The village labourer 1760-1832; a study in the government of England before the Reform bill

Front matter

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CORNELL

Preface

This edition differs from jjrevious editions of The Village Labourer in two respects. The original Chapter One has been omitted : this chapter described the concentration of power in the hands of a small class, which was the leading feature of our political development in the eighteenth century. Secondly, the Appendices have been reduced, but the student who wishes to pursue the subject of enclosure further will find, at the end of this volume, full details of four important and representative enclosures.

In their preface to the edition published in 1913 the authors discussed some of the controversies that had arisen on the topic of the enclosures. It seems worth while to reproduce here the substance of that preface. Two main criticisms have been passed on the treatment of enclosures in these pages : the first, that the writers have drawn an unjust picture, because they deliberately excluded the importance of enclosure in increasing the food supplies of the nation ; the second, that the hardships of the poor have been exaggerated, and that, though the system of enclosure lent itself to abuses, there was no evidence that wrong was done in the mass of enclosures. .

The writers submit the following considerations : (1) It has been the accepted view of all modem critics, with the single exception of Dr. Hasbach, that the enclosures of this period. Or at any rate the enclosures that took place after 1795, made the soil of England immediately more productive. That this is the usual view was stated in the text ; its correctness was not discussed or questioned. The subject of this volume is the fate of the Village Labourer, and so far as he is concerned, the facts which they are accused of neglecting suggest two reflections : (o) the feeding of Manchester and Leeds did not make life cheaper to him ; and (6) if agriculture suddenly became a great industry, multiplying as some say England's resources twenty-fold, an equitable readjustment must have

T vi THE VILLAGE LABOURER, 1760-1882

increased the prosperity of all classes engaged in that industry. The greater the stress laid on the progress of agriculture, the greater appear the perversity and injustice of the arrangements of a society under which the labourer became impoverished. If it is argued that the misery of the labourer was the price the nation had to pay for that advance, it is worth while to point out that that was not the view of Young, or Davies, or Eden, or Sinclair, or Cobbett, and that the actual revolution that was accomplished was not the only alternative to the old unreformed common field system. (2) The authors desire to point out how little they have relied on soUtary instances for their general statements. Complaint has been made of the pubhshing of the story of the attempted enclosure of Sedgmoor, but those who read that account carefully will see that the passage from Selwyn's letters are important as disclosing the state of mind of a chairman of an Enclosure Committee ; they will note also that his letters show that it was a common practice for Members of Parliament to arrange meetings in order to maniptilate Committees in the interest of private persons. Selwyn's view of the responsibilities of a chaimian of one of these Committees has therefore a special significance. The main question for the historian is this : Were the poor sacrificed or not in the enclosures as they were carried out ? The writers have given their reasons for thinking that they were sacrificed, and needlessly sacrificed, and no evidence has come under their notice in the criticisms published to shake that view. They have set out the actual methods of procedure that were adopted for converting England from the old to the new system, and they think it is clear that those methods were such that the poor were bound to suffer unless Parliament expressly intervened for their protection. This was apparent, or became apparent, to observers at the time, and proposals that would have helped the poor were made by Arthur Young, by Eden, by Davies, by Suffield, and by the Board of Agriculture. Those proposals were disregarded, not necessarily from wickedness or rapacity, but because the atmosphere of the ruling class was unfavourable. Young referred to his own proposal six years later in a passage which is worth quoting :

' I have been reading over my Inquiry into the Propriety of applying Wastes to the better Maintenance of the Poor. I had

