by Graham Seal
The prisoner Mason addressed the Court as champion of the rights of the poor, whose property he said the commons were. The judge stated distinctly to the prisoners and the jury, that the poor had no such right.
Trial of an anti-enclosure activist, 1815
‘Sykes’ is an old and widespread name in Yorkshire, with noted and eminent bearers scattered through its industrial and cultural history. But William Sykes, puddler and poacher, was not one of these worthies. Obscurely born in 1827 his fate was to grow up and live a not so good part of his adult life in the manufacturing cauldron of the Sheffield–Rotherham conurbation. It was a place of coal mines and ironworks, shrouded in the stink, smoke and noise of the Industrial Revolution grinding into high gear. Almost all those of William Sykes’s station could look forward only to a life bounded by the pits, the works and the manifold dangers of barely bridled exploitation.
Myra1 Wilcock, destined to be William’s wife, was born five years later into similar circumstances and limited expectations. Both were members of large families, an almost inevitable feature of life at that time. William had two brothers and three sisters. Myra had four brothers and two sisters. Another reality of the time and place was that both William’s and Myra’s mothers were widowed early, probably through industrial accidents. William’s father had been a coachman and Myra’s a coal miner. William was not yet 14 when his father died; Myra would have barely remembered hers. Both the Sykes and Wilcock families lived just outside Greasborough, at Far Green.
As they grew up, living not far from each other but seemingly not meeting until their teens, Myra and William felt the full force of industrialism and its attendant ills. During the eighteenth century, there had been vast enclosures of common land, as usual to the benefit of a privileged few who had an eye for and the means to exploit the wealth above and below the ground. This part of the county was a noted hotbed of social dissatisfaction and political disturbance, which culminated in the Great Charter of 1832. The Reform Bill that arose from the effective actions of the Chartists enfranchised many workers for the first time and also created two members of parliament for Sheffield. Despite this early success, political agitation continued throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s. While there is no evidence that William or Myra were directly involved in political agitation of any kind,2 their lives were touched by these attempts to better the lot of the working class as much as they were tarnished by the consequences of industrialism.
After the death of William Sykes senior his widow, Thirza, took the fatherless family home to the village of Greasbrough. The year was 1841. Together with his brothers John and Joshua, and sisters Emma, Rebecca and Elizabeth, William soon gained a new father. He was a man named Gascoigne, probably a miner. Whether this new arrangement was a happy one we cannot tell, but we do know that William was himself soon gouging black fuel from far beneath the ground alongside other sweating miners, many even younger than his 14 years.
Some of the children employed – or condemned – to the pits at this time were as young as four years old. So poorly were they treated that a commission was established in 1840 to investigate the conditions of child labour in mines and factories throughout the country. The commission’s findings, published in 1842, told a harrowing tale of misery, squalor, degradation, abuse and virtual enslavement. Unfavourable comparisons were made with the conditions of slaves on West Indian plantations. The legislation that eventuated from the report, while considerably watered down in the House of Lords, many of whose members had a financial interest in perpetuating cheap child labour, banned the employment of children under 10 in coal mines.
Yorkshire featured strongly in the commission’s report, especially in relation to unsafe work practices and the provision of insufficient and poor quality nutrition for children who often worked between 11 and 14 hours a day. The children, male and female, were generally employed as trappers, ensuring that the ventilation of the pits worked as efficiently as such primitive mechanisms allowed. Sarah Gooder, aged eight, told the commission: ‘I’m a trapper in the Gawber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to trap without light, and I’m scared. Sometimes I sing when I have a light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then. I don’t like being in the pit.’3
Coal had been mined in Yorkshire since at least the thirteenth century and at Greasbrough before 1700. But even as late as the 1820s the area was described in Baines’s Yorkshire4 as ‘a small village, pleasantly situated on a delightful eminence; its inhabitants generally consist of farmers and miners’. The population was reckoned at 1252. The village was eight miles from Sheffield and two miles north of Rotherham. At this time Rotherham was also merely ‘a small market town’ with two principal inns and a population of just over 3500. Its market was on Mondays, with every second Monday a fair ‘for horned cattle’. On 1 December there was a fair for ‘horses, horned cattle, sheep, &c.’,5 with a Whit Monday fair as well.
