From Serfdom to Manhood: a story of Agricultural life. ... Reprinted from the Labourer's Union Chronicle

Front matter

FROM SERFDOM TO MANHOOD: A STORY OF AGRICULTURAL LIFE. BY HOWARD EVANS. ( Reprinted from the Labourers' Union Chronicle.) LONDON : C. MITCHELL, 12, RED LION COURT, FLEET STREET. LEAMINGTON : J. E. M. VINCENT, "CHRONICLE" STEAM PRINTING WORKS. TO MY FATHER. T inscribe this book to you because you have taught me from my earliest years to love righteousness, and hate injustice ; and, more particularly, because in weary weak ness you can only look from a distance on the noble work in which it is your delight that I bear a part. Those for whom this story was written know too well that it is no fiction, so far as the various incidents bearing upon the Labour Question are concerned. There are many others who will find it hard to believe that this is a true picture of life in many English villages.

But you, at any rate, who have always taught me that it is unlawful to sight evil with the weapons of falsehood, will believe me when I say, that so far from having exaggerated, I have fallen short of the terrible truth.

Chapter I. Haslemead And Its Owner

sj")HERE is not a lovelier spot in the Midland Counties JL than Haslemead. As you travel by the Great South Midland line to Castlebridge, after passing through a flat monotonous district, and a series of deep railway cuttings, you will notice with an exclamation of delight a sudden gleam of beauty — a long broad valley, stretching far away with dark wooded hills on one side, and rolling cornfields on the other ; and between, a clear bright stream, winding like a vein of silver through the meadow lands. Then, with a shriek, the train dashes into the Castlebridge tunnel, and only emerges just at the entrance of that ugly little market town, whose most distinguishing feature is a church of stupendous Georgian ugliness. Half a dozen miles down the valley, of which a hasty glimpse is thus obtained, lies the village of Haslemead.

Though it is somewhat out of the great modern highway, it has not a few visitors, for close to the village is a heap of ivy-clad ruins, the slowly-crumbling remains of a magnifi cent abbey. The tourist, on his way, suddenly turning a corner, sees below him, climbing halfway up the hill-side, a village of straggling houses ; beyond, upon the further bank of the little river, the abbey ruins ; and a little to the left, on a rising ground, a fine old Elizabethan Manor House, the seat of Sir William Hallington. The Manor House was fully equal in interest to the abbey ruins. No less than three kings, at different periods, had slept within its walls. It had been the scene of a Jacobite plot, and in the time of the civil wars it had been defended by the Cavaliers, and taken by the soldiers of the Parliament.

Its then owner was a staunch adherent of King Charles, and the nest of Royalists, whom he har boured, sorely harrassed the trade of the good citizens of London, making the highroad to the west almost impass able. So one fine day, one of Cromwell's colonels made a rapid descent upon the place, and, after a sharp fight, routed out the Royalists, and slew the owner of the house on his own threshold. His son, at the restoration, got back his house and lands, and the present owner, Sir William Hallington, prides himself on his ancient family history. The Hallingtons, however, are a mushroom race. The great grandfather of Sir William was the bastard son of a London merchant, who sent him out to India when he was quite a lad. There, by dint of jobbery, fraud, and torture of unoffending Hindoos, he acquired a considerable for tune, and returned to England to enjoy his wealth — a sel fish, cold-hearted, vicious man, whose enfeebled health was the only curb on his debased and sensual life.

A few years after he married Lucy Aubrey, the only child of Squire Aubrey, of Haslemead Manor. The Squire was heavily in debt, and according to tradition, his daughter's marriage with Hallington saved him from utter disgrace and ruin. There is a sad story in reference to Lucy's after life, and old women in the village say that her ghost visits the haunted room at the manor house to this day. For before her marriage she had a youthful lover, and only two years after that event she died of despair, or by her own hand. When a poor man's daughter sells herself for gold, she is cast out utterly from hope and repentance ; when the daughter of an aristocratic house does the same thing, her path to the shambles is strewn with flowers, and bishops call down Heaven's blessing on the horrid bargain. Hal lington, her husband, who became M.P. for Castlebridge, bought a baronetcy by his steady voting on the Govern ment side, and in due time bequeathed his honours to his only son, whose grandson is the present Sir William.

