I got to Leeds about four o’clock, and went to bed at eight precisely. At five in the morning of the 21st, I came off by the coach to Newcastle, through Harrowgate, Ripon, Darlington, and Durham. As I never was in this part of the country before, and can, therefore, never have described it upon any former occasion, I shall say rather more about it now than I otherwise should do. Having heard and read so much about the “Northern Harvest,” about the “Durham ploughs,” and the “Northumberland system of husbandry,” what was my surprise at finding, which I verily believe to be the fact, that there is not as much corn grown in the North-Riding of Yorkshire, which begins at Ripon, and in the whole county of Durham, as is grown in the Isle of Wight alone. A very small part, comparatively speaking, is arable land; and all the outward appearances show that that which is arable was formerly pasture. Between Durham and Newcastle there is a pretty general division of the land into grass fields and corn fields; but, even here, the absence of homesteads, the absence of barns, and of labourers’ cottages, clearly show that agriculture is a sort of novelty; and that nearly all was pasturage not many years ago, or at any rate only so much of the land was cultivated as was necessary to furnish straw for the horses kept for other purposes than those of agriculture, and oats for those horses, and bread corn sufficient for the graziers and their people. All along the road from Leeds to Durham I saw hardly any wheat at all, or any wheat stubble, no barley, the chief crops being oats and beans mixed with peas. These everywhere appeared to be what we should deem most miserable crops. The oats, tied up in sheaves, or yet uncut, were scarcely ever more than two feet and a half long, the beans were about the same height, and in both cases the land so full of grass as to appear to be a pasture, after the oats and the beans were cut.
The land appears to be divided into very extensive farms. The corn, when cut, you see put up into little stacks of a circular form, each containing about three of our southern wagon-loads of sheaves, which stacks are put up round about the stone house and the buildings of the farmer. How they thrash them out I do not know, for I could see nothing resembling a barn or a barn’s door. By the corn being put into such small stacks, I should suppose the thrashing places to be very small, and capable of holding only one stack at a time. I have many times seen one single rick containing a greater quantity of sheaves than fifteen or twenty of these stacks; and I have seen more than twenty stacks, each containing a number of sheaves equal to, at least, fifteen of these stacks; I have seen more than twenty of these large stacks, standing at one and the same time, in one single homestead in Wiltshire. I should not at all wonder if Tom Baring’s farmers at Micheldever had a greater bulk of wheat-stacks standing now than any one would be able to find of that grain, especially, in the whole of the North-Riding of Yorkshire, and in one half of Durham.
But this by no means implies that these are beggarly counties, even exclusive of their waters, coals, and mines. They are not agricultural counties; they are not counties for the producing of bread, but they are counties made for the express purpose of producing meat; in which respect they excel the southern counties, in a degree beyond all comparison. I have just spoken of the beds of grass that are everywhere seen after the oats and the beans have been out. Grass is the natural produce of this land, which seems to have been made on purpose to produce it; and we are not to call land poor because it will produce nothing but meat. The size and shape of the fields, the sort of fences, the absence of all homesteads and labourers’ cottages, the thinness of the country churches, everything shows that this was always a country purely of pasturage. It is curious, that, belonging to every farm, there appears to be a large quantity of turnips. They are sowed in drills, cultivated between, beautifully clean, very large in the bulb, even now, and apparently having been sowed early in June, if not in May. They are generally the white globe turnip, here and there a field of the Swedish kind. These turnips are not fed off by sheep and followed by crops of barley and clover, as in the South, but are raised, I suppose, for the purpose of being carried in and used in the feeding of oxen, which have come off the grass lands in October and November. These turnip lands seem to take all the manure of the farm; and, as the reader will perceive, they are merely an adjunct to the pasturage, serving, during the winter, instead of hay, wherewith to feed the cattle of various descriptions.
This, then, is not a country of farmers, but a country of graziers; a country of pasture, and not a country of the plough; and those who formerly managed the land here were not husbandmen, but herdsmen. Fortescue was, I dare say, a native of this country; for he describes England as a country of shepherds and of herdsmen, not working so very hard as the people of France did, having more leisure for contemplation, and, therefore, more likely to form a just estimate of their rights and duties; and he describes them as having, at all times, in their houses, plenty of flesh to eat, and plenty of woollen to wear. St. Augustine, in writing to the Pope an account of the character and conduct of his converts in England, told him that he found the English an exceedingly good and generous people; but they had one fault, their fondness for flesh-meat was so great, and their resolution to have it so determined, that he could not get them to abstain from it, even on the fast-days; and that he was greatly afraid that they would return to their state of horrible heathenism, rather than submit to the discipline of the church in this respect. The Pope, who had more sense than the greater part of bishops have ever had, wrote for answer: “Keep them within the pale of the church, at any rate, even if they slaughter their oxen in the churchyards: let them make shambles of the churches, rather than suffer the devil to carry away their souls.” The taste of our fathers was by no means for the potato; for the “nice mealy potato.” The Pope himself would not have been able to induce them to carry “cold potatoes in their bags” to the plough-field, as was, in evidence before the special commissions, proved to have been the common practice in Hampshire and Wiltshire, and which had been before proved by evidence taken by unfeeling committees of the boroughmonger House of Commons. Faith! these old papas of ours would have burnt up not only the stacks, but the ground itself, rather than have lived upon miserable roots, while those who raised none of the food were eating up all the bread and the meat.
