fathers had handled in a year. Such a one was Thomas Bates of Halton, later of Kirklevington, who laid the foundation of his herd of shorthorns in 1810 with a cow bought for 185 guineas. To their landlords, though not always to their labourers, they seemed fine fellows "who talked of beef and ate pudding and drank like true-born Britons.'' Ruddy and broad of beam, in their blue tailcoats, Kersey small-clothes, top boots and waistcoats of crimson or yellow swansdown, they represented the very substance of the England of their time; John Bull himself in his hour of thriving. "Everything prospers with him,,, wrote Mary Mitford, "money drifts about him like snow. . . . There is a sturdy squareness of face and figure and a good-humoured obstinacy, a civil importance. He never boasts of his wealth or gives himself undue airs; but nobody can meet him at market or vestry without finding him the richest man there.'' The same observer drew the greatest farmer of them all, as she remembered him in the closing years of the war at his massive red house at Botley by Bursledon River. "I never saw," she wrote, "hospitality more genuine. . . . There was not the slightest attempt at finery or display of gentility, and every tiling was in accordance with the largest idea of an English yeoman of the old time. They called it a farmhouse and ... everything was excellent, everything abundant— all served with the greatest nicety by trim waiting damsels."1 The garden was full of wonderful wall-fruit, Indian corn, Caroline beans and water-melons, and glowing in the autumn sun with pyramids of hollyhocks and masses of China-asters, cloves, mignonettes and geranium. Over all towered Cobbett himself, tall, stout, sunburnt, with his good-humoured face and never-tiring activity, rising at dawn to mow the lawn with a giant's sweep and rewarding the first of his children downstairs and at work in farm or garden with the coveted title of Lark of the Day and the privilege of making his mother's nosegay.
In one of his outbursts against the social changes that were destroying the England of his youth Cobbett declared that, though no theologian, he loved any religion that gave men plenty to eat and drink. In this he spoke for his country. The English ate as though eating were an act of grace; the very sick were prescribed beefsteaks
1 Mitford, Literary Life, 199-201. See also Howitt, 87-106.
and port. They ate more than any people in the world, because they grew more. A Hampshire farmer at his wedding dinner fed his guests from his own land on beef, fowls, a gammon of bacon and a sucking pig, a green goose, river-fish, plum pudding, apple-pie, cheese-cakes, custards, home-brewed beer, home-made wine and syllabub. From the wholemeal bread baked at home according to some immemorial family recipe1 to the oysters which the seamen of the Ratcliffe Highway ate with such relish on their holidays, the English enjoyed the best of everything. Their seas afforded harvests as rich as their fields; the submarine plants round their shores sustained the world's finest eating fish, and cross-Channel passengers, wind-bound off the Kentish coast, would borrow lines from the captain and fill their baskets with whiting, mackerel and gurnet.
England's fat cattle were among the wonders of the age. On feast days the roast beef of Old England was eaten with musical honours, and legislators rounded off debates with beefsteaks broiled over a clear, strong fire and served hot, juicy and tender. Borrow thought that nothing in nature surpassed a leg of Welsh mutton, "rich but delicate, replete with juices derived from the aromatic herbs of the noble Berwyn and cooked to a turn." Yet in other cuts the mutton of many parts of England excelled it. The verdure that raised such meat produced also the butter and cheeses, the delicious draughts from the can which the Manchester handloom weavers bought on Sunday rambles from their loves, the milkmaids of Hoolswood and Gerrard-hey, the curds and clotted cream which Mother Hundrell, the Devonshire milk-woman, gave little Thomas Cooper and of which he used to dream in hungrier years. "Then we went to the dairy," wrote a young Englishwoman, "so fresh and cool and clean —glittering with cleanliness, overflowing with creamy «riches! And there I had the greatest enjoyment of my whole day, the printing with my own hands a pat of butter."2
Every part of the island had its peculiar delicacies: Lincolnshire acelet and collared eel, Norfolk dumplings, Oxford John, Dee salmon, Pegwell Bay shrimps, Solomon Gundy, Banbury cake, Mansfield gooseberry pie, Isle of Wight crabs, and the cheeses—
1 Walter Scott always insisted on a brown loaf made and cut according to his neighbour Mrs. Shortrede's recipe for making yeast, baking and cutting bread; a specially designed bread-barrel and knife were kept at Abbotsford for the purpose. Lockhart, IV, 194, 242.
