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

by Christopher Hibbert

  The range of inventions with which workers had to grow accustomed was extraordinary. Nearly 1000 new patents were taken out between 1760 and 1789. The flying shuttle, invented by John Kay, a clockmaker, doubled the output of weavers; James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny had a similar effect on the work of spinners; Henry Cort, a naval supplier, devised a new process of converting pig-iron into wrought iron, Abraham Darby one of smelting cast-iron in furnaces with coke; Thomas Newcomen, a Devonshire ironmonger, invented an improved machine for pumping water out of flooded mines. In 1775 came James Watt’s steam engine, and Crompton’s ‘mule’; in 1776 the first iron bridge spanning a river was completed; in 1789 a new power loom was invented by Edmund Cartwright, a clergyman; and in 1815 Sir Humphry Davy perfected his safety lamp. By 1800 the output of coal had risen to nearly 14 million tons a year, compared with less than 5 million tons in 1750.6

  The later years of that period, however, had witnessed growing discontent. Coalminers were relatively well paid; but in some areas they had to deliver the coal as well as mine it, while in many they were expected to spend at least part of their wages in shops owned by the mine-owners, and occasionally they received all their wages in goods rather than in money.

  Working conditions in the mines were appalling, as they were in many factories where women and children laboured alongside men, thousands of them in the cotton industry. Women and children also worked in coalmines and in lead, tin and copper districts, breaking, sorting and washing ore and pulling and pushing wagons. They also worked in lime-kilns and Peter Kalm was distressed to see women carrying as many as three immense baskets of chalk on their heads at a time, smashing up the chalk, labouring – ‘mostly like slaves’ – for 8d a day.7 Indeed, there were few industries for which women and children were considered unsuitable, just as there were few families which could survive without the wages, considerably less than those of men, which they took home. William Hutton, the son of a wool-comber, recalled that when he was a child ‘consultations were held about fixing [him] in some employment for the benefit of the family’. ‘Winding quills for a weaver was mentioned, but died away,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘stripping tobacco for the grocer, in which I was to earn fourpence a week’, was mentioned next. Eventually, when he was seven years old, he was sent to work in a silk factory in Derby.8

  Other children began their working life when they were five. They were taken over by mill-owners who lodged them in crowded sheds near the factory gates and kept them at work for as long as they could stay awake. It was not until 1819 that it was made illegal to employ children under nine in cotton-mills and to keep older children at work for more than twelve hours a day. And even then, since there were no factory inspectors, the law was easily and frequently evaded.

  Children were employed in the field to grub up weeds, pick fruit, scare crows, cart away stones; and in the cities many found employment as crossing-sweepers or chimney-sweeps’ climbing-boys. Most of these climbing-boys were poor children supplied by the parish authorities, as few parents prepared to consign their children to such hard and dangerous work could afford to pay the fees due on apprenticeship. In 1767 and 1778 laws were passed, largely through the efforts of Jonas Hanway, which required that the premiums due should be paid in two instalments. This at least ensured that the sweep had an interest in keeping the boy alive until the second instalment was paid.9 Many did not survive, however, since not only was cancer of the scrotum an occupational disease but fatal accidents were common. Boys were burned and suffocated; and, although they were half-starved to keep them thin enough to climb up narrow chimneys, they often got stuck in them.

  Towards the end of the century women were less often seen working hard with men in the fields. It was not only that agricultural tools had become heavier, but also that unemployment among male labourers was rising. Farmers were laying men off and choosing, when there was work to be done, to employ paupers whom the overseers of the poor offered to them at cheap rates.

