We went indoors and settled about the Sunday and Bettws Chapel where the good parson is to attend on May 22nd and until further notice. Then we had tea. Sarah laid the cloth as usual and she and Emmeline as usual sat opposite me, both looking very pretty, Sarah in her blue shirt and Emmeline in her russet-brown dress.
After tea Sarah and Emmeline were to take to Blaencarde some medicine for a sick parishioner which the good curate had concocted, and he walked with them as far as the village. Emmeline looked very bewitching in her little black hat perched on the top of her fair long curls. . . .
Near a copse between the Ceau and Crowther’s Pool, I stopped to listen to a cuckoo. He was so near that his strong deep liquid voice shook the whole air. I never heard a cuckoo so close before.
Revd Francis Kilvert, Kilvert’s Diary, ed. William Plomer (1938)
MEETING FOR UNION
Oppression, and hunger, and misery made them [farm labourers] desperate, and desperation was the mother of Union. . . .
When I reached Wellesbourne [in Warwickshire; 1872], lo and behold, it was as lively as a swarm of bees in June. We settled that I should address the meeting under the old chestnut tree; and I expected to find some thirty or forty of the principal men there. What then was my surprise to see not a few tens but many hundreds of labourers assembled; there were nearly two thousand of them. The news that I was going to speak that night had been spread about; and so the men had come in from all the villages round within a radius of ten miles. Not a circular had been sent out nor a handbill printed, but from cottage to cottage, and from farm to farm, the word had been passed on; and here were the labourers gathered together in their hundreds. Wellesbourne village was there, every man in it; and they had come from Moreton and Locksley and Charlecote and Hampton Lucy, and from Basford, to hear what I had to say to them. By this time the night had fallen pitch dark, but the men got bean poles and hung lanterns on them, and we could see well enough. It was an extraordinary sight, and I shall never forget it, not to my dying day. I mounted on an old pig-stool, and in the flickering light of the lanterns I saw the earnest upturned faces of those poor brothers of mine – faces gaunt with hunger and pinched with want – all looking towards me and ready to listen to the words that would fall from my lips. These white slaves of England stood there with the darkness all about them, like the Children of Israel waiting for someone to lead them out of the land of Egypt. I determined that, if they made a mistake and took the wrong turning, it would not be my fault, so I stood on my pig-stool and spoke out straight and strong for Union. My speech lasted about an hour, I believe, but I was not measuring minutes then. By the end of it the men were properly roused, and they pressed in and crowded up asking questions; they regularly pelted me with them; it was a perfect hailstorm. We passed a resolution to form a Union then and there, and the names of the men could not be taken down fast enough; we enrolled between two and three hundred members that night. It was a brave start, and before we parted it was arranged that there should be another meeting at the same place in a fortnight’s time. I knew now that a fire had been kindled which would catch on, and spread, and run abroad like sparks in stubble; and I felt certain that this night we had set light to a beacon, which would prove a rallying point for the agricultural labourers throughout the country.
Joseph Arch, Joseph Arch. The Story of his Life (1898)
MOVING ON
The hiring-fair of recent years presents an appearance unlike that of former times. A glance up the high street on a Candlemas-fair day [2 February] twenty or thirty years ago revealed a crowd whose general colour was whity-brown flecked with white. Black was almost absent, the few farmers who wore that shade hardly discernible. Now the crowd is as dark as a London crowd. This change is owing to the rage for cloth clothes which possesses the labourers of today. Formerly they came in smock-frocks and gaiters, the shepherds with their crooks, the carters with a zone of whipcord round their hats, thatchers with a straw tucked into the brim, and so on. Now, with the exception of the crook in the hands of an occasional old shepherd, there is no mark of specialty in the group, who might be tailors or undertakers’ men, for what they exhibit externally . . .
Having ‘agreed for a place’, as it is called, either at the fair, or (occasionally) by private intelligence, or (with growing frequency) by advertisement in the penny local papers, the terms are usually reduced to writing; though formerly a written agreement was unknown, and is now, as a rule, avoided by the farmer if the labourer does not insist upon one. The business is then settled, and the man returns to his place of work, to do no more in the matter till Lady Day, Old Style – April 6.
