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

by Christopher Hibbert

  The resentment among labouring country people which Cobbett had witnessed and shared had already erupted in disturbances in various parts of the country. In Northamptonshire in 1799, for example, troops of yeomanry escorting wagons loaded with fencing had been stopped by a crowd of some 300 people who had lit a bonfire in the road. The Riot Act had been read and several arrests made before the wagons passed. On the whole, as John Clarke has said, the enclosure commissioners carried out their tasks with commendable impartiality.2 But the combination of manorial and tithe rights inevitably led to the share of the village land owned by the lord of the manor – and sometimes by the rector – being increased; while those who had made part of their living by exercising their rights to common land – and those who had made use of it without legal right – were deprived of their independence, and not always compensated by the opportunity of work on the large farms which enclosure created.

  In 1830 there were serious riots all over England in protest against enclosures, low wages, the employment of ‘strangers’, and the farm machines, mainly threshing machines, which were held to be keeping men out of work. From Wiltshire to Sussex and as far north as Carlisle, gangs of men, sometimes with blackened faces and reported to be in women’s clothes, often carrying flags and blowing horns, cut down fences, destroyed machinery and burnt down ricks and barns. Most of the attacks were preceded by threatening letters, many signed by ‘Captain Swing’. One characteristic letter ran, ‘This is to inform you what you have to undergo gentelmen if providing you Dont pull down your messhenes and rise the poor men’s wages the married men give tow and six pence a day the singel tow shillings or we will burn down your barns and you in them this is the last notis.’3

  On occasions when the rioters clashed with yeomanry blood was shed and lives were lost. This happened near Salisbury on 25 December when the owner of the Pyt House estate, roused by his steward early in the morning, rode out” to find 400 labourers armed with bludgeons and crowbars with which they had smashed three threshing machines in local farms. They told him they wanted 2s a day in wages, otherwise they would smash his machines too. Neither appeals nor threats deterred them; and his barns were broken into and his machines destroyed before a troop of yeomanry arrived from Hindon. The labourers fought with their bludgeons and bars, hatchets, pick-axes and hammers; the yeomanry with muskets; one labourer was killed, several others were wounded, and twenty-five arrested.

  More commonly, however, the destruction and arson were carried on without bloodshed. Special constables were sometimes beaten up, men who would not join in the rioting were thrown into the village pond, and ferocious threats were frequently uttered. ‘Blast my eyes,’ a man was heard to shout in a Wallingford public house, ‘I will smash the bloody buggers’ heads, six at a time)’ ‘Be damned,’ another man called out, ‘if we do not beat the bloody place down!’ But although ‘violent language was often heard and formidable weapons carried round,’ so the Attorney General reported, ‘there has been such an absence of cruelty as to create general surprise.’4

  The property of landowners and parsons was mostly at risk; ordinary farmers, particularly small farmers, often sympathized with the labourers who were prepared to accept that their employers would pay higher wages if they did not have to pay such high rents. At Horsham, Sussex, indeed – so the county’s High Sheriff maintained – the farmers ‘were known secretly, to be promoting the assembling of the people’. Certainly, both farmers and labourers assembled in the church where, so a local lady said, they occupied

  every tenable place within the walls, and by their shouts and threatening language [showed] their total disregard for the sanctity of the place. I am ashamed to say the farmers encouraged the labouring classes who required to be paid 2s 6d a day, while the farmers called for a reduction of their rents & the tithes by one half. Mr Simpson [the parson] in a very proper manner gave an account of the revenues of his living, and after shewing that he did not clear more than £400 per annum, promised to meet the gentlemen & farmers & to make such a reduction as they could reasonably expect. Mr. Hurst held out so long that it was feared blood would be shed. The doors were shut till the demands were granted; no lights were allowed; the iron railing that surrounds the monument was torn up, and the sacred boundary between the chancel & alter overleaped before he would yield; at last the three points were gained & happily without any personal injury. The Church is much disfigured. Money was afterwards demanded at different houses for refreshment &, if not obtained with ease, the windows were broken. Today the Mob is gone to Shipley and Rusper.5

  By the time the risings were brought under control there were nearly 2000 rioters held in prison awaiting trial. Suspecting that local magistrates might be too lenient upon them, the Government ordered special commissions to conduct trials in those counties where the disturbances had been most alarming. Of the prisoners tried 800 were acquitted or bound over; 644 were sent to prison; 505 were sentenced to transportation, arid of these 481 sailed for the Australian colonies. Seven prisoners were fined, one was whipped and nineteen were hanged, most of them for arson. As E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude have observed, in terms of death sentences and executions, the punishments followed the pattern of the times. ‘Yet in terms of men transported, they were quite remarkably severe … In the south of England, there were whole communities that, for a generation, were stricken by the blow. From no other protest movement of the kind – from neither Luddites nor Chartists, nor trade unionists – was such a bitter price exacted.’6

  Several attempts to form trade unions had been made after the repeal of the ineffective Combination Acts in 1824 and the subsequent passing of the Reform Act of 1832 which, while welcomed by the middle classes, was a profound disappointment to radicals and the militant working class. One national union, the National Association for the Protection of Labour, which was believed to have recruited 100,000 members, disintegrated soon after its foundation, following a succession of quarrels between its leaders. Two years later the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union was established; but, although this at one time claimed to have half a million members, it, too, was rent by internal disagreements. And when, in 1834, in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle, six trade unionists – the members of whose combination had had their wages reduced from 9s to 6s – administered oaths to their fellow-workers, they were arraigned under the Mutiny Act of 1749 and sentenced to seven years’ transportation.