Such is the lineage of this upstart house, who, for the last three generations, have regarded the villagers of Haslemead as an inferior race of animals. Their fathers may have tilled the fields of Haslemead, and lived there in rude plenty six hundred years ago under the happy rule of the old monks, but they never were fortunate enough to have an ancestor who could gain wealth enough to buy a heiress by swindling and torturing poor Hindoos. So the great grandson of the Anglo-Indian scoundrel rules Haslemead, and the great grandson of the peasant wearily toils to minister to Sir William's luxury. Of course, Sir William has plenty of broad acres ; in fact, there is hardly a foot of land in the parish that is not owned by him. I do not mean to say that from Hasle mead he draws most of his wealth.

His mother brought his father as a marriage portion a barren moor in Yorkshire, the whole annual rent of the estate being less than ,£40 a year. From that estate Sir William now draws thousands annually. Neither himself nor his father ever spent a single penny upon it ; but that moor is now a busy manufacturing town, with a score of large cloth mills and hundreds of workmen's houses. All the twenty thousand people who live in that town are working hard for Sir William. They have to buy from him the right to work and the right to exist there ; and the bigger they make the town, the bigger grows Sir William's wealth. That is what philosophers call the "unearned increase of the rent of land." Not only nearly all the land in Haslemead was owned by Sir William, but the biggest half of the parish of Castle bridge besides.

The Aubreys had lived on the spot for centuries. There was an Aubrey living there in the time of Henry VIII., but then most of the land belonged to the Abbey, or in other words, was the property of the Church and the poor. Aubrey was a hanger-on at Henry's court, and when Henry confiscated tne monastic property, " For some secret service unexpressed, And from its payment only to be guessed," the stolen church lands of Haslemead were handed over to Aubrey. A sad day it was for the little tenants, with whom the monks had always dealt liberally. Under the monks they were all copyholders, and could not be dispossessed of their holdings. But Aubrey either turned them out altogether, or only granted them temporary leases, for the confiscators of the church lands would not recognise any rights but their own.

To-day the descendants of those copyholders plough those very fields at a miserable weekly wage for the descendant of the robber who despoiled their fathers. A hundred years ago, about a half-a-mile from the village, there existed a large common, every acre of which is now enclosed and cultivated. The older cottagers of Haslemead will tell you that in their father's time the rents of the cottages were more than paid by the geese that these peasants kept upon the common, and that from it they obtained free, sufficient fuel to last all through the winter. Sir William's grandfather, not having land enough already, put a stop to all this, and stole the common without giving the poor one penny of compensation. In those evil days there was no man who had the courage to denounce the wrong, or the power to prevent it.

Thus what little remained of the inheritance of the poor was ruthlessly taken from them. There was another common at Castlebridge, which brought in nothing to Sir William's father. When the South Midland line was projected the old baronet opposed -it strongly. The railway men carried their point, but the baronet obtained some thousands for that portion of the common which the railway cut through and spoiled. The Castlebridge people got nothing. Still more extravagant was the sum paid for the land on which now stands Castlebridge Station, and yet within a dozen years of the opening of the railway, which the old baronet opposed, the value of his land in Castlebridge had more than doubled. He had not spent a penny upon it, the railway company had even to bribe him to allow them to improve his property.

But in this happy land of justice and freedom " all things work together for good " to the land monopolist. It may naturally be aski;d — What had the Hallington family done with their enormously increased wealth ? Haslemead Manor was a small house for such a man as Sir William ; he had not, like some men of his class, expended a hundred thousand pounds in building a new mansion. Not a penny of all the thousands he received from his Yorkshire estate ever found its way back there. When the millowners in the town which Sir William owned had some work of charity on hand, they never thought of asking him for a donation, because they knew they would not get it. As to the local charities, I believe Sir William did give a ten-pound note annually to the County Infirmary, at Castle bridge. But you never saw his name in any national subscription list ; and, by the way, it's very seldom you do find the names of great landed proprietors there.

Let who ever doubts search over old Mansion House subscription lists and see. Sir William's wealth was mainly expended at his mansion in London. A few years back, however, he bought a large tract of land in the highlands of Scotland — several thousand acres. The sheep that found pasturage on the hill sides, the Scotch peasantry, whose fathers had lived in the glens generations before the families of Hallington or Aubrey were known to fame, had to make way for the deer. We in the great towns pay a penny or two more per pound for mutton, in order that Sir William and his like may have plenty of hunting-ground ; and the ancient peasantry of the highlands have had to seek new homes in Canada and New Zealand so that Sir William may " lay field to field, that he may be placed alone in the midst of the earth."

