Here is, then, bread for 800 families, mutton for 500, and bacon and beer for 207. Let us take the average of the three, and then we have 502 families, for the keeping of whom, and in this good manner too, the parish of Milton yields a sufficiency. In the wool, the milk, butter, eggs, poultry, and game, we have seen ample, and much more than ample, provision for all wants other than those of mere food and drink. What I have allowed in food and drink is by no means excessive. It is but a pound of bread, and a little more than half-a-pound of meat a day to each person on an average; and the beer is not a drop too much. There are no green and moist vegetables included in my account; but, there would be some, and they would not do any harm; but, no man can say, or, at least, none but a base usurer, who would grind money out of the bones of his own father; no other man can, or will, say, that I have been too liberal to this family; and yet, good God! what extravagance is here, if the labourers of England be now treated justly!
Is there a family, even amongst those who live the hardest, in the Wen, that would not shudder at the thought of living upon what I have allowed to this family? Yet what do labourers’ families get, compared to this? The answer to that question ought to make us shudder indeed. The amount of my allowance, compared with the amount of the allowance that labourers now have, is necessary to be stated here, before I proceed further. The wheat 3 qrs. and 6 bushels at present price (56s. the quarter) amounts to 10l. 10s. The barley (for bacon and beer) 22 qrs. 3 bushels, at present price (34s. the quarter), amounts to 37l. 16s. 8d. The seven sheep, at 40s. each, amount to 14l. The total is 62l. 6s. 8d.; and this, observe, for bare victuals and drink; just food and drink enough to keep people in working condition.
What then do the labourers get? To what fare has this wretched and most infamous system brought them! Why such a family as I have described is allowed to have, at the utmost, only about 9s. a week. The parish allowance is only about 7s. 6d. for the five people, including clothing, fuel, bedding and everything! Monstrous state of things! But let us suppose it to be nine shillings. Even that makes only 23l. 8s. a year, for food, drink, clothing, fuel and everything, whereas I allow 62l. 6s. 8d. a year for the bare eating and drinking; and that is little enough. Monstrous, barbarous, horrible as this appears, we do not, however, see it in half its horrors; our indignation and rage against this infernal system is not half roused, till we see the small number of labourers who raise all the food and the drink, and, of course, the mere trifling portion of it that they are suffered to retain for their own use.
The parish of Milton does, as we have seen, produce food, drink, clothing, and all other things, enough for 502 families, or 2510 persons upon my allowance, which is a great deal more than three times the present allowance, because the present allowance includes clothing, fuel, tools, and everything. Now, then, according to the “Population Return,” laid before Parliament, this parish contains 500 persons, or, according to my division, one hundred families. So that here are about one hundred families to raise food and drink enough, and to raise wool and other things to pay for all other necessaries, for five hundred and two families! Aye, and five hundred and two families fed and lodged, too, on my liberal scale. Fed and lodged according to the present scale, this one hundred families raise enough to supply more, and many more, than fifteen hundred families; or seven thousand five hundred persons! And yet those who do the work are half starved! In the 100 families there are, we will suppose, 80 able working men, and as many boys, sometimes assisted by the women and stout girls. What a handful of people to raise such a quantity of food! What injustice, what a hellish system it must be, to make those who raise it skin and bone and nakedness, while the food and drink and wool are almost all carried away to be heaped on the fund-holders, pensioners, soldiers, dead-weight, and other swarms of tax-eaters! If such an operation do not need putting an end to, then the devil himself is a saint.
Thus it must be, or much about thus, all the way down this fine and beautiful and interesting valley. There are 29 agricultural parishes, the two last being in town; being Fisherton and Salisbury. Now, according to the “Population Return,” the whole of these 29 parishes contain 9,116 persons; or, according to my division, 1,823 families. There is no reason to believe, that the proportion that we have seen in the case of Milton does not hold good all the way through; that is, there is no reason to suppose, that the produce does not exceed the consumption in every other case in the same degree that it does in the case of Milton. And indeed if I were to judge from the number of houses and the number of ricks of corn, I should suppose that the excess was still greater in several of the other parishes. But, supposing it to be no greater; supposing the same proportion to continue all the way from Watton Rivers to Stratford Dean, then here are 9,116 persons raising food and raiment sufficient for 45,580 persons, fed and lodged according to my scale; and sufficient for 136,740 persons, according to the scale on which the unhappy labourers of this fine valley are now fed and lodged!
And yet there is an “Emigration Committee” sitting to devise the means of getting rid, not of the idlers, not of the pensioners, not of the dead-weight, not of the parsons, (to “relieve” whom we have seen the poor labourers taxed to the tune of a million and a half of money) not of the soldiers; but to devise means of getting rid of these working people, who are grudged even the miserable morsel that they get! There is in the men calling themselves “English country gentlemen” something superlatively base. They are, I sincerely believe, the most cruel, the most unfeeling, the most brutally insolent: but I know, I can prove, I can safely take my oath, that they are the most base of all the creatures that God ever suffered to disgrace the human shape. The base wretches know well, that the taxes amount to more than sixty millions a year, and that the poor-rates amount to about seven millions; yet, while the cowardly reptiles never utter a word against the taxes, they are incessantly railing against the poor-rates, though it is, (and they know it) the taxes that make the paupers. The base wretches know well, that the sum of money given, even to the fellows that gather the taxes, is greater in amount than the poor-rates; the base wretches know well, that the money, given to the dead-weight (who ought not to have a single farthing), amounts to more than the poor receive out of the rates; the base wretches know well, that the common foot-soldier now receives more pay per week (7s. 7d.) exclusive of clothing, firing, candle, and lodging; the base wretches know, that the common foot-soldier receives more to go down his own single throat, than the overseers and magistrates allow to a working man, his wife and three children; the base wretches know all this well; and yet their railings are confined to the poor and the poor-rates; and it is expected that they will, next session, urge the Parliament to pass a law to enable overseers and vestries and magistrates to transport paupers beyond the seas! They are base enough for this, or for any thing; but the whole system will go to the devil long before they will get such an act passed; long before they will see perfected this consummation of their infamous tyranny.
