For, in fact, it is not the farmer, but the Landlord and Parson, who wants relief from the “Collective.” The tenant’s remedy is, quitting his farm or bringing down his rent to what he can afford to give, wheat being 3 or 4 shillings a bushel. This is his remedy. What should he want high prices for? They can do him no good; and this I proved to the farmers last year. The fact is, the Landlords and Parsons are urging the farmers on to get something done to give them high rents and high tithes.
At Hertford there has been a meeting at which some sense was discovered, at any rate. The parties talked about the fund-holder, the Debt, the taxes, and so on, and seemed to be in a very warm temper. Pray, keep yourselves cool, gentlemen; for you have a great deal to endure yet. I deeply regret that I have not room to insert the resolutions of this meeting.
There is to be a meeting at Battle (East Sussex) on the 3rd instant, at which I mean to be. I want to see my friends on the South Downs. To see how they look now.
[At a public dinner given to Mr. Cobbett at Norwich, on the market-day above mentioned, the company drank the toast of Mr. Cobbett and his “Trash,” the name “two-penny trash,” having being at one time applied by Lord Castlereagh to the Register. In acknowledging this toast Mr. Cobbett addressed the company in a speech, of which the following is a passage:]
“My thanks to you for having drunk my health, are great and sincere; but much greater pleasure do I feel at the approbation bestowed on that Trash, which has, for so many years been a mark for the finger of scorn to be pointed at by ignorant selfishness and arrogant and insolent power. To enumerate, barely to name, all, or a hundredth part of, the endeavours that have been made to stifle this Trash would require a much longer space of time than that which we have now before us. But, gentlemen, those endeavours must have cost money; money must have been expended in the circulation of Anti-Cobbett, and the endless bale of papers and pamphlets put forth to check the progress of the Trash: and, when we take into view the immense sums expended in keeping down the spirit excited by the Trash, who of us is to tell, whether these endeavours, taken altogether, may not have added many millions to that debt, of which (without any hint at a concomitant measure) some men have now the audacity, the unprincipled, the profligate assurance to talk of reducing the interest. The Trash, Gentlemen, is now triumphant; its triumph we are now met to celebrate; proofs of its triumph I myself witnessed not many hours ago, in that scene where the best possible evidence was to be found. In walking through St. Andrew’s Hall, my mind was not so much engaged on the grandeur of the place, or on the gratifying reception I met with; those hearty shakes by the hand which I so much like, those smiles of approbation, which not to see with pride would argue an insensibility to honest fame: even these, I do sincerely assure you, engaged my mind much less than the melancholy reflection, that, of the two thousand or fifteen hundred farmers then in my view, there were probably three-fourths who came to the Hall with aching hearts, and who would leave it in a state of mental agony. What a thing to contemplate, Gentlemen! What a scene is here! A set of men, occupiers of the land; producers of all that we eat, drink, wear, and of all that forms the buildings that shelter us; a set of men industrious and careful by habit; cool, thoughtful, and sensible from the instructions of nature; a set of men provident above all others, and engaged in pursuits in their nature stable as the very earth they till: to see a set of men like this plunged into anxiety, embarrassment, jeopardy, not to be described; and when the particular individuals before me were famed for their superior skill in this great and solid pursuit, and were blessed with soil and other circumstances to make them prosperous and happy: to behold this sight would have been more than sufficient to sink my heart within me, had I not been upheld by the reflection, that I had done all in my power to prevent these calamities, and that I still had in reserve that which, with the assistance of the sufferers themselves, would restore them and the nation to happiness.”
SUSSEX JOURNAL: TO BATTLE, THROUGH BROMLEY, SEVEN-OAKS, AND TUNBRIDGE.
Battle,
Wednesday, 2 Jan. 1822.
