Jane Austen's England

by Roy Adkins,Lesley Adkins

  There was always a need for workers capable of handling horses. One enduring English folk song about ploughing, which has several titles, is most commonly known by its chorus line ‘We’re all jolly fellows who follow the plough’. A cheerful song, it was in circulation by at least 179463 and relates how the ploughmen rose around four in the morning to get the horses ready. After breakfast they each go out to plough an acre of ground, returning by two in the afternoon. The farmer then suggests that they have not finished their work:

  I stepped up to him, and I made this reply,

  ‘We have all ploughed an acre, so you tell a lie,’

  Our master turned to us and laughed at the joke:

  ‘It’s past two o’clock boys, it’s time to unyoke.’64

  The horses then had to be cared for and settled down for the night before the men could go home after the long day’s work.

  Farming was not yet in any real sense mechanised, but improvements in stock breeding were resulting in healthier, hardier animals that provided more meat and milk, while the introduction of some machinery and experimentation with plants and seeds were improving crop yields. Emphasis was placed on improving the fertility of the soil, which had traditionally been maintained by rotating crops to allow fallow periods and by the penning of animals so that land could benefit from their manure. New methods of manuring included the spreading of chalk or lime, though old ways persisted, as a survey of agriculture in Dorset in 1812 noted:

  Chamber-lye.– In the Isle of Portland, they have a practice of long standing, of preserving all the urine that is made in winter, carrying it out in casks, and distributing it over the wheat crops, in a manner somewhat similar to that used in watering the streets of large towns. This kind of manure has been found to answer well, as may be believed, from the average produce of the Isle being 18 bushels of wheat per acre.65

  Many clergymen did some farming, either of church lands or their own land, which supplemented their income. Jane Austen’s parents farmed land near her father’s rectory at Steventon in Hampshire, and farming activities are mentioned in her letters, as in November 1798 when she asked Cassandra, who was staying at Godmersham in Kent, to ‘tell Edward that my father gives 25s. a piece to Seward for his last lot of sheep, and, in return for this news, my father wishes to receive some [news] of Edward’s pigs’.66 Woodforde also farmed, generally employing a man and a boy for much of the work and hiring extra labour when needed, particularly for harvesting, as in September 1776: ‘Very busy all day with my barley, did not dine till near 5 in the afternoon, my harvest men dined here to day, gave them some beef and some plumb pudding and as much liquor as they would drink. This evening finished my harvest and all carried into the barn – 8 acres. I had Mrs. Dunnell’s cart and horses, and 2 men, yesterday and to day. The men were her son Thos. and Robin Buck.’67

  Unlike today, farming activities were forced to follow the cycle of the seasons, with the most intense work during the long days of summer. Harvest time was the highlight, and the writer and composer William Gardiner had fond memories of helping out at Rothley near Leicester as a seven-year-old boy in 1778:

  With what glee did I mount the harvest waggon for the fun of jolting over the rugged roads, to the wheat field. From shock to shock it slowly moved to gather the rustling sheaves. In the rear of the reapers were a flock of gleaners – some pretty village girls…The day’s toil over, we hastened home for the harvest supper. At the head of the board sat the worthy host, by whose side I was placed. Then came Will, Ralph, Joe, and Jim, with their wives and helpers. Presently a shoulder of mutton, scorching hot, as the day had been, a plum pudding, and a roasted goose were put on the table, when they soon fell to, each playing his part in good earnest…The gingered ale went merrily round. Joe, who was a good singer, was called upon to entertain the company.68

  Samuel Pratt gave an equally romantic picture, this time of when the work had subsided during the early winter months:

  The fields are no longer populated, and labour is not so enlivened by the song, and the converse of the labourer…Every store-house is full, and in every cottage, so benign has been the past season, there are the means of comfort and content. The alterations have increased, the beauty of the autumnal foliage has lost its last charm of variegation – and if the naked boughs remind us of the decline of nature, a few leaves only remain, and these tremble at every breath of wind, as if they were conscious of their defenceless situation.69

