The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

Home > Other > The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) > Page 41
The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Page 41

by Christopher Hibbert


  In the Peak District of Derbyshire, Defoe encountered a poor woman and her children living in a cave and recorded her story ‘to show the discontented part of the rich world how to value their own good fortune’:

  Says I, good wife, where do you live. Here, sir, says she, and points to the hole in the rock. Here! says I; and do all these children live here too? Yes, sir, says she, they were all born here. Pray how long have you dwelt here then? said I. My husband was born here, said she, and his father before him. Will you give me leave, says one of our company, as curious as I was, to come in and see your house, dame? If you please, sir, says she, but ’tis not a place fit for such as you are to come into, calling him, your worship, forsooth; but that by the by. I mention it, to show that the good woman did not want manners, though she lived in a den like a wild body.

  However, we alighted and went in. There was a large hollow cave, which the poor people, by two curtains hanged across, had parted into three rooms. On one side was the chimney, and the man, or perhaps his father, being miners, had found means to work a shaft or funnel through the rock to carry the smoke out at the top. The habitation was poor, ’tis true, but things within did not look so like misery as I expected. Everything was clean and neat, though mean and ordinary. There were shelves with earthen ware, and some pewter and brass. There was, which I observed in particular, a whole flitch or side of bacon hanging up in the chimney, and by it a good piece of another. There was a sow and pigs running about at the door, and a little lean cow feeding upon a green place just before the door, and a little piece of ground was growing with good barley …

  I asked the poor woman, what trade her husband was? She said, he worked in the lead mines. I asked her, how much he could earn a day there? she said, if he had good luck he could earn about five pence a day. Then I asked, what she did; she said, when she was able to [spare time from the children] she washed the ore [and] if she worked hard she could gain three-pence a day. So that, in short, here was but eight-pence a day when they both worked hard, and that not always, and perhaps not often, and all this to maintain a man, his wife, and five small children, and yet they seemed to live very pleasantly, the children looked plump and fat, ruddy and wholesome; and the woman was tall, well shaped, clean, and (for the place) a very well looking, comely woman. Nor was there any thing that looked like the dirt and nastiness of the miserable cottages of the poor; though many of them spend more money in strong drink than this poor woman had to maintain five children with.

  Having given the woman ‘a little lump’ of money, at the sight of which she nearly fainted before bursting into tears, Defoe went to see the lead-mine or, rather, the numerous small holes in the ground down which the miners scrambled. He was wondering at their smallness when out of one of the grooves appeared first a hand, then an arm, next a head, and finally a body, ‘a most uncouth spectacle’, clothed all in leather with a brimless leather hat. He carried his tools in a small basket, and endeavoured to explain their various uses, but his accent was unintelligible. He was lean as a skeleton, grey as a corpse, and panted and struggled as he pulled up about three-quarters of a hundredweight of ore which he had dragged from the vein 150 yards underground. Defoe gave him two shillings, more than he earned in four days, and he hurried off with the money to an alehouse to treat himself to a glass or two of Pale Derby. But Defoe was there before him, bought him his drink, and told him to take the shillings back to his family.

  On his way to Cambridge, Defoe visited Sourbridge Fair, ‘the greatest in the world’, which was held in a large cornfield near Casterton where the booths were filled with the wares of goldsmiths and turners, of milliners, haberdashers and mercers, of pewterers and drapers and clothiers, with toys and books and medicines, and with the tables, benches, jugs and cups of the keepers of taverns, brandy-shops and cooks’ shops, coffee-houses and eating-rooms. Vast quantities of goods were sold and the whole countryside and all the villages and small towns around were crowded with people and even barns and stables were turned into inns.

  From here Defoe went on to give an account of the races at Newmarket where he was much displeased by the drinking and the gambling, the picking of pockets, the ill manners and the prodigal insouciance with which Tregonwell Frampton, ‘the cunningest jockey in England’, lost 1000 guineas one day and won 2000 the next. And he was even more shocked by the infamous Horn Fair at Charlton, an annual event supposedly licensed by King John to a miller whose wife he had seduced. Here the people, many of them dressed as kings, queens and millers with horns on their heads, ‘took all kinds of liberties and the women [were] especially impudent, as if it was a day that justified the giving themselves a loose to all manner of indecency and immodesty’. He thought the fair ought to be suppressed ‘as a nuisance and offence to all sober people’, but it was not, in fact, put down until 1872.