It is manifest enough, that the population of this valley was, at one time, many times over what it is now; for, in the first place, what were the twenty-nine churches built for? The population of the 29 parishes is now but little more than one-half of that of the single parish of Kensington; and there are several of the churches bigger than the church at Kensington. What, then, should all these churches have been built for? And besides, where did the hands come from? And where did the money come from? These twenty-nine churches would now not only hold all the inhabitants, men, women, and children, but all the household goods, and tools, and implements, of the whole of them, farmers and all, if you leave out the wagons and carts. In three instances, Fifield, Milston, and Roach-Fen, the church-porches will hold all the inhabitants, even down to the bed-ridden and the babies. What then? will any man believe that these churches were built for such little knots of people? We are told about the great superstition of our fathers, and of their readiness to gratify the priests by building altars and other religious edifices. But we must think those priests to have been most devout creatures indeed, if we believe that they chose to have the money laid out in useless churches, rather than have it put into their own pockets! At any rate, we all know that Protestant Priests have no whims of this sort; and that they never lay out upon churches any money that they can, by any means, get hold of.
But, suppose that we were to believe that the Priests had, in old times, this unaccountable taste; and suppose we were to believe that a knot of people, who might be crammed into a church-porch, were seized, and very frequently too, with the desire of having a big church to go to; we must, after all this, believe that this knot of people were more than giants, or that they had surprising riches, else we cannot believe that they had the means of gratifying the strange wishes of their Priests and their own not less strange piety and devotion. Even if we could believe that they thought that they were paving their way to heaven, by building churches which were a hundred times too large for the population, still we cannot believe, that the building could have been effected without bodily force; and, where was this force to come from, if the people were not more numerous than they now are? What, again, I ask, were these twenty-nine churches stuck up, not a mile from each other; what were twenty-nine churches made for, if the population had been no greater than it is now?
But, in fact, you plainly see all the traces of a great ancient population. The churches are almost all large, and built in the best manner. Many of them are very fine edifices; very costly in the building; and, in the cases where the body of the church has been altered in the repairing of it, so as to make it smaller, the tower, which everywhere defies the hostility of time, shows you what the church must formerly have been. This is the case in several instances; and there are two or three of these villages which must formerly have been market-towns, and particularly Pewsy and Upavon. There are now no less than nine of the parishes out of the twenty-nine, that have either no parsonage-houses, or have such as are in such a state that a Parson will not, or cannot, live in them. Three of them are without any parsonage-houses at all, and the rest are become poor, mean, falling-down places. This latter is the case at Upavon, which was formerly a very considerable place. Nothing can more clearly show, than this, that all, as far as buildings and population are concerned, has been long upon the decline and decay. Dilapidation after dilapidation have, at last, almost effaced even the parsonage-houses, and that too in defiance of the law, ecclesiastical as well as civil. The land remains; and the crops and the sheep come as abundantly as ever; but they are now sent almost wholly away, instead of remaining, as formerly, to be, in great part, consumed in these twenty-nine parishes.
The stars, in my map, mark the spots where manor-houses, or gentlemen’s mansions, formerly stood, and stood, too, only about sixty years ago. Every parish had its manor house in the first place; and then there were, down this Valley, twenty-one others; so that, in this distance of about thirty miles, there stood fifty mansion houses. Where are they now? I believe there are but eight that are at all worthy of the name of mansion houses; and even these are but poorly kept up, and, except in two or three instances, are of no benefit to the labouring people; they employ but few persons; and, in short, do not half supply the place of any eight of the old mansions. All these mansions, all these parsonages, aye, and their goods and furniture, together with the clocks, the brass kettles, the brewing-vessels, the good bedding and good clothes and good furniture, and the stock in pigs, or in money, of the inferior classes, in this series of once populous and gay villages and hamlets; all these have been by the accursed system of taxing and funding and paper-money, by the well-known exactions of the state, and by the not less real, though less generally understood, extortions of the monopolies arising out of paper-money; all these have been, by these accursed means, conveyed away, out of this Valley, to the haunts of the tax-eaters and the monopolizers. There are many of the mansion houses, the ruins of which you yet behold. At Milton there are two mansion houses, the walls and the roofs of which yet remain, but which are falling gradually to pieces, and the garden walls are crumbling down. At Enford, Bennet, the Member for the county, had a large mansion house, the stables of which are yet standing. In several places, I saw, still remaining, indubitable traces of an ancient manor house, namely a dove-cote or pigeon-house. The poor pigeons have kept possession of their heritage, from generation to generation, and so have the rooks, in their several rookeries, while the paper-system has swept away, or rather swallowed-up, the owners of the dove-cotes and of the lofty trees, about forty families of which owners have been ousted in this one Valley, and have become dead-weight creatures, tax-gatherers, barrack-fellows, thief-takers, or, perhaps, paupers or thieves.