  Yet he knew that after helping with the harvest, the poor could starve whenever the farmers withheld their crops to obtain better prices:

  famine must enter the cottage of the peasant, whose industry has led smiling plenty into the houses of his employer – and multitudes of the most useful members of the community must cry aloud for bread, while those nefarious robbers of the public, known by the names of Forestallers and Monopolizers – which, I fear, are but other words to cover a certain class of the ENGLISH FARMERS – are permitted to hoard up the stores, which the indulgent God of nature gives to supply the wants of all his creatures.70

  In the later eighteenth century, with grain prices rising and rents for farmland soaring, particularly for enclosed land, it became economic for large landowners to pay to have even more land enclosed. In old-fashioned open fields, small farmers in a community worked their own strips of land, an inefficient system dating back to the Middle Ages. Some claimed that enclosure was vital to improve these open fields, as well as the commons and waste land, so that more food could be produced. But others believed that enclosure was evil, because rents were forced upwards and the poor were deprived of their land, their common rights and the means to be self-sufficient.

  Land was the most acceptable way for gentlemen to earn a living, and they relied on their agents and stewards to maximise the income from their estates. The largest landowners often had no legal right to all of the land they wished to enclose, but as enclosure of specific areas was by individual Act of Parliament, the rights of the poor were not considered, and the smaller landowners were squeezed out. The writer and educationalist William Fordyce Mavor commented on the pitfalls of the enclosure system: ‘Various are the instances, within my own knowledge, of twelve farms, which once supported as many families in credit, having been thrown into three or four upon an inclosure.’71

  In his lengthy poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, Oliver Goldsmith expressed his sadness at the effects of enclosure. He imagines a deserted landscape, where all the old sounds of the former village have disappeared. Just one old woman remains:

  But now the sounds of population fail,

  No chearful murmurs fluctuate in the gale,

  No busy steps the grass-grown foot-way tread,

  But all the bloomy flush of life is fled.

  All but yon widowed solitary thing

  That feebly bends beside the plashy spring;

  She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread,

  To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,

  To pick her wintry faggot from the thorn,

  To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn;

  She only left of all the harmless train,

  The sad historian of the pensive plain.72

  According to Mavor, the greed of large landowners created unemployment and hardship:

  If three men monopolize the land which maintained and employed twelve before, nine of course and their families must turn day-labourers, or manufacturers [factory workers], and eventually become chargeable to the parish…Will three farmers raise as much marketable produce as twelve would do? Was it not formerly owing to the small occupiers of land, that many of the necessaries and comforts of life were to be procured in such abundance, and sold at such a moderate rate?73

  In many parts of England John Byng witnessed the changes caused by enclosures, which he prophesied would lead to the countryside’s devastation:

  How wisely did the fost’ring hand of ancestry provide for the poor, by an allotment of a
cottage right of common in the open fields; the village green before their door; the orchard adjoining their house; and the long close behind it! These two latter being seiz’d by the greedy farmer, and the two former being forced from them by the hand of power (upon some inadequate infamous bargain) has driven away the poor; has levell’d the cottage; has impoverish’d the country; and must, finally, ruin it.74

  He felt that Parliament was too focused on the problems of slavery in the British colonies and was deliberately ignoring the virtual slavery suffered by the working classes: ‘I would that Mr Wilberforce, and Mr Burke were obliged to survey, and report upon Hamerton [in Lincolnshire], to a select committee of the House of Commons; and no more to think and prate of East, and West Indian miseries, and depopulations.’75 William Wilberforce, now better known for his role in abolishing the slave trade, had a parliamentary record of enthusiastically supporting measures such as anti-trades union legislation that severely repressed the working class.

  The position of black people in England was different to that in the British colonies. In a test case in 1772, brought by campaigners for the abolition of slavery, Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, ruled that a black man purchased abroad as a slave and brought to England by his owner could not be forced to leave the country.76 The basis of the judgment was that since slavery had no legal foundation in England, any coercion of the man was unlawful. But if he did return to America, he would revert to the status of a slave under that colony’s laws. This was unacceptable to some owners, who considered these people were still their slaves in England.