  He described the smuggling that was carried on along the Kentish and Essex coasts where wine and brandy from France and Holland, pepper, tea, coffee, calico and tobacco were landed in such quantities that the people were ‘grown monstrous rich by that wicked trade’. He complained of the difficulty of understanding the dialects of country people outside London, particularly in Somerset where they spoke in so ‘boorish’ a way that ‘one cannot understand one half of what they say’; and of the custom, introduced, so he said, by Queen Mary, ‘of furnishing houses with chinaware … piling [it] upon the tops of cabinets, scrutoires, and every chimneypiece, to the tops of the ceilings and even setting up shelves for [it] where they wanted such places’.

  He described a mop fair, also known as a living fair, in an Oxfordshire village where men and women offered themselves for hire and indicated the kind of labour they could undertake by holding up an appropriate tool or implement, a brush, a carter’s whip, a shovel, a billhook, a woolcomb. These fairs, Defoe added, were not ‘so much frequented as formerly’.1 They survived, however, until well into the nineteenth century. In Far From the Madding Crowd, published in 1874 and set in the 1840s, Thomas Hardy described one in Casterbridge where ‘two to three hundred blithe and hearty labourers stood at one end of the street’. ‘Among these, carters and waggoners were distinguished by having a piece of whip cord twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw; shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.’2

  28 Countrymen, Clergymen and Farmers

  English society was divided by Defoe into seven classes: there were the great who lived ‘profusely’, the rich who lived ‘plentifully’ and the ‘middle sort’ who lived ‘well’. Then there were those in ‘the working trades’ who laboured hard and felt no want, followed by country people who fared indifferently, the poor who fared hard, and, lastly, ‘the miserable that really pinch and suffer want’.1

  The landed nobility at the apex of society were as a class inordinately rich and tightly enclosed. Many of them had urban as well as country estates, the rents from both of which were increasing year by year. The Russells, earls and dukes of Bedford, who developed Covent Garden and Bloomsbury, were receiving over three times as much from their properties in London at the end of the seventeenth century as they were at the beginning. The Grosvenors, who developed parts of Mayfair and later Belgravia, were already ‘infinitely rich’ when Sir Thomas Grosvenor acquired the estates his wife had inherited from an old uncle; and by the 1770s, after building on the Mayfair lands had been completed, they were richer than ever. Other landowners, like Thomas Coke of Holkham, Earl of Leicester, much increased their rents by means of improved methods of farming and of estate management. They also made immense profits from the coal and timber, the slate and stone which were taken from their lands and from the industries in which they invested. And many of them increased their fortunes by accepting office at court or in the government at a time when a secretaryship of state might yield up to £9000 a year in clear profit, when a paymaster general might put away over half a million pounds during his term of offic
e, and a sinecure could keep a man in comfort for life. By one means or another most peers contrived to make at least £5000 a year, the rough equivalent of £300,000 a year today, and some had far more than this. By 1790, so it has been calculated, 400 landowners had incomes of £10,000 a year. Several had over £20,000; and as early as 1715 the lands of the Duke of Newcastle were bringing in £32,000, that is to say an annual income of some £2 million in present-day terms. By 1800 almost a quarter of England’s landed wealth was owned by peers of the realm, some twenty of whom owned more than 20,000 acres each.2

