by Daniel Pool
Together with the local tradesmen like the carpenter and the blacksmith, these laborers made up the cottagers, the people at the very bottom of the rural social world who inhabited the small one-, two- or four-room thatched or slate dwellings in the local village or on one of the estates. Typically, their cottages and the few acres that might go with them were owned outright by the local squire or aristocrat. Where this was not the case, a cottager may have owned only the house itself and a few tiny acres nearby, enough, perhaps, for a small garden and a place to keep a pig, if he were lucky. These are the people, it will be recalled, whose lot Sir James Chettam, at the ardent behest of Dorothea Brooke, wishes to improve in Middlemarch. Improving landlords were always full of schemes to build better cottages and sometimes better lives for the cottagers, too, as the century wore on, and their ladies bountiful were sometimes keen to assist by helping with the local school, distributing goods among the poor, and so on.
But the changes wrought in the cottagers’ lives in the nineteenth century were seldom happy. Before 1800, a cottager could often count on his family staying on the land generation after generation, either because the cottager owned the land (which was called a freehold), had a lease (leasehold), or had a long lease, of which a copy was on the lord of the manor’s rent roll (copyhold). With the acceleration of the enclosure movement, however, and the trend toward large-scale commercial farming, the cottagers often lost their rights to the common land in the village where they were once able to graze their animals or to the waste areas where they could gather fuel, important resources for families living close to the margin. More and more frequently the large landowners kicked the lease-holding cottagers out of their cottages when their leases expired instead of renewing them as they previously had for generation upon generation—which is what happens to Tess’s family in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The cottages were then often torn down or given up to the short-term agricultural workers who were becoming a more and more common feature of the rural landscape. Unlike cottagers, short-term workers could be easily fired without the landlord having any of the traditional sense of responsibility for them that he might have had for the local, rooted poor. “When Tess’s mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about Marlot had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the home also of their fathers and grandfathers,” Hardy tells us in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “but latterly the desire for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch,” and Tess, of course, spends her brief life as an itinerant farm laborer, working here for a dairy farm, there cutting turnips—but always moving on when the season is over and the task is done. We are made witness in the tale of her life to the story of an itinerant laborer whose own destruction is meant to mirror the disappearance of the traditional English countryside.
SHIRE AND SHIRE ALIKE: LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN BRITAIN
The full title of Oliver Twist was Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. The term “parish” referred not to an ecclesiastical unit of jurisdiction but rather to the fundamental form of local government in England. Virtually all of England was divided into parishes (some 15,000 in the 1830s), units presumably modeled after or derived from the parishes of the Church of England but with whose boundaries they had often long since ceased to coincide. Created in Elizabethan times, the parish was organized to serve the purposes of poor relief, keeping the peace, and maintaining the highways and church property. Parishes ranged in size from a tiny cluster of rural cottages to areas in London full of vast numbers of tenement houses.
The parishes were overseen by a churchwarden (there were often two), a constable, an overseer of the poor, and a surveyor of highways. The term of office was one year, and all local members of the parish were required to take their turn at these posts, except august folk like the nobility, clergy, and M.P.’s. Being churchwarden was a position of some prestige. (In The Mayor of Casterbridge Henchard held the post in addition to being mayor.) The churchwarden was charged with responsibility for the upkeep of the church and churchyard, and also, at least in early times, with monitoring the moral conduct of local parishioners. Constable and surveyor of the highways, on the other hand, were jobs to be avoided. Constables were required to keep the peace, something which might not endear you to your neighbors when you tried quieting them down after a rowdy evening at the alehouse; a surveyor of the highways had to supervise the work done on the local highway once a year by the able-bodied men of the parish. Overseers of the poor were charged with maintaining the workhouse and providing for any necessary “outdoor relief” to those not living under its roof, and they would presumably see to it that the “settlement” laws were vigorously enforced. These laws generally required that one be born in the parish, have lived there a year, or have been apprenticed there at least forty days in order to find shelter in the local workhouse. The overseers were replaced by elected boards of guardians under the New Poor Law of 1834; Oliver Twist is brought before the “board” when he is taken from the children’s “farm” by Mr. Bumble, the beadle, and told by them that “you have come here to be educated, and taught a useful trade . . . so you’ll begin to pick oakum tomorrow morning at six o’clock.”
Beadles were very minor parish officials, which makes their immense self-importance in the various works of Dickens that much the more comical. For the most part, this often ridiculous figure with his old-fashioned cocked hat and his staff, whom Dickens caricatures in Oliver Twist in the pompous person of Mr. Bumble, assisted the parish officers, helping the constable to keep the peace, the overseers to deal with the poor, and any other parish official to do his duties, which sometimes meant that the beadle was no more than a glorified messenger boy. He was sometimes charged with keeping order in church. David Copperfield recalls “once, when Steerforth laughed in church, and the beadle thought it was Traddles, and took him out.”
