combined 'comfort, convenience, and economy;' they each contained one room 12 feet by 14 feet and 6 feet high with a bedroom over, and cost £32 10s. each. They were evidently considered quite superior dwellings, far better than the ordinary run of labourer's cottages. Cobbett gives us a picture of some in Leicestershire in 1826; '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 brick, or of the bare ground; look at the thing called a bed, and survey the rags on the backs of the wretched inhabitants.'[604] The chief exceptions to this state of affairs were the estates of many of the great landlords. On that of the Earl of Winchelsea in Rutland, the cottages he had built contained a kitchen, parlour, dairy, two bedrooms, and a cow-house, and several had small holdings attached of from 5 to 20 acres.[605] Not long before, wages in Hampshire and Wiltshire were 5s. and 6s. a week.[606]

In 1822 it was stated that 'beef and mutton are things the taste of which was unknown to the mass of labourers. No one has lived more in cottages than I, and I declare solemnly I never remember once to have seen such a thing.'[607] A group of women labourers, whom Cobbett saw by the roadside in Hampshire, presented 'such an assemblage of rags as I never saw before even amongst the hoppers at Farnham.'[608]

The labourer's wages may have gone a little further, but he had lost his by-industries, his bit of land and rights of common, and would have had a very different tale to tell from that of the framers of the reports above quoted.