  They spent their money lavishly, building and improving huge houses, laying out parks, moving villages to improve the view, buying quantities of furniture, pictures and books, spending vast sums on gambling, clothes, bloodstock, kennels of hounds, election expenses and troops of servants. Sir Robert Walpole spent £1500 a year on wine at Houghton Hall and £1 a night on candles; the Nevilles laid out £100,000 on altering Audley End; the dukes of Devonshire maintained not only Chatsworth but also Hardwick Hall, Bolton Abbey, Lismore Castle and Compton Place as well as Devonshire House and Burlington House in London. In 1753 the fourth Duke additionally inherited Chiswick House, the magnificent country villa modelled on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda at Vicenza. At Canons Park, the Duke of Chandos’s house which stood in landscaped grounds of 841 acres between Stanmore and Edgware, there were ninety-three household servants and a private orchestra of twenty-seven musicians.3

  Members of the nobility were anxious to preserve their caste. Some might marry heiresses from lesser families to increase a fortune, but daughters were expected not to marry beneath them. Indeed, those beneath were often regarded as creatures of another species. ‘It is monstrous,’ the Duchess of Buckingham complained of Methodists, ‘to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.’ The Earl of Cork lamented that it was necessary at election time to open his doors ‘to every dirty fellow in the county that is worth forty shillings a year’. ‘All my best floors are spoiled by the hobnails of farmers stamping about them,’ he continued. ‘Every room is a pig-stye and the Chinese paper in the drawing-room stinks so abominably of punch and tobacco that it would strike you down to come into it.’4

  The aristocracy managed to keep itself a small élite. It was now much rarer than it had been in the past for a younger son to go into trade. He might possibly accept a position with some such organization as the East India Company or go into banking but he was more likely to enter politics, the army or the Church. It was also ‘hard to buy your way into high society’, as Dr Roy Porter has observed. ‘It was easier to marry a peer than obtain a peerage. The ascent towards the Lords was normally slow, arduous and costly, though a few lawyers could take a faster route and become Lord Chancellor – as did Macclesfield, Hardwicke, Camden, Thurlow and Eldon.’ National heroes like Robert Clive, a former writer in the East India Company at Madras, and, later, Horatio Nelson, son of a Norfolk country parson, were rewarded with peerages.

  But nouveaux riches, however riches, did not easily become ennobled. They could not buy a peerage – peerages were just about the one thing not for sale in Georgian England. Nor could they themselves count on marrying peers’ daughters. De Quincey wrote that John Palmer [the son of a prosperous brewer] had accomplished two things very hard to do so in our little planet. He had invented mail-coaches and he had married the daughter of a Duke.5

  Beneath the uppermost class, however, there was much more what was later to be termed social mobility. Ranks were strictly graded, each inclined to look down upon the one below, physicians regarding themselves as superior to surgeons, brewers to provision merchants, governesses to housekeepers, housekeepers to cooks, cooks to gardeners. But it was easier than it was in most other European countries to climb the slope that led from one class to the next, and numerous are the examples of those who managed to do so. The father of Henry Thrale, the brewer, had been an agricultural labourer; so had the father of the navigator, Captain Cook; Robert Dodsley, the publisher, had once been a footman; Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown a kitchen-gardener; Lord Eldon was the son of a Newcastle coal factor and hence known in the royal family as ‘Old Bags’; John Thomas, Bishop of Salisbury, was the son of a drayman at Nicholson’s Brewery.

  This, however, was highly unusual in a bishop. Nearly all Thomas’s fellow-bishops were either related to noblemen or had been chaplains or tutors in noble families. Frederick Cornwallis, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a son of Lord Cornwallis; the father of Robert Hay Drummond, Archbishop of York, was the Earl of Kinnoul; H. R. Courtenay, Bishop of Exeter, was a grandson of Earl Bathhurst; the Bishop of Winchester, Brownlow North, a son of the Earl of Guilford; Thomas Thurlow, Bishop of Lincoln, brother to the Lord Chancellor. Joseph Wilcocks, Bishop of Gloucester, had been preceptor to the daughters of the Prince of Wales; and on his elevation resided ‘as much as any bishop in his diocese, at least four months in the year’ and kept ‘a very generous and hospitable table which [made] amends for the learning he [was] deficient in’.