This pleasant-sounding balance of the rural and the proto-industrial was, even as the gazetteers made these observations, undergoing profound change. ‘The town is far from elegant’, noted one such writer in the early 1820s. ‘The streets are narrow, and irregular; and the houses have, in general, a dull and dingy appearance.’ Already the industry that would define this area was in development: ‘A considerable trade is here carried on in coals, and in other articles, by means of the river Don.’6
Just across the valley in iron-ore rich Masborough, Samuel Walker had founded his ironworks in the mid-eighteenth century. The radical Tom Paine had worked here while the factory was casting the iron bridge Rennie threw across the Thames and is said to have written his Age of Reason (1790) during this period. By the 1820s Walker’s could be described as ‘one of the most extensive and flourishing establishments of the kind in Europe’.7
By the time the Sykes family moved back to Greasbrough in 1841, the whole area was well on the way to becoming a vast industrial landscape, pocked with coal mines, forges and steam hammers. Nearby Sheffield was described by a traveller in 1843 as ‘one of the dirtiest and smoky towns I ever saw’. The town was hilly and the smoke from the ‘quantity of small forges without tall chimneys’ hung in the streets. While the children often washed themselves before bed, ‘their bodies imbibe continual dust and grime’ and people lived in an atmosphere in which they continually breathed in smoke and soot.8
At 24 years of age, William Sykes had, by 1851, considerable experience of living and working in this landscape and was employed in one of the local pits as a coal trammer, pushing tubs of coal from the face to the central collection point. He was the last of his siblings to marry and, perhaps motivated by that knowledge, began to court Myra Wilcock who was working as a domestic servant at the Ashcroft Academy, Wentworth, a boarding school for young gentlemen. Even for that era it was a drawn-out courtship. It was not until two years later that they married at the parish church of Sheffield. In accordance with the working-class affectation of the time, both bride and groom signed the register with an ‘X’ even though both had received basic schooling and were – just – able to read and write, as the evidence of their letters and other documents shows. Myra was 21.
Soon after Myra and William were married, children began to arrive. Ann was born in 1854, Alfred in 1857 and Thirza in 1859. When the fourth child, William, arrived six years later,9 the Sykes family moved to Midland Road, Masborough, where they lived in a standard two-up, two-down terraced house. By now William had escaped the pits. At the Masborough ironworks on the opposite side of the street he now puddled pots of molten metal preparatory to their being poured and beaten into whatever shapes and sizes had been ordered by the incessant demands of the Sheffield–Rotherham steel industries. Hard and dangerous though puddling was, it was better than crawling through a dark coal mine and William Sykes could consider himself to have improved at least a little upon his initial lot in life.
According to Murray’s Hand-Book of Yorkshire, Masborough was now a town of the same size as nearby Rotherha
m.10 Like many other villages in this area, though, it retained something of its rural character. Despite the noise, stink and industrial discipline of the works that permeated every aspect of life, it was still quite easy to walk a mile or two and be out into the open country. Distinctions between city and country were more apparent than real. The factories and foundries of industry had been sucking in labour from the countryside for only a generation or so. Many people still lived their lives in villages, or in what had been villages before being engulfed by the blackened cities. From these villages or the hasty housing developments thrown up around them, workers lived a dual existence, working in the urban forges and factories for wages while retaining the habits and interests of country life during whatever leisure time they could get. Unfortunately, most of those once common lands now belonged to someone else.
The long and unhappy history of rural enclosure and appropriation of common rights had nearly reached its conclusion at this time and in this place. Inexorably, fields, footpaths and forests had all fallen into private hands intent on exploiting the resources they contained, or those that could be erected upon them, to the full. The ancient rights of common, of grazing stock, of fishing, of collecting firewood and other basic necessities of everyday life had almost entirely disappeared. Now, the fields were fenced and hedged, the fishing rights belonged to the landowners and the woods were the source of both lumber and fuel for the furnaces of the industrial revolution. ‘Improving’, rational agrarian progress, was the mood of the times and of those who called its tunes.
Common rights were a complex combination of legal and customary rights, privileges and obligations that often originated in the mediaeval era, or even earlier. Despite the existence of legislation, such as the Statute of Artificers (1563), that supposedly regulated work hours and conditions, there was little standardisation or complementarity between these rights and obligations. A fair day’s work in one parish was longer or shorter than that in a neighbouring parish. The widespread perquisites known as ‘rights of common’ were equally varied and of dubious legal status. These included such things as common of pastures (the right to take the produce of the land), common of turbary (the right to cut turf for fuel), common of estovers (the right to cut wood for fuel) and common of piscary (the right to fish in someone else’s waters). In some parts of the country there were also common rights of fowling and of cutting hay on common land ‘according to the custom of the manor’.11 Throughout England and Wales the local landholders and owners were bound by such precedents that might also regulate the rent they could charge and such details as the length and conditions of leases. Imperfect and unbalanced as this moral order was, it struggled on as the main mode of economic and political relationships for centuries.
By the middle of the eighteenth century this ‘moral economy’, as the historian Edward Thompson called it, with its assumptions of reciprocity, paternalism and deference in return for a reasonable guarantee that the necessities of life would be provided to the powerless by the powerful, was in serious decline. It had become an anachronism at the centres of power, which now preferred to encourage the normal operation of supply and demand in a free market rather than to leave things to the tinkerings of the local squire. The old assumptions were under serious challenge from the new approach of rational rural capitalism, with its emphasis on efficiency, productivity, exploitation and even morality. These innovations and the benefits they would bring to those who made them were summed up in the aims of the Board of Agriculture’s ‘Plan for Reprinting the Agricultural Surveys’ of 1795:
Perhaps the following is the most natural order for carrying on such important investigations; namely to ascertain,
1. The riches to be obtained from the surface of the national territory.
2. The mineral or subterraneous treasures of which the country is possessed.
3. The wealth to be derived from its streams, rivers, canals, inland navigations, coasts and fisheries: And
4. The means of promoting the improvements of the people in regard to their health, industry, and morals, founded on a statistical survey, or a minute and careful enquiry into the actual state of every parochial district in the kingdom, and the circumstances of its inhabitants … 12
The increasing disparities between the economic rationalising of industrial capitalism and the values hanging over from the agrarian past created long-lasting and serious social conflict. From Elizabethan times onwards, the enclosing of previously common land, woods, streams and other natural resources by private owners was the source of fierce resistance. Enclosure went to the heart of the moral order of deference and paternalism that kept the rural poor alive before industrialisation. It expropriated their physical access to resources and it outraged the customary expectations of what was right and fair.
