Pork and cabbage all the year;
Mouldy bread and sourish beer,
Rusty bacon, skim milk cheese;
Beds of chaff and full of fleas,
Who would like the living here?
A few local parishes started subsidising emigration so that they could be rid of the excessive burden of maintaining the unemployed. In 1827, some seventy families from the Weald left England. Not far away, in Petworth, West Sussex, the Earl of Egremont offered to pay the passage to Canada for workers from his estate. He was praised for his magnanimity though, in truth, he had merely discovered a convenient way to dispatch a considerable problem along with any of the residual qualms of conscience that it had caused.
The outspoken radical William Cobbett – who had himself been a farm boy before a spell in the Army had expanded his horizons – toured the southern English countryside by foot and on horseback between 1821 and 1826 reporting on what he saw in his classic Rural Rides. He was clear as to the cause of the problem. It lay in the demise of the old English farmhouse in which the small farmer had provided board and lodging for workers whom he cared for as part of his family. They had tilled his few acres together and, at the end of the day, shared the fruits of their labour and the comforts of his home. There would have been a quart of beer, a good barley loaf and a bowl of potatoes, turnips and carrots from the garden and maybe some butter from the dairy wrapped up in a dock leaf and a hunk of smoked bacon cut from the storeroom’s side of pig. But the days of ‘the cask in the cellar and the flitch in the pantry were gone’,15 Cobbett wrote. Traditional steadings had been swallowed whole by ‘bullfrog farmers’, agricultural capitalists intent only on making a return on their money. An old farm table, spotted for sale at a country auction, summed up the situation for this writer: ‘Squire Charington’s father used, I dare say, to sit at the head of the oak table along with his men, say grace to them, and cut up the meat and the pudding,’ he wrote. ‘He might take a cup of strong beer to himself, when they had none; but that was pretty much all the difference in their manner of living. So that all lived well.’ But as his son rose in his manner of living and expectations, Cobbett said, his need of luxuries, of wine decanters, of dinner sets and dessert knives, ‘must of necessity have robbed the long oak table if it had remained fully tenanted . . . therefore, it became almost untenanted; the labourers retreated to hovels, called cottages; and instead of board and lodging, they got money’.16
By the end of the eighteenth century, the majority of farmers had become tenants of such wealthy landowners as the Marquis of Camden who, farming just a few miles from Shoreham, had, by Palmer’s day, spread ‘his length and breadth over more . . . than ten or twelve thousand acres’.17 In 1830, out of all the agricultural land in England, The Times estimated that 90 per cent was farmed under lease.18 Even worse, when the old beneficial leases expired they were replaced with vastly inflated rental values which reflected the sharp rise in farm prices during the war. ‘The farmers have become labourers and tenants of little cottages for which they pay £5 or £6 an annum, though they cover a few rods only of that land which they had earlier sold for £2 an acre,’ the newspaper reported.19 Meanwhile, ‘the farming servant is a miserable outcast . . . ill-paid, half-starved, heartless and exasperated’. He is reduced to ‘little more than a labouring animal on the estate’.20
The Church did nothing to help. It still exacted its tithes. One priest, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, laying the problem at the door of a rising population, urged ‘moral restraint’. He proposed that married labourers should abstain from sex while those still unwed should defer plans for matrimony until such time as they could be sure they could maintain a family without parish help. William Cobbett countered him vigorously, arguing that nobody had ever suggested controlling the birth rate of clergy or any other non-productive classes that drained public finances. Cobbett published a weekly newspaper, the Political Register, which, launched in 1802, soon established itself as a powerful radical voice. Landowners, he declared in his paper, were not any more valuable than their workers or more entitled to governmental protection. It would be immoral for them to continue to ‘perpetuate their extravagant gains’.