At the time when our story begins, neither the labourers of Haslemead, nor the tradesmen of Castlebridge, nor the factory hands of Hadford (Sir William's Yorkshire estate), had even a dim consciousness as to who was the huge incubus that weighed down upon them all ; and yet, though it was long after the corn-law days, any one of them might have pointed to the baronet and quoted with truth Ebenezer Elliott's lines — " While yon proud pauper, dead to shame, Is fed by mine and me, And underneath the rascal's name The scoundrel writes M.P." Yes, Sir William was a Member of Parliament. He might have lived to the age of Methusaleh before he would have got in by sheer force of merit. But when a mere lad, while his father was living, he was elected for Castlebridge, and helped to howl at Cobden in the Anti-Corn Law League times.

He sat for Castlebridge because his father owned half the town — and all things work together for good to the landed monopolist. Except in one Parliament he had been M.P. for Castlebridge 0ever since. Some of you may wonder why the people were fools enough to vote for him. Well, it was partly through ignorance and partly through fear, and partly through corruption. The lawyers and publicans were in Sir William's pay, or awed by Sir William's position on the bench of magistrates. The tradesmen voted for him in the hope of at some time or other to catch some of the crumbs falling from the rich man's table. The parsons supported him to a man, of course, because he was a staunch Church and State man, though, like Lord Thur low, he was a buttress of the Church, because he always kept outside of it.

And the working men — well, there were not many in Castlebridge who had votes, and most of those could be " got at " in election times. At the time our story commences, existence for the cot tagers of Haslemead had become just tolerable. Those in the prime of life could remember the evil days when the landowners taxed the poor man's loaf, and when, as Carlyle puts it, strong men were " glad to be imprisoned in work house Bastiles, that they might not perish starved." How generous and forgiving are the people ! Sir William still sits for Castlebridge, and few care to remember, when Lord Derby's statue is set up at Westminster, that he fought against the big, cheap loaf. Who shall say we are not a Christian nation when we so soon forget the crimes of the enemies who starved us ? There had been hard times since then.

Some day, perhaps, a man will rise who will put into words all the dumb, patient misery of the years of the Crimean war. Historians already have measured the no-results of that struggle against the sufferings of our soldiers in the hard winter on the heights before Sebastopol, but few have told us a word of the grim famine at home among our peasantry. You may hear about it if you stop for a chat with some labourer's wife at her cottage door. She will tell you how she suckled her child on a crust of dry bread, and how her hungry brood cried themselves to sleep for want of the common necessaries of life ; how even stony-hearted farmers grew appalled, and in face of all the misery rose wages one or even two shillings a week. Haslemead had its share of those hard times, but it never had any help from Sir William beyond the paltry sum due from him as poor-rates on his ridiculously under-rated manor house.

The cottages of Haslemead looked pretty in a picture — some of them hardly so, especially those that were situated just where the common used to be, and which had been built by " squatters on the waste." Sir William could plead on behalf of these hovels that neither he nor his father, nor his grandfather had built them, but yet he took the rent for them — huts on which none of the Hallington race had ever spent a penny. Even in the village proper the houses were small and in a disgraceful condition. The roofs were leaky, the floors broken, and in some of the houses the damp trickled down in streams to the floor. Mostly the cottages had two rooms, if the upper room could indeed have such a name properly applied to it. The morals of such a village can better be imagined than described. Happy were the children of those parents who could find no room in the village at all.

And there were many such, for when a cottage grew so ruinous that it was impossible to use it any longer it was shut up, that Sir William and the farmers might save them selves a few pounds yearly in poor-rates. The men could findxottages at Castlebridge, and a walk of a few miles to and from their daily labour was no hardship to Sir William and the farmers. I think I hear some unfriendly reader complain that I am raking up the past. Yes, I am raking up the past, and I do not see why it should be forgotten. The landed aristocracy only exist because the people forget their wrongs so easily. They take it for granted that justice tardily conceded, and only conceded when to delay it any longer is perilous, is a full atonement for all their past crimes. Our indictment against Sir William Hallington and his compeers extends over a lengthened period, and the heaviest count in it is that with their own eyes they saw, and with their own ears they heard, the misery of those around them, and they, with full power to aid them, left them to suffer.

For what has been since achieved we owe them no thanks. We have gained much. But for what has been wrung from them we have to thank the patient valour of true and brave men, whose work is the glory of the Victorian age, and a prophecy and pledge of victory to all of us who to-day are wrestling in grim fight with the great curse of England.