A terse exchange between the judge and a man accused, with four others, of breaking down the fences of a Norfolk enclosure in 1815 gives a hint of popular attitudes and shows the gap that existed between the rulers and the ruled. Similar sentiments were to be voiced in the proceedings of William Sykes’s trial for murder:
The prisoner Mason addressed the Court as champion of the rights of the poor, whose property he said the commons were. The judge stated distinctly to the prisoners and the jury, that the poor had no such right as was asserted by the prisoner Mason. 13
While the hapless Mason was deluded, it was a delusion he shared with millions of other English people at this time.
There were many other outbreaks of resistance to the expropriation of ways of life and livelihoods through enclosure. Some were small instances of local people simply ‘possessioning’ or circling a piece of land that they believed should be available to all rather than just to the exploitation of the fortunate or crafty few. One earlier case involved Charles I who enclosed Richmond Park with a high wall, to the great displeasure of the people of several adjoining parishes. The parishioners, on a number of occasions into the eighteenth century, ‘beat the bounds’ and pulled down the wall to register their protest at this royal affront and, in vain, to assert their customary rights.14
Other enclosure-related struggles were bitter and violent confrontations between two incompatible ways of seeing the world, as in the Hampshire forest of Waltham during the 1720s. Here, there were prolonged episodes of ritualised deer poaching by locals, who blacked their faces in the traditional disguise of the rural rioter. Deer were taken, trees, fish, ponds and fences – the trappings of agrarian exploitation – were destroyed by hammer, fire and knife. Such was the scale of this protest that the authorities came to see it, hysterically, as a potential Jacobite uprising. In 1723 the Waltham Black Act was enacted, under which deer stealers who went armed and with blackened faces were liable to the death penalty.15
More than a century later, on 6 September 1830 at Otmoor in Oxfordshire, 1000 people circled the boundaries of the moor that had been enclosed 15 years before, thereby formally possessioning it, as they said had been their habit in the past.16 There were continuing enclosure riots throughout East Anglia, especially notable outbursts being in 1817, 1825, 1826 and 1844. There were protests against the impounding of stock by local pindars, or bailiffs. There were gleaning riots and stonings of farmers who refused to allow locals their customary perquisite of collecting leftover stubble from the fields after harvesting.
Enclosure was as much a burning issue around Rotherham and Sheffield. As elsewhere in the country throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, there had been continued and bitter resistance to the enclosure of local commons.17 It was still an issue in 1879, when there was strong community opposition to the enclosure of Maltby Common.18 A locally – and pseudonymously – published history was still fulminating against the appropriation of common lands as late as 190719 and private encroaching on public rights of way still has the power to generate intense controversy in Britain.
But most of these protests were hopeless causes. The economic rationalism that underpinned the new ind
ustrialism eroded the traditional assumptions of common rights upon which large numbers of people depended for their very existence. By the early nineteenth century the gentry was increasingly inclined to ignore the niceties of tradition and custom in favour of the more profitable practices of economic rationalism and public order.
Sykes and his friends were fringe dwellers between the city and the country. But like the prisoner Mason, the Waltham Blacks and the Otmoor possessioners, they were also caught between a rural past with its now archaic assumptions of a social and economic compact between the rulers and the ruled and the individualist, ‘improving’ industrial present. William and his comrades were no strangers to secret woodland ways, dark nights and outwitting gamekeepers. But they earned their daily bread, and that of their usually large families, sweating in the furnaces of the steel industry and lived in villages that were rapidly becoming suburbs.
These village suburbs frequently preserved the core symbols of rural life in the form of the church, the village green – often the only common land left – and the usual collection of inns or public houses. Around this focus, the rows of cramped red-brick terraces marched relentlessly out into the surrounding countryside, year after year. Thrown up in a hurry and with little thought given to planning or amenities, the suburbs developed, in fits and starts, the features that would come to typify everyday English life for the following century or more.
If there was a village church or churches, well and good. These soon became islands of piety and morality surrounded by seas of red brick. They could often be the focus of family and community life, if only for the rites of passage necessary for birth, marriage and death. The church, or more particularly the man who looked over it, was also often the only point of contact with the government and its bureaucracy. The vicar was a member of the respectable classes of society, educated, relatively well off and, at least to the likes of the Sykes and their peers, influential. It was to be St Mary’s church in Greasbrough that would perform many of these functions for Myra and her family in the hard years ahead.