  In the view of most well-to-do observers, poverty was a necessary if regrettable state; and poor labouring people, while essential to the economy of the country, were not necessarily honourable. Their work was for the benefit of society, but would not be performed unless poverty drove them to it. The world could not subsist without poverty, in the opinion of Soame Jenyns, the well-born Member of Parliament for Cambridgeshire and prolific author of A Free Enquiry into the Origin and Nature of Evil, ‘for had all been rich, none could have submitted to the demands of another, or the drudgeries of life’. Henry Fielding agreed with him. So did George Hickes, the Bishop of Thetford, who in a sermon declared that the poor were

  necessary for the establishment of Superiority, where there must be Members of Dishonour, as well as Honour, and some to serve and obey, as well as others to command. The poor are the Hands and Feet of the Body Politick … who hew the Wood, and draw the Water of the Rich. They Plow our Lands, and dig our Quarries, and cleanse our Streets.10

  It was ‘God’s own appointment’, another clergyman observed, ‘that some should be Rich and some Poor, some High and some Low’.11 It was Samuel Johnson’s opinion that mankind were ‘happier in a state of inequality and insubordination’. And Johnson’s friend Hannah More, whose poetry he praised with such flattering extravagance, observed: ‘Scarcity has been permitted by an all wise and gracious Providence … to show the poor how immediately dependent they are upon the rich.’

  Arthur Young concluded that ‘everyone but an idiot’ knew that ‘the lower classes must be kept poor’ or they would ‘never be industrious’. When food prices rose this was not a reason for higher wages but for stricter economy on the part of those who were required to pay the prices demanded.12

  Indeed, by the end of the century it was commonly agreed that the problems of the poor were caused not so much by poverty itself as by vice, by drunkenness, gambling and excessive sexual indulgence. In 1797 Frederick Morton Eden argued persuasively against this theory in his The State of the Poor which demonstrated how hard life was for the indigent even when their lives were models of sobriety and prudence. But no easy solutions to the problem were offered. Nor were they by Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on Population of 1798 foresaw a world whose population increased faster than the means of subsistence.13

  It was only right and proper, customary morality argued, that for the sake of the well-being of society and of stable government, the poor should be provided with adequate subsistence to fulfil their duties. But they should expect no more than this, and should be thankful that they received no more; for men and women who worked hard kept their bodies exercised and healthy and their minds free from the mental problems that perplexed the minds of the rich. Modest wages also prevented them from drinking too much. When workmen earned large sums, said George Fordyce, the Scottish physician who helped to found the Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge in 1793, they merely spent it ‘in drinking’. They were always idle when they had ‘any money left so that their life [was] spent between labour … and perfect idleness and drunkenness’. The women of the overpaid also passed ‘very disorderly lives’.14

  This was a view almost universally shared. Francis Place, a champion of radicalism and the right of combination, wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century that ‘until lately, all the amusements of the working people of the metropolis were immediately concerned with drinking – choir clubs, chanting clubs, lottery clubs, and every variety of club, intended for amusement, were always held at public houses’. It was also commonly agreed that even if they were not spent on drink, excessive wages would be wasted on some other form of luxury or debauchery.

  There was no such agreement, however, upon what constituted an excessive wage. In the country – though there were still large numbers of self-employed men such as thatchers and tinkers – most workers were now wage-earners, as, indeed, they were in the towns. And in the early years of the century, when labour was in relatively short supply, employers were abl
e to keep wages down. They varied from district to district and season to season, and were sometimes implemented by allowances of beer or cider or food, and, for young men who did not live in their own cottages, of accommodation also. But, except at harvest time, men were unlikely to earn more than 10d to 1s 3d a day – haymakers in Islington were earning is 4d a day in 1775 – and women, employed at less strenuous tasks such as weeding, earned only about half as much as men. When travelling in England in 1748 Peter Kalm discovered that one farmer he came across in Hertfordshire paid no more than 8d to 10d a day for which he required twelve hours’ work. The farmer gave the men beer but no food. In Essex, Kalm, found rates a little more generous at 9s a week for hired labourers, but again no food was provided, only beer.