2 Mary Mitford, Literary Life, 116-19. See Our Village, 154; Bamford, I, 109, 143, 154, 168, 188, 217; Borrow, Wild Wales, 47; Cobbett, Cottage Economy, 98; Cooper, 5; Eland, 12, 23; Fowler, I, 251; Howitt, 91-6; Lucas, I, 35; Simond, II, 164; Osbaldeston, 30;Raumer, III, 142-3
Stilton, and Cheddar, Cheshire, Double Gloucester, Blue Vinney, Lancashire Leigh, York, Colwick, Wensleydale—which were among England's regional glories. There seemed so much to eat that many found it hard to stop eating. A Yorkshire squire at a- single sitting absorbed a plateful of haddock, another of veal, two of tongue, three of mutton, two of roast pig, a wing of duck, and half the tail of a lobster. It was not surprising that bulging veins, mottled noses and what was politely termed a full habit were common among the English upper and middle classes. Statesmen, judges, merchants, poets, all engaged in the national vice of stuffing; when Coleridge dined with a rich friend in the victory summer of 1814, it was on turbot, lobster sauce, boiled fowls, turtle, ham, a quarter of lamb and cauliflowers, ducks, green peas, a gooseberry and currant pie, a soft pudding, grapes, pineapples, strawberries, cherries, champagne, burgundy and madeira. Charles Lamb, celebrating the glories of roast pig, was writing for a ready public. Even divines shared the ruling passion; Dr. Paley, author of the Evidences, always ate everything on the table and finished with a raid on the side dishes which he called skirmishing.1
What there was on the table is shown by contemporary menus. Spiced mulligatawny and turtle soup, salmon and turbot set in smelts, saddle of mutton and roast beef, boiled fowls, tongue and ham followed one another at dinner parties with splendid, indigestible monotony. When the Reverend Benjamin Newton stayed with his wife and daughter at a Cocker mouth inn, they sat down with twenty-two other guests to dine on a trout, a salmon, a pair of soles, a fillet of veal, a ham, two boiled fowls, a round of beef, a loin of mutton, pies, puddings, gooseberries, currants and cherries. For supper they had roast rabbits, a round of cold beef, shrimps—a local speciality—potatoes and "etceteras," and for breakfast meat and eggs. The inclusive charge was four shillings a head a day. "My wife and Anne ate ravenously," the parson noted, adding that, while so long as they were moving such liberties did no harm, now that they were stationary the salmon, gooseberries and currant-and-apple pies were beginning to tell.2
1 He was described by a friend as "a great sensualist in eating." Farington, VIII, 180. See idem, II, 194; VII, 185; Bamford, II, 330; Brownlow, 125; Coleridge, Unpublished Letters, II, 122; English Spy, II, 98; Gronow, I, 217-18; Jekyll and Jones, 109; Leigh Hunt, II, 65; Mytton, 18-19; Newton, 122-3; Simond, I, 8, 22, 284; II, 35, 242.
2 Newton, 188-91; Fowler, 222-4. "Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness," wrote Jane Austen. Austen, II, 424-5.
After the salads and cheeses the servants set on the table, with oranges and nuts, the brandy-primed sherries, ports, marsalas and madeiras in which Englishmen delighted. Except in Scotland and the exotic little world of the higher aristocracy, which remained gal-licised even during the war, clarets were little drunk by men; such thin, washy stuff was thought unworthy of gentlemen of bottom, at least until the port was finished. By that time there were better things to crown a festive evening: broiled bones and a bowl of punch or "Bishop," that noble concoction of steaming port and roasted lemons so loved of the higher Anglican clergy. Or, if it was Scotland, there would be a salver of silver quaighs brimful of Glenivet. Those who survived would top up, before retiring, with a night-cap of hot brown brandy or a glass of Hollands
gin with a lump of sugar in it.1
The poor, of course, did not fare like this. In days when international trade was confined mainly to goods of small bulk, the price of grain fluctuated widely with the season. Though England was normally better off in this respect than any other country, the prolonged closure of Europe's ports hit her hard. There were times during the blockade when, under her dazzling appearances of wealth, she had faced famine and the shadow of social collapse. Five times during the war, with the Baltic shut to her ships, the harvest had failed. Though the rich and middle classes suffered little, those who lived largely on bread had been reduced almost to starvation. "For two seasons," wrote a poor dyer, "the corn was spoiled in the fields with wet, and when the winter came we would scoop out the middle of the soft distasteful loaf; and to eat it brought on sickness."2 Such seasons had fallen with particular severity on the manufacturing districts where the workers, divorced from the land, were dependent on shop prices and where, at the height of the Continental blockade, there had appeared anew phenomenon, mass-unemployment, which, sweeping the young manufacturing districts of the North and Midlands like a pestilence, temporarily deprived whole populations— producing for export instead of subsistence—of the wherewithal to
1 Ashton, I, 331-3; Creevey Papers, II, 92-3; English Spy. I. 134; II, 233; Farington, VIII, 104; Fowler, 221; Gronow, II, 208-10; Letts, 206; Lockhart, I, 89; IV, 167; Ncvill, 41; Romany Rye, 10; Simond, I, 46-7; II, 164.
