The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  1 The comparison is taken from the North Buckinghamshire villages of Winslow, enclosed in 1766, and Maid's Morton, still unenclosed in 1800. —Fremantle, I, 33.

  houses by the roads on the Continent. The parlour in which the family were going to sit down to dinner was as clean and neat as possible; and on the table were a nice piece of roasted beef and a plum pudding—articles I had not seen for a long time." He would have seen them at the same hour in the corresponding place in most English parishes.

  For, though decline and decay had set in, the average eighteenth-century village had not yet become a rigid community with a sprinkling of gentry and tenant farmers and a mass of landless labourers. It was still a little microcosm of the greater England of which it was a part, whose members included every social type from the squire who administered the law to the barber who cupped veins and drew the rustic tooth. Here was the blacksmith whose smithy was at once the ironmongery of the community and the wayside repair-station of an equestrian age, the wheelwright with his cunning craft, the clockmaker, the tailor seeking orders from door to door, the upholsterer, glazier, miller, cobbler, farrier, maltster, reddleman and tranter. Arthur Young, writing in 1789, enumerated in a Norfolk parish of 231 families 38 husbandmen, 26 spinners, 12 farmers, 12 publicans, 8 carpenters, with a total of 57 different classes of employment. Here was a closely-associated community rich in diversity, and because in diversity in vital and self-renewing life.

  Such employments were intricately interwoven. The farrier, the miller and the maltster generally also held or rented farms; each village craftsman had his garden and, in an unenclosed village, his holding in the common fields. Few were solely dependent on their craft. The rustic world, by geographical measure, was narrow, but there was choice in it. In many counties a subsidiary form of employment was afforded by the cloth industry, then scattered throughout the rural counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon. Like other local crafts such as the cottage lace industry and straw plaiting of Buckinghamshire, it afforded domestic occupation and employment not only to men but to women and children, endowing every member of the family with a measure of independence. The wealth thus acquired and diffused, as Wilberforce said, was not obtained at the expense of domestic happiness but in the employment of it. Such trades had their ups and downs, and with the rapid expansion of machinery it was soon to be mostly downs. But in the last decade before the great war, the weavers of the North Country were doing well, often employing journeymen and apprentices in addition to their families. The new mechanical spinning frames gave them cheap and plentiful supplies of yarn. They enjoyed well-furnished dwellings bright with clocks, prints, mahogany furniture and Staffordshire ware, and plenty of butcher's meat, oatmeal and potatoes cooked as only the housewives of the North know how.

  Good fare was still regarded as the Englishman's birthright. In many counties a gallon of beer a day was not thought an excessive allowance for a working man. Men still lived on the fresh fruits of the earth they tilled: the germ of the wheat remained in the bread, the waste of man and beast went back into the soil and the healthy cycle of nature was unbroken. Every substantial cottage had its flitches of home-cured bacon hanging from the smoky beam and its copper for brewing ale. Eggs, geese, poultry and rabbits abounded, though the wild game which in earlier days had come easily to the peasant's pot was disappearing with enclosures and the growing passion of the rich for the chase. But although a term was being set to all this prosperity and a stormier horizon lay in the path of the poor, the age of comparative rustic plenty lingered into the 'eighties of the Hanoverian century. Rochefoucauld in 1784 noted how much greater the consumption of meat was in England than in any other country and even claimed that in East Anglia the labourer enjoyed butcher's meat every day.1 This was almost certainly an exaggeration: but in France such a claim would have seemed fantastic.

  How much well-to-do folk contrived to eat staggers the modern imagination. With transport still predominantly dependent on the beast and the soft cart-track, the bulk of what was raised could only be consumed locally. Every place and season had its own peculiar delicacies. Our stout forebears, reckless of pot-belly and rubicund countenance, took care that they were not wasted. " My dinner (I love to repeat good ones)," wrote John Byng over his slippered ease in his inn at nightfall, " consisted of spitchcock'd eel, roasted pidgeons, a loyn of pork roasted, with tarts, jellies and custards."