  Nor were most men able to remain in employment for the full 300 or so working days a year. They were more likely to be taken on as hired labourers for less than 250 days, either for general labour or for specific tasks such as spreading manure, digging turnips, threshing, hedging or building fences; and in winter they were hard pressed to survive. Those who could do so obtained other work in rural industries, as assistants to tailors or shoemakers, or relied upon the wages their women and children could earn, as spinners in East Anglia at 4d a day perhaps, as glove-makers in Oxfordshire and Dorset, lace-makers in Buckinghamshire, or straw-plaiters in Bedfordshire.15 In some villages, indeed, these rural industries rivalled agriculture as the principal occupation of the poor. Professor W. G. Hoskins has shown that in one such village, Wigston Magna in Leicestershire, where framework knitting was already widespread at the beginning of the century, a third of the inhabitants were engaged in manufacturing by the 1760s.16 In other households in Wigston Magna tailors and shoemakers combined their trades with the cultivation of land.17 Elsewhere, men moved from one occupation to another as demands for their labour required. In Dorset, for example, farmworkers turned their hands to rope-making, tanning and quarrying stone; in Banbury, Oxfordshire, they turned to weaving; in Cornwall tin-miners worked in the pilchard fishery when they needed the extra money the busy autumn season offered; while in Selborne in Hampshire, as Gilbert White said, ‘beside the employment in husbandry the men work in hop gardens, of which we have many; and fell and bark timber. In the spring and summer the women weed the corn; and enjoy a second harvest in September by hop-picking.’18

  Low as wages were, they were not excessively so for those who could by one means or another find regular work, for prices were also low and remained so until the 1760s. Both the political economists, Adam Smith and Malthus, agreed that wages kept apace of prices in these years;19 and Dr R. W. Malcolmson has suggested that ‘the real wages of the labouring people were probably slightly higher around 1760 than they had been at the beginning of the century’.

  However, from the 1760s provisions ceased to be cheap. Average annual grain prices rose significantly from the mid 1760s, reaching unprecedented heights during the last decade of the century. Wheat, for instance, which cost 34s a quarter in 1780, cost 58s by 1790 and was as much as 128s by 1800 … It also seems … that wage rates on the whole, though they increased almost everywhere, tended to lag behind prices, or at best just kept up with inflation (and even this was not common in the 1790s). The only districts that unquestionably experienced a general increase in real wages during the last third of the century were those with rapidly expanding industrial economies, notably the West Riding of Yorkshire, south Lancashire and the Birmingham region. Real wages in most country districts during these decades were undoubtedly eroded, and in London they were probably in decline by the 1790s if not before. As the nineteenth century opened the real wages of most labouring people in most parts of England were probably lower – sometimes just slightly, sometimes quite strikingly – than they had been in the 1760s.20

  This decline in wages was accompanied not only by a growing disinclination on the part of employers to allow their workers such traditional perquisites as dockers’ ‘sweepings’ and miners’ free cóal but also by hardship occasioned by the continuing enclosure of common lands which, so it was complained, utterly ruined families who for centuries had enjoyed the rights of pasturage, of feeding pigs, of collecting fuel, nuts and berries and of materials for thatching. ‘An amazing number of people,’ wrote the rector of Cook-ham, Berkshire, ‘have been reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of mere hirelings, who when out of work immediately come on the parish.’21 Arthur Young, who recognized the benefits to commercial farming of enclosure, had to admit that it caused widespread hardship: ‘By nineteen out of twenty Enclosure Bills the poor are injured and most grossly … The poor in the parishes may say with truth,

  Parliament may be tender of property. All I know is, I had a cow; and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me.’