Brougham and Birkbeck, and the rest of the Malthusian crew, are constantly at work preaching content to the hungry and naked. To be sure, they themselves, however, are not content to be hungry and naked. Amongst other things, they tell the working-people that the working-folks, especially in the North, used to have no bread, except such as was made of oats and of barley. That was better than potatoes, even the “nice mealy ones;” especially when carried cold to the field in a bag. But these literary impostors, these deluders, as far as they are able to delude; these vagabond authors, who thus write and publish for the purpose of persuading the working-people to be quiet, while they sack luxuries and riches out of the fruit of their toil; these literary impostors take care not to tell the people, that these oatcakes and this barley-bread were always associated with great lumps of flesh-meat; they forget to tell them this, or rather these half-mad, perverse, and perverting literary impostors suppress the facts, for reasons far too manifest to need stating.
The cattle here are the most beautiful by far that I ever saw. The sheep are very handsome; but the horned cattle are the prettiest creatures that my eyes ever beheld. My sons will recollect that when they were little boys I took them to see the “Durham Ox,” of which they drew the picture, I dare say, a hundred times. That was upon a large scale, to be sure, the model of all these beautiful cattle: short horns, strait back, a taper neck, very small in proportion where it joins on the small and handsome head, deep dewlap, small-boned in the legs, hoop-ribbed, square-hipped, tail slender. A great part of them are white, or approaching very nearly to white: they all appear to be half fat, cows and oxen and all; and the meat from them is said to be, and I believe it is, as fine as that from Lincolnshire, Herefordshire, Romney Marsh, or Pevensey Level; and I am ready, at any time, to swear, if need be, that one pound of it fed upon this grass is worth more, to me at least, than any ten pounds or twenty pounds fed upon oil-cake, or the stinking stuff of distilleries; aye, or even upon turnips. This is all grass-land, even from Staffordshire to this point. In its very nature it produces grass that fattens. The little producing-land that there is even in Lancashire and the West-Riding of Yorkshire, produces grass that would fatten an ox, though the land be upon the tops of hills. Everywhere, where there is a sufficiency of grass, it will fatten an ox; and well do we Southern people know that, except in mere vales and meadows, we have no land that will do this; we know that we might put an ox up to his eyes in our grass, and that it would only just keep him from growing worse: we know that we are obliged to have turnips and meal and cabbages and parsnips and potatoes, and then, with some of our hungry hay for them to pick their teeth with, we make shift to put fat upon an ox.
Yet, so much are we like the beasts which, in the fable, came before Jupiter to ask him to endow them with faculties incompatible with their divers frames and divers degrees of strength, that we, in this age of “waust improvements, Ma’um,” are always hankering after laying fields down in pasture, in the South, while these fellows in the North, as if resolved to rival us in “improvement” and perverseness, must needs break up their pasture-lands, and proclaim defiance to the will of Providence, and, instead of rich pasture, present to the eye of the traveller half-green starveling oats and peas, some of them in blossom in the last week of September. The land itself, the earth, of its own accord, as if resolved to vindicate the decrees of its Maker, sends up grass under these miserable crops, as if to punish them for their intrusion; and, when the crops are off, there comes a pasture, at any rate, in which the grass, like that of Herefordshire and Lincolnshire, is not (as it is in our Southern countries) mixed with weeds; but, standing upon the ground as thick as the earth can bear it, and fattening everything that eats of it, it forbids the perverse occupier to tear it to pieces. Such is the land of this country; all to the North of Cheshire, at any rate, leaving out the East-Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, which are adapted for corn in some spots and for cattle in others.