Palmer and Cobbett both dreamt of a perfect rural community. But, in 1829, when the youthfully self-indulgent Palmer, mingling for the most part with gentlemanly farmers and so blind to the baser sufferings of the agricultural community, refused to see anything but his archaic ideal, Cobbett (who did not disapprove of the hierarchical society or wish for any class-based antagonism) was pleading with his countrymen to recreate a working alliance wherein landowners would recognise their duties towards their workers and represent their case to Parliament. He called for reductions in tithes, reform of the Corn Laws, a wider suffrage and an end to innovations in the Poor Law – not least those which allowed unemployed workers to be put up for auction, their labour sold to the highest bidder, or permitted paupers to be used quite literally as beasts of burden, set to dragging laden carts or shouldering towering stacks of wood. Time and again, even as late as the harvest of 1830, Cobbett was begging the farmers to share more of their wealth. Change your ways now ‘or we shall be wide awake about the middle of next winter. The “grand rousing” will come from the fellows with hobnails in their shoes,’ he warned.21 These were the very hobnails that Palmer picked out in a sketch in which he posed a shepherd boy like a slumbering Endymion. This was the very year he was painting his Coming from Evening Church, a symbolic expression of an outmoded order, which, far from preserving a traditional idyll, was grinding the rural worker down into the dust.
By the end of the 1820s, a dangerous impasse had been reached. The inimical Cobbett again put his finger on the point: ‘Your labourers hate you as they hate toads and adders,’ he warned landowners. ‘They regard you as their deadly enemies; as those who robbed them of their food and raiment, and who trample on them and insult them in their state of weakness; and they detest you accordingly . . . You know that you merit their deadly hatred; and then, proceeding upon a principle of the most abominable injustice, you hate them, and you destroy them, if possible, because you know that they hate you.’22
The peasants were trapped. A labourer could not make enough money to provide for his family and yet, at the same time, he was policed by a ruthless penal system in which stealing a watch could send him to the gallows and the snaring of a rabbit lead, under newly tightened game laws, to seven years’ transportation. One of the amply laden apple trees which Palmer painted would have meant the difference between survival and starvation to a man for whom a ripe bough of russets provided food for his children and money for the rents that kept a roof above his head. ‘Crime is the inevitable consequence of desperation,’23 The Times warned in October 1830. In the autumn of the very year that Palmer painted his Coming from Evening Church, the greatest rural rebellion in English history broke out.
After harvest home, peasant workers would traditionally have found their next job in the flailing barns where, wielding a staff with a free-swinging stick at the end, they would have manually beaten the sheaves of the corn, separating the good grain from the husks and straw. But with the arrival of the threshing machine, this winter employment was coming to an end. As the nights closed in, tensions grew. Soon, desperate gangs of men, dressed in dark clothes and with blacked-out faces, set out hallooing across the garden of England. Armed with cudgels and hatchets, hammers, axes and saws – and sometimes even guns – they descended on farmsteads, smashing the detested threshing machines and setting fire to the ricks. Sometimes dozens of labourers would stand around watching as a farmer’s annual profit went up in smoke. None would have dared to put out the flames and there was little the landowner could do in the face of such frightening insubordination: he could neither command his attackers nor guard his steading round the clock.
Towards the end of the year, menacing semi-literate notes began to drop on to doorsteps. These – perhaps inspired by the frightening missives that had b
een sent during the Luddite rebellion of 1811 – threatened death. Farmers risked being burnt alive unless they got rid of their threshing machines and improved the conditions of their labourers, the letters warned. They were signed ‘Captain Swing’, or sometimes just ‘Swing’. No one was quite sure of the source of this sinister name. William Cobbett thought it came from that part of the thresher’s flail which was known as the ‘swing’ or ‘swingel’, but a Kent journalist suggested that it originated in the signal call customarily given to haymakers who, having taken a break to sharpen their scythes, would be summoned back to their labours by their leader or ‘captain’ with a loud cry of ‘swing’. It also had hair-prickling associations with the hangman. Whatever the name’s origins, within days it had become synonymous with rural riots. Imaginations ran amok. Captain Swing was hailed by the country folk as an avenging hero. The authorities were desperate to catch him. But no one could identify him, most likely because there was no such person. Swing was a mystery, which made him an even more potent force in the minds of the illiterate farmhands who followed where he led.
For a few short weeks riots swept across the south of England, spreading westwards from Kent to Sussex and Hampshire. Poverty fought property; destitution battled possession. Every day new and ever more alarming reports flooded in. Armed gangs were tramping the highways; granaries, barns and hayricks, stacks of corn, clover and furze were going up in flames. The plumes of black smoke were like sinister beacons: they could be seen for miles.