  In that same year the grievances of the poor were much exacerbated by the Poor Law Amendment Act which sought to remedy the evils of a system whereby a labourer’s wages were fixed immutably at a figure that took no account of the cost of living, being supplemented, in cases of severe necessity, by a pitifully meagre dole from the parish. The so-called Speenhamland system, which had spread from Berkshire to other places, originated with a decision by local magistrates in 1795 to provide outdoor relief – on a scale based on the price of bread and the size of the family concerned – both to those who were unemployed and to those whose earnings fell below the settled scale, thus in effect subsidizing the wages of the lowest paid. Since the amount of the dole depended upon the number of mouths a labourer had to feed, families had tended to grow larger, young men and women had come to town in search of work, and industrial workers had become almost as ill paid as those who worked on the land. Furthermore, the supplementation of inadequate wages out of the poor-rate killed any incentive there might otherwise have been to hard work and destroyed the workers’ self-respect. Under the new Poor Law there were to be no supplementary allowances; there were to be no inducements for men to live as idle paupers; those without the means of livelihood were to be consigned to workhouses where rules were to be imposed with such strictness, and food was to be distributed with such economical care, that no one would enter them while hard work was an alternative.

  Workhouses already had a bad name. By 1776 there were nearly 2000 of them, many of them built under a general Workhouse Act of the 1720s. They were often farmed ou
t to contractors who made what profit they could out of them; and the death rate in them was appallingly high. Jonas Hanway, who believed that babies up to three years old consigned to workhouses in London were not likely to live for much more than a month, went so far as to say that ‘parish officers never intend that parish infants should live’. Parson Woodforde, after visiting a workhouse in Norfolk in 1781, had observed, ‘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.’

  The condition of workhouses had not since improved. With barns, ricks and threshing machines, they had been one of the principal targets of the rioters of 1830 who took care not to harm the inmates. At Headley in Hampshire, the master testified, they left the sick ward untouched; but, having removed the infants, put them in beds in the yard, covered them over and ‘kept them from harm all the time’, they pulled the rest of the building down ‘until not a room was left entire’.

  It was generally accepted by the middle classes that the new law of 1834 was, as Dr Arnold of Rugby called it, ‘a measure in itself wise and just’. ‘But standing alone and unaccompanied by others of a milder and more positively improving tendency’, it wore, Arnold added, ‘an air of harshness’ which would ‘embitter the feelings of the poorer classes still more’.7 And embitter them it did. It was intended that distinctions should be made between those who could not work and those who chose not to do so; but these distinctions were rarely made, and in many workhouses the respectable poor and such foundlings as Oliver Twist were incarcerated with men and women who might well have been in prison. Dickens’s description of the workhouse diet as constituting ‘three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays’ was not, of course, meant to be taken as exact; yet the officially approved allowances were not very much more generous, while children under nine years of age were to be dieted ‘at discretion’. The bowl of gruel and small piece of bread, which Oliver and his companions ate hungrily in the bare stone hall of the workhouse, cannot have been too uncommon a meal; nor was the beadle, Mr Bumble, choleric and fat, as proud of his oratorical powers as of his own importance, exceptional in being an incompetent official which the new system of poor relief inherited from the old.

  The New Poor Law revived the unrest of 1830. When a proposal was made to alter the workhouse at Wroughton in Wiltshire the parishioners demonstrated their disapproval of the measure by walking out of the church en masse and smoking their pipes in the graveyard. At Christian Melford there were riots against the rules that separated men from their wives in the workhouses. There were subsequent riots in Sussex and in other counties, too.

  The injustices of the Poor Law and the failure of attempts to develop trade unionism were among the complaints voiced by that movement for political reform known as Chartism. The movement took its name from The People’s Charter of 1838 which was largely drafted by William Lovett, son of a Cornish master mariner, and his radical friends in the London Working Men’s Association. This Charter made six demands of the government. It required annual parliaments, universal male suffrage and vote by secret ballot, equal electoral districts, an end to property qualifications for Members of Parliament and the introduction of salaries for them. These demands were taken up by other Working Men’s Associations throughout the country, all determined, in the words of Benjamin Wilson, the Halifax Chartist and Methodist, to obtain ‘a voice in making the laws they were called upon to obey’.

  Chartism attracted mass support and aroused the deepest fears. Its leaders declared that they would have the Charter ‘peaceably’ if they could, but ‘forcibly’ if they must. At immense meetings of supporters, hatred of the governing classes was loudly voiced and the class solidarity of the workers passionately acclaimed. There were rallies in the open on public holidays – one at Halifax on Whit Monday 1839 was said to have attracted a crowd of 200,000 – and there were meetings at night.