  1 On one of Coke of Holkham's farms he was told that the harvesters had meat three times a day and as much small beer as they could drink.—Rochefoucauld, 230.

  Woodforde, a Norfolk parson with a modest living, entertained his neighbours to such fare as " fish and oyster sauce, a nice piece of boiled beef, a fine neck of pork roasted and apple sauce, some hashed turkey, mutton stakes, salad, etc., a wild duck roasted, fried rabbits, a plumb pudding and some tardets, desert, some olives, nuts, almonds and raisins and apples." " The whole company," he added apologetically, " was pleased with their dinner, and considering we had not above three hours' notice of their coming, we did very well in that short time." Nor was such feasting confined to the days when the good parson entertained. He and his niece Nancy, and one can be sure his domestics below stairs, did themselves almost equally well on ordinary days. " We returned home about three o'clock to dinner. Dinner to-day boiled chicken and a pig's face, a bullock's heart roasted and a rich plumb pudding." Small wonder that Nancy sometimes felt ill of an afternoon " with a pain within her, blown up as if poisoned "; that the parson was forced to complain after a somewhat restless night " mince pie rose oft"; and that itinerant Torrington after his inn fare found himself so frequently battling—with true English stubbornness—against postprandial slumber.

  They drank as deep: even when it was only tea. Miss Burney's mother once made Dr. Johnson twenty-one cups in succession. After dinner, bottles of spirits of various kinds—brandy, rum, shrub —moved in ceaseless procession round the table. At Squire Gray's— " a fine jolly old sportsman "—the cloth was not cleared until a bottle of port had been laid down before a mighty silver fox's head, out of which the squire filled a bumper and drank to fox-hunting preparatory to passing it about.1 Parson Woodforde did not scruple to entertain five fellow-clergymen with eight bottles of port and one of Madeira besides arrack punch, beer and cider.

  It was the hallmark of your true Englishman that he " loved his can of flip." In London alone there were more than five thousand licensed houses within the Bills of Mortality. From the Royal Family to the poor labourer " being in beer "—a state so habitual that it was ordinarily held to excuse almost any excess 2—there was

  1 Dyott, 1,17.

  2 Mr. Newton, Secretary of the Royal Academy, dining with some friends in Somerset and being " a little affected by liquor," found his coachman and footman much more so, so put them into the carriage and himself mounted the coachbox.—Farrington, I, 68.

  a general contempt for heeltaps: the King's sailor son, the Duke of Clarence, whenever one of his guests stopped drinking, would call out, " I see some daylight in that glass, sir: banish it." " We made him welcome," wrote Ramblin Jack of the fo'c'sle, " as all Englishmen do their friends, damnabell Drunk, and saw him safe home to Dean's Square, Ratclife way." 1 Even the livestock on occasion seemed to partake of the national passion: a clergyman noted how two of his pigs, drinking some of the beer grounds out of one of his home-brewed barrels, got so drunk that they were not able to stand and remained like dead things all night: " I never saw pigs so drunk in my life."

  Foreigners, less blessed with plenty, were profoundly impressed, if sometimes a little appalled. All this exuberant grossness seemed part of the genius of England: these robust islanders, with their guzzling and swilling, were like so many pieces of animated roast beef with their veins full of ale. It appeared a point of pride with them—a mark of their superiority to other starveling nations—to fill themselves up. A farmer at the Wheel at Hackington Fen ate for a wager two
dozen penny mutton pies and drank half a gallon of ale in half an hour: then, remarking that he had had but a scanty supper, went on for the sheer love of the thing and consumed a 3d. loaf, a pound of cheese and a leg of pork. " Sir," said the great Dr. Johnson, the very embodiment of England, " I mind my belly very studiously, for I look upon it that he who will not mind his belly will scarcely mind anything else."