These Yorkshire and Durham cows are to be seen in great numbers in and about London, where they are used for the purpose of giving milk, of which I suppose they give great quantities; but it is always an observation that if you have these cows you must keep them exceedingly well: and this is very true; for, upon the food which does very well for the common cows of Hampshire and Surrey, they would dwindle away directly and be good for nothing at all; and these sheep, which are as beautiful as even imagination could make them, so round and so loaded with flesh, would actually perish upon those downs and in those folds where our innumerable flocks not only live but fatten so well, and with such facility are made to produce us such quantities of fine mutton and such bales of fine wool. There seems to be something in the soil and climate, and particularly in the soil, to create everywhere a sort of cattle and of sheep fitted to it; Dorsetshire and Somersetshire have sheep different from all others, and the nature of which it is to have their lambs in the fall instead of having them in the spring. I remember when I was amongst the villages on the Cotswold-hills, in Gloucestershire, they showed me their sheep in several places, which are a stout big-boned sheep. They told me that many attempts had been made to cross them with the small-boned Leicester breed, but that it had never succeeded, and that the race always got back to the Cotswold breed immediately.
Before closing these rural remarks, I cannot help calling to the mind of the reader an observation of Lord John Scott Eldon, who, at a time when there was a great complaint about “agricultural distress” and about the fearful increase of the poor-rates, said, “that there was no such distress in Northumberland, and no such increase of the poor-rates:” and so said my dignitary, Dr. Black, at the same time: and this, this wise lord, and this not less wise dignitary of mine, ascribed to “the bad practice of the farmers o’ the Sooth paying the labourers their wages out of the poor-rates, which was not the practice in the North.” I thought that they were telling what the children call stories; but I now find that these observations of theirs arose purely from that want of knowledge of the country which was, and is, common to them both. Why, Lord John, there are no such persons here as we call farmers, and no such persons as we call farm-labourers. From Cheshire to Newcastle, I have never seen one single labourer’s cottage by the side of the road! Oh, Lord! if the good people of this country could but see the endless strings of vine-covered cottages and flower-gardens of the labourers of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire; if they could go down the vale of the Avon in Wiltshire, from Marlborough Forest to the city of Salisbury, and there see thirty parish churches in a distance of thirty miles; if they could go up from that city of Salisbury up the valley of Wylly to Warminster, and there see one-and-thirty churches in the space of twenty-seven miles; if they could go upon the top of the down, as I did, not far (I think it was) from St. Mary Cotford, and there have under the eye, in the valley below, ten parish churches within the distance of eight miles, see the downs covered with innumerable flocks of sheep, water meadows running down the middle of the valley, while the sides rising from it were covered with corn, sometimes a hundred acres of wheat in one single piece, while the stack-yards were still well stored from the previous harvest; if John Scott Eldon’s countrymen could behold those things, their quick-sightedness would soon discover why poor-rates should have increased in the South and not in the North; and, though their liberality would suggest an apology for my dignitary, Dr. Black, who was freighted to London in a smack, and has ever since been impounded in the Strand, relieved now and then by an excursion to Blackheath or Clapham Common; to find an apology for their countryman, Lord John, would be putting their liberality to an uncommonly severe test; for he, be it known to them, has chosen his country abode, not in the Strand like my less-informed dignitary, Dr. Black, nor in his native regions in the North; but has, in the beautiful county of Dorset, amidst valleys and downs precisely like those of Wiltshire, got as near to the sun as he could possibly get, and there, from the top of his mansion he can see a score of churches, and from his lofty and ever-green downs, and from his fat valleys beneath, he annually sends his flocks of long-tailed ewes to Appleshaw fair, thence to be sold to all the southern parts of the kingdom, having L. E. marked upon their beautiful wool; and, like the two factions at Maidstone, all tarred with the same brush. It is curious, too, notwithstanding the old maxim, that we all try to get as nearly as possible in our old age to the spot whence we first sprang. Lord John’s brother William (who has some title that I have forgotten) has taken up his quarters on the healthy and I say beautiful Cotswold of Gloucestershire, where, in going in a postchaise from Stowe-in-the-Wold to Cirencester, I thought I should never get by the wall of his park; and I exclaimed to Mr. Dean, who was along with me, “Curse this Northumbrian ship-broker’s son, he has got one half of the county;” and then all the way to Cirencester I was explaining to Mr. Dean how the man had got his money, at which Dean, who is a Roman Catholic, seemed to me to be ready to cross himself several times.
No, there is no apology for Lord John’s observations on the difference between the poor-rates of the South and the North. To go from London to his country-houses he must go across Surrey and Hampshire, along one of the vales of Wiltshire, and one of the vales of Dorsetshire, in which latter county he has many a time seen in one single large field a hundred wind-rows (stacks made in the field in order that the corn may get quite dry before it be put into great stacks); he has many a time seen, on one farm, two or three hundred of these, each of which was very nearly as big as the stacks which you see in the stack-yards of the North Riding of Yorkshire and of Durham, where a large farm seldom produces more than ten or a dozen of these stacks, and where the farmer’s property consists of his cattle and sheep, and where little, very little, agricultural labour is wanted. Lord John ought to have known the cause of the great difference, and not to have suffered such nonsense to come out of a head covered with so very large a wig.