  Working people met in their thousands and tens of thousands to swear devotion to the common cause [wrote a Chartist of demonstrations in the factory districts of Lancashire]. It is almost impossible to imagine the excitement caused by these manifestations. The people met at a starting point, from whence, at a given time, they issued in huge numbers, formed into procession, traversing the principal streets, making the heavens echo with the thunder of their cheers on recognizing the idols of their worship in the men who were to address them, and sending forth volleys of the most hideous groans on passing the office of some hostile newspaper, or the house of some obnoxious magistrate or employer. The banners containing the most formidable devices, viewed by the red light of the glaring torches, presented a scene of awful grandeur …

  The uncouth appearance of thousands of artisans who had not time from leaving the factory to go home and attend to the ordinary duties of cleanliness, and whose faces were therefore begrimed with sweat and dirt, added to the strange aspect of the scene. The processions were frequently of immense length, sometimes containing as many as fifty thousand people; and along the whole line there blazed a stream of light, illuminating the lofty sky, like the reflection from a large city in a general conflagration. The meetings themselves were of a still more terrific character. The very appearance of such a vast number of blazing torches only seemed more effectually to inflame the minds alike of speakers and hearers.8

  It seemed on occasions that the demands of the Chartists could not be resisted. In August 1839 a general strike was attempted; and later that year an insurrection broke out in Newport, Monmouthshire, which was suppressed with greater loss of life to the civilian population than any other outbreak of the nineteenth, or, for that matter, of the eighteenth century, greater even than the so-called Peter loo Massacre of 1819 in which fifteen people were killed when a crowd of 60,000 people, gathered near the centre of Manchester to hear the great orator Henry Hunt speak on the urgent need for parliamentary reform, were charged by mounted troops. The immediate objective of the demonstrators in 1839 was the release of Henry Vincent, the Chartist orator, from Newport gaol. About 7000 armed men, mostly miners and iron-workers, marched through the streets of the town and were suddenly fired upon by soldiers when they reached the Westgate Hotel in its centre. At least twenty-two of them were killed.9

  Chartism itself survived. In 1842 a petition presented to Parliament contained 3 million signatures; and in 1848, the year of revolutions on the Continent, when a massive demonstration was planned in London, it was feared, or hoped, that revolution was about to break out in England too. But the government was resolute. Huge numbers of police were brought into London; 150,000 special constables were enrolled; yeomanry regiments were called up. One Chartist leader declared that the government had proved itself too strong for the workers. Another, the Irish orator, Fergus O’Connor, already suffering from the disease which was to kill him, urged the crowds to depart.10 Thereafter Chartism, which had consistently failed to build an efficient national organization, gradually declined and eventually disintegrated. The reforms its leaders sought were slow to come.

  45 Below Stairs

  ‘Does your father keep a coach?’ a clergyman’s daughter was asked soon after arriving for her first term at a smart boarding school in the late eighteenth century.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How many servants have you?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Dear! Only think, Miss’s papa does not keep a coach, and they have only four servants.’1

  Four was certainly considered a modest number of servants for a gentleman to employ at that time. The Rev. John Trusler, author of a book of advice on such matters, recommended that a country squire even of modest means could not manage with less than five. Parson Woodforde, with his quite modest income of about £300 a year, employed a staff of this number, a farming-man who sometimes helped in the house, a footman, a yard-boy and two maids. Woodforde’s two clergyman friends, du Quesne and Jeanes, also had five servants. Clergymen and squires of ampler incom
es usually had more. The Rev. George Betts, Francis Sitwell, Henry Purefoy and Sanderson Miller all had seven; and John Custance, a Norfolk landowner, ten. Even ten was considered parsimonious by Giles Jacob, author of The Country Gentleman’s Vademecum, who proposed that the average, fairly large country family should have twenty servants. Many did have as many, and several had more. Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys described an establishment of 1786 which was ‘so numerous’ she thought it ‘uncomfortable – house-steward, man-cook, two gentlemen out of livery, under-butler, Mrs Pratt’s two footmen, Mr Pratt’s two, upper and under coachmen, two grooms, helpers, etc., etc. These are menservants; female ones, I dare say, in proportion.’2 There were households enough with over forty servants.

  The sixth Duke of Somerset employed twenty-six menservants alone in the 1720s; and at his London house the Duke of Bedford had forty-two male and female servants in 1771. Thomas Coke had about sixty in 1820; and Joseph Farington calculated in 1816 that at Wentworth Woodhouse, which was ‘princely in all respects’, seventy servants sat down to dinner every day in the servants’ hall and a further thirty upper servants in the housekeeper’s room.3 Even Horace Walpole’s friend, Mary Berry, considered that it was impossible to live without ‘pinching economy and pitiful savings’ with fewer than three menservants and four women. Walpole himself at Strawberry Hill had a staff of about ten.4