PREFACE vii

almost forgotten it, but of all the essays and papers I have produced, none I think so pardonable as this, so convincing by facts, and so satisfactory to any candid reader. Thank God I wrote it, for though it never had the smallest effect except in exciting opposition and ridicule, it will, I trust, remain a proof of what ought to have been done ; and had it been executed, would have diffused more comfort among the poor than any proposition that ever was made ' {Autobiography, July 14, 1806). One further fact of interest and importance in this connection may be mentioned. Michael Sadler, the Factory Reformer, was, unhappily for England, thrown out of Parliament after the passing of the Reform Bill. He was in the House of Commons for only three years. One of the most important speeches that he made in his brief career there, was a long speech reviewing the disastrous change that had come over the agricultural labourers in recent times. The chief cause he found in the disappearance of the small farmer, the pulling down of cottages, and the enclosures. He said that the enclosures had inflicted on the poor as a class ' the most irreparable injuries.' Like Thelwall, with whom he would have been slow to recognise any affinity, he argued that enclosure might have benefited the poor, but that in practice it had ruined them. ' Inclosures might indeed have been so conducted as to have benefited all parties ; but now, coupled with other features of the system, they form a part of what Blackstone denominates a " fatal rural poUcy " ; one which has completed the degradation and ruin of your agricultural poor.'

Two subjects are discussed fully in this volume for the first time. One is the actual method and procedure of Parliamentary Enclosure ; the other the labourers' rising of 1830, More than one important book has been written on enclosures during the last few years, but nowhere can the student find a full analysis of the procedure and stages by which the old village was destroyed. The rising of 1830 has only been mentioned incidentally in general histories : it has nowhere been treated as a definite demand for better conditions, and its course, scope, significance and punishment have received little attention. The writers of this book have treated it fully, using for that purpose the Home Office Papers accessible to students in the Record Office. They wish .to express their viii THE VILLAGE LABOURER, 1760-1832

gratitude to Mr. Hubert Hall for his help and guidance in this part of their work.

The obligations of the writers to the important books published in recent years on eighteenth-century local government are manifest, and they are acknowledged in the text, but the writers desire to mention specially their great debt to Mr. Hobson's Industrial System, a work that seems to them to throw a new and most illuminating hght on the economic significance of the history of the early years of the last century.

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Ponsonby and Miss M. K. Bradby have done the writers the great service of reading the entire book and suggesting many important improvements. Mr. and Mrs. C. R. Buxton, Mr. A. Glutton Brock, Professor L. T. Hobhouse, and Mr. H. W. Massingham have given them valuable help and advice on various parts of the work.

Hemel Hempsted, April 1920,

Contents

I. The Village before Enclosure, . . . 1

The Common-field System — Classes in the Village — Motives for Enclosure— Agricultural Considerations — Moral Considerations — Extent of Parliarhentary Enclosure.

II. Enclosure (I), ....... ig

CHAPTER I THE VILLAGE BEFORE ENCLOStHBE

To elucidate these chapters, and to supply further information for those who are interested in the subject, we publish an Appendix containing the history, and tolerably full particulars, of four separate enclosures at Croydon, Haute Huntre, Stanwell and Wakefield, ,

IIAt the time of the great Whig Revolution, England was in the main a country of^commons and of common fields ^ ; at the time of the Reforn^BillTEngland was in the main a country of individualist agriculture and of large enclosed farms. There has probably been no change in Europe in the last two centuries comparable to this in importance of which so httle is known to-day, or of which so little is to be learnt from the general histories of the time. The accepted view is that this change marks a great national advance, and that the hardships which incidentally followed could not have been avoided : that it meant a vast increase in the food resources of England in comparison with which the sufferings of indi\iduals counted for little : and that the great estates which then came into existence were rather the gift of economic forces than the deliberate acquisitions of powerful men. We are not concerned to corroborate or to dispute the contention that enclosure made England more productive,^ or to discuss the merits of enclosure itself as a public policy or a means to agricultural progress in the eighteenth century. Our business is with the changes that the enclosures caused in the social structure of

' Gregory King and Davenant estimated that the whole of the cultivated land in England in 1685 did not amount to much more than half the total area, and of this cultivated portion three-fifths was still farmed on the old common-field system.

2 For a full discussion, in which the ordinary view is vigorously combated in an interesting analysis, see Hasbach, History of the Agricultural Labourer: on the other side, Levy, Large and Small Holdings.