2 Cooper, 26.
buy. Scarcity prices for grain, while benefiting the landlord and farmer, hit, with what seemed a monstrous injustice, the landless labourer in the newly enclosed villages of the east Midlands. For having forfeited his ancient copyhold or manorial rights, he had lost with them the grain, grazing and firewood which had enabled him, regardless of price and wage levels, to provide his own milk, eggs, poultry and cooking fuel. In time of shortage he was now reduced to living on baker's bread, occasional cheese and weak tea.
Such times, however, had been the exception, not the rule, and had lasted only a season. If the population had doubled, the agricultural improvements of the past sixty years enabled the soil to support twice as many mouths as before. The war which quickened the threat of famine had also brought new markets and means of livelihood; after the Baltic had been reopened by Nelson's victory at Copenhagen, and again in 1812, a period of widespread prosperity and full employment ensued. At the time of their victory over Napoleon the British did not look like a people used to going hungry. The very bitterness of their resentment when they did so implied that, unlike the poor of other lands, they regarded it as something out of the course of nature. The peasants in the south, it is true, tended to be rather small and pallid, suggesting to one foreign traveller that, for all their neat appearance, they were better dressed than fed. But in the north they were more often giants, with stiff bony frames and rugged majestic features, like "the fearless, sword-heaving English dragoon, engrafted on the simple, incredulous, ineradicable rusticity of the old Lancashire moorlander" whom Bam-ford remembered keeping the gate of the Manchester infirmary. And many of the London labourers—draymen, coal-heavers, bargees —were huge fellows with massive shoulders and ruddy faces, the kind of Englishmen who figured in the patriotic cartoons belabouring whole packs of starveling Frenchmen. There was about the race an unmistakable air of health and good living; an Italian lady was amazed by the beauty of the adventuresses in the theatres. The country lasses whom Simond saw as he travelled through Lancashire had rosy cheeks, cherry-lips, fine shapes and arms red as apples. The carpenter's daughter in Our Village was "of square, sturdy, upright form with the finest limbs in the world, a complexion purely English, a round, laughing face, sunburnt and rosy, large, merry, blue eyes, curling brown hair and a wonderful play of countenance.,,I
Even in the worst times of the war the dietary of the English had never fallen to the dreadful level of many parts of Europe where periodically starvation and typhus took toll of thousands. Frederic Eden, in his survey of the condition of the poor made during the famine years of 1795 and 1796, analysed the budget of a Leicester woolcomber with two children, who, out of an income of .£47 a year, made up of his own and his wife's and elder son's earnings and an -£11 grant from the Poor Law guardians, was able to buy weekly ten pounds of butcher's meat, two pounds of butter, three and a half of cheese and about nineteen pints of milk, as well as potatoes, vegetables, tea, sugar and beer. He was not even a particularly industrious man, for he was said to spend several days every month in the alehouse lamenting the hardness of the times.2 Another case instanced by Eden was that of a Manchester dyer who only earned, with his wife's help, .£42 p.a., yet bought five pounds of meat weekly. Even in the workhouses meat usually figured on the dietary three or four days a week. When six Lancashire weavers were consigned by the Home Office to the Cold Bath Fields prison on a charge of treason, they were allowed between them for breakfast six pound-loaves of bread, two pounds of butter, two of sugar and one of tea, for dinner a quarter of pork with vegetables, potatoes and a pot of porter apiece, and for supper cold meat and tea. On another day they were given a leg of mutton weighing thirteen and a half pounds.