  The foundation of this good living was the wealth of the English soil. Few countries were more blest by nature: in none had nature been turned to such advantage by the cultivator. Since the Revolutionary settlement a succession of remarkable men— aristocrats, hedge squires and farmers—had devoted their lives to the improvement of crops and livestock. Bakewell's new breed of Leicester sheep in the 'sixties and 'seventies were said to have given his country two pounds of mutton where she had one before. In 1776 young Thomas Coke began his great work of transforming the Holkham estate from a sandy desert into the agricultural Mecca of Europe.

  It was due to such efforts that England in the grim years ahead

  1Ramblin’ Jack (ed. R. R. Bellamy), 204.

  was able to sustain the long burden of blockade and feed her industrial population.

  In the two decades before the war with revolutionary France farming was the first hobby of educated Englishmen. From the King—" Varmer George "—who contributed to the Agricultural Magazine under the pseudonym of Robinson and carried a copy of Arthur Young's Farmer's Letters on all his journeys—to Parson Woodforde, who recorded daily his horticultural activities and his observations on the weather, the pursuit of husbandry gripped their eminently practical minds. Great lords would pay £400 or more for the hire of one of Mr. Bakewell's rams, and yeomen would club together to establish cart-horse and ploughing tests. The country gentleman who did not look after his estate lost as much caste as he who shirked his fences in the hunting field. Practical, hardy, realist, the landowners of England were a source of astonishment to their Continental neighbours, who did not know at which to wonder more: aristocratic absorption in clovers and fat cattle or the intelligence with which farmers and peasants, who abroad would have been regarded as no better than beasts of burden, conversed oil the principles of their calling.1

  This common passion had one important political consequence. It helped to unify the nation and, by accustoming men of all classes to act together, gave them cohesion in time of trial. It made not for theoretical but for practical equality. It was one of the influences that constantly tempered the aristocratic government of the country. Too many currents of robust popular air broke in on the senate and salons of eighteenth-century England for the atmosphere to remain hot-house.

  They blew not only from the field, but from the jury-box, the hustings and the counting-house. In this land of paradox a lord might find his right to lands or goods questioned by process of law

  1 Captain Fremantle drove me in his gig to see Mr. Wenar's farm and his famous fat oxen for which he every year gets two or three prizes—he was not at home, but his daughter as fat as the cattle, tho' a civil girl, did the honours of the mansion which is a very ancient half-ruined house—she showed me the fat beasts which are fed some on oil cake and some on turnips, and look like elephants. It is only in this country that one may see a man like Mr. Wenar, who is visited and courted by Dukes and Peers, dines at their table, and returns their dinners, and all this because he can fatten oxen better than his brethren, the other farmers. A German Baron could hardly believe this."—Wynne Diaries, III, 72.

  courts where the final word lay with the decision of twelve fellow-countrymen chosen from the general body of the nation. Strong though the opportunities of blood were, there was no profession to which a man of humble birth might not aspire. Dr. Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1783 to 1805, was the son of a grazier; Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor with one brief break from 1801 to 1827, the son of a coal-factor's apprentice.

  The way these strange islanders chose their rulers outraged alike foreign prejudice and logical formulas. An English election had to be seen to be believed. It was not that the political constitution of the country was democratic: it was on the face of it overwhelmingly aristocratic. The House of Lords was hereditary. Of 558 members of the House of Commons, 294—a majority—were returned by constituencies with less than 250 members. Many of the newer and larger centres of population had no representation at all, while an under-populated county like Cornwall still returned a tenth of the English and Welsh members. 157 M.P.s were nominated by 84 local proprietors, mostly peers, and 150 more on the recommendation of another 70.