England, from the manner in which they were in practice carried out. We propose, therefore, to describe the actual operations by which society passed through this revolution, the old viUage vanished, and rural life assumed its modern \f orm and characteE ' ^

It is difficult for us, who think of a common as a wild sweep of heather and beauty and freedom, saved for the enjoyment of the world in the midst of guarded parks and forbidden meadows, to realise that the commons that disappeared from so many an English village in the eighteenth century belonged to a very elaborate, complex, and ancient economy. The antiquity of that elaborate economy has been the subject of fierce contention, and the controversies that rage round the nursery of the English village recall the controversies that raged round the nursery of Homer. The main subject of contention has been this. Was the manor or the township, or whatever name we like to give to the primitive unit of agricultural life, an organisation imposed by a despotic landowner on his dependents, or was it created by the co-operation of a group of free tribesmen, afterwards dominated by a military overlord ? Did it owe more to Roman tradition or to Teutonic tendencies ? Professor Vinogradoff, the latest historian, inclines to a compromise between these conflicting theories. He thinks that it is impossible to trace the open-field system of cultivation to any exclusive right of ownership or to the power of coercion, and that the communal organisation of the peasantry, a village community of shareholders who cultivated the land on the open-field system and treated the other requisites of rural life as appendant to it, is more ancient than the manorial order. It derives, in his view, from the old English society. The manor itself, an institution which partakes at once of the character of an estate and of a unit of local government, was produced by the needs of government and the development of individualist husbandry, side by side with this communal village. These conditions lead to the creation of lordships, and after the Conquest they take form , in the manor. The manorial element, in fact, is superimposed"^ on the communal, and is not the foundation of it : the mediaeval village is a free village gradually feudalised. Fortunately it is not incumbent on us to do more than touch on this fascinating study, as it is enough for our purposes to note thatjjhe greater part of England in cultivation at the beginning of the eighteenth century was cultivated on a system which, with certain local variations, belonged to a common type, representing this common ancestrj^y

r The term ' common ' was used of three kinds of land in the eighteenth - century village, and the three were intimately connected with each other. There were (1) the arable fields, (2) the common meadowland, and (3) the common or waste. The arable fields were divided into strips, with different owners, some of whom owned few strips, and some many. The various strips that belonged to a particular owner were scattered among the fields. Strips were divided from each other, sometimes by a grass band called a balk, sometimes by a furrow. They were cultivated on a uniform system by agreement, and after harvest they were thrown open to pasturage. The common meadow land was divided up by lot, pegged out, and distributed among the owners of the strips ; after the hay was carried, these meadows, like the arable fields, were used for pasture. The common or waste, which was used as a common pasture at all times of the year, consisted sometimes of woodland, sometimes of roadside strips, and sometimes of commons in the modern sense.* J

Such, roughly, was the map of the old EngUsh village. What were the classes that lived in it, and what were their several rights ? In a normal village there would be (1) a Lord of the Manor, (2) Freeholders, some of whom might be large proprietors, and many small, both classes going by the general name of Yeomanry, (3) Copyholders, (4) Tenant Farmers, holding by various sorts of tenure, from tenants at wiU to farmers with leases for three Uves, (5) Cottagers, (6) Squatters, and (7) Farm Servants, living in their employers' houses. The proportions of these classes varied greatly, no doubt, in different villages, but we have an estimate of the total agricultural population in the table prepared by Gregory King in 1688, from which it appears that in addition to the Esquires and Gentlemen,

' This was the general structure of the village that was dissolved in the

eighteenth century. | It is distinguished from the Keltic type of communal

agriculture, known as run-rig, in two important respects. In the run-rig village

the soil is periodically redivided, and the tenant's holding is compact. Dr.