  Benjamin Silliman recorded that while he was at Liverpool in 1805, he descended into the hold of a slave ship ‘and examined the cells where human beings are confined, under circumstances which equally disgust decency and shock humanity…Liverpool is deep, very deep in the guilt of the slave-trade.’77 Although black people formed a minority of England’s population, they were present at all levels of society, mostly in urban areas. Silliman particularly noticed that many worked as servants in rich households:

  A black footman is considered as a great acquisition, and consequently negro servants are sought for and caressed. An ill dressed or starving negro is never seen in England, and in some instances even alliances are formed between them and white girls of the lower orders of society…As there are no slaves in England, perhaps the English have not learned to regard negroes as a degraded class of men, as we do in the United States, where we have never seen them in any other condition.78

  The plight of children forced down mines, up chimneys and into factories was perhaps the closest to the misery endured by slaves taken across the Atlantic from Africa, but other features of English society were compared with slavery, including impressment into the Royal Navy. Because press-gangs were permitted to force men and boys into the navy, seizing them from the streets or even their homes, impressment was said to be legalised slavery. One naval captain, Thomas Pasley, commented in 1780: ‘Poor Sailors – you are the only class of beings in our famed Country of Liberty really Slaves, devoted and hardly [harshly] used, tho’ the very being of the Country depends on you.’79 The smuggler Jack Rattenbury from Beer in Devon was often targeted by the press-gangs. ‘Our country is called the land of liberty’, he complained; ‘we possess a just and invincible aversion to slavery at home and in our foreign colonies, and it is triumphantly said that a slave cannot breathe in England. Yet how is this to be reconciled with the practice of tearing men from their weeping and afflicted families…and chaining them to a situation which is alike repugnant to their feelings and principles?’80

  Press-gangs caused much fear and anxiety in London and other ports and coastal settlements, as William Darter in Reading recalled:

  During the protracted war [with France and America]…no young man could safely go to London. I remember a young fellow of the name of Chandler living in Mount Pleasant, who with another…went to town for the purpose of working at their business as carpenters and joiners. They had not been there more than a few weeks, when on their way back to their shop after dinner they stopped to look into a shop window. A Press Gang came up and forcibly took them down to the water where they were put into an armed boat and taken down to the Nore. These men fought in several battles on board His Majesty’s ships, and after many years Chandler returned home, but his comrade was killed in action.81

  Unlike the navy, the army was not allowed to seize anyone it pleased, but had to tempt young men with cash bonuses or trick them into joining. The militias also needed men to defend Britain against invasion from abroad or revolution from within. They were organised on a local basis, and eligible men were put into a lottery. Those drawn had to serve or find someone else to take their place. In September 1779 Woodforde nearly lost a servant to the militia: ‘Lent my man Ben my little mare to go to Norwich this morning to try to get a substitute to serve for him in the militia as he is drawn…Ben Legate [Leggett] returned home in the evening from Norwich having got a substitute and seen him sworn in immediately as well as accepted. He is obliged to give the substitute 9.9.0. I gave him, in part of it, this evening 1.1.0.’82 Woodforde’s contribution appears less than generous considering that Ben was his valued farming man.

  Plenty of unemployed people were available to replace men lost to the armed forces, but in rural areas the unemployed were trapped, unable to travel beyond their parish to the Midlands and northern England where expanding industries had jobs. This lack of mobility also hindered mill owners, who could not find enough workers. It was actually easier for the Irish to cross the sea and find work in Lancashire or Yorkshire than for destitute people from southern counties. The only options for the unemployed were to apply for poor relief or go into the workhouse or poorhouse. Such assistance was financed at parish level by the poor rates. At Castle Carrock in Cumberland in December 1794, Frederick Eden listed those receiving parish relief, including:

  J.G. aged 30; was incapacitated from working by a kick from a horse: he is allowed 2s. a week.