By and large, as the population increased, the feeding standards of the poor were declining. It was probably no longer true, as Defoe had claimed a century before, that the English labourer ate and drank three times more than any foreigner. In counties like Kent, where before the war farm-workers had enjoyed meat almost daily, there had been a big falling-off, but they were still better off than Continental peasants who lived part of the year on roots.3 Even after enclosure many cottagers still contrived, so long as the war lasted,
1 Mitford, Our Village, 76, 82,126. "Oh! how I admire the Devonshire girls of about fifteen!'" wrote Keats. "There was one at the inn-door, holding a quartern of brandy; the very thought of her kept me warm a whole stage." See also Bewick, 104; Campbell, II, 270-1; Letts, 211-12; Simond, I, 3; II, 143; Green, Stendhal, 128.
8 Eden, 228-9.
* Gronow of the Guards, comparing French soldiers with British, noted that the broth on which the latter campaigned would never do for the former, who required meat twice a day.. Gronow, II, 299.
to keep a pig; ham and eggs and "a bit of frizzle" figure with cheering frequency in Bamford's account of his early days of poverty. William Howitt in his youth once saw bacon ten inches thick on a farm-servant's breakfast flanked by a peck of boiled beans and a brown loaf the size of a beehive.1 Even in the enclosed villages, where wholemeal bread, cheese and ale had come to form the landless labourer's main dietary, there was in normal times as much of all three as he could eat or carry with him into the fields. Many-country folk still baked and brewed at home; the germ remained in the wheat, and the oven, like the porch and tank, was part of the peasant's birthright. So were the ale brewed in the copper, the mead, sweet and mellow but strong as brandy, made from home-raised honey, the cowslip and other rustic wines distilled from traditional recipes and drunk on special occasions. The old skills and habits were dying out with enclosure, but large numbers of country workers still quenched their thirst on untaxed ale of their own making. And what they bought in the alehouse, if not always wholesome, was at least strong and cheap: an old Buckinghamshire labourer declared he didn't think nothing of no beer if it didn't give him three falls for a shilling. A poor man could drink his skinful; Jack Birt, the Berkshire shepherd in Our Village, had a pot of double X placed before his sheepdog, Watch, every evening.2
In the north the poor man's food was usually much more varied. Its staples were oatmeal crowdie, riddle and girdle-cakes, thick porridge with buttermilk, pease-kail, dumpling, oaten jannocks and barley-bread, butter, treacle and plentiful milk. Thomas Bewick, who grew up among the Northumbrian peasantry, reckoned that, though they lived almost entirely on oatmeal, barley cakes, broth, potatoes and milk, they enjoyed better health than any men he knew. The Duke of Argyll recalled how as a boy he watched the farmhands eating their breakfast with spoons and mu
gs of horn out of a bowl of steaming porridge as big as a footbath. "I went to rest betimes," wrote Bamford, describing his early dietary, "and rose clear-headed and with a strength and buoyancy of limb that mocked
1 Howitt, 115-16. See Bamford, I, 157; Clapham, I, 118, 316-17; De Selincourt, II, 878; Lord Coleridge, 233-4; Eden, passim; Simond, I, 256; II, 224; Woodward. 9.
2 Mitford, Our Village. Cobbett a decade later, when conditions had worsened, mentioned that the haymakers at Redbourne got two quarts a day of what they called strong beer and as much small beer as they could drink. Rural Rides, I, 81-2. See idem, 62; Austen, 27; Bamford, I, 60, 120-1, 129-30, 152, 208, 217; II, 212, 279; Bewick, 73; Clapham, I, 170-1; Cobbett, Rural Rides, 1,62-3, 82; Eden, 107; Fowler, 1,25,251; Old Oak, 36; Romany Rye, 123; Howitt, 115-16; Lockhart, IV, 194, 242; Grote, 21.
toil and weariness." The same witness has left the picture of a Lancashire weaving family's meals at the beginning of the century: the brown earthenware dish on a low table, the breakfast of boiling water-porridge poured into it from the pan, the children standing round, each with his spoon, oaten-cake and dish of milk, the fatherly blessing before the eager silent feast; the dinners of crisp-crusted potato pie, dumpling, meat-broth or butcher's meat taken in the same patriarchal fashion, the meat apportioned to each child on a piece of oatcake, the potatoes poured into the central dish from which all helped themselves until it was empty, after which the children stole out to their play munching the remnants of meat and cake. And all the while not a word was spoken.1
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