Slater (Geographical Journal, Jan. 1907) has shown that in those parts of

j England where the Keltic type predominated, e.g. in Devon and Cornwall,

J enclosure took place early, and he argues with good reason that it was easier to

I enclose by voluntary agreement where the holdings were compact than it was

( where they were scattered in strips. But gradual enclosure by voluntary agree-

; ment had a different effect from the cataclysm-like enclosure of the eighteenth

\ century, as is ?vi4ent fronj the large number of snjall farmers jn Devonshire,

\ there were 40,000 families of freeholders of the better sort,

\ 140,000 families of freeholders of the lesser sort, and 150,000

\farmers, Adam Smith, it will be remembered, writing nearly

y century later, said that the large number of yeomen was at

ri»nce the strength and the distinction of EngUsh agriculture. 1 Let us now describe rather more fully the different people represented in these different categories, and the different rishts that they enjoyed. We have seen in the first chapter tmt the manorial courts had lost many of their powers by this time, and that part of the jurisdiction that the Lord of th^ Manor had originally exercised had passed to the Justice of the Peace. No such change had taken place in his relation to the economic life of the village. He might or he might not still own a demesne land. So far as the common arable or common meadow was concerned, he was in the same position as any other proprietor : he might own many strips or few strips or no strips at all. His position with regard to the waste was different, the difference being expressed by Blackstone ' in those waste grounds, which are usually called commons, the property of the soil is generally in the Lord of the Manor, as in the common fields it is in the particular tenant.' The feudal lawyers had developed a doctrine that the soil of the waste was vested in the Lord of the Manor, and that originally it had all belonged to him. But feudal law acknowledged certain definite limitations to his rights over the wadte. The Statute of Merton, 1235, allowed him to make enclosures on the waste, but only on certain terms ; he was obliged to leave enough of the waste for the needs of his tenants. Moreover, his powers were limited, not only by the concurrent rights of freeholders and copyholders thus recognised by this ancient law, but also by certain common rights of pasture and turbary enjoyed by persons who were neither freeholders nor copyholders, namely cottagers. These rights were explained by the lawyers of the time as being concessions made by the Lord of the Manor in remote antiquity. The Lord of the Manor was regarded as the owner of the waste, subject to these common rights : that is, he was regarded as owning the minerals and the surface rights (sand and gravel) as well as sporting rights,

'Every grade of property and status was represented in the

ranks of the freeholders, the copyholders and the tenant

farmers, from the man who employed others to work for him

. to the man who was sometimes employed in working for others.

No distinct line, in fact, can be drawn between the small farmer, whether freeholder, copyholder or tenant, and the cottager, for the cottager might either own or rent a few strips ; the best dividing-line can be drawn between those who made their living mainly as farmers, and those who made their living mainly as labourers.

It is important to rernember that no farmer, however large his holdings or property, or however important his social position, was at liberty to cultivate his strips as he pleased. The system of cultivation would be settled for him by the Jurj' of the Manor Court, a court that had different names in different places. By the eighteenth century the various courts of the manorial jurisdiction had been merged in a single court, called indifferently the View of Frankpledge, the Court Leet, the Court Baron, the Great Court or the Little Court, which transacted so much of the business hitherto confided to various courts as had not been assigned to the Justices of the Peace.^ Most of the men of the village, freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders, or cottagers, attended the court, but the constitution of the Jury or Homage seems to have varied in different manors. Sometimes the tenants of the manor were taken haphazard in rotation : sometimes the steward controlled the choice, sometimes a nominee of the steward or a nominee of the tenants selected the Jury : sometimes the steward took no part in the selection at all. The chief part of the business of these courts in the eighteenth century was the management of the common fields and common pastures, and the appointment of the village officers. These courts decided which seed should be sown in the different fields, and the dates at which they were to be opened and closed to common pasture. Under the most primitive system of rotation the arable land was divided into three fields, of which one was sown with wheat, another with spring corn, and the third lay fallow : but by the end of the eighteenth century there was a great variety of cultivation, and we find a nine years' course at Great Tew in Oxfordshire, a six years' course in Berkshire, while the Battersea common fields were sown with one uniform round of grain without intermission, and consequently without fallowing.^

By Sir Richard Sutton's Act ' for the cultivation of common

^ See Webb, Manor and Borough, vol. i. p. 66 seq. \_, — — — '' Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, p. 77. ' '13 George in. c. 81.