In Kent and Sussex the protest became particularly fierce. A gang of several hundred labourers surrounded the mansion of the rector in Wrotham crying out ‘Bread or blood!’ and a baying mob was seen to attack the castle of Lord Abergavenny at Eridge Green, dispersing just before the soldiers arrived. Another gang dragged their overseer down the street and a parish officer was taken prisoner in a dung cart. Meanwhile, there were reports of arson attacks taking place in broad daylight, of fire-lighters tramping from parish to parish pressing even the most timid to join their mob, of suspicious outsiders hanging around farmers’ markets, of plough boys compelled to leave their horses in the fields. All along the road to Canterbury the word ‘Swing’ was chalked.
Some feared that England was on the brink of civil war, or worse, revolution. The search for Captain Swing grew ever more urgent. Several landowners capitulated, promising wage increases. Others destroyed their machines voluntarily. Meanwhile, special constables were hurriedly sworn in and landed gentry were encouraged to volunteer as watchmen or to join night patrols. Police bodies were hastily dispatched to wherever it was believed that there would be a gathering. Rewards were posted up for the capture of the arsonists. Soon, men were apprehended just for being in the vicinity of an unlawful gathering. Brought before the courts they were hanged as a gruesome example to all. But by the time that Home Office ministers and local magistrates had finally developed an effective anti-riot strategy, the majority of threshing machines had either been destroyed or dismantled, not to appear again until steam-powered contraptions began to operate in significant numbers in the 1850s. The riots that for a few short weeks had held centre stage had, by the end of the year, died down. Only a few smouldering embers remained, glowing darkly in Kent where the movement had started, a latent spirit of underground resistance which would flare up periodically at times of particular hardship with the odd alarming fire or attack on an overseer’s property.
Palmer was aware of the Swing rioters and would have seen the great conflagrations on the dark hills at night. One of his farmer friends, the hop grower Samuel Love, was among the first to suffer incendiary attacks. Palmer had described him as ‘one of the best farmers hereabouts’,24 though evidently, as far as his labourers were concerned, he was among the worst. But Palmer did not understand the predicament of the peasants: he didn’t share their lifestyles or ambitions or worries. He spoke a completely different language to their broad vernacular. He was even on the way to becoming a landlord himself – albeit on a modest level – for he had already invested a family legacy in the first of the five cottages in the village that he was eventually to own and let out. The Ancients might often have felt the pinch of straitened financial circumstances but, at a time when the local landowner Lord Gage was recorded as paying his hedgers and ditchers two shillings a week, Richmond, keeping meticulous account of his expenditure in Shoreham, was living on ten shillings – and he didn’t have a family to feed. What to a young gentleman felt like extreme frugality, to the average field worker would have felt more like wealth. Where extreme privation to the former meant giving up green tea or snuff, to the latter it meant going to bed without supper after a hard day’s work.