Of all the days in the year, people who love the rural poor of the south-west should pray for a fine day then. Dwellers near the highways of the country are reminded of the anniversary surely enough. They are conscious of a disturbance of their night’s rest by noises beginning in the small hours of darkness, and intermittently continuing until daylight – noises as certain to recur on that particular night of the month as the voice of the cuckoo on the third or fourth week of the same. The day of fulfilment has come, and the labourers are on the point of being fetched from the old farm by the carters of the new. For it is always by the waggon and horses of the farmer who requires his services that the hired man is conveyed to his destination; and that this may be accomplished within the day is the reason that the noises begin so soon after midnight. Suppose the distance to be an ordinary one of a dozen or fifteen miles. The carter at the prospective place rises when ‘Charles’s wain is over the new chimney’, harnesses his team of three horses by lantern light, and proceeds to the present home of his coming comrade. It is the passing of these empty waggons in all directions that is heard breaking the stillness of the hours before dawn. The aim is usually to be at the door of the removing household by six o’clock, when the loading of goods at once begins; and at nine or ten the start to the new home is made. From this hour till one or two in the day, when the other family arrives at the old house, the cottage is empty, and it is only in that short interval that the interior can be in any way cleaned and lime-whitened for the newcomers, however dirty it may have become, or whatever sickness may have prevailed among members of the departed family. . . .
While men do not of their own accord leave a farm without a grievance, very little fault-finding is often deemed a sufficient one among the younger and stronger. Such ticklish relations are the natural result of generations of unfairness on one side, and on the other an increase of knowledge, which has been kindled into activity by the exertions of Mr Joseph Arch. . . .
The result of the agitation, so far, upon the income of the labourers, has been testified by independent witnesses with a unanimity which leaves no reasonable doubt of its accuracy. It amounts to a rise of three shillings a week in wages nearly all over the county. The absolute number of added shillings seems small; but the increase is considerable when we remember that it is three shillings on eight or nine – i.e., between thirty and forty per cent. And the reflection is forced upon everyone who thinks of the matter, that if a farmer can afford to pay thirty per cent more wages in times of agricultural depression than he paid in times of agricultural prosperity, and yet live, and keep a carriage, while the landlord still thrives on the reduced rent which has resulted, the labourer must have been greatly wronged in those prosperous times.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883)
PRINCELY COTTAGES
[On the Prince of Wales’s estate, well-built cottages were each let at £3 10s yearly rent, producing 1½ per cent return on the investment]
‘The Cottage-homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!’
(So once Felicia Hemans sang)
Throughout the shining land!
By many a shining riverside
These happy homes are seen,
And clustering round the commons wide,
And ’neath the woodlands green.
The Cottage-hom
es of England –
Alas, how strong they smell!
There’s fever in the cess-pool,
And sewage in the well.
With ruddy cheeks and flaxen curls
Though their tots shout and play,
The health of these gay boys and girls
Too soon will pass away.
The Cottage-homes of England!
Where each crammed sleeping-place
Foul air distils, whose poison kills
Health, modesty and grace.
Who stables horse, or houseth kine
As these poor peasants lie,
More thickly in their straw than swine
Are herded in a sty?
The Cottage-homes of England! –
But may they not be made
What Poetess Felicia
In graceful verse portrayed?
With chambers where a purer air
The sleepers’ lungs may bless,
And pretty porches, gardens fair? –
The Prince of Wales says, ‘Yes.’
The Cottage-homes of England,
Whose aspect makes men wince,
May turn to happy dwellings yet,
With landlords like the Prince.
Then quicker brain and readier arm,
And more strength better spent,
May add an economic charm
To less than two per cent.
The Cottage-homes of England!
The toiler gay and blithe,
Who drinks his ale, and plies his flail,
And swings his sweeping scythe,
His sons and daughters, braced anew
With strength that nothing ails,
Will bless each Prince of Landlords who
Does like the Prince of Wales.
Tom Taylor, Punch (1873)
COTTAGE LIFE
(I)
When we go into the cottage of the working man, how forcibly are we struck with the difference between his mode of life and our own. There is his tenement of, at most, one or two rooms. His naked walls – bare brick, stone or mud floor, as it may be; a few wooden, or rush-bottomed chairs; a deal, or old oak table; a simple fireplace, with its oven beside it, or, in many parts of the kingdom, no other fireplace than the hearth; a few pots and pans – and you have his whole abode, goods and chattels. He comes home weary from his outdoor work, having eaten his dinner under hedge or tree, and seats himself for a few hours with his wife and children, then turns into a rude bed, standing perhaps on the farther side of his only room, and out again before daylight, if it be winter. He has no-one to make a fire in his dressing-room, to lay out his clothes, to assist him in his toilet; he flings on his patched garments, washes his face in a wooden or earthen dish at the door; blows up the fire, often gets ready his own breakfast, and is gone.
Such is the routine of his life, from week to week and year to year; Sundays, and a few holidays, are white days in his calendar. On them he shaves, and puts on a clean shirt and better coat, drawn from that old chest which contains the whole wardrobe of himself and children; his wife has generally some separate drawer or bandbox, in which to stow her lighter and more fragile gear. Then he walks round his little garden, if he have it; goes with his wife and children to church or meeting; to sit with a neighbour, or have a neighbour look in upon him.