^elds, passed in 1773, a majority of three-fourths in number id value of the occupiers, with the consent of the owner and titheholder, was empowered to decide on the course of husbandry, to regulate stinted commons, and, with the consent of the Lord of the Manor, to let off a twelfth of the common, applying the rent to draining or improving the rest of it.^ Beibre this Act, a universal consent to any change of system wa^ necessary.2 The cultivation of strips in the arable fields carried with it rights of common over the waste and also over the \common fields when they were thrown open. These rights were known as ' common appendant ' and they are thus defined by Blackstone : ' Common appendant is a right belonging to the owners or occupiers of arable land to put commonable beasts upon the Lord's waste and upon the lands of other persons within the same manor.'

The classes making their hving mainly as labourers were the cottagers, farm servants, and squatters. The cottagers either owned or occupied cottages and had rights of common on the waste, and in some cases over the common fields. These rights were of various kinds : they generally included the right to pasture certain animals, to cut turf and to get fuel. The cottagers, as we have already said, often owned or rented land. This is spoken of as a common practice by Addington, who knew the Midland counties well ; Arthur Young gives instances from Lincolnshire and Oxfordshire, and Eden from Leicestershire and Surrey. The squatters or borderers were, by origin, a separate class, though in time they merged into the cottagers. They were settlers who built themselves huts and cleared a piece of land in the commons or woods, at some distance from the village. These encroachments were generally sanctioned. A common rule in one part of the country was that the right was established if the settler could build his cottage in the night and send out smoke from his chimney in the morning.^ The squatters also often went out as day labourers. The farm servants were usually the children

^ This was done at Barnes Common ; see for whole subject, Annals of Agriculture, vol. xvii. p. 516.

' For cases where changes in the system of cultivation of common fields had been made, see Annals of Agriculture, vol. xvi. p. 606 : ' To Peterborough, crossing an open field, but sown by agreement with turnips.' Cf. Report on Bedfordshire: 'Clover is sown in some of the open clay-fields by common consent (p. 339), and ' Turnips are sometimes cultivated, both on the sands and gravels, by mutual consent ' (p. 340).

' Slater, p. 119.

of the small farmers or cottagers ; they lived in their masters' houses until they had saved enough money to marry and take a cottage of their own.

Were there any day labourers without either land or common rights in the old village ? It is difficult to suppose that there were many.^ Blackstone said of common appurtenant that it was not a general right ' but can only be claimed by special grant or by prescription, which the law esteems sufficient proof of a special grant or agreement for this purpose.' Prescription covers a multitude of encroachments. Indeed, it was only by the ingenuity of the feudal lawyers that these rights did not attach to the inhabitants of the village at large. These lawyers had decided in Gateward's case, 1603, that ' inhabitants ' were too vague a body to enjoy a right, and on this ground they had deprived the inhabitants of the village of Stixswold in Lincolnshire of their customary right of turning out cattle on the waste. ^ From that time a charter of incorporation was necessary to enable the inhabitants at large to prove a legal claim to common rights. But rights that were enjoyed by the occupiers of small holdings or of cottages by long prescription, or by encroachments tacitly sanctioned, must have been very widely scattered.

Such were the classes inhabiting the eighteenth-centu ry village . As the holdings in the common fields could be sold, the property might change hands, though it remained subject to common rights and to the general regulations of the manor court. Consequently the villages exhibited great varieties of character. In one village it might happen that strip after strip had been bought up by the Lord of the Manor or some proprietor, until the greater part of the arable fields had come into the possession of a single owner. In such cases, however, the land so purchased was still let out as a rule to a number of small men, for the engrossing of farms as a practice comes into fashion after enclosure. , Sornet imes such purchase was a preliminary t o enclosure. The Bedfordshire reporter gives an example in the village of Bolnhurst, in that county. Three land. speculators bought up as much of the land as they could with a view to enclosing the common fields and then selling at a large profit. But the land turned out to be much less valuable than they had supposed, and they could not get it

' Dr. Slater's conclusion is that ' in the open field village the entirely landless labourer was scarcely to be found,' p. 130. ' See Commons, Forests, and Footpaths, by Lord Eversley, p. II.