‘Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in the cities,’ Palmer later would write in an introduction to Virgil’s Eclogues. His vision of Shoreham was an outsider’s view. Describing its harvests as a wonderfully ‘pretty picture’25 he seemed rather more concerned that heavy rains would spoil perfect rustic views than worried that the labourers’ crops would be ruined. Later he recommended the study of ‘picturesque farm implements’.26 Even where his works had some political resonance, he failed to ponder the more profound implications. As an eager young man, he had written to Linnell asking him to try to get hold of Blake’s ‘terrific poem’27 on the French Revolution, but he was not a political radical like his visionary mentor. Blake, who had been imprisoned and stood trial for sedition, waged a lifelong war against state and Church, against an establishment which he saw as an instrument of repression and corruption. But Palmer, for all that he mourned ‘the old manners’, the days when, visiting a farmer in Edenbridge, he had seen the labourers ‘clumping in their any-sounding hobnails, and dining cheerily at the side tables’, did not seem to have been able to understand why suddenly these same peasants should have been meditating rick-burning while they eked out ‘a quarter meal of baker’s bread be-alumed and rancid bacon under a hedge’.28
The Captain Swing riots had all but fizzled out by the end of 1830 but they had not been fruitless. They provided a powerful impetus for political reform. This was badly needed. Aristocratic families dominated the political landscape. ‘Rotten boroughs’ – typically depopulated villages in which the electorate had dwindled to a tiny handful of constituents – had an undue influence on the make-up of Parliament because, however few its inhabitants, a borough had the right to elect two representatives to the House of Commons. Britain’s parliamentary system no longer reflected the realities of a rapidly changing world. Six hundred and fifty-eight MPs had seats at Westminster, but neither Birmingham nor Manchester – both growing new industrial towns – were represented while the notorious Old Sarum, an abandoned relic of the medieval era, returned its two members despite being populated only by a few thorn bushes. There were also ‘pocket boroughs’ owned by major landowners who could choose their representatives and, since the ballot was not secret and voters were easily intimidated or bribed, they usually got the man whom they wanted in. Not everyone could vote anyway: in thirty-nine English boroughs the right was attached only to certain properties; in forty-three the electors were the town council; in sixty-two only freemen were balloted. In the counties, if you were a freeholder of property worth more than forty shillings you could cast your vote and naturally you tended to do so in deference to the wishes of the local landowner for fear that he might otherwise withdraw valued favours. Parliament was not for the people. It was more like an exclusive club: the aristocracy forming the House of Lords, their friends and relations along with a sprinkling of other gentry making up the Commons. A ‘ruling few’ dominated a ‘subject many’, as Jeremy Bentham famously said.
From around 1815 on, a deep sense of dissatisfaction had been swelling in Britain. By 1830, reform was firmly on the agenda. The violence of the Swing revolt, the naked contempt of the workers, the hopelessness of the gentry in the face of their fury, had finally convinced an aristocratic elite that their rule could not continue unless changes were broug
ht into effect. Both the emerging industrial classes and the commercial middle classes had to be given a more significant voice. Under the Whig administration of Lord Grey, a bill for reform was presented in March 1831. It went through its many drafts and readings, passes and rejections, amid such dramatic scenes of contention that the very stability of society seemed often at stake, until eventually, in June 1832, the Great Reform Act received the royal assent and the political map of Britain was redrawn.
The act did not bring about universal suffrage. In its final form it increased the electorate from around 366,000 to 650,000. About 18 per cent of the total adult male population (very few belonging to the working classes) could vote. In towns the vote was given to all whose homes were valued for rates at £10 per annum. In the counties it was given to forty-shilling freeholders as well as long leaseholders and tenants who paid more than £50 per annum rent. This led to the redistribution of seats in Parliament: those seats with less than 2,000 voters – the Earl of Caledon’s Old Sarum among them – lost their representation; others which had previously returned two members were reduced to one and all the seats thus gained were redistributed, twenty-two to towns such as Birmingham and Manchester which now had representation for the first time, and sixty-five others re-allocated to the counties, many of which were divided into two. Old corruption was not completely rooted out. Some seventy seats remained under aristocratic patronage. But this was the start: it was a landmark event in the history of English democracy.
Palmer felt as if the walls of his Eden had been breached. He was an old-fashioned high Tory who voted with what he believed to be the best motives. ‘As I love our fine British peasantry,’ he explained to Richmond in 1828, ‘I think best of the old high Tories, because I find they give most liberty to the poor, and were not morose, sullen and bloodthirsty like the whigs, liberty jacks and dissenters whose cruelty when they reign’d, was as bad as that of the worst times of the worst papists; only more sly and smoothlier varnish’d over with a thin shew of reason.’29 Palmer was deeply distrustful of revolutionary principles. To him, the ancient institutions of England were sacred, and foremost among these was the Anglican Church. He had been unsettled by the emancipation of the Catholics; now he was deeply disturbed by discussion of the abolition of tithes, for this ecclesiastical tax – a time-honoured method of providing for the clergy which required members of a parish to hand over 10 per cent of their income – seemed to him symbol of the sacramental unity that existed between a pastor and his people. To abolish it, Palmer believed, would be to hurl a firebrand into the heart of the peaceful procession that winds its way homewards in Coming from Evening Church.
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