  No longer employed as the king’s civil servants, bishops had few secular duties to perform other than their attendance at the House of Lords, and so most of them were able to devote more time to their diocese than many of their predecessors had. And for this some of them at least were very highly paid, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, receiving £7000 a year, the Bishop of Durham £6000. Most of the lesser clergy in their dioceses were also better paid than they had been in the past. There were still many poor clergy occupying livings worth less than £100 a year who were obliged to earn money in other ways as the poor parsons Barnabee, Adams and Trulliver all do in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews of 1742; and there were many others being paid as little as £50 a year or less to act as curates for pluraliste and absentee parsons. James Marshall, who was curate of Ireby in Cumberland for over sixty years from 1777, never had more than £50 a year. To make ends meet he kept two work-horses and carted coals from Bolton colleries to Keswick, filling the carts and conducting them to market himself. The curate of a nearby parish whose stipend was no more than £28 a year eked out his living by sheep clipping. Many others taught in schools or gave private lessons.6

  There were still many absentee parsons. About a quarter of the 10,000 parishes in England had no resident parson, and in some counties the proportion was much higher; in Devon it had reached 70 per cent by 1780. In 1808, however, a Bill required all clergymen to live in their parishes; and one man whose life was thus transformed was Sydney Smith who, though living in London, was incumbent of Foston-le-Clay, a living in the gift of the Lord Chancellor, which was in a remote part of Yorkshire, twelve miles, as Smith put it himself, from the nearest lemon. Required to reside there, he endeavoured to exchange the living for one more accessible; but as he was permitted only to exchange it for another chancery living of similar income he did not manage to do so. He moved, therefore, to Foston where there had been no resident rector for 150 years and where the parsonage house was a hovel and had to be rebuilt. He obtained permission to live temporarily nearby at Heslington which was closer to York, a city in which he discovered that, contrary to popular opinion in the south, the people had been converted to the Christian faith, wore clothes and were not addicted to cannibalism.7

  Smith became a good and well-liked parson. He found time to entertain numerous visitors, to teach his sons until they went to their public schools, to help his wife in the education of his daughters, to write for the Edinburgh Review, to preach sermons, to cross swords with Methodists and devotees of Evangelical enthusiasm, to perform the duties of a magistrate, to give dinners for some of the local farmers, and to farm himself much of the extensive Foston glebe. To save time when directing activities on his farm, he stood outside his front door, shouting orders through a tremendous speaking trumpet; and, in the words of a visiting friend, ‘as a proper companion’ for the trumpet, h
e had a ‘telescope slung in leather’ to observe what the labourers were doing. But his farming did not prevent him from attending conscientiously to his pastoral duties, from visiting the sick and even, on the strength of his attendance at some of Christopher Pegge’s lectures at Oxford, and at clinical classes at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, from becoming a ‘village doctor’ as well as ‘village comforter’. ‘The poor intirely confided their maladies to him,’ his widow wrote, ‘and he had the satisfaction of being to them eminently useful. All his drugs were got from London, a record was kept of each case of sickness and of the remedies applied.’ One of the rectory servants, Annie Kay, acted as his ‘apothecary’s boy’ and made up the medicines for him in accordance to his eccentric instructions.

  There is the Gentle-jog, a pleasure to take [he explained], the Ball-dog for more serious cases; Peter’s puke; Heart’s delight, the comfort of all the old women in the village; Rub-a-dub, a capital embrocation. Dead-stop settles the matter at once; Up-with-it-then needs no explanation; and so on. Now, Annie Kay, give Mrs Sprat a bottle of Rub-a-dub; and to Mr Coles a dose of Dead-stop and twenty drops of laudanum.8

  With his fellow-clergy, ‘the sporting clergy of Malton’, as he described them, Smith got on well enough, though many of them did not understand his jokes and others did not approve of them. In one of his sermons he asked if it were right for a ‘minister of god to lead the life of a gamekeeper or a groom’. But, although he derived little pleasure from the company of his clerical neighbours, cheerfulness was always breaking in. ‘I see so little of any clever men here that I have nobody to recommend,’ he told Lord Brougham. ‘But if you have any young horses to break I can find many clergymen who will do it for you.’

 

‹ Prev