off their hands : all improvements were at a standstill, for thp speculators only let from year to year, hoping still to find arket.i In other villages, land might have changed hands in 'iust the opposite direction. The Lord of the Manor might sell\his property in the common fields, and sell it not to some capkaUst or merchant, but to a number of small farmeijs. We learn from the evidence of the Committee of 1844 on enclosures that sometimes the Lord of the Manor sold his property in the waste to the commoners. Thus there were villages with few owners, as there were villages with many owners. The writer of the Report on Middlesex, which was pubUshed in 1798 says, ' I have known thirty landlords in a field of 200 acres, and the property of each so divided as to lie in ten or twenty places, containing from an acre or two downwards to fifteen perches ; and in a field of 300 acres I have met with patches of arable land, containing eight perches each. In this instance the average size of all the pieces in the field was under an acre. In all cases they lie in long, narrow, winding oj worm-like slips.' ^

The same writer states that at the time his book was written (1798) 20,000 out of the 23,000 arable acres in Middlesex were cultivated on the common-field system.* Perhaps the parish of Stanwell. of which w ejifiscrib'* ^Tip ppf^ losure in detail "elsewhergg ^may be_taken as a fair example of an eighteenth-centu ^^ ^lape. Tn this parish there were, according to the enclosure award, four large proprietors, twenty-four moderate proprietors, twenty-four small proprietors, and sixty-six cottagers with common rights. ,

The most important social fact about this system is that it provided, opportu nities for the humblest and poorest labourer C onse in the village. Population seems to have moved slowly, Sid thus there was no feverish competition for land. The farm servant could save up his wages and begin his married life by hiring a cottage which carried rights of common, and / gradually buy or hire strips of land. Every village, as HasbachV^ has put it, had its ladder, and nobody was doomed to stay on the lowest rung. This is the distinguishing mark of the old village. It would be easy, looking only at this feature, to idealise , the society that we have described, and to paint this age as an age of gold. But no reader of Fielding or of Richardson would fall into this itiistake, or persuade himself that this community 1 Bedfordshire Report, 1808, p. 323, quoting from Arthur Young. » P. 114. ' P. '38-

10 THE VILLAGE LABOURER, 1760-1832L

was a society of free and equal men, in which tyranny was impossible. The old village was under the shadow of the squire and the parson, and there were many ways in which these powers controlled and hampered its pleasures and habits : there were quarrels, too, between farmers and cottagers, and there are many complaints that the farmers tried to take the lion's share of the commons : but, whatever the pressure outside and whatever the bickerings within, it remains true that the common-field system formed a world in which the V villagers lived their own lives and cultivated the soil on a basis of independence.

It was this community that now passed under the unqualified rule of the oligarchy. Under that rule it was to disappear. Enclosure was no new menace to the poor. English literature before the eighteenth century echoes the dismay and lamentations of preachers and prophets who witnessed the havoc that it spread. Stubbes had written in 1553 his bitter protest against the enclosures which enabled rich men to eat up poor men, and twenty years, later a writer had given a sombre landscape of the new farming : ' We may see many of their houses built alone like ravens' nests, no birds building near them.' The Midlands had been the chief scene of these changes, and there the conversion of arable land into pasture had swallowed up great tracts of common agriculture, provoking in some cases an armed resistance. The enclosures of this century were the second and the greater of two waves.* In one respect enclosure was in form more difficult now than in earlier periods, for it was generally understood at this time that an Act of Parliament was necessary. In reality there was less check on the process. For hitherto the enclosing class had had to reckon with the occasional panic or illtemper of the Crown. No English king, it is true, had intervened in the interests of the poor so dramatically as did the earlier and unspoilt iiouis xiv., who restored to the French village assemblies the public lands they had alienated within a certain period. But the Crown had not altogether overlooked the interests of the classes who were ruined by enclosure, and in different ways it had tried to modify the worst consequences of this policy. From 1490 to 1601 there were various Acts and proclamations designed for this purpose. Charles i. had actually annulled the enclosures of two years in certain midland counties, several Commissions had been issued, and the Star Chamber had instituted proceedings again sten closure s