Chapter II. Glorious News

! DOWN AGAIN ! ! HALF-A-MILE out of Haslemead was Rockley Farm, tenanted by Mr. Abel Norton. You would not be long in Mr. Norton's company before you pronounced him a jolly old fellow. Straight and strong, and sixty, with hair as white as snow, a face the colour of a beet root, and eyes keen as a hawk's — that was Abel Norton. He had been to market, and with him George Summers a neighbouring young farmer, with a large holding, whose sister Clara had been spending the day at Norton's house. They came home to a meat tea, and round the table were seated Mr. Norton, his wife, his son Tom, his daughter Ruth, and George and Clara Summers. Mr. Norton and George were talking "shop" as they eat and drank — the crops, the weather, the markets, "with damnable iteration." At last they got on to the question of wages, and a warm argument arose as to whether the farmers were right or wrong in making up their minds to lower wages a shilling a week.

Norton was of the old school, George Summers of the new. Norton believed in the paternal system, the labourers to be treated as grown up children, to be paid just enough to live on, with timely aid from poor rates, or charity, as often as it was needed. George Summers, on the other hand, had got a smattering of political economy, believed in buying in the cheapest, and selling in the dearest market, in buying labour thus as well as other things. He believed in the political economy of shrewdness and craft, that lays down proper philosophical authority for sucking all possible profit out of ignorance and weakness. Hence the two were not at all agreed. Mr. Norton maintained that wages ought not to be reduced; George as stoutly maintained that they ought to be, provided men could be got, to work at the lower rate.

In this controversy Ruth Norton was a silent biit inter ested spectator, and her sympathies were all on her father's side. George Summers' theories weighed nothing against the things she had heard and seen. Ruth had been only home from school a few months, but in those few months everybody in Haslemead had learned to love her. The cottagers of Haslemead knew her well _ she was almost always among them. It was not so much the help that she brought them, as the way in which she brought it, that won their hearts ; or to speak more accurately, it was the winning way in which she taught them to help themselves. But she had seen sad sights, and heard sad tales as she had gone from cottage to cottage, and right glad she was to hear her father stoutly opposing George. After tea the younger folks strolled into the garden, Clara pairing off with Tom Norton, and Ruth with George Summers.

" And are they really going to lower the men's wages?" asked Ruth. " Yes, though I doubt if your father will ; he seems to have set his back up about it." "Just like him, the dear old fellow, — my papa has got an honest, old English heart." "Ah, Ruth you don't understand these things, they are all regulated by certain laws, which are as true as the laws of nature." " I know the people are wretchedly poor, George, and that they do our work ; that is quite enough for me." " But you know they are quite free to get better work if they can ; and if they can, we shall have to pay them more to prevent them going away." " Free to get better work ? How can they go and take it, if it's only fifty miles away ? A man can't take his family and goods on his back." " That's his fault, not mine. If he has surrounded himself with furniture and a family — that's his look out.

Besides, it stands to reason that a man won't take less wages than what he can live on." " Oh, George, do you know how these people live? I do, and it makes my heart bleed, indeed it does." " Upon my word, you fight their battles bravely, Ruth; I didn't think you had so much spirit in you. But to change the subject, are you going to Bournemouth next week?" "Yes, I believe so," said she ; but, George, "you don't mean to say that you really are going to take your men off a shilling ?" "Now really Ruth," said he, laughing, "you don't imagine that you are strong enough to alter the laws of political economy ?" " I don't know anything about them," said Ruth, pouting her pretty lips ; " but you surely won't do it if I ask you not," and she turned up a beseeching face that might have almost melted Martin Slater into kindness.

" Well, well, I'll think about it," said he evasively ; " I wish Ruth, you would et the labourers alone; I wanted to talk about other things this evening." "And I," said Ruth in a most decided tone, " am not inclined to talk about other things, so I shall run off and join Clara," and so she did much to George's disgust. When George and his sister had departed, and Ruth had gone up to her room to be alone with her thoughts, she found the said thoughts of a rather perplexing character. " Wanted to talk about other things," mused Ruth, and she made a shrewd guess as to what the other things were. " Better we should not talk about other things just yet. I am not at all sure that we know each other well enough. I have learnt a little more this evening than I ever knew before, and that little is painful indeed.