Came here to-day from Kensington, in order to see what goes on at the Meeting to be held here to-morrow, of the “Gentry, Clergy, Freeholders, and Occupiers of Land in the Rape of Hastings, to take into consideration the distressed state of the Agricultural interest.” I shall, of course, give an account of this meeting after it has taken place.—You come through part of Kent to get to Battle from the Great Wen on the Surrey side of the Thames. The first town is Bromley, the next Seven-Oaks, the next Tunbridge, and between Tunbridge and this place you cross the boundaries of the two counties.—From the Surrey Wen to Bromley the land is generally a deep loam on a gravel, and you see few trees except elm. A very ugly country. On quitting Bromley the land gets poorer; clay at bottom; the wheat sown on five, or seven, turn lands; the furrows shining with wet; rushes on the wastes on the sides of the road. Here there is a common, part of which has been enclosed and thrown out again, or, rather, the fences carried away.—There is a frost this morning, some ice, and the women look rosy-cheeked.—There is a very great variety of soil along this road; bottom of yellow clay; then of sand; then of sand-stone; then of solider stone; then (for about five miles) of chalk; then of red clay; then chalk again; here (before you come to Seven-Oaks) is a most beautiful and rich valley, extending from east to west, with rich corn-fields and fine trees; then comes sand-stone again; and the hop-gardens near Seven-Oaks, which is a pretty little town with beautiful environs, part of which consists of the park of Knowle, the seat of the Duchess of Dorset. It is a very fine place. And there is another park, on the other side of the town. So that this is a delightful place, and the land appears to be very good. The gardens and houses all look neat and nice. On quitting Seven-Oaks you come to a bottom of gravel for a short distance, and to a clay for many miles. When I say that I saw teams carting gravel from this spot to a distance of nearly ten miles along the road, the reader will be at no loss to know what sort of bottom the land has all along here. The bottom then becomes sand-stone again. This vein of land runs all along through the county of Sussex, and the clay runs into Hampshire, across the forests of Bere and Waltham, then across the parishes of Ouslebury, Stoke, and passing between the sand hills of Southampton and chalk hills of Winchester, goes westward till stopped by the chalky downs between Romsey and Salisbury.—Tunbridge is a small but very nice town, and has some fine meadows and a navigable river.—The rest of the way to Battle presents, alternately, clay and sand-stone. Of course the coppices and oak woods are very frequent. There is now and then a hop-garden spot, and now and then an orchard of apples or cherries; but these are poor indeed compared with what you see about Canterbury and Maidstone. The agricultural state of the country or, rather, the quality of the land, from Bromley to Battle, may be judged of from the fact, that I did not see, as I came along, more than thirty acres of Swedes during the fifty-six miles! In Norfolk I should, in the same distance, have seen five hundred acres! However, man was not the maker of the land; and, as to human happiness, I am of opinion, that as much, and even more, falls to the lot of the leather-legged chaps that live in and rove about amongst those clays and woods as to the more regularly disciplined labourers of the rich and prime parts of England. As “God has made the back to the burthen,” so the clay and coppice people make the dress to the stubs and bushes. Under the sole of the shoe is iron; from the sole six inches upwards is a high-low; then comes a leather bam to the knee; then comes a pair of leather breeches; then comes a stout doublet; over this comes a smock-frock; and the wearer sets brush and stubs and thorns and mire at defiance. I have always observed, that woodland and forest labourers are best off in the main. The coppices give them pleasant and profitable work in winter. If they have not so great a corn-harvest, they have a three weeks’ harvest in April or May; that is to say, in the season of barking, which in Hampshire is called stripping, and in Sussex flaying, which employs women and children as well as men. And then in the great article of fuel! They buy none. It is miserable work, where this is to be bought, and where, as at Salisbury, the poor take by turns the making of fires at their houses to boil four or five tea-kettles. What a winter-life must those lead, whose turn it is not to make the fire! At Launceston in Cornwall a man, a tradesman too, told me, that the people in general could not afford to have fire in ordinary, and that he himself paid 3d. for boiling a leg of mutton at another man’s fire! The leather-legged-race know none of these miseries, at any rate. They literally get their fuel “by hook or by crook,” whence, doubtless, comes that old and very expressive saying, which is applied to those cases where people will have a thing by one means or another.