(II)
The cooking in the best cottages would not commend itself to the student of that art; in those where the woman is shiftless it would be deemed simply intolerable. Evidence of this is only too apparent on approaching cottages, especially towards the evening. Coming from the fresh air of the fields, perhaps from the sweet scent of clover or of new-mown grass, the odour which arises from the cottages is peculiarly offensive. It is not that they are dirty inside – the floor may be scrubbed, the walls brushed, the chairs clean, and the beds tidy; it is from outside that all the noisome exhalations taint the breeze. The refuse vegetables, the washings, the liquid and solid rubbish generally is cast out into the ditch, often open to the highway road, and there festers till the first storm sweeps it away. The cleanest woman indoors thinks nothing disgusting out of doors, and hardly goes a step from her threshold to cast away indescribable filth. Now, a good deal of this refuse is the remains of imperfect cooking – masses of soddened cabbage, part of which only is eaten, and the rest stored for the pig or thrown into the ditch. The place smells of soaking, saturated cabbage for yards and yards round about.
The difficulty arises from the rough, coarse taste of the labourer, and the fact, which is useless to ignore, that he must have something solid, and indeed bulky. . . . His teeth are large, his jaws strong, his digestive powers such as would astonish a city man; he likes solid food, bacon, butcher’s meat, cheese, or something that gives him a sense of fullness, like a mass of vegetables. This is the natural result of his training and work in the fields.
THE COUNTRY PUB
When the agricultural labourer drops in on his way home from his work of a winter evening – heralding his approach by casting down a couple of logs, or bundle of wood which he has been carrying, with a thud outside the door – he does not demand liquor of that character [Bass, or quality beer]. When in harvest time, after sundown, when the shadows forbid further cutting with the fagging hook at the tall wheat, he sits on the form without, under the elm tree, and feels a whole pocketful of silver, flush of money like a gold digger at a fortunate rush, he does not indulge in Allsopp or Guinness. He hoarsely orders a ‘pot’ of some local brewer’s manufacture – a man who knows exactly what he likes, and arranges to meet the hardy digestion of the mower and the reaper. He prefers a rather dark beer with a certain twang faintly suggestive of liquorice and tobacco, with a sense of ‘body’, a thickness in it, and which is no sooner swallowed than a clammy palate demands a second gulp to wash away the relics of the first. Ugh! The second requires a third swig, and still a fourth, and appetite increasing with that it feeds on, the stream rushes down the brazen throat that burns for more. . . .
MILK COLLECTION
There is a low murmur rather than a buzz [of bees] along the hedgerow; but over it the hot summer breeze brings the thumping, rattling, booming sound of hollow metal striking against the ground or in contact with other metal. These ringing noises, which so little accord with the sweet-scented hay and green hedgerows, are caused by the careless handling of milk tins dragged hither and thither by the men who are getting the afternoon milk ready for transit to the railway station miles away. Each tin bears a brazen badge engraved with the name of the milkman who will retail its contents in distant London. . . .
Sturdy milkmaids may still be seen in London, sweeping the crowded pavement clear before them as they walk with swinging tread, a yoke on their shoulders, from door to door. Some remnant of the traditional dairy thus survives in the stony streets that are separated so widely from the country. But here, beside the hay, the hedgerows, the bees, the flowers that precede the blackberries – here in the heart of the meadows the romance has departed. Everything is mechanical or scientific. From the refrigerator that cools the milk, the thermometer that tests its temperature, the lactometer that proves its quality, all is mechanical precision. The tins themselves are metal – wood, the old country material for almost every purpose, is eschewed – and they are swung up into a waggon specially built for the purpose. It is the very antithesis of the jolting and cumbrous waggon used for generations in the hay-fields and among the corn. It is light, elegantly proportioned, painted, varnished – the work rather of a coachbuilder than a cartwright. The horse harnessed in it is equally unlike the cart-horse. A quick, wiry horse, that may be driven in a trap or gig, is the style – one that will rattle along and catch the train.
William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (1840)
IN THE HARVEST FIELDS
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilfu
l-wavier
Meal-drift moulded over and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens . . .
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ (1877; pub. 1918)
Machinery in the field does not reduce the number of men employed. But they are employed in a different way. The work all comes now in rushes. By the aid of the reaping machine acres are levelled in a day, and the cut corn demands the services of a crowd of men and women all at once, to tie it up into sheaves. . . . Under the old system, a dozen men worked all the winter through, hammering away with their flails in the barns. Now the threshing machine arrives, and the ricks are threshed in a few days. As many men are wanted (and at double the wages) to feed the machine . . . But instead of working for so many months, this rush lasts as many days.
Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times Page 17