  J.D. aged 70; gained his settlement here by service: old age, and poverty, threw him on the parish: his weekly allowance is 1s. 6d.…

  A child, 8 years old, whose parents are dead, costs the parish 1s. a week.

  A male bastard, of the same age, costs the parish 1s. a week.83

  One woman receiving aid at nearby Cumwhitton was ‘A.S. 60 years of age, a farmer’s widow, receives a weekly allowance of 1s: she resided in another parish, but, upon becoming burthensome, was removed hither.’84 A parish was responsible for anyone born within their jurisdiction, though on marriage a woman came under her husband’s parish. If someone did manage to settle in another parish for a year, that parish was responsible for them if they became destitute. Wealthier households paid the poor rates, and because this was an increasing and often resented burden, every effort was made to repatriate paupers to their home parish. As Louis Simond put it: ‘The poor of England are under certain regulations, called poor-laws, forming one of the distinctive features of this government. Their object is half police, and half charity; but their utility very questionable…Parishes being bound to provide each for their own poor, it becomes a matter of importance to prevent new comers from acquiring a settlement, by removal to a new parish.’85 John Byng considered the welfare system terrible: ‘why, in God’s name, is this country to be swallowed up by poor rates? And the oppress’d, miserable inhabitants to be hunted about from village, and village; and at last to be starved to death in a work house!!!’86

  Some paupers were maintained in parish workhouses or poorhouses, while others were privatised or ‘farmed’ – given to private contractors for an agreed price. The clergyman William Jones described the facilities at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire: ‘The poor house, as it is called, in this parish, is a wretched hovel, considerably below the level of the adjoining road. The workhouse of [nearby] Hoddesdon is not badly situated, but its almshouses are in a miserable, confined alley.’87 In 1795 Eden noted how paupers at St Albans, a f
ew miles west of Broxbourne, were farmed out for £400 a year: ‘The Poor of this parish have generally been farmed…The contractor finds food, cloaths, fuel, &c.; and the parish provides the house and furniture, which the farmer is bound to leave in good condition. He has 39 poor people at present in the house, 10 of which are old women, 7 men, and the rest children.’88

  In Norfolk, Woodforde had few illusions about the workhouses. In March 1781 he and a companion visited one: ‘we took a ride to the House of Industry about 2 miles west of Dereham, a very large building at present tho’ there wants another wing. About 380 poor in it now, but they don’t look either healthy or cheerful, a great number die there – 27 have died since Christmas last.’89 The situation for the destitute was no better eleven years on, and Woodforde took pity on a man who had fled from a workhouse. He was heading for London but was so poor that he could have been arrested as a vagrant at any time and returned:

  To a man of Bargewell (by name Brighton whose father and mother lately kept the Bell Inn at Billingford) who escaped this morning out of Bargewell’s Poor House being hardly kept alive there, the allowance so very short, the house being farmed out at 1s/6d, per week for each poor person. I gave him as he appeared to be a very civil spoken man and as one that once knew better days 0.1.0. He was going for London he said to his wife who is a housekeeper to some person in town.90

  Illegal ways of obtaining money, such as begging and stealing, might be resorted to by those unable or unwilling to work, especially if they were not eligible to receive assistance. Louis Simond was surprised that ‘at the entrance of most towns or villages, you see written a notice, “To vagrants, and other idle and disorderly persons;—that such as may be found in it will be proceeded against with the utmost rigour of the law;” that is to say, of the poor-laws.’91 Within their own parishes, clergymen often dispensed charitable gifts both on a casual basis and to meet specific needs. In the harsh winter of 1789 Woodforde made his servant distribute money among the poor: ‘Bitter cold day again with high wind, it froze in all parts of the house. Sent Ben round my parish with some money to the poor people this severe weather, chiefly those that cannot work at this time, some 1 shilling apiece – some at 1s/6d apiece. In all, Ben gave for me this day 1.14.6.’92