  Yet the curious fact remained that the English parliaments of the eighteenth century represented not inaccurately the trend of popular political feeling. Not all the power and bribery of a few great lords, who regarded the Whig rule of England as something permanently ordained by heaven, could prevent the younger Pitt from carrying the country against the prevailing parliamentary majority in the famous election of 1784. The effect of corruption, openly acknowledged and shamelessly displayed, largely cancelled itself out. Those who sought entry to Parliament, being English, were individualists to a man. They were there for their careers or local prestige, or out of a sense of personal duty. They were seldom much interested in abstract ideas nor inclined to press them to inhuman extremes. They were often childishly sensitive to what their fellow-countrymen—and particularly their neighbours— thought of them. The very illogicality of the electoral system inclined them to bow to any unmistakable expression of public opinion; unlike both ideological despots and the representatives of a more rational democracy, they felt the intellectual weakness of their position and claimed no sanctity for their point of view.

  An example of this was the regard paid to county as opposed to borough elections. The 92 Knights of the Shire were the elite of the House and carried far more weight than could be explained by their numbers. When they were united—an event, however, which only happened in a time of national emergency—no government could long withstand their opposition. This was because their election by forty-shilling freeholders gave them a real right to speak for England: they represented the substance of her dominant interest and industry. They were no placemen or carpet-baggers but independent gentlemen openly competing with their equals for the suffrages of their neighbours—of those, that is, best fitted to judge their character and stewardship. Before a county election sturdy freeholders rode into the shire town from every side to hear speeches from the rival candidates, to be canvassed by them in market hall and street, to march in bannered and cockaded processions behind bands of music, and to eat and drink at their expense in the leading inns and taverns. The most important of all county elections— because it represented the largest constituency—was that of the great province of Yorkshire: on the result of this the eyes of Ministers and even of European statesmen were fixed.

  In such contests, and even in those of the close borough, there was a wealth of homely plain speaking and even homelier conduct. The candidates, however splendid their lineage and estates, had to take their turn of lampoons, brutal jests and rotten eggs and run the gauntlet of a fighting, drunken, cheering, jeering crowd before they could hope to enter the portals of Westminster. One did not have to be an alderman or an hereditary burgess or even a forty-shilling freeholder to fling a dead cat at the hustings. The right to do so during an election was regarded as an inalienable privilege of every Englishman: the only check the right of every other subject to return the compliment. At the Wycombe election in 1794 Lord Wycombe was thrown down in the mud and Squire Dashwood, another candidate, lost his hat and almost his life. " Elections are certainly of some use," wrote radical John Byng, " as affording lessons of humility and civility to a proud lord and a steeped lord-ling."

  The rowdiest of all elections was that of Westminster. Here, by one of the incalculable illogicalities of the English constitution, something approaching manhood suffrage prevailed. Every adult male with his own doorway and a fireplace on which to boil his pot
had the right to record his vote. Like Yorkshire Westminster was regarded by statesmen as a political test: in its noisy humours—its riots, its stuffed effigies, its grand ladies cajoling porters and draymen with kisses—one could feel the pulse of England.

  But perhaps the most startling manifestation of English licence was the power of the mob. England had no police force, and it was regarded as a mark of effeminate namby-pambyism to wish there to be one. Facing a mob was like facing a fence or standing up to an enemy in the ring: a thing a gentleman took in his stride. One did it with courage and good humour, and then the monster—which, being English itself, respected courage and good nature—did no great harm. True in 1780 the London mob surrounded the Houses of Parliament, took drunken control of the capital for four days and burnt about a tenth of it down. But even this excess was regarded as part of the price of popular freedom. And in its crude, barbarous way the mob did—under guidance—act as a kind of rough watchdog of the national liberties and even, on occasion, of morality. Thus, when the House of Commons in its dislike of the disreputable John Wilkes outraged the principles of freedom of choice and speech which it was its duty to uphold, it was the constancy of the mob to the cause which had brought Strafford to the scaffold that shamed and finally defeated the advocates of despotism. And when an aspiring lady of the frail sisterhood buried her cat in hallowed ground, it was not a dignitary of the church but the hand of the London mob which rebuked her, noisily flinging the corpse back through her window within two hours of its interment.