Rural Rides

by William Cobbett

I looked with particular care on the sides of the road all the way through Yorkshire and Durham. The distance, altogether, from Oldham in Lancashire, to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is about a hundred and fifty miles; and, leaving out the great towns, I did not see so many churches as are to be seen in any twenty miles of any of the valleys of Wiltshire. All these things prove that these are by nature counties of pasturage, and that they were formerly used solely for that purpose. It is curious that there are none of those lands here which we call “meadows.” The rivers run in deep beds, and have generally very steep sides; no little rivulets and occasional overflowings that make the meadows in the South, which are so very beautiful, but the grass in which is not of the rich nature that the grass is in these counties in the North: it will produce milk enough, but it will not produce beef. It is hard to say which part of the country is the most valuable gift of God; but every one must see how perverse and injurious it is to endeavour to produce in the one that which nature has intended to confine to the other. After all the unnatural efforts that have been made here to ape the farming of Norfolk and Suffolk, it is only playing at farming, as stupid and “loyal” parents used to set their children to play at soldiers during the last war.

If any of these sensible men of Newcastle were to see the farming in the South Downs, and to see, as I saw in the month of July last, four teams of large oxen, six in a team, all ploughing in one field in preparation for wheat, and several pairs of horses, in the same field, dragging, harrowing, and rolling, and had seen on the other side of the road from five to six quarters of wheat standing upon the acre, and from nine to ten quarters of oats standing alongside of it, each of the two fields from fifty to a hundred statute acres; if any of these sensible men of Newcastle could see these things, they would laugh at the childish work that they see going on here under the name of farming; the very sight would make them feel how imperious is the duty on the law-giver to prevent distress from visiting the fields, and to take care that those whose labour produced all the food and all the raiment, shall not be fed upon potatoes and covered with rags; contemplating the important effects of their labour, each man of them could say as I said when this mean and savage faction had me at my trial, “I would see all these labourers hanged, and be hanged along with them, rather than see them live upon potatoes.”

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 24th September, 1832.

Since writing the above I have had an opportunity of receiving information from a very intelligent gentleman of this county, who tells me, that in Northumberland there are some lands which bear very heavy crops of wheat; that the agriculture in this county is a great deal better than it is farther south; that, however, it was a most lamentable thing that the paper-money price of corn tempted so many men to break up these fine pastures; that the turf thus destroyed cannot be restored probably in a whole century; that the land does not now, with present prices, yield a clear profit, anything like what it would have yielded in the pasture; and that thus was destroyed the goose with the golden eggs. Just so was it with regard to the downs in the south and the west of England, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres, where the turf was the finest in the world, broken up for the sake of the paper-money prices, but now left to be downs again; and which will not be downs for more than a century to come. Thus did this accursed paper-money cause even the fruitful qualities of the earth to be anticipated, and thus was the soil made worth less than it was before the accursed invention appeared! This gentleman told me that this breaking up of the pasture-land in this country had made the land, though covered again with artificial grasses, unhealthy for sheep; and he gave as an instance the facts, that three farmers purchased a hundred and fifty sheep each, out of the same flock; that two of them, who put their sheep upon these recently broken-up lands, lost their whole flocks by the rot, with the exception of four in the one case and four in the other, out of the three hundred: and that the third farmer, who put his sheep upon the old pastures, and kept them there, lost not a single sheep out of the hundred and fifty! These, ever accursed paper-money, are amongst thy destructive effects!

I shall now, laying aside for the present these rural affairs, turn to the politics of this fine, opulent, solid, beautiful, and important town; but as this would compel me to speak of particular transactions and particular persons, and as this Register will come back to Newcastle before I am likely to quit it, the reader will see reasons quite sufficient for my refraining to go into matters of this sort, until the next Register, which will in all probability be dated from Edinburgh.

While at Manchester, I received an invitation to lodge while here at the house of a friend, of whom I shall have to speak more fully hereafter; but every demonstration of respect and kindness met me at the door of the coach in which I came from Leeds, on Friday, the 21st September. In the early part of Saturday, the 22nd, a deputation waited upon me with an address. Let the readers, in my native county and parish, remember that I am now at the end of thirty years of calumnies poured out incessantly upon me from the poisonous mouths and pens of three hundred mercenary villains, called newspaper editors and reporters; that I have written and published more than a hundred volumes in those thirty years; and that more than a thousand volumes (chiefly paid for out of the taxes) have been written and published for the sole purpose of impeding the progress of those truths that dropped from my pen; that my whole life has been a life of sobriety and labour; that I have invariably shown that I loved and honoured my country, and that I preferred its greatness and happiness far beyond my own; that, at four distinct periods, I might have rolled in wealth derived from the public money, which I always refused on any account to touch; that, for having thwarted this Government in its wastefulness of the public resources, and particularly for my endeavours to produce that Reform of the Parliament which the Government itself has at last been compelled to resort to; that, for having acted this zealous and virtuous part, I have been twice stripped of all my earnings by the acts of this Government; once lodged in a felon’s jail for two years, and once driven into exile for two years and a half; and that, after all, here I am on a spot within a hundred miles of which I never was before in my life; and here I am receiving the unsolicited applause of men amongst the most intelligent in the whole kingdom, and the names of some of whom have been pronounced accompanied with admiration, even to the southernmost edge of the kingdom.

Hexham, 1st Oct., 1832.

I left Morpeth this morning pretty early, to come to this town, which lies on the banks of the Tyne, at thirty-four miles distant from Morpeth, and at twenty distant from Newcastle. Morpeth is a great market-town, for cattle especially. It is a solid old town; but it has the disgrace of seeing an enormous new jail rising up in it. From cathedrals and monasteries we are come to be proud of our jails, which are built in the grandest style, and seemingly as if to imitate the Gothic architecture.

From Morpeth to within about four miles of Hexham, the land is but very indifferent; the farms of an enormous extent. I saw in one place more than a hundred corn-stacks in one yard, each having from six to seven Surrey wagon-loads of sheaves in a stack; and not another house to be seen within a mile or two of the farmhouse. There appeared to be no such thing as barns, but merely a place to take in a stack at a time, and thrash it out by a machine. The country seems to be almost wholly destitute of people. Immense tracks of corn-land, but neither cottages nor churches. There is here and there a spot of good land, just as in the deep valleys that I crossed; but, generally speaking, the country is poor; and its bleakness is proved by the almost total absence of the oak tree, of which we see scarcely one all the way from Morpeth to Hexham. Very few trees of any sort, except in the bottom of the warm valleys; what there are, are chiefly the ash, which is a very hardy tree, and will live and thrive where the oak will not grow at all, which is very curious, seeing that it comes out into leaf so late in the spring, and sheds its foliage so early in the fall. The trees which stand next in point of hardiness are the sycamore, the beech, and the birch, which are all seen here; but none of them fine. The ash is the most common tree, and even it flinches upon the hills, which it never does in the South. It has generally become yellow in the leaf already; and many of the trees are now bare of leaf before any frost has made its appearance.

The cattle all along here are of a coarse kind; the cows swag-backed and badly shaped; Kiloe oxen, except in the dips of good land by the sides of the bourns which I crossed. Nevertheless, even here, the fields of turnips, of both sorts, are very fine. Great pains seem to be taken in raising the crops of these turnips: they are all cultivated in rows, are kept exceedingly clean, and they are carried in as winter food for all the animals of a farm, the horses excepted.