As all this suggests, the parish was not so much an organ of self-government as it was a handy unit of administration through which services could be exacted from the locals and order maintained. The same may be said of the county. In the gray old days before the Normans conquered England, the island was divided into shires, each of them commanded by a shire-reeve (sheriff) and an earl. When the Normans took over, they kept the shires but renamed them “counties.” (The Anglo-Saxon earl for each county was deemed equivalent to the Norman “count.” An earl’s wife in England was therefore called a countess.) There were fifty-two counties in England and Wales in the 1800s, and many of them—Hampshire, Worcestershire, etc.—retained the “-shire” in their names despite their new, formal political status. The high sheriff was at one time the most important royal administrator in the county. However, his power dwindled after his term of office was limited in the twelfth century to only a year, and by the late 1800s he had become a somewhat marginal figure who hired the bailiffs to serve process, executed court judgments, and ceremonially welcomed the king’s judges on their circuit at the assizes.
The lord lieutenant was another county official who had in large measure become a figurehead by 1800, although he still retained considerable power over the militia. The post of lord lieutenant was created in the 1600s during the tumult accompanying the civil war; it was his task to summon the county militia to arms against invasion. By the 1800s, however the post was a largely ceremonial distinction bestowed on one of the great landed magnates in the county. Plantagenet Palliser, Trollope tells us in The Prime Minister, by then duke of Omnium, felt a modest pride when he “saw the flag waving over the Castle, indicating that he, the Lord Lieutenant of the County, was present there on his own soil.” It is a post held also by the odious marquis of Steyne in Vanity Fair. As Sir Pitt Crawley—wrongly—observes of him: “The Lord Lieutenant of a County, my dear, is a respectable man.” Acting on behalf of the monarch, the lord lieutenant formally designated the justices of the peace.
These justices, or magistrates, as they were called, were picked from among the gentry and were often squires or clergymen; by law, the p
ost could go only to a man with an income of at least £100 or more a year. Dorothea Brooke’s uncle in Middlemarch; Edgar Linton and his father in Wuthering Heights; Sir Pitt Crawley and his son, young Pitt, in Vanity Fair—all of them, held “commissions of the peace.” They appointed the overseers of the poor, the constable and the surveyor of highways, and they were responsible in their area of the county for maintaining the peace, summarily trying petty offenses, keeping the local government running smoothly, and, in general, running local affairs, a not terribly difficult task when we consider that the justice of the peace was often the landlord of all the other parishioners. “I’ve been robbed!” shouts Silas Marner, stumbling into the local tavern when he discovers the theft of his hoard. “I want the constable—and the Justice—and Squire Cass—and Mr. Crackenthorp.” The local magistrate dispensed justice on his own when necessary, sometimes with another justice in the county at the petty sessions, and at least four times a year he met with all the other justices to hold the quarter sessions, where countywide administrative matters were dealt with and criminals were tried whose cases were too tricky for a local hearing but not so grave that they had to be passed on to the assize courts. The justices were the people really responsible for local law, order, and administration in England, and a statistic may suggest something of the extent of their authority; in 1883, a year when English juries convicted only 12,000 people, magistrates sent 80,000 people to jail, all without a trial.
The remaining unit of local English government was the borough, generally a town that had been granted a charter of local self-government by the king. Some, indeed, had their own officials, called recorders, instead of justices of the peace, and were therefore not part of the county justice system. Boroughs were generally ruled by a corporation consisting of councillors who designated an aldermen and a mayor. Casterbridge is a borough, and the eponymous hero of The Mayor of Casterbridge is pointed out to his wife as she comes seeking him after many years: “That’s Mr. Henchard, the Mayor, at the end of the table,” says an onlooker, “and that’s the Council men right and left.” These governing bodies were not necessarily very representative in nature. In Plymouth, for example, at one time only 292 out of the town’s 75,000 residents could vote for its leadership. After 1835, however, the borough ratepayers got to elect their councillors.
In the early 1800s, most of the counties had the right to send two members of the local gentry to the House of Commons as members of Parliament (M.P.s). The boroughs could often send representatives to Parliament, too, but over the years many boroughs lost most—or almost all—of their electorate as the local population died out or emigrated, with the consequence that often a member of Parliament was representing only a handful of people. These virtually depopulated, or “rotten,” boroughs were in some cases scarcely different from that of the borough of Queen’s Crawley that Thackeray describes in Vanity Fair, in a village of which Sir Pitt Crawley’s former servant Horrocks leases an inn. “The ex-butler had obtained a small freehold there likewise, which gave him a vote for the borough. The Rector had another of these votes, and these and four others formed the representative body which returned the two members for Queen’s Crawley.” In fact, shortly before 1800, it was found that fewer than 50 voters elected the members of Parliament in 51 of the parliamentary constituencies, and in 130 of the boroughs there were less than 300 votes cast. Thus, a distinction developed between a parliamentary borough that could send someone to Parliament and a municipal borough that was a self-governing municipality. Middlemarch is evidently a borough of both varieties, however. In its municipal capacity it was governed by Mr. Vincy as mayor, while as a parliamentary constituency, it was the object of a campaign by Mr. Brooke, “and his estate was inherited by Dorothea’s son, who might have represented Middlemarch, but declined, thinking that his opinions had less chance of being stifled if he remained out of doors.”