How shall two walk together except they be agreed ? and we are very, very far from agreeing. But if he is hard and cold he is very tender to me. Of course, everybody is to me How could I love a man that was tender to me and cruel to other people ?" And so Ruth worried her poor little brains till she got into a complete fog, and left off thinking, because the more she thought the more confused all things seemed, FROM SERFDOM TO MAKHOOD. 15

Chapter III

A SUCCESSOR OF THE APOSTLES. IT was night. The Rector of Haslemead was walking slowly homeward to the parsonage from Castlebridge, the said parsonage being at the far end of the village. Instead of taking the high road from the town, he had made a short cut across the fields, and down an unfrequented lane which led him past a detached clump of cottages, known as Kite's End. As he came towards the last of these, where the lane joined the main street of the village, his attention was arrested by a sound from within. Was it a song ? Yes. No, positively it was a hymn, for advancing a step or two closer to the cottage, he heard these words sung : — "Our fainting souls sustain With blessings from above, And ever on Thy people rain The manna of Thy love." The Rector frowned and turned hastily away, then came back and listened once more.

Worse and worse ! there was a man praying, and by the low chorus of Amens at the end of every sentence the Rector judged that there were several persons present. He came nearer towards the window, where the narrow blind afforded him a glimpse inside, and his fears were confirmed. " A Methodist prayer meeting in my parish ! This will never do," muttered the parson to himself, as he quickened his pace homewards ; " I must put a stop to this at once." To use John Bunyan's expression, the rector was " much tumbled up and down in his mind;" he would have been far less disturbed had there been an outbreak of typhoid fever or small pox in the village. That in his parish men should sing hymns, and give thanks to God without his assistance was a thing not to be endured. Had he not preached a sermon, only a few weeks back, on the sin of Korah and his company ?

Had he not followed it up with another sermon from the text ' Ye worship ye know not what ?' And here was some ignorant clodhopper, who could hardly write his own name, and on whom no bishop had ever laid consecrating hands, that dared to pray in the presence of people the cure of whose souls he himself had bought with his own money! What next ? The following evening the rector walked over to Kite's End, and entered the cottage where the prayer meeting had been held the night before. It was a good sized room for a Haslemead cottage, poorly but very neatly furnished, most of the furniture, indeed, being of an ancient and substantial kind, family relics of more prosperous days long ago. The floor was of stone, sprinkled over with clean sand ; a few pieces of bacon hung from the rafters ; a number of pictures cut from newspapers adorned the walls, or, more properly speaking, covered their decay ; and beside the open window was a small shelf of books, chiefly antiquated volumes of divinity, and bound Methodist magazines, two generations old.

A stalwart sunburnt man, with iron-grey hair, between fifty and sixty years of age, his shirt sleeves rolled back from his hairy arms, and his waistcoat thrown open because of the heat, was sitting at the table, cutting a great slice from a loaf, with a mug of tea ready poured cut before him. " Good evening, sur," said the man, rising as the rector entered. "Good evening, John," said the rector; "glorious weather, this." " Ees, it be, sur, bless th'* good Lord," replied John, with a glow of light on his brown face. " Sit down, John — go on with your tea," said the rector, as he took a chair himself by the window ; " you have a nice snug cottage." " Well, sur, it beant the worse i'Haslemead by a long way, but it be main cold i' the winter." " What were you doing here last night, John ? As I came by on my road home I heard some singing."

" Well sur, there be a few on us that be Methodists i' Haslemead, and it be a long way to Castlebridge, so we have a prayer meeting every Thursday night. We should be main glad to see you, sur, if you'd be kind enough to come now and then." " I am exceedingly sorry to hear it John," replied the rector, easing his stiffened collar with his forefinger ; " such proceedings are quite unwarrantable. I make every allow ance that you have done it in ignorance, but it is my duty to warn you that the sin of schism is a most heinous one." " I doan't exactly know what you mean, sur," replied John, as he cut another huge slice, "but if so be as you mean that it be wrong to praise the Lord anywhere, I make bold to say that I never found it in my Bible yet." " Ah, John, you cannot expect to understand the Bible so well as those whom the Church has appointed over you."

" Why, sur, we can't help it ; ' Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.' " " John Ransom, permit me to remind you that there are many passages of scripture, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest to their own destruction." " True, sur, true. But when a man's got the love of God in his heart, he bean't one o' that sort. ' The word is a lamp to his feet and a light to his path, and the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein.' " " Not so fast, John ; that passage does not refer to the present time, but to the future, to what you call the millenium." " Beg pardon, sur, but I don't think so. These things are often hidden from the wise and prudent, and are revealed unto babes. Bless the Lord ! 'He fills the hungry with good things, and the rich he sends empty away.'" " Well my good fellow, I am glad that you have so much scrioture by heart, but it is all the more necessary that you should set a good example in obeying those who have the rule over you, the ministers of Christ's divinely appointed church."