  The diet of the poor consequently became more meagre and for the first time the bread which formed so large a part of it was as likely to be bought in a shop as baked at home. Even so, while one family in five was in receipt of poor relief, the worker who received regular wages ate quite well, and at least some of those who had to look to the parish for financial help contrived to buy butter and lard to spread on their bread, and bacon to eat with it. One Oxfordshire labourer, who had three children and earned no more than 9s a week, spent £2 10s a year on tea and sugar which was only 10s a year less than he spent on rent.22

  Although better wages could generally be earned in the town or in collieries than on the land, the movement from the countryside into the industrial centres was at first quite slow: by 1800 about two-thirds of the country’s population were still living in the country. Yet, the industrial towns which Defoe had described would scarcely have been recognized by him sixty or seventy years later when the population of Birmingham, that ‘largest mere village in England’, had risen from about 12,000 to 45,000 and that of Liverpool from some 6000 to nearly 40,000; nor would the workplaces which they contained, the mills and factories of Manchester and Leeds, the potteries of north Staffordshire, the foundries of Sheffield, the mines around Newcastle and Durham, the glassworks and distilleries of Bristol, the shoe workshops of Northampton, the hosiery works in Leicester and Nottingham, the ship-repair yards of Hull, the naval dockyards at Chatham, the harbours of Folkestone, Whitby, Lowestoft and of several other thriving seaports. London, the city of Defoe’s birth whose population had risen from about 575,000 in 1700 to nearly 700,000 in 1800, was not only by far the largest city in England but also by now the largest in Europe. It had few big industries of national importance, other than shipbuilding and, in Spitalfields, silk-weaving; but it found employment for innumerable skilled and unskilled men in the building trade, for tens of thousands of domestic servants and shop assistants, and for all manner of craftsmen and their apprentices. So, to a far lesser extent, did the provincial, market and cathedral towns of England where small busineses attended to the needs of local communities, where the staffs of numerous inns looked after wayfarers and the houses of gentlemen were tended by innumerable servants.

  Foreign and native visitors were alike much struck by the attractiveness of these small provincial towns. But they were often either distressed or overwhelmed by the industrial towns of the Midlands and North, and by the condition of those who were obliged to work in them. They were ready to admit that there was compensation for the vigorous workmen in full employment who might earn as much as £3 a week, the amount which some maidservants were paid in a year. On an income like this a man could afford to eat meat fairly regularly, to have white rather than brown rye or barley bread on their tables, to drink tea – which was much stronger than it was in poor households where the same leaves were used time after time – and to indulge a growing taste for sugar, 5 million pounds of which were consumed in 1760. Yet in most large towns there were streets in which the poverty was appalling. ‘I found some in their cells, others in their garrets, half starved with cold and hunger, added to weakness and pain,’ John Wesley wrote in 1753. ‘But
I found not one of them unemployed who was able to crawl about the room. So wickedly, so devilishly false is that common objection, “They are poor because they are idle”.’23

  Working long hours, commonly from dawn to dusk six days a week, workers suffered from a variety of industrial diseases for which there was no cure nor even treatment. ‘The collier, the clothier, the painter, the gilder, the miner, the makers of glass, the workers in iron, tin, lead, copper, while they minister to our necessities or please our tastes and fancies,’ the Gentleman’s Magazine conceded in 1782, ‘are impairing their health, and shortening their days.’ Lead-miners contracted plumbism, butchers anthrax; coalminers – who spent more time underground as pits grew deeper and some of whom slept as well as worked underground – ran the risk not only of contracting silicosis but also of being killed when a pit prop – or a pillar of coal used as a prop – collapsed or when there was an explosion caused by fire-damp, as there was at Chester-le-Street in 1708 when a hundred miners were killed and at Bensham in 1710 when eighty more lost their lives.24 And everywhere tired workers were being mutilated by primitive unguarded machinery.

  In Birmingham, so Robert Southey said, every man stank of train oil and emery and had a complexion ‘composed of oil and dust smoke-dried’. ‘Some I have seen with red eyes and green hair; the eyes affected by the fires to which they are exposed, and the hair turned green by the brass works.’25 Of Manchester, Edmund Burke, comparing British workers to slaves in other countries, wrote, ‘I suppose there are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people employed in lead, tin, iron, copper and coal mines … An hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the production of those mines.’26