This system of local government creaked along for some years into the nineteenth century. Communications were poor, the desire to interfere from London in local affairs (excepting enclosure) virtually nonexistent, and the local adherents of change were generally both outnumbered and outargued. With the coming of the railroads and mass communications, however, much of this insularity was broken down, and legislative changes drastically reshaped the local political landscape. In 1834 the New Poor Law took away from the parish the exclusive authority for dealing with poverty—a major function. In 1856 London required localities to replace the old part-time constabulary with full-time bobbies, and the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835 began opening up boroughs to real self-government by the electorate. Finally, increasing demands for more sophisticated local health care, education, and the like gradually reduced the principal features of the old local self-government to a shell or eliminated them.
“THE THEORY AND SYSTEM OF FOX HUNTING”
are we hunting a fox now?” asks Lizzie Eustace of Lord George Carruthers in The Eustace Diamonds, at a point, Trollope tells us, when “they were trotting across a field or two, through a run of gates up to the first covert.”
“Not quite yet,” replies Lord George. “The hounds haven’t been put in yet. You see that wood there? I suppose they’ll draw that.”
“What is drawing, Lord George? I want to know all about it, and I am so ignorant. Nobody else will tell me.”
“Then Lord George gave his lesson,” says Trollope, “and explained the theory and system of fox-hunting.”
Originally, hunting foxes wasn’t a sport at all. Foxes were officially regarded as livestock-destroying vermin, and a statute passed in Elizabethan days required churchwardens to pay bounties for their heads. Robin Hood, Henry VIII, and everybody else in those days meant deer, not foxes, when they talked about hunting.
But deer became scarce. Trees were felled for fuel or to make ships for the king’s navy, and at the same time more and more land was put into cultivation, and, as a consequence, the forest the deer needed vanished. And so the deer vanished, too.
Why not, then, hunt foxes instead, thought someone.
Foxes, however, are fast as well as tricky. New, improved hounds were therefore needed to track foxes for sport, since hounds bred for the chase had traditionally been used to chase hares, a type of game that was clever rather than fast. Lo and behold, however, in the mid-1700s, Hugo Meynell began breeding dogs at Quorn Hall in north Leicestershire that were fast enough to keep up with foxes, and suddenly everyone was off and running.
The sport worked like this: in the early morning people were sent out to stop up the holes of foxes in the hunt area. This was done to prevent the foxes—nocturnal animals—from returning to their dens. About eleven o’clock all the mounted sportsmen (the “field”), plus the yapping hounds (usually forty or fifty to a pack), gathered together at the “meet” under the overall supervision of the master of the foxhounds, who was the local worthy in nominal charge of the whole proceeding. The physical work was actually the responsibility of the huntsman, often a local working-class man who had bred the hounds, could frequently identify each one individually by bark, and was in charge of putting them through their paces on the day of a hunt.
Once assembled, the field followed the huntsman and his hounds out to a covert (pronounced “cover”), a gorse patch or thicket of some kind in which a fox was thought to have sought refuge when it found its front door locked. The hounds were sent in at one end of the covert, the idea being that they would sniff their way through it until they flushed the fox out into the open. (This was the “drawing” about which Lizzie asks George Carruthers.) Once the fox was spotted, the observer shouted “Tally-ho!”—or just shouted—and the huntsman and his hounds took off after the fox, with the field following at a discreet distance.
From then on, the idea was simply to gallop across country at top speed and have a whale of a good time splashing through rivers and dashing across fields in pursuit of the hounds and the fox without breaking your neck. The fun was in the gallop plus the sport
of watching the hounds chase down the fox.
When the fox was finally cornered, the hounds killed him. They customarily devoured him except for his “brush” (tail) and “mask” (head) and “pads” (paws), which could be cut off and awarded as trophies. Squire Cass, the rough-edged member of the gentry in Silas Marner, has a brush on his parlor wall. A child riding in his first hunt might be “blooded” by being smeared with the blood of the dead fox.
That was it.
Traditionally, fox hunting began on the first Monday in November, although September often witnessed “cub hunting,” a sort of training for inexperienced foxes and riders. The best fox hunting was in the middle of the country in the Midlands areas that fox hunting men called “the shires,” especially Rutland, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire. Fox hunting was felt to be manly, patriotic, and good training for war as well as fun. Numerous regiments gave their men leave during the hunting season to go dashing around the countryside, and perhaps it wasn’t too different from everyday workouts for the cavalry. In addition, it was probably the only exercise many country gentlemen ever got, and for the young, it had the added advantage of being dangerous if done recklessly enough. And, of course, it was very social. There were sometimes “lawn meets,” when people from all over gathered on the grounds of a great estate and were regaled with food and drink as the hunters prepared for their “run.” There were hunt balls, too, sponsored by the hunt clubs that had originally grown up to provide stables and quarters for hunters in the days when hunts covered wide areas of country. Also—if you did it right—the activity was expensive. The Quorn’s annual operating expenses in 1821, though admittedly above the average, were £4,000. A good hunter of moderate ability might cost 100 guineas (Lizzie Eustace pays 160 pounds for each of hers), and then there was always hay and stabling to be paid for as well.
